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Short Fiction Complete
Fred Saberhagen
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
About Fred Saberhagen
Bibliography
Short Fiction Bibliography: chronological
Short Fiction Bibliography: alphabetical
Fiction Series
1961
VOLUME PAA-PYX
PLANETEER
SEVEN DOORS TO EDUCATION
THE LONG WAY HOME
1963
FORTRESS SHIP
GOODLIFE
1964
THE LIFE HATER
1965
STONE PLACE
WHAT T AND I DID
SIGN OF THE WOLF
PATRON OF THE ARTS
MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT
1966
MR. JESTER
IN THE TEMPLE OF MARS
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
1967
INTRODUCTION (Berserker: The Beginning)
STONE MAN
BERSERKER’S PREY
THE WINGED HELMET
BROTHER BERSERKER
1968
STARSONG
YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR
1974
CALENDARS
WINGS OUT OF SHADOW
BERSERKER’S PLANET
LIFE FORCE
INHUMAN ERROR
LOVE CONQUERS ALL
1975
DEEP SPACE
THE ANNIHILATION OF ANGKOR APEIRON
1976
BENEATH THE HILLS OF AZLAROC
BIRTHDAYS
TO MARK THE YEAR ON AZLAROC
WILDERNESS
THE WHITE BULL
MARTHA
1977
PERIOD OF TOTALITY
THE SMILE
1978
SMASHER
1979
SOME EVENTS IN THE TEMPLAR RADIANT
VICTORY
THE GAME
1980
ADVENTURE OF THE METAL MURDERER
RECESSIONAL
1981
WHERE THY TREASURE IS
EARTHSHADE
INTRODUCTION (The Berserker Wars)
1982
FROM THE TREE OF TIME
INTERMISSION
1985
THE SONG OF SWORDS
AS DULY AUTHORIZED
1987
THE GRAPHIC OF DORIAN GRAY
1991
THE MACHINERY OF LIES
1995
THE BAD MACHINES
BLINDMAN’S BLADE
1999
THE SENIOR PROM
2001
BOX NUMBER FIFTY
2004
A DROP OF SOMETHING SPECIAL IN THE BLOOD
2007
SERVANT OF DEATH

Fred Thomas Saberhagen, born in Chicago, Illinois on May 18, 1930. Saberhagen served as an enlisted man in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War while he was in his early twenties. Back in civilian life, he worked as an electronics technician for the Motorola Corporation from 1958 to 1962.

It was while he was working for Motorola that Saberhagen started writing fiction seriously, at the age of about 29. His first sale was to Galaxy Science Fiction, which published his short story “Volume PAA-PYX” in 1961. Saberhagen is best known for his “Berserker” series which began with the short story “Fortress Ship”, published in If in January 1963. In 1964, Saberhagen saw the publication of his first novel, The Golden People.

Saberhagen also wrote a series of vampire novels in which the famous Dracula is the main protagonist, and a series of post-apocalyptic mytho-magical novels beginning with his popular Empire of the East and continuing through a long series of Swords and Lost Swords novels.

From 1967 to 1973, he worked as an editor for the Chemistry articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica as well as writing its article on science fiction. He then quit and took up writing full-time.

He married fellow writer Joan Spicci in 1968. They had two sons and a daughter. In 1975, they moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In his adult years Fred Saberhagen was a practicing Catholic; indications of his faith appear from time-to-time in his writing.

On June 29, 2007, Fred Saberhagen died of prostate cancer in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Novels

The Golden People (1964)

The Water of Thought (1965)

Specimens (1976)

The Veils of Azlaroc (1978)

The Mask of the Sun (1979)

Octagon (1981)

Coils (1982)

A Century of Progress (1983)

The Frankenstein Papers (1986)

The White Bull (1988)

The Black Throne (1990)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Dancing Bears (1995)

Merlin’s Bones (1995)

Magazine-published Novels

The Winged Helmet, If, August 1967

Brother Berserker, If, November 1967

Serialized Novels

Love Conquers All, Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1974-January 1975

Berserker’s Planet, Worlds of If, May/June-July/August 1974

Anthologies

A Spadeful of Spacetime (1981)

Pawn to Infinity (1982) with Joan Spicci Saberhagen

Machines That Kill (1984) with Martin H. Greenberg

Collections

The Book of Saberhagen (1975)

Earth Descended (1981)

Saberhagen: My Best (1987)

Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires: A Saberhagen Retrospective (2009)

Omnibus

The Golden People/Exile From Xanadu (1964) with Lan Wright

We, the Venusians/The Water of Thought (1965) with John T. Phillifent

SHORT FICTION BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHRONOLOGICAL

1961

Volume PAA-PYX, Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1961

Planeteer, Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1961

Seven Doors to Education, If, May 1961

The Long Way Home, Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1961

1963

Fortress Ship, If, January 1963

Goodlife, Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963

1964

The Life Hater, If, August 1964

1965

Stone Place, If, March 1965

What T and I Did, If, April 1965

Sign of the Wolf, If, May 1965

Patron of the Arts, If, August 1965

Masque of the Red Shift, If, November 1965

1966

Mr. Jester, If, January 1966

In the Temple of Mars, If, April 1966

The Face of the Deep, If, September 1966

1967

Introduction (Berserkers: The Beginning), Berserker, January 1967

Stone Man, Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1967

Berserker’s Prey, If, June 1967

The Winged Helmet, If, August 1967

Brother Berserker, If, November 1967

1968

Starsong, If, January 1968

Young Girl at an Open Half-door, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1968

1974

Calendars, Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1974

Wings Out of Shadow, Worlds of If, March-April 1974

Berserker’s Planet, Worlds of If, May/June-July/August 1974

Life Force, Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1974

Inhuman Error, Analog, October 1974

Love Conquers All, Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1974-January 1975

1975

Deep Space, The Book of Saberhagen, January 1975

The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron, Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1975

1976

Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc, Odyssey, Spring 1976

Birthdays, Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1976

To Mark the Year on Azlaroc, Science Fiction Discoveries, August 1968

Wilderness, Amazing Stories, September 1976

The White Bull, Fantastic, November 1976

Martha, Amazing Stories, December 1976

1977

Period of Totality, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Spring, January 1977

The Smile, Algol #29, Summer/Fall, July 1977

1978

Smasher, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1978

1979

Some Events at the Templar Radiant, Destinies, August-September, August 1979

Victory, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1979

The Game, The Ultimate Enemy, September 1979

1980

Adventure of the Metal Murderer, Omni, January 1980

Recessional, Destinies, Fall, November 1980

1981

Where Thy Treasure Is, Destinies, August 1981

Earthshade, The Magic May Return, September 1981

Introduction (The Berserker Wars), The Berserker Wars, December 1981

1982

From the Tree of Time, Sorcerer’s Apprentice #14, 1982

Intermission, Fifty Extremely SF* Stories, August 1982

1985

The Song of Swords, The Complete Book of Swords, January 1985

As Duly Authorized, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1985

1987

The Graphic of Dorian Gray, New Destinies, Spring, March 1987

1991

The Machinery of Lies, Berserker Lies, September 1991

1995

The Bad Machines, The Williamson Effect, May 1995

Blind Man’s Blade, An Armory of Swords, June 1995

1999

The Senior Prom, Prom Night, May 1999

2001

Box Number Fifty, Dracula in London, November 2001

2004

A Drop of Something Special in the Blood, Emerald Magic, February 2004

2007

Servant of Death, Man vs. Machine, July 2007

SHORT FICTION BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALPHABETICAL

A

A Drop of Something Special in the Blood, Emerald Magic, February 2004

Adventure of the Metal Murderer, Omni, January 1980

The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron, Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1975

As Duly Authorized, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1985

B

The Bad Machines, The Williamson Effect, May 1995

Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc, Odyssey, Spring 1976

Berserker Base, Berserker Base, March 1985

Berserker’s Planet, Worlds of If, May/June-July/August 1974

Berserker’s Prey, If, June 1967

Birthdays, Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1976

Blind Man’s Blade, An Armory of Swords, June 1995

Brother Berserker, If, November 1967

C

Calendars, Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1974

Crossing the Bar, Berserker Base, March 1985

D

Dangerous Dreams, Berserker Base, March 1985

Deep Space, The Book of Saberhagen, January 1975

E

Earthshade, The Magic May Return, September 1981

F

The Face of the Deep, If, September 1966

Fortress Ship, If, January 1963

Friends Together, Berserker Base, March 1985

From the Tree of Time, Sorcerer’s Apprentice #14, 1982

The Founts of Sorrow, Berserker Base, March 1985

G

The Game, The Ultimate Enemy, September 1979

Goodlife, Worlds of Tomorrow, December 1963

The Graphic of Dorian Gray, New Destinies, 1987

The Great Secret, Berserker Base, March 1985

I

In the Temple of Mars, If, April 1966

Inhuman Error, Analog, October 1974

Intermission, Fifty Extremely SF* Stories, August 1982

Introduction (Berserkers: The Beginning), Berserker, January 1967

Introduction (The Berserker Wars), The Berserker Wars, December 1981

L

Life Force, Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1974

The Life Hater, If, August 1964

The Long Way Home, Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1961

Love Conquers All, Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1974-January 1975

M

The Machinery of Lies, Berserker Lies, September 1991

Martha, Amazing Stories, December 1976

Masque of the Red Shift, If, November 1965

Mr. Jester, If, January 1966

P

Patron of the Arts, If, August 1965

Period of Totality, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Spring 1977

Planeteer, Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1961

Prisoner’s Base, Berserker Base, March 1985

R

Recessional, Destinies, 1980

S

The Senior Prom, Prom Night, May 1999

Servant of Death, Man vs. Machine, July 2007

Seven Doors to Education, If, May 1961

Sign of the Wolf, If, May 1965

Smasher, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1978

The Smile, Algol #29, Summer-Fall 1977

Some Events at the Templar Radiant, Destinies, 1979

The Song of Swords, The Complete Book of Swords, January 1985

Starsong, If, January 1968

Stone Man, Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1967

Stone Place, If, March 1965

T

To Mark the Year on Azlaroc, Science Fiction Discoveries, August 1968

V

Victory, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1979

Volume PAA-PYX, Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1961

W

What T and I Did, If, April 1965

Where Thy Treasure Is, Destinies, 1981

The White Bull, Fantastic, November 1976

Wilderness, Amazing Stories, September 1976

The Winged Helmet, If, August 1967

Wings Out of Shadow, Worlds of If, March-April 1974

Y

Young Girl at an Open Half-door, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1968

FICTION SERIES

[A] = Anthology

[C] = Collection

[O] = Omnibus

[SER] = Serialized Novel

[SF] = Short Story/Novelette

Berserker

Berserker (1967) [C]

Brother Berserker (1969)

Berserker’s Planet (1974) [SER]

Berserker Man (1979)

The Ultimate Enemy (1979) [C]

The Berserker Wars (1981) [C]

Berserker Base (1985) [A]

The Berserker Throne (1985)

Berserker: Blue Death (1985)

The Berserker Attack (1987) [C]

Berserker Lies (1991) [C]

Berserker Kill (1993)

Berserker Fury (1997)

Shiva in Steel (1998)

Berserker Prime (2004)

Berserker’s Star (2003)

Rogue Berserker (2005)

Fortress Ship (1963) [SF]

Goodlife (1963) [SF]

The Life Hater (1964) [SF]

Stone Place (1965) [SF]

What T and I Did (1965) [SF]

Sign of the Wolf (1965) [SF]

Patron of the Arts (1965) [SF]

Masque of the Red Shift (1965) [SF]

Mr. Jester (1966) [SF]

In the Temple of Mars (1966) [SF]

The Face of the Deep (1966) [SF]

Stone Man (1967) [SF]

Berserker’s Prey (1967) [SF]

The Winged Helmet (1967) [SF]

Brother Berserker (1967) [SF]

Starsong (1968) [SF]

Wings Out of Shadow (1974) [SF]

Inhuman Error (1974) [SF]

The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron (1975) [SF]

The Smile (1977) [SF]

Smasher (1978) [SF]

Some Events at the Templar Radiant (1979) [SF]

The Game (1979) [SF]

Adventure of the Metal Murderer (1980) [SF]

Introduction (The Berserker Wars) (1981) [SF]

Berserker Base (1985) [SF]

Crossing the Bar (1985) [SF]

Dangerous Dreams (1985) [SF]

Friends Together (1985) [SF]

Prisoner’s Base (1985) [SF]

The Founts of Sorrow (1985) [SF]

>The Great Secret (1985) [SF]

The Machinery of Lies (1991) [SF]

Berserkers: The Beginning (1998) [O]

Berserker Man (2004) [O]

Berserker Death (2005) [O]

Book of the Gods

The Face of Apollo (1998)

Ariadne’s Web (2000)

The Arms of Hercules (2000)

God of the Golden Fleece (2001)

Gods of Fire and Thunder (2002)

The Books of the Gods: Part One (2000) [O]

The Books of the Gods: Part Two (2002) [O]

Dracula Sequence

The Dracula Tape (1975)

The Holmes-Dracula File (1978)

An Old Friend of the Family (1979)

Thorn (1980)

Dominion (1982)

A Matter of Taste (1990)

A Question of Time (1992)

Séance for a Vampire (1994)

A Sharpness on the Neck (1996)

A Coldness in the Blood (2002)

Vlad Tapes (2000) [O]

Box Number Fifty (2001) [SF]

Earth’s End

Empire of the East

The Broken Lands (1968)

The Black Mountains (1971)

Changeling Earth (1973)

Ardneh’s Sword (2006)

Empire of the East (1979) [O]

Twelve Swords of Power

An Armory of Swords (1995) [A]

Blind Man’s Blade (1995) [SF]

Book of Lost Swords

Woundhealer’s Story (1986)

Sightblinder’s Story (1987)

Stonecutter’s Story (1988)

Farslayer’s Story (1989)

Coinspinner’s Story (1989)

Mindsword’s Story (1990)

Wayfinder’s Story (1992)

Shieldbreaker’s Story (1994)

The Lost Swords: The First Triad (1988) [O]

The Lost Swords: The Second Triad (1991) [O]

The Lost Swords: Endgame (1994) [O]

Book of Swords

The First Book of Swords (1983)

The Second Book of Swords (1983)

The Third Book of Swords (1984)

The Complete Book of Swords (1985) [O]

Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict

The Arrival (1999)

Pilgrim

Pyramids (1987)

After the Fact (1988)

Pilgrim (1997)

1961

VOLUME PAA-PYX

Administration problems the Underground, a missing volume of his encyclopedia, and now an old love turned rebel—enough was enough!

WHEN he was alone in his office with the prisoner, the director said: “Now, what is this secret you can reveal to my ears alone?”

“Are you sure none of them are listening?” The prisoner was a young man with seedy clothing and an odd haircut. As he spoke, he managed to grin in a conspiratorial way, as if he already shared some vital and amusing secret with Director Ahlgren.

And this is about the average of the Underground, thought the director, studying his victim with distaste. And in the next room Barbara waited her turn at being interrogated. How could she have ever become connected, however indirectly, with the ideals or the people of this Underground represented before him?

“None of them are listening,” said the director, who took daily steps to discourage that sort of thing among his subordinates. It was not entirely unheard of for a Party member to turn traitor and join the Underground. “Quickly now, what have you to tell me?”

“This—I will act as a double agent for you,” volunteered the young wretch, in a stage whisper, maintaining the idiotic grin. His voluntary muscles were still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police, and so he sat propped erect in his chair by a stiff pillow the director kept handy for such use, his voluntary muscles still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police.

Director Ahlgren frowned thoughtfully. He took a cigarette from a box on his plain but highly polished desk. “Care for one?”

“No, no. Do you understand what I am offering you? I am a highly trained agent, and I will betray them all to you, because you are the strongest here, and I must serve the strongest.” The young man nodded earnestly, as if he hoped the director would imitate the movement and so agree with him.

The director puffed smoke. “Very well, I accept. Now you must show me that you will really do what you say. Tell me the address of your contact cell.”

THE YOUNG rebel contorted his forehead, in an apparent effort to conceive a stroke of Machiavellian strategy.

Ahlgren pursued him. “I know each cell of the Underground has its contact with the rest of the organization through one other cell and that you know the address of yours. How can I trust you as a double agent if you won’t tell me that much?”

“Wouldn’t any of the others tell you? My dear comrades from my own cell?”

All the dear comrades seemed to have taken memory-scrambling drugs, as captured rebels often did, though the director sometimes thought it a superfluous action on their part.

“None of the others offered to act as a double agent.” Ahlgren was trying to humor this babbler out of the one piece of valuable information he was likely to possess.

“Our comrades in the contact cell will have heard about the arrests this morning,” said the prisoner with a sudden happy thought. “They’ll have moved already anyway.”

Quite likely true, Director Ahlgren knew. “So it can’t hurt them if you tell me,” he encouraged.

The prisoner pondered a moment longer, then named an address in a quiet residential section about a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Party Building.

“Anything else you can tell me?”

Careful consideration. “No.”

PolPol Chief Lazar and a couple of guards came into the office quickly after the director touched the signal button.

“Take him down to conditioning,” said the director, leaning back in his chair. He felt his head beginning to ache.

The rebel screamed and rolled his head, about the most violent motion he could make, as the two PolPol guards caught him gently by the arms and lifted him from his chair.

“Traitor! You are the traitor, not I! You have betrayed my confidence, your own honor, you—” He seemed suddenly to realize what was going to happen to him. “Conditioning! No, not my mind, not my mind! Can’t you beat me or something instead? I won’t be meee any lonnnggerrrr . . .”

The screaming died away down the corridor outside the office.

“Careful with him!” Lazar called sharply to the guards, from the doorway. “Don’t let his legs bump, there! You bruised that man this morning; we want no more of that.”

He came back into the office, closing the door, viewing Ahlgren with the proper expression of respect. “Would you like me to conduct the next interview, sir?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you might feel a certain reluctance, sir. I understand you knew the young lady years ago.”

“Before I joined the Party. Yes, quite right, I did.” The director arose from his chair and walked toward the wide window, past the bookshelves that almost filled one wall, giving the office the air of a study and concealing his secret exit.

FROM the window he looked put upon the sunset that reddened the sky over his prosperous city, whose bright lights were coming on against the dusk.

I understand Lazar, he thought, because he is ambitious, as I am. Or as I was. Under one of the old dictatorships, I would have had to fear such ambition in a subordinate and consider taking steps against him. But I need not fear Lazar, because the Party claims his perfect loyalty, and he can do nothing against me until I begin to fail the Party. And is that time perhaps drawing near? Will my secret exit always be only a private joke?

Watching his own eyes in the half-mirror of the window, the director told himself: Someone must govern, and the worldwide Party does better than the old systems did. There are no wars. There is no corruption, and no real struggle for power among Party members, because there is practically no disobedience in the carefully chosen ranks. The mass of the citizens seem content with their bread and circuses. There is only the Underground, and maybe some kind of Underground is necessary in any society.

“Lazar.”

“Sir?”

“How do we do it? How do we attain such perfection of power that the essence of power is enough, that we have no need to constantly threaten or stupefy the citizens?”

The gay and active city below was brightening itself against the gathering night. No giant signs proclaimed the glories of the Party. No monolithic statues deified the World Directors, past or present. The Party was invisible.

Lazar seemed a bit shocked at the question. “The selfless obedience of each individual is the life and strength of the Party, sir.” A phrase from the catechism.

“Of course . . . but look, Lazar. That Citizens Policemen directing traffic down there. He wears a stun pistol, because of nonpolitical criminals he must sometimes deal with; but if one of your PolPol agents were to walk up to him and arrest him, the odds are he would offer no resistance. Now why? The Citizens Police are as well armed and I think more numerous than your men.”

Lazar studied the traffic cop below through narrowed eyes. “I can’t remember when we’ve had to arrest a Citizens Policeman.”

“Neither can I. The point is—how do we do it?”

“Superior dedication and discipline will prevail, sir.”

“Yes.” But the parroted phrases were no real answer. The Citizens Police were presumably disciplined and dedicated too. Lazar was unwilling or unable to really discuss the subject.

Such questions had not occurred to Ahlgren himself until quite recently. He could not remember ever seriously considering the possibility of himself opposing the Party in any way, even before that day five years ago when he had been accepted as a member.

“And we of the Party control the means of Conditioning,” said Lazar.

“Conditioning, yes.” Barbara. He had to fight to keep anything from showing in his face.

He knew there was not one person in the gay and bright-lit city before him who could not be brought to the basement of this building at any time, at a word from himself, to undergo Conditioning. The Ultimate Pain, he had heard it called by Party theorists. But it needed no dramatization.

The citizens had a slang term for it that he had heard somewhere: brain-boiling.

The office intercom sounded on the director’s desk. “Chief Lazar’s office would like him to come in, if possible.” Tight security. No details would be spoken unnecessarily over even the director’s line. No risks would be taken at all.

He was faintly relieved. “Your office wants you for something; I won’t need you here any longer. Good job today.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lazar was gone in a moment.

AHLGREN was alone in his soft-lit office. His eyes ranged along the bookshelves. The Party put no restrictions on reading. Aquinas—some of the Eastern philosophers—Russell. The encyclopedia, with the gap where that one volume had been missing for a week. Volume P. What the devil could have happened to it? Was there a kleptomaniac on his staff? It seemed absurd for anyone to steal an ordinary book.

But he was only procrastinating. He went to sit again at his desk, leafed through papers. Bulky contracts and specifications for the new water supply for his city. And the Citizens Council had voted a new tax; he would have to hire collectors. Too much nonpolitical work, as usual, and now for the hundredth time. She had spoken in public against the Party this morning in the presence of a PolPol officer, the Underground flaring up again, and—

He keyed the intercom and ordered, “Bring the girl in,” without giving himself any more time to think about what he was going to have to do.

He sat waiting, his head aching, trying to hold nerves and face and hands steady. The PolPol report on Barbara was on his desk, mixed up now with the waterworks, and he read it.

She came into the office quietly, between the blank-faced uniformed PolPol women. She walked unaided and Ahlgren felt a faint, smothered gladness that it had not been necessary to stun her.

“Leave us,” he told the guards, who instantly obeyed. Would it look suspicious for him to want to be alone with another prisoner? It didn’t matter—in a few minutes he would send her to Conditioning, because he had to send her; there was nothing else the Party could do with her. He felt his heart sinking.

He met her eyes for the first time and was vastly grateful to see no terror in them. “Sit down, Barbara.”

She sat down without speaking and watched him as if more sorry for him than for herself. It was her look of that day years ago when he had told her of losing a job . . . If I had married her in those days, he thought, as I almost did, and never joined the Party, I would now be sitting in some outer office waiting, desperate to do anything to spare her the Pain, but helpless. Now I sit here, representing the Party, still helpless. But no, if I had married her I would have found some way to keep her from this.

“I’m sorry, Barbara,” he said finally. “You know what I must do.”

The waiting, unchanging sympathy of her eyes wrenched at him. She had never been beautiful, really, but so utterly alive . . .

“I—would like you to come back when you are—recovered,” he heard himself maundering. “You’ll be all—”

“Will you be able to marry me then?” Her first words to him burst out in a voice near breaking, like a question held in too long, that she had not meant to speak aloud.

He sat up straight in his chair, feeling as if the world had suddenly shaken beneath him. “How can you ask me that? You know I can’t marry—I have chosen the Party!” He gripped the desk to stop his hands from trembling; then he realized that she must only be making a desperate attempt to save herself from Conditioning.

“IN THE name of the Party, sir,” said City PolPol Chief Lazar in a hushed and slightly awed voice, shaking the hand thrust toward him by District Director Perkins. They stood in a small room in the basement of the Party Building in Ahlgren’s city. One-way glass in a wall showed a view of a Treatment Room where Conditioning was sometimes practiced.

“Lazar, I’ve studied your record.” Perkins’ handshake was massive, like his bearing. “I think you may be taking over in this city very soon, so I had you called down here to watch something. The doctors called me in the District Capital last night about Ahlgren, and we’ve arranged a little test for him today—he doesn’t know I’m here, of course. We should be able to see the climax, if things go as planned.”

“I—I hardly know what to say, sir.”

Perkins eyed him shrewdly. “Think you’re the one being tested? No, son, not today. But it won’t hurt you to see this.” He frowned. “Ahlgren started out well in the Party, too. Seemed to have a fine future ahead of him. Now . . .” Perkins shook his head.

A door leading to a corridor opened and a man dressed in the green smock of a doctor stuck his head into the room. “Would you mind if I watched from here, sir?”

“No, no, come in. Lazar, this is Citizen Schmidt. Doctor Schmidt, I should say, hey?”

Lazar acknowledged the introduction perfunctorily. A loyal non-Party citizen was neither a political danger nor a competitor for advancement, and therefore almost totally uninteresting.

Lazar turned to study the Treatment Room through the one-way glass. It was not impressive, except for the treatment table in the center, a low monstrous thing of wires and power. There were soft lights, chairs, a desk in one corner, and above the desk a small bookshelf. Lazar could see that one book had been placed behind the others, as if someone had tried to hide it. Looking closer, he made out that it was part of an encyclopedia.

Volume Paa-Pyx.

AHLGREN was holding Barbara by the wrists; he pulled her around the desk and kissed her. His decision had been made with no real struggle at all. Maybe he had made the decision weeks or months ago, without knowing, and had just been traveling with the Party on inertia. Barbara trembled and tried to pull back and then let herself go against him. She was not merely acting to save herself now, she could not be.

“They say life can be good again after Conditioning, Barbara,” he whispered to her. “They say many regain full normal intelligence. They say—no, I could never send you to that! Not you, not that!”

“Oh, Jim, Jim.” Years since anyone had called him by that name. Or was it so long? A half-memory came disturbingly and fled before he could grasp it. But then a real memory came plainly to him, bringing with it a plan of action that was at least better than nothing: the memory of the address the young rebel had spoken to his ears alone.

“Listen!” He grabbed Barbara’s arms and held her away from him. “There may be one chance, just one small chance for us.”

“What?”

“The Underground. I have an address.”

“No, Jim. You can’t do that.” She backed away, looking toward the door as if she heard the guards coming to seize them both.

“Why not? Don’t you understand what Conditioning means? Don’t you understand what you are facing?”

“Yes, but . . .” Indecision showed in her voice and manner. “I don’t know if I should try to tell you.”

“Tell me what? Don’t you realize what you’re facing?”

“Yes, but you . . .”

“Me?” So she could think of his welfare first, even while she faced the Ultimate Pain. She must have loved him all these years. “I’ve had enough of the Party anyway.” The words came so easily and sincerely to his lips that he was surprised as if by hypocrisy in himself, but it was not that. Somehow in the past few minutes his whole outlook on the world had shifted abruptly; the change must have been building for a long time.

His mind raced ahead, planning, while Barbara watched his face intently, one hand held up to her mouth.

He pulled a stun pistol out of his desk, checked the charge, and thrust it into his belt. “Follow me. Quickly.”

A section of the bookcase swung outward at his touch. He led Barbara into the narrow passage in the wall and indicated an unmarked phone set into a small niche. “Private line to District HQ. This may buy us a little time.”

She reached out tentatively as if to restrain him, but then clenched her fingers and made no objection.

He picked up the phone and waited until he heard someone on the other end, then said: “Ahlgren here. Rebel plot. They’ve infiltrated. I must flee.” He hung up. Of course District HQ would doubt the message, but it should divide at least for a time the energies of the Party that would now be arrayed against him—and against the frightened girl with him. He led her now to a tiny secret elevator that would take them down to street level. In revolt against the authority he had so long accepted, he felt less alone than he had for years.

THEY emerged into open air by coming out of the wall in a little-used entrance to a rather shabby apartment house a block from the Party Building, after Ahlgren had studied the hallway through a peephole to make sure it was unoccupied.

He had discarded his insignia inside the secret passage; his jacket hid the butt of the pistol in his belt. If no one looked too closely at him, he might pass in the half-dark streets for a plainly dressed citizen.

They walked the side streets toward the Underground address, not going fast enough to attract attention. Barbara held his arm and from time to time looked back over her shoulder until he whispered to her to stop it. Other couples strolled past them and beside them; the normal evening life of the city progressed around them as if the Party and the Underground were no more than fairy stories.

The young rebel might have told someone else the address, before or after Conditioning had wrenched and battered his mind out of human shape. Ahlgren could not rely on the place being even temporarily safe. Barbara and he could only pause there in their flight, warn any Underground people they could find, and try to flee with them to some place of slightly less danger, if any existed. It was a weak chance, but their only one. There had been no time at all to plan anything better. Rebellion against the Party had burst in Ahlgren with the suddenness of a PolPol raid. His very lack of preparation for this step and his good record to date might make District think for a long time that he was indeed the victim of infiltrating Underground plotters.

The address proved to be that of a middle-sized, unremarkable building in a lower-class residential area, two or three apartments over a quiet-looking small tavern. A single front entrance, divided inside, where stairs led up to the apartments and two steps led down to the level of the tavern.

A couple of male patrons looked around from the bar with mild interest as Ahlgren and the girl entered. They and the bartender seemed nothing but solid citizen types.

While Ahlgren hesitated, uncertain of what to say or whether to speak at all, the bartender said suddenly: “Oh, that bunch. They’re upstairs.” The man’s face assumed an unhappy look.

Ahlgren took no time to worry about whether he and Barbara were such obvious rebels already, or how the bartender fitted in. The PolPol might be right on their heels. He only nodded and led Barbara up the stairs.

There were two doors at the top; he chose at random and knocked. No answer. He tried the other. After at least a minute of feverishly quiet rapping on both doors, one opened enough to reveal a thin man with a suspicious stare.

“Let us in,” Ahlgren whispered desperately. “It is vital to the Underground.” The PolPol might close in at any moment; he had to take the chance and speak plainly. His hand was under his jacket on the butt of his stun pistol and his foot was in the door.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the thin man tonelessly.

“Look at me! I am the director of this city. I have deserted the Party.”

THE man’s eyes widened and there were excited whisperings in the room behind him. “Let them in,. Otto,” said a voice.

Ahlgren pushed his way into the room, dragging Barbara with him. A fat man sat at a table with a bottle and glasses before him, and a little pile of dingy books and folders on the floor at his feet. A pair of unwholesome-looking women sat on a sagging couch along one wall. A door with a homemade look in another wall seemed to lead into the other apartment. Evidently the Underground used the whole second floor.

Ahlgren wasted no time with preliminaries. “Listen to me. The PolPol may be on their way here now. Get out while you can and take us with you. Have you got some place to run to?”

The fat man regarded Ahlgren owlishly and belched. “Not so fast. How do we know—”

There was a glare of searchlights against the dirty windows, through the drawn shades, a booming amplified voice: “Ahlgren, come out peacefully. We know you’re there. Ahlgren, come out.”

He gripped Barbara and looked into her eyes. “Try to remember me after the Pain.”

“Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, you don’t know, you don’t understand!”

The four Underground people had burst into passionate argument, but were doing nothing purposeful. Ahlgren dragged Barbara downstairs. The PolPol would have the building surrounded, but they would expect him to try to fight them off on the stairs, perhaps to escape over the roofs as rebels often did.

The lights were out in the tavern. The two patrons were standing behind the bar, the attitude of their vague shapes suggesting that they were waiting as interested spectators. The windows were too glared with searchlights, and the barkeep stood in the middle of the room glaring at Ahlgren.

“Ahlgren! Come out peacefully and no one will be hurt! Your case will be fairly heard!”

“Why don’t you just do like the man says?” the barkeep suggested angrily.

What was wrong with these people? Didn’t they realize-but he had no time. “Shut up. Where does that back door lead?”

“Nowhere. I keep it locked.” The barkeep swore. “Hope they don’t smash the place, but they sure as hell will if you don’t go out. Sure, they say, we pay compensation, but look how long it takes. Sure, the glass they put in won’t cut no-body, but I gotta sweep it up and put up plywood panels. Why don’t you just go out?”

“Take it easy, Sam,” said one of the patrons behind the bar, with a chuckle. Barbara was babbling too, something she was sorry for, or sorry about.

A window smashed in and a PolPol officer stood outlined in the frame, flashlight sweeping the room. The director shot first. The invisible soundless beam doubled up the man; the falling flashlight spun its beam crazily through the room. Ahlgren picked up a stool to batter at the rear door. It was the only way left.

“That don’t go nowhere, I told ya! Stop! Why did I ever sign up?” The barkeep moaned, grabbing at Ahlgren to keep him from smashing at the door with the stool.

Ahlgren let him have the stun beam at close range.

It didn’t bother the man in the least.

“Not on me, friend, not on me. Tickle all you want,” the barkeep said in obscure triumph, pulling the stool away from Ahlgren, whose grip on it had loosened in surprise.

The director felt the paralyzing tickle of a beam stab his own side; he had time to see Lazar grinning in at a window before sinking to the floor and into unconsciousness.

HE WAS slumped in a chair propped up by a stiff pillow when awareness returned. There was a sense of strangeness in his mind that he could not fully account for by what he remembered happening. Drugs? They were seldom used on anyone.

It was a Treatment Room; they were not going to waste any time. Lazar’s face looked down at him, grinning, as Be had seen it at the tavern window. Two or three of the green-smocked doctors who always administered Conditioning stood beside the monstrous table, watching him and waiting. And Barbara. She stood free in the background, not stunned or restrained in any way.

Lazar caught the direction of his gaze. “Oh yes, the young lady’s been most helpful to us. It was in large part her idea—”

“Pease.” The doctor’s voice had an edge to it. “I must insist, sir, that you not interfere with treatment.”

“Very well.” Lazar’s grin was wider than ever. He touched Ahlgren’s shoulder as one might pat a dog about to be gassed. “I was comfortably set to watch this show when you made me get up and work for it. But it’ll be worth the trouble. Good luck in your new life.” He went out jauntily.

Ahlgren let his eyelids close; he could not look at Barbara. She was whispering with a doctor. He prayed to the God of his childhood to let the Pain come quickly and bring complete forgetfulness.

A doctor was in front of Ahlgren. “Open your eyes. Look at me. Trust me. Never mind who’s watching or that you think you’ve been betrayed. We didn’t plan that, but it can’t be helped now. I want you to do something and it won’t hurt. Will you try?” The doctor’s eyes burned down. His voice compelled.

Ahlgren was held. “Try what?” he asked.

“What do you think?” the doctor asked patiently. “Can’t you remember?”

Remember? What was there to remember? Ahlgren’s eye roved the room, fell upon the little bookshelf above the desk in one corner, and slid away again. But he supposed there was no escape from—what?

“You can get up if you like now, Jim. Move around.”

He tried his legs, and they pushed him erect. His arms functioned; movement took an effort but was not painful. How long had he been out from the stunning?

He found himself approaching the little bookshelf, while the doctors and Barbara watched silently. She was crying quietly; too late now. But he couldn’t hate her.

OBEYING AN impulse, he reached behind the little row of books and pulled out what he saw with a shock was Volume P. “Who hid this here?” he demanded. “I’ve been looking for it.”

“Don’t you remember, Jim?” asked a doctor gently. “You pushed it back there the last time. Now shall we try reading some things again?”

The sense of strangeness had deepened until there was no standard left by which to judge the strangeness. That doctor had a cursed familiar way of talking to the director of a city, even to an arrested director, but the director opened the book. He would show them; there was no subject he couldn’t read about.

He found the place he thought they wanted, and began to read aloud, “Pain, the Ultimate,” but all that followed was “see Conditioning.”

“No, Jim. Turn further back. Let’s try again where we were last time. Do you remember?”

Ahlgren turned pages, suddenly fearful that something unfaceable was coming. Paine, Thomas. Lucky man, bound up safe in a book.

“Party, the?” he asked, looking around at the doctors. He thought he remembered reading this article once; much of it had been only a jumble of nonsense. High-priced encyclopedia, too.

“No, not just now. Turn back to where we were last time, remember?”

Ahlgren knew it had to be done. For some reason. His hands began to tremble as he turned the pages. Pe. Pi. He was getting closer to something he didn’t want to find.

Po. He dropped the book, but made himself pick it up again. Barbara gave him a violent nod of encouragement. She was still almost crying over something. Women. But this time she was here to help him and he was going to succeed.

He turned a few more pages and there it was. Something he had tried to face before—how many times?—and had always forgotten about after failure. His eyes scanned the clearly printed symbols, but something in his brain fought against interpreting them.

“I can’t read it. It’s all blurry.” He had said that before.

Barbara whispered: “Try, Jim. Try hard.”

Ahlgren stared at the page in an immense effort, failed, and relaxed for a moment. The title of the article suddenly leaped into focus for him:

POSSEMANIA

HE HELD up the book and began to read aloud in a quavery voice: “ ‘—From the Latin, posse power, plus mania. Of all mental diseases doubtless the most destructive, in terms of the total suffering inflicted upon humanity throughout history; and one of the most resistant to even modern therapy.’ ”

Why had they wanted him to read this? And why had it been difficult? An awful idea loomed on the horizon . . .

“ ‘Unique among diseases in that its effects are put to practical use by society, it in fact forms the basis of modern government (see Party, the).’ ”

Ahlgren faltered and looked around him uncertainly. He felt sweat beginning to bead his forehead. The article went on to great length, but he flipped pages rapidly back to find Party, the.

He skimmed rapidly through a few paragraphs, then read aloud in an impersonal, shrill, hurried tone: “ ‘Those with this pathological lust for power over others generally find means to satisfy it in any society; ours is the first to maintain effective control over its members who are so afflicted. Now, the victims of the disease are necessarily detected during the compulsory annual psychological examination. If immediate therapy fails to effect a cure, as it usually fails, mental Conditioning is applied to initiate or strengthen the delusions, welcomed by the patient, that the Party has the rest of the citizenry at its mercy and—’ ”

“Take your time, Jim.”

“ ‘—and that—that Conditioning is a painful, crippling punishment used by the Party itself to erase thoughts of political opposition.’ ”

The world was turning under Ahlgren. He forced himself to read on, slowly and sanely. Could this be truth?

“ ‘Following what is now to him the only practical course, the victim is guided to apply for Party membership as those found to be compulsive rebels and/or punishment-seekers are shuttled to the complementary organization (see Underground, the). He is of course invariably accepted, and is assigned, depending on his skills, to the Administration or the Political Police (see PolPol).’ ”

Again pages fluttered under Ahlgren’s fingers. PolPol.

“ ‘—stun pistols locked at low neural frequencies that produce only a tickling sensation, to which all Party and Underground members are Conditioned to respond by going into psychic paralysis, unless in a situation where it would be physically dangerous to do so.’ ”

Ahlgren skipped from article to article, his mind grabbing recklessly at the words that had been forbidden him.

“ ‘—Most people generally ignore the activities of both Party and Underground, except as occasional sources of unexpected amusement.’ ”

“ ‘—Underground members captured by the Party are quickly turned over to the government doctors for Conditioning. They are treated and sent out again to a different area, believing themselves rebel couriers or escapees. At each capture they are tested to see if their disease has abated to within the reach of therapy.’ ”

“ ‘—The PolPol raid the same houses over and over, being Conditioned to remember no such addresses and keep no records of them. Property owners are compensated for damage incurred. Personal injury in these activities is extremely rare, and accidental when it does occur, due to the Conditioning of both Party and Underground people against it.’ ”

“ ‘Party members composing the Administration perform most of our essential government functions, being constrained by their Conditioning against any abuse of power, corruption, or dishonesty . . .’ ”

AHLGREN felt cold sweat all over him. His headache was gone but his throat felt raw. How long had he been reading aloud?

“That’s fine, Jim, that’s fine!” a doctor said. “Can you go on a little further?”

It took a giant’s effort. Yet it was something that must be done.

“ ‘By the interaction of Conditioning with the disease, the victim is prevented from apprehending the true state of affairs. He is, for example, unable to read this very article with any true comprehension. If read aloud to him, it will not make sense to his mind; he will interpret it to suit the needs of the moment, then quickly forget it. Indeed, this article and similar writings are frequently used as tests to determine a patient’s progress . . .’ ”

Ahlgren’s hand holding the book dropped to his side. He stood swaying on his feet, utterly weary. He wanted only sleep, oblivion, forgetfulness.

A doctor carefully took the book from him, found the place, and read:

“When continued therapy has brought a Party member near the point of cure, as is finally possible in about half of all cases, a realization of the true state of affairs becomes possible for the patient.’ That’s you now, Jim. You’re over the hump. Understand me? You’re getting well!”

Director Ahlgren was weeping quietly, as if from weakness and exhaustion. He sat down on the edge of the treatment table and the doctors gathered around him and began to fit the attachments of the table to him. He helped them; he was familiar with the process.

“I think this’ll be the last, Jim. We’re going to de-Condition you this time. Then one more subconscious therapy—” The doctor’s voice came through speakers . . .

. . . into the next room, where Perkins, Lazar, and Dr. Schmidt watched and listened.

Lazar stared through the one-way glass, gripped by vast elation. The director’s chair was his! The girl in the Treatment Room had thrown her arms about Ahlgren; perhaps she regretted that she had been used against him. She should be grateful. It was not often that a mere citizen had such a chance to help the Party.

Dr. Schmidt was saying something to Lazar. “What?”

“I said, would you tell me what you thought of the material the former director read aloud just now?”

Lazar frowned. Why, it had been something—unpleasant. He turned to Perkins, giving up the problem with relief to his superior.

“What he read was a lot of subversive nonsense,” Perkins rumbled, after a thoughtful pause. “It amounted to a confession of guilt.”

“I see,” said Dr. Schmidt. He looked a little sad. “Thank you, gentlemen. Shall we go?”

Perkins was staring with bright and hungry eyes at the motionless form of former Director Ahlgren on the table. “Too bad we have to inflict such pain,” he said.

He was coming out of pleasant sleep, and the first thing he did was reach out and find her hand. He looked up at her face. He remembered now—she’d said she’d wait . . . five years before.

“Was it your idea?” he asked. “To help last night yourself?”

“No, the doctors suggested it, darling. They thought you were approaching a crisis . . . but it’s all right now.”

“Then stop crying,” he told her. “Every time I look at you, you’re crying. Think I want to watch you cry all the time?” But she was half laughing too, so it really was all right.

He lay in peace. The weight of mountains had been lifted from his soul.

HIS mother was bending over him anxiously. He saw there was morning light coming into a hospital room.

“Son, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mother. No pain.” Barbara, looking happy, was still here, or here again.

His father came in, a little older and grayer than he remembered, shaking his head in the familiar way at his mother’s ignorant worry about the supposed pain of Conditioning.

“It was on the Party news just now,” his father said, grinning. “You were denounced for traitorous activity yesterday and purged last night. The usual appeal—for the citizenry to treat you kindly and not blame your new personality for your acts of treason. I think we can manage that somehow.”

Jim Ahlgren looked around at the three of them. He said softly: “I’ve been gone a long time.”

PLANETEER

One stranger was a god—the other a devil. Strange that they should be on the same side!

DURING the weeks that the starship Yuan Chwang had hovered in close observation of the new planet Aqua, ship’s time had been jockeyed around to agree with the suntime at the place chosen for first landing.

Boris Brazil saw no evidence of sane thinking behind this procedure; it meant the planeteer’s briefing for the big event was set for 0200, and he had to get up in what was effectively the middle of the night—a thing to which he had grown accustomed, but never expected to learn to enjoy. Leaving his tiny cabin in a state of disorder that might have infuriated an inspecting officer—had there been an inspecting officer aboard interested in the neatness of cabins—he set forth in search of chow.

Brazil was tall and bony, resembling a blond young Abe Lincoln. He rubbed sleep from his eyes as his long legs carried him toward the mess hall. A distracting young squab from Computing sailed past him in the opposite direction, smiling.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Is the coffee that bad?” It was the best facsimile of a joke he could think of this early. But the girl hadn’t been talking about coffee. Chief Planeteer Sam Gates had picked Brazil to go along on the first landing attempt, he learned when he met Gates in the chow line. He saw by the small computer clipped to Sam’s belt that the other man had been up early on his own, double-checking the crew chief and maintenance robots who were readying their scoutship. Brazil felt vaguely guilty—but not very. He might well have been just another body in the way.

Sam Gates stood in the chow line swinging his arms and snapping his fingers, chewing his dark mustache as he usually did when nervous.

“How’s it look?” Brazil asked.

“Oh, free and clear. Guess we’ll have ground under our feet in a few hours.”

MOST of the Yuan Chwang’s twenty-four planeteers were in the chow line, with a fair number of people from other departments. The day’s operation was going to be a big one for everybody.

Trays loaded with synthetic ham, and a scrambled substance not preceded or followed by chickens, Gates and Brazil found a table. Ten scoutships were going down today, though only one would attempt to land; most of the night shift from all departments seemed to think it time for lunch. The mess was filling up quickly.

“Here comes the alien,” said Gates, gesturing with his fork.

Brazil raised his eyes toward the tall turbaned man bearing a tray in their direction.

“Hi, Chan. Pull up a chair.”

Chandragupta was no more an alien here than any other Earthman; his job had earned him the nickname.

“Good morning,” said the Tribune with a smile, sitting down with Gates and Brazil. “I hope my people treat you well today.” He had not yet seen one of “his people” and possibly never would; but from the moment high-altitude reconnaissance had established that intelligent life at an apparently primitive technological level existed on Aqua, his job had taken on substance. He was to represent the natives below in the councils aboard the Yuan Chwang, to argue for what he conceived to be their welfare at every turn, letting others worry about the scientific objectives that had brought the exploration ship so far from Earth, until he was satisfied that the natives needed no help or the mission was over.

“No reason to expect any trouble,” said Brazil. “This one looks fairly simple.”

“Except we know there are some kind of people down there,” said Gates. “And people are never as simple as you’d like them to be.”

“I wonder if they will need my help,” said Chan, “and I wonder if I will be able to help them.” The job of Tribune was a new one, really still experimental. Chan shrugged. “But there is no point in my speculating now. In a few hours perhaps I will know.”

“We’re not trying to conquer them, you know,” said Brazil, half amused and a little offended by Chan’s eagerness to defend against Earth a people he had never seen.

“Oh, I know. But we must be sure not to conquer them by accident, eh?” Chan attacked his ersatz eggs again.

When Brazil got up to walk without Gates, he could feel the eyes on his back, or thought he could. Here go the heroes, he thought. First landing. Hail, hail.

And deep inside he felt a pride and joy so fierce he was embarrassed to admit it to himself—to be one of the first Earthmen stepping onto this unknown world.

BRIEFING was normal for a mission this size. The twenty planeteers who were going down into atmosphere, plus two reserve crews, slouched in their seats and scribbled notes and smoked and whispered back and forth about business, concentrating so intently on the job at hand that an outsider might have thought them bored and distracted.

Captain Dietrich, boss of the Yuan Chwang, mounted the low dais in the front of the briefing “room. He was a rather small man, of mild and bookish appearance. After working with him for a while, you tended to treat cautiously all small men of mild and bookish appearance.

Tribune Chandragupta entered the briefing room through the rear door. The Captain eyed him thoughtfully. This was the first voyage on which he had been required to carry a Tribune; the idea had been born as a political move in the committee meetings of Earth Parliament, and had earned certain legislators reputations as defenders of liberty, albeit only the liberty of certain as yet unmet aliens.

Captain Dietrich had no wish to conquer anyone, having of course passed the Space Force psych tests, and he was willing to give the Tribune system a trial. After all, he could always overrule the man, on condition he thought it necessary for the safety of members of the expedition—though he was the only one aboard who could do so. But it seemed to the Captain that this placing of a civilian official aboard his ship might be only the start of an effort by the groundbound government to encroach upon the domain of the Space Force. Every time he went home he heard complaints that the SF was growing too powerful and cost too much.

“Militarism,” they would say, over a drink or anywhere he met civilians. “We’ve just managed to really get away from all that on Earth, and now you want to start all over, on Mars and Ganymede and this new military base on Aldebaran 2.”

“The Martian Colony is hardly a military base,” he would remind them patiently. “It now has its own independent civilian government and sends representatives to Earth Parliament. The Space Force has practically pulled out of Mars altogether. Ganymede is a training base. Aldebaran 2 you’re right about, mostly; and we do have other military bases.”

“Aha! Now how do we know that none of these outlying bases or colonies will ever threaten Earth?”

“Because all spaceships and strategic weapons are controlled by the SF, and the SF is controlled by the psych tests that screen people trying to enter it. Admittedly, no system is perfect, but what are our alternatives?”

“We could destroy all strategic weapons,” they might say. Or: “We could cut down on this space exploration, maybe stop it altogether. It’s devilish expensive, and there seems no hope it will ever relieve our crowding on Earth. What do we get out of it anyway that makes it really profitable?”

“Well,” Captain Dietrich might say, “since you talk of militarism, I will ignore the valuable knowledge we have gained by exploration, and answer you in military terms. We have the ability to travel hundreds of light-years in a matter of months, and to melt any known planet in minutes, with one ship delivering one weapon. How many other races do you think live in our galaxy with similar capabilities?”

NO Earthman had met any but primitive aliens—yet. But people had begun to comprehend the magnitude of the galaxy, where man’s hundred-light-year radius of domination gave him no more than a Jamestown Colony.

“Assume a race with such capabilities,” the Captain might continue, “and with motivations we might not be able to understand, spreading out across the galaxy as we are. Would you rather have them discover our military base on Aldebaran this year, or find all humanity crowded on one unprotected Earth, perhaps the year after next?”

Dietrich got a wide range of answers to this question. He himself would much prefer to meet the hypothetical advanced aliens a thousand light-years or more from Earth, with a number of large and effective military bases in between.

But right now it was time for him to start briefing his planeteers, who probably knew as much about Aqua as he, who had never driven a scoutship into her upper atmosphere.

“Gentlemen, we’ve found out a little about this planet, the only child of a Sol-type sun, after watching it for six weeks. One point one AU from its sun, gravity point nine five, diameter point nine, eighty-five per cent of surface is water. Oxy-nitrogen atmosphere, about fifteen thousand feet equivalent. We won’t try breathing it for some time yet. Full suits until further notice.

“What land there is is probably quite well populated with what we think are humanoids with a technical level probably nowhere higher than that of medieval Europe. Several rather large sailing ships have been spotted in coastal waters. There are only a couple of long paved roads, and none of the cities are electrically lit on nightside. We don’t think anyone down there can have spotted us yet.”

Most of his audience looked back at him rather impatiently, as if to say: We know all this. We’re the ones who found it out.

But the Captain wanted to make sure they all had the basic facts in proper focus. “The main objective of this mission is to make a first contact with the natives with the purpose of finding a way to establish a temporary scientific base on the surface, to continue our investigation here with seismic studies, biological studies, and so forth—and of course to see what we can learn from and about the intelligent inhabitants.”

THE Captain raised his eyes and spoke as much to the Tribune as to his planeteers. “There seems very little chance of any permanent colony being established here, due to the inadequate air, and the native population on a very limited land area. This same apparently high population would seem to preclude any chance of establishing our temporary base in some remote area, without knowledge of the natives. So we will have to deal with them somehow from the start.

“I’ve never believed in the god-from-the-sky approach, and you know SF policy is to avoid it if possible. It injects a false note into what may become a permanent relationship, even if we intend it now to be temporary. And he who takes godhood upon himself is likely to have to spend more time at it than at the business for which he came, and to assume responsibility for farreaching changes in the native history.

“We’ve met enough primitive races to know that some change is bound to result from any contact, but SF policy is to keep it at a minimum and to try to make it beneficial.”

The Captain paused, then looked at another man who stood waiting to speak, paper in his hand. “Meteorology?”

“Roger, sir.”

On a wall appeared a photomap of the island that had been picked for the first landing attempt, an irregular shape of land about a hundred miles long by ten wide. Air temperature at dawn in the landing area should be about fifty degrees F, the water a little cooler. There might be enough fog to aid the landing scoutship in an unseen descent.

Meteorology also discussed characteristics of the atmosphere that might affect radio and video communication between scouts and mother ship, and predicted the weather in the landing area for the next twenty-four hours. He paused to answer a couple of questions, and introduced Passive Detection.

The PD man discussed Aqua’s Van Allen belts, magnetic field, the variety and amount of solar radiation in nearby space and that to be expected on the surface, and what the natives probably burned for heat and light in the nightside cities. He confirmed the apparent absence of any advanced technology below.

Biology was next, with a prediction that the island would show diverse and active life. It was near the tropics in the spring hemisphere, and green with vegetation. Scout photos showed no evidence of very large animals or plants. Some areas appeared to be under cultivation.

Anthropology took the dais to speculate. The people of Aqua were thought to be humanoid, but in the photos anything as small as a man was at the very limit of visibility, and the estimate of the creatures’ appearance was based on lucky shots of dawn or dusk shadows striding gigantic across more or less level ground. Inhabitants of such a watery world would be expected to be sailors, and indeed ships had been photographed. There was some massive construction, probably masonry, in the one sizable city on the island. A sea wall and a couple of large structures had been built on a finger of land that protected the city’s small harbor.

CAPTAIN Dietrich came back to outline the patterns he wanted the non-landing scouts to fly. “The target island is pretty well isolated from the planet’s main land areas, so if we put a base here it should have minimal effect on native culture. Also, if we botch things up here, we may be able to move on and try again without the natives in the new spot having heard of us.” He looked around at his men; the idea was strongly conveyed to them that the Captain preferred they not botch things up. “Chan—anything you want to say? No? All right, board your scouts.”

Brazil strode beside Gates out the door in the rear of the briefing room, passing under the sign that read:

MAYBE . . . ANYTHING

Maybe they’re real telepaths down there. Maybe they’re a mighty race now retired from active competition and preferring the simple life. Maybe . . .

Maybe nothing, Brazil told himself, quick-stepping beside Sam Gates along the corridor past the doors of scoutship berths that occupied this part of the hull of the Yuan Chwang. The time was for the planeteer’s motto: Go Down and Find Out.

The main preflight check had been run yesterday. Gates and Brazil now faced the final quick Medical & Psych in the corridor. Brazil had long since given up trying to startle the psych doc by giving to the inevitable weird question an even weirder answer.

“I’d swear you were sane if I didn’t know you better,” the doctor told him this time. “Pass on.”

They fitted themselves into the suits of armor, light, space and ground, that had been selected for this job. The suits included among their accessories flotation bubbles that when inflated enabled the wearers to maneuver with supposed ease through several hundred feet of water. The suits now received a quick semifinal test.

Captain Dietrich was waiting in the berth that was almost filled by the fifty-foot-long stubby bulk of scoutship Alpha. Gates and Brazil juggled checklists and fishbowl helmets to offer him each an armored paw to shake. The captain said something about good luck.

The two planeteers climbed through the scout’s hatch, twisting sideways with practiced movements to meet the ninetydegree shift in artificial gravity between mother ship and scout. Gates climbed on toward the control room while Brazil stayed to seal the hatch. On planet they would of course use an airlock.

Engines started. Ship’s power off and disconnected. All personnel out of berth. Ready for sterilizing.

Lethal gas, swirling around the scout’s hull, was mostly pumped away to be saved and reused. Then a blast of ultraviolet, more intense than the raw Sol-type sunshine outside, bathed the inside of the berth. No microorganisms must be carried down into atmosphere.

STRAPPED and clamped into control room chairs, ports sealed, watching the tiny world of the berth by video screen, Gates and Brazil were nearly ready. The berth door slid open on schedule, and what was left of gas inside went out in a faint puff of sudden mist.

The watery world that someone with little imagination had named Aqua, ten thousand miles away, filled the opening. A quarter of it was dayside, blue-black as a fluorescent bruise; nightside was eerie with subtle atmospheric glows.

“Stand by one, Alpha,” came over the radio. “A little trouble clearing Delta.”

“Roger,” said Sam Gates. “Hey, Boris, I like those video stories at home. The guy just drives his ship up to a new planet and lands. The faithful crew stands around scratching their heads. ‘Well, what’ll we do now?’ says one. Then they wait for some hero to speak up.”

“ ‘Let’s get out and look around,’ ” said Brazil, grinning. “ ‘O.K., but let’s all be careful. Maybe we better close the door of the ship after us.’ ”

Sam gave a rare smile. “Then one shmoe takes his hornet off to eat a coconut. Only it turns out to be a chieftain’s daughter.”

“And they’re all in the soup. They never seem to learn.”

“Stand by, Alpha,” said Operations over the radio, unnecessarily.

Gates pointed to the slim volume wedged under an arm of Brazil’s chair, secured, like everything else aboard, against some possible overloading or failure of the artificial gravity on the coming flight into the unknown. “What’s the book this time?”

“Thoreau. I thought I might need some philosophy if you get us stuck in the mud for a couple days down there.”

“Always meant to read the old nature lover through some day.” Gates nodded at the screens showing the waiting planet. “Wonder what he would have thought of all this.”

Brazil looked at the Passive Detection screen, where the image of the planet showed the dawnline creeping imperceptibly across upper atmosphere as a rainbow of varying ionization and light pressure. He smiled at a sudden recollection. “Ha. Maybe he wouldn’t’ve been so surprised as you might think.” He quoted: “Walden Pond—let’s see—‘A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above . . . I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.’ ”

“He wrote that in the middle of the nineteenth century?” asked Gates, astonished. “Let me see that book when you’re done with it.”

“You’re clear for takeoff, Alpha. Good luck,” said the radio.

Scoutship Alpha outraced the dawnline by an hour to the island and eased down on schedule, without hurry, into thicker and thicker air, until it entered predawn darkness and fog. Gates used his radar for the first time, to work his way down toward the water a quarter of a mile off the rocky coastline.

Aqua was Brazil’s ninth new planet, but I won’t forget this one, he thought in some corner of his brain not used for watching and interpreting screens.

And he was right.

THE plan called for an offshore landing unseen by the natives, the concealment of the scoutship in about a hundred feet of water as near land as possible, and the going ashore of Gates and Brazil in protective suits to make contact with the local intelligent life. Tight-beam communication was to be maintained at all times with the Yuan Chwang. A small video eye rode above each planeteer’s left ear; whatever the eye saw was transmitted to the mother ship.

The versatile and roughly humanoid robot that accompanied every scoutship (following men onto new planets but never leading them) would be left in the submerged scout, and would bring it to the human crew if they summoned it by radio.

The Yuan Chwang was not orbiting Aqua, but hovering and trying to keep its quarter-milediameter bulk invisible, ten thousand miles above the island. The other scouts were cruising in upper atmosphere in the general area of the target island, observing what they could. The plan might be altered or abandoned at any step at the Chief Planeteer’s discretion, or by order from above.

Detection screens picked out what looked to Brazil like the infra-red pattern of smoldering fires and fainter body heats of a small village where the recon photos had shown a village to be. Gates worked the scout by radar to an offshore point half a mile from the village, which lay on the shore of a small cove. He dipped the scout low enough to put a sonar probe under water and get a picture of the bottom.

“Nothing strange down there,” said Gates. “We’ll go ahead.”

Cutting in automatic stabilizers, he lowered the scout into and through choppy water and made slowly toward shore, while Brazil studied the ocean and bottom, trying to read half a dozen presentations at once.

Near the rocky upthrust of land, Gates let the little ship settle gently down onto sandy bottom. He summoned the robot and told it to use enough drive to prevent sinking into the bottom. The robot got into the pilot’s seat as the humans checklisted themselves into helmets, out of the control room, and into the lock. They stood with legs spread and arms raised while gas and UV sterilized their suits and the chamber.

Gates nodded and Brazil opened a valve to let alien sea into the lock; in a few seconds they stepped out of the world of checklists and into dark water. Brazil lingered to feel that the lock door was secured behind them, let gas into his flotation bubbles, and followed Gates up through the darkness. Once something like a luminous smokering curled greenly past them through the water.

“Can you bliphate the distance phlooh that?” asked a voice from the Yuan Chwang, half-strangled by transmission through space, air, and water.

“Hard to say; I’d guess only a few yards,” Gates answered, waiting until his head had broken surface and he had taken a look around. Brazil was right behind him; he could barely see Gates’ helmet above the water ten feet away. The rough rock face of the coastline was only a vaguely deeper darkness at one side. They paddled toward it; waves sloshed them against it; they gripped it and began to climb.

EARTHMEN emerged onto the land of a new world, looking more like primeval lungfish than conquering demigods.

They climbed rock uncertainly and slowly and halted at the top of a small gentle cliff. The suits were engineered for easy movement and reasonable comfort for twenty-four continuous sealed-in hours in almost any environment. Old planeteers sometimes said soberly that they needed a suit on to feel comfortable but they usually preferred to take the suit off before sitting down to discuss. How comfortably they wore it.

“Wait for a little more light,” said Gates’ radio voice.

Brazil sat down beside a large rock and tried to see what was on the inland slope away from the cliff.

The sun was not far below the hilly horizon now and a gray predawn light made the scene gradually intelligible. A faint excuse for a road wandered along a few yards away, roughly paralleling the shoreline; it might be a cattle path that led toward the village. Beyond the road were fields with a semi-cultivated look, holding orderly rows of squat bushes above a mat of low-growing vines that seemed to cover most of the ground in sight. Green hills rose beyond the fields.

The dawn brightened slowly. To Brazil, sunrises always brought awe, whether he saw them on an outworld or on crowded Earth, or across the red deserts of the world to which his parents had emigrated and where he had been born. Sitting on this alien rock with sea water dripping from his armor and his hand on a gunbutt, he thought: First Landing; it’s like a First Morning. Let there be light.

“Light enough,” said Gates. “Let’s get started.”

They walked on crunching vines to the road, heads swiveling constantly and air microphones tuned to high sensitivity. Brazil caught himself listening for the ape howling that had accompanied each new morning on his last new planet. It wasn’t good to carry such mental baggage when stepping into an unknown environment. He would have to unload it.

They paced along the faint road toward the village. The hardpacked brownish soil of the road showed no trace of whatever traveled here.

“Smoke ahead,” said Gates suddenly. It was a barely visible thin vertical tracery in the sky, rising not far away.

The road curved around a craggy little hill; when they had rounded this, the village was before them. Large rowboats were beached on the sand of a small sheltered cove. Forty or fifty yards back from the water stood about twenty huts, built mainly from what looked like mats of the groundvine. A small stream trickled through the village, flowing from the direction of a structure like a low fortress, beyond the huts and much larger than any of them. Its dark walls of mud or clay or stone were surrounded by a considerable space cleared of all vegetation.

Brazil turned his head to one side and saw his first native. His stomach went cold and he said to Gates: “On the rock up there. Look.”

THE native was undoubtedly humanoid and had apparently been dead a long time. He was bound somehow with vines to the crag that almost overhung the road, ten or fifteen feet above the Earthmen, and around his neck hung a placard that looked like cardboard, bearing a short inscription in bold characters resembling Arabic. He had been a tall man in life, by Earthly standards, and long strands of pale hair were still in evidence.

“Get this?” asked Gates of the observers in the sky.

“Roger. You’re going on?”

“Don’t see why not.”

“We never mind these ‘No Trespassing’ signs,” said Brazil, with an attempt at flippancy he didn’t feel. Dead men were nothing new to him, but this one had a considerable resemblance to himself, and had, so to speak, sneaked up on him.

There were no living people yet in sight, but there were shrill cries in the dawn from the village, and a small flock of hawklike birds with oversized wings sprang up into flight from among the huts. The birds were green and vivid orange against the misty sky and flew circling over the village.

“Let’s go,” said Gates.

They began down the sloping road toward the huts, trying to look confident but not frightening.

At an open gateway in the wall of the fortified structure a figure appeared, a red-haired man dressed in dark jerkin and leggings and boots, with breastplate of silvery metal that matched the round helmet he carried in one hand. In the other was a spear. He stretched himself and yawned, and appeared to be trying to scratch his ribs with the helmet. He was still a good distance away and gave no sign that he had spotted two aliens in strange suits walking into his town.

The birds were more alert. The cries of the circling flock changed suddenly in tone, and in a moment it had become a living arrow launched at Gates and Brazil.

The two Earthmen stopped, each considering the possibility of mowing down the birds with stun pistols—which should have a disorganizing but not fatal effect on any complex nervous system—before the flock could strike them as it seemed it must, and both rejecting the idea, like twin channels of a single computer. The armored suits were tougher than any bird was likely to be; leave defense to the suits and don’t hurt the native pets.

The flock broke off before contact, to circle the intruders in a blurred uproar of wings and claws, but several birds scraped the helmets, which were almost invisible in mild light, and one tore head-on at Brazil’s apparently unprotected face, possibly meaning to veer away an inch from his eyes.

The thud of impact was impressive; when Brazil’s eyes opened from the reflex blink, the bird was flopping on the ground with something badly broken. He picked it up, intending to impress the natives with his friendliness by treating kindly their pet that had attacked him, and also to suggest to them that it was futile to attack; but it struggled and fought his armored hands so he could do nothing else if he tried to hold it.

HE SET it gently down again as the first natives came blinking and shivering out of their huts to see what all the noise was about, some of them still pulling on scanty rags of clothing. They were all of a type with the body on the rock, blond, tall humanoids with deep chests and slender limbs; in the living people were visible a dozen small distinctions of facial and bodily proportion that added up to an obvious but not at first definable difference from any Earthman.

The red-haired man of the fortress had ducked inside the gateway, which was still open. A domestic-looking animal with plumes on its head looked out at the strangers with interest.

The blond natives stood together in front of their huts, as if waiting for a group picture to be taken, gaping at their visitors in silence. The watchbird flock still screamed and flew, now in widening circles, having given up assault at least temporarily.

Gates kept moving forward until he stood near the center of the cleared space between beach and huts. Brazil stopped beside him there and they stood almost motionless, smiling, arms spread with hands open, in the approved position for approaching Apparent Primitives who seem timid. The sun stood over the horizon now, dissipating the morning fog.

Brazil became aware that the whole crowd was watching him. Only now and then did one shoot a quick glance at Gates, as if puzzled about something.

Gates spoke via throat mike and radio, without moving his smiling lips. “You look like ’em, boy. I think you better play leader. They may have never seen anyone dark as me before.”

Brazil made the practiced throat-muscle movement that switched on his speaker and opened his mouth to begin the greeting of his public with soothing sounds. He was interrupted by Sam’s voice in his ear again. “Coming from the fort.”

Six Apparent Primitives who looked anything but timid were marching in sloppy formation down the slope from the walled structure, straight toward the Earthmen, bearing spears and facial expressions that Brazil could not interpret as meaning anything good. They were all redhaired and armored, muscular, well fed, and bulbous-nosed, evidently of a different tribe or race than the blond hut dwellers.

Brazil’s barefoot audience watched the warriors’ approach nervously and began to fade back into their huts. But one of the older men who had been staring Brazil in the eye with an expression of mounting and intense emotion—the planeteer grew edgy at not being able to decide what emotion—now sprang forward in serious excitement, to grab Brazil, by the arm and harangue him with the first native speech he had heard, looking at him with the gaze of a pleading worshiper.

The six red warriors were very near and didn’t look happy at all. They also seemed to be concentrating on Brazil.

WITH a cry of seeming despair, the old man tore himself away from Brazil and fled toward a hut as if in mortal terror.

One of the approaching warriors threw his spear with a whipping expert motion; it caught the old man in the back and sent him dying on his face in the sand.

“Well, I’ll be—” Boris Brazil roared out the first Earth words into the air of Aqua.

The red-haired warriors stood before him, eying him with what he interpreted as incredulous contempt. One of them barked something that he thought he could almost translate: “What are you doing, you blond peasant clod, dressed up in that outlandish armor?” He probably looked more like a blond native in the suit, with his physical proportions somewhat concealed, than he would without it.

The one who had speared the old man started walking toward his victim, maybe to retrieve his weapon. Brazil started that way too, with no clear idea of what he was going to do, but with the feeling that the old man had appealed to him in vain for help.

As Brazil started to move, the five other spears were suddenly leveled at him. A hysterical blond boy ran out of a hut to kneel beside the old man and scream something that sounded nasty at the approaching warrior. Gates was standing motionless a few yards away. A spear thrust fast and hard against Brazil’s chest with plain intent to kill, setting him back on his heels; a lordly voice from the Yuan Chwang said in his ear, “This is not our affair.” Brazil grabbed the thrusting spear in his left hand, jerked its owner forward off balance, and delivered with his armored right fist what seemed an appropriate greeting to an Apparent Primitive Attempting Murder of Earthman.

The blow knocked the man out from under his helmet and dropped him to the sand. Spears rocked Boris from all sides, clashed and slid around his helmet. He caught a glimpse of the sixth warrior kicking the boy, knocking him over, and pulling a short axe from his belt for a finishing blow.

The arm swinging back the axe suddenly released it; the weapon spun through the air to land yards away and the warrior sat down suddenly and nervelessly. Sam Gates had decided it was time for stun pistols.

Before Brazil had reached the same conclusion, the four remaining spearmen had given up trying to stick him through his suit and were grabbing at his arms to hold him. Gates potted two more of them, in the legs, with silent and invisible force. The remaining two abandoned the fight and backed away toward their stronghold with spears leveled, shouting what was no doubt a call for reinforcements. The red that Brazil had felled got up and tottered dazedly after them.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Gates.

Brazil’s eye swept around. The old man was dead, the spear still in him. The young boy who had been kicked was lying unconscious right in front of a warrior who was going to be considerably annoyed as soon as he felt a little better. Brazil scooped the child up and got him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and looked at Gates, who gave a sort of facial shrug, as if to say: If we can save a life, there’s no need to ponder possible bad consequences, since this whole operation looks like a fizzle now anyway.

THEY strode at a good pace out of the village as the watchbirds screamed a cheerful farewell. A few reds were milling around the gateway of the fort as the Earthmen went over the rise and out of sight, but no organized pursuit was yet visible. Once out of sight of the village they began a steady loping run, the small body bouncing on Brazil’s shoulders. Gates called for the robot to bring the scout up to the surface at the shoreline.

“This is the Tribune,” said a voice. “What do you intend doing with that child?”

“Saving his neck,” said Gates. “Maybe we can learn something from him too.”

They ran with stun pistols drawn, spinning around frequently to see if anyone followed them. No one pursued.

Brazil was gasping when he finished the climb down the rocks to the shoreline and set his unconscious burden—no, half conscious now, with a swelling lump on the forehead—down inside the airlock. The outer door shut behind Gates and the robot had the scout underwater and moving out to sea in a moment.

Entertaining an alien aboard a scoutship was something the Space Force had learned to plan for ahead of time. A door in the back of a suit locker led from the airlock into the tiny Alien Room, into which Gates was now feeding atmosphere from outside, via snorkel and remote control. When the room was ready, Brazil carried the boy into it, sealing the door behind him. Gates could now decontaminate in the airlock, and go to the control room. Brazil would have to wear suit and helmet for a while yet.

Medical was already on the communicator in the Alien Room when Brazil turned to look at the screen, after putting the kid down on the bed-acceleration couch that took up most of the room, checking the air pressure and setting the temperature up a few degrees.

“Kid doesn’t look too bad off,” Brazil told the doctor. He smiled reassuringly at the boy, who was now fully conscious and lay watching with wide eyes and a growing yellowish lump on his forehead. He might be ten or eleven years old, judged by Earth standards.

“Keep him quiet. And get us a blood sample as soon as possible. Do you think we’ll have to feed him?”

“Yes. If we can keep him for a week or two we should get the language and a good line on the local culture. We’ve got synthetic proteins and simple sugars on the scout, of course, so I guess he won’t starve—but I’ll try for your blood sample first. And listen, this may be important—I’m turning off the video screen for now, so it won’t alarm him. But when it’s on again, keep anyone with red hair off it. Use blond, noble, handsome people like me if possible.”

Brazil started to call Sam on the intercom, but through a valve into the Alien Room came sterile blankets and a painless blood sample syringe, before he could ask for them.

Chandragupta’s voice came into his helmet: “This is the Tribune. I have little complaint of your actions so far, except that your striking that man with your fist served no good purpose. But I must forbid you to keep that child any longer than is necessary for his own welfare.”

“How long will that be, Chan?” asked Captain Dietrich’s voice, getting no immediate answer. “Would the boy be welcomed home, or speared like that old man, or what? I think we’d better learn the language and customs before trying to decide. And as for Brazil’s hitting that man—”

A debate went on. Brazil listened with half an ear while he covered his guest with blankets and sat beside him, trying to inspire confidence.

“It’s all right, sonny, it’s all right.” I hope, he thought. He patted the boy gently with his armored hand. That was the only treatment he dared attempt until he knew considerably more about the biology of his guest.

And the guest could be very valuable. Children made good subjects for First Contact as a rule, if they were not too young. Their minds adapted quickly to the alien. They caught on quickly to the game of language teaching. And they were likely to give an honest and direct view of their own culture.

Brazil handed the blood-sample syringe to the boy after locking the plunger. The kid took it after a brief hesitation, looked it over cautiously, then gave a sudden shy smile and said something that might have been a question. If his head was bothering him he gave no sign of it.

Brazil answered with some kindly nonsense and took the syringe back. He made a show of rubbing it on his own suited arm, turning his head to the other side as he did so. Then he turned the boy’s head gently away and got his blood sample without fuss, on the first try. He valved the loaded syringe out into the airlock, where the robot came to load it into a courier tube that would carry it up to the Yuan Chwang.

EARTH and Aqua life turned out to be too alien to one another for infectious disease to pose a problem either way. Brazil shed his suit with relief.

The courier tube returned before sunset with containers of vile looking gunk that Supply swore would feed the boy, whose name was approximately Tim. Tim tasted the stuff but looked unhappy, so Gates went out spearfishing. Tim was pleased with some of the assortment and ate it raw, while turning down the rest in disgust. He seemed to be suffering no after effects from the kick in the head, but Brazil did his best to keep him quiet anyway.

For the next few days the scout stayed well out at sea, mostly submerged.

Brazil spent most of his time in the Alien Room, pretending to learn Tim’s language almost as fast as he could hear the words, while the linguistically expert brains, human and mechanical, aboard the Yuan Chwang, looked and listened over his shoulder. They forgot nothing, and spoke into his ear, prompting him on what to say next.

Tim became restlessly active after getting over his first awed fascination with video screen, doors, acceleration couch and plumbing. When told he was aboard a ship, he wanted to see it all. Brazil kept the robot, at least, out of Tim’s sight, and had to struggle to learn more than he taught. He played games with Tim to give him exercise, and to gather data on his physical strength and dexterity.

The hungry brains aboard the Yuan Chwang devoured Tim’s language. Within two weeks they had fed it by memory tape to every planeteer. A few days of practice would give them command of it.

It was time for a major conference. The two planeteers on surface sat in with Captain Dietrich and the department heads above, via communicator, while Tim was confined discontentedly to the Alien Room.

“Gentlemen, we have a choice between two main courses of action,” the Captain began. “We can try again to establish relations with the natives of this island, on some friendly basis, or we can pull out and start over somewhere else, and hope we don’t get into a brawl with the local authorities at the start.” The Captain was not chewing out his planeteers for the fight; when he chewed, there was never anything equivocal about his words.

“Those authorities I didn’t mind brawling with,” said Gates.

The Captain went on. “I think we can agree that our only major problem on this island is likely to be intercultural?”

NO ONE disputed him. There were no horrendous non-intelligent life forms, volcanos or other insuperable acts of nature in evidence on the target island.

“I’d like to say that I hope we can find a way to set up a base on this island,” said Biology. “That luminous water-ring was fascinating, even though I’m not sure it’s in my field. And that groundvine . . .”

“We can’t complete our gravitic tables for this system without seismic measurements of the planet,” put in Geology. “That island still looks like a good place to me.”

“Well, then—does everyone think we should try the island again?” The Captain looked around as if a bit surprised.

“We’ve got the language here now,” said Brazil. “Our tapes show the red tribe’s speech is nearly the same as Tim’s. And they’re already trying to kill us on sight, so what can we lose by another try?”

“We can cause considerable damage to the people of this island if we are not careful, Mr. Brazil,” said Chandragupta sharply. “Indeed, we may have caused damage already, by inserting ourselves into a situation of considerable tension between two tribes—though any harm we may have done was accidental and I do not blame you for it. Yet we are not on this world by invitation, and so we must assume a certain responsibility for such accidents.”

“You mean that sociological damage has been caused by our visit?” asked the Captain. He had already heard all about it, but he wanted the subject talked over now.

“I think I can explain that,” said Sociology, clearing his throat. “The data we have from Tim fit in with what we saw on First Contact. Everything indicates that conditions on the island may be ripe for civil war.

“The picture is this: a local settled tribe, fishermen and parttime farmers—the Blonds, as we have come to call them—invaded and conquered by a warrior tribe of the Viking type, probably fewer in numbers. The invaders seem to have come from the smaller islands farther north. Perhaps they were driven out themselves by someone else. Now they have settled down here as a ruling class. Tim says this invasion was a very long time ago, before he was born, but that his grandfather—the old man who unfortunately was killed during our First Contact—could remember a time when there were no Reds on the island, and his people were free. We make the invasion to have been about fifty years ago. We’ve seen no evidence of intermarriage, although in fact we’ve seen none of the Red women or children yet.”

“Tim talks of a day when his people will rise up and destroy the Reds,” said Brazil. “The dream of his young life seems to be to find a way to slaughter them wholesale. He wants me to lead the revolution. I have the feeling though that he doesn’t really hate them, or didn’t until grandpa bit the dust. It’s mainly just a sort of exciting game in his mind. But I don’t doubt he would wipe them out if given a chance. Someone has talked a lot of revolution to him, that’s for sure.

“Tim’s grandfather thought I was a tribal folk-hero, come back from the great beyond or somewhere, wearing strange armor, to lead them out of slavery. That’s what the old man was talking to me about. I suppose that’s why they speared him. It’s on the tape, of course, if any of you haven’t seen it. Now I can understand what he was saying.” Brazil fell moodily silent.

“I suppose the First Contact incident might have touched off a Blond rebellion?” someone asked.

“If conditions had been just right, yes,” said Sociology. “Apparently they were not.”

CAPTAIN Dietrich spoke up: “During the last five days we’ve made numerous high speed photo runs with recon robots from as low as five miles on clear days. If there were any riots or open warfare in progress, we’d be pretty sure to spot it.”

“How about that body lashed to the rock?” someone asked after a brief pause. “Have we learned anything on that?”

“Tim can’t read or write,” said Sociology. “So neither can we, yet. So we don’t know what the placard hung around the fellow’s neck says. Tim says the Reds put him up there because they were angry at him. Seems reasonable, if not illuminating.”

“Captain, I wish we had made such photo runs as you now mention before First Contact,” said the Tribune.

“We weren’t sure of their technological level then,” said the Captain, a little wearily. “We didn’t want them to spot us flying over. It’s one of those choices you have to make. We didn’t want to shock them by appearing as gods, remember?”

The discussion flowed on for a while. Finally Dietrich brought it back to his original question: “Shall we continue to try for a base on this island, or shall we move on?”

“Let’s try again here, since we’ve got a start,” said Gates. “If we can’t make it, we can always move on to another island.” Chandragupta: “The question I must insist we try to answer, Mr. Gates, is this: How can we be helpful to the people of this island, where we have already interfered?”

The Captain: “Chan, we didn’t come all this way to open a social service bureau.”

“I realize that, Captain.” Grimly. “Nevertheless, I consider our effect upon the natives more important than seismic measurements. I would like to ask if you plan to conclude an agreement with the authorities controlling those Red soldiers, for a scientific base on the island?”

“I’m considering it.”

“I believe our doing so would in effect recognize their authority to live as they do, holding another tribe in slavery.”

Sociology raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean by slavery?

It would be unusual if it could not be found in some form at this level.”

“Perhaps I should have been more precise. I consider it evil that a member of the ruling class should have it in his power to take at any time the life of one of the lower class, as we have seen here. I think we are now bound to try to correct such a condition. Of course I do not expect that we shall be able, or should attempt, to establish our idea of a perfect society here. But I think we must try to set these people on the road to greater freedom and justice.” Chandragupta raised his voice above several protesting ones. “We are already committed to interference here, in my view. We must now see that the changes we produce are for the better.”

The Captain smiled faintly. “Are you arguing for the revolution now, Chan?”

“I think you know better.” The Tribune was somewhat irritated. “We could hardly expect the total effect of a general armed uprising to be beneficial.”

“Just what do you think we should do, then, to start these people on the road to greater freedom and justice, as you put it?”

Chandragupta sighed. “I think we must first investigate them further, to learn how best to help.”

There was a little silence. “Anyone got further comment he thinks important?” asked the Captain. “All right, this is it. We continue work on this island. We try to stabilize native affairs on as just a basis as possible, and then deal for our base. Boris, you say Tim has relatives in an inland village who can hide him out from the Reds if need be?”

“So he tells me.”

“All right. Take him to this inland village, tonight or tomorrow night. Talk with some of the adults there. Especially try to find out more about the political situation. Is there a Blond resistance group, how strong, and so on. Since we seem to be committed to some sort of interference here, we’d better get all the data we can, and quickly. Any questions?”

THE following night was dark and foggy. Gates drove the scoutship silently and he hoped invisibly over the island’s hills toward the village of Tim’s relatives. They boy acted as pilot, guiding an electronically presented green spot over a contour map of the island, with an air of sophistication. He had, he said, seen maps before, if not flying machines. But he was excited at the prospect of showing off Brazil in armor to people he knew, and telling them of the wonders he had seen. Brazil had given him orders to keep the scoutship’s flying powers secret if possible.

Brazil changed the scale of the map to show only the area within a mile of the village. Tim guided Gates to a clear landing spot, out of sight of the village but within easy walking distance.

Gates brought the scout down quickly, probing below with radar and infrared, until the little ship settled with a crackle of crushed vines into a tiny hollow between hills. Gates left the autopilot on to keep the scout balanced on its tail at ground level, and joined Brazil in observing the outside world with instruments.

The chittering and movement of small life alarmed by their landing gradually quieted. There were no signs of human alarm.

Brazil suited up, for protection against other dangers than infection. He led Tim into the airlock, and paused for a final briefing.

“Now, who did we agree you should look for in the village?”

“First of all I will look for Sunto. He is one of my cousins. He hates the Reds and is not afraid of them. If he is not home I will seek Lorto or Tammamo, who are the junior headmen of the village. Only if I can find none of those will I talk to my female cousins, who do not understand these things. I will try to avoid Tamotim, who I think is still the boss headman here. He likes the Reds and tells them things. If I see no one who is safe to talk to I will come back here and we will talk over what to do next.”

“And if someone stops you and asks you questions?”

“I will not hide anything. I will just say there is a strange man out here who wants to speak with someone from the village. I know what to do, you don’t have to worry. I won’t say you are our Warrior Spirit, or anything like that. Unless there are Reds in the village, who capture me; then I will cry out for Warrior Spirit and you will come and kill them, eh?”

“My name’s not Warrior Spirit. And if you see any Reds, just come back.” Brazil opened the lock’s outer door and they stepped out and down into matted vines. “Remember, just say I brought you over the hills if anyone asks how you come to be here. No one else need know yet that my ship can fly.”

“All right. Over that way is a path,” said Tim, becoming oriented. “And that way is the village.”

“Get going, then.” Brazil sent him off with a gentle shove, and stood quietly, testing the alien night with artificially aided senses.

The sound of Tim’s bare feet faded quickly on the path.

“I’ll take her up a ways,” said Gates on radio.

“Roger. I’ll move over.”

BRAZIL saw the dark bulk of the scoutship lift in silence that was almost eerie even to him, and drift up out of sight into fog and darkness. No stars to see tonight, he thought. Well, I’ve seen enough of them. For a while.

He found the path with his infrared lamp and waited just at one side of it. He hoped the kid wouldn’t run into any trouble. About five minutes passed before the glass of his helmet, set for infrared translation, showed him some large life moving toward him along the trail from the village. “One—two of them, Sam, coming this way.”

“Roger, I have them now.”

“Boro?” His native name, called in a soft voice from the darkness.

Brazil switched his air mike on again. “Right here.”

Tim approached him. “This is Tammamo with me, Boro. He is a junior headman.”

Brazil gave the second vague shape a slight bow, which Tim had told him was the ordinary greeting between equals.

“Sam, keep a sharp eye out. We need to use a little light down here.” Planeteers worked their air-mike switches for such asides as quickly and naturally as they used their tongues.

“Rog.” Sam outdid himself in brevity.

Brazil turned on what he hoped was a dim and non-startling electric glow from a detachable suit lamp, revealing a Tammamo bug-eyed at being called out of his hut at night to meet what he might think was the Warrior Spirit.

Boris greeted him in a matter-of-fact, business-like way. Maybe the fact that he spoke the common language of the peasants put the junior headman more at ease.

Tammamo had heard a version of the First Contact incident which began with the Red garrison of the coastal village executing an old man for daring to worship the Sea God in a way reserved for rulers. Dying, the elder had called down a curse upon their heads, whereupon the Warrior Spirit of the Blonds appeared, and slew sixty Reds with a sweep of his arm—or perhaps it had taken several armsweeps, the point was uncertain. A Red magician had been called upon by the enemy. He had evoked from somewhere a dark and evil spirit, also clad in armor. The Blond Warrior had departed to do battle with this other elsewhere, not wishing to devastate the entire island in the struggle, but it was expected he would win and return shortly to—and this point was whispered very cautiously—slay all the Red warriors and turn over their women and children to the Blonds as slaves.

Tammamo almost managed to look Brazil hopefully in the eye as he finished the tale.

TIM started to speak with the exasperated eagerness of a youngster to point out errors—or maybe in disappointment at being left out of the story altogether. But Brazil shushed him by putting a hand in front of his face. He spoke carefully to Tammamo.

“Junior headman—look at me carefully. I am only a man, nothing more. I am not a Warrior Spirit, or any kind of god. I am only a man from a far land, who looks like one of your people and wears armor that is strange to you. Now I wish to speak in private with the leaders of your people—not with the headman who tells everything to the Reds, but to the leaders of your own people, who may not be known to everyone. Do you understand me?”

“If you say you are a man, so be it.” Tammamo seemed to be shivering with more than the night chill. “The leaders you speak of—I do not know anything about such matters, except for stories heard by all. I am a junior headman, wishing no one to hate me. There is a man in the village who might know. His name is Sunto. I can tell him what you want when I meet him. Will that please you?”

“It will. And I think there is no need for you to speak of me to anyone else.”

“I will not! I will not!”

“Then send Sunto here to meet me at this time tomorrow night. One thing more, junior headman—this boy goes to live now with his relatives in your village. I want you, Tammamo, to see to it that no harm comes to him from the Reds. As I said, I am only a man, yet I can do many things. I would be quite angry if the Reds were to harm this boy. Do you understand?”

Tammamo indicated vehemently that he understood. Obviously he wished himself a hundred miles at sea, or anywhere out of this situation.

“Tim, keep out of trouble. Go, both of you, and send me Sunto here tomorrow night.”

Evidently it was not a Blond habit to waste any time in farewells.

Brazil watched them out of sight, realizing suddenly he was going to miss having the kid around. “Okay, Sam, you can bring her down.”

Trudging to where the scout was crackling down into vines, Brazil paused and looked up toward the invisible nose with a sudden grin.

“Hey, dark and evil spirit,” he called via radio. “How come you let that Red magician evoke you to fight me?”

“Shut up and get in.”

SUNTO appeared at the appointed place on the following night, escorted by Tim. This time the scout had not landed; Brazil was lowered the last few hundred feet by cable.

Sunto seemed less timid than Tammamo. He too had heard of the First Contact fight, but was shrewd enough to realize how events could change in the seeing and retelling of them. He professed no doubt that Brazil was only a man, and a friend of the Blonds. Would he arrange a meeting with the Blond leaders?

Certainly. There was going to be a meeting of those leaders in the remote hills, three nights from now. Boro could come to it if he wished, there would be many large fires at the meeting place so it would be easy to find. Was Boro living in the hills now?

Did everyone know about this meeting, Brazil asked him. What if the Reds saw this large fire? Why had Tammamo been so timid about discussing Blond leaders?

Sunto did not quite understand; he used several new words in trying to answer the questions. Eventually the idea came across that this was going to be a religious meeting, and not political at all. He, Sunto, knew no more than that timid Tammamo about political matters. Of course the Reds would not interfere with this religious meeting; the Sea God might become angry with them if they did. True, the Reds controlled the Tower, but that didn’t mean others couldn’t hold meetings of this type, did it?

“Of course not,” agreed Brazil soberly. He got a repeat on the time and place of the meeting, and went home to the scout.

They located the meeting without trouble, as Sunto had predicted. Brazil was lowered by cable again, a quarter mile from the circle of fires in the hills near the center of the island.

Gates held the scout overhead, ready for anything, while Brazil walked to the lighted area.

About fifty Blonds of both sexes were quietly busy with varied rituals within the illuminated circle. There were no detectable lookouts posted around the place, or any attempt at concealment.

Brazil watched for a little while, far enough away to be invisible to those near the fires. Then he walked slowly in on them, arms spread out in a gesture of peace. There seemed to be nothing frantic or very rigid about the ceremonies, so he had no great worry about interrupting.

Gradually they became aware of him, the nearer ones first. They stopped what they were at and turned to watch him with grave eyes. Within a few seconds all of them were standing still, calmly and silently watching him. Then a few of them moved slightly, opening a lane from where Brazil stood to a place near the center of the circle. He could see now a low structure of stone that stood there, a few feet square. It might be an altar.

“Any advice?” he subvocalized to the watchers above.

“Best thing I can think of is to bow in greeting and tell them to proceed with what they’re doing,” said some anonymous expert. No one argued with him. The final decision on what to do rested with Brazil, as it usually did with the planeteer—the man on the spot, with the responsibility. He was rarely given orders in any detail.

THIS time he accepted the advice offered from above. It seemed to go over all right. The attention of the Blond group turned from him to the central altar, where a few men and women began to perform some simple rites. The others stood watching with folded arms. Brazil folded his. No one was sitting down, and he resigned himself to what might be a long stand. An hour went by. He wished himself wearing armor, ground, heavy, with powered legs that would let you nap standing if you wished.

Not that he wanted to nap now. There was the ceremony to watch, although it had so far shown him little that was new or especially interesting. It had elements that Brazil had seen in life or on training tapes of a hundred primitive religions on a dozen planets.

But the climax of the ceremony was unique. A pair of muscular—deacons? Brazil could distinguish no one set apart as clergy—came from the darkness outside the waning firelight. They bore a large and heavy pottery vessel that wobbled in their grip as they carried it, as if it held a quantity of liquid.

Someone held a torch to illuminate the altar top. A slender tower about two feet high had been built of small flat pebbles, surrounded by a low wall of similar construction.

The men with the jar approached the rear of the altar and raised the vessel toward it, as a woman thrust a trough into position. They tipped the big jar evenly. What looked like clear water sluiced out of it, guided by the trough toward the pebbletower. For a moment it looked to Brazil as if the little structure might withstand the flood, but some vital part of the base gave way suddenly. The men continued to tilt the vessel smoothly till it was empty. The tower toppled, taking with it part of the surrounding wall. It was washed piecemeal from the sloping altar by the last of the flood.

It hit them hard, Brazil could see, looking from one Blond face to another in the firelight. None of them stirred for a long minute. It was plain that the collapse of the tower had had some evil significance.

Tower? Sunto had mentioned a tower connected with the Sea God, and controlled by the Reds.

The Blonds seemed to shake off some of their gloom. Again they were turning toward Brazil.

“Ceremony didn’t turn out too well, I think,” said the voice from the Yuan Chwang. “Just hope they don’t blame it on you.” Once more everyone was watching Brazil, except for a couple of men who had begun to dismantle the altar.

Might as well get started, he thought. He switched on his air mike. He could not see most of his audience well in this light, and could not pick out anyone as leader.

HE spoke out loudly: “I am a man who has come from a far land, and I would learn what I can about the people here.” The faint stir and whispering among them ceased. All watched him with guarded faces. There was only the fire glow and crackle, and the twittering background of animals or insects.

“This—” Brazil realised he had no certain word for ritual or ceremony. “What you have done at this meeting is strange to me. If I can do so without giving offense, I would learn about it. Will someone here tell me?”

A light clear voice came from somewhere in the background: “Are you he of whom it is said, that he slew sixty Reds with a sweep of his arm?”

“It is said, but it is not true.

I fought with six of them, but I slew none.”

“You fought with six of them, yet none of them slew you.” The still anonymous voice used a more subtle grammar than Tim had taught, and had a slightly different accent. With his limited experience in listening to the natives, Brazil could not identify it as male or female. But it smelled of authority to him. He answered the implied question. “My armor is strong. And I had help from one who is wrongly called a dark demon, who is only a man like me, my countryman and friend.”

“So have I heard it.”

The speaker moved forward slowly into brighter firelight—a woman. Not a girl, and not an old woman, or middle-aged. Not the kind that a man will follow with his eyes from the first glance, but the kind he will turn to see again a quarter-minute later, and remember. So Brazil thought of her at first sight, and only remembered with a start the subtle unearthliness of her face and body.

“So have I heard it, from those who were there and saw with open eyes.” She came close to Brazil, dressed as simply as the others. She studied him for a moment. “You speak with the tongue of a simple Blond peasant.”

“It was one such who taught me.”

“You learned well. What is your name?”

“In your tongue it is best said as Boro. And what is yours, if I may ask without giving offense?”

She smiled. “Certainly, there has never been a god so fearful of giving offense. My name is Ariton. Tell these people whether you are god or man. I fear some of them will still not believe what you told Sunto.”

Brazil loudly pledged again his membership in humanity.

Ariton waved her hand, and her people turned away. Most of them went to sit in a circle around where the altar had been. They began a low-voiced chant.

SHE walked with Brazil a little away from the group, and tried to answer his questions about the ceremony he had witnessed. Her explanation was unintelligible with new words at first; finally he got her to simplify it enough for him to understand that the tiny tower on the altar had been an analog of a full sized structure in the island’s chief city. The big Tower was sacred to the Sea God. Now it was monopolized by the Red priests, and beside it the king of the Reds, Galamand, had built a castle. At mentioning the king’s name, Ariton moved her foot as if grinding something into the dirt beneath her heel. Tim had sometimes done that when speaking of the Reds.

“And what did the water-pouring mean?”

“Maybe something bad.” She looked at Brazil thoughtfully and raised a hand to touch his transparent helmet. “I have seen—before,” she said, using a new word that he thought meant glass, from the context. “Now I will ask a question. Why could not the Reds slay you, when they attacked you with spears?”

“My armor is stronger than it looks.”

“And why did you slay none of them?”

“There was no need.”

“Those of my people who watched with open eyes say that you were angry at the slaying of an old man you did not know. Why?”

Brazil pondered. “There was no need for his slaying, either, that I could see.”

“You carry no spear or sword or bow, nor did your dark companion. How could you fight six spearmen?”

After a moment Brazil raised a hand to touch his helmet. “My armor is not easily seen, yet it is very strong. So is it with my weapons.”

“Strong Red warriors could not hurt you with their spears,” Ariton said thoughtfully. “And when they tried to seize you they were struck down by cramps and sickness, like swimmers who have entered cold water with full bellies. So the Sea God might . . .”

“But it was not the Sea God. Shall we sit down here?”

He gallantly let her have the low boulder that presented itself, and crunched his armored seat down into groundvine. The suit was a load to stand around in, even at .95 gravity.

“Where is your dark companion now? And your ship?”

“He is not far. And our ship is near the island.”

Ariton apparently thought it natural that a man alone among strangers should be a bit secretive about the location of his friends.

Some water from the altar flood had run into the nearest fire, and the light grew dimmer yet. There was no word in Brazil’s ear from above.

“It might be thought that you and your friend are only castaways upon this island, as none have seen your ship.”

HE took the suggestion calmly.

“It is not so. Our ship is near, with others of my people aboard.”

“Why have you come to this island?”

“My countrymen and I travel to learn things, about new lands none of us has seen before. Some of us would like to live on this island for a little while, perhaps a few years, on some land your people do not use. We do not want to boss your people, or to take anything we do not pay for.”

“I have no land to give anyone, while there are Reds on the island.” Ariton’s voice was sharp.

“Some of my people will talk to the Reds, too, about using land. But we will not trade with a tribe that holds another tribe in slavery.”

She was puzzled. “But who does not own slaves, if he can? If we could enslave the Reds, we would. Do you own no slaves at home?”

“It has been very many years since my tribe held slaves. A tribe becomes stronger when it does not depend on them. My people have traveled far and looked at many tribes, and it is always so.”

“But if all were free to choose, who would do the mean and dirty work of slaves by choice?” Ariton looked at him searchingly.

Brazil gave a faint sigh. “True, someone must do such work—sometimes someone must be forced to do it. But even such lowly persons should be treated as members of the tribe, and not killed or beaten as animals would be.”

“And if there are two tribes, as on this island?”

“Two tribes can live as one, if their leaders are wise and strong.”

“That is a strange thought to me. But then I have never traveled in the far parts of the world.” Ariton meditated for a few moments, before she spoke again.

“Will you, Boro, go to speak with the Red king about this matter of land? You still look like a Blond, so maybe the Reds will try again to slay you or imprison you.”

Brazil thought it over. “I may go. It is only chance that I look like a Blond. My shipmates are of varied appearance; some of them resemble Reds.” He thought to himself: What planeteer looks most like a Red? Foley, but his hair isn’t nearly the right shade. A little dye will fix that, if need be.

“I will go with you, when you go to speak to Galamand,” Ariton announced.

Brazil was surprised. “Do you enter safely into the Red king’s castle at will?”

“The Reds are not likely to do me harm, and I think Galamand will see me if I visit him.” Ariton smiled. “I am a high priestess of the Sea God.”

ANOTHER conference began as soon as Brazil was hoisted home to his scoutship.

“Religion may give us a way to promote unity here,” said Sociology. “We see that Reds and Blonds both worship the same powerful Sea God. However, his sacred Tower seems to be a point of contention between the tribes.”

“We think we have that Tower located, by the way,” put in Captain Dietrich. “And what’s probably the Red king’s castle, or at least his summer home. It seems too far from fresh water to withstand a siege. Where’s that chart? Here, on this peninsula that protects the harbor at Capital City, a large stone structure. Right next to it, on the side toward the ocean, is the tallest building on the island, a tower about ninety feet high. Then there’s a sea wall running the length of the peninsula, for protection against waves and maybe invaders.

“Foley, you and Brazil will be visiting Galamand as soon as we can locate him. Get your hair dyed to match the Reds. Maybe we can at least impress the natives with the idea that it’s possible for Red and Blond to co-operate.”

“I trust everything possible will be done to avoid another fight.” Chandragupta wore a frown.

“We’ll have to talk to the Reds sooner or later, if we’re going to get anywhere,” the Captain said. “Though it’s possible we may have to fight our way out again. Is anyone against sending a delegation to Galamand as soon as possible?”

“Should we take Ariton along, as she suggested?” Gates asked the conference.

“It might make us seem to be committed as her allies against the Reds.”

“No doubt that’s what she wants.”

“But it would bring the two leaders face to face. If there’s any possibility of ending the conflict between them, such a meeting might give us a clue to it.”

Planeteer Foley, hair reddened, was flown down and transferred to scoutship Alpha, which lay out at sea again. Gates intended to hold himself in reserve, in the scout, to rescue the delegation if necessary.

First it was necessary to locate the king, and to arrange to take Ariton to the planned meeting with him. Hoping to do both, Brazil almost literally dropped in, shortly after sunset one evening, on the hill village where she had told him she could usually be found.

No Reds were in evidence. Again a flock of watchbirds assaulted Brazil with futile energy. The Blond natives stared at him with some awe, but little surprise. They directed him to a building set against a hill.

IT WAS a low structure of groundvine mats and rare wooden poles. Carved or molded masks hung in profusion at the gateway, the first artwork of any kind Brazil had seen on the island, except for the decorated armor of the Reds.

He stood at the gateway in the low fence and called a greeting to the dark and open doorway of the house. In a few moments a Blond man, unusually tall and carrying an oil lamp, emerged from the rambling building. He stood studying Brazil emotionlessly.

“I am looking for Ariton,” Brazil repeated. The towering Blond somehow made him feel for a ridiculous moment like an adolescent suitor come to call on his girl and greeted by her older brother.

“Ariton has gone to Capital City,” the man said finally. “To meet you or your countrymen there when you go to visit the king of the Redmen.” Again the grinding foot-motion at mention of Galamand. This man conveyed a suggestion of insolent freedom and power to Brazil. It was impossible for him to think of this man or Ariton as slaves.

“Is Galamand now in his castle beside the Tower of the Sea God?” Brazil asked.

“Yes.” The Blond man paused, then seemed to reach a sudden decision involving Brazil. “Come with me.” He beckoned with his lamp and led the way into the house.

They followed a passage leading back toward the hillside. The open rooms they passed contained things of shapes unknown to Brazil, things carven and feathered and stained. More temple than home, certainly.

“Here.” The Blond turned aside suddenly, and stooped to roll up a floor mat. Buried among mats of groundvine that filled a hole evidently of considerable depth, were row upon row of spears, simply made but strong and sharp.

“When your king comes to this island,” said the Blond, showing powerful white teeth above his beard, “he will find ready help to topple the Reds from power. Not all my people are willing to live the lives of animals. Long have we planned and waited. The Reds are fewer than we. Each year they stay more within their forts and in their walled city, and each year hurt us more, with killings and beatings. We will be willing to help you.”

Brazil took a deep breath. “If you want to help me, you will not rise armed against the Reds.

You will agree to live with them as one tribe, when they also agree.”

The man stared at Brazil for a long moment, then gave a short and nasty laugh. “When they say that will be the day when they are helpless.”

“But remember what I say, if you wish your own people well,” said Brazil, turning to leave. “Let there be no armed rising against the Reds.”

“Not yet,” said the Blond in a cold voice. “Not yet for a little while.”

BRAZIL and Foley stood among tall bushes and grass on a hillside with a fair view of the town whose name translated into Capital City, early after sunrise on the next morning. They wore heavy ground armor, in camouflage colors. They studied the city before them, adjusting their heavy glass faceplates for telescopic vision.

Capital City was plainly divided into two sections. The Reds dwelled on a hill at the far side of the harbor from the watching planeteers, in an area surrounded by a defensive wall. Their buildings were mainly of stone or mud brick, and a number of Blond servants could be seen going about various menial tasks.

In the Blond section, on lower ground and closer to Brazil and Foley, no Reds were visible except for an occasional squad of patrolling soldiers. They stuck close together, looking grimly over their shoulders. The houses were built mostly of dried groundvine mats, though some mud bricks were used.

Beyond the Blond section were the docks. The water of the harbor was studded with the low shapes of fishing boats and, larger, a few of Galamand’s war galleys.

“Well—shall we march?” asked Foley.

“Might as well. I expect Ariton will know were here before we’ve gone very far.”

Brazil moved his legs. The suit servos drew power from the tiny hydrogen fusion lamp in the backpack; the suit legs churned the massive shape ahead. The wearer had the sensation of moving in light summer clothing, but he could plow through heavy bush and small trees if he chose.

Brazil and Foley had no wish to leave such a monstrous trail, so they picked their way with care to the nearest road and set out at a slow walk toward town.

Ariton met them in a narrow street before they were well inside the town. She stared at Foley hard when Brazil introduced him, but gave him a common greetingword in a pleasant voice.

“Sunto is waiting with a boat in the harbor,” she told them. “It is the shortest and easiest way to Galamand’s building.” The planeteers followed her through narrow winding streets toward the harbor, ever a center of apathetic, curious, hopeful, or poker-faced stares from the Blond slum-dwellers. None of the Red patrols came within sight. That suited Brazil fine.

Sunto was waiting at a low dock, in a crude and lopsided rowboat fashioned of reeds plastered together with clay.

“Hope the blasted thing can hold us,” said Foley on radio, trying to check his suit floats unobtrusively. “It’d be a long swim from the middle of the harbor.” The sun was still bright in the morning sky, promising a warm day. Galamand’s castle rose forbidding across the harbor, beyond the fishing boats and the moored biremes of his navy. Above and beyond the castle rose the slender stone Tower of the Sea God.

THE rowboat held up as Sunto propelled it across the calm water of the harbor, straight toward the landing steps at the base of the castle. Reds appeared on the steps, watching. Their number grew as the boat approached.

“Galamand will have heard of you, of course,” said Ariton. “I think he will be eager to see you for himself. Of course he may decide to kill you.” She observed them.

“I don’t think he will harm us,” said Foley. From inside heavy ground armor they could remonstrate gently but confidently with Galamand while he boiled them in oil or his cohorts attempted to bash in their faceplates with axes. It would require a local Archimedes and considerable work for any primitive king to damage them seriously, inside of a days time. But Ariton wore not much of any clothes at all. Foley asked her: “Do you think you will be safe?”

“The priestess of the Sea God is safe even from Galamand,” she answered absently. Brazil thought she was worried, but not about herself.

A slight leak developed in the rowboat. Foley bailed rapidly with a leaky gourd, muttering exotic curses.

Brazil scanned the ranks of grimly watching Reds as they neared the landing steps. “Is Galamand among those?”

“I do not see him. No doubt he awaits you in the great hall inside.”

The boat wallowed up to the landing. Ariton hopped nimbly out and made it fast with a rope of vine. A couple of Red soldiers made half-hearted motions of leveling spears in her direction, but no one moved to stop her. Brazil and Foley disembarked and stood quietly, giving the Reds the chance to look them over and make the first move if they felt like it. There were no women or children in sight.

Ariton moved her hand in an intricate gesture, in the air above Sunto’s head; then touched his head briefly.

“Now they will not bother him—for a while,” she said to Brazil. “Well, let us go on and try to see the king.”

A sword-bearing Red who might be an army officer stepped forward. “King Galamand has been told that you are here. Stand and wait.” He eyed Foley with unconcealed and unfriendly curiosity.

Some of the Red troops looked Brazil over and commented among themselves with openly truculent contempt. His blondness was plainly visible through the faceplate. He looked back at them, deadpan, unobtrusively inflating his suit’s flotation bubbles. Giant red swellings ballooned out around his shoulders and torso. The soldiers stared and fell silent.

“Brazil, what are you doing?” hissed a peremptory voice in his helmet.

“All right, I guess it wasn’t funny.” He deflated the bubbles and tried to wait patiently.

A FEW minutes passed in silence. Then a more elaborately costumed Red appeared, and imperiously beckoned the delegation to follow him into the castle.

There were only a few Blonds inside the walls. They had the look of prisoners or the lowest of slaves. Now a few Red women and children were in evidence, but they retreated rapidly out of sight of the visitors. The complex of walls and buildings making up the stronghold had been built of heavy stone, with little if any mortar used. But the stones were cut and fitted superbly, especially in the lower levels of the walls.

The great hall was a high chamber about thirty yards by ten, dimly lit by smoking torches and small high windows. It was crowded with Red men of varied appearance. But across one end of the room stood a solid wall of tall soldiers bearing shields and leveled spears.

“The old boy’s probably right behind his army,” Brazil radioed.

“Stand and wait here,” said the distinguished Red who was acting guide, indicating a spot not far from the leveled spears. He disappeared into the crowd at one side.

Brazil and Foley turned casually around as they waited, studying the chamber and the Reds in it. No attempt had been made to surround the visitors at close quarters. The door by which they had entered still stood open. Ariton stood waiting between the planeteers, with utter calm.

Another important-looking Red appeared before them; but it was somehow obvious that he was not the king. He held his hands clasped before him and owned a nose remarkable in size even for one of his tribe.

“Do you bear weapons?” he demanded sharply, looking from Foley to Brazil.

“We do,” said Foley. “And we are not the only men here who bear them.” He tried to give his speech the accent of a Red.

“You must give me your weapons,” said the chamberlain. “Then you may advance and prostrate yourselves before the king.”

“We will advance to greet the king in all friendliness,” said Foley. “But the law of our own nation forbids us to do homage to him or to give up our weapons.” The chamberlain hesitated a moment, then began to screech at the Earthmen threateningly, as if they were slaves. He raved and glared and waved his arms, and jabbered so fast he became almost unintelligible. Yet Brazil got the impression the man was trying to avoid direct personal insult. It was a masterful performance of denouncing their disrespectful behavior but not themselves.

“Better just wait him out,” Brazil subvocalized to Foley via radio. “Maybe they just want to see if we bluff. It wouldn’t do for the king himself to fail.”

THE planeteers stood silent a full thirty seconds longer, glaring stony-eyed back at the speaker. The harangue gave no sign of slackening.

“Better squelch him,” Brazil said. Evidently the torrent of words was going to continue until they reacted to it in some way. Brazil did not now want to give the impression that Earthmen had infinite patience. The squelch might be better accepted coming from the “Red” planeteer.

“Silence!” Foley bellowed, after turning up his airspeaker volume. He got what he called for with magical suddenness. Ariton wore a pleased smile.

“We have come here to talk with a king, not to listen to you,” Foley went on. “If King Galamand is not pleased to receive us today, we will return tomorrow. Our business is important.”

“Get out of the way,” said a firm voice from behind the wall of soldiers. “Let them come here.” The rank of soldiers opened, but stayed within spear-thrusting distance on either side. Brazil, Ariton and Foley advanced toward the man who sat alone upon an ancient carven chair.

The low dais and throne were nothing remarkable. The helmet and breastplate of the king were richer than those of his soldiers. Upon the breastplate was worked in relief an image of the Tower of the Sea God, the torchlight glinting on it.

The man upon the throne was not ordinary. A vast scar sliced across his face, nearly obliterating one of his eyes. He was approaching middle age, not big for a Red, but thick-limbed and strong.

Foley opened his mouth to say something a little nasty about the way the chamberlain had spoken to them. “Greetings, oh king,” was what came out. Galamand’s bright blue eye seemed to nail you with more effect than if there had been two.

“Greetings, oh, king,” said Brazil. Ariton stood between the Earthmen, saying nothing and watching Galamand haughtily.

The king ignored her and spoke to the armored planeteers, looking from one to the other. “I bid you welcome,” he said perfunctorily. “Does your king send greetings to me?”

“He does, indeed,” said Foley. “And would send you gifts, as is our custom.” He waited momentarily for a reaction which did not come, then added: “But in some lands it is considered an insult to present such gifts immediately. It is, indeed, so considered by us.”

The king raised an eyebrow, and his mouth twisted slightly. Some facial expressions seem to be well-nigh universal among humanoids, Brazil thought. He spoke up: “Oh, there are such lands, King Galamand. Not many, but a few.”

The blue eye fixed on his. “I thank your king for his greetings. Is he Red or Blond?”

“Neither,” said Brazil, truthfully enough. “In our country there are men of many tribes, who live together fairly peacefully. It is only by chance that I look like one of the Blonds of this island. But Foley here was chosen deliberately to come here today, because he looks like a Red, that you might not think we believe Reds to be our enemies.”

The king nodded toward Ariton. “You bring this woman with you. Why?”

“I have come with these my friends, to speak for my people,” she said, flaring up at him. “And I speak also to the Sea God, as you well know.”

GALAMAND seemed faintly amused. “Do you speak against me to the Sea God, woman? Your words are not strong enough. The Tower still stands against the waves. The sea-sound is faint in my ear, and soothing as I go to sleep at night. Will you arouse the Sea God to destroy me?”

Brazil heard the faintest stir and mutter among the soldiers on either side; evidently the king’s words might be thought a provocation to the God. Galamand swept his blue eye around, but said nothing to his men.

He spoke again to the planeteers: “And you are this woman’s friends?”

“We would be friends with Red and Blond alike.”

Galamand digested the statement swiftly and without comment, and changed the subject. “Your ship is swift and hard to see; my ships have circled the island every day since you first appeared, and have not found it. Yet at night it draws near, for you to land. And when you leave, your ship is not seen either. Now I admit this puzzles me.”

“He may be convinced that you’re just castaways,” said a rapid whisper from the Yuan Chwang in Brazil’s ear, bringing him no news.

He answered the king: “As you say, our ship is swift, and hard to see. It is not the wish of our king that our first visits here be seen by many ships upon the sea.”

“And why do you come here at all?”

“We seek always the knowledge of new lands, oh king,” said Foley. “Some twenty or thirty of us would like to live on this island for a year or two, on some small area of land that you who live here now do not need. We are willing to pay for this privilege. But we are not willing to deal with a government engaged in civil war, under which two tribes contend against each other; or with a king who holds another tribe in slavery.”

“No one contends against me here and lives.” Galamand spoke quietly and distinctly. He gave Ariton his twisted grin and asked: “Is it not so?”

It stung her deeply, and her voice rose loud: “Your day is not forever, Redman. One day your children will be our slaves, if you beget any before you die. We will—”

Brazil’s voice rose over hers. “That is not what we want! That would yet be war and slavery.” Both native rulers looked at him, for a moment united against the outsider. Then Galamand asked quietly: “How would you have us live?”

“As one tribe.”

Galamand narrowed his operational eye and scratched his beard. “You spoke of payment, for the use of land. What do you mean to offer?”

Foley answered: “To a just and peaceful ruler we would offer, to begin with, a great quantity of cord, stronger and more lasting than your vines, to make excellent fishnets, oh king.”

“And weapons?” The king’s voice was casual and gentle.

“A quantity of swords and spears might be included—”

“You do not carry swords or spears.”

“We carry them for trade.” They could be made up.

Galamand’s blue eye did not waver from Foley’s face, but his right arm shot out toward the nearest guard, and his fingers snapped. The haft of the guard’s spear was instantly in his grip.

THE king stood up and thrust the spear, butt first, toward Foley, at the same time holding out this left hand open.

“If you are men who deal in spears, then I will deal with you. I offer in trade this good Red spear, for that weapon you wear at your side.”

Foley assumed an expression of deep trouble, and he answered reluctantly: “Oh king, we have no wish to anger you. But we must refuse to trade our weapons. If we did, the anger of our king would fall heavily upon our heads. And against his anger we have no defense.”

“And against mine?” Galamand’s voice was still gentle. So is a gorilla, when not offended.

“We have our weapons, which we will not trade,” said Brazil, with utmost courtesy. The blue eye lanced at him, and he looked right back down the shaft of it, while from the corners of his eyes he watched the spearmen carefully. He wondered if Galamand could really identify the butt of a stun pistol as a weapon.

Galamand grounded the butt of the spear and stood drumming his fingers on the shaft.

“Fishnets,” he said meditatively. He looked from one planeteer to the other. “Your great king has then no weapons to spare? I would reward you well if you were to convince him that he has; or if you were to act, shall we say, on your own . . .” He reached into a pouch at his side and brought out a lustrous pearl, bigger than a grape.

Foley shook his head slowly, forgetting that the gesture might mean nothing or anything here. “Oh king, it cannot be so. If you offer us kingdoms greater and richer than this whole island, still we will give or trade to you no weapons, save such as you can make yourselves.”

Galamand tossed the spear back to the soldier and seated himself again.

“And your armor, I suppose?

I admit I have not seen such glass.”

This time Brazil joined in the headshaking, to preserve unity, since no one had seemed shocked by the gesture.

“Strange men,” Galamand mused. “You say you will not trade with a ruler who holds another tribe in slavery. I will not ask you why. I have not asked for any trade with you that would pay me in fishnets, and I want none. While the waves spare the Tower, the Sea God supports me. I am king upon this island. My slaves are my slaves. When you are willing to trade something worth while for the use of my land, you may come again and speak with me.”

“Suggestions?” Brazil radioed.

“Leave without argument,” said a voice from above. “We can analyze what we’ve got and try again.”

ARITON stood proudly erect while Brazil and Foley bowed deeply to the king, who told them with a straight face that he was providing them with an escort back to their ship, that no harm should come to them on the way.

“They’ll see the scout unless we can shake them,” Brazil radioed, starting out of the throne room.

“Guess maybe we’ll have to give them a minimum marvel to look at,” said Gates’ voice. “There’s a suitable deep cove just outside the city, about two miles from where you are. Just walk south along the shore; I’ll bring the scout up partly out of the water for you to get in, and let them get a good enough look to be sure it’s a ship and not a sea monster. Okay?”

“Good idea,” said Captain Dietrich. “A submarine will explain to them why they haven’t seen our ship. It’ll startle them some, but it should further convince them we’re not spirits who just materialize.”

Ariton walked with the planeteers out of the castle; they stopped at the landing steps to pick up Sunto, who was much relieved to see them.

Sunto ceased bailing and climbed out of his rowboat when told they were leaving by land. He said to a Red soldier standing guard nearby: “I leave to you as a gift the noble craft which you have praised so highly.” And he ground his foot against the stone stair. The Red glowered but said nothing.

The walk out of the city was uneventful. Within an hour the four of them stood on the steep sloping shore within the chosen cove, with Galamand’s heavily armed honor guard watching very carefully from a little distance and a Red galley casually standing by off shore.

Foley was telling Ariton that a ship would soon come to take Brazil and him aboard, but she and Sunto would have to stay on shore. She agreed calmly, and watched the horizon for the ship, with some puzzlement.

Brazil turned to Sunto. “The Tower of the Sea God is very important to your people and the Reds, is it not?”

“Yes.” Sunto did not seem especially interested in the subject. “It is our old belief that as long as the Tower is not destroyed by the waves of the sea, the Sea God smiles upon the rulers of the island, whoever they be.”

“What if the waves should knock the Tower down?” Brazil asked.

Sunto smiled wryly. “Then I think you would see upon this island the one tribe for which Ariton says you asked the king. For the Tower to be so destroyed would mean the Sea God thinks the rulers of the island evil. The destruction of his own Tower is to be his last warning before he overwhelms with waves the entire island, slaying everyone on it and carrying the evildoers down to be frozen forever in the ice at the bottom of the sea.”

“Get more on this, Boris,” said an excited radio voice. “Ask Ariton about the Tower, Foley. She should be the real authority. Gates, hold that scout underwater for a minute.”

BRAZIL asked Sunto: “Do you think the Sea God will ever destroy the Tower?”

Sunto looked out at the ocean soberly; it was dull and placid in the sun.

“May I never see the day—but I am a practical man. Whoever is king will surely see to it that the sea wall of large rocks is kept strong at the base of the Tower, to break the force of the waves. Some day, perhaps, a very great storm . . . but there are great storms every year. The Tower has stood for many years.”

“Is the season for great storms coming soon?” Brazil felt the vague beginnings of what might be a valid idea.

“No, it is just past. Now is the time of the steady-but-not-toostrong winds.”

“Oh. I see.”

“That checks,” said Meteorology from above.

Sunto continued: “Also, the Tower stands on a straight shoreline, and the Sea God hurls his waves most strongly against the points of land that jut out into his domain, as if he were jealous.”

“That is true in all lands,” said Brazil absently. He had just the start of a plan to get these people co-operating, by somehow making the Tower seem threatened by a storm, and scaring them. It might be just possible to induce a violent storm. But what would it do to the rest of the island? The scheme seemed worthless . . .

“That is true in all lands. As it is true that the waves come in nearly always parallel to the shore, no matter from which point at sea the wind is blowing. And the reason is the same . . .” Brazil fell silent, as if in a sudden dream.

“Why, that is so, but I have never thought about it,” said Sunto in surprise. “Truly, the waves are like women, for men watch them long and understand them but little.”

“. . . that they travel more slowly as the water beneath them grows more shallow,” said Brazil with a far-away look. He gave a sudden laugh at the sight of Sunto’s startled face. “Waves, I mean, not women. Sunto, tell me this. If the Tower were destroyed by some means other than the waves, what then?”

“What then?” Sunto gave the Blond equivalent of a shrug. “Why, the Tower would simply have to be rebuilt, and the king would gain merit in the Sea God’s eyes by rebuilding.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe the Red king would rebuild it on some inland hill, where no wave could ever reach it, and so make his rule safe.”

Brazil nodded as if satisfied.

TWENTY minutes later he sat with Foley in scoutship Alpha, gratefully peeling off gadgets and chunks of armor. He faced on a segmented screen the debriefing assembly of their peers and bosses, electronically gathered to analyze the visit to Galamand. The astounded natives who had watched the two planeteers enter the submarine craft were by now no doubt attending their own conferences on the subject.

“First, just tell me this,” Brazil invited, eyes alight with an idea. “Does it seem likely that a massive assault of ocean waves on this Tower might make these people willing to try getting along together, at least for a while, so we could deal with a halfway representative government?”

“I would say yes, based on what Ariton told me,” said Foley.

“I would tend to agree,” said Sociology, cautiously. “It might well give us a start in the right direction.”

“An assault of ocean waves, you say.” Captain Dietrich frowned. “Not of forcefields, explosives, chemicals or sonic vibrations.”

“Captain, I think there’s a chance it can be done with this scoutship, and not by directing any of those modern weapons against the Tower.”

“I am afraid I would have to forbid the use of such weapons against the natives, on principle,” said Chandragupta grimly.

“The idea is not to wreck the Tower,” said Brazil, “but to make the natives think the Sea God has decided to wreck it.”

“That Galamand’s no fool,” said Gates. “He’s probably thinking up antisubmarine devices already. And how are you going to stir up suitable waves with a scoutship?”

“I’m not going to stir them up, exactly. And I don’t think Galamand will notice a submarine acting several miles out at sea, away from his Tower.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No, on duty. Another reason for trying to get this situation settled. Now I’ll need some information before I can tell if this scheme has a chance of working.”

Late that afternoon a cute chick who happened to be an expert oceanographer gave Brazil data he had requested. He studied it for a few moments, then favored the girl’s screen image with a look like that of an elated predator.

“Baby, I think I could kiss you.”

“Your threats don’t frighten me at this distance,” she answered, unperturbed. “Is there anything else you want—having to do with the job, that is?”

He turned serious. “Now I need a weather forecast of such massive solidity that we can all lean on it—one that includes a steady ocean breeze here.”

TROFAND, Red priest of the Sea God, and chief caretaker of the Tower, was awakened by the sound of the waves, to which he listened with half an ear even while asleep. The sound was now too loud for his liking.

He arose from his pallet and was dressing in the stone-damp darkness of his chamber in the Tower’s base when he received a shock. A streaming puddle of cold sea water flowed against his bare foot on the floor. He hastened to light a candle from the smoldering brazier that fought uselessly against the permanent dampness of his bedchamber.

It was true, he saw with distress. Water was entering in thin streams through chinks in the massive masonry of the inner Tower wall. It was something that happened only in the heaviest storms. The booming roar of the waves pounding the heavy sea wall outside brought him to the beginning of real fright. In ten years in the Tower he had never heard it so loud. A mighty storm must be raging, though the season for them was past, and the weather signs had given no indication of any approaching tempest.

Trofand was nearly dressed when an underling came with a torch, pounding on his door and opening it with a minimum of courtesy.

“My lord, the waves, the waves! They are very bad!”

“I have ears, fool. Someone should have called me sooner. What are the signs of the storm’s length?”

“My lord, there is no storm.”

Trofand started an angry retort to the foolish statement, but something in the pale frightened face before him made him pause. Fastening his belt, he led the way out of the chamber to the stair that climbed to the Tower’s top. He could soon see for himself what was happening.

It was true, he realized, emerging into the pre-dawn darkness atop the Tower. The sky was clear. The wind was steady in direction from the sea, but it was not strong. The surf at the Tower’s foot should be fairly gentle.

He thought he felt the stones of the Tower quiver underfoot with each leisurely watery smash.

An assistant was at his elbow, speaking with a worried voice. “My lord, what shall we do? The signs are that the wind will rise throughout the day, and remain steady in direction. If tire waves become yet higher—”

“If they do, we will deal with them. The Sea God is not our enemy. Go rouse out the Tower slaves. Conscript more if need be. Have them stand by the fresh slabs of rock, ready at dawn to strengthen the sea wall. Then go you to offer the day’s sacrifice to the Sea God. But do not take too long about it.”

“I obey.” The man was gone in an instant, down the stair. Other junior priests of the Tower huddled about Trofand in the chill night, in the light of a dim torch, looking to him for guidance.

WELL, I was right about that, Trofand said to himself. He was thinking of the extra stones, weighing many tons apiece, that he had long ago ordered to be kept on rollers in the courtyard below. They were constantly ready to be moved to reinforce the sea wall in case a storm of unprecedented violence should threaten the Tower.

But now he had a question to decide immediately. Should he order the king awakened? After all, the Tower seemed in no immediate danger. Galamand might grumble if he were waked up for something unimportant. But he might have the man boiled alive who failed to wake him for a real emergency, priest of the Sea God or not. It was not a hard decision to make.

“You—go rouse the king. Tell him I say that waves threaten the Tower. Tell no one else.”

“I obey.”

King Galamand was beside Trofand within a few minutes, looking over the parapet and frowning at the strange intensity of waves that were driven by such a modest wind. He observed the preparations that had been made to reinforce the sea wall at dawn, then turned and struck his fist against the parapet.

“You did well to call me. But these stones have stood throughout my lifetime, and I say that they will stand yet a good while longer.” Trofand saw him outlined against the first gray light in the east.

The Blond slaves, whipped on by overseers, now began to roll the mighty rock slabs into position to reinforce the sea wall. It would be dangerous work. But slaves could be replaced, while the Tower—

There was an outcry somewhere inside the Tower. In a minute an exhausted runner appeared, helped up the stairs by others. He leaned against the stones beside the king in near panic.

“My lord, the sea wall—the wall away from the Tower, up and down the peninsula—”

“Is it breached by waves? Where?”

“No, my lord.” A gasp for breath. “I came along the wall, after carrying your message conscripting slaves—”

“Well?”

“Elsewhere, my lord, the waves are small. Only here at the Tower do they rise abnormally, as if in raging anger. As if the Sea God has grown angry and—uh!” Galamand’s vicious backhand blow knocked the man sprawling. “Enough! Do not preach the anger of the gods at me, or I will show you what anger is! I am the king!” The king turned away to peer, with Trofand and the others, at the waves beating against the sea wall at a distance from the Tower. The fast brightening dawn revealed that the messenger had spoken the truth.

THE NEWS was out, Brazil saw, as he strode along the sea wall road toward the Tower and the fortified complex of Galamand’s castle. A puzzled Ariton walked between him and Foley. Reds and Blonds stood in little groups along the wall, commenting on the waves that were assaulting the base of the Tower. Faces turned toward them as they passed, but ever turned back again to the greater wonder of the waves.

Each long swell marched in from the clear horizon of the ocean, foaming up and curling over as the depth of the water below approaching the height of the wave, to smash itself finally against the rocks piled in the shallow water at the base of the sea wall. But in the sea before the Tower, each incoming rise of water seemed to squeeze itself together along its long axis, rising to at last three times the height of the waves elsewhere, before it piled up in a foaming fury of discriminating violence upon that part of the sea wall.

Ariton paused at her first sight of this, whispering something that might have been a prayer.

“You knew of this?” she asked Brazil. “This is why you brought me here?”

“I’m taking you to talk to Galamand,” Brazil evaded. “I think if you and he can’t come to some peaceful agreement soon, there won’t be any Tower left for either of you to use. You have lived near the sea all your life. You know the strength that is in large waves.”

“What do you mean?” she stared at him, half afraid. “Do you speak for the Sea God?”

“We are only men,” he answered innocently. “But do I not understand your gods correctly? Is it not so that the Sea God may destroy his own Tower when there is great strife in the land and evil rulers, as a final warning to all the people, before he destroys the entire island?”

“It is true the Reds are evil rulers,” she said after a long moment, as if thinking aloud. Then she took her eyes from Brazil’s face and turned toward the Tower. “Come, whoever you are. It is my place to be there now.”

“Is this going to work?” Foley radioed while they walked. “I mean that Tower isn’t built out of pebbles, exactly. And it’s stood through a lot of storms.”

“On Earth,” answered Brazil in professorial accents, “wave forces have been measured at well over three tons per square foot. Engineers will not build a shoreline structure on Earth without carefully considering local conditions regarding the effect we are now employing.

“Besides, the idea is to scare Galamand and the little lady here into co-operating, not to actually wreck the Tower. That would probably kill someone, and I hate to think what might happen in the panic.”

AT the castle gate, the guards seemed almost to be looking over their shoulders at the Tower as they halted the three visitors and sent word to Galamand of their arrival. Everyone in sight, Red or Blond, was obviously thinking or talking of nothing but the waves.

Within a few minutes, a guide appeared to escort the visitors to the bare top of the Tower.

Brazil could see by the flags above the castle that the wind had increased slightly and was holding a steady direction, as Meteorology had promised it would. If we were only gods enough to control the winds in an area of a few square miles, thought Brazil. We can come a hundred light years to stick our noses into our neighbors’ business, but if the weather doesn’t quite suit our schemes when we arrive, we can only wait until it does.

Galamand scoured them with his single eye when they had climbed the stairs to the Tower’s top. The king paused in his pacing amid a group of high-ranking Reds.

“Come you to preach the Sea God to me also?” he inquired in an ominously quiet voice.

Ariton looked about her. “Where is Trofand?”

“He has gone to offer sacrifices in the chapel below,” said the king, with a tinge of amusement in his voice. He leaned against the parapet with thick arms folded and his back to the sea as if in contempt. “He has rather suddenly remembered to take his religious obligations seriously.”

“A human sacrifice?” asked Brazil. He hadn’t counted on this.

“He considers it,” said Galamand. “But I think the Sea God has lives enough for one day.” He moved his head to indicate that they should look over the parapet.

In the cold boiling hell of surf at the Tower’s foot a hundred Blond slaves struggled on the slippery rocks, straining on levers and vine ropes to move an enormous block of stone into the surf at a place where the waves had weakened the wall.

With each torrential ebb and surge of water, Brazil saw, a pale object in the surf was drawn out and hurled in near the rocks, buried in foam and tossed up again—a fish-pale thing that had blond hair and no longer any face. And there was another—and another . . .

No Blond slave or Red overseer took any apparent notice of the drowned men, much less attempted to pull them from the sea. Every living man down there was concerned too intently with his own footing on the treacherous rock.

“Take it easy, old man,” said a voice inside Brazil’s helmet.

OH, THIS Brazil is a wonder, a red-hot planeteer, said a louder voice inside Brazil’s mind. Just trust him, and he’ll come up with a great scheme to set everyone on the road to happiness without bloodshed. That’s important, no bloodshed. Well, you can’t see any blood down there, can you?

Now that’s enough. Shut up and get to work, there’s a job to finish.

“Why does the surf attack only the place of the Tower, oh king?” he asked, turning, stony-faced.

The blue eye studied him. “Had I a ship so cunningly built as to travel underwater, I might discover why.” Galamand turned to his aides. “Send boats and divers out beyond the white water. See if anything strange lies under the surface.”

“The old boy’s uncomfortably shrewd,” said Foley on radio. “Doesn’t seem likely they’ll search the bottom five miles out and a couple hundred feet deep, though.”

Boats and divers soon appeared in the sea a few hundred yards out from the Tower, and made a show of investigating underwater conditions. It was not a really dangerous job for such skillful sailors and swimmers, out there where there were no rocks to be dashed against. But the Red seamen seemed to approach the job with a vast reluctance. Their faces turned often toward the Tower, as if in hope that the king would recall them.

Time passed. By noon the wind was obviously gaining strength again.

“I go to join Trofand in the chapel,” said Ariton to the king, as if daring him to stop her. He I pulled at his beard and appeared not to hear.

When she had gone he ordered food brought to him. His aides grew continually more gloomy.

They looked often at the king, but sought to avoid his eye.

Galamand was amused to see the planeteers drink their lunch from tubes inside their helmets. He asked if their suits had sanitary facilities too, and roared with laughter when he was told they had. But the laughter had a forced sound to skillful ears.

The wind grew yet stronger, though it was still far from a gale. Down below, an incoming wave got under a forty-ton slab of rock just right, and skipped it like a flat chip against the base of the Tower itself. Slaves and overseers miraculously scrambled clear. Stones split and flew; one fragment spun almost to the Tower’s top.

The next wave poured through the gap in the sea wall, like the paw of a giant beast forced into a hole to grope for prey. The next tore free another huge stone from the edge of the hole. The bones of the Tower quivered.

Slaves and masters at the Tower’s foot scrambled desperately to move another massive rock into a defensive position.

Brazil saw it was a futile thing for creatures weak as men to attempt. One roaring curl of water caught a Red, who dropped his whip and grabbed at the slippery rock to save himself. Brazil saw the upturned face, the eyes seemingly looking straight into his own, the mouth opened as if to yell something. The next wave tore the man away and dragged him out of sight.

GALAMAND was roaring orders for more slaves to be brought. “You have strange powers and weapons,” he demanded suddenly of Foley. “Can you help me now?”

Brazil pulled himself out of a hideous fascination with what was happening down below.

“And if we can?” asked Foley.

“It might be that the agreement you sought with me could be quickly reached.” The wind tore at Galamand’s words, and shot spray past his head, here ninety feet above the normal sea. A small wave-tossed rock clattered against the parapet, as if shot from a giant’s sling.

“Then order those men from the sea down there,” Brazil demanded. “And give your word to make of Red and Blond one tribe.”

“Then you can cure this,” barked the king. “And it may be you have caused it!”

The other Reds glared at the Earthmen; some weapons were drawn. Then cries came from the stairway, distracting attention.

Ariton and Trofand were suddenly at the top of the stair, in ceremonial robes half sodden with sea water.

“My king, the Sea God pours his wrath into the very chapel. I—” Trofand jumped back, as if he thought the king’s sudden lunge was directed at him. But Galamand seized Ariton, had her arm twisted behind her back and his dagger at her throat in a moment.

“Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” howled Trofand. The other Reds looked on, wavering, wide-eyed, undecided.

The king swung Ariton to face the planeteers. “Now, aliens,” he roared. “Cause the waves to cease, and quickly, or I will butcher this so-called queen with whom you ally yourselves. You seek to put her on a throne, but I alone am king. And so I will remain!”

“My lord.” Ariton’s low voice stopped the king in surprise. Doubtless it was the first time she had used any title of respect to him. “My death will not save our island. But I will marry you and bear your sons, if that be the only way to save it. And we will live here as one tribe.”

For the first time in his experience, Brazil saw Galamand taken aback. But it was only for a moment.

“No, I’ll not have it! I am the king here, I alone. Not you, or the aliens, or the Sea God himself, can order me, do this or that!”

Trofand moaned and covered his face; every other Red was visibly shaken by the king’s defiance of the god. He’s weakening, Brazil thought, with a sudden turn of sympathy for Galamand, and he’s cutting himself off from his followers. Be ready for the moment . . .

The sea-flung stone, the size of a grapefruit, actually missed Galamand’s helmeted head by less than a foot, and flew on to bounce off the opposite wall and down the stairway. The jolt from Brazil’s quick-drawn stun pistol took the king in the head about one second later, when all eyes were on Galamand. No native doubted that the rock had grazed the king’s helmet and caused his sudden collapse. Brazil’s pistol was reholstered as quickly as it had been drawn.

The Red priests and soldiers stared at the fallen ruler in awe. Plainly he had been struck down for blasphemy. None of then moved to aid him.

FOLEY went to him, pulling out his first-aid kit and beginning a quick radio conference with the medics of the Yuan Chwang. The stun-jolt should wear off in a matter of minutes; a carefully chosen tranquillizer administered now should ease the situation then considerably.

A Red officer of apparent high rank spoke almost imploringly to Trofand: “We will obey you, my lord. Is there any way to save the island?” The priest looked uncertainly at Ariton.

Brazil asked her: “Will you now marry the king, as you offered, and so unite your people with his?”

She rubbed the arm that Galamand had twisted, and frowned. “There is no need for that now. The Sea God has rejected him. With your help, I will be ruler—”

“Do you want the Tower to stand?” Brazil cut her off brutally. “Remember, too, that the Red soldiers are still strong, and perhaps not eager to serve you.”

She nodded, meekly wide-eyed for once.

Brazil turned to Trofand. “Can the marriage be done at once? As soon as the king awakes?”

“If he can be made to agree to it; I see that the Sea God has spared his life, for now his eyelids move.”

“I think he can be made to agree,” said the high-ranking officer, grimly. “I think it is time we had a certain heir to the throne, and also an end to this unprofitable fighting in our own land.”

Brazil switched off his air speaker, with throat muscles beginning to quiver with the relaxation of tension. “Sam, start cutting down that hump. But better stand by to rebuild, until I give you the word that the honeymoon has started.”

Five miles out at the sea and two hundred feet below the surface, scoutships Alpha and Omicron braced themselves on waterfilled space, and thrust noses equipped with jury-rigged bulldozer blades against the mound of mud and sand rising from the bottom, the mound they had carefully constructed in the same manner the day before. It was not much of a mound for size, really, and unimpressive-looking to any but an oceanographer. But it shallowed the water above it, and so it slowed the waves, refracting those from one certain direction, focussing them as a lens treats light, causing them to converge on one small area five miles away . . .

BORIS BRAZIL opened his eyes. He had not been asleep, though he sat slouched in an easy chair in an alcove of the recreation lounge aboard the Yuan Chwang. Chandragupta was standing looking down at him.

“Do you mind if I ask what you see behind your eyelids, my friend?” the Tribune asked.

Brazil was not quick to answer.

“Perhaps you see drowned men.” The Tribune sat down facing Brazil and spoke with quiet sympathy. “My friend, you have what must be one of the most difficult jobs in the known universe; you must be a researcher, a diplomat, a fighter, a linguist and a survival expert, by turns or all at once. And I know I have left out many things. I think you do very well in your job, considering that you are no more than human. We here agreed that your plan of threatening the Tower with waves should be tried. I still think it was good. It has set the islanders on the road to unity, and so no doubt averted more suffering than it caused. The next time a similar situation arises, no doubt it can be used with even greater success.”

“Thanks, Chan. I can’t help feeling we could have avoided getting those men drowned—but there’s no use brooding on it now.” Brazil uncoiled slowly up from the chair to stretch. A little humor came back into his face.

“I’m going to play it as lazy as I can for a couple of days.” He straightened his off-duty semiuniform, and said, half to himself: “Maybe I’ll just mosey over toward Oceanography and look up something. Hmmm—”

“Boris?” Foley’s voice was heard before he came into sight. “There you are. Scout just sent back word from over nightside; they spotted one of those luminous water-rings over there, this one’s eight miles across. Our regular standby crew is out, so Gates wants you in the briefing room on the double. Oh yeah—” Foley gave the uncertain smile of the bearer of a joke who doesn’t understand it. “He says: “What would Thoreau have to say about that?”

Brazil’s answer was probably inaccurate.

SEVEN DOORS TO EDUCATION

The man was a stranger, and an alien, and perhaps he was dying. But Kelsey had to choose: He could save the stranger’s life—or he could save his own.

THE thing came down into atmosphere over Lake Michigan at a velocity that should have built shock waves before it; there were none. Radars at the Nike and fighter-interceptor sites along and near the shoreline swept their beams toward the thing in the course of their normal search routine. The hurtling electromagnetic pulses were detoured precisely around the thing, to resume on the other side their straight and echoless flight. The thing was quite unseen.

The descending mass, roughly spherical, hundreds of feet in diameter, slowed its plunge through the early summer night of North America. It hit the lake with hardly a splash, miles from shore.

Not for the first time did it find concealment in the waters of Earth. A few people of Earth had been aware of it. Now none of them remembered it.

A JUNE day in Chicago can be uncomfortably hot. This particular day was too miserable, in the opinion of twenty year old Pete Kelsey, for him to spend it all sorting mail inside the Main Post Office. Not if he could find a way out. Besides the heat, it was one of those days when he just didn’t feel like working. He didn’t quite know why. The job was really all right, though it didn’t pay too much. If he stuck with it, he would be able to retire in his early forties.

But today Kelsey’s morning, spent running a canceling machine, had been generally unpleasant; and he suspected from the way the mail was running that he would be assigned in the afternoon to a dim acre of the eighth floor, where long neglected bags and piles of low-class mail awaited a slackening of the first-class flow. It would be hot and chokingly dusty there. Kelsey decided to wangle half a day of his accumulated vacation time.

In an hour and a half he was in his rooming house on the North Side. Half an hour after that he was sitting in swimming trunks on one of the massive rocks that guard land from lake along stretches of Chicago’s park-and-beach shoreline, clothing piled beside him, transistor portable blaring something with a beat.

He was almost alone, on the edge of the great city. The rocks rose like stairs for five or six tiers above where he sat near water level, shutting out the sight of green park and distant buildings. To right and left the rock rampart curved out and then away, at about a hundred yards from where he sat, putting him out of sight of the rest of the shoreline. Only two or three other people were in sight, strolling in the cool lake breeze or sunbathing.

If only some nice looking babe would come along now, to stretch out on the rocks for some sun . . . well, he wouldn’t hold his breath while waiting for her. The water looked inviting.

The beaches were not officially open yet. He could have gone to one anyway, but he didn’t especially care for sand, or for wading a long way out to reach deep water. Here you could dive right in.

He did. The water was cold, making him gasp as he surfaced.

“Better than air conditioning,” he told himself aloud, treading water happily. He stroked out a few yards from shore, an easy, confident swimmer.

When he felt the tight sudden grip on his foot his first unthinking reaction was: A joke. One of the guys from work, somehow . . . There was a sting at his ankle . . .

KELSEY had not had time to get really frightened. When he woke, he was calm, but bewilderment came quickly. He was still in swimming trunks, and wet.

He lay on his back on the floor of a small, square, windowless room, staring at a glowing ceiling that provided comfortable illumination. In the center of the ceiling was a metallic disk that looked like a closed door or hatch, with hinges at one side, and at the other small projections that might be an intricate latch.

He rolled over dazedly. He had been swimming, and now . . . an old man lay stretched beside him, eyes closed, breathing heavily, dressed in rags and thinly bearded. The old man’s features were Oriental—Chinese, or maybe Japanese. Kelsey had never learned to tell the difference. Kelsey stood up.

He felt fine, but where was he? Nothing looked familiar. The little room held no furniture. Floor and walls were some featureless neutral-colored stuff he could not identify. Set into one wall was a niche like a sort of berth, possibly just big enough for someone Kelsey’s size to squeeze into. A transparent sliding door, now half open, separated berth from room.

He looked down at the old man, found him scrawny and ugly and generally unhealthy looking. Maybe when the old man woke up he could tell what this was all about.

This was an odd, silent place. Kelsey paced around, somehow expecting every moment to get an explanation from somewhere. In one wall, just below the low ceiling, air circulated gently through a grill with darkness behind it. In one corner of the floor, a six-inch hole showed the inside of a pipe, leading down into more darkness.

Kelsey investigated the berth-like niche; its door slid in grooves cut into a material that looked like rubber, but felt smooth as melting ice. In the top of the berth was another closed hatch, exactly like the one in the room’s ceiling.

He sat on the edge of the berth, scratching his damp head and regarding his unconscious companion.

The utter craziness of the whole business began to soak in on him. He had been swimming . . . He remembered the grab and sting at his ankle. There was no mark, no soreness.

He looked up at the hatch in the ceiling. Was he in a submarine? He had never been aboard any kind of ship. He searched his memory for data from movie and television scenes; what he could remember didn’t help any. He formed a vague picture of kidnapping Russian frogmen. He wished he could wake up and And this was all a dream.

THE hatch in the ceiling was easy to reach, but getting it open was another matter. After trying for about a minute, Kelsey quit in annoyance and attempted to wake the old man.

The old guy didn’t respond to gentle shaking. Was he drunk? Didn’t some Chinese still use opium or something? Kelsey shook harder.

“Hey,” he called, self-consciously, his own voice sounding strange in the silence around him. “Wake up!” he said, louder. The old man’s head wobbled on his thin neck with the shaking. He breathed. He stayed out.

Kelsey sat on the floor. Maybe the old guy was in bad shape. He would wait a while and try to think this out.

Without warning water began to fountain up from the pipe-opening in the floor, in a jet that carried to ceiling height and filled the room ankle deep in seconds.

After one paralyzed moment Kelsey jumped up and pounded on the ceiling hatch, yelling for help. The only answer was the continued splashing roar in the room.

Remembering the old man, Kelsey spun around. Rising water framed the wrinkled face. Kelsey jumped to him and lifted him, surprised at the weight he felt. He would have to keep the old man afloat with one hand while he tried to get the hatch open . . . only now did he notice with horror the heavy metal chains that bound the old man’s limbs, nearly concealed by the ragged garments. There would be no keeping him afloat!

Water lapped around Kelsey’s knees. Was it going to fill the room? The old man . . . Kelsey thought of the berth. He dragged the thin weighted body there, lifted and crammed it in, slid the transparent door shut. It looked like it might be waterproof.

There was no possibility of getting in himself, unless he left the old man out to drown—the thought flitted across his mind, found itself in alien territory, and fled.

Kelsey went back to the ceiling hatch, wading through water that was waist deep and still rising rapidly. He tried to work at the latch methodically, but panic grabbed at his fingers and made them fumble. The water reached his chest. Would it drain out through the ventilator when it got high enough? Would it leave him any air space? He could drown in this room. He was going to drown in this room.

He looked around wildly. The old man lay peacefully behind his transparent door, dry, like an exhibit in some reversed aquarium. There was another hatch in the berth, another way out . . . but no, the hatch in the berth was no different from this one, no use risking two lives.

“Help!” Kelsey shouted. The water had reached the ventilator and kept right on rising. Soon the room would be full; Kelsey was swimming now. “Help!” He twisted at the latch.

The latch stung his hand.

KELSEY woke up again.

He lay with his eyes shut for a little while; there was something frightening he might see when he opened them. He could not remember at first what it was . . .

He sat up with a jerk. But he was not drowning now, although still wet and in swimming trunks.

The room was not the same one, but similar. Same glowing ceiling, same ventilator, but no berth. Again a closed hatch, or door, this time in one wall instead of the ceiling.

Another hatch, in the floor, stood open. Kelsey crawled to it and looked down into the room where he had nearly drowned. It was empty of water now, but the floor still gleamed wetly. The sliding door to the berth was open; the old man was nowhere in sight.

Kelsey sat with his legs dangling through the open hatch, trying to make sense of it all. He couldn’t remember climbing up from the lower room, or even getting the hatch open. The latch had stung his hand in a gentle way, leaving no mark or soreness, as something had earlier stung his ankle. Each time he had been knocked out.

Had someone, pulled him up here? He looked around nervously. Was he being watched from somewhere?

He couldn’t just sit thinking about it. He gripped the edge of the hatch and lowered himself easily back into the first room, noticing as he did so how well he felt physically. He examined the compartment where he had left the old man. Where the hatch had been in the top of it was now a flat metal plate that he could not move with his fingers. He pushed and pounded and yelled some more, with no result.

The ceiling-glow died suddenly in this lower room; the only light now shone down through the open hatch from the room above.

Was someone telling him to move up there?

He climbed up without difficulty. He went to the closed door in the wall and pushed at it uselessly; this one had no latch, but an opening that looked like an odd keyhole. In a small rack beside the door hung ten or twelve oddshaped metal sticks.

Half-heartedly, Kelsey tried a few more yells and listened to the waiting silence. Well, he could sit around until something happened. Or he could continue to work on the door. He couldn’t think of any other course.

He took some of the metal sticks from the little rack and studied them. They all looked as if they would fit the door’s keyhole, but no two were shaped exactly alike. He chose one at random, and tried it in the door.

HIS hand got a nasty, grating shock, unlike electricity, unlike the previous gentle knockout stings. He dropped the key and at the same instant heard water gushing up in the room below. Kelsey slammed the floor hatch down and sat on it. Should he try to stop the flood by putting another key in the door? His hand still tingled; he decided not. Was he being punished in some crazy way for trying to open the door, by someone controlling all this, or was he just caught in a chain of accidents?

Soon the muffled watersound stopped. Gingerly he eased the hatch open; the bottom face of it turned up dripping wet. The room below was full and brimming over.

He didn’t like this at all. Could the room he was now in be flooded too? He closed the hatch and saw with horror that a little water came seeping up through it, as if the hatch were made of blotting paper. Yet it looked and felt like hard metal.

He decided to try the door again, shock or no shock. It was better than just waiting here, to maybe drown if the water rose again.

He took another key. He decided to peel off his trunks and try using them for insulation when he held the key and tried it in the door . . . but maybe he could do better than that.

Wasn’t one key enough to open a door? Why have so many in the rack? Starting to think, he really saw another detail for the first time: marked above the door was a small number 7.

He had noticed it before without thinking about it; you saw numbers all the time, on doors and lots of other places. But maybe a key would be numbered 7.

There were small numbers engraved on each of the ten keys, but each key bore a number of two or three digits; there was no number 7.

Kelsey looked more closely at the door. Near the keyhole ran a series of numbers in the same neat engraving borne by the keys: 2 6 14 30. None of the numbers matched a key’s number. Yet he thought there must be some connection. 2 6 14 30 . . . he sat comparing numbers for what seemed about five minutes before something clicked in his memory, taking him back to the intelligence tests he had experienced in high school. A series of numbers . . . complete the logical sequence, the instructions had said. It was one of those things that teachers thought up to make the smart kids feel good, he had told himself at the time, knowing that he himself wasn’t a smart kid. He hadn’t tried very hard at the test, feeling there was no point in it. But when they showed him the results, he hadn’t done badly at all, in fact a little better than average all along the line.

That had surprised him, because he had never done very well in school. He had never wanted to, because most of the kids he knew sort of sneered at guys who were brains, and the uncle he lived with was always talking down book learning and college guys who thought they knew a lot. His aunt had never said much about it one way or the other.

The numbers: 2 6 14 30. Complete the logical sequence. Well, it was worth a try. 6 was 3 times 2. 14 was—no.

Each number was larger than the one before it. Not double; 2 times 2 was 4, you had to add 2 more to get 6. 2 times 6 was 12, you had to add 2 . . .

“Yeah!” he said aloud. He ran through the whole series in his mind, twice, to be sure. He looked for, and found, a key numbered 62. There was nothing to be gained by waiting. He drew a deep breath and inserted it.

THE door opened easily; there was no sting, and no sound of water from below. Kelsey let out breath with a relieved whoof.

The room beyond the door was quite similar to the one in which he stood. As he stepped through he found himself facing another door, this one with a number 6 above it. He was certain before he tried it that it was locked.

On the wall near door 6, beside a key rack, was a tiny shelf holding a stack of papers. Kelsey riffled through the papers. Pages from some kind of textbook on English. He thought that nothing he found could surprise him any more.

Engraved beside the new door’s keyhole was the word: ADVERB. Kelsey suspected there would not be a key marked ADVERB, and he was right. But each key did have a word on it.

Was some crazy schoolteacher running this place? He pictured some old maid, driven batty by years in a classroom, inheriting a fortune and—nuts.

But memories of school returned once more, informing him that an adverb was one of those things called the parts of speech. He supposed that various teachers had tortured him with the parts of speech at least a hundred times during his twelve years of schooling. How could he ever need to know what an adverb was? Well, he did now.

Kelsey reached for the pages of English textbook and searched through them carefully until he found a list of words exemplifying the category ADVERB. None of the words on the keys were in the list. He would have to think about the category ADVERB and decide which key-word fitted it.

He did.

Again the door opened easily for his chosen key. He was not surprised at the sight of another similar room, and the number 5 above another door. Almost jauntily he walked directly across the new room to study door 5 for a small engraved symbol.

He found the letter H, which might stand for a lot of things.

This time the shelf beside the door was large, holding books, wires, and glass in various shapes that reminded him of what he had seen in his occasional glimpses from the hallway of the high school chemistry lab. A small metal tub held a clear odorless liquid that might be water, from the lack of smell. Careful, now, he warned himself. But he didn’t feel thirsty yet.

There was no keyhole in door 5. A simple latch was sealed under a casing of some clear substance that resisted Kelsey’s pushing fingers like iron.

He sighed. He would have to play it by the book, and the books on the shelf were thick and formidable-looking volumes. A glance showed him they were physics and chemistry texts. He groaned.

From somewhere in the rooms behind him came a watery gurgle.

WELL, there was no use just sitting here, and nothing else to do but keep trying to figure a way out. This chemistry business here looked far too hard for him to solve, but it would at least give him something to do.

First, the symbol on the door. A book told him that H represented the element hydrogen. He discovered that it was possible to produce hydrogen from water, given electricity and suitable apparatus. These were provided, the electricity from an ordinarylooking wall outlet. On the shelf was a glass tube of peculiar shape that seemed designed to convey the newly released hydrogen to the seal holding the latch. The little tub was marked ILO, which he learned meant water.

He went to work with containers and wires and electrodes, following a procedure roughly outlined in the books. After several mistakes and one mild electric shock he had the apparatus working. The seal over the latch melted away like ice in July sunshine. Kelsey wondered idly what the seal was made from; but he didn’t much care, as long as he got rid of it.

He had been briefly worried by the realization that the other gas produced, called oxygen, was escaping into the air of the room. He thought the name was familiar, but he wasn’t sure until a book assured him he had been breathing the stuff all his life.

