Dr. Linebarger considered these his best short works - and they were.

The dedication of SPACE LORDS to

Eleanor Jackson, the Negro servant who had been in the Linebarger household since shortly after World War II, underscored the parallels between the situation of the underpeople and the contemporary racial situation.

Dr Linebarger, in spite of this, had little interest in social causes - in particular, he didn't like clergymen getting involved in political issues which he thought they didn't know anything about. "There was sort of a personal feeling in the Negro parallel," Mrs. Linebarger explains. "She (Eleanor) really was like one of the family. Paul would get involved in a social issue only if it were first a personal issue. It was not out of idealism - there had to be something to trigger it."

Notwithstanding the racial parallel, it was startling how well Dr. Linebarger, in the cycle of stories dealing with the too perfect society of the Instrumentality, the revolt of the underpeople, the Old Strong Religion and the Rediscovery of Man, was able to create worlds that had a reality of their own. Viewing Earthport and Alpha

Ralpha Boulevard through the eyes of Jestocost or Paul and Virginia, one can almost feel the weight of millennia of history - and view our own era as some dim legend lost in antiquity.

Shayol, for all of being taken from Dante emotionally, fits into a science fiction scheme with its treatment of the effects of strange drugs and brain stimulation on the pleasure-pain principle. The trial of D'joan/Joan becomes more than a retelling of the Joan of Arc story, because of its daring treatment of a psychosocial theme -the deliberate engineering of a martyrdom in order to create a legend that will change the course of history.

All this was undoubtedly because Dr. Linebarger was a careful planner. The notebook he kept on the history of the Instrumentality gave his stories coherence often lacking among his imitators. And the styles and methods he used were not something he thought up on the spur of the moment, but reworkings of traditional Chinese and other techniques of storytelling with which he had been familiar since his childhood and used before in some of his 1930's manuscripts

Even this fitted into a science fiction context, however: the human culture of the future would logically be the result of many existing cultural traditions coming

together and indeed the society in which Lord Jestocost, C'Mell, Lady Alice More and Rod McBan play crucial roles in a blend of Oriental and Occidental influences that is quite convincing. The intrigues may be inspired by the "Romance of Three Kingdoms" - but the stakes are the government secrets maintained in a computer bank.

Some of the stories outside the main cycle do not show the same care and attention In the Casher O'Neill stories, for example, the mixture of a religious message with a situation too obviously based on Middle East politics fails to create a reality of its own in fact, Pohl rejected 'On The Sand Planet', which may be the worst story Dr. Linebarger ever wrote. Pohl also turned down 'Drunkboat' and 'The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal', but he still was more tolerant than Gold had been. Gold would probably have rejected nearly all the later stories because of the religious messages. Pohl did, however, change several of Dr. Linebarger's idiosyncratic story titles. 'Think Blue, Count Two', for example, had come in as 'Three People in a Cube, All Alone Together' and 'Under Old Earth', was originally titled 'The Sum is Null.

Under Old Earth was the last story he wrote and one of the strangest. Part of the main cycle of post-1960 stories, it differs in style from the rest. Whereas the other stories in the cycle take the form of "explanations" of legends told elsewhere, the tale of the old Lord Sto Odin and Sunboy seems to be a legend in the "6riginal" form. It certainly shows that Dr. Linebarger had lost none of his inventive powers and could have continued to write stories of the first rank, even under the pressure for greater production that had led to some mediocre ones and even trifles like From Gustible's Planet.

He was, in fact, talking about a whole new series of stories, 'The Lords of the Afternoon' which would have been set in the period following the Rediscovery of Man. Even his friend Arthur Burns could not quite grasp what Dr. Linebarger intended. And Mrs. Linebarger admits, "I wasn't quite sure what he had in mind ..... maybe something mystical. The idea of mystic, inexplicable experience, somehow tied in with science fiction and =he plan of things." Dr. Linebarger also talked of writing a mainstream adventure novel.

But neither was ever written - except in his brain. In 1965, after finishing UNDER OLD EARTH, he and his wife went on a series of world travels again - Greece, Egypt, Taiwan and Australia again. There was more research to be done on Southeast Asian politics - and there was a history of "small wars" Dr. Linebarger had in mind. Once in Australia, he even took a side trip to New Guinea to do a survey on problems of security and social development there. He announced that he hoped to retire to Australia one day.

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