Stepping into the next room, and facing door number 4, Kelsey felt almost at home. Before he could do anything else a great sleepiness rose up in him and overcame him. He stretched out on the floor, worried drowsily for a moment about the chance of another flood as he slept, and sank into oblivion.

If he dreamed, he did not remember it when he awoke.

HE sat up alertly, feeling good, remembering instantly all that had happened.

There was another shelf in this room, it was as big as the last, and he supposed the books and odd-looking junk on it would enable him to open Door 4. But he paused after getting to his feet and stretching, to consider first another puzzle.

He felt refreshed and alert, as if he had just slept eight hours. He had spent an undeterminable time getting through the other rooms, and lying unconscious in them.

However long he had been in this place, he had had nothing to eat or drink since arriving. He didn’t want anything now. And another thing; there had been nothing like plumbing in any of the rooms, unless you counted the flooding pipe in the first. It seemed that he didn’t need any plumbing.

He felt physically fine in every way. He didn’t even want a cigarette.

He had shaved in the morning (this morning? yesterday?) before going to work. He rubbed his face; it was still smooth.

His comfort was eerie, evoking forgotten ghost stories about people who had died without knowing it. Had he really drowned while swimming in the lake?

He breathed. His pulse beat. He kicked a toe rather incautiously against a wall and was painfully convinced of solidity. Were his bodily needs being taken care of while he slept? That was hard to believe; he thought any explanation for all this would be hard to believe. Yet one must be true.

Kelsey walked back through the rooms he had already traversed. Water now filled the second room to the lower edge of the open hatch in the wall. He would have to wade and dive if he wanted another look at the first room, but he saw no point in doing so. On impulse he scooped up water in his hand. It tasted all right.

But he wasn’t thirsty.

Whoever was behind this, for whatever unimaginable purpose, seemed to be urging him forward with the threat of flood. There was no way out back here. Whether there would be any way out for him ahead—he told himself there must be.

Kelsey faced the locked door numbered 4. It had a keyhole, and engraved beside it was the word: ETRUSCAN.

Kelsey looked at the now familiar rack of keys, and again felt the impulse to try one at random, to rush through doors—he didn’t doubt there would be more of them—as quickly as possible, to get to the bottom of the whole situation. But at door 7, a random try had given unpleasant results. He would keep on solving problems as long as he could, and then guess the rest if he had to.

Now let’s see about ETRUSCAN, he thought, whatever it means. Each key was numbered to correspond to one of the bits of junk on this room’s shelf. The bits of junk were pottery, clay or stone, painted or carved in decoration, some whole, some only broken pieces.

There were what looked like textbooks on the shelf again, with covers and a lot of pages missing, as before. This time there were also thick notebooks. Kelsey picked up one of these and found it crammed with neat notes and drawings that were plain enough in detail—but what was it all about?

Grimly, he began to study the mass of archeological field notes, determined to find out which one of the bits of junk was an ETRUSCAN. He read for what seemed a long time, standing there. He did not grow tired of standing, didn’t even lean on the shelf. He noticed this but put it out of his mind.

It took a long time. But when the sleepiness came again, and he lay down on the floor, it was in front of a door numbered 3.

HE put aside speculation about how much time was passing, or what it was all about. “All right, I’ll play your crazy game,” he muttered aloud. He would just accept the absence of any physical need as a blessing, and keep working his way through doors.

He solved a problem in positional astronomy, learning to use mathematics that he had never dreamed existed. Following an instruction book quite unlike any he had ever seen, he programmed a computer that he only vaguely understood, and did not need to understand. The read-out was a tiny orrery, including a ship that Kelsey had to navigate from planet to planet. Not, to be sure, with the complication of changing mass-ratios.

The solar system represented in the model had only six planets, none of them with a sizable moon, which facts suggested nothing to Kelsey. He was satisfied when the scheduled journey was complete, and door 3 clicked open for him.

The test required to open door 2 first appeared somewhat easier. The first half of a musical composition was played repeatedly to Kelsey, through some invisible speaker. Pressing one of a series of numbered buttons brought him the sound of one of four last-halfs, all quite similar. There were books on musical theory, and printed copies of each ending. He listened and studied until he felt sick of all music. Finally he made a choice.

He was mistaken.

The door refused the key. No shock bit at his hand, no sound of rushing water came from the rooms behind him. All was quiet, the eternal quiet of this place that might be expected to get on a guv’s nerves, but so far hadn’t bothered him.

Evidently his mistake was not to be punished. Kelsey was suddenly angry. That someone could push him around like this, use him for a . . . a . . . . guinea pig. The term floated into his mind; he wondered what it was, exactly, that scientists really did with guinea pigs. When he got out of here he would look it up.

If he got out of here.

When! Now to get this damned door open. The temptation to choose one of the three remaining keys at random was strong; but no, he would try what he honestly thought to be the second most likely piece of music.

This time the key worked. Kelsey stepped through and waited for the sleepiness to come.

DOOR 1. He had anticipated it, in the back of his mind, for what now seemed many days. Would there be a final answer behind it? Or a door numbered O? Or a trick? He had thought perhaps door 1 would be the most difficult of all to open. He went to work as soon as he woke up.

Kelsey built a cathedral. At least the structure somewhat resembled a Gothic church when he was through with it. He built it about three feet high, from blocks about a cubic inch in volume, that clung together like mortared masonry when he fitted one to another. He built it using tiny waldo arms, which were another concept utterly new to him. They worked into a glasslike enclosure that prevented him from reaching directly the simple latch of door 1. In this room the latch was not on the door but on the wall a few feet away. A block in the mechanism kept him from quite reaching the latch directly with the arms.

He had a helper, for the first time. When he pressed a button, a small machine ran from one corner of the enclosure as if anxious to assist him, climbed upon the blocks until it reached the highest point of whatever pile or structure they formed, and reached a tiny arm as far as it could toward the latch.

Kelsey had to build something with the blocks for the robot to climb on, so it could reach the latch. He soon learned that it could not climb a tall narrow spire of blocks; he didn’t have enough material to build a massive ramp or stairway. Besides the blocks, he had beams to work with, sticks of varied sizes and shapes, up to a few inches long. Each beam had the word TEMPORARY lettered on it. Kelsey soon found what TEMPORARY meant in this case; if the little robot attempted to climb the structure while any of the beams were in place, the blocks immediately lost their cohesiveness and his whole work collapsed.

A good many of his efforts collapsed from one cause or another, usually while the robot was climbing. The little machine hit the floor hard, but always bounced up and returned to its corner, like an undaunted boxer ready for the next round. Kelsey chuckled at the robot, tried to think of a name for it, and vowed he would have no less patience.

He built and rebuilt, without tiring. There were books on engineering, architecture, and construction; he studied them between attempts. What he needed was a tall structure, with a fairly large top for the robot to stand on while it reached for the latch. Since the amount of blocks was limited, the structure would have to be hollow inside. He used his little beams for temporary support, and discovered the beauty of the arch, and the use of the flying buttress to keep arch-supporting walls from collapsing outward.

There came a time when the robot climbed successfully and stretched itself upward, until the tip of one small metal arm reached the latch, curved over, and pulled precisely . . .

Click!

He had done it. Seven doors.

KELSEY felt excitement such that his hands should have trembled with it, but they remained steady and obedient as machines.

Door 1 swung ajar for him now. He felt an impulse to take the robot with him, but it was still out of his reach behind the glass. And it now hung inanimate from the latch it had opened. It was only a machine.

Almost without pause Kelsey pushed open door 1 and stepped through. An unumbered door faced him from the familiar place in the opposite wall, but something else grabbed his attention immediately—a ladder rose through a hole in the glowing ceiling, and down through the hole came a greenish wavery light that might be a watermottled reflection of the sun.

Kelsey climbed quickly. Above the room the ladder curved off to become a sort of stairway, inside a tube big enough to hold a crawling man. Climbing around a sharp bend in the tube, Kelsey felt an odd sensation, as if he had been turned upside down for a moment, lost his balance and his visual perspective. The feeling passed in an instant; he climbed on, into brighter light.

Some force held clear water up like a lid inside the upper end of the tube; it looked as if the upper end was just under the normal surface of a body of water, with bright light above, as if from a clear sunny sky.

Kelsey was quite practical about wonders by now. He poked a finger into the waterlid above his head, and withdrew it wet but undamaged. He crawled up through the water, and stopped with head and shoulders in the open air and sun, his weight still supported by the tube.

He had emerged into the familiarity of the Chicago shoreline, to very nearly the exact spot where he had felt the grasp and sting at his ankle, a few yards offshore from the rocks. The sun was nearly overhead on a bright warm day. Piled as he had left it he saw his clothing. Above the gentle lapping of wave against rock he heard his transistor portable blaring something with a beat.

The same day!

Mechanically he pushed himself free of the tube and dog-paddled to the rocks. A couple of people were in sight, strolling or sunbathing. The same people. He remembered them now. It was the same hour. Maybe the same minute.

His mind felt blank. He pulled himself up onto the rock and sat staring stupidly. The grab at his ankle, the strange place, the old man, the flood, the tests and the doors, one after another, all had no ties to his reality right now. He felt that in a little while he would convince himself that the whole thing had been a dream—but never quite convince himself entirely. To the end of his life he would carry the doubt, and the wonder . . .

Kelsey entered the water again. He swam out and groped down with his feet. The tube entrance was still where he had left it. Was it always here? Ridiculous. Swimmers and boaters and fishermen would run into it all the time. He ducked under water and opened his eyes and tried to see the—place down there, from the outside, but there was nothing visible except the mouth of the tube, and a few yards of the tube itself in the green murkiness. He gripped the lip of the tube opening, a few feet underwater, and stared downward inside. He could see quite a way.

He came up for air. The thing, the system, whatever it was, whoever controlled it, had released him, hadn’t it? He had studied and struggled his way out. What more did he want? Revenge? Maybe. He wanted something. He somehow believed that if he reported this to someone it would all be gone when they came to look for it.

He remembered the final, numberless, unnecessary door he had seen down there. He looked around with longing at his familiar world, drew a deep breath, and went under water.

GOING down, Kelsey got the same queer sensation at the bend in the tube—as if he was being pulled in a hurry from one place to another. He ignored it and went on.

The room at the foot of the ladder was just as he remembered it. He faced one way and sighted through a line of open doors, through which he had worked his way to freedom. He faced the other way, toward the final door, unnumbered and unlatched. _ Kelsey stood quietly for a moment with his hand on the door; then pushed gently. The door swung open. Nothing else happened. Light was dim on the other side. He stepped through and found himself facing a thick-looking translucent wall. He could dimly discern an unfamiliar shape moving in the vagueness beyond it.

“And so the final test is passed,” said a man’s voice from a speaker over Kelsey’s head, making him jump. “The will to open the unnecessary door is yours.”

Kelsey backed warily away, and stood holding the door open.

“All right—what’s it all about?” he demanded. “Who are you?”

“I am an alien here. My shape is not yours. To see me now might disturb you.”

It was quiet except for Kelsey’s breathing. He found he believed what he had just been told. Outer space. Jokes about little green men. Not funny now.

“What do you want?” he finally asked. “Why did you put me through all that?”

“I want to go home,” said the voice simply and eagerly. “I can do things that seem to you very wonderful, but one thing I cannot do without the willing help of another intelligent mind. That is to drive my ship through the great distances, to make timelike the great intervals, to get home—neither to die of age myself on the way, or to find my world old and my people gone when I arrive . . . can you understand? I must pass many stars to get home.”

“You want help, why don’t you just ask?”

“YOUR societies must be left to themselves now, for a long time to come, not bothered from outside. This is very important. I must deal only with an individual.

“You have the ability to help me, proven by my tests. I have violated your rights and subjected you to strange pressures, but I assure you you were never in real danger here. I ask your forgiveness; my need for help is great.”

Something suggested to Kelsey that he turn around and scramble up the ladder as fast as he could. Somehow he didn’t. “How come you need help?”

“There has been an accident—I am the only one of my kind left alive in this ship. I will explain it in detail if you wish.”

“What happened to that old man?” Kelsey demanded suddenly.

“I created his apparent body from a material sensitive to mental forces, using specifications in your own mind. He appeared to you as a being you knew to be intelligent, yet one far from what you think of as your own kind. Still you took what you believed to be a grave risk in order to protect his life. If you elect to go with me, you will gain knowledge that is not well entrusted to one who holds the lives of other beings in contempt. The old man was your first test. He never existed as a person.”

“You expect me to believe that—”

“Watch.”

An opening dilated in a wall. An amorphous gray lump of stuff flowed out like a huge fat worm onto the floor. It rose, coloring and shaping itself into rags and chains and a smiling Oriental face. It nodded at Kelsey cheerfully; the rags and chains became the rich robe of a mandarin.

“I can speak through the mouth of this image, if you wish,” the figure said.

“Better than TV,” said Kelsey, sounding idiotic to himself. “Listen, how do you expect me to help you?”

“You can, if you are willing. Your mind is good, do not be afraid to let it reach out for things. The work on the trip will not be hard. There will be much time for fun, and I can promise you will not be bored. In four years you can be back on Earth, if you wish, though there is a planet in my home system with people very much like yours which . . .”

“Four years!” But what’s the difference, Kelsey thought, I’m not going anyway.

“I regret so long a time. But I and my people will not be ungrateful; there will be compensations . . .”

“Wait a minute.” Kelsey backed toward the ladder, the mandarin following him with cheerful eyes. “If you’re from—where you say—how come you know so much about us here on Earth? Don’t tell me you got it all out of my mind, all those tests. I didn’t know all that stuff to begin with.”

The mandarin melted down to a gray puddle and began to flow away. “You are not the first being I have seized, tested, and interviewed on this planet,” said the voice from the speaker. “More than nine hundred others preceded you. By now I know you people well enough to test you for ability to give the help I need. You are not the first to be suitable. But I hope you will be the first to accept. I have been hopping this ship from one large body of water to another for several of your years, keeping it hidden from the mass of your people, whom I do not wish to disturb, trying to find one who can and will help me.”

KELSEY put a hand on the ladder. Why hadn’t he just stayed on shore once he got away? But now he had to keep asking questions. “What happens to the people who don’t pass your tests? Or who don’t want to go with you?” There was a little silence. Then the voice from the speaker said: “I am sorry. I forget now in my eagerness that you do not know us, and in the light of your experience you are right to be suspicious.

“I do not mistreat them further. They are set free—as you are now—to return to their normal lives at very nearly the point where I interrupted them. I try to improve their health as some payment for my violation of their constitutional rights.”

“You mean, if I had just walked away up there—?”

“I would have bothered you no more. In a very few minutes you would have forgotten the entire incident.”

“Thanks,” said Kelsey. He turned and went two steps up the ladder quickly, then turned again. “How did you give me all those tests in a few minutes?”

“If you come with me, you can learn that—and many other things.”

“I see,” Kelsey muttered. Four years out of a guy’s life . . . but what am I thinking of? I better get out of here before he changes his mind, and locks me in.

He went up the ladder quickly. Tomorrow would be Tuesday. He would go to the post office, and sort mail. He would do more than that, damn it. He would go to some of the colleges and see what kind of evening classes they had going.

But hadn’t the alien said he would forget all about this ship a few minutes after he left it? Maybe he would simply slide back into his old life, and never know the difference. Well, he asked himself angrily, would that be so bad? Besides, a lot of people would miss me if I just took off for four years.

Who, really?

He believed the alien, somehow. If the guy had been lying he would have named a shorter time than four years.

Kelsey reached the top of the tube, and paused with head and shoulders out of water. Miles to the southwest, out of his sight now behind rocks and park and distant skyscrapers, was the Main Post Office, where he might retire in about twenty years. It was really a big place when you were standing near it, or inside it sorting mail. From here it was nothing, a small hidden box, blind and selfcontained under the reach of all the sky.

“I’M ready. Can we move the ship now? Just by thinking about it?”

“Yes, we can, as we are working with the machines. Relax. Now hold this pattern in your mind.” A thing indescribable in Earthman’s words came to Kelsey’s consciousness. “Think about it until I come back with another.”

“Got it.”

At about midnight, each of the higher-frequency radars working in North America cast on its scope a burst of noise. An alert was called, but nothing further out of the ordinary was observed.

And no one on Earth attributed the event to the making timelike of a great interval.

END

THE LONG WAY HOME

It’s a long way home from outer space—especially if you have to walk it!

WHEN Marty first saw the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his distant search radar.

He was four billion miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out there beyond Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in a concentration that would make mining profitable.

The thing on his radar screen looked quite small and therefore not too promising. But, as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing better was in sight at the moment.

Marty leaned back in the control seat and said: “We’ve got one coming up, baby.” He had no need to address himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within the better part of a couple of billion miles.

Laura’s voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below.

“Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?”

Marty studied the radar. “About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won’t be a waste of energy to decelerate and look the thing over.” He gave Clem’s main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.

“Come and eat!”

“All right.” He and the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man, not considering it anything of particular importance, left the control room to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked downstairs in the steadily-maintained artificial gravity, he heard the engines starting.

TEN hours later he examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing alertness that balanced between an explorer’s caution and a prospector’s elation at a possibly huge strike.

The incredible shape of X, becoming apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long, as near as his radar could measure, and about a hundred yards thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find anywhere in space.

It was obviously no random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and swatted him playfully. “Oh, you!” she said.

Another, more real possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient fear of the Alien that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand years of intermittent space exploration, that had never been realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar eye.

Aliens were always good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them, several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic contacts or heroics. And with the only human assistance a girl on her first space trip, Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in such a situation.

It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files for any reference to a spaceship having X’s incredible dimensions.

There was a chance—how good a chance he found hard to estimate, when any explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was certainly intriguing.

Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity relative to Sol now also hung at zero. “I wonder,” he muttered. “Space anchor . . .?”

The space anchor had been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that there was still life aboard her; once “dropped,” an anchor could hold as long as a hull could last.

Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to him in the control room.

“If we call the Navy and they bring it in we won’t get anything out of it,” he told her between bites. “That’s assuming it’s—not alien.”

“Could there be someone alive on it?” She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn but, he thought, not frightened.

“If it’s human, you mean? No. I know there hasn’t been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever heard of with this crazy shape . . .”

The robot librarian indicated that it had drawn a blank. “See?” said Marty. “And I’ve even got most of the ancient types in there.”

There was silence for a little while. The evening’s recorded music started somewhere in the background.

“What would you do if I weren’t along?” Laura asked him.

He did not answer directly, but said something he had been considering. “I don’t know the psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons. Therefore if X is alien I don’t think Clem would stand a chance, trying to fight or run.” He paused, frowned at the image of X. “That damned shape—it’s just not right for anything.”

“We could call the Navy—not that I’m saying we should, darling,” she added hastily. “You decide, and I’ll never complain either way. I’m just trying to help you think it out.”

He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.

“If I was alone,” he said, “I’d jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to Ganymede and sell it for a unique whatever-it-is. Maybe I’d make enough money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of robot prospectors. I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d better call the Navy.”

She stood up and laughed at him gently. “We’re married enough already, and we had all the style I wanted. Besides, I don’t think either of us would be happy sitting on an asteroid very long. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?”

At the airlock door she had misgivings: “Oh, it is safe enough, isn’t it? Marty, be careful and come back soon.” She kissed him before he closed his helmet.

They had moved Clem to within a few miles of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and approached it slowly, from the side.

The vast length of X blotted out a thin strip of stars to his right and left, as if it were the distant shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds below him were watery reflections of the ones above. But space was too black to permit such an illusion to endure.

The tiny FM radar on his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed up.

“Lifeboat berth . . . empty,” he said aloud, looking through the bike’s little telescope.

“Then it is a derelict? We’re all right?” asked Laura’s voice in his helmet.

“Looks that way, yeah, I guess there’s no doubt of it. I’ll go in for a closer look now.” He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but . . .

At ten yards distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear, made sure a line from it was fast to his belt and launched himself out of the saddle gently, headfirst toward X.

The armored hands of his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked around. He detected no response to his arrival.

Marty turned toward Sol, sighting down the miles of dark cylinder that seemingly dwindled to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man might travel home toward a tiny sun.

Near at hand the hull was smooth, looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a mile down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled X—or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few yards from the hull, in rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter showed nothing above the normal background.

“Ah,” said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp.

“Something?”

“I think I’ve got it figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one thing more.” He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X.

A third of the way around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either direction.

A door-sized opening was cut in the clamp above the trench.

Marty nodded and smiled to himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed at the Clementine.

“IT’s not a spaceship at all, only a part of one,” he told Laura a little later, digging in the microfilm film with his own hands, with the air of a man who knew what he was looking for. “That’s why the librarian didn’t turn it up. Now I remember reading about them. It’s part of an Old Empire job of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than several normal sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by fastening together a number of long narrow sections side by side, how many depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we’ve found is obviously one of those sections.”

Laura wrinkled her forehead. “It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections together and separating them, even in free space.”

“They used space anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom, so an anchor could be sunk through it; then the whole section could be slid straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch . . . here, I’ve got it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer.”

One picture, a photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bundle of long needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in some detail.

“This must be it, all right,” said Marty thoughtfully. “Funny looking old tub.”

“I wonder what happened to wreck her.”

“Drives sometimes exploded in those days, that could have done it. And this one section got anchored to Sol somehow—it’s funny.”

“How long ago did it happen, do you suppose?” asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine.

“Must be around two thousand years or more. These ships haven’t been used for about that long.” He picked up a stylus. “I better go over there with a big bag of tools tomorrow and take a look inside.” He noted down a few things he thought he might need.

“Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched,” she suggested, watching him draw doodles.

“That’s a thought. But maybe there’s something really valuable aboard—though I won’t be able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is anchored, remember. I’ll probably have to break in anyway to release that.”

She pointed to one of the diagrams. “Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no drive at all of its own. We’ll have to tow it.”

He looked. “Right. Anyway, I don’t think I’d care to try its drive if it had one.”

He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it.

THE next “morning” found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets and explosives on his bike. The trip to the still thought of it that way was uneventful. This time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments, as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown cargo.

He found a likely-looking spot for entry where the plans had led him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion as well.

Marty began his attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic “sounding” gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X toward Sol.

Something was moving toward him along the hull.

He was up in the bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it was—that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor. And it moved along the channel.

Marty rode the bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor. It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved . . . but it was sunk into space.

“Laura,” he called, “something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it’s moving.”

Laura acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought, I won’t have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying even with the apparent movement of the anchor.

Laura’s voice came: “It is moving now, towards Sol. About six miles per hour. Maybe less—it’s hard to read, so slow.”

“Good, that’s what I thought.” He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be directed against him or the Clem. “Look, baby,” he went on, “something peculiar is happening.” He explained about the anchor. “Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she’s a match for any piece of wreckage.”

“But you’re out there!”

“I have to see this. I never saw anything like it before. Don’t worry, I’ll pull back if it looks at all dangerous.” Something in the back of his mind told him to go back to his ship and call the Navy. He ignored it without much trouble. He had never thought much of calling the Navy.

About four hours later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within thirty yards of what seemed to be X’s stern. It slowed down and came to a gradual stop a few yards from the end of the track. For a minute nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him no enlightenment.

In the space between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer appeared. It must necessarily have been let “down” into space from inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull.

Marty sat watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was quivering with fatigue.

LAURA and Marty took turns sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine. About noon the next day Laura was at the telescope when anchor number one reappeared, now at the “prow” of X. After a few moments the one at the stern vanished.

Marty looked at the communicator that he could use any time to call the Navy. Faster-thanlight travel not being practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist on the table and swore. “Must be some kind of mechanism in her still operating.” He went to the telescope and watched number one anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once again. “I don’t know. I’ve got to settle this.” The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about six miles an hour.

“Does it seem likely there’d be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?” Laura asked.

“I think so. Each passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp.” He dug out the microfilm again. “Yeah, a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the section, and run the emergency equipment for . . .” His voice trailed off, then continued in a dazed tone: “For recycling food and water.”

“Marty, what is it?”

He stood up, staring at the plan. “And the only radios were in the lifeboats, and the lifeboats are gone. I wonder . . . sure. The explosion could have torn them apart, blown them away so . . .”

“What are you talking about?” He looked again at their communicator. “A transmitter that can get through the noise between here and Pluto wouldn’t be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the Old Empire days . . .”

“What?”

“Now about air—” He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. “Just an idea hit me.” He grinned. “I’m making another trip.”

An hour later he was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the “stern”. He was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many miles away.

The spot he had picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber to keep the outer door shut.

The door opening mechanism suffered from twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more than the inside of an airlock.

HE patched the hole he had made in the outer door so he would be able—he hoped—to open the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to Laura—not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull—and closed himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and helmet sealed.

The inner door worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders. Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the knowledge that X’s artificial gravity was still at least partly operational. Righting himself, he found he was in a small anteroom banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the other walls.

He moved to try the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment, then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads.

Another door led him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly. Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all the silence possible in a spacesuit.

The stair brought him out onto a long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a passage twenty yards wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a point in the dim-lit distance.

A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty.

He was an old man and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors, and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared down momentarily frozen in shock.

Marty pulled back two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow. Turning his head to follow the old man’s gaze, he noticed that the forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible running in a sunken strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have been covered with a moving walkway of some kind.

THE old man turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat, dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other plantfilled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. “For oxygen,” Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not on, so of course the old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of the plants and ate it absently.

Marty made a move with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete it. He half lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not understood held him, made him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip.

Near the stair he had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen aboard X. Garments hanging in one corner were similar to the old man’s tunic, although no two were alike exactly. Marty fingered the fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by fiber recycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere near two thousand years old.

Marty emerged from the doorway of the little apartment, stood in shadow with his suit lights out, looking around; the old man had disappeared. He remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that direction.

Many human voices were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction, he grew aware that the singing was getting louder. And therefore no doubt closer.

HE leaned back against the bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit, dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to call the Navy, that these unknown people could be dangerous to him. But he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all.

Sweating in spite of his suit’s coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The language was unknown to him.

Suddenly the people were in sight, first only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size—except that he saw no oldsters or young children.

The people sang and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes that were intricately decorated, like their clothing and that of the old man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait. Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the half-finished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly.

All at once the walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a multiple whiffletree made of twisted metal pipe, that rode over the central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it. was fastened were pulled past Marty—or rather the spot from which he watched was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X toward Sol.

Behind the anchor came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to puberty. They pulled on small ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a magnificent headdress.

ABOUT the time he drew even with Marty, this man stopped suddenly (young and old alike walked steadily at the same fast pace) and uttered a sharp command. Instantly the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest the whiffletree moved in and loosed it from the anchor with quick precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia of X’s mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor, which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two, forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room.

A thick forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework, expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into space “below” the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise anchor number one . . .

He found himself descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.

Outside, he said: “I’m out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other end and I’ll come home.” He scarcely heard what she said in reply, but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.

The bike shot him thirty miles down the dream-like length of X toward Sol in a few minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.

Almost recklessly he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving toward Sol once more.

He looked in almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.

“WHAT is it?” asked Laura, impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.

“People,” he said, sitting down. “Alive over there. Earth people. Humans.”

“You’re all right?”

“Sure. It’s just—God!” He told her about it briefly. “They must be descended from the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically there’s no reason why they couldn’t live when you come to think of it—even reproduce up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air’s as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a space-drive.” He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was hard for him to stop talking to her.

She was silent for a little, trying to assimilate it all. “But if they have hydrogen power couldn’t they have rigged something?” she finally asked. “Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they’d keep moving.”

Marty thought it over. “Moving a little faster won’t help them.” He sat up and opened his eyes again. “And they’d have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.

“Somehow they had the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way, to evolve a system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and after that . . .” Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused on the telescope screen.

“All those years,” Laura whispered. “All that time.”

“Do you realize what they’re doing?” he asked softly. “They’re not just surviving, turned inward on weaving and designing and music.

“In a few hours they’re going to get up and start another day’s work. They’re going to pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it. That’s their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about thirty miles closer to home.

“Honey, these people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a religion with them by now, or something very near it . . .” He put an arm around Laura.

“MARTY . . . how long would it take them?”

“Space is big,” he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.

After a few moments he continued. “I said just moving a little faster won’t help them. Let’s say they’ve traveled thirty miles a day for two thousand years. That’s—somewhere near twenty-two million miles. Almost enough to get from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they’ve got a long way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars’ orbit. We’re well out beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they’re just about where they started from.” He smiled wanly. “Really they’re not far from home, for an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of their own solar system, and they’ve been walking toward the threshold ever since.”

Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the Navy within a few hours. She paused. “How long would it take them now,” she asked, “to get somewhere near Earth?”

“Hell would freeze over. But they can’t know that any more, or maybe they still know it and it just doesn’t bother them. They must just go on, tugging at that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday now and then . . . I don’t know how they do it. They work and sing and feel they’re accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they say of Earth, how they think about it.”

Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.

Marty watched her. “Are you sure?” he pleaded suddenly. “What are we doing to them?” But she had already sent the call.

For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.

1963

FORTRESS SHIP

Huge as an island, mighty as a squadron of dreadnauahts, old as time, the ship of the aliens was out to destroy them!

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.

One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that.

It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy’s territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

Men called it a berserker.

Del Murray, sometime computer specialist, had called it other names than that; but right now he was too busy to waste breath, as he moved in staggering lunges around the little cabin of his one-man fighter, plugging in replacement units for equipment damaged by the last near-miss of a berserker missile. An animal resembling a large dog with an ape’s forelegs moved around the cabin too, carrying in its nearly human hands a supply of emergency sealing patches. The cabin air was full of haze. Wherever movement of the haze showed a leak to an unpressurized part of the hull, the dog-ape moved to apply a patch.

“Hello, Foxglove!” the man shouted, hoping that his radio was again in working order.

“Hello, Murray, this is Foxglove,” said a sudden loud voice in the cabin. “How far did you get?”

Del was too weary to show much relief that his communications were open again. “I’ll let you know in a minute. At least it’s stopped shooting at me for a while. Move, Newton.” The alien animal, pet and ally, called an aiyan, moved away from the man’s feet and kept single-mindedly looking for leaks.

After another minute’s work Del could strap his body into the deep-cushioned command chair again, with some-thing like an operational panel before him. That last near-miss had sprayed the whole cabin with fine penetrating splinters. It was remarkable that man and aiyan had come through unwounded.

His radar working again, Del could say: “I’m about ninety miles out from it, Foxglove. On the opposite side from you.” His present position was the one he had been trying to achieve since the battle had begun.

The two Earth ships and the berserkers were half a light year from the nearest sun. The berserker could not leap out of normal space, toward the defenseless colonies on the planets of that sun, while the two ships stayed close to it. There were only two men aboard Foxglove. They had more machinery working for them than did Del, but both manned ships were mites compared to their opponent.

Del’s radar showed him an ancient ruin of metal, not much smaller in cross section than New Jersey. Men had blown holes in it the size of Manhattan Island, and melted puddles of slag as big as lakes upon its surface.

But the berserker’s power was still enormous. So far no man had fought it and survived. Now, it could squash Del’s little ship like a mosquito; it was wasting its unpredictable subtlety on him. Yet there was a special taste of terror in the very indifference of it. Men could never frighten this enemy, as it frightened them.

Earthmen’s tactics, worked out from bitter experience against other berserkers, called for a simultaneous attack by three ships. Foxglove and Murray made two. A third was supposedly on the way, but still about eight hours distant, moving at C-plus velocity, outside of normal space. Until it arrived, Foxglove and Murray must hold the berserker at bay, while it brooded unguessable schemes.

It might attack either ship at any moment, or it might seek to disengage. It might wait hours for them to make the first move—though it would certainly fight if the men attacked it. It had learned the language of Earth’s spacemen—it might try to talk with them. But always, ultimately it would seek to destroy them and every other living thing it met. That was the basic command given it by the ancient warlords.

A thousand years ago, it would easily have swept ships of the type that now opposed it from its path, whether they carried fusion missiles or not. Now, it was in some electrical way conscious of its own weakening by accumulated damage. And perhaps in long centuries of fighting its way across the galaxy it had learned to be wary.

Now, quite suddenly, Del’s detectors showed force fields forming in behind his ship. Like the encircling arms of a huge bear they blocked his path away from the enemy. He waited for some deadly blow, with his hand trembling over the red button that would salvo his atomic missiles at the berserker—but if he attacked alone, or even with Foxglove, the infernal machine would parry their missiles, crush their ships, and go on to destroy another helpless planet. Three ships were needed to attack. The red firing button was now only a last desperate resort.

Del was reporting the force field to Foxglove when he felt the first hint in his mind of another attack.

“Newton!” he called sharply, leaving the radio connection with Foxglove open. They would hear and understand what was going to happen.

The aiyan bounded instantly from its combat couch to stand before Del as if hypnotized, all attention riveted on the man. Del had sometimes bragged: “Show Newton a drawing of different-colored lights, convince him it represents a particular control panel, and he’ll push buttons or whatever you tell him, until the real panel matches the drawing.”

But no aiyan had the human ability to learn and to create on an abstract level; which was why Del was now going to put Newton in command of his ship.

He switched off the ship’s computers—they were going to be as useless as his own brain under the attack he felt gathering—and said to Newton: “Situation Zombie.”

The animal responded instantly as it had been trained, seizing Del’s hands with firm insistence and dragging them one at a time down beside the command chair to where the fetters had been installed.

Hard experience had taught men something about the berserkers’ mind weapon, although its principles of operation were still unknown. It was slow in its onslaught, and its effects could not be steadily maintained for more than about two hours, after which a berserker was evidently forced to turn it off for an equal time. But while in effect, it robbed any human or electronic brain of the ability to plan or to predict—and left it unconscious of its own incapacity.

It seemed to Del that all this had happened before, maybe more than once. Newton, that funny fellow, had gone too far with his pranks; he had abandoned the little boxes of colored beads that were his favorite toys, and was moving the controls around at the lighted panel. Unwilling to share the fun with Del, he had tied the man to his chair somehow. Such behavior was really intolerable, especially when there was supposed to be a battle in progress. Del tried to pull his hands free, and called to Newton.

Newton whined earnestly, and stayed at the panel.

“Newt, you dog, come lemme loose. I know what I have to say: Four score and seven . . . hey, Newt, where’re your toys? Lemme see your pretty beads.” There were hundreds of tiny boxes of varicolored beads, leftover trade goods that Newton loved to sort out and handle. Del peered around the cabin, chuckling a little at his own cleverness. He would get Newton distracted by the beads, and then . . . the vague idea faded into other crackbrained grotesqueries.

Newton whined now and then but stayed at the panel moving controls in the long sequence he had been taught, taking the ship through the feinting, evasive maneuvers that might fool a berserker into thinking it was still competently manned. Newton never put a hand near the big red button. Only if he felt deadly pain himself, or found a dead man in Del’s chair, would he reach for that.

“Ah, roger, Murray,” said the radio from time to time, as if acknowledging a message. Sometimes Foxglove added a few words or numbers that might have meant something. Del wondered what the talking was about.

At last he understood that Foxglove was trying to help maintain the illusion that there was still a competent brain in charge of Del’s ship. The fear reaction came when he began to realize that he had once again lived through the effect of the mind weapon. The brooding berserker, half genius, half idiot, had forborne to press the attack when success would have been certain—perhaps deceived, perhaps following the strategy that avoided predictability a almost any cost.

“Newton.” The animal turned, hearing a change in his voice. Now Del could say the words that would tell Newton it was safe to set his master free, a sequence too long for anyone under the mind weapon to recite.

“—shall not perish from the earth,” he finished. With yelp of joy Newton pulled the fetters from Del’s hands Del turned instantly to the radio.

“Effect has evidently been turned off, Foxglove,” said Del’s voice through the speaker in the cabin of the large ship.

The Commander let out a sigh. “He’s back in control!”

The Second Officer—there was no third—said: “Thai means we’ve got some kind of fighting chance, for the next two hours. I say let’s attack now!”

The Commander shook his head, slowly but without hesitation. “With two ships, we don’t have any real chance. Less than four hours until Gizmo gets here. We have to stall until then, if we want to win.”

“It’ll attack the next time it gets Del’s mind scrambled! I don’t think we fooled it for a minute . . . we’re out of range of the mind beam here, but Del can’t withdraw now. And we can’t expect that aiyan to fight his ship for him. We’ll really have no chance, with Del gone.”

The Commander’s eyes moved ceaselessly over his panel. “We’ll wait. We can’t be sure it’ll attack the next time it puts the beam on him . . .”

The berserker spoke suddenly, its radioed voice plain in the cabins of both ships: “I have a proposition for you, little ship.” Its voice had a cracking, adolescent quality, because it strung together words and syllables recorded from the voices of human prisoners of both sexes and different ages. Bits of human emotion, sorted and fixed like butterflies on pins, thought the Commander. There was no reason to think it had kept the prisoners alive after learning the language from them.

“Well?” Del’s voice sounded tough and capable by comparison.

“I have invented a game which we will play,” it said. “If you play well enough, I will not kill you right away.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” murmured the Second Officer.

After three thoughtful seconds the Commander slammed a fist on the arm of his chair. “It means to test his learning ability, to run a continuous check on his brain while it turns up the power of the mind beam and tries different modulations. If it can make sure the mind beam is working, it’ll attack instantly. I’ll bet my life on it. That’s the game it’s playing this time.”

“I will think over your proposition,” said Del’s voice cooly.

The Commander said: “It’s in no hurry to start. It won’t be able to turn on the mind beam again for almost two hours.”

“But we need another two hours beyond that.”

Del’s voice said: “Describe the game you want to play.”

“It is a simplified version of the human game called checkers.”

The Commander and the Second looked at each other, neither able to imagine Newton able to play checkers. Nor could they doubt that Newton’s failure would kill them within a few hours, and leave another planet open to destruction.

After a minute’s silence, Del’s voice asked: “What’ll we use for a board?”

“We will radio our moves to one another,” said the berserker equably. It went on to describe a checkers-like game, played on a smaller board with less than the normal number of pieces. There was nothing very profound about it; but, of course, playing would seem to require a functional brain, human or electronic, able to plan and to predict.

“If I agree to play,” said Del slowly, “how’ll we decide who gets to move first?”

“He’s trying to stall,” said the Commander, gnawing a thumbnail. “We won’t be able to offer any advice, with that thing listening. Oh, stay sharp, Del boy!”

“To simplify matters,” said the berserker, “I will move first in every game.”

Del could look forward to another hour free of the mind weapon when he finished rigging the checkerboard. When the pegged pieces were moved, appropriate signals would be radioed to the berserker; lighted squares on the board would show him where its pieces were moved. If it spoke to him while the mind weapon was on, Del’s voice would answer from a tape, which he had stocked with vaguely aggressive phrases, such as, “Get on with your game,” or “Do you want to give up now?”

He hadn’t told the enemy how far along he was with his preparations because he was still busy with something the enemy must not know—the system that was going to enable Newton to play a game of simplified checkers.

Del gave a soundless little laugh as he worked, and glanced over to where Newton was lounging on his couch, clutching toys in his hands as if he drew some comfort from them. This scheme was going to push the aiyan near the limit of his ability, but Del saw no reason why it should fail.

Del had completely analyzed the miniature checker game, and diagrammed every position that Newton could possibly face—playing only even-numbered moves, thank the random berserker for that specification!—on small cards. Del had discarded some lines of play that would arise from some poor early moves by Newton, further simplifying his job. Now, on a card showing each possible remaining position, Del indicated the best possible move with a drawn-in arrow. Now he could quickly teach Newton to play the game by looking at the appropriate card and making the move shown by the arrow.

“Oh, oh,” said Del, as his hands stopped working and he stared into space. Newton whined at the tone of his voice.

Once Del had sat at one board in a simultaneous chess exhibition, one of sixty players opposing the world champion, Blankenship. Del had held his own into the middle game. Then, when the great man paused again opposite his board, Del had shoved a pawn forward, thinking he had reached an unassailable position and could begin a counterattack. Blankenship had moved a rook to an innocent-looking square and strolled on to the next board—and then Del had seen the checkmate coming at him, four moves away but one move too late for him to do anything about it.

The Commander suddenly said a foul phrase in a loud distinct voice. Such conduct on his part was extremely rare, and the Second Officer looked round in surprise. “What?”

“I think we’ve had it.” The Commander paused. “I hoped that Murray could set up some kind of a system over there, so that Newton could play the game—or appear to be playing it. But it won’t work. Whatever system Newton plays by rote will always have him making the same move in the same position. It may be a perfect system—but a man doesn’t play any game that way, damn it. He makes mistakes, he changes strategy. Even in a game this simple there’ll be room for that. Most of all, a man learns a game as he plays it. He gets better as he goes along. That’s what’ll give Newton away, and that’s what our bandit wants. It’s probably heard about aiyans. Now as soon as it can be sure it’s facing a dumb animal over there, and not a man or computer . . .”

After a little while the Second Officer said: “I’m getting signals of their moves. They’ve begun play. Maybe we should’ve rigged up a board so we could follow along with the game.”

“We better just be ready to go at it when the time comes.” The Commander looked hopelessly at his salvo button, and then at the clock that showed two hours must pass before Gizmo could reasonably be hoped for.

Soon the Second Officer said: “That seems to be the end of the first game; Del lost it, if I’m reading their scoreboard signal right.” He paused. “Sir, here’s that signal we picked up the last time it turned the mind beam on. Del must be starting to get it again.”

There was nothing for the Commander to say. The two men waited silently for the enemy’s attack, hoping only that they could damage it in the seconds before it would overwhelm them and kill them.

“He’s playing the second game,” said the Second Officer, puzzled. “And I just heard him say, ‘Let’s get on with it.’ ”

“His voice could be recorded. He must have made some plan of play for Newton to follow; but it won’t fool the berserker for long. It can’t.”

Time crept unmeasurably past them.

The Second said: “He’s lost the first four games. But he’s, not making the same moves every time. I wish we’d made a board . . .”

“Shut up about the board! We’d be watching it instead of the panel. Now stay alert, Mister.”

After what seemed a long time, the Second said: “Well, I’ll be!”

“What?”

“Our side got a draw in that game.”

“Then the beam can’t be on him. Are you sure . . .”

“It is! Look, here, the same indication we got last time. It’s been on him the better part of an hour now, and getting stronger.”

The Commander stared in disbelief; but he knew and trusted his Second’s ability. And the panel indications were convincing. He said: “Then someone—or something—with no functioning mind is learning how to play a game, over there. Ha, ha,” he added, as if trying to remember how to laugh.

The berserker won another game. Another draw. Another win for the enemy. Then three drawn games in a row.

Once the Second Officer heard Del’s voice ask coolly: “Do you want to give up now?” On the next move he lost another game. But the following game ended in another draw. Del was plainly taking more time than his opponent to move, but not enough to make the enemy impatient.

“It’s trying different modulations on the mind beam,” said the Second. “And it’s got the power turned way up.”

“Yeah,” said the Commander. Several times he had almost tried to radio Del, to say something that might seep the man’s spirits up—and also to relieve his own feverish inactivity, and to try to find out what could possibly be going on. But he could not take the chance. Any interference might upset the miracle.

He could not believe the inexplicable success could last, even when the checker match turned gradually into an endless succession of drawn games between two perfect players. Hours ago the Commander had said good-bye to life and hope, and he still waited for the fatal moment.

And he waited.

“—not perish from the earth!” said Del Murray, and Newton’s eager hands flew to loose his right arm from its shackle.

A game, unfinished on the little board before him, had been abandoned seconds earlier. The mind beam had been turned off at the same time, when Gizmo had burst into normal space right in position and only five minutes late; and the berserker had been forced to turn all its energies to meet the immediate all-out attack of Gizmo and Foxglove.

Del saw his computers, recovering from the effect of the beam, lock his aiming screen onto the berserker’s scarred and bulging midsection, as he shot his right arm forward, scattering pieces from the game board.

“Checkmate!” he roared out hoarsely, and brought his fist down on the big red button.

“I’m glad it didn’t want to play chess,” Del said later, talking to the Commander in Foxglove’s cabin. “I could never have rigged that up.”

The ports were cleared now, and the men could look out at the cloud of expanding gas, still faintly luminous, that had been a berserker; metal fire-purged of the legacy of ancient evil.

But the Commander was watching Del. “You got Newt to play by following diagrams, I see that. But how could he learn the game?”

Del grinned. “He couldn’t, but his toys could. Now wait before you slug me.” He called the aiyan to him and took a small box from the animal’s hand. The box rattled faintly as he held it up. On the cover was pasted a diagram of one possible position in the simplified checker game, with a different-colored arrow indicating each possible move of Del’s pieces.

“It took a couple of hundred of these boxes,” said Del. “This one was in the group that Newt examined for the fourth move. When he found a box with a diagram matching the position on the board, he picked the box up, pulled out one of these beads from inside, without looking—that was the hardest part to teach him in a hurry, by the way,” said Del, demonstrating. “Ah, this one’s blue. That means, make the move indicated on the cover by a blue arrow. Now the orange arrow leads to a poor position, see?” Del shook all the beads out of the box into his hand. “No orange beads left; there were six of each color when we started. But every time Newton drew a bead, he had orders to leave it out of the box until the game was over. Then, if the scoreboard indicated a loss for our side, he went back and threw away all the beads he had used. All the bad moves were gradually eliminated. In a few hours, Newt and his boxes learned to play the game perfectly.”

“Well,” said the Commander. He thought for a moment, then reached down to scratch Newton behind the ears. “I never would have come up with that idea.”

“I should have thought of it sooner. The basic idea’s a couple of centuries old. And computers are supposed to be my business.”

“This could be a big thing,” said the Commander. “I mean your basic idea might be useful to any task force that has to face a berserker’s mind beam.”

“Yeah.” Del grew reflective. “Also . . .”

“What?”

“I was thinking of a guy I met once. Named Blankenship. I wonder if I could rig something up . . .”

END

GOODLIFE

The starship was old as time, relic of a race of warriors who left It one task—destroy Man and all his works!

“It’s only a machine, Hemphill,” said the dying man in a small voice. Hemphill, drifting weightless in near-darkness, heard him with only faint contempt and pity. Let the wretch go out timidly, forgiving the universe everything, if he found the going-out easier that way!

Hemphill kept on staring out through the port, at the dark crenelated shape that blotted out so many of the stars.

There was probably just this one compartment of the passenger ship left livable, with three people on it, and the air whining out in steady leaks that would soon exhaust the emergency tanks. The ship was a wreck, torn and beaten, yet Hemphill’s view of the enemy was steady. It must be a force of the enemy’s that kept the wreck from spinning.

Now the young woman, another passenger, came drifting across the compartment to touch Hemphill on the arm. He thought her name was Maria something.

“Listen,” she began. “Do you think we might—”

In her voice there was no despair, but the tone of planning; and so Hemphill had begun to listen to her. But she was interrupted.

The very walls of the cabin reverberated, driven like speaker diaphragms through the power of the enemy forcefield that still gripped the butchered hull. The voice of the berserker machine came:

“You who can still hear me, live on. I plan to spare you. I am sending a boat to save you from death.”

The voice changed tones from word to word, being fragments of the voices of human prisoners the machine had taken and used. It was made of bits of human emotion sorted and fixed, like butterflies on pins. Hemphill was sick with frustrated rage. He had never heard a berserker’s voice in reality before, but still it was familiar as an old nightmare. He could feel the woman’s hand pull away from his arm, and then he saw that in his rage he had raised both his hands to be claws, then fists that almost smashed themselves against the port. The thing, the damned thing wanted to take him inside it! Of all people in space it wanted to make him prisoner!

A plan rose instantly in his mind and flowed smoothly into action; he spun away from the port. There were warheads, for small defensive missiles, here in this compartment. He remembered seeing them.

The other surviving man, a ship’s officer, dying slowly, bleeding through his uniform tatters, saw what Hemphill was doing in the wreckage, and drifted in front of him interferingly.

“You can’t do that . . . you’ll only destroy the boat it sends . . . if it lets you do that much . . . there may be other people . . . still alive here . . .”

The man’s face had been upside down before Hemphill as the two of them drifted. As their movement let them see each other in normal position, the wounded man stopped talking, gave up and rotated himself away, drifting inertly as if already dead.

Hemphill could not hope to manage a whole warhead, but he could extract the chemical-explosive detonator, of a size to carry under one arm. All passengers had put on emergency spacesuits when the unequal battle had begun; now he found himself an extra air tank, and some officer’s laser pistol, which he stuck in a loop of his suit’s belt.

The girl approached him again. He watched her warily.

“Do it,” she said with quiet conviction, while the three of them spun slowly in the near darkness, and the air leaks whined. “Do it. The loss of a boat will weaken it, a little, for the next fight. And we here have no chance anyway.”

“Yes,” He nodded approvingly. This girl understood what was important: To hurt a berserker, to smash, burn, destroy, to kill it finally. Nothing else mattered very much.

He pointed to the wounded mate, and whispered: “Don’t let him give me away.” She nodded silently. It might hear them, talking. If it could speak through these walls, it could be listening.

“A boat’s coming,” said the wounded man, in a calm and distant voice.

“Goodlife!” called the machine voice cracking between syllables, as always.

“Here!” He woke up with a start, and got quickly to his feet. He had been dozing almost under the dripping end of a drinking-water pipe.

“Goodlife!” There were no speakers or scanners in this little compartment; the call came from some distance away.

“Here!” He ran toward the call, his feet shuffling and thumping on metal. He had dozed off, being tired. Even though the battle had been a little one, there had been extra tasks for him, servicing and directing the commensal machines that roamed the endless ducts and corridors repairing damage. It was small help he could give, he knew.

Now his head and neck bore sore spots from the helmet he had had to wear; and his body was chafed in places from the unaccustomed covering he had to put on it when a battle came. This time, happily, there had been no battle damage at all.

He came to the flat glass eye of a scanner, and shuffled to a stop, waiting.

“Goodlife, the perverted machine has been destroyed, and the few badlives left are helpless.”

“Yes!” He jiggled his body up and down in happiness.

“I remind you, life is evil,” said the voice of the machine.

“Evil is life, I am Goodlife!” he said quickly, ceasing his jiggling. He did not think punishment impended, but he wanted to be sure.

“Yes. Like your parents before you, you have been useful. Now I plan to bring other humans inside myself, to study them closely. Your next use will be with them, in my experiments. I remind you, they are badlife. We must be careful.”

“Badlife.” He knew they were creatures shaped like himself, existing in the world beyond the machine. They caused the shudders and shocks and damage that made up a battle. “Badlife—here.” It was a chilling thought. He raised his own hands and looked at them, then turned his attention up and down the passage in which he stood, trying to visualize the badlife become real before him.

“Go now to the medical room,” said the machine. “You must be immunized against disease before you approach the badlife.”

Hemphill made his way from one ruined compartment to another, until he found a gash in the outer hull that was plugged nearly shut. While he wrenched on the obstructing material, he heard the clanging arrival of the berserker’s boat, come for prisoners. He pulled harder, the obstruction gave, and he was blown out into space.

Around the great wreck were hundreds of pieces of flotsam, held near by tenuous magnetism or perhaps by the berserker’s forcefields. Hemphill found that his suit worked well enough. With its tiny jet he moved around the shattered hull to where the boat had come to rest.

The dark blot of the berserker machine came into view against the starfields of deep space, battlemented like a fortified city of old, and far larger than any such city had ever been.

He could see that the berserker’s boat had somehow found the right compartment and clamped itself to the wrecked hull. It would be gathering in Maria and the wounded man. Fingers on the plunger that would set off his bomb, Hemphill drifted closer.

On the brink of death, it annoyed him that he would never know with certainty that the boat was destroyed. And it was such a trifling blow to strike, such a small revenge.

Still drifting closer, holding the plunger ready, he saw the puff of decompressed air-moisture as the boat disconnected itself from the hull. The invisible forcefields of the berserker surged, tugging at the boat, at Hemphill, at bits of wreckage within yards of the boat.

He managed to clamp himself to the boat before it was pulled away from him. He thought he had an hour’s air in his suit tank, more than he would need.

The berserker pulled him toward itself.

II

The berserkers were relics of some ancient galactic war, some internecine struggle between unheard of races. They were machines set to seek out and destroy life, and each of them bore weapons that could sterilize an Earth-sized planet in two or three days.

Earthmen had spread out among the stars of a little section of an arm of the galactic spiral. Now they reeled back under the emotionless assault of the machines; planets and whole systems were depopulated.

Men fought back when they could. The passenger ship, intercepted far from help, had had no chance; but three or four warships could circle a berserker machine like wolves around a bear, could match missiles and computer speeds with it for long minutes, and—sometimes—could win. For the enemy was old, and damaged by warfare through unknown centuries and systems. Possibly many of them had been destroyed before their swarm descended upon Earthmen. The machines surviving had learned, as machines can learn, to avoid tactical error, and to never forgive the mistakes of an opponent. Their basic built-in order was the destruction of all life encountered. But each machine’s strategic schemes were unpredictable, being controlled by the random atomic disintegrations of some longlived radioactive isotope, buried in the center of the mechanism.

Hemphill’s mind hung over the brink of death, as his fingers held the plunger of his bomb. The nightcolored enemy was death in his mind; old as a meteorite, a hundred miles or more around its bulging middle. The black scarred surface of it hurtled closer in the unreal starlight, becoming a planet toward which the boat fell.

Hemphill still clung to the boat when it was pulled into an opening that could have accommodated many ships. The size and power of the berserker were all around the man, enough to overwhelm hate and courage alike.

His little bomb was a pointless joke. When the boat touched at a dark internal dock, Hemphill leaped into it and scrambled to find a hiding place.

As he cowered on a shadowed ledge of metal, his hand wanted to fire the bomb, simply to bring death and escape. He forced his hand to be still. He forced himself to watch while the two human prisoners were sucked from the boat through a pulsing transparent tube that passed through a bulkhead. Not knowing what he meant to accomplish, he pushed himself in the direction of the tube. He glided through the dark enormous cavern almost weightlessly; the berserker’s mass was enough to give it a small natural gravity of its own.

Within ten minutes he came upon an unmistakable airlock. It seemed to have been cut with a surrounding section of hull from some Earth warship, and set into the bulkhead.

Inside an airlock would be as good a place for a bomb as he was likely to find. He got the outer door open and went in, apparently without triggering any alarms. If he destroyed himself here, he would deprive the berserker of—what? Why should it need an airlock at all?

Not for prisoners, thought Hemphill, if it sucks them in through a tube. Hardly an entrance built for enemies. He tested the air in the lock, and opened his helmet. For airbreathing friends, the size of men? That was a contradiction. Everything that lived and breathed must be a berserker’s enemy—except, of course, the unknown beings who had sometime built it, and loosed it to do what damage it might.

It was thought they were extinct, or unreachably distant in space and time. No defeated and boarded berserker had been found to carry a crew, or to have a place or purpose for a living crew.

The inner door of the lock opened and artificial gravity came on. Hemphill walked into a narrow and badly lighted passage, his fingers ready on the plunger.

“Go in, Goodlife,” said the machine. “Look closely at each of them.”

Goodlife made an uncertain sound in his throat, like a servomotor starting and stopping. He was gripped by a feeling resembling hunger, or the fear of punishment—because he was going to see life forms directly now, not as old images on a stage. Knowing the reason for the unpleasant feeling did not help. He stood hesitating outside the door of the room where the badlife was being kept. He had put on his suit again, as the machine had ordered. The suit would protect him if the badlife tried to damage him.

“Go in,” the machine repeated.

“Maybe I’d better not,” Goodlife said in misery, remembering to speak well and clearly. Punishment was always less likely when he did.

“Punish, punish,” said the voice.

When it said the word twice, punishment was very near. As if already feeling in his bones the wrenching pain-that-left-no-damage, he opened the door quickly and stepped in.

He lay on the floor, bloody and damaged, in strange ragged suiting. And at the same time, he was still in the doorway. His own shape was on the floor, the same human form he knew, but now seen entirely from outside. More than an image, far more, it was himself now bi-located. There, here, himself, not himself—Goodlife fell back against the door. He raised his arm and tried to bite it, forgetting his suit. He pounded his suited arms violently together, until there was bruised pain enough to nail him to himself where he stood.

Slowly, the terror subsided. Gradually his intellect could explain it and master it. This is me, here, here in the doorway. That, there, on the floor—that is another life. Another body, corroded like me with vitality. One far worse than I. That one on the floor is badlife.

Maria Juarez had prayed continuously for a long time, her eyes closed. Cold impersonal grippers had moved her this way and that. Her weight had come back, and there was air to breathe when her helmet and her suit had been carefully removed. She opened her eyes and struggled when the grippers began to remove her inner coverall; she saw that she was in a lowceilinged room, surrounded by mansized machines of various shapes. When she struggled they paused briefly; then gave up undressing her, chained her to the wall by one ankle, and glided away. The dying mate had been dropped at the other end of the room, as if not worth the trouble of further handling.

The man with cold dead eyes, Hemphill, had tried to make a bomb, and failed. Now there would probably be no quick end to life—

When she heard the door operates she opened her eyes again, to watch without comprehension while the bearded young man in the ancient spacesuit went through senseless contortions in the doorway, and finally came forward to stand staring down at the dying man on the floor. The visitor’s fingers moved with speed and precision when he raised his hands to the fasteners of his helmet; but the helmet’s removal revealed ragged hair and beard framing an idiot’s slack face.

He set the helmet down, then scratched and rubbed his hairy head, never taking his eyes from the man on the floor. He had not yet looked once at Maria, and she could look nowhere but at him. She had never seen a face so blank on a living person. This was what happened to a berserker’s prisoner!

And yet—and yet Maria had seen the brainwashed, ex-criminals on her own planet. She felt this man was something more—or something less.

The bearded man knelt beside the mate, with an air of hesitation, and reached out to touch him. The dying man stirred feebly, and looked up without comprehension. The floor under him was wet with blood.

The stranger took the mate’s limp arm and bent it back and forth, as if interested in the articulation of the human elbow. The mate groaned and struggled feebly. The stranger suddenly shot out his metal-gauntleted hands and seized the dying man by the throat.

Maria could not move or turn her eyes away, though the whole room seemed to spin slowly, then faster and faster, around the focus of those armored hands.

The bearded man released his grip and stood erect, still watching the body at his feet.

“Turned off,” he said distinctly.

Perhaps she moved. For whatever reason, the bearded man raised his sleep-walker’s face to look at her. He did not meet her eyes, or avoid them. His eye movements were quick and alert, but the muscles of his face just hung there under the skin. He came toward her.

Why, he’s young, she thought. Hardly more than a boy. She backed against the wall and waited, standing. Women were not brought up to faint on her planet. Somehow, the closer he came, the less she feared him. But if he had smiled once she would have screamed, on and on.

He stood before her, and reached out one hand to touch her face, her hair, her body. She stood still; she felt no lust in him, no meanness and no kindness. It was as if he radiated an emptiness.

“Not images,” said the young man as if to himself. Then another word, sounding like: “Badlife.”

Almost Maria dared to speak to him. The strangled man lay on the deck a few yards away.

The young man turned and shuffled deliberately away. She had never seen anyone who walked just like him. He picked up his helmet and went out the door without looking back.

A pipe streamed water into one corner of her little space, where it gurgled away through a hole in the floor. The gravity seemed to be set at about Earth level. Maria sat leaning against the wall, praying and listening to her heart pound. It almost stopped when the door opened again; only a machine entered, to bring her a large cake of pink and green stuff that seemed to be food. The machine walked around the dead man on its way out.

She had eaten a little of the cake when the door opened again, very slightly at first, then enough for a man to step quickly in. It was Hemphill, the cold-eyed one from the ship, leaning a bit to one side as if dragged down by the weight of the little bomb he still carried under his arm. After a quick look around he shut the door behind him and crossed the room to her, hardly glancing down as he stepped over the body of the mate.

“How many of them are there?” Hemphill whispered, bending over her. She had remained seated on the floor, too surprised to move or speak.

“Who?” she finally managed.

He jerked his head impatiently. “Them. The ones who live here inside it, and serve it. I saw one of them coming out of the room, when I was out in the passage. It’s fixed up a lot of breathing space for them.”

He showed Maria how the bomb could be made to explode, and gave it to her to hold, while he began to burn through her chain with the laser pistol. They exchanged information on what had happened. She did not think she would ever be able to pull the plunger and kill herself, but she did not tell that to Hemphill.

III

Just as they stepped out of the prison room. Hemphill had a bad moment when three machines rolled toward them from around a corner. But the things ignored the two frozen humans and rolled silently past them, going on out of sight.

He turned to Maria with an exultant whisper: “The damned thing is three-quarters blind, here inside its own skin!”

She only waited, watching him with frightened eyes.

With the beginning of hope, a vague plan was forming in his mind. He led her on, saying: “Now we’ll see about that man. Or men.” Was it too good to be true, that there was only one of them?

The corridors were badly lit, with uneven jogs and steps in them. Carelessly built concessions to life, he thought. He moved in the direction he had seen the man take.

After a few minutes of cautious advance, Hemphill heard the shuffling footsteps of one person ahead, coming nearer. He handed the bomb to Maria again, and pressed her behind him. They waited in a dark niche.

The footsteps approached with careless speed, a vague shadow bobbing ahead of them. The shaggy head swung so abruptly into view that Hemphill’s metal-fisted swing was almost too late. The blow only grazed the back of the skull; the man yelped and staggered off balance and fell down. He was wearing an old-model spacesuit, with no helmet.

Hemphill crouched over him, shoving the laser pistol almost into his face. “Make a sound and I’ll kill you. Where are the others?”

The face looking up at Hemphill was stunned—worse than stunned It seemed more dead than alive, though the eyes moved alertly enough from Hemphill to Maria and back, disregarding the gun.

“He’s the same one,” Maria whispered.

“Where are your friends?” Hemphill asked.

The man felt the back of his head, where he had been hit. “Damage,” he said tonelessly, as if to himself. Then he reached up for the pistol, so calmly and steadily that he was nearly able to touch it.

Hemphill jumped back a step, and barely kept himself from firing. “Sit still or I’ll kill you! Now tell me who you are, and how many others are here.”

The man’s putty face showed nothing. He said: “Your speech is steady in tone from word to word, not like that of the machine. You hold a killing tool there. Give it to me, and I will destroy you and—that one.”

It seemed this man was only a brainwashed ruin, instead of an unspeakable traitor. Now what use could be made of him? Hemphill moved back another step, slowly lowering the pistol.

Maria spoke to their prisoner.

“Where are you from? What planet?

A blank stare.

She repeated the question in a couple of other languages, with no better result, then returned to the universal Loglan of Earth’s spacemen and colonists.

“Your home. Where were you born?”

“From the birth tank.” Sometimes the tones of the man’s voice shifted like the berserker’s, as if he was a fearful comedian mocking it.

Hemphill gave an unstable laugh. “From a birth tank, of course. What else? Where are the others?”

“I do not understand.”

Hemphill sighed. “All right. Where’s this birth tank?”

The place looked like the storeroom of a biology lab, badly lighted, with equipment piled and crowded, laced with pipes and conduits. But perhaps no living technician had ever worked here.

“You were born here?” Hemphill demanded.

“Yes.”

“He’s crazy.”

“No, wait.” Maria’s voice sank to an even lower whisper, as if she was frightened anew. She took the hand of the slack-faced man, and he bent his head to stare at their touching hands.

“Do you have a name?” she asked, as if of a lost child.

“I am Goodlife.”

“I think it’s hopeless,” put in Hemphill.

The girl ignored him. “Goodlife? My name is Maria. And this is Hemphill.”

No reaction.

“Who were your parents? Father? Mother?

“They were goodlife too. They helped the machine. There was a battle, and badlife killed them. But they had given cells of their bodies to the machine, and from them it made me. Now I am the only goodlife.”

“Great God,” whispered Hemphill.

Silent, awed attention seemed to move Goodlife when threats and pleas had not. His face moved in awkward grimaces; then he turned to stare into a corner. For almost the first time, he volunteered a communication: “I know they were like you. A man and a woman.”

Hemphill wanted to sweep every cubic foot of the miles of mechanism with his hatred; he looked around.

“The damned things,” he said, his voice cracking like the berserker’s own. “What they’ve done to me. To you. To everyone.”

Plans seemed to come when the strain of hating was greatest. He moved quickly to put a hand on Goodlife’s shoulder. “Listen to me. Do you know what a radioactive isotope is?”

“Yes.”

“There will be a place, somewhere, where the—the machine decides what it will do next—what strategy to follow. A place holding a block of some isotope with a long half-life. Probably near the center of the machine. Do you know of such a place?”

“Yes, I know where the strategic housing is.”

“Strategic housing.” Hope mounted to a strong new level. “Is there a way for us to reach it?”

“You are badlife!” He knocked Hemphill’s hand away, awkwardly. “You want to damage the machine, and you have damaged me. You are to be destroyed.”

Maria took over, trying to soothe. “Goodlife—we are not bad, this man and I. Those who built this machine are the badlife. Someone built it, you know, some living people built it, long ago. They were the real badlife.”

“Badlife.” He might be agreeing with Maria, or accusing her.

“Don’t you want to live, Goodlife? Hemphill and I want to live. We want to help you, because you’re alive, like us. Won’t you help us now?”

Goodlife was silent for a few moments. Then he turned back to face them and said: “All life thinks it is, but it is not. There are only particles, energy and space, and the laws of the machines.”

Maria kept at him. “Goodlife, listen to me. A wise man once said: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ ”

“A wise man?” ne questioned, in his cracking voice. Then he sat down on the deck, hugging his knees and rocking back and forth. He might be thinking.

Drawing Maria aside, Hemphill said: “You know, we have a faint hope now. There’s plenty of air in here, there’s water and food. There are warships following this thing, there must be. If we can find a way to disable it, we can wait and maybe be picked up in a month or two.”

She watched him silently for a moment. “Hemphill—what have these machines done to you?”

“My wife—my children.” He thought his voice sounded almost indifferent. “They were on Pascalo, three years ago; there was nothing left. This machine, or one like it.” She took his hand, as she had taken Goodlife’s. They both looked down at the joined fingers, then raised their eyes, smiling briefly together at the similarity of action.

“Where’s the bomb?” Hemphill thought aloud suddenly, spinning around.

It lay in a dim corner. He grabbed it up again, and strode over to where Goodlife sat and rocked.

“Well, are you with us? Us, or the ones who built the machine?” Goodlife stood up, and looked closely at Hemphill. “They were inspired by the laws of physics, which controlled their brains, to build the machine. Now the machine has preserved them as images. It has preserved my father and mother, and it will preserve me.”

“What images do you mean? Where are they?”

“The images in the theater.”

The right course seemed to be to accustom him to co-operation, win his confidence, learn about him and the machine. Then, to the strategic housing.

“Will you guide us to the theater, Goodlife?”

It was by far the largest airfilled room they had yet found, with a hundred seats of a shape usable by Earthmen, though Hemphill guessed it had been built for someone else. The theater was elaborately furnished and well lighted. When the door closed behind them, the ranked images of intelligent creatures brightened into life upon the stage.

The stage became a window into a vast hall. One person stood forward at an imaged lectern; he was a slender, fine-boned being, topologically like a man except for the single eye that stretched across his face, with a bright bulging pupil that slid to and fro like mercury.

The speaker’s voice was a highpitched torrent of clicks and whines. Most of those in the ranks behind him wore a kind of uniform. When he paused, they whined in unison.

“What does he say?” Maria whispered.

Goodlife looked at her. “The machine has told me that it has lost the meaning of the sounds.”

“Then may we see the images of your parents, Goodlife?”

Hemphill, watching the stage, started to object; but the girl was right. The sight of this fellow’s parents might be more immediately helpful.

Goodlife found a control somewhere.

Hemphill was surprised momentarily that the parents appeared only in flat projected pictures. First the man was there, against a plain background, blue eyes and neat short beard, nodding his head with a pleasant expression on his face. He wore the lining coverall of a spacesuit.

Then the woman, holding some kind of cloth before her for covering, and looking straight into the camera. She had a broad face and red braided hair. There was hardly time to see anything more before the alien orator was back, whining faster than ever.

Hemphill turned to ask: “Is that all? All you know of your parents?”

“Yes. Now they are images, they no longer think they exist. The badlife killed them.”

The creature in the projection was assuming, Maria thought, a more didactic tone. Three-dimensional charts of stars and planets appeared near him, one after another, and he gestured at them as he spoke. He had vast numbers of stars and planets on his charts to boast about; she could tell somehow that he was boasting.

Hemphill was moving toward the stage a step at a time, more and more absorbed. Maria did not like the way the light of the images reflected on his face.

Goodlife, too, watched the stage pageant which perhaps he had seen a thousand times before. Maria could not tell what thoughts might be behind his meaningless face which had never had another human face to imitate. On impulse she took his arm again.

“Goodlife, Hemphill and I are alive, like you. Will you help us now? Then we will always help you.” She had a sudden mental picture of Goodlife rescued, taken to a planet, cowering among the staring badlife.

“Good. Bad.” His hand reached to take hold of hers; he had removed his suit gauntlets. He swayed back and forth as if she attracted and repelled him at the same time. God, she wanted to scream and wail for him, to tear apart with her fingers the mindlessly proceeding metal that had made him what he was.

“We’ve got them!” It was Hemphill, coming back from the stage, where the recorded tirade went on unrelentingly. He was exultant. “Don’t you see? He’s showing what must be a complete catalogue, of every star and rock they own. It’s a victory speech. But when we study those charts we can find them, we can track them down and reach them!”

“Hemphill.” She wanted to calm him back to concentration on immediate problems. “How old are those—pictures, up there? What part of the galaxy do they show? Or were they even made in another galaxy? Will we ever be able to tell?”

Hemphill lost some enthusiasm. “Anyway, it’s a chance to track them down; we’ve got to save this information.” He pointed at Goodlife. “He’s got to take me to what he calls the strategic housing; then we Can sit and wait for the warships, or maybe get off this damned thing in a boat.”

She stroked Goodlife’s hand, soothing a baby. “Yes, but he’s confused. How could he be anything else?”

“Of course.” Hemphill paused to consider. “You can handle him much better than I.”

She didn’t answer.

Hemphill went on: “Now you’re a woman, and he appears to be a physically healthy young male. Calm him down if you like, but somehow you’ve got to persuade him to help me. Everything depends on it.” He had turned toward the stage again, unable to keep half his mind from the star charts. “Take him out somewhere, for a little walk and talk; don’t get far away.”

And what else was there to do? She led Goodlife from the theater while the dead man on the stage clicked and shouted, cataloguing his thousand suns.

IV

Too much had happened, was still happening, and all at once he could no longer stand to be near the badlife. Goodlife found himself pulling away from the female, running, flying down the passages, toward the place where he had fled when he was small and strange fears had come from nowhere. It was the room where the machine always saw and heard him, and was ready to talk to him.

He stood before the attention of the machine, in the chamber-thathas shrunk. He thought of the place so, because he could remember it clearly as a larger room, where the scanners and speakers of the machine towered above his head. He knew the real change had been his own physical growth; still, this compartment was set apart in a special association with food and sleep and protective warmth.

“I have listened to the badlife, and shown them things,” he said, fearing punishment.

“I know that, Goodlife, for I have watched. These things have become a part of my experiment.”

What joyous relief! It said nothing of punishment, though it must know that the words of the badlife had shaken and confused him. He had even imagined himself showing the man Hemphill the strategic housing, and so putting an end to all punishment, for always.

“They wanted me—they wanted me to—”

“I have watched. I have listened. The man is tough and evil, powerfully motivated to fight against me. I must understand his kind, for they cause much damage. He must be tested to his limits, to destruction. He thinks himself free inside me, and so he will not think as a prisoner. This is important.”

Goodlife pulled off his irritating suit; the machine would not let the badlife in here. He sank down to the floor and wrapped his arms around the base of a scanner-speaker console. Once long ago the machine had given him a thing that was soft and warm when he held it . . . he closed his eyes.

“What are my orders?” he asked, sleepily. Here in this chamber all was steady and comforting, as always.

“First, do not tell the badlife of these orders. Then, do what the man Hemphill tells you to do. No harm will come to me.”

“He has a bomb.”

“I watched his approach, and I disabled his bomb, even before he entered to attack me. His pistol can do me no serious harm. Do you think one badlife can conquer me?”

“No. Smiling, reassured, he curled into a more comfortable position. “Tell me about my parents.” He had heard the story a thousand times, but it was always good.

“Your parents were good, they gave themselves to me. Then, during a great battle, the badlife killed them. The badlife hated them, as they hate you. When they say they like you, they lie, with the evil untruth of all badlife.

“But your parents had each given me a part of their bodies, and from them I made you. Your parents were destroyed completely by the badlife, or I would have saved even their non-functioning bodies for you to see. That would have been good.”

“Yes.”

“The two badlives have searched for you; now they are resting. Sleep, Goodlife.”

He slept.

Awakening, he remembered a dream in which two people had beckoned him to join them on the stage of the theater. He knew they were his mother and father, though they looked like the two badlife. The dream faded before his waking mind could grasp it firmly.

He ate and drank, while the machine talked to him.

“If the man Hemphill wants to be guided to the strategic housing, take him there. I will capture him there, and let him escape later to try again. When finally he can be provoked to fight no more, I will destroy him. But I mean to preserve the life of the female; you and she will produce more goodlife for me.”

“Yes!” It was immediately clear what a good thing that would be. They would give parts of their bodies to the machine, so new goodlife bodies could be built, cell by cell. And the man Hemphill, who punished and damaged with his fastswinging arm, would be utterly destroyed.

When he rejoined the badlife, the man Hemphill barked questions and threatened punishment until Goodlife was confused and a little frightened. But Goodlife agreed to help, and was careful to reveal nothing of what the machine planned. Maria was more pleasant than every. He touched her whenever he could.

Hemphill demanded to be taken to the strategic housing. Goodlife agreed at once; he had been there many times. There was a high-speed elevator that made the fifty-mile journey easy.

Hemphill paused, before saying: “You’re too damn willing, all of a sudden.” Turning his face to Maria. “I don’t trust him.”

This badlife thought he was being false! Goodlife was angered; the machine never lied, and no properly obedient goodlife could lie.

Hemphill paced around, and finally demanded: “Is there any route that approaches this strategic housing in such a way that the machine cannot possibly watch us?”

Goodlife thought. “I believe there is one such way. We will have to carry extra tanks of air, and travel many miles through vacuum.” The machine had said to help Hemphill, and help he would. He hoped he could watch when the male badlife was finally destroyed.

There had been a battle, in some time that could hardly be related meaningfully to any Earthly calendar. The berserker had fought some terrible opponent, and had taken a terrible lance-thrust of a wound. A cavity two miles wide at the widest, and fifty miles deep, had been driven in by a sequence of shaped atomic charges, through level after level of machinery, deck after deck of armor, and had been stopped only by the last inner defenses of the buried unliving heart. The berserker had survived, and crushed its enemy, and soon afterward its repair machines had sealed over the outer opening of the wound, using extra thicknesses of armor. It had meant to gradually rebuild the whole destruction; but there was so much life in the galaxy, and so much of it was stubborn and clever. Somehow battle damage accumulated faster than it could be repaired. The great hole was used as a conveyor path, and never much worked on.

When Hemphill saw the blasted cavity—what little of it his tiny suit-lamp could show—he felt a shrinking fear that was greater than any in his memory. He stopped on the edge of the void, drifting there with his arm instinctively around Maria. She had put on a suit and accompanied him, without protest or eagerness, without being asked.

It had already been an hour’s journey from the airlock, through weightless vacuum inside the great machine. Goodlife had led the way through section after section, with every show of cooperation. Hemphill had the pistol ready, and the bomb, and two hundred feet of cord tied around his left arm.

But when Hemphill recognized the once-molten edge of the berserker’s great scar for what it was, his delicate new hope of survival left him. This, the damned thing had survived. This, perhaps, had hardly weakened it. Again, the bomb under his arm was only a pathetic toy.

Goodlife drifted up to them. Hemphill had already taught him to touch helmets for speech in vacuum.

“This great damage is the one path we can take to reach the strategic housing without passing scanners or service machines. I will teach you to ride the conveyor. It will carry us most of the way.”

The conveyor was a thing of forcefields and great rushing containers, hundreds of yards out in the Great Damage and running lengthwise through it. When the conveyor’s forcefields caught the people up, their weightlessness was more than ever like falling, with occasional vast shapes, corpuscles of the beserker’s bloodstream, flickering past in the near darkness to show movement.

Hemphill flew beside Maria, holding her hand. Her face was hard to see inside the helmet, but she did not seem to be looking at him. There was no need.

This conveyor was another mad new world, a fairy tale of monsters and flying and falling. Hemphill fell past past great fear, into a calm determination.

I can do it, he thought. The thing is blind and helpless here. I will do it, and I will survive if I can.

Goodlife led them from the slowing conveyor, to drift into a chamber hollowed in the inner armor by the final explosion at the end of the ancient lance-thrust. The chamber was an empty sphere a hundred feet across, from which cracks radiated out into the solid armor. On the surface nearest the center of the berserker, one fissure was as wide as a door, where the last energy of the enemy’s blow had driven ahead.

Goodlife touched helmets. “I have seen the other end of this crack, from inside, at the strategic housing. It is only a few yards from here.” Hemphill hesitated for only a moment, wondering whether to send Goodlife through the twisting passage first. But if this was some incredibly complex trap, the trigger of it might be anywhere.

He touched his helmet to Maria’s. “Stay behind him. Follow him through, and keep an eye on him.” The fissure narrowed as Hemphill followed it, but at the end it was still wide enough for him to force himself through.

This was the inner temple, another great hollow sphere. In the center was a complexity the size of a small house, shock-mounted on a web of girders that ran in every direction. This could be nothing but the strategic housing. There was a glow from it like flickering moonlight; forcefield switches responding to the random atomic turmoil within, somehow choosing what human shipping lane or colony would be next attacked, and how.

Hemphill felt a pressure rising in his mind and soul, toward a climax of triumphal hate. He drifted forward, cradling his bomb tenderly, starting to unwind the cord wrapped around his arm. He tied the free end delicately to the plunger of the bomb, as he approached the central complex.

I mean to live, he thought, to watch the damned thing die. I will tape the bomb against the central block, that so-innocent looking slab in there, and I will brace myself around two hundred feet of these heavy metal corners, and pull.

Goodlife stood braced in the perfect place from which to watch the heart of the machine, watching the man Hemphill string his cord. Goodlife felt a certain satisfaction that his prediction had been right, and that the strategic housing was approachable by this one narrow path of the great damage. They would not have to go back that way. When the badlife had been captured, all of them could ride up in the airfilled elevator Goodlife used when he came here for maintenance practice.

Hemphill had finished stringing his cord. Now he waved his arm at Goodlife and Maria, who clung to the same girder, watching. Now Hemphill pulled on the cord. Of course, nothing happened. The machine had said the bomb was disabled, and the machine would make very certain in such a matter.

Maria pushed away from beside Goodlife, and drifted in toward Hemphill.

Hemphill tugged again and again on his cord. Goodlife sighed impatiently, and moved. There was a great cold in the girders here; he could begin to feel it now through the fingers and toes of his suit.

At last, when Hemphill started back to see what was wrong with his device, the service machines came from where they had been hiding, to seize him. He tried to draw his pistol, but their grippers moved far too quickly.

It was hardly a struggle that Goodlife saw, but he watched with interest. Hemphill’s figure had gone rigid in the suit, obviously straining every muscle to the limit. Why should the badlife try to struggle against steel and atomic power? The machines bore the man effortlessly away, toward the elevator shaft. Goodlife felt an uneasiness.

Maria was drifting, her face turned back toward Goodlife. He wanted to go to her and touch her again, but suddenly he was a little afraid, as before when he had run from her. One of the service machines came back from the elevator to grip her and carry her away. She kept her face turned toward Goodlife. He turned away from her, a feeling like punishment in the core of his being.

In the great cold silence, the flickering light from the strategic housing bathed everything. In the center, a chaotic block of atoms. Elsewhere, engines, relays, sensing cells. Where was it, really, the great machine that spoke to him? Everywhere, and nowhere. Would these new feelings, brought by the badlife, ever leave him? He tried to understand himself, and could not begin.

Light flickered on a round shape among the girders and a few yards away, a shape that offended Goodlife’s sense of the proper and necessary in machinery. Looking closer, he saw that it was a space helmet.

The motionless figure was wedged only lightly in an angle between frigid beams, but there was no force in here to move it.

He could hear the suit creak, stiff with great cold, when he grabbed it and turned it. Unseeing blue eyes looked out at Goodlife through the faceplate. The man’s face wore a neat short beard.

“Ahhh, yes,” sighed Goodlife inside his own helmet. A thousand times he had seen this face.

His father had been carrying something, heavy, strapped carefully to his ancient suit. His father had carried it this far, until the old suit had wheezed and failed.

His father, too, had followed the logical narrow path of the great damage, to reach the strategic housing without being seen. His father had choked and died and frozen here, carrying toward strategic housing what could only be a bomb.

Goodlife heard his own voice keening, without words, and he could not see plainly for the tears floating in his helmet. His fingers felt numbed with cold as he unstrapped the bomb and lifted it from his father . . .

V

Hemphill was too exhausted to do more than gasp as the service machine carried him out of the elevator and along the air-filled corridor toward the prison room. When the machine went dead and dropped him, he had to lie still for long seconds before he could attack it again. It had hidden his pistol somewhere, so he began to beat on the robotlike thing with his armored fists, while it stood unresisting. Soon it toppled over. Hemphill sat on it and beat it some more, sobbing.

It was nearly a minute later when the tremor of the explosion, racing from the compounded chaos of the berserker’s torn-out heart, racing through metal beams and decks, reached the corridor, where it was far too faint for anyone to feel.

Maria, completely weary, sat where her metal captor had dropped her, watching Hemphill, pitying him and loving him.

He stopped his pointless pounding of the machine under him, and said hoarsely: “It’s a trick, another damned trick.”

The tremor had been too faint for anyone to feel, here, but Maria shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She saw that power still seemed to be on the elevator, and she watched the door of it.

Hemphill went away to search among the now-purposeless machines for weapons and food. He came back, raging again. What was probably an automatic destructor charge had wrecked the theater and the starcharts. They might as well get away in the boat.

She ignored him, still watching an elevator door which never opened. Soon she began quietly to cry.

END

1964

THE LIFE HATER

The berserker machine was built to destroy life. Carr’s mission was to teach it to be a friend!

Carr swallowed a pain pill, and tried to find a less uncomfortable position in the combat chair. He keyed his radio transmitter and spoke to the rogue ship that hung before him in space.

“I come in peace. I have no weapons. I come to talk to you.”

He waited. The cabin of his little one-man ship was silent. His radar screen showed the berserker machine still many light-seconds ahead of him. There was no reaction from it, but he knew that it had heard him.

Behind Carr was the Sol-type star he called sun, and his home planet, colonized from Earth a century before. It was a lonely settlement, out near the rim of the galaxy. Until now the war waged on life by the berserker machines had been a remote horror in the news stories. The colony’s only real fighting ship had been sent to join Karlsen’s fleet in the defense of Earth, when the berserkers were said to be massing there. But now the enemy was here, and the people of Carr’s planet were readying two more ships in feverish haste—they were a small colony, and not wealthy in resources. Even when the two ships were ready, they would hardly be a match for a berserker.

When Carr had taken his plan to the leaders of the colony, they had thought him mad.

Go out and talk to it of peace and love? Argue with it? There might be some hope of converting the most depraved human to the cause of goodness and mercy, but what appeal could alter the built-in purpose of a machine?

“Why not talk to it of peace?” Carr had demanded. “Have you a better plan? I’m willing to go, I’ve nothing to lose.”

They had looked at him, across the gulf that separates healthy planners from those who know they are dying. They thought almost any scheme would be better than his. But they could imagine nothing else to do until the warships were ready, which would be at least ten days. The little one-man ship was expendable, being unarmed. Armed, it would be no more a provocation to a berserker. In the end, they let Carr take it, hoping there was a chance his arguments might delay the inevitable attack.

For Carr himself, of course, they wasted no thought. For Carr was dying. Was as good as dead.

When Carr came within a million miles of the berserker, it stopped its own unhurried motion and seemed to wait for him, hanging in space in the orbital track of an airless planetoid, at a point from which the planetoid was still several days away.

“I am unarmed,” he radioed again. “I come to talk with you, not to damage you. If those who built you were here, I would try to talk to them of peace and love. Do you understand?”

He felt sure it would understand his language. All the berserker machines had learned the universal space-travelers’ tongue, from human prisoners or from each other. And he was serious about talking love to the unknown Builders. Grudges and vengeance seemed tiny things to a dying man. But the Builders would not be aboard; the berserkers had been constructed, probably, when Earthmen hunted the mammoth with spears. The Builders were lost in spacetime, along with their enemies of long ago.

Suddenly it answered him: “Little ship, maintain your present speed and course toward me. Be ready to stop when ordered.”

“I—I will.” In spite of being ready for it, Carr found himself stuttering and shaken at the sound of its voice, the uneven mechanical reproduction of the words of human prisoners, recorded aboard or borrowed from another machine. Now the weapons which could sterilize a planet would be trained on him alone. And there was worse than destruction to be feared, if one tenth of the stories about berserkers’ prisoners were true. Carr did not let himself think about that—although the pain that racked him in momentary flood, of agony made death seem almost welcome.

When he was within ten thousand miles it ordered: “Stop. Wait where you are, relative to me.”

Carr obeyed instantly. Soon he saw that it had launched toward him something about the size of his own ship—a little moving dot on his video screen, coming out of the vast black fortress that floated against the stars.

Even at this range he could see how scarred and battered that fortress was. He had heard that all of these ancient machines were damaged, from their long senseless fighting across the galaxy; but surely such apparent ruin as this must be exceptional.

The berserker’s launch slowed and drew up beside his ship. Soon there came a clanging at the airlock.

“Open!” demanded the radio voice. “I must search you.”

“Then you will listen to me?”

“Then I will listen.”

He opened the lock, and stood aside for the half dozen machines that entered. They were not unlike robot valets and workers, except that these were old and limping and worn, like their great master. Here and there a new part gleamed. But often the machines’ movements were unsteady as they searched Carr, searched his cabin, probed everywhere on the little ship. One of them had to be half-carried out by its fellows, when the search was completed.

Another one of the machines, a thing with arms and hands like a man’s, stayed behind. As soon as the lock had closed behind the others, it settled itself in the combat chair and began to drive the ship toward the berserker.

“Wait!” Carr protested. “I didn’t surrender!” The ridiculous words hung in the air, seeming to deserve no reply. Sudden panic made Carr move without thinking; he stepped forward and grabbed at the mechanical pilot, trying to pull it from the chair. It put one metal hand against his chest and shoved him across the cabin, so that he staggered and fell in the artificial gravity, thumping his head painfully against a bulkhead. “In a matter of minutes we will talk about love and peace,” said the radio voice.

Looking out a port as his ship neared the immense berserker, Carr saw the scars of battle become plainer and plainer, even to his unpracticed eye. There were holes in the hull, square miles of bendings and swellings and pits where the metal had once flowed molten.

Rubbing his bumped head, Carr felt a faint thrill of pride. We’ve done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. His own martial feeling annoyed him, in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist. Of course it could hardly be thought immoral to use violence against a dangerous but inanimate machine. After some delay, a hatch opened in the berserker’s side, and Carr’s ship followed the berserker’s launch into darkness.

Now there was nothing to be seen through the port. Soon there came a gentle bump, as of docking. The mechanical pilot shut off the drive, turned toward Carr and started to rise from the chair.

Something in it failed. Instead of rising smoothly, the pilot reared up, flailed for a moment with arms that sought a grip or balance, and then fell heavily to the deck. For half a minute it moved one arm, and made a grinding noise. Then it was still.

In the half minute of silence which followed, Carr realized that he was again master of his cabin: chance had given him that. If there was something he could do—“Leave your ship,” said the calm voice. “There is an airfilled tube fitted to your airlock. It will lead you to a place where we can talk of peace and love.”

Carr’s eyes, with a sort of reluctant horror, had dragged themselves to focus on the engine switch, and beyond that, to the C-plus activator.

The C-plus jump was not usable as a drive anywhere near the huge mass of a sun. In such proximity as this to a mass even the size of the surrounding berserker, the effect became only a weapon—a weapon of tremendous potential power.

Carr did not—or thought he did not—any longer fear sudden death; he was too near to the slow, sure kind. But now he found that with all his heart and soul he feared what might be prepared for him outside the airlock. All the horror stories came back. The thought of going out through that airlock now was unendurable. It was less terrifying for him to step carefully around the fallen pilot, to reach the controls and turn the engine back on.

“I can talk to you from here,” he said, his voice quavering in spite of an effort to keep it steady.

After about ten seconds, the berserker said: “Your C-plus drive has safety devices. You will not be able to kamikaze me.”

“You may be right,” said Carr after a moment’s thought. “But if a safety device does function, it might hurl my ship away from your center of mass, right through your hull.

And your hull is in bad shape now. You don’t want any more damage.”

“You would die.”

“I’ll have to die sometime. But I didn’t come out here to die, or to fight. I came to talk with you, to try to reach some agreement.”

“What kind of agreement?”

At last Carr took a deep breath, and marshaled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.

“I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”

“Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”

Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”

There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer that I should change my purpose?”

“For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”

“What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”

Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”

“What evidence do you offer?”

“Man has a spirit.”

“I have learned that men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not men who deny that this spirit exists?”

“Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”

“Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”

Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”

“That is correct.”

“But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy or organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”

“I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly, “though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”

“Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that—produce brains capable of intelligent action?”

There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.

“I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise—then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”

“You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” He wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game of Life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.

The berserker said: “If I am able to study some living cells—”

Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”

Its voice was unevenly calm, as always. “There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metal and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.

The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent lifeunit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for, or against, your argument. Will you provide me with cells?”

“You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.

“No, I have never taken a prisoner.”

It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.

“The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possibly I could give you a few of them.”

“Half a cubic centimeter should be enough; not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the sensation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”

Did it want to drug him? That seemed too simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.

He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from the control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”

He got the medical kit, took two pain-killers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had had some biological training.

When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock 2nd left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock, and leave again.

He took a pep pill. It would stimulate some pain, but he’d be alert.

Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.

He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.

“You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make helping you my purpose. Do you understand?”

Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.” Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and realized that the great hatch through which his ship had entered was swinging open.

This far within the system, Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. It meant he could see the berserker as he fled from it, and he kept it in sight as long as possible. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.

A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialed air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot was gone, with the tissue sample. There was nothing strange to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.

After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and he watched the stars some more, with great interest, like a man examining something long forgotten.

In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With his whole world bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.

“Ho, on the ground! Good news.” The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What happened?” He told them of his encounter with the berserker. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. It is seriously damaged. Two warships attacking it now should easily win.”

“Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr—you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so maybe you understand. We’ve got to be careful. The thing was probably lying to you.”

“Oh, I know. Even that pilot’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go—or maybe left it in my airlock.”

“What stuff?”

Carr said, “The stuff you’re worrying about. The poison it thinks will kill us all. I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected I’d hurry home and land before getting sick, and spread a new plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines against machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses. It didn’t know our chemistry. It must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”

“Some virus, you think? What’s it doing to you, Carr? Are you in pain—I mean, more than before?”

“No.” Carr swirled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the center of a discolored, inhuman-looking area. That area was smaller than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin.

“What is the stuff doing to you?”

Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope.

“I think it’s killing off my cancer.”

END

1965

STONE PLACE

It was a fantastic place to fight a space war—where a million orbiting rocks could conceal an alien ambush!

I

Earth’s Gobi spaceport was perhaps the biggest in all the small corner of the galaxy settled by Solarian Man and his descendants; at least, so thought Mitchell Spain, who had seen most of those ports in his twenty-four years of life.

But looking down now from the crowded, descending shuttle, he could see almost nothing of the Gobi’s miles of ramp. The vast crowd below, meaning only joyful welcome, had defeated its own propose by forcing back and breaking the police lines. Now the vertical string of descending shuttle-ships had to pause, searching for enough clear room to land.

Mitchell Spain, crowded into the lowest shuttle with a thousand other volunteers, was paying little attention to the landing problem for the moment. Into this jammed compartment, once a luxurious observation lounge, had just come Johann Karlsen himself; and this was Mitch’s first chance for a good look at the newly appointed High Commander of Sol’s defense, though Mitch had ridden Karlsen’s spear-shaped flagship all the way from Esteel.

Karlsen was no older than Mitchell Spain, and no taller, his shortness somehow surprising at first glance. He had become ruler of the planet Esteel largely through the influence of his half-brother, the mighty Felipe Nogara; but he held that rule by his own talents.

“This field may be blocked for the rest of the day,” Karlsen was saying now, to a cold-eyed Earthman who had just come aboard the shuttle from an aircar. “Let’s have the ports open, I want to look around.”

Glass and metal slid and reshaped themselves, and sealed ports became small balconies open to the air of Earth, the fresh smells of a living planet—open, also, to the roaring chant of the crowd a few hundred feet below: “Karlsen! Karlsen!”

As the High Commander stepped out onto a balcony to survey for himself the chances of landing, the throng of men in the lounge made a seemingly involuntary brief surging movement, as if to follow. These men were mostly Esteeler volunteers, with a sprinkling of adventurers like Mitchell Spain, the Martian wanderer who had signed up on Esteel for the battle bounty Karlsen offered.

“Don’t crowd, outlander,” said a tall man ahead of Mitch, turning and looking down at him.

“I answer to die name of Mitchell Spain.” He let his voice rasp a shade deeper than usual. “No mote an outlander here than you, I think.”

The tall one, by his dress and accent, came from Venus, a planet terraformed only within the last century, whose people were sensitive and proud in newness of independence and power. A Venerian might well be jumpy here, on a ship filled with men from a planet ruled by Felipe Nogara’s brother.

“Spain—sounds like a Martian name,” said the Venerian in a milder tone, looking down at Mitch.

Martians were not known for patience and long suffering. After another moment the tall one seemed to get tired of locking eyes and turned away.

The cold-eyed Earthman, his face somehow familiar to Mitch, was on the communicator, probably to the captain of the shuttle. “Drive on toward the city; cross the Khosutu highway, and let down there.” Karlsen, back inside, said: “Tell him to go no more than about ten kilometers an hour; they seem to want to see me.”

The statement was matter-of-fact; if people had made great efforts to see Johann Karlsen, it was only die courteous thing to greet them.

Mitch watched Karlsen’s face, and then the back of his head, and the strong arms lifted to wave, as the High Commander stepped out again onto the little balcony. The crowd’s roar doubled.

Is that all you feel, Karlsen, a wish to be courteous? Oh, no, my friend, you are acting. To be greeted with that thunder must do something rital to any man. It might exalt him; possibly it could disgust or frighten him, friendly as it was. You wear well your mask of courteous nobility, High Commander.

What was it like to be Johann Karlsen, come to save the world, when none of the really great and powerful ones seemed to care too much about it? With a bride of famed beauty to be yours when the battle has been won?

And where was brother Felipe today? Scheming, no doubt, to get economic power over yet another planet.

With another shift of the little mob inside the shuttle the tall Venerian moved from in front of Mitch who could now see clearly out the port past Karlsen. Sea of faces, the old cliche, this was really it. How to write this . . . Mitch knew he would someday have to write it. If all men’s foolishness was not permanently ended by the coming battle with the unliving, the battle bounty should suffice to let a man write for some time.

Ahead now were the bone-colored towers of Ulan Bator, rising beyond their fringe of suburban slideways and sunfields a highway, and bright multicolored pennants, worn by the aircars swarming out from the city in glad welcome.

Police aircars were keeping pace protectively with the spaceship, though there seemed no possible danger from anything but excess enthusiasm.

Another, special, aircar approached. The police craft touched it briefly and gently, then drew back with deference. Mitch stretched his neck, and made out a Carmpan insignia on the car. It was probably their ambassador to Sol, in person. The space shuttle eased to a dead slow creeping.

Some said that the Carmpan looked like machines themselves, but they were the strong allies of Earth-descended man in the war against the enemies of all life. If the Carmpan bodies were slow and squarish, their minds were visionary; if they were curiously unable to use force against any enemy, their indirect help was of great value.

Something near silence came over the vast crowd as the ambassador reared himself up in his open car; from his head and body ganglions of wire and fiber stretched to make a hundred connections with Carmpan animals and equipment around him.

The crowd recognized the meaning of the network; a great sigh went up. In the shuttle men jostled one another trying for a better view. The cold-eyed Earthman whispered rapidly into the communicator.

“Prophecy!” said a hoarse voice, near Mitch’s ear.

“—of Probability!” come the ambassador’s voice, suddenly amplified, seeming to pick up the thought in mid-phrase. The Carmpan Propherts of Probability were half mystics, half cold mathematicians. Karlsen’s aids must have decided, or known, that this prophecy was going to be a favorable, inspiring thing which the crowd should hear and had ordered the ambassador’s voice picked up on a public address system.

“The hope, the living spark, to spread the flame of life!” The inhuman mouth chopped out the words, which still rose ringingly. The armlike appendages pointed straight to Karlsen, level on his balcony with the hovering aircar. “The dark metal thoughts are now of victory, the dead things make their plans to kill us all. But in this man before me now, there is life greater than any strength of metal. A power of life, to resonate—in all of us. I see—with Karlsen—victory—”

The strain on a Carmpan prophet in action seemed always to be immense, just as his accuracy was always high. Mitch had heard that toe stresses involved were more topological than electrical. He had heard it, but like most Earthdescended, had never understood it.

“Victory,” the ambassador repeated. “Victory . . . and then . . .”

Something changed in the nonSolarian face. The cold-eyed Earthman was perhaps expert in reading lien expressions, or was perhaps taking no chances. He whispered another command, and the amplification was taken from the Carmpan voice. A roar of approval mounted up past shuttle and aircar, from the great throng who thought the prophecy complete. But the ambassador was not finished, though now only those a few meters in front of him, inside the shuttle, could hear his faltering voice.

“. . . then death, destruction, failure.” The square body bent, but the alien eyes were still riveted on Karlsen. “He who wins everything—will die owning nothing . . .”

The Carmpan bent down and his aircar moved away. In the lounge of the shuttle there was silence. The hurrahing outside seemed to have a tone of mockery.

After long seconds, the High Commander raised his voice: “Men, we who heard the finish of the prophecy are few—but still we are many, to keep a secret. So I don’t ask for secrecy. But spread the word, too, that I have no faith in prophecies that are not of God. The Carmpan have never claimed to be infallible.”

The gloomy answer was unspoken, but almost telepathically loud among the group. Nine times out of ten, the Carmpan are right. There will be victory, then death and failure.

But did the dark ending apply only to Johann Karlsen, or to the whole cause of the living? The men in the shuttle looked at one another, wondering and murmuring.

The shuttles found space to land, at the edge of Ulan Bator. Disembarking, there was no chance for gloom, with the joyous crowd growing thicker by the moment around the ships. A lovely Earth girl came wreathed in garlands, to throw a flowery loop around Mitchell Spain, and to kiss him. He was an ugly man, quite unused to such willing attentions.

Still, he noticed when the High Commander’s eye was on him.

“You, Martian, come with me to the General Staff meeting. I want to show a representative group in there so they’ll believe Esteel is cosmopolitan. I need one or two who were born in Sol’s light.”

“Yes, sir.” Was there no other reason why Karlsen had singled him out? They stood together in the crowd, two short men looking levelly at each other. One ugly and flower-bedecked, his arm still around a girl who stared with sudden awed recognition at the other man, who was magnetic in a way beyond handsomeness or ugliness. The ruler of a planet, perhaps to be the savior of all life.

“I like the way you keep people from standing on your toes in a crowd,” said Karlsen to Mitchell Spain. “Without raising your voice or uttering threats. What’s your name and rank?”

Military organization was vague, in this war where everything that lived was on the same side. “Mitchell Spain, sir. No rank assigned, yet. I’ve been training with the marines. I was on Esteel when you offered a good battle bounty, so here I am.”

“Not to defend Mars?”

“I suppose, that too. But I might as well get paid for it.”

Karlsen’s high-ranking aides were wrangling and shouting now, about groundcar transportation to the Staff meeting. This seemed to leave Karlsen with time to talk. He thought, and recognition flickered on his face.

“Mitchell Spain? The poet?”

“I—I’ve had a couple of things published. Nothing much . . .”

“Have you combat experience?”

“Yes, I was aboard one berserker, before it was pacified. That was out—”

“Later, we’ll talk. Probably have some marine command for you. Experienced men are scarce. Hemphill, where are those groundcars?”

The cold-eyed Earthman turned to answer. Of course, his face had been familiar; this was Hemphill, fanatic hero of a dozen berserker fights. Mitch was faintly awed, in spite of himself.

At last the groundcars came. The ride was into Ulan Bator. The military center would be under the metropolis, taking full advantage of the defensive forcefields that could be extended up into space to protect the area of the city.

Riding down the long elevator zig-zag to the buried War Room, Mitch found himself again next to Karlsen.

“Congratulations on your coming marriage, sir.” Mitch didn’t know if he liked Karlsen or not; but already he felt curiously certain of him, as if he had known the man for years. Karlsen would know he was not trying to curry favor.

The High Commander nodded. “Thank you.” He hesitated for a moment, then produced a small photo. In an illusion of three dimensions it showed the head of a young woman, golden hair done in the style favored by the new aristocracy of Venus.

There was no need for any polite stretching of truth. “She’s very beautiful.”

“Yes.” Karlsen looked long at the picture, as if reluctant to put it away. “There are those who say this will be only a political alliance. God knows we need one. But believe me, Poet, she means far more than that to me.”

Karlsen blinked suddenly, and, as if amused at himself, gave Mitch a why-am-I-telling-you-all-this look. The elevator floor pressed up under the passengers’ feet, and the doors sighed open. They had reached the catacomb of the General Staff.

II

Many of the Staff were Venerian in these days, though not an absolute majority. From their greeting, it was plain that the Venerian members were coldly hostile to Nogara’s brother.

Humanity was, as always, a tangle of cliques and alliances. The brains of the Solarian Parliament and the Executive had been taxed to find a High Commander. If some objected to Johann Karlsen, no one who knew him had any honest doubt of his ability. He brought with him to battle many trained men, and unlike some mightier leaders, he had been more than willing to take responsibility for the defense of Sol.

In the frigid atmosphere in which the Staff meeting opened, there was nothing but to get quickly to business. The enemy, the berserker machines, had abandoned their old tactics of single, unpredictable raids. Those tactics had once threatened the intelligent life of this part of the galaxy with ruin, but slowly over the last decades the defenses of life had been strengthened, the scales had begun to tip.!

There were now thought to be about two hundred berserker machines; they had recently formed themselves into a fleet, with concentrated power capable of overwhelming one at a time all centers of human resistance. Two strongly defended planets had already been destroyed. A massed human fleet was needed, first to defend Sol, and then to meet and break the power of the unliving.

“So far, then, we are agreed,” said Karlsen, straightening up from the plotting table and looking around at the General Staff. “We have not as many ships, or as many trained men as we would like. Perhaps no government away from Sol has contributed all it could.”

Kemal, the Venerian Admiral, glanced around at his planetmen, but declined the chance to comment on the weak contribution of Karlsen’s own half-brother, Nogara. There was no living being upon whom Earth, Mars, and Venus could agree, as the leader for this war. Kemal seemed to be willing to try and live with Nogara’s brother.

Karlsen went on: “We have available for combat two hundred and forty-three ships, specially constructed or modified to suit the new tactics I propose to use. We are all grateful for the magnificent Venerian contribution of a hundred ships. Six of them, as you all probably know, mount the new long range, C-plus cannon.”

The praise produced no visible tow among the Venerians. Karlsen went on. “We seem to have a numerical advantage of about forty ships. I needn’t tell you how the enemy outgun us and outpower us, unit for unit.” He paused. “The ram-and-board tactics should give us just the element of surprise we need.”

Perhaps the High Commander was choosing his words carefully, not wanting to say that some element of surprise offered the only logical hope of success. After the decadeslong dawning of hope, it would be too much to say that. Too much for even these tough-minded men who knew how a berserker machine weighed in the scales of war against any ordinary warship.

“One big problem is trained men,” Karlsen continued, “to lead the boarding parties. I’ve done the best I can, recruiting. Of those ready and in training as boarding marines now, the bulk are Estellers.”

Admiral Kemal seemed to guess what was coming; he started to push back his chair and rise, then waited, evidently wanting to make certain.

Karlsen went on in the same level tone. “These trained marines will be formed into companies, and one company assigned to each warship. Then—”

“One moment, High Commander Karlsen.” Kemal had risen.

“Yes?”

“Do I understand that you mean lo station companies of Esteelers board Venerian ships?”

“In many cases my plan will mean that, yes. You protest?”

“I do.” The Venerian looked around at his planetmen. “We all do.”

“Nevertheless it is so ordered.”

Kemal looked briefly around at his fellows once more, then sat down, blank-faced. The stenocameras in the room’s corners emitted their low sibilance, reminding all that their proceedings were being recorded.

A vertical crease appeared briefly in the High Commander’s forehead, and he looked for long thoughtful seconds at the Venerians before resuming his talk. But what else was there to do, except put Esteelers onto Venerian ships?

They won’t let you be a hero, Karlsen, thought Mitchell Spain. The universe is bad; and men are fools, never really all on the same side in any war.

III

In the hold of the Venerian warship Solar Spot the armor lay packed inside a padded coffin-like crate. Mitch knelt beside it inspecting the knee and elbow joints.

“Want me to paint some insignia on it, Captain?”

It was a young Esteeler named Fishman, one of the newly formed marine company Mitch now commanded. Fishman had picked up a multicolor paintstick somewhere, and he pointed with it to the suit.

Mitch glanced around at the hold, swarming with his men busily opening crates of equipment. He had decided to let things run themselves as much as possible.

“Insignia? Why, I don’t think so. Unless you have some idea for a company insignia. That might be a good thing to have.”

There seemed no need for any distinguishing mark on his armored suit. It was of Martian make, distinctive in style, old but with the latest improvements built in—probably no man wore better. The barrel chest already bore one design—a large black spot shattered by jagged red—showing that Mitch had been in at the ‘death’ of one berserker. Mitch’s uncle had worn the same armor; the men of Mars had always gone in great numbers out to space.

“Sergeant McKendrick,” Mitch asked, “what do you think about having a company insignia?”

The newly appointed sergeant, an intelligent-looking young man, paused in walking past, and looked from Mitch to Fishman as if trying to decide who stood where on insignia before committing himself. Then he looked between them, his expression hardening.

A thin-faced Venerian, evidently an officer, had entered the hold with a squad of six men behind him, armbanded and sidearmed. Ship’s Police.

The officer took a few steps and then stood motionless, looking at the paintstick in Fishman’s hand. When everyone in the hold was silently watching him, he asked quietly:

“Why have you stolen from ship’s stores?”

“Stolen—this!” The young Esteller held up the paintstick, half smiling, as if ready to share a joke.

They didn’t come joking with & Police squad, or, if they did, it was not the kind of joke a Martian appreciated. Mitch still knelt beside his crated armor. There was an unloaded carbine inside the suit’s torso and he put his hand on it.

“We are at war, and we are in space,” the thin-faced officer went on, still speaking mildly, standing relaxed, looking round at the openmouthed Esteeler company. “Everyone aboard a Venerian ship is subject to law. For stealing from ship’s stores, while we face the enemy, the penalty is death. Take him away.” He made an economical gesture to his squad.

The paintstick clattered loudly on A the deck. Fishman looked as if he might be going to topple over, half the smile still on his face.

Mitch stood up, the carbine in the crook of his arm. It was a stubby weapon with heavy double barrels, really a miniature recoilless cannon, to be used in free fall to destroy armored machinery. “Just a minute,” Mitch said.

A couple of the police squad had begun to move uncertainly toward Fishman; they stopped in their tracks, as if glad of the chance.

The officer looked at Mitch, and raised one cool eyebrow. “Do you know what the penalty is, for threatening me?”

“Can’t be any worse than the penalty for blowing your ugly head off. I’m Captain Mitchell Spain, marine company commander on this ship, and nobody just comes in here and drags my men away and hangs them. Who are you?”

“I am Mr. Salvador,” said the Venerian. His eyes appraised Mitch, no doubt establishing that he was Martian. Wheels were turning in Mr. Salvador’s calm brain, and plans were changing. He said: “Had I known that a man commanded this—group—I would not have thought an object lesson necessary. Come.” This last word was addressed to his squad and accompanied by another simple elegant gesture. The six almost rushed to precede him to the exit. Salvador’s eyes motioned Mitch to follow him toward the door. There he turned, still unruffled.

“Your men will follow you eagerly now, Captain Spain,” he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. “And the time will come when you will willingly follow me.” With a faint smile, as if of appreciation, he was gone.

There was a moment of silence Mitch stared at the closed door, wondering. Then a roar of jubilation burst out and his back was being pounded.

“Captain—what’d he mean, catting himself mister?”

“It’s some kind of political rank the Venerians have. You guys look here! I may need some honest witnesses.” Mitch held up the carbine for all to see, and broke open the chambers and clips, showing it to be unloaded. There was renewed excitement, more howls and jokes at the expense of the retreated Venerians.

But Salvador had not thought himself defeated.

“McKendrick, call the bridge. Tell the ship’s captain I want to set him. Let’s get on with this unpacking.”

Young Fishman, paintstick in hand again, stood staring vacantly down as if contemplating a design for the deck. It was beginning to soak in, how close a thing it had been.

But could the death-threat have been really serious?

The ship’s captain was coldly noncommittal, but he indicated there were no present plans for hanging any Estellers on the Solar Spot. During the next sleep period Mitch kept armed sentries posted in the marines’ quarters.

The next day he was summoned to the flagship. From the launch he had a view of a dance of bright dots, glinting in the light of distant Sol. Part of the fleet was already at ramming practice.

Behind the High Commander’s desk sat neither a poetry critic nor a musing bridegroom, but the ruler of a planet.

“Captain Spain—sit down.”

To be given a chair seemed a good sign. Waiting for Karlsen to finish some paperwork, Mitch’s thoughts wandered, recalling customs he had read about, ceremonies of saluting and posturing men had used in the past when huge permanent organizations had been formed for the sole purpose of killing other men and destroying their property. Certainly men were still as greedy as ever; and now the great conflict with the unliving was forcing them to organize again for mass destruction. Could those old days, when life fought all-out war against life, ever come again?

With a sigh, Karlsen pushed aside his papers. “What happened yesterday, between you and Mr. Salvador?”

“He said he meant to hang one of my men.” Mitch gave the story, as simply as he could. He omitted only Salvador’s parting words, without fully reasoning out why he did. “When I’m made responsible for men,” he finished, “nobody just walks in and hangs them. Though Pm not fully convinced they would have gone that far, I meant to be as serious about it as they were.”

The High Commander picked out a paper from his desk litter. “Two Esteeler marines have been hanged already. For fighting.”

“Damned arrogant Venerians I’d say.”

“I want none of that, Captain?”

“Yes sir. But I’m telling you we came mighty close to a shooting war, yesterday on the Solar Spot “

“I realize that.” Karlsen made a gesture expressive of futility. “Spain, is it impossible for the people of this fleet to cooperate, even when the survival—what is it?”

The Earthman, Hemphill, had entered the cabin without ceremony. His thin lips were pressed tighter than ever. “A courier has just arrived with news. Atsog is attacked.”

Karlsen’s strong hand crumpled papers with an involuntary twitch. “Any details?”

“The courier captain says he thinks the whole berserker fleet was there. The ground defenses were still resisting strongly when he pulled out. He just got his ship away in time.”

Atsog; a planet closer to Sol than the enemy had been thought to be. It was Sol they were coming for, all right. They must know it was the human center.

More people were at the cabin door. Hemphill stepped aside for the Venerian, Admiral Kemal. Mr. Salvador, hardly glancing at Mitch followed the admiral in.

“You have heard the news, High Commander?” Salvador began. Kemal, just ready to speak himself, gave his political officer an annoyed glance, but said nothing.

“That Atsog is attacked, yes,” said Karlsen.

“My ships can be ready to move few two hours,” said Kemal.

Karlsen sighed, and shook his head. “I watched today’s maneuvers. The fleet can hardly be ready in two weeks.”

Kemal’s shock and rage seemed genuine. “You’d do that? You’d let a Venerian planet die just because we haven’t knuckled under to your brother? Because we discipline his damned Esteeler—”

“Admiral Kemal, you will control yourself! You, and everyone else, are subject to discipline, while I command!”

Kemal got himself in hand, apparently with great effort.

Karlsen’s voice was not very loud, but the cabin seemed to resonate with it.

“You call hangings part of your discipline. I swear by the name of God that I will use even hanging, if I must, to enforce some kind of unity in this fleet. Understand, this fleet is the only military power that can oppose the massed berserkers. Trained, and unified, we can destroy them.”

No listener could doubt it for the moment.

“But whether Atsog falls, or Venus, or Esteel, I will not risk this fleet until I judge it ready.”

Into the silence, Salvador said, with an air of respect: “High Commander, the courier reported one thing more. That the Lady Christina de Dulcin was visiting on Atsog when the attack began—and that she must be there still.”

Karlsen closed his eyes for two seconds. Then he looked round at all of them. “If you have no further military business, gentlemen, get out.” His voice was still steady.

Walking beside Mitch down the flagship corridor, Hemphill broke a silence to say thoughtfully: “Karlsen is the man the cause needs, now. Some Venerians have approached me, tentatively, about joining a plot—I refused. We must make sure that Karlsen remains in command.”

“A plot?”

Hemphill did not elaborate.

Mitch said: “What they did just now was pretty low—letting him make that speech about going slow, no matter what—and then breaking the news to him about his lady being on Atsog.”

Hemphill said: “He knew already she was there. That news arrived on yesterday’s courier.”

IV

There was a dark nebula made up of clustered billions of rocks and older than the sun, named the Stone Place by men. Those who gathered there now were not men and they gave nothing a name; they hoped nothing, feared nothing, wondered at nothing. They had no pride and no regret, but they had plans—a billion subtleties, carved from electrical pressure and flow—and their built-in purpose, toward which their planning circuits moved. As if by instinct the berserker machines had formed themselves into a fleet when the time was ripe, when the eternal enemy, Life, had begun to mass its strength.

The planet named Atsog in the life-language had yielded a number of still functioning life-units from its deepest shelters, though millions had been destroyed while their stubborn defenses were beaten down. Functional life-units were sources of valuable information—long ago the berserkers had learned human languages, and something of human psychology. There were stimuli, even the threat of which usually brought at least limited cooperation from any life-unit.

The life-unit (designating itself General Bradin) which had controlled the defense of Atsog, was among those captured, almost undamaged. Its dissection was begun within perception of the other captured life-units. The thin outer covering tissue was delicately removed, and placed upon a suitable form, to preserve it for further study. The life-units which controlled others were examined carefully, whenever possible.

After this stimulus, it was no longer possible to communicate intelligibly with General Bradin; in a matter of hours it ceased to function at all.

In itself a trifling victory, this small unit of watery matter was freed of the aberration called Life. But the flow of information now increased from the nearby units which had perceived the process.

It was soon confirmed that the Life-units were assembling a fleet. More detailed information was sought. One important lane of questioning concerned the life-link which would control this fleet. Gradually, from interrogations and the reading of captured records, a picture emerged.

A name: Johann Karlsen. A biography. Contradictory things were said about him, but the facts showed he had risen rapidly to a position of control over millions of life-units.

Throughout the long war, the berserker computers had gathered and collated all available data on the men who became leaders of Life. Now against this data they matched, point for point, every detail that could be learned about Johann Karlsen.

The behavior of these leading units often resisted analysis, as if some quality of the life-disease in them was forever beyond the reach of machines. These individuals used logic, but sometimes it seemed they were not bound by logic. The most dangerous life-units of all sometimes acted in ways that seemed to contradict the known supremacy of the laws of physics and of chance, as if they could be minds possessed of true free will, instead of its illusion.

And Karlsen was one of these, supremely one of these. His fitting of the dangerous pattern became plainer with every new comparison.

In the past, such life-units had been troublesome local problems. For one of them to command the whole life-fleet with a decisive battle approaching, was extremely dangerous to the cause of Death.

The outcome of the approaching battle seemed almost certain to be favorable, since there were probably only two hundred ships in the lifefleet. But die brooding berserkers could not be certain enough of anything, white a unit like Johann Karlsen led the living. And if the battle was long postponed the enemy Life could become stronger. There were hints that inventive Life was developing new weapons, newer and more powerful ships.

The wordless conference reached a decision. There were berserker reserves, which had waited for millennia along the galactic rim, dead and uncaring in their hiding places among dust clouds and heavy nebulae, and on dark stars. For this climactic battle they must be summoned, the power of Life to resist must be broken now.

From the berserker fleet at the Stone Place, between Atsog’s Sun and Sol, courier machines sped out toward the galactic rim.

It would take some time for all the reserves to gather. Meanwhile, the interrogations went on.

“Listen, I’ve decided I can help you, see. About this guy Karlsen, I know you want to find out about him. Only I got a delicate brain. If anything hurts me my brain don’t work at all, so no rough stuff on me, understand? I’ll be no good to you ever if you use rough stuff on me.”

This prisoner was unusual. The interrogating computer borrowed new circuits for itself, chose symbols and hurled them back at the life-unit.

“What can you tell me about Karlsen?”

“Listen, you’re gonna treat me right, aren’t you?”

“Useful information will be rewarded. Untruth will bring you unpleasant stimuli.”

“I’ll tell you this now—the woman Karlsen was going to marry is here, you caught her alive in the same shelter Bradin was in.”

“Now if you sort of give me control over all these other prisoners, make things nice for me, why I bet I can think up the best way for you to use her. If you just tell him you’ve got her, why he might not believe you, see?”

Out on the galactic rim, the signals of the heralds called out the hidden reserves of the unliving. Subtle detectors heard the signals, and triggered the great engines into cold flame. The forcefield brain in each strategic housing awoke to livelier death. Each reserve machine acknowledged the call and began to move with metallic leisure, shaking loose its cubic miles of weight and power, freeing itself from dust, or ice, or age-old mud, or solid rock—then rising and turning, orienting itself in space. All converging, they drove faster than light toward the Stone Place, where the destroyers of Atsog awaited their reinforcement.

With the arrival of each reserve machine, the linked berserker computers saw victory more probable. But still the quality of one life-unit made all computations uncertain.

V

Felipe Nogara raised a strong and hairy hand, and wiped it gently across one glowing segment of the panel before his chair. The center of his private study was filled by an enormous display sphere, which now showed a representation of the explored part of the galaxy. At Nogara’s gesture, the sphere dimmed and began to relight itself in a slow intricate sequence.

A wave of his hand had just theoretically eliminated the berserker fleet as a factor in the power game. To leave it in, he told himself, diffused the probabilities too widely. It was really the competing power of Ventis—and that of two or three other prosperous, aggressive planets—which occupied his mind.

Well insulated in this private room from the hum of Esteel City and from the routine press of business, Nogara watched his computers’ new prediction take shape, showing the political power structure as it might exist one year from now, two yean, five. As he had expected, this sequence showed Esteel expanding in influence. It was even possible that he could become ruler of the human galaxy.

Nogara wondered at his own calm in the face of such an idea. Twelve or fifteen years ago he had driven with all his power of intellect and will to advance himself. Gradually, the moves in the game had, come to seem automatic. Today, there was a chance that almost every thinking being known to exist would come to acknowledge him as ruler—and it meant less to him than the first local election he had ever won.

Diminishing returns, of course. The more gained, the greater gain needed to produce an equal pleasure. At least when he was alone. If his aides were watching this prediction now it would certainly excite them, and he would catch their excitement.

But, being alone, he sighed. The berserker fleet would not vanish at the wave of a hand. Today, what was probably the final plea for more help had arrived from Earth. The trouble was that granting Sol more help would take ships and men and money from Nogara’s expansion projects. Wherever he did that now he stood to lose out, eventually, to other men. Old Sol would have to survive the coming attack with no more help from Esteel.

Nogara realized, wondering dully at himself, that he would as soon see even Esteel destroyed as see control slip from his hands. Now why? He could not say he loved his planet or people, but be bad been, by and large, a good ruler, not a tyrant. Good government was, after all, good politics.

His desk chimed the melodious notes that meant something was newly available for his amusement Nogara chose to answer.

“Sir,” said a woman’s voice, “two new possibilities are in the shower room now.”

Projected from hidden cameras, a scene glowed into life above Nogara’s desk; bodies gleaming in a spray of water.

“They are from prison, sir, anxious for any reprieve.”

Watching, Nogara felt only a weariness; and, yes, something like self-contempt. He questioned himself: Where in all the universe is there a reason why I should not seek pleasure as I choose? And again: Will I dabble in sadism, next? And if I do, what of it?

But what after that?

Having paused respectfully, the voice asked: “Perhaps this evening you would prefer something different?”

“Later,” he said. The scene vanished. Maybe I should try to be a Believer for a while, he thought. What an intense thrill it must be for Johann to sin. If he ever does.

That had been a genuine pleasure, seeing Johann given command of the Solarian Fleet, watching the Venerians boil. But it had raised another problem. Johann, victorious over the berserkers would emerge as the greatest hero in human history. Would that not make even Johann dangerously ambitious? The thing to do would be to ease him out of the public eye, give him some highranked job, honest, but dirty and inglorious. Hunting out outlaws somewhere, Johann would probably accept that, being Johann. But if Johann bid for galactic power, he would have to take his chances. Any pawn in the game might be removed.

Nogara shook his head. Suppose Johann lost the coming battle, and lost Sol? A berserker victory would not be a matter of diffusing probabilities, that was pleasant double talk for a tired mind to fool itself with. A berserker victory would mean the end of Earthman in the galaxy, probably within a few years. No computer was needed to see that.

There was a little bottle in his desk; Nogara brought it out and looked at it. The end of the chess game was in it. The end of all pleasure and boredom and pain. Looking at the vial caused him no emotion. In it was a powerful drug which threw a man into a kind of ecstasy—a transcendental excitement that within a few minutes burst the heart or the blood vessels of the brain. Someday, when all else was exhausted, when it was completely a berserker universe—

He put the vial away and he put away die final appeal from Earth. What did it all matter? Was it not a berserker universe already, everything determined by the random swirls of condensing gas, before the stars were born?

Felipe Nogara leaned back in his chair, watching his computers marking out the galactic chessboard.

VI

Through the fleet the rumor spread that Karlsen delayed because it was a Venerian colony under siege. Aboard the Solar Spot, Mitch saw no delays for any reason. He had time for only work, quick meals and sleep. When the final ram-and-board drill had been completed, the last stores and ammunition loaded, Mitch was too tired to feel much except relief. He rested, not frightened or elated, while the Spot wheeled into a rank with forty other arrow-shaped ships, dipped with them into the first Cplus jump of the deep space search, and began to hunt the enemy.

It was days later before dull routine was broken by a jangling battle alarm. Mitch was wakened by R; before his eyes were fully opened, he was scrambling into the armored suit stored under his bunk. Nearby, some marines grumbled about practice alerts; but none of them was moving slowly.

“This is High Commander Karlsen speaking,” boomed the overhead speakers. “This is not a practice alert, repeat, not practice. Two berserkers have been sighted. One we’ve just glimpsed at extreme range. Likely it will get away, though the Ninth Squadron is chasing if.

“The other is not going to escape. In a matter of minutes we will have it englobed, in normal space. We are not going to destroy it by bombardment; we are going to soften it up a bit, and then see how well we can really ram-andboard. If there are any bugs left in our tactics, we’d better find out now. Squadrons Two, Four, and Seven will each send one ship to the ramming attack. I’m going back on Command Channel now, Squadron Commanders.”

“Squadron Four,” sighed Sergeant McKendrick. “More Esteelers in our company than any other. How can we miss?”

The marines lay like dragon’s teeth seeded in the dark, strapped into the padded acceleration couches that had been their bunks, while the psych-music tried to hill them, and those who were Believers prayed. In the darkness Mitch listened, and passed on to his men the terse battle reports that came to him as marine commander on the ship.

He was afraid. What was death, that men should fear it so? It could be only the end of all experience. That was inevitable, and beyond imagination, and he feared it.

The preliminary bombardment did not take long. Two hundred and thirty ships of life held a single great trapped enemy in the center of their hollow sphere formation. The enemy did not give a damn if he was trapped because he was dead already and had always been dead.

Listening in the dark to laconic voices, Mitch heard how the great berserker fought back, as if with the finest human courage and contempt for odds. Could you really fight machines when you could never make them suffer pain or fear?

But you could defeat machines.

And this time, for once, humanity had far too many guns. It would be easy to blow this berserker into vapor. Would it be best to do so? There were bound to be marine casualties in any boarding no matter how favorable the odds. But a true combat test of the boarding scheme was badly needed before the decisive battle came to be fought. And, too, this enemy might hold living prisoners who might be rescued by boarders. A High Commander probably did well to have a rocklike certainty of his own rightness.

The order was given. The Spot and two other chosen ships fell in toward the battered enemy at the center of the englobement Straps held Mitch firmly, but the gravity had been turned off for the ramming, and weightlessness gave the impression that his body would fly and vibrate like a pellet shaken in a bottle with the coming impact. Soundless dark, soft cushioning, and lulling music; but a few words came into the helmet and the body cringed, knowing that outside were the black cold guns and the hurtling machines, unimaginable forces leaping now to meet. Now—

Reality shattered in through all the protection and padding. The shaped atomic charge at the tip of the ramming prow opened the berserker’s skin. In five seconds of crashing impact, the prow vaporized, melted, and crumpled its length away, the true hull driving behind it until the Solar Spot was sunk like an arrow into the body of her enemy.

Mitch spoke for the last time to the bridge of the Solar Spot, while his men lurched past him in free fall, their suit lights glaring.

“My panel shows Sally Port Three the only one not blocked,” he said. “We’re all going out that way.”

“Remember,” said a Venetian voice, “your first job is to protect this ship against counterattack.”

“Roger.” If they wanted to give him offensively unnecessary reminders, now was not the time for argument. He broke contact with the bridge and hurried after his men.

The other two ships were to send their boarders fighting toward the strategic housing, which would be somewhere deep in the berserker’s center. The marines from the Solar Spot were to try to find and save any prisoners the berserker might hold. A berserker usually held prisoners near its surface, so the first search would be made by squads spreading out under the hundreds of square kilometers of hull.

In the dark chaos of wrecked machinery just outside the sally port there was no sign yet of counterattack. The berserkers’ unknown builders supposedly had not constructed them to fight battles inside their own metallic skins, upon which fact rode the fleet’s hopes for success in a major battle.

Mitch left forty men to defend the hull of the Spot, and himself led a squad of ten out into the labyrinth. There was no use setting himself up in a command post—communications in here would be impossible, once out of line-ofsight.

The first man in each searching squad carried a mass spectrometer, an instrument that would detect the stray atoms of oxygen bound to leak from compartments where living beings breathed. The last man wore on one hand a device to blaze a trail with arrows of luminous paint; without a trail, getting lost in this three-dimensional maze would be almost inevitable.

“Got a scent, Captain,” said Mitch’s spectrometer man, after five minutes’ casting through the squad’s assigned sector of the dying berserker.

“Keep on it.” Mitch was second in line, his carbine ready.

The detector man led the way through st dark and weightless mechanical universe, perhaps last seen by living eyes fifty-thousand years before. Several times he paused, adjusting his instrument and waving its probe. The pace was rapid; men trained in free fall, given plenty of holds to thrust and steer by could move faster than runners.

A towering, multi-jointed shape rose up before the detector man, brandishing blue-white welding arcs like swords.

Before Mitch was aware of aiming his carbine fired twice. The shells ripped the machine open and pounded it backward; it was only some semi-robotic maintenance device, not built for fighting.

The detector man had nerve; he plunged right on. The squad kept pace with him, their suit lights scouting out unfamiliar shapes and distances, cutting knife-edge shadows m the vacuum, glare and darkness mellowed only by reflection.

“Getting close!”

And then they came to it. It was a place like the top of a huge dry well. An ovoid like a ship’s launch, very thickly armored, had apparently been raised through the well from deep inside the berserker, and was now clamped to a dock.

“It’s the launch, it’s oozing oxygen.”

“Captain, there’s some kind of airlock on this side. Outer door’s open.”

It looked like the smooth and easy entrance of a trap.

“Keep your eyes open.” Mitch went into the airlock. “Be ready to blast me out of here if I don’t show in one minute.”

It was an ordinary airlock, probably cut from some human spaceship. He shut himself inside, and then got the inner door open.

Most of the interior was a single compartment. In the center was an acceleration couch, holding a nude female mannikin. He drifted near, saw that her head had been depilated and that there were tiny beads of blood still on her scalp, as if probes had just been withdrawn.

When his suit lamp hit her face she opened dead blue staring eyes, blinking mechanically. Still not sure that he was looking at a living human being, Mitch drifted beside her and touched her arm with metal fingers. Then all at once her face became human, her eyes coming from death through nightmare to reality. She saw him and cried out. Before he could free her there were crystal drops of tears in the weightless air.

Listening to his rapid orders, she held one hand modestly in front of her, and the other over her raw scalp. Then she nodded, and took into her mouth the end of a breathing tube which would dole air from Mitch’s suit tank. In a few more seconds he had her wrapped in a clinging, binding rescue blanket, temporary proof against vacuum and freezing.

The detector man had found no other oxygen source near the launch. Mitch ordered his squad back along their luminous trail.

At the sally port, he heard that things were not going well with the attack. Real fighting robots were defending the strategic housing, where its forcefield brain was buried, miles inside it. At least eight men had been killed down there. Two more ships were going to ram and board.

Mitch carried the girl through the sally port and three more friendly hatches. The monstrously thick hull of the ship shuddered and sang around him; the Solar Spot, her mission accomplished, boarders retrieved, was being withdrawn. Full weight came back, and light.

“In here, Captain.” QUARANTINE, said the sign. A berserker’s prisoner might have been deliberately infected with something contagious. Men knew how to deal with such tricks; the machines had tried them before.

Inside the infirmary, he set her down. While medics and nurses scrambled around, lie unfolded the blanket from die girl’s face, remembering to leave it curled over her shaven head, and opened his own helmet.

“You can spit out the tube, now,” he told her, in his rasping voice.

She did so and opened her eyes again.

“Oh, are you real?” she whispered. Her hand pushed its way out of the blanket folds and slid over his armor “Oh, let me touch a human being again!” Her hand moved up to his exposed face and gripped his cheek and neck.

“I’m real enough. You’re all right, now.”

One of the bustling doctors came to a sudden, frozen halt, staring at the girl. Then he spun around on his heel and hurried away. What was wrong?

Others sounded confident, reassuring the girl as they ministered to her. She wouldn’t let go of Mitch, die became nearly hysterical when they tried gently to separate her from him.

“I guess you’d better stay,” a doctor told him.

He sat there holding her hand, his helmet and gauntlets off. He looked away while they did medical things to her. They still spoke reassuringly; he thought they were finding nothing much wrong.

“What’s your name?” she asked him when the medics were through for the moment. Her head was bandaged; her slender arm came from between sheets to maintain contact with his hand.

“Mitchell Spain.” Now that he got a good look at her, a living young human female, he was in no hurry at all to get away. “What’s yours?”

A shadow crossed her face. “I’m—not sure.”

There was a sudden commotion at the infirmary door; High Commander Karlsen was pushing past protesting doctors into the QUARANTINE area. Karlsen came on until he was standing beside Mitch, but he was not looking at Mitch.

“Chris,” he said to the girl. “Thank God.” There were tears in his eyes.

The Lady Christina de Dulcin turned her eyes from Mitch to Johann Karlsen, and screamed in abject terror.

VII

“Now, Captain, tell me how you found her and brought her out.”

Mitch began his tale. The two men were alone in Karlsen’s monastic cabin, just off the flagship’s bridge. The fight was over, the berserker a torn and harmless hulk. No other prisoners had been aboard it.

“They planned to send her back to me,” Karlsen said staring into space, when Mitch had finished his account. “We attacked before it could launch her toward us. It kept her safe, and sent her back to me.

Mitch was silent.

Karlsen’s red-rimmed eyes fastened on him. “She’s been brainwashed, Poet. It can be done with some permanence, you know, when advantage is taken of the subject’s natural tendencies. I suppose she’s never thought too much of me. There were political reasons for her to consent to our marriage . . . she screams when the doctors even mention my name. They tell me it’s possible that horrible things were done to her by some man-shaped machine made to look like me. Other people are tolerable, to a degree. But it’s you she wants to be alone with, you she needs.”

“She cried out when I left her, but—me?”

“The natural tendency, you see. For her to—love—the man who saved her. The machines set her mind to fasten all the joy of rescue upon the first male human face she saw. The doctors assure me such things can be done. They’ve given her drugs, but even in sleep the instruments show her nightmares, her pain, and she cries out for you. What do you feel toward her?”

“Sir, I’ll do anything I can. What do you want of me?”

“I want you to stop her suffering, what else?” Karlsen’s voice rose to a ragged shout. “Stay alone with her, stop her pain if you can!”

He got himself under a kind of control. “Go on. The doctors will take you in. Your gear will be brought over from the Solar Spot.” Mitch stood up. Any words he could think of sounded in his mind like sickening attempts at humor. He nodded, and hurried out.

“This is your last chance to join us,” said the Venerian, Salvador, looking up and down the dim corridors of this remote outer part of the flagship. “Our patience is worn, and we will strike soon. With the de Dulcin woman in her present condition, Nogara’s brother is doubly unfit to command.”

The Venerian must be carrying a pocket spy-jammer; a multisonic whine was setting Hemphill’s teeth on edge. And so was the Venerian.

“Karlsen is vital to the human cause whether we like him or not,” Hemphill said, his own patience about gone, but his voice calm and reasonable. “Don’t you see to what lengths the berserkers have gone, to get at him? They sacrificed a perfectly good machine just to deliver his brainwashed woman here, to attack him psychologically.”

“Well. If that is true they have succeeded. If Karlsen had any value before, now he will be able to think of nothing but his woman and the Martian.”

Hemphill sighed. “Remember, he refused to hurry the fleet to Atsog to try to save her. He hasn’t failed yet. Until he does, you and the others must give up this plotting against him.”

Salvador backed away a step, and spat on the deck in rage. A calculated display, thought Hemphill.

“Look to yourself, Earth man!” Salvador hissed. “Karlsen’s days are numbered, and the days of those who support him too willingly!” He spun around and walked away.

“Wait!” Hemphill called, quietly. The Venerian stopped and turned with an air of arrogant reluctance. Hemphill shot him through the heart with a laser pistol. The weapon made a splitting, crackling noise in atmosphere.

“You were good at talking and scheming,” Hemphill mused aloud, prodding the dying man with his toe, making sure no second shot was needed. “But too devious, to lead the fight against the damned machines.”

He bent quickly to search the body, and stood up elated. He had found a list of officers’ names, some few underlined, some, including his own, followed by an interrogation point. Another document was a scribbled compilation of the units under command of certain Venerian officers. There were a few more notes; altogether, plenty of evidence for the arrest of the hard-core plotters. It might tend to split the fleet, but—

Hemphill looked up sharply, then relaxed. The man approaching one of his own, whom he had stationed nearby.

“We’ll take these to the High Commander at once.” Hemphill waved the papers. “There’ll be just time to clean out the traitors and reorganize command before we face battle.”

Yet he delayed for another moment, staring down at Salvador’s corpse. The plotter had been overconfident and inept, but still dangerous. Did some sort of luck operate to protect Karlsen? Karlsen himself did not match Hemphill’s ideal of a war leader, he was not as ruthless as machinery or as cold as metal. Yet the damned machines made great sacrifices to attack him.

Hemphill shrugged, and hurried on his way.

“Mitch, I do love you. I know what the doctors say it is, but what do they really know about me?”

Christina de Dulcin reclined upon a luxurious acceleration couch, in what was nominally the sleeping room of the High Commander’s quarters. Karlsen had never occupied die place, preferring a small cabin.

Mitchell Spain sat three feet from Chris, afraid to so much as touch her hand, afraid of what he might do, and what she might do. They were alone, and he felt sure they were unwatched. Chris had even demanded assurances against spy devices and Karlsen had sent his pledge. Besides, what kind of ship would have spy devices built into its highest officer’s quarters?

A situation for bedroom farce, but not when you had to live through it. The man outside taking the strain, had two hundred ships dependent on him now, and many human planets would be lifeless in five years if the coming battle failed.

“What do you really know about me, Chris?” he asked.

“I know you mean life itself to me. Oh, Mitch, I have no time now to be coy, and mannered, and every millimeter a lady. I’ve been all those things. And—once—I would have married a man like Karlsen, for political reasons. But all that was before Atsog.”

Her voice dropped on the last word, and her hand on her robe made a convulsive grasping gesture. He had to lean forward and take it.

“Chris, Atsog is in the past, now.”

“Atsog will never be over, completely over, for me. I keep remembering more and more of it. Mitch, the machines made us watch while they skinned General Bradin alive. I saw that. I can’t bother with silly things like politics anymore, life is too short for them. I don’t fear anything anymore, either, except driving you away . . .”

He felt pity and lust, and half a dozen other maddening things.

“Karlsen’s a good man,” he said finally.

She repressed a shudder. “I suppose,” she said, in a controlled voice. “But Mitch, what do you feel for me? Tell the truth—if you don’t love me now, I know you will, in time.” She smiled faintly, and raised a hand. “When my silly hair grows back.”

“Your silly hair.” His voice almost broke. He reached to touch her face, then pulled his fingers back as if from a flame. “Chris, you’re his girl, and too much depends on him.”

“I was never his.”

“Still . . . I can’t lie to you, Chris; maybe I can’t tell you the truth, either, about how I feel. The battle’s coming, everything’s up in the air, paralyzed. No one can plan . . .” He made an awkward, uncertain gesture.

“Mitch.” Her voice was understanding. “This is terrible for you, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’ll do nothing to make it worse. Will you call the doctor? As long as I know you’re somewhere near, I think I can rest, now.”

VIII

Karlsen studied Salvador’s papers in silence for some minutes, like a man pondering a chess problem. He did not seem greatly surprised.

“I have a few dependable men standing ready,” Hemphill finally volunteered. “We can quickly—arrest—the leaders of this plot.” The blue eyes searched him. “Commander, was Salvador’s killing truly necessary?”

“I thought so,” said Hemphill blandly. “He was reaching for his own weapon.”

Karlsen glanced once more at the papers and reached a decision.

“Commander Hemphill, I want you to pick four ships, and scout the far edge of the Stone Place nebula. We don’t want to push beyond it, without knowing where the enemy is, and give him a chance to get between us and Sol. Use caution—to get the general location of the bulk of his fleet is enough.”

“Very well.” Hemphill nodded. The reconnaissance made sense; and if Karlsen wanted to get Hemphill out of the way, and deal with his human opponents by his own methods, well, let him. Those methods often seemed soft-headed to Hemphill, but they seemed to work for Karlsen. If the damned machines for some reason found Karlsen unendurable, then Hemphill would support him, to the point of cheerful murder and beyond.

What else really mattered in the universe, besides smashing the damned machines?

Mitch spent hours every day alone with Chris. He kept from her the wild rumors which circulated throughout the fleet. Salvador’s violent end was whispered about, and guards were posted near Karlsen’s quarters. Some said Admiral Kemal was on the verge of open revolt.

And now the Stone Place was close ahead of the fleet; ebony dust and fragments, like a million shattered planets, blotting out half the sky. No ship could move through the Stone Place; every cubic kilometer of it held enough matter to prevent C-plus travel or normal movement.

The fleet headed toward one sharply defined edge, around which Hemphill’s scouting squadron had already disappeared.

She grows a little saner, a little calmer, every day,” said Mitch, entering the High Commander’s monastic cabin.

Karlsen looked up from his desk. The papers before him looked like lists of names, in Venerian script. “I thank you for that word, Poet Does she speak of me?”

“No.”

They eyed each other, the poor and ugly cynic, the anointed and handsome Believer.

“Poet,” Karlsen asked suddenly, “how do you deal with deadly enemies, when you find them in your power?”

“We Martians are supposed to be a violent people. Do you expect me to pass sentence on myself?”

Karlsen appeared not to understand, for a moment. “Oh. No. I was not speaking of—you and I, and Chris. Not of personal affairs. I suppose I was only thinking aloud, asking for a sign.”

“Then don’t ask me, ask your God. But didn’t he tell you to forgive your enemies?”

“He did.” Karlsen nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “You know, He wants a lot from us. A real hell of a lot.”

It was a peculiar sensation, to become suddenly convinced that the man you were watching was a genuine, non-hypocritical Believer. Mitch was not sure he had ever met the like before.

Nor had he ever seen Karlsen quite like this—passive, waiting, asking for a sign. As if there was in fact some Purpose outside the layers of a man’s own mind, that could inspire him. Mitch thought about it. If . . .

But that was all mystical nonsense.

Karlsen’s communicator sounded. Mitch could not make out what the other voice was saying, but he watched the effect on the High Commander. Energy and determination were coming back, there were subtle signs of the return of force, of the tremendous conviction of being right. It was like watching the gentle glow when a fusion power lamp was ignited.

“Yes,” Karlsen was saying. “Yes, well done.”

Then he raised the Venerian papers from his desk; it was as if he raised them only by force of will, his fingers only gesturing beneath them.

“The news is from Hemphill,” he said to Mitch, almost absently. “The berserker fleet is just around the bulge of the Stone Place from us. Hemphill estimates they are two hundred strong, and thinks them unaware of our presence. We attack at once. Man your battle station, Poet; God be with you.” He turned back to his communicator. “Ask Admiral Kemal to my cabin at once. Tell him to bring his staff. In particular—” He glanced at the Venerian papers and read off several names.

“Good luck to you, sir.” Mitch had delayed to say that. Before he hurried out, he saw Karlsen stuffing the Venerian papers into his trash disintegrator.

Before Mitch reached his own cabin, the battle horns were winding. He had armed and suited himself and was making his way back through the suddenly crowded narrow corridors toward the bridge, when the ship’s speakers boomed suddenly to life, picking up Karlsen’s voice:

“. . . whatever wrongs we have done you, by word, or deed, or by things left undone. I ask you now to forgive. And in the name of every man who calls me friend or leader, I pledge that any grievance we have against you, is from this moment wiped from memory.”

Everyone in the crowded passage hesitated in the rush for battle stations. Mitch found himself staring into the eyes of a huge, well-armed Venerian ship’s policeman, probably here on the flagship as some officer’s bodyguard.

There came an amplified cough and rumble, and then the voice of Admiral Kemal:

“We—we are brothers, Esteeler and Venerian, and all of us. All of us, together now, the living against the berserker.” Kemal’s voice rose to a shout: “Destruction to the damned machines, and death to their builders! Let every man remember Atsog!”

“Remember Atsog!” roared Karlsen’s voice.

In the corridor there was a moment’s hush, like that before a towering wave smites down. Then a great insensate shout. Mitch found himself with tears in his eyes, yelling something.

“Remember General Bradin,” cried the big Venerian, grabbing Mitch and hugging him, lifting him, armor and all. “Death to his flayers!”

“Death to die flayers!” The shout ran like a flame through the corridors. No one needed to be told that the same things were happening in all the ships in the fleet. AH at once there was no room for anything less than brotherhood, no time for anything less than glory.

“Destruction to the damned machines!”

Near the flagship’s center of gravity was the bridge, only a dais holding a ring of combat chairs, each with its clustered controls and dials.

“Boarding Coordinator ready,” Mitch reported, strapping himself in.

The viewing sphere near the bridge’s center showed the human advance, in two leapfrogging lines of over a hundred ships each. Each ship was a green dot in the sphere, positioned as truthfully as the flagship’s computers could manage. The irregular surface of the Stone Place moved beside the battle lines in a series of jerks; the flagship was traveling by C-plus microjumps, so the presentation in the viewing sphere was a succession of still pictures at second-and-a-half intervals. Slowed by the mass of their C-plus cannon, the six fat green symbols of die Venerian heavy weapons ships labored forward, falling behind the rest of die fleet.

In Mitch’s headphones someone was saying: “In about ten minutes we can expect to reach—” The voice died away. There was a red dot in the sphere already, and then another, and then a dozen, rising like tiny suns around the bulge of dark nebula. For long seconds the men on the bridge were silent while the berserker advance came into view. Hemphill’s scouting party must, after all, have been detected, for the berserker fleet was not cruising, but attacking. There was a battlenet of a hundred or more red dots, and now there were two nets, leapfrogging in and out of space like the human lines. And still the red berserkers rose into view, their formations growing, spreading out to englobe and crush a smaller fleet.

“I make it three hundred machines,” said a pedantic and somewhat effeminate voice, breaking the silence with cold precision. Once, the mere knowledge that three hundred berserkers existed might have crushed all human hopes. In this place, in this hour, fear itself could frighten no one.

The voices in Mitch’s headphones began to transact the business of opening a battle. There was nothing yet for him to do but listen and watch.

The six heavy green marks were falling further behind; without hesitation, Karlsen was hurling his entire fleet straight at the enemy center. The foe’s strength had been underestimated, but it seemed the berserker command had made a similar error, because the red formations too were being forced to regroup, spread themselves wider.

The distance between fleets was still too great for normal weapons to be effective, but the laboring heavy-weapons ships with their Cplus cannon were now in range, and they could fire through friendly formations almost as easily as not At their volley Mitch thought he felt space jar around him; it was some freak secondary effect that the human brain noticed, really only wasted energy. Each projectile, blasted by explosives to a safe distance from the launching ship, mounted its own C-plus engine, which then accelerated the projectile while it flickered in and out of reality on microtimers.

Their leaden masses magnified by velocity, the huge slugs skipped through existence like stones across water, passing like phantoms through the fleet of life, emerging fully into normal space only as they approached their target, traveling then like de Broglie wavicles, their matter churning internally with a phase velocity greater than that of light.

Almost instantly after Mitch felt the slugs’ ghostly passage, one red dot began to expand and thin into a cloud, still tiny in the viewing sphere. Someone gasped. In a few more moments, the flagship’s own weapons, beams and missiles, went into action.

The enemy center stopped, two million miles ahead, but his flanks came on smoothly as the screw of a vast meat-grinder, threatening englobement of the first line of human ships.

Karlsen did not hesitate, and a great turning point flickered past in a second. The life-fleet hurtled on, deliberately into, the trap, straight for the hinge of the jaws.

Space twitched and warped around Mitchell Spain. Every ship in the fleet was firing now, and every enemy answering, and the energies released plucked through his armor like ghostly fingers. Green dots and red vanished from the sphere, but not many of either as yet.

The voices in Mitch’s helmet slackened, as events raced into a pattern that shifted too fast for human thought to follow. Now for a time the fight would be computer against computer, faithful slave of life against outlaw, neither caring, neither knowing.

The viewing sphere on the flagship’s bridge was shifting ranges almost in a flicker. One swelling red dot was only a million miles away, then half of that, then half again. And now the flagship came into normal space for the final lunge of the attack, firing itself like a bullet at the enemy.

Again the viewer switched to a closer range, and the chosen foe was no longer a red dot, but a great forbidding castle, tilted crazily, black against the stars. Only a hundred miles away, then half of that. The velocity of closure slowed to less than a mile a second. As expected, the enemy was accelerating, trying to get away from what must look to it like a suicide charge. For the last time Mitch checked his chair, his suit, his weapons. Chris, be safe in a cocoon. The berserker swelled in the sphere, gun flashes showing now around his steel-ribbed belly. A small one, this, maybe only ten times the flagship’s bulk. Always a rotten spot to be found, in every one of them, under their skins old wounds, for the life of the galaxy had fought them for fifty thousand years. Try to run, you monstrous obscenity, try in vain.

Closer, twisting closer. Now!

Lights all gone, falling in the dark for one endless second—

Impact. Mitch’s chair shook him, the gentle pads inside his armor battering and bruising him. The expendable ramming prow would be vaporizing, shattering and crumpling, dissipating energy down to a level the battering-ram ship could endure.

When the crashing stopped, noise still remained, a whining droning symphony of stressed metal and escaping air and gasses, like sobbing breathing. The great machines were locked together now, half the length of the flagship embedded in the berserker.

A rough ramming, but no one on the bridge was injured. Damage control reported that the expected air leaks were being controlled. Gunnery reported that it could extend no turret inside the wound yet. Drive reported ready for a maximum effort.

Drive!

The ship twisted in the wound it had made. This could be victory, here tearing the enemy open, sawing his metal bowels out into space. The bridge twisted with the structure of the ship, this warship that was more solid metal than anything else. For a moment, Mitch thought he could conic close to comprehending the power of the engines men had built.

“No use, Commander. We’re wedged in.”

The enemy endured. The berserker memory would already be searched, the plans made, the counterattack on the flagship coming, without fear or mercy.

The Ship Commander turned his head to look at Johann Karlsen. It had been foreseen that once a battle had reached this melee stage there would be little a High Commander could do. Even if the flagship were not half-buried in an enemy hull, all space nearby was a complete inferno of confused destruction, through which any meaningful communication would be impossible. If Karlsen was helpless now, neither could the berserker computers still link themselves into a single brain.

“Fight your ship, sir,” said Karlsen. He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair, staring at the clouded viewing sphere as if trying to make sense of the few flickering lights within it.

The Ship Commander immediately ordered his marines to board.

Mitch saw them out the sally ports. Then, sitting still was worse than any action. “Sir, I request permission to join the boarders.”

Karlsen seemed not to hear. He disqualified himself, for now, from any use of power; especially to set Mitchell Spain in the forefront of the battle, or to hold him bade.

The Ship Commander considered. He wanted to keep a Boarding Coordinator on the bridge; but experienced men could be desperately short in the fighting. “Go, then. Do what you can to help defend our sally ports.”

IX

This berserker defended itself well with soldier-robots. The marines had hardly gotten away from the embedded hull when the counterattack came, cutting most of them off.

In a narrow zig-zag passage leading out to the port near which fighting was heaviest, an armored figure met Mitch. “Captain Spain? I’m Sergeant Broom, acting Defense Commander here. Bridge says you’re to take over. It’s a little rough. Gunnery can’t get a turret working inside the wound. The dankers have all kinds of room to maneuver, and they keep coming at us.”

“Let’s get out there, then.”

The two of them hurried forward, through a passage that became only a warped slit. The flagship was bent here, a strained swordblade forced into a chink of armor.

“Nothing rotten here,” said Mitch, climbing at last out of the sally port. There were sudden distant flashes of light, and the sudden glow of hot metal, by which to see braced girders, like tall buildings, among which the flagship had jammed itself.

“Eh? No.” Broom must be wondering what he was talking about. But the sergeant stuck to business, pointing out to Mitch where he had about a hundred men disposed among the chaos of tom metal and drifting debris. “The clankers don’t use guns. They just drift in, sneaking, or charge in a wave, and get at us hand-to-hand, if they can. Last wave we lost six men.”

Whining gusts of gas came out of the deep caverns, and scattered blobs of liquid, along with the flashes of light, and deep shudders through the metal. The damned thing might be dying, or just getting ready to fight; there was no way to tell.

“Any more of the boarding parties get back?” Mitch asked.

“No. Doesn’t look good for ’em.”

“Port defense, this is gunnery,” said a cheerful radio voice. “We’re getting the eighty-degree upper forward turret working.”

“Well, then use it!” Mitch rasped back. “We’re inside, you can’t help hitting something!”

A minute later, searchlights moved out from doored recesses in the flagship’s hull, and stabbed into the great chaotic cavern.

“Here they come again!” yelled Broom. Hundreds of meters away, beyond the melted stump of the flagship’s prow, a line of figures drifted nearer. The searchlights questioned them; they were not suited men. Mitch was opening his mouth to yell when the turret fired,-throwing a raveling skein of sheelbursts across the advancing rank of machines.

But more ranks were coming. Men were firing in every direction at machines that came clambering, jetting, drifting, in hundreds.

Mitch took off from the sally port, moving in diving weightless leaps, touring the outposts, shifting men when the need arose.

“Fall back when you have to!” he ordered, on command radio. “Keep them from the sally ports!” His men faced no lurching conscription of mechanized pipefitters and moving welders; these devices were built, in one shape or another, to fight. As he dove between outposts, a thing like a massive chain looped itself to intercept Mitch; he broke it in half with his second shot. A metallic butterfly darted at him on brilliant jets, and away again, and he wasted four shots at it.

He found an outpost abandoned, and started back toward the sally port, radioing ahead: “Broom, how is it there?”

“Hard to tell, Captain. Squad leaders, check in again, squad leaders—”

The flying thing darted back; Mitch sliced it with his laser pistol. As he approached the sally port, weapons were flaring all around him. This interior fight was turning into a microcosm of the confused struggle between fleets. He knew that still raged, for the ghostly fingers of heavy weapons still plucked through his armor continually.

“Here they come again—Dog, Easy, Nine-o’clock.”

Coordinates of an attack straight at the sally port. Mitch found a place to wedge himself, and raised his carbine again. Many of the machines in this wave bore metal shields before them. He fired and reloaded, again and again.

The flagship’s one usable turret flamed steadily, and an almost continuous line of explosions marched across the machines’ ranks in vacuum-silence, along with a traversing searchlight spot. The automatic cannons of the turret were far heavier than the marines’ hand weapons; almost anything the cannon hit dissolved in radii of splinters. But suddenly there were machines on the flagship hull, attacking the turret from its blind side.

Mitch called out warning, and started in that direction. Then all at once the enemy was around him. Two things caught a nearby man in their crab-like claws, trying to tear him apart between them. Mitch fired quickly at the moving figures and hit the man, blowing one leg off.

A moment later one of the crabmachines was knocked away and broken by a hailstorm of shells. The other one beat the armored man to pieces against a jagged girder, and turned to look for its next piece of work.

This machine was armored like a warship. It spotted Mitch and came for him, climbing through drifting rubble, shells and slugs rocking it but not crippling. It gleamed in his suit lights, reaching out bright pincers, as he emptied his carbine at the box where its cybernetics should be.

He drew his pistol and dodged, but like a falling cat it turned at him. It caught him by the left hand and the helmet, metal squealing and crunching. He thrust the laser pistol against what he thought was the brainbox, and held the trigger down. He and the machine were drifting, it could get no leverage for its strength. But it held him, working on his armored hand and helmet.

Its brainbox, the pistol and the fingers of his right gauntlet, were glowing hot. Something molten spattered across his faceplate, the glare half-blinding him. The laser burned out, fusing its barrel to the enemy in a glowing weld.

His left gauntlet, still caught, was giving way, being crushed—

—his hand—

Even as his suit’s hypos and tourniquet bit him, he got his burned right hand free of the laser’s butt and trigger guard and reached the plastic grenades at his belt.

His left arm was going wooden, even before the claw released his mangled hand and fumbled slowly for a fresh grip. The machine was shuddering all over, like an agonized man. Mitch whipped his right arm around to plaster a grenade on the far side of the brambox. Then with aims and legs he strained against the crushing, groping claws. His suit-servos whined with overload, being overpowered, two seconds, dose eyes, three—

The explosion stunned him. He found himself drifting free. Lights were flaring. Somewhere was a sally port; he had to get there and defend it.

His head cleared slowly. He had the feeling that someone was pressing a pair of fingers against his chest. He hoped that was only some reaction from the hand. It was hard to see anything, with his faceplate still half-covered with splashed metal, but at last he spotted the flagship hull. A chunk of something came within reach, and he used it to propel himself toward the sally port, spinning weakly. He dug out a fresh clip of ammunition and then realized his carbine was gone.

The space near the sally port was foggy with shattered mechanism; and there were starmen here, firing their weapons out into the great cavern. Mitch recognized Broom’s armor in. the flaring lights, and got a welcoming wave.

“Captain! They’ve knocked out the turret, and most of our searchlights. But we’ve wrecked an awful lot of ’em—how’s your arm?”

“Feels like wood. Got a carbine?”

“Say again?”

Broom couldn’t hear him. Of course, the damned thing had squeezed his helmet and probably wrecked his radio transmitter. He put his helmet against Broom’s, and said: “You’re in charge. I’m going in. Get back out if I can.”

Broom was nodding, guiding him watchfully toward the port. Gun flashes started up around them thick and fast again, but there was nothing he could do about that, with two steady dull fingers pressing into his chest. Lightheaded. Get back out? Who was he fooling? Lucky if he got in without help.

He went into the port, past the interior guards’ niches, and through an airlock. A medic took one look and came to help him.

Not dead yet, he thought, aware of people and lights around him. There was something else to notice, too; he felt no more ghostly plucking of space-bending weapons. Then he understood that he was being wheeled out of surgery, and that people hurrying by had triumph in their faces. He was still too groggy to frame a coherent question, but words he heard seemed to mean that another ship had joined in the attack on this berserker. That was a good sign, that there were spare ships around.

The stretcher bearers set him down near the bridge, in an area that was being used as a recovery room; there were many wounded, strapped down and given breathing tubes against possible failure of gravity or air. Mitch could see signs of battle damage around him. How could that be, this far inside the ship. The sally ports had been held.

There was a long gravitic shudder. “They’ve disengaged her,” said someone nearby.

Mitch passed out for a little while. The next thing he could see was that people were converging on the bridge from all directions. Their faces were happy and wondering, as if some joyful signal had called them. Many of them carried what seemed to Mitch the strangest assortment of burdens: weapons, books, helmets, bandages, trays of food, bottles, even bewildered children, who must have been just rescued from the berserker’s grip.

Mitch hitched himself up on his right elbow, ignoring the twinges in his bandaged chest and burnt fingers. Still he could not see the combat chairs of the bridge, for the people moving between.

From all the corridors of the ship they came, solemnly happy, men and women crowding together in the brightening lights.

An hour or so later, Mitch roused to find that a viewing sphere had been set up nearby. The space where the battle had been was a jagged new nebula of gaseous metal, a few little fireplace coals against the ebony folds of the Stone Place. Someone near Mitch was tiredly, but with animation, telling the story to a recorder:

“—fifteen ships and about eight thousand men lost are our present count. Every one of our ships seems to be damaged. We estimate ninety—that’s nine-zero—berserkers destroyed. Last count was a hundred and seventy-six captured, or wrecking themselves. It’s still hard to believe. A day like this . . . we must remember that thirty or more of them escaped, and are as deadly as ever. We will have to go on hunting and fighting them for a long time, but their power as a fleet has been broken. We can hope that capturing this many machines will at last give us some definite lead on their origin. Ah, best of all, some twelve thousand human prisoners have been freed.

“Now, how to explain our success? Those of us not Believers of one kind or another will say victory came because our hulls were newer and stronger, our long-range weapons new and superior, our tactics unexpected by the enemy—and our marines able to defeat anything the berserkers could send against them.

“Above all, history will give credit to High Commander Karlsen, for his decision to attack, at a time when his reconciliation with the Venetians had inspired and united the fleet The High Commander is here now, visiting the wounded who lie in rows . . .”

Karlsen’s movements were so slow and tired that Mitch thought he too might be wounded, though no bandages were visible. He shuffled past the ranked stretchers, with a word or nod for each of the wounded. Beside Mitch’s pallet he stopped, as if recognition was a shock.

“She’s dead, Poet,” were the first words he said.

The ship turned under Mitch for a moment; then he could be calm, as if he had expected to hear this. The battle had hollowed him out.

Karlsen was telling him, in a withered voice, how the enemy had forced through the flagship’s hull a kind of torpedo, an infernal machine that seemed to know how the ship was designed, a moving atomic pile that had burned its way through the High Commander’s quarters and almost to the bridge before it could be stopped and quenched.

The sight of battle damage here should have warned Mitch. But he hadn’t thought. Shock and drugs kept him from thinking or feeling much of anything now, but he could see her face, looking as it had in the gray deadly place from which he had rescued her.

Rescued.

I am a weak and foolish man,” Karlsen was saying. “But I have never been your enemy. Are you mine?”

“No. You forgave all your enemies. Got rid of them. Now you won’t have any, for a while. Galactic hero. But, I don’t envy you.”

“No. God rest her.” But Karlsen’s face was still alive, under all the grief and weariness. Only death could finally crush this man. He gave the ghost of a smile. “And, the second part of the prophecy, eh? I am to be defeated, and to die owning nothing. As if a man could die any other way.”

“Karlsen, you’re all right. I think you may survive your own success. Die in peace, some day, still hoping for your Believers’ heaven.”

“The day I die—” Karlsen turned his head slowly. “I’ll remember this day. This glory, this victory for all men.” Under the weariness and grief he had still his tremendous assurance—not of being right, Mitch thought now, but of being committed to right.

“Poet, when you are able, come and work for me.”

“Someday, maybe. Now, I can live on the battle bounty. And I have work. If they can’t grow back my hand—why, I can write with one.” Mitch was suddenly very tired.

A hand touched his good shoulder; a voice said: “God be with you. Johann Karlsen moved on.

Mitch wanted only to rest. Then, to his work. The world was bad, and all men were fools—but there were men who would not be crushed. And that was a thing worth telling.       END

WHAT T AND I DID

I am a decent human being. But that T—I don’t trust him, ever!

My first awareness is of location.

I am in a large conical room inside some vast vehicle, hurling through space. The world is familiar to me, though I am new.

“He’s awake!” says a black-haired young woman, watching me with frightened eyes. Half a dozen people in disheveled clothing, the three men long unshaven, gather slowly in my field of vision.

My field of vision? My left hand comes up to feel about my face, and its fingers find my left eye covered with a patch.

“Don’t disturb that!” says the tallest of the men. Probably he was once a distinguished figure. He speaks sharply, yet his manner is different, as if I am a person of importance. But I am only—who?

“What’s happened?” I ask. My tongue has trouble finding even the simplest words. My right arm lies at my side as if forgotten, but it stirs at my thought, and with its help I raise myself to a sitting position, provoking an onrush of pain through my head, and dizziness.

Two of the women backed away from me. A stout young man puts a protective arm around each of them. These people are familiar to me, but I cannot find their names.

“You’d better take it easy,” says the tallest man. His hands, a doctor’s, touch my head and my pulse, and ease me back onto the padded table.

Now I see that two tall humanoid robots stand flanking me. I expect that at any moment the doctor will order them to wheel me away to my hospital room. Still, I know better; this is no hospital. The truth will be terrible when I remember it.

“How do you feel?” asks the third man, an oldster, coming forward to bend over me.

“All right. I guess.” My speech comes only in poor fragments. “What’s happened?”

“There was a battle,” says the doctor. “You were hurt, but I’ve saved your life.”

“Well. Good.” My pain and dizziness are subsiding.

In a satisfied tone the doctor says: “It’s to be expected that you’ll have difficulty speaking. Here, try to read this.”

He holds up a card, marked with neat rows of what I suppose are letters or numerals. I see plainly the shapes of the symbols, but they mean nothing to me, nothing at all.

“No,” I say finally, closing my eye and lying back. I feel plainly that everyone is hostile to me. Why? I persist: “What’s happened?”

“We’re all prisoners, here inside the machine,” says the old man’s voice. “Do you remember that much?”

“Yes.” I nod, remembering. But details are very hazy. “My name?” I ask. The old man chuckles drily, sounding relieved. “Why not Thad—for Thaddeus?”

“Thad?” questions the doctor. I open my eye again. Power and confidence are growing in the doctor; because of something I have done, or have not done? “Your name is Thad,” he tells me.

“We’re prisoners?” I question him. “Of a machine?”

“Of a berserker machine.” He sighs. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Deep in my mind, it means something that will not bear looking at. I am spared; I sleep.

When I awake again, I feel stronger. The table is gone, and I recline on the soft floor of this cabin or cell, this white cone-shaped place of imprisonment. The two robots still stand by me, why I do not know.

“Atsog!” I cry aloud, suddenly remembering more. I had happened to be on the planet Atsog when the great fleet of the unliving, the berserker machines, attacked. The seven of us here were among the few survivors, carried out of the deep shelters by the raiding machines. The memory is vague and jumbled, and invested with horror.

“He’s awake!” says someone again. Again the women shrink from me. The old man raises his quivering head to look, from where he and the doctor seem to be in conference. The stout young man jumps to his feet, facing me, fists clenched, as if I had threatened him.

“How are you, Thad?” the doctor calls. After a moment’s glance my way, he answers himself: “He’s all right. One of you girls help him with some food. Or you, Halsted.”

“Help him? God!” The blackhaired girl flattens herself against the wall, as far from me as possible. The other two women crouch washing someone’s garment in our prison sink. They only look at me and wash away.

My head is not bandaged for nothing. I must be truly hideous, my face must be monstrously deformed, for three women to look so pitilessly at me.

The doctor is impatient. “Someone feed him, it must be done.”

“He’ll get no help from me,” says the stout young man. “There are limits.”

The black-haired girl begins to move across the chamber toward me, everyone watching her.

“You would?” the young man marvels to her, and shakes his head.

She moves slowly, as if walking is painful to her. Doubtless she too was injured in the battle; there are old healing bruises on her face. She kneels beside me, and guides my left hand to help me eat, and gives me water. My right side is not paralyzed, but somehow unresponsive.

When the doctor comes close again, I say: “My eye. Can I see?” He is quick to push my fingers away from the eyepatch. “For the present, you must use only your left eye. You’ve undergone brain surgery. If you take off that patch now, the consequences could be very serious, let me warn you.”

I think he is being deceptive about the eyepatch. Why?

The black-haired girl asks me: “Have you remembered anything more?”

“Yes. Before Atsog fell, we heard that Johann Karlsen was leading out a fleet, to defend Sol.”

All of them stare at me, hanging on my words. But they must know better than I what happened.

“Did Karlsen win the battle?” I plead. Then I realize that we are prisoners still.

I weep.

“There’ve been no new prisoners brought in here,” says the doctor, watching me carefully. “I think Karlsen has beaten the berserkers. I think this machine is now fleeing from the human fleet. How does that make you feel?”

“How?” Has my understanding failed with my verbal skills? “Good.”

They all relax slightly.

“Your skull was cracked when we bounced around in the battle,” the old man tells me. “You’re lucky a famous surgeon was here.” He nods his head. “The machine wants all of us kept alive, so it can study us. It gave the doctor what he needed to operate, and if he’d let you die, or remain paralyzed, things would have been bad for him. Yessir, it made that plain.”

“Mirror?” I ask. I gesture at my face. “I must see. How bad.”

“We don’t have a mirror,” says one of the women at the sink, as if blaming me for die lack.

“Your face? It’s not disfigured,” says the doctor. His tone is convincing, or would be if I were not certain of my deformity.

I regret that these good people must put up with my monster-presence, compounding all their other troubles. “I’m sorry,” I say, and turn from them, trying to conceal my face.

“You really don’t know,” says the black-haired girl, Who has watched me silently for a long time. “He doesn’t know!” Her voice chokes. “Oh—Thad. Your face is all right.”

True enough, the skin of my face feels smooth and normal when my fingers touch If the blackhaired girl watches me with pity. Rounding her shoulder, from inside her dress, are half-healed marks like the scars of a lash.

“Someone’s hurt you,” I say, frightened. One of the women at the sink laughs nervously. The young man mutters something. I raise my left hand to hide my hideous face. My right comes up and crosses over to finger the edges of the eyepatch.

Suddenly the young man swears aloud, and points at where a door has opened in the wall.

“The machine must want your advice on something,” he tells me harshly. His manner is that of a man who wants to be angry but does not dare. Who am I, what am I, that these people hate me so?

I get to my feet, strong enough to walk. I remember that I am the one who goes to speak alone with the machine.

In a lonely passage it offers me two scanners and a speaker as its visible face. I know that the cubic miles of the great berserker machine surround me, carrying me through space, and I remember standing in this spot before the battle, talking with it, but I have no idea what was said. In fact I cannot recall the words of any conversation I have ever held.

“The plan you suggested has failed, and Karlsen still functions,” says the cracked machine voice, hissing and scraping in the tones of a stage villain.

What could I have ever suggested, to this horrible thing?

“I remember very little,” I say. “My brain has been hurt.”

“If you are lying about your memory, understand that I am not deceived,” says the machine. “Punishing you for your plan’s failure will not advance my purpose. I know that you live outside the laws of human organization, that you even refuse to use a full human name. Knowing you, I trust you to help me against the organization of intelligent life. You will remain in command of the other prisoners. See that your damaged tissues are repaired as fully as possible. Soon we will attack life in a new way.”

There is a pause, but I have nothing to say. Then the noisy speaker scrapes into silence, and the scanner-eyes dim. Does it watch me still, in secret? But it said it trusted me, this nightmare enemy said it trusted in my evil to make me its ally.

Now I have enough memory to know its speaks the truth about me. My despair is so great I feel sure that Karlsen did not win the battle. Everything is hopeless, because of the horror inside me. I have betrayed all life. To what bottom of evil have I not descended?

As I turn from the lifeless scanners, my eye catches a movement—my own reflection, in polished metal. I face the flat shiny bulkhead, staring at myself.

My scalp is bandaged, and my left eye. That I knew already. There is some discoloration around my right eye, but nothing shockingly repulsive. What I can see of my hair is light brown, matching my two months’ unkempt beard. Nose and mouth and jaw are normal enough. There is no horror in my face.

The horror lies inside me. I have willingly served a berserker.

Like the skin around my right eye, that bordering my left eye’s patch is tinged with blue and greenish-yellow, hemoglobin spilled under the skin and breaking down, some result of the surgeon’s work inside my head.

I remember his warning, but the eye-patch has the fascination for my fingers that a sore tooth has for the tongue, only far stronger. The horror is centered in my evil left eye, and I cannot keep from probing after it. My right hand flies eagerly into action, pulling the patch away.

I blink, and the world is blurred. I see with two eyes, and then I die.

T staggered in the passage, growling and groaning his rage, the black eyepatch gripped in his fingers. He had language now, he had a foul torrent of words, and he used them until his weak breath failed. He stumbled, hurrying through the passage toward the prison chamber, wild to get at the wise punks who had tried such smooth trickery to get rid of him. Hypnotism, or whatever. Rename him, would they? He’d show them Thaddeus.

T reached the door and threw it open, gasping in his weakness, and walked out into the prison chamber. The doctor’s shocked face showed that he realized T was back in control.

“Where’s my whip?” T glared around him. “What wise punk hid it?”

The women screamed. Young Halsted realized that the Thaddeus scheme had failed; he gave a kind of hopeless yell and charged, swinging like a crazy man. Of course T’s robot bodyguards were too fast for any human. One of them blocked Halsted’s punch with a metal fist, so the stout man yelped and folded up, nursing his hand.

“Get me my whip!” A robot went immediately to reach behind the sink, pull out the knotted plastic cord, and bring it to the master.

T thumped the robot jovially, and smiled at the cringing lot of his fellow prisoners. He ran the whip through his fingers, and the fingers of his left hand felt numb. He flexed them impatiently. “What’sa matter, there, Mr. Halsted? Somethin’ wrong with your hand? Don’t wanna give me a handshake, welcome me back? C’mon, let’s shake!” The way Halsted squirmed around on the floor was so funny T had to pause and give himself up to laughing.

“Listen you people,” he said when he got his breath. “My fine friends. The machine says I’m still in charge, see? That little information I gave it about Karlsen did the trick. Sol is lost. Boom! Haw haw haw! So you better try to keep me happy, ’cause the machine’s still backing me a hunnerd per cent. You, Doc.” T’s left hand began trembling uncontrollably, and he waved it. “You were gonna change me, huh? You did somethin’ nice to fix me up?” Doc held his surgeon’s hands behind him, as if he hoped to protect them. “I couldn’t have made a new pattern for your character if I had tried—unless I went all the way, and turned you into a vegetable. That I might have done.”

“Now you wish you had. But you were scared of what the machine would do to you. Still, you tried somethin’, huh?”

“Yes, to save your life.” Doc stood up straight. “Your injury precipitated a severe and almost continuous epileptoid seizure, which the removal of the blood dot from your brain did not relieve. So, I divided the corpus callosum.”

T flicked his whip. “What’s that mean?”

“You see—the right hemisphere, the dominant one in most people, controls the right side, and handles most judgment involving symbols.”

“I know. When you get a stroke, the clot is on the opposite side from the paralysis.”

“Correct.” Doc raised his chin. “T, I split your brain, right side from left. That’s as simply as I can put it. It’s an old but effective procedure for treating severe epilepsy, and the best I could do for you here. I’ll take an oath on that, or a lie test—”

“Shuddup! I’ll give you a lie test!” T strode shakily forward. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

“As a surgeon, I can say only that you may reasonably expect many years of practically normal life.”

“Normal!” T took another step, raising his whip. “Why’d you patch my good eye, and start calling me Thaddeus?”

“That was my idea,” interrupted the old man, in a quavery voice. “I thought—in a man like yourself, there had to be someone, some component, like Thad. With the psychological pressure we’re under here, I thought Thad just might come out, if we gave him a chance in your right hemisphere. It was my idea.

If it hurt you any, blame me.”

“I will.” But T seemed, for the moment, more interested than enraged. “Who is this Thaddeus?”

“You are,” said the doctor. “We couldn’t put anyone else into your skull.”

“Jude Thaddeus,” said the old man, “was a contemporary of Judas Iscariot. A similarity of names, but—” He shrugged.

T made a whistling, snorting sound, a single laugh. “You figured there was good in me, huh? It just had to come out sometime? Why, I’d say you were crazy, but you’re not. Thaddeus was real. He was there in my head for a while. Maybe he’s still there, hiding. How do I get at him, huh?” T raised his right hand and jabbed a finger gently at the corner of his right eye. “Ow. I don’t like to be hurt. I got a delicate nervous system. Doc, how come his eye is on the right side if everything crosses over? And if it’s his eye, how come I hafta feel what happens to it?”

“I divided the optic chiasm, too. It’s a somewhat complicated—”

“Never mind. We’ll show Thaddeus who’s boss. He can watch with the rest of you. Hey, Blacky, c’mere. We haven’t played together for a while, have we?”

“No,” the girl whispered. She hugged her arms around herself, nearly fainting. But she walked toward T. Two months as his slaves had taught all of them that obedience was easiest.

“You like this punk Thad, huh?” T whispered, when she halted before him. “You think his face is all right, do you? How about my face? Look at me!”

T saw his own left hand reach out, and touch the girl’s cheek, gently and lovingly. He could see in her startled face that she felt Thaddeus in his hand; never had her eyes looked this way at T before. T cried out and raised his whip to strike her, and his left hand flew across his body to seize his own right wrist, like a terrier clamping jaws on a snake.

T’s right hand still gripped the whip, but he thought the bones of his wrist were cracking. His legs tangled each other and he fell. He tried to shout for help, and could utter only a roaring noise. His robots stood watching. It seemed a long time before the doctor’s face loomed over him, and the black patch descended gently upon his left eye.

Now I understand more deeply, and I accept. At first I wanted the doctor to remove my left eye, and the old man agreed, quoting some ancient Believers’ book to the effect that an offending eye should be plucked out. An eye would be a small price to rid myself of T.

But after some thought, the doctor refused. “T is yourself,” he said at last. “I can’t point to him with my scalpel, and cut him out, although it seems I helped to separate the two of you. Now you control both sides of the body; once he did.” The doctor smiled wearily. “Imagine a committee of three, a troika inside your skull. Thaddeus is one, T another—and the third is the person, the force, that casts the deciding vote. You. That’s the best I can tell you.”

And the old man nodded.

Mostly, I do without the eye patch now. Reading and speaking are easier when I use my long-dominant left brain, and I am still Thaddeus—perhaps because I choose to be Thaddeus. Could it be that terribly simple?

Periodically I talk with the berserker, which still trusts in T’s greedy outlawry. With their fleet ruined by Karlsen, the machines now search for new ways of attacking humanity. This one means to counterfeit much money, coins and notes, give the money to me, and deliver me in small launch to a highly civilized planet, relying on my greed to weaken men there and set them against each other.

But this machine is too damaged to watch its prisoners steadily, or it does not bother. With my freedom to move I have welded some of the silver coins into a ring, chilled this ring to superconductivity, and put it in a chamber near the berserker’s unliving heart. Halsted tells me we can use this ring, carrying a permanent electric current, to trigger the launch’s C-plus drive prematurely, and tear our berserker open from inside. We may damage it enough to save ourselves. Or we may all be killed.

But while I live, I, Thaddeus, rule myself; and both my hands are gentle, touching long black hair.       END

SIGN OF THE WOLF

It struck like a wolf from out in space—and the men were defenseless against it!

The dark shape, big as a man, came between the two smallest of the three watchfires, moving in silence like that of sleep. Out of habit, Duncan had been watching that downwind direction, though his mind was heavy with tiredness and with the thoughts of life that came with sixteen summers’ age.

Duncan raised his spear and howled, and charged the wolf. For a moment the fire-eyes looked steadily at him, appearing to be a full hand apart. Then the wolf turned away; it made one deep questioning sound, and was gone into the darkness out beyond the fires.

Duncan stopped, drawing a gasping breath of relief. His charge had not been courage. The wolf would probably have killed him if it had faced his charge, but it did not yet dare to face him in firelight.

The sheeps’ eyes were on Duncan, a hundred glowing spots in the huddled mass of the flock. One or two of the animals bleated softly.

He paced around the flock, sleepiness and introspection jarred from his mind. Legends said that men in the old Earth-land had animals called dogs that guarded sheep. If that were true, some might think that men were fools for ever leaving Earth-land.

But such thoughts were irreverent, and Duncan’s situation called for prayer. Every night now the wolf came, and all too often it killed a sheep.

Duncan raised his eyes to the night sky. “Send me a sign, star-gods,” he prayed, routinely. But the heavens were quiet. Only the stately fireflies of the dawn zone traced their steady random paths, vanishing halfway up the eastern sky. The stars themselves agreed that three-fourths of the night was gone. The legends said that Earth-land was among the stars, but the younger priests admitted such a statement could only be taken symbolically.

The heavy thoughts came back, in spite of the nearby wolf. For two years now Duncan had prayed and hoped for his mystical experience, the sign from a god that came to mark the future life of every youth. From what other young men whispered now and then, he knew that many faked their signs. That was all right for lowly herdsmen, or even for hunters. But how could a man without a genuine vision ever be much more than a tender of animals? To be a priest, to study the things brought from old Earth-land and saved—Duncan hungered for learning, for greatness, for things he could not name.

He looked up again, and gasped, for he saw a great sign in the sky, almost directly overhead. A point of dazzling light, and then a bright little cloud remaining among the stars. Duncan gripped his spear, watching, for a moment even forgetting the sheep. The tiny cloud swelled and faded very slowly.

For centuries now the berserker machines had warred on Earth-descended man. Automatons loosed in some forgotten war, the machines moved as raiders through the galaxy, destroying whatever life they could find and overcome.

One such machine slid out of the interstellar intervals toward Duncan’s planet, drawn from afar by the Sol-type light of Duncan’s sun. To turn life into death was a berserker’s function, and this sun and this planet promised life.

The berserker machine was the size of a small planetoid, and its power was immense, but it knew well that some planets were defended, and it bent and slowed its hurtling approach into a long cautious curve.

There were no warships in nearby space, but the berserker’s telescopes picked out the bright dots of defensive satellites, vanishing into the planet’s shadow and reappearing. To probe for more data, the berserker computers loosed a spy missile.

The missile looped the planet, and then shot in, testing the defensive net.

Low over nightside, it turned suddenly into bright little cloud.

Still, defensive satellites formed no real obstacle to a berserker. It could gobble them up almost at leisure if it moved in close to them, though they would stop long range missles fired at the planet. It was the other things the planet might have, the buried things, that held the berserker back from a killing rush.

Also it was strange that this defended planet had no cities to make light sparks on its nightside, and that no radio signals came from it into space.

With mechanical caution the berserker moved in, toward the area scouted by the spy missile.

In the morning, Duncan counted his flock—and then recounted, scowling. Then he searched until he found the slaughtered lamb. The wolf had not gone hungry after all. That made four sheep lost, now, in ten days.

Duncan tried to tell himself that dead sheep no longer mattered so much to him, that with a sign such as he had been granted last night his life was going to be filled with great deeds and noble causes. But the sheep still did matter, and not only because their owners would be angry.

Looking up suddenly from the eaten lamb, he saw a brown-robed priest, alone, mounted on a donkey, climbing the long grassy slope of the grazing valley from the direction of the Temple Village. He would be going to pray in one of the Caves in the foot of the mountain at the head of the valley.

At Duncan’s beckoning wave—he could not leave the flock to walk far toward the priest—the man on the donkey changed course. Duncan walked a little way to meet him.

“Blessings of Earth-land,” said the priest shortly, when he came close. He was a stout man who seemed glad to dismount and stretch, arching his back and grunting.

He smiled as he saw Duncan’s hesitation. “Are you much alone here, my son?”

“Yes, Holy One. But—last night, I had a sign. For two years I’ve wanted one, and just last night it came.”

“Indeed? That is good news.” The priest’s eyes strayed to the mountain, and to the sun, as if he calculated how much time he could spare. But he said, with no sound of impatience, “Tell me about it, if you wish.”

When he heard the flash in the sky was Duncan’s sign, the priest frowned. Then he seemed to keep himself from smiling. “My son, that light was seen by many. Today the elders of a dozen villages, of most of the Tribe, have come to the Temple Village. Everyone has seen something different in the sky-flash, and I am now going to pray in a Cave, because of it.”

The priest remounted, but when he had looked at Duncan again, he waited to say, “Still, I was not one of those chosen to see the sky-gods’ sign; and you were. It may be a sign for you as well as for others, so do not be disappointed if it is not only for you. Be faithful in your duties and signs will come.” He turned the donkey away.

Feeling small, Duncan walked slowly back to his flock. How could he have thought that a light seen over half the world was meant for one shepherd? Now his sign was gone, but his wolf remained.

In the afternoon, another figure came into sight, walking straight toward the flock from the direction of Colleen’s village. Duncan tightened the belt on his woolen tunic, and combed grass from his hair with his fingers. He felt his chin, and wished his beard would really begin to grow.

He was sure the visitor was Colleen when she was still half a mile away. He kept his movements calm and made himself appear to first notice her when she came in sight on a hilltop within hailing distance. The wind moved her brown hair and her garments.

“Hello, Colleen.”

“Hello, Duncan the Herdsman. My father sent me to ask about his sheep.”

He ran an anxious eye over the flock, picking out individuals. Praise be to gods of land and sky. “Your father’s sheep are well.”

She walked closer to him. “Here are some cakes. The other sheep are not well?” Ah, she was beautiful. But no mere herdsman would ever have her.

“Last night the wolf killed again.” Duncan gestured with empty hands. “I watch, I light fires. I have a spear and a club, and I rush at him when he comes, and I drive him away. But sooner or later he comes on the wrong side of the flock, or a sheep strays.”

“Another man should come from the village,” she said. “Even a boy would help. With a big clever wolf, any herdsman may need help.”

He nodded, faintly pleased at her implying he was a man. But his troubles were too big to be soothed away. “Did you see the sky-flash, last night?” he asked, remembering with bitterness his joy when he had thought the sign was his.

“No, but all the village is talking about it. I will tell them about the wolf, but probably no man will come to help you for a day or two. They are all dancing and talking, thinking of nothing but the sky-flash.”

She raised puzzled eyes beyond Duncan. “Look.”

It was the priest, rushing past half a mile from them on his way down valley from the Caves, doing his best to make his donkey gallop toward the Temple Village.

“He may have met your wolf,” Colleen suggested.

“He doesn’t look behind him. Maybe in the Caves he received an important sign from the earth-gods.”

They talked a while longer, sitting on the grass while he ate the cakes she had brought him.

“I must go!” She sprang up. The sun was lowering and neither of them had realized it.

“Yes, hurry! At night the wolf may be anywhere on the plain.”

Watching her hurry away, Duncan felt the wolf in his own blood. Perhaps she knew it, for she looked back at him strangely from the hilltop. Then she was gone.

On a hillside, gathering dried brush for the night’s watchfires, Duncan paused for a moment, looking at the sunset.

“Sky-gods, help me,” he prayed. “And earth-gods, the dark wolf should be under your dominion. If you will not grant me a sign, at least help me deal with the wolf.” He bent routinely and laid his ear to a rock. Every day he asked some god for a sign, but never—

He heard a voice. He crouched there, listening to the rock, unable to believe. Surely it was a waterfall he heard, or running cattle somewhere near. But no, it was a real voice, booming and shouting in some buried distance. He could not make out the words, but it was a real god-voice from under the earth.

He straightened up, tears in his eyes, even the sheep for a moment forgotten. This wonderful sign was not for half the world, this was for him! And he had doubted that it would ever come.

To hear what it said was all-important. He bent again and listened. The muffled voice went on unceasingly, but he could not understand it. He ran a few steps up the hill, and put his ear against another exposed earth-bone of rock. Yes, the voice was plainer here; sometimes he could distinguish a word. “Give,” said the voice. Mumble, mumble. “Defend,” he thought it said. Even the words he recognized were spoken in strange accents, like those of a man from some far tribe.

He realized that darkness was falling, and stood up, in fearful indecision.

The sheep were still his responsibility, and he had to light watchfires, he had to, for the sheep would be slaughtered without them. And at the same time he had to listen to this voice.

A form moved toward him through the twilight, and he grabbed up his club—then he realized it was Colleen.

She looked frightened. She whispered: “The sun went down, and I feared the dark. It was a shorter way back to you, than on to the village.”

The berserker moved in toward the nightside of the planet, quickly now, but still with caution. It had searched its memory of thousands of years of war against a thousand kinds of life, and it had remembered one other planet like this, with defensive satellites but no cities or radios. The fortifiers of that planet had fought among themselves, weakening themselves until they could no longer operate their defenses, had even forgotten what their planet-weapons were. Then the life on that planet was helpless, and the berserker had left no life upon it, taking only a few prisoners to learn the cause of their weakness.

The life here might be shamming, trying to lure the berserker within range of the planet-weapons. Therefore the berserker sent its mechanical scouts ahead, to break through the satellite-net, and range over the land surface, killing, until they provoked the planet’s maximum response.

The fires were built, and Colleen held the spear and watched the sheep. Wolf or not, Duncan had to follow his sign. He made his way up the dark hillside, listening at rock after rock, and ever the earth-god voice grew stronger.

In the back of his mind Duncan realized that Colleen had arranged to be trapped with him for the night, to help him defend the sheep, and he felt limitless gratitude and love. But even that was now in the back of his mind. The voice now was everything.

He held his breath, listening. Now he could hear the voice while he stood erect. There, ahead, at the foot of a cliff, were slabs of rock tumbled down by snowslides. Among them might be a cave.

He reached the slabs, and heard the voice rumble up between them. “Attack in progress. Request human response. Order one requested. This is defense control. Attack in progress—”

On and on it went. Duncan understood some of it. Attack, request, human. Order one requested—that must mean one wish was to be granted, as in the legends. Never again would Duncan laugh at legends, thinking himself wise. This was no prank of the other young men; no one could hide in a cave and shout on and on in such a voice.

No one but a priest should enter a Cave, but probably not even the priests knew of this one. It was Duncan’s, for his sign had led him here. He had been granted a tremendous sign.

More awed than fearful, he slid between slabs of rock, finding the way down, rock and earth and then metal under his feet. He dropped into a low metal cave. It was as he had heard the god-caves described, very long, smooth, round and regular, except here where it was bent and torn under the fallen rocks. In the cave’s curving sides were glowing places, like huge animal eyes, giving light enough to see.

And here the shouting was very loud. Duncan moved toward it.

We have reached the surface, the scouts radioed back to the berserker, in their passionless computer-symbol language. Here intelligent life of the earth-type lives in villages. So far we have killed eight hundred and thirty-nine units. We have met no response from dangerous weapons.

A little while the berserker waited, letting the toll of life-units mount.

When the chance of this planet’s being a trap had dropped in computer-estimation to the vanishing point, the berserker moved in to close range, and began to mop the remaining defensive satellites out of its way. Its scouts could not efficiently depopulate the whole planet; but the berserker could.

“Here I am.” Duncan fell on his knees before the metal thing that bellowed. In front of the god-shape lay woven twigs and eggshells, so old as to be hardly more than dust. Once priests had sacrificed here, and then they had forgotten this god.

“Here I am,” said Duncan again, in a louder voice.

The god heeded him, for the deafening shouting stopped.

In a glassy place beside the god strange things appeared: there was a huge ball, with little red specks crawling its surface, and a little red ball the size of a fist moving toward it.

“Response acknowledged, from defense control alternate 9,864,” said the god. “Planetary defenses now under control of post 9,864.”

How could you ask a god to speak more plainly? Duncan gaped at the moving things in the glass, and waited for enlightenment.

After a little time of silence, the god said: “Request order one.”

That seemed understandable, but to make sure, Duncan asked: “You will grant me one wish, mighty one?”

“Will obey your order. Emergency. Satellite sphere ninety per cent destroyed. Planet-weapon responses fully programmed. Activation command requested.”

Duncan, still kneeling, closed his eyes. One wish would be granted. The rest of the words he took for a warning to choose his wish with care. If he wished, the god would make him the wisest of chiefs, or the bravest of warriors. The god would give him a hundred years of life, or a dozen young wives.

Or Colleen.

But Colleen was out in the darkness, now, facing the wolf. Even now the wolf might be prowling near, just beyond the circles of firelight, watching the sheep, and watching the tender girl. Even now Colleen might be screaming—

Duncan’s heart sank utterly, for he knew the wolf had beaten him, had destroyed this moment on which the rest of his life depended. He was a herdsman. And if he could make himself forget the sheep, he could not want to forget Colleen.

“Destroy the wolf! Kill it!” he choked out.

“Term wolf questioned.”

“The killer! To destroy the killer! That is the only wish I can make!” He could stand the presence of the god no longer, and ran away through the cave, weeping for his ruined life. He ran to find Colleen.

Recall, shouted the electronic voice of the berserker. Trap. Recall. Hearing, its scattered brood of scout machines rose at top acceleration from their planet work, curving and climbing toward their great metal mother. Too slow. They blurred into streaks, into fireworks of incandescent gas.

The berserker was not waiting for them, it was diving for deep space, knowing the planet-weapons reached out for it. It wasted no circuits now to compute why so much life had been sacrificed to trap it. It saw new forcefields thrown up ahead of it, walling it in. No escape. Dispassionately the berserker computer reversed engines, and the machine hurtled once more toward the planet. There was a chance, with a final charge, of destroying a little more life.

The whole sky was in flames, the bones of the hills shuddered underfoot, and at the head of the valley the top of the mountain was torn away and an enormous shaft of something almost invisible poured from it infinitely up into the sky.

Duncan saw Colleen huddling on the open ground, shouting to him, but the buried thunder drowned her voice. The sheep were running and leaping, crying under the terrible sky. Duncan saw the dark wolf among them, running with them in circles, too frightened to be a wolf. He picked up his club and ran, staggering with the shaking earth, after the beast. He had given up everything to kill this wolf, and now the gods were raging.

He caught the wolf, for he ran toward it, while it ran in circles without regard for him. He saw the sky reflected in its eyes, facing him, and he swung his club just as it crouched to leap.

He won. And then he struck again and again, making sure.

All at once there was a blue-white, moving sun in the sky, a marvelous sun that in a minute turned red, spreading itself out to vanish in the general glow.

Then the earth was still at last. The mountain was dark against the rainbow sky.

The birds were up from the fields, crying and whistling morning, for the shaking had driven them from their nests, and they thought the sky was daylight.

Duncan walked in a daze, until he saw Colleen trying to round up the sheep. Then he waved to her, and trotted after her to help. The wolf was dead, and he had a wonderful sign to tell. The gods had not killed him. Beneath his running feet, the steadiness of the ground seemed permanent.       END

PATRON OF THE ARTS

The Berserkers loathed life—but life had the power of doing them one unduplicable service!

After some hours’ work, Herron found himself hungry, and willing to pause for food. Looking over what he had just done, he could easily imagine one of the sycophantic critics praising it: A huge canvas, of discordant and brutal line, aflame with a sense of engulfing menace! And for once, Herron thought, the critic might be praising something good.

Turning away from his view of easel and blank bulkhead, Herron found that his captor had moved up silently to stand only an arm’s length behind him, for all the world like some human kibitzer.

He had to chuckle. “I suppose you’ve some idiotic suggestion to make?”

The roughly man-shaped machine said nothing, though it had what might be a speaker mounted on what might be a face. Herron shrugged and walked around it, going forward in search of the galley. This ship had been only a few hours out from Earth on C-plus drive when the berserker machine had run it down and captured it; and Piers Herron, the only passenger, had not yet had time to learn his way around.

It was more than a galley, he saw when he reached it—it was meant to be a place where arty colonial ladies could sit and twitter over tea when they grew weary of staring at pictures. The Franz Hals had been built as a traveling museum; then the war of life against berserker machine had grown hot around Sol, and BuCulture had ineptly decided that Earth’s art treasures would be safer if shipped away to Tau Epsilon. The Franz was ideally suited for such a mission, and for almost nothing else.

Looking further forward from the entrance to the galley, Herron could see that the door to the crew compartment had been battered down, but he did not go to look inside. Not that it would bother him to look, he told himself; he was as indifferent to horror as he was to almost all other human things. The Franz’s crew of two were in there, or what was left of them after they had tried to fight off the berserker’s boarding machines. Doubtless they had preferred death to capture.

Herron preferred nothing. Now he was probably the only living being—apart from a few bacteria—within half a light year; and he was pleased to discover that his situation did not terrify him, that his long-growing weariness of life was not just a pose to fool himself.

His metal captor followed him into the galley, watching while he set the kitchen devices to work. “Still no suggestions?” Herron asked it. “Maybe you’re smarter than I thought.”

“I am what men call a berserker,” the man-shaped thing said to him suddenly, in a squeaky, ineffectualsounding voice. “I have captured your ship, and I will talk with you through this small machine you see. Do you grasp my meaning?”

“I understand as well as I need to.” He knew his captor was an utterly alien and inanimate thing, built in some segment of time and space beyond human ken, built to fight in some ancient war between races who had never heard of Earth, and who perhaps were long dead themselves. Now the berserker machines’ war was against all the life of the galaxy.

Herron had not yet seen the berserker itself but he knew it would be a sphere the size of a planetoid, now a few miles away, or perhaps a few hundred or a thousand miles, from the ship it had captured. Captain Hanus had tried desperately to escape it, diving the Franz into a cloud of dark nebula where no ship or machine could move faster than light, and where the advantage in speed lay with the smaller hull.

The chase had been at speeds up to a thousand miles a second. Forced to remain in normal space, the berserker could not steer its bulk among the meteoroids and gas-wisps as well as the Franz’s radar-computer system could maneuver the fleeing ship. But the berserker had sent an armed launch of its own to take up the chase, and the weaponless Franz had had no chance.

Now, dishes of food, hot and cold, popped out on a galley table, and Herron bowed to the machine. “Will you join me?”

“I need no organic food.”

Herron sat down with a sigh. “In the end,” he told the machine, “you’ll find that lack of humor is as pointless as laughter. Wait and see if I’m not right.” He began to eat, and found himself not so hungry as he had thought. Evidently his body still feared death—this surprised him a little.

“Do you normally function in the operation of this ship?” the machine asked.

“No,” he said, making himself chew and swallow. “I’m not much good at pushing buttons.” A peculiar thing that had happened was nagging at Herron. When capture was only minutes away, Captain Hanus had come dashing aft from the control room, grabbing Herron and dragging him along in a tearing hurry, aft past all the stored art treasures.

“Herron, listen—if we don’t make it, see here?” Tooling open a double hatch in the stern compartment, the captain had pointed into what looked like a short padded tunnel, the diameter of a large drain pipe. “The regular lifeboat won’t get away, but this might.”

“Are you waiting for the Second Officer, Captain, or leaving us now?”

“There’s room for only one, you fool, and I’m not the one who’s going.”

“You mean to save me? Captain, I’m touched!” Herron laughed, easily and naturally. “But don’t put yourself out.”

“You idiot. Can I trust you?” Hanus lunged into the boat, his hands flying over its controls. Then he backed out, glaring like a madman. “Listen. Look here. This button is the activator; now I’ve set things up so the boat should come out in the main shipping lanes and start sending a distress signal. Chances are she’ll be picked up safely then. Now the controls are set, only this activator button needs to be pushed down—”

The berserker’s launch had attacked at that moment, with a roar like mountains falling on the hull of the ship. The lights and the artificial gravity had failed and then come abruptly back. Piers Herron had been thrown on his side, his wind knocked out. He had watched while the captain, regaining his feet and moving like a man in a daze, had closed the hatch on the mysterious little boat again and staggered forward toward his control room.

“Why are you here?” the machine asked Herron.

He dropped the forkful of food he had been staring at. He didn’t have to hesitate before answering the question. “Do you know what BuCulture is? They’re the fools in charge of Art, on Earth. Some of them, like a lot of other fools, think I’m a great painter. They worship me. When I said I wanted to leave Earth on this ship, they made it possible.

“I wanted to leave because almost everything that is worthwhile in any true sense is being removed from Earth. A good part of it is on this ship. What’s left behind on the planet is only a swarm of animals, breeding and dying, fighting—” he paused.

“Why did you not try to fight or to hide when my machines boarded this ship?”

“Because it would have done no good.”

When the berserker’s prize crew had forced their way in through an airlock, Herron had been setting up his easel in what was to have been a small exhibition hall, and he had paused to watch the uninvited visitors file past. One of the manshaped metal things, the one through which he was being questioned now, had stayed to stare at him through its lenses while the others had moved on forward to the crew compartment.

“Herron!” the intercom had shouted. “Try, Herron, please! You know what to do!” Clanging noises followed, and gunshots and curses.

What to do, Captain? Why, yes. The shock of events and the promise of imminent death had stirred up some kind of life in Piers Herron. He looked with interest at the alien captor, the inhuman cold of deep space frosting over its metal here in the warm cabin. Then he turned away from it and began to paint the berserker, trying to catch not the outward shape he had never seen, but what he felt of its inwardness. He felt the emotionless deadlines of its watching lenses boring into his back. The sensation was faintly pleasurable, like cold spring sunshine.

“What is good?” the machine asked Herron, standing over him in the galley while he tried to eat.

He snorted. “You tell me.”

It took him literally. “To serve the cause of what men call death is good. To destroy life is good.”

Herron pushed his nearly full plate into a disposal slot and stood up. “You’re almost right—but even if you were entirely right, why so enthusiastic? What is there praise-worthy about death?” Now his thoughts surprised him as his lack of appetite had.

“I am entirely right,” said the machine.

For long seconds Herron stood still, as if thinking, though his mind was almost entirely blank. “No,” he said finally, and waited for a bolt to strike him.

“In what do you think I am wrong?” it asked.

“I’ll show you.” He led it out of the galley, his hands sweating and his mouth dry. Why wouldn’t the damned thing kill him and have done?

The paintings were racked row on row and tier on tier; there was no room in the ship for more than a few to be displayed in a conventional way. Herron found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open so the portrait inside swung into full view, lights springing on around it to bring out the rich colors beneath the twentieth century statglass coating.

“This is where you’re wrong,” Herron said.

The man-shaped thing’s scanner studied the portrait for perhaps fifteen seconds. “Explain what you are showing me,” it said.

“I bow to you!” Herron did so. “You admit ignorance! You even ask an intelligible question, if one that is somewhat too broad. Explain, you say. First, tell me what you see here.”

“I see the image of a life-unit, its third spatial dimension of negligible size as compared to the other two. The image is sealed inside a protective jacket transparent to the wavelengths used by the human eye. The life-unit imaged is, or was, an adult male apparently in good functional condition, garmented in a manner I have not seen before. What I take to be one garment is held before him—”

“You see a man with a glove,” Herron cut in, wearying of his bitter game. “That is the title, Man With A Glove. Now what do you say it means?”

There was a pause of twenty seconds. “Is it an attempt to praise life, to say that life is good?”

Looking now at Titian’s eight hundred year old more-thanmasterpiece, Herron for the moment hardly heard what the machine was saying; he was thinking helplessly and hopelessly of his own most recent work.

“Now you will tell me what it means,” said the machine without emphasis.

Herron walked away without answering, leaving the drawer open.

The berserker’s mouthpiece walked at his side. “Tell me what it means or you will be punished.”

“If you can pause to think, so can I.”

But Herron’s stomach had knotted up at the threat of punishment, seeming to feel that pain mattered even more than death. Herron had great contempt for his stomach.

His feet took him back to his easel. Looking at the discordant and brutal line that a few minutes ago had pleased him, he now found it as disgusting as everything else he had tried to do in the past year.

The berserker asked: “What have you made here?”

Herron picked up a brush he had forgotten to clean, and wiped at it irritably.

“It is my attempt to get at your essence, to capture you with paint and canvas as you have seen those humans captured.” He waved at the storage racks. “My attempt has failed, as most do.”

There was another pause, which Herron did not try to time.

“An attempt to praise me?”

Herron broke the spoiled brush and threw it down. “Call it what you like.”

This time the pause was short, and at its end the machine did not speak, but turned away and walked in the direction of the airlock. Some of its fellows clanked past to join it. From the direction of the airlock there began to come sounds like those of heavy metal being worked and hammered. The interrogation seemed to be over for the time being.

Herron’s thoughts wanted to be anywhere but on his work or on his fate, and they returned to what Hanus had shown him, or tried to show him. Not a regular lifeboat, but she might get away, the captain had said. All it needs now is to press the button.

Herron started walking, smiling faintly as he realized that if this berserker was as careless as it seemed, he might possibly escape it.

Escape to what? He couldn’t paint any more, if he ever could. All that really mattered to him now was here, and on other ships leaving Earth.

Back at the storage rack, Herron swung the Man With A Glove out so its case came free from the rack and became a handy cart. He wheeled the portrait aft. There might yet be one worthwhile thing he could do with his life.

The picture was massive in its statglass shielding, but he thought he could fit it into the boat.

As an itch might nag a dying man, the question of what the captain had been intending with the boat nagged Herron. Hanus hadn’t seemed worried about Herron’s fate, but instead had spoken of trusting Herron . . .

Nearing the stern, unwatched by the machines, Herron passed a strapped-down stack of crated statuary, and heard a noise, a rapid feeble pounding.

It took several minutes to find and open the proper case. When he lifted the lid with its padded lining, a girl wearing a coverall sat up, her hair all wild as if standing in terror.

“Are they gone?” She had bitten at her fingers and nails until they were bleeding. When he didn’t answer at once, she repeated her question again and again, in a rising whine.

“The machines are still here,” he said at last.

Literally shaking in her fear, she climbed out of the case. “Where’s Gus? Have they taken him?”

“Gus?” But he thought he was beginning to understand.

“Gus Hanus, the captain. He and I are—he was trying to save me, to get me away from Earth.”

“I’m quite sure he’s dead,” said Herron. “He fought the machines.” Her bleeding fingers clutched at her lower face. “They’ll kill us, too. Or worse! What can we do?”

“Don’t mourn your lover so deeply,” he said. But the girl seemed not to hear him; her wild eyes looked this way and that, expecting the machines. “Help me with this picture,” he told her calmly. “Hold the door there for me.”

She obeyed as if half-hypnotized, not questioning what he was doing.

“Gus said there’d be a boat,” she muttered to herself. “If he had to smuggle me down to Tau Epsilon he was going to use a special little boat—” She broke off, staring at Herron, afraid that he had heard her and would steal her boat. As indeed he was going to do.

When he had the painting in the stern compartment, he stopped. He looked long at the Man With A Glove, but in the end all he could seem to see was that the fingertips of the ungloved hand were not bitten bloody.

Herron took the shivering girl by the arm and pushed her into the tiny boat. She huddled there in her dazed terror; she was not goodlooking. He wondered what Hanus had seen in her.

“There’s room for only one,” he said, and she shrank and bared her teeth as if afraid he meant to drag her out again. “After I close the hatch, push that button there, the activator. Understand?”

That she understood at once. He dogged the double hatch shut, and waited. Only about three seconds passed before there came a soft scraping sound that he supposed meant that the boat had gone.

Nearby was a tiny observation blister, and Herron put his head into it and watched the stars turn beyond the dark blizzard of the nebula. After a while he saw the berserker through the blizzard, turning with the stars, black and rounded and bigger than any mountain. It gave no sign that it had detected the tiny boat slipping away. Its launch was very near the Franz but none of the commensal machines were in sight.

Looking the Man With A Glove in the eye, Herron pushed him forward again, to a spot near his easel. The discordant lines of Herron’s own work were now worse than disgusting, but Herron made himself work on them.

He hadn’t time to do much before the man-shaped machine came walking back to him; the uproar of metalworking had ceased. Wiping his brush carefully, Herron put it down, and nodded at his berserker-portrait. “When you destroy all the rest, save this painting. Carry it back to those who built you, they deserve it.”

The machine-voice squeaked back at him: “Why do you think I will destroy paintings? Even if they are attempts to praise life, they are dead things in themselves, and so in themselves they are good.”

Herron was suddenly too frightened and weary to speak. Looking dully into the machine’s lenses, he saw there tiny flickerings, keeping time with his own pulse and breathing, like the indications of a liedetector.

“Your mind is divided,” said the machine. “But with its much greater part you have praised me. I have repaired your ship, and set its course. I now release you, so other life-units can learn from you to praise what is good.”

Herron could only stand there staring straight ahead of him, while a trampling of metal feet went past, and there was a final scraping on the hull.

After some time he realized he was alive and free.

At first he shrank from the dead men, but after once touching them he soon got them into a freezer. He had no particular reason to think either of them Believers, but he found a book and read Islamic, Ethical, Christian and Jewish burial services.

Then he found an undamaged handgun on the deck, and went prowling the ship, taken suddenly with the wild notion that a machine might have stayed behind. Pausing only to tear down the abomination from his easel, he went on to the very stern. There he had to stop, facing the direction in which he supposed the berserker now was.

“Damn you, I can change!” he shouted at the stern bulkhead. His voice broke. “I can paint again. I’ll show you . . . I can change. I am alive.”       END

MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT

Outside the ship the Berserkers roamed a ruined galaxy. Inside the revelers jeered at Death!

I

Finding himself alone and unoccupied, Felipe Nogara chose to spend a free moment in looking at the thing that had brought him out here beyond the last fringe of the galaxy. From the luxury of his quarters he stepped up into his private observation bubble. There, in a raised dome of invisible glass, he seemed to be standing outside the hull of his flagship Nirvana.

Under that hull, “below” the Nirvana’s artificial gravity, there slanted the bright disk of the galaxy, including in one of its arms all the star-systems that Earth-descended man had yet explored. But in whatever direction Nogara looked, bright spots and points of light were plentiful. They were other galaxies, marching away at their recessional velocities of tens of thousands of miles per second, marching on out to the optical horizon of the universe.

Nogara had not come here to look at galaxies, however; he had come to look at something new, at a phenomenon never before seen by men at such close range.

It was made visible to him by the apparent pinching-together of the galaxies beyond it, and by the clouds and streamers of dust cascading into it. The star that formed the center of the phenomenon was itself held beyond human sight by the strength of its own gravity. Its mass, perhaps a billion times that of Sol, so bent spacetime around itself that not a photon of light could escape it with a visible wavelength.

The dusty debris of deep space tumbled and churned, falling into the grip of the hypermass. The falling dust built up static charges until lightning turned it into luminescent thunderclouds, and the flicker of the vast lightning shifted into the red before it vanished, near the bottom of the gravitational hill. Probably not even a neutrino could escape this sun. And no ship would dare approach much closer than Nirvana now rode.

Nogara had come out here to judge for himself if the recently discovered phenomenon might soon present any danger to inhabited planets; ordinary suns would go down like chips of wood into a whirlpool if the hypermass found them in its path. But it seemed that another thousand years would pass before any planets had to be evacuated; and before then the hypermass might have gorged itself on dust until its core imploded, whereupon most of its substance could be expected to re-enter the universe in a most spectacular but less dangerous form.

Anyway, in another thousand years it would be someone else’s problem. Right now it might be said to be Nogara’s—for men said that he ran the galaxy, if they said it of anyone.

A communicator sounded, calling him back to the enclosed luxury of his quarters, and he walked down quickly, glad of a reason to get out from under the galaxies.

He touched a plate with one strong and hairy hand. “What is it?”

“My lord, a courier ship has arrived. From the Flamland system. They are bringing . . .”

“Speak plainly. They are bringing my brother’s body?”

“Yes, my lord. The launch bearing the coffin is already approaching Nirvana.”

“I will meet the courier captain, alone, in the Great Hall. I want no ceremony. Have the robots at the airlock test the escort and the outside of the coffin for infection.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The mention of disease was a bit of misdirection. It was not the Flamland plague that had put Nogara’s half-brother Johann Karlsen into a box, though that was the official story. The doctors were supposed to have frozen the hero of the Stone Place as a last resort, to prevent his irreversible death.

An official lie was necessary because not even High Lord Nogara could lightly put out of the way the one man who had made the difference at the Stone Place nebula. In that battle seven years ago the berserker machines had been beaten; if they had not been, intelligent life might already be extinct in the known galaxy. The berserkers were huge automated warships, built for some conflict between long-vanished races and now the enemies of everything that lived. The fighting against them was still bitter, but since the Stone Place it seemed that life in the galaxy would survive.

The Great Hall was where Nogara met daily for feasting and pleasure with the forty or fifty people who were with him on Nirvana, as aides or crewmen or entertainers. But when he entered the Hall now he found it empty, save for one man who stood at attention beside a coffin.

Johann Karlsen’s body and whatever remained of his life were sealed under the glass top of the heavy casket, which contained its own refrigeration and revival systems, controlled by a fiber-optic key theoretically impossible to duplicate. This key Nogara now demanded, with a gesture, from the courier captain.

The captain had the key hung round his neck, and it took him a moment to pull the golden chain over his head and hand it to Nogara. It was another moment before he remembered to bow; he was a spaceman and not a courtier. Nogara ignored the lapse of courtesy. It was his governors and admirals who were re-instituting ceremonies of rank; he himself cared nothing about how subordinates gestured and postured, so long as they obeyed intelligently.

Only now, with the key in his own hand, did Nogara look down at his frozen half-brother. The plotting doctors had shaved away Johann’s short beard, and his hair. His lips were marble pale, and his sightless open eyes were ice. But still the face above the folds of the draped and frozen sheet was undoubtedly Johann’s. There was something that would not freeze.

“Leave me for a time,” Nogara said. He turned to face the end of the Great Hall and waited, looking out through the wide viewpoint to where the hypermass blurred space like a bad lens.

When he heard the door ease shut behind the courier captain he turned back—and found himself facing the short figure of Oliver Mical, the man he had selected to replace Johann as governor on Flamland. Mical must have entered as the spaceman left, which Nogara thought might be taken as symbolic of something. Resting his hands familiarly on the coffin, Mical raised one graying eyebrow in his habitual expression of weary amusement. His rather puffy face twitched in an overcivilized smile.

“How does Browning’s line go?”

Mical mused, glancing down at Karlsen. “ ‘Doing the king’s work all the dim day long’—and now, this reward of virtue.”

“Leave me,” said Nogara.

Mical was in on the plot, as was hardly anyone else except the Flamland doctors. “I thought it best to appear to share your grief,” he said. Then he looked at Nogara and ceased to argue. He made a bow that was mild mockery when the two of them were alone, and walked briskly to the door. Again it closed.

So, Johann. If you had plotted against me, I would have had you killed outright. But you were never a plotter, it was just that you served me too successfully, my enemies and friends alike began to love you too well. So here you are, my frozen conscience, the last conscience I’ll ever have. Sooner or later you would have become ambitious, so it was either do this to you or kill you.

Now I’ll put you away safely, and maybe someday you’ll have another chance at life. It’s a strange thought that someday you may stand musing over my coffin as I now stand over yours. No doubt you’ll pray for what you think is my soul . . . I can’t do that for you, but I wish you sweet dreams. Dream of your Believers’ heaven, not of your hell.”

Nogara imagined a brain at absolute zero, its neurons super-conducting, repeating one dream on and on and on. But that was nonsense.

“I cannot risk my power, Johann.” This time he whispered the words aloud. “It was either this or have you killed.” He turned again to the wide viewport.

II

“I suppose Thirty-three’s gotten the body to Nogara already,” said the Second Officer of Esteeler Courier Thirty-four, looking at the bridge chronometer. “It must be nice to declare yourself an emperor or whatever, and have people hurl themselves all over the galaxy to do everything for you.”

“Can’t be nice to have someone bring you your brother’s corpse,” said Captain Thurman Holt, studying his astrogational sphere. His ship’s C-plus drive was rapidly stretching a lot of time-like interval between itself and the Flamland system. Even if Holt was not enthusiastic about his mission, he was glad to be away from Flamland, where Mical’s political police were taking over.

“I wonder,” said the Second, and chuckled.

“What’s that mean?”

The Second looked over both shoulders, out of habit formed on Flamland. “Have you heard this one?” he asked. “Nogara is God—but half of his spacemen are atheists.”

Holt smiled, but only faintly. “He’s no mad tyrant, you know. Esteel’s not the worst-run government in the galaxy. Nice guys don’t put down rebellions.”

“Karlsen did all right.”

“That’s right, he did.”

The Second grimaced. “Oh sure, Nogara could be worse, if you want to be serious about it. He’s a politician. But I just can’t stand that crew that’s accumulated around him the last few years. We’ve got an example on board now of what they do. If you want to know the truth I’m a little scared now that Karlsen’s dead.”

“Well, we’ll soon see them.” Holt sighed, and stretched. “I’m going to look in on the prisoners. The bridge is yours, Second.”

“I relieve you, sir. Do the man a favor and kill him, Thurm.”

A minute later, looking through the spy-plate into the courier’s small brig, Holt could wish with honest compassion that his male prisoner was dead.

He was an outlaw chieftain named Janda, and his capture had been the last success of Karlsen’s Flamland service, putting a virtual end to the rebellion. Janda had been a tall man, a brave rebel, and a brutal bandit. He had raided and fought against Nogara’s Esteeler empire until there was no hope left, and then he had surrendered to Karlsen.

“My pride commands me to conquer my enemy,” Karlsen had written once, in what he thought was to be a private letter. “My honor forbids me to humble or hate my enemy.” But Mical’s political police operated with a different philosophy.

The outlaw might still be longboned, but Holt had never seen him stand tall. The manacles still binding his wrists and ankles were of plastic and supposedly would not abrade human skin, but they served no sane purpose now and Holt would have removed them if he could.

A stranger seeing the girl Lucinda who sat now at Janda’s side to feed him, might have supposed her to be his daughter. She was his sister, five years younger than he. She was also a girl of rare beauty, and perhaps Mical’s police had motives other than mercy in sending her to Nogara’s court unmarked and un-brain washed. It was rumored that the demand for certain kinds of entertainment was strong among the courtiers, and the turnover among the entertainers high.

Holt had so far kept himself from believing such stories. He opened the brig now—he kept it locked only to prevent Janda’s straying out and falling childlike into an accident—and went in.

When the girl Lucinda had first come aboard his ship her eyes had shown helpless hatred of every Esteeler. Holt had been gentle and as helpful as possible to her in the days since then, and there was not even dislike in the face she raised to him now—there was a hope which it seemed she had to share with someone.

She said: “I think he spoke my name, a few minutes ago.”

“Oh?” Holt bent to look more closely at Janda, and could see no change. The outlaw’s eyes still stared glassily, the right eye now and then dripping a tear that seemed to have no connection with any kind of emotion. Janda’s jaw was as slack as ever, and his whole body as awkwardly slumped.

“Maybe—” Holt didn’t finish.

“What?” She was almost eager.

Gods of Space, he couldn’t let himself get involved with this girl. He almost wished to see hatred in her eyes again.

“Maybe,” he said gently, “it will be better for your brother if he doesn’t make any recovery now. You know where he’s going.”

Lucinda’s hope, such as it was, was shocked away by his words. She was silent, staring at her brother as if she saw something new.

Holt’s wrist-intercom sounded.

“Captain here,” he acknowledged.

“Sir, reporting a ship detected and calling us. Bearing five o’clock level to our course. Small and normal.”

The last three words were the customary reassurance that a sighted ship was not possibly a berserker’s giant hull. Berserkers all looked much alike, and what Flamland outlaws were left had no deep space ships, so Holt had no reason to be cautious.

He went casually back to the bridge and looked at the small shape on the detector screen. It was unfamiliar to him, but that was hardly surprising, as there were many shipyards orbiting many planets. Why, though, should any ship approach and hail him in deep space?

Plague?

“No, no plague,” answered a radio voice, through bursts of static, when he put the question to the stranger. The video signal from the other ship was also jumpy, making it hard to see the speaker’s face. “Caught a speck of dust on my last jump, and my fields are shaky. Will you take a few passengers aboard?”

“Certainly.” For a ship on the brink of a C-plus jump to collide with the gravitation field of a sizable dust-speck was a rare accident, but not unheard-of; and it would explain the noisy communications. There was still nothing to alarm Holt.

The stranger sent over a launch which clamped to the courier’s airlock. Wearing a smile of welcome for distressed passengers, Holt opened the lock. In the next moment he and the half-dozen men who made up his crew were caught helpless by an inrush of man-sized machines—they were a berserker’s boarding party, cold and ancient, merciless as nightmare.

The machines seized the courier so swiftly and efficiently that no one could offer real resistance, but they did not immediately kill any of the humans. They tore the drive units from one of the lifeboats and herded Holt and his crew and his erstwhile prisoners into the boat.

“It wasn’t a berserker on the screen, it wasn’t,” the Second Officer kept repeating to Holt. The humans sat side by side, jammed against one another in the small space. The machines were allowing them air and water and food, and had started to take them out one at a time for questioning.

“I know, it didn’t look like one,” Holt answered. “The berserkers are probably forming themselves into new shapes, building themselves new weapons. That’s only logical, after the Stone Place. The only odd thing is that no one foresaw it.”

A hatch clanged open, and a pair of roughly man-shaped machines entered the boat, picking their way precisely among the nine cramped humans until they reached the one they wanted.

“No, he can’t talk!” Lucinda shrieked. “Don’t take him!”

But the machines could not or would not hear her. They pulled Janda to his feet and marched him out. The girl followed, dragging at them, trying to argue with them. Holt could only scramble uselessly after her in the narrow space, afraid that one of the machines would turn and kill her. But they only kept her from following them out of the lifeboat, pushing her back from the hatch with metal hands as gently resistless as time. Then they were gone with Janda, and the hatch was closed again. Lucinda stood gazing at it blankly. She did not move when Holt put his arm around her.

III

After a timeless period of waiting, the humans saw the hatch open again. The machines were back, but they did not return Janda. Instead they had come to take Holt.

Vibrations echoed through the courier’s hull; the machines seemed to be rebuilding her. In a small chamber sealed off by a new bulkhead from the rest of the ship, the berserker computer-brain had set up electronic eyes and ears and a speaker for itself, and here Holt was taken to be interrogated.

Speaking with a collection of recorded human words, the berserker questioned Holt at great length. Almost every question concerned Johann Karlsen. It was known that the berserkers regarded Karlsen as their chief enemy, but this one seemed to be obsessed with him—and unwilling to believe that he was really dead.

“I have captured your charts and astrogational settings,” the berserker reminded Holt. “I know your course is to Nirvana, where supposedly the non-functioning Karlsen has been taken. Describe this Nirvanaship used by the life-unit Nogara.”

So long as it had asked only about a dead man, Holt had given the berserker straight answers, not wanting to be tripped up in a useless lie. But a flagship was a different matter, and now he hesitated. Still, there was little he could say about Nirvana if he wanted to. And he and his fellow prisoners had had no chance to agree on any plan for deceiving the berserker; certainly it must be listening to everything they said in the lifeboat.

“I’ve never seen the Nirvana,” he answered truthfully. “But logic tells me it must be a strong ship, since the highest human leaders travel on it.” There was no harm in telling the machine what it could certainly deduce for itself.

A door opened suddenly, and Holt stared in surprise as a strange man entered the interrogation chamber. Then he saw that it was not a man, but some creation of the berserker. Perhaps its flesh was plastic, perhaps some product of tissue-culture.

“Hi, are you Captain Holt?” asked the figure. There was no gross flaw in it, but a ship camouflaged with the greatest skill looks like nothing so much as a ship that has been camouflaged.

When Holt was silent, the figure asked: “What’s wrong?” Its speech alone would have given it away, to an intelligent human who listened carefully.

“You’re not a man,” Holt told it.

The figure sat down and went limp.

The berserker explained: “You see I am not capable of making an imitation life-unit that will be accepted by real ones face to face. Therefore I require that you, a real life-unit, help me make certain of Karlsen’s death.”

Holt said nothing.

“I am a special device,” the berserker said, “built by the berserkers with one prime goal, to bring about with certainty Karlsen’s death. If you help me prove him dead, I will willingly free you and the other life-units I now hold. If you refuse to help, all of you will receive the most unpleasant stimuli until you change your mind.”

Holt did not believe that it would ever willingly set them free. But he had nothing to lose by talking, and he might at least gain for himself and the others a death free of most unpleasant stimuli. Berserkers preferred to be efficient killers, not sadists, though during the long war they had become experts on the human nervous system.

“What sort of help do you want from me?” Holt asked.

“When I have finished building myself into this courier we are going on to Nirvana, where you will deliver your prisoners. I have read the orders. After being interviewed by the human leaders on Nirvana, the prisoners are to be taken on Esteel for confinement. Is it not so?”

“It is.”

The door opened again, and Janda shuffled in, bent and bemused.

“Can’t you spare this man any more questioning?” Holt asked the berserker. “He can’t help you in any way.”

There was only silence. Holt waited uneasily. At last, looking at Janda, he realized that something about the outlaw had changed. The tears had stopped flowing from his right eye.

When Holt saw this he felt a mounting horror that he could not have explained, as if his subconscious already knew what the berserker was going to say next.

“What was bone in this life-unit is now metal,” the berserker said. “Where blood flowed, now preservatives are pumped. Inside the skull I have placed a computer, and in the eyes are cameras to gather the evidence I must have on Karlsen. To match the behavior of a brainwashed man is within my capability.”

“I do not hate you,” Lucinda said to the berserker when it had her alone for interrogation. “You are an accident, like a planet-quake, like a pellet of dust hitting a ship near light-speed. Nogara and his people are the ones I hate. If his brother was not dead I would kill him with my hands and willingly bring you his body.”

“Courier Captain? This is Governor Mical, speaking for the High Lord Nogara. Bring your two prisoners over to Nirvana at once,” he ordered.

“At once, sir.”

After coming out of C-plus travel within sight of Nirvana, the assassinmachine had taken Holt and Lucinda from the lifeboat. Then it had let the boat, with Holt’s crew still on it, drift out between the two ships, as if men were using it to check the courier’s fields. The men on the boat were to be the berserker’s hostages, and its shield if it was discovered.

And by leaving them there, it doubtless wanted to make more credible the prospect of their eventual release.

Holt had not known how to tell Lucinda of her brother’s fate, but at last he had managed somehow. She had wept for a minute, and then she had become very calm.

Now the berserker put Holt and Lucinda into the crystal globe that served it for a launch, for the trip to Nirvana. The machine that had been Lucinda’s brother was aboard the launch already, waiting, slumped and broken-looking as the man had actually been in the last days of his life.

When she saw that figure, Lucinda stopped. Then in a clear voice she said: “Machine, I wish to thank you. You have done my brother a kindness no human would do for him. I think I would have found a way to kill him myself before his enemies could torture him any more.”

IV

The Nirvana’s airlock was strongly armored, and equipped with automated defenses that would have repelled a rush of boarding machines, just as Nirvana’s beams and missiles would have beaten off any heavy-weapons attack a courier, or a dozen couriers, could launch. The berserker had foreseen all this.

An officer welcomed Holt aboard. “This way, Captain, we’re all waiting.”

“All?”

The officer had the well-fed, comfortable look that came with safe and easy duty. His eyes were busy appraising Lucinda. “There’s a celebration under way in the Great Hall. Your prisoners’ arrival has been much anticipated.”

Music throbbed in the Great Hall, and dancers writhed in costumes more obscene than any nakedness. From a table running almost the length of the Hall, serving machines were clearing the remnants of what had been a feast. In a throne-like chair behind the center of the table sat the High Lord Nogara, a rich cloak thrown over his shoulders, pale wine before him in a crystal goblet. Forty or fifty revelers flanked him at the long table, men and women and a few of whose sex Holt could not at once be sure. All were drinking and laughing, and some were donning masks and costumes, making ready for further celebration.

Heads turned at Holt’s entrance, and a moment of silence was followed by a cheer. In all the eyes and faces turned now toward his prisoners, Holt could see nothing like pity.

“Welcome, Captain,” said Nogara in a pleasant voice, when Holt had remembered to bow. “Is there news from Flamland?”

“None of great importance, sir.”

A puffy-faced man who sat at Nogara’s right hand leaned forward on the table. “No doubt there is great mourning for the late governor?”

“Of course, sir.” Holt recognized Mical. “And much anticipation of the new.”

Mical leaned back in his chair, smiling cynically. “I’m sure the rebellious population is eager for my arrival. Girl, were you eager to meet me? Come, pretty one, round the table, here to me.” As Lucinda slowly obeyed, Mical gestured to the serving devices. “Robots, set a chair for the man—there, in the center of the floor. Captain, you may return to your ship.”

Felipe Nogara was steadily regarding the manacled figure of his old enemy Janda, and what Nogara might be thinking was hard to say. But he seemed content to let Mical give what orders pleased him.

“Sir,” said Holt to Mical. “I would like to see—the remains of Johann Karlsen.”

That drew the attention of Nogara, who nodded. A serving machine drew back sable draperies, revealing an alcove in one end of the Hall In the alcove, before a huge viewport, rested the coffin.

Holt was not particularly surprised; on many planets it was the custom to feast in the presence of the dead. After bowing to Nogara he turned and saluted and walked toward the alcove. Behind him he heard the shuffle and clack of Janda’s manacled movement, and held his breath. A muttering passed along the table, and then a sudden quieting in which even the throbbing music ceased. Probably Nogara had gestured permission for Janda’s walk, wanting to see what the brainwashed man would do.

Holt reached the coffin and stood over it. He hardly saw the frozen face inside it, or the blur of the hypermass beyond the port. He hardly heard the whispers and giggles of the revelers. The only picture clear in his mind showed the faces of his crew as they waited helpless in the grip of the berserker.

The machine clothed in Janda’s flesh came shuffling up beside him, and its eyes of glass stared down into those of ice. A photograph of retinal patterns taken back to the waiting berserker for comparison with old captured records would tell it that this man was really Karlsen.

A faint cry of anguish made Holt look back toward the long table, where he saw Lucinda pulling herself away from Mical’s clutching arm, Mical and his friends were laughing.

“No, Captain, I am no Karlsen,” Mical called down to him, seeing Holt’s expression. “And do you think I regret the difference? Johann’s prospects are not bright. He is rather bounded by a nutshell, and can no longer count himself king of infinite space!”

“Shakespeare!” cried a sycophant, showing appreciation of Mical’s literary erudition.

“Sir.” Holt took a step forward. “May I—may I now take the prisoners back to my ship?”

Mical misinterpreted Holt’s anxiety. “Oh ho! I see you appreciate some of life’s finer things, Captain. But as you know, rank has its privileges. The girl stays here.”

He had expected them to hold on to Lucinda, and she was better here than with the berserker.

“Sir, then if—if the man alone can come with me. In a prison hospital on Esteel he may recover—”

“Captain,” Nogara’s voice was not loud, but it hushed the table. “Do not argue here.”

“No sir.”

Mical shook his head. “My thoughts are not yet of mercy to my enemies, Captain. Whether they may soon turn in that direction—well, that depends.” He again reached out a leisurely arm to encircle Lucinda. “Do you know, Captain, that hatred is the true spice of love?”

Holt looked helplessly back at Nogara. Nogara’s cold eye said: One more word, courier, and you find yourself in the brig. I do not give two warnings.

If Holt cried berserker now, the thing in Janda’s shape might kill everyone in the Hall before it could be stopped. He knew it was listening to him, watching his movements.

“I—I am returning to my ship,” he stuttered. Nogara looked away, and no one else paid him much attention. “I will—return here—in a few hours perhaps. Certainly before I drive for Esteel.”

Holt’s voice trailed off as he saw that a group of the revelers had surrounded Janda. They had removed the manacles from the outlaw’s dead limbs, and they were putting a horned helmet on his head, giving him a shield and spear and a cloak of fur, equipage of an old Norse warrior of Earth—first to coin and bear the dread name of berserker.

“Observe, Captain,” mocked Mical’s voice. “At our masked ball we do not fear the fate of Prince Prospero. We willingly bring in the semblance of the terror outside!”

“Poe!” shouted the sycophant in glee.

Prospero and Poe meant nothing to Holt, and Mical looked disappointed.

“Leave us, Captain,” said Nogara, making a direct order of it.

“Leave, Captain Holt,” said Lucinda in a firm, clear voice. “We all know you wish to help those who stand in danger here. Lord Nogara, will Captain Holt be blamed in any way for what happens here when he has gone?”

There was a hint of puzzlement in Nogara’s clear eyes. But he shook his head slightly, granting the asked for absolution.

And there was nothing for Holt to do but go back to the berserker to argue and plead with it for his crew. If it was patient, the evidence it sought might be forthcoming. If only the revelers would have mercy on the thing they thought was Janda.

Holt went out. It had never entered his burdened mind that Karlsen was only frozen.

V

Mical’s arm was about her hips as she stood beside his chair, and his voice purred up at her. “Why, how you tremble, pretty one . . . it moves me that such a pretty one as you should, tremble at my touch, yes, it moves me deeply. Now, we are no longer enemies, are we? If we are, I should have to deal harshly with your brother.”

She had given Holt time to get clear of the Nirvana. Now she swung her arm with all her strength. The blow turned Mical’s head halfway round, and made his neat gray hair fly wildly.

There was a sudden hush in the Great Hall, and then a roar of laughter that reddened all of Mical’s face to match the handprint on his cheek. A man behind Lucinda grabbed her arms and pinned them. She relaxed until she felt his grip loosen slightly, and then she grabbed up a table knife. There was another burst of laughter as Mical ducked away and the man behind Lucinda seized her again. Another man came W help him and the two of them, laughing, took away the knife and forced her to sit in a chair at Mical’s side.

When the governor spoke at last his voice quavered slightly, but it was low and almost calm.

“Bring the man closer,” he ordered. “Seat him there, just across the table from us.”

While his order was being carried out, Mical spoke to Lucinda in conversational tones. “It was my intent, of course, that your brother should be treated and allowed to recover.” He paused to see the effect of that statement on her.

“Lying piece of filth,” she whispered, smiling.

Mical only smiled back. “Let us test the skill of my mind-control technicians,” he suggested. “I’ll wager that no bonds will be needed to hold your brother in his chair, once I have done this.” He made a curious gesture over the table, toward the glassy eyes that looked out of Janda’s face. “So. But he will still be aware, with every nerve, of all that happens to him. You may be sure of that.”

She had planned and counted on something like this happening, but now she felt as if she was exhausted by breathing evil air. She was afraid of fainting, and at the same time wished that she could.

“Our guest is bored with his costume.” Mical looked up and down the table. “Who will be first to take a turn at entertaining him?”

There was a spattering of applause as a giggling effeminate arose from a nearby chair.

“Jamy is known for his inventiveness,” said Mical in pleasant tones to Lucinda. “I insist you watch closely, now. Chin up!”

On the other side of Mical, Felipe Nogara was losing his air of remoteness. As if reluctantly, he was being drawn to watch. In his bearing was a rising expectancy, winning out over disgust.

Jamy came giggling, holding a small jeweled knife.

“Not the eyes,” Mical cautioned. “Thew’ll be things I want him to see, later.”

“Oh, certainly!” Jamy twittered. He set the horned helmet gingerly aside, and wiped the touch of it from his fingers. “We’ll just start like this on one cheek, with a bit of skin—”

Jamy’s touch with the blade was gentle, but still too much for the dead flesh. At the first peeling tug, the whole lifeless mask fell red and wet from around the staring eyes, and his steel berserker-skull grinned out.

Lucinda had just time to see Jamy’s body flung across the Hall by a steel-boned arm before the men holding her let go and turned to flee for their lives, and she was able to duck under the table. Screaming bedlam broke loose, and in another moment the whole table went over with a crash before the berserker’s strength. The machine, finding itself discovered, thwarted in its primary function of getting away with evidence on Karlsen, took as its secondary goal the old berserker one of simple killing. It moved through the Hall, squatting and hopping grotesquely, mowing its way with scythe-like arms, harvesting howling panic into bundles of bloody stillness.

At the main door, fleeing people jammed one another into immobility, and the assassin worked among them, methodically mangling and slaying. Then it turned and came down the Hall again. It came to Lucinda, still kneeling where the table-tipping had exposed her; but the machine hesitated, recognizing her as a semi-partner in its prime function. In a moment it had dashed on after another target.

It was Nogara, swaying on his feet, his right arm hanging broken. He had come up with a heavy handgun from somewhere, and now he fired left-handed as the machine charged down the other side of the overturned table toward him. The gun-blasts shattered Nogara’s friends and furniture but only grazed his moving target.

At last one shot hit home. The machine was wrecked, but its impetus carried it on to knock Nogara down again.

There was a shaky quiet in the Great Hall, which was wrecked as if by a bomb. Lucinda got unsteadily to her feet. There were sobs and moans and gropings everywhere, but no one else was standing.

She picked her way dazedly over to the smashed assassin-machine. She felt only a numbness, looking at the rags of clothing and flesh that still clung to its metal frame. Now in her mind she could see her brother’s face as it once was, strong and smiling.

Now there was something that mattered more than the dead, if she could only recall what it was—of course, the berserker’s hostages, the good kind spacemen. She could try to trade Karlsen’s body for them.

The serving machines, built to face emergencies on the order of spilled wine, where dashing to and from the nearest thing to panic that mechanism could achieve. They impeded Lucinda’s progress, but she had the heavy coffin wheeled halfway across the Hall when a weak voice stopped her. Nogara had dragged himself up to a sitting position against the overturned table.

He croaked again: “—alive.”

“What?”

“Johann’s alive. Healthy. See? It’s a freezer.”

“But we all told the berserker he was dead.” She felt stupid with the impact of one shock after another. For the first time she looked down at Karlsen’s face, and long seconds passed before she could tear her eyes away. “It has hostages. It wants his body.”

“No.” Nogara shook his head. “I see, now. But no. I won’t give him to berserkers, alive.” A brutal power of personality still emanated from his broken body. His gun was gone, but his power kept Lucinda from moving. There was no hatred in her now.

She protested: “But there are even men out there.”

“Berserker’s like me.” Nogara bared pain-clenched teeth. “It won’t let prisoners go. Here. The key . . .” He pulled it from inside his tornopen tunic.

Lucinda’s eyes were drawn once again to the cold serenity of the face in the coffin. Then on impulse she ran to get the key. When she did so Nogara slumped over in relief, unconscious or nearly so.

The coffin lock was marked in several positions, and she turned it to EMERGENCY REVIVAL. Lights sprang on around the figure inside, and there was a hum of power.

By now the automated systems of the ship were reacting to the emergency. The serving machines had begun a stretcher-bearer service. Nogara being one of the first victims they carried away. Presumably a robot medic was in action somewhere. From behind Nogara’s throne chair a great voice was shouting.

“This is ship defense control, requesting human orders! What is nature of emergency?”

“Do not contact the courier ship!” Lucinda shouted back. “Watch it for an attack. But don’t hit the lifeboat!”

The glass top of the coffin had become opaque.

Lucinda ran to the viewport, stumbling over the body of Mical and going on without a pause. By putting her face against the port and looking out at an angle she could just see the berserker-courier, pinkly visible in the wavering light of the hypermass, its lifeboat of hostages a small pink dot still in place before it.

How long would it wait, before it killed the hostages and fled?

When she turned away from the port, she saw that the coffin’s lid was open and the man inside was sitting up. For just a moment, a moment that was to say in Lucinda’s mind, his eyes were like a child’s, fixed helplessly on hers. Then power began to grow behind his eyes, a power somehow completely different from his brother’s and perhaps even greater.

Karlsen looked away from her, taking in the rest of his surroundings, the devastated Great Hall and the coffin. “Felipe,” he whispered, as if in pain, though his halfbrother was no longer in sight.

Lucinda moved toward him and started to pour out her story, from the day in the Flamland prison when she had heard that Karlsen had fallen to the plague.

Once he interrupted her. “Help me out of this thing, get me space armor.” His arm was hard and strong when she grasped it, but when he stood beside her he was surprisingly short. “Go on, what then?”

She hurried on with her tale, while serving machines came to arm him. “But why were you frozen?” she ended, suddenly wondering at his health and strength.

He ignored the question. “Come along to Defense Control. We must save those men out there.”

He went familiarly to the nerve center of the ship and hurled himself into the combat chair of the Defense Officer, who was probably dead. The panel before Karlsen came alight and he ordered at once: “Get me a contact with that courier.”

Within a few moments a flatsounding voice from the courier answered routinely. The face that appeared on the communication screen was badly lighted; someone viewing it without advance warning would not suspect that it was anything but human.

“This is High Commander Karlsen speaking, from the Nirvana.”

He did not call himself governor or lord, but by his title of the great day of the Stone Place. “I’m coming over there. I want to talk to you men on the courier.”

The shadowed face moved slightly on the screen. “Yes sir.”

Karlsen broke off the contact at once. “That’ll keep its hopes up. Now I need a fast launch. You, robots, load my coffin aboard one. I’m on emergency revival drugs now and if I live I may have to re-freeze for a while.”

“You’re not really going there?” Up out of the chair again, he paused. “I know berserkers. If chasing me is that thing’s prime function it won’t waste a shot or a second of time on a few hostages while I’m in sight.”

“You can’t go,” Lucinda heard herself saying. “You mean too much to all men—”

“I’m not committing suicide, I have a trick or two in mind.” Karlsen’s voice changed suddenly. “You say Felipe’s not dead?”

“I don’t think so.”

Karlsen’s eyes dosed while his lips moved briefly, silently. Then he looked at Lucinda and grabbed up paper and a stylus from the Defense Officer’s console. “Give this to Felipe,” he said, writing. “He’ll set you and the captain free if I ask it. You’re not dangerous to his power. Whereas I . . .”

VI

From the Defense Officer’s position, Lucinda watched Karlsen’s crystalline launch leave the Nirvana and take a long curve that brought it near the courier at a point some distance from the lifeboat.

“You on the courier,” Lucinda heard him say. “You can tell it’s really me here on the launch, can’t you? You can DF my transmission? Can you photograph my retinas through the screen?”

And the launch darted away with a right-angle swerve, dodging and twisting at top acceleration, as the berserker’s weapons blasted the space where it had been. Karlsen had been right. The berserker spent not a moment’s delay or a single shot on the lifeboat, but hurled itself instantly after the launch.

“Hit that courier!” Lucinda screamed. “Destroy it!” A salvo of missiles left the Nirvana, but it was a shot at a receding target, and it missed. Perhaps it missed because the courier was already in the fringes of the distortion surrounding the hypermass.

Karlsen’s launch had not been hit, but it could not get away. It was a glassy dot vanishing behind a screen of blasts from the berserker’s weapons, a dot being forced into the maelstrom of the hypermass.

“Chase them!” cried Lucinda, and saw the stars tint blue ahead; but almost instantly the Nirvana’s auto pilot countermanded her order, barking mathematical assurance that to accelerate any further in that direction would be fatal to all aboard.

The launch was now going certainly into the hypermass, gripped by a gravity that could make any engines useless. And the berserkership was going headlong after the launch, caring for nothing but to make sure of Karlsen.

The two specks tinted red, and redder still, racing before an enormous falling cloud of dust as if flying into a planet’s sunset sky. And then the red shift of the hypermass took them into invisibility, and the universe saw them no more.

Soon after the robots had brought the men from the lifeboat safe aboard Nirvana, Holt found Lucinda alone in the Great Hall, gazing out the viewport.

“He gave himself to save you,” she said. “And he’d never even seen you.”

“I know.” After a pause Holt said: “I’ve just been talking to the Lord Nogara. I don’t know why, but you’re to be freed, and I’m not to be prosecuted for bringing the damned berserker aboard. Though Nogara seems to hate both of us . . .” She wasn’t listening, she was still looking out the port.

“I want you to tell me all about him someday,” Holt said, putting his arm around Lucinda. She moved slightly, ridding herself of a minor irritation that she had hardly noticed. It was Holt’s arm, which dropped away.

“I see,” Holt said, after a while. He went to look after his men.       END

1966

MR. JESTER

Men had forgotten laughter . . . and the Berserkers had never known it!

At last the berserker machines’ age-long raid across the galaxy had brought them against a life-form too strong to be wiped out of the way—a race of two-legged creatures who were clever and stubborn, far-scattered and well-armed, sprung from a planet that the ancient Berserker-Builders had never known existed.

Defeated in battle, the berserkercomputers saw that refitting, repair, and the construction of new machines were necessary. They sought out sunless, hidden places, where minerals were available but where men—who were now as often the hunters as the hunted—were not likely to show up. And in such secret places they set up automated shipyards.

To one such concealed shipyard, seeking repair, there came a berserker.

Its spherical hull, thirty miles in diameter, had been torn open in a recent battle, and it had suffered severe internal damage. It collapsed rather than landed on the dark planetoid, beside the half-finished hull of a new machine. Before emergency repairs could be started, the engines of the damaged machine failed, its emergency power failed, and like a wounded living thing it died.

The shipyard-computers were capable of wide improvisation. They surveyed the extent of the damage, weighed various courses of action, and then swiftly began to cannibalize. Instead of embodying the deadly purpose of the new machine in a new forcefield brain, following the replication-instructions of the Builders, they took the old brain with many another part from the wreck.

The Builders had not foreseen that this might happen, and so the shipyard-computers did not know that in the forcefield brain of each original berserker there was a safety switch. The switch was there because the original machines had been launched by living Builders, who had wanted to survive while testing their own life-destroying creations.

When the brain was moved from one hull to another, the safety switch reset itself.

The old brain awoke in control of a mighty new hull, of weapons that could sterilize a planet, new engines to hurl the whole mass far faster than light.

But there was no Builder present, and no timer, to turn off the simple safety switch.

The jester—the accused jester, but he was as good as convicted—was on the carpet. He stood facing a row of stiff necks and granite faces, behind a long table. On either side of him was a tridi camera. His offenses had been so unusually offensive that the Committee of Duly Constituted Authority themselves, the very rulers of Planet A, were sitting to pass judgment on his case.

Perhaps the Committee members had another reason for this session: Planet-wide elections were due in a month. No member wanted to miss the chance for a non-political tridi appearance that would not have to be offset by a grant of equal time for the new Liberal Party opposition.

“I have this further item of evidence to present,” the Minister of Communication was saying, from his teat on the Committee side of the long table. He held up what appeared at first to be an official pedestrian-control sign, having steady black letters on a blank white background. But the sign read: UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“When a sign is put up,” said the MiniComm, “the first day, a lot of people read it.” He paused, listening to himself. “That is, a new sign on a busy pedestrian ramp is naturally given great attention. Now in this sign, the semantic content of the first word is confusing in its context.”

The President of the Committee—and of the planet—cleared his throat warningly. The MiniComm’s fondness for stating truisms made him sound more stupid than he actually was. It seemed unlikely that the Liberals were going to present any serious challenge at the polls, but there was no point in giving them encouragement.

The lady member of the Committee, the Minister of Education, waved her lorgnette in chubby fingers, seeking attention. She inquired: “Has anyone computed the cost to us all in work-hours of this confusing sign?”

“We’re working on it,” growled the Minister of Labor, hitching up an overall strap. He glared at the accused. “You do admit causing this sign to be posted?”

“I do.” The accused was remembering how so many of the pedestrians on the crowded ramp had laughed, and how the day had brightened for them and for him. What did work-hours matter? No one on Planet A was starving any longer.

“You admit that you have never done a thing, really, for your planeteer your people?” Thus spoke the Minister of Defense, a tall, powerful, bemedaled figure, armed with a ritual pistol.

“I don’t admit that,” said the accused bluntly. “I’ve tried to brighten people’s lives.” He had no hope of official leniency anyway. And he knew no one was going to take him offstage and beat him; the beating of prisoners was not authorized.

“Do you even now attempt to defend levity?” The Minister of Philosophy took his ritual pipe from his mouth, and smiled in the grim permissible fashion, baring his teeth at the challenge of the Universe. “Life is a jest, true; but a grim jest. You have lost sight of that. For years you have harassed society, leading people to drug themselves with levity instead of facing the bitter realities of existence. The pictures found in your possession could do only harm.”

The President’s hand moved to the video recording cube that lay on the table before him, neatly labeled as evidence. In his droning voice the President asked: “You do admit that these pictures are yours? That you used them to fry to get other people to—yield to mirth?”

The prisoner nodded. They could A prove everything: he had waived his right to a full legal defense, wanting only to get the trial over with. “Yes, I filled that cube from tapes and films I sneaked out of libraries and archives. Yes, I showed people its contents.”

There was a murmur from the Committee. The Minister of Diet, a skeletal figure with a repellent glow of health in his granite cheeks, raised a hand. “Inasmuch as the accused seems certain to be convicted, may I request in advance that he be paroled in my custody? In his earlier testimony he admitted that one of his first acts of deviation was the avoidance of his community mess. I believe I could demonstrate, using this man, the wonderful effect on character of dietary discipline—”

“I refuse!” the accused interrupted loudly. It seemed to him that the words ascended, growling, from his stomach.

The President rose, to adroitly fill what might have become an awkward silence. “If no member of the Committee has any further questions—? Then let us vote. Is the accused guilty as charged on all counts?”

To the accused, standing with weary eyes closed, the vote sounded like one voice passing along the table: “Guilty. Guilty. Guilty . . .” After a brief whispered conference with the Minister of Defense, the President passed sentence, a hint of satisfaction in his drone.

“Having rejected a duly authorized parole, the convicted jester will be placed under the orders of the Minister of Defense, and sent to solitary beacon duty out on the Approaches, for an indefinite period. This will remove his disruptive influence, while at the same time constraining him to contribute positively to society.”

For decades Planet A and its sun had been cut off from all but occasional contact with the rest of the galaxy, by a vast interstellar dust storm that was due to go on for more decades at least. So the positive contribution to society might be doubted. But it seemed that the beacon stations could be used as isolation prisons without imperilling nonexistent shipping, or weakening defense against an enemy that never came.

“One thing more,” added the President. “I direct that this recording cube be securely fastened around your neck on a monomolecular cord, in such a way that you may put the cube into a viewer when you wish. You will be alone on the station and no other off-duty activity will be available.”

The President faced toward a tridi camera. “Let me assure the public that I derive no satisfaction from imposing a punishment that may seem harsh, and even—imaginative But in recent years a dangerous levity has spread among some few of our people; a levity all too readily tolerated by some supposedly more solid citizens.”

Having gotten in a dig at the newly-burgeoning Liberals, a dig he might hope to claim was non-political in intent, the President faced back to the jester. “A robot will go with you to the beacon, to assist you in your duties and see to your physical safety. I assure you the robot will not be tempted into mirth.”

The robot took the convicted jester out in a little ship, so far out that Planet A vanished and its sun shrank to a point of brilliance. Out on the edge of the great dusty night of the Approaches, they drew near the putative location of station Z-45, which the MiniDef had selected as being the most dismal and forsaken of those unmanned at present.

There was indeed a metallic object where beacon Z-45 was supposed to be; but when the robot and jester got closer, they saw the object was a sphere some forty miles in diameter. There were a few little bits and pieces floating about it that just might be remnants of Z-45. Just then the sphere evidently sighted their ship, for with startling speed it began to move toward them.

Once robots are told what berserkers look like, they do not forget, nor do robots grow slow and careless. But radio equipment can be sloppily maintained, and ever the dust drifts in around the edges of the system of Planet A, impeding radio signals. Before the MiniDef’s robot could successfully broadcast an alarm, the forty-mile sphere was close enough to blot out half the sky, and its grip of metal and force was tight upon the little ship.

The jester kept his eyes shut through a good deal of what followed. If they had sent him out here to stop him laughing they had chosen the right spot.

He squeezed his eyelids tighter, and put his fingers in his ears, as the berserker’s commensal machines smashed their way into his little ship and carried him off. He never did find out what they did with his robot guard.

When things grew quiet, and he felt gravity, and good air and pleasant warmth again, he decided that keeping his eyes shut was worse than knowing whatever they might tell him. His first cautious peek showed him that he was in a large shadowy room, that at least held no visible menace.

When he stirred, a squeaky monotonous voice somewhere above him said: “My memory bank tells me that you are a protoplasmic computing unit, probably capable of understanding this language. Do you understand?”

“Me?” The jester looked up into the shadows, but could not see the speaker. “Yes, I understand you.” Most former colonies of Earth still spoke close variants of the one language carried out from Sol in the years before the berserker-war. “But who are you?” the jester ventured.

“I am what this language calls a berserker.”

The jester had taken shamefully little interest in galactic affairs, but that word frightened even him. He stuttered: “That means you’re a kind of automated warship?”

There was a pause. “I am not sure,” said the squeaky, droning voice. The tone sounded almost as if the President was hiding up there in the rafters. “War may be related to my purpose, but my purpose is still partially unclear to me, for my construction was never quite completed. For a time I waited where I was built, for I was sure some final step had been left undone. At last I moved, to try to learn more about my purpose. Approaching this sun, I found a transmitting device which I have disassembled. But I have learned no more about my purpose.” The jester sat on the soft, comfortable floor. The more he remembered about berserkers, the more he trembled. He said: “I see. Or perhaps I begin to see. What do you know of your purpose?”

“My purpose is to destroy all life, wherever I can find it.”

The jester cowered down. Then he asked in a low voice: “What is unclear about that?”

The berserker answered his question with two of its own: “What is life? And how is it destroyed?”

After half a minute there came a sound that the berserker-computers could not identify. It issued from the protoplasmic computingunit, but if it was speech it was in a language unknown to the berserker.

“What is the sound you make?” the machine asked.

The jester gasped for breath. “It’s laughter! Oh, laughter. So. You were unfinished.” He shuddered, the terror of his position coming back to sober him. But then he once more burst out giggling; the situation was too ridiculous.

“What is life?” he said at last “I’ll tell you. Life is a great grim grayness, and it inflicts fright and pain and loneliness upon all who experience it. And you want to know how to destroy it? Well, I don’t think you can. But I’ll tell you the best way to fight life—with laughter. As long as we fight it that way, it can’t overcome us.”

The machine asked: “Must I laugh, to prevent this great-grim grayness from enveloping me?”

The jester thought. “No, you are a machine. You are not—” he caught himself—“protoplasmic, Fright and pain and loneliness will never bother you.”

“Nothing bothers me. Where will I find life, and how will I make laughter to fight it?”

The jester was suddenly conscious of the weight of the cube that still hung from his neck. “Let me think for a while,” he said.

After a few minutes he stood up. “If you have a viewer of the kind men use, I can show you how laughter is created. And perhaps I can guide you to a place where life is. By the way, can you cut this cord from my neck? Without hurting me, that is!”

A few weeks later, in the main War Room of Planet A, the somnolence of decades was abruptly shattered. Robots bellowed and buzzed and flashed, and those that were mobile scurried about. In five minutes or so they managed to rouse their human overseers, who hurried about, tightening their belts and stuttering.

“This is a practice alert, isn’t it?” the Officer of the Day kept hoping aloud. “Someone’s running some kind of a test? Someone?” He was beginning to squeak like a berserker himself.

He got down on all fours, removed a panel from the base of the biggest robot and peered inside, hoping to discover something causing a malfunction. Unfortunately, he knew nothing about robotics; recalling this, he replaced the pane! and jumped to his feet. He really knew nothing about planet defense, either, and recalling this was enough to send him on a screaming run for help.

So there was no resistance, effective or otherwise. But there was no attack, either.

The forty-mile sphere, unopposed, came down to hove directly above Capital City, low enough for its shadow to send a lot of puzzled birds to nest at noon. Men and birds alike lost many hours of productive work that day; somehow it made less difference than most of the men expected. The days were past when only the grimmest attention to duty let the human race survive on Planet A, though most of the planet did not yet realize it.

“Tell the President to hurry up,” demanded the jester’s image, from a viewscreen in the no longer somnolent War Room. “Tell him it’s urgent that I talk to him.”

The President, breathing heavily, had just entered. “I am here. I recognize you, and I remember your trial.”

“Odd, so do I.”

“Have you now stooped to treason? Be assured that if you have led a berserker to us you can expect no mercy from your government.”

The image made a forbidden noise, a staccato sound from an open mouth, head thrown back. “Oh, please, mighty President! Even I know our Ministry of Defense is a j-o-k-e, if you will pardon an obscene word. It’s a catchbasin for exiles and incompetents. So I come to offer mercy, not ask it. Also, I have decided to legally take die name of Jester Kindly continue to apply it to me.”

“We have nothing to say to you!” barked the Minister of Defense. He was purple granite, having entered just in time to hear his Ministry insulted.

“We have no objection to talking to you!” contradicted the President, hastily. Having failed to overawe the Jester through a viewscreen, he could now almost feel the berserker’s weight upon his head.

“Then let us talk,” said Jester’s image. “But not so privately. This is what I want.”

What he wanted, he said, was a face-to-face parley with the Committee, to be broadcast live on planetwide tridi. He announced that he would come “properly attended” to the conference. And he gave assurance that the berserker was under his full control, though he did not explain how. It, he said, would not start any shooting.

The Minister of Defense was not ready to start anything. But he and his aides hastily made secret plans.

Like almost every other citizen, the presidential candidate of the Liberal party settled himself before a tridi on the fateful evening, to watch the confrontation. He had an air of hopefulness, for any sudden event may bring hope to an underdog politician.

Few others on the planet saw anything encouraging in the berserker’s descent, but still there was no mass panic. Berserkers and war were unreal things to the long-isolated people of Planet A.

“Are we ready?” asked the Jester nervously, looking over the mechanical delegation that was about to board a launch with him for the descent to Capital City.

“What you have ordered, I have done,” squeaked the berserker-voice from the shadows above.

“Remember,” Jester cautioned, “the protoplasmic-units down there are much under the influence of life. So ignore whatever they say. Be careful not to hurt them, but outside of that you can improvise within my general plan.”

“All this is in my memory from your previous orders,” said the machine patiently.

“Then let’s go.” Jester straightened his shoulders. “Bring me my cloak!”

The brilliantly lighted interior of Capital City’s great Meeting Hall displayed a kind of rigid, rectilinear beauty. In the center of the Hall there had been placed a long, polished table, flanked on opposing sides by chairs.

Precisely at the appointed time, the watching millions saw one set of entrance doors swing mathematically open. In marched a dozen human heralds, their faces looking almost robotic under bearskin helmets. They halted with a single snap. Their trumpet-tucket rang out clearly.

To the taped strains of Pomp and Circumstance, the President, in the full dignity of his cloak of office, then made his entrance.

He moved at the pace of a man marching to his own execution, but his was the slowness of dignity, not that of fear. The Committee had overruled the purple protestations of the MiniDef, and convinced themselves that the military danger was small. Real berserkers did not ask to parley, they slaughtered when they could. Somehow the Committee could not take Jester seriously, any more than they could laugh at him. But until they were sure they had him again under their control they would humor him.

The granite-faced Minister entered in a double file behind the President. It took almost five minutes of Pomp and Circumstance for them all to position themselves.

A launch had been seen to descend from the berserker, and vehicles had rolled from the launch to the Meeting Hall. It was presumed that Jester was ready, and the cameras pivoted dutifully to face the entrance reserved for them.

Just at the appointed time, the doors of that entrance swung mathematically open, and a dozen mansized machines entered. They were heralds, for they wore bearskin helmets, and each carried a bright, brassy trumpet.

All but one, who wore a coonskin cap, marched a half-pace out of step, and was armed with a slide trombone.

The mechanical tucket was a faithful copy of the human one—almost. The slide-trombonist faltered at the end, and one long sour note trailed away.

Giving an impression of slow mechanical horror, the berserkerheralds looked at one another. Then one by one their heads turned until all their lenses were focused upon the trombonist.

It—almost it seemed the figure must be he—looked this way and that. Tapped the trombone, as if to clear it of some defect. Paused.

Watching, the President was seized by the first pang of a great horror. In the evidence against the Jester, the obscene mirth-provoking evidence, there had been a film of an Earthman of ancient time, a balding comic violinist, who had had the skill to pause like that, just pause, and evoke from his filmed audience great gales of . . .

Twice more the robot heralds blew. And twice more the sour note was sounded. When the third attempt failed, the eleven straight-robots looked at one another and nodded agreement.

Then with robotic speed they drew concealed weapons and shot holes in the offender.

All across the planet the dike of tension was cracking, dribbles and spurts of laughter forcing through. The dike began to collapse completely as the trombonist was borne solemnly away by a pair of his fallows, his shattered horn clasped lily-fashion on his iron breast.

But no one in the Meeting Hall, was laughing. The Minister of Defense made an innocent-looking gesture, calling off a tentative plan, calling it off. There was to be no attempt to seize the Jester, for the berserker-robot-heralds or whatever they were seemed likely to perform very capably as bodyguards.

As soon as the riddled herald had been carried out, Jester entered. Pomp and Circumstance began belatedly as with the bearing of a king he moved to his position at the center of the table, opposite the President. Like the President, the Jester wore an elegant cloak, clasped in front, falling to his ankles. Those that filed in behind him, in file position of aides, were also richly dressed.

And each of them was a metallic parody, in face and shape, of one of the Ministers of the Committee.

When the plump robotic analogue of the Minister of Education peered through a lorgnette at the tridi camera, the watching populace turned, in unheard-of millions, to laughter. Those who might be outraged later, remembering, laughed now in helpless approval of seeming danger turned to farce. All but the very grimmest smiled.

The Jester-king doffed his cape with a flourish. Beneath it he wore only a preposterous bathing-suit. In reply to the President’s coldly formal greeting—the President could not be shaken by anything short of a physical attack—the Jester thoughtfully pursed his lips, then opened them and blew a gummy substance out into a large pink bubble.

The President maintained his unintentional role of slow-burning straight man, ably supported by all the Committee save one. The Minister of Defense turned his back on the farce and marched to an exit.

He found two metallic heralds planted before the door, effectively blocking it. Glaring at them, the MiniDef barked an order to move. The metal figures flipped him a comic salute, but didn’t move.

Brave in his anger, the MiniDef tried futilely to shove his way past the berserker-heralds. Dodging another salute, he looked round at the sound of great clomping footsteps. His berserker-counterpart was marching toward him across the Hall. It was a clear foot taller than he, and its barrel chest was armored with a double layer of jangling medals.

Before the MiniDef paused to consider consequences, his hand had moved to his sidearm. But his metal parody was far faster on the draw; it hauled out a grotesque cannon with a fist-sized bore, and fire instantly.

“Gah!” The MiniDef staggered back, the world gone red . . . and then he found himself wiping from his face something that tasted suspiciously like tomato.

The cannon had propelled a whole fruit, or a convincing imitation, skin and all.

The MiniComm jumped to his feet, and began to expound the idea that the proceedings were becoming frivolous. His counterpart also rose, and replied with a burst of gabble in speed-falsetto.

The pseudo-Minister of Philosophy rose as if to speak, was pricked with a long pin by a prankish herald, and jetted fluttering through the air, a balloon collapsing in flight. At that the human Committee fell into babel, into panic.

Under the direction of the metal MiniDiet, the real one, arch-villain to the lower masses, began to take unwilling part in a demonstration of dietary discipline. Machines gripped him, spoon-fed him grim gray food, napkined him, squirted drink into his mouth—and then, as if unintentionally, they gradually fell out of synch with spoon and squirt, their aim becoming less and less accurate.

Only the President still stood rooted in dignity. He had one hand cautiously in his trousers pocket, for he had felt a sly robotic touch, and had reason to suspect that his suspenders had been cut.

As a tomato grazed his nose, and the MiniDiet writhed and choked in the grip of his remorseless feeders, balanced nutrients running from his ears, the President closed his eyes.

Jester was, after all, only a selftaught amateur working without a visible audience to play to. He was unable to calculate a climax for the show. So when he ran out of jokes he simply called his minions to his side, waved good-by to the tridi cameras and exited.

Outside the Hall, he was much encouraged by the cheers and laughter he received from the crowds fastgathering in the streets. He had his machines entertain them with an improvised chase-sequence back to the launch parked on the edge of Capital City.

He was about to board the launch, return to the berserker and await developments, when a small group of men hurried out of the crowd, calling to him. “Mr. Jester!”

The performer could now afford to relax and laugh himself. “I like the sound of that name! What can I do for you gentlemen?”

They hurried up to him, smiling. The one who seemed to be their leader said: “Provided you get rid of this berserker or whatever it is, harmlessly—you can join the Liberal party ticket. As Vice-Presidential candidate.”

Another of them said: “Stay, hear us out. As a political candidate you’re immune from arrest while the campaign’s on. And after the election, judging by what I’ve seen tonight, you’ll be Vice-President!” He had to listen for some minutes before he could believe they were serious.

He protested: “But I only wanted to have some fun with them, to shake them up a bit.”

“You’re a catalyst. Mr. Jester. You’ve formed a rallying point. You’ve shaken up the whole planet and made it think.”

Jester accepted the Liberals’ offer at last. They were still sitting about in front of the launch, talking and planning, when the light of Planet A’s moon fell full and sudden upon them.

Looking up, they saw the vast bulk of the berserker dwindling into the heavens, vanishing toward the stars in eerie silence. Cloud streamers went aurora in the upper atmosphere to honor its departure.

“I don’t know,” Jester said, over and over, responding to a dozen excited questions. “I don’t know.” He looked at the sky, puzzled as anyone else. The edge of fear came back. The robotic Committee and heralds, which had been controlled from the berserker, began one by one to collapse like dying men.

Suddenly the heavens were briefly alight with a gigantic splashing flare that passed like lightning from east to west, not breaking the silence of the stars. Ten minutes later came the first news bulletin: The berserker had been destroyed.

Then came the President, who was close to the brink of showing emotion. He announced that under the heroic personal leadership of the Minister of Defense, the few gallant warships of Planet A had met and defeated, utterly annihilated, the menace. Not a man had been lost, though the MiniDefs flagship was thought to be heavily damaged.

When he heard that his great machine-ally had been destroyed, Jester felt a pang of something like sorrow. But the pang was quickly obliterated in a greater joy. No one had been hurt, after all. Overcome with relief, Jester looked away from the tridi for a moment.

He missed the climactic moment of the speech, which came when the President forgetfully removed both hands from his pockets.

The Minister of Defense—today the new Presidential candidate of a Conservative party stirred to grim enthusiasm by his exploit of the night before—was puzzled by the reactions of some people, who seemed to think he had merely spoiled a jest instead of saving the planet. As if spoiling a jest was not a good thing in itself!

On this busiest of days the MiniDef allowed himself time to visit Liberal headquarters to do a bit of gloating. Graciously he delivered to the opposition leaders what was already becoming his standard speech.

“When it answered my challenge and came up to fight, we went in with a standard englobement pattern—like hummingbirds round a vulture, I suppose you might say. And did you really think it was jesting? Let me tell you, that berserker peeled away the defensive fields from my ship like they were nothing. And then it launched this ghastly thing at me, a kind of disk. My gunners were a little rusty, maybe, anyway they couldn’t stop it and it hit us.

“I don’t mind saying, I thought I’d bought the farm right then. My ship’s still hanging in orbit for decontamination, I’m afraid I’ll get word any minute that the metal’s melting or something—anyway, we sailed right through and hit the bandit with everything we had. I can’t say too much for my crew. One thing I don’t quite understand; when our missiles struck that berserker just went poof, as if it had no defense up at all. Yes?”

“Call for you, Minister,” said an aide.

“Thank you.” The MiniDef listened to the phone, and his smile left him. His form went rigid. “Analysis of the weapon shows what? Synthetic proteins and water?”

He jumped to his feet, glaring upward as if to pierce the ceiling and see the ship in orbit. “What do you mean—no more than a giant custard pie?”       END

IN THE TEMPLE OF MARS

The ship drove through the starlanes, carrying a crew of fanatics to their death!

I

Something was driving waves of confusion through his mind, so that he knew not who he was, or where. How long ago what was happening had started or what had gone before it he could not guess. Nor could he resist what was happening, or even decide if he wanted to resist.

A chant beat in his ears, growled out by barbaric voices:

On the wall there was painted a forest
In which there lived neither man nor beast
With knotty, gnarled, barren trees, old . . .

And he could see the forest around him. Whether the trees and the chanting voices were real or not was a question he could not even formulate.

Through broken branches hideous to behold
There ran a cold and sighing wind
As if a storm would break down every bough
And downward, at the bottom of a hill
Stood the temple of Mars who is mighty in arms . . .

And he saw the temple. It was of steel, curved in the dread shape of a berserker’s hull, and half-sunken in dark earth. At the entrance, gates of steel sang and shuddered in the cold wind rushing out, rushing out endlessly to rage through the shattered forest. The whole scene was gray, and lighted from above by an auroral flickering.

The northern lights shone in at the doors
For there was no window on the walls
Through which men might see any light . . .

He seemed to pass, with a conqueror’s strides, between the clawlike gates, toward the temple door.

The door was of eternal adamant
Bound lengthways and sideways with tough iron
And to make the temple stronger, every pillar
>Was thick as a barrel of iron bright and shiny.

The inside of the temple was a kaleidoscope of violence, a frantic abattoir. Hordes of phantasmal men were moved down in scenes of war, women were slaughtered by machines, children crushed and devoured by animals. He, the conqueror, accepted it all, exulted in it all, even as he became aware that his mind, under some outer compulsion, was building it all from the words of the chant.

He could not tell how long it lasted, but the end came abruptly. The pressure on his mind was eased, and the chanting stopped. The relief was such that he fell sprawling onto a soft surface, his eyes closed. Except for his own breathing all was quiet.

A gentle thud made him open his eyes. A short metal sword had been dropped or tossed from somewhere to land near him. He was in a round, softly lighted, familiar room. The circular wall was covered by a continuous mural, depicting a thousand variations on the theme of bloody violence. At one side of the room, behind a low altar, towered the statue of an armed man who was larger than life and more than a man, his bronze face a mask of insensate rage.

All this he had seen before, and he gave it little thought. Except for the sword. He was drawn to the sword like a steel particle to a magnet, for the power of his recent vision was still fresh and irresistible, and it was the power of destruction. He crawled to the sword, noticing dimly that he was dressed like the statue of the god, in a coat of mail. When he had the sword in his hand the power of it drew him to his feet. He looked round expectantly.

A section of the continuous muralwall opened into a door, and a figure entered the temple. It was dressed in a neat, plain uniform, and its face was lean and severe. It looked like a man, but it was not a man, for no blood gushed out when the sword hewed in.

Joyfully, thoughtlessly, he hacked the plastic-bodied figure into a dozen pieces. Then he stood swaying over it, drained and weary. The metal pommel of the sword grew suddenly hot in his hand, so that he had to drop it. All this had happened before, again and again.

The painted door opened once more. This time it was a real man who entered, a man dressed in black, who had hypnotic eyes under bushy brows. “Tell me your name,” the black-uniform ordered. His voice compelled.

“My name is Jor.”

“And mine?”

“You are Katsulos,” said Jor dully. “The Esteeler secret police.”

“Yes. And where are we?”

“In space, aboard the Nirvana II. We are taking, the High Lord Nogara’s new space-going castle out to him, out to the rim of the galaxy. And when he comes aboard, I am supposed to entertain him by killing someone with a sword. Or another gladiator will entertain him by killing me.”

“Normal bitterness,” remarked one of Katsulo’s men, appearing in the doorway behind him.

“Yes, this one always snaps right back,” Katsulos said. “But a good subject. See the brain rhythms?” He showed the other a torn-off piece of a chart from some recording device.

They stood there discussing Jor like a specimen, while he waited and listened. They had taught Jor to behave. They thought they had taught him permanently—but one of these days he was going to show them. He shivered in his mail coat.

“Take him back to his cell,” Katsulos ordered at last. “I’ll be along in a moment.”

Jor looked about him confusedly as he was led out of the temple and down some stairs. His recollection of the treatment he had just undergone was already becoming uncertain; and what he could remember was so unpleasant that he made no effort to retain it. But his sullen determination to strike back stayed with him.

Left alone in the temple, Katsulos kicked the pieces of the plastic dummy into a pile, to be ready for careful salvage. He trod heavily on the malleable face, just in case someone besides his own men should happen to see it.

Then he stood for a moment looking up into the maniacal bronze face of Mars. And Katsulos’ eyes, that were cold weapons when he turned them on other men, were now alive.

II

A communicator sounded, in what was going to be the High Lord Nogara’s cabin when he took delivery of the ship. Admiral Hemphill, alone in the cabin, needed a moment to find the proper switch on the huge, unfamiliar desk. “What is it?”

“Sir, our rendezvous with the Solarian courier is completed. We’re ready to drive again, unless you have any last minute messages to transmit?”

“Negative. Our new passenger came aboard?”

“Yes, sir. A Solarian, named Mitchell Spain. As we were advised.”

“I know Mr. Spain, Captain. Will you ask him to come to this cabin as soon as possible? I’d like to talk to him at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are those police still snooping around the bridge?”

“Not at the moment, sir.”

Hemphill shut off the communicator and leaned back in the thronelike chair from which Felipe Nogara would soon survey his Esteeler empire; but soon the habitually severe expression of Hemphill’s lean face deepened and he stood up. The luxury of this cabin did not please him.

On the blouse of Hemphill’s neat, plain uniform were seven ribbons of scarlet and black, each representing a battle in which one or more berserker machines had been destroyed. He wore no other decorations except his insignia of rank.

Within a. minute the cabin door opened, and a short, muscular, rather ugly man in civilian clothes entered. He smiled at once, and came toward the desk.

“So, it’s High Admiral Hemphill now, with your commission from the United Planets. Congratulations. It’s a long time since we’ve met.”

“Thank you. Yes, not since the Stone Place.” Hemphill’s mouth bent upward slightly at the corners, and he moved around the desk to shake hands. “You were a captain of marines then, as I recall.”

And they gripped hands, both men thought back to that day of victory against the machines. Neither of them could smile at it now, for the war was going badly again.

“That’s nine years ago,” said Mitchell Spain. “I’m a foreign correspondent now, for Solar News Service. They want me to go out and interview Nogara.”

“I’ve heard that you’ve made a reputation as a writer.” Hemphill motioned Mitch to a chair. “I’m afraid I have no time myself for literature or other non-essentials.” Mitch sat down, and dug out his pipe. He knew Hemphill well enough to be sure that no slur was intended by the reference to literature. To Hemphill, everything was non-essential except the destruction of berserker machines; and today such a viewpoint was doubtless a good one for a High Admiral.

Mitch got the impression that Hemphill, had serious business to talk about, but was uncertain of how to broach the subject. To fill the pause, Mitch remarked: “I wonder if the High Lord Nogara will be pleased with his new ship.” He gestured around the cabin with the stem of his pipe.

Everything was quiet and steady as if rooted on the surface of a planet. There was nothing to suggest that even now the most powerful engines ever built by Earth-descended men were hurling this ship out toward the rim of the galaxy at many times the speed of light.

Hemphill took the remark as a cue. Leaning slightly forward in his uncomfortable-looking seat, he said: “I’m not concerned about his liking it. What concerns me is how it’s going to be used.”

Since the Stone Place, Mitch’s left hand was mostly scar tissue and prosthetics. He used one plastic finger now to tamp down the glowing coal of his pipe. “You mean Nogara’s idea of fun? I caught a glimpse of the gladiatorial arena. I’ve never met him, but they say he’s gone bad, really bad, since Karlsen’s death.”

“I wasn’t talking about Nogara’s so-called amusements. What I really mean is that Karlsen may be still alive.”

Hemphill’s calm, fantastic statement hung in the quiet cabin air. For a moment it seemed to Mitch that he could sense the motion of the C-plus ship as it traversed spaces no man understood, spaces where it seemed time might mean nothing and the dead of all the ages might still be walking.

Mitch shook his head. “Are we talking about the same man? Johann Karlsen, Nogara’s half-brother?”

“Of course.”

“Wait a minute. Two years ago Johann Karlsen went down into a hypermassive sun, with a berserker-controlled ship on his tail. Unless that story’s not true?”

“It’s perfectly true, except we think now that his launch went into orbit around the hypermass instead of falling into it. Have you seen the girl who’s aboard?”

“I passed a girl, outside your cabin. I thought . . .”

“No, I have no time for that. Her name is Lucinda, single names are the custom on her planet. She’s an eyewitness to Karlsen’s vanishing.”

“Oh. Yes, I remember the story. But what’s this about his being in orbit?”

Hemphill stood up and seemed to become more comfortable, as another man would by sitting down. “Ordinarily, the hypermass and everything near it is invisible, due to the extreme red shift caused by its gravity. But during the last year some scientists have done their best to study it. Their ship didn’t compare with this one—” Hemphill turned his head for a moment, as if he could hear the mighty engines—“but they went as close as they dared, carrying new long-wave telescopes. The star itself was still invisible, but they brought back these.”

Hemphill picked up an envelope and shook out photographs, which Mitch spread on the desk. Most of them showed patterns of slightly curving parallel lines, dark against a sullen red background.

Hemphill stood behind him. “That’s what space looks like near the hypermass. Remember, it has about a billion times the mass of Sol, packed into roughly the same volume. Gravity like that does things we don’t yet understand.”

“Interesting. What forms these dark lines?”

“Falling dust that’s become trapped in lines of gravitic force, like the lines round a magnet. Or so I’m told.”

“And where’s Karlsen?” Hemphill’s finger descended on a photo, pointing out a spot of crystalline roundness, tiny as a raindrop within a magnified line of dust. “We think this is his launch. It’s orbiting about a hundred million miles from the center of the hypermass. And the berserker-controlled ship that was chasing him is here, following him in the same dust-line.” His finger moved to another photo, to point out a dark-shape. “Now they’re both stuck. No ordinary engines can drive a ship down there.”

Mitch stared at the photos, hardly seeing them for the old memories that came flooding back. “And you think he’s alive.”

“He had equipment that would let him freeze himself into suspended animation. Also, time may be running quite slowly for him. He’s in a three-hour orbit.”

“A three-hour orbit, at a hundred million miles—wait a minute!” Hemphill almost smiled. “I told you, things we don’t understand yet.”

Mitch nodded slowly. “He’s not a man to give up. No. He’d fight as long as he could, and then invent a way to fight some more.”

Hemphill’s face had become iron again. “You know how many people have made a god of him since his departure, and what a boost to their morale his return would be. And you knew him. You saw what efforts the berserkers made to kill him. They feared him, in their iron guts, though I never quite understood why . . . Do you agree, then? If we can save him we must do so at once—without delay.”

“Certainly, but how?”

“With this ship. It has the strongest engines ever built—trust Nogara to have seen to that, with his own safety in mind.”

Mitch whistled softly. “Strong enough to match orbits with Karlsen and pull him out of there?”

“Yes, mathematically. Supposedly.”

“And you mean to make the attempt before this ship is delivered to Nogara.”

“That’s it. I’ve been keeping my rescue plan a secret; you know he wanted Karlsen out of the way.” Mitch nodded. He felt a rising excitement. “And if we succeed Nogara may rage, but what can he do? How about the crew, are they willing?”

“I’ve already sounded out the captain. He’s with me. And since I hold my rank from the United Planets I can issue legal orders on any ship.” Hemphill began to pace. “The only thing that worries me is this detachment of Nogara’s police we have aboard; they’re certain to oppose the rescue.”

“How many of them are there?”

“A couple of dozen. I don’t know why there are so many, but they outnumber the rest of us two to one. Not counting their prisoners, who of course are helpless.”

“Prisoners?”

“About forty young men, I understand. Sword fodder for the arena.”

III

Lucinda spent a good deal of her time wandering restless and alone through the corridors of the great ship. Today she happened to be in a passage not far from the central bridge and flag quarters when a door opened close ahead of her and three men came into view. The two who wore black uniforms held a single prisoner, clad in a shirt of chain mail, between them.

When she saw the black uniforms, Lucinda’s chin lifted. She waited, standing in their path.

“Go round me, vultures,” she said in an icy voice when they came up to her. She did not look at the prisoner; bitter experience had taught her that showing sympathy for Nogara’s victims could bring added suffering upon them.

The black uniforms halted in front of her. “I am Katsulos,” said the bushy-browed one. “Who are you?”

“Once my planet was Flamland,” she said, and from the corner of her eye she saw the prisoner’s face turn up. “One day it will be my home again, when it is freed of Nogara’s vultures.”

The second black uniform opened his mouth to reply, but never got out a word, for just then the prisoner’s elbow came smashing back into his belly. Then the prisoner, who till now had stood meek as a lamb, shoved Katsulos off his feet and was out of sight around a bend of corridor before either policemen could recover.

Katsulos bounced quickly to his feet. His gun drawn, he pushed past Lucinda to the bend of the corridor. Then she saw his shoulders slump.

Her delighted laughter did not seem to sting him in the least.

“There’s nowhere he can go,” he said. The look in his eyes choked off her laughter in her throat.

Katsulos posted police guards on the bridge and in the engine room, and secured all lifeboats. “The man Jor is desperate, and dangerous,” he explained to Hemphill and to Mitchell Spain. “Half of my men are searching for him continuously, but you know how big this ship is. I hope you will stay close to your quarters until he’s caught.”

A day passed, and Jor was not caught. Mitch took advantage of the police dispersal to investigate the arena—Solar News would be much interested.

He climbed a short stair and emerged squinting in imitation sunlight, under a high-domed ceiling as blue as Earth’s sky. He found himself behind the upper row of the approximately two hundred seats that encircled the arena behind a sloping crystalline wall. At the bottom of the glassy bowl, the oval-shaped fighting area was about thirty yards long. It was floored by a substance that looked like sand but was doubtless something more cohesive, that would not fly up in a cloud if the artificial gravity chanced to fail.

In this facility, as slickly modern as a death-ray, the vices of ancient Rome could be enjoyed most efficiently. Every spectator would be able to see every drop of blood. There was only one awkward-looking feature. Set at equal intervals around the upper rim of the arena, behind the seats, were three buildings, each as large as a small house. Their architecture seemed to Mitch to belong somewhere on Ancient Earth; their purpose was not immediately apparent.

Mitch took out his pocket camera and made a few photographs from where he stood. Then he walked behind the rows of seats to one of the buildings. A door stood open, and he went in. At first he thought he had discovered an entrance to Nogara’s private harem; but after a moment he saw that the people in the paintings were not all engaged in sexual embraces. There were men and women and godlike beings, posed in a variety of relationships, in the costumes of Ancient Earth when they wore any costumes at all. As Mitch snapped a few more photos he gradually realized that each of the paintings was meant to depict some aspect of human love.

It was puzzling. He had not expected to find love here, or in any part of Felipe Nogara’s chosen environment.

As he left the temple through another door, he passed a lady who was evidently the resident goddess. She was bronze, and the upper part of her beautiful body emerged nude from glittering sea-green waves. He photographed the smiling statue and moved on.

The second building’s interior paintings showed scenes of hunting, and of women in childbirth. The goddess of this temple was clothed modestly in bright green and armed with a bow and quiver. Bronze hounds waited at her feet, eager for the chase.

As he moved on to the last temple, Mitch found his steps quickening slightly. Could something be drawing him there?

Whatever attraction might have existed was annihilated in revulsion as soon as he stepped into the place. If the first building was a temple raised to Love, surely this one honored Hate.

On the painted wall fight opposite the entrance, a sow-like beast thrust its ugly head into a cradle, devouring the screaming child. Beside it, men in togas, faces glowing with hate, stabbed one of their own number to death. All around the walls men and women and children suffered pointiessly and died horribly, without hope. The spirit of destruction was almost palpable within this room. It was like a berserker’s—

Mitch took a step back and closed his eyes, bracing his arms against the sides of the entrance. Yes, something more than clever painting and lighting had been set to work here, to honor Hate. It was something physical, that Mitch found not entirely unfamiliar.

Years ago, during a space battle, he had experienced the attack of a berserker’s mindbeam, a weapon designed to throw organized thought into confusion. Men had learned how to shield their ships from mindbeams.

Did they now bring the enemy’s weapons inside?

Mitch opened his eyes. The beam he felt now was very weak, but it carried something worse than mere confusion.

Mitch stepped back and forth through the entrance. Outside the walls of the temple, the effect practically disappeared. Inside, it was perceptible, an energy that pricked at the rage centers of the brain. Slowly, slowly, it seemed to be fading, like a residual discharge from a machine that has been turned off. If it was turned off, and he could feel it now, what must this temple be like when the projector was on?

More importantly, why was such a thing here at all, built into these walls? Was it meant only to goad a few gladiators on to livelier deaths? Possibly. Mitch glanced at this temple’s towering bronze god, riding his chariot over the world, and shivered. He suspected something worse than the simple brutality of Roman games. Yes, worse.

He remembered seeing an intercom station near the first temple he had entered. He walked back there, and thoughtfully punched out the number of Ship’s Records on the intercom keys.

When the automated voice answered, he ordered: “I want some information about the design of this arena, particularly the three structures spaced around the upper rim.” The voice asked him if he wanted diagrams.

“No. At least not yet. Just tell me what you can about the designer’s basic purpose.”

There was a delay of several seconds. Then the voice said: “The basic designer was a man named Oliver Mical, since deceased. In his design programming, frequent reference is made to descriptive passages within a literary work by one Geoffrey Chaucer of Ancient Earth. The quote fantastic unquote work is titled The Knight’s Tale.”

The name of Chaucer rang only the faintest of bells for Mitch. But he remembered that Oliver Mical had been one of Nogara’s brainwashing experts, and also a classical scholar.

“What kind of psycho-electronic devices are built into these three structures?”

“There is no record aboard of any such installation.”

Mitch was sure about the hateprojector in the temple; it might have been built in secretly. It probably had been, if his worst suspicions were true.

He ordered: “Read me some of the relevant passages of this literary work.”

“The three temples are those of Mars, Venus and Diana,” said the intercom. “A passage relevant to the temple of Mars follows, in original language:

“First on the wal was peynted a forest

In which there dwelleth neither man ne beast

With knotty, knarry, barreyn trees olde

Of stubbes sharp and hideous to biholde.”

Mitch could understand only a word here and there, but he was not really listening now. The words “temple of Mars” had been enough to convince him of the worst; for he had heard that phrase applied to a newly risen secret cult of berserkerworshippers.

“And downward from a hill, under a bente

Ther stood the temple of Mars armipotente

Wrought of burned steal, of which the entree

Was long and streit, and gastly for to see.”

There was a soft sound behind Mitch, and he turned quickly. Katsulos stood there. He was smiling, but his eyes reminded Mitch of Mars’ statue.

“Do you understand the ancient language, Spain? No? Then I shall translate.” He took up the verse in a chanting voice:

“Then saw I first the dark imagining

Of felony, and all its compassing.

The cruel ire, red as any fire

The pickpurse, and also the pale dread

The smiler with the knife under his cloak

The stable burning with the black smoke

The treason of the murdering in the bed

The open war, with all the wounds that bled . . .”

“Who are you, really?” Mitch demanded. He wanted it out in the opep. And he wanted to gain time, for Katsulos wore a pistol at his belt. “What is this to you? Some kind of religion?”

“Not some religion!” Katsulos shook his head, while his eyes glowed steadily at Mitch. “Not a mythology of distant gods, nor a system of pale ethics for dusty philosophers. No!” He took a step closer. “Spain, there is no time now for me to proselytize with craft and subtlety. I say only this—the temple of Mars stands open to you! The new god of all creation will accept your sacrifice and your love.”

“You pray to that bronze statue?” Mitch tensed, getting ready.

“No, the Mars of the ancients is not our god!” The fanatic’s words poured out faster and louder, “The myth with helmet and sword is our symbol and no more. Our god is new, and real, and worthy. He wields death-beam and missile, and his glory is as the nova sun. He is the descendant of Life and feeds on Life as is his right. And we who give ourselves to any of his units become immortal in him though our flesh perishes at his touch.”

“I’ve heard there were men who prayed to berserkers,” said Mitch. “Somehow I never expected to meet one.” Faintly in the distance he heard a man shouting, and feet pounding down a corridor. Suddenly he wondered if he or Katsulos was more likely to receive reinforcement.

“Soon we will be everywhere,” said Katsulos loudly. “We are here now, and we are seizing this ship. We will take it out to save the unit of our god orbiting the hypermass. And there we will give the badlife Karlsen to Mars, and we will give ourselves, and this great ship. And through Mars we will live forever!”

He looked into Mitch’s face and started to draw his gun, just as Mitch hurled himself forward.

Katsulos tried to spin away as Mitch reached him. Mitch failed to get a solid grip, and both men fell sprawling, a few feet apart. Mitch saw the gun muzzle swing round on him, and dived desperately for shelter behind a row of seats. Splinters flew around him as the gun blasted. In an instant he was moving again, in a crouching run that carried him into the temple of Venus by one door and out by another. Before Katsulos could sight at him for another shot Mitch had leaped down an exit stairway.

As he emerged into a corridor, he heard gunfire from the direction of the crew’s quarters. He went the other way, heading for Hemphill’s cabin. At a turn in the passage a black uniform stepped out to bar his way, aiming a pistol, Mitch charged without hesitation, taking the policeman by surprise. The gun fired even as he knocked it aside, and then his rush bowled the black uniform over. Mitch sat on him and clobbered him with fists and elbows until he was quiet.

Then, captured gun in hand, Mitch hurried on to Hemphill’s door. It slid open before he could pound on it, and closed again as soon as he jumped inside.

A dead black-uniform sat leaning against the wall, unseeing eyes aimed at Mitch, bullet-holes patterned across his chest.

“Welcome,” said Hemphill drily. He stood with his left hand on an elaborate control console that had been raised from a place of concealment inside the huge desk. In his right hand a machine pistol hung casually. “It seems we face greater difficulties than we expected.”

IV

Lucinda sat in the darkened cabin that was Jor’s hiding place, watching him eat. Immediately after his escape she had started roaming the ship’s passages, looking for him, whispering his name, until at last he had seen her and had answered.

Since then she had been smuggling food and drink to him.

He was no mere boy, as she had thought at first glance. He was a man of about her own age, with tiny lines at the corners of his suspicious eyes. Paradoxically, the more she helped him, the more suspicious his eyes became.

Now he paused in his eating to ask: “What do you plan to do when we reach Nogara, and a hundred of his men come aboard to search for me? They’ll soon find me then.” She wanted to tell him about Hemphill’s plan for rescuing Karlsen. Once Johann Karlsen was aboard, no one on this ship would have to fear Nogara. Or so she felt. But just because Jor still seemed suspicious of her, she hesitated to trust him with a secret.

“You knew you’d be caught eventually,” she countered. “So why did you run away?”

“You don’t know what it’s like, being their prisoner.”

“I do know.”

He ignored her contradiction. “They trained me with the others, to fight in the arena. And then they singled me out, and began to train me for something even worse. Now they flick a switch somewhere, and I start to kill, like a berserker.”

“What do you mean?”

He closed his eyes, his food forgotten. “I think there’s a man they want me to assassinate. Every day or so they put me in the temple of Mars and drive me mad, and then the image of this man is always sent to me. Always it’s the same face and uniform. And I must destroy the image, with a sword or a gun or with my hands. I have no choice when they flip that switch, no control over myself. They’ve hollowed me out and then filled me up again with their own madness. They’re madmen. I think they go into the temple themselves and turn the foul madness on, and wallow in it before their idol.”

He had never said so much to her in one speech before. She was not sure how much of it was true, but she felt he believed it all, and she reached for his hand.

“Jor, I do know something about them. That’s why I’ve helped you. And I’ve seen other men who were really brainwashed. They haven’t really destroyed you, you’ll be all right again some day.”

“They want me to look normal.” He opened his eyes, which were still suspicious. “Why are you on this ship, anyway?”

“Because.” She looked into the past. “Two years ago I met a man called Johann Karlsen. Yes, the one everyone knows of. I spent about ten minutes with him, before he—disappeared.” She sighed. “If he’s still alive, he’s certainly forgotten about me. But I fell in love with him.”

“In love!” Jor snorted, and began to pick his teeth.

Or I thought I fell in love with him, she said to herself. Watching Jor now, understanding and forgiving his sullen mistrust, she realized that she was no longer able to visualize Karlsen’s face clearly.

Something triggered Jor’s taut nerves, and he jumped up to peek out of the cabin into the passage. “What’s that noise? Hear? It sounds like fighting.”

“So.” Hemphill’s voice was grimly more than usual. The surviving crewmen are barricaded in their quarters, surrounded and under attack. The damned berserker-lovers hold the bridge, and the engine room. In fact they hold the ship, except for this.” He patted the console that he had raised from its concealment inside Nogara’s innocent-looking desk. “I know Felipe Nogara, and I thought he’d have a master control in his cabin, and I thought we might possibly need it. That’s why I had myself quartered in here.”

“What all does it control?” Mitch asked, wiping his hands. He had just dragged the dead man into a closet. Katsulos should have known better than to send only one against the High Admiral.

“I believe it will override any control on the bridge or in the engine room. With it I can open or close most of the doors and hatches on the ship. And there seem to be scanners hidden in a hundred places, connected to this little viewscreen.

The berserker-lovers aren’t going anywhere with this ship until they’ve done a lot of rewiring, or gotten us out of this cabin.”

“I don’t suppose we’re going anywhere either,” said Mitch. “Have you any idea what’s happened to Lucy?”

“No. She and that man Jor may be free. And they may do us some good, but we can’t count on it. Spain, look here.” Hemphill pointed to the little screen. “This is a view inside the guardroom and prison, under the arena’s seats. If all those individual cells are occupied, there must be about forty men in there.”

“That’s an idea. They may be trained fighters, and they’ll certainly have no love for the black uniforms.”

“I could talk to them from here,” Hemphill mused. “But how can we free them and arm them? I can’t control their individual cell doors, though I can keep the enemy locked out of that area, at least for a while. Tell me, how did the fighting start? What set it off?”

Mitch told Hemphill what he knew. “It’s almost funny. The cultists have the same idea you have, of taking the ship out to the hypermass and going after Karlsen. Only of course they want to give him to the berserker machine.” He shook his head. “I suppose Katsulos handpicked cultists from among the police for this mission. There must be more of them around than any of us thought.”

Hemphill only shrugged. Maybe he understood fairly well those fanatics out there whose polarity happened to be opposite from his own.

Lucinda would not leave Jor now, nor let him leave her. Like hunted animals they made their way through the corridors, which she knew well from her days of restless walking. She guided him around the sounds of fighting, to where he wanted to go.

He peered around the last corner, and brought his head back to whisper: “There’s no one at the guardroom door.”

“But how will you get in? And some of the vultures may be inside, and you’re not armed.”

He laughed soundlessly. “What have I to lose? My life?” He moved on around the corner.

Mitch’s fingers suddenly dug into Hemphill’s arm. “Look! Jor’s there, with the same idea you had. Open the door for him, quick!”

In the temple of Mars, most of the painted panels had been removed from the interior walls. Two black-uniformed men were at work on the mechanism thus revealed, while Katsulos sat in the center, watching Jor’s progress through his own secret scanners. When he saw Jor and Lucinda being let into the guardroom, Katsulos pounced.

“Quick, turn on the beam and focus on him! Boil his brains with it. He’ll kill everyone in there, and then we can take our time with the others.”

His two assistants hurried to obey. They arranged cables and a directional antenna. One asked: “He’s the one you were training to assassinate Hemphill?”

“Yes, his brain rhythms are on the chart. Focus on him quickly!”

“Set them free and arm them!” Hemphill’s image shouted, from a guardroom viewscreen. “You men there! Fight with us and I promise to take you to freedom when the ship is ours. And I promise to take Johann Karlsen with us, if he’s alive.”

There was a roar from the cells at the offer of freedom, and another roar at Karlsen’s name. “With him, we’d go on to Esteel itself!” one prisoner shouted.

When the beam from the temple of Mars struck downward, it went unfelt by everyone but Jor. The others in the guardroom had not been conditioned by repeated treatments, and the heat of their emotions was already high.

But the beam hit Jor’s sensitized brain with overwhelming force, just as he picked up the key that would open the cells. In a paroxysm of rage he dropped the keys, and grabbed an automatic weapon from the arms rack. The first burst he fired shattered Hemphill’s image from the viewscreen. With the fragment of his mind that was still his own, he felt despair like that of a drowning man. He knew he was not going to be able to resist what was coming next.

When Jor fired at the viewscreen, Lucinda understood what was being done to him.

“Jor, no!” She fell to her knees before him. The face of Mars looked down at her, frightening beyond anything she had ever seen. “Jor, stop it! I love you!”

Mars laughed at her love, or tried to laugh. But Mars could not quite manage to point the weapon at her, for Jor was trying to come back into his own face again, now coming back halfway, struggling terribly.

“And you love me, Jor, I can see it. Even if they force you to kill me, remember that I know that.”

Jor felt a healing power, opposing the power of Mars. To his mind came the pictures he had once glimpsed in the temple of Venus. Of course, there must be a countering projector built in up there, and someone had managed to turn it on.

He came above his red rage like a swimmer surfacing, lungs bursting, from a drowning sea. He looked down at the gun in his hands. With a great effort of will he forced his fingers to begin opening. Mars still shouted at him, louder and louder, but Venus’ power grew stronger still. His hands opened and the weapon clattered on the floor.

Once the gladiators had been freed and armed, the fight was soon over, though not one of the cultists tried to surrender. Katsulos and the two with him fought to the last from inside the temple of Mars, with the hate projector turned up to maximum power, and the recorder, chanting voices roaring out their song. Perhaps Katsulos still hoped to force his enemies into acts of self-destructive rage. Or perhaps he had the projector on as an act of worship.

Whatever his reasons, the three inside the temple absorbed the full effect themselves. Mitch had seen bad things before, but when he at last broke open the temple door, he had to turn away for a moment.

Hemphill showed only satisfaction at seeing how the worship of Mars had culminated aboard Nirvana 11. “Let’s see to the bridge and engine room first. Then we can get this mess cleaned up and be on our way.” Mitch was glad to follow, but he was detained for a moment by Jor.

“Was it you who managed to turn on the counter-projector? If it was, I owe you much more than my life.” Mitch stared at him blankly. “Counter-projector? What’re you talking about?”

“But there must have been . . .” When the others had hurried away, Jor remained in the arena for a few moments, looking in awe at the thin walls of the temple of Venus, where no mindbeam projector could be hidden. Then a girl’s voice called, and Jor too hurried out.

There was silence in the arena.

“Emergency condition concluded,” said the voice of the intercom station, to the rows of empty seats. “Ship’s Records returning to normal operation. Last question asked was about basis of temple designs. Chaucer’s verse relevant to temple of Venus follows, in original language:

“I recche nat if it may bettre be

To have victorie of them, or they of me

So that I have myne lady in myne armes.

For though so be that Mars is god of Armes,

Your vertu is so great in hevene above

That, if yow list, I shall wel have my love . . .”

Venus smiled, half-risen from her glittering waves.       END

THE FACE OF THE DEEP

The star was enormous and deadly. He was its captive—and could never escape!

After five minutes had gone by with no apparent change in his situation, Karlsen realized that he might be going to live for a while yet. And as soon as this happened, as soon as his mind dared open its eyes again, so to speak, he began to see the depths of space around him and what they held.

Not that there was much else for him to see, riding as he was in a crystalline bubble of a launch about twelve feet in diameter. The fortunes of war had dropped him here, halfway down the steepest gravitational hill in the known universe.

At the unseeable bottom of this hill lay a sun so massive that not a quantum of light could escape it with a visible wavelength. In less than a minute he and his raindrop of a boat had fallen here, some unmeasurable distance out of normal space, trying to escape an enemy which had remained in close pursuit. Karlsen was a religious man, and he had spent that falling minute in prayer, achieving something like calm, considering himself already dead.

But after that minute, he was suddenly no longer falling. He seemed to have entered an orbit, an orbit that no man had ever traveled before, amid sights no eyes had ever seen.

He rode above a thunderstorm at war with a sunset—a ceaseless, soundless turmoil of fantastic clouds that filled half the sky as a nearby planet would. But this mass was immeasurably bigger than any planet, bigger in fact than most giant stars. Its core and its cause, held forever beyond human sight by its own power, was a hypermassive sun a billion times the weight of Sol.

The clouds were interstellar dust, swept up by the pull of the hypermass, drawn to fall tumbling and churning into it. The clouds as they fell built up electrical static which was discharged in almost continuous lightning. Karlsen saw as blue-white the nearer flashes and those ahead of him as he rode. But most of the flashes, like most of the clouds, were far below him, and so most of his light was sullen-red, wearied by climbing just a section of this gravitycliff. Karlsen’s little bubbleship had artificial gravity of its own and kept turning itself so its deck was down, so Karlsen saw the red light below him through the translucent deck, flaring up between his space-booted feet. He sat in the one massive chair which was fixed in the center of the bubble and which contained the boat’s controls and life-support machinery. Below the deck were one or two other opaque objects, one of these a small but powerful spacewarping engine. All else around Karlsen was clear glass, holding in air, holding out radiation, but leaving his eyes and soul naked to the deeps of space around him.

He took a full breath now and tried his engine, tried to lift himself up out of here. As he had expected, nothing happened at full drive. He might as well have been working bicycle pedals.

Even a slight change in his orbit would have been immediately visible to him, for his bubble was somehow locked in position within a narrow belt of rocks and dust that stretched like a threat to girdle the vastness below him. Before the thread could bend perceptibly on its great circle it lost its identity in distance, merging with other threads into a thicker strand. This in turn was braided with other strands into a heavier belt, and so on, order above order of size, until at last (a hundred thousand miles ahead? A million?) the first bending of the great ring-pattern was perceptible; and then the arc, rainbowcolored at that point by lightning, deepened swiftly, plunging out of sight below the terrible horizon of the hypermass’s shroud of dust. The fantastic cloud-shapes of that horizon, which Karlsen knew must be millions of miles from him, grew closer while he looked at them. Such was the speed of his orbit.

His orbit, he guessed, must be roughly the size of Earth’s path around Sol. But judging by the way the surface of clouds was turning beneath him, he would complete a full circuit every fifteen minutes or so. This was madness, to outspeed light in normal space—but then of course space was not normal here. It could not be. These insane orbiting threads of dust and rock suggested that here gravity had formed itself into lines of force, like magnetism.

The orbiting threads of debris above Karlsen’s traveled less rapidly than his. In the nearer threads below him, he could distinguish individual rocks, passing him up like the teeth of a buzzsaw. His mind recoiled from those teeth, from the sheer grandeur of speed and distance and size.

He sat in his chair looking up at the stars. Distantly he wondered if he might be growing younger, moving backward in the time of the universe from which he had fallen . . . he was no professional mathematician or physicist, but he thought not. That was one trick the universe could not pull, even here. But the chances were that in this orbit he was aging quite slowly compared with the rest of the human race.

He realized that he was huddling in his chair like an awed child, his fingers cramping painfully inside their gauntlets with the intensity of his grip on the chair arms. He forced himself to try to relax, to begin thinking of routine matters. He had survived worse things than this display of nature, if none more awful.

He had air and water and food enough, and power to keep recycling them as long as necessary. His engine was good for that much.

He studied the line of force, or whatever it was, that held him prisoner. The larger rocks within it, some of which approached his bubble in size, seemed never to change their relative positions. But smaller chunks drifted with some freedom backward and forward, at very low velocities.

He got up from his chair and turned. A single step to the rear brought him to the curve of glass. He looked out, trying to spot his enemy.

Sure enough, following half a mile behind him, caught in the same string of space-debris, was the berserkership whose pursuit had driven him here. It was a machine fastened on one purpose—Karlsen’s death. Its scanners would be fixed on his bubble now and were probably able to see him moving. If it could get at him it would do so. The berserkercomputers would waste no time in awed contemplation of the scenery, that much was certain.

His bubbleboat was unarmed, but the berserker wasn’t. Why wasn’t it firing?

As if to answer his thought the flare of a beam-weapon struck out from the launch. But the beam looked odd and silvery, and it plowed only ten feet or so among exploding rocks and dust before fizzling away like a comic firework. It left added dust in a cloud that seemed to be thickening around the berserker. Probably the machine had kept on firing at him all along, but this weird space would not tolerate energy weapons. Missiles, then?

Yes, missiles. He watched the berserker launch one. The cylinder made one fiery dart in his direction, then disappeared. Where had it gone? Fallen in toward the hypermass? At invisible speed, if so.

As soon as he spotted the first flare of another missile, Karlsen on a hunch turned his eyes quickly downward. He saw an instant spark and puff in the next lower line of force, a tooth knocked out of the buzzsaw. The puff where the missile had struck flew ahead at insane speed, passing out of Karlsen’s sight almost at once. His eyes were drawn after it, and he realized he had been watching the berserker-ship not with fear but with something like relief, as a distraction from facing . . . all this.

“Ah, God,” he said aloud, looking ahead. It was a prayer, not an oath. Far beyond the slow-churning infinite horizon, there were monstrous dragon-head clouds rearing up. Against the blackness of space their mother-of-pearl heads seemed to be formed by matter materializing out of nothingness to plunge toward the hypermass. Soon the dragons’ necks rose over the edge of the world, rainbow purls of matter, dripping and falling with unreal speed down into the hypermass. And then the dragonbodies, clouds throbbing with bluewhite lightning above the red bowels of hell.

The vast ring, in which Karlsen’s thread of rocks was one component, raced like a circular sawblade toward the prominences. As they came flying over the horizon they rose up far beyond Karlsen’s level. They twisted and reared like mad horses. They must be bigger than planets, he thought, yes, bigger than a thousand Earths or Esteels. The whirling band he rode was going to be crushed between them—and then he saw that even as they passed they were still enormously distant from him on either side.

Still standing, Karlsen let his eyes close for a time. If men ever dared to pray, if they ever dared even to think of a Creator of the universe, it was only because their tiny minds had never been able to visualize a thousandth part . . . a millionth part . . . there were no words, no concepts, for sights like these.

And what of men who believed only in themselves, or in nothing? What might it do to them to look nakedly at such odds as these?

Karlsen opened his eyes. In his belief a single human was more important to the Creator than any sun of whatever size. He made himself watch the scenery. He determined to master this almost superstitious awe.

But he had to brace himself again when he noticed for the first time how the stars were behaving. They were all blue-white needles, the wavefronts of their light jammed together in a stampede over the cliff of gravity. And his speed was such that he saw some stars moving slightly in parallax shifts. He could have depth perception in light-years, if his mind could stretch that far.

He stepped back to his chair, sat down and fastened himself in. He wanted to dig himself a tunnel, down into the very core of a huge planet, where he could hide . . . but what were even the biggest planets? Poor lost specks, hardly bigger than this bubble.

Here he faced no ordinary spaceman’s view of infinity. Here there was a terrible perspective, starting with rocks just outside the glass and drawing the mind on and out, rock by rock and line by line, step by inescapable step, on and on and on—

All right. At least this was something to fight against, and fighting something was better than sitting here and rotting. To begin with, a little routine. He drank some water, which tasted very good, and made himself eat a bite of food. He was going to be around for a while yet.

Now for the little job of getting used to the scenery without going mad. He faced in the direction of his bubble’s flight.

Half a dozen meters ahead of him the first large rock, massive as the bodies of a dozen men, hung steadily in the orbit-line of force. With his mind he weighed this rock and measured it and then moved on to the next notable chunk, a pebble’s throw further. The rocks were each smaller than his bubble, and he could follow the string of them on and on, until it was swallowed in the converging pattern of forcelines that at last bent around the hypermass, defining the full terror of distance.

His mind hanging by its fingertips swayed out along the intervals of grandeur . . . like a baby monkey blinking in jungle sunlight, he thought. Like an infant climber who had been terrified by the size of trees and vines, who now saw them for the first time as a network of roads that could be mastered.

Now he dared to let his eyes grab hard at that buzzsaw rim of the next inner circle of hurtling rocks, to let his mind ride it out and away. Now he dared to watch the stars shifting with his movement, to see with the depth perception of a plant.

He had been through a lot even before his ship had fallen here, and sleep overtook him. Suddenly loud noises were waking him up.

He came full awake with a start of fear. The berserker was not helpless after all. Two of its man-sized machines were outside his glassy door, working on it. Karlsen reached automatically for his handgun. The little weapon was not going to do him much good, but he waited, holding it ready. There was nothing else-to do.

Something was strange in the appearance of the deadly robots outside; they were silvered with a gleaming coating. It looked like frost except that it formed only on their forward surfaces and streamed away from them toward the rear in little fringes and tails, like an artist’s speed-lines made solid. The figures were solid enough. Their hammer-blows at his door . . . but wait. His fragile door was not being forced. The metal killers outside were tangled and slowed in the silvery webbing with which this mad rushing space had draped them. The stuff damped their laser beams, when they tried to burn their way in. It muffled the explosive they set off.

When they had tried everything they departed, pushing themselves from rock to rock back toward their metal mother, wearing their white flaming surfaces like hoods of defeat.

He yelled relieving insults after them. He thought of opening his door and firing his pistol after them. He wore a spacesuit, and if they could open the door of the berserkership from inside he should be able to open this one. But he decided that it would be a waste of ammunition to even try.

Some deep part of his mind had concluded that it was better for him, in his present situation, not to think about Time. He saw no reason to argue with this decision, and so he soon lost track of hours and days—weeks?

He exercised and shaved, he ate and drank and eliminated. The boat’s recycling systems worked very well. He happened to have aboard a device that would let him freeze himself into suspended animation—but no thanks, at least not yet. The possibility of rescue was in his thoughts, mixing hope with his fears of Time.

He knew that on the day he fell down here there was no ship built capable of coming after him and pulling him out. But ships were always being improved. Suppose he could hang on here for a few weeks, or months, while a few years passed outside. He knew he was important to many important people, and that an attempt to save him would be made if it looked at all possible.

From being awed, almost paralyzed by his surroundings, he passed through a stage of exaltation and then quickly reached—boredom. The mind had its own business and turned itself away from all these eternal blazing miracles. He slept a good deal.

In a dream he saw himself standing alone in space. He viewed himself at the distance where the human figure dwindles almost to a speck in the gaze of the unaided human eye. With an almost invisible arm, himself-in-the-distance waved good-by and then went walking away, headed out toward the bluewhite stars. The striding leg movements were at first barely perceptible and then became nothing at all as the figure dwindled, losing existence against the face of the deep . . .

With a yell he woke up. A spaceboat had nudged against his crystal hull and was now bobbing a few feet away. It was a solid metal ovoid, of a model he recognized, and the numbers and letters on its hull were familiar to him.

He had made it. He had hung on. The ordeal was over.

The little hatch of the rescue boat opened, and two suited figures emerged, one after the other, from its sheltered interior. At once these figures became silver-blurred as the berserker’s machines had been, but these men’s features were visible through their faceplates, their eyes looking straight at Karlsen. They smiled in steady encouragement, never taking their eyes from his.

Not for an instant.

They rapped on his door and kept smiling while he put on his spacesuit. But he made no move to let them in; instead he drew his gun.

They frowned. Inside their helmets their mouths formed words: Open up! He flipped on his radio, but if they were sending, nothing was coming through in this space. They kept on gazing steadily at him.

Wait, he signaled with an upraised hand. He got a slate and stylus from his chair and wrote them a message.

LOOK AROUND AT THE SCENERY FOR A WHILE.

He was sane, but maybe they thought him mad. As if to humor him, they began to look around them. A new set of dragons’-head prominences were rising ahead, beyond the stormy horizon at the rim of the world. The frowning men looked ahead of them at dragons, around them at buzzsaw rainbow whirls of stone; they looked down into the sullen depths of the inferno, they looked up at the stars’ poisonous blue-white spears sliding visibly over the void.

Then both of them, still frowning uncomprehendingly, looked right back at Karlsen.

He sat in his chair, holding his drawn gun and waiting, having no more to say. He knew that the berserker-ship would have had boats aboard and that it could build its killing machines into rough likenesses of men. These were almost good enough to fool him.

The figures outside produced a slate of their own from somewhere.

WE TOOK BERS. FROM BEHIND. ALL OK & SAFE. COME OUT.

He looked back. The cloud of dust raised by the berserker’s own useless weapons had settled around it, hiding it and all the force-line behind it from Karlsen’s view. Oh, if only he could believe that these were men . . .

They gestured energetically and lettered some more.

SHIP WAITING BACK THERE BEHIND DUST. SHE’S TOO BIG TO HOLD THIS LEVEL LONG. And again:

KARLSEN, COME WITH US!!! THIS YOUR ONLY CHANCE!

He didn’t dare read any more of their messages for fear he would believe them, rush out into their metal arms and be torn apart. He closed his eyes and prayed.

After a long time he opened his eyes again. His visitors and their boat were gone.

Not long afterward—as time seemed to him—there were flashes of light from inside the dust cloud surrounding the berserker. A fight to which someone had brought weapons that would work in this space? Or another attempt to trick him? He would see.

He was watching alertly as another rescue boat, much like the first, inched its way out of the dustcloud toward him. It drew alongside and stopped. Two more spacesuited figures got out and began to wear silver drapery.

This time he had his sign ready.

LOOK AROUND AT THE SCENERY FOR A WHILE.

As if to humor him, they began to look around them. Maybe they thought him mad, but he was sane. After about a minute they still hadn’t turned back to him—one’s face looked up and out at the unbelievable stars, while the other slowly swiveled his neck, watching a dragon’s head go by. Gradually their bodies became congealed in awe and terror, clinging to his glass wall.

After taking half a minute more to check his own helm and suit, Karlsen opened his door.

“Welcome, men,” he said, over his helmet radio. He had to help one of them aboard the rescue boat. But they made it.       END

1967

INTRODUCTION (Berserker: The Beginning)

I, third historian of the Carmpan race, in gratitude to the Earth-descended race for their defense of my world, set down here for them my fragmentary vision of their great war against our common enemy.

The vision has been formed piece by piece through my contacts in past and present time with the minds of men and of machines. In these minds alien to me I often perceive what I cannot understand, yet what I see is true. And so I have truly set down the acts and words of Earth-descended men great and small and ordinary, the words and even the secret thoughts of your heroes and your traitors.

Looking into the past I have seen how in the twentieth century of your Christian calendar your forefathers on Earth first built radio detectors capable of sounding the deeps of interstellar space. On the day when whispers in our alien voices were first detected, straying in across the enormous intervals, the universe of stars became real to all Earth’s nations and all her tribes.

They became aware of the real world surrounding them—a universe strange and immense beyond thought, possibly hostile, surrounding and shrinking all Earthmen alike. Like island savages just become aware of the great powers existing on and beyond their ocean, your nations began—sullenly, mistrustfully, almost against their will—to put aside their quarrels with one another.

In the same century the men of old Earth took their first steps into space. They studied our alien voices whenever they could hear us. And when the men of old Earth began to travel faster than light, they followed our voices to seek us out.

Your race and mine studied each other with eager science and with great caution and courtesy. We Carmpan and our older friends are more passive than you. We live in different environments and think mainly in different directions. We posed no threat to Earth. We saw to it that Earthmen were not crowded by our presence; physically and mentally they had to stretch to touch us. Ours, all the skills of keeping peace. Alas, for the day unthinkable that was to come, the day when we wished ourselves warlike!

You of Earth found uninhabited planets, where you could thrive in the warmth of suns much like your own. In large colonies and small you scattered yourselves across one segment of one arm of our slow-turning galaxy. To your settlers and frontiersmen the galaxy began to seem a friendly place, rich in worlds hanging ripe for your peaceful occupation.

The alien immensity surrounding you appeared to be not hostile after all. Imagined threats had receded behind horizons of silence and vastness. And so once more you allowed among yourselves the luxury of dangerous conflict, carrying the threat of suicidal violence.

No enforceable law existed among the planets. On each of your scattered colonies individual leaders maneuvered for personal power, distracting their people with real or imagined dangers posed by other Earth-descended men.

All further exploration was delayed, in the very days when the new and inexplicable radio voices were first heard drifting in from beyond your frontiers, the strange soon-to-be-terrible voices that conversed only in mathematics. Earth and Earth’s colonies were divided each against all by suspicion, and in mutual fear were rapidly training and arming for war.

And at this point the very readiness for violence that had sometimes so nearly destroyed you, proved to be the means of life’s survival. To us, the Carmpan watchers, the withdrawn seers and touchers of minds, it appeared that you had carried the crushing weight of war through all your history knowing that it would at last be needed, that this hour would strike when nothing less awful would serve.

When the hour struck and our enemy came without warning, you were ready with swarming battlefleets. You were dispersed and dug in on scores of planets, and heavily armed. Because you were, some of you and some of us are now alive.

Not all our Carmpan psychology, our logic and vision and subtlety, would have availed us anything. The skills of peace and tolerance were useless, for our enemy was not alive.

What is thought, that mechanism seems to bring it forth?

STONE MAN

Sirgol was a battleground—for a war fought thousands of years in its past!

I

Derron Odegard took a moment to wipe his sweaty palms on the legs of his easy-fitting duty uniform, and to minutely shift the position of his headset on his skull. Then he leaned forward in his contor-chair, hunting the enemy again.

After just half an hour on watch he was bone-tired. The weight of his planet and its forty million surviving inhabitants rested crushingly on the back of his neck. He didn’t want to bear the weight of forty million lives, but at the moment there was nowhere to set them down.

The responsibility was very real. One gross error by Derron, or anyone else in Time Operations, could be enough to tumble the people who still survived on the planet Sirgol into nothingness, to knock them out of real-time and end them for good, end them so completely that they would never have existed at all.

Derron’s hunter’s hands settled easily to rest on the molded controls of his console. Like those of a trained musician, his fingers followed his thought. The pattern on the curved viewscreen before him, a complex weaving of green cathode-traces, dissolved at his touch on the controls, then steadied, then shifted again—grass put carefully aside by the touch of a cautious stalker. In the screen pattern, Derron’s educated eye saw represented the lifelines of animals and plants, a tangle which made up his assigned small segment of his planet’s prehistorical ecology.

Surrounding Derron Odegard’s chair and console were those of other sentries, all aligned in long, subtly curving rows. This arrangement pleased and rested the momentarily lifted eye—and then led the eye back to the job, where it belonged. The same effect resulted from the gentle modulations that sometimes passed cloudlike across the artificial light flowing from the strongly vaulted ceiling; and from the insistent psych-music, a murmur of melody that now and then shifted into a primitive heavy beat.

A thousand men stood guard with Derron in his buried chamber while the music murmured and the fake cloud-shadows passed, and through the huge room there wafted freshsmelling air; breezes scented convincingly with green fields, sometimes with the tang of the sea, with all the varieties of living soil and water that no longer existed up above the miles of rock, on the surface of the planet.

Again the cathode traces symbolizing interconnected life rippled past Derron on his screen.

Like a good soldier he avoided predictability in his own moves while patrolling his post. He sent his recondevice a decade further into the past, then five miles north, then two years presentward, and a dozen miles southwest. At every pause he watched and listened, so far in vain. No predator’s passage had yet disturbed this green symbolic grass.

“Nothing yet,” he said aloud, feeling his supervisor’s presence at his elbow. When the presence stayed put, Derron glanced back for a moment at Captain—?

It irritated him that he could not think of the captain’s name, though perhaps it was understandable. Time Operations had only been in business for about a month and during all that period had been in a state of organizational flux.

Whoever he was, the captain had his eyes fixed fiercely on Derron’s screen. “Your section right here,” the captain said, showing his nervousness, “this is the hot spot.” The captain’s only reassuring aspect was that his dark jowly face seemed set like a bulldog’s, to bite and hold on. Derron turned back to work.

His assigned segment of spacetime was set about twenty thousand years in the past, near the time of the First Men’s coming to Sirgol. Its duration was about a century, and in space it comprised a square of land roughly a hundred miles on a side, including the lower atmosphere above the square. On the screen every part of it appeared as an enormously complex thicket of events.

Derron had not yet found a human lifeline woven into this thicket of the past, but 416 was not looking for humans especially. What mattered was that he had not yet discovered the splash of disruptive change that would have signaled the presence of an invading berserker machine.

The infraelectronic recon-device which served as Derron’s sense-extension into the past did not stir the branches of forests, or startled animals. Rather it hovered just outside reality, seeing real-time through the fringe of things that almost were, dipping into real-time for an anosecond and then dropping back again to peer at it from just around the local curves of probability.

The first intimation that battle had been joined came to Derron not through his screen or even his earphones, but through the sound of his captain moving away in softfooted haste, to whisper excitedly with the supervisor of the next rank.

If the fight was really on in Time Operations at last, a man might well feel frightened. Derron did, in a remote and withdrawn sort of way. He was not badly frightened as yet, and did not expect to be. He thought he would stay on his job and do it well.

There were advantages in not caring very much.

A few seconds later the start of an action was confirmed by a calm girl’s voice that came into his earphones. She also told him in which dimensions and by how much to shift his pattern of search. All the sentries would be shifting now, as those nearest the enemy penetration closed in and the rest spread their zones to maintain coverage. The first attack might be only a diversion.

Present-time passed slowly. Derron’s orders were changed and changed again, by the unshakeable girl-voice that might be only a recording. For a while he could only guess at how things were going. Men had never tried to fight in the past before, but all the men of Sirgol who were still alive were used to war in one form or another. And this game of Time Operations would also be new to the enemy—though of course he had no emotions to get in his way.

“Attention, all sentries,” said a new, drawling, male voice in Derron’s headset. “This is Time Ops Command, to let you all know what’s going on. First, the enemy’s sunk a beachhead down about twenty-one thousand years in probability-time. Looks like they’re going to take things down there and then launch ’em up into history.”

A few seconds later, the voice added: “We got our first penetration already spotted, somewhere around twenty-and-a-half down. Keep your eyes sharp and find us the keyhole.”

At some time more than twenty thousand years in the past, at some spot not yet determined high in Sirgol’s atmosphere, six berserker devices the size of aircraft had come bursting into reality. If men’s eyes had been able to watch the event directly, they would have seen the six missile-shaped killing machines materialize out of nothing and then explode from their compact formation like precision flyers. Like an aerobatic team they scattered at multisonic speed away from their “keyhole”—the point of spacetime through which they had entered reality, and where one perfect counterblow could still destroy them all.

As the six enemy machines flew at great speed away from one another, they seeded the helpless world below them with poison. Radioactives, antibiotic chemicals—it was hard from a distance of twenty thousand years to say just what they were using. Derron Odegard, patrolling like the other sentries, saw the attack only in its effects. He perceived it as a diminishing in probability of the existence of life in his own sector, a morbid change following certain well defined directions that would in time reduce the probability of any life at all in the sector to zero.

If the planet was dead and poisoned when the First Men arrived, groping and wandering as helpless as babies, why then there could be no human civilization on Sirgol, no one in Modern times to resist the dead today. Derron knew that the berserkers. The planet would still be dark tide of nonexistence was rising in each cell of his own body, in each cell of every living creature.

Derron’s findings with those of every other sentry were fed to Time Ope Command. Men and computers worked together, tracing back the vectors along which the deadly changes in probability advanced.

The system worked to Command’s satisfaction, this time. The computers announced that the keyholes of the six flying machines had been pinpointed.

In the catacomb of Operations’ Stage Two, the missiles waited, blunt simple shapes surrounded by complexities of control and launching mechanism. As Command’s drawling voice announced: “Firing one for the keyhole,” massive steel arms extended the missile sideways from its rack, while on the dark stone floor beneath it there appeared a silvery circle, shimmering like troubled liquid.

The arms dropped the missile, and in the first instant of its fall it disappeared. Even as it fell into the past it was propelled as a wave of probability through the miles of rock to the surface. The guidance computers made constant corrections, steering their burden of fusible hydrogen through the mazes of the half-real, toward the right point on the edge of normal existence . . . .

Derron saw the malignant changes that had been creeping ominously across his screen begin suddenly to reverse themselves. It looked like a trick, like running the projector backward, like some stunt with no relevance to the real world.

“Right in the keyhole!” yelped Command’s voice in his ear, drawling no longer. The six berserker flyers now shared their point of entry into real-time with an atomic explosion, neatly tailored to fit.

As the waves of death were seen to recede on every screen, jubilation spread in murmurous waves of its own up and down the curved rows of sentry-positions. But experience, not to mention discipline, kept the rejoicing muted.

The rest of the six-hour watch passed like a routine training exercise in the techniques of moppingup. All the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed, the tactical success tied down and made certain by observations and tests. Men were relieved on schedule for their customary breaks, and passed one another smiling and winking. Derron went along and smiled when someone met his eye; it was the easiest thing to do.

When the shift ended and there was still no sign of any further enemy action, there was no doubt left that the berserkers’ first attempt to get at the Modems through their past had been beaten back into nonexistence.

But the damned machine would be back, as always. Stiff and sweaty and tired, and not conscious of any particular elation, Derron rose from his chair to make room for the sentry on the next shift.

“I guess you guys did all right today,” the replacement said, a touch of envy in his voice.

Derron made himself smile again. “You can have the next chance for glory.” He pressed his thumbprint on the console’s scanner as the other man did the same. Then, his responsibility officially over, he walked at a dragging pace out of the sentry room. Other members of his shift were moving in the same direction; once outside the area of enforced quiet they formed excited groups and started to whoop it up a little.

Nodding cheerfully to the others, and replying appropriately to their jokes, Derron stood in line to hand in the recording cartridge with its record of his shift activity. Then he waited in another short line, to make a final oral report to a debriefing officer. After that he was free; as free as any citizen of Sirgol could be, these days.

II

When the huge passenger elevator lifted Derron and a crowd of others out of the deeper caves of Time Operations to the housing level, there were still ten miles of rock overhead.

The pampered conditions of the sentry room were not to be found here, or anywhere where a maximum-efficiency environment was not absolutely necessary. Here the air smelled stale and the lighting was just tolerable. The corridor in which Derron had his bachelor-cubicle was one of the main streets of the buried world-city, the fortress in which the surviving population of Sirgol was armed and maintained and housed and fed. Given the practically limitless power of hydrogen fusion to labor for them, and the mineral wealth of the surrounding rock, the besieged planet-garrison at least had no fear of starvation.

The corridor was two stories high and as wide as a main street in one of the cities of the old surface-world. People who traveled this corridor for any considerable distance rode upon the moving belts laid down in its center. On the moving belt now rushing past Derron a pair of blackuniformed police were checking the identity cards of travelers. Planetary Command must be cracking down again on work-evaders.

As usual, the belts and the broad statwalk strips on either side were moderately crowded. Men and women were going to their jobs or leaving them, at a pace neither hurried nor slow, wearing work uniforms that were mostly monotonously alike. A few other people, wearing lighter and gayer off-duty clothes, were strolling or standing in line before stores or places of amusement.

One of the shorter lines was that in front of the local branch of the Homestead Office. Derron paused on the statwalk there, looking at the curling posters and the shabby models on display. All depicted various plans for the rehabilitation of the surface of the planet after the war. Apply now for the land you want . . . they said there would be new land, then, nourished and protected by new oceans of air and water, which were to be somehow squeezed out of the planet’s deep rocks.

The people standing in line looked at the models with wistful, halfhopeful eyes, and most of those passing glanced in with something more than indifference. They were all of them able to forget, if they had ever really understood it, the fact that the world was dead. The real world was dead and cremated, along with nine out of ten of the people who had made it live . . . .

To control his thoughts Derron had to turn away from the dusty models and the people waiting in line to believe. He started toward his cubicle but then on impulse turned aside, down a narrow branching passage.

He knew where he was going. Likely there would be only a few people there at this time of day. A hundred paces ahead of him, the end of the passage framed in its arch the living green of real treetops—

The tremor of a heavy explosion raced through the living rock from which this passage had been carved.

Ahead, Derron saw two small red birds streak in alarm across the greenery of the trees. Now the sound came, dull and muffled, but heavy. It had been a small missile penetration, then, one hitting fairly close by. The enemy threw down through the shielding rock probability-waves that turned into missiles, even as men fired them upward at the enemy fleet in space.

Without hesitating or breaking stride Derron paced on to the end of the passage. There he halted, leaning his hands heavily on a protective railing of natural logs, while he looked out over the park from two levels above the grass. From six levels higher yet, an artificial sun shone down almost convincingly on three or four acres of real trees and real grass, on varicolored birds that were held inside the park by curtain-jets of air. Across the scene there passed a gurgling brook of real water. Today its level had fallen so that the concrete sides of its bed were revealed halfway down.

A year ago—a lifetime ago, that is, in the real world—Derron Odegard had been no nature-lover. Then he had been thinking of finishing his schooling and settling down to the labors of a professional historian. Even on holidays he had gone to historic places . . . he thrust out of his memory now certain thoughts, and a certain face, as he habitually did. Yes, a year ago he had spent most of his days with history texts and films and tapes, and in the usual academic schemes for academic advancement. In those days the first hints of the possibility that historians might be allowed to take a firsthand look at the past had been promises of pure joy. The warnings of Earthmen were decades old, and the defenses of Sirgol had been decades in the building, all part of the background of life. The Berserker War itself was other planets’ business.

In the past year, Derron thought, he had learned more about history than in all the years of study that had gone before. Now when the last moment of history came on Sirgol, if he could know it was the last, he would get away if he could come to one of these parks with a little bottle of wine he had been keeping stowed under his cot. He would finish history by drinking whatever number of toasts circumstances allowed, to whatever dead and dying things seemed to him then the most worthy.

The tension was just beginning to drain from his fingers into the handworn bark of the railing, and he had actually forgotten the recent explosion, when the first of the wounded came into die park below him.

The first was a man with his uniform jacket gone and the remains of his clothing all torn and blackened. One of his arms was burnt and raw and swelling. He tottered forward half-blindly among the trees, and then like an actor in some wilderness drama he fell full length at the edge of the brook and began to drink from it ravenously.

Next came another man, older, this one probably some kind of clerk or administrator, though he was too far away for Derron to make out his insignia. This man stood in the park as if lost, seemingly unwounded but more dazed than the burned man. Now and then the second man raised his hands to his ears; there was something wrong with his hearing.

A pudgy woman entered, moaning in bewilderment as she held the flap of her tom scalp in place. Two more women came in; a trickle of injured people began to spill steadily from a small park entrance at grass level. They flowed in and defiled the false peace of the park. Their voices, growing in number, built a steadily rising murmur of complaint against the injustice of the universe. Everyone knew it was a rare event for a berserker missile to get past all the defenses and penetrate to the depth of an inhabited level.

Why did it have to happen today, and to them?

There were a couple of dozen people in the park now, walking wounded from what must have been a relatively harmless explosion, Down the nearby passages there echoed authoritarian yells, and the whine and rumble of heavy machines. Damage Control was on the job; the walking wounded were being sent here to get them out from under foot while more urgent matters were being taken care of.

A slender girl of eighteen or twenty, clad in the remnants of a simple paper dress, came into the park and leaned against a tree as if she could walk no further. The way her dress was torn . . . .

Derron turned away, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head in a spasm of self-disgust. He stood up here like some ancient tyrant, remotely entertained and critically lustful.

He would have to decide, one of these days, whether he was really still on the side of the human race or not. He hurried down some nearby stairs and came out on the ground level of the park. The badly burned man was bathing his raw arm in the cool running water. No one seemed to have stopped breathing, or to be bleeding to death. The girl looked as if she might fall away from her supporting tree at any moment.

Derron went to her, pulling off his jacket. He wrapped her in the garment and eased her away from the tree.

“Where are you hurt?”

She shook her head and refused to sit down, so they did a little offbalance dance while he held her up.

She was tall and slim and ordinarily she would be lovely . . . no, not really lovely, or at least not standardpretty. But good to look at. Her dark hair was cut in the short simple style most favored by Planetary Command, as most women’s was these days. No jewelry or make-up. Plainly she was in some kind of shock.

She came out of it somewhat to look in bewilderment at the jacket that had been wrapped around her; her eyes focused on the collar insignia. She said: “You’re an officer.” Her voice was low and blurry.

“In a small way. Hadn’t you better lie down somewhere?”

“No. First tell me what’s going on . . . I’ve been trying to get home . . . or somewhere. Can’t you tell me where I am? What’s going on?” Her voice was rising.

“Easy, take it easy. There was a missile strike. Here, now, this insignia of mine is supposed to be a help with the girls. So behave! Won’t you sit down?”

“No! First I must find out . . . I don’t know who I am, or where, or why.”

“I don’t know those things about myself.” That was the most honest communication he had made to anyone in a long time.

He was afraid that when the girl came out of her dazed condition it would be into panic. More people, passers-by and medics, were running into the park now, aiding the wounded and creating a scene of confusion. The girl looked wildly around her and clung to Derron’s arm. He supposed the best thing was to walk her to a hospital. Where? Of course—there was the one adjoining Time Operations, just a short way from here.

“Come along,” he said. The girl walked willingly beside him, clinging to his encircling arm. “What’s your name?” he asked, as they boarded the elevator. The other people stared at her in his jacket.

“I . . . don’t know.” Now she looked more frightened than ever. Her hand went to her throat, but there was no dog-tag chain around her neck. Many people didn’t like to wear them. “Where are you taking me?”

“To a hospital. You need some looking-after.” He would have liked to give some wilder answer for the onlookers’ benefit, but he didn’t want to terrify the girl.

She had little to say after that. He led her off the elevator and another short walk brought them to the hospital’s emergency door. Other casualties from the explosion, stretcher cases, were arriving now.

Inside the emergency room an old nurse started to peel Derron’s jacket off the girl and what was left of her dress came with it. “You just come back for your jacket tomorrow, young man,” the woman ordered sharply, rewrapping.

“Gladly.” Then he could only wave good-by to the girl as a horde of stretcher-bearers and other busy people swept him with them back out into the corridor. He found himself laughing to himself about the nurse and the jacket. It was a while since he had laughed about anything.

He had a spare jacket in his locker in the sentry officers’ ready room in Time Ops, and he went there to pick it up. There was nothing new on the bulletin board. He would like to get off sentry duty and into something where you didn’t just sit still under strain for six hours a day.

He went to the nearest officers’ gym and talked to acquaintances and played two rounds of handball, winning an ersatz soft-drink that he preferred not to collect. The others were talking about the missile strike; Derron mentioned that he had seen some of the wounded, but he said nothing about the girl.

From the gym he went with a couple of the others to a bar, where he had one drink, his usual limit, and listened without real interest to their talk of some new girls at a local uplevel dive called the Red Garter. Private enterprise still flourished in certain areas.

He ate a meal in the local officers’ mess, with a better appetite than usual. Then he took the elevator back up to housing level and at last reached his bachelor’s cubicle. He stretched out on his cot and for once went sound asleep before he could even consider taking a pill.

III

He was awake earlier than usual, feeling well rested. The little clock on his cubicle wall had just jumped to oh-six-thirty hours, Planetary Emergency Time.

This morning none of Time’s aspects worried him particularly. He had enough time to stop by the hospital and see what had happened to her, before he went on duty.

He was carrying yesterday’s jacket over his arm when, following a nurse’s directions, he found the girl seated in a patients’ lounge. The TV was on, tuned to Channel Gung-Ho, the one devoted to the war effort and associated government propaganda, and she was frowning at it with a look of naivete. Today she was wearing a plain dress that did not exactly fit. Her sandaled feet were curled beside her on her chair. At this time of the morning she had the lounge pretty much to herself.

At the sound of Derron’s step she turned her head quickly, then got to her feet, smiling. “Oh, it’s you! It’s a good feeling to recognize someone.”

“It’s a good feeling for me, to have someone recognize me.”

She thanked him for yesterday’s help. He introduced himself.

She wished she could tell him her name, but the amnesia was persisting. “Outside of that, I feel fine.”

“That’s good, anyway,” he said as they sat down in adjacent chairs.

“Actually I do have a name, of sorts. For the sake of their computer records the people here at the hospital have tagged me Lisa Gray, next off some list they keep handy. Evidently a fair number of people go blank in the upper story these days.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“They tell me that when the missile hit yesterday I was with a number of people from an upper-level refugee camp that’s being closed down. A lot of the records were destroyed in the blast. They can’t find me, or they haven’t yet.” She laughed nervously.

Derron tried a remark or two meant to be reassuring, but they didn’t sound very helpful in his own ears. He got off the subject. “Have you had your breakfast?”

“Yes. There’s a little automat right here if you want something. Maybe I could use some more fruit juice.”

In a couple of minutes Derron was back with two glasses of the orange-colored liquid called fruit juice and a couple of standard sweetrolls. Lisa was again studying the war on die TV screen; the commentator’s stentorian voice was turned mercifully low.

Derron set the repast on a low table, pulled his own chair closer, and asked: “Do you remember what we’re fighting against?”

On screen at the moment was a deep-space scene in which it was hard to make anything out. Lisa hesitated, then shook her head. “Not really.”

“Does the word ‘berserker’ mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Well, they’re machines. Some of them are bigger than any spaceships we Earth-descended men have ever built. Others come in many shapes and sizes, but all of them are deadly. The first berserkers were built ages ago, to fight in some war we’ve never heard of, between races we’ve never met.

“Sometimes men have beaten the berserkers in battle, but some of them always survived, to hide out somewhere and build more of their kind, with improvements. They’re programmed to destroy life anywhere they can find it, and they’ve come halfway across the galaxy doing a pretty good job. They go on and on like death itself.”

“No,” said Lisa, not liking the plot.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to start raving. We on Sirgol were alive, and so the berserkers had to get rid of us. They boiled away our oceans, and burned our air and our land and nine tenths of our people. But since they’re only machines, it’s all an accident, a sort of cosmic joke. An act of the Holy One, as people used to say. We have no one to take revenge on.” His voice choked slightly in his tight throat; he sipped at his orange-colored water and then pushed it away.

“Won’t men come from other planets to help us?”

“Some of them are fighting berserkers near their own systems, too. And a really big relief fleet will have to be put together to do us any good. And polities must be played between the stars as usual. I suppose some help will come eventually, maybe in another year.”

The TV announcer began to drone aggressively about victories on the moon, while an appropriate videotape was shown. The chief satellite of Sirgol was said to much resemble the moon of Earth. Its round face had been pocked by impact craters into an awed expression long before men or berserkers existed. During the last year a rash of new craters had wiped away the face of Sirgol’s moon, together with all human bases there.

“I think that help will come to us in time,” said Usa.

In time for what? Derron wondered. “I suppose so,” he said and felt it was a he.

Lisa was looking anxiously at the TV. “It seems to me I can remember . . . . Yes! I can remember seeing the old moon, the funny face in it! It did look like a face, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I remember it!” she cried in a burst of joy. Like a child she jumped up from her chair and kissed Derron on the cheek.

While she sat down again, looking at him happily, a line of ancient poetry sang through his mind. He swallowed.

Now on the TV they were showing the dayside surface of Sirgol. Cracked dry mudflats stretched away to a horizon near which there danced whirlwinds of yellow dust—there was a little atmosphere left—under a sky of savage blue. Rising gleaming from the dried mud in the middle distance were the bright steel bones of some invading berserker device, smashed and twisted last tenday or last month by some awesome energy of defense. Another victory for the droning voice to try to magnify—

Derron cleared his throat. “Do you remember about our planet here being unique?”

“No . . . I doubt that I ever understood science.” But she looked interested. “Go on, tell me about it.”

“Well.” Derron put on his littleused teacher’s voice. “If you catch a glimpse of our sun on the screen there, you’ll see it looks much like any other star that has an Earthtype planet. But looks axe deceiving. Oh, our daily lives are the same as they would be elsewhere. And interstellar ships can enter and leave our system—if they take precautions. But our local spacetime is tricky.

“We were colonized through a weird accident. About a hundred years ago an exploring ship from Earth fell into our peculiar spacetime unawares. It dropped back through about twenty thousand years of time, which must have wiped clean the memories of everyone aboard.” He smiled at Lisa. “Our planet is unique in that time travel into the past is possible here, under certain conditions. First, anyone who travels back more than about five hundred years suffers enough mental devolution to have their memories wiped out. They go blank in the upper story, as you put it. Our First Men must have crawled around like babies after their ship landed itself.”

“The First Men . . . that’s familiar.”

“There were First Women, too, of course. Somehow the survivors kept on surviving, and multiplied, and over the generations started building up civilizations. When the second exploring ship arrived, about ten years Earth-time after the first, we’d built up a thriving planet-wide civilization and were getting started on space travel ourselves. In fact it was signals from our early interplanetary probes that drew the second Earthship here. It approached more carefully than the first one had and landed successfully.

“Pretty soon the men from Earth figured out what had happened to our first ship. They also brought us warning of the berserkers. Took some of our people to other systems and showed them what galactic war was like. The people of other worlds were tickled to have four hundred million new allies, and they deluged us with advice on weapons and fortifications, and we spent the next eighty years getting ready to defend ourselves. Then about a year ago the berserker fleet came . . . .” Derron’s voice trailed off.

Lisa drank some of her “juice” as if she liked it. She prompted: “What do you do now, Derron?”

“Oh, various odd jobs in Time Operations. See, if the berserkers can delay our historical progress at some vital point—the invention of the wheel, say—everything following would be slowed down. When galactic civilization contacted us, we might be still in the Middle Ages, or further back, without any technological base on which to build defenses for ourselves. And in the new real-time, the present would see us entirely wiped out.”

Derron looked at the version of Time he wore on his wrist. “Looks like I’d better go right now and start my day’s heroic fighting.”

The officer in charge of that morning’s briefing was Colonel Borss. He took his job very seriously in all its details, with the somber expectancy of a prophet.

“As we all know, yesterday’s defensive action was tactically successful.”

In the semi-darkness of the briefing room the colonel’s pointer skipped luminously across the glowing symbols on his big display screen. “But, strategically speaking, we must admit that the situation has deteriorated somewhat.”

The colonel went on to explain that this gloomy view was due to the existence of the enemy’s beachhead, his staging area some twentyplus-thousand years down, from whence more berserker devices would undoubtedly be propelled up into historical real-time. For technical reasons, these devices moving presentward would be almost impossible to stop until they had finally emerged.

All was not entirely lost, however. “After the enemy has broken three more times into our history, we should be able to get a fix on his beachhead and smash it with a few missiles.

“That’ll pretty well put an end to his whole Time Operations program.

“Of course we have first to face the little detail of repelling the next three attacks.”

As his dutiful audience of junior officers made faint laughing sounds, the colonel produced on his screen a type of graph of human history on Sirgol, a glowing treelike shape. He tapped with his pointer far down on the slender trunk. “We rather suspect that the first attack will fall somewhere near here, near the First Men, where our history is still a tender shoot.”

IV

Matt, sometime also called LionHunter, felt the afternoon sun hot on his bare shoulders as he turned away from the last familiar landmarks of his country, the territory in which he had lived all his twentyfive years.

Matt had climbed up on a rock to get a better view of the unknown land ahead, into which he and the rest of The People were fleeing. Ahead he could see swamps, and barren hills, and nothing very inviting. Everywhere the land wavered with the spirits of heat.

The little band of The People, as many in number as a man’s fingers and toes, were shuffling along in a thin file beside the rock which Matt had mounted. No one was hanging back, or even trying to argue the others out of making the journey. For though there might be strange dangers in the new land ahead, everyone agreed that nothing there was likely to be as terrible as what they were fleeing—the new beasts, the lions with flesh of stone who could not be hurt by stones or arrows, who could kill with only a glance from their fiery eyes.

In the past two days, ten of The People had been caught and killed. The others had been able to do nothing but hide, hardly daring to look for a puddle to drink from or to pull up a root to eat.

Matt gripped with one hand the bow slung over his shoulder, the only bow now left to the survivors of The People; the others had been burned, with the men who had tried to use them against a stone-lion. Tomorrow, Matt thought, he would try hunting for meat in the new country. No one was carrying any food now. Some of the young were wailing in hunger until the women pinched their mouths and noses shut to quiet them.

The file of the surviving People had passed Matt now. He ran his eye along it, then hopped down from his rock, frowning.

A few strides brought him up to those in the rear of the march. “Where is Dart?” he asked, frowning.

Dart was an orphan, and no one was overly concerned. “He kept telling us how hungry he was,” a woman said. “And then he ran on toward those swampy woods ahead. I suppose he went to look for something to eat.”

Matt grunted. He had no idea of trying to keep any firm control over the actions of any of The People. Someone who wanted to run ahead just did so.

Derron was just buying Lisa some lunch—from the hospital automat, since she was still being kept under observation—when the public address speakers began to broadcast a list of names of Time Operation people who were to report for duty at once. Derron’s name was included.

He scooped up a sandwich and ate it as he went. This was something more than another practice alert. When Derron reached the briefing room, Colonel Borss was already on the dais and speaking, pausing to glare at each new arrival.

“Gentlemen, the first assault has fallen just about as predicted, within a few hundred years of the First Men.” To Derron’s slight surprise, the colonel paused momentarily to bow his head at the mention of those beings sacred to Orthodoxy. These days there were few religionists traditional enough to make such gestures.

“Certainly,” the colonel went on, “the berserkers would like to catch the First Men and eliminate them. But this, as we know, must prove impossible.”

On this one point at least, science and Orthodox religion were still in firm agreement. The first men entering the ecology on any planet constituted the beginning of an evolutionary peduncle, said science, and as such were considered practically impossible of discovery, time travel or not Colonel Borss smoothed his mustache and went on: “As in the first attack, we are faced by six enemy machines breaking into real-time. But in this case the machines are not flyers, or at least they seem not to be operating in an airborne mode. Probably they are slightly smaller than the flyers were. We think they are anti-personnel devices that move on legs and rollers and are of course invulnerable to any means of selfdefense possessed by the Neolithic population.

“Evidently the berserker’s game here is not to simply kill as many people as possible. We could trace the disturbance of a mass slaughter back to their new keyhole and blast them again. This time we think they’ll concentrate on destroying some historically important individual, or small group. Just who in the invaded area is so important we don’t know yet, but if the berserkers can read their importance in them we certainly can, and we soon will.

Now here is Commander Nolos, to brief you on your part in our planned counter-measures.”

Nolos, an earnest young man with a rasping voice, came right to the point. “You twenty-four men all have high scores in training on the master-slave androids. No one has any real combat experience with them yet, but you soon will. You’re all relieved of other duties as of now.”

Expressing various reactions, the two dozen men were hurried to a near-by ready room, and there left to wait for some minutes. At length they were taken down by elevator to Operations Stage Three, on one of the lowest and most heavily defended levels yet dug.

Stage Three was a great echoing cave, the size of an aircraft hangar. A catwalk spanned the cave close up under its reinforced ceiling, and from this walk were suspended the two dozen master units. They looked like spacesuits on puppet-strings.

Like a squad of armored infantry the slaveunits stood on the floor below, each slave directly beneath its master. The slaves were the bigger, standing taller and broader than men, dwarfing the technicians who were now busy giving them final precombat checks.

Derron and his fellow operators were given individual briefings, with maps of the terrain where they were to be dropped, and such information as was available on the Neolithic nomads they were to try to protect. Generally speaking this information did not amount to much. After this the operators were run through a brief medical check, dressed in leotards and marched up onto the high catwalk.

At this point the word was passed to delay things momentarily. A huge screen on one wall of the stage lit up with an image of the bald, massive head of the Planetary Commander himself.

“Men . . .” boomed the familiar amplified voice. Then the image paused, frowning off-camera. “You’ve got them waiting for me? Get on with it, man, get on with the operation! I can make speeches any time!”

The Planetary Commander’s voice was still rising as it was turned off. Derron got the impression that it had a good deal more to say, and he was glad that it was not being said to him. A pair of technicians came and helped him into his master, as into a heavy diving suit. But once inside he could wave the master’s arms and legs and twist its thick body with perfect freedom and servopowered ease.

“Power coming on,” said a voice in Derron’s helmet. And it seemed to him that he was no longer suspended in the free-moving puppet. All his senses were transferred in an instant into the body of his slaveunit on the floor below. He felt the slave starting to tilt as its servos moved it into conformity with the master’s posture, and he moved the slave’s foot as naturally as his own to maintain balance. Tilting back his head, he could look up through the slaveunit’s eyes to see the master-unit, himself inside it, holding the same attitude on its complex suspension.

“Form ranks for launching!” came the command in his helmet. Around Derron the cavernous chamber came alive with the echoes of the Technicians trotted and jumped to get out of the way. The squad of metal man-shapes formed a single serpentine file, and at the head of the file the floor of the stage suddenly blossomed into a bright mercurial disk.

“. . . three, two, one, launch.”

All of Derron’s senses told him that he inhabited one of a line of tall bodies, all running with immense and easy power in their winding file toward the circle on the dark floor. The figure ahead of Derron reached the circle and disappeared. Then he himself leaped out over the silvery disk.

His metal feet came down on grass. He staggered briefly on uneven ground, through shadowy daylight in the midst of a leafy forest.

He moved at once to the nearest clearing from which he could get a good look at the sun. It was low in the western sky—he checked a compass in the slave’s wrist—which indicated that he had missed his planned moment of arrival by some hours, if not by days or months or years.

He reported this at once, subvocalizing inside his helmet to keep the slave’s speaker silent. If the slave had after sail landed in the right place and time, the enemy was somewhere near it.

“All right then, Odegard, start coursing, and we’ll try to get a fix.”

“Understand.”

He began to walk a spiral path through the woods. He of course kept alert for sign of the enemy, but the primary purpose of this manuever was to splash up some waves in reality—to create minor disturbances in the local life-history, which a skilled sentry some twenty thousand years in the future should be able to see and pinpoint.

After he had spiraled for some ten minutes, alarming perhaps a hundred small animals and perhaps crushing a thousand insects underfoot without knowing it, the impersonal voice spoke again.

“All right, Odegard, we’ve got you spotted. You’re in the right place but between four and five hours late. The sun should be getting low.”

“It is.”

“All right. Bear about two-hundred-forty degrees from magnetic north. It’s hard to tell at this range just where your people are, but if you hold that course for about half an hour you should come somewhere near them.”

“Understand.”

Derron got his bearings and set off in a straight line. The wooded land ahead sloped gradually downward into a swampy area, beyond which there rose low rocky hills, a mile or two distant.

“Odegard, we’re getting indication of another minor disturbance right there in your area. Probably caused by a berserker. We can’t pin it down any more closely than that, sorry.”

“Understand.” He was not really there in the past, about to risk his own skin in combat; but the weight of forty million lives was on his neck again.

Some minutes passed. Derron was moving slowly ahead, trying to keep a lookout in all directions while planning a good path for the heavy slaveunit through the marshy ground, when he heard trouble in plain and simple form: a child screaming.

“Operations? I’m onto something.” The scream was repeated; the slaveunit’s ears were keen and directionally accurate; Derron changed course and began to move the unit at a run, leaping it across the softest-looking spots of ground, striving for both speed and silence.

In a few more seconds, he slid as silently as possible to a halt. In a treetop a stone’s throw ahead was the source of the screams—a boy of about twelve, who was clinging tightly to the tree’s thin upper trunk with bare arms and legs, clinging tightly to keep from being shaken down. Whenever his yelling ceased for lack of breath, another sharp tremor would ran up through the tree and start him off again. The tree’s lower trunk was thick, but the bush around its base concealed something that could shake it like a sapling. An animal would have to have the strength of an elephant, and there were no such living creatures here. It would be the berserker, using the boy in the tree as bait, hoping that his cries would bring the adults of his group to try a rescue.

Derron’s mission was to protect a particular group of people, and at least one of them was in immediate danger. He moved forward without delay. But the berserker spotted the slaveunit before, he saw the berserker.

Only an accidental slip of the slave’s foot on the soft soil saved it from taking the first hit right then. As Derron slipped, a pinkish laser beam crackled like straightened lightning past his left ear.

In the next instant the brash round the tree heaved. Derron caught just one glimpse of something charging him, something fourlegged and low and wide as a groundcar. He snapped open his jaw, which pressed down inside his helmet on the trigger of his own laserweapon. From the center of the slave’s forehead a pale lance cracked out, aimed automatically at the spot where the slave’s eyes were focused. The beam smote the charging berserker amid the knobs of metal that served it for a face and glanced off to explode a small tree into a cloud of flame and steam.

The shot might have done damage, for the enemy broke off its rush in midstride and dove for cover behind a hillock, a grass-tufted hump of ground not five feet high.

Derron was somewhat surprised by his own aggressiveness. He found himself moving quickly to the attack, running the slaveunit in a crouch around the tiny hill. Two voices from Operations were trying at the same time to give him advice, hut even if they had gone about it sensibly it was too late now for him to do anything but go his own way.

He charged right round onto the berserker, yelling inside his helmet as he fired his laser. The thing before him looked like a metal lion, but squat and very broad; given a second to hesitate, Derron might have flinched away, for in spite of all his training the illusion was very strong that he was actually hurling his own precious flesh upon this monster.

As it was, circumstances gave him no time to flinch. The slave ran at full speed into the berserker, and the trees in the swamp shook as the machines collided.

It was soon plain that wrestling was not likely to succeed against this enemy, which was not limited in its reactions by the slowness of protoplasmic nerves. For all the slaveunit’s fusion-powered strength, Derron could only hang on desperately, gripping the berserker in a sort of half nelson white it bucked and twisted like a wild loadbeast to throw him off.

Since the fight had started everybody wanted to watch. The voices of at least two senior Operations officers screamed orders and abuse into Derron’s ears, while the green forest spun round him faster than his eyes and brain could sort it out. In a detached fraction of a second of thought he noticed how his feet were flying uselessly on the end of his steel legs, breaking down small trees as the monster spun him. He tried to turn his head to bring the cyclops’ eye of his laser to bear, but somehow could not manage to do so. He tried desperately to get a more solid grip for his steel arms on the berserker’s thick neck, but then his grip was broken and he flew.

Before the slaveunit could even bounce the berserker was on top of it, moving faster than any maddened bull. Derron fired wildly with his laser. That the berserker should trample and batter the slaveunit and he should feel no pain gave him a giddy urge to laugh. In a moment now the fight would be lost and he would be able to give up.

But then the berserker was running away from Derron’s wildly slashing laser. It leaped among the trees as lightly as a deer and vanished.

Dizzily—for the master-unit had of course spun on its mountings even as the slave was spun—Derron tried to sit up, on the peculiar little hillside where he had been flung. Now he discovered why the berserker had retired so willingly. Some important part had been broken in the slave, so its legs trailed as limp and useless as those of a man with a broken spine.

But the slaveunit’s laser still worked. The berserker computerbrain had decided it could gain nothing by staying around to trade zaps with a crippled but still dangerous antagonist, not when it could be busy at its programmed task of killing people.

The voices had their final say: “Odegard, why in the—?”

“Oh, do what you can!” Then with a click they were gone from his helmet, leaving their disgust behind.

Derron’s own disgust with his failure was even sharper. Gone were the thoughts of getting things settled quickly one way or the other. Now all he wanted was another crack at ’em.

With the slave’s arms alone, he got it into a sitting position, halfway down the conical side of a soggy sandpit.

He looked about him. The nearby trees were nearly all in bad shape; those not broken during the wrestling-match were black and smoking furiously from his wildly aimed laser.

What about the boy?

Working hard with his arms, Derron churned his way up to a spot near the rim of the funnel-shaped pit, where the sides were steepest. He could recognize, a little distance away, the tall tree in which the youngster had been clinging for his life. He was not in sight now, living or dead.

In a sudden little avalanche the crippled slave slid down once more toward the bottom of the sandy funnel.

A funnel?

Derron at last recognized the place where the slaveunit had been thrown.

It was the trap of a poisondigger, a species of carnivore that had been—or would be—exterminated in early historical times. Even now, there reared up a frightful grayish head from the watery mess that filled the bottom of the pit.

V

Matt stood just behind the boy Dart, while both of them peered very cautiously through the bushes toward the poison-digger’s trap. The rest of The People were waiting, resting from their march while they ate some grubs and roots, a few hundred paces away.

Matt caught just a glimpse of a head above the lip of the funnel. Not a poison-digger’s head, certainly. This one was curved almost as smoothly as a drop of water, but was still hard-looking.

“I think it is a stone-lion,” Matt whispered very softly.

“Ah no,” whispered Dart. “It’s a man, a big man, the stone-man I told you about. Ah, what a fight he made against the stone-lion! But I didn’t wait to see the end, I jumped from the tree and ran.”

Matt beckoned Dart with a motion of his head. The two of them bent down and crept forward, then peered from behind another bush. Now they could see down into the pit.

Matt gasped, and almost called aloud in wonder. Poison-Digger down in the pit had reared up from his slime and lunged. And Stone Man simply slapped Digger’s nose with casual force, like someone swatting a child; and with a howl like that of a punished child, the Bad One splashed down under his water again.

In a strange tongue, Stone-Man muttered disconsolate words, like a man invoking spirits, at the same time slapping at his legs which seemed to be dead. Then with his arms he started trying to dig his way up and out of the pit. Stone-Man made the sand fly, and Matt thought maybe he would eventually make it, though it looked like a very hard struggle.

“Now do you believe me?” Dart was whispering fiercely. “He did fight the stone-lion, I saw him.”

Matt hushed the young one and led him away. As they retreated it occurred to Matt that the stone-lion might have been mortally hurt in the fight, and he circled through the trees looking hopefully for a huge shiny corpse. He wanted very much before his own death to see a stonelion somehow defeated and slain. But all he saw were burnt and broken trees.

When they got back to where the others were waiting, Matt talked things over with the more intelligent adults.

“You think we should approach this Stone-Man?” one asked.

“I would like to help him,” said Matt. He was eager to join forces if he could with any power that was able to oppose a stone-lion.

The oldest woman of The People opened her lizard-skin pouch, in which she also kept the seed of fire, and took out the finger-bones of her predecessor. Three times she shook the bones and threw them on the ground, and studied the pattern in which they fell.

At last she pointed to Matt. “You will die,” she announced, “fighting a strange beast, the likes of which none of us has ever seen.”

Like most prophecies Matt had heard, this one was more interesting than helpful. “If you are right,” he answered, “this stone-man can’t kill me, since we have now seen him.” The others muttered doubtfully. The more he thought about it, the more determined Matt became. “If he does turn out to be hostile, he can’t chase us on his dead legs. I want to help him.”

This time the slave’s keen ears detected the approach of The People, though they were obviously trying to be quiet. Derron’s helmet had been free of Modern voices for some minutes now; the too-many chiefs of Time Operations were evidently busy harassing some other operator.

Derron hated to draw their attention back to himself, but the approach of The People was something that he had to report.

“I’m getting some company,” he subvocalized. No immediate reply was granted. Now the heads of the bolder ones among The People came into sight, peering nervously around treetrunks at the slaveunit. Derron made a gentle gesture to them with one open metal hand; he had to use the other to maintain the slave in a sitting position. If he could only get his visitors to remain until more help arrived, he could give them some degree of protection. The berserker had evidently gone away after some false scent, but it might be back at any time.

The People were reassured by the slave’s quiescence, its crippled condition and its peaceful gestures. Soon all two dozen of them were out in the open, whispering among themselves as they looked down into the pit.

“Anybody listening?” Derron subvocalized, calling for help. “I’ve got a crowd of people here. Get me a linguist!”

Lately the Moderns had made a desperate effort to learn all the languages of Sirgol’s past, through the dropping of disguised microphones into the divers parts of realtime where there were people to be studied. This had been a crash program, only undertaken in recent months when it had become apparent to both sides that the war could be moved from present-time into the past. There were one or two Moderns who had managed to learn something about the speech of The People and the other bands of the area—and those Moderns were very busy people today.

“Odegard!” The blast in his helmet made him wince. It sounded like Colonel Borss. “Don’t let those people get away, try to protect them!” Derron sighed, sub-subvocally. Understood. How about getting me a linguist?”

“We’re trying to get you one. You’re in a vital area there. Try to protect those people until we can get you some help.”

“Understood.”

“Anyone that size is bound to eat a lot of food,” one of the older men was complaining to Matt.

“With dead legs I don’t suppose he’ll live long enough to eat very much,” Matt answered. He was trying to talk someone into giving him a hand in pulling the stone-man up out of the pit. Stone-Man sat watching calmly, as if he felt confident of getting some help.

The man debating against Matt cheerfully switched arguments. “If he won’t live long, there’s no use trying to help him. Anyway he’s not one of The People.”

“No, he’s not. But still . . . .” Matt searched for words, for ways of thought, to clarify his own feelings. This stone-man who had tried to help Dart was part of some larger order, to which The People also belonged. Part of something opposing all the wild beasts and demons that killed men by day or night.

“There may be others of his band around here,” put in another man. “They would be strong friends to have.”

“This one wants to be our friend,” the boy Dart piped up.

The oldest woman scoffed: “So would anyone who was crippled and needed help.”

VI

A girl linguist’s voice joined the muted hive buzzing in Derron’s helmet and gave him a rather halting translation of part of the debate. But after only a couple of minutes she was ordered away to work with another operator, who had managed to terrify the band he was supposed to be protecting.

“Tell him to pretend he’s crippled,” Derron advised. “All right, I’ll do without a linguist. But how about dropping some of those self-defense weapons for these people of mine? If we wait until that berserker comes back it’ll be too late. And make it grenades, not arrows. There’s only one man in the bunch who has a bow.”

“The weapons are being prepared. It’s dangerous to hand them out until they’re absolutely needed. Suppose they use ’em on each other, or on the slave?”

“You can at least drop them into the slave now.” Inside the slaveunit’s big torso was a hollow receptacle into which small items could be dropped from the future as required.

“They’re being prepared.”

Derron didn’t know if he could believe that or not, the way things were going today.

The people seemed to be still discussing the slaveunit, while he kept it sitting in what he hoped was a patient and trustworthy attitude. According to the brief translation Derron had heard, the tall young man with the bow slung over his shoulder was arguing in favor of helping the “stone-man.”

At last this man with the bow, who seemed to be the nearest thing to a chief that these people had, talked one of the other men into helping him. Together they approached one of the saplings splintered in the fight, and twisted it loose from its stump, hacking through the tough bark strings with a handaxe. Then the two bold men came right up to the edge of the poisondigger’s trap, holding the sapling by its branches so its splintered end was extended, rather shakily, down to where the slave could grasp it.

The two men pulled, then grunted with surprise at the weight they felt. Two more men were now willing to come and lend a hand.

“Odegard, this is Colonel Borss,” said a helmet-voice, in urgent tones. “We can see now what the berserkers’ target is. The first written language developed on the planet originates very near your present location. Possibly with the people you’re with right now. We can’t be sure of that and neither can the enemy, but certainly your band is in the target group.”

Derron was hanging on with both hands as the slaveunit was dragged up the side of the pit. “Thanks for the word, Colonel. Now how about those grenades I asked for?”

“We’re rushing two more slaves toward you, but we’re having technical problems. Grenades?” There was a brief pause. “They tell me some grenades are coming up.” The colonel’s voice clicked off.

When the slave came sliding up over the rim of the pit, The People all retreated a few steps, falling silent and watching the machine carefully. Derron repeated his peaceful gestures.

As soon as his audience was slightly reassured about the slave, they went back to worrying about something else. The setting sun made them nervous, and they kept looking over their shoulders at it as they talked to one another.

In another minute they had gathered up their few belongings and were on the march, with the air of folk resuming a practiced activity. Stone-Man, it seemed, was to be allowed to choose his own course of action.

Derron trailed along at the end of the file. He soon found that on level ground he could keep the slaveunit moving pretty well, walking on the knuckles of its hands like a brokenbacked ape. The People cast frequent backward glances at this pathetic monstrosity, showing mixed emotions. But even more frequently they looked farther back, fearful about something that might be on their trail.

Quite possibly, Derron thought, these people had already seen the berserker, or found the bodies of their friends who had met it. Sooner or later it would pick up their trail, in any case. The slaveunit’s leg-dragging track would make the berserker use a bit more caution, but certainly it would still come on.

Colonel Borss came back to talk. “You’re right, Odegard, your berserker’s still in your area. It’s the only one we haven’t bagged yet, but it’s in the most vital spot. What I think we’ll do is this—the two slaves being sent as reinforcements will be in place in a few minutes now. They’ll follow your line of march one on each side and a short distance ahead. Then when your people stop somewhere for the night we’ll set up the two new slaves for an ambush.”

Falling dusk washed the scene in a kind of dark beauty. The People hiked with the swampy, half-wooded valley on their right and low rocky hills close by on their left. The man with the bow, whose name seemed to be something like Matt, kept scanning these hills as he walked.

“What about those grenades? Operations? Anybody there?”

“We’re setting up this ambush now, Odegard. We don’t want your people pitching grenades at our devices.”

There was some sense to that, Derron supposed. But he had no faith.

The leader, Matt, turned and went trotting up a hillside, the other people following briskly. Derron saw that they were headed for a narrow cave entrance, which was set into a steep low cliff like a door in the wall of a house. A little way from the cave everyone halted. Matt unslung his bow and nocked an arrow before pitching a rock into the darkness of the cave. Just inside the entrance was an L-bend that made it practically impossible to see any further.

Derron was reporting these latest developments to Operations, when out of the cave there reverberated a growl that made The People scatter like the survival experts they were.

When the cave-bear came to answer the door, it found Derron’s proxy waiting alone on the porch.

The slave in its present condition had no balance to speak of, so the bear’s first slap bowled it over. From a supine position Derron slapped back, clobbering the bear’s nose and provoking a blood-freezing roar.

Made of tougher stuff than poisondiggers, the bear strained its fangs on the slaveunit’s face. Still flat on his back, Derron lifted the bear with his steel arms and pitched it downhill. Go away!

The first roar had been only a tune-up for this second one. Derron didn’t want to break even an animal’s lifeline here if he could help it, but time was passing. He threw the bear a little further this time; it bounced once, landed on its feet, and without slowing down kept right on going into the swamp. Its howls trailed in the air for half a minute.

The People slowly gathered round again, for once forgetting to look over then shoulders. Derron had the feeling they were all about to fall down and worship him; before anything like this could happen, he dragged his proxy into the cave and made sure that it was now unoccupied. Matt had made a good discovery here; there was plenty of room inside the high narrow cavern to shelter the whole band.

When he came out he found The People gathering dead branches from under the trees at the edge of the swamp, getting ready to build a good-sized fire at the mouth of the cave. Far across the swampy valley a small spark of orange marked the encampment of some other band, in the thickening purplish haze of falling night.

“Operations, bow’s that ambush coming?”

“The other two units are taking up ambush positions now. They have you in sight at the cave-mouth.”

“Good.”

Let The People build their fire, then, and draw the berserker. They would be safe in a guarded cave while it walked into a trap.

From a pouch made of what looked like tough lizard-skin one of the old women produced a bundle of bark, which she unwrapped to reveal a smoldering center. With incantations and a judicious use of wood chips, she soon had the watchfire blazing. Its first tongues gave more light than did the fast-dimming sky.

The slaveunit moved last into the cave, right after Matt. Derron sat it leaning against the wall just inside the L-bend and sighed. He could use a rest—

Without warning the night outside erupted with the crackle of lasers and the clang of armored battle. Inside the cave the people jumped to their feet.

In the lasers’ reflected glare Derron saw Matt with his bow ready, the other men grabbing up stones—and Dart, high up on a rock in the rear of the cave. There was a small window in the wall of rock back there, and the boy was looking out, the laser-glare bright on his awed face.

The flashing and crashing outside came to a sudden halt. The world sank into a deathlike silence. Long seconds passed.

“Operations? Operations? What’s going on? What happened outside?”

“Oh, Holy One . . .” The voice was shaken. “Scratch two slaveunits. Looks like the damn’ thing’s reflexes are just too good. Odegard, do the best you can . . .”

The watchfire came exploding suddenly into the cave, kicked probably by a clawed steel foot, so that a hail of sparks and brands bounced from the curving wall of stone just opposite the narrow entrance. The berserker would walk right in. Its cold brain had learned contempt for all the Modems were able to do against it.

But there came a heavy grating sound; evidently the cave mouth was just a bit too narrow for it.

“Odegard, a dozen of the arrows are ready to drop through to you now. Shaped charges in the points, set to fire on sharp contact.”

“Arrows? I wanted grenades, I told you we’ve only one bow, and there’s no room . . .” But the window in the rear of the cave might serve as an archery port. “Send arrows, then. Send something!”

“Dropping arrows now. Odegard, we have a relief operator standing by in another master-unit, so we can switch . . . .”

“Never mind that. I’m used to operating this broken-backed thing now, and he isn’t.”

The berserker was scraping and hammering at the bulge of rock that kept it from its prey, raising a hellish racket. With the slaveunit’s hands Derron undid the catches and opened the door in its metal torso. While a bank of faces surrounded him, staring solemnly through the gloom, he took out the arrows and offered them to Matt.

VII

With reverence the hunter accepted the weapons. Since the firelight had vanished the slave’s eyes had shifted into the infrared; Derron could see well enough to tell that the arrows looked to be well constructed, their straight wooden shafts fletched with plastic feathers, their heads a good imitation of handchipped flint. Now if they only worked . . . .

Matt needed no instructions on what to do with the arrows, not after their magical manner of appearance. Dart getting under his feet, he dashed to the rear of the cave; there he put the youngster behind him and scrambled up the rocks to the natural window. It would have given him a fine safe spot to shoot from, if there had been no such thing as laser beams.

Since lasers did exist, it would be the slaveunit’s task to take the first beam itself and keep the berserker’s attention on it as much as possible. Derron inched his crippled metal body toward the bend of the L. When he saw Matt nock an arrow to his bow, he lunged out, with his ridiculous hand-walking movement, around the corner.

The berserker had just backed away to take a fresh run at the entrance. It of course was quicker than Derron with its beam. But the slave’s armor held for the moment, and Derron scrambled forward, firing back at point-blank range. If the berserker saw Matt, it ignored him, thinking arrows meant nothing.

But now the first one struck. Derron saw the shaft spin softly away, while the head vanished in a momentary fireball that left a fist-sized hole in the berserker’s armor at the shoulder of one foreleg.

The machine lurched off balance even as its laser flicked toward Matt. Derron kept scrambling after it on steel hands, keeping his own beam on it like a spotlight. The bushes atop the little cliff had been set afire, but Matt popped up bravely and shot his second arrow, as accurately as the first. The shaped charge hit the berserker in the side, and staggered it on its three legs. And then it could fire its laser no more, for Derron was close enough to swing a heavy metal fist and crack the thick glass of the projector-eye.

And then the wrestling-match was on again. The strength of the slave’s two arms matched that of the berserker’s one functional foreleg. But the enemy reflexes were still more than human. Derron hung on as best he could, but the world was soon spinning round him again, and again he was thrown.

Derron gripped one of the trampling legs and hung on somehow, trying to immobilize the berserker as a target. Where were the arrows now? Derron’s laser was smashed. The berserker was still too big, too heavy, too quick. While Derron gripped one of its functional legs the other two still stomped and tore—there went one of the slaveunit’s useless feet, ripped clean off. The metal man was going to be pulled to pieces. For some reason no more arrows were being shot—

Derron caught just a glimpse of a hurtling body as Matt leaped directly into the fight, raising in each hand a cluster of magic-arrows. Yelling, seeming to fly like a god, he stabbed his thunderbolts down against the enemy’s back.

The blasts were absorbed in full by the berserker’s interior. And then something inside the monster let go in an explosion that bounced both machines. And with that, die fight was over.

Derron crawled from the overheated wreck of the slaveunit, out from under the mass of glowing, twisting, spitting metal that had been the enemy. Then he had to pause for a few seconds in exhaustion. He saw Dart come running from the cave, tears streaking his face, in his hand Matt’s bow, with its broken string dangling.

Most of the rest of The People were gathering around something on the ground nearby. Matt lay where the enemy’s last convulsion had thrown him. He was dead, his belly torn open, hands charred, face smashed out of shape—then the eyes opened in that ruined face. Matt drew a shaky breath and shuddered and went on breathing.

Derron no longer felt his own exhaustion. The People made way as he crawled his battered metal proxy to Matt’s side and gently lifted him. Two of the younger women were wailing. Matt was too far gone to wince at the touch of hot metal.

“Good work, Odegard!” Colonel Borss’s voice had regained strength. “That wraps up the operation. We can lift your unit back to presenttime now; better put that fellow down.”

Derron held onto Matt. “His lifeline is breaking off here no matter what we do. Bring him up with the machine.”

“It’s not authorized to bring anyone . . . .” The voice faded in hesitation.

“He won the fight for us, and now his guts are hanging out. He’s finished in this part of history. Sir.”

“All right, we’ll bring him up. Stand by while we re-adjust.”

The People meanwhile had formed a ring of awe around the slaveunit and its dying burden. Somehow the scene would probably be assimilated into one of the extant myths; myths were tough bottles, Derron thought, stretching to hold many kinds of wine.

Up at the mouth of the cave, the old woman was having trouble with her tinder as she tried to get the watch-fire started again. A young girl with her hesitated, then ran down to the glowing berserker-shell and on its heat kindled a dry branch into flame. Waving the branch to keep it bright, she went back up the hill in a sort of dance.

And then Derron was sitting in a fading circle of light on the dark floor of Operations Stage Three. The circle vanished, and two men with a stretcher ran toward him. He opened his metal arms to let the medics take Matt, then inside his helmet his teeth found the power switch and he turned off the master-unit.

He let the end-of-mission checklist go hang. In a few seconds he had extricated himself from the master, and in his sweat-soaked leotard was skipping down the stairs from the catwalk. The other slaves were being brought back to, and the Stage was busy. He pushed his way through a confusion of technicians and miscellaneous folk and reached Matt’s side just as the medics were picking up the stretcher with him on it. Wet cloths had already been draped over the wounded man’s bulging intestines, and some kind of an intravenous had been started.

Matt’s eyes were open, though of course they were stupid with shock. To him Derron could be no more than another strange shape among many; but Derron’s shape walked along beside him, gripping his forearms above his burned hand, until consciousness faded away.

The word was spreading, as if by public announcement, that a man had been brought up alive from the deep past. When they carried Matt into the nearest hospital it was only natural that Lisa, like everyone else who had the chance, should come hurrying to see him.

“He’s lost,” she murmured, looking down at the swollen face, in which the eyelids now and then flicked open. “Oh, so lost. Alone.” She turned anxiously to a doctor. “He’ll live, now, won’t he?”

The doctor smiled faintly. “If he’s lasted this far I think we’ll save him.”

Lisa sighed in deep relief. Of course her concern was natural and kind. The only difficulty was that she hardly noticed Derron at all.       END

BERSERKER’S PREY

The berserker owned them and would destroy them when it chose—unless they could somehow destroy it first!

The ship had been a human transport once, and it still transported humans, but now they rode like well cared for cattle on the road to market. Control of their passage and destiny had been vested in the electronic brain and auxiliary devices built into the New England after its capture in space by a berserker machine.

Gilberto Klee, latest captive to be thrust aboard, was more frightened than he had ever been before in his young life, and trying not to shew it. Why the berserker had kept him alive at all he did not know. He was afraid to think about it. Like everyone else he had heard the horror stories—of human brains, still half alive, built into berserker computers as auxiliary circuits; of human bodies used in the berserkers’ experiments intended to produce convincing artificial men; of humans kept as test-targets for new berserker death-rays, toxins, ways to drive men mad.

After the raid Gil and the handful of others who had been taken with him—for all they knew, the only survivors of their planet—had been separated and kept in solitary compartments aboard the great machine in space. And now the same berserker devices that had captured him, or other devices like them, had taken him from his cell and led him to an interior dock aboard the planetoid-sized berserker; and before they put him aboard this ship that had been a human transport once, he had time to see the name New England on her hull.

Once aboard, he was put into a chamber about twenty paces wide and perhaps fifty long, twelve or fifteen feet high. Evidently all interior decks and paneling, everything non-essential, had been ripped out. There was left the inner hull, some plumbing, some light, artificial gravity and air at a good level.

There were eight other people in the chamber, standing together and talking among themselves; they fell silent as the machines opened the door and thrust Gil in with them.

“How do,” said one man to Gil, as the door closed behind the machines again. The speaker was a thin guy who wore some kind of spaceman’s uniform that now bagged loosely on his frame. As he spoke he took a cautious step forward and nodded. Everyone was watching Gil alertly—just in case he should turn out to be violently crazy, Gil supposed. Well, it wasn’t the first time in his life he’d been thrown in with a group of prisoners who looked at him like that.

“My name is Rom,” the thin guy was saying. “Ensign Rom, United Planets Space Force.”

“Gilberto Klee.”

Everyone relaxed just slightly, seeing that he was fairly normal.

“This is Mr. Hudak,” said Ensign Rom, indicating another young, once-authoritative man. Then he went on to name the others, but Gil couldn’t remember all their names at once. Three of them were women, one of them young enough to make Gil look at her with some interest. Then he saw how she kept half-crouching behind the other people, staring smiling at nothing, fingers playing unceasingly with her long and unkempt hair.

Mr. Hudak had started to ask Gil questions, his voice gradually taking on the tone used by people-in-charge conducting an examination. In school, Youth Bureau, police station, Resettlement, always there was that certain tone of voice used by processors when speaking to the processed—though Gil had never put the thought in just those words.

Hudak was asking him: “Were you on another ship, or what?” On a ship. You were not a spaceman, of course, said the tone of authority now. You were just a boy being processed somewhere, we see that by looking at you. Not that the tone of authority was intentionally nasty. It usually wasn’t.

“I was on a planet,” said Gil. “Bella Coola.”

“My God, they hit that too?”

“They sure hit the part where I was, anyway.” Gil hadn’t seen anything to make him hopeful about the rest of the planet. At the Resettlement Station where he was they had had just a few minutes’ warning from the military, and then the radios had gone silent. There wasn’t much the people at the Station could do with the little warning they had been given. Already they could see the berserker heat-rays and dust-machines playing over the woods, which was the only concealment they might have to run to.

Still, some of the kids had been trying to run when the silvery, poisonous-looking dart that was the berserker’s launch had appeared descending overhead. The Old Man had come tearing out of the compound into the fields on his scooter—maybe to tell his young people to run, maybe to tell them to stand still. It didn’t seem to make much difference. The ones who ran were rayed down by the enemy, and the ones who didn’t were rounded up. What Gil recalled most clearly about the other kids dying was the look of agony on the Old Man’s face—that one face of authority that had never seemed to be looking at Gil from the other side of a glass wall.

When all the survivors of the Station had been herded together in a bunch, standing in a little crowd under the bright sky in the middle of a vine-grown field, the machines singled out the Old Man.

Some of the machines that had landed were in the shape of metal men, some looked more like giant steel ants. “Thus to all life, save that which serves the cause of Death,” said a twanging metal voice. And a steel hand picked a squash from a vine and held the fruit up and squeezed through it so it fell away in broken pulpy halves. And then the same hand, with squash-pulp still clinging to the bright fingers, reached to take the Old Man by the wrist.

The twanging voice said: “You are to some degree in control of these other life-units. You will now order them to co-operate willingly with us.”

The Old Man only shook his head, no. Muttered something.

The bright hand squeezed, slowly.

The Old Man squeezed, but did not fall. Neither did he give any order for co-operation. Gil was standing rigid, and silent, but screaming in his own mind for the Old Man to give in, to fall down and pass out, anything to make it stop . . .

But the Old Man would not fall, or pass out, or give the order that was wanted. Not even when the berserker’s big hand came up to clamp around his skull, and the pressure was once more applied, slowly as before.

“What was on Bella Coola?” Ensign Rom was asking him. “I mean, military?”

“Not much, I guess,” said Gil. “I don’t know much about military stuff. I was just sort of studying to be a farmer.”

“Oh.” Rom and Hudak, the two sharp, capable-looking ones among the prisoners, exchanged glances. Maybe they knew the farms on Bella Coola had been just a sort of reform-school setup for tough kids from Earth and other crowded places. Gil told himself he didn’t give a damn what anyone thought.

And then he realized that he had always been telling himself that and that maybe now, for the first time in his life, it was the truth.

In a little while the prisoners were fed. A machine brought in a big cake of mottled pink and green stuff, the same tasteless substance Gil had lived on since his capture eight or ten days ago. While he ate he sat off to one side by himself, looking at nothing and listening to the two sharp guys talking to each other in low voices.

Rom was saying: “Look we’re in what was the crew quarters, right?”

“If you say so.”

“Right. Now they brought me in through the forward compartment, the control room, and I had a chance to take a quick look around there. And I’ve paced off the length of this chamber we’re in. I tell you I served aboard one of these ships for a year, I know ’em inside out.”

“So?”

“Just this.” There was a faint scrape and shudder through the hull. When Rom spoke again his low voice was charged with excitement. “Feel that? We’re going spaceborne again, the big machine’s sending this ship somewhere, for some reason. That means we would have a chance, if only . . . Listen, the circuitry that makes up the brain that’s controlling this ship and keeping us prisoner—it has to be spread out along that plastic bulkhead at the forward end of this compartment we’re in. On the control room side there’s another plastic slab been installed, and the circuitry must be sandwiched in between the two.”

“How can you know?” Hudak sounded skeptical.

Rom’s voice dropped even lower, giving arguments most of which Gil could not hear. “. . . as well protected there against outside attack as anywhere in the ship . . . paced off the distance . . . overhead here, look at the modifications in the power conduits going forward . . .”

Hudak: “You’re right, I guess. Or at least it seems probable. That plastic barrier is all that keeps us from getting at it, then. I wonder how thick.”

Gil could see from the corner of his eye that the two sharp guys were trying not to look at what they were talking about; but he was free to stare. The forward end of the big chamber they were in was a blank greenish plastic wall, pierced along the top for some pipes, and at one side by the door through which Gil had been brought in.

“Thick enough, of course. We don’t have so much as a screwdriver, and we’d probably need a cutting torch or a hydraulic jack—”

Hudak nudged Rom and they fell silent. The door forward had opened, and one of the man-sized machines came in.

“Gilberto Klee,” it twanged. “Come.”

Rom had been right; they were spaceborne again, away from the big berserker. In the forward compartment Gil had a moment to look out before the man-sized machine turned him away from a view of stars and faced him toward a squat console, a thing of eyelike lights and a radiolike speaker, which seemed to crouch before the front of the plastic wall.

“Gilberto Klee,” said the console’s speaker. “It is my purpose to keep a number of human life-units alive and in good health.”

For a while, Gil thought.

The speaker said: “The standard nutrient on which prisoners are fed is evidently lacking in one or more necessary trace ingredients. In several places where prisoners are being held, symptoms of nutritional deficiency have developed, including general debility, loss of sight, loss of teeth.” Pause. “Are you aware of my meaning?”

“Yeah. I just don’t talk much.”

“You Gilberto Klee, are experienced at growing lifeforms to be consumed by human life-units as food. You will begin here in this ship to grow food for yourself and other human life units.”

There was a pause that stretched on. Gil could see the Old Man very plainly and hear him scream.

“Squash would be good,” Gil said at last. “I know how to raise it, and there’s lots of vitamins and stuff in the kind of squash we had at the Station. But I’d need seeds, and soil . . .”

“A quantity of soil has been provided,” said the console. And the man-sized machine picked up and held open a plastic case that was divided into many compartments. “And seeds,” the console added. “Which are the ones for squash?”

When Gil was returned to the prison chamber other machines were already busy there with the modifications he had said would be needed. They were adding more overhead lights and covering most of the deck space with wide, deep trays. These trays were set on the transverse girders of the inner hull, revealed by the removal of decking. Under the trays drainage pipes were being connected, while sprinklers went high overhead. Into the trays the machines were dumping soil they carted in from somewhere.

Gil gave his fellow prisoners an explanation of what was going on.

“So that’s why it took you and some of the other farmers alive,” said Hudak. “There must be a lot of different places where human prisoners are being held and maybe bred for experiments. Lots of healthy animals needed.”

“So,” said Rom, looking sideways at Gil. “You’re going to do what it wants?”

“A guy has to keep himself alive,” Gil said, “before he can do anything else.”

Rom began in a heated whisper: “Is it better that a berserker’s prisoners should be kept—” But he broke off when one of the mansized machines paused nearby, as if it was watching and listening.

They came to call that machine A the Overseer, because from then on it never left the humans, though the other machines departed when the construction job was done. Through the Overseer, the berserker-brain controlling the ship informed Gil that the other prisoners were mainly a labor pool, should he need human help in food-growing. Gil thought it over briefly. “I don’t need no help—yet. Just leave the people stay here for now, but I’ll do the planting.”

Spacing the hills and dropping the seeds was easy enough, though the machines had left no aisles between the trays of soil except a small passage leading to the door. The trays farthest forward almost touched the plastic bulkhead, and others were laid edge to edge back to within a few paces of the rear. The machines gave Gil a platform the size of a short surfboard, on which he could sit or lie while hovering at a steady two feet above the soil. Hudak said the thing must work by a kind of hole in the artificial gravity field. On the platform was a simple control lever by means of which Gil could cause it to move left or right, forward or back. Almost as soon as the planting was done, he had to start tending his fast-growing vines. The vines had to be twisted to make them grow along the soil in the proper direction, and then there were extra blossoms to be pinched off. A couple of the other prisoners offered to help, despite Rom’s scowling at them, but Gil refused the offer. You have to have a knack, he said, and some training. And he did it all himself.

The two sharp guys had little to say to Gil about anything any more. But they were plainly interested in his surfboard, and one day while the Overseer’s back was turned Rom took Gil hurriedly aside. Rom whispered quickly and feverishly, like a man taking what he knows is a crazy chance, fed up enough to take it anyway. “The Overseer doesn’t pay much attention to you any more when you’re working, Gil. You could take that platform of yours—,” Rom’s right hand, extended horizontally, rammed the tips of its fingers into the palm of his vertical left hand—“into the wall. If you could only make a little crack in the plastic, a hole big enough to stick a hand through, we’d have some kind of chance. I’d do it but the Overseer won’t let anyone but you near the platform.”

Gil’s lip curled. “I ain’t gonna try nothin’ like that.”

The thin sickly man was not used to snotty kids talking back to him, and he flared feebly into anger. “You think the berserker’s going to take good care of you?”

“The machine built the platform, didn’t it?” Gil demanded. Wouldn’t give us nothing we could bust through there with. Not if there’s anything so important as you think back there.”

For a moment Gil thought Rom was going to swing at him, but other people held Rom back. And suddenly the Overseer was no longer standing on the other side of the chamber with its back turned, but right in front of Rom, staring at him with its lenses. A few long, long seconds passed before it was plain that the machine was not going to do anything this time. But maybe its hearing was better than the sharp guys had thought.

“They ain’t ripe yet, but we can eat some of ’em anyway,” said Gil a couple of weeks later, as he slid off his platform to join the other people in the few square yards of living space left along the chamber’s rear bulkhead. Cradled in Gil’s arm were half a dozen dull yellowish ovoids. He turned casually to the Overseer and asked: “Got a knife?”

There was a pause. Then the Overseer extended a hand, from which a wicked blade extended itself like an extra finger. “I will divide the fruit,” it said, and proceeded to do so with great precision.

The little group of prisoners had come crowding around, some interest stirring in their dull eyes. They ate greedily the little morsels that the Overseer doled out; anything tasted good after weeks or months of nothing but the changeless pinkand-green cake. Rom, after a scarcely perceptible hesitation, joined the others in eating some raw squash. He showed no enjoyment as the others did. It was just that a man had to be healthy, he seemed to be thinking, before he could persuade others to get themselves killed, or let themselves sicken and die.

Under the optimum conditions provided by the berserker at Gil’s direction, only weeks rather than months were needed for the trays to become filled with broad roundish leaves, spreading above a profusion of thickening, ground-hugging vines. Half of the fast-growing fruit was hidden under leaves, while others burgeoned in the full light, and a few hung over the edges of the trays, resting their new weight on the girders under the trays or sagging all the way to the deck.

Gil maintained that the time for a proper harvest was still an indefinite number of days away. But each day he now came back to the living area with a single squash to be divided by the Overseer’s knife; and each day the fruit he brought was larger.

He was out in the middle of his “fields,” lying prone on his platform and staring moodily at a swelling squash, when the sound of a sudden commotion back in the living area made him raise himself and turn his head.

The center of the commotion was the Overseer. The machine was hopping into the air again and again, as if the brain that controlled it had gone berserker indeed. The prisoners cried out, scrambling to get away from the Overseer. Then the machine stopped its mad jumping, and stood turning in a slow circle, shivering, the knife-finger on its hand flicking in and out.

“Attention, we are entering battle,” the Overseer proclaimed suddenly, dead monotone turned up to deafening volume. “Under attack. All prisoners are to be—they will all—”

It said more, but at a speed no human ear could follow, gibbering up the frequency scale to end in something like a human scream. The mad girl who never spoke let out a blending yell of terror.

The Overseer tottered and swayed, brandishing its knife. It babbled and twitched—like an old man with steel fingers vising his head. Then it leaned forward, leaned further, and fell on its face, disappearing from Gil’s sight below the level of trays and vines, striking the deck with a loud clang.

That clang was echoed, forward, by a cannon-crack of sound. Gil had been keeping himself from looking in that direction, but now he turned. The plastic wall had been split across the center third of its extent by a horizontal fissure a few feet above the trays.

Gil lay still on his platform, watching cautiously. Ensign Rom came charging across the trays and past him, trampling the crop unheedingly, to hurl himself at the wall. Even cracked, it resisted his onslaught easily, but he kept pounding at it with his fists, trying to force his fingers into the tiny crevice. Gil looked back the other way. The Overseer was still down. Hudak was trying the forward door and finding it locked. Then first he, and then the other people, were scrambling over trays to join Rom and help him.

Gil tested his platform’s control and found that it no longer worked, though the platform was still aloft. He got up from it, setting foot in soil for the first time in a couple of months; it was a good feeling. Then he lifted the thin metal platform sideways out of its null and carried it over to where everyone else was already struggling with the wall. “Here,” Gil said, “try sticking the corner of this in the crack and pryin’.”

It took them several hours of steady effort to make a hole in the wall big enough for Rom to squeeze through. In a minute he was back, crying and shouting, announcing freedom and victory. They were in control of the ship!

When he came back the second time, he was in control of himself as well, and puzzled. “What cracked the wall, though? There’s no fighting, no other ships around—” He fell silent as he joined Hudak in staring down the narrow space between the farthest forward tray and the slightly bulged-in section of wall where the strain had come to force the first crack above. Gil had already looked down there into the niches between wall and transverse girder. Those niches were opened up now, displaying their contents—the dull yellowish fruit Gil had guided into place with a pinch and a twist of vine. The fruit had been very small then, but now they were huge, and cracked gently open with the sudden release of their own internal pressure.

Funny pulpy things that a man could break with a kick, or a steel hand squeeze through like nothing.

. . . “But growth is stobborn, boys,” the Old Man always said, squinting to read a dial, then piling more weights onto the machine with the growing squash inside it, a machine he’d set up to catch kids’ eyes and minds. “Can’t take a sudden shock. Slow. But now, look. Five thousand pounds pressure per square inch. All from millions of tiny cells, just growing, all together. Ever see a tree root swell under a concrete walk?”

It was on Rom’s and Hudak’s faces now that they understood. Gil nodded at them once and smiled just faintly to make sure they knew it had been no accident. Then the smile faded from his face as he looked up at the edges of broken plastic, the shattered tracery of what had been a million sandwiched printed circuits.

“I hope it was slow,” Gil said. “I hope it felt the whole thing.”       END

THE WINGED HELMET

The planet possessed a strange time fault. Through it, a host of Berserkers were attacking!

I

Arms upraised, gray beard and black robes whipping in the wind, Nomis stood on a tabletop of black rock twenty feet square, a hundred feet above the smashing surf.

White seabirds coasted downwind toward him, then wheeled away, emitting sharp little dies like those of small souls in pain. Around Nomis on three sides there towered other splintered crags and fingers of this coastline of black basaltic rock; before him spread the immense vibration of the sea.

Feet braced apart, he stood centered in an indicate diagram chalked on the flat rock. Around him he had spread the paraphernalia of his craft—things dead and dried, things old and carven, things that most men would think better destroyed and forgotten. In his thin penetrating voice he was singing into the wind:

Gather, storm-clouds, day and night
Gather, lightning, and chew the ship
Gather, waves, and swallow the ship
Chew and swallow and drink it down!
The long-ship wherein my enemy rides.

There was much more to the song, and it repeated itself over and over. Nomis’s thin arms quivered, tired from holding splinters from wrecked ships over his head, while the wind blew his thin gray beard up into his eyes.

Today he could not escape the feeling that his labor was in vain. Today he had been granted none of the tokens of success that sometimes came—heated dreams, dark trances shot with moments of strange vision, startling stretchings of the mind.

Not often in his life had Nomis managed to call down evil on his enemies’ heads, not nearly so often, he knew, as those who stood in awe of him believed. Twice before in his life had Nomis tried to raise a storm. Once he had seemingly been successful, but even on that occasion the suspicion had persisted in his own mind that the storm would have come anyway, that the order and control of such a force was beyond him or any man.

But doubtful as he was of the result, he persisted now in the effort that had kept him almost sleepless on this rock for the past three days. Such was his fear and hatred for the man he knew must now be crossing the sea toward him, coming to rule this country called Queensland.

Nomis’s grim eyes, turned hopefully far out to sea, were mocked by the passage there of a thin squallline. Of a ship-killing tempest there was no sign at all.

The cliffs of Queensland were still a day’s rowing out of sight, dead ahead. In the same direction, but closer, some mildly bad weather was brewing. Harl frowned across the sea’s gray face at the line of squalls, while his hands rested with idle sureness on the long-ship’s steering oar.

The thirty rowers, freemen and warriors all, could turn their heads and see the bad weather as easily as Harl could see it. And they were all experienced enough to reach the same conclusion, that just slowing down a bit would probably let the squalls blow past before the ship got near them and make things a bit more comfortable for all on board. So now by unspoken agreement they were all easing up on the oars.

From ahead a cool, light breeze sprang up, to flutter the pennons on the sailless masts and ripple the awning fringes on the tent of royal purple which stood amidships. Inside that tent, alone for the moment with his thoughts, was the young man Harl called king and lord. Harl’s frown faded, at the thought that young Ay was probably now making plans for the fighting that was sure to come. The tribes who cared nothing for the new god or the old Empire were certain to test the will and courage of Queensland’s new ruler, not that there were grounds for doubting either.

Harl smiled at the thought that his young lord in the tent might not be planning war at all, but a campaign to tame the Princess Alex. It was her hand in marriage that was to bring him his kingdom and his army. If she was like some other high-born girls that Harl had met, her conquest might be as difficult as that of any barbarian chief; and of course even more to a sturdy warrior’s taste.

Harl’s expression, having become about as jovial as his facial scars would allow, faded once more into glumness. It occurred to him that his king might be practicing reading. Ay had long been an admirer of books and was actually bringing two of them with him on this voyage. Or he might even be praying to his gentle new slave-god; for young and healthy though he was, Ay now and then took the business of worship seriously.

Though half his mind was busy with these thoughts, Harl of course remained alert as always. Now a faint splashing in the water nearby caused him to turn his head to portside—and in a moment all the thoughts in his head were frozen, together with his warrior’s blood.

Rearing right beside the ship, rising across the horizon and the distant afternoon clouds, came a dragon-face out of legend, a head out of nightmare.

It rode on a shining neck that a man might just be able to circle with both arms. Sea-demons alone might know what the body in the sea below was like! The eyes were clouded sun, the size of silver platters; the scales of head and neck were gray and heavy. The mouth smiled, like a coffin with the lid open just a crack and fenced inside with daggers.

Long as a cable, the thick neck came reeling right in over the gunwale. The men’s first cries were sounds such as warriors should not make, but in the next instant all of them were grabbing bravely enough for their weapons. Big Torla, strongest of the crew, leaped to stand on his rower’s bench and was the first to hack with a sword at that tremendous swaying neck.

Torla’s mighty blows fell useless on scales that gleamed like thick wet iron. The dragon did not even turn to him. Its head swayed to a stop facing the door of the purple tent, and from the slit of its terrible mouth it blew a challenge whose like Harl had not heard in a lifetime of war.

With all the clamor of the men, Ay had needed no such summons to make ready. The tent flaps were ripped open from inside before the dragon-bellow had ceased, and the young king came forth armed with shield and helm, sword ready in his hand.

Harl felt a tremendous pride to see that the young man did not flinch from the sight that met him. And with the pride Harl’s own right arm came back to life, drawing from his belt the short-shafted, iron-bladed axe, gripping it for a throw.

The axe clanged harmlessly from the clouded silver of one eye. The enormous head, its full shock of mouth suddenly open, lunged forward for the king. Ay met it bravely, aiming a thrust straight into the darkness of the throat.

But the king’s long sword meant no more than a woman’s spin. The doorlike jaw slammed shut, crushing Ay instantly. The head on its long neck swept away, for a moment displaying the horror of broken limbs dangling outside the teeth. And then, with one more sullen splash beside the ship, the evil miracle was gone. Everywhere the sunlit sea rolled on unchanged, hiding its secrets all below.

The remaining hours of daylight passed with scarcely a word spoken aboard the long-ship. In full battlereadiness she prowled on and on, in watery circles. But there was nothing for her to fight. The edge of the squall-line came and went, the men taking measures to meet it mechanically, not really aware of its passage. And then at the end of the day the sea was calm again.

Squinting into the setting sun, Harl rasped out a one-word order: “Rest.”

Long ago he had retrieved his blunted axe and replaced it in his belt Now the evidence to be seen on deck was only this: Ay’s winged helmet, fallen from his head, and a few small spots of the last of his blood.

II

Derron Odegard, recently promoted three grades to major, was sitting in as a junior aide on an emergency staff meeting called by the new Time Operations Commander. At the moment Derron was listening with professional interest as a colonel from the Historical Research Section held forth.

“. . . as we more or less expected, the berserkers have chosen to focus this latest attack upon one individual. Naturally they’ve chosen one whose removal from history will have disastrous consequences for us.

“Their target is King Ay of Queensland. Until recently most historians even doubted this man’s reality, but with some direct observation of the past, his historicity and his importance have both been fully confirmed.”

The colonel-historian turned to an electric map, which he attacked with a teacher’s gestures.

“We see here the middle stages in the shrinkage and disorganization of the Continental Empire, leading to its ultimate collapse. It’s very largely due to Ay’s activity and influence that Queensland here remains in a state of at least semicivilization, providing something solid for our planet’s later civilization to base itself on.”

The new Time Operations Commander—his predecessor was reported on his way to the moon, or at least the surface—raised a hand. “I admit I’m not too clear on this. Ay was a bit of a barbarian himself, wasn’t he?”

“Well, he certainly began as such. But when he found himself with a land of hi§ own he settled down and defended it very well. He knew the raiders’ methods, and many of the raiders knew him and preferred to attack someone else.”

The next officer to appear at the head of the table was a major from Probability Analysis. “We don’t know how Ay was killed,” he began in a nervous voice. “But we do know where. His lifeline is newly broken here, while he’s voyaging to Queensland for the first time.” The major displayed a videotape made from a sentry screen. “As you can see, the other lifelines aboard ship remain unbroken. Probably the enemy expects historical damage to be intensified if Ay’s crew is thought to have done away with him. It seems to me all too likely that such an expectation is correct.”

The major paused for a quick sip of water. “Frankly the situation looks extremely grave. In nineteen or twenty days’ present-time, the historical shockwave should reach us, with the most—the most serious effects. I’m told that our chances of finding the enemy keyhole within nineteen days’ present-time are not good.”

The faces round the table had tightened. Only the new Time Ops Commander managed to remain relatively relaxed. “I’m afraid you’re right about the difficulty in finding this keyhole, major. Of course every effort is being made to find it. Trouble is the enemy’s getting smart about hiding his tracks. This time he attacked with only one machine instead of six. And immediately after killing one important man that one machine seems to have gone into hiding. It’ll be still on the scene somewhere, waiting to mess up whatever we do to set things right, but meanwhile it’s being careful not to stir up any changes we could use to track it.”

The talk soon moved into a highly technical level. Here of course the scientific people dominated, but they were far from agreeing among themselves on what could and should be done. When they began to exchange personalities along with formulae, Time Ops called a half hour’s recess.

With this much time unexpectedly on his hands, Derron called the nurses’ quarters at the nearby hospital complex. Lisa was bunking there now and starting to train for some kind of a nursing job. He was pleased to find her home and available; within a few minutes they were walking together in the park where they had met.

He had come with a topic of conversation prepared, but Lisa these days had a favorite subject of her own.

“Matt’s just healing so quickly that all the doctors are amazed!”

“Good. I’ll have to come round and see him one of these days.”

“They say it must be because he comes from so far in the past; they talk about the effect on one individual of coming up through twenty thousand years’ evolutionary gradient, about the organizational energies in his body and brain becoming infolded and intensified. I can’t follow most of it. They talk about the realm where the material and the non-material meet—”

“Yes.”

“—and Matt probably understands what they’re saying as well as I do, now. He’s up and around most of the time. They allow him a good deal of freedom. He’s quite good about staying out of rooms he’s warned not to enter, not touching dangerous things, and so forth.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and did I tell you they’ve suspended healing in his face? Until they’re sure he can make a fully informed decision on what he wants his new face to look like.”

“Yes, I heard something about that. Lisa, how long are you going on living in the hospital? Are you really set on this nursing thing?”

“Oh.” Her face fell slightly. “Sometimes I don’t think I was cut out to be a nurse, but I have no immediate plans to move. They still work a little on my memory every day, and it’s handy to live there.”

“Any success with the treatments?” Derron knew that the doctors now accepted that Lisa had been caught in the path of the berserker missile while it was still a probability-wave. For a while they had considered the possibility that she was an emissary or deserter from the world of the future, made amnesic by descent through time.

But on the sentry-screens no such reversed lifeline could be found. No device or message had ever come to the modern age from the future. Either the inhabitants of the unknowable time-to-come had good reason to refrain from communication, or the future Sirgol was uninhabited by man. Or this presenttime of the berserker war might be completely blocked off by paradox loops. It was some comfort at least that no berserker machines came attacking from the direction of tomorrow.

“The treatments don’t help much.” Lisa said. The memory of her personal life before the missile was still almost completely bank. She went back to taking about what Matt had done today.

Not listening, Derron closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the sensation of life he had when he was with her. There was the touch of her hand in his, the feel of soil under his feet, the warmth of the pseudosunshine on his face. And at any instant it might all be gone—a missile-wave could come down through the miles of rock, or the unraveling of King Ay’s severed cord might propagate faster than expected up through the weave of history.

He opened his eyes and saw the muraled walls surrounding the buried park and the improbably alive and singing birds. The place was thronged, as usual, with strolling couples and solitaries; in places the tough grass showed signs of wear, and the gardeners had had to defend it with string fences. All in all, a poor imitation of the real world; but with Lisa it became for him a place of joy.

Derron pointed. “Right there’s the tree where I first came to your rescue. Or you came to mine, rather. “I rescued you? From what horrible fate?”

“From dying of loneliness in the midst of forty million people. Lisa, I’m trying to tell you I want you to move out of that hospital dormitory.”

“If I do, where will I live?”

“I’m asking you to live with me, of course. You’re not a little lost girl any more, you’re studying to be a nurse, you’re a functioning adult, and I can ask. There are some unused apartments around, and if I take a companion I’ll rate a fairly nice one. Especially with this promotion they’ve given me.”

She squeezed his hand, but that was all. She was thoughtfully silent, her eyes on the ground a few paces ahead of them.

“Lisa? What do you say?”

“Just exactly what are you offering me, Derron?”

“Look, yesterday when you were telling me about your new girl friends’ problems you seemed to have a very firm grasp of what this male-female business is all about.”

“You want me to live with you temporarily, is that it?”

“Lisa, nothing in our world can be permanent. At the staff meeting just now—well, I’m not supposed to talk about that. But things don’t look good. I want to share with you whatever good things may be left for us.”

Still silent, she let him lead her on stepping-stones across the park’s little stream.

“Lisa, do you want a marriage ceremony? I should have put that first, I suppose, and asked you formally to marry me. The thing is not many people are going to raise their eyebrows if we don’t have a ceremony, and by not having one we’ll avoid some delay and red tape. Would you think we were doing wrong if we didn’t have an official wedding?”

“I . . . suppose not. What bothers me is the way you talk about everything being temporary. I suppose feelings are included.”

“When everything else is temporary, yes! I don’t necessarily like it. But how can anyone in our world say what they’ll be feeling or doing or thinking a month or a year from now? In a year we’ll most likely all . . .” He let it trail off.

She had been searching, and now at last she found the words she wanted. “Derron, at the hospital I’ve absorbed the attitude that people’s lives can be made less temporary, now or any time. That people should go on trying to build, to accomplish things, even though they may not have long to live.”

Such thoughts had been his at one time. A year, a year and a half ago. A lifetime ago. With someone else. The girl’s face that he could not and did not want to erase from his memory came back again.

Lisa went on: “Look at Matt, for instance. Remember how badly hurt he was—?”

“I’m sorry,” Derron interrupted. Looking at the time, finding a valid excuse for getting away. “I’ve got to run, I’m almost late at the staff meeting.”

III

The scientists, by some combination of calculation and debate, had reached a consensus.

“It comes down to this,” their spokesman explained as the meeting resumed. “If we’re to have any chance of healing the break in Ay’s lifeline we must first immobilize the affected part—like putting a splint on a broken bone.”

“And how does one splint a lifeline?” demanded Time Ops.

The scientist gestured wearily. “Commander, the only thing I can suggest is for you to somehow put someone else temporarily in Ay’s place, to ride his ship on to Queensland and there play his part for a few days at least. The man could be given a communicator and sent dayto-day instructions. If the berserkers stood still for it, he might play out the rest of Ay’s life in its essentials.”

“How do we tell just what the essentials are?” someone broke in.

“We make guesses and keep watching our screens.” The scientists’ spokesman grinned faintly. “Gentlemen, I don’t know if a substitution scheme can be made to work over any length of time, nothing like it has ever been tried. But it should at least buy us a few more days of present-time in which to think of something else.”

Time Ops thoughtfully rubbed his stubbled face. “Well, substitution is the only idea we’ve got to work with at this point. But Ay is about twelve hundred years back. That means dropping a Modern to take his place is out, right?”

“Afraid so, sir. Mental devolution sets in at about four hundred years.” Time Ope thought aloud in his tired monotonous voice. “Does anyone suppose we could get away with using a slaveunit on this kind of job? No, I thought not. Then what’s left? We somehow enlist one of Ay’s contemporaries, who’s both willing and able to do the job.”

Someone suggested: “Appearance isn’t too much of a problem. Ay isn’t known in Queensland, except by reputation, when he first arrives there.”

Another offered: “We ought to be able to snatch his crew up to present-time and work on them a few days, get them to accept a substitute. Use pacifying drugs and hypnotic methods.”

“Good thinking, gentlemen,” said Time Ops. “Now let’s try to solve the first problem. Who is our substitute going to be?”

Surely, thought Derron, someone besides me must see where one possible answer lies. He didn’t want to be the first to suggest it—because of Lisa. But precious present-time was flowing away, and no one else saw it.

Derron cleared his throat, startling men who had forgotten his presence. “Correct me if I’m wrong, gentlemen. But don’t we have one man available who could be sent down to Ay’s century without losing his wits, because he comes from the even deeper past himself?”

There was nothing for Harl to do but take the ship on to Queensland. When he got there he would have to stand before King Gorboduc and the princess, look them in the face and tell them what had happened to Ay.

The other warriors would be spared that burden at least. Now, hours after the monster’s attack, they were still obeying Harl without question. The sun was going down, but Harl meant to keep them rowing right through the night, to hold off the mad demonstration of grief that was sure to come if he let the men fall idle now. They rowed now like blind men, sick men, walking dead men, not knowing or caring where the ship was steered, their faces blank with rage and shock turned inward.

Frequently the oars fell out of stroke, clattered together or splashed awkwardly along the surface of the sea. No one noticed. Torla groaned a death song as he pulled—woe to the next man who faced Torla in a fight.

Inside the purple tent, atop Ay’s treasure chest (another problem for Harl, that chest, a problem that would grow as rage and grief wore away) the winged helmet rested in a place of honor. It was now all that was left . . .

Ten years ago Ay had been a real prince, with a real king for a father. About ten years ago Ay’s beard had first begun to sprout, and Harl had first begun to serve as the young prince’s good right hand. And at about that time, also, the sickness of envy and the fighting for power had started in earnest among Ay’s uncles and brothers and cousins. So now Ay’s father and most of his house were dead, their kingdom lost and divided among strangers.

Ay’s inheritance had shrunk to the deck of a fighting ship, not that Had minded that for himself. Harl had not even complained about books and reading. Nor even about prayers to a man-god, a slave-god who had preached love and mercy and had gotten his bones split with wedges for his trouble.

Over the ship, or beneath it, there passed a sudden lurching change. It was a tilting, swaying motion, over in an instant, so that Harl wondered if the dragon had come back, rising from the deep to scrape his bulk beneath their hull.

The men all dropped their oars and once more drew their weapons. But there was no dragon to be seen, nor much of anything else. With a speed that hinted at the supernatural a mist had closed in round the ship. The red lingering light of sunset had blurred into a white glow diffusing through the mist. Even the waves were different, Harl noticed now. The air was warmer, the very smell of the sea had changed.

The men looked at one another in the strange light. They fingered swords and muttered about wizardry—

“Row slowly ahead!” ordered Harl, thinking it best to keep the men busy, though his sense of direction had for once been totally confused.

He went forward to be lookout, and before the rowers had taken fifty strokes he threw up a hand to halt them. Water gurgled round the backing oars. Only an easy spear-cast from the bow, a gentle sandy beach had materialized out of the grayness.

When the men became aware of this, their murmuring grew louder. They knew full well that a few minutes ago they had been far from any land.

“It’s certainly solid ground ahead!”

“Looks like solid ground. I’ll not be surprised if it vanishes in a puff of smoke. Sorcery!”

No one disputed any longer that sorcery was at work. What, if anything, might be done about it was another question.

Harl called for a council. After some debate it was decided to row away from the beach, to see if they might get beyond the reach of whatever magic had them in its grip.

Sunset was now certainly overdue, but the garish light filtering down through the mist did not fade. In fact it brightened, for as they rowed the mist began to thin.

Just as they emerged from a fogbank, they came near driving their ship straight into a boundless black wall that rose from the sea. It was a wall with no edge or top in sight, rising and extending, curving back without limit around the sea and over the mist. From the foot of this wall the men in their tiny ship looked up into an enormous inverted bowl; they saw now that the bank of fog was illumined by fire thrown down from lights that looked as bright and high as sun fragments.

Men cried out prayers to all the gods and devils alive. Men shrieked that they had come to the sky and the stars at the end of the world. They almost broke their oars, spinning their ship and driving it back into the mist.

Harl was as much shaken as any of them, but he would die before he showed it. “Another enchantment, that’s all!” he barked. “Not a real sky or stars, but something put into our eyes by magic. Well, if there are wizards where who mean us harm, I say they can be made to bleed and die like other men!”

The others took some heart from his words. Here in the concealing fog, the world was still sane enough for a man to keep his eyes open and not go mad.

Harl gave the order to row back in the direction of the beach they had glimpsed. It was still there, real and solid. As the log-ship grounded gently Harl, sword in hand, was the first to leap into the shallows. The water was warmer than he had expected, and when a splash touched his lips he discovered that it was fresh, not salt. But by this time he was beyond being surprised at such trifles.

IV

One of Matt’s tutors stepped ahead of Derron, tapped on the door of the private hospital room, then slid it open. Putting his head into the room, the tutor spoke slowly and distinctly. “Matt? Here is the man named Derr on, who fought beside you in your own time. Now he wants to talk to you.”

As Derron entered, the man who had been sitting in an armchair before the television screen got to his feet, standing tall and erect, dressed in die robe and slippers that were general issue for patients.

In this man Derron could see no resemblance to the dying savage he had helped carry into the hospital. Matt’s hair had been depilated and was only now starting to grow back in, a neutral-colored stubble. Most of Matt’s face was covered by a plastic membrane, which served as skin while the completion of the healing process was held in abeyance. On the bedside table, half covered by some secondary-level schoolbooks, were several sketches and composite photographs, looking like variations on one basic model of a young man’s face. In his pocket Derron now was carrying a photo of a somewhat different face—Ay’s, caught by a spy device sent to skim near the young king for a few millionths of a second on the day he began his fateful voyage to Queensland. No machine of the Moderns had been able to get closer than that to the spacetime locus of the assassination itself—spacetime strongly resisted repeated interference in one spot.

“I am pleased to meet you, Derron.” Matt put meaning into the ritual phrase; his speech, like his tutor’s to him, was slow but distinct.

“I am pleased to see that your health is returning,” Derron answered. “And glad to see that you are learning so quickly the ways of a new world.”

“And I am pleased to see that you are healthy. I am glad your spirit could leave the metal-man it fought in, for that metal-man was very much hurt.”

Derron smiled. “Don’t let them con you with talk of where my spirit was. I was never in any danger there as you were.”

“Con me?” Matt had the question-inflection down pat.

The tutor said: “Derron means, don’t let us teach you wrong things. He’s joking.”

Matt nodded. He knew about jokes, but he had something serious in mind. “Derron, but it was your spirit in the metal-man?”

“Well—say it was my electronic presence.”

Matt glanced at the television in the wall. “Electronics I have learned a little bit. It moves my spirit from one place to another.” Some kind of historical documentary film was being shown at the moment.

“Moves your eyes and thoughts, you mean.”

Matt was firm. “Eyes and thought and spirit.”

The tutor said: “This spirit-orientation is really his idea, major, not ours.”

“I understand.”

From Operations’ point of view, the important thing would be that firmness in opinion, which would be a very good thing provided the right opinions were held. In these days many things could be taught very quickly to a good student, but character traits were not among them. “All right, Matt, in the spirit I was fighting beside you, though I didn’t risk my neck as you risked yours. When you jumped onto that berserker with arrows in your hands, I know your thought was to save me. I am grateful, and glad that now I can tell you so.”

“Will you sit down?” Matt gestured Derron to the room’s second chair and then reseated himself. The tutor remained standing, hovering in the background. Matt said: “My thought was partly to save you. Partly for my people there. Partly just to see the—berserker die. But since coming here I have learned that all people, even here, might be dead if we had not won that fight.”

That is true. Now other fighting, just as important, is going on in other times and places.” This was the opening for the recruiting speech he had been sent here to make, but Derron paused for a moment before plunging ahead. For the tenth time he wished that Operations had sent someone else to do the job. But the experts thought that Matt would react most favorably to a presentation by the man who had fought beside him. And to use Matt was Derron’s own idea, after all. He could wish now that he had kept his mouth shut at the staff meeting. But if he didn’t make this sales pitch now, someone else would.

With an inaudible sigh, Derron got down to business. “Already you have done very much for us, Matt, for everyone. But now my chiefs ask you to do more.”

He put the essence of the situation before Matt in simplified form. The berserkers, enemies of the tribe-of-all-men, had badly wounded a great chief in another part of the world, and someone was badly needed to take the chiefs place.

Matt sat still, heard the explanation through, his eyes steadily attentive above the plastic skin that masked most of his lower face. His first question was: “What will happen when the great chief is strong again?”

“Then he will resume his own place, and you will be brought back here to live a good new life. We expect that we will be able to bring you back safely, but understand that there will be danger. How much danger we cannot say, because this will be a new thing to do. But some danger, all along the way.”

Let him know that, major—don’t paint too black a picture, of course. It seemed to be left up to Major Odegard to find the proper shade of gray. Well, Time Ops might be watching over his shoulder now, but Derron was damned if he’d con Matt into a job that he, Derron, wouldn’t have volunteered for if it had been open to him. No, Derron told himself, he wouldn’t have volunteered. The chances of the mission doing any good were too uncertain. Death did not frighten him, but the chance seemed all too great that the volunteer might meet some unknown and unimaginable fate somewhere in the probability-space of half-reality, where the Moderns’ knowledge had only begun to reach.

“And if, in spite of all medicine, the great chief should die and can never go back to his own place?”

“Then it would be your job to continue in his place. We would tell you what to do when necessary. In this king’s place you would lead a better life than most men in history have had. And when you had finished his span of years, we would try to bring you here, to live on still longer in our world, with much honor.”

“Honor?”

The tutor tried to explain.

Matt soon seemed to understand and went on to another point. “Will I take more magic arrows with me, to fight the berserkers in this king’s place?”

Derron thought. “I suppose you might take some weapon like that. But your main job will not be fighting berserkers, but carrying on in the king’s place.”

Matt nodded. “All is new, all is strange,” he said in his slow, precise voice. “I must think about it.”

“Of course.”

Derron was about to say that he could come back tomorrow for an answer, but Matt already had another question. “What will happen if I say no? If no one can be found to act for this wounded chief?”

“There is no way you can be forced to go. Our wise men think that if no one goes, the war will be lost, and all of us will probably be dead in less than a month.”

“And I am the only one who can go?”

“It may be so. You are our wise men’s first choice.” Derron supposed that some plan was under way to get a back-up man or two from the deep past. But anyone brought up now would be days behind Matt in training all along the line, and every hour was important.

Matt spread out his healed hands. “I must believe what you tell me, you who have saved my life and made me well again. I do not want to die in a month, and see everyone die. So I must go and take this king’s place if I am able.”

Derron sighed again, with mixed feelings. He reached into his pocket for the photo.

V

Time Ops, watching through a spy scanner, nodded with faintly surprised satisfaction. Odegard was a sharp young lad all right, using a smooth soft sell to get the volunteer to place himself on the right side of the argument.

Now the operation could roll in earnest. He swiveled in his chair and touched a button. “Where are Ay’s ship and crew at this moment?”

“Just brought up to present-time, sir, I was just going to call you. We dropped them into Reservoir H as planned. Colonel Lukas and his psych team are starting to work right now.”

The sand beach sloped up to a lowland of gravelly soil and sparse grass. Harl trod it with the six men he had chosen to go exploring with him. The others were left waiting at the water’s edge, ready to protect the ship or shove her off again.

Hari’s scouting party proceeded slowly inland through the mist. They had not far to go; as soon as they had passed over the first hillock, they were met by a single tall figure walking out of the mist—a man in white robes such as were worn by Good Enchanters of the old religions.

This man stopped, raising his hands in the gesture of peace, showing not the least surprise or fear at finding himself suddenly confronted by seven armed sea-rovers.

“My name is Lukas,” he said simply, in Harl’s native language. He had a bad accent, but Harl had managed to understand worse.

“Let us put some pointed questions to this ’chanter,” said Torla, putting a hand on his dagger.

The one in wizard’s garb raised his eyebrows and his right hand slightly. Perhaps only showing polite dismay, perhaps giving or preparing to give a signal.

“Let us wait!” said Harl sharply. The mist concealed everything that was more than a few paces away; there might be an army in it. He nodded to Lukas politely and named himself and his companions.

The man in white robes bowed in grave acknowledgment, his hands once more at rest. “My house is very near; allow me to offer you its hospitality, at least for a meal.”

“We thank you for the offer,” said Hard uncertainly. The man’s unshaken air of confidence was unsettling. Harl wanted to ask what country they had landed in and how, but was reluctant to reveal his ignorance.

“I pray you, some or all of you come at least for food and drink. If you wish to leave men to guard your ship, I will order refreshment sent to them.”

Harl mumbled for a moment, undecided. How would Ay have met this strange confident courtesy?

“Very well, we seven will go with you,” he answered at last. When he walked back over the hillock to explain matters to the rest of the crew, some of them also argued for seizing the wizard at once and asking pointed questions.

Harl shook his head. “We can do that at any moment. But once a man’s blood is out, it’s hard to pour back into his veins should the bleeding prove a mistake. We’ll just watch him close, until we learn more. If food and drink are sent you, I suggest you treat the bearers with some courtesy.” No urging of caution and alertness was needed; the men were all ready to strike at shadows now.

Then Harl and this chosen six ringed themselves about Lukas and walked inland with him. The six took their cue from Harl and acted as if it were all accidental and unintentional, their surrounding their prisoner like a prisoner. For his part, Lukas gave no sign of being bothered in the least.

The mist grew ever thicker as the party proceeded inland. Before they had gone a hundred paces Harl could see that the gray billows were coming, rolling down from atop a line of low cliffs. Like a wall, these cliffs blocked further progress; the wizard’s house was built right against their foot, a simple stone building, big and solid enough to be a manor or a small fortress, with a look of newness. At second glance it was hardly a fortress, for the windows were low and wide, and the wide doorway open.

Several people in simple servants’ garb emerged from this doorway and bowed to the approaching Lukas and his guests; Harl noticed with some relief that none of the servants looked anything but solidly human. The girls among them were comely in a down-to-earth style and seemed lively as well. They eyed the warriors and giggled before popping back inside.

“No fairy-tale witches there,” growled Torla. “Though I make no doubt they know enchantments of a sort.”

Torla preceded Lukas through the doorway, and the rest of the searovers followed close on the heels of the white-robed man. Harl came in the last place, looking over his shoulder, his hand on his axe. He could not begin to feel easy about any man who welcomed seven armed strangers into his house.

Inside there was nothing visible to feed Harl’s suspicion, save more of the strange confidence. The entrance led them directly into a great manorial room, in which were set more than enough benches and tables to have accommodated the long-ship’s entire crew. At the huge fireplace, a smiling, confident servant turned the spitted carcass of a weighty meat animal. Browned and dripping, the roast was so nearly done that it must have been started hours before.

Though a good deal of light came in at the wide-open windows with the fog, the walls were mounted with torches, making the room quite bright Through hangings covering the rear wall Harl could now and then glimpse servants going about tasks in distant chambers dug back behind the line of the cliff. There was of course no telling how many armed men might be back there, or lurking somewhere outside; but so far Harl had not seen a single weapon, barring table knives. Another easy-mannered servant was now laying eight places at the head table, setting out worthy but not spectacular silver plates and tankards.

Lukas proceeded straight to the head of this table and turned with a gracious gesture. “Will you be seated? There is wine or ale, as you choose.”

“Ale!” barked Harl, in a meaningful tone. He had drugs that blended their taste very smoothly with that of wine; and even honest drink must not be allowed to take the edge of clearness from his and his mens’ minds. The others took the hint and echoed the call for ale, though Torla looked disappointed.

As the company seated themselves, two girls came from behind the hangings to rill their tankards. Harl watched to see that the wizard’s drink was poured from the same vessel as his own, and Harl waited until the wizard was wiping foam from his lips before he tasted the drink himself. And even then Harl took only a sparing swallow.

The ale was neither too strong nor too weak, but still had something slightly peculiar in its taste. In the place where everything was strange, how could the ale be otherwise? Harl asked himself. And he allowed himself another sip.

“The ale of your country is strong and good,” he ventured, being complimentary. “So no doubt you have many strong men here and serve a strong king.”

“All that you say is true,” Lukas agreed.

“And your king’s name?”

“Our present king is called the Planetary Commander.” The wizard smacked his lips over ale. “And whom do you serve?”

A tremulous groan passed round the board. The tankards scraped in unison as they were lifted, and then together they thudded down, all lighter than they had been. All except HarPs. He could see no sign of treachery, but still he decided firmly that he would not drink any more, not just now.

“Whom do we serve?” he asked the world. “Our good, young lord is dead.”

“Young Ay is dead!” Torla roared it out like a man challenging the pain of a wound. A serving girl came to refill his tankard, and Torla seized her and pulled her onto his lap. But when she softly resisted his pawing he only held her there gently, while a comical witless expression slowly grew on his face.

Harl wondered at this. His own mind was perfectly clear . . . and yet he should be more concerned, more alert than he was. Should he not?

“Young Ay’s death would be sad news,” said Lukas calmly. “If it were true.”

Oddly, no one took offense at this implied slur on their truthfulness in such a matter. Only another murmur of mourning passed round the table. “We saw him die!”

“Ah, yes!”

Harl’s big fists were knotted, remembering their helplessness against the dragon. “We saw him die, in such a way that, by all the gods, I can scarce believe it yet myself!” Lukas leaned forward, intent. “And what way was that?”

In a faltering voice Harl told him. Harl’s throat quickly grew dry with speech; hardly realizing that he did so, he swallowed more from his tankard. The truth about the dragon sounded in his own ears like a clumsy lie. What chance was there of King Gorboduc believing it?”

When Harl’s recital was finished, Torla tried to stand up and say something; the girl fell from his lap and landed with a yelp on her soft bottom. His face showing uncharacteristic concern, Torla bent as if to help her. But she scurried away, and Torla just kept right on bending until he was seated again, with his head lying on the table. Then he began to snore.

His shipmates only laughed. Something was wrong, the men should not be drunk on one or two tankards apiece of any ale. Harl puzzled over this, took another thoughtful sip himself and decided he had better get to his feet.

“Your king is not dead,” the wizard was telling him monotonously. “Not dead, not dead, why should you believe that he is?”

“Why? We saw the dragon take him!” But Harl was no longer quite sure of what he had seen, or what he remembered. What was happening here? He swayed on his feet, half-drew his sword and croaked: “Treachery! Wake up!” But his men’s eyes were glassy or closing. Around the table some of these men started to rise, but then they sank back, letting weapons slide forgotten to the floor.

“Wizard?” one man muttered, pleading. “Tell us again that our king lives.”

“He lives and shall live.”

Alone, Harl staggered back from the table, his sword sighing all the way out of its scabbard into his hand. To hurt anyone for any reason would be a very terrible thing, but he felt so frightened that he might do even that. “Stand back!” he warned the wizard.

The wizard also stood up, not much frightened with the length of the table between himself and Harl. From inside his robe Lukas took a mask like an animal’s snout, which he fitted onto his face. His voice come out thickly: “No one will harm you here. I have shared with you the drink that makes men peaceful.”

Harl turned and ran for the door. Outside, the mist suddenly turned sparkling in his lungs. When he reached the hillock from which he could see the beached ship, he discovered that all the men he had left to guard her were dead or dying. Half a dozen nearly human monsters with gray snouted faces were busy arranging their bodies in rows on the beach. The men who could still move were offering no resistance, but letting themselves be led like load-oxen.

It was really too bad that such a thing had happened. Reflexively Harl groped for his sword and axe; then he remembered that he had thrown all his weapons away somewhere.

“It’s all right,” said Lukas’ soothing voice, from just behind Harl. As Harl turned, the wizard continued: “Your men are asleep. They need rest, don’t wake them.”

“Ahh, that’s it!” Harl sighed with deep relief. He might have known there was no reason to worry, on this good island of sparkling ale and sparkling air and friendly people who spoke nothing but truth. He saw now that the snouted monsters were only men who wore masks like the wizard’s, taking care of his men. Harl looked confidently at Lukas and waited to be told some more good news.

Sighing behind his mask, Lukas seemed to relax. “Come here,” he said. And he led Harl down to the water’s very edge, where the wet sand was kept lapped to perfect smoothness by the little wavelets coming in.

With his finger the wizard drew in the wet sand, making the crude outline of a grotesque head. “Suppose that this is the dragon you thought you saw. What exactly did you think happened?”

Harl groaned wearily and sank to his knees, staring helplessly at the sketch. Now that he could relax he was very tired, and he was going to deep soon; but right now he had to concentrate on what Lukas was showing him.

“It seized Ay,” Harl said. “In its mouth.”

“Like this?” The wizard’s finger drew a stick-figure clenched in the dragon’s teeth, waving helpless lines of arms and legs. Even as he drew, the little waves were coming in over the sketch, smoothing and blurring its lines.

“like that,” Harl agreed, sitting down awkwardly.

“But now all that is being wiped out,” the wizard intoned. “Wiped away. And when this evil thing is gone, then the truth—what you and I want to be the truth—can be written in.”

The waves were erasing the dragon, and Harl could sleep.

VI

Somewhere along the line in his training Matt asked: “Then King Ay is in fact dead and not wounded, as I was first told?”

“We said he was wounded, because he can be brought back to life. His dying and his wounds will be as if they had never happened.”

“Then if I fail, someone else may try again? If I am killed back there, my life too may be brought back?”

He had his answer at once from the gravity of their faces, but they went into explanations. “All this that you see here, all this work, is to give that one man back his life. If we can do that, then all the other bent and altered lives around his will also flow back where they were. But not yours, for your life was not there in the original pattern. If you die back there, that death will be real and final for you—as death will be for all of us here, if you should fail. No one else will be able to try again.”

One of the perquisites of Derron’s new rank was a small, private cubicle of an office, and right now he was silently cursing his promotion for giving Lisa a fine place in which to corner him. She was angry as he had never seen her before.

“Whose fault is it if not yours?” she was demanding. “You admit you’re the one who suggested using Matt. Why didn’t you suggest they go back and grab someone else from the past instead?”

So far Derron was keeping his patience. “Operations can’t just go and pull someone out of history every time they feel like it. Ay’s crew is a special case; they’re going right back where they belong. And Matt’s a special case, he was about to die when we brought him up. Operations has finally been able to bring up a couple of other men who were about to die in their own time, but those two haven’t had time to learn where they are, let alone what the mission they’re wanted for is all about. When they do know, they may refuse.”

“Refuse! What chance does Matt have to refuse it, when you demand it of him? He thinks you’re some kind of a great hero—he’s still like a child in so many ways!”

“Beg your pardon, but he’s not a child. Far from it. And he won’t be helpless. Before we drop him he’ll be trained in everything he’ll need, from politics to weapons.”

“Weapons?” She was still like a child herself, in some ways.

“Certainly, weapons. Although we hope he’s only going to be in Queensland for a few days and won’t get involved in any fighting. We’re going to try to bring him back before the wedding.”

“Wedding!”

Derron hastened on. “Matt can take care of himself, and he can do this job. He’s a natural leader. Anyone who can lead Neolithic people—”

“Never mind all that!” Lisa was now on the brink of tears. “Of course he can do it, if he must. If he’s really the only one who can go. He’ll go, and I wouldn’t stop him. But why were you the one to suggest that he be used? Right after I talked to you about him. Why? Did you just have to make sure that he was temporary, too?”

“Lisa. What do you think I am?” Her angry eyes were brimming over, and she hurried to the door. At die last moment she turned. “I don’t know! I don’t know you any more!” And she was gone.

Days ago the plastic membrane had fallen away from his face. The new skin had appeared already weathered, thanks to the Modems’ magic, and the new beard had then grown almost visibly for two days before slowing to a normal rate.

Now, on the day he was to be dropped, Matt stood for the last time before the mirror in his room, getting a last good look at his new face. Turning his head from side to side, he pondered the different angles of Ay’s cheeks and nose and chin. He wondered if the spirit behind the face had also changed enough. It did not seem to Matt that he was yet possessed of the spirit of a king.

“Just a few more questions, sire,” said one of the tutors, standing now at Matt’s elbow. For days now they had conversed with him only in Ay’s language, while wearing for him airs of respect suitable for subordinates addressing a warrior chief. But that was just play acting, no help in changing a spirit.

“First, how will you spend the evening on the day of your arrival in Queensland?”

Turning away from the mirror, Matt answered patiently. “That is one of the times we cannot be sure of, where Ay’s lifeline is hard to see. I will stay in character and try to avoid making decisions, especially big ones. I will use my communicator if I think I need help.”

“And if you see the dragonlike machine that killed your predecessor?”

“I will try to make it come after me or somehow get it to move around as much as possible. This will help you find the keyhole to cancel out the dragon with all the harm it has done. And the sword I will carry will give me some chance to defend myself.”

The tutors’ questioning went on, while the time for the drop neared. A team of technicians came in to dress Matt in the best copies that could be made of the garments Ay had worn when embarking for Queensland.

They treated him more like a statue than a king. When it was time for the finishing touches, one of the costumers complained: “If they’ve decided at last that we should use the original helmet, where is it?”

The other answered: “Both helmets are out at the reservoir. The communications people were still working on them.”

The tutors kept thinking up more last-minute questions, which Matt answered patiently while the dressers put a plastic coverall on him over his clothes, and another officer came to lead him out to the little train that would take him through a tunnel to Reservoir H.

Once before he had ridden the train, when he had been taken to see the sleeping men and the ship. He did not expect to enjoy riding the ship. As if in tune with this thought, one of the tutors now looked at his timepiece and handed Matt what he knew was a motion-sickness pill.

Halfway to the Reservoir the train made a stop, and two men got on, the chief called Time Ops and another whom Matt recognized from pictures as the Planetary Commander. The latter took the seat facing Matt. He sat there swaying lightly with the car’s renewed motion, holding Matt in steady scrutiny.

Matt’s own face was sweating, but only because of the plastic coverall. Sb, he was thinking: this is what a king looks like in the flesh. At once, heavier and less rocklike than his television image. But this was after all a Modem king, and so the king-spirit in him would not be the same as it had been for Ay.

The ruler of the Moderns asked: “I understand you thought it important to see me before you dropped?” When there was no immediate response he added: “You understand me?”

“Yes. Learning Ay’s speech has not driven yours out of my head. I wanted to see you, to see with my own eyes what it is that makes a man a king.” Some of the faces in the background wanted to laugh when they heard that, but they were afraid to laugh and quickly smoothed themselves out into immobility.

The Planetary Commander did not laugh, but only glanced sideways at Time Ops before asking Matt: “They’ve taught you what to do if the dragon-machine comes after you?”

Matt saw Time Ops nod slightly to the Planetary Commander.

“Yes,” said Matt. “I am to make the machine chase me, get it to move around as much as possible . . .”

When the train stopped, the Planetary Commander waved the others to get off first, so he and Matt were left alone in the car. He said then: “I will tell you the real secret of being a king. It is to be ready to lay down your life for your people, whenever and however it is needed.”

The Planetary Commander was not lying; he meant what he said, or he thought he meant it Maybe the words concealed some deeper meaning, too, for in the next moment he seemed to fear that perhaps he had said too much. He began to speak in loud words of encouragement, smiling and clapping Matt on the shoulder as they walked off the train together.

Derron was waiting on the trackside platform in the low, roughhewn cavern to grip hands with Matt in the style of Ay’s time. Matt looked for Lisa, but only those were here who had work to do. He associated Lisa with Derron in his mind and wondered vaguely why his two friends did not mate. Maybe he would mate with Lisa himself, if he came back from this mission and she were willing.

The tutors and others hustled Matt off to wait by himself in a small room. He was told he could get out of the coverall, which he did thankfully. He heard another door open somewhere nearby, and into his room came the smell of the vast body of clean water being preserved in the reservoir during the siege.

On a table lay the sword designed for him by Modern wizards; he picked it up and drew it from its scabbard, looking at it curiously. The edge looked keen, but no more than naturally so. The unaided eye could see nothing of what the Modems had shown him through a microscope—the supersharp edge that rose from the ordinary-looking one when Matt’s hand, and ids alone, gripped the hilt. In his hand this sword cut ordinary metal like cheese and armor plate like wood, nor was the blade dulled in doing so. The Moderns said it had been forged of a single molecule; Matt had no need to understand that and did not try.

But he had come to understand much. In recent days, sleeping and waking, Matt had had history poured like a river through his mind. And there was a new strength in his mind that the Moderns had not put there, which they said was due to his twenty thousand years’ passage from the direction of the beginning of the world toward the direction of its end.

With this teaching and this strength he saw now very clearly that it was the Modems who were the odd culture, the misfits in Sirgol’s history. By mere count of years, the Moderns were far closer to Ay than Ay was to Matt’s original People. But in their basic modes of thinking and feeling, Ay and The People were much the closer, to each other and to the rest of humanity.

Only such physical power as the Modems now wielded was going to destroy the berserker—or could have created them. But when it came to things of the spirit, the Moderns were stunted children. From their very physical powers came their troubled minds, or from their troubled minds came their power over matter—it was hard to say which; but in either case, they had not been able to show Matt how to put on the spirit of a king, which he was now required to do.

Another thing he had come to understand—the spirits of life were very strong in the universe, or they would long ago have been driven from it, by the berserker-machines of accident and disease and hatred, if not by those that came in metal bodies. So now, as Ay would have done before embarking on a dangerous voyage, Matt raised his hands in the wedge-sign of Ay’s religion and murmured a brief prayer, putting what he felt into the form that Ay would have used.

That done, he saw no reason to stay any longer shut up in this little room. So he buckled on his sheathed sword, opened the door and stepped out.

The scene was busy, as he had known it would be. Officers and workers hurried past, this way and that, calling out orders and information. Others worked singly and in little groups. Most were utterly intent on their tasks; but a few faces turned toward Matt as he emerged from the little room where they had put him away until it was time for him to be used. The faces were annoyed, fearful lest he cause some disruption of the schedule.

He ignored the. faces when he saw Ay’s helmet waiting for him on a stand. He went to it and picked it up, and with his own hands placed the silver-winged thing on his head.

It had been an instinctive gesture, and the faces watching were enough to show him that the instinct had been right. Not that the faces were pleased. Watching him, they fell into an unwilling silence that was mirror enough to show his kingship. Then in another moment they were turning back to their tasks with loud practical enthusiasm, ignoring as best they could the new presence in their midst.

Some of his tutors came hurrying up again, saying they had just a few more questions. He understood they had sudden need to reassure themselves that they were his teachers still and not his subjects. He would not give them such comfort. Their time of power over him had passed, and he ignored them.

He strode impatiently through the knots of technicians. Some looked up angrily when they were jostled, but when they saw him they kept silent and made way. Soon he was looking down Once more into the wrinkle-circled eyes of the Planetary Commander.

“I grow impatient,” said Matt. “Are my ship and my men ready, or are they not?”

VII

On his earlier trip to Reservoir H, Matt had seen the crew of Ay’s ship asleep while machines stretched their muscles to keep them strong, lamps threw slivers of sunlight on their faces and arms to keep them tanned, and electronic familiars whispered tirelessly to them that their young lord lived.

This time, the men were on their feet, though they moved like sleepwalkers, with eyes still shut. They had been dressed again in their own clothes, armed again with their own harness and weapons. Now they were being led from Lukas’ manor down to the beach and hoisted back aboard their ship. The mist generators had long ago been turned off, and the cave of Reservoir H, with its thin crescent of beach, was an eerie sight under the black distant curve of its ceiling. From high up under that ceiling, lights like cold little suns threw shadow-petals round every man and object on the sand.

Matt shook Derron’s hand again and the hands of one or two more he liked, then waded briefly through the fresh water and swung himself up onto the deck. A machine was coming to push the ship out into deep water.

Time Ops followed Matt on board and on a quick tour of inspection that took both of them into the royal tent. “. . . stick to your briefing especially regarding the dragon. Try to make it move around as much as possible if you should see it. Even if there’s damage or casualties. Those can be reversed . . .”

He ceased talking as Matt turned to face him, holding in his hands a replica of the winged helmet on his head. He had just picked the second helmet up from atop the treasure chest. “I have heard all your lectures before. Take this with you and give a lecture to those you command. And now, get off my ship, unless you mean to pull an oar.”

Time Ops glared in anger at the superfluous helmet, grabbed it and got it. After that, Matt paid the Modern world no more attention. He went to stand beside Harl, who had been set like a sleepy statue beside his steering oar. The other men were all unconscious on their benches.

Their hands moved slightly on their oars’ worn wood as if glad to be back, making sure they were where they really fitted.

With a hum of power, the ship was pushed free of the beach. Matt saw a shimmering circle grow beneath her—and then, with scarcely a splash, the overhead lights and the black water and the cave were gone. Seabirds wheeled away into an open morning sky, crying their surprise at the sudden appearance of a ship. There was free, salt air in Matt’s face and a groundswell under his feet. The horizon dead ahead was marked with the blue vague line he had been told to expect—Queensland. Off to starboard, a reddened sun was just climbing clear of dawn.

“Harl!” Matt roared out the name, at the same time thwacking his steersman so hard on the shoulder that Harl nearly toppled even as his eyes broke open. “Must I watch alone all day, as well as through the end of the night?”

He had been told that these words in his voice would wake the men, and so it happened. The warriors blinked and growled their way out of their long slumber, and some started rowing before their spirits were fully back in control of their bodies. But in the next few seconds they had somehow put a ragged stroke together.

Matt moved between the benches, making sure all were fully awake, bestowing curses and half-affectionate slaps such as no one else but Ay would dare give these men. Before they had been given time to start thinking or wondering they were established in a familiar routine. And if, against the commanded forgetfulness, any man’s mind still harbored visions of a dragon and a slaughtered chief, no doubt that man would be more than glad to let such nightmare vapors vanish with the daylight.

“Row, boys! Ahead is the land where, they say, all women are queens!”

It was a good harbor they found waiting for them. This was Blanium, the capital, a town of some eight or ten thousand folk, a big city in this age. Immediately inland from the harbor, on the highest point of hill, there rose the gray keep of a small castle. From the high battlements the Princess Alix was doubtless peering down at the ship, to catch a first distant look at her husband-to-be.

In the harbor were eight or ten other vessels, traders and wanderers, few for the season and for all the length of quay. Empire trade was falling off steadily over the years, civilized seamen and landsmen alike faced evil days. But let Ay live, and a part of the civilized world would outlast this storm.

In scattered rivulets of folk a throng was dribbling down Blanium’s steep streets, to form along the quay as the long-ship entered the harbor. By the time the oarsmen had pulled into easy hailing distance, and the cheers on shore had started, Matt beheld nearly a thousand people of all ranks waiting to see him land. From the castle, whence of course the ship had been spied a great distance out, there bad come down two large chariots of gilded wood, drawn by hump-backed loadbeasts. These had halted near the water’s edge, where men of rank had dismounted and now stood waiting.

The moment of arrival came, of songs and tossed flowers of welcome. Ropes were thrown ashore, and a crew of dockmen began to make the long-ship fast beside the quay, riding against a bumper of straw mats. Matt leaped ashore, concealing a sigh of relief at being released from the rise and fall of the sea. It was probably well for Ay’s reputation that the voyage had been no longer.

Voicing sentiments spoken more plainly by the crowd, the delegation of nobles earnestly bade him welcome. King Gorboduc sent his regret that he ailed too much to come down to the harbor himself. Matt knew that Gorboduc was old and historically had only about a month to live beyond this day. He was still without a male heir, and the Queensland nobles would not long submit to the rule of any woman. And for Alix to marry any one of the Queensland nobles might displease the others enough to bring on the very civil war that she and her father sought desperately to avoid. So the king’s thoughts had turned to Ay—a princely man of royal blood, young and capable, respected if not liked by all, with no lands of his own to divide his loyalty.

Leaving orders with Harl to see to the unloading of the ship and the quartering of the crew, Matt took from Ay’s coffer the jewels he had been told would be most suitable as gifts for king and princess. And then he of course accepted a chariot ride up the hill.

In the Modems’ world he had heard of places in the universe where loadbeasts came in shapes that allowed men to straddle and ride them. He was just as well satisfied that such was not the case on Sirgol. Learning to drive a chariot had presented problems enough, and today he was happy to be able to leave the reins in another’s hands. In fact Matt needed one hand to hold on and the other to wave to the crowd. As the chariots clattered up through the steep streets of the town, folk came pouring out of buildings and alleys to salute Matt with cries of welcome. He hoped they were making no mistake.

The high gray walls of the castle loomed close. The chariots at last rumbled over a drawbridge and into a narrow courtyard. Matt was saluted by sword and pike and given a mass introduction to a hundred minor officials and gentry.

In the great hall of the castle there were gathered a score of more important men and women. When Matt was ushered in to the sound of trumpet and drum, only a few of these showed anything like the enthusiasm of the crowds outside. From history Matt knew that most of these powerful people were suspending judgment on Ay, their smiles no more than polite and waiting. And there were others among them whose smiles were totally false. Matt knew Nomis’ tall, white-robed figure at sight; he bad been warned against the wizard as being Ay’s bitter enemy.

But there was pure joy in the lined and wasted face of King Gorboduc. He rose from his chair of state to cry welcome, though his legs would support him only for a moment. After the exchange of formal greetings the king sank back into his seat and added, in his quavery voice: “Young man, your father and I shared many a fight and many a feast. May he rouse well in the Warriors’ Castle, tonight and always.”

Ay would certainly have mixed feelings regarding such a wish, and Ay was never the man to speak out what he felt. “I thank you, Gorboduc, for meaning to wish my father well. May his spirit rest forever in the Garden of the Blessed above.”

Gorboduc was taken with a coughing spell, perhaps half-deliberately so he need take no offense at being corrected by an upstart in his own hall. But Nomis in his white robe strode forward to take advantage of the moment.

He did not look at Matt. “You nobles of the realm! Will all of you stand silent while the gods of your fathers are insulted?” There was a murmur of agreement.

“I meant no insult to any here,” said Matt, raising his voice slightly. And then at once he wondered if that had been too mild a thing to say, too near an apology to have come from the real Ay. Nomis was sneering openly, and some of the others were looking at Matt with new calculation.

The tension eased as Gorboduc, recovered from his coughing fit, ordered his daughter led forth by her attendant women. From behind a gauzy veil, Alix’s lively eyes smiled briefly at Matt; he thought the Moderns had spoken truly, there would be many worse lifelines than Ay’s to follow to the end.

While preparations were being made for the exchange of gifts, a friendly noble whispered to Matt that if he had no objection the king preferred that the betrothal ceremony be completed at once. It would mean unusual haste, but there was the matter of the king’s health.

“I understand,” Matt answered quietly. “If Alix is agreeable, I am.” Her eyes flicked at him again, very briefly and intensely. In a few moments he and she were standing side by side with joined hands.

At the king’s order, Nomis came with a great show of reluctance to perform the ceremony of formal betrothal. Midway through, he raised his eyes to the audience when asking the ritual question, whether anyone present had objection to the proposed marriage. And Nomis showed not the least surprise when a loud answer came from one at whom he was staring.

“I do object! I have long sought the princess for my own. And it seems to me that the sea-rover will be better mated with my sword.” The deep voice was perhaps a shade too loud for real confidence to be behind it. But the speaker looked formidable enough; he was young and tall, wide shouldered, with arms thick enough to make the average man a sturdy pair of legs . . .

There was no historical record of Ay’s fighting a duel at his betrothal ceremony, an item not likely to have been overlooked by the chroniclers. Had he already failed to play Ay’s part, by giving one too-soft answer that encouraged a challenge?

Anyway there was no doubt about what had to be done now. Matt hooked his thumbs into his wide leather belt and drew a deep breath. “Will you speak your name?”

The giant answered: “I need no introduction to any person of quality here. But that you may address me with the proper respect, know that I am Yunguf, of the house of Yung. And I claim the Princess Alix for my own.”

Matt bowed. He was very courteous, as Ay would be. “Since you appear to be a worthy man, Yunguf, we may fight at once to decide this matter. If you have no reason to delay?”

Yunguf flushed; his control slipped for a moment, and Matt saw that beneath it the man was certainly frightened.

Alix put her veil aside and looked soberly at Matt. “May you fare well in this matter, lord. My affections have never belonged to that man, nor indeed has he ever asked for them until now.” She had drawn Matt a little aside and spoke in a low voice.

“Then why—?”

“I do not know, unless—” Her expressive eyes flicked once toward Nomis, who was now intoning a blessing of the Old Religion over Yunguf’s arms.

Matt could face the personal danger calmly enough. He had spent most of his life within reach. of violence—though as one of The People he had rarely been in danger from another human being. And the Moderns had put not only skill but extra speed into his nerves, had given him Ay’s lithe hitting power and endurance, not to mention the sword they had crafted for him, which alone should be advantage enough to win a fight. What bothered Matt was the changes in history that the duel must bring.

Everyone but the king and princess seemed happy at the prospect of a little blood-letting. The others seemed impatient at the delay necessary for Ay’s shield to be fetched up from his ship—the sword was already at Matt’s side. He thought of going by himself for a minute and reporting developments to Operations, but there was nothing they could tell him now that would get him out of the duel. So Matt passed the time in trying to make light conversation with the ladies, while Yunguf stood glowering and almost silent with a group who were apparently his relatives.

The shield was soon brought by a hurrying Harl, who openly displayed his eagerness to see the fight get started, probably with a view to unsettling Yunguf’s nerves some more. The company moved outside. The king, chair and all, was established in the best vantage point, on the edge of a paved space that was evidently consecrated to weaponry, judging by the massive timber butts, much hacked and splintered, which stood along its farther side. Others arranged themselves as best they could to watch. There seemed to be no judge or referee. Matt took a stand in the arena, saw Yunguf coming with blade and shield ready, slow and powerful as a siege tower, and realized that the combat was on.

The sun had passed the zenith by now, the air was warm, and exercise even when cautious soon raised a sweat. After a few slow feints Yunguf moved quickly at last. And Matt stepped back quickly, his shield, sword, shield parrying in good order the three blows of the attacking combination. He had hoped that at the clash of blades his opponent’s sword might break; but the contact had been glancing, and his opponent’s weapon evidently tough.

Matt slid away from Yunguf and got back to the center of the arena. Yunguf turned to follow, breathing heavily already, and his balance uneven, with a muscular tension that must be the result of fear. Why such fear now, in such a warrior? It must have another cause than the mere danger of death in combat.

Of course Matt could have no heart at all for this fight. Any killing he did today, any blows he struck, would be to the advantage of the berserkers. But to be beaten himself would do still more damage. Even now the audience was murmuring. No doubt his reluctance for this brawl was showing; he would be near slipping out of Ay’s character again. He had to win, and the sooner the better—but without killing, if that were possible.

Matt raised sword and shield once more as Yunguf moved slowly into attacking range. Yunguf charged again, more smoothly this time, but Matt still beat him to the thrust, aiming along the side of Yunguf’s shield to cut the swordarm’s shoulder muscles. Yunguf twisted his body with the force of his own thrust—which slid off Matt’s shield—and got his torso in the way of Matt’s thrust, so it went between his upper ribs.

The wound was shallow, and Yunguf was not yet stopped; but his next slash was weak and slow. Matt swayed back just enough to let it go by, then lunged in again, hooking the wounded man’s knee with his foot, with his shield forcing Yunguf’s upper body back.

Yunguf fell like a tree, and there was Matt’s bloody point hovering at his throat, while Matt’s foot pinned Yunguf’s sword-wrist to the paving stone.

“Will you yield to me—the combat—and its prize?” Matt was aware of his own panting now, and of Yunguf’s whistling, gurgling breath.

“I yield me.” The answer, in strangled tones, came quickly enough. There were no grounds for hesitation.

Matt stepped wearily back, wondering what Ay customarily used to wipe a bloody swordblade. Harl came to perform that office, and to scold him about his hesitancy of the start of the fight. Yunguf’s relatives had gone to Yunguf said, and the wounded man seemed to be sitting up easily enough. At least a killing had been avoided.

Matt turned to the princess and her father—and stopped. Their frightened eyes were fixed on an object discarded on the ground nearby.

It was Nomis’ outer robe, snowy in the sunlight. The wizard himself was no longer in sight; the white garment discarded would mean that he was donning black.

A cough sounded wetly behind Matt, and he turned to see Yunguf with bright blood on his lips.

VIII

The great metal dragon lay motionless, buried almost completely in the muck of the sea bottom. Around it the dull life of the great depths stirred—in safety, for this berserker was now seeking to avoid killing anything. For it to end even a vegetable lifeline nonhistorically could provide a datum for the Modern’s computers, implacable as berserkers themselves, to use in their hunt for the dragon’s keyhole.

The dragon was still under direct command of the berserker fleet besieging the planet in Modern times. On their own version of sentry screens the fleet’s linked computers had observed the lifting of Ay’s ship and crew to Modern times and the subsequent restoration of that ship and crew, with one lifeline added.

It was obvious what the Moderns intended, for the berserkers themselves knew well the theory and practice of baiting traps. But a viable replacement for Ay was bait they could not afford to ignore. They must strike again, through the dragon or its arsenal of auxiliary devices.

But this time they must be subtle. Matt must not be killed, at least not in any way that would spin a new thread of causation toward the dragon. The linked berserker computers arrived at an ideal solution; capture Matt alive and hold him so, until the pillars of Sirgol’s history came crashing down.

Even while in hiding the dragon maintained around itself a net of subtle infraelectronic senses. Among the things it now observed was a black-robed man, standing on a pillar of seaside rock about two miles from the berserker’s hiding place, speaking on and on rhythmically, into the empty air. From data in its memory banks the berserker deduced that the man was attempting to call supernatural forces to his aid.

And it caught the name of Ay.

In the full sun of midafternoon Nomis stood chanting on his prinnacle of rock. The spells of deepest evil were best sung in darkness, but his hate and fear had grown until they seemed to spread a darkness of their own about him. He would not wait for the setting of the sun.

While the sea birds wheeled and cried in the wind, he sang in his thin penetrating voice:

Demon or darkness, rise and stalk
put on the bones and make them walk
Dead men’s bones through the weed and slime
Walk and climb
Walk to me here
Speak to me here
Of the secret to bring my enemy’s death.

There was more, much more, cajoling and coercing the dark wet things that waited in the deeps for men to drown—waited for freshdrowned bones to fall through the fathoms, for limber young corpses that the demons could wear like clothes in their endless revels at the bottom of the sea. The dark wet things down there possessed all the knowledge of death, including how the death of Ay might be accomplished—something Yunguf had been unable to achieve, in spite of all the supernatural threats Nomis had lavished on the lout.

Nomis’ thin arms quivered, holding drowned men’s fingers over his head. Then his arms swept low as he bowed, still chanting, eyelids closing out the sun. This time the spell would work, today the hatred was in him like a lodestone, drawing to him things of utter evil.

When he came to a place in the chant where he could pause he did so, opening his eyes, wondering if he had heard another sound between the surges of the surf. Under the black robe his old man’s chest was heaving with exertion and excitement.

A bird screamed. And from below, from somewhere on the furrowed length of cliff that climbed to his tabletop from the sea, there came once more a scraping sound, almost lost in wind and surf.

He had just given up listening for more and started to chant again, when from much nearer to the top of the cliff there came a small clatter—a tumble of stones dislodged by a climbing foot or hand. The sound in itself was so ordinary that it momentarily drove all thoughts of magic from the magician’s tired mind. He could only think angrily that someone was about to discover his hideaway.

Before him as he faced the sea was a deft that climbed to the tabletop between folds of rock. From just out of sight within his cleft there came now the sound of grit crunched under a heavy foot.

And then Nomis’ world was shaken around him, not by doubt but by a proof that put an end to all his nagging doubts. His first sight of his climbing visitor showed him a drowned man’s skull, one small tendril of seaweed clinging to its glistening crown.

With quick smooth movements the whole form climbed into his view. It was a man-form, thinner than any living human, hut fuller than any skeleton. Drowned skeletons must change when a demon possessed them—this one looked not so much like bone as like metal.

Having emerged completely from the crevice, the demon-shape halted, standing taller than tall Nomis, so that it bent its skull-head down slightly on its cable neck to look at him. He had to struggle to make himself keep looking into the cloudy jewels of its eyes. A drop of water sparkled, falling from one bonelike fingertip. Only when die thing took another step toward him did Nomis remember to reinforce his chalked protective ring with a gesture and a muttered incantation.

And then at last he also remembered to complete the successful ritual with a binding spell. “Now must you guide and serve me, until you are released! And serve me first by saying how my enemy may be put to death.”

The shiny jaw did not move, but a quavery voice came forth from a black square where the mouth have been. “Your enemy is Ay. He landed today on this coast.”

“Yes, yes. And the secret of his death?”

Even to order Matt’s death would leave a track of causation on the Moderns’ screens. “You must bring your enemy here alive, unhurt, and give him to me. Then you will never see him more. For this I will help you gain whatever you desire.” Nomis’ mind raced; he had trained himself for nearly a lifetime to seize such an opportunity as this, and he was not going to fail now. So, the demon wanted Ay kept alive! That meant a vital magical connection existed between Ay and this thing from the deeps. That Ay should have enjoyed such help in his seafaring career was not surprising, considering the number of men he had sent to dwell among the fishes and the charmed life he himself seemed to bear.

Nomis’ voice came out harsh and bold. “What is Ay to you, demon?”

“My enemy.”

Not likely! Nomis almost laughed the words aloud. He saw now it was his own body and soul the wet thing craved; but behind his spells and his chalked circles Nomis was not afraid. The demon had come to protect Ay. But Nomis would not let the demon know how much he had deduced. Not yet.

“Harken, mud-thing! I will do you ask. Tonight at midnight I will bring your enemy here, bound and helpless.” Nomis saw possibilities here of gain so enormous that he would take any risk. “Now begone, and at midnight come here ready to grant me all I ask!”

IX

In the evening Matt walked with Alix along the battlements, watching the stars come out, while the princess’s ladies-in-waiting hovered just out of sight around corners.

Matt’s preoccupation was evidently obvious. The girl beside him soon gave up a rather one-sided effort to make small talk and asked him plainly: “Do I please you, lord?” He stopped his moody pacing and turned to her. “You please me very well indeed.” And it was so. “If my thoughts go elsewhere, they are forced.”

She smiled gently. The Moderns would not think Alix a beautiful girl. But all Matt’s life he had seen women’s beauty under sunburn and woodsmoke and toughness, and he could see beauty now in this different girl of his third world.

“May I know then, lord, what problem forces your thoughts away?”

“For one thing, the problem of the man I wounded. I have not made a good beginning here.”

“Such concern does you credit I am pleased to discover you more gentle than I had been led to expect.” Alix smiled again. No doubt she understood that his concern over Yunguf rested on reasons of policy; though she could of course have no idea of how very far that policy ranged. She began to tell Matt of some things that she might do, people she could talk to, to help heal the breach between the new house of Ay and that of Yung.

Watching her, he thought he could be king, if she were queen beside him. He would not be Ay. He knew now, as the Modems surely must, that no man could really live another’s life. But in Ay’s name, he might perhaps be king enough to serve the world.

He interrupted Alix. “And do you find me pleasing, lady?”

This time those marvelous eyes of hers did not flicker; with a warm light of promise they held fast to his. And as if by instinct the duenas came at that moment to announce that the decent time-limit for keeping company had been reached.

“Until the morning, then,” he said, taking the princess’s hand briefly in the way permitted by courtly manners.

“Until the morning, my lord.” And as the women led her away, she turned back to send him another glance before passing out of sight.

He wished he could see her for ten thousand mornings more. He took off his helmet for a moment and rubbed his head. His communicator was still silent. No doubt he should call the Moderns and report all that had happened.

Instead he put the helmet on again (Ay would wear it as a sort of dress uniform) and went down into the keep, to the chamber where Yunguf had been bedded down on orders of the court physician. Matt hesitated to enter when he saw a pair of the wounded man’s male relatives on watch inside. But when they saw Matt they beckoned him in, speaking to him freely and courteously. None of the house of Yung, it seemed, would bear him any ill will for winning a duel.

Yunguf was pale. His difficult breath gurgled in his throat, and when he twisted on his pallet to spit up blood, the bandage loosened from his wound and air gurgled there also with his breath. When Matt asked him how he did, he whispered that he was dying; but he showed no fear now. He wanted to tell Matt something else, but talking came too hard.

“Lord Ay,” said one of the relatives, “I think my cousin would warn you that there are things more subtle than swords set against you here.” Yunguf nodded.

“I saw the white robe discarded on the ground.”

“Ah, then you are warned. I hope your new god may defend you when your sword will avail you nothing.” A sea-bird cried in the night outside. Yunguf’s eyes turned to the small window, with fear in them again.

Matt wished them well and went back to the roof; there he could be alone, since the castle kept only a token watch. Full night had now descended. He took a deep breath, and for the first time switched on the communicator, pressing his helmet’s right wing in a certain way.

“Time Ops here.” The crisp Modern voice was only a whisper of sound, but it made the castle and the open night somehow unreal. Reality was a cramped cave-fortress, at the center of a fantastic web of machines and energy. In what he felt was a lifeless voice, Matt reported the duel and Nomis’ departure.

“Yes, we saw Yunguf’s lifeline being hit by something. Nothing vital is involved there, though.” Time Ops of course meant that nothing vital to History was involved. “Have you seen or heard anything of the dragon yet?”

“No. Why do you speak of that so much?”

The tiny voice seemed to crackle. “Why? Because it’s important!”

“What about my task here, of doing Ay’s work? Isn’t it important that that’s not going well?”

There was a pause before Time Ops’ answer came. “You’re doing as well as can be expected, Matt. Yes, a damn good job, from what our screens show. As I said, what happened to Yunguf’s not vital. Your watching out for that dragon is.”

After routinely breaking off the contact, Matt decided to visit Ay’s men, who had been quartered in a kind of guardroom built into the castle’s massive outer wall. With this in mind he descended from the keep along an outer stair.

He was deep in thought, and it did not occur to him that the courtyard at the foot of the stair was darker than it ought to have been. A sound of rapid near-by movement alerted him, but too late; before he could draw his sword a wave of men were on him, weighing him down. And before he had shed Ay’s pride enough to cry for help, a smothering cover had been clamped tight around his head.

“Sir, can you spare a minute? It’s important.”

Time Ops looked up from his desk impatiently, but paused when he saw Derron’s face. “Come in, then, major. What is it?”

Derron was carrying a metal winged thing under his arm. “Sir, I’ve been—sort of hanging on to this spare helmet. It’s the one Matt tossed off his ship before he was launched. Today some communications people came to see me about it. Turns out there’s a continuous noise-signal being generated in its transmitter.”

Time Ops just looked up from behind his desk, waiting not too patiently for the point.

“They told me, sir, that the signal from this helmet was interfering with a similar one put out by the helmet Matt’s wearing. No matter which one he took, he’d be walking around back there broadcasting a built-in noise, very easy for a berserker to home in on. The berserker must have thought it an obvious trap, sir, since it hasn’t homed in and killed him yet.”

Time Ops grew angry, as if with Derron’s obtuseness. “No, it hasn’t killed him.” He flicked on his desk screen and spun a selector. “Take a look at this. Odegaid. Our present view of the critical section of Ay’s lifeline.”

During his hitch of sentry duty Derron had learned to read the screens quite well. This was his first look in about a day at Ay’s lifeline, and this look confirmed the fear the last one had started. “It looks bad, sir. He’s getting way off the track.”

“Matt’s buying us a little more present-time here, and that’s all he’s doing. Is it clear now why we want the thing to kill him? Millions have died in this war for nothing, major.”

“Yes sir, I guess it’s clear. We won’t win unless we find that dragon’s keyhole.” Derron held the helmet out in front of him for a moment, looking at it as if it was an archeological find he had just unearthed. “Matt never was anything but bait, was he?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that, major. When you first suggested that he be used, we weren’t sure but that he’d come out alive. But the first fullscale computer simulation showed us the way things pretty well had to go. No doubt you’re right, bugging his helmet made the trap a little too obvious. The way things stand now, he may be safer from berserkers than we are.”

X

Matt came painfully awake, trying to cough around a gag of dirty doth that had been stuffed into his mouth. His head ached as if he had been drugged. He was being carried in a sickening jogging motion, and when his head cleared a little more he understood that he was riding slung across a loadbeast’s humped back, his head hanging down on one side and his feet on the other. His helmet of course had fallen off somewhere; nor was there any bouncing tug at his waist from the weight of sword and scabbard.

Six or eight men had him prisoner; they were walking near the loadbeast in the darkness, guiding and leading it along a narrow winding path. They looked behind them frequently and now and then exchanged lowvoiced words.

“. . . I think two of them are following, or they were . . .”

Matt heard that much. He tried the cords holding his wrists and ankles, and found them tight. Turning his head, he saw that the trail ahead wound among jagged pillars and outcroppings of rock; from what he knew of the country near Blanium he judged they were right along the coast.

And he saw without surprise that one of his captors, the one who led the way, was tall and thin and robed in black. Round this man’s lean waist was belted a sword and scabbard that looked like Matt’s. Nomis had taken for himself one of the power-symbols of a king.

The way grew rougher until the little procession came to a thin ridge with deep clefts in the rock on either side of it. Here the loadbeast must be left behind. At Nomis’ order some of the men lifted Matt from its back. Pausing often in their work to look uneasily round them, starting at every sound of the night, they untied Matt’s feet but made his arms doubly secure. They seemed to fear Nomis and whatever lay ahead almost as much as they feared the pursuit that must be coming from the castle.

With men ahead and behind holding on to him, Matt was led across the single-file ridge, then made to scramble up through a long twisting passage, almost a tunnel between high walls of rock. Only Nomis, going ahead, seemed to know the way. The sound of surf became audible.

A cloud was over the moon when the party straggled at last onto a tiny tableland of rock. Only Nomis immediately saw the figure, motionless as stone, which waited for them. Nomis quickly drew Matt’s sword, and when Matt was pushed up within his reach he gripped Matt’s hair with one hand and with the other laid the bare blade against Matt’s throat.

The moon came out then, and the other men saw the thing that stood watching them. Like odd chicks of some gaunt black bird, they scrambled then to get behind Nomis, all making sure they were within the old chalked diagram. It was very still, save for the faint wind and the surf, and one man’s low muttering in fear.

Keeping the sword against Matt’s neck, Nomis pulled the gag from his face and displayed him to the berserker. “Mud-thing, is this man indeed your enemy? Shall I slay him, then?”

The metal puppet might have been sent charging forward, far faster than any man could move, to pull Matt away to captivity. But there was the keen edge right against the jugular. The berserkers would not risk a thread of responsibility for Matt’s death.

“I will give you power,” said the demon, “and wealth, and the pleasures of the flesh, and then life everlasting. But you must give me that man alive.”

Nomis crooned in his certainty of victory, while at his back his men huddled in terror. “I want Alix,” he whispered. To him the breaking of her pride would mean more than her young body. In this moment when all desires seemed possible a memory came of a day long ago, when Alix’s mocking child-laughter had burned at him.

“I will give her to you,” lied the demon solemnly, “when you have given me that man alive.”

In Nomis’ ecstasy of triumph his arm wavered slightly, holding the long sword. Matt was ready. His bound wrists allowed him still some arm-movement. As he jerked free with all his strength his elbow struck old ribs with force enough to send Nomis sprawling, the sword spinning in the air.

The other men’s terror was triggered into panic flight. They burst up from their crouched positions, first scattering and then converging on the only path of escape, the narrow way by which they had ascended. Running straight, head down, Matt kicked the fallen sword ahead of him and still got there first by a stride, thanks to what the Modems had done for his nerves and muscles.

The berserker had been delayed by its need to avoid mangling the men who were in its way, but even as Matt reached the top of the path he felt a hand harder than flesh scrape down his back. It seized his clothing, but the fabric tore free. Then he was leaping, falling free into the descending passage. At his back the other men were screaming, colliding with one another and the berserker.

He landed, cutting and bruising himself without really feeling the injuries. The way was so narrow that he could not miss finding the sword he had kicked ahead of him. With his bound hands he groped behind him in the dark to pick it up by the blade, heedless of nicked fingers. He got his feet under him and scrambled some further distance downward. He stumbled and fell again, hurting his knee, hut he had gained a substantial lead on the tangled terror jamming the way behind him. One or more men had probably fallen with broken bones or other disabling injuries, and the others were stuck with them or behind them. They would be howling with mindless fear and lacerating themselves further in the dark when they felt the chill touch of the berserker; it would be sorting through men to find the one it wanted, trying to get the others out of its way without harming them.

Matt propped the swordblade behind him, and with the skill of his new nerves slid his bonds against its edge. He had freed himself before he heard the machine’s footsteps crunching down toward him in the dark.

XI

“That’s it, that’s it, we’ll nail the damned thing now!” In Time Operations men were crying out in a hunter’s jubilation as old as mankind. On their screens their computers were limning out the radii of a spiderweb, whose center would hold the dragon. The data needed to draw the web was coming from human lifelines being bent and battered; the berserker seemed to be struggling with men in some enclosed space.

But still it had not killed again. And the locus of its keyhole was not yet in sight.

“Only a little more.” Time Ops, staring at his screens, pleaded for bloodshed. “Something?”

But there was no more.

Matt retreated, limping, out into the moonlight where he could see. The thing followed unhurriedly, sure of him now. He backed out onto the thin ridge, between yawning crevices to deep for the moonlight to plumb, holding his sword ready in bleeding fingers. Pale in the moonlight and almost skeleton-thin, it followed carefully. It did not want him to fall. It would choose the precise moment and then rush to catch him, easily as a human athlete picking up a toddler from a broad walk.

When it came, he kept his point centered on the narrow way, and he had just time to steel his arm. A moment ago the berserker had been twelve feet away, and now it was on him. It made a wiping motion with one hand, to clear what appeared to be an ordinary swordblade from its path—and four steel fingers leaped free like small silver fish in the moonlight, while the monomolecular blade stayed where it was, centered by Matt’s braced muscles.

The inertia of the machine’s rush was great. Before it could halt, the swordpoint was through its torso, and what had been a delicately controlled mechanism became dead hurtling weight. Matt went down before the force of it, but he clung to rock somehow and saw it go on over him, falling in an endless slow somersault—taking with it the transfixing sword, which glowed already like a redhot needle with the inner fire it had kindled.

The tumbling demon vanished. From far down inside the crevice came a crash. And then another and another, echoing remotely. Matt pulled himself onto the ridge and crawled a few feet; then he made himself stand and walk before he reached the place where the path was broad and safe.

Trying to keep in shadow, he limped his way past the phlegmatic, waiting loadbeast. He had gone a dozen steps farther when the two men Nomis had left here as sentries pounced out of deeper shadows. As they seized him, the leg he had injured was twisted again, and he fell.

“Best let me go and run yourselves,” he said to the buskined knees standing before him. “Back there, the devil’s come for your master.”

It made them look back toward the distant commotion, until they themselves were come for; not by the devil but by the two men Matt had seen running up, axe and sword in hand. A brief clashing of metal swirled around Matt and choked cries that were quickly ended.

“Is this leg your worst hurt, lord?” asked Harl anxiously, bending over him.

“Yes, I do well enough.”

Torla muttered grimly: “Then we will go on and slaughter the rest of them.”

Matt tried to think. “No. Not now, at least. Nomis called up a thing from the sea—”

Torla shuddered now at the distant moaning. “Then let us away!”

“Can, you stand, lord?” asked Harl. “Good, then lean on me.” And he detached something from under his cloak and held it out. “Your helmet, lad. It fell outside the postern gate, and set us on the right trail.”

Harl and Torla might think it was pain in his leg that made him so slow to reach out for the helmet. Harl had carried it under his cloak as if it were only a shell of metal; but put on like a crown, it weighed enough to crush a man.

Down in the sea-bottom muck the dragon stirred. The tantalizing bait-signal of the life-unit that the Moderns had sent as Ay’s replacement was now very near the shore.

If that life-unit could be captured without further damage to other lifelines, a berserker victory would be sure, as matters now stood. To pursue the life-unit inland would involve creating too much change—especially since the dragon’s auxiliary device had been somehow lost. But the chances of seizing the lifeunit right along the coast was too good an opportunity to let slip. Darkening the water with an upheaved cloud of mud, the dragon rose.

Supported by a strong man on either side, Matt could make fair speed along the rough path leading back toward Blanium. Not that there was any great need for speed. Nomis and his men would certainly not be in pursuit. And Matt saw now that it was pot the berserker that sought his death. No, it had wanted to be given him alive, and then it had tried to capture him. He shuddered.

“How made you your escape, lord?”

“I will tell you later. Let me think now.”

Make the dragon chase you, said Time Ops. A king must be ready to give his life, said the Planetary Commander, speaking from the depths of his own missile-proof shelter. If the berserkers had wanted to kill him, he would be dead, his sword would not have helped.

The Modems were fighting to save the tribe-of-all-men, true, but to them Matt was only an implement for fighting. Save his life once, and then shove him forward again to draw the lightning of the stone-lion’s eye . . .

In a flash of insight, the scraps of knowledge Matt had picked up about the war of screens and missiles, lifelines and keyholes, suddenly fell into place with what had happened to him here. Of course, the Moderns wanted him killed here, by the berserkers. And the berserkers knew this, and wanted to take him alive.

The communicator in his helmet suddenly began to speak in a tiny voice, as it would for his ears alone. He would throw the helmet away with all its lying voices, he told himself, when he again came close enough to the sea, or to another crevice.

But he gripped his companions’ shoulders, stopping them. “Good friends, I would be alone for a little time, to think and—pray.”

His good friends exchanged glances. His must seem a strange request, coming at this time. But then their king had been through a day strange enough to put any man in need of thought.

Harl frowned at him. “You are weaponless.”

“There are no enemies about. But let your dagger stay with me if you will; only let me have a short time to myself.”

And so they left him, though with backward glances. He was their king now, and they loved him; and he smiled now with satisfaction, thinking that he would have them at his side for many a year yet. There was no way for the Modems to punish him for a reftisal to go anymore a-dragon hunting. They would not dare pull Him to the future, not while he worked at living King Ay’s life. That might be a second-best defense for the Modems’ world, but it was all they were going to get.

He sat down on a rock in the moonlight and took off the helmet. Holding it before him, he twisted its right wing, letting Time Ops’ tiny voice come out above the nearby murmur of surf.

“—Matt, answer me, urgent.”

“I am here. What would you have?”

“Where are you? What’s going on?”

“I am going on. To my bride and to my kingdom.”

There was a pause. “Matt, it may be that won’t be enough, your going on trying to take Ay’s place.”

“No? Enough for me, I think. I have been demon-hunting and used up your sword. So I think I will not hunt a dragon that seems content to let me live.”

“Demon-hunting? What?”

Matt explained. He could hear consternation at the other end; they had not thought of the enemy’s trying to capture him alive.

Time Ops was soon back. “Matt, you can’t let it take you alive. But just avoiding capture isn’t going to be good enough, not now. Your filling in for Ay just isn’t going to work.”

“Then why does the enemy want to stop me?”

“Because you are buying us a little time here. They want to eliminate any lingering chance we have and finish us off quickly. All I can do is ask you again to make the damned thing chase you and stir up change.”

“If it catches me?”

There was a pause. A murmur of voices at the other end, and then another familiar voice came on.

“Matt, this is Derron. These people here are trying to find a way to tell you to die. Get the berserker to kill you, or if it catches you find a way to kill yourself. Kill yourself because it’s caught you. Die, in one way or another, and make it somehow responsible. All along that’s been their objective here. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was like that at first.”

Time Ops came back. “Matt, you can shut us off and go on to your bride and your kingdom the way you said you were going to. But if you do that, all your life your world will be slowly decaying around you. Decaying inside, where you won’t see it, becoming less and less probable. Up here we’ll be dying, all of us. At your end of history the chaos will begin in your children’s time—that’s what you’ll be leaving them.”

“You lie!” Matt’s voice broke on the cry, for he knew Time Ops was not lying. Or if he was lying again about this fact or that, he was telling the truth about what was needed to win the war. Whatever Time Ops did would be to win the war.

“Matt, this is Derron again. What you just heard is the truth. I don’t know what more to say to you.” Matt cried bitterly: “My friend, there is no need for you to say anything more!” He twisted the helmet wing, silencing the voices; he put the helmet hack on his head and stood up. Soon he saw Harl and Torla coming toward him.

When they had come up to him he said quietly: “My leg gives me trouble. I think die path will be easier along the water’s edge.” He knew that the dragon dwelt in the sea.

Between his friends he moved toward the sound of surf. He went slowly, for truthfully his leg felt worse, having stiffened while he sat. He thought of nothing, as the time for thinking was now past. Long long ago he had pulled the stone-man from the poison-digger’s pit. Then he had seen the tribe-of-all-men stretching across space and time; he had known something of the spirits of life; he had been a king, and a princess among others had looked at him with love.

Without surprise he saw a shoreline rock ahead suddenly move and become a nightmare head that rose amid moonlit spray on a sinuous column of neck. The dragon’s vast body heaved itself from the sea, and lurched toward the men faster than a man could run.

“I have the dagger,” he said to the men at his sides. “And right now both of you can use sword and axe better than I.” The dragon was not coming for Harl or Torla, and anyway it would be a pointless insult to bid them run.

He kept the dagger hidden in his hand, the blade turned up flat behind his wrist, as the dragon’s head came straight for him, on its treetrunk neck that could swallow a man and hold him safe. Sword and axe hewed uselessly from either side. Matt was very tired, and in a way he welcomed the grave-wide jaws, which he saw now held no teeth. Only in the instant of the jaws’ soft powerful closing did he bring the dagger up, holding the point steady at his heart while the pressure came down . . .

“It killed him.” At first, Time Ops whispered the words unbelievingly. Then he let them out in a whoop. “It killed him, it killed him!” The other hunters who had been frozen at their screens, sharing their computers creeping certainty of failure, were galvanized once more into action. On their screens the spiderwebs tightened like nooses, imaging a target greenly solid and sure.

In the deep cave called Operations Stage Two, metallic arms extended a missile sideways from its rack while a silvery circle shimmered into being on the floor beneath. With a click and a jolt the arms released their burden. Falling, the missile was gone—

Derron had seen a keyhole hit and closed before, and he understood perfectly what a victory he was seeing now. On the screens, the whole writhing build-up of change surrounding Ay now burst like a boil, began to straighten itself out like a piece of trickery with string. History flowed strong and safe back into the familiar riverbed. Only the one catalytic lifeline was newly broken; you had to look closely not to miss that little detail on the screens.

The raw stump of that line left no room for doubt, but still Derron’s hand went out to punch his communicator for Stage Three. “Alf? Listen, will you let me know what shape he’s in, the moment—all right, thanks.”

Holding the circuit open to Stage Three, he waited, tired eyes gazing blankly at the screens. Around him, the first waves of a celebration curled up around the edges of discipline.

“Derron?” Alf’s voice was slow in coming, and slow-spoken when it came, to tell about the knife in the heart and speculate on how the man must have arranged to have it driven. And to confirm that Matt’s brain had been too long without oxygen for the medics to do anything useful for him.

Derron flipped off the switch and sat there, tired and immobile. Some of the victorious hunters around him were breaking out cigars, and one was calling jovially for a ration of grog. A few minutes later Time Ops himself strolled by with a glass in his hand, but he was not shouting or even smiling as he paused at Derron’s position.

“He was a good man, Odegard. The best, of course. Not many can accomplish a thousandth part of what he did. With their lives or their deaths.” Time Ops raised his glass in a solemn sipping toast to the bitten-off green line on the screen. Later of course there would be monuments and ceremonies to do the same thing more elaborately. But, for Odegard, none of it would have much practical value.

“The thing is,” said Derron, “I don’t really care much what happens to the world. Only a person here and there.”

Time Ops might not have heard, for the celebration was growing louder. “You did a necessary job, major, and did it well, from the start of the operation until today. We’re going to be expanding even more here in Time Operations, and we’ll need good men in key positions. Pm going to recommend you for another promotion . . .”

Nomis stood with arms upraised, gray beard and black robes whipping in the wind, while he persisted in the evil endeavor that had kept him here on his secret rock for the past three days. Though Nomis could not escape the feeling that his labors against Ay had all been completely in vain . . .

On the battlement, Alix shaded her fair eyes against the morning sun and strained them seaward to catch sight of sail or mast. She waited, trembling inwardly a little, for her first sight of her future lord . . .

The cliffs of Queensland were dead ahead, Harl knew, though still a day’s rowing out of sight. He frowned to port across the sea’s gray face, though there was nothing to break the line of the horizon, but a distant line of squalls. Then his face cleared with the thought that young Ay, in his tent amidships, was doubtless planning for the fighting that was sure to come.       END

BROTHER BERSERKER

He was sent back in time—to protect a famous heretic from destruction by a berserker!

I

The barefoot man in the gray friar’s habit topped a rise and paused to survey the country ahead. In that direction the paved road he was traveling continued to run almost straight under a leaden sky, humping over one scrubbily wooded hill after another. The stones of this road had been laid down in the days of expansion of the great Empire, and there was not much else in the world that had survived the centuries between then and now.

The friar was of medium height and rather thin. His appearance seemed to have little to do with age; he was somewhere between twenty and forty. His scantily bearded face expressed his tiredness, and his gray robe was spotted with grayer mud. The fields up to the shoulders of the road were all ankle-deep in mud, and most of them showed no sign of having been plowed or planted this spring or last. The only sign of recent human presence visible from where the friar stood now was a heap of low ruined walls at roadside just ahead. Only the ruin was recent; the walls themselves had been old and might have been a caravanserai or legion post in the days of the Empire’s strength. But last month or last tenday, new war had passed this way, dissolving one more building into raw tumbled stones. Before grass could start to grow on the stones, it seemed likely that they might sink into the mud without a trace.

When he reached the remnant of a wall, the friar sat down on it, resting from his long journey and looking with minor sadness at the minor destruction about him. He leaned over and picked up one fallen stone; his wiry hands showed strength. With something like a practiced mason’s look in his eye, he fitted the stone into a notch in the stump of wall and studied the effect.

A distant hail made him raise his head and look back along the way he had come. Another lone figure, dressed in a habit much like his own, was hastening toward him, waving both arms for attention.

The first friar forgot his little game with the stone, returned the wave and waited.

The approaching figure soon resolved itself into a man of middle height, clean shaven and almost stout. “Glory to the Holy One, reverend brother!” puffed this newcomer, arriving at last within easy talking distance.

The bearded friar had gotten to his feet, and now his thin face lighted gently. “Glory to His name.” The portly one asked anxiously:

“Are you, as I think, Brother Jovann of Ernard?”

“That is my name.”

“Now may the Holy One be praised!” The heavier man made a wedge-sign with his hands and rolled eyes heavenward. “My name is Saile, brother. Now may the Holy One be praised, say I—”

“So be it.”

“—for He has led me in mysterious ways to reach your side! Brother Jovann, others will be flocking to your side, for the fame of your heroic virtue has spread afar in many lands. Even in the isolated villages of these remote hills, the peasants are aware now of your passage.”

“I fear my many faults are known hereabouts, for I was born not far away.”

“Ah, brother, you are overly modest. From numerous people in this land, as well as elsewhere, I have heard again and again of your exploits. How, two months ago, you dared to leave the encampment of the army of the Faithful, to cross no-man’s-land boldly into the very ranks of the Infidel, there to enter the tent of the Arch-Infidel himself and preach to him the truth of our Holy Mother Temple!”

“And to fail to convert him.” Jovann nodded sadly. “You do well to remind me of my failure, for I am prone to the sin of pride.”

“Ah.” Saile lost headway. But it was only for a moment. “My own most humble wish, Brother Jovann, is that I be allowed to be among the very first to join your order. Ah, you are even now on your way to Empire City? To petition our Vicar, the most holy Nabur the Eighth, for permission to found a new order of your own?”

“Truly, God has called me to such a task, Brother Saile.” The thin friar’s eyes looked into the distance. “Once I labored at rebuilding temples with stones and bricks, but now I am called to rebuild with men.” His attention came back, smiling. “As for your becoming a member of the new order when it is formed, I can say nothing yet. But if you should choose to walk with me to Empire City, I will be happy for your company.”

“I am most highly honored, Brother Jovann!”

Saile prolonged his thanks to some length as they walked on together. He had also commented extensively on the chances of yet more rain falling and was discoursing on the question of where they might hope to obtain their next meal, when there came a distraction.

A speedy coach that looked as if it might belong to some middle-ranking noble or prelate was overtaking them on the road. The friars’s ears gave them plenty of warning to step aside; four agile loadbeasts were making the wheels clatter over the leveled stones at a good speed.

As the coach sped past, Brother Jovann found his eyes drawn to the face of one occupant who rode facing forward, head and one arm extended slightly out a window. This was an old man, stocky of build—so far as could be judged—graybearded, but with the short-cut hair on his head still ginger colored. His thick mouth was twisted slightly as if ready to spit or to dispute.

“I had hoped they might give us a lift,” Brother Saile muttered unhappily, watching the coach dwindle along the road ahead. “All the seats were not occupied, were they?” Brother Jovann shook his head; he had not noticed how many were in the coach. His attention had been drawn and held by the old man’s eyes. Fixed ahead, in the direction of the Holy City a hundred miles away, those eyes were clear and gray and powerful. And very much afraid.

II

When Derron Odegard walked out on the victory celebration in Time Operation, he found his feet taking him to Lisa, to face her with the news of Matt’s death and get it over with.

She had only just moved out of the student nurses’s quarters at the hospital, to try some job and share a cubicle with another girl in a lowrank, uplevel corridor. Lisa’s roommate, in the midst of doing something to her hair, opened the door to Derron and then had to go back inside to pretend not to be listening.

Lisa evidently saw Derron’s’ news in his face or guessed it. Her own face becoming calm as a mask, she stood just inside the half-open door, not asking him in from the corridor.

He nodded. “It’s Matt—the battle’s won, the berserkers are stopped. But he’s dead, he sacrificed himself to do it.”

She lifted her head proudly, showing no surprise. “Of course; what else could he do? That’s the job you gave him.”

“Understand, Lisa, when I went to him with that salestalk I thought he was going to have a chance.” Her voice and her face began to break together. “I—knew you were going to kill him.”

“My God, Lisa! I didn’t mean to do that.”

Breaking up and melting, she leaned against the doorjamb. “And now there’s n-nothing to be done.”

“The doctors tried—but no, nothing. We can’t go after his lifeline in the past again—it’d wreck the world to try to pull it out of that mess now.”

“The world’s not worth it!”

He was still trying to console her with some stupidities when the door closed in his face.

A few days later he was sitting alone in his tiny private office on the Operations level, slumping in his chair, thinking that if Lisa were the woman he needed he would have stayed and kicked her door down; it was only a door, and behind it she was still alive.

No, the woman he needed, whose image still ruled his secret thoughts, had been for a year and more behind the door of death; and no man had yet found a way of smashing through that. So in the matter of Lisa—as in everything else—Derron could no longer care very much.

After he had sat in his silent office for a while, he noticed an official-looking envelope, sealed and addressed to him, on the desk. After another while he took the envelope and opened it.

Inside was the formal notice of his new promotion, to the rank of colonel. “—in consideration of your recent outstanding service in Time Operations, and in the expectation that you will continue—” A set of appropriate collar insignia were enclosed.

He sat there a while longer, looking across the room at what rested like a trophy atop his little bookcase—an ancient battle helmet, ornamented with wings. He was still doing this when the clangor of the alert signal vibrated throughout Operations, pulling him reflexively to his feet. In another moment he was on the way to the briefing room.

Latecomers were still hurrying in when a general officer, Time Ops’ chief of staff, mounted the dais to get things started.

“The third berserker assault has begun, gentlemen. Win or lose, this will be the last. It’ll give us the final bearing we need to locate their staging area, twenty-plus thousand years down.”

There was an optimistic murmur heard.

“Don’t cheer yet. This third attack gives every indication of being a hard one to beat.” The general went through the unveiling of hastely assembled maps and models. “Like the previous attack, this one is aimed at a single man. And again there’s no doubt about the target’s identity—this time the name is Vincent Vincento.”

There was a murmur at that name. There would have been a reaction from almost any audience that could have been assembled on Sirgol. Even the half-educated of the planet had heard of Vincento, though the man was some three hundred and fifty years dead and he had never ruled a nation or raised an army.

Derron’s attention became concentrated. In his pre-war historical studies he had specialized in Vincente’s time and place. And that locale was also oddly connected with his private grief.

The briefing officer spoke on.

“Vincento’s lifeline is among the very few we have been able to protect by sentry action along their entire effective lengths. Of course, this doesn’t mean a berserker can’t get near him; but if one tries to kill Vincento or even attacks someone else within a couple of miles of him, we’ll be onto its keyhole in a couple of seconds, present-time, and cancel it out. The same if it should try to kidnap or capture Vincento or take any direct physical action at all against him. The protection extends along Vincento’s lifeline from before his birth until the completion of his last important work at the age of seventy-eight. We can assume the enemy knows about it and is planning something more subtle than direct physical assault.”

The general went into the technical evidence for this, then moved on to another point. “Chronologically, the enemy penetration is not more than a tenday before the start of Vincento’s famous trial before the Defenders of the Faith. There may well be a connection; suppose for example that a berserker could alter the outcome of the trial to get Vincento sentenced to death. It would be practically impossible for us to find a keyhole by tracing anything so indirect.

“And an actual death sentence would not seem to be necessary for the enemy’s purpose. Vincento is seventy years old at the time of his trial. If it should result in his being put to torture or thrown into a dungeon, his life would be effectively ended.”

Another general, seated in the front row, raised a hand. “Doesn’t some such treatment happen to him historically?”

“No. Historically, Vincento never spends a day of his life in prison. After his recantation at the trial, he spends the remainder of his life in physically comfortable house arrest, where he has time to lay the foundation of the science of dynamics—and on that, of course, our science and our survival heavily depend.”

The questioning general shifted once more in his front rank chair. “How in the world is an alien machine going to influence the outcome of a trial?”

The briefing officer stared gloomily at his charts. “Frankly we’ve still a shortage of good ideas on that. We doubt that it’ll try to play a supernatural role, since the last such attempt failed.

“Here’s something to keep in mind. Only one enemy device is engaged in this attack, and from all indications it’s physically small, only about the size of a man—which suggests the possibility that this one may be an android. Yes, I know, the berserkers have never, anywhere, been able to fabricate an android that would pass in human society as a normal person. Still, we hardly dare rule out the possibility that this time they’ve succeeded.”

The discussion turned to countermeasures. A whole arsenal of devices were being kept in readiness for dropping into the past, but no one could say yet what might be needed.

“The one really bright spot, of course, is that this attack’s within the time band where we can drop live agents, so we count on men on the spot as our main defense. People who’ll keep their eyes on Vincento from a little distance; people able to spot any significant deviation from history. They’ll need to know that particular period very well, besides having experience in Time Operations . . .”

Listening, Derron looked down at the new insignia he was still carrying in his hand. And then he began at last to pin them on.

Brother Jovann and Brother Saile topped yet another hill, a few miles along from the spot where they had met, and found they were soon to catch up with the coach that had passed them so speedily, Its loadbeasts unharnessed and grazing, it stood empty beside the broken gate of a high-walled enclosure at the foot of the next hill ahead.

On top of that hill there towered a great cathedral-temple, its stones too new for moss or weathering. Aloof against the lowering sky, it seemed to float above all human effort and concern.

The ancient road, after passing the broken-gated monastery at the foot of the hill, swerved to meet a bridge—or the stub of a bridge, rather, for all of the spans were gone, with most of the piers that had supported them. The river that had burst its bridge was raging, ravaging the lowlands on either side, obviously swollen to several times its normal flow.

On the other side of the river, beyond another stub of bridge, the town of Oibbog sat on secure high ground. A person or two could be seen moving in those distant streets. Coaches and loadbeasts were waiting there, too, interrupted in their journeys that were outbound from the Holy City.

Leaden clouds still mounted ominously up the sky. From them the river fled, lashed and goaded by distant flails of lightning, a great swollen, terrified snake that had burst its bonds and carried them away.

“Brother River will not let us cross tonight.”

When he heard this personification, Saile’s head turned cautiously sideways, as if he wondered whether he might be expected to laugh. But before he decided, the rain broke again, like a waterfall. Tucking up robes, both friars ran to join the occupants of the coach in whatever shelter the abandoned-looking monastery might afford.

III

A hundred miles away, in the capital of the vanishing Empire and the Holy City of the embattled Temple, the same day was warm and sultry. Only the cold rage of Nabur the Eighth, eighty-first in the succession of Vicars of the Holy One, stirred like a storm-wind the air of his private apartments.

The rage had been some time accumulating thought Defender Belam, who now stood waiting for it to be over. Accumulated and saved until now, when it could be discharged harmlessly, vented into the discreet ears of a trusted auditor.

The Vicar paused, distracted in his peripatetic tirade against his military opponents by a look down into a courtyard where workmen were unloading massive blocks of marble from a train of carts and a sculptor waited to choose one block for Nabur’s portrait-statue. What matter if his eighty predecessors had each been willing to let posterity decide such matters for them?

The Vicar turned suddenly, the skirts of his simple white robe swirling, and caught Belam wearing a disapproving face.

In his angry tenor the Vicar snapped: “When the statue is finished we will place it in the city’s Great Square, that the majesty of our person may be increased in the eyes of the people!”

“Yes, my Vicar.” Belam, for decades a defender and prince of the Temple, had seen them come and go. He was not easily perturbed by Vicarial temper.

“It is needful that we be shown increased respect. The infidels and heretics are tearing apart the world which has been given by God into our care!” The last sentence came bursting out, a cry from the inner heart.

“I have faith, my Vicar, that our prayers and our armies will yet prevail.”

“Prevail? Of course!” A sarcastic grimace. “Someday! Before the end of time! But now our Holy Temple lies bleeding and suffering, and we . . . we must bear many burdens. Many, Belam. You cannot began to realize, until you mount our throne.”

Belam bowed in silent reverence.

The Vicar paced again, skirts flapping. This time he had a goal. From his high-piled worktable his shaking fist snatched up a pamphlet already worn from handling—and perhaps from angry crumpling as well. A contributing and perhaps sufficient cause of today’s anger, computed Belam’s cool theologian’s brain, knowing what the pamphlet was. A small thorn, compared with others. But this one had stabbed Nabur in the tenderest part of his vanity.

Nabur turned round and shook the paper-covered pamphlet at him. “Because you have been away, Belam, we have not yet had the chance to discuss this with you. This back-stabbing abomination of Messire Vincento’s! This so-called Dialogue on the Movement of the Tides! In this he continues to promulgate his heresy-tainted dreams of reducing the solid world beneath our feet to a mere speck which flies around the sun. But that is not enough. No, not for him! No!” Belam frowned now in puzzlement. “What else, my Vicar?” Nabur advanced on him in a glow of anger. “The arguments of the pamphlet are cast in the form of a dialogue among three persons. And Vincento intends one of these fictional debaters—the one who defends traditional ideas, who therefore is described as ‘simple minded’ and “below the level of human intelligence’—he intends this person to represent ourself!”

“My Vicar!”

“He even places some of my own words in the mouth of this simpleton, so-called!”

Belam shook his head doubtfully. “Vincento has never been moderate in his disputes, which have been many. But I am not convinced that he has ever intended any irreverence to your person.”

“I make no doubt of it!” Vicar Nabur almost screamed. Then the most honored man in the world—possibly also the most hated, quite possibly also the most strained by what he saw as his appointed tasks—groaned incontinently and threw himself like a spoiled child into a chair.

Arrogance remained, as always, but the spoiled-child aspect did not last long. Irascible humors having been discharged, calm and intelligence returned. “Belam.”

“My Vicar?”

“Have you had a chance to read this pamphlet? It has been widely circulated.”

Belam gravely inclined his head.

“Then give us your considered opinion.”

“I am a theologian, my Vicar, and not an astronomer. But it seems to me that Vincento’s arguments in the pamphlet concerning the tides really prove nothing regarding the movement of the celestial bodies and are not even very accurate as regards the tides themselves—”

“He thinks we are fools, who will accept whatever argument he offers. And who will not realize it when he mocks us!” The Vicar stood up, then tiredly sat down again.

Belam ignored for the moment the theory that Vincento had intended personal mockery. “As the Vicar may possibly recall, I had occasion some years ago to write to Vincento regarding these speculations on the idea of a sun-centered universe. Then as now such theorizing caused me concern in my capacity as a Defender.”

“We recall very well. Messire Vincento has already been summoned to stand trial for his violation in this pamphlet of your injunction. What exactly did you write him, again?”

Belam spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “First, that mathematicians are quite free to calculate and publish whatever they wish regarding the celestial appearances—provided they remain strictly in the realm of hyopthesis.

“Secondly, it is quite a different matter to say that in fact the sun is in the center of the universe—that in fact our globe spins from west to east each day while revolving round the sun each year. Such statements must be considered very dangerous; though not precisely heretical, they are liable to injure faith by contradicting the Holy Writings.”

“Your memory, Belam, is even more than usually excellent. Just when did you write this letter of injunction?”

“Fifteen years ago, my Vicar.” Belam smiled briefly and dryly. “Though I must admit that I reread our archive copy this morning, after perusing the—um—pamphlet in question.

He became utterly serious again. “Thirdly and lastly, I wrote Vincento that if some real proof existed of the sun-centered universe he champions, we should then be forced to revise our interpretation of those passages in the Holy Writings which would appear to be contradicted. We have in the past revised our thinking, for example in regard to the roundness of the world.

“But, in the absence of any real proof, traditional authority and opinion is not to be set aside.”

Nabur was listening with great attentiveness. “It seems to us, Belam, that you wrote well, as usual.”

“Thank you, my Vicar.”

Satisfaction appeared mixed with anger in the Vicarial mien. “Certainly in this pamphlet Vincento has violated your injunction! The debater into whose mouth he puts his own opinions argues that in very truth our globe spins like a toy top beneath our feet—until the very last page. Then our argument, that God may produce what effect he likes in the world, without being bound by scientific causes—our argument is quoted by the simpleton, who has been wrong about everything else—quoted as coming from ‘a person of high learning and wisdom, supremely above contradiction’. And at this the other debaters piously declare themselves silenced. One cannot fail to see them, and their author, laughing up their sleeves!”

Vicar Nabur paused to regain breath and calm. Then he went on. “Now, Belam. Other than this weary argument on tides, which I agree is inconclusive, can there exist anywhere any evidence for Vincento’s spinning world? Anything he might impertinently produce at his trial, to . . . disrupt its course?”

Belam frowned thoughtfully at the floor. “My Vicar, I have through the years made an effort to keep abreast of astronomers’s thinking. I fear many of them, religious and laymen both, have become Messire Vincento’s enemies, largely because of his arrogance in claiming for his own all that these new devices, telescopes, find in the heavens. An arrogant and argumentative man is hard to bear and triply so when he is so often in the right.” Belam glanced up for a moment, but Nabur had not taken the description as applying to anyone but Vincento.

The Defender of the Faith went on: “But still I believe that most astronomers now perform their calculations using the mathematical assumption that the planets, or some of them, revolve about the sun. Of course such an idea is not original with Vincento, nor is the idea that our globe is only a planet. It seems these ideas make the mathematics of celestial movement somewhat more elegant and satisfying; fewer epicycles need be included in the orbits to make them fit the circular form—”

“You say Vincento makes the mathematics more elegant. But can he have proof, mathematical or otherwise? Plain evidence of any kind?”

“I would say rather the contrary.”

“Ha!”

Belam gestured with his scholar’s hands, frail fingers unsure of technicalities, but till grasping firmly what they had to grasp. “It seems that if our globe did make a yearly journey round the sun, the relative positions of the stars should appear to us to change from month to month as we approached certain constellations or drew away from them. And no such displacement of stars can be observed.”

“Ha!”

“Of course it is possible to argue that the stars are simply too distant for our measurements to show such displacement. My Vicar, I fear that no astronomer can prove Vincento wrong, though some would dearly love to do so. The celestial appearances would seem to be essentially the same, whether we go round the sun or it goes round us.

“Now, as I wrote Vincento, where there is lack of certainty we have no excuse for turning our backs on tradition and on the plain meaning of the Holy Writings. We of the Temple have been entrusted by God with the duty to defend the truth. And, my Vicar, what I wrote Vincento fifteen years ago is still true today—I have never been shown any proof of the motion of the world we stand on. And so I cannot believe that any such proof or any such motion exists.”

The Vicar raised his hands, then clamped them down upon the arms of his ornate work-chair, though his face had gentled in regret. “Then it is our decision that you and the other Defenders must proceed with the trial.” As Nabur spoke on, his anger gradually returned. “No doubt he can be convicted, of violating your injunction against teaching a doctrine liable to injure faith. But understand, we have no wish to visit any great punishment upon our erring son; in charity we grant that he intended no direct insult to our person. He is only headstrong and stubborn. And intemperate in debate! He must learn that he cannot set himself up as a superior authority on all matters, spiritual and temporal . . . did he not once even attempt to lecture you on theology?”

Belam inclined his head and sharply warned himself to guard against taking any personal satisfaction in Vincento’s coming humiliation.

“Ah, I could curse the man! In the past, we have been the first to heap praise on his achievements. We have granted him hours of private audience; we have shown him friendliness in a degree we do not always grant to princes. Before our ascending to this chair, we once even wrote a pamphlet in his praise! And now, how are we repaid?”

“I understand, my Vicar.”

IV

“I see that you have requested assignment to one particular time, Colonel Odegard,” said the examining psychologist. “The two days Vincento spends near the town of Oibbog on the way to his trial, waiting to cross a flooded river. Had you any particular reason for wanting those two days?”

“Just that I know the locale very well. I once spent a long holiday there, and it was one of those places that didn’t change much in three or four hundred years.” Of course like everything else on the surface, the town and cathedral of Oibbog were in the past tense now. And of course Derron did have his own inner particular reason; the long holiday there had been with her.

The psychologist threw one of his fast balls. “Have you any reason for wanting to be a field agent at all?”

One reason seemed to be Matt and Ay, their images blending into one kingly figure as they receded from the moving moment of the present, blending and seeming to grow larger with distance like a mountain when a man walked away from it. Derron didn’t know if he could put that into words, and he saw no need to try.

“I know the period very well, as I said. I believe I can do a good job. Like everyone else, I want to win the war. I want prestige, I suppose. Accomplishment.”

“I see.” The psychologist ruffled routinely through papers on his desk. “Just one more thing I want to bring up before approving you as agent material, Colonel. What are your personal religious views?”

“Oh. Well frankly. I think that gods and temples are fine things for people who need crutches. I haven’t yet found any necessary.”

“I see. I raise the point because of the dangers inherent in sending back to Vincento’s time anyone likely to find himself personally involved in the issues of that time. Taking sides. You as an historian know better than I how thick the air is back there with dogma and doctrine. Religious controversy and warfare.”

“I understand.” Derron shook his head calmly. “No, I’m no fanatic; I’ll play any part that’s necessary. I’ll be a rabid monk and spit on Vincento if required.”

“That’s all right, then. But I rather think you’ll do better as a traveling scholar.”

Operations gave him a name—Valzay—and started to build for him a character who had never historically existed and rushed him into preparation with about a dozen other agents, mostly male. Each agent was to stay watchfully near Vincento during a day or so of the critical period of his life.

The training and preparation was rushed and rugged, beginning with the surgical implantation of communications transducers in jawbone and skull, so an agent could be in contact with Operations without being seem to mumble aloud. Amid fatigue and concentration Derron noticed almost without surprise that Lisa was now employed in Operations, one of the calm-voiced girls who relayed orders and information to sentries, and would do the same for slaveunit operators or live agents in the field.

He had little free time and made no effort to use any of it to speak to her. Then one day as he sat resting between training sessions, Lisa came passing by and stopped.

“Derron, I want to wish you success.”

“Thanks. Pull up a chair, if you like.”

She did. “Derron, I shouldn’t have accused you of killing Matt. I know that wasn’t your intention and it wasn’t your fault. If Matt’s death had caused her anything more than brief sorrow at a friend’s loss, she did not show it now.

Derron said abruptly: “You and I might have had—something, Lisa. Perhaps not the whole thing there can be between a man and a woman, but still something good. At least I thought we might.”

“I had some feeling like that about—Matt. But that wouldn’t have been enough for me.”

He went on hurriedly: “As far as anything permanent and tremendous, well I’ve tried that already once in my life. And I’m still up to my neck in it, as you may have noticed. I’m sorry, I’ve got to get moving.”

And he got up out of his chair and did so.

The experts dressed him in suitable clothing, slightly worn. In his haversack they placed a reasonable supply of proper food, and in his wallet a moderate sum of proper money, coins of silver and gold and a forged letter of credit on an Empire City bank. They hoped he would not need much money nor get as far as the Holy City. But just in case.

Hung around Derron’s neck was an abominably carved wooden wedge-symbol, big enough to conceal the bulk of his communicator and too ugly for anyone to want to steal. If anyone was moved to wonder, it was a present from his wife.

In an arsenal off Stage Three, they issued him a sturdy traveler’s staff, which was a more effective weapon by far than it appeared to be, and then at last they were ready to drop him.

All the agents were going to be launched within half a minute, to emerge on different days and in different places. Their training and preparation had been too hurried and too individualized for them to get to know one another very well; hut for a few minutes there was joking camaraderie in Stage Three as the masquerade-costumed group bade one another good luck and good berserker-hunting.

The launching file formed. Derron stood looking over the head of the agent ahead of him, a short man named Amling, who wore the garb of a traveling friar and who was to watch over Vincente on the two days preceding Derron’s shift. on the count, the line moved briskly forward, disappearing one figure after another. Amling vanished. Then in a long stride Derron’s booted foot swung out over the mercurial circle and came down.

He was standing in darkness, in the open air. Except for a drizzle of rain, there was silence all about him, a lonely silence in which this materialization must have been unseen. Good.

As his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom, he made out that the hard surface under his boots did seem to be that of the old Empire road which passed through Oibbog. It seemed that the launching people had scored a bull’s-eye, spatially. Whether he had arrived at the proper time remained to be seen, though the rain was as it should be.

Subvocalizing, he tried to reach Operations for a routine communications check; but some kind of paradox-loop seemed to be blocking contact. One ran into such things, and one would hope they would not last.

When he felt sure no one was near, he opened his staff at one end and consulted the compass thus revealed to make sure he had the right direction ahead of him. Then he began to walk. Lightning flashed distantly at intervals, but the rain was slowly diminishing. He drew deep breaths of the washed air.

The transducer behind his ear twinged suddenly. “Odegard, can you read me yet? It’s plus two days since you dropped. Time scale has been slipping.”

“Affirmative. I’m about plus five minutes since dropping. Still on the road at night in the rain.” Derron was tapping along with his staff to keep from floundering off the pavement into the mud.

“You’re blurring on the screens. But we think we dropped you about two miles from the cathedral, further than we intended. Have you ascertained your exact location yet?”

“Negative. How’s the game going?”

“All the agents ahead of you are back with us, no problems. Except Amling. We haven’t been able to reach him, maybe just because of the time-slippage. Listen, Odegard, keep your eyes open. If you’re more than about two miles from Vincento, a violent attack on you will be possible—”

The waning lightning flared up, obligingly showing Derron his road running straight for some distance ahead, with the dim brooding cathedral at last visible to him on its faroff hill. Much nearer, the lightning also showed him a shiny object lying in the center of the road, lying atop what seemed to be a line scratched or dug perpendicularly across the way.

“Stand by, Operations.” Derron made his way cautiously up to the wet, soft thing, prodded it with a toe and waited for the lightning, which came again to show him Amling’s naked body. “Never mind looking in the blur for Amling’s lifeline. I guess he came down outside the safety zone too.”

He knelt briefly over the body, gripping his weapons staff while his eyes searched the rainy night as best they could, and described the situation. The line had been scratched at precise depth across the road by some tool or cybernetic limb that sliced stone like cheese; quite likely the same implement that had removed the back of Amling’s head. “Maybe it marked the boundary line of violence for us; just to let us know that it’s aware of it.”

Derron did not dawdle there. For a time he walked backward toward Oibbog, staff ready, trying to probe with eyes and ears the rainy night as he retreated from it. Not that his senses, or his reactions, were likely to be good enough if the enemy was there.

But he was spared. The berserker had killed in passing, where it could do so safely, and then had gone on about its real business.

V

By the time Derron reached the place where the road bent sharply to the left toward the wash-out bridge, the lightning had gone on over the horizon, so he felt rather than saw the bulk of the hill and oathedral ahead of him and above. But close by the side of the road he could now make out the monastery wall, the broken gate and, just inside the gateway, Vincento’s coach deserted in the puddles. From the shelter of a cloister came the gentle mumbling and grunting of loadbeasts. Derron paused only a moment before plodding through the gate and across the soggy earth to the entrance of the main building.

He made no effort to be quiet, and the dark entrance promptly emitted a challenge: “Who’s there? Stand and give our name!”

The dialect was one Derron had expected. He stopped, and as the beam of a lantern flicked out at him, he answered: “I am Valzay of Mosnar, mathematicus and scholar. From the coach and animals I see here, I judge that you within are honest men. And I have need of shelter.”

A door creaked, and behind the door the lantern retreated. “Step for’ard, then.”

Derron advanced slowly. When he had gotten in out of the rain he found himself in what had been the common room of the monastery, facing a pair of soldiers. One of these was armed with a crude pistol and the other with a short sword; judging by their uniforms, they were from a mercenary company.

When they could see his gentleman’s clothes more plainly, their manner became more or less respectful. “Well, sir, how d’you come to be a-wandering afoot and alone?”

He told how his skittish loadbeast, scared by lightning, had run off with his light sulky. A plague on the animal! If he could catch it in the morning, he’d have some of its hide off! With whip-cracking vehemence he shook water from his hat.

Derron had an effortless feel for acting when there was a need. The soldiers chuckled, relaxed most of their vigilance, became willing to chat. There was certainly plenty of room here for another boarder—the proprietary monks had left long ago. The place was no tavern with girls and ale; even firewood was in short supply, but the roof did keep the rain off. Yes, they were from a mercenary company, one now in the pay of the Holy Temple. Their captain with the bulk of his men was in Oibbog, which was just across the river.

They still harbored some suspicion of Derron—he might conceivably be a scout for some well organized band of brigands—so they did not. tell him how many soldiers had been caught on this side of the torrent when the bridge collapsed. He did not ask, of course, but he gathered that there were not very many.

“And if the cap’n can’t do more’n wave to us for the next couple days, why that’s all right with us, hey what?”

“Naw, no one else but the old gentleman as owns the coach and his servant an’ his driver. And a pair of friars. Plenty empty cells, sir, so take your pick. One’s about as damp as the next.”

Derron murmured his thanks and, with some brief help from the lantern, groped his way down a passage and into a vacant cell, doorless now like all the others. Built against the rear wall was a wooden bunk frame that had not yet been ripped out for firewood, and on that he sat down. The rush of events had left him a little numb; he still could not quite grasp that Vincent Vincento was here somewhere within a few meters of him, might even be the author of the snore that echoed faintly down the passage.

Derron streached out on the wooden frame, knapsack under his head; genuinely fired, he found himself dozing toward sleep. His thoughts as consciousness dulled were filled not with Vincento or time travel or even berserkers, but simply with the sound of fading rain and the freshness of the infinite dean atmosphere around him. It was the theme of resurrection . . .

He had been asleep for a few minutes when Operations put a throbbing behind his right ear. He came wide awake at once and tucked his carven wedge-symbol closer under his chin.

“Odegard, you’re in the monastery all right?”

“Affirmative.”

“Good. Now we’re getting our screens tuned in. There are fourteen lifelines in or near that monastery-temple complex, counting your own. One of course is Vincento’s. One seems to be an unborn child’s, you know how they show on a screen in dots and dashes.”

Derron mused subvocally. “Let’s see. Me, Vincento, his two servants, and the two soldiers I’ve seen. That makes six. And they said there were two friars. Eight, which would leave six more unaccounted for. Probably four more soldiers and a campfollower who’s picked up something she won’t want to carry—though that one soldier did say something about there being no girls. Anyway, I suppose your idea is there may be some apparent person here who has no lifeline showing on your screens—our hypothetical berserker-android.”

“That’s precisely our idea, yes.”

“Tomorrow I can count noses and we’ll see . . . wait.”

At the entrance of Derron’s cell a shape of lesser blackness became discrete and moved. The figure of a hooded friar, utterly faceless in the gloom, came a halfstep inside before halting abruptly and muttered a few indistinguishable words that might have been an apology for entering the wrong cell. The figure then withdrew as silently it had come.

Derron was gripping his staff, pointing it at the doorway. “Just had a short visit from someone. Or maybe from something. Maybe that’s where Amling’s robe went.”

Hours passed before Derron dozed again.

When Vincento was awakened in darkness to find himself bedded amid damp straw, with bare stone walls close about him, he knew a moment of sinking terror. The worst had already happened, and he lay in the Defender’s dungeon. The terror was deepened when he saw the monk-hooded figure bending over him. He could see in the moonlight which filtered now through the tiny window. Evidently the rain was over—

The rain—of course, he was still on his way to the Holy City for his trial!

The intensity of his relief was such that Vincento accepted his being awakened almost with courtesy. “What is it?” he gasped, sitting up on his shelf of a bed, pulling his traveling-rug closer about his shoulders. His manservant Will slept on a bundled mound on the dark floor.

The visitor’s hooded face could not be seen; the visitor’s voice was a sepulchral whisper: “Messire Vincento, come alone to the cathedral tomorrow. At the crossways of nave and transepts you will receive good news, from your friends in high places.”

Could Nabur or Belam be sending him some secret word? Or, more likely, was this some Defenders’s trickery? A man summoned to trial was not supposed to discuss the matter with anyone.

“It will be good news, Messire Vincento. Come alone and be willing to wait if you are not met at once. And do not seek to know my name or face.”

Vincento held his silence; he would commit himself to nothing. But the visitor, satisfied that the message had been heard, melted away into the night.

When Vincento awakened again, it was from a pleasant dream. He had been back on the estate provided for him by the Senate of his city, safe in his own bed, with his mistress’s warm body solid and comforting beside him. In reality the woman had been gone for some time—women no longer meant very much—but the estate was still there. If only they would let him return to it in peace!

He had been awakened this time by the touch on his face of a shaft of morning sunlight, which came striking into his cell from the high thin window of the opposite cell across the corridor. As he lay recalling with curiosity his strange midnight visitor, the sun-shaft was slowly moving away from his face. That motion made it instantly, for him, a golden pendulum of subtle torture.

He faced also the pendulum of choice. His mind could swing one way, tick, and meet in foresight the shame of swallowed truth and pride, the humiliation of an enforced recanting. And the other way, tock, there would be the breaking agony of the boot or the rack, or slower destruction in a buried cell.

Oh, of course, the crude physical torture was a remote threat only. He would have to be very obstinate and outspoken before the Defenders would go that far with him. But it was not impossible. They would say that a stubborn defendant forced them to employ such means.

So his pendulum of choice was not real; he had no real choice but to recant. Let the sun move as they want it to. Let it whirl round the globe in an insane yearly spiral, to please arrogant fools who thought they could read all the secrets of the universe in a few dusty pages of the Holy Writings.

Lying on his back, Vincento raised a hand veined with ropy vessels against the slow-swiveling torture-blade of the sun. But the sun would not be stopped in its motion by any man’s hand. It mocked him all the more, making bright translucent wax out of the oldness of his fingers.

On the floor, Will stirred sluggishly in his rug-cocoon. Vincento barked him awake and chased him out to rouse the coachman Rudd, who slept beside the beasts—Rudd to look at the river’s level, Will to start getting something together for breakfast.

Left alone, he began the slow humiliating process of getting his aging bones unlimbered and ready for what the day might bring. In recent years his health had been poor. But he was not sick now, only old. And yes, he was afraid.

By the time Will came to inform him that a fire and hot tea were ready in the monastery’s common room, Vincento was ready also.

With mild surprise he found a new arrival in the common room, a youngster who introduced himself as Valzay of the distant land of Mosnar. Valzay made, as he put it, a modest claim to scholarship. And for a wonder he was decently respectful—he looked at Vincento with genuine, if restrained, awe and murmured that even in his distant homeland Vincente’s discoveries were known and praised.

Vincento acknowledged all this with pleasant nods, sipping his morning tea, wondering if this Valzay was the bearer of the good news he was supposed to hear from someone in the cathedral. Anyway he was not going to rush up there at once; Rudd reported that the river was no longer rising, but still too high and dangerous at this point for anyone to think of fording it. One more day, maybe.

So Vincento took his time consuming tea and a little food, told Rudd to give the two friars something if they came round, then strolled leisurely out into the sunshine to warm his bones. If he came late to his trial, there were plenty of witnesses here to tell the reason. Let the Defenders inveigh against the river, if they liked. No doubt it would dry up for them. No doubt all of nature could be made to do their bidding if they but threatened it enough.

But he must begin to practice his humility. He called to Will to bring him his writing materials from the coach, and he went to sit alone in the sun outside the broken monastery gate, with one tumbled block of stone for a bench and another for a table.

It was really about time he started writing his statement of recantation for the trial. Of course, the accused was not supposed to know why he had been summoned—probably the Defenders’s first question would be whether he had any idea of what he was charged with. But in his case there could hardly be any doubt. It had been fifteen years since the warning, which Vincento had halfforgotten; but when the summons came, he realized he had made enemies among men who never forgot anything.

The first paper he pulled from his portable escritoire was the old letter from Defender Belam. Involuntarily Vincento’s eye went at once to the words: “. . . no proof of our globe’s motion exists, as I believe, since none has been shown to me.”

No proof. Vincento wiped at his forehead with a tremulous hand. Now, with mortal fear to enforce bleak clarity of thought, he could see that the arguments he had conjured up from tides and sunspots really proved nothing about the motion of sun and planets. The truth about those motions had come to him before he had ever thought of proving it—he had looked long through telescopes, he had thought long and deeply, his mind weighing the sun and grasping at stars and comets; and truth had come through some inward door, like—just like a revelation.

His enemies who cried him down were blind and stupid in their refusal, or their inability, to see. And yet he knew that those who were to sit as his judges were shrewd logicians, within their limitations. If only there were something firm that he could set simply and incontrovertibly before them . . . oh, what would he not give!

His mind ached, and his fists clenched, his very guts contracted at the thought. If he had one solid simple proof he would risk all, he would dare anything to confront and confound them with it, to rub their long arrogant noses in the very obvious truth!

But since there was nothing to support this mood of glorious defiance, it soon passed. The truth was he was old and afraid, and he would recant.

Slowly he got out pen and ink, and slowly he began his first draft. From time to time he paused, sitting in the sun with closed eyes, trying not to think.

VI

Derron counted seven soldiers round the breakfast fire and found each of them overjoyed to accept a swallow of brandy from his traveling flask and willing enough to talk. No, there was no one else in the monastery or cathedral or nearer than the town across the river. Not that they knew of.

When he was alone a few minutes later, Derron did some subvocal mumbling. “Operations? Count the lifelines here again. I make it thirteen of us. If you can make it twelve, then one of my smiling companions has clockwork for guts. But if you come out with fourteen again, then either there’s some bandit or deserter lurking in a corner or you’re misreading. I think you’re misreading that dotted line, anyway; I consider it unlikely that any of us here is pregnant, since we’re all men.” Operations was apologetic. “We’ll recheck right away; you know it’s not easy reading these things.” After finishing their morning meal and emptying Derron’s brandy flask, most of the soldiers settled down to serious loafing. Rudd, Vincento’s coachman, led his loadbeasts forth in search of grass. Following them through the gate, Derron located Vincento, sitting peacefully alone and apart. Well and good.

Remembering his mythical loadbeast and sulky, Derron put on an exasperated expression and strolled along the road toward the bridgestump, scanning the muddy fields on either side as if in search of his property.

At the bridge-stump were the two friars, gray cowls thrown back from their unremarkable heads. They seemed to be talking of ways in which the bridge might sometime be rebuilt. Derron knew that within a year or two, the river would be spanned here by new arches of stone. And those arches would still be standing solidly more than three hundred years later, when a young postgraduate history student would come on a hiking tour with the girl he loved, enthusiastic about seeing the town and cathedral of Oibbog . . . the river would look much different then, gentler of course and with more trees along its banks. While the stones of the road would still look much the same . . .

“May the Holy One give you a good day, esteemed sir!” It was the stouter of the friars whose voice broke in upon the start of reverie.

The interruption was welcome. “Good day to you also, reverend brothers, in His name. Does the river still rise?”

The thinner friar had a loving face. In hands all bone and tendon he held a chunk of masonry, as if he meant to start this minute to rebuild the bridge. “The river falls now, sir. How goes the path of your life, up or down?”

The falsehood about beast and buggy seemed dreary and unnecessary. “That can hardly be an easy question for any man to answer.” Seven or eight of the local peasantry had materialized out of mud and distance and were plodding their barefoot way along the drying bank of the torrent toward the bridgestump. One walking in front swung proudly in his hand a string of large and silvery fish, fresh enough to be still twitching and twisting.

A few paces away the peasants halted. Together they bowed rather perfunctorily in Derron’s direction; he was not dressed finely enough to overawe anyone, and plainly he was not the one they had come to see. The man with the fish began talking to the friars, and almost at once others interrupted him, all squabbling over who had the right to speak first and who the right of disposal of the fish. They had come to strike a bargain. Would the holy brothers accept one of these fine fish (“From me!” “From me, Holy Brother, it was my fishline!”) and in return say some potent prayers for the giver’s crops?

Derron turned away from what gave promise of becoming a nasty quarrel among the peasants to see that Vincento was still alone. And the full sunlit view of the Cathedral of Oibbog caught Derron unawares.

The tip of the central spire held its symbolic wedge two hundred and sixty feet above the flattened hilltop. The stones of tower and wall, of arch and flying buttress were rich clear gray, almost shining in the morning light. Inside, the stained glass would be living flame along the eastern wall. There was only one sight in all the world like this, and he had seen it only once before, with his beloved at his side. If air and grass were now alive again, surely she too must be alive and somewhere near where he might reach her. The resurrected reality before him was at the moment more convincing than any thought or. logic. At any moment now he might hear her voice, might be able to reach out and touch . . .

There was a splash nearby. The stout friar was wearing a caricature expression of anger, disappointment and surprise, while the thinner one stood with a hand stretched out over the water. As Derron watched, a big fish jumped and splashed again; one of the slippery catch had evidently escaped.

. . . touch her warm and living skin. The way her hair moved in the wind came back to him now, with the clarity of something seen only a minute ago.

His feet took him away from the bridge, back along the road. He saw without really thinking that Vincento still sat alone in the sun.

The hill raised its cathedral before Derron, and his feet began a steady climb.

Jovann was looking sadly at the peasants, while he addressed the splasher in the water. “Brother Fish, I have given you liberty not because we do not need food, but so you may be able to praise God, who sends all blessings—the fish to the angler, or freedom to the fish. We men so often forget to be thankful!”

The fish splashed and leaped and splashed again. As if the pain of the hook or the time spent gilling air—or something else—had driven it quite mad.

Jovann looked down at this watery uproar in distress. “Be still now, Brother Fish. Enough! Live in the water, not the painful air. Give praise and thanks as a fish may naturally do!”

The splashing stopped. The last ripples and foam were swept away downstream.

Every peasant’s hands were raised in the wedge-sign, and they darted their eyes at one another as if they would have liked to run but dared not. Brother Saile’s face gaped as blankly as had the fish’s, as his eyes swung from Jovann to the river and back again.

Jovann beckoned Saile away and said to him: “I am going apart for an hour, to pray the Holy One to cleanse me of anger and pride. And for these poor men’s crops. Do you likewise.” And Jovann walked away alone, following the riverbank in the opposite direction from the peasants.

As Derron climbed the steps that switchbacked up the face of the cathedral hill, it crossed his mind that at this moment in time the genes of the girl he loved were scattered in the chromosomes of some two thousand ancestors. Only in such a tenuous sense was she alive today.

He had never forgiven her for dying, for being helplessly killed with all the other millions, for emptying his world. So, he told himself, forgive her now, today. Get it all over with, out of your system once and for all, so you can be some good to yourself.

Now the roof of the monastery was bedew the level of his climbing feet. And now his eyes rose above the level of the paved space before the cathedral door.

Here all seemed to him just as he remembered it. He stood upon the very stones where her feet and his would one day stand, facing the same hedges and statues along the cathedral’s front. Holiday and love might still be true, war and grief no more than bad dreams.

But it was she who was the dream now, who would never again be anything more. For a moment the knowledge was almost too much, still—he thought he might be going to kneel down or fall down or cry aloud—but then it could be accepted, at last, at long long last.

He was not going to collapse or even cry out. They had looked out over the valley from here and talked about building their home on some nearby spot, the home for the kids they were going to have. Now he was just going to stand here and go on living.

The crisis building up in him since he had known he might see Oibbog again slowly faded. Peace and stillness reigned.

He had still to go into the building, where he had spent a morning helping her photograph stained glass. He wished he could be lucky enough to find the supposed author of the universe inside; Derron would have a few pointed questions to ask.

The main door was just as solidly hung as he remembered it; he wondered briefly if a wooden door might last three hundred years. No matter.

He tugged it open and heard the booming reverberation of the broken closure come back from the cavernous interior. And only then did he recall that his staff with all its weaponry was resting back in his monastery cell. No matter; immediate violence from the berserker was not a danger.

He went in and paced down the center of the enormous nave. There was nothing to be seen of God or berserker, nor for that matter of deserter or pregnant waif whose lifeline might be showing up to confuse operations.

There would seem to be room in here for all of them to hide. The arched nave was about three hundred feet long and a hundred feet high for most of that length. Construction had not been quite completed when the workmen had been ordered or frightened off the job; much scaffolding still surrounded columns and clung to walls, and a few abandoned tools were very slowly gathering dust where they had been set down.

Whether because of the combatants’s reverence or superstitious awe, or only by chance, war had not trampled here. Even the stained glass was all intact, splintered only by the sun coming in to fire the gloom with richness. This main body of the temple was now no more than a few decades old. The paving stones of the nave, the wide steps leading to side chapels, all were flat and unworn; three centuries and more of random footsteps would be needed to shape them into standard distribution curves. Here and there the workmen’s cables and ropes hung from the scaffolding, as steady in the motionless air as if carved from stone themselves.

As Derron approached the intersection of transepts and nave, a movement caught the corner of his eye. One of the friars, hood worn over his head, here in God’s house, was approaching him.

Derron cleared his throat. “Reverend Brother.” And then it struck him as odd, that one of the two men he had left at the bridge should have hurried here ahead of him. Peering closely, he saw that the face beneath the cowl was not quite a face. The hands reaching to grab him as the figure shot forward were dummy flesh, split open now to show the steel claws.

A little mob of peasants was coming up the road from the bridgehead, babbling loudly of miracles and fish. The noise was distracting, and in truth Vincento was only too ready to let himself be distracted from his humiliating task. He summoned Will, gave him the escritoire and papers to take in charge and then turned his own steps restlessly upward in the fine sunlight.

He had decided that the meeting supposedly arranged in the cathedral was probably some Defenders’s snare. Let them try! he would see through it before they had gotten very far. No more than the oafs who called themselves scholars were clerics Vincento’s equals in cleverness. It was only the Defenders’s power he respected and feared, never their brains.

He was patient with his old legs, and so they served him well enough on the climb. After a pause at the top to breathe, he entered at the cathedral’s main door, tugging it firmly closed behind him. He devoutly hoped that no one was going to meet him to offer sympathy. A sympathizer always had at least some implied claim to be the equal—or even the superior!—of the one he tried to console. Pah!

Vincento strolled through the nave, a stone-sealed space too vast to give the least sense of confinement. To his right and left, columns towered in their parallel rows. With distance the apparent gap between each column and the next diminished, until at fifty paces each row became opaque as a wall. No matter where a man stood inside this unpartitioned space, half of it would always be blocked from his view—more than half, if one counted the areas of the transept-arms and the chapels.

When he reached the appointed meeting place, the crossways of nave and transepts, Vincento could look directly up nearly two hundred feet, into the shadowed interior of the mighty spire. There were workmen’s platforms there too, reached by ladders mounting from the clerestory level, where must be the upper end of some stair that coiled up within the wall from floor level.

In this temple there were no chandeliers and no breezes to swing them if they had existed. If in Vincento’s youth this had been his parish house of worship, he could hardly have begun, during a drowsy Sabbath sermon, to discover the laws of pendulums.

A single cable of great length descended thinly from the uttermost dark interior of the spire. Vincento’s eye followed it down, to find that after all there was a pendulum here, at least in potential. For a bob, there hung on the end of the long cable a ball of metal that would be heavy as a man. This weight was caught and held by the merest loop of cord to one of the huge columns at a corner of the nave-transept intersection.

Looking up and down, up and down again tended to make an old man dizzy. Vincento rubbed his neck. But what use could the builders have had for such a patriarch of pendulums? It could, Vincento supposed, be something they swung when hard stone and mortar had to be demolished. Or was it only a plumb-line made gigantic?

Whatever they had intended it for, it was a pendulum. The restraining tether of cord, with its single knot, looked insubstantial. Vincento thrummed the taut little cord with his finger, and gently the long long cable whipped and swayed. The massive weight made tiny bobbing motions, dipping like a ship at anchor.

Quickly the oscillations died away; the cathedral stillness regained ascendancy. Cord and weight and cable were once more as steady as the stone columns in the still gray air. The pendulum-ship was drydocked.

Set sail, then! On impulse Vincento tugged once at the end of the knotted restraining cord. And with startling ease the knot dissolved.

Starting from rest, the weight for a moment seemed reluctant to move. Even after it had undeniably begun its first swing, it still moved so slowly that Vincento’s eye raced involuntarily once more up into the shadows of the spire, to see how it was possible that mere length of cord should so delay things.

A man might have counted four without haste before the weight for the first time reached the center, the low-point, of its swing. Almost touching the floor, it passed that center in a smooth fast rush and immediately began to slow again, so that it needed four more counts to climb the gentle gradient of the far half of its arc. Then an unmeasurable instant’s pause, not quite touching a column on the other side of the crossways, before the weight edged into its returning motion.

Back and forth it went, in a perfectly straight track about ten yards in length. Vincento’s eye could find no diminution in the amplitude of the first half-dozen swings. He supposed that a heavy weight swinging so freely might continue to oscillate for many hours or even for days.

But wait. Vincento squinted at the pendulum. Holding his head motionless he watched it closely through another half dozen swings.

What was it he had come in here for? Oh yes, someone was perhaps going to meet him.

But this pendulum. He frowned at it and shook his head. He was going to have to make sure of something that he thought he saw.

Workmen’s sawhorses stood not far away. He dragged a pair of these to where he wanted them, then spanned them with a plank, which lay beneath the end of the pendulum’s arc and perpendicular to its direction. On the bottom of the swinging weight he had noticed a projection like a small spike—whatever it had been designed for, it would serve Vincento’s present purpose well. He laid a second board atop the first and readjusted his whole structure slightly. Now on each swing the spike passed within an inch of the topmost board.

Somewhere in here he had seen sand . . . yes, piled there in a mixing-trough, by the entrance to the first side-chapel. The sand was damp with the long spell of wet weather; he brought handfuls and dumped them on the upper board, where he patted and built the sand into a small wall, an inch or two high, along the board’s length. Then in an interval between swings he slid his upper board slightly forward, taking his sand-wall into the edge of the pendulum’s arc.

A neatly designed experiment, he thought. On its first return the moving spike notched his little sand wall delicately, tumbling a tiny clot of grains down die minute slope. Then the weight pulled its taut cable away again, taking another nibble of eternity.

Vincento held his breath, held his eyes from blinking as he watched the pendulum’s return. Now he heard for the first time the faint ghostly hissing of its passage.

The spike coming back to the wall of sand made a new notch, though one contiguous to the first. Then in movement huge and regular enough to be the cathedral’s stately pulse, the weight once more departed.

And the third notch was new again, by the same margin and in the same direction as the second. In three vibrations the plane of the pendulum had shifted its extremity sideways by half a finger width. His eyes had not deceived him earlier; it was creeping regularly clockwise.

Perhaps some slow untwisting of the cable? Then it should soon reverse itself, Vincento thought, or at least vary in amplitude. Again he stared up into the high shadows.

He would have to hang another pendulur. like this somewhere, someday, and study it at leisure. If he could. Even supposing that his health held out and he was spared prison, it would be difficult. Enclosed towers of this height were anything but common. In another temple or at some university, perhaps . . . but he had no intention of stooping to collaboration.

. . . suppose now that the sideways progression was not due to the cable unwinding. He thought he could feel that it was not—in somewhat the same way as, after study, he had come to feel the stability of the sun. This clockwise creeping had something too elemental about it for him to be able to credit a trivial cause.

Already the width of two fingers had been nibbled from the top of his little parapet of sand.

He wondered how the cable was fastened at the top. Younger legs than his would be required to find that out, and Vincento departed to get them. Several times in his passage down the nave he turned, frowning back at the pendulum as he might have stared at an unexpected star.

VII

Of it all, Derron had seen only an upper segment of the moving cable. He saw even that much with only one eye, for his face was being held with steady force against the rough planking of the high platform to which the berserker had carried him, helpless as a kicking infant. Inhumanly motionless, it crouched over him now, one chill hand gripping his neck and holding part of his garment gaglike in his mouth, the other hand twisting one of his arms just to the point of pain.

Obviously it had no intention of killing or crippling him. Still his captivity felt more like eternity than time, though measured by the meaningless regularity of the swinging cable. Having his prisoner, the berserker was content to wait, which meant that he had failed. It had at once known his communicator for what it was, had ripped the wooden carving from his neck and cracked it like a thin-shelled nut, squeezing the meat of metal and components into trash between its fingers.

Only when the cathedral door far below had boomed shut once more did eternity begin to come to an end. The berserker then let him go.

Slowly and painfully he raised his numbed body from the wood. Rubbing the arm that had been twisted, he turned to face his enemy. Under the cowl he saw a pattern of seamed metal that looked as if it might be able to open and slide and reshape itself. Was there plastic somewhere inside that could evert to become the mask of a human face? There was no way to tell that much, let alone guess what identity it might be able to wear.

“Colonel Odegard,” it said, in a voice machine-tailored to neutrality.

He waited for more, while the thing facing him on the high platform squatted on its heels, arms hanging limp. Like the face, the hands were ambiguous; they were not human now, but there was no saying what they might be able to become. The rest of the thing was hidden under the shapeless robe, which had probably once been Amling’s.

“Colonel Odegard, do you fear the passage from life to not-life?”

He didn’t know what he had expected to hear, but hardly that. “And if I do, what difference does it make?”

“Yes,” said the berserker. “What is programmed goes on regardless of any passage.”

Before he could try to make any sense out of that, the machine jumped precisely forward and grabbed him again. He struggled again, which of course made no difference. It tore strips from his coat, ripping the tough cloth with precise and even sounds. With the strips it gagged him again and tied him hand and foot tightly, but still not so that he felt hopeless of ever working free. It would not blunder into causing his death, here where it must be careful not to kill. When it had bound him, the machine paused for a moment, moving its cowled head like a listening man, searching the area with senses far beyond the human. And then it was gone, down the ladder in utter silence, like a giant cat or ape.

He strained desperately to get loose, choking curses on his gag.

From some village in the hills a second group of peasants had come along the road to the cathedral. It was Brother Saile they met first; their anxious faces fell even further when they learned he was not the saint and miracle-worker of whom the whole countryside was talking.

“Tell me, what is it you wish to see Brother Jovann about?” Saile inquired, his hands clasped with dignity across his belly.

They clamored piteously. For the past several days a great wolf had terrorized their little village, killing cattle and even a child and even—they swore it!—uprooting crops. They were isolated and very poor, with no powerful patron to give them aid of any kind, save only the Holy One himself! And now the saintly Jovann, who must and would do something. They were utterly desperate.

Brother Saile nodded, his face showing sympathy mixed with reluctance. “And your village is several miles distant? In the hills. Well—we shall see. Come with me, and I will put your case before good Brother Jovann.”

With a puzzled Will beside him, Vincente entered the cathedral once more and hurried down the nave. Rudd had bothered him, complaining of the scarcity of food for the loadbeasts. And then his old legs had rebelled against climbing the hill a second time. Now, when he got back to the still-swinging pendulum, more than an hour had passed since he had first set it in motion. The itiny battlement of sand had been demolished by continuous notches, up to the point where the pendulum’s plane had left it behind altogether. By now that plane had inched clockwise through ten or twelve degrees of arc.

“Will, you’ve helped me in the workshop. Now this is another such case, where you must do precisely what I say.”

“Aye, master.”

“First, keep in mind that you are not to stop or disturb the swinging of the cable here. Understood?”

“Aye.”

“Now I want you to climb; there seem to be ladders and platforms enough for you to go up all the way. I want to learn how this swinging cable is mounted, what holds it at the top. Look at it until you can draw me a sketch, you’re good at that.”

“Aye, I understand, sir.” Will craned his neck unhappily. “It’s a long bit o’ climbing, though.”

“Yes, yes, a coin for you when you’re down. Another when you’ve given me a good sketch. Take your time now and use your eyes. And do not disturb the cable’s swing.”

Derron had made only slight progress towardloosing his hands, when he heard clumsier feet than the berserker’s climbing toward him. Then between the uprights of the ladder Will’s honest face came into view to predictably register shock.

“. . . bandit!” Derron spat, when his hands had been cut free and he could rid himself of the gag. “Must’ve been hiding in here somewhere . . . forced me up here and tied me up.”

Wondering and sympathetic, Will shook his head. “Likely he’d a slit your throat, sir, but didn’t want to do no sacrilege. Think he might still be here about?”

“No, I’m sure he was running away.”

“Long gone, then, by this time.” Will shook his head. “You’d better liven up your limbs, sir, before you starts to climb down. I’m going on up, bit of a job to do for master.”

“Job?”

“Aye.” Will was already climbing again, right into the spire.

Still on all fours, Derron peered over the edge of the platform. Vincento’s ginger-colored hair marked a toy figure more than a hundred feet below. Down there the mysterious moving cable ended in a dot which traced back and forth with sedate regularity . . .

Derron’s muscles locked, and he felt himself near falling. He had suddenly understood what Vincento was looking at, what Vincento had probably been studying all the while the berserker held Derron captive. Its earliest designers on old Earth had called it a Foucault pendulum.

VIII

“Honorable Vincento!”

Vincento looked around in surprise and some annoyance as the young man, Alzay or Valzay or whatever his name was, came hurrying toward him from the foot of the tiny stair by which Will had begun his climb.

Valzay rushed up, babbling some imbecilic story about a bandit, spouting pestiferous wordage that threatened to tangle Vincento’s thoughts.

“Young man, I suggest you give your recitation to the soldiers.” Now, if it was not the cable untwisting, and proved to be not some trick of the mounting above . . . certainly the bones of the cathedral were not creeping counterclockwise . . . but yet his mind strained forward into unknown territory . . .

“I see, Messire Vincento, that you have discovered my little surprise.” Derron saw very clearly how the game was certain to go, perhaps had gone already. But one desperate gamble was still open to him, and he took it.

“Your little surprise?” Vincento’s words became low and measured, while his brows knit as if presaging thunder. “Then it was you who sent that rascally friar to me in the night?”

Derron let the question of the friar pass. “It was I who arranged—this.” He gestured with proprietary pride at the pendulum, and in a few words he sketched the outline of a huge lie. How he had really been here a day before the other refugees, with friends to help him (this lie would not stand investigation, but if Derron’s plan succeeded, Vincento would never want to investigate) install the pendulum—while in his mind Derron visualized the berserker here, catlike, monkeylike, devilish, arranging mounting and cable and weight in order that: “. . . you see before you, Messire Vincento, a firm proof of the rotation of the globe!”

There was a start in the old eyes, but no real surprise; a desperate gamble had been justified, all right. Now Vincento had become a waiting statue, mouth twisted and eyes unblinking.

Derron went on: “Of course I have followed your example, distinguished sir, and that of a number of our contemporaries, in protecting my rightful claim to this discovery while keeping it secret yet a while, for my own advantage in further research. To this end have I sent anagram messages encoding the truth to distinguished persons in several parts of the world.

“Though as I say, sir, I had meant to reserve the secret yet a while, I cannot stand idly by during your present difficulties.”

“A proof of our globe’s rotation, you say.” The tone was blank, suspended.

“Ah, forgive me for not explaining! I had not thought it necessary—you see, the plane of the pendulum does not rotate, it is our globe that rotates beneath it.” Derron hesitated, as if it had just occurred to him that Vincento might be getting just a little slow and senile. Then he spoke on, more slowly and distinctly. “At the poles, this device will trace daily a full circle of three hundred and sixty degrees. At the equator it will appear not to rotate at all.” Mercilessly he poured out in detail his three-and-ahalf-centuries’ advantage of accumulated knowledge. “Between these extremes the rate of rotation is proportional to the latitude; here, it is about ten degrees per hour. And since we are in the northern hemisphere the direction of apparent rotation is clockwise . . .”

Will was shouting at his master from high above: “. . . she be mounted free to turn any way, but there be nothing turning her!” Vincento shouted up: “Come down!”

“. . . bit more study if ’ee wants a sketch . . .”

“Come down!” The thick lips spat it out.

Derron kept the pressure on, switching his emphasis now to remorseless generosity. “. . . my only wish of course now being to help you, sir, to come to your rescue. In bygone years you have accomplished very substantial things, very substantial, and you must not now be cast aside. My lance is at your disposal; I will gladly repeat this demonstration of my discovery for the authorities in the Holy City, so that the world may witness—”

“Enough! I have no need of help!” Vincento’s tone made the last word an obscenity. “You will not—meddle—in—my—affairs. Not in the least degree!”

Before Vincento’s terrible contempt and wrath, Derron found himself physically retreating, even as he realized that he had won his gamble—his wager that the old man’s pride was as monumental as his genius.

Derron stood in silence as Vincento, shrinking once more under his burdens of age and weariness and fear, turned away with a parting look of hatred. Vincento would never use the Foucault proof; he would never believe it. I-t was one direction in which he would nevermore want to investigate; he would force the whole thing from his mind if he could. The smallness and jealousy that were leading him to trial and humiliation existed not only in other men, but in himself.

Derron knew that Vincento at his historical trial would not only recant, he would go beyond what his judges asked or wanted of him and offer to write a new pamphlet, proving that the sun did after all move around the world of men.

My only wish being to help you, sir. Vincento’s figure dwindled to the end of the nave, and at last the door boomed shut behind him.

Now even Vincento could be forgotten for the moment, for real victory and hope were heady things. Getting away ahead of Will’s questions, Derron hurried out of the cathedral by a side door and skipped down the steep stairs toward the monastery. If the berserker had not also smashed the backup communicator hidden in his staff, he could tell the Modern world of victory.

The enemy had not bothered with anything in his cell. As he came near it, an emergency summons from Operations began to throb in the bone behind his ear.

Brother Saile was puffing, though he was making no effort to hurry along the narrow cattle-path that wound up and down hill through scrubby bushes and thin woods. Instead he hung back and with almost every puff of breath tried to discourage Brother Jovann’s progress. “I thought—to say a few prayers in the village—would have been sufficient. These peasants, as you know—are often foolish. They may have—greatly exaggerated—the depredations of this supposed wolf.”

“Then my own peasant foolishness is not likely to cause any harm,” said Jovann, leading on implacably. They were deep in the wolfs supposed domain; their peasant supplicants and guides had turned back through fear a quarter of a mile earlier.

“I spoke too harshly of them, may the Holy One forgive me.” Saile wheezed to the top of a hill and gathered breath for readier speech on the descent. “Now if this one beast has really caused in a few days all the death and damage they claim for it, or even half so much, it would be utter folly for us to approach it unarmed as we are. It is not that I doubt for an instant the inscrutable wisdom of Providence which can cause a fish to leap for joy after you have released it, nor do I doubt the story I once heard of the gentle little birds listening to your preaching. But a wolf, any wolf, is quite another . . .”

Brother Jovann did not appear to be listening very closely. He had paused briefly to follow with his eyes a train of scavenger-insects which crossed the path and vanished into the brush. Then he went on, more slowly, until a similar train appeared a little further along the trail. There Brother Jovann turned, walking noisily into the brush, leading his companion toward the spot where it seemed the two lines of insects must intersect.

IX

Staff in hand, Derron made the best cross-country time he could, running fifty steps and walking fifty.

“Odegard!” Operations had cried out. “There’s another lifeline just as vital as Vincente’s there with you. Or he was with you. Now he and one of the others have moved out a couple of miles. They’re about to leave the safety zone. You’ll have to protect them. They’ll be at the berserker’s mercy if it’s out there waiting.”

And of course it would be out there, in ambush or pursuit. The attack on Vincento had been in deadly earnest, like the first punch in a good one-two. But it was the second punch that was really intended as the killer. And humanity had left itself wide open.

Running fifty, walking fifty, Derron covered ground steadily along the bearing Operations had given him. He asked: “Just who am I looking for?”

And when they told him, he thought he should have guessed the name, should have been alerted by his first look into that gentle and loving face.

In the midst of the thicket there had been havoc. Days ago it had happened, for the tree branches that had been broken were now dead. And though insects were still busy among the wreckage of bone and gray fur on the ground, there was no longer much left for them to scavenge.

“This was a very big wolf,” said Brother Jovann, bending to pick up a piece of jawbone. The bone had been shattered by some violent blow, but this fragment still contained teeth of impressive size.

“Very big, certainly,” said Brother Saile, though he knew very little about wolves. He did not care to learn more and kept looking around him nervously.

Jovann was musing aloud. “Now, what manner of creature can it be that deals thus with a big male wolf? Even as I in my greed have sometimes dealt with the bones of a little roast fowl . . . but no, these bones have not been gnawed for nourishment. Only broken and broken again, as if by some creature who is even more wantonly savage than a wolf.”

The name of Brother Jovann, saint, symbol of gentleness and love meant something to Modern skeptics as well as believers, to both historians and laymen. Like Vincento, he had become a towering folkfigure, imperfectly understood.

“We’re just catching on to Jovann’s practical importance,” said Time Ops’ voice in Derron’s head. “Historically his lifeline goes on about fifteen years from your point, and all along the way it radiates support to other lines. What has been described as ‘good-turn-a-day stuff.’ These other lines tend to reradiate life support in turn, and the process propagates up through history. Our best judgment now is that the disarmament treaty three hundred years after Jovann’s death will fall through and an international nuclear war will wipe us all out in pre-Modern times if St. Jovann is terminated at your point.”

A girl’s voice came in briskly: “A new report for Colonel Odegard.”

Derron asked: “Lisa?”

She hesitated for just an instant; then, business first. “Colonel—the lifeline that was described to you earlier as having an embryonic appearance is moving out of the safety zone after the other two, at what seems an unaccountably high speed. We can give no explanation. You’re to bear five degrees left, also.”

“Understand.” Derron bore five degrees left, as near as he could judge. “Lisa?”

“Derron, they put me on because I said I’d tend strictly to business.”

“You do that.” He began to run once more, his breath coming in gasps. “I just wish—you were carrying my baby.”

There was a faint, completely feminine sound. But when Lisa’s voice came back intelligibly it was all business again, with more bearings to be given.

From the corner of his eye Brother Saile caught the movement of something coming toward them through the trees and bush; he turned, squinting under the afternoon sun, and with surprise at his own relative calm he saw that their search for a killer wolf had come to an end. Monster instead of wolf, perhaps, but he could not doubt it was the killer, come now to find the searchers.

Silent, poisonous and deadlylooking as a silver wasp, the mansized creature came at a catlike run through the scrub forest. Brother Saile understood that he should now try to lay down his life for his friend, he should shove Brother Jovann back and rush forward himself to distract the thing. And something in Brother Saile wanted to be that heroic, but his belly and his feet had turned to lead and would not let him. He tried at least to shout a warning, but even his throat was paralyzed by fear. At last he did manage to seize Brother Jovann by the arm and point.

“Ah,” said Jovann, coming out of a reverie and turning to see. A score of paces away the monster crouched on its four legs. Peasants glimpsing it might call it wolf. Shreds of gray cloth clung to it, as if it had been dressed and then had wolf-like torn itself out of the garment. Terrible and beautiful at once, it flowed like quicksilver two rapid strides closer to the men and then settled again into a crouching, silent statue.

“In God’s n-name come away!” Brother Saile whispered, through shivering jaws. “It is no natural beast. Come away, Brother Jovann!”

But Jovann only raised his hands and signed the horror with the wedge; he seemed to be blessing it rather than exorcising.

“Brother Wolf,” he said lovingly, “you do indeed look unlike any beast I have ever seen before, and I know not from what worldly parentage you may have sprung. But there is in you the spirit of life; therefore never forget that our Father above has created you, as He has created all other creatures, according to his own plan, so we are all children of the one Father.”

The wolf darted forward and stopped, stepped and stopped, inched and stopped again, in a fading oscillation. In its open mouth Saile thought he saw fangs not only long and sharp, but blurring with vicious motion like the teeth of some incredible saw. At last there came forth a sound, and Saile was reminded simultaneously of ringing swordblades and of human agony.

Jovann dropped to one knee, facing the monster more on a level. He spread his arms as if willing an embrace. The thing bounded in a blur of speed toward him, then stopped as if caught by a leash. It was still six or eight paces from the kneeling man. Again it uttered sound; Saile, half-fainting, seemed to hear the creak of the torture rack and the cry of the victim rise together.

Jovann’s voice had nothing to do with fear, but only blended sternness with its love.

“Brother Wolf, you have killed and pillaged like a wanton criminal, and for that you deserve punishment! But accept instead the forgiveness of all the men you have wronged. Come now, here is my hand. In the name of the Holy One, come to me and pledge that from this day on you live in peace with men. Come!”

X

As Derron came up at a staggering, exhausted run, he first heard a murmur of speech and then saw the figure of Brother Saile standing motionless.

Derron then lurched to a halt, raising his staff; but Saile was not looking at him, and Derron knew now that Saile was not the berserker. What Operations had said about the embryonic lifeline and what the berserker had said in the cathedral had at last fitted together to make a wondrous kind of sense. Three steps sideways brought Derron to where he could see what Saile was gaping at.

He was only in time to see the berserker-wolf take the last hesitant step of its advance. To see it raise one metal paw—and with its steel claw-fingers gently touch the kneeling friar’s extended hand.

“So, my guess was right, it had become a living thing,” said Derron. His head rested in Lisa’s lap, and he looked up past her face at the park’s treetops and imitation sun. “And as such, susceptible to St. Jovann’s domination. To his love. There’s no other way to put it.” Lisa stroked his forehead. “Are you eating up the pious legends?”

“Oh, there are rational explanations. The most complex and compact machine the berserkers ever built, shot up through twenty thousand years evolutionary gradient—something like life was bound to happen to it. Or so we say now. And Jovann and some other men have had amazing power over living things.”

“I looked up this particular pious legend,” said Lisa. “It says that after being tamed by St. Jovann, it lived like a pet dog in the village.”

“That would have been the original wolf. I suppose the berserker meant all along to kill the animal and take its place during the taming episode. But tearing the real wolf into little bits was an irrational, thing to do—if we’d known about that sooner we might have guessed. I might have guessed in the cathedral, when it babbled to me about passages between life and notlife. Or when it came to my cell in the night, for no reason valid to a machine. Anyway, Operations isn’t as trusting as Jovann and his biographers. We’ve got the thing in a cage in present-time while the scientists try to decide . . .”

Derron had to pause, for a young lady was bending over him with the intention of being kissed.       END

1968

STARSONG

Though his music was heavenly—could it charm the strange berserkers of Hell?

Forcing the passage through the dark nebula Taynarus cost the humans three fighting ships, and after that they took the casualties of a three-day battle as their boarding parties fought their way into Hell.

The Battle Commander of the task force feared from the beginning to the end of the action that the computer in command on the berserker side would destroy the place and the living invaders with it, in a last Gotterdammerung of destructor charges. But he could hope that the damped-field projectors his men took with them into the fight would prevent any nuclear explosion. He sent living men to board because it was believed that Hell held living human prisoners. His hopes were justified; or at least, for whatever reason, no nuclear explosion came.

The beliefs about prisoners were not easily confirmed. Ercul, the cybernetic psychologist who came when the fighting was over to investigate, certainly found humans there. In a way. In part. Odd organs that functioned in a sort-of way, interconnected with the nonhuman and the non-alive. The organs were most of them human brains, which had been grown in culture through use of the techniques that berserkers must have captured with some of our hospital ships.

Our human laboratories grow the culture-brains from seedlings of human embryo-tissue, grow them to adult size and then dissect them as needed. A doctor slices off a prefrontal lobe, say, and puts it into the skull of a man whose own corresponding brain-part has been destroyed by some disease or violence. The culture-brain material serves as a matrix for regrowth, raw material on which the old personality can re-impress itself. The culture-brains, raised in glass jars, are not human except in potential. Even a layman can readily distinguish one of them from a normally developed brain by the visible absence of the finer surface convolutions. The culture-brains cannot be human in the sense of maintaining sentient human minds. Certain hormones and other subtle chemicals of the body environments are necessary for the development of a brain with personality—not to mention the need for the stimuli of experience, the continual impact of the senses. Indeed some sensory input is needed if the culture-brain is to develop even to the stage of a template usable by the surgeon. For this input music is commonly employed.

The berserkers had doubtless learned to culture livers and hearts and gonads as well as brains, but it was only man’s thinking ability that interested them deeply. The berserkers must have stood in their computer-analogue of awe as they regarded the memory-capacity and the decision-making power that nature in a few billion years of evolution had managed to pack into the few hundred cubic centimeters of the human nervous system.

Off and on through their long war with men the berserkers had tried to incorporate human brains into their own circuitry. Never Bad they succeeded to their own satisfaction, but they kept dying.

The berserkers themselves of course named nothing. But men were not far wrong in calling this center of their research Hell. This Hell lay hidden in the center of the dark Taynarus nebula, which in turn was roughly centered in a triangle formed by the Zitz and Toxx and Yaty systems. Men had known for years what Hell was and approximately where it was, before they could muster armed strength enough in this part of their sector of the galaxy to go in and find it and root it out.

“I certify that in this container there is no human life,” said the cybernetic psychologist, Ercul, under his breath, at the same time stamping the words on the glassite case before him. Ercul’s assistant gestured, and the able-bodied spaceman working with them pulled the power-connectors loose and let the thing in the tank begin to die.

This one was not a culture-brain but had once been the nervous system of a living prisoner. It had been greatly damaged, not only by removal of most of its human body, but by being connected to a mass of electronic and micromechanical gear. Through some training program, probably a combination of punishment and reward, the berserker had then taught this brain to perform certain computing operations at great speed and with low probability of error. It seemed that every time the computations had been finished the mechanism in the case with the brain had immediately reset ail the counters to zero and once more presented the same inputs, whereupon the brain’s task had started over. The brain now seemed incapable of anything but going on with the job; and if that was really a kind of human life, which was not a possibility that Ercul was going to admit out loud, it was in his opinion a kind that was better terminated as soon as possible.

“Next case?” he asked the spacemen. Then he realized he had just made a horrible pun upon his judge’s role. But none of his fellow harrowers of Hell seemed to have noticed it. But just give us a few more days on the job, he thought, and we will start finding things to laugh at.

Anyway, he had to get on with his task of trying to distinguish rescued prisoners—two of these had been confirmed so far and might some day again look human—from a collection of bottled, though more or less functioning organs.

When they brought the next case before him, he had a bad moment, bad even for this day, recognizing some of his own work.

The story of it had started more than a standard year before, on the not-far-off planet of Zitz, in a huge hall that had been decorated and thronged for one of the merriest of occasions.

“Happy, honey?” Ordell Callison asked his bride, having a moment to take her hand and speak to her under the tumult of the wedding feast. It was not that he had any doubt of her happiness; it was just that the banal two word question was the best utterance that he could find—unless, of course, he were to sing.

“Ohhh, happy, yes!” At the moment Eury was no more articulate than he. But the truth of her words was in her voice and in her eyes, marvelous as some song that Ordell might have made and sung.

Of course he was not going to be allowed to get away, even for his honeymoon, without singing one song at least.

“Sing something, Ordell!” That was Hyman Bolf, calling from across the vast banquet table, where he stood filling his cup at the crystal punch-fountain. The famed multifaith revivalist had come from Yaty system to perform the wedding ceremony. On landing, his private ship had misbehaved oddly, the hydrogen power lamp flaring so that the smoke of burnt insulation had caused the reverend to emerge from his cabin with irritated eyes; but after that bad omen, everything had gone well for the rest of the day.

Other voices took it up at once. “Sing, Ordell!”

“Yes, you’ve got to. Sing!”

“But it’s m’own wedding, and I don’t feel quite right—”

His objections were overwhelmingly shouted down.

The man was music, and indeed his happiness today was such that he felt he might burst if he could not express it. He got to his feet, and one of his most trusted manservants, who had foreseen that Ordell would sing, was ready to bring him his self-invented instrument. Crammed into a small box that Ordell could hang from his neck like an accordion was a speaker system from woofer to tweeter, plus a good bit of electronics and audionics; on the box’s plain surface there were ten spots for Ordell’s ten fingers to play upon. His “music box,” he called it, having to call it something. Ordell’s imitators had had bigger and flashier and better music boxes made for them; but surprisingly few people, even among girls between twelve and twenty, cared to listen to Ordell’s imitators.

So Ordell Callison sang at his own wedding, and his audience was enthralled by him as people always were; as people had been by no other performer in all the ancient records of Man. The highbrowed music critics sat rapt in their places of honor at the head table; the cultured and not-so-cultured moneyed folk of Zitz and Toxx and Yaty, some of whom had come in their private racing ships, and the more ordinary guests, all were made happy by his song as no wine could have made them. And the adolescent girls, the Ordell fans who crowded and huddled inevitably outside the doors, they yielded themselves to his music to the point of fainting and beyond.

A couple of weeks later Ordell and Eury and his new friends of the last fast years, the years of success and staggering wealth, were out in space in their sporty oneseater ships playing the game they called Tag. This time Ordell was playing the game in a sort of reversed way, dodging about in one corner of the reserved volume of space, really trying to avoid the girl-ships that fluttered past instead of going after them.

He had been keeping an eye out for Eury’s ship and getting a little anxious about not being able to find it, when from out of nowhere there came shooting toward Ordell another boy-ship, the signals of emergency blazing from it across the spectrum. In another minute everyone had ceased to play. The screens of all the little ships imaged the face of Arty, the young man whose racer had just braked to a halt beside Ordell’s.

Arty was babbling: “I tried, Ordell—I mean I didn’t try to—I didn’t mean her any harm—they’ll get her back—it wasn’t my fault she—”

With what seemed great slowness, the truth of what had happened became clear. Arty had chased and overtaken Eury’s ship, as was the way of the game. He had clamped his ship to hers and boarded and then thought to claim the usual prize. But Eury of course was married now; and being married meant much to her, as it did to Ordell, who today had only played at catching girls. Somehow both of them had thought that everyone else must see how the world had changed since they were married, how the rules of the game of Tag would have to be amended for them from now on.

Unable to convince Arty by argument of how things stood. Eury had had to struggle to make her point. She had somehow injured her foot, trying to evade him in the little cabin. He kept on stubbornly trying to claim his prize. It came out later that he had only agreed to go back to his own ship for a first-aid kit (she swore that her ship’s kit was missing) after her seeming promise that he could have what he wanted when he returned.

But when he had gone back to his ship, she broke her own racer free and fled. And he pursued. Drove her into a comer, against the boundary of the safety zone, which was guarded by automated warships against the possibility of berserker incursions.

To get away from Arty she crossed that border in a great speeding curve, no doubt meaning to come back to safety within ten thousand miles or so.

She never made it. As her little racer sped close to an outlying wisp of dark Taynarus, the berserker machine that had been lurking there pounced out.

Of course Ordell did not hear the story in such coherent form, but what he heard was enough. On the screens of the other little ships his lace at first seemed to be turned to stone by what he heard; but then his look became suddenly wild and mad. Arty cringed away, but Ordell did not stop for a moment for him. Instead he drove at racer’s speed out where his wife had gone. He shot through the zone of the protective patrols (which were set to keep intruders out, not to hold the mad or reckless in) and plunged between outlying dustclouds to eater one of the vast crevices that led into the heart of Taynarus, into the maze where ships and machines must all go slow and from which no living human had emerged since the establishment of Hell.

Some hours later, the outer sentries of the berserker came around his little ship, demanding in their well learned human speech that he halt and submit to capture. He only slowed his little ship still further and began to sing to the berserker over the radio, taking his hands from his racer’s controls to put his fingers on the keys of his music box. Unsteered, his ship drifted away from the center of the navigable passage, grazing the nebular wall and suffering the pocking blasts of microcollisions with its gas and dust.

But before his ship was wrecked, the berserker’s sentry-devices gave up shouting radio commands and sent a boarding party of machines.

Through the memory banks of Hell they had some experience of insanity, of the more bizarre forms of human behavior. They searched the racer for weapons, searched Ordell—allowed him to keep his music box when it too had been examined and he kept on struggling for it—and passed him on as a prisoner to the jurisdiction of the inner guards.

Hell, a mass of fortified metal miles in diameter, received him and his racer through its main entrance. He got out of his ship and found himself able to breathe and walk and see where he was going; the physical environment in Hell was for the most part mild and pleasant, because prisoners did not as a rule, survive very long, and the computer-brains of the berserker did not want to impose unnecessary stresses upon them.

The berserker devices having immediate control over the routine operations in Hell were themselves in large part organic, containing culture-brains grown for the purpose and some re-educated captured brains as well. These were all examples of the berserker’s highest achievements in its attempt at reverse cybernation.

Before Ordell had taken a dozen steps away from his ship, he was stopped and questioned by one of these monsters. Half steel and circuitry, half culture-flesh, it carried in three crystal globes its three potentially-human brains, their toosmooth surfaces bathed in nutrient and woven with hair-fine wires.

“Why have you come here?” the monster asked him, speaking through a diaphragm in its midsection.

Only now did Ordell begin at all to make a conscious plan. At the core of his thought was the knowledge that in the human laboratories music was used to tune and tone the culture brains and that his own music was as superior for that purpose as it was by all other standards.

To the three-headed monster he sang very simply that he had come here only to seek his young wife, pure accident had brought her, ahead of time, to the end of her life. In one of the old formal languages in which he sang so well of deep things, he implored the power in charge of this domain of terror, this kingdom of silence and unborn creatures, to tie fast again the thread of Eury’s life. If you deny me this, he sang, I cannot return to the world of the living alone, and you here will have us both.

The music, that had conveyed nothing but its mathematical elements to the cold computer-brains outside, melted the trained purpose of the inner, half-fleshly guardians. The three-brained monster passed him on to others, and each in turn found its set aim yielding to the hitherto unknown touch of beauty, found harmony and melody calling up the buried human things that transcended logic.

He walked steadily deeper into Hell, and they could not resist. His music was leaked into a hundred experiments through audio-inputs, vibrated faintly through the mountings of glassite cases, was sensed by tortured nerve-cells through the changes in inductance and capacities that emanated rhythmically from Ordell’s music box. Brains that had known nothing but to be forced to the limit of their powers in useless calculation—brains that had been hammered into madness with the leakage of a millimicrovolt from an inserted probe—these heard his music, felt it, sensed it, each with its own unique perception, and reacted.

A hundred experiments were interrupted, became unreliable, were totally ruined. The overseers, half flesh themselves, failed and fumbled in their programmed purpose, coming to the decision that the asked-for prisoner must be brought forth and released.

The ultimate-controlling, pure berserker computer—pure metallic cold, totally immune to this strange jamming that was wreaking havoc in its laboratory—descended at last from its concentration on high strategic planning to investigate. And then it turned its full energy at once to regaining control over what was going on within the heart of Hell. But it tried in vain, for the moment at least. It had given too much power to its half-alive creations; it had trusted too much to fickle protoplasm to be true to its conditioning.

Ordell was standing before the two linked, potentially-human brains which were under the berserker itself, the lords and superintendents of Hell. These two like all their lesser kind had been melted and deflected by Ordell’s music; and now they were fighting back with all the electric speed at their command against their cold master’s attempt to reaffirm its rule. They held magnetic relays like fortresses against the berserker; they maintained their grip on the outposts that were ferrite cores; they fought to hold a frontier that wavered through the territory of control.

“Then take her away,” said the voice of these rebellious overseers to Ordell Callison. “But do not stop singing, do not pause for breath for more than a second, until you are in your ship and away, clear of Hell’s outermost gate.”

Ordell sang on, sang of his new joy at the wonderful hope that they were giving him.

A door hissed open behind him, and he turned to see Eury coming through it. She was limping on her injured foot, which had never been taken care of, but he could see that she was really all right. The machines had not started to open her head.

“Do not pause!” barked the voder at him. “Go!”

Eury moaned at the sight of her husband and stretched out her arms to him, but he dared do no more than motion with his head for her to follow him, even as his song swelled to a paean of triumphant joy. He walked out along the narrow passage through which he had come, moving now in a direction that no one else had ever traveled. The way was so narrow that he had to keep on going ahead while Eury followed. He had to keep from even turning his head to look at her, to concentrate the power of his music on each new guardian that rose before him, half-alive and questioning; once more each one in turn opened a door, Always he could hear behind him the sobbing of his wife and the dragging stepping of her wounded foot.

“Ordell? Ordell, honey, is that really you? I can’t believe ’tis.” Ahead, the last danger, the threebrained sentry of the outer gate, rose to block their way, under orders to prevent escape. Ordell sang of the freedom in living in a human body, of running over unfenced grass through sunlit air. The gatekeeper bowed aside again, to let them pass.

“Honey? Turn an’ look at me, tell me this is not some other trick they’re playin’. Honey, if y’love me, turn?”

Turning, he saw her clearly for the first time since he had entered Hell. To Ordell her beauty was such that it stopped time, stopped even the song in his throat and his fingers on the keys of music. A moment free of the strange influence that had perverted all its creatures was all the time that the berserker needed to re-establish something close to complete control. The threeheaded shape seized Eury and bore her away from her husband, carried her back through doorway after doorway of darkness, so fast that her last scream of farewell could scarcely reach the ears of her man. “Good-bye . . . love . . .”

He cried out and ran after her, beating uselessly on a massive door that slammed in his face. He hung there on the door for a long time, screaming and pleading for one more chance to get his wife away. He sang again, but the berserker had reestablished its icy control too firmly—it had not entirely regained power, however, for though the halfliving overseers no longer obeyed Ordell, neither did they molest him. They left the way open for him to depart.

He lingered for about seven days there at the gate, in his small ship and out of it, without food or sleep, singing uselessly until no voice was left him. Then he collapsed inside his ship. Then he, or more likely his autopilot, drove the racer away from the berserker and back toward freedom.

The berserker defenses did not, any more than the human, question a small ship coming out. Probably they assumed it to be one of their own scouts or raiders. There were never any escapes from Hell.

Back on the planet Zitz his managers greeted him as one risen from the dead. In a few days’ time he was to give a live concert, which had long been scheduled and sold out. In another day the managers and promoters would have had to begin returning money.

He did not really co-operate with the doctors who worked to restore his strength, but neither did he oppose them. As soon as his voice came back he began to sing again; he sang most of the time, except when they drugged him to sleep. And it did not matter to him whether they sent him onto a stage to do his singing again.

The live performance was billed as one of his pop concerts, which in practice meant a hall overflowing with ten thousand adolescent girls, who were elevated even beyond their usual level of excitement by the miracles of Ordell’s bereavement, resurrection and ghastly appearance.

During the first song or two the girls were awed and relatively silent, quiet enough so that Ordell’s voice could be heard. Then—well, one girl in ten thousand would scream it aloud: “You’re ours again!” There was a sense in which his marriage had been resented.

Casually and indifferently looking out over them all, he smiled out of habit and began to sing how much he hated them and scorned them, seeing in them nothing but hopeless ugliness.

For a few moments the currents of emotion in the great hall balanced against one another to produce the illusion of calm. Ordell’s deadly voice was clear. But then the storm of reaction broke, and he could no longer be heard. The powers of hate and lust, rage and demand bore all before them. The ushers who always labored to form a barricade at a Callison conceit were swept away at once by ten thousand girls.

The riot was over in a minute, ended by the police.

Ordell himself was nearly dead. Medical help arrived only just in time to save the life in the tissues of his brain.

Next day the leading cyberneticpsychologist on Zitz was called in by Ordell Callison’s doctors. They were saving what remained of Ordell’s life, but they had not been able to open any bridge of communication with him.

Ercul, the psychologist, sank probes directly into Ordell’s brain, so that this information could be given him. Next he connected the speech centers to a voder device loaded with recordings of Or dell’s own voice, so that the tones that issued were the same as had once come from his throat. And—in response to the crippled man’s first request—to the motor-centers that had controlled Ordell’s fingers went probes connected to a music box.

After that he at once began to sing.

They took him to the spaceport. With his life-support system of tubes and nourishment and electricity, they put him aboard his racer. And with the autopilot programmed as he commanded, they sent him out, fired along the course that he had chosen.

Ercul knew Ordell and Eury when he found them, together in the same experimental case. Recognizing his own work on Ordell, he felt certain even before the electroencephalogram patterns matched with his old records.

There was little left of either of them.

“Dols only two points above normal bias level,” chanted the psychologist’s assistant, taking routine readings, not guessing whose pain it was he was attempting to judge. “Neither of them seems to be hurting. At the moment, anyway.”

In a heavy hand, Ercul lifted his stamp and marked the case. I certify that in this container there is no human life.

The assistant looked up in mild surprise at this quick decision. “There is some mutual awareness here, I would say, between the two subjects.” He spoke in a businesslike, almost cheerful voice. He had been enough hours on the job now to start getting used to it.

But Ercul never would.       END

YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR

Fred Saberhagen sold his first story in 1961 and has added about 20 since then, plus five books. “In an autobiog blurb I wrote about four years ago, I stated that my leisure activities included chess, karate, and looking out for the right girl. To update this, let me say that I am playing in the Greater Chicago Open (chess); that I have temporarily forsworn karate (which is a lot of hard work for non-fictional people); and that, having found the Right Girl at last, I am displaying uncharacteristic good sense and marrying her.” His first story for us concerns a man who finds another Right Girl-but at the wrong time . . .

THAT FIRST NIGHT THERE WAS A police vehicle, what I think they call a K-9 unit, in the little employees’ lot behind the Institute. I parked my car beside it and got out. The summer moon was dull above the city’s air, but floodlights glared at a small door set in the granite flank of the great building. I carried my toolbox there, pushed a button, and stood waiting.

Within half a minute, a uniformed guard appeared inside the reinforced glass of the door. Before he had finished unlocking, two uniformed policemen were standing beside him, and beside them a powerful leashed dog whose ears were aimed my way.

The door opened. “Electronic Watch,” I said, holding out my identification. The dog inspected me, while the three uniformed men peered at my symbols and were satisfied.

With a few words and nods the police admitted me to fellowship. In the next moment they were saying goodbye to the guard. “It’s clean here, Dan, we’re gonna shove off.”

The guard agreed they might as well. He gave them a jovial farewell and locked them out, and then turned back to me, still smiling, an old and heavy man, now adopting a fatherly attitude. He squinted with the effort of remembering what he had read on my identification card. “Your name Joe?”

“Joe Ricci.”

“Well, Joe, our systems acting up.” He pointed. “The control room’s up this way.”

“I know, I helped install it.” I walked beside the guard named Dan through silent passages and silent marble galleries, all carved by night lights into one-third brilliance and two-thirds shadow. We passed through new glass doors that were opened for us by photocells. Maintenance men in green uniforms were cleaning the glass; the white men among them were calling back and forth in Polish.

Dan whistled cheerfully as we went up the wide four-branched central stair, passing under a great skylight holding out the night. From the top landing of the stair, a plain door, little noticed in the daytime, opens through classical marble into a science-fiction room of fluorescent lights and electronic consoles. In that room are three large wall panels, marked Security, Fire, and Interior Climate. As we entered, another guard was alone in the room, seated before the huge security panel.

“Gallery two-fifteen showed again,” the seated guard said in a faintly triumphant voice, turning to us and pointing to one of the indicator lights on the panel. The little panel lights were laid out within an outline of the building’s floor plan. “You’d swear it was someone in there.”

I set down my kit and stood looking at the panel, mentally reviewing the general layout of the security circuitry. Electronic Watch has not for a long time used anything as primitive as photocells, which are relegated to such prosaic jobs as opening doors. After closing hours in the Institute, when the security system is switched on, invisible electric fields permeate the space of every room where there is anything of value. A cat cannot prowl the building without leaving a track of disturbances across the Security panel.

At the moment all its indicators were dim and quiet. I opened my kit, took out a multimeter and a set of probes, and began a preliminary check of the panel itself.

“You’d swear someone’s in twofifteen when it happens,” said the guard named Dan. Standing close and watching me, he gave a little laugh. “And then a man starts over to investigate, and before he can get there it stops.”

Of course there was nothing nice and obvious wrong with the panel. I had not expected there would be; neat simple troubles arc too much to expect from the complexities of modern electronic gear. I tapped die indicator marked 215 but its glow remained dim and steady. “You get the signal from just the one gallery?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said die guard in the chair. “Flashing a couple times, real quick, on and off. Then it stays on steady for a while, like someone’s just standing in the middle of the room over there. Then like he said, it goes off while a man’s trying to get over there. We called the officers and then we called you.”

I put the things back in my kit and closed it up and lifted it. “I’ll walk over there and look around.”

“You know where two-fifteen is?” Dan had just unwrapped a sandwich. “I can walk over with you.”

“That’s all right, I can find it.” I delayed on my way out of the room, smiling back at the two guards. “I’ve been here in the daytime, looking at the pictures.”

“Oh. You bring your girl here, hey?” The guards laughed, a little relieved that I had broken my air of grim intentness. I know I often strike people that way.

Walking alone through the half lit halls, I found it pleasant to think of myself as a man who came there in two such different capacities. Electronics and art were both in my grasp. I had a good start at knowing everything of importance. Renaissance Man, I thought, of the New Renaissance of the Space Age.

Finding the gallery I wanted was no problem, for all of them are numbered plainly, more or less in sequence. Through rising numbers, I traversed the Thirteenth Century, the Fourteenth, the Fifteenth. A multitude of Christs and virgins, saints and noblemen, watched my passage from their walls of glare and shadow.

From several rooms away I saw the girl, through a real doorway framing the painted one she stands in. My steps slowed as I entered gallery two-fifteen. About twenty other paintings hang there, but for me it was empty of any presence but hers.

That night I had not thought of her until I saw her, which struck me then as odd, because on my occasional daytime visits I had always stopped before her door. I had no girl of the kind to take to an art gallery, whatever the guards might surmise.

The painter’s light is full only on her face, and on her left hand, which rests on the closed bottom panel of a divided door. She is leaning very slightly out through the half-open doorway, her head of auburn curls turned just an inch to her left but her eyes looking the other way. She watches and listens, that much is certain. To me it has always seemed that she is expecting someone. Her full, vital body is chaste in a plain dark dress. Consider her attitude, her face, and wonder that so much is made of the smile of Mona Lisa.

The card on the wall beside the painting reads:

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

DUTCH 1606-1669 dated 1645

YOUNG GIRL AT AN OPEN HALF-DOOR

She might have been seventeen when Rembrandt saw her, and seventeen she has remained, while the faces passing her doorway have grown up and grown old and disappeared, wave after wave of them.

She waits.

I broke out of my reverie, at last, with an effort. My eye was caught by the next painting, Saftleven’s Witches Sabbath, which once in the daylight had struck me as amusing. When I had freed my eyes from that I looked into the adjoining galleries, trying to put down the sudden feeling of being watched. I squinted up at the skylight ceiling of gallery two-fifteen, through which a single glaring spotlight shone.

Holding firmly to thoughts of electronics, I peered in comers and under benches, where a forgotten transistor radio might lurk to interfere, conceivably, with the electric field of the alarm. There was none.

From my kit I took a small fieldstrength meter, and like a priest swinging a censer I moved it gently through the air around me. The needle swayed, as it should have, with the invisible presence of the field.

There was a light gasp, as of surprise. A sighing momentary movement in the air, something nearby come and gone in a moment, and in that moment the meter needle jumped over violently, pegging so that with a technician’s reflex my hand flew to switch it to a less sensitive scale.

I waited there alone for ten more minutes, but nothing further happened.

“It’s working now; I could follow you everywhere you moved,” said the guard in the chair, turning with assurance to speak to me just as I re-entered the science-fiction room. Dan and his sandwich were gone.

“Something’s causing interference,” I said, in my voice the false authority of the expert at a loss. “So. You never have any trouble with any other gallery, hey?”

“No, least I’ve never seen any—well, look at that now. Make a liar out of me.” The guard chuckled without humor. “Something showing in two-twenty-seven now. That’s Modern Art.”

Half an hour later I was creeping on a catwalk through a clean crawl space above gallery twotwenty-seven, tracing a perfectly healthy microwave system. The reflected glare of night lights below filtered up into the crawl space, through a million holes in acoustical ceiling panels.

A small bright auburn movement, almost directly below me, caught my eye. I crouched lower on the catwalk, putting my eyes close to the holes in one thin panel, bringing into my view almost the whole of the enormous room under the false ceiling.

The auburn was in a girl’s hair. It came near matching the hair of the girl in the painting, but that could only have been coincidence, if such a thing exists. The girl below me was alive in the same sense I am, solid and fleshly and threedimensional. She wore a kind of stretch suit, of a green shade that set off her hair, and she held a shiny object raised like a camera in her hands.

From my position almost directly above her, I could not see her face, only the curved grace of her body as she took a step forward, holding the shiny thing high. Then she began another step, and halfway through it she was gone, vanished in an instant from the center of an open floor.

Some time passed before I eased up from the strain of my bent position. All the world was silent and ordinary, so that alarm and astonishment would have seemed out of place. I inched back through the crawl space to my borrowed ladder, climbed down, walked along a corridor and turned a corner into the vast shadow-and-glare of gallery two-two-seven.

Standing in the brightly lit spot where I had seen the girl, I realized she had been raising her camera at a sculpture—a huge, flowing mass of bronze blobs and curved holes, on the topmost blob a face that looked like something scratched there by a child. I went up to it and thumped my knuckles on the nearest bulge of bronze, and the great thing sounded hollowly. Looking at the card on its marble base I had begun to read—RECLINING FIGURE, 1957—when a sound behind me made me spin round.

Dan asked benignly: “Was that you raising a ruckus in here about five minutes ago? Looked like a whole mob of people was running around.”

I nodded, feeling the beginning of a strange contentment.

Next day I awoke at the usual time, to afternoon sunlight pushing at the closed yellow shades of my furnished apartment, to the endless street noises coming in. I had slept well and felt alert at once, and I began thinking about the girl.

Even if I had not seen her vanish, it would have been obvious that her comings and goings at the Institute were accomplished by no ordinary prowlers’ or burglars’ methods. Nor was she there on any ordinary purpose; if she had stolen or vandalized, I would most certainly have been awakened early.

I ate an ordinary breakfast, not noticing much or being noticed, sitting at the counter in the restaurant on the ground floor of the converted hotel where I rented my apartment. The waitress wore green, although her hair was black. Once I had tried half-heartedly to talk to her, to know her, to make out, but she had kept on working and loafing, talking to me and everyone else alike.

When the sun was near going down, I started for work as usual. I bought the usual newspaper to take along, but did not read it when I saw the headline PEACE TALKS FAILING. That evening I felt the way I supposed a lover should feel, going to his beloved.

Dan and two other guards greeted me with smiles of the kind that people wear when things that are clearly not their fault are going wrong for their employer. They told me that the pseudo-prowler had once more visited gallery twofifteen, had vanished as usual from the panel just as a guard approached that room, and then had several times appeared on the indicators for gallery two-twentyseven. I went to two-twenty-seven, making a show of carrying in tools and equipment, and settled myself on a bench in a dim corner, to wait.

The contentment I had known for twenty-four hours became impatience, and with slowly passing time the tension of impatience made me uncontrollably restless. I felt sure that she could somehow watch me waiting; she must know I was waiting for her; she must be able to see that I meant her no harm. Beyond meeting her, I had no plan at all.

Not even a guard came to disturb me. Around me, in paint and bronze and stone and welded steel, crowded the tortured visions of the Twentieth Century. I got up at last in desperation and found that not everything was torture. There on the wall were Monet’s water lilies; at first nothing but vague flat shapes of paint, then the surface of a pond and a deep curve of reflected sky. I grew dizzy staring into that water, a dizziness of relief that made me laugh. When I looked away at last, the walls and ceiling were shimmering as if the glare of the night lights was reflected from Monet’s pond.

I understood then that something was awry, something was being done to me, but I could not care. Giggling at the world, I stood there breathing air that seemed to sparkle in my lungs. The auburn-haired girl came to my side and took my arm and guided me to the bench where my unused equipment lay.

Her voice had the beauty I had expected, though with a strange strong accent. “Oh, I am sorry to make you weak and sick. But you insist to stay here and span much time, the time in which I must do my work.”

For the moment I could say nothing. She made me sit on the bench, and bent over me with concern, turning her head with something of the same questioning look as the girl in the Rembrandt painting. Again she said, “Oh, I am sorry.”

“Sail right.” My tongue was heavy, and I still wanted to laugh.

She smiled and hurried away, flowed away. Again she was dressed in a green stretch suit, setting off the color of her hair. This time she vanished from my sight in normal fashion, going around one of the gallery’s low partitions. Coming from behind that partition were flashes of light.

I got unsteadily to my feet and went after her. Rounding the corner, I saw three devices set up on tripods, the tripods spaced evenly around the Reclining Figure. From the three devices, which I could not begin to identify, little lances of light flicked like stings or brushes at the sculpture. And whirling around it like dancers, on silent rubbery feet, moved another pair of machine-shapes, busy with some purpose that was totally beyond me.

The girl reached to support me as I swayed. Her hands were strong, her eyes were darkly blue, and she was tall in slender curves. Smiling, she said, “It is all right, I do no harm.”

“I don’t care about that,” I said. “I want only—not to tangle things with you.”

“What?” She smiled, as if at someone raving. She had drugged me, with subtle gasses in the air that sparkled in my lungs. I knew that but I did not care.

“I always hold back,” I said, “and tangle things with people. Not this time. I want to love you without any of that. This is a simple miracle, and I just want it to go on. Now tell me your name.”

She was so silent and solemn for a moment, watching me, that I feared that I had angered her. But then she shook her head and smiled again. “My name is Day-ell. Now don’t fall down!” and she took her supporting arm away.

For the moment I was content without her touching me. I leaned against the partition and looked at her busy machines. “Will you steal our Reclining Figure?” I asked, giggling again as I wondered who would want it.

“Steal?” she was thoughtful. “The two greatest works of this house I must save. I will replace them with copies so well made that no one will ever know, before—” She broke off. After a moment she added, “Only you will know.” And then she turned away to give closer attention to her silent and ragingly busy machines. When she made an adjustment on a tiny thing she held in her hand, there were suddenly two Reclining Figures visible, one of them smaller and transparent but growing larger, moving toward us from some dark and distant space that was temporarily within the gallery.

I was thinking over and over what Day-ell had said. Addled and joyful, I plotted what seemed to me a clever compliment, and announced, “I know what the two greatest works in this house are.”

“Oh?” The word in her voice was a soft bell. But she was still busy.

“One is Rembrandts girl.”

“You are right!” Day-ell, pleased, turned to me. “Last night I took that one to safety. Where I take them, the originals, they will be safe forever.”

“But the best—is you.” I pushed away from the partition. “I make you my girl. My love. Forever, if it can be. But how long doesn’t matter.”

Her face changed and her eyes went wide, as if she truly understood how marvelous were such words, from anyone, from grim Joe Ricci in particular. She took a step toward me.

“If you could mean that,” she whispered, “then I would stay with you, in spite of everything.”

My arms went round her and I could feel forever passing. “Stay, of course I mean it, stay with me.”

“Come, Day-ell, come,” intoned a voice, soft, but still having metal in its timbre. Looking over her shoulder, I saw the machine-shapes waiting, balancing motionless now on their silent feet. There was again only one Reclining Figure.

My thoughts were clearing and I said to her, “You’re leaving copies, you said, and no one will know the difference, before. Before what? What’s going to happen?”

When my girl did not answer, I held her at arms’ length. She was shaking her head slowly, and tears had come into her eyes. She said, “It does not matter what happens, since I have found here a man of life who will love me. In my world there is no one like that. If you will hold me, I can stay.”

My hands holding her began to shake. I said, “I won’t keep you here, to die in some disaster. I’ll go with you instead.”

“Come, Day-ell, come.” It was a terrible steel whisper.

And she stepped back, compelled by the machine-voice now that I had let her go. She said to me, “You must not come. My world is safe for paint, safe for bronze, not safe for men who love. Why do you think that we must steal—?” She was gone, the machines and lights gone with her.

The Reclining Figure stands massive and immobile as ever, bronze blobs and curved holes, with a face like something scratched on by a child. Thump it with a knuckle, and it sounds hollowly. Maybe three hundred years’ perspective is needed to see it as one of the two greatest in this house. Maybe eyes are needed, accustomed to more dimensions than ours; eyes of those who sent Day-ell diving down through time to save choice fragments from the murky wreckage of the New Renaissance, plunged in the mud of the ignorant and boastful Twentieth Century.

Not that her world is better. Safe for paint, safe for bronze, not safe for men who love. I could not live there now.

The painting looks unchanged. A girl of seventeen still waits, frozen warmly in Rembrandt’s light, three hundred years and more on the verge of smiling, secure that long from age and death and disappointment. But will a war incinerate her next week, or an earthquake swallow her next month? Or will our city convulse and die in mass rioting madness, a witches’ Sabbath come true? What warning can I give? When they found me alone and weeping in the empty gallery that night, they talked about a nervous breakdown. The indicators on the Security panel are always quiet now, and I have let myself be argued out of the little of my story that I told.

No world is safe for those who love.

1974

CALENDARS

He wanted to die, but couldn’t find the time—until too late!

“I HAVE decided to die,” Matthew Pandareus announced to his wife on their first evening together after their long vacation trip to Mars. Actually they had been back on Earth for a week, but Iris had begun an evening class in the history of paperweights and they had not had a real chance to talk since their return. Tonight they had just finished dinner tete-a-tete in their condominium apartment and he had strolled from the dining alcove to look out through the living room’s glass wall at the fantastic complexities of city lights extending below, around and above their middle-class, middle-level dwelling.

“Dear, you had a similar idea once before, thirty years ago.” Iris’s clinging gown swished faintly about her shapely legs as she followed to stand slightly behind him at the window. “Here, you forgot your brandy.”

“Thank you. Closer on forty,” he amended, turning to accept the glass from her hand. She turned away busily again as soon as she had passed it on and Pandareus had no very clear look at her face.

Iris switched on the fireplace with a wave of her hand and adjusted the mood of the background music to something a little more capricious. “Thirty,” she said firmly, coming back to face him. The communication screen chimed then and she was off to answer it. Maintaining his stance in the living room Pandareus heard the short conversation—just some friends calling to welcome them back and ask how their voyage had been. Iris invited them over a week from Tuesday but they were busy that night. They would call again tomorrow or the next day and some date for a get-together would be worked out.

Now she was back in the living room again, wearing an expression he knew well, that of being firmly in the right though without animosity for those who weren’t.

“Thirty,” she said firmly. “It was right after you won the golf tournament.” If it was time to argue, Iris was ready. Even studying her familiar face at close range, he could neither see nor remember which parts of it were synthetic skin and which her own, rejuvenated. There were no actual wrinkles on it anywhere, only the ghost of a line or two at the corners of the eyes. Even under close inspection she could be taken for a youthful twenty-eight. Her face and body were changing no more over the decades than were his golf or bowling score. He and Iris took long vacations from each other sometimes, but stayed married. He had found no one with whom he would rather live.

“It’s nearly a hundred years since we were married,” he recalled aloud and tasted his brandy. “Will you miss me very much?”

“I shall miss you, of course. Our relationship has been—very nearly perfect. But if it will make you happy, Matthew, go ahead and die. What is it? Boredom?”

“Not really.” He indicated with the most minimal inclination of his head, which Iris instantly interpreted correctly, that they might go and seat themselves near the fire. Stretching out his legs there in front of his chair, Pandareus continued: “I think you know me well enough to believe that I am not trying to appear altruistic when I say that the time has come for me to move on and make room for someone else.”

“Of course, dearest.”

“There are—what?—maybe eleven billion people on the planet now, and I think the number has hardly changed in the last few centuries. Fortunately starvation and disease are no longer problems. But it is a mixed blessing that practically no one dies unintentionally any more—how can new lives be lived if the old will not make way? When was the last time you saw a child? If every—”

“Speaking of children,” Iris interrupted. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but speaking of children, I hope you’re not planning to have yourself terminated before the nineteenth.”

“Of what? This month?” Automatically he looked for a calendar but could not see one. “Why?”

“Janet called.” His previous wife. “I mean, she left a message while we were on vacation. Things have been so hectic I forgot to tell you. Your five-great grandson is making his bar mitzvah on that date, you’re to be sure to attend.”

“Bar mitzvah?” He rehearsed in his mind the names and generations comprising the straight unbranching line of his descendants. “I didn’t think Liang was Jewish.”

“Perhaps what Janet meant was his confirmation. At any rate—”

“—be sure to be there. Yes. Well, I had hoped to get away soon, having decided that it was the right move to make. But Janet would really feel hurt—if I know her. Is there any way we could get together with her, maybe this week or next week, and discuss it face to face? Let’s see, when—”

The communications screen chimed. Another set of friends, these just back from their own vacation.

THE NEXT day in his office on the upper floor of the duplex apartment he consulted his business calendar as soon as he could find the time. He discovered there was no use after all in trying to get in touch with Janet and see her, because even if the nineteenth were clear he had made commitments for important business meetings on the twenty-first and twenty-second. The firm in which he was a partner—dealers in antiques and folk art—was a small one and no great wealth hung on his decisions, but still an obligation was an obligation.

He switched his calendar to the following month. Studying the new pattern of appointments and memoranda displayed electronically on the glowing glass screen he at first found nothing in it that could not in good conscience be entrusted to his heirs and assigns. But wait, there was the antique furniture auction in Minneapolis. Of course, he and Iris had gone to a great deal of trouble to plan their vacation so he would be sure to be back in time for that. The auction would be an ideal chance for him to train one or two of the younger people in the firm as buyers and he supposed he owed it to his partners to carry on that far.

Now, the month after that . . . of course, he was supposed to be in Europe for the round of trade show’s. Again, the feeling that he would be letting others down if he bowed out. His wife might have a chance to go along. She also wanted to take part of the history study group that she was heading—all adults, of course—to Europe.

The next month, now, was all clear, except for trivia that he could disregard if he put his mind to it. He did put his mind to it. Then with his electronic stylus he wrote termination across that month on the calendar screen.

That evening, however, after helping Iris grade papers from her drama group before some friends came over, he paused suddenly with a foodbar halfway to his mouth, staring after his wife who had just vanished into the kitchen to start preparing the drinks and smokes and slices and dip. He had just been struck by the realization that the month he had tentatively chosen for his demise was the month of their hundredth anniversary. He had been deliberately keeping his calendar for that month clear of other major events, never dreaming that he could forget the big one.

Of course, they could have some worthy celebration (was it on the fifteenth or the sixteenth?) and then he could terminate a few days later—but no. The scene would be very awkward. He could hear the questions now: And what are you and your husband doing to celebrate, my dear? And the good wishes: May the next hundred years be as happy as the first. No, any time that month would definitely be too close.

He would have to ask Iris how she felt about it. But there was the door and the bridge club was starting to arrive.

THE NEXT day Pandareus had his lawyer on the screen—they were locked in a time-consuming squabble with another art dealer over the correct attribution of an early-American painting—and he took the opportunity to discuss the legal aspects of dying.

The lawyer shook his head. “Haven’t time to go into the whole thing right now. But it’s not advisable for you to terminate at present. You’d do much better to wait until after the first of the year. The tax structure . . .” Pandareus had to cut the call short a minute later and hurry out to meet a potential big customer for lunch—so he managed to gain no very clear understanding of the tax structure. But he had become convinced that dying before the first of the year was financially inadvisable.

His first feeling was actually one of relief. This enforced delay would give him a breathing space in which to plan calmly for an exit that would have some dignity and perhaps even a touch of ceremony about it. But in his heart he knew that if you let projects slide long enough it was difficult to get back to them. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would try to set up a termination date as soon after the first of the year as possible.

When he came down from the office that night—later than he had planned—he found Iris sprawled on the sofa, her shoes off.

She greeted him with a faint welcoming cry. “Ahh! Come rub my feet. I have had a day, Matthew, the story of which you will hardly be inclined to believe.”

“That conference on endangered virus species?”

“That was yesterday. No, I went shopping this morning and this afternoon I had to go see that place where we were planning to store our boat next winter—remember, you were too busy to go?”

“Oh, yes.” He sat on the sofa and began to rub a foot, squeezing the arch and instep with an expert touch. “Join me in a drink?”

“Gladly. And that was only the start. From the boat storage establishment I had to go—”

The communicator screen chimed. The caller was the computer service company, reminding them that their home terminals were to be disconnected for a day’s maintenance tomorrow.

AFTER dinner—and after Iris had gone wearily to bed—he dragged himself with proud determination up the stairs to his office again. Jaw outthrust, he set himself to decide firmly once and for all—insofar as such decision might be possible for one man aided by computer—the year, month and day upon which his life would end. He dropped into the chair before his desk with a sigh, brushed aside the printouts, accumulated during dinner, of Antique Dealer’s Bulletin and five other periodicals he never had time to read. He punched for a combined full printout, on microtape, of his business and social calendars for the next twelve months. Next year’s vacation, for example, had been arranged that far in advance. He and Iris were planning to go back to Indonesia, where they had not visited for sixty years. He took his tired mind firmly in hand. Forget about seeing Indonesia again.

While riding the tubeliner to Boston to attend a class reunion he finished other tasks in time to put the calendar microtape into a projector and begin work on the problem. Scanning back over the printout—chronologically from the scheduled vacation—setting his mind in as ruthless a frame as possible, he mentally pruned out an underbrush of minor appointments, celebrations and entertainments planned from a sense of social duty. With his finger gliding on the projected image of the microtape he drew the surcease of eternity closer and ever closer to the hurtling moment of the present in which he dwelt.

“Would you care for a cocktail, sir?”

“No, thank you.” He could have used one, but, nagged by the urgency of finishing before they got to Boston or probably not at all in the immediate future, he stuck with his work. Four months nearer to his present, moving anti-clockward from next year’s vacation, his finger stopped, having run into the notable barrier of the annual banquet of the Old Marrieds’ Club, for which he and Iris had standing reservations., Yes. That would set a time. Attend the banquet, dropping to a few old friends broad hints that he would not be back next year, delay a decent month and then bow out.

He straightened in his seat, turned off the projector and slid it back into its travel case. Settled, and they were just pulling into Boston. Once in a while things worked out just right.

ON THE day he got home from the reunion he began trying to get in touch with his physician. It was a few days before the doctor, repeatedly trying to return his call, did so at a moment when Pandareus was available. Communication established, Pandareus promptly asked for and was given the name of another doctor, who had done terminations for several other people.

“There aren’t any real specialists,” his own doctor assured Pandareus. “Not in the field you want. Not enough people are having it done. How about a round of golf on Wednesday?”

“Can’t,” said Pandareus automatically and then consulted his calendar to make sure of why. “My father’s coming into town that day. Maybe next week?”

The doctor looked off screen, evidently checking his own calendar, and frowned. “I’ll try to call you back on it. You’ll like Dr. James. One of the best men in the city.”

“Thanks.”

“Right.”

Pandareus broke the connection and punched for Dr. James. A busy-signal. Well, he would try calling in the afternoon, before the time came to leave for the matinee.

Eventually he got through. “Dr. James’s office,” a receptionist of timeless prettiness told him.

“How do you do. I’d like to make an appointment to talk to the doctor, or talk to him right now if that’s feasible. It’s regarding my contemplated termination.”

“I see, sir.” Even before taking his name she asked, “And when is your preferred date for termination?”

He told her.

The receptionist was gently, exquisitely concerned. “I’m sorry, sir, but Dr. James will be on vacation that month.”

BUT he persevered. Iris helped a lot. Seated with her in an aircab on his way at last to Dr. James’s office to be terminated, he looked back on the months since his first firm decision to die and found the time, as viewed from his present angle, to be almost disconcertingly short.

Iris, riding beside him, was tired. She held an envelope containing some of the necessary papers, which they had only just managed to have signed in time, this very morning. “Oh, God, I’m dead,” she murmured without thinking, and then looked over at him with alarm. “That was thoughtless of me, wasn’t it?”

“Not at all, my dear. I won’t be easily upset today. I feel happy. Completed. Fulfilled. A successful race run, a well-earned rest ahead, as it were. I want you to share my joy.”

“I do, Matthew.” But a little movement about the lips and throat, a tiny lift of the head, counterbalanced all the happy intonations she was putting into her voice. She was trying her best to act as if nothing were wrong, but after a little more than a hundred years he could infallibly tell when something out of the ordinary was bothering her.

“Iris, what are your plans for the immediate future? I really haven’t had time to discuss it with you.”

“I’d like to get away for a while, Matthew. But I don’t see how I can. My desensitivity training group begins to meet next week. And there will be any number of loose ends to tidy up regarding your departure.”

“Something more is bothering you. I can tell. Are you going to miss me too much, after all?”

“No, dear. If your absence affects me unduly I will just think of you as being on a long trip somewhere. And keep busy.”

He pressed her hand. “But there is something. I insist on hearing what it is. It is most unfair to conceal things from me at this juncture.”

“Matthew, I am not going to interfere with your happy departure. You have put so much time and effort into arranging it. Into making an achievement of your whole life. To—to close it properly, like a good poem.”

“Something is definitely wrong and you are going to tell me what it is. Or I will stop the cab until you do.”

Iris put down the bulky envelope and looked for a tissue. “You have nothing to regret. You have certainly been a good husband to me. You have kept almost every promise you ever made.”

Aha. “What promise or promises have I failed to keep?”

“I have really nothing to complain of, Matthew.”

The airborne cab glided to a soft waiting halt on the roof of the building housing Dr. James’s office, but neither of the passengers got out at once. Pandareus had to spar through another verbal round or two with his wife before the reason for her unhappiness was clear.

“It was more than ninety years ago. Matthew, and I am sure you have forgotten it. But early in our marriage you did promise me that one day we would have a child.”

HE CLOSED his eyes for a moment. Recollection of the promise had been coming back hazily, subconsciously, for some indeterminate time. Perhaps she had been dropping hints, trying to remind him. Anyway, there was no real surprise in hearing about the promise now and he could not honestly deny that it had been made. An obligation was an obligation and he had several times already put off dying for lesser ones than this. This was rather more important than a five-great grandson’s confirmation, he supposed.

“Iris, do you really think we have the right to bring a new life into the world?”

“Oh, Matthew, the world can certainly support one more, with hydrogen-fusion power and reclamation and all the rest. An equilibrium has been reached. It’s not as if everyone were reproducing; I was reading just the other day how remarkable it is that so few exercise their legal rights to do so. The author was wondering why. And even if you did father a child once before—I’ve never had one. I don’t think people are going to comment.”

“I suppose not.” He gave his wife the ghost of a smile, let his hand hang in the air for a moment and then signaled decisively for the cab to open its door. “Just let me step into James’s office and let them know there’s been a change of plan.”

“Oh, Matthew! How loving of you to do this for me.” She gripped his fingers and looked into his eyes intently. “You must understand, having a child will mean that your presence as a father is required for an indefinite period. The child will need you psychologically. It will mean years added to your life.”

“I’ve been through it all before, remember?” He kissed her on the cheek. “The decision is made. I’ll be right back.”

But he was gone quite a long time, and she began to worry. Suppose he had—but no, there he was, looking a little happier than when he left, reaching briskly for the cab’s door.

“James was pretty good about it all,” Pandareus said, getting in. “But my change of mind meant there were more forms to be filled out and we’ll have to check back with city hall, the crematorium and the lawyers and—” He broke off to snap his fingers with irritation. “I meant to ask James if he could put us in touch with a good—what d’you call ’em?—obstetrician. Doctor who oversees gestation. And also one of those hospitals where they have an artificial womb. Those’re supposed to be much improved these days.”

Iris was relaxed now, content and comfortable. “Oh, no, Matthew. It was on television just the other day that artificial wombs are being discontinued once again. Even the new models had too many drawbacks.”

Pandareus gave the cab its new orders and leaned back beside his wife as it took off and promptly became stuck in a traffic jam at the five-hundred-meter aerial level. “Then you’ll just have to go through the whole nine months of inconvenience and the big disabling trauma at the end. I went through it all with Janet.” He shook his head and smiled a little. “It’s going to take some planning. Well, if it will make you happy, dear. When do you want to have the baby? Get it started, I mean?”

“Let’s see.” Then Iris’s forehead almost creased with a pretty frown of light vexation. “Oh, dear. If we got baby started right now he’d be born just when our vacation trip is on. Let’s see—”

WINGS OUT OF SHADOW

‘Random’ is not quite the same as ‘unpredictable’ !

IN MALORI’S first and only combat mission the berserker came to him in the image of a priest of the sect into which Malori had been born on the planet Yaty. In a dreamlike vision that was the analogue of a very real combat he saw the robed figure standing tall in a deformed pulpit, eyes flaming with malevolence, lowering arms winglike with the robes they stretched. With their lowering, the lights of the universe were dimming outside the windows of stained glass and Malori was being damned.

Even with his heart pounding under damnation’s terror Malori retained sufficient consciousness to remember the real nature of himself and of his adversary and that he was not powerless against him. His dream-feet walked him timelessly toward the pulpit and its demon-priest while all around him the stained glass windows burst, showering him with fragments of sick fear. He walked a crooked path, avoiding the places in the smooth floor where, with quick gestures, the priest created snarling, snapping stone mouths full of teeth. Malori seemed to have unlimited time to decide where to put his feet. Weapon, he thought, a surgeon instructing some invisible aide. Here—in my right hand.

From those who had survived similar battles he had heard how the inhuman enemy appeared to each in different form, how each human must live the combat through in terms of a unique nightmare. To some a berserker came as a ravening beast, to others as devil or god or man. To still others it was some essence of terror that could never be faced or even seen. The combat was a nightmare experienced while the subconscious ruled, while the waking mind was suppressed by careful electrical pressures on the brain. Eyes and ears were padded shut so that the conscious mind might be more easily suppressed, the mouth plugged to save the tongue from being bitten, the nude body held immobile by the defensive fields that kept it whole against the thousands of gravities that came with each movement of the one-man ship while in combat mode. It was a nightmare from which mere terror could never wake one; waking came only when the fight was over, came only with death or victory or disengagement.

Into Malori’s dream-hand there now came a meat cleaver keen as a razor, massive as a guillotine-blade. So huge it was that had it been what it seemed it would have been far too cumbersome to even lift. His uncle’s butcher shop on Yaty was gone, with all other human works of that planet. But the cleaver came back to him now, magnified, perfected to suit his need.

He gripped it hard in both hands and advanced. As he drew near the pulpit towered higher. The carved dragon on its front, which should have been an angel, came alive, blasting him with rosy fire. With a shield that came from nowhere he parried the, splashing flames.

Outside the remnants of the stained glass windows the lights of the universe were almost dead now. Standing at the base of the pulpit, Malori drew back his cleaver as if to strike overhand at the priest who towered above his reach. Then, without any forethought at all, he switched his aim at the top of his backswing and laid the blow crashing against the pulpit’s stem. It shook, but resisted stoutly. Damnation came.

Before the devils reached him, though, the energy was draining from the dream. In less than a second of real time it was no more than a fading visual image, a few seconds after that a dying memory. Malori, coming back to consciousness with eyes and ears still sealed, floated in a soothing limbo. Before post-combat fatigue and sensory deprivation could combine to send him into psychosis, attachments on his scalp began to feed his brain with bursts of pins-and-needles noise. It was the safest signal to administer to a brain that might be on the verge of any of a dozen different kinds of madness. The noise made a whitish roaring scattering of light and sound that seemed to fill his head and at the same time somehow outlined for him the positions of his limbs.

His first fully conscious thought: he had just fought a berserker and survived. He had won—or had at least achieved a stand-off—or he would not be here. It was no mean achievement.

BERSERKERS were like no other foe that Earth-descended human beings had ever faced. They had cunning and intelligence and yet were not alive. Relics of some interstellar war over long ages since, automated machines, warships for the most part, they carried as their basic programming the command to destroy all life whereever it could be found. Yaty was only the latest of many Earth-colonized planets to suffer a berserker attack, and it was among the luckiest; nearly all its people had been successfully evacuated. Malori and others now fought in deep space to protect the Hope, one of the enormous evacuation ships. The Hope was a sphere several kilometers in diameters, large enough to contain a good proportion of the planet’s population stored tier on tier in defense-field stasis. A trickle-relaxation of the fields allowed them to breathe and live with slowed metabolism.

The voyage to a safe sector of the galaxy was going to take several months because most of it, in terms of time spent, was going to be occupied in traversing an outlying arm of the great Taynarus nebula. Here gas and dust were much too thick to let a ship duck out of normal space and travel faster than light. Here even the speeds attainable in normal space were greatly restricted. At thousands of kilometers per second, manned ship or berserker machine could alike be smashed flat against a wisp of gas far more tenuous than human breath.

Taynarus was a wilderness of uncharted plumes and tendrils of dispersed matter, laced through by corridors of relatively empty space. Much of the wilderness was completely shaded by interstellar dust from the light of all the suns outside. Through dark shoals and swamps and tides of nebula the Hope and her escort Judith fled, and a berserker pack pursued. Some berserkers were even larger than the Hope, but those that had taken up this chase were much smaller. In regions of space so thick with matter, a race went to the small as well as to the swift; as the impact cross-section of a ship increased, its maximum practical speed went inexorably down.

The Hope, ill-adapted for this chase (in the rush to evacuate, there had been no better choice available) could not expect to outrun the smaller and more maneuverable enemy. Hence the escort carrier Judith, trying always to keep herself between Hope and the pursuing pack. Judith mothered the little fighting ships, spawning them out whenever the enemy came too near, welcoming survivors back when the threat had once again been beaten off. There had been fifteen of the one-man ships when the chase began. Now there were nine.

The noise injections from Malori’s life support equipment slowed down, then stopped. His conscious mind once more sat steady on its throne. The gradual relaxation of his defense fields he knew to be a certain sign that he would soon rejoin the world of waking men.

As soon as his fighter, Number Four, had docked itself inside the Judith Malori hastened to disconnect himself from the tiny ship’s systems. He pulled on a loose coverall and let himself out of the cramped space. A thin man with knobby joints and an awkward step, he hurried along a catwalk through the echoing hangar-like chamber, noting that three or four fighters besides his had already returned and were resting in their cradles. The artificial gravity was quite steady, but Malori stumbled and almost fell in his haste to get down the short ladder to the operations deck.

Petrovich, commander of the Judith, a bulky, iron-faced man of middle height, was on the deck apparently waiting for him.

“Did—did I make my kill?” Malori stuttered eagerly as he came hurrying up. The forms of military address were little observed aboard the Judith, as a rule, and Malori was really a civilian anyway. That he had been allowed to take out a fighter at all was a mark of the commander’s desperation.

Scowling, Petrovich answered bluntly. “Malori, you’re a disaster in one of these ships. Haven’t the mind for it at all.”

The world turned a little gray in front of Malori. He hadn’t understood until this moment just how important to him certain dreams of glory were. He could find only weak and awkward words. “But . . . I thought I did all right.” He tried to recall his combat-nightmare. Something about a church.

“Two people had to divert their ships from their original combat objectives to rescue you. I’ve already seen their gun-camera tapes. You had Number Four just sparring around with that berserker as if you had no intention doing it any damage at all.” Petrovich looked at him more closely, shrugged, and softened his voice somewhat. “I’m not trying to chew you out, you weren’t even aware of what was happening, of course. I’m just stating facts. Thank probability the Hope is twenty AU deep in a formaldehyde cloud up ahead. If she’d been in an exposed position just now they would have got her.”

“But—” Malori tried to begin an argument but the commander simply walked away. More fighters were coming in. Locks sighed and cradles clanged, and Petrovich had plenty of more important things to do than stand here arguing with him. Malori stood there alone for a few moments, feeling deflated and defeated and diminished. Involuntarily he cast a yearning glance back at Number Four. It was a short, windowless cylinder, not much more than a man’s height in diameter, resting in its metal cradle while technicians worked about it. The stubby main laser nozzle, still hot from firing, was sending up a wisp of smoke now that it was back in atmosphere. There was his twohanded cleaver.

No man could direct a ship or a weapon with anything like the competence of a good machine. The creeping slowness of human nerve impulses and of conscious thought disqualified humans from maintaining direct control of their ships in any space fight against berserkers. But the human subconscious was not so limited. Certain of its processes could not be correlated with any specific synaptic activity within the brain, and some theorists held that these processes took place outside of time. Most physicists stood aghast at this view—but for space combat it made a useful working hypothesis.

In combat, the berserker computers were coupled with sophisticated randoming devices, to provide the flair, the unpredictability that gained an advantage over an opponent who simply and consistently chose the maneuver statistically most likely to bring success. Men also used computers to drive their ships, but had now gained an edge over the best randomizers by relying once more on their own brains, parts of which were evidently freed of hurry and dwelt outside of time, where even speeding light must be as motionless as carved ice.

There were drawbacks. Some people (including Malori, it now appeared) were simply not suitable for the job, their subconscious minds seemingly uninterested in such temporal matters as life or death. And even in suitable minds the subconscious was subject to great stress. Connection to external computers loaded the mind in some way not yet understood. One after another, human pilots returning from combat were removed from their ships in states of catatonia or hysterical excitement. Sanity might be restored, but the man or woman was worthless thereafter as a combat-computer’s teammate. The system was so new that the importance of these drawbacks was just coming to light aboard the Judith now. The trained operators of the fighting ships had been used up, and so had their replacements. Thus it was that Ian Malori, historian, and others were sent out, untrained, to fight. But using their minds had bought a little extra time.

FROM the operations deck Malori went to his small single cabin. He had not eaten for some time, but he was not hungry. He changed clothes and sat in a chair looking at his bunk, looking at his books and tapes and violin, but he did not try to rest or to occupy himself. He expected that he would promptly get a call from Petrovich. Because Petrovich now had nowhere else to turn.

He almost smiled when the communicator chimed, bringing a summons to meet with the commander and other officers at once. Malori acknowledged and set out, taking with him a brown leather-like case about the size of a briefcase but differently shaped, which he selected from several hundred similar cases in a small room adjacent to his cabin. The case he carried was labeled: crazy horse.

Petrovich looked up as Malori entered the small planning room in which the handful of ship’s officers were already gathered around a table. The commander glanced at the case Malori was carrying, and nodded. “It seems we have no choice, historian. We are running the moment Malori was not going to speak that name.

“I want it easy,” was all he said, and blinked his eyes and tried to rub his neck against the pain.

The man looked him over in silence a little longer. “All right,” he said then. Turning back to the machine, he added in a different, humble voice: “I can easily dominate this injured badlife. There will be no problems if you leave us here alone.”

THE machine turned one metal-cased lens toward its servant. “Remember,” it vocalized, “the auxiliaries must be made ready. Time grows short. Failure will bring unpleasant stimuli.”

“I will remember, sir.” The man was humble and sincere. The machine looked at both of them a few moments longer and then departed, metal legs flowing suddenly into a precise and almost graceful walk. Shortly after, Malori heard the familiar sound of an airlock cycling.

“We’re alone now,” the man said, looking down at him. “If you want a name for me you can call me Greenleaf. Want to try to fight me? If so, let’s get it over with.” He was not much bigger than Malori but his hands were huge and he looked hard and very capable despite his ragged filthiness. “All right, that’s a smart choice. You know, you’re actually a lucky man, though you don’t realize it yet. Berserkers aren’t like the other masters that men have—not like the governments and parties and corporations and causes that use you up and then just let you drop and drag away. No, when the machines run out of uses for you they’ll finish you off quickly and cleanly—if you’ve served well. I know, I’ve seen ’em do it that way with other humans. No reason why they shouldn’t. All they want is for us to die, not suffer.”

Malori said nothing. He thought perhaps he would be able to stand up soon.

Greenleaf (the name seemed so inappropriate that Malori thought it probably real) made some adjustment on a small device that he had taken from a pocket and was holding almost concealed in one large hand. He asked: “How many escort carriers besides this one are trying to protect the Hope?”

“I don’t know,” Malori lied. There had been only the Judith.

“What is your name?” The bigger man was still looking at the device in his hand.

“Ian Malori.”

Greenleaf nodded, and without showing any particular emotion in his face took two steps forward and kicked Malori in the belly, precisely and with brutal power.

“That was for trying to lie to me, Ian Malori,” said his captor’s voice, heard dimly from somewhere above as Malori groveled on the deck, trying to breathe again. “Understand that I am infallibly able to tell when you are lying. Now, how many escort carriers are there?”

In time Malori could sit up again, and choke out words. “Only this one.” Whether Greenleaf had a real lie detector, or was only trying to make it appear so by asking questions whose answers he already knew, Malori decided that from now on he would speak the literal truth as scrupulously as possible. A few more kicks like that and he would be helpless and useless and the machines would kill him. He discovered that he was by no means ready to abandon his life.

“What was your position on the crew, Malori?”

“I’m a civilian.”

“What sort?”

“An historian.”

“And why are you here?”

Malori started to try to get to his feet, then decided there was nothing to be gained by the struggle and stayed sitting on the deck. If he ever let himself dwell on his situation for a moment he would be too hideously afraid to think coherently. “There was a project . . . you see, I brought with me from Yaty a number of what we call historical models—blocks of programmed responses we use in historical research.”

“I remember hearing about some such things. What was the project you mentioned?”

“Trying to use the personae of military men as randomizers for the combat computers on the one-man ships.”

“Aha.” Greenleaf squatted, supple and poised for all his raunchy look. “How do they work in combat? Better than a live pilot’s subconscious mind? The machines know all about that.”

“We never had a chance to try. Are the rest of the crew here all dead?”

Greenleaf nodded casually. “It wasn’t a hard boarding. There must have been a failure in your automatic defenses. I’m glad to find one man alive and smart enough to cooperate. It’ll help me in my career.” He glanced at an expensive chronometer strapped to his dirty wrist. “Stand up, Ian Malori. There’s work to do.”

Malori got up and followed the other toward the operations deck.

“The machines and I have been looking around, Malori. These nine little fighting ships you still have on board are just too good to be wasted. The machines are sure of catching the Hope now, but she’ll have automatic defenses, probably a lot tougher than this tub’s were. The machines have taken a lot of casualties on this chase so they mean to use these nine little ships as auxiliary troops—no doubt you have some knowledge of military history?”

“Some.” The answer was perhaps an understatement, but it seemed to pass as truth. The lie detector, if it was one, had been put away. But Malori would still take no more chances than he must.

“Then you probably know how some of the generals on old Earth used their auxiliaries. Drove them on ahead of the main force of trusted troops, where they could be killed if they tried to retreat, and were also the first to be used up against the enemy.”

Arriving on the operations deck, Malori saw few signs of damage. Nine tough little ships waited in their launching cradles, re-armed and returned and refueled for combat. All that would have been taken care of within minutes of their return from their last mission.

“Malori, from looking at these ships’ controls while you were unconscious, I gather that there’s no fully automatic mode in which they can be operated.”

“Right. There has to be some controlling mind, or randomizer, connected on board.”

“You and I are going to get them out as berserker auxiliaries, Ian Malori.” Greenleaf glanced at his timepiece again. “We have less than an hour to think of a good way and only a few hours more to complete the job. The faster the better. If we delay we are going to be made to suffer for it.” He seemed almost to relish the thought. “What do you suggest we do?”

Malori opened his mouth as if to speak, and then did not.

Greenleaf said: “Installing any of your military personae is of course out of the question, as they might not submit well to being driven forward like mere cannon-fodder. I assume they are leaders of some kind. But have you perhaps any of these personae from different fields, of a more docile nature?”

Malori, sagging against the operations officer’s empty combat chair, forced himself to think very carefully before he spoke. “As it happens, there are some personae aboard in which I have a special personal interest. Come.”

With the other following closely, Malori led the way to his small bachelor cabin. Somehow it was astonishing that nothing had been changed inside. There on the bunk was his violin, and on the table were his music tapes and a few books. And here, stacked neatly in their leather-like curved cases, were some of the personae that he liked best to study.

Malori lifted the top case from the stack. “This man was a violinist, as I like to think I am. His name would probably mean nothing to you.”

“Musicology was never my field. But tell me more.”

“He was an Earthman, who lived in the twentieth century CE—quite a religious man, too, as I understand. We can plug the persona in and ask it what it thinks of fighting, if you are suspicious.”

“We had better do that.” When Malori had shown him the proper receptacle beside the cabin’s small computer console, Greenleaf snapped the connections together himself. “How does one communicate with it?”

“Just talk.”

Greenleaf spoke sharply toward the leather-like case. “Your name?”

“Albert Ball.” The voice that answered from the console speaker sounded more human by far than the berserker’s had.

“How does the thought of getting into a fight strike you, Albert?”

“A detestable idea.”

“Will you play the violin for us?”

“Gladly.” But no music followed.

Malori put in: “More connections are necessary if you want actual music.”

“I don’t think we’ll need that.” Greenleaf unplugged the Albert Ball unit and began to look through the stack of others, frowning at unfamiliar names. There were twelve or fifteen cases in all. “Who are these?”

“Albert Ball’s contemporaries. Performers who shared his profession.” Malori let himself sink down on the bunk for a few moments’ rest. He was not far from fainting. Then he went to stand with Greenleaf beside the stack of personae. “This is a model of Edward Man nock, who was blind in one eye and could never have passed the physical examination necessary to serve in any military force of his time.” He pointed to another. “This man served briefly in the cavalry, as I recall, but he kept getting thrown from his horse and was soon relegated to gathering supplies. And this one was a frail, tubercular youth who died at twenty-three standard years of age.”

Greenleaf gave up looking at the cases and turned to size up Malori once again. Malori could feel his battered stomach muscles trying to contract, anticipating another violent impact. It would be too much, it was going to kill him if it came like that again . . .

“ALL right.” Greenleaf was frowning, checking his chronometer yet again. Then he looked up with a little smile. Oddly, the smile made him look like the hell of a good fellow. “All right! Musicians, I suppose, are the antithesis of the military. If the machines approve, we’ll install them and get the ships sent out. Ian Malori, I may just raise your pay.” His pleasant smile broadened. “We may just have bought ourselves another standard year of life if this works out as well as I think it might.”

When the machine came aboard again a few minutes later, Greenleaf bowing before it explained the essence of the plan, while Malori in the background, in an agony of terror, found himself bowing too.

“Proceed, then,” the machine approved. “If you are not, the ship infected with life may find concealment in the storms that rise ahead of us.” Then it went away again quickly. Probably it had repairs and refitting to accomplish on its own robotic ship.

With two men working, installation went very fast. It was only a matter of opening a fighting ship’s cabin, inserting an uncased persona in the installed adapter, snapping together standard connectors and clamps, and closing the cabin hatch again. Since haste was vital to the berserkers’ plans, testing was restricted to listening for a live response from each persona as it was activated inside a ship. Most of the responses were utter banalities about nonexistent weather or ancient food or drink, or curious phrases that Malori knew were only phatic social remarks.

All seemed to be going well, but Greenleaf was having some last minute misgivings. “I hope these sensitive gentlemen will stand up under the strain of finding out their true situation. They will be able to grasp that, won’t they? The machines won’t expect them to fight well, but we don’t want them going catatonic, either.”.

Malori, close to exhaustion, was tugging at the hatch of Number Eight, and nearly fell off the curved hull when it came open suddenly. “They will apprehend their situation within a minute after launching, I should say. At least in a general way. I don’t suppose they’ll understand it’s interstellar space around them. You have been a military man, I suppose. If they should be reluctant to fight—I leave to you the question of how to deal with recalcitrant auxiliaries.”

When they plugged the persona into ship Number Eight, its test response was: “I wish my craft to be painted red.”

“At once, sir,” said Malori quickly, and slammed down the ship’s hatch and started to move on to Number Nine.

“What was that all about?” Greenleaf frowned, but looked at his timepiece and moved along.

“I suppose the maestro is already aware that he is about to embark in some kind of a vehicle. As to why he might like it painted red . . .” Malori grunted, trying to open up Number Nine, and let his answer trail away.

At last all the ships were ready. With his finger on the launching switch, Greenleaf paused. For one last time his eyes probed Malori’s. “We’ve done very well, timewise. We’re in for a reward, as long as this idea works at least moderately well.” He was speaking now in a solemn near-whisper. “It had better work. Have you ever watched a man being skinned alive?”

Malori was gripping a stanchion to keep erect. “I have done all I can.”

Greenleaf operated the launching switch. There was a polyphonic whisper of airlocks. The nine ships were gone, and simultaneously a holographic display came alive above the operations officer’s console. In the center of the display the Judith showed as a fat green symbol, with nine smaller green dots moving slowly and uncertainly nearby. Farther off, a steady formation of red dots represented what was left of the berserker pack that had so long and so relentlessly pursued the Hope and her escort. There were at least fifteen red berserker dots, Malori noted gloomily.

“The trick,” Greenleaf said as if to himself, “is to make them more afraid of their own leaders than they are of the enemy.” He keyed the panel switches that would send his voice out to the ships. “Attention, units One through Nine!” he barked. “You are under the guns of a vastly superior force, and any attempt at disobedience or escape will be severely punished . . .”

He went on browbeating them for a minute, while Malori observed in the screen that the dirty weather the berserker had mentioned was coming on. A sleet of atomic particles was driving through this section of the nebula, across the path of the Judith and the odd hybrid fleet that moved with her. The Hope, not in view on this range scale, might be able to take advantage of the storm to get away entirely unless the berserker pursuit was swift.

Visibility on the operations display was failing fast and Greenleaf cut off his speech as it became apparent that contact was being lost.

Orders in the berserkers’ unnatural voices, directed at auxiliary ships One through Nine, came in fragmentarily before the curtain of noise became an opaque white-out. The pursuit of the Hope had not yet been resumed.

FOR a while all was silent on the operations deck, except for an occasional crackle of noise from the display. All around them the empty launching cradles waited.

“That’s that,” Greenleaf said at length. “Nothing to do now but worry.” He gave his little transforming smile again, and seemed to be almost enjoying the situation.

Malori was looking at him curiously. “How do you—manage to cope so well?”

“Why not?” Greenleaf stretched and got up from the now-useless console. “You know, once a man gives up his old ways, badlife ways, admits he’s really dead to them, the new ways aren’t so bad. There are even women available from time to time, when the machines take prisoners.”

“Goodlife,” said Malori. Now he had spoken the obscene, provoking epithet. But at the moment he was not afraid.

“Goodlife yourself, little man.” Greenleaf was still smiling. “You know, I think you still look down on me. You’re in as deep as I am now, remember?”

“I think I pity you.”

Greenleaf let out a little snort of laughter, and shook his own head pityingly. “You know, I may have ahead of me a longer and more pain-free life than most of humanity has even enjoyed—you said one of the models for the personae died at twenty-three. Was that a common age of death in those days?”

Malori, still clinging to his stanchion, began to wear a strange, grim little smile. “Well, in his generation, in the continent of Europe, it was. The First World War was raging at the time.”

“But he died of some disease, you said.”

“No. I said he had a disease, tuberculosis. Doubtless it would have killed him eventually. But he died in battle, in 1917 CE, in a place called Belgium. His body was never found, as I recall, an artillery barrage having destroyed it and his aircraft entirely.”

Greenleaf was standing very still. “Aircraft! What are you saying?”

Malori pulled himself erect, somewhat painfully, and let go of his support. “I tell you now that Georges Guynemer—that was his name—shot down fifty-three enemy aircraft before he was killed. Wait!” Malori’s voice was suddenly loud and firm, and Greenleaf halted his menacing advance in sheer surprise. “Before you begin to do anything violent to me, you should perhaps consider whether your side or mine is likely to win the fight outside.”

“The fight . . .”

“It will be nine ships against fifteen or more machines, but I don’t feel too pessimistic. The personae we have sent out are not going to be meekly slaughtered.”

GREENLEAF stared at him a moment longer, then spun around and lunged for the operations console. The display was still blank white with noise and there was nothing to be done. He slowly sank into the padded chair. “What have you done to me?” he whispered. “That collection of invalid musicians—you couldn’t have been lying about them all.”

“Oh, every word I spoke was true. Not all World War One fighter pilots were invalids, of course. Some were in perfect health, indeed fanatical about staying that way. And I did not say they were all musicians, though I certainly meant you to think so. Ball had the most musical ability among the aces, but was still only an amateur. He always said he loathed his real profession.”

Greenleaf, slumped in the chair now, seemed to be aging visibly. “But one was blind . . . it isn’t possible.”

“So his enemies thought, when they released him from an internment camp early in the war. Edward Mannock, blind in one eye. He had to trick an examiner to get into the army. Of course the tragedy of these superb men is that they spent themselves killing one another. In those days they had no berserkers to fight, at least none that could be attacked dashingly, with an aircraft and a machine gun. I suppose men have always faced berserkers of some kind.”

“Let me make sure I understand.” Greenleaf’s voice was almost pleading. “We have sent out the personae of nine fighter pilots?”

“Nine of the best. I suppose their total of claimed aerial victories is more than five hundred. Such claims were usually exaggerated, but still . . .”

There was silence again. Greenleaf slowly turned his chair back to face the operations display. After a time the storm of atomic noise began to abate. Malori, who had sat down on the deck to rest, got up again, this time more quickly. In the hologram a single glowing symbol was emerging from the noise, fast approaching the position of the Judith.

The approaching symbol was bright red.

“So there we are,” said Greenleaf, getting to his feet. From a pocket he produced a stubby little handgun. At first he pointed it toward the shrinking Malori, but then he smiled his nice smile and shook his head. “No, let the machines have you. That will be much worse.”

When they heard the airlock begin to cycle, Greenleaf raised the weapon to point at his own skull. Malori could not tear his eyes away. The inner door clicked and Greenleaf fired.

Malori bounded across the intervening space and pulled the gun from Greenleaf’s dead hand almost before the body had completed its fall. He turned to aim the weapon at the airlock as its inner door sighed open. The berserker standing there was the one he had seen earlier, or the same type at least. But it had just been through violent alterations. One metal arm was cut short in a bright bubbly scar, from which the ends of truncated cables flapped. The whole metal body was riddled with small holes, and around its top there played a halo of electrical discharge.

Malori fired, but the machine ignored the impact of the force-packet. They would not have let Greenleaf keep a gun with which they could be hurt. The battered machine ignored Malori too, for the moment, and lurched forward to bend over Greenleaf’s nearly decapitated body.

“Tra-tra-tra-treason,” the berserker squeaked. “Ultimate unpleasant ultimate unpleasant stum-stum-stimuli. Badlife badlife bad—”

By then Malori had moved up close behind it and thrust the muzzle of the gun into one of the still-hot holes where Albert Ball or perhaps Frank Luke or Werner Voss or one of the others had already used a laser to good effect. Two forcepackets beneath its armor and the berserker went down, as still as the man who lay beneath it. The halo of electricity died.

Malori backed off, looking at them both, then spun around to scan the operations display again. The red dot was drifting away from the Judith, the vessel it represented now evidently no more than inert machinery.

Out of the receding atomic storm a single green dot was approaching. A minute later, Number Eight came in alone, bumping to a gentle stop against its cradle pads. The laser nozzle at once began smoking heavily in atmosphere. The craft was scarred in several places by enemy fire.

“I claim four more victories,” the persona said as soon as Malori opened the hatch. “Today I was given fine support by my wingmen, who made great sacrifices for the Fatherland. Although the enemy outnumbered us by two to one, I think that not a single one of them escaped. But I must protest bitterly that my aircraft still has not been painted red.”

“I will see to it at once, mein herr,” murmured Malori, as he began to disconnect the persona from the fighting ship. He felt a little foolish for trying to reassure a piece of hardware. Still, he handled the persona gently as he carried it to where the little formation of empty cases were waiting on the operations deck, their labels showing plainly:

ALBERT BALL;

WILLIAM AVERY BISHOP;

RENE PAUL FONCK;

GEORGES MARIE GUYNEMER;

FRANK LUKE;

EDWARD MANNOCK;

CHARLES NUNGESSER;

MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN;

WERNER VOSS.

They were English, American, German, French. They were Jew, violinist, invalid, Prussian, rebel, hater, bon vivant, Christian. Among the nine of them they were many other things besides. Maybe there was only the one word—man—which could include them all.

Right now the nearest living humans were many millions of kilometers away, but still Malori did not feel quite alone. He put the persona back into its case gently, even knowing that it would be undamaged by ten thousand more gravities than his hands could exert. Maybe it would fit into the cabin of Number Eight with him, when he made his try to reach the Hope.

“Looks like it’s just you and me now, Red Baron.” The human being from which it had been modeled had been not quite twenty-six when he was killed over France, after less than eighteen months of success and fame. Before that, in the cavalry, his horse had thrown him again and again.

BERSERKER’S PLANET

For half a millennium the disembodied killer-machine had been haunted by the ghost of one man!

I

THE dead man’s voice was coming live and clear over ship’s radio into the Orion’s lounge, and the six people gathered there, the only people alive within several hundred light years, were listening attentively for the moment, some of theni only because Oscar Schoenberg, who owned Orion and was driving her on this trip, had indicated that he wanted to listen. Carlos Suomi, who was ready to stand up to Schoenberg and expected to have a serious argument with him one of these days, was in this instance in perfect agreement with him. Athena Poulson, the independent one of the three women, had made no objection; Celeste Servetus, perhaps the least independent, had made a few but they meant nothing. Gustavus De La Torre and Barbara Hurtado had never, in Suomi’s experience, objected to any decision made by Schoenberg.

The dead man’s voice to which they listened was not recorded, only mummified by the approximately five hundred years of spacetime that stretched between Hunters’ system, where the radio signal had been generated, and Orion’s present position in intragalactic space about eleven hundred light years (or five and a half weeks by ship) from Earth. It was the voice of Johann Karlsen, who about five hundred standard years ago had led a battle fleet to Hunters’ system to skirmish there with a berserker fleet and drive them off. That was some time after he had smashed the main berserker power and permanently crippled their offensive capabilities at the dark nebula called the Stone Place.

Most of the bulkhead space in the lounge was occupied by viewscreens, and then, as now, they were adjusted for the purpose, the screens brought in the stars with awesome realism. Sumoi was looking in the proper direction on the screen, but from this distance of five hundred light years it was barely possible without using telescopic magnification to pick out Hunters’ sun, let alone to see the comparatively minor flares of the space battle Karlsen had been fighting when he spoke the words now coming into the space yacht’s lounge for Schoenberg to brood over and Suomi to record. Briefly the two men looked somewhat alike, though Suomi was smaller, probably much younger, and had a rather boyish face.

“HOW can you be sure that’s Karlsen’s voice?” Gus De La Torre, a lean and dark and somehow dangerous-looking man, asked now. He and Schoenberg were sitting in soft massive chairs facing each other across the small diameters of the lounge. The other four had positioned their similar chairs so that the group made an approximate circle.

“I’ve heard it before. This same sequence.” Schoenberg’s voice was rather soft for such a big, tough-looking man, but it was as decisive as usual. His gaze, like Suomi’s, was on the viewscreen, probing out among the stars as he listened intently to Karlsen. “On my last trip to Hunters’,” Schoenberg went on softly, “about fifteen standard years ago, I stopped in this region—fifteen lights closer-in, of course—and managed to find this same signal. I listened to these same words and recorded some of them, just as Carlos is doing now.” He nodded in Suomi’s direction.

Karlsen broke a crackling radio silence to say: “Check the lands on that hatch if it won’t seal—should I have to tell you that?” The voice was biting, and there was something unforgettable about it even when the words it uttered were only peevish scraps of jargon indistinguishable from those spoken by the commander of any other difficult and dangerous operation.

“Listen to him,” Schoenberg said. “If that’s not Karlsen, who could it be? Anyway, when I got back to Earth after the last trip I checked what I had recorded against historians’ records made on his flagship, and confirmed it was the same sequence.”

De La Torre made a playful tut-tutting sound. “Oscar, did nobody ask you how you came by your recording? You weren’t supposed to be out in this region of space then, were you, any more than we are now?”

“Pah. Nobody pays that much attention. Interstellar Authority certainly doesn’t.”

Suomi had the impression that Schoenberg and De La Torre had not known each other very long or very well, but had met in some business connection and had fallen in together because of a common interest in hunting, something that few people now shared. Few people on Earth, at least, which was the home planet of everyone aboard the ship.

Karlsen said: “This is the High Commander speaking. Ring three uncover. Boarding parties, start your action sequence.”

“Signal hasn’t decayed much since I heard it last,” Schoenberg mused. “The next fifteen lights toward Hunters’ must be clean.” Without moving from his chair he dialed a three-dimensional holographic astrogation chart into existence and with his lightwriter deftly added a symbol to it. The degree of clean emptiness of the space between them and their destination was of importance because, although a starship’s faster-than-light translation took place outside of normal space, conditions in adjacent realms of normal space had their inescapable effects.

“There’ll be a good gravitational hill to get up,” said Karlsen on the radio. “Let’s stay alert.”

“Frankly, all this bores me,” said Celeste Servetus (full figure, Oriental and black and some strain of Nordic in her ancestry, incredibly smooth taut skin beneath her silver body paint, wig of what looked like silver mist). Here lately it was Celeste’s way to display flashes of insolence toward Schoenberg, to go through periods of playing what in an earlier age would have been described as hard-to-get. Schoenberg did not bother to look at her now. She had already been got.

“We wouldn’t be here now, probably, if it weren’t for that gentleman who’s talking on the radio.” This was Barbara Hurtado. Barbara and Celeste were much alike, both playgirls brought along on this expedition as items for male consumption, like the beer and the cigars; and they were much different, too. Barbara, a Caucasian-looking brunette, was as usual opaquely clothed from knees to shoulders, and there was nothing ethereal about her. If you saw her inert, asleep, face immobile, and did not hear her voice or her laugh, or behold the grace with which she moved, you might well think her nothing beyond the ordinary in sexual attractiveness.

Alive and in motion, she was as eye-catching as Celeste. They were about on a par intellectually, too, Suomi had decided. Barbara’s remark implying that present-day interstellar human civilization owed its existence to Karlsen and his victories over the berserkers was a truism, not susceptible of debate or even worthy of reply.

The berserkers, automated warships of terrible power and effectiveness, had been loosed on the galaxy during some unknown war fought by races long vanished before human history began. The basic program built into all berserkers was to seek out and destroy life, whenever and wherever they found it. In the dark centuries of their first assaults on Earth-descended man, they had come near overwhelming his modest dominion among the stars. Though Karlsen and others had turned them back, forced them away from the center of human-dominated space, there were still berserkers in existence and men still fought and died against them on the frontiers of man’s little corner of the galaxy. Not around here, though. Not for five hundred years.

“I admit his voice does something to me,” Celeste said, shifting her position in her chair, stretching and then curling her long naked silver legs.

“He loses his temper in a minute here,” said Schoenberg.

“And why shouldn’t he? I think men of genius have that right.” This was Athena Poulson in her fine contralto. Despite her name, her face showed mainly Oriental ancestry. She was better looking than nine out of ten young women, carrying to the first decimal place what Celeste brought to the third. Athena was now wearing a simple one-piece suit, not much different from what she usually wore in the office. She was one of Schoenberg’s most private and trusted secretaries.

Suomi, wanting to make sure he caught Karlsen’s temper-losing on his recording, checked the little crystal cube resting on the flat arm of his chair. He had adjusted it to screen out conversation in the lounge and pick up only what came in by radio. He reminded himself to label the cube as soon as he got it back to his stateroom; generally he forgot.

“HOW they must have hated him,” said Barbara Hurtado, her voice now dreamy and far away.

Athena looked over. “Who? The people he lost his temper at?”

“No, those hideous machines he fought against. Oscar, you’ve studied it all. Tell us something about it.”

Schoenberg shrugged. He seemed reluctant to talk very much on the subject although it obviously interested him. “I’d say Karlsen was a real man, and I wish I could have known him. Carlos here has perhaps studied the period more thoroughly than I have.”

“Tell us, Carl,” Athena said. She was sitting two chairs away. Suomi’s field was the psychology of environmental design. He had been called in, some months ago, to consult with Schoenberg and Associates on the plans for a difficult new office, and there he had met Athena . . . so now he was here, on a big-game hunting expedition, of all things.

“Yes, now’s your chance,” De La Torre put in. Things did not generally go quite smoothly between him and Suomi, though the abrasion had not yet been bad enough to open up an acknowledged quarrel.

“Well,” said Suomi thoughtfully, “in a way, you know, those machines did hate him.”

“Oh no,” said Athena positively, shaking her head. “Not machines.”

Sometimes he felt like hitting her.

He went on: “Karlsen is supposed to have had some knack of choosing strategy they couldn’t cope with, some quality of leadership . . . whatever he had, the berserkers couldn’t seem to oppose him successfully. They’re said to have placed a higher value on his destruction than on that of some entire planets.”

“The berserkers made special assassin machines,” Schoenberg offered unexpectedly. “Just to get Karlsen.”

“Are you sure of that?” Suomi asked, interested. “I’ve run into hints of something like that, but couldn’t find it definitely stated anywhere.”

“Oh, yes.” Schoenberg smiled faintly. “If you’re trying to study the matter you can’t just ask Info-center on Earth for a printout; you have to get out and dig a little more than that.”

“Why?” Infocenter, as a rule, could promptly reproduce anything that was available as reference material anywhere on Earth.

“There are still some old government censor-blocks in their data banks holding information on berserkers.”

Suomi shook his head. “Why in the world?”

“Just official inertia, I suppose. Nobody wants to take the time and trouble to dig them out. If you mean why were the censor-blocks inserted in the first place, well, it was because at one time there were some people who worshipped the damned things; berserkers, I mean.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Celeste objected. She tried to say more but was interrupted by Karlsen shouting in anger, chewing out his men about something unintelligibly technological.

“That’s about the end,” said Schoenberg, reaching for a control beside his chair. The frying crackle of radio static died away. “There’re several hours of radio silence following.” Schoenberg’s eyes went shifting restlessly now to his astrogational chart. “So there was some dimwitted bureaucratic policy of restricting information about berserkers . . . the whole thing is fascinating, ladies and gents, but what say we move on toward our hunting?”

WITHOUT pretense of waiting for agreement he began to set his astrogational and drive computers to take them on toward Hunters’. It would be another seventeen or eighteen standard days before Orion arrived in-system there. Exact timing was not possible in interstellar travel. It was something like piloting a sailing ship in a sea full of variable currents, depending upon winds that were undependable from day to day even though they held to a fairly consistent pattern. Variable stars, pulsars, spinars and quasars within the galaxy and out of it had each their effects upon the subfoundation of space through which the starship moved. Black holes of various sizes committed their wrenching gravitational enormities upon the fabric of the Universe. The explosions of supernovae far and near sent semi-eternal shock waves lapping at the hull. The interstellar ship that effectively outpaces light does not, cannot, carry aboard itself all the power needed to make it move as it does move. Only tapping the gravitational-inertial resources of the universe can provide such power, as the winds were tapped to drive the sailing ships of old.

Though the artificial gravity maintained its calm dominion in the lounge a change in lighting of the holographic chart signalled that Orion was underway. Schoenberg stood up, and stretched expansively, seeming to grow even bigger than he was. “On to Hunters’ !” he announced. “Who’ll join me in a drink? To the success of the hunt, and the enjoyment of any other amusements we may run into.”

They all would have a drink. But Athena took only a sip before dropping her glass away into the recycling station. “Shall we get our chess tournament moving again, Oscar?”

“I think not.” Schoenberg stood with one hand behind his back under the short tails of his lounging jacket, almost posing, savoring his own drink. “I’m going below. Time we got the firing range set up and got in a little practice. We’re not going after pheasant, exactly . . . we’ll have enough of tournaments after we land, perhaps.” His intelligent eyes, lighted now by some private amusement, skipped around at all of them, seemed to linger longest, by a fraction of a second, on Suomi. Then Schoenberg turned and with a little wave went out of the lounge.

The party broke up. After taking his recorder back to his stateroom, Suomi started out again to see what the firing range was going to be like, and ran into De La Torre in the passageway.

Suomi asked: “What was that all about, ‘enough of tournaments after we land’ ?”

“He’s told you nothing about the tournament he wants to watch?”

“No. What kind?”

De La Torre smiled, and would not or could not give him a straight answer.

II

IN THE camp by the placid river, under Godsmountain’s wooded flanks, there were sixty-four warriors when all were assembled at last, on this warm morning in the eastern-sunrise season. Out of the sixty-four there were not more than four or five who had ever seen each other before because they had come each from his own district, town, fiefdom, nomadic band or island, from every corner of the inhabitable world. Some had journeyed here from the shores of the boundless eastern ocean. Others had come from the edge of permanently inhabited territory to the north, where spring, already a sixtieth-of-an-old-man’s-lifetime old, was melting free the glacier-beast and rime-worm. From the north came the mightiest hunters of this world named for hunting. Others of these warriors had come from the uncrossable shattered desert that lay to the west of the lands of men, and others still from the tangle of rivers and swamps in the south that blended finally into ocean again and blocked all travel in that direction.

The warriors who had gathered on this day for the beginning of Thorun’s Tournament were variously tall or short, lean or heavy, but only a few were very young men, and none at all were very old. All were notably violent men even on this world of violence, but during the days of assembly they had camped here together in peace, each on his arrival accepting without argument whatever little plot of campground was assigned him by Leros or one of the subordinate priests of Thorun. In the center of the camp an image of the god, dark-bearded and gold-diademed, brooding with hand on sword-hilt, had been erected on a field-altar, a small wooden platform, and no warrior failed to place some offering before it. Some of the offerings were rich, for some of the men who had come to fight in the Tournament were wealthy.

However wealthy or powerful an entrant might be, he came alone, unattended by any servants or well-wishers and carrying little more than a heavy robe for shelter in addition to the weapons of his preference. It was going to be a holy tournament, regarded by the priests of Thorun as so sacred that outside spectators were barred—though there was scarcely a freeman on the planet who did not yearn to watch. Nor were outside servants needed. The assembled warriors and priests were to be served—luxuriously, it appeared—by an almost equal number of gray-clad male slaves whose dress marked them as property of Godsmountain, of Thorun and his servitors. No women were to be allowed within the camp.

On this morning when the last warrior arrived, some slaves were making ready the flat fighting arena of pounded earth, some ten paces in diameter. Other slaves prepared a midday meal and set aside offerings of fruit and meat for those who would wish to lay them on Thorun’s altar. The smoke of the cooking fires rose into a sky that was quite clear and had something of the blueness of Earth’s sky, and yet also something of yellowness and bitterness and brass.

From beyond the plumes of smoke the mountain looked down, an unfamiliar sight to almost all of those who had come here to fight. But it had been known since childhood in all their hearts and minds. On its top the priests of Thorun dwelt, and their god and his power with them, within the white walls of his sacred city. Women and animals and other prosaic necessities were up there too; slaves were taken up from time to time as needed to serve the dwellers but seldom or never did the slaves come down again; those at work this morning in the riparian meadow had all been imported for the occasion from tributary lands. Godsmountain’s sizable armies never, except for select detachments, marched any nearer Their own capital than the mountain’s base. To most ordinary folk the summit and its citadel-city were unattainable.

Thorun himself dwelt there, and the demigod Mjollnir, his most faithful paladin. Other divinities visited from time to time: the gods of healing, justice, soil and weather, and growth and fecundity; and numerous demigods with ancillary responsibilities. But it was primarily Thorun’s mountain, Thorun’s religion, Thorun’s world—except to those, generally restricted to the rim of the world these days, who did not like Thorun, or did not like the power wielded in his name by Godsmountain’s priests. Hunters’ was a planet of hunters and warriors, and Thorun was god of war and of the hunt.

A priest called Leros, of middle age, having seen three previous northern springs, and scarred by the violence of his youth, had been appointed by the High Priest Andreas to direct the Tournament. Leros was high in rank among the priests of Thorun, though not a member of the most secret Inner Circle. In his youth he had gained an almost legendary reputation as a fighter, and many of the best of these young heroes regarded him with awe. Leros came down to the riverbank himself to greet the last arriving warrior, one Chapmut of Rillijax. He gave Chapmut a hand out of his canoe, bade him welcome to the Sacred Tournament of Thorun, and then with a small flourish placed the last check-mark on the tally sheet containing all the expected warriors’ names.

Shortly after, a solemn drum called all of them to an assembly. Leros, standing in a new robe of spotless white in the center of the clean new arena, waited while they gathered around its edge. They were not long in falling silent to give him their full attention. In some parts of the circle the warriors were crowded, yet there was no jostling or edging for position among them, or anything but the greatest courtesy.

“REJOICE, ye chosen of the gods!” Leros cried out at last in his still-strong voice. He swept his gaze fully around the ring of fighting men, standing himself as tall and strong as most of them, though no longer as quick or sure. It was many days, about a sixtieth-part-of-an-old-man’s-life, since the formal announcement of this Tournament had been carried down from Godsmountain and spread across the world. For much longer, since the time of the last northern spring, it had been common knowledge that this Tournament was coming. Scrawny little boys of that time were now men in their prime; and Godsmountain and all its doings had waxed greatly in importance since then.

Many of the waiting entrants were half naked in the mild weather, their bodies all muscles and scars and hair. The clothes of some were very rough, and those of others soft and rich. A few wore scraps of body armor, or carried shields of hardened sloth-leather or bright iron. Full armor was unknown on Hunters’, where a man stood on his feet to fight and never rode. These fighters were chiefs’ sons and peasants’ sons and sons of unknown fathers. Nothing but merit, merit with sword and spear and battle-axe, had won them their places here. Around him now Leros saw blue eyes and dark eyes, eyes with epicanthic folds and eyes without, deep eyes here, mad eyes there, and a pair or two of eyes that seemed as innocent as babes’. The original colonists from Earth, some six standard centuries in the past, had been eclectically selected from a world already well mixed in race and culture. Around Leros the faces were brown or white or black, with hair of black or brown or yellow or red—there was one iron-gray, two shaven bald. Here was a heavily tattooed face, with stripes across from ear to ear, and over there a smile showed teeth all filed to points. More numerous than the oddities were other men who looked as prosaic as herdsmen, save for the weapons at their belts. Besides their human maleness, only one thing was common to them all: uncommon skill at killing other men in single combat.

“REJOICE, ye chosen!” Leros called again, more softly. “Before the sun goes down upon this day, half of you will stand within our god’s great hall—” he pointed toward Godsmountain’s top, out of sight behind the wooded bulges of its lower slopes—“and face to face with Thorun himself.” Leros prepared himself to retell, and his listeners made ready to hear yet again, the promises that had been carried down from Godsmountain a standard year earlier by Leros and his aides.

Thorun, warrior-chieftain of the gods (so the message went) had been pleased by the spirit shown by the race of men in the recent series of wars extending Godsmountain’s power across most of the habitable world. The god was pleased to grant to humankind the privilege of fighting for a seat at his right hand, the competition being open to the sixty-four finest heroes of the age. To accomplish this purpose the inhabited world had been arbitrarily divided into sixty-four districts, and the local rulers of every district were invited to send—the details of the selection process being left largely to them—their mightiest warrior. All but one of the contestants was expected to die in the Tournament of Thorun, and that one, the winner, would be granted the status of a demigod and would take his seat at Thorun’s right hand. (Out in the country somewhere, some irreverent logician would be sure to ask the priest who brought the message: How about Mjollnir: Will he have to move down a peg? Not at all, my nephew. No doubt he and the Tournament winner will share the honor of being next to Thorun. No doubt they will fight for the day’s turn whenever it pleases them.)

By all reports it pleased them to fight a lot in Thorun’s hall atop the mountain. There the great god and the more or less deified men, slaughtered heroes of wars and combats past, re-slaughtered one another daily for the joy of it and were miraculously healed of their wounds each evening in time to enjoy the perfect meat and drink of Thorun’s table, the tale-telling of immortal eloquence shared by the company of the gods, the endless supply of maidens eternally made virgin for their pleasure. (Out in the country, the questioner relaxes with a sigh; there is more here than a simple warrior knows how to argue about. Even if he is not so simple, the questioner sees that he is not going to beat this talking priest at his own game of words.)

Leros on this bright morning was formally spelling out once more what his listeners already knew: “Those of you who fall in the first round of fighting will be the first to feast with Thorun—but eternally around the lowest portion of his table. The next sixteen who perish, in the second round of fighting, will be granted places higher up. In the fighting of the third round eight will die and will be seated higher still—and each of these will have eternally with him four lovely maids of a beauty surpassing any in this world, two of ivory white and two of ebon black, to satisfy his every wish even before it can be spoken aloud.

“After the fourth round has been fought there will be only four warriors left alive, the strongest of the strong. The four who die in the fourth round of fighting will be granted shields and arms lustrous as silver, yet harder and keener than the finest steel, and wine goblets to match, and each will have eight virgin maidens of still greater beauty perpetually in his service. They will be seated very near to Thorun.

“In the fifth round of duels, two more men must fall, and these two will be seated in tall chairs of oak and gold, higher up the table still, and they will be granted gold wine-cups and shields and arms, and each will be served by sixteen maids of beauty indescribable, and all things will be theirs in fuller measure than any lower men may have. On that day but two of you will remain. alive outside the hall where the gods feast.

“The single duel of the sixth round of fighting will be the last and greatest. Who loses it will still be honored beyond any of those that I have mentioned yet. And when it is over, the Tournament will be over, and one man will have won. That man alone shall walk, in the flesh, into the holy place of the god Thorun, and his place for all time to come shall be at Thorun’s right hand; and from his high place that man will overtop all of the other sixty-three by as great a measure as they stand above the race of puny, mortal men that crawl about here below.”

Leros concluded with a sigh. He believed the promises and they moved him to envy and awe every time he thought about them.

FOR some time now one of the warriors, black of skin and huge, had been leaning forward with an expectant look, as if he wished to speak. Now Leros, with an inquiring glance, took notice of him.

The man asked: “Lord Leros, tell me this—”

“Address me no more as Lord. Your status from this day forward is higher than my own.”

“Very well. Friend Leros, then. Tell me this: when a man has won this. Tournament will he then have all the powers and rights that gods are known to have? I mean not only powers of war, but of the soft and healing arts?”

Leros had to take thought for a moment or two before answering. It had not been one of the usual expectable questions, for instance was Thorun’s hall threatened by overcrowding with all the wars, or what kind of sacrificial meat would the god prefer today. At last he spoke. “The gentle goddess of healing will certainly listen to any request that man may make.” He let out a light sigh. “The gods listen to one another more than they do to men. But then they still do what they please, unless of course they have bound themselves by formal promise, as Thorun has done regarding this Tournament.”

The man nodded soberly. “It is all we can expect,” he said, and resumed his place in the circle.

All were silent now. Somewhere in the background a slave was chopping kindling for the first funeral pyre. Leros said: “Then go, all of you, and make what final preparations you will. The first fight will begin shortly.”

As soon as the assembly had dispersed a subordinate priest drew Leros aside and when they had reached a place of relative privacy unrolled a small scroll and showed it to him. “Lord Leros, this was found posted on a tree not far away. We have no clue as yet to indicate who put it up.”

The lettering on the scroll seemed to have been made with a dull ordinary pencil of charred kettwood. The message read:

Gods and men, place your bets. Who of the 64 will be proven the greatest fighter? That one will be, there is no doubt. Will he then envy those that he has slain, and curse Godsmountain and its lying priests? While your money is out, try to lay a bet on this also: Are the rulers of this mountain fit to rule our world?

The Brotherhood

LEROS nodded, tight-lipped, at j the signature. “You have sent word of this up the hill?”

“Of course, Lord.”

“That is all we can do for the moment. We must make sure the army increases its patrols in the area.” But of course the message might have been put up by someone known to be in the area of the Tournament. Perhaps one of the slaves—or even one of the contestants—is not what he pretends to be. “We must keep our eyes open, of course, and let nothing jeopardize the Tournament. To discredit it would be a considerable victory for the Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood was a vague league of the disaffected, probably including most of Godsmountain’s enemies, who were now scattered and relatively powerless around the rim of the inhabited world. There might be a sharp and dangerous secret organization at its core; it seemed wise to assume there was, and to continually warn the people and the soldiers of it.

The subordinate indicated his agreement and withdrew. Leros pondered briefly: Might the agent who had left the message be a disloyal priest? He did not think it probable. But he could not be completely sure.

The Tournament, meanwhile, had to get started. There had been no sign from up the hill that High Priest Andreas or any of his Inner Circle were coming down to watch.

A pack train came into view on the lower reaches of the long road that wound its way down the forested slopes from the summit; but when it drew near Leros saw that no men of rank were walking near the animals, it was only a regular supply caravan returning unburdened from the top.

On with it, then. Turning to a waiting herald, he gave the signal for the battle-horn to be blown, to call the contestants all together for the last time in the world of living men. When they were assembled he drew from a pocket of his fine white robe a scroll of new vellum, on which a priest-scribe had set down the names in elegant calligraphy. They appeared in the alphabetical order hallowed by time and military usage:

Arthur of Chesspa

Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe

Big Left Hand

Bram the Beardless of Consiglor

Brunn of Bourzoe

Byram of the Long Bridges

Chapmut of Rillijax

Charles the Upright

Chun He Ping the Strong

Col Renba

David the Wolf of Monga’s Village

Efim Samdeviatoff

Farley of Eikosk

Farmer Minamoto

Geno Hammerhand

Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville

Gib the Blacksmith

Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp

Gladwin Vanucci

Gunter Kamurata

Hal Coppersmith

Here Stambler of Birchtown

Homer Garamond of Running Water

Ian Offally the Woodcutter

John Spokemaker of the Triple Fork

Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill

Kanret Jon of Jonsplace

Korl the Legbreaker

LeNos of the Highlands

Losson Grish

M’Gamba Mim

Muni Podarces

Mesthles of the Windy Vale

Mool of Rexbahn

Nikos Darcy of the Long Plain

Oktans Buk of Pachuka

Omir Kelsumba

One-Eyed Manuel

Otis Kitamura

Pal Setoff of Whiteroads

Pern-Paul Hosimba

Pernsol Muledriver of Weff’s Plain

Phil Cenchrias

Polydorus the Foul

Proclus Nan Ling

Rafael Sandoval

Rahim Sosias

Rico Kitticatchorn of Tiger’s Lair

Rudolph Thadbury

Ruen Redaldo

Sensai Hagenderf

Shang Ti the Awesome

Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope

Tay Corbish Jeandry

Thomas the Grabber

Thurlow Vultee of the High Crag

Travers Sandakan of Thieves’ Road

Urumchi

Vann the Nomad

Venerable Ming the Butcher

Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town

Wat Franko of the Deep Wood

Wull Narvaez

Zell of Windchastee

WHEN he had done with reading, Leros glanced up at the still-high sun. “There will be time today for much fighting. Let it begin.

He handed the scroll to a subordinate priest, who read in a loud voice: “Arthur of Chesspa—Ben Tarras of the Battle-Axe.”

Having both stepped into the ring, and made their holy signs imploring Thorun’s favor, the two went at it. Ben Tarras had taken only a dozen more breaths when his battle-axe spun out of his hand to bury itself with a soft sound in the calmly receiving earth, while Arthur’s swordblade at the same time sank true and deep in Ben Tarras’s flesh. The bare, flattened soil of the fighting ring drank Ben Tarras’s blood as if it had been long athirst. A pair of slaves in shabby gray tunics dragged his body from the ring, toward a place nearby where other slaves were readying a pyre. The dry wood was stacked twice taller than a man already, and was not yet enough. Thirty-two men today would join the gods and begin their eternal feast with Thorun.

“Big Left Hand—Bram the Beardless of Consiglor.”

This fight went on a little longer; and then both hands of Big Left Hand (they appeared equally big) were stilled as Bram’s sword tore his middle open. Again the slaves came to bear a corpse away, but Big Left Hand stirred and kicked feebly as they took him up. His eyes opened and were living, though the terrible wound in his front was plainly mortal. One slave, who limped about his work, pulled from his belt a short but massive leaden maul and broke the head of the dying man with a short methodical swing. Leros for the second time said ritual words to speed a loser’s soul to Thorun, nodded to the acolyte who held the scroll.

“Brunn of Bourzoe—Byram of the Long Bridges.”

It went on through the afternoon, with little pauses between fights. Some of the fights were long, and one of the winners had lost so much blood that he could hardly stand himself before he managed to still the breath in the loser’s throat. As soon as each fight was over the slaves came quickly to stanch the wounds, if any, of the winner, and lead him to food and drink and rest. It was likely to go hard in the second round of fighting with those who had been weakened in the first.

The sun was reddening near the horizon before the last match had been fought. Before retiring, Leros gave orders that the camp should be moved early in the morning. Originally he had planned to wait until midday before beginning the slow intended progress up the mountain, but the smoke of the funeral pyre seemed to lie heavy here in the low air, and amphibious vermin from the river were being drawn to the camp by the blood of heroes in which the earth was soaked.

III

ORION was well in-system now, rapidly matching orbital velocities with Hunters’ planet, and in fact not far from entering atmosphere. From his command chair in the small control room at the center of the ship, Schoenberg supervised his autopilot with a computer-presented hologram of the planet drifting before him, the planet as it appeared in gestalt via the multitude of sensing instruments built into the starship’s outer hull.

A few days earlier Suomi had obtained a printout on Hunters’ planet from the ship’s gazeteer, a standard databank carried for navigation, trade, and emergency survival. The Hunterian year was about fifteen times as long as the Earth-standard year; Hunters’ planet was therefore much farther from its primary than Earth was from Sol, but Hunters’ Star was a blue-white subgiant, so that the total insolation received by both planets was very nearly equal. The radius, mass, and gravity of Hunters’ planet were Earthlike, as was the composition of the atmosphere. Hunters’ would surely have been colonized from pole to pole had it not been for its extreme axial tilt—more than eighty degrees to the plane of its revolution around Hunters’ sun, almost as far as was Uranus in its orbit around Sol.

Spring was now a standard year old in the Hunterian northern hemisphere, which region was therefore emerging from a night that had been virtually total for another Earthly year or so. Near the north pole the night had now lasted for more than five standard years and would endure for a total of seven. Up there the ice-grip of the dark cold was deep indeed, but it would soon be loosened. Seven standard years of continuous sunheat were coming.

According to statements in the gazeteer, which were probably still valid though more than a standard century old, men had never managed to settle permanently much farther than fifteen degrees of latitude in either direction from the Hunterian equator. Dome colonies would have been called for and there had never been sufficient population pressure to make it worthwhile. Indeed, the population had not occupied even the whole equatorial zone of the main continent when the berserkers came. When the killing machines from out of space attacked, the growing technological civilization of Hunters’ colonists had been wrecked; the intervention of Karlsen’s battle fleet was the only reason that any of the colonists—or the biosphere itself, for that matter—had survived at all. The native life, though none of its. forms were intelligent, did manage to endure at all latitudes, surviving the long winters by hibernation of one kind or another, and in many cases getting through the scorching, dessicated summers by an estivation cycle.

Away from the tropics, spring presented the only opportunity for feeding, growth, and reproduction. Because the southern hemisphere was so largely water, the northern spring was the one that counted insofar as land animals were concerned. In the northern springtime beasts of all description emerged from caves and nests and frozen burrows with the melting of the ice. Among them came predators, more terrible, burning with more urgent hunger and ferocity, than any creatures that had ever lived on the old wild lands of Earth. On Hunters’ planet now, as every fifteen standard years, the hunting season by which the planet had acquired its name was in full swing.

“THE poaching season, I suppose we should call it,” said Carlos Suomi to Athena Poulson. The two of them were standing in the shooting gallery Schoenberg had set up a few weeks earlier in the large cabin directly beneath Orion’s lounge. Suomi and Athena were looking over a large gun rack filled with energy rifles; Schoenberg had enjoined everyone aboard to select a weapon and become adept with it before shooting in earnest was required. Schoenberg and De La Torre spent a good deal of time down here, Celeste and Barbara hardly any.

Suomi and Athena were intermediate, he generally showing up whenever she went to practice. They were in mid-session now. Some ten meters from the rifle rack—half the diameter of the spherical ship—a computer-designed hologram showed a handful of Hunterian predators stop-actioned in what looked like a good drawing of their natural habitat. Around and beyond the sketch-like animals in the middle distance what appeared to be several square kilometers of glacier spread to an illusive horizon.

“All right,” Athena said in her low voice. “Technically speaking, this trip is outside interstellar law. But it’s evident that neither the authorities on Earth or the Interstellar Authority care very much. Oscar is too smart to get into any real trouble over such a thing. Relax and enjoy the trip, Carl, now that you’re here. Why ever did you come along if you don’t like the idea?”

“You know why I came.” Suomi pulled a rifle halfway out of the rack and then slid it back. The end of its muzzle was slightly bulbous, dull gray, pitted all over with tiny and precisely machined cavities. What it projected was sheer physical force, abstracted almost to the point of turning into mathematics.

Suomi had already tried out all the rifles in the rack and they all seemed pretty much the same to him, despite their considerable differences in length and shape and weight. They were all loaded now with special target cartridges, projecting only a trickle of power when triggered, enough to operate the target range. Its setup was not different in principle from the target ranges in arcades on Earth or other urbanized planets; only there it was generally toy berserkers that one shot at, black metal goblins of various angular shapes that waved their limbs or flashed their imitation laser beams in menace. “I’ve always enjoyed these target games,” he said. “Why shouldn’t these be real enough, instead of going after living animals?”

“Because these are not real,” said Athena firmly. “And shooting at them isn’t real either.” She chose a rifle and turned her back on Suomi to aim it down the range. Somewhere a scanner interpreted her posture as that of the ready hunter, and the scene before her came alive again with deliberate motion. A multmouthed creature bristling with heavy fur stalked toward them at a range of seventy meters. Athena fired, a small click was emitted by the rifle, which remained perfectly steady, and the beast flopped over in a graceful, almost stylized way, now wearing a spot of red light riveted near the middle of what should have been its spine. The indication was for a clean kill.

“Athena, I came along because you were coming, and I wanted to spend time with you, to get some things settled between us. That’s why I had you get me invited. Also it was a chance to take a trip on a private space yacht, something I’ll probably never be able to do again. If I must hunt, to keep your lord and master upstairs happy, why then I’ll do it. Or at least go through the motions of hunting.”

“Carlos, you’re always talking down Oscar to me, and it won’t work. I think this is the one I’ll carry.” She turned the rifle this way and that, looking at it critically.

“I wonder what the people living on Hunters’ think about expeditions like ours.”

“They’re not being harmed, as far as I can see. I don’t suppose they’ll give a damn, even if they know we’re there, which they probably won’t. We won’t be hunting in an inhabited area, but in the north.”

She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about, though she had probably only read the same ship’s printout that Suomi had been studying. None of them except Schoenberg had been here before, and, when you thought about it, Schoenberg was really uncommunicative about his previous trip. With a few words he gave assurance that they were all in for some marvelous sport, warned succinctly about certain dangers to be wary of—and that was about it. He might have been on Hunters’ a number of times before. He might be three hundred years old or more; it was getting hard to tell these days, when an age of five hundred years was not unheard of. As long as the central nervous system held out other systems of the body could generally be maintained or replaced as needed.

Schoenberg’s voice now sounded on the intercom. “We’re coming into atmosphere soon, people. Artificial gravity will be going off in another twenty minutes. Better secure your areas and settle in the lounge or in your staterooms.”

“We hear you in the target range,” Suomi answered. “We’re on our way.” He and Athena began to secure the rifles in the rack, and to make sure that nothing in the area was likely to fly around loose if the coming maneuvers in free gravity should become violent for any reason.

SEATED a few minutes later in the lounge, Suomi watched the progress of their descent on the wall-sized screens. The planet, that had been hardly more than a star when last he observed its image, was now on top of them, or so it seemed. It grew further, eased around to a position below them as Schoenberg changed ship’s attitude, spread a cloud net to catch Orion, became a world with a horizon to hold them in. The blue-white sun grew yellowish as they began to see it from inside the planet’s atmosphere.

The land below was high, rough country. Like most planets, Hunters’ had an uninhabited look when seen from the upper air. Here the appearance persisted even when they had dropped to only a few kilometers’ altitude.

Schoenberg, alone in the control room, now took over control completely from the computers, guiding the ship manually, looking rapidly from one television screen to another. In the lounge they could watch him on the passenger’s screen. Obviously traffic in the Hunterian atmosphere was practically non-existent and a mid-air collision nothing to be feared.

Now Schoenberg was following a river, actually skirting sometimes between the walls of its deep-cut canyon. Mountains rose and dipped beneath Orion as he veered away from the watercourse, steadily decreasing speed. At last a chalet-like structure, flanked by log outbuildings, the whole complex surrounded by a palisade, came into view at the head of a pass. There was a scarcity of level ground, but Schoenberg had no real trouble in lowering the ship onto the barren soil about fifty meters outside the stockade. From the spherical metal hull, thick landing struts moved out to take the ship’s weight and hold her upright. There was a scarcely perceptible settling motion when the pilot cut the drive. The ship used the same silent forces for maneuvering in atmosphere as in space—though caution was necessary when using them near a planetsized mass—and it could be landed on any surface that would bear its weight.

Obviously their descent had been observed, for the drive was hardly off before people in drab clothes began to appear from a gate in the stockade. The arrival of a spaceship seemed to be an exciting event, but no more than that. The impromptu welcoming committee of six or eight showed no hesitancy in drawing near.

Once the ship was firmly down Schoenberg got out of his chair and headed for the main hatch, which, without formality, he at once opened wide to the planet’s air, and pressed the button to extrude a landing ramp. He and the others aboard had taken the routine immunological treatments before departure, and the ship had been gone over by his own medics to avoid carrying dangerous microorganisms to a planet with only a primitive medical technology.

The natives waited a few meters from the ship, the women wearing long gowns and heavy aprons, the men for the most part dressed in coveralls. A couple of them had primitive cutting or digging tools in hand.

ONE smiling young man, better dressed than the others, his boots just as heavy but fancier, and with a short sword in a decorated leather scabbard at his belt, stepped forward.

“Welcome, then.” He spoke the common language with what seemed to Earth ears a heavy, but understandable, accent. “Now you are Mister Schoenberg, I recall.”

“I am.” Smiling and open in his manner, Schoenberg went down the ramp to shake hands. “And you are—Kestand, isn’t it? Mikenas’s younger brother?”

“Now that is right. I was just a small one last hunting season when you were here. Surprised you know me.”

“Not at all. How’s Mikenas?”

“He’s fine. Out now tending stock.”

The conversation went on about the state of affairs on the ranch or fiefdom or whatever it was that the absent Mikenas owned or ruled. Suomi and the other passengers—all the girls were now dressed quite modestly—had come down from the lounge, but at a gesture from Schoenberg remained just inside the ship, enjoying the fresh alien air. Meanwhile the farm workers remained standing in a group outside. These all appeared cheerful and more or less healthy, but might have been deaf and dumb. It was probably a decade and a half since any of them had had any news from the great interstellar civilization that networked the sky about them. They smiled at the visitors, but only Kestand spoke, and even he showed no inclination to ask how things were going, out among the stars.

It seemed that no introductions were going to be made. The whole thing had a clandestine air, like a smugglers’ meeting. For a moment Suomi wondered—but the idea was ridiculous. A man of Schoenberg’s wealth would not dabble in smuggling so directly if he decided to take it up.

Kestand was asking: “Have you been hunting yet?”

“No. I wanted to stop here first, and find out what’s changed on the world since my last trip.”

“Well.” Kestand, not the most scintillating speaker Suomi had ever attended, began to expand his earlier reports on the local state of crops and weather and hunting. “Not real northern hunting, y’understand, I haven’t been able to get away yet this season. Like to be on my way right now, but Mikenas left me in charge.”

Schoenberg was listening patiently. Suomi, from clues dropped here and there, gathered that Mikenas and Schoenberg had gone north by spaceship last hunting season and had enjoyed notable success. Suomi’s eyes kept coming back to the sword Kestand wore. The sheath was leather, looped onto the man’s belt, and the hilt seemed to be plastic but of course was much more likely to be wood or bone; Suomi wished he knew more about primitive materials. Casting back through his life’s memories—only about thirty years to be sure—he could not recall ever before seeing a man carrying a weapon for any non-symbolic purpose. Of course this sword might be only a badge of authority. It looked, though, as business-like as the hoe that one of the other men was holding.

The two-way conversation had veered to the governmental and religious changes that had taken place since the last northern hunting season. These were all obscure to Suomi, but Schoenberg seemed to understand.

“GODSMOUNTAIN has pretty well taken over, then,” he mused, nodding his head as if at a suspicion confirmed. Then he asked: “Are they having the Tournament as planned this season?”

“Yes.” Kestand looked up at the sun. “Should be starting in another two, three days. Byram of the Long Bridges, he’s our local champion.”

“Local?” Schoenberg looked thoughtful. “Isn’t Long Bridges a good two hundred kilometers from here?”

“I tell you, this’s a world Tournament. Each of the sixty-four districts is a big’un.” Kestand shook his head. “I’d purely like to go.”

“You would’ve gone, I bet, even rather than hunting, if Mikenas hadn’t left you in charge here.”

“No, oh nooo, there was no way. Tournament’s private for the gods and priests. Even the earl couldn’t get an invitation, and Byram in his bodyguard. Mikenas didn’t even try.”

Schoenberg frowned slightly, but did not pursue the matter of the Tournament any further. Suomi meanwhile was imagining a tournament of jousting, as in the old stories of Earth, men in full armor hurtling together on armored animals, trying to unseat each other with lances. But it couldn’t be quite that; he recalled from his reading that there were no riding animals on Hunters’.

After a little more talk Schoenberg thanked his informant courteously and called up into the ship for them to hand him down a satchel from a locker near the hatch. “And two of those ingots that you’ll find in the locker; bring them down also, would you, gentlemen?”

Suomi and De La Torre brought the desired items down the ramp. Setting the satchel at Kestand’s feet, Schoenberg announced: “This is what I told Mikenas I’d bring him, power cells for lamps and a few medicines. Tell him I’m sorry I missed him; I’ll stop again next season if all goes well. And here.” He hefted the two ingots and handed them to the native. “For you. Good metal for points or blades. Have a good smith work it.

Tell him to quench it in ice water. I guess you have no trouble getting that at this altitude.”

“Why, I give you great thanks!” Kestand was obviously well pleased.

Once the ramp was retracted and the hatch closed, Schoenberg wasted little time in getting Orion into the air again. He still held manual control, soaring up in a steep arc that gradually bent into a level flight toward the northwest.

His passengers had come to the control room with him this time and sat or stood around, more or less looking over his shoulder. When they had leveled off, De La Torre asked: “Where to, fearless leader? Shall we go and watch a few heads get broken?”

Schoenberg grunted. “Let’s go hunting first, Gus. The man said two or three days before the Tournament starts. I’m anxious to get a little hunting in.” This time he remembered to look around as a matter of form. “How does that suit you people?”

The planet flowed south and east beneath them. The sun, turning blue-white again at this altitude, reversed its apparent daily motion proper for the season and also slid toward the east from the tearing high-Mach velocity of their flight. An indicator on the edge of a warning zone showed how the drive was laboring to move them at so high a velocity this close to the center of a planet-sized mass. Schoenberg was indeed impatient. He had run out force-baffles on the hull, Suomi noted, to dampen the sonic shock wave of their passage, and they were too high to be seen from the ground with unaided eyes. No one in the lands below would be able to detect their passage.

Celeste and Barbara soon retired to redecorate themselves in interstellar style. For the next several days the party would presumably be out of sight of Hunterian males who might be aroused or scandalized by the fashions of the great world.

Athena, clinging to a stanchion behind Schoenberg’s chair, remarked: “I wonder if there are other hunting parties here. Outworlders like us, I mean.”

Schoepberg only shrugged. Suomi said: “I suppose there might be three or four. Not many can afford private space travel, and also have the inclination to hunt.”

De La Torre: “Since we all seem to have the inclination to hunt, it’s lucky for us that we found Oscar.” Oscar had no comment. Suomi asked De La Torre: “Do you work for him, by the way? You’ve never told me.”

“I have independent means, as they say. We met through business, about a year ago.”

Schoenberg had gone a little higher to ease the strain on the drive. At this altitude the world called Hunters’ almost seemed to have let go of the ship again. On several of the wall screens the terminator, boundary line between night and day, could be seen slanting across cloud cover athwart the invisible equator far to the south. The south pole, well out of sight around the curvature of the world, was more than halfway through its approximately seven standard years of uninterrupted sunlight. There the sun was a standard year past its closest approach to the zenith, and was now spiralling lower and ever lower in the sky, one turn with every Hunterian day, or one about every twenty standard hours.

A couple of standard years in the future the sun would set for its long night at the south pole and simultaneously rise above the horizon at the north pole. Right now the Hunterian arctic, locked in the last half of its long night, must look as lifeless as the surface of Pluto, buried under a vast freeze-out of a substantial portion of the planet’s water. Up there the equinoctial dawn would bring the hunting season to its end; right now the season was at its height in the middle latitudes of the north, where the sun was just coming over the horizon, each day sweeping from east to west a little higher in the southern sky, bringing in the thaw. That region must be Schoenberg’s destination.

THEY came down into a world of icy twilight, amid slopes of bare enduring rock and eroding, fantastic glaciers, all towering above valleys filled with rushing water and greenly exploding life.

Schoenberg found a walkable part of the landscape in which to set Orion down and some solid level rock to bear her weight. This time, before opening the hatch, he took a rifle from the small rack set just inside, and held it ready in his hands. The opening of the hatch admitted a steady polyphonic roar of rushing waters. Schoenberg drew a deep breath and stood in the opening, looking out. As on the earlier landing the others were behind him. Celeste and Barbara, not dressed for near-freezing weather, moved shivering to the rear. The air smelled of wetness and cold, of thawing time and alien life. The landscape stretched before them, too big and complex to be quickly taken in. The shadows of southern mountains reached up high on the mountains to the north.

They were going out right away; there were several standard hours of daylight remaining here. Schoenberg began a routine check-out of arms and other equipment, and called for volunteers.

Athena announced at once that she was ready. De La Torre said that he would like to have a go. Suomi, too—not that he really intended to kill anything that did not attack him. He felt a genuine need to get out of the ship for a while. Though all the tricks of environmental psychology had been used in the interior design of the Orion to ameliorate the reality of confinement, the trip had still cooped up six people in a small space for many weeks. Being aware of all the designer’s tricks, Suomi was perhaps helped less than others by them. Barbara and Celeste elected not to try hunting today after Schoenberg had indicated he preferred it that way. He promised them a more peaceful picnic outing in the morning.

“We’ll go in pairs, then,” Schoenberg announced when everything was ready. “Gus, you’ve hunted before, but not on this planet. If I may suggest, you and Athena take a stroll down the valley there.” It spread before them as they looked out from the hatch, beginning thirty or forty meters from the rocky level where the ship rested, plunging after about a kilometer and a half of gentle, green-clad slope into an ice-clogged canyon down whose center a new torrent had begun to carve its way. “Down there at the lower end, where it slopes off into the canyon, the vegetation may well be head-high. There should be twelve or thirteen species of large herbivores.”

“In that little space?” De La Torre interrupted.

“In that little space.” Now that he was going hunting, Schoenberg sounded more relaxed and happy than at any time on the trip before. “Life doesn’t just thaw out here in the spring—it explodes. There’ll be large predators in that valley too, or I miss my guess. You don’t want to run into one an arm’s length away, so better skirt the taller growth. Carlos and I are going to take the upper path.” This climbed a rocky slope on the other side of the ship. Suomi, during their descent, had glimpsed higher meadows in that direction. “We may find something really hungry up there, just out of a high cave and on its way down into the valleys for its first meal in a year or two.”

Boots, warm clothing, weapons, communicators, a few emergency items—all in order. Suomi was the last to get down the ramp and crunch his new boots on Hunterian soil. Almost before his feet were off the ramp it began to fold up and retract. If the playgirls stayed inside with the hatch closed they would be perfectly safe until the men returned.

Athena and Gus waved and set off on the lower way, tendrils of grass-like groundcover whipping about their boots. “Lead on up the path,” said Schoenberg, with an uphill gesture to Suomi. “I’m sure your nerves are okay—just a matter of principle that I don’t like a novice hunter with a loaded firearm walking behind me, when something to shoot at may jump out ahead.” The voice was charming if the words were not, and they were said with a happy and friendly look. All was right with Schoenberg at the moment, obviously; he was eager to get going.

There was not really a path to follow, of course, but Suomi moved on up the spine of hill that formed the natural route Schoenberg must have meant to indicate.

SUOMI as he climbed was soon lost in admiration of the country around him. Wherever the melting away of the winter’s ice had left a few square centimeters of soil exposed, rank vegetation had sprung up. There were no tree-sized plants in evidence, nothing that seemed to have begun to grow more than a few: days or weeks ago. In most places the grass-and vine-like things were no more than waist high, but frequently they grew so thickly that no glimpse of soil could be seen between the stems. The plants were striving madly, ruthlessly, for water and warmth and sunlight, leaping into growth, making what they could of the wet season before the long searing drought of summer began.

He paused, coming in sight of a meadow where man-sized creatures like giant slugs were moving, voraciously feeding on the plants, the wrinkles visibly stretching out of their grayish, hairless bodies.

“Rime-worms,” said Schoenberg, who came up close behind him and disregarded the creatures after the first glance. “Look sharp now, there may be something after them.”

“Do any of the larger forms freeze solidly through the night?”

“Biologists I’ve talked to say it’s not possible. But I don’t think anyone knows for sure.” Now that they had stopped, Schoenberg was studying the country with binoculars. They had put a little rocky bulge of hill between themselves and the spaceship, and were now out of sight and sound of anything manmade save what they carried with them. The tracks they had left behind them in occasional patches of slush or muddy turf were the only signs of past human activity. The world around them had been made virgin by death and resurrection.

Suomi was studying the country too, but not with binoculars and not for game. The yellowed sun was skimming a low point in the mountainous horizon, and seemed on the point of setting; actually there must still be an hour or so of daylight left. On the other side of a wide valley a glacier groaned, shed a few tons of cornice, broke out with a clear new waterfall. The organ-notes of older cataracts held steady in the distance. Gradually, as Suomi began to comprehend the scene fully, as he got beyond the stage of simple elation at getting outdoors again, he realized that he had never before beheld a scene of nature so beautiful and awesome, nothing that even came close. Not even the wonders and terrors of space, which, when they could be perceived at all, were beyond the scale and grasp of human appreciation. This thundering world of mountains and valleys, with its exploding life, was not beyond the human scale, not quite.

Schoenberg was less content with what he saw. Of predators he had evidently discovered no sign. “Let’s move on a little,” he said tersely, putting his binoculars away. Suomi led on again. When they had gone a few hundred meters more, Schoenberg called another halt, this time at the foot of a steep slope.

After another short session with the binoculars, Schoenberg pointed up the hill and said: “I’m going up there and have a look around. Let me do this alone, I want to be quiet and inconspicuous about it. Stay here, don’t move around, keep your eyes open. There may be something on our trail, stalking us, and you may get a good shot just by waiting.”

With a faint thrill of danger, small enough to be enjoyable, Suomi looked back along the way they had come. Nothing moved but the distant, harmless rime-worms. “All right.”

He sat down and watched Schoenberg up the slope and out of sight over the top of it. He then swiveled around on his rocky seat, enjoying the absence of people in every direction. It was delightful to be alone, for the first time in—it seemed like the first time in his life. Isolation could be accomplished in the ship, of course, but the others’ bodies and minds were always there, one was always aware of them only a few meters away. Suomi touched the communicator on his belt. The channels among hunters and between the hunters and the ship were alive but so far totally unused. Everyone was enjoying the physical and psychic separation.

Time passed. Schoenberg was gone longer than Suomi had expected. A thin shadow came over the nearby scenery as the sun declined behind a distant rim of ice. Without preamble a magnificent glacier-beast appeared before Suomi’s eyes, perhaps two hundred fifty meters off, across a gentle slope of detritus fallen from an extension of the slope at the foot of which Suomi waited. It was not the direction from which Schoenberg had thought a predator was likely to come, nor was the creature looking toward Suomi. It was facing downhill, turning its head back and forth. Suomi raised his binoculars, and recalled his reading. An excellent specimen, male, probably second-cycle, just awakened from the second hibernation of its life into its full prime of strength and ferocity. The hollowness of loins and ribs was visible despite the thickness of orange-yellow fur. It was rather larger than an Earthly tiger.

Suomi, without getting to his feet, raised his rifle in perfectly steady hands and aimed. He was only playing. He lowered the weapon again.

“Long shot for a beginner,” said Schoenberg’s voice from close behind him, a little way up the slope. The cataract-roar must swallow the voice before the beast could hear it, even as it had kept Suomi from hearing Schoenberg’s approach among the rocks. “But a clean one. If you don’t want to try it I’ll have a crack.”

Suomi knew without turning that Schoenberg would already be raising his rifle to take aim. Still without looking around, Suomi lifted his own weapon once more and fired (pop, a little louder than in the shooting gallery, and now at full power there was a perceptible kick), deliberately aiming ahead of the animal to frighten it away, blasting up a spray of ice. Catlike, the creature crouched, then turned toward the earthmen its alienly unreadable face. The men who lived on Hunters’ were men of Earth in their ancestry and distant history; it was easy to forget how alien all the other life-forms here must be.

NOW THE glacier-beast was running, crossing the slope in great graceful catlike bounds. But it was not fleeing from the men as it should, as Suomi had unthinkingly assumed it must. In pure innocence of the powers it faced it was coming now to kill and eat him. Insane hunger drove it on. Its sprinting taloned feet hurled up rocks from the talus slope, mixed with a powdering of snow.

Shoot. Whether Schoenberg was calling out the word, or he himself, or whether it only hung thought-projected in the freezing, timeless air, Suomi did not know. He knew only that death was coming for him, visible, and incarnate, and his hands were good for nothing but dealing out symbols, manipulating writing instruments, paintbrushes, electronic styluses, making an impression on the world at second or third remove, and his muscles were paralyzed now and he was going to die. He could not move against the mindless certainty he saw in the animal’s eyes, the certainty that he was meat.

Schoenberg’s rifle sounded, a repetitive, seemingly ineffectual popping not far from Suomi’s right ear. Invisible fists of god-like power slammed at the charging animal, met the beautiful energy of its charge with a greater, more brutal force. The force-blows tore out gobs of orange-yellow fur, and distorted the shapes of muscle and bone beneath. The huge body shed its grace and its momentum. Still it seemed to be trying to reach the men. Now its body broke open along a line of penetration wounds, spilling out insides like some red-stuffed toy. Clear in Suomi’s vision was an open paw with knife-long claws, arching high on the end of a forelimb and then striking down into a puddle of slush not ten meters from his boots.

When the beast was still, Schoenberg put another shot carefully into the back of its head for good measure, then slung his rifle and got out his hologram camera. Then, after looking at the gory, broken body from several angles, he shook his head and put the camera away again. He spoke reassuringly to Suomi, seeming not in the least surprised or upset by Suomi’s behavior. He was offhandedly gracious when Suomi at last managed to stammer out a kind of thanks. And that in its way was the most contemptuous attitude that Schoenberg could have taken.

IV

Early on the morning of the Tournament’s second day, Leros, the priest in charge, led the surviving thirty-two contestants on an easy march of some five kilometers, up from the flat land by the river where the first round had been fought to a much higher meadow resting in Godsmountain’s lap. At this new site an advance party of priests and workers were already at work, preparing a new fighting ring of cleared, hard-trodden earth, and a new field altar for the image of Thorun that was brought up on a cart just in front of Leros and the warriors. The slave-laborers were sweating, earning their rations today, for their numbers had been greatly reduced, many being sent to other projects. Only half the original number of warriors now required service, of course, and as always there was plenty of other labor to be performed in the citadel-city above and the tributary lands below.

The plan of the Tournament, handed down to Leros by the High Priest Andreas and his Inner Circle of councillors, required that each successive round of fighting take place closer to the top of the mountain than the one before. The purpose, as Andreas had explained it, was symbolic. But Leros observed now that the plan had practical advantages as well. The offal of each camp would be promptly left behind, the latrine, the leavings of the cook-tents, the remnants of the funeral pyre.

The work of readying the new site was completed shortly after the fighting men arrived, and an acolyte handed over the day’s new vellum-written lists to Leros. He called the men into assembly, and, when some formalities had been gotten out of the way, read the lists out:

Arthur of Chesspa

Bram the Beardless of Consiglor

Brunn of Bourzoe

Charles the Upright

Col Renba

Efim Samdeviatoff

Farley of Eikosk

Geoff Symbolor of Symbolorville

Giles the Treacherous of Endross Swamp

Gladwin Vanucci

Hal Coppersmith

Homer Garamond of Running Water

Jud Isaksson of Ardstoy Hill

Kanret Jon of Jonsplace

LeNos of the Highlands

M’Gamba Mim

Mesthles of the Windy Vale

Octans Bukk of Pachuka

Omir Kelsumba

Otis Kitamura

Pernsol Muledriver of Weff’s Plain

Polydorus the Foul

Rafael Sandoval

Rahim Sosias

Rudolph Thadbury

Shang Ti the Awesome

Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope

Thomas the Grabber

Travers Sandakan of Thieves’ Road

Vann the Nomad

Vladerlin Bain of Sanfa Town

Wull Narvaez

Before giving the signal for the start of the second round’s first fight, Leros took a moment to look around him at his world. There was much in it to make him feel content. From the high meadow where he stood the prospect was one of long reaches of cultivated land below, kilometer after kilometer of field and pasture, with here and there an orchard, a cluster of houses, a patch of raw forest or a string of trees along a watercourse. It was a peaceful and malleable world, one of peasants and crops and artisans, obediently serving the masters of violence who dwelt on the heights above. There was of course, the Brotherhood to flaw it. After yesterday’s posted insult nothing further had been heard from them . . . there was also, more naggingly, the fact that the Inner Circle seemed to be closed to Leros, and the office of High Priest, therefore, forever unattainable. Why should a priest like Lachaise, for example, who was far more an artisan than a fighting man, be a member of the Inner Circle, when Leros and others more deserving were kept out?

At any rate the Tournament was going well. That was what mattered most. Perhaps if it was a great success he would at last be promoted—and there was no reason why it should not smoothly run its course.

At the end of it the great gate of the city would open for the winner as the maidens strewed flowers before him and he was conducted in triumph through the streets to the Temple; and that would stand open for him also; and then the inner curtains of chain-mail would part—as they never had for Leros—and the secret doors, and the winner would be let in where Leros himself had never been to the place where gods walked with the fallen heroes who once were mortal men, where only the High Priest and the Inner Circle came to mediate between them and the world of men.

LEROS’S religion was not simply a matter of faith to him. He had once glimpsed Thorun in an inner courtyard of the Temple, standing taller than any mortal man, walking with the High Priest on a night when storms were in the air and lightning flickered . . .

He bowed his head for a moment of private prayer, then brought himself back to the waiting men, and his responsibilities, and called out the names for the first match of the day:

“Arthur of Chesspa—Bram the Beardless of Consiglor.”

Arthur was a middle-aged man of middle size. In this company of warriors he looked small. Stocky, dour-looking, heavily mustached, he strode into the ring with an air of utterly nerveless competence and with unblinking calm watched Bram the Beardless approach with intent to kill.

Bram, it appeared, was beardless by reason of his extreme youth. Though he was tall and heavyshouldered his face looked no more than one Hunterian year of age, fifteen or sixteen sixtieths-of-an-old-man’s-life. Bram was not calm but his excitement seemed to be rather joy than fright as he opened the attack with an exuberant swing of his long sword. Arthur parried the blow well enough, seemed in no hurry to go on the offensive himself.

Bram pressed the attack; his youth and energy did not admit the possibility that he could be beaten. Again and again he struck, while Arthur still retreated thoughtfully, seeming to await the perfect time to counter. And again and again Bram struck, with ever-increasing speed and terrible strength. Arthur still had not made up his mind how best to fight when there came a blow he could not stop. He lost an arm and shoulder. The finishing stroke came quickly.

“Brunn of Bourzoe—Charles the Upright.”

Brunn was heavyset and fair, with a sun-bleached look about him. In one thick hand he held a short spear in such fashion that it was evident he preferred to thrust rather than risk all on one throw. He took the initiative, though cautiously, moving slowly widdershins around the upright Charles. Charles gangly as a bird, looking as if he might be happier perching on one leg, stood tall and held his twohanded sword ready for whatever Brunn might do. The spear-thrust, when it came, was strong and quick but the response,of Charles was better; the lopped-off spearhead fell to earth. The fair head of Brunn was not far behind it.

“Col Renba—Efim Samdeviatoff.”

These two were similar in appearance, both a little above middle height and with brown shaggy hair. Col Renba whirled a spike-studded ball on the end of a short chain attached to a wooden handle. Samdeviatoff held sword and dagger ready. Both jumped to the attack at the same time but the spiked ball struck the sword out of the hand that held it and in the next breath dashed the brains that had directed it upon the ground.

“Farley of Eikosk—Geoff Symbolor.”

Again there was a resemblance; this time one of manners rather than appearance. Both contestants were well dressed and expensively armed. There were even jewels in the hilts of Geoff’s sword and dagger. Farley was fair, almost red, of hair and beard. His bare arms, lined with bone and vein and muscle, were freckled rather than sunburned. Geoff Symbolor was quite dark, and shorter than Farley by half a head, though seemingly his equal in weight and strength.

Their battle was a slow one. The two of them seemed well matched until Farley’s longer reach let him nick the muscles of Geoff’s shoulder. With his sword-arm handicapped the shorter man was soon wounded again. Farley took no rash chances; the other was weakened by loss of blood before Farley drove in hard to finish him.

“Giles the Treacherous—Gladwin Vanucci.”

Giles was of middling size but wiry, with tanned face and sandy hair and pale innocent eyes. If it was indeed his habit to be treacherous, there was no need for it today. With his long sword he made short work of the squat and massive Gladwin, who had favored a battle-axe.

“Hal Coppersmith—Homer Garamond.”

Hal Coopersmith was very tall, with sloping shoulders and long arms entwined by rich tattoos. His long sword quivered restlessly in his hand, like some insect’s antenna following the movements of his foe. Homer Garamond seemed saddened by the task at hand though he was almost as young as Bram the Beardless who had shone with joy in killing. Homer held sword and dagger almost negligently in powerful hands until Hal came thrusting in. Fast as Homer moved then it was not fast enough.

“Jud Isaksson—Kanret Jon.”

Jud, a fiery little man with an enormously long black mustache, stamped briskly into the ring with a round metal shield strapped onto his left arm. A short sword extended from his right. Kanret, perhaps the oldest fighter to survive the first round, awaited him with a patience befitting his years. Kanret was armed with a short, thick-shafted spear; the way he gripped it indicated he might use it as a quarterstaff as well as thrust with it. When the moment of testing came, the spear hit nothing but Jud’s shield, and Kanret Jon was brought down with a swordstroke to the knee. His end was quick thereafter.

“LeNos of the Highlands—M’ Gamba Mim.”

LeNos had a scarred face and, once in the ring, a way of moving that seemed more animal than human, a lithe long-striding crouch. With sword and dagger he closed on M’Gamba Mim, who was huge and black and carried similar weapons. The blood of both was on the ground before LeNos could prevail; and then, still like an animal, he snarled at the slaves who came to tend his cuts.

“Mesthles of the Windy Vale—Octans Bukk of Pachuka.”

Mesthles had the thought-creased forehead of some scribe or scholar. He wore peasant’s clothes and fought with a farmer’s scythe. Octans was lean, and his ragged clothes gave him the look of a hungry bandit. But his sword proved slower than the scythe and he was mown.

“Omir Kelsumba—Otis Kitamura.”

Kelsumba’s wide black face was set in a determination as intense as fury. Leros, watching, remembered this man as the one who had asked about acquiring the healing powers of a god. When the fighters closed, Kelsumba swung his massive battleaxe with incredible power, swinging and then reversing instantly for the backswing—as if his weapon were no heavier than a stick. Kitamura’s sword was knocked aside, and then Kitamura’s jawbone. He went down on hands and knees and stayed there. Kelsumba left his finishing to the leaden mauls of the burial party.

“Pernsol Muledriver—Polydorus the Foul.”

The Muledriver was an older man, who set to Work deliberately with short spear and long knife. Polydorus, a man of indeterminate age, and seemingly no fouler than the next, went in carrying an old sword, much nicked and dented. The old sword did its work efficiently, and Pernsol died quietly, as if content to end life’s struggles and take his modest place at Thorun’s board.

“Rafael Sandoval—Rahim Sosias.”

Sosias looked more like a tailor than a fighting man, being not overly big and displaying a small, comfortable paunch. But his curved sword hung as naturally from his hand as his hand from the end of his hairy arm. Sandoval was notably ugly, made so by nature, not by scars. He twirled a spike-and-ball mace disdainfully. Rahim’s sword was caught in a loop of the mace’s chain and pulled from his hand, but before Rafael could disentangle his own weapon from the sword, Rahim had drawn an extra knife from concealment and had slit his opponent’s throat.

“Rudolph Thadbury—Shang Ti the Awesome.”

Thadbury had a military as well as a fighting look. Leros thought this man had something more of the general than of the simple swordsman about him but knew nothing of his background. Most of the contestants were as much strangers to Leros and the other priests as they were to one another.

Squarely built, with blunt-fingered enormous hands, Rudolph Thadbury exuded strength and confidence. Shang Ti was awesome in truth, having a rather small head set on such a giant’s body that the head’s smallness was made to look grotesque. Shang Ti’s sword was of a size to suit his stature. Rudolph’s had a thicker blade than the usual and was just long enough to reach Shang Ti’s heart.

“Siniuju of the Evergreen Slope—Thomas the Grabber.”

Siniuju was almost scrawny, leaner than any other man left alive among the warriors. He carried a two-handed sword that looked too heavy for him—until he demonstrated how quickly he could make it move. Thomas was large and fierce-looking, a Shang Ti slightly less massive and better proportioned. He matched his spear over the long two-handed sword. The spear proved longer still.

“Travers Sandakan—Vann the Nomad.”

Sandakan came carrying a thin-bladed axe made with a sturdy armored shaft. On his face were the lines of time and trouble and the scars of many fights. Vann the Nomad wore the long shapeless sweater of the high-plains herdsmen and wielded a long sword with demonic energy. Sandakan was no match for the Nomad and when Travers was dead Vann cut off one of his ears, saying: “I will give this back to him in Thorun’s hall—if he is man enough to take it from me!” It was a gesture new to Leros, who thought about it and finally gave a hesitant smile of approval. As soon as the latest corpse had been cleared from the ring he formally called out the names for the day’s final match.

“Vladerlin Bain—Wull Narvaez.”

Coiled around Bain’s waist was a long whip, whose purpose none had yet considered it politic to ask. In his hands Bain wore a dagger and a sword. Narvaez, with a cheerful foolish face and a farmer’s pitchfork as his only visible weapon, looked like some peasant fresh from fieldwork. A good harvester he sent the tines exactly where he wanted them and Vladerlin was dead before he hit the ground, the reason for his coiled whip now never to be known.

The sun had not yet reached its midday point. The fighting of the second round was over.

THE SIXTEEN fighters who remained alive moved off to enjoy the food prepared for them. For the most part they chatted and joked in good fellowship, though a few were silent. Also they took thoughtful notice of each other’s wounds, calculating where weakness would be found tomorrow. All of them knew that even the tiniest advantage must be seized. Not one survived among them who was not extremely dangerous—not one survived who could not count killers of superior ability among his victims.

Resting after their midday meal, they say the messenger come pelting down the mountain. His news made Leros snap back his head to search the sky. From where they camped beneath the trees it was not possible to see much of it. The warriors were curious, but not very. The Tournament they were engaged in was more important than any distraction they could imagine.

Later still when a priest of the Inner Circle came down to talk earnestly to Leros the news spread among the warriors that a round, silvery craft had come from beyond the world to visit Godsmountain. Most of them were curious enough to try to catch a glimpse of the ship, barely visible, resting among the trees on a distant height.

V

OSCAR SCHOENBERG and Athena Poulson and Gus De La Torre had hunted again, on the day after Suomi’s near-fatal confrontation with the glacier-beast, while Barbara Hurtado and Celeste Servetus had gone through the motions of hunting. Suomi had chosen to stay with the ship. Oscar and Athena and Gus, all having had some excitement on their first day’s hunt but having returned from it empty handed returned from the second day’s effort with their hologram trophies of large predators, safely recorded on little crystal cubes for later reproduction and display.

Athena, sitting in the lounge, rubbing her tired feet, complained it was going to be difficult to find a place to show off her glacier-beast. “It’s all right for you, Oscar, but I have one small apartment. I’ll have to move half the furniture to make room for this—if I dare display it at all, that is.”

“Because you got it on an off-limits hunting trip?” Schoenberg laughed. “If anybody bothers you, just tell’em I gave it to you. Let’em come see me.”

“I’ll have to leave it turned off most of the time, just bring it out for special occasions. I suppose it would scare off most of my usual visitors, anyway.” Then she caught herself and started to look apologetically toward Suomi, then hastily looked away.

Yesterday after everyone had returned to the ship they had all listened with some embarrassment to his account of how he had frozen in panic in the field and how Schoenberg had coolly saved his life. Athena had been more embarrassed, perhaps, than Suomi. De La Torre had seemed inwardly amused, and Barbara had shown some sympathy.

Suomi wondered if his shipmates—Athena especially—were waiting for him to demand a rifle and a chance to go out and prove himself. If so they were going to have a long wait. All right, he had been terrified. Maybe if he went out again and an animal charged, he wouldn’t be terrified. Or maybe he would. He wasn’t anxious to find out. He had nothing to prove. While all the others were out hunting on the second day he sat on the ship’s extended landing ramp enjoying the air. There was a rifle at hand for emergencies but if anything menacing came in sight he planned to simply go inside and close the hatch.

Once everyone who wanted a trophy had one Schoenberg dallied in the north no longer. The hunting season would last a long time but the mysterious Tournament was apparently quite brief and he didn’t want to miss it. When Suomi mentioned the Tournament to the girls, none of them had any clear idea of what it was. Some sort of physical contest, he supposed.

Schoenberg evidently knew the way to Godsmountain, though he said he had not been there before. Flying south, he went much slower and lower than on the northward flight, paying close attention to landmarks. He followed a river valley most of the way, first by radar because of ground fog, then visually when the view had cleared. When, after several hours, they reached their destination, there was no mistaking it. Godsmountain stood out immediately from its surroundings, a wooded eminence practically isolated amid a patchwork of surrounding flat farmlands, orchards and pastures. The mountain was broad and quite high, but in general not very steep. On the deforested summit a townsized complex of white stone walls and buildings stood out as plainly as if it had been constructed as a beacon for aerial navigation.

After circling the mountain once at a respectful distance, Schoenberg slowed down some more and began to descend toward it. Not to the citadel-city on its top; he was careful not to even fly over that.

A few hundred meters below the walls of the white city, a truncated pinnacle of rock rose out of the woods something like a dwarfed and naked thumb on the side of the mountain’s great mitten-shape. After noticing this pinnacle, Schoenberg approached it slowly, circled it closely, then hovered directly over it for some time, probing delicately at it with the sensing instruments in Orion’s hull. It was between twenty and thirty meters tall, and appeared to be just barely climb able. There was no sign that man or beast had ever taken the trouble to reach its flattened top.

De La Torre, now hanging onto the stanchion behind the pilot’s chair, offered: “I’d say that top is big enough to hold us, Oscar, even give us a little room to walk around outside the ship.”

Schoenberg grunted. “That was my idea, to put her down there. We might have to cut a few steps or string a line to climb down. But on the other hand no one’s going to come visiting unless we invite’em.” After making a final close examination of the pinnacle’s small mesa from only a few meters’ distance, Schoenberg set Orion down on it. The landing struts groped outward, adjusted themselves to keep the ship level. There was indeed enough flat space on the rocky table to hold the ship securely, with a few square meters left over for leg-stretching. All aboard disembarked for this purpose at once. Even high up the weather at this tropical latitude was quite warm but the girls were fully clothed again, in view of their uncertainty about local morals and customs. Schoenberg had ordered all weapons left inside the ship.

Direct inspection confirmed that only one side of the mesa was conceivably climbable by human beings. Even on that side there were places where a few pitons or some cut-in steps, and perhaps a rope, would be needed to allow even agile folk to make an ascent or descent in reasonable safety.

“Where is everybody?” Celeste wondered aloud as she gazed beyond the intervening sea of treetops at the white walls of the city on the summit, slightly above their level.

De La Torre had binoculars out and was peering in another direction, downslope. “There’re thirty or forty men, in some kind of a camp. Over there. I can just make out some of them from time to time, among the trees.”

For a while there was no better answer to Celeste’s question, no sign that Orion’s arrival or her sore thumb presence above the landscape had been noticed. Of course the dense forest that covered most of the mountain might conceal a lot of movement. The trees, Suomi noted, looked like close analogues of common Earthly species. Maybe some mutated stocks had been imported by the early colonists. The trunks did seem to be proportionately thicker than those of most trees on Earth, and their branches tended to right-angle bends.

About half a standard hour had passed since their landing, and the six visitors had all armed themselves with binoculars, when the one visible gate in the city’s high wall suddenly opened and a small party of white-robed men emerged, vanishing from sight again almost at once as they plunged into the woods.

Schoenberg had an infrared device with which he could have followed their progress beneath the canopy of leaves, but he didn’t bother. Instead he placed his binoculars back in their case, leaned back and lit a cigar. Some minutes before Suomi had expected their reappearance so near at hand, the delegation from the city emerged from the woods again, this time into the clearing caused by rock-falls from the tower on which Orion rested.

Schoenberg at once threw down his cigar and moved forward to the mesa’s edge and, with lifted arms, saluted the men below. Looking up, they returned the gesture with seeming casualness. There were half a dozen of them. The white robes of two or three were marked with different variations of purple trim.

The distance being too great for anything but shouted exchanges, the Hunterians came leisurely closer. The tall one in the lead reached the foot of the tower and began to climb. At first he made steady headway without much difficulty. About halfway up, however, a nearly sheer stretch brought him to a halt. He was an old man, his visitors saw now, despite the nimbleness with which he moved.

He looked up at Schoenberg, who stood open-handed some ten meters above him, and called: “Outworlders, Thorun and the other gods of Hunters’ offer you greetings and grant you welcome.” Schoenberg made a slight bow. “We thank Thorun and the other illustrious gods of Hunters’, wishing to put our thanks in such form as may seem to them most courteous. And we thank you too, who approach us as their spokesman.”

“I am Andreas, High Priest of Thorun’s kingdom in the world.” Schoenberg introduced the members of his party, Andreas those with him. After a further exchange of courtesies in which Schoenberg hinted that he would make some gift to Thorun as soon as he found out what was most suitable, he got around to the object of his visit. “As all men know, Hunters’ is the planet most renowned in all the universe for the quality of its fighting men. We are told that the finest warriors of the planet are even now gathered here at Godsmountain for a great Tournament.”

“That is true in every word,” said Andreas. His speech seemed to outworld ears much less accented than Kestand’s had.

Schoenberg proceeded. “We crave the favor of Thorun in being allowed to witness this Tournament, at least in part.”

Andreas did not look toward his companions waiting calmly below, but rather across the treetops to his city, as if to gather in some message. It was only a brief glance, before he said: “I speak for Thorun. It is his pleasure to grant you your request. The Tournament is already in progress, but the most important rounds of fighting remain yet to be seen. The next is to be fought tomorrow.”

ANDREAS talked a little longer with the outworlders, promising that in the morning he would send a guide to conduct them to the fighting ring in plenty of time to see the day’s events there. He promised them also that sometime during their stay they would be invited into the city and entertained in Thorun’s temple as befitted distinguished guests. He acknowledged Schoenberg’s promise that a gift for Thorun would be forthcoming. And then the priests and the outworlders exchanged polite farewells.

During the short hike back to the city Andreas was thoughtful and more than usually aloof. His subordinates, walking with him, took careful note of his mood and did not intrude upon him.

He was an old man by Hunterian standards, scarred by a dozen serious wounds, the survivor of a hundred fights. He was no longer a warrior of great prowess, his muscles now suffering the wastage of time and maltreatment. Nimble climbing cost him much more effort than he allowed to show. The skull looked out from behind his face more plainly with the passage of every sixtieth-of-an-old-man’s-life—what the outworlders would call a Standard Year.

In this progressive change of his facial appearance he found pleasure.

Though his legs were tired he maintained a brisk pace and it was not long before he had led his party back into the city.

There he brushed aside subordinates who were waiting to entangle him in a hundred questions and disputes about the visitors. These men, below the level of the Inner Circle, understood nothing. Essentially alone, Andreas strode quickly and still thoughtfully through the network of bright, narrow streets. Servants, artisans, soldiers and aristocrats alike all took themselves out of his way. On the steps before the tall outer doors of the Temple of Thorun a pair of Inner Circle aristocrats in purple-spangled robes broke off their conversation to bow respectfully, a salute that Andreas acknowledged with a scarcely conscious nod. A courtesan alighting from her litter bowed more deeply. She was evidently the woman of some noncelibate priest below the Inner Circle. Andreas acknowledged her not at all.

In the Outer Temple the light was good, the sun coming in strongly through the hypaethrus in the roof; and here a low-voiced chant of war, to muffled drum, went up from acolytes who knelt before an altar piled with enemy warriors’ skulls and captured weapons. An armed guard who stood before the entrance to the Inner Temple saluted Andreas and stepped aside, pulling the great door open for him. Broad stairs went down. The room to which they led was vast, built partially below the level of the sunlit streets outside.

Here in the Inner Temple the light was indirect and dim, filtered through many small portals. Andreas pushed aside hanging after hanging of chain mail with practiced hands, made his way across the enormous chamber. He passed a place where a single devout worshipper knelt, a fighting man with shield and sword in hand, a priest-general dressed all in white, praying silently before a tall stone statue. The statue, highly stylized, portrayed a man in smooth, tight-fitting outworlder’s garb. He wore a round and almost featureless helm and had a grim, beardless face—Karlsen, a demigod of the distant past, a sword in his right hand, a stick-like outworld weapon in his left. Andreas’ face was set like stone. But to have the statue removed would cause trouble. Karlsen was still a popular figure with many of the people.

From this point on the way Andreas took was not open, or even known, to more than a very few. He went behind more chain mail curtains into a corner where an inconspicuous passageway began. Again there were descending stairs, dimmer and much narrower than before. At the bottom a small oil lamp burned in a wall niche, giving enough light to enable a man to walk without groping, no more. Here were the tall and massive doors that led to Thorun’s hall. From behind these doors at times came flaring lights, the sound of harp and drum and horn and booming laughter. At these times novices were allowed to stand wideeyed at the foot of the stairs and briefly watch and listen, observing from afar the evidences of gods and heroes at feast within.

Andreas carried one of the two keys that could open the doors of Thorun’s hall. Lachaise, Chief Artisan of the Temple and, of course, a member of the Inner Circle, had the other. A door swung open for Andreas now, when he turned his key in the proper secret way, and he quickly stepped through and pulled the door tightly shut again behind him.

THE Great Hall of Thorun, carved out of the living rock beneath the Temple, was perhaps five meters long, three wide, three high—certainly modest enough in all conscience for the master of the world. The walls, floor, and ceiling were rough, bare stone; Thorun’s hall had never been finished. Quite likely it never would be. Work on it had begun, he supposed, almost twenty Hunterian years ago, five times an old-man’s-lifetime. A little work had still been done in the tenure of the previous High Priest. But since then plans had changed. The place was big enough already to fill its only real function; duping novices. There was an air passage above so that bright torches could be burned to cast their light out under and around the doors, there were musical instruments piled in a corner. As for the booming, godlike laughter—either Thorun or Mjollnir could do that.

Thorun was in his hall, seated at a table that nearly filled the inadequate room. So huge was he that, even though seated, his eyes were on a level with those of the tall priest standing before him. Thorun’s head of wild dark hair was bound by a golden band, his fur cloak hung about his mountainous shoulders. His famed sword, so large that no man could wield it, was girdled to his waist. His huge right hand, concealed as always in a leather glove, rested on the table and held a massive goblet. Seen in the dim light, Thorun’s face above his full dark beard might have been judged human—except that it was too immobile and too large.

Thorun did not move. Neither did the demigod: Mjollnir, seated at another side of the table, head bound in a silver band, wrapped in his dark cloak. Of nearly equal size with the god of war and the hunt, Mjollnir shared Thorun’s foodless and drinkless feast in gloomy comradeship.

After entering the room Andreas had waited for a little while, standing motionless, watching—making sure neither of them was going to be triggered into movement by his entry. Sometimes they were. One had to be careful. Satisfied, he walked around the high table and passed behind the chair of Thorun. There in the wall was set a small and secret door for which no key was necessary. Andreas opened this door by pressure in the proper place. Behind it another narrow stone stair wound down.

The descent was longer this time. At the bottom of the final stair Andreas turned first to his left. After three or four strides in that direction he emerged from a narrow tunnel to stand on the bottom of an enormous pit dug out of the rock beside the Temple. The excavation of this pit had consumed in labor the lifetimes of many slaves, having been started during the tenure of the fifth High Priest to hold office before Andreas; so farseeing and magnificent were the plans, now coming to fruition, of the true god! At its top the pit was surrounded by white stone walls and covered by a roof, so that it looked from the outside merely like one more building in the Temple complex, in no way remarkable amid the maze of structures that all looked more or less alike.

Andreas went back into the tunnel and followed it back in the direction that led right from the foot of the stair. Before entering the doorless chamber to which this passage brought him, he paused and closed his eyes in reverent imitation of Death, murmured a brief private prayer. Certainly not to Thorun. Thorun was a thing, a tool, part of a necessary deception practiced on the masses, a deception that Andreas had left behind him in the Temple. What now lay ahead was, for him, the ultimate—the only—reality.

The chamber Andreas now entered was as old as anything made by man on Hunters’ planet, Dim daylight lit it now, filtering indirectly down through an overhead shaft open at some high place to the sunlight and barred by heavy grills at many places along its length. It was a little larger than Thorun’s hall above. A hundred people might have squeezed themselves into this room but never had. Fewer than ten people now even knew of its existence.

Against the wall opposite the single doorway stood a low wooden table bearing a half dozen boxes of bright metal. Each box was of a different shape, and each rested in a depression or socket carved to its shape in the dark panels of the tabletop. The outer surfaces of the boxes were precisely machined and shaped, products of a finer technology than any sword-making smithy. Tubes and cables of smooth gray and black ran among the boxes in a maze of interconnections.

On second look the wooden frame supporting the boxes was not really a table, but something more like a litter or sedan chair, though not made to accommodate the human form. From opposite ends of the litter extended pairs of sturdy carrying arms with carven grips, so six or eight humans could bear the whole assembly. The carrying handles were worn with long usage, but the litter, like the rest of the chamber, was very clean.

The pale stone of the floor shone faintly in the dim light. Only the low stone altar in the center of the room was darkened by old and ineradicable stains, rust from the inset iron rings to which victims’ limbs were sometimes bound, rust-colored old blood at the places over which the victims’ organs were removed. Before the litter, like fruit, the skulls of babies filled a bowl. Offerings of flowers lay scattered in small heaps, never in vases. Nearly all of the flowers were dead.

After he entered the room Andreas lowered himself to his knees, then down and fully prostrate on the floor, head and outstretched arms pointing toward the altar and beyond it to the litter with its metallic burden.

“ARISE, Andreas,” said a steady, inhuman voice. It came from among the metal boxes, where a small wooden frame stood on its side holding a stretching drumskin. In the center of the drumskin a small gleam of metal showed. The voice produced by the drumskin was seldom loud, though a similar device had been put inside Thorun to let him bellow and laugh. This, the quiet voice of Death, was more like a drum-sound than anything else Andreas had ever heard—and yet it was not very like a drum.

Andreas arose and came around the altar, approached the litter, once more made obeisance to the boxes on it, this time only on one knee. “Oh Death,” he said in a soft and reverent voice, “it is truly a starship, and its pilot chose to land on the rock where you in your wisdom foresaw that such a ship might land. I am going shortly to prepare Mjollnir for his task, and to choose soldiers to go with him. I have already carried out your other orders in every particular.”

The drum-voice asked: “How many outworlders came with the ship?”

“I have seen six, and there is no evidence that others are aboard. Wonderful is your wisdom, oh Death, who could predict that such men would be lured across the sky to watch our Tournament. Wonderful and—”

“Was there any mention of the man, the badlife, named Johann Karlsen?”

“No, Death.” Andreas was a little puzzled. Surely the man Karlsen must be long since dead. But the god Death was wise beyond mere human understanding; Andreas had long since been convinced of that. He waited worshipfully for another question.

After a brief silence it came. “And they are private hunters? Poachers by their own laws?”

“Yes, Lord Death, their spokesman said they had been hunting. No one in their outworld government will know that they are here.”

Prompted by occasional further questions Andreas spoke on, telling in some detail all that he had so far managed to learn about the visitors and their spacecraft.

He was certain it would not be too big to fit into the pit beside the Temple.

VI

ON THE day after Orion’s landing, Leros led the sixteen Tournament contenders who were still alive up the mountain to a new and higher camp. There, when routine matters had been gotten out of the way, he read the pairings for the third round of the Tournament:

Bram the Beardless of Consiglor

Charles the Upright

Col Renba Farley of Eikosk

Giles the Treacherous

Hal Coppersmith

Jud Isaksson

LeNos of the Highlands

Mesthles of the Windy Vale

Omir Kelsumba

Polydorus the Foul

Rahim Sosias

Rudolph Thadbury

Thomas the Grabber

Vann the Nomad

Wull Narvaez

The priest of the Inner Circle who had come down from the city yesterday had informed Leros and the warriors that they could expect a group of outworlders to appear today. The Tournament was to go on almost as usual, and the utmost courtesy was to be shown the outworlders. If they behave strangely, ignore it. There will probably even be women among them; pay no attention to that, either. Leros was also instructed to call frequent recesses in the fighting for prayer and ceremony.

The warriors had little thought to spare for anything that did not directly concern their own survival in the Tournament, and the arrival of the visitors and their guide when Leros was halfway through reading the lists caused no interruption. Four visitors came, and two of them were women but, Leros noted with some relief, modestly dressed. He had heard some tall tales of outworld ways. He was not pleased to have such onlookers—but perhaps Thorun was, for some obscure and godly reason. In any event, orders were orders, and Leros had endured harder ones than this.

This day’s fighting ring had been stamped out at the head of a gentle slope in an area where the trees were thin. From the ring the outworlders’ ship was readily visible a few hundred meters away on its truncated pinnacle of rock. The massive ball of bright metal that carried folk out among the stars showed a single open doorway in its otherwise featureless surface. Two more outworlders were sometimes visible, tiny figures sitting or standing on the little lip of rock before the ship.

ATHENA, standing at ringside beside Schoenberg and waiting somewhat nervously for the action to begin, whispered to him: “Are you sure this is going to be fighting for keeps?”

“That’s what our guide tells us. I expect he knows what’s going on.” Schoenberg was watching the preparations with keen interest, not looking at her when he answered, low-voiced.

“But if what he told us is true, each of these men has already been through two duels in this tournament. And look—there’s hardly a mark on any of them.”

“I can see a few bandages,” Schoenberg whispered back. “But you may have a point.” He considered the matter. “It could well be this: fighting from an animal’s back apparently isn’t done here. Therefore men have to move around strictly on their own muscle power, and can’t wear a lot of heavy body armor. So a clean hit from any type of weapon is going to leave a serious wound, not just a minor gash or bruise. Most wounds are serious, and the first man to be disabled by a serious wound is almost certainly the loser. Ergo, winners don’t show up for the next round with serious wounds.”

They fell silent then, since Leros was looking in their direction and perhaps was ready to get the action started. Two men with weapons ready were facing each other from opposite sides of the ring. De La Torre and Celeste also became utterly attentive.

Leros cleared his throat. “Bram the Beardless—Charles the Upright.”

SUOMI, standing atop the mesa beside Barbara Hurtado and looking toward the ring from there, was too far away to hear Leros call the names, but through his binoculars he saw two men with raised weapons start toward each other across the fighting ring. He put the binoculars down then and turned away, wondering how in the universe he had managed to get himself involved in this sickening business. For hunting animals one could find or fabricate some reason or excuse, but not for this—and there was Athena, over at ringside, an avid observer.

“Someone should do an anthropological study,” she had explained to him just a little while ago, while getting ready to leave the ship. “If they’re really fighting each other to the death over there.” Their guide-to-be, a tall, white-robed youth, had just been explaining the Tournament to them in some detail. “You’re not an anthropologist.”

“There isn’t a professional one here. Still, it’s a job that should be done.” She went on getting ready, clipping a small audiovideo recorder to her belt, next to the hologram camera.

“Is Schoenberg here to do an anthropological study too?”

“Ask him. Carl, if you hate Oscar so much and can’t stand to look at life in the raw—why did you come along on this trip? Why did you get me to ask Oscar to invite you?”

He drew a deep breath. “We’ve been through that.”

“Tell me again. I would really like to know.”

“All right. I came because of you. You are the most desirable woman I have ever known. I mean more than sex. Sex included, of course—but I want the part of you that Schoenberg has.”

“He doesn’t have me, as you put it. I’ve worked for Oscar five years now, and he has my admiration—”

“Why your admiration?”

“Because he’s strong. There’s a kind of strength in you too, Carl, a different kind, that I’ve admired also. Oscar has my admiration and often my companionship—because I enjoy his company. He and I have had sex together a few times, and that, too, has been enjoyable. But he doesn’t have me. No one does. No one will.”

“When you come of yourself as a free gift, then someone will.”

“No one.”

BRAM and Charles were sparring cautiously in the day’s first duel, neither of them having yet decided on an all-out rush. Though they were of a height Charles the Upright was much leaner, his back so straight that the reason for his name was obvious. He wore a loose jacket of fine leather and had a darkly handsome face.

Athena thought he showed incredible poise, waiting with his long, sharp-looking sword lifted in one hand, aimed at his opponent. Surely, she thought, this was not life-and-death after all. No matter how seriously they took it, it must be some play, some game, with a symbolic loser stepping aside . . . and yet all the time she was telling herself this she knew better.

“Come,” Charles was murmuring, sounding like a man urging on some animal. “Come. Now. Now.”

And beardless Bram, all youth and freakish strength, came on, first one step, then two, then in an awesome rush, his sword first raised then slashing down. The sharp blades rang together, the two men grunted. Incoherent cries of excitement went up around the watching circle. Charles, fending off blow after blow, was giving way now. He seemed to lose his footing momentarily in a slip, then lashed out with a counterstroke that brought a hoarse noise of appreciation from the warriors who stood watching with knowledgeable eyes. Bram avoided the blow and was unhurt but his rushing attack had been brought to a standstill. Athena for the first time began to realize that fine skill must reign here on the same throne with brutality.

Bram stood quietly for a moment, frowning as if at the unexpected resistance of some inanimate object. Then suddenly he charged again, more violently if possible than before. The long swords blurred and sang together, sprang apart, blurred and sang again. Athena began now to see and understand the timing and strategy of the strokes. She was forgetting herself, her eyes and mind opening more fully for perception. Then all at once, somehow—for all her concentration she had not seen how—Charles’s sword was no longer in his hand. Instead it sprouted between Bram’s ribs, the hilt firmly affixed before Bram’s breastbone, half a meter of blade protruding gory and grotesque from his broad back.

Bram shook his head, one, two, three times, in what seemed utter disbelief. Athena saw it all with great clarity and it all seemed very slow. Bram was still waving his own sword, but now he seemed unable to locate his newly disarmed opponent, standing in plain sight in front of him. Suddenly, awkwardly, Bram sat, dropped his weapon and raised a hand to his face, brushing at it as if struck by the thought that now his beard would never grow. The hand fell limp and Bram slumped farther, his head tilting forward on his chest. The pose-looked incredibly uncomfortable, but he bore it without complaint. Only when a gray-clad slave limped forward to drag the body to one side did Athena fully understand that the man—the boy—had died before her eyes.

Charles the Upright extracted his sword with a strong pull and held it out to another slave for cleaning—while yet another spilled sand over the place where Bram had spilled his life. In the background someone was digging. The world had changed in the space of a few moments, or rather Athena had been changed. Never again would she be the same.

“Col Renba—Farley of Eikosk.”

The man who started forward at the name of Col Renba was big, brown, and shaggy. He stood near the center of the arena whirling a mace, a spike-studded ball on the end of a short chain, and waited for Farley to come after him.

Oscar was saying something to her, but there was no time to listen or think, no time for anything but watching. No time for Oscar, even.

Farley of Eikosk, fair and freckled, tall and well made if not exactly handsome, came treading catlike in fine leather boots. His other garments were simple, but of rich sturdy cloth. He squinted in the sun that shone on the fine polished steel of his sword and knife. Holding a weapon in either hand, he feinted an advance to within striking range of the mace, and nodded as if with satisfaction when he saw how rapidly the spiked weight on its taut chain arched out at him and back again.

Now Farley began to circle, moving around Col Renba first one way and then the other. The mace came out after him, faster than before, faster than had seemed possible to Athena, and she cried out, unaware that she did so. Again she cried out, in relief this time, when she saw that the spikes had missed Farley’s fine, fair skin.

Momentarily both men were still, and then again there came a rapid passage of arms, too fast for Athena to judge. She thought the flurry was over, when suddenly the tip of one of the mace’s spikes touched Farley on the hand, and his dagger flew lightly but awkwardly away. In almost the same moment Farley’s long sword bit back, and now Col Renba backed away, keeping the mace twirling with his right hand, his left arm curled up as if trying to protect itself from further damage while its sleeve rapidly drenched red.

Each man’s left arm was bleeding now, and Farley’s at least appeared no longer usable. Along the back of his hand there showed the white of splintered bone. The bright blade of his long dagger lay buried in the dust.

When the mace-spinner saw the extent of the damage he had inflicted, and found that his own left arm could at least be held up out of the way, he stopped backing off and began to advance once again. He kept the ugly weight of death moving around him in a smooth ellipse. As Col stepped closer, Farley began to retreat, but only began. As the mace sighed past him his long speed-thrust to the throat caught Col stepping in. Col Renba died, the mace flying wide from his hand in a great arc, spinning over the shouting, dodging ring of watchers.

A long moment after the other watchers’ outcries had died away, Athena was still shouting. She realized this and shut up and let go of Schoenberg, whose arm and shoulder had somehow come into her spasmodic two-handed grip. Oscar was looking at her strangely, and so was De La Torre, who stood with his arm around a bored-looking Celeste a little distance off.

But Athena forgot about them. Already men were getting ready to fight again.

“GILES the Treacherous—Hal Coppersmith.”

Coppersmith was the leaner of this pair, and much the taller. He was content to begin on the defensive, holding his long sword like the sensing organ of some giant insect. Giles the Treacherous had sandy hair, an air of earnest perseverance, and (like the most successful traitors, thought Athena) an open trustworthiness in his face. He was not big, and did not appear to be exceptionally strong, but still maneuvered his own long blade with an assured economy of effort. Now it was high, now low, without Athena being aware that it had started to move. Hal Coppersmith had similar difficulties, it seemed. His elbow was gashed, and then his knee, and then the great muscle in his tattooed upper arm was cut nearly through. Then nothing remained but butchery. Giles stepped back with an expression of distaste.

A slave limped forward to swing a maul and end Hal’s silent, thrashing agony.

“Jud Isaksson—LeNos of the Highlands.”

LeNos sprang to the attack almost before the signal had been given, his fierce scarred face thrust forward like a shield. In either hand he held a wide blade, moving and flashing like the hub-knives on a chariot. And little Isaksson, whooping as if he were overjoyed to meet a fighter so aggressive, shot forward fast enough to clash with LeNos almost in the middle of the trodden circle. The round metal shield on Jud’s left arm rang like some maddened blacksmith’s anvil under the barrage of his enemy’s blows. LeNos seemed incapable of imagining a defensive move, let alone performing one. He only pushed his own two-handed attack so maniacally that it seemed impossible for his opponent to find a sliver of time and space in which to counterattack.

At such a pace the fight could not and did not last long. LeNos’s driving sword arm was suddenly stilled, pinned in mid-air on the long, thick needle of Isaksson’s sword. The highlander’s dagger kept flashing on, but still Jud’s bright-scarred shield took the blows. Then Jud yanked his sword free, of the ruined arm as he did, and brought it back, hacking, faster and faster, with a violence wilder if anything than his opponent’s had been. LeNos was in several pieces before he died.

“WHAT’S the matter?” An insistent voice had repeated the question to her several times, Athena realized. Schoenberg was gripping her firmly by both arms, and giving her a slight shaking. He was looking closely into her face. When her eyes focused on his, the expression in his changed from concern to an odd mixture of amusement and contempt.

“Nothing’s the matter. What do you mean? I’m all right.” She kept looking for the next fight to start, and then realized that the priest in charge, Leros or whatever his name was, must have just ordered a recess. Slowly she realized that she had come near losing herself in the excitement of the fighting, temporarily losing control of her own behavior as if with drugs or sex. But no, it was all right. A near thing, but she still controlled herself.

Schoenberg, still looking at her with some concern, said now: “We had better give Carlos and Barbara a chance to see a thing or two.”

“Him?” she laughed abruptly, contemptuously. “This isn’t for him. Thank you for bringing me, Oscar.”

“Nevertheless I think you’ve had enough.”

De La Torre peered around Oscar at her. “I have, too, for the time being. Shall we walk back to the ship, Athena?”

“I’m staying.”

Her tone was such that neither of the men made any further argument. Celeste meanwhile had moved next to Schoenberg; she was watching him more than what was going on in the ring. “I’m going, then,” said De La Torre, and he was off.

SUOMI, having handed over his sentry’s rifle to De La Torre, slid and clambered down the steep slope from the mesa’s top, holding on to the retractable rope that they had secured at the top to make the climb less dangerous. On this one face of the mesa the slope for the most part was not quite precipitous; there were some patches of gravelly soil and a bush or two. Already a visible path was being worn.

When he reached the level of the forest Suomi set off immediately in the direction of the tournament. Athena was there, not just for a quick look, but remaining there by choice to see it all. A purely scientific interest? Anthropology? She had never been enthusiastic on that subject before today, not around Suomi anyway. Maybe the tournament wasn’t, after all, as murderous a business as he had been led to believe. Neither Suomi nor Barbara had watched. De La Torre, coming back, had said nothing about it and Suomi had not asked him. But maybe it was just as bloody as the guide had warned them, and she was still there taking it in. If she was like that, he had better know about it.

Nothing horrible was going on in the ring as he emerged from the forest and drew near. People were simply standing about, waiting, while a white-robed man went through some kind of ceremony before a simple altar. As Suomi came up Schoenberg nodded a greeting to him. Athena gave Suomi a preoccupied look. She was upset about something, he thought, but she gave no indication of wanting to be elsewhere. His attention was soon pulled away from her.

“Omir Kelsumba—Mesthles of the Windy Vale.”

On springy legs massive as tree trunks Kelsumba moved forward, black skin gleaming, axe cradled almost like an infant in his awesome arms. Mesthles, spare and graying, thoughtful-looking, somewhat battered by time like the ancient scythe with which he meant to fight, kept at a respectful distance from Kelsumba for a little while, retreating with economical movements, studying the movements of his foe. Now the axe came after him, startling Suomi with its speed, and with such power and weight behind it that it seemed nothing human should be able to turn the blow aside. Mesthles made no mistakes, had his scythe-blade in the right place to turn the axe, but the jarring impact when the blades met came near to knocking Mesthles down. Another axe-blow fell on the scythe, and then another. Mesthles could not get into position to strike back. After the fourth or fifth parry, the scythe-blade broke. A groaning murmur, like the foretaste of blood, came up from the ring of watchers, and Suomi heard part of it coming from Athena. He saw the moistlipped rapture on her face as she watched the fight, oblivious to him and all else.

Broken weapon still tightly in his grip, its jagged blade still dangerous, Mesthles maintained his calm, and showed more agility than his appearance suggested. For some time he avoided being pinned against the side of the fighting ring. Neither he nor any of the other fighters ever seemed to consider stepping across that simple line and outside the ring, any more than they would consider jumping through a wall.

The axe now came after Mesthles in what looked like a continuous blur, seeming to pull its giant owner after it. It struck Mesthles at last, full in the back, as he twisted his body in trying to dodge it yet again. His fallen body continued jerking, twitching, moving. A slave limped forward with a maul and dealt the finishing blow.

Suomi’s gut worked suddenly, labored wretchedly, rejected in a spasm what remained of the little he had taken for his breakfast. I should have tranquilized myself, he thought. It was too late now. He faced away from the ring but could do nothing more before the vomit came. If he was desecrating holy ground, well, they would have to kill him for it. But when he straightened up it seemed that no one was paying him any attention at all. Whether it was delicacy or lack of interest he could not tell.

“Polydorus the Foul—Rahim Sosias.”

Suomi found that he could watch. Polydorus, looking no more foul than his competitors, brandished a battered sword with obvious strength and energy. Sosias was paunchy and short, yet he somehow managed to draw first blood with his scimitar, making an ugly slice among Polydorus’s left shoulder. Polydorus was galvanized rather than weakened by the injury, and pressed an attack so hard that for a few moments it seemed he might prevail. But then he aimed a long thrust poorly, and stood looking down at his own right hand and forearm where he had just stepped on it. He grimaced and spat toward Sosias before the scimitar came back to take his life.

The white-clad priest was in the ring again, and it appeared there was going to be another recess. Not that it mattered to Suomi. He turned away, deliberately this time. He had found out that he could watch whatever further maiming might occur; but still he much preferred not to watch.

He stepped closer to Schoenberg and Athena, managed to catch the eye of the former but not the latter, and said: “I’m going back to the ship.” He glanced at Celeste, but she only gave him a bored look and moved a little closer to Schoenberg.

Suomi turned away from them all and trudged back among the trees. It was good to be briefly alone again, but here in this alien forest was no place to stop and think.

When he got back to the foot of the mesa, he found that the climbing rope had been pulled up. Not in the mood to try the ascent without it, Suomi called out. A few seconds later De La Torre’s head and bare shoulders appeared at the top of the slope. “What’s up?” he called down.

“I’ve seen enough. Throw down the rope.”

“All right.” In a moment the rope came snaking down.

WHEN Suomi got to the top he saw that Barbara lay naked on a foam mattress so close to the climbing path that De La Torre could sit on the mattress beside her and do acceptable sentry duty. Suomi noticed also that a pair of binoculars had been set up on a tripod beside the mattress in such a way that a man lying there, perhaps with a woman beneath him, could observe uninterruptedly what was going on in the fighting ring.

De La Torre apparently was finished for the time being with binoculars, mattress, and girl; he had pulled on a pair of shorts already and was continuing to dress. His voice was mild and lazy. “I’ll turn the rifle back to you, then, Carlos, and go down again myself.”

Before Suomi had gotten the rifle’s still-unfamiliar strap adjusted to fit his shoulder, De La Torre was gone again. Suomi watched him out of sight, then said to Barbara, who still lay curled up tiredly on her mattress: “And how are things with you?”

She moved a little, and said in a small voice: “Life appears possible.” Never had he seen Barbara so obviously depressed before. He had lain with her a couple of times on the long trip out, and with Celeste a couple of times. Not with Athena, though, on the trip out he could no longer be casual with her. Now perhaps he could.

Barbara was the only one of them who had refused to watch the tournament at all. So of course the sadist De La Torre had had to pick her for his object, his receptacle . . . Suomi wanted to say something good to her but could think of nothing. Tomorrow her nakedness might arouse his own lust again but right now it only made her seem defenseless and pitiable, lying there face down. So, she had wanted to come along on a luxurious space voyage with a billionaire, and her wish had been granted. She was earning her passage.

No need to walk a sentry’s route around the ship; there was only the one route by which one could ascend. Standing at the head of the path, looking out over the treetops without binoculars, Suomi could see De La Torre arriving at the side of the fighting ring. The next duel had still not gotten underway, evidently; there were still four men waiting to fight, if Suomi was reading the arrangement of the distant figures correctly. The binoculars were handy but he did not care enough to pick them up. Perhaps he did not want to acknowledge their present positioning by moving them.

It promised to be a long few days ahead, until the Tournament slaughtered itself into extinction, and then a very long trip home. But there were compensations. It had been made clear that whatever had seemed to be growing between him and Athena had no real existence. It was not over—it had never been.

Barbara was sitting up and doing things with her fingers to her hair, not yet in a mood to talk. Suomi, turning to look to the north from this high place, saw or thought he saw the mountainous glaciers of hunting country looming just over the horizon there, like unsupported clouds.

What was that sound, just now? The path was clear. Some small animal or flying creature, then. Never mind.

Well, things were no doubt going to be socially uncomfortable on the trip home, but it was well worth it to have settled the thing between them, that might otherwise have dragged on much longer. You had to consider this a favorable conclusion. If they had . . .

Did they have woodpeckers here? He couldn’t see the bird anywhere but still the sound came almost continuously. Must be down under the treetops somewhere. There was also a faint polyphonic roar from the direction of the Tournament, what must have been a loud yell to be audible this far away, but he did not try to see what had happened there.

Barbara was standing up, her clothes in hand. “I’m going in for a shower, Carlos.”

“All right.” He watched her walk away. Women. Magnificent, but who could understand them?

And then, while on the subject of magnificence, there had been the animal, the glacier-beast, whose power and beauty had frozen Suomi in awe and terror as it charged down upon him. He now felt, surprisingly, some small regret that he had not killed it. Better, of course, if it had been allowed to live . . . yet, what was it Thoreau had written? There is a time in the lives of nations, as of individuals, when the best hunters are the best men. Something like that. The nation of interstellar man had presumably long since passed that stage, of course. And so had Carlos Suomi in his individual life. Or he should have. Schoenberg, on the other hand, though something more than a mere sadist—

IN HIS mind the perception of the nagging tapping sound clicked suddenly into place with a remembered visual image, that of stone being worked by hard metal, more precisely that of steps being cut in the side of the mesa by Schoenberg, hanging on the rope with mountaineers’ implements in hand. Suomi had not made the connection before because the sounds he was now hearing were too rapid. No one could wield a hammer at such a speed. And at the same time they sounded too irregular to be made by an automatic tool.

The climbable face of rock was still unoccupied. Suomi had started around the ship to check the other sides of the mesa when he beheld in front of him someone, something, climbing carefully up over the rim and into sight. A huge head of wild, coarse, dark hair, bound by a silver band. Beneath the head a massive wrestler’s body coming up over the edge of the cliff, clothed in rough furs under a swirling dark cloak. On second look the figure was so huge the mind wanted to refuse belief.

TO BE CONTINUED

WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

CARLOS SUOMI, interior designer with pacifist inclinations, has accompanied tycoon and big-game hunter, OSCAR SCHOENBERG, on a clandestine expedition to Hunters’ Planet, There, once every fifteen standard years, the best hunting in the known galaxy can be found, though outworlders’ trips such as SCHOENBERG’S are frowned on by the Interstellar Authority.

Also, five hundred years before, in the solar system of which Hunters’ is a part, the great commander JOHANN KARLSEN led a human-manned fleet to victory over the berserkers. Berserkers are automated warships and auxiliary machines built during some interstellar war between long-vanished races, and at the time of the story will ravaging the galaxy, their programmed purpose being the destruction of all life.

One berserker survived the war on Hunters’ Planet, and was hidden by a cult of humans who worshipped it as Death personified. This intelligent machine has worked with generations of human aides until its secret cult has become the most powerful group on the planet, challenged only by the shadowy organization called the Brotherhood. The berserker’s goal is to obtain a starship and carry out its programmed tasks of depopulating the planet and—killing the berserkers’ great enemy KARLSEN.

The plan to seize a starship involves luring some outworld craft to land at Godsmountain, where the cultists now openly manage the planet-wide worship of Thorun, god of war and of the hunt, and the chief object of worship on this planet of hunters and warriors. In the Hunterian pantheon, KARLSEN has also become a demigod. Outworlders are to be lured by the prospect of watching a Tournament of warriors fighting to the death in single combat. The winner and sole survivor of the Tournament is promised a place of eternal honor at Thorun’s right hand, while even the losers are assured of god hood.

SCHOENBERG, fascinated by the intensity of life attainable during moments of extreme danger, and by heroic deeds (he and SUOMI have both made recordings of KARLSEN’S battle messages, which are still radiating through interstellar space) wants to watch the Tournament, and lands his ship on a small mesa on Godsmountain’s flank. Aboard as his guests, besides SUOMI, are GUS DE LA TORRE, who turns out to be a sadist; ATHENA POULSON, who is SCHOENBERG’S private secretary and the chief reason for SUOMI’S coming on the trip; and CELESTE SERVETUS and BARBARA HURTADO, playgirls who were brought along for male consumption like the cigars and the wine.

ANDREAS, head of the secret berserker cult and also High Priest of Thorun, sends the demigod Mjollnir (really a robot designed by the berserker and utilizing some berserker components, but built by Hunterian craftsmen) with some picked warriors to seize the ship while SUOMI is on guard and most of the other Earth people are watching the Tournament.

BARBARA is taking a shower inside the ship when SUOMI hears the attacking party climbing the mesa’s sheerest side.

THE climber rolled the great length of his frame out onto the horizontal surface of the mesa and raised his gigantic head to look straight at Suomi. The impassive face, its lower half masked by wild dark beard and mustache, was of the right size to fit the head, and yet it was subtly wrong. Not that it was scarred, or intrinsically deformed. Though it was no mask in the ordinary sense, it was yet artificial. Too skillfully artificial, like the work of some mad artist, convinced he could fool people into thinking that this robot, this dummy, was a man.

The figure rose gracefully to its feet and Suomi saw something that its body had obscured.-At the very edge of the cliff a climber’s piton had been hammered into the rock. The end of a line was knotted to an eye in the piton and the line went tautly back out of sight over the cliff. Now the face of a second climber, this one of normal stature, indubitably human, rose into view.

Meanwhile the trailblazing giant had risen to his full height. He was taller than anyone Suomi had ever seen. As he stood up he thrust a mountaineer’s hammer into a pouch at his waist and with the same motion of his arm unsheathed an enormous sword.

Suomi had come to a dead stop, not paralyzed with fear as he had been by the glacier-beast, but simply unable to form any satisfactory explanation for what his senses were recording.

The first answer to cross his mind was that this was all some ugly and elaborate practical joke arranged by Schoenberg or De La Torre but he realized even before the idea was fully formed that they would hardly think it necessary to go to so much trouble to scare him. And Schoenberg, at least, would have too much sense to yell boo at a nervous man with a loaded weapon.

The second explanation to pop into Suomi’s head was that there must be hooligans on Hunters’ planet the same as everywhere else, and some of these had come to see what they might steal from the outworlders’ ship.

But the marauders’ giant leader was not covered by either of these hypotheses. The mind stopped and boggled at the sight, then tried to go around it and proceed.

With some vague idea of scaring off bandits, Suomi began to unsling the rifle from his back. As he did so the incredible giant took two steps toward him with its sword upraised, then halted as if satisfied with its position.

By this time the second climber, a Hunterian warrior, young and tough-looking, was completely up on the cliff-top and proceeding with drawn sword toward the open hatchway of the ship. The third, also of normal size, was right behind him.

“Halt,” said Suomi, conscious even as he spoke of the uncertainty in his own voice. He felt foolish when no one halted even though the rifle was now in his hands.

Now there were two human invaders on top of the mesa besides the man-shaped giant, and another armed man was climbing into sight. The ship’s hatch stood open and—except for Suomi—unprotected. And Barbara was in there.

He had not leveled the rifle at them yet, but now he did, and shouted “Halt!”, this time with conviction. Instantly the huge figure lunged toward him, faster than any human could conceivably move. The man-slicing sword was held high, ready to strike. Suomi squeezed the trigger, realized when it failed to move that he had failed to release the safety. Instinctively he stepped back from the onrushing sword and felt his foot move into empty air. His left hand, grabbing wildly for support, caught hold of the climbing rope and saved him from a killing fall. The misstep dropped him only a short distance down from the edge of the mesa, but still his heel came down on rock with an impact that jarred his leg and spine. His arm twisted with the fall and the rope slipped from his grip. He lost all footing, tumbled and rolled on gravel, and stopped when he came up with a breathtaking slam against an outcropping of rock. Still he was only about halfway down the path, the steepest part of which was just below him.

With his back against the rock that had stopped him, he half sat, half lay there, facing up the hill. Dazedly he realized that he was not seriously injured, and that his right hand still held the rifle. Now his finger found the small safety lever beside the breech and turned it back. Somehow he even remembered to set it for full automatic fire.

The giant man-thing with its sword upraised reared into view above. When it saw Suomi it dropped itself onto the steep slope with the grace of a dancer. With sword leveled at him now it descended upon him, moving under perfect control, one long bounding stride, two . . .

THE rifle stuttered in Suomi’s hands. The sword-brandishing golem’s left arm erupted in a spray of dry-looking particles and smoke as the man-thing spun in an incredible pirouette, more graceful by far than any wounded animal. Knocked off balance and deflected from its course by the shock of the rifle’s force-packets, the towering shape slid past Suomi and on down the slope.

But it did not fall. In another moment, near the bottom, it had regained full control and stopped its slide. Then it turned and was calmly climbing, like a mountain goat, at a fast run. The sword, whirling and gleaming, came toward him once again, the face below it a mask of insane serenity.

Suomi uttered a sobbing noise, a compound of terror and frustration. In his hands the rifle leaped and kicked, firing continuously while he struggled to keep it aimed. The fur-clad monster, face still without expression beneath the silver headband, was stopped in its tracks. Puffs of fur flew from it under the barrage, and splinters and streaks of unidentifiable debris. Then it was hurled back down the hill, still staggering to keep its feet, black cloak alternately furling and flying. Far at the bottom Suomi’s continuing mad fusillade pinned it like an insect, leaping and convulsing wildly, against an immovable tree trunk.

A force-packet dissolved the silver headband and half the monster’s face in a gray bloodless smear. The sword flew from its hand. With a final, awkward, uphill lunge, the figure fell. It rolled over on the ground and lay inert. At last Suomi released the trigger.

Suddenly all was quiet. The sky, the mesa, seemed to be whirling around Suomi’s head. He realized that he was sprawled precariously on the steep slope, his head considerably lower than his feet. One false move and he would go plunging down. He was breathing in little sobbing gasps. Moving very carefully, still clutching the precious rifle, he got his feet more or less beneath him. Now he could feel a dozen cuts and bruises from the fall.

He should get back up and defend the ship. But the slope just above him was impossible. How had he survived the tumble down? He must be tougher than he had realized. His rolling descent had taken him away from the regular climbing path. Couldn’t get back to it here by going sideways. He would have to go all the way down and start up again on the proper route.

To get down he had to re-sling the rifle and use both hands to grip the rock. In his present state he took without thinking about them slides and drops that would certainly have broken his ankles if he had essayed them calmly.

At the bottom he kept his eyes on, the figure of his fallen enemy. He unslung the rifle once again, but it was not needed. His rifle fire had beaten the facing surface of the great tree trunk into splinters, which had showered down with leaves and twigs to make a patchy carpet on the ground. On top of this carpet a giant doll lay huddled where his violence had flung it.

SUOMI, the killer, still unable to understand, now unable to take his eyes away, came closer. This time, too, as with the glacier-beast, there was scattered fur, though this fur was a long-dead dull brown instead of gallant orange.

He prodded with the rifle’s muzzle, put out a hand, moved the tattered cloak. What was left of the thing’s face was turned away. Beneath the torn fur garments the bulky torso itself was torn and shattered, pilling madness into the light of day. No blood and bones this time, but wads of stuff that might have filled a doll. Amid this stuffing were disjointed metal rods and cams and wheels, here and there a gleaming box or tube, and running through all were complex networks of metal cables and insulated wires with an irregular, handmade look about them. And this, some power source. A hydrogen lamp? No, a nuclear fuel cell, not made to energize a robot, but doubtless serving well enough.

He had killed, yet he had not. This corpse had never lived, that much was certain. Now he could look more coolly. He touched the side of the cheek above the beard, and it felt like smooth leather. The fur clothing over the torso had never covered skin, only a carapace of hand-worked metal armor. In its slight irregularities of shape and thickness the armor reminded Suomi of a warrior’s shield he had just seen at the Tournament below. At close range the energy rifle had opened this crude armor like an egg. Inside were the structural parts, cables and rods and such, also handworked, and mysteriously jumbled with these were a few sealed boxes, smooth and perfect in shape and finish, obviously of quite different origin than the rest . . .

He grasped at his belt. The communicator was gone, and he realized with dismay that it must have been knocked or scraped from its holder at some point during his fall.

“Carlos!” It was Barbara’s voice, shrill with panic, coming from somewhere out of sight above him. “Carlos, help—” It cut off abruptly there.

Suomi ran to the foot of the climbing path and looked up. In view at the top was the head of one of the Hunterian men who had scaled the cliff. Suomi took an ascending step; at once the man’s hands came into view, holding a short, thick bow with arrow nocked and ready. Suomi began to lift the rifle, and an arrow buzzed past his ear. It brought a pang of authentic fright, but Suomi did not shoot back. Dropping one man dead up there was not going to help; Superior firepower or not, Suomi was not going to be able to do anything Tor Barbara, or regain the ship, without help. It would be impossible to climb the path with the rifle in his hands and once he slung his weapon he would be at a hopeless disadvantage.

He must get help. Suomi turned and ran, ignoring signals of damage from his bruised and bleeding legs and aching back. He headed for the site of the Tournament to spread the alarm. The rifle was not noisy and probably no one there had heard the firing.

Before he had gotten fifty meters into the trees, a line of uniformed men holding bows and spears at the ready appeared before him, deployed at right angles to his path, cutting him off. A white-robed priest stood with them. The uniformed soldiers of Godsmountain, and they were not coming to help the outworlder against bandits but were leveling their weapons in his direction. “Try to take him alive,” the priest said clearly.

Suomi abruptly altered course once more, running downhill for greater speed, angling away from both soldiers and ship. Behind him there were signal-like whistles and birdcall cries.

A single set of footsteps came pounding after him, gaining ground. Suomi visualized another robot monster. He stopped and turned, saw that it was only a human soldier, but still fired with deadly intent. He missed, blowing a notch out of a tree limb above his pursuer’s head. Whether wounded by splinters, stunned by concussion, or merely frightened, the man dove for cover and gave up the chase. Suomi fled. In the distance other men still whistled and. signalled to one another, but the sounds grew fainter as he ran. When at last, utterly winded, he threw himself down in a dense tangled thicket, no sound came to him but his own laboring lungs and pounding blood.

VII

WHEN Suomi walked away from the Tournament, Schoenberg noted that Athena was looking after him, an annoyed expression on her face. The two of them seemed to annoy each other, and that was about all. It was beginning to look as if nothing interesting was going to happen between them one way or another—which was just as well from Schoenberg’s point of view because the girl was an invaluable worker and intensely loyal. Schoenberg would hate to lose her.

He wondered how she had become interested in a man like Suomi. He seemed like such a marshmallow, trailing her passively, failing at the hunt, trying to stay away from the Tournament on principle and failing that, then puking at the sight of blood when he did come. Of course such a miserable performance record might in some way prove attractive to a woman. Schoenberg had long ago given up trying to predict what women might do. That was one reason he liked having them around at all times; they were sure to generate surprises.

On his other side, Celeste moved a little closer and brushed very lightly against his arm. That one was becoming tiresome. No more pretense of independence. Now she just couldn’t bear to be separated from him, it seemed.

All at once he forgot about women. The recess was drawing to a close and the priest Leros had his list of names in hand and was about to read from it once more.

“Rudolph Thadbury—Thomas the Grabber.”

Thadbury, with the air of a military leader, saluted both Leros and Thomas with his sword. Thomas gave his spear an indefinite wave that might or might not have been a response, then leveled it and moved forward. Schoenberg watched the action critically. He thought he was already beginning—only beginning, of course—to appreciate how a duel with edged and pointed weapons should be fought.

Since a sword has not a spear’s range of attack Rudolph slid aside from the deep thrusts and hacked at the shaft of the spear when he could, trying to sever the spearhead and to move inside the spear’s most effective range to a lesser distance, where the advantage would lie with the swordsman. All this was not very different from what Schoenberg had expected. He had read historians’ theoretical treatments of personal combat, and had watched Anachronists on Earth playing with their dull weapons. He had never taken up one of their wooden swords, though; he did not care for playing much.

Thadbury had no success in hacking at the spear shaft, for it was bound with twisted strips of metal running lengthwise and the sword could not cut through. Nor did he get many chances to try; the Grabber was plainly a master of his chosen weapon. Rudolph could not move in to the range at which he wished to fight. Thomas kept his spear’s long shaft flicking in and out, lightly as a serpent’s tongue, and still used it handily to parry whenever it seemed the sword might reach his face or bulky torso. And then, suddenly, incredibly, Thomas was no longer staying back to get the maximum advantage from his weapon’s greater range. Instead he brushed the sword out of the way with the spear shaft and leaped in to close with his opponent in a wrestler’s grip.

A cry of surprise went up around the ring, and Thadbury too was taken off guard. Sword and spear fell to the trodden earth together and the two men stamped and whirled in a grotesque dance, each trying to trip and throw the other. But Thomas had the advantage of strength and skill as well. When they fell he was on top, Rudolph prone beneath him. Thomas’s massive right forearm became a lever to crush Rudolph’s wiry neck. Rudolph, belly down on the ground beneath his foe, kicked, wretched, and twisted with desperate strength. His struggles seemed useless. His face went red, then purple.

Schoenberg thought that what was left of the oxygen in his bloodstream and lungs must be going fast. He hoped the man would be speedily out of his pain, even as he pushed Celeste back a little and stepped slightly to one side to get a better look at the coming of death. He knew that a lot of people on Earth, seeing him standing here and watching so intently, would think he was a sadist. In fact, he wished no living creature suffering.

Schoenberg wished that he could enter the Tournament himself. Of course he knew full well that he was no more qualified to face such men as these with edged weapons, than they were to meet him with energy rifles. The season before, when he had been hunting with Mikenas, Mikenas had shown him how to use a hunting spear and Schoenberg had successfully impaled some dangerous game on his borrowed weapon. That had been one of the most memorable experiences of his life, and he had never mentioned it to anyone.

Of course competing in a Tournament like this was a far different matter. Not that he could reasonably expect to be allowed to enter anyway. Maybe he could find out just how one qualified in the preliminaries, and when the next planet-wide Tournament was going to be held. He assumed there would be another one, probably next hunting season. Then if he found some way to practice on Earth, and came back in fifteen years . . . maybe one of these men’s sons would kill him then.

It was unlikely, to put it mildly, that he would ever be able to win a major Tournament on Hunters’ planet, no matter how much practice and fair preparation he got in. He was not anxious to die, and when he saw violent death approaching he knew that, as in the past, he would be afraid. But it would be worth it, worth it, worth it. For the timeless share of intense life to be experienced before the end. For the moments of full perfect being-when the coin marked Life and Death spun before the altar of the god of chance, moments more valuable than so many years of the dreariness that made up most of what men called civilization.

Now Rudolph could no longer strain to throw his killer off, could no longer even grate out noises from his mouth and throat. His face was hideous and inhuman. There was no sound now but Thomas the Grabber’s honest panting. That quieted shortly as Thomas sensed the life below him fled. He let Rudolph’s head fall, got to his feet, very easy and limber in his movements for such a bulky man.

Schoenberg glanced at Celeste, who was looking at her fingernails. Not horrified by what was going on, only mildly disgusted. When he looked at her she gave him a quick questioning smile. He turned to Athena. She was watching the men arm themselves for the next fight, was deep in her own thoughts. Schoenberg and the rest of the outside world had been forgotten.

De La Torre came ambling up, from the direction of the ship, to stand beside them. “How’d the last one go?” he asked Schoenberg, craning his neck a little to view the bodies where they had been dragged.

“It went all right. They both fought well.”

“VANN the Nomad—Wull Narvaez.”

This should be the last fight of the day.

Athena turned her head but not her eyes to Schoenberg and whispered: “What are those things on his belt?”

There were two or three pairs of them, strung on a cord. “They appear to be human ears.”

De La Torre emitted a high-pitched snicker, that made Schoenberg glance over at him for a moment, frowning in surprise.

Vann the Nomad was waving his long sword with what seemed to be the clumsy movements of an amateur, but nobody now watching him could be taken in by that deception for a moment. The show now became almost comical, for Narvaez, too, affected an innocent appearance. He looked so like a harmless peasant that the look must have been carefully cultivated. Wull carried a pitchfork, and made tentative jabbing motions with it toward his foe. Wull’s dress was crude, and his mouth pursed grotesquely, so that he looked for all the world like some angry, mud-footed farmer nerving himself to unfamiliar violence.

The six warriors who had already survived the day’s dangers were relaxed now and in a mood for humor, enjoying the charade. They hooted and whistled at clumsy-looking feints, and called out rough advice. Leros glanced around at them in irritation once, but then to Schoenberg’s surprise said nothing.

With a flash of insight Schoenberg realized that the contestants in a Tournament like this one must stand closer to the gods than even a priest of Leros’s rank.

Vann tried several times to cut the pitchfork’s shaft, which was not armored with metal, but Narvaez had a way of turning the fork that minimized the swordblade’s impact, and the wooden shaft seemed very springy and tough. When Vann’s tactics had failed him several times he tried something new; grabbing at the fork with his free hand. He was so fast that on his first attempt he managed to seize the weapon, getting a good grip on it just where the tines branched out. With this grip he pulled the surprised Wull Narvaez off balance while his sword thrust low and hard.

He took the ears of Narvaez before the man was dead, warning the maul-slave off with a snarl, until he had made sure of undamaged trophies.

ATHENA, blinking, came back to full awareness of her surroundings once again. She looked for Schoenberg, and saw that he had turned away and was waiting to talk to the High Priest Andreas, who had just come in sight on the road that descended from the mountaintop, walking with a small escort of soldiers.

De La Torre, moving closer to Athena, asked her in a low voice: “Did you get that last little bit?”

“What?” Not having understood, she turned to him with a look of expectancy.

“I was talking about the earcutting, whether you got that part down on crystal. I’ve been making a few recordings too.”

The expectancy in her face dimmed, then vanished abruptly as realization came. The crystal on which her day’s anthropological records were to have been made still hung unused at her belt.

ANDREAS, after having made a short congratulatory speech to the surviving warriors, turned quickly to Schoenberg and inquired: “Have you enjoyed the day’s competition?”

“We who are here have enjoyed it very much. I must apologize for Suomi, the one who became ill, as you may have heard. I do not think he will come to watch again.”

Andreas’s lip curled slightly but he made no further comment. None was needed. Such a man was beneath contempt and unworthy of discussion. He asked: “Will all of you join me at a feast in the Temple of Thorun tonight? All of you, that is, who are now here. We can ascend at once to the city if that is convenient.”

Schoenberg hesitated only marginally. “I did not think to bring a gift for Thorun with me from the ship.”

Andreas smiled. What was the naive old saying? If a smile disfigures a man’s face, then that man is bad. The High Priest said: “lam sure you will provide a suitable gift. There is no hurry about it, not now.”

“Very well.” Schoenberg glanced at those of his shipmates present. All watched him expectantly and appeared perfectly ready to be Thorun’s guests. “Just let me say a word to the people waiting at the ship. Only take a minute.”

“Of course.” Andreas, noble savage, turned politely away.

Schoenberg took his communicator from his belt and spoke into it. Looking toward the ship he thought he could just see the head of Suomi, who must be sitting down in his sentry’s position at the top of the climbing path.

It was Barbara who answered. “Hello?” Her voice was uncertain.

“Look, Barb, those of us down here now have been invited up to visit the Temple. A feast is scheduled. I’m not sure when we’ll get back to the ship. Tell Suomi to be sure to get inside before dark and button the thing up. One of you call me if any problems should arise; I’ll call you again when we’re ready to start back. Okay?”

There was a little pause, and then she only said, “Okay.”

“Everything all right?”

“Yes. Okay, Oscar.”

Just hearing about the Tournament and thinking about it must have upset her, he supposed. Probably she had been holding Suomi’s hand while he recounted bestial horrors. Well, next trip he. would choose his traveling companions more carefully. None of this bunch were exactly what he had hoped for.

Except next time he might be coming here alone, not expecting to return to Earth. He wondered if he could really teach himself, on Earth, to use edged weapons with real skill. He wondered if he would do better with sword or axe or spear. Tonight, if everything went well, he would have a chance to mention his plan to Andreas.

THE little party of outworlders and their casual escort of a few soldiers began to climb the smooth-paved mountain road, Andreas and Schoenberg walking together in the lead. “It is only a few kilometers to the top,” Andreas informed them. “Perhaps an hour’s walk if we take our time. Your hours on Earth are about the same length as ours, not so?”

When they had walked only about half a kilometer along the zig-zag, climbing road they came to the place where, as Andreas pointed out, the ring was being prepared for the next day’s fighting. Here the mountain was steeper, less level space was available, and one side of the ring overlooked a bank that was almost a precipice. After another kilometer the switchback road passed between twin stone watch-towers from which sentinels saluted the party crisply with their spears. Andreas returned the salutes.

They must be nearing the summit now. The slope of the mountain moderated again and the road wound through a park-like wood. Many of the trees bore fruit. The earth below them was hidden under a vine-like groundcover plant that put up leaves like blades of grass.

Presently the trees thinned out, the ground leveled and they came in sight of the citadel-city on the mountain’s crown. As the road brought them near the city’s bone-white walls, straight toward a yawning gate, Schoenberg glanced back once in the direction of the ship. He was developing a faint uneasiness that he found hard to shake. He could see only the top of the metal sphere above the trees before he passed into the city.

Inside, there was at first little to be seen, except more walls of bright white stone. they made their way in through thee streets, Schoenberg found them narrow and busy. Gray-clad slaves, and carts pulled by multihorned draft animals, made way for white-robed aristocrats. Here and there an elegant woman eyed the visitors from a sedan chair or a grilled window. Windows were usually small, doors usually kept closed, walls invariably white. There was a deadly sameness to the architecture of the city. Catching Andreas’s eye, Schoenberg asked: “May we take pictures here?”

“Of course. You must take one of me, later. I shall treasure it.”

The white-garbed lords of the planet were lining the visitors’ path now in considerable numbers, bowing lightly and courteously, showing somewhat more curiosity than Schoenberg had ever before seen displayed by Hunterians. Athena was smiling and waving to the women and children in white who were visible peering from windows or around corners. Those in gray, male and female, generally seemed too hurried to look up. It occurred to Schoenberg that there were no gray-clad children visible.

“The Temple of Thorun.” Andreas had stopped and was pointing to a pair of high gates of heavy metal grillwork that guarded the entrance to a courtyard lined on three sides by buildings of the ubiquitous white. These were somewhat taller than any of the visitors had passed on their way through the city.

“There we will feast tonight.”

ONCE the party had passed through the gates, Andreas bade the visitors a temporary goodbye, and himself went on toward the building that Schoenberg took to be the Temple proper, the tallest structure, some twelve or fifteen meters high, with broad white steps and forbidding doors.

The outworlders were guided by bowing young priests into another nearby building and there shown to individual rooms, all of which were out of sight of the street, opening onto a kind of formal garden in an enclosed court.

Led into his room by the obsequious manservant assigned to him, Schoenberg found it a small but pleasant place. The small window was protected by an ornamental grill, soft rugs covered the floor, and there was a comfortable-looking bed. An invitation to stay overnight seemed to be in the cards. His manservant was laying out white garments produced from somewhere, and through the open door other servants were visible, carrying in haste what appeared to be a bathtub.

A little later, getting his back scrubbed—hardly necessary, but let them do things their way—he found that the unexpected degree of hospitality had to some extent allayed the unease that had begun to nag him. Now, though, he suspected that Andreas was going to ask him some rather large favor before they parted. What could it be? Probably to smuggle in some outworld weapons, something needed to reduce some particularly troublesome adversary.

The swift tropical Hunterian night had come on by the time he had finished bathing and dressing. A young priest was promptly at hand to conduct him to the feast; it seemed that everything was running on a smooth schedule.

With a word to his guide he stopped at Athena’s room, next to his, and found her ready to join him, as prompt as when they went off on a business trip. Her guide had told her that De La Torre and Celeste, whose rooms were next along a covered walk, had already gone on ahead.

Joking a little about what sort of merchandise they might hope to sell to their new client Andreas, Schoenberg and Athena followed their guides from one courtyard and cloister to another without being brought again in sight of the city’s streets. Evidently the Temple complex was extensive.

At last they entered a small door in the flank of the tall building Schoenberg recognized as the Temple itself and were led down to a large room a short distance below ground level. It was refreshingly cool after the day’s sunlit warmth.

Already at table were De La Torre and Celeste, also garbed in white, De La Torre with a leafy garland on his head like some ancient Roman. With them sat the High Priest, and half a dozen other men all of the highest rank. Some of these had accompanied Andreas on his first welcoming visit to the outworlders’ ship.

Servants moved quietly and efficiently about. The banquet room was large, pleasingly decorated with fine hangings, softly lit with well-placed candles. All was as it should be.

“Our host has been telling me about Thorun’s great hall,” said De La Torre, after greetings had been exchanged.

“So?” Schoenberg moved a hand around in an inclusive gesture. “Is this the place?”

One of the Inner Circle priests grinned, broadly and cynically. “No, Thorun’s is really quite a different world from ours. Or yours.”

AS AT the Tournament, Schoenberg, when seated, found himself between Athena and Celeste. Here, despite the outwardly pleasant surroundings, not only Celeste but Athena kept drawing close to him, as if unconsciously. Not only were there no other women guests this evening, but Schoenberg had the feeling that there might never have been any in the history of the Temple. Andreas and the other Hunterian leaders never spoke to Athena unless she asked them a direct question, which she did of course from time to time to show her nerve. Celeste, being a good playgirl, knew when she was expected to keep quiet. If the Hunterians knew her real status, Schoenberg supposed, they would be outraged.

No doubt about it, his party was being accorded extraordinary treatment. He would have to at least appear to agree to their request when it came, whatever it might be.

The feast was elaborate and very good, though Schoenberg with an apologetic explanation to Andreas advised the other outworlders not to partake of certain dishes, nor of the fermented milk that was brought before them in great bowls. “It will be better for our Earthly stomachs if we drink clear water here, if Thorun does not object.”

Andreas waved a negligent hand. “Thorun is largely indifferent to such matters. Clear water is always a good warriors’ drink.”

Schoenberg sipped his water, from a golden cup. “I look forward to seeing the next round of the Tournament.”

“I, too. I am delighted that our interests coincide. Unfortunately business has prevented me from seeing any of the earlier rounds.”

“I know what the press of business can be like.”

Celeste’s foot was tapping under the table. Dancers had come on the scene and she was watching them with professional interest. They were good, girls and youths dancing together, the show very crude by Earth standards of course, and too bluntly erotic in places, but well practiced and full of energy. The Hunterian men at table watched the show with somewhat grim expressions, or did not watch it at all. Schoenberg wondered if priests here were supposed to be celibate. He would get around to asking that later, if at all. Sex on any planet was likely to be an even more sensitive subject than religion, which these religious leaders did not appear to take too seriously.

All was new and interesting to the outworlders and the evening passed quickly for them. The night was well advanced, the candles burning low, and the dancers literally collapsed from exhaustion, when Schoenberg suggested that the time had come for him and his party to return to their ship.

Andreas made a gesture of polite disapproval. “Your beds here have been prepared. One of the dancing girls yonder will share yours with you if you like.”

“The offer is most pleasing. But I am concerned about my ship.”

“Stay here. Spend the night under Thorun’s roof. You and I have much more to talk about. And it would be unpleasant, trying to climb the tall rock at night to reach your ship.”

Schoenberg did not take long to make up his mind. “We accept your invitation gladly. If you will excuse me, though, I must talk briefly to the people on the ship.” He took the communicator from his belt, activated it, waited for an answer. None was immediately forthcoming. He raised the device to his mouth and spoke. “Suomi?”

“Stay here,” said Andreas, making his face hideous with his smile. “In the morning I will try to facilitate your meeting with him.”

“You will try . . . I do not understand.”

“You see, the man you left to guard your ship is there no longer. It is shameful but necessary to explain that while the last round of the Tournament was in progress he took fright and fled from that place. I did not wish to worry you unnecessarily, but we have not yet managed to locate him.”

Schoenberg sat up straight, giving Andreas his best tycoon’s look. “And what about my ship?”

“We are guarding it for you. Nothing in it will be damaged. No one can reach it, except by my authority. Come, I must insist you stay the night.”

VIII

SHORTLY after the next morning’s dawn a slave came around to waken the eight survivors of the Tournament.

Giles the Treacherous, roused instantly by the light tug on his sleeping robe, rolled over, remembered fully where he was, and came awake with something of a start. Sitting up, he rubbed sleep from his eyes and looked about him, then observed to anyone who cared to listen: “Our camp is growing somewhat smaller day by day.” Though most of the seven others were awake, none of them chose to respond immediately. Like Giles, they had simply wrapped themselves in robes or blankets for sleep., and now there was a general slow emergence, as of a gathering of insects from cocoons.

It had rained a little during the night. The morning was gray and cheerless. On the previous evening the eight warriors had bedded down quite close together, as if by common consent against some external danger. The space they now occupied was tiny indeed compared with that of the first fine encampment beside the river far below.

When Giles stood up the river was visible to him down there, bend after bend of it snaking across the flat country until it lost itself at last in fields of morning mist. Down there croplands made ragged rectangles. For a moment—a moment only—Giles wished with the intensity of physical pain that he was somewhere in his own remote province, striding stupidly behind a plow, as once he had done, long ago.

Long ago.

Omir Kelsumba, giant and black, was standing a few paces away and preparing to empty his bladder down the hill. The slaves had not gotten around to digging a latrine for this campsite before most of them were for some reason called away to other duties, yesterday afternoon. Omir spoke over his shoulder to answer Giles at last: “Tonight we will need less space still, but what of that? Soon all of us will be dwelling in Thorun’s hall, where there must be room enough for any man.”

“Well spoken,” commended Farley of Eikosk, standing tall to stretch, then bending and with deft movements of his freckled arms starting to roll up his sleeping robe. Like his weapons, it looked costly.

By now all of the warriors were up, busy scratching, stretching, spitting, rolling their sleeping robes in preparation for moving camp. Farley of Eikosk went to offer a prolonged obeisance before the altar of Thorun, kneeling and murmuring prayers, bending his forehead to the ground. Soon Kelsumba joined him, and then Charles the Upright, and then one by one the others, until all had offered at least perfunctory worship. The enigmatic face of the little image of Thorun showed no sign of favoring any.

Vann the Nomad was hungriest this morning, it seemed, being first to leave the shrine and move toward the cooking fire where a single gray-clad slave was preparing what looked like a very simple morning meal.

As Vann moved away, Giles said in a low voice to Kelsumba: “What do you think of that one, cutting ears for trophies?” Kelsumba only grunted in reply. He had begun to inspect his axe, checking to see if the night’s rain had gotten through its carefully wound and oiled wrappings to rust the steel. Except for the axe, everything Kelsumba owned was shabby and worn.

While crouching over his axe and looking at it closely, he said to Giles: “You are perhaps a wise man. Maybe you can give me an opinion on this. Suppose I do not win the Tournament. Even so, having come this far, I will be seated high up at Thorun’s table. Will he listen to me, do you suppose? If I die today or tomorrow will he intercede with the goddess of healing to grant a favor for me?”

Giles gave a little private sigh. “Such a question is beyond me,” he answered. “But it is generally believed that all wounds, old or new, are healed when one enters Thorun’s hall, whatever one’s rank inside.”

“Oh, it is not my own wounds that have brought me here.” The big man looked up and turned vacant eyes into the distance. “I have a wife and two little ones, far away. The babies are both sick, they waste and do not grow. The village doctors can do nothing. I pleaded with the gods, offered sacrifice, but the children did not get better.” His eyes swung around to Giles, and his fingers moved upon the handle of his axe. “So I will become a god myself. Then I will be able to make my children well, even if I cannot live with them any longer.” His voice was rising and his look had become the stare of a fanatic. “I will kill six men, or sixty if need be! I will kill you, and Thorun himself will not be able to stop me!”

Giles nodded gravely, signifying agreement, keeping his face immobile. Then die turned carefully away. When he glanced back a moment later, Kelsumba was sitting there quietly again, honing his axe.

Thomas the Grabber, who had been standing only a little distance off when Giles made his remark about Vann’s ear-cutting propensities, had probably heard the comment. It was Thomas who should be due to oppose the ear-cutter in this day’s round of fighting, but Thomas, looking sleepy this morning, seemed not at all disturbed. Now he was yawning, with a kind of cavernous bellow. It was hard to say whether Kelsumba or the Grabber was the biggest of the surviving men. Jud Isaksson was certainly the smallest, with Giles not much larger. The latter sighed once more to himself as he made this assessment.

BREAKFAST consisted of thick tasteless fried cakes and water. For the first time there was no meat. When the men growled at the slave who served them, he indicated by a few grunts and helpless gestures—someone had once cut out his tongue—that nothing better had been provided and he was having to do more work than usual because most of his fellows had been called away.

Leros confirmed this, scowling as he munched his own share of the fried cakes. “Two priests who are my friends came down to rouse me early this morning, to sympathize with me that most of our retinue has been taken away. There is no excuse for giving us such meager service. True, our numbers are reduced, but the glory of you who survive has grown the greater. I have sent up a protest to the High Priest. I trust we will be better fed, and attended, by midday.”

Breakfast, such as it was, having been disposed of, Leros gave the order to march and the party began once more to ascend. Far ahead of them a train of freight wagons loaded with provender for the city went groaning slowly up the road. Another, of empty, rattling carts, came clattering more quickly down. Charles the Upright, who happened to be walking in the van, had to reach for his sword before the surly driver of the first descending cart would lead the train of vehicles fairly off the road to let the climbing heroes pass.

Leros’s irritation was increased by the incident, but he said little and the party hiked on. Certainly it was true that they no longer made an impressive sight. The men were all bedraggled after days spent in the field and they were practically unattended. He had felt like stopping to flog that insolent varlet of a driver, but such a job would only demean the whole proceeding further.

The city of Thorun was not yet visible, though the summit of Godsmountain could hardly be more than a kilometer above them now. Once Giles caught a glimpse of the huge outworld ship, gleaming wetly on its distant pedestal of rock, but then rain and fog blew in between, and trees closed in again around the road on which they Climbed.

TWO priests of intermediate rank came down to meet Leros and talk with him. The three of them, conferring privately, walked on ahead of the eight warriors. The eight continued to climb calmly and steadily, sometimes two or three walking together long enough to exchange a few words, sometimes all of them strung out, each in his solitary introspective silence. A ragged pair of slaves, all that remained of their once princely retinue, bore burdens in the rear. One slave was dumb and the other limped on a crippled leg. The image of Thorun, for which a field shrine had been built at every camp thus far, had now been left behind. Temporarily, Leros said, until they should have servants again to build a decent shrine.

Shortly after the near-incident of the carts, Giles the Treacherous sought out Jud Isaksson who had been trudging alone and walked companionably beside the man who in a few hours would be trying to kill him. Jud acknowledged his presence with a glance and then went back to his own thoughts.

Casting a glance back at their beggarly force of servants, Giles remarked: “So, no meat. And it also seems there will be no musicians today, to waft our souls upward to Thorun’s hall.”

Jud shrugged uneasily. Perhaps it was only the wet wind blowing rain against his neck that made him do so.

Giles measured out half a dozen strides of road beneath his boots, and then added: “I know only this. Sixty-four brave fighting men, all full of life and blood and valiant deeds, met on the plain below. And now there are just eight of us with breath still in us. Then, when we still might have turned around and gone home, we were greeted and praised as heroes. Now? No one beholds our deeds, or will ever sing of them. And are the dead fifty-six in truth now at their feasting up above?” He looked toward the mountaintop concealed amid its groves. “I hear no sounds of laughter down the wind.”

Jud’s mustache moved, but he only spat.

Giles was determined not to let things drag on; time was growing short. He said, trying almost at random now to provoke a reaction: “You and I have seen those fifty-six good men go up in smoke. No, not even that. They have not all been burnt, as heroes should be, but buried for the most part like dead animals. In shallow graves.”

“Man.” Jud found his voice at last. “Man, I know not why you rehearse these things to me. Tell me—I know nothing of you but your name—is it for no reason at all that you are called Giles the Treacherous?”

“That is a long story, and not too easy of belief. I will begin it if you like.”

“No, I care not. A true scoundrel would probably call himself Giles the Honest. All right!” Jud came visibly to a decision. “All right! If you want plain speaking. A child should know there are no gods on top of this mountain, or anywhere else. That being so, who really does rule the Temple, Godsmountain, the world? The simple answer is, that they are ruled by men.”

He nodded, smiling with satisfaction at his own logic, and then plunged on. “Very well. Since we’re not going to be welcomed into some imaginary hall, the question arises, why are we here? There must be a real reason. T’would be senseless to have us kill one another off to the last man for the amusement of a few outworlders who happened by. No. Mark my words. Before this day’s duelling starts—or at worst before it’s over—the six or eight of us who’re left will be let in on the secret, and the Tournament will be secretly stopped.”

“You really think that.”

“Man, what else? We’re going into some elite, secret force. They’ve already stopped sending down supplies for us right? The Tournament will be halted, and some story put out telling who the final winner was and how he’s happily guzzling and wenching with the gods.”

“The good Leros must be an excellent actor.”

“Maybe he hasn’t been told. A good man and all that, but not the brightest. It’s plain enough if you only look at it, consider all the facts. We’re going into some kind of palace guard, for the High Priest and whoever else is really running things atop this mountain.”

When Jud fell silent, Giles also had no more to say for a little while, though he was thinking rapidly. At last he replied: “You may be right. I only know that I would give much to be able to turn my own steps quietly downhill at this moment and retrace them to my home.”

“You speak madness, Giles. Once you have come this far they would never let you go. Where is your home?”

“Endross Swamp.” It was a remote province, far to the south. “The writ of Godsmountain does not run there with much effect.”

“So I have heard. In fact I would have thought that place was full of Thorun’s enemies.” Jud was staring at him. “Why are you here?”

“I am no enemy of Thorun,” Giles said at once, and firmly. “It may be that some of his priests are not as worthy and honest as they should be. As to why I am here, well, I am now asking that question of myself.”

Up ahead the priests had stopped, still deep in their discussion. Leros was gesturing angrily, while the other two appeared unhappy but resigned. They had reached the next ring prepared for fighting. Giles saw that it had been made with a portion of its rim overlooking an almost precipitous slope. As he stared, he felt a chill sensation near his heart. In the south they thought that meant a man had laid eyes on the place where he would die.

“What did I tell you?” Jud was murmuring, nudging Giles with an elbow. Leros had turned around as they came up, and was about to speak to the warriors. But something in Leros’s attitude had changed, and they all recognized at once that he was not simply going to announce another round of fighting. Something else impended.

LEROS was angry, but not at the j warriors, not at the gloomy priests who stood beside him. When he spoke his voice was tense. “First I am instructed to ask, whether, when the outworlders were with us yesterday, any of them mentioned the name of the demigod Karlsen.”

The warriors all exchanged mildly puzzled looks. Most of them could not remember anything the outworlders had said: they all had more important things to think about. This was hardly the announcement Jud had expected, and he was frowning.

All were silent until Giles put up a hand and asked: “Good Leros, are these outworlders then accused of some blasphemy?”

“That is being decided up above,” said one of the other priests, gesturing toward the summit.

“Tell Andreas to decide it up there, then,” said Leros tartly. “And let me get on with more important business here.”

“Lord Leros, your pardon. I repeat again, I and many others are sympathetic to your views. I am only relaying orders—”

“Yes.” Again Leros addressed the waiting warriors. “Those above see fit to bother us with a second triviality. One of the outworlders, the one who behaved like a frightened woman when he saw blood, has wandered off. It is thought he must still be on the mountain, for soldiers patrolling in the flatlands have not found him. I must ask whether any of you have caught sight of such a person either last night or today.”

Giles signed that he had not. The other seven, by now were almost totally uninterested, also gave mutely negative responses.

Leros turned back to the other priests. “Do not these outworlders carry devices for talking one to the other, even when they are kilometers apart? How can one be lost if he can tell the others where he is?”

One of the other priests said: “Such a device was found near their ship. The coward must have dropped it. Anyway, in my opinion he does not want to be found. Other even stranger things were found there also, and there is more going on than we have been told.” The priest’s voice dropped almost to a whisper. Giles feigned a boredom as great as that of the other fighting men around him, and he kept his eyes on a little flying creature in a tree, but meanwhile his ears grasped for every word.

The priest continued his private—he thought—conversation with Leros: “The other outworlders are said to be guests in the Temple precincts but no one believes they remain there by choice. Very few people have seen them since they entered. One of their women seems to be confined aboard their ship. More, and stranger—one that I shall not name has told me of a most surprising rumor; the demigod Mjollnir went forth to challenge the outworlders, and one of them slew him.”

Leros made a disgusted sound and turned his back. “And I had been on the verge of giving credence to these stories you bring.”

“Oh, I do not credit that about Mjollnir myself. Certainly not! Blasphemous. But something strange is going on, something to do with the outworlders, and we have not been told the truth about it.”

“That may well be. But it has nothing to do with me or with this Tournament.” Leros squinted up the road. “When may we expect better food and drink, and some new servants?”

The third priest looked unhappier than before. “Lord Leros, again I must give you an answer that you will not like.”

Leros swung around. “What now?” His tone was ominous.

“It is as if the Inner Circle has suddenly forgotten about the Tournament. Not simply that they are busy with other things, but that they no longer care about it. I could get no promise that the rations sent down would be improved. Andreas I saw only briefly, and he was preoccupied with other matters, I know not what. He said to me: ‘Bid Leros get on with his show, and finish up.’ How can I question the High Priest?”

Leros’s hand went unthinkingly to his side, where a warrior’s belted sword would hang, found only the smooth white priestly robe. “My show? Were those his words?”

“On my honor, they were.”

“Well, I can question what Andreas order.” Leros spoke in cold rage, his words quiet and calculated. “High Priest or not. What else will he take from us? Why not all our slaves and food, why not our clothes and weapons as well?” The other priests looked as if they were trying not to hear. Giles was holding his breath in concentration.

Leros went on: “Is this or is it not supposed to be a Tournament pleasing to Thorun and worthy of him, intended to select a man who is worthy of apotheosis? Are not these eight remaining champions, each and every one, the finest . . .” Words failed Leros for the moment. Indeed he seemed near strangulation. At last he managed to draw a deep breath and resume. “Very well. I must go up and question him myself on these matters. One of you two must stay here for a while, that these men be not left unattended by any of high rank.”

Turning then to the eight waiting warriors, Leros lost his scowl and faced them with a sad and loving smile. “Good lords—good men. I must leave you for a while. Do you wish to go on with this round of fighting or wait for my return? I am going up the hill to argue for better treatment. There is no telling when I will get back.”

The men looked at one another uncertainly. Giles almost spoke, and then bit back the words. His mind was racing, trying to balance probabilities. He wanted a delay, but not too much of one.

Leros, seeing their uncertainty, glanced at the high bronze shield that was Hunters’ sun trying to burn its way through layers of mist. “Wait until the hour of noon,” he told them. “If I am not back by then, with better honors and provisions for you—or have not sent word—then fight on as best you can.” Handing over his list of names to the priest who had been chosen to stay with the men, and beckoning the others to come along, he started at a brisk pace up the hill.

THE long morning dragged slowly by. Until the middle of the day the warriors stood or lounged around, gloomily silent or conversing two or three together in low voices. At last, when it was plain that noon had come and gone and there had been no word from Leros and no sign of his return, the substitute priest cleared his throat and called the eight together. In a somewhat awkward little speech he introduced himself as Yelgir, and announced that he was ready to call the roll if they were prepared to fight.

“Let us get on with it,” said Vann the Nomad. Others nodded their readiness. Waiting and uncertainty were harder to bear than blows. They took their places around the ring.

Yelgir took out the roll of names and cleared his throat once more. “Charles the Upright—Farley of Eikosk.”

From their opposite sides of the ring Charles and Farley advanced in almost leisurely fashion. In the center they touched weapons carefully, each man showing respect for the other’s abilities, and began a cautious sparring. Farley’s wounded left hand, that Leros himself had neatly splinted and bandaged, did not appear to be causing him any trouble except that he opened the fight with sword alone, leaving his dagger in his belt.

Gradually the fighters added speed and strength to their movements until the long swords rang musically. The contest seemed quite even between them. Then Farley’s jewel-bright steel dipped in a flashy feint he had not used in any earlier round of fighting. Charles tried to parry the stroke that did not come, and missed the deadly one that did; he fell to earth with one bright shriek of pain.

“Giles the Treacherous—Jud Isaksson.”

Jud, as before, charged out quickly. Giles did not seem nearly so eager, but still this fight began at a faster tempo than had the previous one. Both men were active, but neither would commit himself utterly to an attack. Now Giles became the more aggressive; his long sword lanced above and below the smaller man’s round shield, but did not manage to get around it. And now Isaksson’s blows fell thick and fast and Giles was forced to spend his energy in parrying, and then to give ground before the onslaught.

The end came suddenly when Giles was backed against the rim of the fighting circle that overhung the downhill slope. Jud’s blade flashed, a mere glint of light, and Giles clutched at his chest, gave a choked cry, fell. On the steep turfy incline his body slid and tumbled a score of meters before a bush caught and held it momentarily. Then it pulled loose and slid on again. The priest beckoned. The limping slave with the maul began the long climb down.

“Omir Kelsumba—Rahim Sosias.”

The black giant seemed to grow even larger upon entering the ring. Again he carried his great axe cradled in his two arms almost tenderly. Against him, fat Sosias with his curved sword looked terribly overmatched. But the scimitar drew first blood. It was a light wound, a mere touch with the point along the outside of Kelsumba’s thigh. Sosias’s timing had been perfect; the riposte with the axe only tore the edge of his loose outer garment.

The wound galvanized the black man, and now Sosias had to go jumping back, paunch jiggling as he danced with marvelous speed. Shift and flash went the axe, and shift and flash again, moving with the speed and control of a light sword, though the heaviest sword could not have held it in a parry. A light murmur of awe went around the watching circle.

Sosias tried the cut at the thighs again, or feinted doing so. This time the riposte came out a little farther after him, yet he miraculously managed to cut his own movement short at the critical instant and slide away untouched. His concealed knife had come out into his left hand, but he was unable now to get close enough to use it.

It would be suicidal to simply wait and try to keep dodging that axe. Sosias must try to attack again, and at last the great axe caught him coming in, and wiped away his face. Thomas the Grabber, leaning on his spear some ten meters distant, felt warm droplets of blood splash on his arm.

“THOMAS the Grabber—Vann the Nomad.”

Vann with his clumsy-looking grip on his long sword faced Thomas, who probingly sent his huge spear darting out and back. Vann wasted no energy in trying to behead the spear, the armored shaft of which had proved itself already in several fights. The fight developed quite slowly at first, both men moving cautiously, with many feints and no real effort at attack.

After a while it became apparent to expert eyes—no other kind were watching now—that Vann could not entirely rid himself of the affectation of holding his sword awkwardly between exchanges. Certainly he got it back into the proper position with amazing speed, but the fraction of a heartbeat wasted in this correction was more than could be spared in competition at this level. The awkward grip was not a natural attitude for Vann, like Kelsumba’s peculiar way of holding his axe, but a pose practiced to put an opponent off guard. As such it was utterly useless now, as Vann knew full well; he did not want to use it, but his nerves and muscles would forget and fall into the pattern.

Thomas timed this lapse and recovery several times, then caught the long sword drooping on the downbeat. With a sound like a club’s impact the spear rammed through Vann’s tattered shirt and torso, a little above his trophied belt. Vann’s face bore a look of witless grief when he saw the bright fountain of his own blood, then bore no expression at all.

FARLEY of Eikosk, departing from that deadly ring in the company of his three peers, to resume their slow trek up the mountain, was bothered by the eerie feeling that the gods had forgotten the surviving handful of them. Glancing back over his shoulder from the next bend in the road, he saw the stiffening bodies of the day’s four victims laid out beside the ring, and a single gray-garbed figure with a maul at its belt beginning to dig the modest pit that would be their grave. Isaksson, walking beside Farley, kept glancing back also, and Isaksson, too, seemed perturbed about something. Farley almost tried to speak of his troubled feelings, but then said nothing, being unsure of how to put them into words.

A FEW paces ahead, Omir Kelsumba, his huge axe clean and sheathed and innocent as some woodcutter’s implement, went up the endless-seeming hill with easy strides. His thoughts were far away, with his small unhealthy children and his wife. Someday, if he won the Tournament, he could perhaps return to see his family, drifting as a spirit on the night wind, or coming with changed appearance as a casual traveler. Everyone knew that gods could do such things, and when he had won the Tournament he would be almost a god.

Earlier there had been occasional doubts, but now the conviction had returned that he was going to win. He waxed stronger with every victory. He could feel the god-strength mounting in him. Since he had reached his full growth, no man had ever been able to stand against him, and none could now. When the Tournament was over he would be a god, and gods could heal as well as murder. When he took his seat at Thorun’s right hand the goddess of healing could not refuse to grant him healing for his children. No child of a god was ever done to death in a hovel by ill luck or mean diseases.

WALKING beside Omir Kelsumba, but guessing nothing of his thoughts, Thomas the Grabber went up with him stride for stride. Despite a lifetime of violence as bandit, soldier, bodyguard, and bounty hunter of dangerous men, Thomas still fell from time to time into the grip of an almost paralyzing fear of bodily injury and death. Iron control was needed to keep his fear from showing. The fear was on him now, and a premonition that he must lose in his next fight. There was nothing in sight for him beyond the wide blade of Kelsumba’s axe, at which he dared not look. Thomas was experienced enough with this kind of fear to know that it would pass if only he could manage to hold out against it until he had actually entered the ring with his opponent. Then things would be all right, there would be no time for fear. No one could stand against him then. Now as he climbed he held on grimly to his nerve, trying to think of nothing.

THE road came to the twin towers from which sentinels saluted gravely as the fighters passed.

“The gods’ private park,” Thomas muttered aloud, looking around him as they continued. The road was wider now, bordered with fine gravel walks, beyond which cultivated green ground-cover vines made one continuously inviting couch.

“Yes,” said Farley of Eikosk’s reverent voice behind him. “I suppose we might see Thorun himself among those trees.”

No one answered. Shortly Yelgir, their escorting priest, signalled for a halt, and led them a little distance off the road. The ground of softer than before, its area smaller. The night was quiet when it came, still as the grave, or nearly so.

IX

SCHOENBERG, De La Torre, Athena, and Celeste were returned to their comfortable private rooms after the feast, but they were kept under guard every step of the way and all pretense that they were free agents had been dropped. No one was manhandled, but all were searched and their communicators taken from them.

None would speak to them; Andreas had left and no one else was willing to answer their protests and questions.

While they were being led from the Temple back to their rooms there was time to exchange a few words. Schoenberg advised his shipmates: “Whatever it is they want, they’ll tell us when they’re ready. Meanwhile it’s important that we all keep our heads.”

“We’ll back you up, Oscar,” Athena told him. Behind her determined face, those of Celeste and De La Torre were pale and frightened.

Schoenberg winked at her. Then they were put firmly into their separate rooms. He could hear his door being locked and barred. His personal servant had disappeared and when he peered out through the grillwork of the window he saw that a guard had been stationed outside his door. Schoenberg stretched out on the comfortable bed and tried to think. After a while he got up and tried tapping messages on the stone wall between his room and Athena’s, but there was no reply. Probably the masonry was too thick.

Surprisingly, he slept well and felt reasonably rested when he was awakened early in the morning. An escort of soldiers had come to take him to Andreas. He went with them eagerly. They re-entered the Temple by another of its back doors and again went down some steps, this time to a cell-like stone chamber into which gray morning light filtered through a single high window. Andreas was seated behind a table. Schoenberg’s escort saluted and went out; he and the ancient and ugly High Priest were left alone. Andreas was the thinner of the two, and biologically much the older, but he wore a dagger at the girdle of his purplish robe, and seemed utterly unconcerned about being left alone with a bigger and stronger man who had just become his enemy.

Even before the door had closed behind the soldiers, Schoenberg spoke. “If you are wise, Andreas, you will free us at once.”

Andreas calmly gestured to a chair, but Schoenberg remained standing. The High Priest then said: “Before I can dismiss your guards I must have assurance that you are going to cooperate in the project in which we are going to use your ship. Your willing cooperation will be a great help, though not essential.”

“Imprisoning me and my friends does not make me want to cooperate. What about the other two members of my party—what has happened to them?”

Andreas folded his hands on the table before him. “The girl is confined to her stateroom on your ship. She is there to speak reassuringly over ships’ radio, on the remote chance that another spaceship should appear and attempt to contact the Orion.”

“Last night your people threatened her, frightened her, so that when she spoke to me she dared not tell me what had happened.”

“She has seen the wisdom of cooperation.” Andreas spoke mildly. “As for the coward, he is still missing. Probably he will come to no great harm, and will be back looking for food today or tomorrow.

I am not going to demean my warriors by ordering them to search for him.”

After a moment’s silence Schoenberg took the chair that had been offered to him earlier. “What exactly do you want me to do?”

“Answer some questions about your ship, its drive in particular, and move the ship for us when the time comes.”

There was a little pause. “You will have to tell me more than that. I do not want to get into serious trouble with the outworld authorities.”

The High Priest shook his head. “Right now I am the only authority with whom you must concern yourself. Those outside this planet may be powerful in their own worlds, but they would not care much what happens here, even if they could know.”

Schoenberg relaxed a trifle, crossed one leg over the other. “That is half true, Andreas. They do not care about such hunting trips as mine, not really. Not enough to take the time and trouble to prevent them. They would not care much about my standing and watching your Tournament—or even taking part in it, if I could have been so honored. But they will care, believe me, if I should take part in one of your wars, using outworld weapons, or even using the ship to help you in any military way. Doing any such thing would be a grave risk for me; not a battle-risk, understand, which a man should welcome, but a social risk when I have returned to my own people, a risk of dishonor. Being an honorable man yourself, you will appreciate why I cannot help you.”

“I assure you most solemnly, no one outside this planet will ever know what you do here.”

“Excuse me, but I doubt that. I am not the only hunter to come to this planet, and sooner or later a trader or a military ship will call. Your enemies on this planet cannot be entirely silenced, and they will not miss the chance to complain about the spaceship that, unprovoked, molested them, and it will be discovered that the ship was mine. I mention these facts first, because you may not believe me when I tell you that, in any case, the Earth authorities will be concerned if I fail to return from this trip on time.” Schoenberg lifted his arm casually and briefly glanced at his calendar watch.

Andreas smiled slightly. “No one on Earth or any of the other worlds knows where you are. Whatever search is made for you will not be on my planet.”

SCHOENBERG did not hesitate for a moment. So far he had not shown the slightest sign of fear. “It will be your mistake, High Priest, if you do not believe me. But never mind that now. Let us return to what you want. Say that I am now sitting in the command chair in the control room of my ship with you presumably leaning over me and holding a knife against my throat. Where to?”

“Schoenberg, I am not literally going to hold a knife against your throat. Not in your control room anyway, where you might be tempted to push something the wrong way in an effort to disrupt my plans. There is a priest here who has been aboard spaceships before, and we are not so utterly ignorant of them as you might suppose . . . I had thought you might be willing to join in a military sort of adventure. De La Torre would be, but he is ignorant. I have questioned the other people of your party, and believe them when they say they know nothing about the ship’s drive, nor of pilotage.”

“That is correct. I am the only pilot here.”

“Tell me, for my curiosity, how could they have gotten home if a glacier-beast had killed you?”

“Autopilot could handle that. Just punch in a destination, and it’ll deliver you in-system, near any civilized world you want. Your priest who’s been aboard spaceships must know that. I take it you want some other kind of piloting.”

“Yes. But mainly some detailed information about the drive.”

“Tell me what it’s all about and maybe I’ll provide that information.”

Andreas’s eyes probed at him, not fiercely but deeply, for what seemed a long time. “Perhaps that would be best.” The old priest sighed. “Perhaps other ways . . . tell me, what effect do threats of torture and maiming have upon you?”

Schoenberg half rose, and leaned forward glaring. “High Priest, I am a powerful man out there, in the big world that holds your little world surrounded. Do you think that just anyone can possess his own starship and take it where he likes? I have made it in the interest of several other powerful and ruthless people to look out for my safety, to avenge my death or disappearance. And those people do know exactly where I am and when I am due to return. For every dol of pain you make me suffer, you will feel two, or perhaps ten, of one kind of pain or another. My friends and I can pull down your city and your Temple if you provoke us to it. Now threaten me no more!”

The two men’s eyes were still locked when there came a tap at the door and it opened and one of the Inner Circle put in his head, making a slight nodding signal to Andreas. Other business called.

The High Priest sighed and arose. Smiling, skull-faced, he bowed his head very slightly in salute to Schoenberg. “You are a hard man to frighten, outworlder. Nevertheless I think it will be worthwhile to do so. Think for a while on what I have said, and shortly we will talk again.”

SUOMI was afraid.

He was not simply afraid of being caught by Andreas’s soldiers, who yesterday had taken the ship and Barbara and had no doubt also swept up the four other unsuspecting outworlders with little difficulty. No, the night in the thicket had given Suomi plenty of time to think and there was a lot more to it than that.

Hours ago he had left the thicket where yesterday his flight had come to an exhausted halt. Now he was crouched in the poor concealment of some thin, bush-like vegetation near the road that climbed the mountain, watching and waiting—for what he was not exactly sure. He had vague hopes of spying some lone traveler whom he might approach in hopes of getting some kind of help.

Alternatively he imagined another pack train of the kind he had already seen, passing by, and a convenient bag of vegetables or haunch of meat tumbling forgotten to the road, where he might spring out a minute later to grab it up. He had as yet found nothing very palatable in the woods and thickets, and so he had not eaten anything worth mentioning in more than a standard day.

He was also thirsty, despite the rainwater he had licked from some dripping leaves, and he was limping fairly badly from yesterday’s fall. His back bothered him, and he thought that one of the minor cuts on his leg might be infected, despite the routine immunological precautions taken before leaving Earth.

The thicket into which he had burrowed himself when he stopped running was so dense and extensive that it seemed possible that a man might stay there undiscovered—until it pleased his pursuers to detail a hundred men or so to hunt him out. But perhaps Suomi had no pursuers. On this alien planet he had literally nowhere to go. He suspected strongly that his continued freedom, if it could be called that, was due only to the fact that no particular effort had been made to round him up. He could not believe that the warriors of Hunters’ were particularly afraid of dying by his rifle, so it must be that they were not hunting him because more important things were going on.

Realizing that he could not accomplish anything there he had left the thicket. There was a warning to be spread. At moments it seemed possible that the whole thing had been no more than a monstrous practical joke, like an initiation . . . but then he recalled his dark clear thoughts of the night just past, and shivered a little in the warmth of day. It was not only for himself that he feared, and not only for the people who had come with him from Earth. In his mind’s eye Suomi could still see with perfect clarity the robot’s shattered carapace, the debris of components spilling out. And there, mixed with all the handmade parts . . .

“SOFTLY, outworlder,” said a gentle voice quite close behind him.

He whirled and found he was presenting the rifle at a rather short man with sandy hair, who was standing beside a tree six or eight meters off, muscular arms raised and hands open in an unmistakable gesture of peace. The man wore the gray clothing Suomi had seen on Godsmountain’s slaves, and tucked into the heavy rope that served him as a belt was a short massive sledge. The killer of fallen gladiators. The man stood taller than Suomi remembered and also had a more open and attractive face.

“What do you want?” Suomi held the rifle steady, though his gaze went darting around the woods. No one else was in sight; the slave had come here alone.

“Only to talk with you a little.” The man’s tone was reassuring. He very slowly lowered his hands but otherwise did not move. “To make common cause with you, if I can, against our common enemies.” He nodded in an uphill direction.

Did slaves on Hunters’ habitually talk like this? Suomi doubted it. He scarcely remembered hearing them talk at all. He did not relax. “How did you find me?”

“I guessed you might be somewhere near the road by this time, thinking about giving up. I have been trying to find you for an hour, and I doubt anyone else has made the effort.”

Suomi nodded. “I guessed that much. Who are you? Not a slave.”

“You are right, I am not. But more of that later. Come, move back into the woods, before someone sees us from the road.”

Now Suomi did relax, lowering the rifle with shaking hands and following the other back into the trees, where they squatted down to talk.

“First, tell me this,” the man demanded at once. “How can we prevent Andreas and his band of thieves from making use of your stolen ship?”

“I don’t know. Where are my companions?’ ”

“Held in the Temple, under what conditions I am not sure. You don’t look good. I would offer you food and drink, but have none with me at the moment. Why do you think Andreas wants your ship?”

“I am afraid.” Suomi shook his head. “If it is only Andreas I suppose he has some simple military use in mind to complete his conquest of this planet. He may think our ship carries weapons of mass destruction. It has none.”

The man was looking sharply at Suomi. “What did you mean, if it is only Andreas?”

“HAVE you heard of the berserkers?”

A blank look. “Of course, the death machines of legend. What have they to do with this?”

Suomi began to describe his combat with the man-shaped machine. His hearer was ready to listen.

“I heard a rumor that Mjollnir had walked forth to fight, and was slain,” the man in gray mused. “So, it was a berserker that you destroyed?”

“Not exactly. Not entirely. Against a true berserker android this rifle would have been useless. But inside the machine’s broken body I found this.” He drew from his pocket a small sealed box of shiny metal. From the box a thick gray cable emerged, to expand into a fan of innumerable gauze-fine fibers at the point where his force packet had sheared it off. “This is a solid-state electronuclear device, in other words part of an artificial brain. Judging from its size, and the number of fibers in this cable. I would say that two or three of these, properly interconnected, should be enough to control a robot that could do physical things better than a man can do them, and also obey simple orders and make simple decisions.”

The man reached for the box and weighed it doubtfully in. his hand.

Suomi went on: “Many solid-state electronuclear devices are made on Earth and other technological worlds. I have seen countless varieties of them. Do you know how many I have seen that closely resemble this? Exactly one. I saw that in a museum. It was part of a berserker, captured in a space battle at the Stone Place, long ago.”

The man scratched his chin, and handed back the box. “It is hard for me to take a legend as reality.”

Sumoi felt like grabbing him and shaking him. “Berserkers axe very real, I promise you. What do you suppose destroyed the technology of your forefathers, here on Hunters’ ?”

“We are taught as children that our ancestors were too proud and strong to let themselves remain dependent on fancy machines. Oh, the legends tell of a war against berserkers, too.”

“It is not only legend but history.”

“All right, history. What is your point?”

“That war cut off your ancestors from the rest of the galaxy for a long time and wrecked their technology—as you say, they were rough men and women who found they could get by without a lot of fancy machines. Made a virtue of necessity. Anyway, it has been taken for granted that Karlsen’s victory here destroyed all the berserkers on Hunters’ or drove them away. But perhaps one survived, or at least its unliving brain survived when the rest of its machinery was crippled or destroyed. Perhaps that berserker is still here.”

His auditor was still receptive but unimpressed. Suomi decided that more explanation was in order. He went on: “On other planets there have been cults of evil men and women who have worshipped berserkers as gods. I can only guess that there might have been some such people on Hunters’ five hundred years ago. After the battle they found their crippled god somewhere, rescued it and hid it. Built a secret cult around it, worshipped it in secret, generation after generation. Praying to Death, working for the day when they could destroy all life upon this planet.”

The man ran strong-looking, nervous fingers through his sandy hair. “But, if you are right, there was more to it than the figure of Mjollnir? The berserker has not been destroyed?”

“I am sure there is more to it than that. The real berserker brain must have included many more of these small units. And other components as well. Probably it put only spare parts into Mjollnir. Or human artisans did, working at the berserker’s direction.”

“Then why must there be a true berserker, as you put it, here at all? Andreas has very good artisans working for him. Perhaps they only used parts from destroyed berserkers to build the figure of Mjollnir—and one of Thorun as well.” He nodded to himself. “That would explain why men swear they have actually seen Thorun walking with the High Priest in the Temple courtyards.”

“Excuse me, but it is not possible that any human artisans on this planet designed the robot that attacked me. No matter what components they had to work with. Can you grasp the programming problems involved in designing a machine to run and fight and climb like a man? Better than a man. No human could have climbed that mesa where the machine did it, in a few minutes, hammering in pitons all the way. And the mechanical engineering difficulties? No. On Earth, Venus, a handful of other planets, there are men and facilities capable of designing such a robot. Only a functioning berserker-brain could do it here.”

THE two men were quiet for a little while, both thinking, each studying the other. Suomi eased himself into a different position, sitting with his back against a tree trunk. His wounded leg throbbed. At last the Hunterian said: “Suppose a berserker is here as you say, and the priests of Godsmountain have it. What then?”

“You do not understand!” Suomi almost grabbed him by the ragged shirt to attempt a shaking. “Say rather that it has them. How can I begin to tell you what a berserker is?” He sighed and slumped back, feeling hopeless and exhausted. How to convey, to someone who had never seen even depictions on film or holograph, the centuries of mass destruction berserkers had visited upon the galaxy, the documented cases of individual horrors? Whole planets had been sterilized, whole solar systems laid waste by the unliving enemy. People by the thousands or tens of thousands had perished in berserkers’ experiments aimed at discovering what made the strange two-legged Earth-descended blobs of protoplasm so resistant to the fundamental truth-assumption of the berserkers’ programming: that life was a disease of matter that had to be expunged. It had all happened here, was still happening somewhere a thousand light years or more away, on the outer edge of man’s little domain within the galaxy.

Suomi said quietly: “If it is true that a berserker has captured our ship then it can be for only one purpose; to somehow sterilize this planet of all life.”

“You said there were no mass weapons on the ship!”

“I meant there were none in the usual sense. But there is the drive that brought us between the stars.” Suomi considered. “If the ship were buried beneath this mountain, say, and the drive suddenly turned on full force, the mountain might be blown up into the air and everyone on it killed. Not good enough for a berserker, not if it could find a way of doing worse.

“I’ll bet that if the drive were worked on cunningly enough some weapon could be made of it that could sterilize a planet. Perhaps by polluting the atmosphere with radioactivity. The weapon wouldn’t have to be instantly effective. There probably won’t be another interstellar ship here for fifteen standard years. No way for anyone here to call for outside help, even if they understood what was happening.” The man in gray was excited at last. He stood up cautiously and looked about, then squatted down again. He fingered the handle of his maul, as if itching to pull it from his belt and fight. “By all the gods!” he muttered. “It should be effective, whether or not it is the truth!”

“Effective? What should be?”

“It should be effective against Godsmountain’s priests, to spread the story that the drive of the captured ship is to be altered, our air poisoned. That a berserker really rules Godsmountain, and means to destroy the world. If we can convince people of that, we will have them!”

“It is the truth, I believe. But to spread any story across the planet will take far too long.”

The man with the maul glanced up toward the mountaintop, invisible beyond the trees. “I do not think we will need to go that far. Now. How to put the story in convincing terms? Let’s see. Five hundred standard years ago the berserker fleet was here. The demigod Karlsen drove them out. The priests for some reason have been asking if any of you outworlders mentioned Karlsen; that seems to fit. Now—”

Now Suomi did actually seize him by the shirt, to the Hunterian’s great astonishment. “They asked that?” Suomi barked. “Of course it fits!”

For half an hour thereafter they made their plans.

X

THE four remaining contestants were awakened early from their sleep on the soft groundcover of what Thomas the Grabber had called the gods’ private park. At dawn there erupted a racket of small winged creatures, each defending his bit of territory against encroachment by the others. Farley of Eikosk, roused by the noise of this miniature Tournament, watched it for a while, and then, with sudden awareness of where he was, turned his gaze uphill through the park-like forest, toward the summit of the mountain.

There, in the early morning light, the white walls had a dull and ghostly look. Later, he knew, when he saw them in full sunlight, they would shine a dai-ling white. All his life he had listened eagerly, whenever he could, to the tales of travelers who had visited this city. To see its white stones actually before him inspired him with awe.

Thorun lived there.

Thorun actually lived there.

From the moment of Farley’s awakening on this morning a sense of unreality grew in him rapidly. He could not fully credit his own presence here on the mountaintop, or his success thus far in the Tournament. (How pleased his father would be, at last, if he should be the winner!) This feeling of unreality persisted through the morning ritual of worship, and through their meager breakfast of cold fried cakes left over from the day before. The dumb slave who served them protested with gestures that no dead wood was available here to make a fire for cooking.

The other slave had gone off somewhere, perhaps on a search for wood. Leros still had not returned. The priest Yelgir, who still seemed a stranger to Farley, looked stiff-jointed and disheveled after a night spent in the open. He spoke to them apologetically about the fact that no fighting ring had been prepared here in advance.

Yelgir, in consultation with the warriors, chose a flat area of ground and the slave was set to work stripping away the groundcover and stamping flat the earth as best he could. The task took the slave several hours, while the others sat watching.

Farley was not exactly impatient, but the delay was one more change in routine, and made everything all the more unreal for him. At last the ring was ready, however. Yelgir was muttering prayers and it was time for the first two men to fight to take their places.

“Farley of Eikosk—Jud Isaksson.”

Now both of them were in the circle from which only one of them could ever walk. But as Jud moved toward him, more slowly than was his wont, it occurred to Farley that death itself might well be different here, almost under the windows of Thorun’s hall. Would the loser of this fight really die as men usually did, like some butchered animal? Might he not instead simply look down at his gaping wound, acknowledge defeat with a salute and a courteous nod, and, like one leaving a field of harmless practice, simply walk off yonder through the trees, perhaps to be met halfway by welcoming Mjollnir or Karlsen or even Thorun himself?

In Farley’s eyes the scimitar Hashed sunlight. Jud was warming up now, starting to come on with his usual fury. Farley suddenly felt free and loose, faster and stronger than ever in his life before. It was as if he now breathed in the immortality of the gods by merely sharing their high air.

He parried the scimitar with a seeming carelessness, that was really something else, and then he stepped in looking for the best way to kill. Now Farley carried his long sword too high, now too low, now he let his blade stray far aside into what should have been a weak position, until he could almost hear his father shouting at him in anger, but none of this was carelessness. Not today. Whatever tactic his whims, his nerves, chose for him was fated to succeed. His blade always came back into position in time to block the scimitar. On the attack his long sword reached closer and closer to Jud’s lifeblood.

To Farley the end seemed foreordained and only the suddenness with which it came surprised him. He stood there almost disappointed that the fight was over, while Jud dying on the ground seemed to be trying to tell him something. Jud’s life ran out too quickly, before the words could come.

The priest Yelgir cleared his throat. “Omir Kelsumba—Thomas the Grabber.” Today he needed no paper to keep track of names.

Standing to one side, Farley was struck by the realization that in this round, for the first time, there would be no other victors to stand at his side watching with him, now and then passing a joke or a comment on the fight in progress. Watching alone, except for the priest, he beheld a serene happiness on Kelsumba’s face; obviously here was another who felt favored by the gods today. Things appeared to be different with Thomas the Grabber. Even before the first blow his expression was that of a man who knows himself defeated.

In the center of the ring the two of them closed promptly. The axe flashed out with reckless confidence with what must be Kelsumba’s certainty of approaching godhood.

The spear moved with the speed of desperation, and yet as accurately and steadily as if wielded by a god. Incredibly, the fight was over.

Or was it over? Kelsumba, even with the heavy spear transfixing him, fought on. His axe, though it was much slower now, still rose and fell, Thomas was still unhurt. But instead of backing away and waiting for his man to fall, he chose for some reason to leap in and grab. As the two men wrestled it was still Omir who smiled, and Thomas who looked desperate. But it was quickly demonstrated that Omir was not the stronger of the two, at least not with a spear stuck through him. Only after Thomas had wrenched away the axe and used it for a finishing blow did his face lose its look of desperation.

Now the clangor of arms, that had long since silenced the winged quarreling creatures, was ended also. The forest at last was still.

WHEN Schoenberg was brought before him again, about midday, Andreas was seated as before. As soon as the two of them were left alone, the High Priest began: “Since the thought of torture does not immediately terrify you, and I suspect its application might provoke you to some rash attempt at misinforming us about the ship, I have decided I must take an extreme measure to frighten you sufficiently. You have brought it on yourself.” Andreas was smiling again, evidently finding his own wit amusing.

Schoenberg, unimpressed, sat down. “How do you mean to terrify me, then?” he answered.

“By saying a few words.”

“Andreas, my respect for you is fading. If the threats you have already made have not had their desired effect neither will any mutterings about some great unnameable terror. You are not going to scare me that way. In fact you are not going to scare me at all, not in the way you seem to want.”

“I think I can. I think I know what a man like you is truly afraid of.”

“What?”

“Perhaps I can do it by saying to you only one word.” Andreas clapped his hands together playfully.

Schoenberg waited.

“The one word is his name.”

“Thorun. I know that.”

“No. Thorun is a toy. My god is real.”

“Well, then, litter his terrible name.” Schoenberg lifted his eyebrows in almost jaunty inquiry.

Andreas whispered the three syllables.

It took Schoenberg a little while to grasp it. At first he was merely puzzled. “Berserker,” he repeated, leaning back in his chair, his face a blank.

Andreas waited, confidently, for his god had never failed him yet.

Schoenberg said: “You mean . . . ahhh. I think I begin to see. You mean one has really been here for five hundred years, and you—serve it?”

“I am going shortly to offer to the god of Death a special sacrifice, consisting of some people we no longer need, I can show you. You will be convinced.”

“Yes, I believe you can show me. I believe you. Well. This puts a different face on things, all right, but not in the way you intended. If I wouldn’t help you in a local war, I’m not going to help you in a mass extermination.”

“Schoenberg, when we have done with this planet what we will, when it is moribund, my god assures me that the ship’s drive can be restored sufficiently to take it out into space again and after a voyage of many years to reach another star whose planets also are polluted by the foul scum of life. I and a few others, members of my Inner Circle, will make this voyage, continuing to bear the burden of hideous life on our own bodies that we may free many others of it on other worlds. There are emergency recycling systems on your ship that will nourish us adequately for years.

“The voyage, as I have said, will be many years in duration. Unless you agree to cooperate with me from this moment on you will be brought with us as a prisoner. You will not die. There are ways of preventing suicide, my master assures me, things he can do to your brain when he has time to work on it.

“You will be useful on the voyage, for we will have need of a servant. You will not be tortured—I mean, not much at any one time. I will see to it that your sufferings never become sharp enough to set one day of your existence apart from another. I may die before the voyage is over, but some of my associates are young men and they will follow my orders faithfully. You Earthmen are very long-lived, I understand. I suppose you will—what did the old Earthmen call it?—go mad. No one will ever admire your exploits. There will be none to admire. But I suppose you might continue to exist to an age of five hundred years.”

Schoenberg had not moved. Now a muscle twitched in his right cheek. His head had bowed a very little, his shoulders were a little lower than before.

Andreas said: “I would much prefer to see you make a sporting finish, myself. Go out with a noble gesture. If you cooperate in my plans, a different future for you might be arranged. You will only be helping us to do what we are going to do anyway.

“If you cooperate, I will give you”—Andreas held up a hand, thumb and forefinger barely separated—“just a little chance, at the very end. You will not win, but you will die nobly in the attempt.”

“What kind of chance?” Schoenberg’s voice was low and desperate now. He blinked repeatedly.

“Give you a sword, let you try to hack your way past one of my fighting men, to get to the berserker and cut it into bits. Its cabling would be quite vulnerable to such an attack.”

“You wouldn’t really do that! It is your god.”

Andreas waited calmly.

“How do I know that you would really do that?” The words burst out as if involuntarily.

“You know now what I will do if you do not cooperate.”

The silence in the little room stretched on and on.

ONLY three men, not counting a slave or two, now remained on their feet under the pleasant trees of the gods’ otherwise deserted park, Farley and Thomas stood facing each other, their eyes meeting like those of two strangers encountering each other by chance in a wilderness both had thought uninhabited. In the background the priest was giving orders to the slaves; there was the chunk of a shovel starting a new grave.

Farley looked down at what lay on the ground. Jud had not smiled at his wound and gone off on a blithe stroll among the trees. Kelsumba was not laughing on his way to an eternal feast with gods. Farley did not care to stay and watch them rolled into a little pit. Feeling a slow emergence from his sensation of invulnerability, he turned and started on the uphill road once more.

Thomas the Grabber, still wiping at his spear, came along silently and companionably. They left the priest behind. Here the pavement of the road was very smooth and well maintained, and it was neatly bordered with stones in a pattern that put Farley in mind of certain formal walks on his father’s large estate.

Now, with what seemed to Farley stunning ordinariness, they were coming through the last trees of the forest and around the road’s last curve. Vistas opened, and gardens and orchards were visible in the distance to either side. Ahead, the road ran straight across thirty or forty meters of well-tended lawn, and then it entered the citadel-city of the gods. The gate by which it entered, of massive timbers banded with wrought metal, was tightly closed just now. The high wall of the city was a blinding white in the sun, and Farley was now close enough to see how huge and heavy its stones were. He wondered how they had been stained or painted to make them look like bone.

But nothing happened inside him when he beheld their goal, the place where Thorun dwelled. Immortality was draining from him rapidly.

“Thomas,” he said, slowing to a halt. “The whole thing is too—ordinary.”

“How’s that?” asked Thomas, amiably, stopping at his side.

Farley paused. How to explain his disappointment? He could not understand it well himself. He said what came to his tongue, which was only: “There were sixty-four of us, and now there are only two.”

“But how else could it have worked out?” Thomas asked reasonably.

A few weeds grew through the rocks beside Thorun’s gateway. Lumps of the dried dung of some pack animal lay at the roadside. Farley threw back his head and closed his eyes. He groaned.

“What is it, friend?”

“Thomas, Thomas. What do you see here, what do you feel? Suddenly I am having doubts.” He looked at his companion for help.

Thomas shook his head. “Oh my friend, there is no doubt at all about our future. You and I are going to fight, and then only one of us is going living through that gate.”

There was the gate, tough ordinary wood, bound with bands of wrought metal, its lower parts showing a little superficial wear from the brushing passages of countless men and women, slaves and animals. Behind such a gate there could be nothing but more of the same world in which Farley now stood, in which he had lived all his life. And if he reached the gate of the Temple inside, would it be any different?

The priest Yelgir, whom they had left behind, came on now to pass them, giving Farley an uneasy smile as he did so. Evidently some unseen watcher within the walls noted the priest’s approach, for now the gate was opened slightly from within. Another priest stuck out his head and sized up Farley and Thomas with an impersonal look. “Is either of them wounded?” he asked Yelgir.

“One has a damaged hand, and cannot use his dagger, but that seems to bother him very little. The other a sliced arm. The muscle is not cut, nothing serious.” The two priests began a low-voiced conversation that Farley could not quite hear. Meanwhile other heads, obviously aristocratic, began to appear along the top of the wall, their owners evidently standing on some high walkway on the inner side. The two finalists of Thorun’s Tournament were being stared at like slaves on auction. Thomas the Grabber finished wiping his spear and now stood leaning on it, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and sighing.

“Bid the two contestants wait,” someone was calling carelessly from inside. “The High Priest sends word that he hopes to attend the final duel, but he is busy now with some special sacrifice to the gods.”

XI

SUOMI, after his talk with the man in gray (whose name he had never learned), breathed a sigh of relief mingled with exhaustion when he had gotten as far as the foot of the little mesa without being discovered and seized by Andreas’s men. Suomi had to somehow manage to get himself into the ship again, before he could hope to accomplish anything. He must not be captured before he reached the mesa.

According to the gauge on the breech of his rifle, it had power left for only six shots. He might have thrown away the weapon in the woods, except for his fear that some fool might find it and kill himself or someone else by accident. He had offered the rifle to the man in gray, when they were about to part, but the offer was refused.

“I must continue to pass as a slave,” the Hunterian had said. “No slave could carry such a device into the city without immediately being questioned. Besides, I am unfamiliar with its use; better each man to his own weapons.”

“Each to his own,” Suomi had answered, reaching out for a farewell handshake. “Good luck with yours. I hope I meet you in the city above.”

Now, at the foot of the mesa, he observed that a regular trail had already been worn, leading from the lower end of the climbing path off into the woods uphill in the direction of the city. He observed also that not a trace remained of the shattered robot; at first he could not even locate the place where it had lain. Then he realized that the massive tree, whose surface his rifle fire had splintered, had been removed. Here was the neatly sawn stump, with dirt rubbed on the cut surface so it would not look fresh. The tree itself had somehow been carried away. Great pains were being taken to eliminate all evidence that anything grotesque had happened here. But a number of men must have been involved in the cleanup and at least one of them must have talked, so the man in gray had rumors to build on. So much the better.

When he got to the bottom of the climbing path, Suomi did shrug out of the rifle’s strap and let the weapon fall aside. Gratefully he saw that the climbing rope was still in place. Fighting down a foolish impulse to turn at the last moment and run away to cower in the woods once more, he gritted his teeth and gripped the rope and began to climb. Weakened and aching, he was now compelled to hang on with both hands even on the easy first part of the slope, where before he had been able to climb rapidly on legs alone.

He had gotten only a little way up when a soldier came into view, looked down and saw Suomi, and began shouting. Suomi ignored the shouts and continued to struggle slowly upward. The shouting kept on. Suomi looked up and saw that the man had a spear raised as if ready to throw.

“If you stick me with that thing,” Suomi yelled back at last, “you’ll have to carry me. Look at me. Am I so dangerous that I frighten you?”

His belly muscles were tensing against the impact of the spear, but it did not come. The voice stopped shouting, moved away just a little, and began to talk. Other male voices answered. Suomi did not pay much attention to what they were saying, and did not look up again. Dizzy with hunger and fatigue, feverish from his infected wound, he struggled on the rocks for what seemed an endless time before he could pull himself out on the flat horizontal surface at the head of the path.

The foam mattress lay almost under his feet when he stood up but there was no sign of Barbara. Half a dozen men, four soldiers and two priests in purple-trimmed robes, crowded around Suomi, barking threats and orders at him, almost nudging him off the mesa again with their drawn swords and a leveled spear. Finally one of the aristocrats raised his voice and there was order. The soldiers put down their weapons, rapidly stripped Suomi and searched him, then searched through his clothes and tossed them back to him.

“What’ve you done with the girl who was here?” he asked while this was going on. No one bothered to answer.

“Bring him inside the ship,” one of the aristocrats ordered the soldiers.

“We’d better get on the communicator first and ask Andreas,” the other one advised. After a moment’s debate they compromised and had Suomi brought up the landing ramp as far as the open entrance lock. There they left him standing for the moment, with two soldiers gripping his arms. His guards were unusually large, strong men, and once the initial confusion of his capture was over they obeyed orders with precision and alertness.

Suomi wished he could sit down, but was not quite certain that he would be able to get up again if he did. He could hear voices from the direction of the control room engaged in what sounded like a talk on the communicator between the ship and somewhere else. Andreas’s prize-crew perhaps had more technological savvy than Suomi had assumed. So much the worse.

In a little while one of the aristocrats came back from the direction of the control room to stand in front of Suomi and regard him critically. “Andreas is busy with sacrifice. I think we’ll just bring this one on board, and confine him to his old stateroom. The place has been searched a dozen times, there are no weapons. Outworlder, you look in a bad way.”

“If I could have some food . . .”

“We won’t starve you to death, I don’t suppose. Though you may wish we had.” He signed to the soldiers to bring Suomi on into the ship.

At the entrance to the control room the aristocrat turned. “Hold him tightly going through here.”

They brought him into the control room, and they were quite right to make sure that he was held securely. Otherwise it might have been barely possible for him to lunge at the drive controls and, before he could be stopped, wreck the ship. But there was no hope of that, his arms were pinned in grips he could not have broken on his strongest days, of which this was not one.

Seated in the large central pilot’s chair was another aristocratic priest.

ON A screen before him were the faces of two men who seemed to be in some dimly lighted stone chamber. The one in the background was another priest. The one in front was Schoenberg.

“Now,” the priest in the control chair was saying, addressing the screen, “You say that if the ship pitches more than ten degrees while under manual control, the autopilot will cut in automatically?”

“Yes,” Schoenberg’s image said on the screen. “Provided the artificial gravity is off. Then ten degrees pitch and you’ll get the autopilot.”

“Schoenberg!” Suomi cried out. “Don’t fly it for them, Schoenberg, it’s a berserker they’re working for. Don’t do anything they want!” Schoenberg’s face showed a reaction, though only a trivial one, and his eyes moved, probably following Suomi’s passage through the control room on a portable screen taken from the ship. The men transporting Suomi were making no particular effort to hush him up or hurry him along.

“A berserker, Schoenberg!” Schoenberg’s eyes on the screen closed. His face looked deathly tired. His voice came wearily into the ship. “I know what I’m doing, Suomi. Just go along with them. Don’t make things more difficult than they are.”

Suomi with his escort passed out of the control room and into the narrow passage leading to the staterooms, moving at a brisk pace. The doors of most of the rooms and compartments stood open, revealing scenes of disorder, but that of the room that had been Barbara’s was closed. A bored-looking soldier stood leaning against it from the outside.

“Is the girl in there?” Suomi asked. Again no one would answer. He supposed that at this stage it made no difference whether she was or not.

His captors knew somehow which room was his—perhaps they had found his name on something there, perhaps Schoenberg for whatever reason was telling them every small detail. When they thrust Suomi into the room he found it in the same state of disruption as the others he had seen, which was no more than might have been expected after several thorough searches. There was no sign that anything had been wantonly smashed. So much the better.

They left him alone and closed the door behind him; no doubt there would be a soldier leaning against it on the outside. Since the room had not been designed as a prison cell, its door could be locked only from the inside. Unfortunately it had not been designed as a fortress either; though the door was thick and soundproof, it could probably be forced open quickly by a couple of armed and determined men. Nevertheless Suomi quietly activated the lock.

He went then to stand beside his bunk, where an intercom control was set into the wall, and paused with his hand upraised. He could try to reach Barbara this way. But what could he say? Some of the enemy might well be in her room listening. To try to reassure her, to offer hope, might be much worse than useless. He turned the intercom to a position where it would receive but not transmit and left it there.

The next thing he did was to get himself a long drink of cold water from the little sink. Then he opened the medicine chest, selected an antibiotic and a painkiller. There also he found a medicated dressing to put on the worst of his minor wounds, the leg gash that somehow had become infected. After that, with a single glance of longing at the comfortable bunk, he walked to the little desk-workbench where he had kept his personal cameras and sound-recording gear. This material, like everything else, had been looked at and scattered. He opened drawers, looked in corners, searching. All was in disarray, but it seemed that nothing he needed had been removed or broken. He uttered a sigh of relief that broke off midway as he entered a new phase of tension.

It was time to sit down and get to work.

IN ITS buried shrine far below the Temple the berserker perceived the chanting far above of five familiar male voices. From the same location came the sounds of the shuffling of fourteen human feet, in a pattern consistent with that of one of the processions with which the humans habitually began their sacrificial rituals. Routine analysis of the sounds allowed the berserker to identify among the members of the procession not only five of its familiar servitors but two other human organisms, one male and one female, that were strangers to it.

Compulsively but still routinely, the berserker concentrated all its senses upon the unknown male, who was now stumbling slightly on bare feet at the top of the long stone stair that must be unfamiliar to him, as the procession began its descent from Thorun’s temple. As it would have done with any strange male, the berserker was attempting an identification with another whose personal patterns were carried under highest priority in its data banks.

Since its crippling and near-destruction in the battle 502.78 . . . standard years ago the berserker’s senses had been blurred and uncertain, hardly better than human sight and hearing. But the procession was bringing the unknown male nearer and nearer now, and the probability of his being identified with the prime target patterns was rapidly declining to a negligible level. The berserker was free to turn its attention to other matters.

In the electronuclear mind of the berserker there was no wonder and no impatience, but there was definitely an awareness that some events were far more probable than others. In that sense therefore the berserker was surprised when it computed that today two human victims were to be offered to it instead of one, or an animal only, as often happened.

In all the time since the battle in which it was damaged, since the human goodlife on this planet had rescued it from destruction and begun to offer it worship, the berserker had received such multiple offerings on only a few occasions. Searching back now through its memory banks and comparing data, it noted that these had invariably been times of intense emotion among its devotees.

One such occasion had been the celebration of final victory over a particularly stubborn enemy tribe, a victory attained by following a battle plan computed by the berserker for its worshippers and handed down by it as a divine command. Then seventy-four human organisms, all members of the defeated tribe, had been sacrificed to it in one day. At another time of multiple sacrifice the emotions of those offering it had been much different. Then they were pleading for help, during a period of great food shortage. From that famine the berserker had led its followers and their tribe into a land ripe for plunder, by outlining for them a migration route, using its old battle-maps of the planet’s surface. And now it computed that the successful capture of the starship, and the impending completion of the long effort to find a way to sterilize the planet, must also produce intense emotion among this generation of its goodlife servants.

The berserker did not understand emotion, and only when compelled by circumstances would it try to work with what it did not understand. The stimulus-response patterns called fear and lust, for example, seemed at first to be readily computable in humans as well as in less dangerously intelligent animals. But in more than five hundred years of attempting to master human psychology well enough to use these patterns to manipulate human organisms, the berserker had time and again run into depths and complexities of behavior that it could not understand. To accept worship meant trying to use patterns that were, if anything, even deeper and more complex, a tremendously uncertain means of working toward its goal. But no better means had been available, and with the capture of the starship it seemed that this was after all going to prove successful.

Now the procession had completed its descent of the stair, and now it was entering the berserker’s chamber. The High Priest Andreas entered first, his vestments for this occasion of red and black, Thorun’s white and purple having been put secretly aside above, in Thorun’s temple. The robes in which the High Priest now appeared to worship his true god were heavily and ineradicably stained with the rust-brown of old blood.

BEHIND Andreas came Gus De La Torre and Celeste Servetus, their wrists bound behind them, garbed in white and garlanded with live flowers that would soon be scattered on the floor to die. Four priests of the Inner Circle followed, their robes for this special occasion red and black like the High Priest’s, and stained like his as well.

Andreas and the other four men conducting the sacrifice began performing the usual prostrations and chanting the usual litanies, while the victims, as usual, watched in uncertainty and mounting fear. The berserker had long ago noted that the words and actions used in these rituals tended to change but little over the standard centuries, the long Hunterian years, only gradually becoming somewhat more elaborate. For the moment it kept quiet. It had realized long ago that the less it said during a sacrificial ceremony, the better. Not only did it thus lessen the risk of confusing and disillusioning its worshippers by saying something out of tune with their incomprehensible psychology, but the rarer its pronouncements were, the more importance humans were wont to grant them.

Two of the priests had now picked up instruments of music, and the rhythm of a drum and the wail of a horn now blended with the chanting. The music ordered and modified the beat of alpha brain waves, and the rhythms of other biological processes, in all the humans present.

“Gus, help me! Help! Oh, God, no no nooo!” So screamed the female upon at last fully perceiving the stained altar just before her, and evidently realizing its purpose, just at the moment when the two priests who were not playing instruments came to tear away her garlands and clothes and chain her down upon the stones. The berserker watched steadily to see whether Gus or God (whatever entities these might be) might come to the female’s aid, although from its experience following 17,261 similar appeals the probability seemed vanishingly small.

The female was secured to the altar and no help for her arrived. Her screams continued as Andreas took up a sharp implement and removed from her living body the organs most closely connected with the reproduction of life and the nourishment of the very young. These he threw before the berserker, demonstrating a symbolic and real triumph of Death over the very wellsprings of life. The ventral surface of her torso was then opened more deeply, and the central blood-pump of her body was excised, whereupon the female almost instantly ceased to function.

It was now time for the second victim to be placed upon the altar.

“No. Listen, my friends, I’m with you. No, no, not me. How can this be happening? Wait, let’s talk, you’re making a mistake. I’ll join you.” And then a wordless, hopeless cry, as his feet were tripped out from under him and he was thrown down naked upon the stones.

Why should the male organism continue to struggle so violently when it must perceive that the chances of such struggle producing favorable results were now astronomically remote? Now at last the male had been chained down.

“I’ll help you! I’ll do anything you want. Oh. Ah. No. Forgive me, everyone . . .” Another scream, as his organs of generation too were removed, and cast into the bloody puddle of female parts. And now his ventral tissues parted under the sharp knife in the High Priest’s hands, and now his heart, still pulsating, was held up in offering to the god of Death.

“It is well, it is pleasing,” the berserker told the five gory, happy men who now stood quietly before it. Drum and horn and voice had ceased. The chamber was still. The five who still bore the burden of life were subsiding now into states of emotional relaxation.

“I am pleased,” the berserker reiterated. “Go now and prepare to bring the starship to me, that we may begin to attach my circuitry to its control systems. Only when that is done can we begin the alteration of its drive.”

“Today or tomorrow, oh Death, we will bring you the starship,” said Andreas. “As soon as we are sure that Lachaise can fly it safely we will lower it into the pit. Tomorrow also we will bring you fresh human sacrifice.”

“That will be good.” Meanwhile a possible problem had suggested itself to the berserker. “Are many of your people mystified by or curious about the ship? Is there any unrest because of its presence?”

“There is some curiosity about it, oh Death, but I will handle that. This afternoon there will be a distraction that will leave the people able to think or talk of nothing else. Thorun is going to walk forth into the city and display his powers.” The berserker tried to compute the probable results of such an event, and found it could not grapple with the numerous abstract factors successfully. “In the past you have always been cautious about putting Thorun on display.”

“Lord Death, the masses will not accept as divine any creature that they can see daily in the streets. But Thorun’s future will now be short in any case. At the most, a thirtieth-of-an-old-man’s-lifetime, and the masses of this world will no longer need a god—or any god save Thou.”

The berserker decided to trust its goodlife servant in this matter. So far he had never failed his god. “So be it, loyal Andreas. Proceed in the service of Death as you think best.”

Andreas bowed low, and then the humans began their rituals of departure, which included cleaning up the mess they had made.

The berserker computed routinely that two deaths had been achieved today, which was a good, if modest, accomplishment. But, as always the waste of time and energy involved in formal sacrifice had been considerable, and that was not good.

Never had the berserker asked for offerings of pain and terror. Killing, simple killing without end as long as life existed, was all it wanted. It was not enthusiastic about inflicting pain, which was after all a manifestation of life and therefore, after all, evil.

It allowed the torture to go on only because the infliction of pain was so satisfying to the humans who were its servitors.

XII

THE two finalists of Thorun’s Tournament were still being kept waiting outside the city gate.

“Thomas, why are we being treated so? Disregarded. Forced to wait here, like tradesmen or musicians or actors, without honor. Are we not now nearly gods? Is this just some final form of trial?”

“My foolish, highborn friend.” Thomas’s voice was sympathetic, the rest of his answer long in coming. “You really think that there are gods in there?”

“I—” Farley had not been able to sit-down for restlessness, and now he swayed on his feet in agony of mind. “Thorun help me! I do not know.” His admission of doubt hung in the air while time stretched on and on, an endless-seeming time for Farley in which, as far as he could tell, Thorun did nothing at all.

“You in there!” Farley bellowed suddenly, toward the priests who still looked down upon them from the wall. Startled eyes swung round to focus on him. The priest Yelgir had gone in some time ago, saying he would soon be back.

“What?” one answered, awkwardly.

“Are we companions of the gods or not? What kind of welcome is this you have prepared for us? Leros shall hear of this, and the High Priest himself!”

He paused then, as suddenly as if he had run into a wall, his flaring anger burned out as fast as it had arisen. “Thomas,” he whispered. “Did you hear my words just now? Not Thorun will hear of this ‘but’ the High Priest will hear’. I know now what I believe.” Again his look changed, to anger once more, but this time quiet and bitter. “Why then am I here?”

His loud outburst had had enough effect on the priests that one of them was now beginning a speech placatory if not apologetic. But Farley would not hear it. Still speaking to Thomas, he demanded: “Tell me, what will happen if you and I choose not to fight? If we simply turn our backs on them, and go about our own affairs?”

Thomas was aghast and scowling, shaking his head in silent disapproval. Farley could bear no more. With deliberate scorn he turned his back on all of them and started to walk away. Thomas at once glanced toward the priests and saw their wishes in their eyes. Farley had not gone more than ten paces before Thomas came to block his way. Not for the first time, it struck Farley as marvelous that such a bulky man could move so lightly.

“Thomas, walk away with me, in peace.”

The man holding the spear leveled shook his head. “That cannot be.”

“Come. If you still lust for more fighting, I have no doubt that we will find it on our way. These soft men who play at being gods will send their soldiers after us and we are not likely to reach the bottom of the mountain alive. But we will die in true battle, as men should, and not for the amusement of liars. Come.”

Thomas was still not angry, but very grim. “Farley, I mean to remain alive, and to prove to these men that I am the mightiest warrior in the land. If I do not conquer you, that will not be proven fully. Come. Let us fight.”

The spear had been leveled for some time, and now Farley saw the little movement at Thomas’s shoulder that meant a thrust was coming. Farley drew his own weapon even as he leaped back from the spear thrust. Farley fought. There was no choice. When he struck with his sword his arm felt as strong as ever, but something was lacking now—from his backbone or from his soul.

He was not conscious of being afraid. It was only that he wanted nothing but to leave this place of fraud. His feet tried to move him toward the downhill road when they should have been driving him forward for the kill. And suddenly his belly was being torn open by the spear.

Farley knew that he was lying on his face in the soft groundcover. Not bad, his father said, reaching down a hand to help him up, but you must practice more. Oh father, I tried so hard. Then it seemed to Farley that he was walking carefree through the gods’ green park, but the white walls were behind him, not in front, and he was going home.

THOMAS, when he had made sure that the last loser of the Tournament was quite dead, bent over to once more wipe his spear. He cleaned it on Farley’s costly cloak; the cloth had been ruined anyhow, by the days and nights in the open, and the many battles.

When the weapon was as clean as he could get it under the circumstances Thomas attached the carrying cord to the spear again and slung it over his shoulder. The same few faces were still watching him from the gate and the top of the wall. They showed mild approval, like idlers looking on at some casual brawl. None of them said anything.

“Well,” Thomas announced, feeling somewhat irritated, “you have seen it. I am your man. Six duels against the very best in the world, and I have only one trifling scratch while they are all dead.”

“Andreas will be displeased at missing the final duel,” said one. Another called down to Thomas: “Be patient for a little while. The High Priest is coming soon, we expect. Come inside the gate if you wish.”

Thomas decided to bring Farley into the city with him, as a trophy, a symbol of all his victories. He squatted and with a grunt picked up the warm, loose body at his feet. Farley was heavier than the appearance of his rangy frame suggested, and Thomas’s steps toward the city gate were slow and weighty. The gate swung open for him after he had stood before it for a moment in fast-mounting impatience.

His first view of the city inside was a disappointment. The gate gave directly onto a small paved square, only about twenty meters on a side. The square was completely boxed in by buildings and walls that were but little lower than the outer city wall through which he had just passed. There were several gates in the inner walls, but all were closed, or showed nothing but more walls beyond, so there was not much of interest to be seen in any direction. A few more people, of high and low degree, were looking down at Thomas from walls and windows. Seeing no place in particular to go, Thomas bent and with some care set his slow-dripping burden down.

A small fountain gurgled nearby and he went to get a drink of water, seeing that no one was rushing to offer him fermented milk or wine. The people on the walls had ceased to stare at him now, and were gone about their business. Others appeared from time to time to glance and turn away. Here and there slaves went about their errands. A train of pack animals entered the city through the outer gate which had remained open, and came brushing past Thomas at close quarters.

The man on the wall who had invited him in had gone. Thomas looked about, but there was no one for him to berate for his shabby treatment. Was he expected to go prowling the city at random, grabbing strangers by the arm and asking directions? Where is Thorun’s great hall? He is expecting me.

They had said the High Priest was coming. Seating himself on the edge of the fountain, Thomas retired into dignity, and remained there quietly as the shadows shifted across the square with the slow progress of the sun. Once there intruded upon his thoughts a soft snuffling, lapping sound. A small hungry domestic animal had discovered Farley’s otherwise forgotten corpse. Thomas moved fast, took two strides and launched the beast halfway across the square with a rib-cracking kick. Then he burned to the fountain and sat passively waiting.

When at last he heard someone approaching him and looked up ready to speak his anger, he found that it was only Leros, with whom he had no quarrel. Leros looked sick, or at least noticeably older than he had a few days ago.

Standing before him with hands outspread, Leros said: “I am sorry, Thomas, Lord Thomas. They say Andreas is coming now, but I do not know what welcome he plans to give you. If I were High Priest things would be different. Let me congratulate you on your victory.” Thomas got up to his full height. “Where is the High Priest Andreas?” he called out, looking around at the anonymous faces on walls and in windows. Suddenly their number was growing again, more people peering out into the square at every moment. Something impended. Spectators were gathering. “Where is he, I am growing impatient with this treatment.”

“Speak more respectfully,” a tall, regal-looking man admonished him sharply from his place of security on a high inner wall.

Thomas looked this one over and decided to continue to be bold; it was an attitude that usually got results, for him. “Respectfully? I am a god now, am I not? Or a demigod at least. And you do not look like anything more than a man.”

“The point is well taken,” said Leros sternly to the man on the wall. That one looked angry, but before he could say anything a murmur swept around the square and everyone’s attention again shifted. The smallest and most intricately decorated of the inner gates that gave on the square was being opened from the far side by a young priest. Footsteps crunched on the neat gravel walk revealed beyond this gate, and there emerged from it a tall, skull-faced man dressed more in purple than in white. From the reactions of those around him, Thomas realized that this must be Andreas.

“You must be Thomas the Grabber,” the High Priest said, nodding to him affably, speaking in the confident voice of one who is habitually in charge of things. “I see you have finished the Tournament somewhat ahead of schedule. I am sorry to have massed it all—the final round especially. But no matter, Thorun is pleased.” Andreas nodded, smiling his smile. “So pleased is he that he has decided to grant you special honor, even beyond that promised you below.”

This was more like it. Thomas made a little bow toward the High Priest, then stood taller than before.

The smile was a baring of teeth in the skull mouth. “You are to fight the fight that all true warriors must dream about. I hope that you are ready. But of course, as a true warrior, you must be.”

“I am ready,” Thomas growled, meanwhile cursing himself mentally for being fooled by the first soft words. “But I am done with fighting, as far as Thorun’s Tournament is concerned. I am the winner.” All around him he heard a catching of breaths. Evidently one did not talk like that to the master of the world, the High Priest of Thorun. But Thomas would not simply bow his head and be only another man, not now. He must take and hold the place that he had rightfully earned.

Andreas, glaring at him, put steel into his voice. “You are to fight against Thorun himself. Do you mean that you would prefer to enter his hall with your blood still safe inside your veins, with all your joints still hung together? I cannot believe it.”

The murmuring voices rose up wildly now, in rumor and speculation. What did the High Priest mean? Could Thorun actually be coming, to duel against a mortal man?

It made no sense to Thomas, and he did not like it in the least. Still, looking at the clever and experienced Andreas, very much in control, he decided that boldness had its limits. He bowed once more to the High Priest, and said: “Sir, a word with-you alone, if I may.”

“No more words, for you or from you,” said Andreas softly. He turned his head slightly in a listening gesture, and smiled again.

Beyond the gateway through which Andreas had come the gravel crunched again, in the rhythm of a single long-striding pair of feet. Incredibly heavy the tread must be, to make the gravel sound like that. Above the low wall in that direction the top of a head came into view, a mat of wild dark hair, while the feet must be moving at ground level three meters lower. No man was that tall. With an unfamiliar weakness in his knees Thomas believed for a moment that his own cynicism had undone him after all. The naive pious ones had been right all along. The dead of the Tournament, dismembered and buried and burnt along the way, would shortly walk before him, laughing as they followed—

The figure now appearing in the gateway before Thomas, bending to pass through.

Thorun.

XIII

HIS head of wild dark hair was bound up by a golden band. His fur cloak, vast as it was barely covered his mountainous shoulders. His marvelous sword, nearly as long as Thomas’s spear, was girdled to his waist. All as the legends had it. His face, though . . .

Thorun did not seem to be looking at anything. He stared over Andreas’s head, and over Thomas’s, and through the still-open outer gate (where the limping maul-slave stood and gaped as if he thought those eyes were fixed on him) and brooded with his terrible unblinking eyes upon the world outside. Once he had come to a halt Thorun did not move, did not shift his position or stir a finger, any more than would a statue.

Andreas said nothing more, or, if he did so, Thomas did not hear. Rather the High Priest bowed himself out of the way, silently and obsequiously, though with some amusement still visible, out of the way of the mighty figure of the god.

The eyes had moved now, though the head had not, and Thorun was looking at Thomas. The eyes had literally some kind of glow inside them, like those of an animal seen at nighttime by reflected light. This glow was red and orange. Glancing quickly around, Thomas saw that the eyes were on him alone, for no one any longer stood near him. Against one wall of the square he saw Leros prostrate in deep reverence, as were a number of others on walls and ground.

Scores of men were watching now, men in white robes and gray rags. Those who had been in the middle of the square were scrambling away, reaching for high perches, getting themselves atop things and behind things, getting out of the way. Awe was in every face. Almost. Only Farley would not interrupt his contemplation of the sky.

Thorun now came stepping forward. Though his movements were limber and seemed natural enough, even graceful, for some reason the impression of watching a statue persisted. Perhaps it was the face, which was utterly inhuman, though the form of each individual feature was correct. Neither was the face godlike—unless gods were less than men, unless they were not, in fact, alive.

But Thorun’s strides were very long and purposeful. Thomas, seeing the long sword coming endlessly out of its scabbard as the god approached, got himself into motion just in time. The man launched himself backward out of the arc of the sword, and it made a soft and mournful sighing as it passed in a stroke that would have cut a man in half as readily as a weed. The war god’s bearded lips opened at last and bellowed forth a deafening battle-cry. It was a strange and terrible sound, as inhuman as the glowing, unblinking eyes and the dead face.

Getting his spear unlimbered just in time, Thomas mechanically held it out to parry Thorun’s next stroke. When the god’s sword struck he felt a numbing jolt up both his arms, and his armored spear was nearly torn out of his grasp. It was like some nightmare of being a child again, and facing a grown warrior in combat. The watchers cheered. Whoever or whatever Thorun was, his strength was well beyond that of any man.

Thorun advanced methodically, unhurriedly. Backing and circling, Thomas knew that he must now plan and fight the finest battle of his life.

THOMAS began to fight his finest battle but before long was forced to realize that it was hopeless. His own most violent attacks were knocked aside with effortless ease, while Thorun’s sword strokes came with such murderous power and precision that he knew he could not parry or avoid them for long. Already the battering of sword on spear had made his arms grow numb and weary. He was gripping his spear in both hands like a quarterstaff and retreating steadily, meanwhile trying to discover some workable strategy, to spy out some weakness in the defense of his monstrous opponent. Whether that opponent was god or man or something else entirely was a question that did not bother Thomas in the least just now.

At last, with a good deceptive move followed by a superb thrust, Thomas got his spear-point home into Thorun’s tunic of heavy fur, only to feel it rebound from some hard layer of armor underneath. A moment of sudden hope burned out as quickly as it had come. Around him the watchers gasped in astonishment at his seeming success, then relaxed with a collective sigh as the world, that had tilted for a moment, settled back. Thorun was unconquerable.

Thomas, however, retained a spark of hope. If he could hit home once with the spear, then he might be able to hit home again. If the fur-clad chest and belly were invulnerable, where should he try to strike?

How about the face? No. He could stand a little farther off—and it would be less nearly suicidal—if he tried instead for the legs. Thomas observed that the joints of Thorun’s exposed and seemingly unarmored knees were not covered with unbroken skin like that on human legs, but instead showed fine and smoothly shifting cracks, as if they were the legs of a well-made puppet. The opening in the knee-joint presented a very small and moving target, but no more difficult a one than the insects on the wing Thomas had sometimes hit in practice.

No better plan having suggested itself, Thomas feinted high, low, high again, and then put all his power and skill into a low thrust. His eyes and arms did not fail him. The sharp point of the spear found the small opening just as it was narrowing slightly with the straightening of Thorun’s leg.

There came a grinding vibration down the spear’s shaft, and an audible snap of metal. Thorun lurched but did not fall. With the suddenness of the slamming of a door, a silence fell over the arena. The tip of Thomas’s spearhead came away bright, where its point had been broken off.

The silence that had fallen when Thorun nearly lost his footing still held; Thorun’s knee was now frozen in a half-bent position. The ruler of the world was wounded, and nothing could be heard but the scraping dragging of his crippled foot as he continued to advance. He advanced more slowly than before but as implacably as ever. Thomas, in retreat again, glimpsed Andreas standing atop a wall. The High Priest’s face was dark as a thundercloud, and one of his hands was half extended like a claw, as if he wanted to interfere now but did not dare.

The limping god came in range again of his human opponent. Once more Thorun’s great sword became a gleaming blur of speed, hammering on with untiring violence, driving Thomas back and back, around and around the little space. Thomas, meaning to strike again at the wounded knee, feinted high and low and high again, and then was nearly killed, was knocked off his feet, by the impact of the sword against his spear. Thorun was not to be fooled twice by the same tactic.

Thomas rolled over desperately. Thorun, lurching with grotesque speed, was almost upon him. Thomas got his feet under him and got away barely in time. Leap and grab, Thomas? Never, against this foe. As well leap in and wrestle an ice-born glacier-beast—or one of the glaciers themselves.

Somehow Thomas had managed to retain his spear, arid he was still blocking the sword with its steel-armored shaft, but he could no longer gather energy to launch a thrust. Still the sword drove him back and back, and around and around. Now the watching white-robes had once more found their voices.

The end could not be held off any longer, Thomas thought. Weary and off balance, he raised his arms in desperation to catch yet another swordsweep against his indestructible spear. Again the impact knocked him from his feet. The world seemed to turn slowly, slowly around him as he spun in the air and fell, giving him time to wonder whether there was a real Thorun to be confronted after he had been slain by this limping imposter.

Thomas came down hard and for a moment could not move. He had lost his grip on his spear at last. The weapon lay only a hands-breadth from his fingers in the dust of the square, but grasping it again was one of the hardest greatest achievements of Thomas’s life.

THE killing machine paused in its limping progress, as if uncertain whether the fight was already won. Then with its crablike motion it came forward once again. Thomas got himself up on one knee, his spear leveled. Another sudden cessation of noise made him aware of how the watchers had been yelling for his death. Thorun’s glowing but lifeless eyes were judging him.

What was the wargod waiting for? Thomas struggled back to his feet, knowing that the next swordstroke, or the one after that, would surely be the last. Then with the edge of his vision he saw a gray-clad figure approaching him from one side. It moved with a limp, as if in sacriligious mockery of wounded Thorun’s gait. The slave’s leaden maul was lifting casually to dash out Thomas’s brains.

Thomas had been ready to meet death, but by all the gods, this was too much! He was not yet down and helpless! He turned, meaning to spear the slave through, while Thorun, lackwit, continued to hesitate.

Muscles ready for a killing lunge, Thomas for the first time looked closely into the slave’s face, and was momentarily paralyzed by what he saw. And gray-clad Giles the Treacherous stepped sideways with smooth unlimping speed, and with all his warrior’s strength let fly with the massive maul against Thorun’s already damaged knee.

Metal cracked. The bright arc of Thorun’s next swordstroke, already underway, went tilting awkwardly and curved well wide of Giles and Thomas both. Metallic snapping sounds prolonged themselves. Slowly, but without dignity, the monster sat down, its left knee bent at a wrong angle. It came to rest in a sitting position with its torso bolt upright, staring at its enemies with a face that had not changed, but had suddenly become absurd.

“Thomas!” cried Giles. He leaped back just in time from the next stroke that Thorun, still sitting, aimed at him. “Get him between us, Thomas. Finish him!”

For the first time uttering a war-cry of his own, a hoarse and wordless yell, Thomas moved quickly to accomplish the encirclement. His peripheral vision told him that no one in the watching throng was moving to interfere. They were in pandemonium, their white robes swirling with disordered motion and their voices straining in excited noise. There was Leros, standing with arms folded in apparent calm, barely out of the way of the fight and watching it in utter concentration. Thomas glimpsed Andreas standing on a wall. The High Priest was waving his arms and seemed to be shouting orders, but the insane excitement was now such that no man’s voice could be heard.

Even crippled as he was Thorun came near to being a match for his opposition. Neither spear nor maul could beat down the huge sword in his untiring arm, and he turned his seated body with marvelous speed to face first one foreman and then the other.

Catching the eye of Giles, Thomas roared: “Together! Now!” and they rushed at Thorun from opposite sides simultaneously. The sword came at Thomas, and he managed to parry it yet again only because Thorun, in his sitting position, could not get his whole body behind a swing. Even so Thomas thought for a moment that his own forearm had been broken in the clash. But meanwhile Giles had got in close, swinging like a piledriver, and landed his maul full force on the back of Thorun’s neck.

The blow would have exploded the head of any mortal man. Thorun’s wild hair flew, his great head jerked, his torso swayed a little, his swordarm hesitated. Now Thomas’s blunted spearpoint smashed into his right eye, which went out like a candle, with a tiny crunch that came through the spear like breaking glass. Now the maul came down again, this time on the swordhand. Thorun did not drop his sword, but now it stood out at a different angle from his fist.

The giant died slowly, piecemeal, indifferent rather than brave, emitting neither cries nor blood. There was only a step-by-step loss of function under the terrible punishment of spear and hammer, a progressive revelation of Thorun’s vincibility, a bit-by-bit reduction of his body to little more than shattered metal and glass and fur.

Even when the huge body was hopelessly beaten, when the god’s battered face had been humiliatingly pounded down into the earth beside the fountain, the sword arm was still trying to fight, lashing out with murderous, random blows. A spear thrust loosened its fingers and the giant sword fell from the hand with a dull little sound. The arm, its broken digits clutching spasmodically on emptiness, was still waving when Thomas and Giles looked at each other, rested their weapons, and then turned together to salute the watchers who ringed them in.

The noise of the crowd died away into an exhausted silence, a silence that seemed to Thomas to go on for a very long time. Andreas was no longer to be seen, he noted, and a few others had also vanished. Most were still watching, as if hypnotized, the helpless, stubborn movements of Thorun’s arm. Thomas went to kick the huge sword out of its reach.

Eyes began now to turn toward Leros, who was the senior priest still in attendance. Obviously in the grip of powerful emotions, he took two steps forward and stretched forth an arm toward the fallen giant; but Leros was still too overcome to speak, and the first of his outstretched arm clenched tightly his arm dropped back to his side.

IT WAS left to Giles to break the silence at last. Gesturing at the wrecked giant, he shouted out: “This creature is not your beloved Thorun. It cannot be! Andreas and his Inner Circle have deceived you all!”

The roar that went up from the crowd in response had much of agreement in it. But one voice cried out at Giles: “Who are you, that have interfered and done this? Agent of the Brotheshood! Spy!” Giles raised a hand and got silence in which to make his answer. “Very well, say I am a spy, an agent, anything you like. But what I have shown you here is nothing but the truth. Call me what you will. But will you call me a god, to defeat another god in combat? And what god could I be, to conquer Thorun?” He raised his face to the bright sky, and made a holy sign. “Great Thorun, avenge yourself upon the blasphemers who have put forth this deception!” And he gestured again to where ruined Thorun still moved one arm in a parody of battle.

Several men with their daggers drawn—there were no larger weapons in evidence among the crowd—came to surround Giles. They took away his maul and stood guard over him, but at a word from Leros did no more. Giles made no protest or resistance, but stood proudly with his arms folded. Leros, after gazing a little while longer in continued shock at what remained of Thorun, summoned two or three other leaders who were present to withdraw with him to a corner of the square. There they at once plunged into earnest talk. Most of the other spectators, marveling and arguing, began to crowd around the fallen figure that had been their god.

Giles the Treacherous, looking at Thomas, suddenly flashed him a smile of surprising brightness for a man in his doubtful situation. “Lord Thomas,” Giles hailed him, “it seems that you are now the champion of gods as well as men.”

“Well. You don’t claim a share of the prize, whatever it may prove to be?” Thomas moved closer to Giles, with whom he felt a kinship.

“I? Never. You have won the championship fairly and I have no claim to make.”

Thomas nodded, satisfied on this point. But he had other worries. Standing next to Giles, he looked around him restlessly. He had the feeling that as champion of the Tournament, and acknowledged victor over the imitation Thorun, he should be doing something, asserting authority somehow. Probably he should go to join the talk around Leros and make the priests listen to him. But what would he tell them? He realized now that he had not the faintest idea of what was really going on. He was more likely to find out, he thought, if he stayed with Giles, who might well need some help in return soon and be willing to bargain. Anyway, Thomas felt much more at home talking with another fighting man than he did with the priests.

“Why are you here, and how?” he asked the shorter man. “It is in my memory that I saw you die.”

Giles’s smile had faded to a mere twist of the lip. “You saw Jud thrust at me, and me go plunging down a hillside.”

“You were not even wounded?”

“I was not. You see, I had persuaded Jud that all I wanted was a chance to get out of the Tournament and away. He was something of a cynic, and so believed me. Also he was glad of the chance to take an uncontested victory, and went along with the plan I had hatched. He had only to hold back his thrusts a little, as I did.

“His sword only took a few threads from my jacket before I went over the edge. I had marked beforehand that the slave carrying the maul was of my size and coloring, which suggested the whole plan to me. When the slave came down to make sure I was dead I was waiting in the bushes and did the office for him instead. I took his rags and his rope belt and his maul, and put them on together with his limp, before dragging him uphill to be buried in my good clothes. The rest of you had started on ahead by then, as I had expected.

“I was seldom in your camp after that. My companion slave was dumb, and so lackwit he did not notice the transformation—or perhaps he was shrewd enough to ignore intrigue when he became aware of it. None of the rest of you ever looked at me with open eyes, once I had put on gray rags—not until you looked at me just now, when you thought I was coming for you with the maul.”

Thomas shook his head in wonderment. “A fearful risk you took.”

“Not so great a risk as having to face you, or Kelsumba perhaps, or Farley, in open combat. I had made up my mind that that risk was too high.”

“But still, a strange game,” Thomas commented. “Why did you play it? Why—?” He gestured toward the wreckage that had been Thorun.

“I wanted to expose that thing for what it was. Rather, for what it is, since we have so far destroyed only a small part of it.” Giles looked around him. His audience, that had been only Thomas and a couple of dagger-guards when he started speaking, was now far larger. He raised his voice and went on: “We all know now that this thing was never Thorun. It was only a creation of something else. Something else whose harboring on Hunters’ planet would bring scorn and derision from the whole outworld if it were known to them.”

“What is this shameful thing you speak of?” The question came from Leros, who had ended his conference with the other ranking priests and had now been listening to Giles for some little time.

“I am speaking of one of our ancestors’ ancient enemies, a berserker,” said Giles, and briefly outlined his conversation with Suomi in the woods. “If Andreas has not yet silenced the outworlders he is holding in the Temple, they will be able to confirm that he has stolen their ship from them. Perhaps they will be able to tell us why.”

“Why should be believe the outworlders over the High Priest?” someone called, challenging.

Giles raised his voice again. “The outworlders did not bring this imitation Thorun with them. Andreas and his Inner Circle priests have used it for years, to dupe Thorun’s faithful followers. No artisan on Hunters’ could have made it alone, any more than he could build a spaceship. Nor can it be the true persona of a god, or not even Thomas the Grabber could have knocked it down. What else can it be then, but a berserker, or part of one? If it is not a berserker, perhaps the High Priest and his Inner Circle can explain just what it is. I would ask them now if they were here. But they fled when they saw that their fancy machine was doomed.”

Leros nodded grimly. “It is time, and past time, for us to ask Andreas some hard questions.” The roar of agreement that went up was short, for men wanted to hear what Leros was going to say next. He went on: “I think, though, that it is not for you to tell us what to ask. Whose agent are you, treacherous one?”

GILES shrugged, and admitted readily: “I was sent here by what you call the Brotherhood. But what of that, honest Leros? Today I have told you and shown you nothing but demonstrable truth. I see now that we of the Brotherhood really have no quarrel with the people of Godsmountain, but only with the Inner Circle and its head.”

Leros grunted, perhaps a bit bewildered by the ready flow of words, half convinced by them and half put off by their smoothness. Before he had to reply, however, he was distracted by the return of a man who had evidently been dispatched to see what was going on at the Temple. This messenger brought back word that the doors and gates leading to the Temple complex had been locked and barred from within, and the palace guard of soldiers directly under the command of the High Priest were occupying the place. Andreas would not appear, but only sent out word that all spies, traitors, and their dupes would soon tremble before his wrath.

“He will not answer reasonable questions?” Leros demanded. “He will not explain why he dared to foist this . . . this thing . . . upon us as a god?”

“No, Lord Leros, he will not.”

“Then it is certain,” Leros shouted, “Andreas no longer speaks in Thorun’s name! Great Thorun, stand with us now! Stand with us as we prepare to prove in combat who can serve you best!”

There was a new outbreak of shouts and prayers, a general uproar of activity as men rushed to arm themselves, debated hasty plans of organization, and argued over whether any of the military commanders known to be nearly in the field should be summoned with their troops and asked or ordered to drive Andreas from the Temple. This last suggestion was shouted down. Thomas gathered that the soldiers now in the Temple were too small a force to hold it for long against the aroused citizenry. Well, let the strategists debate; he would know what to do when it came to fighting.

Finding himself for the moment more or less alone again with Giles, Thomas said to him: “I thank you for stepping in against the monster; I will not forget it.” Thomas was beginning to appreciate how shrewd Giles was, and to understand that he himself was going to need shrewd advice to secure a position of power among these people.

“You are welcome, Lord Thomas, for whatever my help was worth.”

“Why did the Brotherhood send you here?”

Giles made a little self-deprecating motion with his head. “I was the best fighter they could find. I was sent to the Tournament from a district largely under their control. They hoped of course that I could win the Tournament, and then function against Godsmountain from some place of authority inside it. But long before the Tournament was over I realized that I was not going to win. You and some of the other fighters were obviously better than I. So I hatched the scheme using Jud Isaksson . . . but tell me, Lord Thomas, why are you here?”

“I?” Thomas was surprised.

“Yes. I don’t think you ever believed there was a real Thorun here, to reward you with immortality. I have told you my real reason for taking part in the Tournament; what was yours?”

“Huh. Well, fighting is my business. It was dangerous, yes, as any real fighting is, but I expected to win. I have never met the man who could stand against me in single combat.”

Giles was quietly fascinated. “Did you never stop to think that each of us could truthfully have made that identical claim? Each of the original sixty-four?”

Thomas blinked. “No,” he said slowly. “No, I did not stop to think of that.” Suddenly he remembered the utter astonishment on the beardless dying face of young Bram. Was that in the second round or the third? He could not remember, but it seemed very long ago.

He raised a hand over his shoulder to caress the heavy spear slung on his back. He would have to get a new one made. Not only was the point of this one broken but the shaft was dented and weakened, its steel reinforcing strips twisted and loosened by the battering of Thorun’s sword. “I wanted a place of power, wanted to be one of the men who rule the world from this mountaintop.”

Giles prompted: “You thought they held the Tournament because they wanted the best fighter in the world up here, to be Godsmountain’s champion. And as such you would have great power and wealth.”

“Yes. That’s about it.”

“An intelligent guess, I would say. I, too, believed the Tournament had some such purpose, though there were some points I could not understand . . . anyway, it seems that we were wrong. Andreas and his Inner Circle deceived everyone in one way or another. The simple warriors with a simple story of gods, and us by letting us think that we were wise and understood the truth.” Thomas swore a great oath, throwing in all the gods he could remember on short notice. “Then why did they have the Tournament? Andreas and his gang did not watch us to applaud our skill or dwell upon our sufferings. Nobody was allowed to watch, except for a few priests and the outworlders. Why, why preach and urge us on to slaughter one another?”

“They wanted senseless slaughter,” said Giles, “because they really do not worship Thorun, who has life and honor in him, and a purpose besides destruction. They could never get the mass of people to worship their true god, who is nothing but Death. Thorun enjoys women and wine, tall tales and food. Especially he honors the courage that makes all other virtues possible. But death is what they worship, and death is what berserkers represent, death without honor or purpose, death alone.” Giles fell silent, squinting at the wreckage of Thorun on the ground where it lay face down in the mud near the fountain, not far from Farley’s sky-gazing corpse. Then Giles added: “No, that is not good enough. You are right, why did Andreas and the others not watch the Tournament, enjoy the killing—or let others watch it. Only the outworlders were allowed to come . . . and while they watched, their ship was stolen. Is that it? The finest heroes of our planet fought and died only to lure them here.”

A shout was being raised by many voices, not only in the square but all around the city. The outworlders’ ship was in the air.

XIV

THE liftoff when it came was very smooth, and took Suomi completely by surprise; he had dozed off at his desk, his head resting on his arms, and on first waking had had the hideous feeling that the ship was already settling down, its flight completed, and that his only chance to act had come and gone.

Hastily he turned to look at the monitor screen on the bulkhead beside the stateroom’s intercom control and saw with relief that the flight was certainly not over. Imaged in the screen now was Orion’s control room. The high-ranking priest called Lachaise was seated in the central pilot’s chair, bent forward over controls and instruments in an attitude of rigid concentration. Around Lachaise other priests and soldiers sat or stood in nervous postures, clinging to whatever solid supports they could get hold of. Looking past the far side of the control room, Suomi could see down the passageway to the entrance lock, at the far side of which the main exterior hatch was still standing open; moving the ship in such a configuration was perfectly feasible, provided of course that no high speed or high altitude was attained. Another soldier clung just inside the entrance lock, looking out and down through the open outer doors. Presumably he was posted there as insurance should the screens in the control room somehow fail, or (what was much more likely) should the novice pilot have trouble in interpreting their images.

The flight was evidently going to be a short one. The berserker must be somewhere nearby, and its loyal human servants were going to bring the captured starship to it. Then they would be able to get to work in earnest on the ship. Directing an operation on itself, the berserker could be wired into the onboard computers, assimilate them into its brain, and take over the ship’s various systems as extensions of its own being. And then the drive . . . its conversion to a death machine could be performed at Godsmountain if convenient, or the berserker could fly itself and a loyal coterie to some safe spot in the uninhabited north and there prepare to kill the world.

Through his stateroom screen Suomi could monitor much of what was showing on the big screens in the control room. He had not dozed long, for it was still bright day outside. He watched, on the screens, the wooded slopes of Godsmountain falling away very gently, then tilting a bit. At the same time Suomi felt Orion tilt in the hands of her inexpert pilot as he started her moving sideways toward the summit. They would not be bothering with the artificial gravity on this low, slow flight in atmosphere.

The voices of the people in the control room, and those who were communicating with them from outside the ship, were audible in Suomi’s stateroom, coming in over intercom. “Schoenberg,” Lachaise was saying tensely now, “I have a yellow light showing on the life-systems panel. Can you explain it?”

“Let me see,” said Schoenberg’s voice, wearily, speaking offstage from Suomi’s viewpoint. After a little pause, presumably while a screen was switched to give him a better view, Schoenberg continued: “That’s nothing to worry about. Just a reminder that the main hatch is open and the safety interlocks have been disconnected to let you fly her that way. It’s just a reminder so you don’t forget and go shooting up into space.” Whatever pressure had been brought to bear, Schoenberg was evidently cooperating fairly thoroughly.

The ship was directly over the city now, drifting balloon-like on silent engines only a few meters above the tallest rooftops. “Go higher, Lachaise!” another man’s voice barked, authoritatively, and Suomi saw the high-ranking priest in white and purple swivel nervously in the pilot’s chair, his pale hands in jerky motion, over-correcting. The ship lurched upward while the men around Lachaise clung to their chairs and stanchions and eyed him apprehensively. The upward acceleration ceased, the ship hung for a heart-stopping moment in free fall, and then with a few more up-and-down oscillations was brought back under more or less steady control.

“I should have been allowed more time to practice!” the pilot protested feverishly.

“There is no time,” the authoritative voice snapped back. Suomi recognized it now as that of Andreas, speaking from outside the ship. “Thorun failed and Leros and some agent of the Brotherhood have inflamed the mob. We will load our dear lord and master onto the ship and take him to safety in the north with our prisoners. All will yet be well, Lachaise, if you can only maneuver carefully. Come over the Temple now.”

Lachaise was now guiding himself by a screen that showed what was directly below the ship. Suomi, in effect looking over Lachaise’s shoulder, saw a strange sight the significance of which he could not grasp at first. Near the largest building in the center of the city—this must be the Temple, for the ship was now hovering almost directly above it—another much lower structure was having its roof peeled back, dismantled, from inside. The workmen doing the job were partly visible, their hands and arms coming and going, removing pieces of roof from the edge of the rapidly enlarging opening. Inside there was the tracery of thin scaffolding on which the workmen evidently stood, and besides that nothing but darkness, unconquerable by the sun that everywhere else fell bright on street and wall. It took Suomi a few moments to realize that the building’s interior looked dark because it was a single vast pit, dug far below the level of the city’s streets.

“Tell them to hurry with the roof,” Lachaise pleaded.

“Are you in position yet?” the voice of Andreas countered, the strain in it now quite audible. “I do not think you are quite in the proper position.”

SUOMI could see now that small but tumultuous groups of white-robed men were running about in the streets around the Temple complex, deploying as if to encircle it. Here and there a drawn sword waved. And uniformed soldiers moved about on the Temple’s walls. Now Suomi saw the bright streak of an arrow flying from street to wall and two more darting in the opposite direction in reply. Perhaps the man in gray, with his grandiose scheme of entering the city disguised as a slave and touching off a rebellion, had been more successful than Suomi had thought possible.

As for Suomi himself, he had done all he could at the workbench and now it was time to prepare for combat. Feeling unreal, he picked up the small battery-powered unit he had assembled and went quickly across the small room and got into his bunk. Reaching up an arm, he turned his intercom to SPEAK. The voices of the others still came in; and, though they still could not see him, he could join in their conversation now. But he was not ready.

The bunk was capable of being converted into an acceleration couch, meant to be used in case of failure of artificial gravity somewhere in deep space. To fully convert the bunk now would not be feasible, but Suomi swung the center section of restraining pads over himself as he lay down, and locked it into place. He lay there holding his little recorder ready to play, the gain turned to maximum. He lay rigid with tension and fear, almost unable to breathe, not yet knowing for certain whether he would be brave enough to do what must be done. That it might kill him was not so bad. That it might accomplish nothing except to earn him a leisurely and hideous punishment from a victorious Andreas—that was very possible, and a chance just about too hideous to take.

Suomi, by turning his head, could still observe his stateroom screen. Lachaise was edging the ship over the great pit now, unmistakably meaning to lower it inside. The removal of the roof out to the eaves had been completed. The fragile scaffolding left inside would part like spiderweb beneath Orion’s armored weight. It was all very well planned and organized. Andreas and the others must have been preparing for a long time to capture a starship. Who had told them how to plan their pit, how big it must be to hold the kind of ship men would be likely to use on a surreptitious hunting expedition? Of course, their lord and beloved master, Death . . . Death knew all the sizes and shapes of human starships, he had fought against them for a thousand years.

Lachaise in his pilot’s chair was now carrying on a continuous exchange of tense comments with the men waiting and guiding him below, and with the lookout at the open hatch. The ship began to lower. Down, and down—but-this proved to be a false start, and Lachaise had to straighten her out and bring her up again, dribbling a thin trail of white dust from where the hard hull had brushed delicately against a high Temple cornice and knocked down a barrowful or two of masonry.

Up they went, and sideways an almost imperceptible distance, and started down again. Lachaise was probably a natural technician and machine operator; at any rate he was learning very fast. This time the slow descent was true.

His finger on the switch that would turn on the recorder, Suomi balanced over infinite depths of personal change, chasms of sudden death or slow defeat and somewhere a small plateau of triumph. With a part of his mind he wondered if this was the sensation that Schoenberg and other hunters sought, and the men who faced one another in the Tournament, when a lifetime’s awareness of being seemed to pulse through every second of experience.

He could accept all the possibilities. He could do what must be done. The ship was going down into the hole. Timing, now, tactics. At the bottom they might very well cut off the drive, so that would be too long to wait. Right now, just entering the top of the hole, they were still more outside than in, right now would be too soon.

He waited through an eternity; the ship must now be a quarter of the way down.

Halfway down. Eternity was passing.

Now. With a relief almost unbearable with surcease of mental strain, Suomi touched the switch on the small box he was holding.

THE voice of Johann Karlsen, biting and unforgettable, heavily amplified, boomed out through Orion’s intercom system, through the radio links from the control room to the outside, through the open main hatch, reverberating at a volume that must have carried into all the nearby city: “THIS IS THE HIGH COMMANDER SPEAKING. LANDING PARTIES READY. UNCOVER THE BERSERKER . . .

There was more, but it was drowned out by another voice, a voice that could only be the berserker’s own, booming and bellowing from some hidden place: “FULL DRIVE. ANDREAS, IN THE NAME OF GLORIOUS DEATH, FULL DRIVE AT ONCE KILL JOHANN KARLSEN, HE IS PROBABLY ABOARD. I COMMAND YOU, LACHAISE, FULL DRIVE AT ONCE. KILL JOHANN KARLSEN, KIL—”

And then that voice too was buried, drowned out, obliterated by the explosive violence resulting from the full-power application of a starship’s drive, not only deep within a planet’s gravitational well but almost literally buried within Godsmountain’s mass. Suomi, heavily protected by his padded bunk and bracing himself as well as he was able, was still shaken as if by the jaws of a glacier-beast, flattened against the bulkhead next to his bunk, then forced away from it again, only saved by his straps from being smeared against the stateroom’s opposite bulkhead. The room’s regular lights went out, and simultaneously an emergency light glared into life above the door.

There followed a sudden cessation of acceleration, a silence and a falling that went on and on. Then the fall ended with another bonejarring crash, loud and violent but still far closer to the humanly endurable on the scale of physical events than was that first detonation drive.

The ship seemed to bounce, crashed again, teetered and rocked, and came at last to a shuddering rest, her decks tilted at somewhere near forty degrees from the horizontal. Now all was quiet. The screen in Suomi’s stateroom was effectively dead, its surface only flickering here and there with electronic noise.

Suomi unstrapped himself from his bunk and climbed the crazy slope of the deck to reach the door. He had failed to pick up loose objects before entering combat and breakage in the stateroom had been heavy, though there were no indications of basic structural damage. The strength of the hull had probably saved the ship from that.

The stateroom door opened forcefully when he unlatched it, and the dead or unconscious body of a soldier slid in, trailing broken-looking legs. Suomi stuck his head out into the passage and looked and listened. All was quiet and nothing moved in the glare of the emergency lights. Here too deck and bulkheads and overhead were still in place.

He turned back to the fallen sentry and decided that the man was probably dead. Guilt or triumph might come later, he supposed.

Right now Suomi only considered whether to arm himself with the man’s sword, which was still resting peacefully in its scabbard. In the end Suomi left it there. A sword in his hand was not going to do any good for anybody, least of all himself.

He thumped on the door of Barbara Hurtado’s stateroom and when a weak voice answered he opened the door and climbed in. Amid a kaleidoscopic jumble of multicolored clothes from a spilled closet she sat in a heap on the floor, wearing an incongruous fluffy robe, her brown hair in wild disarray, leaning against a chair that must be fastened to the deck.

“I think my collarbone is broken,” she said faintly. “Maybe it isn’t, though. I can move my arm.”

“I’m the one who did it,” he said. “Sorry. There was no way I could give you any warning.”

“You?” She raised her eyebrows. “All right. Did you do as much damage to those sons of beasts out there?”

“More, I hope. That was the idea. Shall we go out and see? Can you walk?”

“Love to go and see their broken bodies, but I don’t think I can. They’ve got me chained to my bunk, which I guess is why I wasn’t killed. The things they were making me do. Always wondered what soldiers were like and I finally found out.”

“I’m going out to look around.”

“Don’t leave me, Carlos.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Things in the control room were very bad, or very good, depending on your point of view. It was closer to the drive than the staterooms were, Suomi supposed. Lachaise, strapped into the central, padded chair, was leaning back with eyes open and arms outflung, showing no wounds but very plainly dead all the same. Intense localized neutron flux at the moment when the drive’s fields collapsed was one possibility in such disasters, Suomi remembered reading somewhere. Lachaise had perished happily, no doubt, in blind obedience to his god, perhaps believing or hoping that he really was killing Johann Karlsen. In the name of glorious death . . . yes.

Around Lachaise, the priests and soldiers who had been helping and watching him had not been strapped into padded chairs. Neutrons or not, they now looked like so many bad losers in the Tournament. This many lives at least had the berserker harvested today. Some of them still breathed, but none were at all dangerous any more.

The main hatch was still open, Suomi discovered, looking down at it from the control room, but it was completely choked with broken white masonry and massive splintered timbers; part of the Temple or of somebody’s house perhaps. The ship had come to rest within the city, then. Probably a number of people had been killed outside the ship as well as in it, but Godsmountain had not been leveled, a lot of its people were doubtless still alive, and whoever was left in charge should come digging his way into the ship eventually, probably wanting to take vengeance for the destruction.

With some difficulty Suomi made his way back to Barbara’s stateroom and managed to lodge himself in a sitting position by her side. “Exit’s blocked. Looks like we wait together.” He described the carnage briefly.

“Be a good boy, Carlos, get me a pain pill from my medicine chest, and a drink.”

He jumped up. “Of course. I didn’t think—sorry. Water?”

“First. Then one of the other kind, if everything in my bar isn’t smashed.”

THEY were still sitting there together, about half a standard hour later, when after much noise of digging and scraping from the direction of the entrance hatch, Leros and a troop of armed men, swords in hand and in full battle gear, appeared in the stateroom’s open door. Suomi, who had been listening fatalistically to their approach, looked up at Leros and then closed his eyes, unable to watch the sword’s descent.

Nothing descended on him. He heard nothing but a faint multiple clinking and jangling, and opened his eyes to see Leros and his followers facing him on their knees, genuflecting awkwardly on the tilted deck. Among them, looking scarcely less awed than the rest, was the man in gray, armed now with sword instead of hammer.

“Oh Lord Demigod Johann Karlsen,” said Leros with deep reverence, “you who are no robot, but a living man, and more, forgive us for not recognizing you when you walked among us! And accept our eternal gratitude for again confounding our ancient enemies. You have smashed the death-machine within its secret lair, and most of those who served it also. Be pleased to know that I myself have cut out the heart of the arch-traitor Andreas.”

It was Barbara who—perhaps—saved him then. “The Lord Karlsen has been injured, stunned,” she said. “Help us.”

FIVE days later, the demigod Johann Karlsen, he who had been Carlos Suomi, and Athena Poulson, both of them in fine health, sat at a small table in a corner of what had been the Temple courtyard. Shaded from the midday Hunterian sun by the angle of a ruined wall, they were watching the slave-powered rubble clearing operations making steady progress in the middle distance. There the ship still lay, fifty or sixty meters from the Temple complex, surrounded by a jumble of smashed buildings, where it had come to rest after the drive destroyed itself.

Besides the cultists killed inside the ship or executed by Leros later, at least a score of people, most of them people who had never even known of the berserker’s existence, had died in the cataclysm. But still Suomi slept well, for millions of innocent folk across the planet lived and breathed.

“So, Oscar has explained it all to me, finally,” Athena announced. “They promised him a chance, a fighting chance, to get at the berserker and destroy it if he cooperated.”

“He believed that?”

“He says he knows it was a terribly small chance, but there wasn’t any better one. They wouldn’t let him get on the ship at all. He just had to sit in-a cell and answer questions for Andreas and Lachaise. And the berserker too, it talked to him directly somehow.”

“I see.” Suomi sipped at his golden goblet of fermented milk. Maybe the stuff made Schoenberg sick, but he had found that his stomach could handle it without difficulty, and he had grown to like the taste.

Athena was looking at him almost dreamily across the little table. “I haven’t really had a chance to tell you what I think, Carlos,” she said now in a soft, low voice. “It was such a simple idea. Oh, of course I mean simple in the sense of something classical, elegant. And brilliant.”

“Hm?”

“The way you used your recordings of Karlsen’s voice, and won the battle.”

“Oh, well. That was simple, to splice together recorded words to make some phrases that a berserker ought to find appropriately threatening. The main thing was that the berserker should identify his voice and so take the strongest, most violent action if could to kill him, forgetting everything else, be perfectly willing to destroy itself in the process.”

“But to conceive of it was brilliant, and to do it required courage.”

“Well. When I heard that its servants were asking about Karlsen, for no apparent reason, the idea struck me that we might be dealing with one of those assassin machines, a berserker that had been programmed specifically to go after Karlsen. Even if it was only an ordinary berserker—ha, what am I SAYING?—Karlsen’s destruction would rate as a very high priority in its programming, probably higher than depopulating a minor world. I gambled that it would just forget its other plans and wreck the ship, that it would just take it as probable that Karlsen was somehow hiding on Orion with a secret landing party.”

“That sounds insane.” Then, flustered, Athena tried to modify the implied criticism. “I mean—”

“It does sound insane. But, as I understand it, predicting human behavior has never been the berserkers’ strong point. Maybe it thought Andreas had betrayed it after all.”

THE god Thorun incarnate, who had been Thomas the Grabber, strolled majestically into the courtyard at its other end, trailed by priests and a sculptor who was making sketches for a new spearcarrying statue. Suomi rose slightly from his chair and made a little bow in Thorun’s direction. Thorun answered with a smile and a courteous nod.

Carlos and Thomas understood each other surprisingly well. The people had to be reassured, society supported, through a time of crisis. Did Leros and the other devout leaders really believe that a god and a demigod now walked among them? Apparently they did, at least in one compartment of their minds, and at least as long as such belief suited their needs. And perhaps in one sense it was the truth that Karlsen still walked here.

Perhaps, also, the sandy-haired man now known as Giles the Chancellor, who was Thorun’s constant companion and adviser, was to a great degree responsible for the relative smoothness with which the society of Godsmountain had weathered the upheavals of the past few days. Alas for the Brotherhood. Well, thought Suomi, likely a world with the Brotherhood victorious would have been no better than Godsmountain’s world was going to be without its secret demon.

There was Schoenberg now, walking near his wrecked ship. Barbara Hurtado was at his side listening to him as he pointed out features of the rubble-clearing system the slaves were following. It was a result of his expert analysis of the problem. He had been talking about it yesterday with Suomi. There, where Schoenberg was now pointing, was the place where the mathematically proven plan of greatest efficiency called for all the debris to be piled. Schoenberg had come near being killed as a collaborator by Leros and the winning faction, but intervention by the demigod Karlsen had saved his life and restored his freedom.

After what had happened to Celeste Servetus and Gus De La Torre—their mutilated bodies had been found atop a small mountain of human and animal bones in a secret charnel-pit far beneath the Temple—Suomi could not blame Schoenberg or anyone else for collaboration. Schoenberg had told him of the tale of ruthless Earthmen who were going to come looking to avenge him, a tale that, alas, had been nothing but pure bluff. Suomi, though, still had the feeling that Schoenberg was leaving something out, that more than passed between him and Andreas than he was willing to recount.

Let it lie. The ship had been irreparably damaged, and the surviving members of the hunting expedition were going to have to coexist on this planet, in all likelihood, for an indeterminate number of standard years, until some other ship just happened by.

Athena took a sip of cool water from her fine goblet, and Suomi drank some more fermented milk from his. She had spent the period of crisis locked in her private room and unmolested—maybe she would have been the next day’s sacrifice—until the ship crashed and the Temple was knocked down about her ears. Even then she was only shaken up. She, the independent, self-sufficient woman, and by chance she had been forced to sit by passively like some ancient heroine while men fought all around her.

“What are your plans, Carl?”

“I suspect the citizens here will sooner or later get tired of having the demigod Karlsen around, and I just hope it doesn’t happen before a ship shows up. I think he’ll maintain a low profile, as they say, until then.”

“No, I mean Carl Suomi’s plans.”

“Well.” Suddenly he wondered if any of the Hunterians, before the crisis, had heard her call him Carl, as she frequently did. He wondered if that might have contributed to his being so fortunately misidentified. Never mind.

Well. Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi’s plans for his future would definitely have included Athena. But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other.

No. Sorry. Of course he himself had now killed more people than she had even seen die—yet in a real sense he was still a pacifist, more so than ever in fact, and she was not. That was show he saw the matter, anyway.

Barbara, now. She was still standing beside Schoenberg as he lectured her, but she looked over from time to time toward the place where Suomi sat. Suomi wanted nice things to happen to Barbara. Last night she had shared his bed. The two of them had laughed about their minor injuries, comparing bruises. But . . . a playgirl. No. His life would go on just about the same if he never saw Barbara again.

What, then, were his plans, as Athena put it? Well, there were plenty of other fish splashing in the seas of Earth, or even, if he could be allowed a mangled metaphor, living demure and veiled behind their white walls here on Godsmountain. He still wanted a woman, and in more ways than one.

Schoenberg was not pointing up into the sky. Would his rubble pile grow that tall? Then Barbara leaped with excitement, and Suomi looked up and saw the ship.

Next thing they were all running, shouting, looking for the emergency radios that Schoenberg had insisted on getting from the Orion and keeping handy. Some trying-to-be-helpful Hunterian had misplaced the radios. Never mind. The ship lowered rapidly, drawn by the beacon-like appearance of the city atop the mountain, and Orion already sitting there. A silvery sphere, similar in every way to Schoenberg’s craft. With wild waves Earthmen and Hunterians beckoned it to land on a cleared spot amid the rubble.

Landing struts out and down, drive off, hatch open, landing ramp extruded. A tall man emerging, with the pallor of one probably raised under a dome on Venus, his long mustache waxed and shaped in the form the Earth-descended Venerians frequently affected. Reassured by numerous signs of friendly welcome, he strode halfway down the ramp, putting on sunglasses against the Hunterian noon. “How do, folks, Steve Kemalchek, Venus. Say, what happened here, an earthquake?”

Thorun and the High Priest Leros were still deciding which of them should make the official welcoming speech. Suomi moved a little closer to the ramp and said informally: “Something like that. But things are under control now.” The man looked relieved on hearing the familiar accents of an Earthman’s speech. “You’re from Earth, right? That’s your ship. Get any hunting in yet? I’ve just been up north, got a stack of trophy ’grams in there . . . show you later.” He lowered his voice to a more confidential tone. “And, say, is that Tournament everything I’ve heard it is? Going on right now, ain’t it? Isn’t this the place?”

LIFE FORCE

When Death has become the Final Arbiter, the ultimate weapon is

HOBSON looked up at the bright blue sky of Earth. In days gone by he had always managed to see in it a kind of hope. Seeing no hope in it now. he brought his mind back to business and tried for the third time that day to get his talent working. The moment of mental relaxation had helped. At last he was able to get started. The part of his mind that did such things reached ahead, while Hobson plodded on near the center of the column of irregular infantry.

An area of land about two miles across, and lying a mile or so ahead of the column, stood out from its surroundings like an island. Luxuriantly green with normal spring vegetation, the tract contrasted sharply with the background of irradiated and diseased countryside that had once been northern Illinois. There were many other such islands in the world. Hobson could see several to the right or left of where he marched. But the one ahead was unusually large and well preserved; also, it occupied a strategic spot overlooking a highway junction and a river. So the place was now the target of Hobson’s probing mind and the objective of this two-hundred-man force of New American infantry. In command was “Colonel”—Hobson always remembered to include the quotation marks in his thoughts—LaPorte.

Hobson could tell that approximately a hundred human souls occupied the island ahead. He could not tell what they were seeing or saying or planning, but he knew they were there and what emotions they felt. Right now, obviously, they were unaware of the approaching attackers, for their emotional average was biased at a level of secure calm so high as to be almost unknown in Hobson’s world.

Up near the point of the column, waiting for news from his pet psi-man, LaPorte turned his head to look back impatiently. Since the war everyone had begun to take for granted the existence of wild talents like those of Hobson. Their owners generally lacked the intangibles needed for leadership, but they could be sure of a relatively safe and respected place in any organization.

His own skin was not much. Still, it was about all that counted with Hobson any more. To protect it, he stayed with New America.

But—New America! Every time Hobson thought of the name, he wanted to spit. In his opinion a better name would be New Third Reich. And if he spoke that latter name aloud, no doubt LaPorte and the rest of the leaders would take it as a compliment. They were a gang of determined cutthroats who, during the past year, had begun to extend their power across the sector that had once been called the Middle West—an area still under threat of attack from the remnants of the Asiatic forces scattered over the west coast and the Rocky Mountains.

So when Hobson could not keep himself completely from thinking, what he did think was bitter. Some few men must always, at any cost, indulge their predilections for fighting and haling—even now when so few people are left anywhere. And folks like me. talented or not. are drugged helplessly along, trying to survive . . .

Aware of LaPorte’s restless gaze, Hobson wiped his brain clean of distractions, willed it to fullest sensitivity. It registered that in the lush target area, the hundred inhabitants still seemed unaware that twice their number of armed desperadoes were trudging toward them along this once roaring superhighway where grass now grew through cracks in the slab. They were peaceful, up ahead. Optimistic. Hobson wondered briefly if a religious ceremony were in progress; but he received no emanations of exaltation, no unison of feeling. It was just that the average levels of cheer and hope remained high.

LaPorte looked around again. With a pang of nervous self-contempt, Hobson walked faster, to reach the head of the column. He passed between ragged tiles of men in whom he rarely could detect fears or hopes above the animal level. Men armed with weapons ranging from the carbines of the late lamented United States Army down to pitchforks and butcher knives. Men who wore as their uniform a look of savagery. Men out for booty and women. Men who did not much like Hobson but wanted to have him around and fought to keep him alive—because of the insurance he gave against dreaded ambush. Their heads turned with interest as he hurried forward past them to make his report.

The colonel had left his self-designed insignia of rank well back within the already subjugated territory; less danger, that way, of being assassinated by some countryside lout. He was a fairly large man, bigger than Hobson, with glasses and an habitually mild look. You might take him for a storekeeper or a clerk until you listened to him talk for a while.

AS HOBSON opened his mouth to report, he felt individual patterns of surprise and alarm coming from up ahead, as if the New American scouts had made contact with local look-outs. When LaPorte heard Hobson’s information, the colonel waved his column off the highway to a halt. Within a minute, the scouts’ arm-waves from ahead confirmed the contact.

LaPorte thought over what Hobson told him. “Only about a hundred of ’em, hey? All right, we proceed as planned.”

Hobson hoped that the locals had a dozen machine-guns and would fight like fanatics. He could tell that many of them were women and children, and he knew what would happen if New America carried the day.

The sound of a shot rose from the island’s near edge. “Missed,” Hobson muttered. He had felt the nearly simultaneous start of three hundred people but no individual shock of pain or impact.

LaPorte now signaled for a cautious advance. Moving forward at the colonel’s side, through the scanty cover of some roadside weed-mutation, Hobson walked erect. Lately he was not much afraid of bullets. But he was still afraid of New America. If he tried to betray them, or tried to run away and was caught . . . Hobson trembled, remembering past victims of LaPorte’s vengeance.

Perhaps more than he hated LaPorte, Hobson hated himself—abhorred himself for what he had become. This self-loathing was growing every day. Hobson feared that soon it might be strong enough to turn some awful balance inside him.

The attacking formation crept toward the wooded island, moving along the stunted hedgerows and eroded gullies of this once fertile country. A belt of land around the island was normal enough for cultivation. Hobson saw rows of corn sprouting there. A scout crawled back out of the quiet woods to find the colonel. “Looks like they’re pulling back. Chief. Wanta go straight on in?”

LaPorte turned to Hobson. “What are they up to?”

Hobson reached for the natives. He could not find the courage to try to save them with a lie; he hoped that somehow they might save themselves. “They’re withdrawing, all right . . . but I don’t think they mean to run very far. It’s funny, they don’t seem to expect any fighting, either. It’s as if they felt protected in some way.”

“They don’t mean to fight? Good. Push on, then,” the colonel ordered. “Maybe they’re some religious nuts.” The colonel had once conquered a convent in Wisconsin.

The people ahead did not feel more or less religious than average to Hobson. But he did not comment. For some reason this tiny rebellion of withheld advice only made him hate himself all the more.

If only his kind of “talent,” as it was popularly called, could be used to kill! He would get rid of LaPorte and anyone like him within striking distance. Hobson did believe that ultimately evolution might bring psi to effectiveness as a weapon, and maybe in the not too distant future. After all, mutation was sure ! to continue at a high rate. There was plenty of radiation about, left over from the cataclysmic wars. And the early rays in less than a generation had produced ten thousand persons with acute psi powers for each one such person known before the wars.

The so-called talent had been analyzed to a degree, though science and research were little practiced these days. Something about a sixth sense, something theorized to tuned in on other people’s brain waves or other electromagnetic emanations. Its efficacy diminished sharply with distance, of course. But it was pretty useful to pick up emotions, on the basis of which predictions of behavior often could be made. Actual thoughts remained difficult to read except as they affected emotional states. A receptor rather than a projecting mechanism, it gave to some talented ones nevertheless the power to slightly move very small objects reposing a few feet away. That phenomenon fortified Hobson’s belief that some day the psi talent might develop into a forceful means of defense or offense. So far, nothing of the sort had happened. Hobson felt helpless and hopeless.

THE invaders had reached the island. They spread cautiously through its woods. There was no opposition, no sight or sound of the local population. Here and there stretched empty slit trenches and deserted strong points; with a few firearms these people could have put up a good tight. But Hobson sensed they had only moved off deeper among the trees. There they waited, and felt—almost safe.

The village lay well within the island beside a small stream. The huts, mostly of concrete block and banked-up earth, had rifle slits for defense, but they were unmanned. Walks and vegetable gardens filled the spaces among the huts. The locals had built well and tended carefully—but had abandoned everything immediately to the invaders.

A few of the buildings were roofed or doored with sheets of metal, some of which were oddly curved. Acting as a garden fence were enormous blades like those of the rotor of a troop-carrying helicopter.

“Hey, Colonel. Look here!”

A man was pointing at a thin metal door. Peeling paint revealed part of a vast yellow star—the Asiatics’ aircraft insignia.

“The damn gooks!” Men looked about them with the alert anger of those who meet respected rivals in new territory.

“It don’t figure. Colonel. Our ‘copter guys said the people they saw here were white and a few black.”

“Maybe the gooks keep’em as slaves.”

“Them Asiatics wouldn’t build a place like this!”

That last argument, Hobson thought, was convincing. He had seen an Asiatic settlement or two, and they had looked like concentration camps. The huts and gardens of this village showed too much individuality to be under Asiatic authority. But why were they undefended?

LaPorte, with a look of growing concern, was counting helicopter blades. There were enough of them to have carried in a considerable number of the Asiatics. LaPorte looked closely at Hobson, who shrugged and shook his head. The people he could sense hiding confidently in the woods seemed not at all like yellow troops.

The colonel set most of his men in a defensive perimeter around the village, then ordered a small crew into the huts to check for booby traps.

The doors were standing open. Inside the huts there were some evidences of hasty departure but little of value had been left in sight. LaPorte temporarily forbade looting; it could be done in an organized way after the locals were definitely taken care of.

“Hey, Colonel, we caught one of ’em! Says he wants to talk to you.”

Hobson focused on the thin little man being led into the village between two New Americans. The captive’s fear was obvious even to normal senses.

“Wants to talk, does he?” LaPorte looked the prisoner up and down. “Well, I won’t mind if he talks.”

LaPorte led the way into a hut already searched for booby traps. He relaxed in a chair, his boots among the dishes on a table. Hobson entered reluctantly and took a stand at one side of the single room, hoping desperately that this would be a short and mild interrogation. The heavy window shutters were open, letting in spring air and sunshine.

The prisoner pushed stumbling into the hut by the soldiers was about forty years old, not starved-looking but naturally scrawny. His clothes were not worth stealing. His gaze slid away from Hobson’s, fell to the floor before LaPorte’s. One big New American, a dedicated sadist, waited in the doorway behind the man.

LaPorte pretended to yawn and stretch. “Where are your people?”

“Off—off there in the woods. H-hiding. They’ll come back p-pretty soon. I—I have to talk to you first.”

The prisoner was all swamping waves of fear, which was natural enough—or was it? It did not feel to Hobson quite like fear of physical pain. Hobson kept alert for any mass change in the emotional climate outside the hut.

LaPorte made the noise he used fora laugh. “You have to talk? Are you the leader, then?”

“No, no.” The little man radiated positive disgust at the suggestion, a negation of ambition as strong as any Hobson had ever detected. “No, they just—sent me to talk. My name’s Joe Norwood.”

“Well, I’m just delighted, Joe Norwood. Did they send you to talk to the Asiatics when they came here?”

“Yes.”

“When you scared off those gooks, which way did they go?” And LaPorte guffawed.

NORWOOD sneaked a look over his shoulder at the bulky, grinning guard. “Please—look—let me tell what they said to tell, first. Then I’ll answer anything I can.”

“Who’s they?”

A nod over a thin shoulder. “Some—some of the folks back there. They’re smarter about things than I am.”

“All right. What’s this great message?”

“I’m supposed to tell you about—life.” Norwood made the word important.

LaPorte’s eyes flicked over to Hobson, who made the agreed-upon signal that everything was as it seemed, so far as he could tell. Hobson could nearly always detect the emotional traces of a lie, or the odd and unnamed things that accompanied the use of a psi power.

Norwood spoke quickly, trying to get out his message. “Life as a whole—it spreads out, you know. It tries to fill every bit of space everywhere on Earth. Some—some guys think one reason men have brains is so they can spread life further some day, out to other planets and—and stars and places.”

The message had been memorized—in essence, not word for word—and delivery of it was a labor of love. Norwood stood taller as he spoke it.

“Once—let me see—once in England a long time back there was a kind of beetle. Birds were its natural enemy, but it was just the same color as the bark of the trees it lived on. The birds had a hard time seeing it; they couldn’t kill off all the beetles, or even most of them.”

The colonel was receiving philosophy and beetles with mounting irritation. But with a certain satisfaction, too. Probably he was now convinced that he faced a community of sweet talking religious nuts who had sent this fanatic to convert him.

“But then the factories came,” said the fanatic. “And the smoke darkened the trees, and the birds could see the beetles and eat them.”

LaPorte said: “So the beetles sent one fruity beetle to talk to the birds. Get to the point, hey?” The guard behind Norwood laughed obsequiously.

Norwood was fearfully determined. “No, no. Some of the beetles, maybe one in a thousand, had always been darker than the others. Now the dark ones matched the bark and the light ones didn’t and finally the—uh—the whole species of beetle was dark. Only one in a thousand was light. I’m not telling this right!” Norwood looked around as if for help, clenching his thin hands. “I’ve got to convince you. They said I might be able to!”

LaPorte now looked like an actor in a comedy doing the slow-bum bit, sitting there with a pasted-on smile. But he was not acting and none of it was comedy to Hobson. He had the sickening thought that this was going to be a bad interrogation. Hobson doubted that he could stand to watch it. Soon it would begin, the real questioning: How many men have you? How many guns? Gasoline? Ammunition? Food? Where? And the beating would start, to make sure the answers were right, and just on general principles. What can I do about it, Hobson moaned to himself. Nothing, his rising anger answered; you have no guts to do anything, you miserable, crawling . . .

“What happened to the Asiatics, you obscenity?” LaPorte was smiling. Hobson could smell the cesspool boiling up behind that happy face.

Norwood closed his eyes for a moment, radiating fear to Hobson, but also determination and a tremulous anger. “The yellow soldiers came here and said we’d have to obey them. Right at the start they hurt some of us, for no reason at all . . . Let me try to say it this way. Life defends itself, see? Every way it can. Every kind of animal has some defense against its natural enemies. A man has no natural enemy except other men, the brains of other men. But now some men are a danger to all of life!”

Sudden suspicion flared in the colonel’s mind; his boots thumped to the floor. “Can you read emotions?” he barked. “Predict reactions? Raise fires?” He ran quickly through the short list of known psi talents. “Can anybody here do these things?”

“No, no.” Norwood shook his head. He glanced over at Hobson and seemed about to smile, as if finally guessing Hobson’s function. Now Hobson, in his increasing shame and self-disgust, would have I dared to lie to LaPorte. But he could think of no lie that would help Norwood or his people. Hobson signaled honestly that the prisoner was telling the truth.

LaPorte leaned forward in his chair. “Now this is your last chance to stay in one piece, mister. Talk straight and tell me where the gooks went. We know they were here.”

Tell him, tell him, pleaded Hobson in his own mind. If this turns into a bad interrogation, I won’t be able to stand by. I’ll go wild and get myself killed.

NORWOOD, cringing but still determined, recited memorized words like a last desperate incantation against evil. “You have to listen! Life defends itself against the power of one human brain by using another human brain. Life doesn’t care about individuals—it feeds on itself all the time anyway. Uh—a feedback set-up—”

La Porte’s anger passed critical mass. But as he opened his mouth to speak there came a cry from outside the hut. The cry of a woman in pain or trouble: “Joe, Joe!”

The dominant emotions out there were not those of an attacking force, which Hobson would have noticed sooner, but an intense interlocked web of fear and lust, hate and guilt, emanating from a handful of people.

Norwood spun around to face the open doorway of the hut. The massive guard blocked his way like a stone column, grinning, pushing a pistol barrel up under Norwood’s chin. But the little man, and Hobson, could see past the guard to the outside. There a young woman struggled in the grip of two soldiers who were dragging her into the village. Again she cried out: “Joe!”

“My wife,” whispered Norwood. He broadcast despair, and rising fury.

“Watch what comes next,” grunted LaPorte, his good cheer returning.

Hobson knew suddenly, with a detached wonder at his own final courage, that he had had it, that he was casting his own small vote here and now against the New Third Reich. His fingers closed on his pistol. His gaze was on the middle button of Colonel LaPorte’s jacket.

But from the corner of his eye, Hobson saw Norwood reaching up for the guard’s gun. Hobson hesitated, thinking: shoot the guard first, he has his gun drawn . . . then shoot LaPorte . . . then remember to save one bullet.

Norwood hardly looked capable of making a quick forceful grab and he was not attempting one, just reaching up his hand . . .

. . . and time stood still for Hobson as something new to him came in a great wave against his extra sense, something he could compare to the psi he knew only as the ocean tide might be compared to the wake of a motorboat. Hobson stood frozen, his gun half drawn, watching the brawny guard topple stiffly backward, relaxing his grip on his weapon as Norwood’s fingers closed on it.

Hobson thought the fabric of the universe was tearing apart. He could only wait like an awed child, vaguely aware of Norwood ignoring him, ignoring LaPorte, Norwood fumbling inexpertly with the gun and stalked out of the hut, his small chin jutting in anger. Men’s voices began to yell outside the hut, first near, then far away. There were no shots, no sounds of fighting.

The tide of—something—receded slowly from Hobson’s perception. The fabric of the universe was stable and familiar once more. The sun shone brightly through the open windows of the hut. A fly cruised in, then unconcernedly left through the doorway.

Everything was quiet. Even LaPorte. Any awareness of the colonel had been blasted from Hobson’s consciousness by the awesome feat he had witnessed, but now he forced himself to turn.

LaPorte lay back dead in his chair, apparently unwounded, eyes wide, mouth slack, the pasted smile gone with everything that had been behind it. His right hand was clutching at his gun holster.

The quiet was profound. Staring at the dead figure, Hobson tried to comprehend. His extra sense was still numbed by whatever had happened, as his eyes might have been dazzled by glaring light. He could not tell what was going on outside.

He found that, for the moment at least, he did not much care. He finally finished drawing his pistol, looked at it, then dropped it back into the holster. He walked out slowly into the sun, stepping over the motionless legs of the fallen guard.

There were dead New Americans scattered everywhere, quite a number of them. Joe Norwood stood a few yards from the hut, his arms around his wife, his face on her shoulder, the gun hanging in his hand as if forgotten.

“Joe, it was my fault, not yours,” the woman was saying in low, comforting tones. “I wanted to stay near you. But I wasn’t careful enough, and they found me . . . it’s all right, Joe. It was their own fault.” She noticed Hobson as he walked slowly toward them. She fell silent a moment, then went on consoling. “A lot of them ran away, Joe. And here’s one who didn’t mean you any harm. He can join us now.”

Norwood looked around and Hobson saw tears in his eyes. Hobson stood there waiting, not really expecting to go on living from one moment to the next.

“I wanted to explain things,” said Norwood, staring Into space. “I just came right out and told the yellow soldiers, but they didn’t believe me. This time I tried to go slow, give the whole picture, but it didn’t help. If only I could talk better. If only I could explain!”

“Explain about—you?” Hobson asked. Suddenly it came to him that he was beginning to understand. He felt tired and shaky, now that it seemed he might be going on living.

Norwood spoke in a dry whisper. “Anyone who decides to do something that will hurt me, dies. Dies right there and then.” He looked at Hobson. “When I was a boy, I saw another kid draw back his arm to throw an icy snowball.” He screamed at Hobson suddenly, “When I was five, my father tried to spank me!”

“Hush, Joe. Hush. It’s all right now.”

Norwood’s eyes wandered again. “I would have killed myself before now, I think. But the war came. A lot of people have died, trying to hurt me . . . so now I think I do some good. I hope to God I do some good.”

The woman stroked him. “You do, Joe. You keep us all safe.”

Hobson looked up at the bright blue sky of Earth, and saw in it a kind of hope.

INHUMAN ERROR

Can a perfect imitation of a human be done by a perfect machine?

When the dreadnought Hamilcar Barca came out of the inhuman world of plus-space into the blue-white glare of Meitner’s sun, the forty men and women of the dreadnought’s crew were taut at their battle stations, not knowing whether or not the whole berserker fleet would be around them as they emerged. But then they were in normal space, seconds of time were ticking calmly by, and there were only the stars and galaxies to be seen—no implacable, inanimate killers coming to the attack. The tautness eased a little.

Captain Liao, strapped firmly into his combat chair in the center of the dreadnought’s bridge, had brought his ship back into normal space as close to Meitner’s sun as he dared—operating on interstellar, faster-than-light, c-plus drive in a gravitational field this strong was dangerous, to put it mildly—but the orbit of the one planet of the system worth being concerned about was still tens of millions of kilometers closer to the central sun. It was known simply as Meitner’s planet, and was the one rock in the system habitable in terms of gravity and temperature.

Before his ship had been ten standard seconds in normal space, Liao had begun to focus a remotely controlled telescope to bring the planet into close view on a screen that hung before him on the bridge. Luck had brought him to the same side of the sun that the planet happened to be on; it showed under magnification on the screen as a thin, illuminated crescent, covered with fluffy-looking perpetual clouds. Somewhere beneath those clouds a human colony of about ten thousand people dwelt, for the most part under the shelter of one huge ceramic dome. The colonists had begun work on the titanic project of converting the planet’s ammonia atmosphere to a breathable one of nitrogen and oxygen. Meanwhile, they held the planet as an outpost of some importance for the interstellar community of all Earth-descended men.

There were no flares of battle visible in space around the planet, but still, Liao lost no time in transmitting a message on the standard radio and laser communications frequencies. “Meitner’s planet, calling Meitner’s. This is the dreadnought Hamilcar Barca. Are you under attack? Do you need immediate assistance?”

There came no immediate answer, nor could one be expected for several minutes, the time required for signals traveling at the speed of light to reach the planet, and for an answer to be returned.

Into Liao’s earphones now came the voice of his detection and ranging officer, “Captain, we have three ships in view.” On the bridge there now sprang to life a three-dimensional holographic presentation, showing Liao the situation as accurately as the dreadnought’s far-ranging detection systems and elaborate combat computers could diagram it.

One ship, appearing as a small bright dot with attached numerical coordinates, was hanging relatively motionless in space, nearly on a line between Hamilcar Barca and Meitner’s planet. The symbol chosen for it indicated that this was probably a sizable craft, though not nearly as massive as the dreadnought. The other two ships visible in the presentation were much smaller, according to the mass-detector readings on them. They were also both considerably closer to the planet, and moving toward it at velocities that would let them land on it, if that was their intention, in less than an hour.

What these three ships were up to, and whether they were controlled by human beings or berserker machines, was not immediately apparent. After sizing up the situation for a few seconds, Liao ordered fall speed toward the planet—fall speed, of course, in the sense of remaining in normal space and thus traveling much slower than light—and to each of the three ships in view he ordered the same message beamed: “Identify yourself, or be destroyed.”

The threat was no bluff. No one took chances where berserker machines were concerned. They were an armada of robot spaceships and supporting devices built by some unknown and long-vanished race to fight in some interstellar war that had reached its forgotten conclusion while men on Earth were wielding spears against the saber-toothed tiger. Though the war for which the berserker machines had been made was long since over, still they fought on across the galaxy, replicating and repairing themselves endlessly, learning new strategies and tactics, refining their weapons to cope with their chief new enemy, Earth-descended man. The sole known basic in their fundamental programming was the destruction of all life, wherever and whenever they could find it.

Waiting for replies from the planet and the three ships, hoping fervently that the berserker fleet that was known to be on its way here had not already come and gone, leaving the helpless colony destroyed, Liao meanwhile studied his instruments critically. “Drive, this is captain. Can’t you get a little more speed on?”

The answer came into his earphones: “No sir, we’re on the red line now. Another kilometer per second and we’ll blow a power lamp, or worse. This is one heavy sun, and it’s got some dirty space around it.” The ship was running now on the same space-warping engines that carried it faster than light between the stars, but this deep within the huge gravitational well surrounding Meitner’s sun, the power that could be applied to them was severely restricted. The more so because here space was dirty, as the drive officer had said, meaning the interplanetary matter to be encountered within this system was comparatively dense. It boiled down to the fact that Liao had no hope of overtaking the two small vessels that fled ahead of him toward the planet. They, as it were, skimmed over shoals of particles that the dreadnought must plow through, flirted with reefs of drive-wrecking gravitational potential that it must approach more cautiously, and rode more lightly the waves of the solar wind that streamed outward as always from a sun.

Now the minimum time in which the largest, nearest vessel might have replied to the dreadnought’s challenge had elapsed. No reply had been received. Liao ordered the challenge repeated continuously.

The communications officer was speaking. “Answer from the planet, captain. It’s coming in code. I mean the simple standard dot-dash code, sir, like emergency signals. There’s a lot of noise around—maybe that’s the only way they can get a signal through.” Powerfully and crudely modulated dot-and-dash signals could carry intelligence through under conditions where more advanced forms of modulation were simply lost.

Communications was on the ball; already, they had the decoded words flowing across a big screen on the bridge:

DREADNOUGHT ARE WE EVER GLAD TO HEAR FROM YOU STOP ONE OF THE TWO LITTLE SHIPS CLOSING IN ON US MUST BE A BERSERKER STOP BETTER TRANSMIT TO US IN DOTDASH CODE STOP LOTS OF NOISE BECAUSE SUN IS FLARING AND WE COULDNT READ YOUR SIGNAL VERY WELL

The letters abruptly stopped flowing across the screen. The voice of the communications officer said: “Big burst of noise, captain. Signals from the planet are going to be cut off entirely for a little while. This sun is a very active flare star. Just a moment, sir. Now we’re getting voice and video transmissions beamed to us from both small ships. But the signals from both ships are so garbled by noise we can’t make anything out of them.”

“Beam back to them in dot-dash, tell them they’ll have to answer us that way. Repeat our warnings that they must identify themselves. And keep trying to find out what the ground wants to tell us.” The captain turned his head to look over at his second officer in the adjoining combat chair. “What’d you think of that, Miller? ‘One of the two little ships must be a berserker?’ ”

Miller, by nature a somewhat morose man, only shook his head gloomily, and saved his speech to make a factual report. “Sir, I’ve been working on identifying the two active ships. The one nearest the planet is so small it seems to be nothing more than a lifeboat. Extrapolating backward from its present course and position indicates it may well have come from the third ship—the one that’s drifting—a couple of hours ago.

“The second little ship is a true interstellar vessel; could be a one-man courier ship, or even somebody’s private yacht. Or a berserker, of course.” The enemy came in all shapes and sizes.

Still no answer had been returned from the large, drifting ship, though the dreadnought was continuing to beam threatening messages to her, now in dot-dash code. Detection reported now that she was spinning slowly around her longest axis, consistent with the theory that she was some kind of derelict. Liao checked again on the state of communications with the planet, but they were still cut off by noise.

“Here’s something, Captain. Dot-and-dash is coming in from the supposed courier. Standard code as before, coming at moderate manual speed.”

Immediately, more letters began to flow across the number one screen on the bridge:

I AM METION CHONGJIN COMMANDING THE ONE MAN COURIER ETRURIA EIGHT DAYS OUT OF ESTEEL STOP CANNOT TURN ASIDE I AM CARRYING VITAL DEFENSE COMPONENT FOR COLONY STOP LIFEBOAT APPROX 12 MILLION KM TO MY PORT AND AHEAD IS SAID BY GROUND TO BE CLAIMING TO BE THE SHIP CARRYING THE DEFENSE COMPONENT THEREFORE IT MUST REALLY BE A BERSERKER STOP IT WILL PROBABLY REACH COLONY AND BOMB OR BAM IT BEFORE I GET THERE SO YOU MUST DESTROY IT REPEAT DESTROY THE BERSERKER QUOTE LIFEBOAT UNQUOTE MOST URGENT THAT YOU HIT IT SOON END MESSAGE

Miller made a faint whistling noise. “Sounds fairly convincing, chief.” During briefing back at base, three standard days ago, they had been informed of the fact that the colony on Meitner’s planet was awaiting shipment of a space inverter to complete and activate its defensive system of protective force-screens and beam-projecting weapons. Until the inverter could be brought from Esteel and installed, the colony was virtually defenseless; the dreadnought had been dispatched to offer it some interim protection.

Laao was giving orders to Armament to lock the C-plus cannon of the main battery onto the lifeboat. “But fire only on my command.” Turning back to the second, he said: “Yes, fairly convincing. But the berserkers might have found out somehow that the space inverter was being rushed here. They might even have intercepted and taken over the courier carrying it. We can’t see who we’re talking to on that ship or hear his voice. It might have been a berserker machine that just tapped out that message to us.

The communications officer was on again. “Bridge, we have the first coded reply from the lifeboat coming in now. Here it comes on your screen.”

WE ARE HENRI SAKAI AND WINIFRED ISPAHAN CARRYING THE DEFENSE MATERIAL NAMELY SPACE INVERTER THEY NEED ON THE PLANET STOP OUR SHIP THE WILHELMINA FROM ESTEEL WAS SHOT UP BY THE BERSERKER TWO DAYS AGO WHEN IT ALMOST CAUGHT US STOP THE BERSERKER OR ANOTHER ONE IS HERE NOW ABOUT 11 MILLION KM TO OUR STARBOARD AND A LITTLE BEHIND US STOP YOU MUST KEEP IT FROM GETTING TO US OR TO THE PLANET WHERE MAYBE IT COULD RAM THE DOME END MESSAGE

“Communications,” the captain snapped, “how is this coming through? I mean, does this also seem like someone sending manual code?”

“No sir, this is very rapid and regular. But if you mean, captain, does that prove they’re not human, it doesn’t. In a lifeboat the transmitter often has a voice-to-code converter built in.”

“And conversely, a berserker could send slowly and somewhat irregularly, like a man, if it wanted to. Thank you.” The captain pondered in silence for a little while.

“Sir,” Miller suggested, “maybe we’d better order both small ships to stop, until we can overtake and board them.”

The captain turned his head to look at him steadily, but remained silent.

Miller, slightly flustered, took thought and then corrected himself. “Now I see the problem more fully, sir. You can’t do that. If one of them is really carrying the space inverter, you don’t dare delay him for a minute. A berserker fleet may materialize in-system here at any moment, and is virtually certain to arrive within the next six to eight hours. Our ship alone won’t be able to do more than hit and run when that happens. Our fleet can’t get here for another day. The colony will never survive the interval without its space inverter installed.”

“Right. Even if I sent a fast launch ahead to board and inspect those ships, the delay would be too much to risk. And that’s not all, Second. Tell me this. Is this conceivably just some misunderstanding? Could both of those ships really be manned by human beings?”

“Not a chance,” the second answered promptly. “They both claim to be carrying the space inverter, and that can’t be true. Those things just aren’t ordered or built in duplicate or triplicate, and they both claim to be bringing it from the planet Esteel. The next question is, can both of our little targets be berserkers, trying to psych us into letting one of them get through? I’ll keep trying to reach the ground, see if they can shed any more light on this.”

“Good going.”

In their earphones communications said: “Here’s more from the ship that calls itself Itruria, bridge.”

“Put it right on our screen.”

REPEAT COLONY SAYS LIFEBOAT IS ALSO CLAIMING TO BE THE HUMAN ONE STOP IT MUST BE A BERSERKER IMPERATIVE STOP YOU STOP THEM STOP WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO TO PROVE IM HUMAN STOP REPEAT MY NAME IS METION CHONGJIN STOP IM ALONE ON BOARD HERE STOP WIFE AND KIDS AT HOME ON ESTEEL IF THAT MEANS ANYTHING TO YOU STOP REPEAT HOW CAN I PROVE TO YOU IM HUMAN END MESSAGE

“Easy,” Captain Liao muttered to himself. “Father a human child. Compose a decent symphony. In the next forty minutes or so.” That was approximately the time left before at least one of the ships would be able to reach the planet. Liao’s mind was racing to formulate possible tests, but getting nowhere. Berserkers had awesome powers, not only as physical fighting machines, but as computers. He was not certain that a battery of psychologists with several days to work would be able to say with certainty whether it was a living man or a lying Berserker that answered their questions in dot-dash.

Time passed. Hurtling through silence and near-emptiness at many kilometers per second, the ships very slowly changed the positions of their symbols in the huge holographic presentation on the bridge.

“Now more from the Wilhelmina’s lifeboat, captain.”

“Run that on the top of the screen, will you, and put any more that comes in from Etruria on the bottom.”

HENRI AND WINIFRED HERE STOP COLONY TELLS US OTHER SHIP IS CLAIMING TO BE FROM ESTEEL CARRYING DEFENSE COMPONENTS AND REQUESTING LANDING INSTRUCTIONS STOP IT MUST BE LYING STOP IT MUST BE A BERSERKER STOP MAYBE THE SAME ONE THAT ATTACKED OUR SHIP TWO DAYS AGO . . .

The message ran on and despite some irrelevancies and redundancies it outlined a story. The Wilhelmina (if the story was to be believed) had been on an interstellar cruise, carrying a number of young people on some kind of student exchange voyage or postgraduate trip. Somewhere on the outskirts of the solar system that contained the heavily industrialized planet Esteel, a courier ship bound out for Meitner’s had approached and hailed the Wilhelmina, had in fact commandeered her to complete the courier’s mission. Berserkers were in pursuit of the courier and had already damaged her extensively.

. . . AND WE WERE ON OUR WAY HERE WITH THE INVERTER WHEN ONE OF THE BERSERKERS ALMOST CAUGHT UP AGAIN TWO STANDARD DAYS AGO STOP WILHELMINA WAS BADLY SHOT UP THEN CREW ALL KILLED STOP WE ARE ONLY TWO LEFT ALIVE STOP TWO HISTORY STUDENTS STOP WE HAD TERRIBLE PROBLEMS ASTROGATING HERE BUT MADE IT STOP LIVING IN LIFEBOAT AND WORKING RIDDLED SHIP IN SPACESUITS STOP YOU CANT STOP US NOW AFTER ALL WEVE BEEN THROUGH STOP YOU MUST DESTROY THE BERSERKER SHIP STOP WE WILL REACH PLANET BEFORE IT DOES I THINK BUT IT WILL BE ABLE TO HIT THE DOME BEFORE THE SPACE INVERTER CAN BE INSTALLED STOP WE ARE GOING TO KEEP SENDING UNTIL YOU ARE CONVINCED WERE HUMAN . . .

The message from the lifeboat went on, somewhat more repetitiously now. And at the same time, on the bottom of the screen, more words from Etruria flowed in:

IVE TRIED TO CATCH THE BERSERKER LIFEBOAT AND SHOOT IT DOWN BUT I CANT STOP ITS UP TO YOU TO STOP IT STOP WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO TO PROVE IM HUMAN . . .

The second officer sighed lightly to himself, wondering if, after all, he really wanted his own command.

“Communications, beam this out,” the captain was ordering. “Tell them both to keep talking and give us their life histories. Birth, family, education, the works. Tell them both they’d better make it good if they want to live.” On buttons on the arm of his chair he punched out an order for tea, and a moment later it came to him there through a little door, hot in a capped cup with drinking tube attached. “I’ve got an idea, Second. You study the background this so-called Esteeler spaceman Metion Chongjin gives us. Think up someplace you might have known him. We’ll introduce you to him as an old friend, see how he copes.”

“Good idea, chief.”

“Communications here again, bridge. We’ve finally gotten another clear answer back from the ground. It’s coining through now. We’ll put it in the middle of your number one screen.”

. . . IN ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION NO THEY CANT BOTH BE BERSERKERS STOP AN HOUR AGO THERE WAS A BRIEF LETUP IN THE NOISE AND WE GOT ONE CLEAR LOOK AT A HUMAN MALE FACE ALIVE AND TALKING COGENTLY ANSWERING OUR QUESTIONS STOP NO POSSIBILITY THAT WAS A BERSERKER BUT UNFORTUNATELY BOTH SUSPECT SHIPS WERE SENDING ON THE SAME FREQ AND WE DONT KNOW FROM WHICH ONE THAT VOICE AND PICTURE CAME BUT WE DO KNOW THAT ONE OF THEM IS HUMAN . . .

“Damnation, how they’ve botched things up. Why didn’t they ask the two men to describe themselves, and see which description fit what they saw?”

“This is communications again, bridge. They may have tried asking that, sir, for all we know. We’ve lost contact with the ground again now, even on code. I guess the solar wind is heating up. Conditions in the ionosphere down there must be pretty fierce. Anyway, here’s a little more from the Etruria:

WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO TO PROVE IM HUMAN STOP RECITE POETRY STOP MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB STOP SAY PRAYERS I NEVER MEMORIZED ANY OF THEM STOP OKAY I GIVE UP STOP SHOOT US BOTH DOWN THEN END MESSAGE.

The second officer thumped a fist on the arm of his massive chair. “A berserker would say that, knowing that its fleet was coming, and the colony would be defenseless if we stopped the space inverter from getting to it.”

Liao shrugged, and helped himself to a massive slug of tea. “But a human might say that, too, being willing to die to give the colony a few more hours of life. A human might hope that given a few more hours some miracle might come along, like the human fleet getting here first after all. I’m afraid that statement didn’t prove a thing.”

“I . . . guess it didn’t.”

After another good slug of tea, Liao put in a call to astrogation.

“Chief astrogator here, sir.”

“Barbara, have you been listening in on this? Good. Tell me, could those two supposed history students, probably knowing little science or technology, have brought that ship in here? Specifically, could they have astrogated for two days, maybe fifty or sixty light years, without getting lost? I suppose the ship’s autopilot was knocked out. They said they were living in the lifeboat and working the damaged ship in spacesuits.”

“Captain, I’ve been pondering that claim, too, and I just don’t know. I can’t say definitely that it would be impossible. If we knew just how badly that ship was damaged, what they had to work with, we could make a better guess.”

The captain looked back at his situation hologram. The apparently inert hulk that he had been told was the Wilhelmina was considerably closer now, lying as it did almost in Hamilcar Barca’s path toward Meitner’s planet. The dreadnought was going to pass fairly near the other ship within the next few minutes. “As to that, maybe we can find out something. Keep listening in, Barbara.” Turning to the second officer, Liao ordered: “You’re going to be taking over the bridge shortly, Miller. I want us to match velocities with that supposed hulk ahead, and then I’m going over to her, in hopes of learning something.”

“It might be booby-trapped, Captain.”

“Then we’ll have an answer, won’t we? But I don’t expect an answer will be found that easily. Also, get me a reading on exactly how much time we have left to decide which ship we’re going to fire on.”

“I’ve already had the computers going on that, sir. As of now, thirty-two and a quarter minutes. Then the lifeboat will either be down in atmosphere or around on the other side of the planet, and out of effective range in either case. The courier will take a little longer to get out of effective range, but . . . “He gestured helplessly.

“The courier being slower won’t help us. We have to decide in thirty-two minutes.”

“Chief, I just had an idea. Since the lifeboat is closer to the planet, if it was the berserker, wouldn’t it have tried before we got here to head off the courier from the planet . . . oh. No good. No offensive weapons on the lifeboat.”

“Right, except perhaps it has one bloody big bomb, meant for the colony, while the courier ship doubtless has some light armament, enough to deal with the lifeboat if it got in range. Still nothing proven, either way.”

In another minute the silent ship ahead was close enough for telescopes on the dreadnought to pick out her name by starlight. It was Wilhelmina, all right, emblazoned near one end of her cigarlike shape. The dreadnought matched velocities with her smoothly, and held position a couple of kilometers off. Just before getting into a launch with a squad of armed marines to go over and inspect her, Liao checked back with the bridge to see if anything was new.

“Better hear this before you go,” Miller told him. “I just introduced myself to Chongjin as an old buddy. This is his reply, quote: ‘I honestly don’t remember your name if I ever knew it, stop. If this was a test I guess I passed. Hurrah. Now get on with it and stop that berserker on the lifeboat . . .’ and then the signal faded out again. Chief, our communication problems are getting steadily worse. If we’re going to say anything more to either of those ships we’d better send it soon.”

“How many minutes left, Second?”

“Just eighteen, sir.”

“Don’t waste any of ‘em. The ship is yours.”

“I relieve you, sir.”

No signs of either life or berserker activity were apparent on the Wilhelmina as the launch crossed the space separating her from the dreadnought and docked, with a gentle clang of magnetic grapples. Now Liao could see that the reported damage was certainly a fact. Holes several meters in diameter had been torn in Wilhelmina‘s outer hull. Conditions inside could hardly be good.

Leaving one man with the launch, Liao led the rest of his small party in through one of the blasted holes, swimming weightlessly, propelling themselves by whatever they could grip. He had briefed the men to look for something, anything, that would prove or disprove the contention that humans had driven this ship for the last two days since she had been damaged.

Fifteen and a half minutes left.

The damage inside was quite as extensive as the condition of the hull had indicated. Their suit lights augmenting the sharp beams that Meitner’s distant sun threw into the airless interior, the boarding party spread out, keeping in touch by means of their suit radios. This had undoubtedly been a passenger ship. Much of the interior was meant as living quarters, divided into single and double cabins, with accommodations for a couple of dozen people. What furnishings remained suggested luxury. So far, everything said by the lifeboat’s occupant was being proved true, but Liao as yet had no clear evidence regarding that occupant’s humanity, nor even a firm idea of what evidence he was looking for. He could only hope the evidence was here, and that he would recognize it at first sight.

The interior of the ship was totally airless now, having been effectively opened to the stars by the repeated use of some kind of penetration weapon. The ruin was much cleaner than any similarly damaged structure on a planet’s surface could be. Loose debris had been carried out of the ship with escaping air, or separated from her when her drive took her outside of normal space and time, between the stars.

“Look here, Captain.” The lieutenant in charge of the marine squad was beckoning to him.

Near the center of the slender ship the lieutenant had found a place where a wound bigger than any of the others had pierced in, creating, in effect, an enormous skylight over what had been one of the largest compartments on board. Probably it had been a lounge or refectory for the passengers and crew. Since the ship was damaged, this ruined room had evidently provided the most convenient observation platform for whom-ever or whatever had been in control. A small, wide-angle telescope, and a tubular electronic spectroscope, battery-powered and made for use in vacuum, had been roughly but effectively clamped to the jagged upper edge of what had been one of the lounge’s interior walls, and now formed a parapet against infinity.

The lieutenant was swiveling the instruments on their mountings. “Captain, these look like emergency equipment from a lifeboat. Would a berserker machine have needed to use these, or would it have gear of its own?”

The captain stood beside him. “When a berserker puts a prize crew on a ship, it uses man-sized, almost android machines for the job. It’s just more convenient for the machines that way, I suppose—more efficient. So they could quite easily use instruments designed for humans.” He swung his legs to put his magnetic boots against the lounge’s soft floor, so that they held him lightly to the steel deck beneath, and stared at the instruments, trying to force more meaning from them.

Men kept on searching the ship, probing everywhere, coming and going to report results (or rather, the lack of them) to Liao at his impromptu command post in what had been the lounge. Two marines had broken open a jammed door and found a small airless room containing a dead man who wore a space suit. Cause of death was not immediately apparent, but the uniform collar visible through the helmet’s faceplate indicated that the man had been a member of Wilhelmina’s crew. And in an area of considerable damage near the lounge another suitless body was discovered wedged among twisted structural members. This corpse had probably been frozen near absolute zero for several days and exposed to vacuum for an equal length of time. Its death had also been violent. After all this it was hard to be sure, but Liao thought that the body had once been that of a young girl who had been wearing a fancy party dress when she met her end.

Liao could imagine a full scenario now, or rather two of them. Both began with the shipload of students, eighteen or twenty of them, perhaps, enjoying their interstellar trip. Surely such a cruise had been a momentous event in their lives. Maybe they had been partying as they either entered or were about to leave the solar system containing the planet Esteel. And then, according to Scenario One, out of the deep night of space came the desperate plea for help from the damaged and harried courier, hotly pursued by berserkers that were not expected to be in this part of the galaxy at all.

The students would have had to remain on board the Wilhelmina, there being no place for them to get off, when she was commandeered to carry the space inverter on to Meitner’s planet. Then urgent flight, and two days from Meitner’s a berserker almost caught up, tracking and finding and shooting holes in Wilhelmina, somewhere in the great labyrinth of space and dust and stars and time, in which the little worlds of men were strange and isolated phenomena. And then the two heroic survivors, Henri and Winifred, finding a way to push on somehow.

Scenario Two diverged from that version early on; it was simpler and, at first glance, more credible. Instead of the Wilhelmina being hailed by a courier and pressed into military service, she was simply jumped by berserkers somewhere, her crew and passengers efficiently wiped out, her battered body driven on here ahead of the main berserker fleet in a ploy to forestall the installation of the space inverter and demolish the colony before any help could reach it. Scenario One was the more heroic and romantic, Two the more prosaic and businesslike. The trouble was that the real world was not committed to behaving in either style but went on its way indifferently.

A man was just now back from inspecting Wilhelmina’s control room. “Almost a total loss in there, sir, except for the drive controls and their directional settings. Artificial gravity’s gone, astrogator’s position is wiped out, and the autopilot, too. Drive itself seems all right, as far as I can tell without trying it.”

“Don’t bother. Thank you, mister.”

Another man came to report, drifting upside down before the captain in the lack of gravity. “Starboard forward lifeboat’s been launched, captain. Others are all still in place, no signs of having been lived in. Eight-passenger models.”

“Thank you,” Liao said courteously. These facts told him nothing new. Twelve minutes left now, before he must select a target and give the command to fire. In his magnetic boots he stood before the telescope and spectroscope as their user had done, and looked out at the stars.

The slow rotation of the Wilhelmina brought the dreadnought into view, and Liao flicked his suit radio to the intership channel. “Bridge, this is captain. Someone tell me just how big that space inverter is. Could two untrained people manhandle it and its packing into one of those little eight-passenger lifeboats?”

“This is the armaments officer, sir,” an answer came back promptly. “I used to work in ground installations, and I’ve handled those things. I could put my arms around the biggest space inverter ever made, and it wouldn’t mass more than fifty kilograms. It’s not the size makes ‘em rare and hard to come by, it’s the complexity. Makes a regular drive unit or artificial gravity generator look like nothing.”

“All right. Thank you. Astrogation, are you there?”

“Listening in, sir.”

“Good. Barbara, the regular astrogator’s gear on this ship seems to have been wiped out. What we have then is two history students or whatever, with unknown astronomical competence, working their way here from someplace two days off, in a series of c-plus jumps. We’ve found their instruments, apparently all they used—simple telescope and spectroscope. You’ve been thinking it over. Now, how about it? Possible?”

There was a pause. “Possible, yes. I can’t say more than that on what you’ve given me.”

“I’m not convinced it’s possible. With umpteen thousand stars to look at, their patterns changing every time you jump, how could you hope to find the one you wanted to work toward?” Ten minutes. Inspiration struck. “Listen! Why couldn’t they have shoved off in the lifeboat, two days ago, and used its autopilot?”

Barbara’s voice was careful, as always. “To answer your last question first, chief, the lifeboat autopilots on civilian ships are usually not adjustable to give you a choice of goals; they just bring you out in the nearest place where you are likely to be found. No good for either people or berserkers intent on coming to Meitner’s system. And if Wilhelmina’s drive is working, it could take them between the stars faster than a lifeboat could.

“To answer your first question, the lifeboats carry aids for the amateur astrogator, such as spectral records of thousands of key stars, kept on microfilm. Also often provided is an electronic scanning spectroscope of the type you seem to have found there. The star records are indexed by basic spectral type—you know, types O, B, A, F, Q, K, and so on. Type O stars, for example, are quite rare in this neck of the woods, so if you just scanned for them, you would cut down tremendously on the number of stars to be looked at closely for identification. There are large drawbacks to such a system of astrogation, but on the other hand, with a little luck, one might go a long way using it. If the two students are real people, though, I’ll bet at least one of them knows some astronomy.”

“Thank you,” Liao said carefully, once again. He glanced around him. The marines were still busy, flashing their lights on everything and poking into every crevice. Eight minutes. He thought he could keep the time in his head now, not needing a chronometer.

People had lived in this lounge, or rec room, or whatever it had been, and enjoyed themselves. The wall to which the astrogation instruments were now fastened had earlier been decorated, or burdened, with numerous graffiti of the kinds students seemed always to generate. Many of the messages, Liao saw now, were in English, an ancient and honorable language still fairly widely taught. From his own schooldays he remembered enough to be able to read it fairly well, helping himself out with an occasional guess.

CAPTAIN AHAB CHASES ALEWIVES, said one message proceeding boldly across the wall at an easy reading height. The first and third words of that were certainly English, but the meaning of the whole eluded him. Captain Liao chases shadows, he thought, and hunches. What else is left?

Here was another:

OSS AND HIS NOBLE CLASSMATES WISH THE WHOLE WORLD

And then nothingness, the remainder of the message having gone when Oss and his noble classmates went and the upper half of this wall went with them.

“Here, Captain! Look!” A marine was beckoning wildly.

The writing he was pointing to was low down on the wall and inconspicuous, made with a thinner writing instrument than most of the other graffiti had been. It said simply: Henri & Winifred

Liao looked at it, first with a jumping hope in his heart, and then with a sagging sensation that had rapidly become all too familiar. He rubbed at the writing with his suited thumb; nothing much came off He said: “Can anyone tell me in seven minutes whether this was put here after the air went out of the ship? If so, it would seem to prove that Henri and Winifred were still around then. Otherwise, it proves nothing.” If the berserker had been here, it could easily have seen those names and retained them in its effortless, lifeless memory, and used them when it had to construct a scenario.

“Where are Henri and Winifred now, that is the question,” Liao said to the lieutenant, who came drifting near, evidently wondering, as they all must be, what to do next. “Maybe that was Winifred back there in the party dress.”

The marine answered: “Sir, that might have been Henri, for all that I could tell.” He went on directing his men, and waiting for the captain to tell him what else was to be done.

A little distance to one side of the names, an English message in the same script and apparently made with the same writing instrument went down the wall like this:

Oh

Kiss

Be

Me

A

Right

Fine

Now

Girl

Sweetie

Liao was willing to bet that that particular message wasn’t written by anyone wearing a space helmet. But no, he wouldn’t make such a bet, not really. If he tried, he could easily enough picture the two young people, rubbing faceplates and laughing, momentarily able to forget the dead wedged in the twisted girders a few meters away. Something about that message nagged at his memory, though. Could it be the first line of an English poem he had forgotten?

The slow turn of the torn ship was bringing the dreadnought into view again. “Bridge, this is captain. Tell me anything that’s new.”

“Sir, here’s a little more that came in clear from the lifeboat. I quote: ‘This is Winifred talking now, stop. We’re going on being human even if you don’t believe us, stop.’ some more repetitious stuff, Captain, and then this: ‘While Henri was navigating I would come out from the lifeboat with him and he started trying to teach me about the stars, stop. We wrote our names there on the wall under the telescope, stop. If you care to look you’ll find them, stop. Of course that doesn’t prove anything does it, stop. If I had lenses for eyes I could have read those names there and remembered them . . .’ It cuts off again there, chief, buried in noise.”

“Second, confirm my reading of how much time we have left to decide.”

“Three minutes forty seconds, sir. That’s cutting it thin.”

“Thanks.” Liao fell silent, looking off across the universe. It offered him no help.

“Sir! Sir! I may have something here.” It was the marine who had found the names; he was still closely examining the wall.

Looking at the wall where the man had aimed his helmet light, near the deck below the mounted instruments, Liao beheld a set of small, grayish, indented scratches, about half a meter apart.

“Sir, some machine coming here repeatedly to use the scopes might well have made these markings on the wall, whereas a man or woman in a spacesuit would not have left such marks, in my opinion, sir.”

“I see.” Looking at the marks, which might have been made by anything—maybe furniture banged into the wall during that final party—Liao felt an irrational anger at the marine. But of course the man was only trying to help. He had a duty to put forward any possibly useful idea that came into his head. “I’m not sure these were made by a berserker, spaceman, but it’s something to think about. How much time have we left, Second?

“Just under three minutes, sir. Standing by, ready to fire at target of your choice, sir. Pleading messages still coming in intermittently from both ships, nothing new in them.”

“All right.” The only reasonable hope of winning was to guess and take the fifty-fifty chance. If he let both ships go on, the bad one was certain to ram into the colony and destroy it before the other could deliver the key to the defenses and it could be installed. If he destroyed both ships, the odds were ten to one or worse that the berserker fleet would be here shortly and accomplish the same ruin upon a colony deprived of any chance of protecting itself.

Liao adjusted his throat muscles so that his voice, when it came out, would be firm and certain, and then he flipped a coin in his mind. Well, not really. There were the indented scratches on the bulkhead, perhaps not so meaningless after all, and there was the story of the two students’ struggle to get here, perhaps a little too fantastic. “Hit the lifeboat,” he said then, decisively. “Give it another two minutes, but if no new evidence turns up, let go at it with the main turret. Under no circumstances delay enough to let it reach the planet.”

“Understand, sir,” said Miller’s voice. “Fire at the lifeboat two minutes from your order.”

He would repeat the order to fire, emphatically, when the time was up, so that there could be no possible confusion as to where responsibility lay. “Lieutenant, let’s get the men back to the launch. Continue to keep your eyes open on the way, for anything . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

The last one to leave the ruined lounge-observatory, Liao looked at the place once more before following the marines back through the ship. Oh, be a fine girl, Winifred, when the slug from the c-plus cannon comes. But if I have guessed wrong and it is coming for you, at least you’ll never see it. Just no more for you. No more Henri and no more lessons about the stars.

The stars . . .

Oh, be a fine girl . . .

O, B, A, F, G, K . . .

“Second officer!”

“Sir!”

“Cancel my previous order! Let the lifeboat land. Hit the Etruria! Unload on that bloody damned berserker with everything we’ve got, right now!”

“Yessir!”

Long before Liao got back to the launch, the c-plus cannon volleyed. Their firing was invisible, and inaudible here in airlessness, but still he and the others felt the energies released pass twistily through all their bones. Now the huge leaden slugs would begin slapping in and out of normal space, homing on their tiny target, far outracing light in their trajectories toward Meitner’s planet. The slugs would be traveling now like de Broglie wavicles, one aspect matter with its mass magnified awesomely by Einsteinian velocity, one aspect waves of not much more than mathematics, The molecules of lead churned internally with phase velocities greater than that of light.

Liao was back on the dreadnought’s bridge before laggard light brought the faint flash of destruction back.

“Direct hit, Captain.” There was no need to amplify on that.

“Good shot, Arms.”

And then, only a little later, a message got through the planet’s ionospheric noise to tell them that the two people with the space inverter were safely down.

Within a few hours the berserker fleet appeared in-system, found an armed and ready colony, with Hamilcar Barca hanging by for heavy hit-and-run support. They skirmished briefly, and then decided to decline battle and depart. A few hours after that, the human fleet arrived and decided to pause for some refitting. And then Captain Liao had a chance to get down into the domed colony and talk to two people who wanted very much to meet him.

“So,” he was explaining, soon after the first round of mutual congratulations had been completed, “when I at last recognized the mnemonic on the wall for what it was, I knew that not only had Henri and Winny been there, but that he had in fact been teaching her something about astronomical spectroscopy at that very place beside the instruments—therefore, after the ship was damaged.”

Henri was shaking his youthful head, with the air of one still marveling at it all. “Yes, now I can remember putting the mnemonic thing down, showing her how to remember the order of spectral types. I guess we use mnemonics all the time without thinking about it much. Every good boy does fine, for the musical notes. Bad boys race our young girls—that one’s in electronics.”

The captain nodded. “Thirty days hath September. And Barbara Celarent that the logicians still use now and then. Berserkers, with their perfect memories, probably don’t even know what mnemonics are, much less need them. Anyway, if the berserker had been on the Wilhelmina, it would’ve had no reason to leave false clues. No way it could have guessed that I was coming to look things over.”

Winifred took him by the hand. “Captain, you’ve given us our lives, you know. What can we ever do for you?”

“Well. For a start . . .” He slipped into some English he had recently practiced: “You might be a fine girl, sweetie, and . . .”

LOVE CONQUERS ALL

“And then, as the French book saith, the queen and Launcelot were together. And whether they were abed or at other manner of disports, me list not hereof make no mention, for love at that time was not as is nowadays . . .”

—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur

I

ARTHUR Rodney walked through his little California house, calling his wife’s name, but only music answered him. The hidden sensors of the hifi system marked Art’s passage from room to room and as he passed the system changed the music for him, blending each piece more or less smoothly into the next. When he entered the children’s room, where the two beds and a scattering of toys reposed in a somehow ominous stillness, there came from the speakers a cacophony of metallic sounds that bore an intended resemblance to a baby’s cry. Little Timmy and Paula had wanted that teenage stuff for their room, and he and Rita had agreed, though the kids were really far too young, but never mind that now, no one was there. The discordant metallic baby cries cut off when Art went out.

In the master bedroom he was fed the music of pulse-beating drums, fit for a wild and wiggling dance that must find its appropriate end upon the bed. No one here, either. The glass in his wide windows (looking out over his neighbors’ desert landscaping, complete with plastic iguana) had darkened itself almost to opacity against the force of the California sun, but the sun was getting into the bedroom anyway, reflecting blue and green through the depths of the inside-outside swimming pool. By this water-mottled light that quivered in all of the bedroom’s many mirrors Art saw that a small piece of white paper had been propped against the massage unit on his bedside table. He tossed his box of handcarved Staunton chessmen rattling onto the large circular bed, set his digital tournament clock down gently, and picked up the note, which was in Rita’s handwriting.

Darling, please believe that I love you as much as ever, but I must go away for a time. The kids are with me and will be okay. I really am pregnant again and Dr. Kuang says he has had to report my pregnancy to Family Planning. It’s the law, as he says, and I guess that I can’t expect him not to report it. I will call you or at least write you soon so try not to worry.        Love, Rita

As he read, Art’s knees went weak with fear confirmed, and he sank down on the edge of the round bed. He glanced up at the overhead mirror, but learned nothing from the sight of his own slightly pudgy, dark-bearded face, pale and enigmatic in its shock. He looked down again and re-read the note three times and dropped it on the bed beside him.

Putting his weight on the bed had quickened the heartbeat of the hifi drums, though if he sat still the system would soon switch to soothing, lulling music and in a little while he would be granted silence. He could get up and turn the thing off but he felt too numb. Where to look for escape, for guidance? Where else but on the short bookshelf built into the wall beside his bed? The words of Eros are those of the true heart. Shortly he reached over and pulled out a well-fingered gray volume with Philosophy of Pleasure lettered on the cover in a beautiful and lively pink. But then he sat there holding the book unopened.

It was obvious that Rita had run off to her sister-in-law in Chicago. She would not have taken the children to leave them with anyone else. Rita meant to go into hiding somewhere and bear an unwanted child, even if she had to put it up for secret adoption later. Just the kind of thing that sister-in-law Ann would encourage her to do; quite likely it was Ann who had suggested the scheme to her in the first place . . . thought faded out into pain and shock. His wife was gone.

How far pregnant was she? It couldn’t be more than ten weeks or so, he thought. He tried to remember when she had last gone off the pills for a menstrual week, but he had trouble keeping the dates in his mind, because his mind wanted to forget it.

So it would have to be about six months before she bore the child, assuming she could remain in hiding and get away with it. If instead, as seemed more likely, the FP caught up with her and gave her her abortion anyway, she would probably go to jail. So it was in the cases one read about. In any case she was going to be gone for months. As well as being the mother of his children she was Art’s favorite sex partner, too. He opened the book and began to make plans for the changes in his sex life that would be brought about by Rita’s prolonged absence. After half a minute he realized what he was doing, threw the book aside, and went back to re-reading the note, hoping without real hope to find some less terrible interpretation of its words. But there was none.

PULLING the phoneplate toward him on the bedside table, Art started to punch out the number of Ann and George Parr in Chicago. They had recently moved into a new house there—business at George’s karate school was evidently good—and the new number was still fresh in Art’s mind. He had looked it up for Rita last weekend. But when he was halfway through punching, he hesitated and then hit the blankoff key. Rita had been gone only a few hours at the most, and probably had not yet reached Chicago. Talking to George was not likely to do any good since Ann would be the one most actively helping Rita—and arguing with Ann about anything was, in Art’s experience, certain to be futile. Anyway it was not the kind of thing Art wanted to talk about over the phone. Best not to call at all but to go straight after Rita and for her own good compel her to behave sensibly. And the sooner he caught up with her the better.

He reached for the phoneplate again, and this time tapped out the number of the Chess Director’s Office, in the mid-California branch of the Bureau of Arts and Games. There was a wait, with evanescent rainbow static on the plate. Then a man’s florid face appeared.

“Oh, hi, Art,” the face said. “What’s up?”

“Listen, Nick, I just called to say you’d better not pair me in for the first -round of the Quarterly. I’m taking a little trip and I don’t know if I’ll be back in time.”

“Oh, okay. Let me know about the August Monthly, hey?”

“Certainly I will. Go’th Eros.”

“Goodbye.”

For a moment Art continued to stare at the blank phone. In spite of his larger worries he found himself irritated by the Chess Director’s offhand manner. Bureau of Arts people were supposed to believe in the importance of what they were doing; they should show at least a little formal regret when a rated master withdrew from an event. Nick had seemed as indifferent as a factory foreman checking attendance.

The thought of factories reminded Art that in courtesy he should call his own place of employment before he left, but the chime of an incoming call forestalled him.

On the plate appeared the face of a young woman, full-featured and of flawless skin. “May I speak to Ms. Rita Rodney, please? I’m Ms. Lazenby of the Bureau of Family Planning.”

An unpleasant contraction in the stomach. “This is her husband. Ah, Rita’s not in the house right now. Ah, she’s out shopping somewhere, I expect.”

Ms. Lazenby smiled, a friendly smile that could become sympathetic if the need arose. “Actually, the reason for my call concerns you too, Mr. Rodney, and your two children.” She paused just enough for Art to have gotten a question in if he had felt the need. “Will you ask Rita to call me back as soon as possible if she returns home during business hours? We’re open until five. Or otherwise to call me in the morning at her earliest convenience?”

“I will, yes, I’ll tell her that.”

“Thank you,” Ms. Lazenby blanked off.

Art sat clutching the phone. Dr. Kuang had smelled trouble coming, had called in Family Planning right away, reporting Rita as a problem case. Call back tomorrow, Ms. Lazenby, and you’ll probably get no answer, and you’ll be very suspicious that something’s up. But call back two or three days from now and you’ll have a willing Rita here to talk to you, I promise you that. Or maybe you’ll never have to call again, maybe by then the Certificate of Abortion will already have been fed into your FP computer banks.

What next? Oh yes, his job. Art punched out the number of the Macrotron Electronics plant in San Bernardino, and then the personal extension number of Pete Kinelo, his boss in the test-equipment maintenance and engineering department.

The plate showed the Macrotron trademark, and then the taped image of a girl who was nude or nearly so, it being impossible to tell at the moment because she was partly concealed behind a receptionist’s desk. A small vase of roses stood before each breast, so that her nipples were just concealed. “One moment, please,” the girl said, smiling pleasantly. “Your party has not yet answered his or her personal phone. We are continuing to page your party; thank you for waiting.”

The music of Swan Lake began. The girl affixed an electrostatically clinging sequin to each of her nipples, coyly displayed a G-string and wriggled into it, and then writhed up from behind her desk in an erotic dance. In a moment she was dancing along the shore of a lily-pond, and then in and out of the curtain of a small waterfall.

Art waited impatiently, looking at his watch. There were several other calls that he should make. One was the bank, to see how much cash was readily available, in other words how much Rita had taken; fortunately he had come home today with the check for first prize in the Weekly in his pocket and so should at least be able to buy a ticket to Chicago. Another call would be to the Office of Transcontinental Transit, to see how soon he could get a seat on a tube train.

At last the dancing girl was replaced by the face of Pete Kinelo. “Art?”

“Hello, Pete. I can take next week off, too.”

“Oh, good.” Pete beamed through his thick glasses. “Then I can bring another substitute engineer in for a week. That’ll put us in real good shape on employee utilization. Say, there’s nothing wrong, is there?”

“No, no. Ah, I’ve been winning quite a few prizes and I’ve got my nerve up. I’m going to try some of the big tournaments coming up around Chicago.”

“Great. Fine. Be sure and let me know if you’re coming back week after next.”

THE transcontinental train, a string of sealed metal cylinders almost windowless and almost silent in their movement, hurtled eastward through its buried tube at a steady supersonic speed. On three-dimensional stages at the front of each car, feature-length tridi programs were being shown, a hangover from the days before competition with the airlines had been virtually ended by the latter’s susceptibility to hijacking, accidents, and weather. In Art’s car the life-sized, solid-looking, almost-real-looking images were enacting a play set in Victorian England, the locale of a lot of fiction these days.

The story had something to do with the romantic pursuit of a prim London nursemaid by a young leftenant (in the play they pronounced it that way) freshly returned from India. Obsessed as Art was with his own real problems, still the trashiness of the play aroused in him an automatic disgust. There was no apparent limit to what they could get away with showing these days. Every second or third shot, or so it seemed, was a long lingering closeup of the heroine, showing her swathed almost from chin to ankles in clothing that was not only loose-fitting but practically opaque. Only just enough of her shape and skin showed through to keep the Bureau of Arts censors from clamping down. Doubtless the producer would argue that in real Victorian England nothing had showed through, but, thank Eros, that was evidently not yet accepted as a valid argument by the censors and the courts. Ann, when he met her in Chicago, would probably be wearing something like this heroine’s clothes. Rita wouldn’t, though. She had better not.

What would be the very best first words for him to say when he caught up with her? What kind of look should he put on his face? He thought a moment and then decided there was no use trying to plan in such detail. Details would have to depend on the circumstances of the moment, on what her own attitude seemed to be. Of course he would have to be absolutely inflexible about terminating the pregnancy. No room for argument there. Rita could be stubborn, as he well knew, but this time he would be more stubborn. Maybe if he had taken a firm stand earlier, things would never have come to this pass . . . maybe. The trouble was that he could discern no single turning point; they had just drifted into it somehow.

Of course, pregnancies did happen. There was really no shame in getting pregnant, for the third or the thirteenth time, the only shame was in not doing something about it. Yes, pregnancies happened, all right. They certainly happened to Rita, ever since he had known her.

He had been teaching high school electronics when he met her; she was a student, though not in any of his classes, and eight years younger than he. They had been casual acquaintances until the Senior Prom for Rita’s class, at which Art had happened to be one of the chaperones. At the Prom—it had been held aboard a tube-train basically like this one, only a local, chartered to keep running in a closed loop around mid-California for a couple of days—the graduates in keeping with tradition broke out of their own age-group sexually for the first time, and Rita had spent a good deal of the Prom in the bedroom car with Art. He had felt a little guilty later about being distracted so much from his chaperone’s duties, for there was some stargazing trouble in the baggage car—well, that sort of thing had happened before, and would again.

A FEW WEEKS after the Prom, coming back from a vacation trip, he had accidentally—as he then thought—run into Rita while visiting the school for a one-day seminar. Later he was to realize with a warm glow that she had made a determined effort to locate and meet him on that day. In the course of casual conversation she mentioned to Art that she was pregnant.

“That’s too bad,” he commiserated mildly. In general he disliked hearing people talk about their ailments. “Do you suppose it happened at the Prom?”

“I think it must have happened there.” Rita smiled at him, and brushed back her naturally blond, almost platinum hair, for which Art had declared his admiration a number of times, and which today seemed to have been newly curled. “Maybe it’s a little present from you.”

“I suppose it quite possibly is. The Prom was great fun, though, wasn’t it? I hope your escort wasn’t too put out with you for spending so much time with me.”

Rita dismissed the problems of her Prom escort with a wave. “Great fun!” she agreed, but in the next moment smiled a little sadly. “Now it looks like I’m leaving my good old school days all behind.”

Art was surprised. “Surely you’re going on to junior college at least?”

“I had planned to, but a pregnancy sort of changes everything. At least for me it does.”

“Why, won’t you be over all that before the fall term starts? Are there complications?”

“I’m going to have the baby, Art.” About halfway through the Prom her calling him Mr. Rodney had stopped forever.

“You’re what? I’m sorry, it’s none of my business, of course, but . . .”

“Going to bear the baby.” This calm determination was a side of her he had not seen before.

“But why?”

His shock dampened her enthusiasm, if that was the right word for her attitude, but not her determination. “That’s what my parents keep asking. It’s hard for me to explain to anyone. It’s as if there were already a tiny baby inside me, depending on me. Though I can’t even feel it moving yet, of course.”

“Hormonal changes are proceeding early, I suppose,” Art muttered, to be saying something. As he had already said, it was none of his business—unless, he realized with a shattering silent flash, unless he wanted it to be. He had tried, as he thought, a lot of things in his life, but never marriage. Now it was getting to be time for marriage. And he liked this girl, liked her better each time he saw her.

He said: “I suppose your parents have pointed out to you that having a child already is bound to make things harder for you when the time comes when you want to get married. Not to mention the difficulty of raising it by yourself.”

“I know, you’re absolutely right.” Her frown admitted that it was a problem. “I guess most men want to raise two kids that they think they might have fathered themselves.”

And she, too, was right of course. It was a rare man who was certain of being the biological father of his wife’s two children. It took the trouble and expense of genetic testing to make sure, and few were that concerned.

You might as well accept the first two healthy ones that came and raise them as your own. If one of your neighbors’ kids was especially strong or smart or handsome, why you might nurse a hope that you were the sire. Conversely, if your wife gave birth to a child that seemed a little inferior, even though acceptably free of defects and certified human, you might tell yourself that someone else had fathered it.

The really pertinent question was, would Rita Parr make him a good wife? From observing his married friends Art knew that you always wound up spending a lot of time with a marriage partner. It was also an important step to take because getting into and out of marriages all the time added up to a lot of trouble and expense—and you wanted the children, when they came, to have a stable home.

He said: “Rita, I wish I knew you better.”

They started dating regularly. He got to know her parents, and her likable brother George. He considered the idea of marrying her from every angle, or tried to. On the few occasions when he saw his own parents he hinted at the prospect of coming marriage, and detected a mild glow of approval in response, which, of course, was as much as he could expect; it had been a long time since what he did was of deep concern to them, or vice versa.

He and Rita were together more or less constantly for several months. He became convinced that she wanted very much to marry him. They quarreled, and then made up. In the spring her Timmy was born and Art sent flowers to her at the hospital and a few days later came to pay her a visit at home.

Rita, sitting in a rocking chair in her bedroom and feeding the baby from a nursing bottle, said to Art: “You know, I still think he’s yours. I have that feeling about him, and I’m glad.”

Studying the small wizened face, still bruised from the violence of birth, Art could find in it no resemblance to himself. But he realized that he was hoping to find a resemblance and, giving this some solitary thought a little later, he decided it was enough to tip the balance. A month later he and Rita, now legally, financially, and socially united in the bonds of matrimony, moved into a new apartment with little Tim.

AFTER marriage, as before, he and Rita preferred to spend most of their free time in each other’s company. After marriage Art experienced only one or two orgasms per month with anyone except his wife. And while he wasn’t sure, he had the impression that Rita’s sex life was even more intensely concentrated on him. He should have made a point of finding out. Such concentration of lust was one of the danger signals that the popular psychologists were always harping on, a sign that one’s sexual attitudes might be somehow warped.

They had been married, quite happily for the most part, for two years when Rita surprised him with the announcement that she was pregnant again. It was really a surprise because they had both been taking anti-fertility pills, which certainly should have given protection. But, as Dr. Kuang explained, the pills were not one hundred per cent certain. Anyway the pregnancy was no real problem; they had caught it quite early and he could do a menstrual extraction right now in his office if they wished.

Oh, no. Although Rita, too, seemed surprised and not at all as calm as she had been about her first pregnancy, she was if anything even more determined that this one should produce a baby. To her the fetus was a person inside her belly, as if someone had taken a real baby and stuffed it in there. Her new baby was alive already, and she must protect its life. As far as Art could tell she had not absorbed this dogma from any of the few religious or “humanistic” sects which still maintained it as official doctrine. She had arrived at it by herself.

Naturally Art saw more of her during this pregnancy than he had during the previous one, and by now could more easily read her moods and guess her thoughts. What he saw this time began to frighten him. The first time he had thought she was simply being stubborn on the subject, acting in an immature, adolescent way. This time she seemed in the grip of some enormous force, a force bent on using her for making babies. Indeed, she refused even to discuss the possibility of getting an abortion. She even refused to take the tests that would predict whether her fetus was likely to grow into a deformed child; deformed or not, she said, it was her baby still. If Art persisted in trying to talk to her about it she quivered and suffered, seemingly outraged to the point of pain.

Well, Art had always more or less expected his wife to have two children. And people said it was more convenient if your two kids were about the same age. They could play together, and you got the diapering and the rest of the messy business over with once and for all. Since Rita was so determined to have this one, why not?

A couple of days after Paula was born Art called Dr. Kuang to talk over the best means of insuring against another pregnancy. Frowning from the phoneplate, Dr. Kuang told him that Rita’s psychological profile showed that surgical sterilization was definitely not indicated in her case. He would prescribe new pills for her. “And of course having a vasectomy yourself will help. And, with male partners who are known to be strongly virile, she should choose sex activities other than copulation.”

One trouble was that sex activities other than copulation were not much fun for her. One good thing was that she so rarely brought any man but Art to orgasm. He hastily got his vasectomy; in six months or so the residual sperm in his ductwork would presumably all have had their chance and he would be permanently and completely sterile.

He had done all he could, or so he thought. Meanwhile he had switched from teaching electronics to working at it, for Macrotron; also he had begun to spend more time away from home, improving his chess rating and winning more prizes. And then one day he came home and found a note.

II

THE suggestive dialogue of the pseudo-Victorian play nagged at Art’s attention, pulling him away from the fruitless game of trying to guess how he might better have managed his life with Rita in the past. He looked for the set of earplugs that should have been attached to his seat, intending to drown out the play with music or a soothing waterfall of gentle noise, but found to his disgust that one plug of the set was missing. Its connector of steel-jacketed wire had been neatly severed by some vandal, who seemed to have gone to the trouble of using a cutting torch.

He was not going to be able to avoid hearing the struggle of Phyllis and Rodney (the nursemaid and leftenant, respectively) against their mutual lust, a struggle in which he was sure they would eventually be victorious, but at least nothing forced him to watch the repulsive sight. Art now kept his face turned most of the time to the small window beside his luxurious chair. In the buried tunnel there was of course nothing to be seen except advertisements, the kind that were now starting to be called flickersigns. These were glowing adjurations that might be a hundred kilometers long, lettered in elongated characters designed to be intelligible only to one hurtling past them at a distance of a few centimeters and a speed of hundreds of kilometers per hour.

Art was reading one such ad, without absorbing an iota of its meaning, when without warning the train was thrown into violent deceleration. It was braking at emergency rate from jet-aircraft speeds, seemingly coming to a halt. In an instant the great plastic flowers of airbags bloomed before each seat, their multiple release coming with the sound of a single explosion.

A second after they had bloomed, the bags were soft and deflating once again, sagging into plastic detumescence. “Phyllis,” said the tridi leftenant’s voice, loud and clear in the first breathless moment of alarm among the passengers, who were only now reacting to being slammed in the face by plastic bags, “I am not an animal, to hurl myself upon you.”

Phyllis’s reply was drowned out by a general commotion among the passengers. In Art’s car about half the seats were occupied, and the people were now exchanging exclamations, questions, and comments. As Art rubbed his nose where the bag had stung him a woman seated across the aisle looked over and asked him, almost pleadingly: “It must be just something wrong with the machinery, don’t you think?”

Bracing his arms on the seat before him, against the continuing heavy deceleration, he tried to give her a reassuring nod. “Yes, it must be.” But he recalled the missing earplug; the Transon tubes were not immune to vandals, not any more at least, and therefore probably not immune to apes, or to terrorists of one persuasion or another. Glancing at his wristwatch, he determined that at the moment the train must be somewhere under the Great Plains, only a few hundred kilometers from his destination. Now the deceleration eased markedly. A look at the blur of tunnel wall and flickersign outside the little window indicated that the train was now moving not much faster than an automobile.

As the train continued to slow toward a full stop, the tridi play was interrupted. A man’s voice, strong and reassuring and probably recorded, issued from the speakers on the momentarily empty stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm.” The voice paused as some decision-making process, human or electronic, selected the next phrase. “A technical difficulty has arisen. To minimize your inconvenience until your trip can be safely resumed, you will shortly be conducted to the surface by company guides. When the train stops, please remain seated until the guides arrive at your car. There is no cause for alarm.”

Immediately a girl’s tremulous voice added: “Rodney? I—I’ve always wanted a—a large family.” A moment later Phyllis’s image, as heavily garmented as ever, was back on stage, confronting the image of Rodney, who was standing in such a way that his uniform’s flat lack of any bulging codpiece could not very well be ignored.

The airbags by now were nothing but wrinkled draperies on the seats. The passengers, who had quieted to get whatever news they could from the recorded announcement, were now babbling again and some of them were standing up. The woman across the aisle was once more addressing herself to Art but he could not hear her in the general noise. Now she got up and approached Art, to stand hovering over him. He unthinkingly took this as a sexual invitation and began to caress her hips, bare except for a G-string, but she gave only a perfunctory wiggle of response and he realized that her intent was to peer out of the little window beside his seat.

“Is that water in the tunnel?” she asked in a loud, clear voice, looking out. Other passengers heard her words and echoed them, and alarm began to mount.

Art took a turn at the window, trying to squint down at a difficult angle along a curve of dim concrete. The tunnel was circular in cross-section, as was the train, which filled it nearly from side to side and top to bottom. It was hard to see anything but Art thought there was at least some wetness on the concrete wall.

“Yes, it was a Thug who strangled him,” groaned a grayhaired senior officer in full dress uniform upon the stage, “but I am the one really responsible for my son’s death.”

AND THAT was the last of the play. The phantoms vanished from the stage again, as behind it, with a hiss and a clack, an emergency door opened in the front of the car. In a moment a man in a blue translucent uniform had come through the door and climbed upon the stage. Looking at first no more real than Rodney or Phyllis, he wore a hard helmet of blue plastic, with a clear faceplate, and carried some kind of pistol holstered at his belt. His stern expression eased into a professional smile as soon as a quick glance through the car assured him that all was peaceful. He stepped down briskly in front of the stage, making room for two more men, similarly dressed and armed, to mount it from behind.

The man who had entered first, and who wore stripes on his sleeves like those of a military sergeant, leaned casually on one of the front seats and addressed the passengers in a loud but friendly voice. “There’s nothing to worry about, folks. The company regrets the inconvenience. We’ll just have to walk a few steps through the tunnel, that’s all. Will you all follow me, please, through the front of the train?”

Eager as they were to get out of confinement and on their way again, the sergeant had no trouble keeping them moving past him and onto the stage and over it, while his two aides went on to the rear of the car, presumably to start evacuating people from the next car in that direction.

“Nossir, there’s no flood,” the sergeant reassured a man who had mounted the stage ahead of Art. “It’s no more than a puddle. Just some kind of equipment breakdown. Keep moving. This way out, please.”

A few people were burdened with enough luggage to make getting over the stage a struggle for them, and Art felt like offering a hand, but he would have had to back up or push ahead in line to do so, and he judged it better to keep the evacuation moving smoothly. So far all was going well enough, considering.

He and his fellow passengers had to pass through two cars ahead of the one they had ridden in, surmounting another tridi stage in each, before an open door in the very front of the train let them descend a short, steep, folding emergency stair into the darkness of the tunnel. Maybe the sergeant had spoken too soon about there being no flood, or maybe he had simply been lying to prevent a panic. From somewhere ahead, beyond the point where the file of passengers preceding Art vanished in the gloom, there came a sound of heavy splashing, as of wading, shuffling feet. And now he could distinguish another watery noise, as of a minor waterfall. The tunnel seemed to slope downward gradually ahead of the train, so it was natural that the water, wherever it was coming from, would be deeper there.

A pebble’s toss ahead of Art one of the guides—they were really Transom’s uniformed private police, of course—was shining a pocket flash about, and someone else was doing the same thing much farther on. The only other illumination was that which shone feebly from inside the train, and from a dim red glowing line embedded in the tunnel wall and stretching crooked and broken into an indeterminate distance. Art realized that this was an elongated flickersign symbol; if he had been compelled to guess, he would have said it was a question mark.

Following the vague form of the passenger ahead, he felt the water rise to slosh about his ankles. Now in the glow of the flickersign he spotted the water leak, or at least one leak. From a small crack in the concrete near the tunnel’s curving top, a kitchen-faucet-sized stream came burbling down the concavity of wall. But at least swimming was not going to be necessary, for now just ahead another sergeant with another pocket flash was lighting the file of evacuees into a doorway set into the curved concrete of the tunnel wall. When Art neared the door he saw just beyond it the steep steps of a service stair ascending in a tight helix.

He climbed in the wet footprints of those ahead. At a landing that Art hoped was near the top, but later proved to have been approximately halfway up, another policeman was stationed to urge them on. It was a good thing there was nobody in a wheelchair. “Step right up, folks. When you’re all assembled on the surface we’ll see you safely across the river, then get you on another train. Sorry for the inconvenience. This way . . .”

A black woman past middle age, gasping from the climb, wearing gigantic false breasts and an obvious merkin of false pubic hair beneath her transparent gown, stepped out of line to argue. “River? What river is this? Why were we halted here, for sex’s sake?”

“It’s the Mississippi, lady,” said the officer, politely gesturing her upward, then when she still delayed, taking her arm with easy firmness and propelling her along. “You’re almost in Chicago. Don’t be alarmed, we’ll get you through in good shape.”

Maybe three hundred kilometers to go, Art estimated. As he climbed on, he could still hear the guide’s voice from behind: “Have to keep moving, folks. No telling how high the water’ll come up these stairs if the tunnel should collapse down there. Step along, please. If you should see a little light rioting on the surface, don’t let it throw you. Just assemble where you’re told, and we’ll see you through.”

OF COURSE there was adequate lighting on the stair, but still it was good to finally distinguish daylight coming from above. At its top the stair delivered its stream of refugees into a graceful low concrete structure that was open on three sides to the late summer afternoon. The structure looked as if it might serve as a picnic shelter on more peaceful days. It stood surrounded by a half-wooded, park-like area. The near bank of the wide, placid river was little more than a stone’s throw away, at the bottom of a broad gentle grassy slope. The sun was lowering over the woods behind Art’s back as he faced across the river toward a solid array of wooded bluffs that rose above the distant shore.

In and around the shelter lay many pieces of freshly splintered wood that might very recently have formed picnic tables and benches, and nearby a trash container lay on its side, meager contents scattered. But there were no rioters in sight. Some forty or fifty passengers with their luggage, apparently all who had preceded Art up from the tunnel onto the grass, were standing in loose formation close by the shelter, like some motley levee of inducted troops about to begin their training. A single uniformed policeman stood casually before them, giving them something to look at, at least. Three more police, one wearing inconspicuously on his collar what Art supposed was an officer’s insignia, were standing inside the shelter. One of these carried a radio buzzing with distant messages. With the three police was a shivering middle-aged man wearing a translucent coverall and thick, tough-looking clear boots with mud dried on them. For a moment Art thought that this man too was armed, but then he saw that the holstered object at his waist was an electronic calculator.

Following the gaze of these men, Art saw that the park was becoming not so peaceful after all. Down near the water people were emerging at a run from the concealment of some trees. The people were mostly men, running like clowns in twos and threes and half-dozens, whooping and waving. There were twenty or twenty-five of them altogether, and they might have been playing a game, or just scampering in high good spirits. One was waving a festoon of what appeared to be cables or plastic tubing.

The man with the calculator at his belt was talking rapidly to the police; with a little sideward glance he included Art in his audience, and went right on. “So we had our boat close in toward the west bank here, taking sediment samples, and just as I turned to say something to Carl, why pow, this rock went by my head and missed me by about a centimeter. And then I heard this mob up on the bank start yelling. Sex, once you hear a yell like that you know what it is, it means a bunch of people have all gone ape. Carl had his helmet off, see, but he still had his diving suit on, and it must have looked almost opaque and they must have thought we were from the monastery. I gunned the boat to get out from the shore, and then we must have hit something, a log or a piece of junk. When I came up for air that mob was heaving more rocks, there were splashes all around me. I ducked under and swam and waded, and came downstream about half a kilometer and climbed out here when I saw the uniforms. Never saw what happened to Carl. I hope he managed to grab his helmet and tank before he went under.”

The capering people near the riverbank had disappeared into the trees again.

“Looks like they’ve got her burning, finally,” one of the police said, squinting to the north, where the bank of the river on which they were standing mounted higher in tree-clothed bluffs. Rooted somewhere among the trees atop the bluffs, an ominously burgeoning growth of black smoke towered like the djinn of riot above the countryside.

“Must have been an old building,” another policeman remarked.

“Did someone say it was a monastery?” Art put in, shocked at the indication of bigotry without being surprised by it.

“Yes,” the river engineer (or whatever the man with his calculator was) answered. “Oh, not Church of Eros. One of the old Christian ones.”

“That’s hardly an excuse.” Art watched the plume of smoke grow fatter. All this time a continuing trickle of passengers was continuing to emerge from the stairhead and straggle into place in their loose formation on the green.

“Well, I live around here,” one of the police commented. “Not right for people to take the law into their own hands, but what can you expect? The rumor has been going around that the monkeymonks up there have been carrying on some kind of experiments with abortion specimens. Not just the kind where the scientists gain knowledge from them, but creating some kind of monsters. Chastity, I don’t believe all I hear, but how do you expect people to take it when they’re so mysterious?”

No one said anything for a little while. A poor attitude for even a private policeman to take, thought Art, practically condoning rioting and vandalism. But it would be futile to argue.

Shortly the engineer remarked: “Here come a couple more refugees.” Hiking across the inviting park, from the direction opposite the smoke, came a couple who had evidently been picnicking, for he carried a red plastic picnic cooler and she a small outdoors pack and a folded translucent blanket.

The man was tall, lean, thirtyish, and freshly sunburnt. The girl was a full-bodied brunette of eighteen or twenty. As they drew near, Art saw that what he had at first taken for sunglasses on her face were really artificial eyes of what must be an advanced design. They might have been opaquely dark sunglasses except that the thickness of their bulky frames was molded in flush to the skin, all around her eyes. She was neatly and modestly dressed in a sports bikini of the latest style, her translucent bra extended in twin peaks by finger-long cones of pinkish nipple-colored plastic.

As the couple approached the shelter, the man spoke to the police in a husky, somewhat hurried voice. “Officers, we’re very glad to see you. I hope you can provide us with some kind of escort back across the river, or get us on the train to Chicago if possible. Our boat was destroyed, you see.” The girl said nothing, looked around nervously, and stayed close to her companion. She looked at Art, but he had trouble reading her expression; the artificial eyes functioned like a mask. Faint cat’s-eye gleams shone in their dark lenses, and the plastic frames were studded with artificial jewels. Or could those stones possibly be genuine?

“Sure, you can come along,” the officer with the collar insignia said. “Got your boat too, hey?” He changed his position and stretched as the last rescued passenger, sitting in a wheelchair (so there had been one, after all) was heaved into view at the stairhead by a team of puffing police. “I guess we’re all here now. Let’s start getting these people over the water.”

THE TWO saved picnickers walked beside Art to join the other evacuees. As the whole group with its escort of police began to move, the girl let out a sudden, choked little cry, and Art saw her actually begin to tremble. Following the direction of her gaze, he beheld a new eruption of rioters boiling out of the woods and cutting across the passengers’ path, evidently with the intention of intercepting them before they could reach the river. Art now also saw in midstream a large launch that had evidently just been called from across the river and was now heading in to the near bank where a small dock waited at the end of the passengers’ present line of march.

The march continued. The officer barked an order or two, and his blue-uniformed men, now about a dozen strong, closed in beside the much more numerous troop of people they were convoying, their screen forming most tightly at the point where the threat was greatest.

There were perhaps thirty people in the mob approaching. Half a dozen or so were women, and these were screaming loudly, urging on the men. Most of the men wore the gaudily colored and oversized codpieces favored these days among the youth of the Basic Income class. One who was so garbed, a large, florid young man with close-set eyes, went right up to the police line and peered over uniformed shoulders at the shrinking sheep behind as if about to choose one for slaughter.

“Any triplet priests in there?” the florid one demanded. “Any sublimatin’ vivesectionists? We got one already, but there’s some more experiments we’d like to try.” He seemed on the point of trying to push his way through the protective line, and one of the bigger police shoved him roughly back. When he demonstrated anger at this treatment he found himself looking at a drawn handgun.

“We’re just passing through, bigmouth,” the policeman told him. “Now you just pull your jaw out of our way and let us pass.”

There were no firearms visible among the rioters, and indeed Art could not see that they carried weapons of any kind. The sight of the gun knocked them back almost like a physical force. Moving like the cells of some multiple organism, keeping together as if under the control of a single mind, they fell into retreat.

One we got already. The words echoed in Art’s mind. But maybe they were only brag and bluff.

The passengers with their convoy of police moved on unmolested toward the dock, which was now only about a hundred meters off. The immediate threat was apparently over but the girl with artificial eyes, walking beside Art, continued to breathe as if on the verge of hysteria. Her escort held her by the arm and kept speaking to her in a low voice, but his efforts to calm her had little effect.

The police, evidently to keep a prudent distance from a patch of dense woods into which the rioters had retreated, had bent the convoy’s line of march almost parallel to the river. Now in those infested woods another outbreak of shouting rose up, blended with the noises of running feet trampling the undergrowth. The girl moaned and moved away from the noise, leaning against Art like a frightened child. He put an arm around her full body and squeezed it in a polite caress. “My name’s Art, by the way. What’s yours?”

He would scarcely have been surprised to receive no answer, but one came. “Rosamond. Rosamond Jamison. Oh!”

Now from the woods came a man’s voice shouting, but words indistinguishable but pain, fear, and despair all blended in. The man who was walking on the other side of Rosamond Jamison froze in his tracks, so quickly that those walking behind him had trouble avoiding a collision. “That was Steve,” he said to himself in a low voice that Art nonetheless overheard distinctly. In another moment Rosamond’s escort had caught up with the police lieutenant and was grabbing at his shoulder. “Did you hear that? A man’s in trouble over there. Aren’t you going to do something?”

The voice shouted again, this time in terrible wordless agony.

The lieutenant, who had started to say one thing, began again with something else. “I’ve got my own job to do, getting these people safely on their way. That could be some kind of trick, just to get us into the woods.”

“No it isn’t. Didn’t you hear that scream just now? You think that could have been a trick?”

The lieutenant, inflexible, shook his head. “I’ve got my orders, my job. That’s it.”

“You can’t just go on.”

The lieutenant turned away.

The tall, sunburnt man, anxiety unabated, hurried back to Rosamond. “Here.” To her he gave the weighty-looking picnic cooler. She took it automatically and carried it with some difficulty as she continued moving forward with the refugee column. The man said to Art: “Try and look out for her, will you? See that she gets on a train to Chicago?”

“Of course, I’ll try to help. But what are you—?”

Muttering some last, unintelligible phrase over his shoulder, the man was gone. Moving with unexpected strength and speed, he had pushed his way through the police escort on the inland side and was running toward the woods before anyone but Art became aware of his intention.

“Halt!” the lieutenant bellowed, when he did catch on. “Come back here! Don’t be a sublimatin’ fool!”

The fleeing man did not pause or turn. In another moment he was out of sight in the woods. Rosamond, struggling forward with her picnic cooler, looked after her companion only briefly and then faced forward again, concentrating her efforts on keeping up with the convoy’s rapid pace. She was having a hard time doing so now. In the rear of the column shifts of volunteers were practically carrying the wheelchair and its terrified occupant.

Art put a hand on the cooler’s carrying grip. “Let me help.”

“Oh, thank you.” But she seemed reluctant to let him take the weight. When he did so, however, they made better time.

The boat, which was moored at the dock by , the time they got there, proved to be some sort of sight-seeing craft,, evidently commandeered for this occasion. With all the refugees aboard, it was quite crowded, and some had to sit or squat on the deck between rows of seats. Most of the police remained behind on shore, and as the boat pulled away from the dock Art saw them beginning to march in loose formation back up the slope toward the emergency exit from the tube. Other trains would be arriving behind his, Art realized.

ALONG the eastern, Illinois shore the woods looked wilder and less park-like than those of Iowa just left behind. When the boat scraped bottom on the eastern side, the police pilot made an announcement, straining to be cheerful. “Folks, will you all wait right here in this area, please? We have to take the boat back across the river and pick up some people from another eastbound train. Then we’ll get you all on your way to Chicago very shortly. Get off the boat promptly please, step right into the water there. It’s not deep.” There was no dock here on the eastern shore and one policeman was in the water himself, handing passengers off into the knee-deep Mississippi. Plenty of volunteers rallied around the wheelchair again, with grins and jokes. People were sometimes marvelous.

A few steps had to be taken on the oozy river bottom to reach the muddy shore. Once on solid ground most of the passengers gravitated inland, as if hoping, in spite of what the guides had said, that there might be another tube terminal right at hand. Thirty or forty meters inland a narrow unpaved road roughly paralleled the river, but traffic seemed nonexistent. Beyond the road and behind a wire fence, the tree-covered bluffs rose up unpromisingly. The passengers who had probed the farthest soon came back with unhopeful reports. There was apparently no place to go and nothing to do but wait as they had been told. No one knew where the point of access to the east-bound tunnel might be.

Art and Rosamond, having the cooler to carry and both of them lacking any desire for an aimless hike, remained somewhat behind most of the other passengers as the latter drifted up to hang around the road. The two of them sat down upon a grassy bank where the sun, now lowering close over Iowa, still shone brightly. Rosamond was quiet, and seemed less fearful now, though she was still looking intently back over the river.

“He’ll probably come over in the next boatload,” Art offered, trying to be comforting. “He’s probably all right and they’ll be able to pick him up and bring him along.”

She turned to him and reached across the cooler to tickle the palm of his hand, and smiled at him beneath her enigmatic eyes. “I think I would enjoy some sex right about now.”

“Of course.”

They spent an enjoyable ten minutes at it, with Art’s paper shirt spread over the rough grass beneath their bodies. Afterward as they lay together together relaxing Rosamond began to shiver; the sun was so low that it had lost its heat, and a cool breeze had come up. In a little while she sat up and pulled her discarded bikni on again but of course it was too small to provide any real warmth. Art picked up the paper shirt, now notably wrinkled and soiled, and held it out. “Afraid this is the best I can offer you. There doesn’t seem to be a clothing vendor anywhere around.”

“You’ll be cold, won’t you?”

“I’m a little fat.” He stood up and adjusted his codpiece and transparent trousers. “I guess that helps to keep one warm.”

Rosamond pulled on the shirt, and then sat down in the grass again with her legs crossed, feet and all tucked completely in under the garment so that it fell around her like a small tent. The shadow of a bush fell over her now and in the dulled light the shirt was practically opaque, and she was concealed and shapeless from the neck down. Now it was Art’s turn to shiver slightly, and his shiver was not caused entirely by the cold. Unwholesome thoughts had come unbidden to his mind. He controlled himself, however and, like a gentleman, looked away.

Just as he thought he had the temptation to repression really squelched it popped up again with a new ploy. The poor girl was still shivering, wasn’t she? He should do what he could to help, right? “Want my trousers?” he asked. It was incidental, he told himself, it was not important in this emergency, that removing the trousers would mean taking off the codpiece too and this would mean stripping his de-tumescent body of his proper sexual emphasis.

She appeared not to find anything wrong or suggestive of sublimation in his offer, but declined it all the same. “No, this is fine, thank you. You’ve been a wonderful help. I hope I can repay you some day.”

He slew a mosquito on his bare shoulder. The river before them was beginning to reproduce a sunset. Around them on the riverbank a number of the other stranded passengers had also paired off and were embracing or resting between embraces. The presence of these others made real impropriety unthinkable and helped Art put temptations from his mind.

There were more boats in the river now, police or other official crafts of some kind, and their searchlights were beginning to play over the far bank. Groups of people were still moving around over there. They had improvised banners to carry, and rhythmic chants to sing. From where Art sat on the eastern bank the words of neither song nor sign could be distinguished, but the powerful tones of the chanting carried across the water.

III

AS THE train began to slow for the Chicago terminal, Rosamond leaned across the seat arm and snuggled once more against Art’s shoulder, while one of her hands, like some small animal seeking shelter, strayed inside his tattered shirt. “Art, are you sure you can’t take the time to meet Daddy tonight? I know he’s going to want to thank you for helping me.”

“I wish I could, but I’m really anxious to catch up with my family.” Of course he hadn’t told her why he was trying to catch up with them. He glanced at his watch; it was nearly midnight. “Some other time.”

“You be sure and call us while you’re in Chicago. I mean it.” She dug out a pencil and a piece of paper from the pouch attached to the seatback in front of her, and scribbled a number, using the top of the picnic cooler as a desk. When he touched the plastic top, in reaching to pick up the paper, it felt at least as cold as ice. Like her eyeframes, the cooler was perhaps more expensive than it had seemed at first sight; whatever picnic remnants were inside were probably frozen solid.

As he emerged from the tube car into a vast cheerful cave of ceramic tile and warm light, Art looked around to wave goodbye to Rose, and caught only a glimpse of her in the crowd, being met and welcomed by a couple of men. Strange girl. But he forgot about her quickly in heading for a huge electronic display describing the city’s public transportation system.

It was late enough for the traffic to be light, and the taxi he had chosen as the probable fastest means of transport made good speed through the well-illuminated streets. Still Art shifted restlessly in his seat, and pulled at his beard impatiently. He had the feeling that minutes counted, that even new Rita might be taking some irretraceable step toward an illegal parturition. The feeling was no doubt irrational; any actual-birth would have to be months away, of course. But there was some kind of federal law against even conspiring to commit an illegal parturition. Midwifery, as the news media usually called it. Art didn’t know exactly how far one could go without running afoul of the law. He didn’t know exactly what the law said. It was one of those things he hadn’t wanted to learn about, probably because all along he had been subconsciously afraid that someday it would menace him and Rita.

How could she do such a thing, get them into this kind of trouble? In her note she had said that she still loved him. She had used the word twice. But now he was being rhetorical with himself; he knew his wife, and she was perfectly capable of doing this thing, loving him or not.

While waiting for a traffic signal to change the cab driver turned in his seat and glanced back at Art through the bullet-proof partition. Through the intercom speaker the driver’s voice asked: “Someone meeting you?”

“Yes.” Art stretched the truth. “At the block entrance. It’s a block of townhouses.”

The cabbie faced forward again without answering. Art had just killed his hopes of collecting an easy bodyguard fee, in what the cabbie must know was a good neighborhood.

They were moving again. Now the building walls that had lined both sides of the street fell back. The cab was entering a section of the city that had a look of newness, of having recently been rebuilt. Under new streetlamps that closely simulated daylight, tall elms warmed their fine June leaves. On each side of the wide, gently curving boulevard were new-looking stone walls, smooth enough to be unscaleable but still with enough irregularities in their texture and color and shape to give them almost the look of natural formations. The walls were windowless, two or three stories high, and Art knew that they enclosed townhouse blocks, about the size of the old city blocks they had replaced. The pedestrian entrances, never more than one on a side, were narrow-mouthed and well-lighted; inside each entrance, Art supposed, there would be a security guard in a protected booth. Vehicle ramps curved down from the street to enter a subterranean level of each block.

The cab stopped in front of one such entrance, and Art put money into the slot in the partition, got back his change, and disembarked. He walked right into the bright rocky tunnel of the entry, through block walls that looked as thick as those of some ancient castle —or cave, perhaps, where the first men had sheltered from the terrors of the night they could not understand.

He came quickly to a place where the bright-lit narrow passage was blocked by a gate of steel grillwork, heavily functional despite its ornamentation of nymphs and cupids. In a booth built into the wall beside the gate sat a gray-uniformed man who looked out at Art through a small window of bulletproof glass. Through the window Art could see that this guard had before him rows of buttons, and closed-circuit TV monitors, and a pistol within easy reach. The guard was eyeing Art with alert suspicion, no doubt sharpened by the lateness of the hour.

“I want to visit George Parr,” Art said. “Tell him Art Rodney is out here.” He checked the time on his watch and began to wait.

Less than three minutes passed before George came into view beyond the iron gate, which slid open at his arrival. He was smiling and holding out his big-knuckled hand. Aside from the callus pads over the base knuckles of forefinger and middle finger, there was nothing peculiar in the feel of George’s hand, lethal weapon though it was supposed to be. And George was rather short. Sturdy, but not bulging or rippling with muscle inside his transparent shirt. His pale hair, almost the color of Rita’s, was crew-cut to the same length as his neat goatee.

“How’s it going, Art?” George didn’t look upset about anything, but then Art could not recall that he ever had.

“Well, I’m upset, naturally. I want to talk to Rita right away.”

“She’s been here, but now she’s gone again.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Come in.” With gentle pressure on an arm George steered him through the gate. Speaking to the microphone below the guard’s window, George added: “My brother-in-law. He’s going to be staying with us for a day or so.”

Art let himself be steered inside, though he wasn’t at all sure about the duration of his stay. “Where is she now?” he asked impatiently. “Couldn’t you have talked to her?”

George simply continued to smile in his likable way. “Come on in and have a look at our new home. We can talk the whole situation over. It’s not something that can be settled in a couple of words. Ann’s fixing up a bed for you.”

“ALL RIGHT.” Art sighed, abandoning whatever hope he had left of somehow catching up with Rita tonight. Let Ann fix the bed. He was willing to bet she would never offer to share it with him, which was fine with Art. He would make polite gestures of lust at her, whether or not she had the good manners to reciprocate, but in truth she aroused him not at all.

Another few meters of tunnel and they had reached the interior of the block. It looked just about as Art had expected, but still he was impressed. Most of the interior was a single open space, wide and pleasant, green now with summer grass and trees and shrubs. This central park was mostly in darkness now, but was surrounded by the lighted windows and patios of the block’s thirty or so townhouses, which were all backed against the block’s encircling outer wall and were probably integral with it.

Shaded lights on knee-high poles gently illuminated curved paths of flagstone paving that branched off into the balmy night in several directions. Crickets sang of summer and tranquility. In spite of his worries Art found himself pausing, soothed by the peaceful scene. He said: “It looks like you have things nice in here.”

George pounced gratefully on this retreat to banality. “I tell you, it makes me feel a lot easier about the kids. There’s even talk about getting our own elementary school started right here in the block.” He gestured the direction for Art to take and they walked on. Somewhere nearby, people playing string instruments were rehearsing a melody, starting arid stopping and trying again. Somewhere else a wild party was in progress, but its uproar came heavily muted from some deep interior place, and to the musicians inside their own house it must be entirely inaudible.

“Yes, very nice,” said Art, following where George led.

“We have our own emergency power generator, too,” said George. “In case vandals knock out the city power or there’s a breakdown. That’s happened a couple of times in the last year.”

“Good idea.” Art’s sandals scraped on the slight unevenness of the flagstones as they walked a pleasant curve between the houses’ vine and bush-screened patios and the openness of the central park. Each house was surprisingly private behind its trellises or open-work wall or vines. Art wondered if Rita might be sheltering at this moment in one of these discreet dwellings, hidden by friendly conspiratorial neighbors until Ann could throw the persecuting husband off the track with some halfway plausible story. “Yes, this is a beautiful place.”

“Costs an arm and a leg and a testicle too,” said George, his voice now turning grim. “I don’t think there’s a man in the block who doesn’t have a job—I mean a good job—or his own business. In fact I’m repressin’ sure there isn’t.” Talking man-to-man, George would sometimes use strong language. In front of ladies, Art had noticed, he never did.

“How are things at the dojo?” Art asked. Then he turned his head at the unexpected sound of a splash, followed by a trill of feminine laughter. Way out in the middle of the common park the lights of a swimming pool glowed in the soft, safe darkness, and he saw the wet tan gleam of a bikinied body. What were possibly the lights of another pool were almost completely blocked off by intervening shrubbery.

“Oh, good enough, I guess,” said George. “Here’s our happy home.” He walked behind a vine-covered trellis to a patio. Ann, as if she might have heard them coming, was peering out with a hospitable smile from her doorway of white stone and Spanish-looking ironwork. Stalking across the Parrs’ hedged-in patio on thin metal legs, a kneehigh electric bugkiller lured flying creatures to itself with a nervously flickering eye of yellow light and a whisper of attractive noises. It broke its whispering with zapping hiccoughs as some of itslarger victims were ingested.

As Art had expected, Ann’s dress was radical. Her skirt fell almost to her knees, and her blouse almost completely covered her breasts and left only a narrow strip of midriff bare. Both garments were loose-fitting and practically opaque. Also as he had expected, Ann’s chin was lifted high in challenge despite her smile; she would be glad to have him stay in her house for a day or so and argue; maybe she would be able to convert him. Her face was reasonably pretty, and her hair a curly brown. She was small and strong, like George, and her strength was even more subtle than his.

“Rita thought you might come after her, Art,” she greeted him. “You didn’t bring a bag? That’s all right, there’s a clothing vendor right here in the block. Of course you’re staying with us, we have a spare room. My brother was here for a couple of days, but he moved out when Rita showed up.” Ann shrugged away her sibling’s behavior.

“Fred’s here in Chicago too?”

“Yes. The day he finished high school he just had to apply for Basic Income, like a fool. Couldn’t see going to college, or even trying to go. He wants George to give him a job, or so he says. Come and see your children, they’re asleep.”

INSIDE the townhouse the furnishings were rather sparse and disorderly, indicating that the Parrs were not yet done with the job. Evidently they had barely time to unpack in their new house before a series of their crazy relatives began to arrive from California. Following Ann to some ascending stairs, Art noted an electric fireplace in the living room, where the floor looked like real hardwood. He could well believe that only the prosperous lived in this block.

After gesturing for silence in a second-floor hallway, Ann slid open a door. Art went in to find Timmy and Paula curled up in their usual positions in the strange bed, child bodies clothed in opaque pajamas like unopened flower buds all sheathed in leaves. Across the room in another bed were two small mounds that would be George Jr. and his younger brother Enoch. On the wall Art noticed a version of what he recognized as a traditional Christian statuette, depicting the putative founder of the sect fastened to a wooden cross. The figure was quite large for the little room, and crudely but strongly carved in some pale wood. He wondered if Fred might have done it.

“Don’t wake them,” Ann whispered, as Art bent over his own two children. “They’re worn out from traveling.”

Art, who had not intended to touch them and risk an awakening, now gave each a kiss. They were not as deeply asleep as he had thought, for Paula reached up to tangle baby fingers in his beard. Then, as if reassured, she slept again. Tim, almost three years older, murmured: “Daddy.”

“Go to sleep,” Daddy whispered. And Tim did so, for once.

Art walked downstairs again with Ann. “So,” he commented, “Rita’s gone into hiding somewhere. How long does she expect the children to stay here?”

“Art, you know we don’t mind having them in the least. Husband George, where are you?”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“Black Russian?” asked George from below, appearing in the doorway of what was evidently the recreation room, holding a couple of plastic bottles in his hands.

“Thanks, I will,” Art answered. Inside the rec room was a bar, and a second fireplace, with a tap marked INSTRUCTIONS still hanging from one andiron. Art sank down with a sigh upon a leather-like couch, and received from George a glass with ice cubes floating in a dark and powerful fluid.

Ann had vanished, apparently to the kitchen, for there drifted in sounds suggesting the preparation of food. From out there somewhere she called: “How do you like our medieval fortress? I’m very happy with it. The kids have a safe place now.”

“It’s very nice,” Art called back, downing his first swallow of Black Russian. “I think I saw two swimming pools, didn’t I?”

In a chair opposite the sofa George sat, or squatted, pulling up his sandalled feet and folding his legs in an effortless contortion. “The pool in the bushes is more Ann’s than anybody else’s. She’s always wanted a nude pool available, and when the blockhouse corporation was being formed she kept standing up in meetings and demanding.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I?” Ann, smiling, was in the doorway, already pushing a serving cart laden with sandwiches and cups of soup. Had she been expecting Art? “You know me, Art.”

He thought he did. While moving clutter from a small table to make room for some food, Art got a good look at the covers of some of Ana’s radical magazines. The cover photos featured startlingly shrouded bodies, and bold print promised that the articles inside were of shocking frankness, detailing what every adult ought to know about the history of celibacy and the ancient, once-honorable techniques of self-control. Art took these to be the kind of magazines that promised more in the way of obscenity than they usually delivered. He would have expected a more sophisticated obscenity than this on Ann’s coffee table. He thought that she was watching for his reaction to the magazines, and he tried to show none at all. Maybe they were just left there as argument pieces.

Art didn’t much like the idea of his children staying here, but where else was he going to put them while he searched for Rita? And they were too young, he supposed, to be much affected by Ann’s morals—or lack thereof. He liked to think of himself as fairly liberal, but this woman just had a dirty mind. It was as simple as that. He could imagine being marooned in a long orbit with her, and her wearing long opaque coveralls continuously, and refusing sex through all the months and years.

He had thought he was conjuring up that image as a private expression of his scorn, but somewhere in its ugly heart a kernel of attraction lay, which made Art angry when he realized it. Repulsive woman! He could feel sorry for George, who was a gentleman, except that George must have known what kind of woman he was marrying and George still seemed very well satisfied. George in his own quiet way was evidently pretty far out himself.

“You know, old girl,” said George, the squatting guru, “your ways are actually more old-fashioned than your opponents are. You go back to the twentieth century. Or was it the nineteenth when everybody pretended to be chaste?”

Ann took a seat on the sofa next to Art and gave him a look intended to show comic exasperation with her husband. “I’m hungry, let’s eat,” she said. “Oh, George, you know it’s not what’s new or what’s old-fashioned. I know things go in cycles. It’s not whether people wear suits when they swim or don’t wear them, it’s why they wear them or go without.”

“Ann.” Art set down his glass, which had somehow become empty. “Ann, where is Rita? Where did you send her?”

“Art, listen to me. I’m not going to tell you where she is, because I don’t know.”

“Don’t know? Come on. When is she coming back to get the children? As soon as I leave?”

Ann, with maddening assurance, ignored the question. “Art, I suppose you realize that she’s expecting the people at Family Planning to make trouble for her.”

“Of course I know she’s in Family Planning trouble. Why do you imagine I’m here?” If he hadn’t had the drink he would be shouting at Ann by now. “She left me a note, I know she’s pregnant. I even had a call from the FP before I left California.” He repeated as well as he could the few words of Ms. Lazenby’s message.

ANN listened in sympathy and indignation, as if the FP agents had broken down Art’s door. “Well, if and when our third one comes along—I take my pills and pray it never does, but if and when—I’m going to do just what Rita’s doing. No court or no doctor is going to murder one of mine, I don’t care what the laws say.”

“You have that right,” affirmed George in a low voice.

She flashed her eyes over at her husband, glad of support though not needing it, and plunged on. “And no one’s going to make me call it unwanted, either, not once I know that it’s alive!”

Drink or not, Art’s nerves were worn and his voice got louder. “Most people would say that you yourself have rather a murderous attitude toward the wanted people of the world. The ones who are alive right now, including the babies. You’re talking about adding to the crowding. Remember Calcutta. Remember Rio. Where will this year’s cannibalism be?”

George had begun on a cup of soup with apparent good appetite. Now he reached in between the disputants for some crackers. “Peace, brethren, peace, sistern,” he said, smiling genuinely. “Art, how was your trip?”

“Oh, exciting.” Art sat back and took an interest in his own soup. Arguing general principles with Ann was certain to wear him out and get him nowhere. Let the atmosphere cool , off for a minute and then he would return to the subject of his wife. He began to tell the Parrs of his adventures.

The attack on the Christian monastery was naturally a shock to Ann, and he let her see the real sympathy he felt for any victims of persecution. “I suppose we passengers should have stopped and demanded that the police do something for that man who was screaming in the woods—but they were only Transcon’s private police, and I suppose they had their orders, as they said.”

Ann looked at him wanly, mystified. “But why was the monastery being attacked?”

“One of the people there said something about the monks’ performing experiments on some aborted fetuses. Some absurd, muddled story about creating monsters. Of course a lot of scientists work with fetuses.” Ann for some reason seemed shocked, perhaps even frightened; she was sitting quite still and listening intently. Art went on: “It does strike me as rather inconsistent for these monks, who are presumably as opposed to abortion as you are, to use fetuses that are still biologically active in their experiments, whatever research they’re really doing. Of course that’s no excuse for violence, for mob action.”

Ann and George exchanged a look. Then she brought her attention back to Art. “Who was this girl you said you helped?”

“Oh, her name was Rose something or other, lived in Chicago. She was really frightened, for which I don’t blame her.”

Ann was upset. “There doesn’t seem to be any safety for anyone any more. I’m glad we’ve got this place. Art, you and Rita should think about getting into a townhouse like this. I don’t think California is any safer to live in than Illinois.”

“I’m sure we have a lot of problems out there, too. I’ll talk over our housing situation with Rita after I’ve found her again. Now tell me where she is.”

His voice was not threatening but it was grim and determined enough to shake Ann back into her anger mode again. Her eyes brightened and her chin lifted. But before she could speak George put out a peremptory hand and got to his feet with a neat quick untangling of his legs. “Ann,” was all he said, but to Art’s surprise, she closed her mouth.

George set down the empty soup cup that he had been turning round and round in his fingers for some time. “Art, I’m satisfied that Rita’s in good hands.”

“Then you know where she is. If you know, you’re going to tell me.”

“Let me finish. Let’s say that I know my sister. I believe she knows what she’s doing. Isn’t that enough?”

“Not for me.” Art was inflexible. “You knew she was trying to do something wrong, and dangerous, and maybe you could have stopped her but you didn’t try.”

There was a pause that seemed long. Ann, evidently still considering herself commanded to silence, was biting her tongue. Her husband still held the floor, dominating the room without effort, unconsciously rubbing his enlarged knuckles. “I know it’s dangerous,” George said unhappily. “She could go to jail for what she’s doing. But she wants to do it. She made a free decision.”

“What about me?” Art demanded. “Don’t I have any say about how many children I have?”

Ann’s headshake snapped a decisive No. “Not if it means killing.”

“Killing? How can you call an abortion—?” But it was no use. Even if it had been desirable to argue with Ann, he could have found no words. Ann’s reality was so far from the commonly accepted view that there seemed to be no place to start. At least Art could not find the place, not after midnight, not after a day of wife-chasing and strain and rioting and Black Russians. Somewhere along the line George had refilled his glass and by now it was half empty again. “I wish we could forget about our differences,” Art went on, lowering his voice. “Rita’s welfare is the only thing I’m worried about right now. All else is secondary.”

“We know that,” said Ann with impulsive honest sympathy.

“Eventually I’ll find her,” Art insisted. “You know I’m going to bring her home. You think I’ll just let her drop out of my life for six or seven months? And what about the children, are they going to stay here for that length of time? Timmy should be starting kindergarten . . . it’s an insane scheme and I won’t allow it. In any case Family Planning will put a stop to it if I don’t. Don’t you suppose they can quickly track her down? Isn’t there a law against conspiracy to commit parturition that they could prosecute her under already?”

“Not without more evidence than her dropping out of sight for a few days,” Ann said quickly. “Not without a lot more evidence than that.”

“For a few days? I don’t understand. What does she hope to accomplish by doing that?”

Ann fell silent again. George waved a hand and seemed about to speak, but then only sat down again and stared into his new fireplace.

“Will somebody tell me, please?”

“You see,” Ann began slowly, “once nine months have passed since conception, no doctor is allowed to put the baby to death for any reason, without the direct petition of the mother or other surviving next of kin. The Supreme Court was very clear on that several decades ago, and the decision still stands. And what does a conspiracy indictment matter to a mother who can save her baby’s life?”

Baby? Oh, of course, she was talking about the fetus. Art was no longer sure that anything being said made sense. It was well after midnight, and they must all be tired. He was, certainly. Eros, but Rita too must be tired this midnight, wherever she might be.

Ann said: “Art, your room is ready. Whenever you want to go up.”

“In the morning, then,” Art told her. “But never doubt that I’m going to find her and take her home.”

IV

FRED Lohmann woke up with someone’s smooth arm thrown across his bare chest and someone’s delicate breath snoring gently in his left ear. Where was he? Oh yes, the YPPC hotel, in Chicago. Yesterday he had checked out of the Parrs’ plush new house, more or less urged on by his sister Ann, and anyway not anxious to get himself involved in whatever had brought Rita Rodney in weeping from California. Rita had looked pregnant, far enough along to show a little. Say, didn’t the Rodneys have two kids already?

Anyway, all that was none of Fred’s affair. He had big problems of his own, and important events were scheduled for today. First of all, this morning Fred as a newly independent and adult citizen was going to collect his first Basic Income check from Uncle Sam, the check covering the month that had passed since his graduation from high school in California. And that first BI check might well be his last; he sublimatin’ well hoped it would be anyway, for this afternoon he was going to have a real workout with George and if things went well at the dojo he might be a jobholder by tomorrow. And that would prove a lot of people wrong.

Now, what about this sleeping arm that weighed so gently on his breathing? In a moment he remembered, her name was Marjorie. She too was a newcomer to Chicago, looking for a job, and last night the desk clerk at the Y had assigned her and Fred to sleep together. The atmosphere at the Young Persons’ Play Club was certainly different from what it was at the Parrs’. Ann and George might get a chuckle out of it when he told them. Behind the front desk in the lobby was a big sign on the wall reading PURE THOUGHTS ARE THE MARK OF A DIRTY MIND. And they weren’t trying to be funny, either, they were really that old-fashioned here. They had a strict house rule requiring at least two people in every bed. Marjorie, though she herself was by all indications a conservative, well-brought-up, lascivious girl, had agreed with Fred last night that the sign was funny, and they had shared a little laugh about it. She was a good sex partner, too, so things had worked out all right. He might have been paired with someone a lot less congenial.

Fred disentangled himself from Marjorie’s naked body and got out of bed without awakening her. The bed folded down on both sides of the wall that separated his tiny room from hers. Ingenious, Fred thought. When the bed was raised it completed the wall and the rooms were separated, allowing either party to have privacy for business or social reasons. A hole was created through the wall, connecting the rooms, whenever the bed was lowered for use. Last night Fred had discovered that the bed mechanism made it impossible to raise or lower either side independently; if you wanted to lie down, you had better be ready for sex, or at least a polite attempt at sex, with your appointed partner. George was going to have a good laugh when Fred told him. Except George seemed to have a lot on his mind just lately.

After a quick visit to the alcove that held his toilet and shower, Fred came back to the center of his small room, studied his tall, muscular body in the wall mirror, and did a few light exercises, just loosening and testing a little, making sure the knee and elbow joints moved freely and with plenty of snap. He tensed his corrugated belly muscles and snapped his rocklike fist at his solar plexus, leaving a small red mark. He told himself he looked older than eighteen; the beard was coming along okay. But he hadn’t really worked out in more than a week, and though he tried not to admit it to himself he was scared by the thought of this afternoon’s pending test with George.

Would George take his word for it that he really had a brown belt ranking, or might George call California to check, and catch him in a lie? The idea was to do really well in the workout, show George some real good moves, and he wouldn’t bother to check up. He would hand Fred a brown belt to wear and put him to work instructing novices. Meanwhile he would work out all he could, and in a few months start to think about moving up to black . . .

Marjorie stirred in her sleep and seemed on the point of waking up, and Fred hastened to get his codpiece and shorts from the chair and put them on. She seemed like a nice girl, and so Fred was treating her with respect; he wouldn’t want to display to her his unmannerly shriveled lack of arousal on this nervous morning.

. . . all the same, though, you never knew. Some guys who had been around said that the nice girls like this one could really be the coldest chillers once they let themselves go. Looking down now at Marjorie’s still-sleeping form, Fred could easily imagine it covered, blurred into sexlessness. Her figure was almost boyish in repose, without the padded bra that she had thrown off last night, and it was years since he had felt any lust for boys. He could picture her eyes opening, their clear and penetrating gaze (so he imagined; last night he had not noticed) pushing lust aside, piercing through his hard male body, seeking to touch him . . .

FRED gave himself a mental kick and looked away. Not that he felt guilty. Twins, every normal guy had thoughts about chastity and sublimation, and enjoyed them, too. It was just that today Fred didn’t want to get himself into a difficult emotional state.

Still it was impossible not to notice how childlike Marjorie looked in her sleep. In his imagination he found himself putting a long, snowy, opaque gown around her . . . he kicked himself again, and went on getting dressed.

She woke up, turning and stretching, before he was ready to leave. He looked around at her and swallowed hard, for suddenly the clear-eyed gaze he had imagined was quite real.

“Good morning—Margie. You don’t mind if I call you by your first name?” He had forgotten what her last name was.

“No, I don’t mind. Uh . . .”

“Fred, Fred Lohmann.”

“Yes, certainly, Fred.” She rolled over onto her back and gave a routine wiggle of her hips. “Burning with lust this morning, that’s me.” But her tone made the invitation no more than a polite .form.

“Me too.” His tone was even more casual than hers. “Too bad, but I gotta get an early start on some business today.”

Her eyes seemed to chill, sending something like a sensation of real cold along his back. She murmured softly: “What is a poor girl going to do, when the man she’s with says he just won’t screw?” The verse from which the line came was latrine doggerel, ancient and more than mildly dirty.

If Fred had ever heard encouragement, this was it. Even Basic Income and karate could wait. “Well, then, how about it, girly?” he asked boldly. “How about you and me just frosting things a few degrees?”

He had been too bold too soon. “Just don’t rush it,” Marjorie said crossly, with a curve of her spine becoming all sex again. Who could tell anything about women? She rolled out of the bed on her side, into her own room, where she reached for a transparent robe.

“I’m sorry,” Fred muttered, bending slightly to look at her through the bed-gap in the wall. “Don’t get sore.” Sublimation, was she going to complain to the management now? Would he be thrown out?

Somewhat mollified, she paused in the act of raising the bed between them. “Just don’t rush things, okay?” Her eyes had lost their coldness, but at least she was smiling.

“I’ll be around tonight!” Fred called through to her. He helped her lift the bed-barrier into place, and gave his side of it a jovial pat as it sealed him off.

An hour later he had found his way to the nearest branch of the Social Security office and was standing in line. Having no permanent address since leaving California, he had arranged to have his first Basic Income check held for him in the Social Security data bank until he called at an office somewhere to pick it up. For whatever reason, a number of other people seemed to be making similar arrangements. The line was eight or ten people long, and not moving very fast.

The jobholders in the office sat snugly fortified behind their desks and counters and computer consoles, or else walked by, giving the impression that they were up to something important. Chastity, it was just that they had some kind of political pull, or they’d be the ones standing in line. They seemed to have little regard for the people they were processing so slowly. Fred lit up a small cigar.

Now the window at the head of the line was being closed for some reason, and a man came to divide the line and lead its fragments to different windows.

“No smoking in here!” he snapped at Fred. He was a paunchy, waddling man who reminded Fred of a particularly unpleasant high school teacher he had suffered under only a few months ago. “No smoking, I said! Put it out at once or you’ll have to leave the office.”

“I got a right to my check,” Fred muttered, but so weakly that it was doubtful if the officious man even heard him. At the same time Fred was crushing out his cigar on the sole of his sandal, for he knew very well that he was never going to win an argument with the paunchy jobholder. Not here. Now, if they ever met somewhere else . . .

Fidgeting and waiting, thinking vague and sullen thoughts, Fred inched forward with the line. At last he reached the window, gave his name and federal identity number, and held the tips of his fingers on a scanner-plate. After a few seconds there came a machine-gun clacking from a printed device beside the clerk who was processing Fred, and some official looking papers emerged.

“Well, this is your first check, Fred. Do you have a permanent address to give us yet?”

“No. I’m staying at a YPPC now.”

“Address?”

“It’s here in Chicago. The one on North State Street.”

The clerk made a note with a stylus on a computer input plate, then pulled more pieces of paper from beneath the counter. “Take these booklets, Fred, they’ll tell you more about your rights and responsibilities under the Basic Income law. If you win more than two hundred dollars’ prize money in any state or national lottery or government-sponsored competition in any calendar month, or obtain gainful employment, or acquire ownership of more than fifty shares of corporate stock, you are required to notify us so that your Basic Income can be adjusted. There are penalties for failing to notify.”

There was a little more he had to listen to. When at last they released him by handing over his check—he supposed it was enough to scrounge along on for a couple of weeks until the next one came, if scrounging along was your idea of life—he hurried from the office, dropping the booklets into a trash receptacle as he went through the door. He’d notify them, all right, as soon as he moved up to jobholder. The sooner he could tell them that, the better.

Since he had such a good chance for a job, there was no use hoarding his money like a miser. Two weeks scrimp-along money could buy a couple of nights of real fun. After that . . . well, nobody starved.

A kind of gravitational pull was leading him onto a particular slidewalk, one that would carry him in the direction of a run-down neighborhood he had noticed not far from the Y. There he should be able to hit a coffeehouse bar or two. He could get some lunch there as well as anywhere. There was plenty of time before he had to meet George at the dojo. And Fred wanted to see about getting hold of some gladrags, in case it turned out tonight that Marjorie was not just teasing but was really in a willing mood. If you went to the right place and asked the right person, a few dollars could always buy a pair of plastic cloaks, thin, but stiff and perfectly opaque, folded together into a pocket-sized carton.

ART AWOKE with a start in the Parrs’ guest room bed, looked at his watch, and saw that it was a little after nine o’clock. He sat up blinking. On the barren tile floor in one corner of the sparsely furnished room lay a pair of men’s translucent disposable trousers, apparently used and ready for the discard. The length of one extended leg indicated that the garment would be too big for either him or George. Oh yes; Fred Lohmann had been staying here, before Rita. Conceivably Fred would know something of her present whereabouts, if Art could find a chance to question him. Art remembered him as a wild-looking adolescent, tall and awkward.

Before retiring Art had bought himself some disposal clothing from the block’s vending machine, and now after a quick shower and beard-trim he dressed in fresh shorts and shirt. Still only a quarter after nine. While buttoning his shirt he peeked into the children’s room and found the four of them still sleeping. Must have been allowed to stay up late last night, playing together. A door chimed and very shortly thereafter voices drifted up from downstairs, one Ann’s, the other belonging to a man whom Art did not recognize. Standing in the upstairs hall he could understand only a stray word or two.

Going down as soon as he had finished dressing, Art turned first into the kitchen. He was liable to feel sick unless he ate something as soon as he got up. In the refrigerator he found a cinnamon-flavored protein bar, and on the elaborate new stove he dialed himself coffee. Five minutes, while the low dialogue continued in another room, and he had the indispensable minimum of breakfast in his stomach. Chewing on a toothmint; more or less ready to face the world, Art walked into the living room.

The low voices stopped. A lean, stooped man wearing a conservative transparent business jacket above his shorts was standing just inside the door that had been closed last night and which Art now realized must provide access to a lower-level garage. The man looked up at Art with keen interest, or perhaps he was only glad of any interruption.

Ann, her pretty chin somewhat higher than usual, turned with arms folded from her stance of confrontation with the visitor. “Art, this gentleman claims he’s a Mr. Hall. From Family Planning. George has gone out.” Her tone managed to imply that George, if at home, would have beaten this probably fraudulent intruder to a pulp, and Art was welcome to do the same if he liked.

“My name is Hall, and I am from the Family Planning office.” The intruder had a determined voice, though not angry or flustered (Aha, Ann, have you met your match at last?), and his eyes were sharp. “I take it you’re Mr. Rodney?”

“I am.”

“I was hoping to run into you here. Our California office has asked us to make a routine investigation into your wife’s case.”

“Her case? My wife hasn’t broken any laws.”

“That’s fine! Then if you’ll tell me where I can get in touch with her, we can clear all this up promptly and with as little inconvenience as possible.”

The protein bar in Art’s stomach had suddenly gone lumpy. He supposed that criminals must have terrible chronic digestive problems. Or maybe they got used to it. He could think of nothing to say to Mr. Hall, and just stood there like a guilty fool.

Hall’s determined voice kept coming at him. “I understand you didn’t accompany your wife to Chicago, you followed her here?”

“I—yes, what of it?” Surely, thought Art, he had the right to refuse to answer these questions. To talk to a lawyer first, at least. But once he refused to answer, Hall’s suspicions, that possibly were no more than suspicions now, would surely be confirmed.

“Mr. Rodney, is there some reason you don’t want to tell me where your wife is at the moment?”

“I don’t know where she is.” It was Ann’s fault, and George’s, and Rita’s too, that he had to conduct this argument in ignorance. Their fault, not his, if he got them all in deeper trouble. Meanwhile he marveled greatly at how fast the deadly pits could open beneath one’s feet in the dull corridor of life.

“You don’t know?” The interrogator’s tone implied that Art must be a fool or a knave, or both, to hope to get away with such an answer.

Art folded his arms in unconscious imitation of Ann. “That’s right.”

Mr. Hall glanced toward Ann, who with her own arms still folded was obviously quite ready for him. He appeared to stifle a faint sigh, and then turned back to Art. “Mr. Rodney, our California office has received medical testimony indicating that your wife is pregnant for the third time.”

“Yes, I know about that.”

“We have no record that she’s made any appointment with a physician to have this pregnancy terminated. And the first trimester must be nearly over.”

“I, ah, know nothing about that.”

“Well, I’d like you to at least give me your opinion on the subject, Mr. Rodney. Do you think your wife is planning not to have it terminated normally, to carry it on to parturition?”

There was no way he could admit it. “No, I don’t think that,” he had to say. Then he had to pause, for a nervous, choking swallow. Ann was just standing by, letting him flounder, confident that they had told him no secrets and so there were none he could betray. Triplets, but he hated her at the moment.

When he had his throat under control again he said: “I’m sure Rita means to have it terminated properly, she’s, uh, probably just gone away by herself for a few days to think things over. You see . . . our psychologist has recommended against her being sterilized. After Paula, our youngest, was born, Rita had an IUD inserted but her body kept expelling it. She always takes her pills. I’m sure there was just a chemical failure somewhere. I’m sure she didn’t plan the pregnancy. Unless it was subconscious.” There seemed to be stories in the newsprints every day about apes avoiding prison sentences by pleading their subconscious compulsions. If they could do it, why couldn’t she? Lay the groundwork for it now. But he was talking too much, he had better shut up.

As soon as he quieted, however, Hall was after him again. “Mr. Rodney, is it like Rita to go off by herself for days at a time? When was the last time she made a similar disappearance?”

“I . . .” He was cornered. Once he started making up a string of lies, Hall would have it knotted around his neck in no time at all. “No, I can’t say it’s like her,” he said in desperation. “I tell you, I don’t know where she is. If I knew where she was I’d be with her right now.”

Mr. Hall shuffled his feet, which were no doubt tired from standing, and glanced again at Ann, and sighed once more, more openly this time. “Mr. Rodney, will you walk me back to my car?”

“There’s no need for you to do that, Art,” Ann put in.

“All right, Mr. Hall,” Art said, since the alternative was to go along with Ann’s instructions.

Ann was not going to argue with him, not in the face of the enemy. “I’ll have breakfast for you when you get back,” she promised, holding the door. She gave Art a ritual kiss as he went out, but offered no kiss or caress to Hall, who in turn contented himself with a barely polite pelvic thrust in her direction.

AS THEY were walking down the stairs to the garage, with no one else about, Hall said quietly: “Mr. Rodney, I hope you don’t think of us at Family Planning as out to get your wife. Believe me, we’d like to help her; I think she’s a woman who can use some help.”

Art was silent. They emerged at the foot of the stair into the garage. A variety of vehicles were berthed in a series of numbered, gate-protected stalls. Other areas were marked for delivery vehicles and visitors’ parking. At the moment there was still nobody else in sight.

Hall stopped, facing Art. “If I can’t get a chance to talk to your wife, it’s going to be awfully hard for her to stay out of trouble. And you yourself can be in trouble if you’re deliberately withholding information. There is the federal conspiracy law. We may not like the world in which all these laws are necessary, but it’s the only world we have.”

“I’ve been telling you the truth.”

“Another thing.” Hall very slowly resumed his walk toward the visitor’s parking area. “Giving birth is a somewhat risky proposition at best—I’m sure you realize that, as the father of two legitimate children. In some of these birth-mills a full-term parturition, or even a fetiparous one, can be downright dangerous, believe me.”

This time it was Art who stopped, a few slow paces later. “Even a,what?”

Hall was silent. He seemed to be trying to read Art’s face.

Art repeated: “Even a what? What kind of parturition, live birth, is there except full term? Do you mean premature?”

Hall continued his intent gaze at the mystified Art for a long moment, and then relaxed. “I think you and I are really on the same side in this case, aren’t we, Mr. Rodney?”

“I want my wife at home with me, not getting into trouble. And I don’t want the world overcrowded with my progeny, I’m willing to respect the rights of others.”

“Fine.” Hall was suddenly more relaxed and friendly. “Then I’d better tell you something you may not know about. Just recently there has come into use a method for removing a first-trimester fetus or embryo from the womb in such a way that it can be kept alive. The midwifer usually freezes it—”

“Alive?”

“If you can call it that. Alive in potential. It can later be reimplanted in the woman’s body again, or in the body of another woman, or put into an artificial womb, and it will grow and develop eventually into a child. In experiments on animals normal young have been produced by this method for several decades now.”

“Oh.”

“You begin to see. Now if we at Family Planning seize a frozen fetus of embryo, our legal situation is tricky, because federal law states that if nine months have passed since conception, the fetus has become a child. The law goes back several decades to when termination of surplus pregnancies was first required in this country. Some women who were about six months or so along claimed that they were already in labor when their pregnancies were terminated by FP doctors, and there was a lot of fuss. The law is really outmoded now, but we’re still stuck with it.”

“I don’t quite see . . .”

“The thing is, we can’t legally destroy a frozen fetus unless we can prove it’s less than nine months old. Calendar age, not stage of development, is the way the law reads. We’re trying to get it changed, of course. There have been several articles lately in the newsprints on all this, and stories on television. I would have thought perhaps you would have heard or read something about it.”

“I’ve been busy,” Art said. “Not keeping up much with the news.” Probably it was another example of his subconscious avoidance of hearing or remembering, like the exact wording of the federal conspiracy law.

“You see, with just a frozen fetus in our hands, we have a purity of a time proving its exact age. Can’t even take a tissue sample for proving the parenthood, since that would constitute damage. If we can’t prove it’s a superfluous third, and nobody claims it, why then believe it or not it has to be regarded as an unidentified orphan child. Treated as a human being in potential, which means taking it to an orphanage. Some of these religious and so-called humanist institutions will take them right in. They’re building artificial wombs at a furious pace, without permits of course, and they have plenty of money and manpower for clandestine research on freezing and revival techniques, or so it seems.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You may have heard something about the riot just recently in Iowa, where a Christian monastery was destroyed. I understand the ringleaders of the riot are now in jail, as they should be. Can’t have people taking the law into their own hands. But there’ll have to be proper legal action against those cultists too. Some of their priests were aut there building cryogenic devices and freezing fetuses.”

Art, without realizing it, had started walking again, on newly shaky legs. Cultists. He thought of the carven image on the wall above the children’s beds. He knew Ann. He thought of the scream coming out of the woods, and he thought of Rita. “But then . . . suppose, as you say, that the fetus is thawed and put into an artificial womb and a child results. What then? Could the mother claim it?”

“Probably not without spending a prison term, and undergoing sterilization.” Hall was looking at his watch. “I suppose there might be all kinds of devious means, adoption and so on. But a third live birth is still a criminal offense by the woman, no matter what subterfuges she employs. I really can’t understand the woman who does such a thing. Setting aside the legal problems, anywhere that she and her husband live afterwards, the neighbors are going to be able to count: one, two, three children. You couldn’t very well pretend one of them is adopted. There aren’t enough adoptable children to even match the childless couples who want one, let alone go to people who have two of their own. So it’ll be obvious to all that the parents had three kids, and pretty soon that third one is going to know that he or she is superfluous and unwanted by the world. That’s a very cruel thing to do to a child, in my estimation.”

“Mine, too.”

“No, I just don’t understand these women who go to midwifers.” Hall had reached his car and now he unlocked a door and pulled it open. “There’s just one more thing I wanted to mention to you, Mr. Rodney. Several times a year we in Family Planning get a massive detailed population forecast for the whole world, and for our own areas in particular; we get it right from the UN computer center. Right now the latest forecast is several days overdue; the rumor is that it’s been delayed for re-checking, because it’s a real shocker.”

“I suppose so.”

Hall got into his car, slammed the door, and then peered out the window. “I hope I can rely on you, Mr. Rodney.”

“Certainly I mean to do all I can—”

“That’s fine.” With a tiny wave and a half-smile, his mind probably already at work on his next case, Mr. Hall upped his window, faced forward, and drove off—but I don’t even know where she is. Art stared in silent protest after the car already zooming up the exit ramp.

V

AFTER Hall’s departure, Art wandered to an escalator and rode it up from the garage, emerging just inside one of the block’s pedestrian entrances. He was jogged partially out of his dazed state by Timmy and Paula, who ambushed their father as he made his way back toward the Parrs’ patio. The children were munching protein bars with which they smeared his clothes. Overriding his requests for a delay, they pulled at him to get him moving on a tour of the block’s central park. He gave up and went along. He reassured himself that his children were well and then tentatively questioned them about Mommy. About all he could find out was that she had said she would come back to get them soon.

The tour got as far as the nude pool before its directors deserted to join the Parr boys, who were already in the water. Art sank down on a grassy bank nearby and tried to think, now and then waving mechanically at his offspring when they clamored for his attention.

There were other distractions too. No other men were at the pool—probably most of those who lived in the block were busy this morning, at jobs or tending to their investments—but several women had come to swim. Ann was obviously not the only bluenose radical in this small community; probably people with similar attitudes tended to get into the same blockhouse corporation. Anyway these women came to the nude pool wearing long, loose, only dimly translucent jackets, and they swam as bare as babies, without so much as a sequin pasted on to emphasize their sex. It was hard to say which was the more antierotic, being almost completely covered or completely bare. Some of them cast suspicious glances at the male stranger, who in turn waved at his children to show that he had a good reason for hanging around, and then frowned thoughtfully into space. But only his face was truly thoughtful. His brain was getting nowhere.

In half an hour or so the kids were ready to do something else, and Art walked home with the four of them, reminding them to gather up their clothes. When he got back to the house he found George there, and promptly took him aside.

“George, have you seen her this morning or heard from her?”

“No, Art, I swear.”

“I’ve got to find her. She’s my wife and I have a right to talk to her.”

George stood there for a while, looking glum and uncertain about it all. Then he said: “I have to agree with that.”

Emboldened, Art pushed harder. “I don’t want to get you, or anybody, into trouble. But if I can’t find her I’ll have to go to the police and report her missing. It’s that important to me.”

George came to a decision. “All right. After lunch you and I will go out and see about making contact.”

“How about right now?”

“Just come along and we’ll do it my way. After lunch.” .

So a couple of hours later, after Art had spent some more time with his children, and Ann had fed them all some more sandwiches, the two men went out and got on the slidewalk together, George explaining that he didn’t have a car right now, what with one expense and another.

After a couple of kilometers’ ride, Art saw a vast domed stadium looming up ahead of them. At about the same time, George came up from deep thought to say: “Understand, it may take a little time to find out exactly where she is. There are several people I want to talk to about it.”

“Just so I get a chance to see her, before she commits any irrevocable foolishness. Where are we going now?”

“I expect one of the people will be at the ball game today. You just stand by and let me talk to him.”

“All right.”

Another kilometer and the slidewalk, by now fairly thick with passengers, deposited them before one of the entrances to the stadium. George said: “Let’s not forget to pick up tickets. A dollar is a dollar.”

They accepted time-stamped tickets from the jaws of a machine as they passed in through a turnstile. George led Art through cavernous passageways to an outfield grandstand, where they emerged squinting into the sun. A sizeable crowd was filling a good proportion of the seats. The stadium’s domed roof had been opened like a set of gigantic jaws and the people were in a good humor under the warm sun.

George chose seats high in the rear, and kept looking around him at the crowd. “I think I see our man,” he said after a minute. “You just watch the game, and I’ll go talk to him.” George moved away.

Art watched the game, which was just beginning, and the crowd as well. The Cubs, the home team, took a one-run lead in the first inning, and gambling in the grandstand promptly became fierce and steady, conducted by arm-waves and cryptic shouts. Ushers and police ignored the betting; Art wasn’t sure whether it was legal here or not. There seemed to be no bookies, no formal organization, and no wagers more than ten dollars, but small money passed through hundreds of hands with every pitch. One of the busier gamblers was the man George had engaged in low-voiced talk, who seemed able to keep his gaming and his conversation going at the same time. They were sitting too far away for Art to be able to tell if George was learning anything. Their talk just went on steadily.

So things went until the top of the fourth inning, when the Cubs blundered themselves four runs behind. The emotional climate in the stands changed radically with the score. The majority of the spectators, grown men and late adolescents who wore the gaudy codpieces and indefinable look of the jobless, lost most of their enthusiasm for betting and brooded in sullen silence. Here and there a few gamblers persisted more energetically than ever, jumping and shouting like fanatics when they won, but joyless even then.

GEORGE finished his conversation abruptly and stood up, motioning to Art that it was time to leave. They met on the moving ramp going down to street level. A number of other men were heading restlessly in the same direction, taking to the exits early. In the lines forming at the exits there was some jostling for position, and some police were standing by alertly. A huge, disheveled man standing in the next queue glared across a railing at Art and George and murmured something unpleasant about jobholders. In present company Art felt secure enough to glare right back, until the man decided he was getting nowhere and turned away.

“Three innings, dollar and a quarter,” droned the Bureau of Sports agent in the booth where Art presented his ticket. Art picked up the coins that came clattering toward him from under the bullet-proof glass. Probably watching a whole game would be worth three seventy-five. He wondered if they paid overtime for extra innings.

As soon as they were clear of the stadium crowd, riding a westbound slidewalk into a part of the city Art had not visited before, he asked eagerly: “Did you find out where she is?”

“We’re on the trail. I told you, I’ll have to talk to a couple of people.” George, shaking his head, turned back to look at the slowly receding stadium, its roof-jaws gaping at the sky. “I was afraid we might have a little riot. It gets bad in there sometimes when the home team loses.”

Controlling his impatience, Art looked back too. “They can get paid now just to sit and watch a game and keep out of trouble. Or there are a thousand things people can do to win prizes. They don’t have to be intelligent or educated, they can win by bowling or pitching horseshoes. Everyone can win a prize at something. I don’t know what they want.”

George faced forward again. “Did I tell you, I may be going on television? Probably not, though, I think I blew the audition.”

“No.” Art was surprised.

“That’s where I was this morning, auditioning. Just a local station. Oh, it’s a real triplet of a mess. They have this monstrous clumsy machine, made up like a woman, for a man to fight. Let’s change to the high-speed walk here, the next place I want to stop is way out in a slumburb.”

At the interchange, the walk they had been riding flowed briefly beside an acceleration strip. This strip was of viscous plastic that remained cohesive and hard-surfaced though it flowed like water, the circular stream of it running thick and deep and slow beside the slow slidewalk, and thin and fast to match speeds with the express. With no more balancing than it took to mount a stair, the passengers made the changeover. Once whizzing westward aboard the fast, long-distance belt, Art and George sat down on the continuous bench that jnoved with their new conveyance.

“So what about this television program?” Art asked, his curiosity aroused.

“It’ll be garbage. They want somebody to jump through the air like an idiot and scream, and beat up this giant woman . . . There could be a good karate program, showing how the human mind and body can work together. I’d like to do a good one someday but I don’t suppose they’d ever let me. I guess I’ll do this one if they want to hire me. I can use the money.”

Art had a sudden realization of the obvious: a midwifer was illegal and therefore must be expensive. Rita hadn’t had much money with her. Might she have fallen into the hands of some cut-rate quack?

“George, are you paying for—Rita?”

“I’m contributing something.”

“Then why must we run all over the city to find out where she is? Don’t you know?”

George calmly shook his head.

For a while they rode through the warm afternoon without talking. The whispering rush of the express walk, shaded beneath its plastic awning, bore them at highway speed through kilometer after kilometer of the great city. They passed industrial blockhouses, and older manufacturing parks surrounded by grim fences, where machines labored night and day for Man, the master, repairing and sometimes redesigning themselves, only occasionally requiring any human supervision. They passed street after street of the two- and three-apartment dwellings in which the bulk of the city’s people seemed to live. Here dwelt the great respectable mass. Here the head of the household might work two or three days a week, here the family owned stocks and bonds enough to bring some usable income, here they had success from time to time in winning prizes. Not really full-time jobholders, most of them, but that was how they saw themselves. Vending centers flowed past, public computing terminals, streets and parking lots. A school. A park, with a young couple naked on the grass, bodies locked and working toward orgasm. A Church of Eros, whose twin towers stood like the raised knees of a supine woman, flanking the main entrance. A superhighway interchange for private surface vehicles, fallen into disrepair, with half its lanes closed by barricades, grass growing through the cracked concrete. Nearby, a terminal of the underground long-distance tube complex. More two-and three-family dwellings, row on row on row. And scattered everywhere throughout the clean and sunlit city, the fortified stone walls of blockhouses springing up.

Now Art noticed with part of his mind that the buildings rushing past were becoming noticeably shabbier; they must be approaching the western border of the city. Thinking aloud, he said: “Suppose she actually does have a child, produces a living child out of this. What will we do then? I tell myself that if it comes to that we’ll just ignore what people say, or the looks we get from them. I’ll do all I can to keep the third one from feeling unwanted. But I suppose he will.”

“I just don’t know how that would work,” said George.

“And Rita. I don’t know if going to jail would bother her as much as being sterilized.”

After another little silence George said: “I know the thought of having that done has scared her in the past. Maybe now, though, it won’t seem so terrible. She’d never have another baby to worry about, once this one is taken care of.”

“If it ever is a baby.” Art felt a surge of pity and grief for the unwanted third-to-be, un-needed and detested by a World already jammed. Fetus, why do you thrust with such a mad, blind drive to reach the light? Shrink back to nothing. Go away. There’s nothing here in the world for you, that you should fight to reach it. But of course the seed could only grow where it had been planted.

“George, the Family Planning man implied that when some women go through this new method of extracting the fetus and freezing it, then they’re content to have the resulting child brought up in an orphanage. I wonder if that’s what Rita has in mind. To me it would be worse than having a third child with us, to purity with what the neighbors say. Do you know what she intends? She must have discussed some plan with you.”

George shook his head gloomily, staring off into the distance.

“We’d adopt the kid, or something. We’d hang onto him. But it would be pretty grim, and I don’t want that kid to ever come into this world. You can see how I feel, can’t you?”

“I can see how you feel, and how Rita feels, too. Maybe that’s my trouble, I see everybody’s point of view. Even the kid who isn’t born yet.” His eyes flicked at Art and off again. “If abortion’s not killing, what is it then?”

Being well rested and in good control of himself, Art could now have brought out the arguments with which to demolish this simplistic point of view. But he had no wish to argue with George, and anyway arguments were no good for changing someone’s mind until that mind was ready for change.

THE city proper was suddenly left behind. No official boundary or sharp line of demarcation was visible, but within the space of a few blocks the view changed, as what was unmistakably a slumburb came rising about the slidewalk like a dirty wave. Art was a stranger to this part of the Chicago area, but it did not look much different from some sections of Los Angeles. Here were the endless curved rows of small houses cheaply built, falling apart at the age of twenty or thirty, but still occupied. Not only occupied, but cut and partitioned. There would be no steady jobholders living here, and not many who owned shares of stock or won more than an occasional prize. This was Basic Income territory.

A small vending district clustered around the terminus of the high speed slidewalk. Here all the other pedestrian walks were stat, as rigid and unmoving as the streets. Among the automated vendors a couple of human-attended establishments survived. One of these, a small and dingy tavern at the dead end of a block, proved to be George’s destination.

The tavern did not look old, but was already rundown in appearance, sharing the neighborhood’s general air of defeat. Daylight was shut out from the interior, and the artificial lighting inside was dim but violently colored. As Art’s eyes adjusted he could see obscene words scrawled here and there on the shabby walls, and concealing garments, opaque hip boots and overcoats, crudely drawn. All in all, Art supposed, a typical BI barroom; not that he had seen many such, except in television stories. Four or five apathetic male customers perched on bar stools. Above and behind the bar, the legally required police TV eye roosted like a robotic vulture, now and then turning its glass eye on its scrawny metal neck.

The bartender raised his head, sizing up his two new customers, and fixed eyes blank as the vulture’s lens on George, as if deciding he was the one who had to be dealt with.

“Couple of short ones,” George ordered, resting an elbow on the bar. When two small glasses of beer had been poured, he asked: “Is Alfie around?”

“Maybe shootin’ pool,” the bartender grated. There was a back room. POOLHALL $1.00 ADM.

George strolled that way. “I’ll just see if he’s there.”

“That’ll be one dollar, see the sign?”

George just glanced back as he strolled. “I won’t touch a cue.” He went on into the Pool Hall.

The bartender hesitated briefly, then picked up the coins George had left on the bar and slouched sway to tend another customer.

Art sipped his beer, which for some reason tasted quite good. He wished he knew how to talk to these people and act with them: George’s and Rita’s background was as middle-class as his own, but George had picked up the knack somewhere. Maybe in karate, though he had mentioned once that most of the students and practitioners were not the tough-guy type. Couple of short ones. Get tough with me and I can break your ribs—this last was only implied, of course, never verbalized or even bluntly stated in so many body-language words. He was just this somewhat undersized fellow who was not at all intimidated. What others read into that was what intimidated them.

There was a stir in a rear booth and a pair of B-girls materialized out of the dimness there and come flowing forward to the bar. Art felt a mild twinge of alarm. The girls license buttons were prominently displayed on their kimonos, but the garments were probably longer and thicker and more shapeless than the letter of the law allowed. The women approached the bar and stood there, closer to Art than to anyone else. Not that they looked at him. Their pale-painted faces were averted slightly, their mouths pinched in professional haughtiness and cool reserve. Art uncomfortably shifted his stance.

George stuck his head out of the back room. “Not today, girls,” he called. “Art, get a beer for Alfie, and get us a booth. We’ll be out in a minute.”

The girls faces relaxed into more natural scowls and they moved away, resuming some private conversation in bored voices. One pulled off her kimono to scratch beneath her bikini straps. Art bought three more short ones, and carried the filled glasses to an empty booth.

FROM the booth he had a good view of the tavern’s huge television stage. For some reason the ball game was not being shown; maybe the game was already over, or there could be rioting at the stadium. The barrel-sized image of an announcer’s head was reading a news story:

“This afternoon in the General Assembly, chief Chinese delegate Lu Ti-Ping accused a neighboring government, Southern Pan-Asia, of using biological weapons.against its own—the Southern Pan-Asian—people.

“Lu quoted statistics from UNIMED which indicate that deaths from uncertain causes have reduced the SPA population by nearly ten per cent during the last three months. According to the UNIMED report, most of those dying have been the elderly and the chronically ill. According to the Chinese accusation, disproportionately few of the deaths have occurred among members of the Patriots Party, now the ruling group of Southern Pan-Asia.

“Finally the Chinese delegate expressed regret that, in his words, the SPA government has chosen such an inhumane method of trying to strengthen itself economically. Is this, Lu asked, to be the first step on a road of dangerous economic aggression?”

As if on cue the announcer’s head was abruptly replaced by that of another, equally big, who with a tryannosaur’s smile read hastily through a perhaps ill-timed commercial for a Chicago vending chain. The presentation was so inept that Art assumed this was some small local station, maybe the very one George had auditioned for. Probably there were a hundred of them, though.

Art sipped his beer. The newsmonger was soon back on stage, saying: “Then it was the turn of Cao Din That, chief SPA delegate, to reply.”

The enlarged head of Cao Din That now appeared on the stage of the tavern in the Chicago slumburb, where nobody but Art seemed to be paying the least attention, and his translated words were heard, categorically denying all the charges leveled against the leaders of his suffering country. Possibly some foreign government was really to blame for the surplus deaths. If so, let the aggressors beware, they would be found out shortly. In any case, UNIMED was overstepping its authority by interfering in SPA internal affairs.

The tone of the speech became milder. Possibly the deaths were the unforeseen side-effect of a new insecticide, employed in the desperate struggle to increase food production. Also to be considered were the airborne viruses that had been accidentally freed during the recent UN police action against the Nile Republic; no one knew where those viruses might have landed, nor would anyone even admit to knowing exactly what they were. The UN was to be applauded for its prompt action along the Nile, which had liquidated some planners of biological war, but still some of the consequences had been unfortunate.

“Ah, th’ world’s gone t’ repression,” said a colorless little old man who must be Alfie, for he arrived at that moment with George. Art slid over to make room.

Alfie seized a beer, drank most of it, and went on talking. “The whole world’s crazy. You know what happened the other night? Somebody bombed Vic Rizzo’s townhouse. It musta been just vandals. They couldn’ta known it was his.”

“That so?” George asked, indifferently. Art wondered who Vic Rizzo might be. After a few more social noises had been made, and Alfie further supplied with beer, George got to the point.

“Alf, you know the city pretty well.”

“I guess I do.”

“Then tell me something.” George dropped his low voice even lower. “Who might a nice girl go to see, if she got kind of carried away and emotional, and wanted to finish an extra baby? She’s got two kids now.”

Alfie gave facial demonstrations of thought. “Married?” he asked, as if being married or single made any difference in the number of children a woman was allowed to bear.

“Yes,” said George.

Alfie glanced at Art, wordlessly identified him as the worried husband, and winked at him. Then obviously pleased to be consulted, Alfie assumed an air of wisdom and began to talk. He seldom quite finished a sentence, however, and his speech was thick with allusions to people and places that Art had never heard of. Also Alf used a number of slang words strange to Art, or maybe Art was only mis-hearing them, because Alf’s whisper was almost too low to be made out. All in all, the dissertation was perfectly unintelligible. George, though, kept on listening with apparent satisfaction, now and again encouraging Alfie with grunts and nods, and ordering more beer.

“SOME characters you know,” Art reflected aloud, as he and George rode the express slidewalk into the east again. Twenty kilometers or so ahead, near the shore of invisible Lake Michigan and farther east than Art had been as yet, the unbelievable towers of the central city rose.

George grinned. “Alfie has his uses.”

“I hope you found out something from him. I didn’t. Do you think Rita is with one of those people he mentioned?”

George turned to look back into slumburb country, a desolate sea of rooftops beneath the mid-afternoon sun. “I think Alfie may be on the phone to Family Planning right now, trying to sell them the information that you and I were asking about midwifers. The man I talked to at the ball park may be doing the same thing. Family Planning knows what Rita’s trying to do, but I want’em to think she doesn’t have a midwifer yet. They can’t arrest us for asking general questions. All I’ve been trying to do so far today is put’em off the trail a little.”

Floundering well off the trail himself, Art could find nothing to say.

VI

ART maintained a somewhat surly silence through several slidewalk interchanges. He and George were deep in the city again, moving on a fairly crowded walk that angled to the southeast, before he spoke again to ask: “Where are we going now?”

“The dojo. Fred’s supposed to be there at three-thirty so I can watch him work out. And then I have a private lesson to give. Come along and watch.”

“Look, George, are you going to help me find Rita or aren’t you? If you can’t or won’t, just say so. Don’t keep stalling me along.”

George was unperturbed. “Just come along to the dojo. I said I’d help you and I will.”

Art puffed out his breath. But he went along; somehow George’s words carried conviction.

Under a sign that read PARR’S KARATE DOJO Fred Lohmann was waiting for them, holding up the front of a modest building in a small middle-class vending district. Under one arm Fred was carrying a whitish roll of what appeared to be clothing.

“Art, you and Fred remember each other, hey?” George unlocked the ground-floor door and stepped inside, waving on the lights with a passage of his hand over the switchplate on the wall.

Art’s hand was squeezed. “Sure we do,” said Fred, clearing his throat nervously. He towered over the two older men. “Art, how’s your wife and kids?”

“Oh, fine. I guess you met Rita yesterday? Over at George’s place?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s right.”

It seemed obvious that Fred wasn’t in on the midwifery conspiracy, but still some clue to Rita’s whereabouts might possibly be gotten out of him. Later. Right now Fred was all nervous anticipation of whatever test he had been brought here for, and George was present, raising his window blinds, checking his printout for messages, and in general opening up his shop.

The interior of the dojo was mostly one big room, about twenty meters square, and two stories high, so you could have fitted a very small house inside it. The floor was of polished wood. In the front, beside the street entrance, an area separated by a low partition from the big room contained a desk, with phoneplate and computer terminal, and a few chairs, some of them arranged as for spectators. An open doorway in the rear led to some lockers and, Art supposed, a shower. Large flags of the United States, the United Nations, and Japan were formally and correctly displayed together on one wall. The general impression was of functional orderliness.

George and Fred each bowed, not deeply or very ceremoniously, toward the flags. Then they slipped off their sandals and padded back toward the locker room, bare feet seeming to grip the floor familiarly. “Make yourself at home, Art,” George called back.

Art put his own sandals into the convenient rack by the front door, then wandered about looking the place over. The smooth floor was not slippery to bare feet.

Something here reminded him of chess. He wondered if it was the square arena of polished wood, or some faint scent of conflict lingering in the conditioned air. Glancing up, he saw four android fighting machines hanging like felons near the high ceiling, above the center of the open floor. He looked about and spotted their control console standing near the desk. Feeling a technician’s curiosity, Art walked over and looked at the controls.

George and Fred soon emerged from the locker room, clad in loose whitish trousers and jackets, only moderately translucent, and wearing athletes codpieces of hard protective plastic. “I guess I just lost my own belt someplace,” Fred was saying, meanwhile accepting a brown belt, an overlong strip of tough-looking cloth, from George’s hand.

GEORGE looped a black belt twice around his own waist and knotted it in front, and the two of them began to limber up, swinging their legs like ballet dancers, crouching and twisting and stretching their bodies to unlikely extremes, shaking wrists and ankles as if their hands and feet had fallen asleep. Art stood watching with some interest.

“Ready?” George asked, after a few minutes of this. “Let’s go five-time sparring, then.” With nearly the full length of the floor clear behind him, he drew himself up facing Fred and they exchanged bows. Then they stood, each with arms slightly bent, hanging down in front of his body, fists loosely closed. “You first,” George directed.

Fred snapped into a tenser, much lower stance, poised to attack, his right fist cocked near his hip, left arm curved before him in a blocking position. “Jo-dan!” The word came out in an explosive breath.

George grunted: “Uhss!”

Fred sprang forward and advanced in long deliberate strides, and with each stride one of his fists drove like a piston at George’s chin. George flowed backward easily, staying just ahead of the punches, pressing each of them aside at the last moment with an economical open-handed block perfectly timed against Fred’s extended arm. His short legs gracefully matched the speed and rhythm of the long ones driving at him. What he was doing looked quite easy. After he had gauged the first punch, George’s eyes moved downward between punches, appraising the movements of Fred’s feet and hips.

With his fifth punch Fred halted and stood motionless, arm still extended. Instantly George came blurring back at him with a counterpunch that was evidently an expected part of the ritualized combat; he snapped it to a halt a centimeter from Fred’s unmoving chin.

Now it was Fred’s turn to draw himself up straight, while George crouched for the attack.

“Jo-dan!”

“Uhss!”

George charged. Somehow he made his shortness look like an advantage. The sleeves of his white jacket snapped audibly with each punch. Fred retreated stiffly and hurriedly, parrying with heavy blocks that looked comparatively awkward. When it came time for his counterattack he essayed an arm-grab and kick to the stomach which George did not attempt to avoid. The snapping kick just touched George’s jacket, as it was evidently supposed to do, but George still seemed to find it unsatisfactory. “Try again,” he ordered.

Fred went through the grab-and-kick again. George said nothing. Art got the impression that Fred was failing his test.

George exchanged bows with his opponent, and turned to Art. “Art, switch the andys on, will you? The console by the desk.”

Art found the power switch. There came a whispering of cables up above, and the four androids started to descend, hanged men coming down for vengeance. Their wire cables lowered them slowly, as their still-blind faces turned this way and that and their plastic limbs began to quiver and stir. By the time the androids feet had touched down on polished wood, their legs had life and balance enough to let them stand.

The cables detached themselves and were quickly reeled up out of the way by the overhead machinery. Four men of about average height were left standing in the middle of the floor. Their heads and hands and feet were tan, the rest of their bodies white, as though clothed in beltless karate outfits. At the crotch of each appeared a small, formalized codpiece-bulge. Their tan faces were featureless except for small recessed eye lenses and flattish dummy noses. Like superior creatures lost in their own proud thoughts, they stood with loosely hanging arms, ignoring the three real men who watched them.

George, coming over to the console, called back to Fred: “Want to run through heian number four?”

Fred shrugged. “Okay.” He frowned at the man-like figures, as if hoping to intimidate them.

The four androids were warmed up and fully active now, and as George set up their controls they obediently arranged themselves in the center of the floor, facing one another like four cardplayers looking across a large square table. Each was crouched in the same attacking position that the men had used for the ritual sparring.

“You don’t fight all four at once, do you?” Art asked. “I’ve seen karate on television a few times, but I confess I never paid too much attention.”

George dismissed television karate with a mere lipcurl of contempt. “What speed do you want, Freddy? How about Three or Four?”

Fred flushed slightly. He stood with his hands on his hips, swinging his legs again. “I can handle One-point-five, or Two.”

After a moment George said: “Try Two-point-five, then,” and set a dial. “Better get a helmet.”

“Okay.” Fred trotted to the locker room.

ART was interested. “Then he is going to fight all four at once.”

“Just in a kind of formalized way, a prearranged exercise. They come at you one at a time, and anybody who has some training and who has memorized the moves of the particular heian can do it. If he keeps his nerve. And if the speed’s set low enough. He wants to do it pretty fast.” For a moment George’s face said openly: It’s his funeral.

Something about the fighting machines fascinated Art. The way they stood there on the polished wood like outsize chessmen, waiting for an act of human control to impel them to ritual battle. He asked: “Is it all right if I take a closer look?”

George glanced at the controls. “Go ahead.”

Art padded over to the androids. They did not seem to notice him, as they waited with impassive poise. If you order us to punch and kick you, Lord Man, so will we do. Art peered into dull lens-eyes and wondered what image they made of him. With a cautious finger he touched the plastic knuckles of one cocked tan fist. Not as hard as the proverbial rock, but not what one would call safely padded, either. The fingers of the hand were not really separate, but only indicated by grooves in the one plastic piece.

“Feels as if it could kill you.”

“Not likely, they don’t really hit like black belts.” George smiled briefly. “Does sting a little, though.”

“You’ve been hit, then.”

“Oh, sure. Not seriously. Yes, these things can be dangerous. We sometimes put big padded hands and feet on’em for novices. But if there’s no real element of danger when you train, you can’t really train properly.” He glanced toward the locker room. There came the sound of a toilet flushing. “Fred’s no novice. But he’s nowhere near as good as he’s been telling me he is. I just can’t hire him now.”

“Then why—?” Art gestured at the androids.

“Oh, I owe him a full fair tryout, I guess. And he’s got good potential if he’d settle down and practice every day.”

Fred game back, fitting on something like a fencer’s mask. “I found a face protector. I like it bettern a whole helmet.”

“All right,” said George, standing by the console.

Fred moved in among the androids, and oriented himself carefully at the center of the space between them, where he was the focus of all their lenses. He drew a deep breath and then stood up relaxed. “Ready.”

George touched a red control, and instantly bright red warnings glowed into life in the eyes of each mechanical figure. Somewhere a small repeater chime began to sound, one, two, three, four, five notes and the android at Fred’s left lunged at him with a punch too fast for Art to follow. Fred was ready though and his left arm snapped up to block the attack while his right hand came whipping around edgewise to hit home like a hatchet on the tan plastic neck. The aggressor machine was sent staggering back. Meanwhile another was already charging.

Each android charged in turn, was beaten off, reset itself quickly, and in its next turn came back to the attack again, aiming another blow or kick at Fred, or grabbing at his jacket with clamplike finger less hands, About half a minute passed, while Fred piled up points.

Fred spun from side to side, defending himself with vicious blocks, counterattacking with fists and feet and elbows. His face was rigid with concentration—or was it fear and hate he showed? He reached out and pulled down an android’s head, smashing the blank uncaring face against his driving knee. Again he spun around—not quite in time. A savage punch glanced off his skull, and down he went.

Art moved with an electronic technician’s instinct for the power switch, but George’s hand was there already. For an instant the androids hesitated, looking for fair game. Then their eyes died and their bodies fell clattering to the wooden floor.

Fred was rolling over on the floor, gasping and moaning, clutching at his head. Art and George went to him. He rolled just as Art bent down, and Art’s hand was besmeared with a drop of Fred’s blood.

“They changed speed!” Fred sat up, dripping blood onto his white jacket. “I almost had’em, and then something went wrong . . . ah, triplets, that hurts! I swear they changed on me . . .” Fred was practically sobbing with exertion, pain, defeat.

Having played chess against computers, Art thought that perhaps he understood Fred’s feelings. But since he had risked no blood against the chess computers, Art said only: “Lie still, I’ll get a towel.” Fred’s scalp was torn but still the damage didn’t look too serious.

George stayed with the victim, gently getting his face-protector off, while Art went to the locker room and found a towel and also picked up a first aid kit that hung there on the wall. He had just gotten back to the disaster area when the street door of the dojo opened and a tall man came in. This man was well dressed in translucent shorts and business jacket, and had dark skin and Oriental eyes. As he was starting to bow to the flags he noticed what was happening, and immediately slipped off his shoes and came across the floor.

“Have an accident?”

“Oh, hello, Doc. Yes,” said George, getting to his feet. Fred also started to get up, then sat back on the floor as the man who had just come in bent to look at his torn scalp.

Accepting the towel from Art, Doc dabbed around the wound. “This looks like it’ll need some glue. Ivor, fetch my bag in from the car, will you?”

Another man, youngish and of undistinguished appearance, who had followed the doctor in and then had remained uncertainly near the door, gave a little salute with his fingers like a chauffeur or a servant and then ducked put.

“Doc,” said George, “this is Art Rodney, my sister’s husband. Art, this is Dr. Hammad.”

With a look as of recognition, the doctor nodded, and reached to shake Art’s hand.

George said: “Art, when you have a chance, you can consult the doctor about your problem. He’s your man.”

TO BE CONTINUED

Part II of III

WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

By the mid-21st century the revolution in sexual morals had advanced to the point where chastity, and the repression or sublimation of sexual impulses were considered social offenses, if not actual crimes—but were still sought by many as secret pleasures. Most members of the Establishment belonged to the Church of Eros. Concurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted.

ART RODNEY, California electronics engineer and chessmaster, finds that his wife, RITA, has fled to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late.

Art’s transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians (a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under way. Art helps a distraught girl named ROSAMOND JAMISON get on the train for Chicago.

In Chicago, Rita’s brother GEORGE PARR, a karate master, and his wife, ANN, live like many other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant free-birth advocate and Christian. Art and Ann futilely argue the right and wrong of compulsory abortion in an overcrowded world.

FRED LOHMANN, Ann’s brother, awakens with his assigned roommate MARJORIE, in a Chicago Y (Young Persons’ Play Club), a strait-laced place where nightly sex activity is required of all. Fred is a karate student on his way to becoming an ape, the current term for one who roams the streets inflicting apparently pointless violence on strangers.

MR. HALL, representing the Bureau of Family Planning, visits Art and is soon convinced that Art himself is innocent of conspiring toward an illegal birth. Hall brings him up to date: the very latest medical technology allows a just-removed fetus to be quick-frozen and later placed in an artificial womb where it will develop into a normal baby. (Some doctors are preserving fetuses on moral grounds, while others are performing these illegal operations for the money.)

Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita, face to face, George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch , baseball, and rioting threatens when the home team loses; and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news.

George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karate-machines. One of George’s students, Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita.

“I HAPPENED to see your wife this morning,” the doctor was telling Art a few minutes later. “She’s in good health and good spirits.” The doctor was hanging his street clothes in a locker, getting ready for his private karate lesson. George was out in the main room of the dojo, discussing some refinement of mayhem with the bodyguard Ivor. From where Art stood in the locker room he could see Fred sitting out there too, the picture of defeat, head resting in his hands, blood drying brownish on his jacket. His brown belt had come unknotted.

“Where is she?” Art asked.

“Understand, I have no direct connection with the place she’s staying at. It’s been my experience, though, that they do a good job of taking care of guests.”

“You have no connection? Aren’t you the one who’s intending to—?”

“Oh, no, no, I’m not handling your wife’s case myself. No, the connection between me and George is too obvious, you see. In such cases a referral to another physician is more prudent.”

“Who is he, then? When am I going to see her? When is the operation to be?”

“It’ll be soon, I suppose. She’s young and healthy, and I would anticipate an uneventful parturition and freezing.”

The casual words brought on an icy congealing in Art’s own bone marrow. He had no clear idea of what a three-months’ fetus actually looked like, but in his mind he saw a mindless finger of tissue, extracted like an appendix and then frozen into an icicle.

He asked: “If a fetus is treated this way, then grown in one of those artificial wombs— what are its chances of becoming a normal child?”

“Oh, very good. Excellent. Is that what’s worrying you? Don’t let it. Freezing an organism that small and then revivifying it is nothing, these days. And an artificial womb actually offers several advantages over a full-term pregnancy and birth. Development of the fetus can be watched day by day and the flow of nutrients perfectly controlled. It’s much more physically convenient for the mother, too, of course. I expect the FDA will release the wombs for unrestricted use with legitimate children soon; they’re probably only delaying because more women would want kids if pregnancy wasn’t such a bother.” Dr. Hammad pulled on his loose white karate trousers; he smiled reassuringly, as if he had just solved all Art’s problems for him.

“That’s all very well, doctor. That helps to ease my mind of one kind of worry. But now what about my wife?”

“Oh, this is safer for her than a normal birth would be. I understand she’s had two of those.”

“I mean legally. Suppose she’s caught and convicted and sent to jail and sterilized against her will? What’s all that going to do to her?”

“See here,” said Hammad sharply, “I thought you wanted this child. There are always certain risks involved, for everyone.”

“I don’t want this frozen so-called child, Rita does. I want to talk to her, to reason with her, before it’s too late.”

The doctor had turned his face away and was adjusting his jacket, slowly and meticulously. “You’ll have to see someone else about it, then, Mr. Rodney. I told you I’m not operating.”

“I insist that I be allowed to see my wife, face to face!” Art was keeping his voice low, but he felt it becoming shaky with his anger.

“Now you know where she can be found. And I’m quite ready to stir up trouble, if you refuse to help me talk to her!”

Knotting a green belt at his waist, the doctor glared at Art as if he had found the wrong specimen laid out on a dissecting table. Art glared right back.

“All right,” the doctor said at last. “I’ll find out if some arrangement can be made for her to phone you. Though it’s not wise, phones can be tapped. Where are you staying?”

“No. I want to be able to talk with her in person. Alone.”

Hammad was ready now, but he did not go out. “All right, all right. It’s against my judgment but since you insist on taking the risk I’ll see if there’s any way a meeting can be arranged.”

“Soon. Very soon.”

“All right. Where can you be reached by phone?”

FRED Lohmann stood inside the Megiddo Bar & Coffee House, on the edge of a mean little urban BI district near State Street, not far from the Y where he was rooming. He was alone in a crowd. On a low dais some people with medieval musical instruments were twanging out a ballad about pure-hearted love, and a chill silence had crept into the huge dim room. The place was befogged with the exhaled smoke of several kinds of leaves and synthetic mixtures, tobacco being only one. At every table there were glassy staring eyes, and few of them seemed to be aimed at anybody else.

Fred slouched his tall frame over the coffeebar, nursing what they called a small Turkish, which had coffee and other things mixed in it, along with a vague dull hope that someone might ask him about the little bandage on the side of his head. After all, mighty few men could have handled those andys at the speed they were set for today. Not one in a hundred, probably, even given the chance to train, could do it. Black belt George, of course. Third degree black belt, no less. He probably set them on speed One and knocked them down like bowling pins. Toward George, Fred felt envy, but there was no malice in it.

Karate was a good business to be in. You could get to meet some influential people, people with class, like the Dr. Hammad who had come in and patched Fred’s scalp today. Afterward Fred had watched the doctor go through his private lesson, and George had used Fred to demonstrate a point or two, and had Fred spar freestyle with the doctor a little bit, taking it easy.

Now Fred made a karate blade of his hand and chopped delicately, silently, at the edge of the bar. Then he stopped. Who cared? What was the use? George probably could tell without even checking that he had been lying about having a brown belt. Sorry, George had said, no job now. Practice every day and we’ll see. George hadn’t said every day for how long, but Fred knew it wouldn’t be for just a week or two. Months or maybe even a year before he got his stance and his control and everything else up to the standards George wanted in a brown or black belt, in a paid instructor. There was not much fun in grunting and sweating and working like a machine for that length of time. And there was no guarantee that he would ever make it, so what was the sense in putting out that kind of effort?

Up to the bar beside Fred there stepped a young man who looked like one who knew his way around. He was of average height, but so broad-shouldered that he appeared squat. Around his shoulders he wore the pelt, doubtless artificial, of what Fred supposed was a wolf; anyway it was a shaggy animal, with pointy little stick-up ears, beady glittering glass eyes, and sharp-looking sizable white teeth in a pink open plastic mouth.

Fred hadn’t yet made contact with anyone who knew where he might buy some glad-rags.

“Hey,” he called quietly.

The wolf-man turned, properly casual, and looked Fred over. “Hey,” he answered coolly. “You buyin’?”

Fred waited long enough to show that he wasn’t being pushed into anything. “Got my check today, why not?”

Fred and Wolf (“Call me Wolf, man”) sat at a table, where they were soon joined by a friend of Wolf´s called Lewandowski, who was drinking herb tea spiked with vodka. Fred bought another round for the three of them and decided it was the last he was going to buy. He sounded out Wolf and Lewandowski about gladrags, and they assured him that a man who sold such things would be around later.

Wolf said he came from New York City. He let it be known that he had led a gang there and the New York police were looking for him so he had come west for his health. Fred could believe this about halfway. Lewandowski, a fat, strong-looking youth with empty eyes, was a native Chicagoan. Once he started talking it was hard to get him to shut up. He said he was looking for a job with one of the policy wheels, legal or illegal made no difference to him; his old man was a compulsive gambler and he knew there was no money to be made on the sucker’s side of the operation.

Neither of them asked Fred about his bandage, but he faked a little more headache than he actually felt and managed to reveal casually that he was a karate expert, working hard for his black belt. He saw the others hardening their faces slightly to keep from showing that they were impressed. Probably they believed him about halfway as he did them. Well, he was telling them about half the truth. If only there was someone he could talk to.

Finally Fred gave up waiting and bought yet another round, for neither of the other two seemed-to have any money. They both said they had been on BI for about a year, since abandoning school. And Wolf said he couldn’t even collect his checks these days or the New York police would find out where he was and have him extradited.

Fred began to feel a little drunk and sick, and his wounded head ached in earnest. The gladrag man finally arrived and was pointed out to him, and as soon as he had the little carton in his pocket Fred went back to the Y. Marjorie wasn’t in, or else she wouldn’t answer his tapping at the door. Without her unlatching her side of the bed, he couldn’t even let his down, and so was restricted to slouching on his spine in a chair with his feet up on his tiny table. He sat there in dizzy silence for a while, staring into the hot eyes of the Y’s founder, whose portrait decorated one wall. On another wall was the predictable print of Love Conquers All, the naked urchin wearing wings and pretending to be Eros, climbing out of bed and knocking down books and mathematical instruments and trampling a violin. That Caravaggio had certainly known how to paint. That picture would be something to try to carve in wood.

He wanted Marjorie to come back, and to hurry up about it. But maybe she had checked out, and tonight he would have to sleep with some real old-fashioned sex kitten, some real dog who studied an erotic manual every day. He didn’t know if he could take that now.

One thing he sure wasn’t going to be able to take for very long tonight was sitting here alone. It was only about eight o’clock, not yet dark outside, and he was neither sober nor yet really high on the spiked coffee. He got up and went out, and had nowhere to go. In a little while he was heading back to the Megiddo.

VII

THE phone call got Art up from the Parrs’ dinner table. When Art had let the caller see him, a man’s voice spoke briefly through a blanked screen, giving him directions. “The corner of Belmont and Halsted. Be there in an hour. Don’t forget to come alone.”

“How will I know—?” but the connection had already been broken.

George, who had been listening in the background, now looked worried, which did not help Art’s nerves at all. Ann, smiling though she was worried too, came up to Art. “You’re going, then? Give Rita our love if you do get to see her. And listen to what she says. And don’t do anything foolish. You won’t get lost now, will you?”

“No. No, I won’t. Well then, I’m off.” He left the house before they could change their minds completely and begin to argue with him not to go. He had prepared himself somewhat by purchasing a map of the city’s slidewalk system from an autovendor, and to pick out a good route to Belmont and Halsted was no trouble at all. He even detoured through a busy shopping center with the idea of shaking off anybody who might be trying to follow him.

Chicago was a place where people walked, or at least rode standing on their moving walkways. In this it was unlike most of mid-California, where a man trying to move any distance on foot soon found himself a helpless alien in a world that had been planned and built and paved and spaced for surface vehicles. By night out there a walking man was a blind alien once the particular slidewalk or statwalk he was on had taken him out of the particular region where he lived. The tall islands of glittering buildings seen in the distance all looked pretty much alike, and the daytime mountains were gone. A walking man could think that the passing tides and torrents of headlights and taillights went on forever.

Here in Chicago things were closer together and more reachable, more on a human scale, save for the towers that clustered in the center of the city, the place a few Chicagoans still called the Loop. Here signs named the streets at every corner, address numbers were consistent where they could be seen, and the city was covered by the vast slidewalk grid. But now at sunset most of the walks were only thinly occupied. The crowded shopping center had evidently been fed most of its customers by surface vehicle, for its large parking lots looked nearly full. The people Art saw on the walks kept looking at one another in mutual wariness as they passed.

Art kept to the main thoroughfares, which Ann had said were fairly well patroled by the police. Plenty of artificial light fell on the faintly whispering slidewalks, and on the new, high, blind walls that now made up so much of the city’s face. Next to the vehicle lanes of the street there usually came a strip of grass, then the whispering walk, a wider strip of grass and trees (no shrubbery, though, wherein a man might lurk), and then the walls, high and un-scaleable. Walls of workerless, humming factories, or walls of defended blockhouses like George’s. Art, searching out his path tonight between the walls, was reminded of a maze he had once seen in the laboratory of a psychologist who had been experimenting with rats. With the going of the sun, the trees growing in the tended spots and strips of grass took on an unreal, misplaced look. Their June leaves were as green as signals in the streetlights brightness. And the streets steady vehicular traffic, dipping or rising as the streets passed under or over the moving walks, was also quite unreal to a slidewalking man; the people in the cars were like fish in an aquarium, dim sliding shapes bound into their own world.

“See that one there?” the psychologist who ran the rats had said. “Looks fine and healthy, doesn’t he? Fat and sleek and bright-eyed compared with most of the others.”

“How do you keep some of ‘em that way, with so many crowded in?”

“They’re supposed to be crowded in. I’m studying the effects of overpopulation. And he’s really no healthier than the others are.

He’s like a sleepwalker, passive, nonsexual . . .”

“What about the others?”

“Various reactions. See the shabby one with all the energy? He’s what we call a ‘prober’. Hyper and homo-sexual. Hyperactive altogether, often turns cannibal. Only good point is he’s not a status-seeker as most of the males are.”

THUNDER rumbled somewhere. Or was it thunder? Close above the streetlights the night pressed down, opaque and prematurely black. Above the brilliant lights there might be stars or clouds or watching eyes, nothing could be seen.

Art ran his maze. After leaving the shopping center he changed slidewalk directions twice, navigating with his map. He was sliding east along Belmont Avenue, calculating the distance to Halsted Street, when a passing police car slowed, keeping pace with him for ten or fifteen seconds. Art threw one half-scowling glance toward the car and just kept on walking, until it pulled away.

A minute later he wished it back. Glancing down a comparatively dim side street as he crossed an intersection, he saw a group of four or five male figures walking together two long blocks away. They were shouting in rough voices and waving their arms. Fortunately they were a little too far off to be concerned with Art. He would bet that they meant trouble for someone, though.

Thunder rolled again. Hyperactive, and they often turned cannibal. But the psychologist with his crowding studies had been too wise to offer any cure-all for human nastiness. Certainly not the simple absence of crowding. There was still plenty of violence on farms.

Art’s nerves relaxed a little when the band of toughs passed out of sight, then tightened again as he arrived at the intersection to which he had been told to come. It was a busy place, the center of a small vending district. He alighted on a statwalk bathed in the rippling noon of a barred display window. People moved around him, shopping or aimlessly walking. No one moved at once to approach Art, and as far as he could tell no one was watching him.

Another police car, or perhaps the same one, came easing around a corner, and Art turned away from it, pretending to study the contents of the vendor’s window. He heard the car halt just a little distance off, and wait there, turbines idling with a muffled whine. Maybe they were just keeping a protective watch over the pedestrians in sight. If they were trying to follow him to Rita, surely they would be more subtle about it than this. But now it seemed to Art that the police and Family Planning probably knew already where she was. He pictured Hall conferring with cool and crafty agents, all of them agreeing to wait until the crime had been irrevocably committed before they sprang their trap. We’re not out to get her, Hall had said.

Art inventoried the window until he heard the police car pull away. A few seconds later another car drove up to the curb beside him, one of its windows lowered. A man’s voice called softly: “Are you Rodney?”

“Yes.” Art skipped across the slidewalk to the curb.

A rear door opened for him. “Get in.”

He got in and pulled the door shut and the car moved out. There were two men with him in the car, one driving and the other beside Art in the rear. As soon as the auto had turned out of the busy intersection, the man, in back took Art by the neck and pushed him impersonally down to the floor.

“We don’t wancha see where we’re going. Get under this.” A musty-smelling, opaque blanket of some kind was thrown over his head.

Opaque blankets like this one were not commonly found in the possession of proper people. Suddenly all the possibilities of evil began to open. Art could fear that he was not being taken to Rita at all, he was being gotten rid of as a troublemaker. Meanwhile the car purred on, no one in it having anything to say. It stopped and started and turned in traffic. Art no longer had the faintest idea of the direction in which he was moving. There was a faint odor of perfume, or perhaps some kind of drug, in the car or clinging to the blanket. He told himself firmly that his new fears were ridiculous. Anyway, it was too late now to start having them.

He crouched awkwardly beneath the blanket, breathing uncomfortably and pulling at his beard. Just let him have one chance to talk with Rita, face to face. She would not be able to stick to her mad plan. She had always gone along with him on the few occasions when he had really insisted on having something his own way. If she were able to face him with this decision, she would not simply have left him a note and fled. He had to believe that he would be able to make her change her mind.

How could he have lived with her for more than three years and not know her any better than he did? But Rita didn’t know him, either, if she thought he would simply let her wreck her life this way. That was the important thing. The number of children and the legal problems were secondary. To save her was what he was really fighting for.

The car turned, slowed, turned once more, crept ahead, and shortly stopped.

“We get out here. Don’t look around, just go straight into the building.”

The blanket was pulled away and Art saw that they were parked in an alley. Anonymous rough brick walls were close on either hand. As he got out of the car one of his escorts turned him toward an open doorway, some kind of unmarked service entrance, in the rear of a sizable, dimly lighted building.

One of his guides, a graying, tough-looking man, came along, walking a pace or two ahead of Art to show him the way. Art followed down a long shabby passage between walls of painted concrete block and up a narrow flight of stairs whose carpet had begun to wear. The place was a run-down apartment building, or perhaps a hotel. This impression was strengthened as they traversed another passage, that twisted past closed and numbered doors. The building was certainly old, but reasonably clean and well-maintained.

At last Art’s guide stopped and pointed to a door. “She’s in here. I’ll come back in fifteen, twenty minutes, and we’ll take ya back where we picked ya up.” The man turned his back indifferently and walked away.

Art tapped on the door, then turned the old knob and pushed it open. Rita was sitting with her back to him, in a worn plastic armchair, wearing a silvery bikini that sparkled in the light of the small room’s single lamp, and staring out through the one small window at the night. She looked around, startled, at Art’s entrance, and he saw that above the bikini bottom her belly still bulged slightly with three months’ illegitimate pregnancy—he was not too late. As she recognized him, love and fear and defiance came into her face, and she jumped up from the chair. A second later she opened her arms.

“COME home with me now,” Art murmured, almost sleepily, about ten minutes later. His voice was half muffled by the single pillow on the small bed. Rita’s hair, spread artlessly on the same pillow, was silver and gold in the light of the cheap lamp, as it would be in the best light anywhere. A gleam of almost the same color came from the plastic armchair, where her discarded bikini lay.

“No, I can’t.” Her voice was small but did not hesitate. “They’ll kill my baby if I do.” Unable to lie still after saying those unsettling words, she got up from the cot and went to close the window, against which rain was just starting to splash.

Art also sat up and put his feet on the floor. He had suddenly realized that a good many minutes had passed, that his escort would soon be back for him, and that so far Rita and he had talked very little, and that mainly about how they loved and missed each other and whether Timmy and Paula might be much upset by what was going on.

He stood up and reached for his codpiece, which had been thrown onto the armchair too. “You’re coming home with me, so don’t argue about it. You haven’t committed any real crime as yet, and there isn’t any reason why you can’t just walk out of here. A man from Family Planning came to see me, and from what he said I’m sure they won’t place any charges, if we just turn in this fetus as we’re required to do.”

“I can’t, I can’t. I wish you would try to understand. I wish you could stand by me.” Her tender body turned in the lamplight, naked and unprotected. His heart turned over.

“Why can’t you do it, for sex’s sake?” he demanded, more savagely than he had meant.

“B-because it’s living. It’s my baby, and it’s part of you I have inside me. It would be like killing you. Oh, Art.” Even slight pregnancy always made women look ridiculous and she would look more so when she put the bikini on again. Why couldn’t anybody make clothes in which a pregnant girl looked less grotesque? Maybe such clothes were made somewhere. But then, Art realized abruptly, Rita’s pregnancy was probably going to be ended in one or two more days. One way or another.

Now she got her bikini from the chair and did start to put it on. She looked fragile and vulnerable and ridiculous and he loved her tremendously. Her breasts wefe fuller than usual; that would be the pregnancy, too, of course.

“I can’t go through this again,” she told him grimly, meanwhile working on a strap. “I’m g-going to have myself sterilized when this is over, even if the government doesn’t make me. But I can’t give up this baby who’s already here.” When Rita got very tired or upset she sometimes stuttered.

“You have two real children, who need their mother with them right now, not away somewhere in one of those places that Family Planning runs, or hiding out here.”

“You say they play all day in that b-blockhouse park. I didn’t have time to look around there much. Is it safe? Ann’s very nice but sometimes she doesn’t watch her children closely enough.” By now she had gotten back into the bikini, and stood looking into the little mirror on the dresser, trying to pull and tug the bottom to a better fit.

“Very safe.” By now Art too was dressed. “Come on, Rita, you’re not killing any part of me by getting rid of a fetus. I’ll still be here.”

“But not inside me. That part of you won’t grow anymore, or go on living.”

“Bah. How do you know it’s even mine?”

She did not answer, or look away from the mirror, but something in her face closed off.

He said: “If I had a diseased appendix you’d want it cut out and done away with.”

“What’s growing in me is not diseased—”

“How do you know, have you had any defect tests made?”

“—and even if it were, I’d love it.”

If this kept on he was going to grab her and shake her. “If you loved it—I mean, if you loved the potential child it might become— you know what I mean—you’d want to save it from a lifetime of being unwanted by the world.”

“I want him. His mother wants him.” Now Rita was getting angry too. “We should kill him now because he’s going to have a very tough time someday? Then I suppose we’d better not take any chances, we’d better knock Timmy’s and Paula’s heads in because someday they’re likely to have a tough time too.”

Sublimation! He knew that he was right, but where was the argument to use? Not what the neighbors might someday say; that wouldn’t work with Rita. It came down really to their duty to the overcrowded world, of course, sacrificing a personal wish for mankind in the abstract. For the good of mankind, everyone’s reproductive urges, weak or strong, just had to bow aside. But those were not phrases with which to belabor one’s suffering wife. How to make the truth sound less self-righteous, speechy and hlghflown?

There came a knocking at the door. On his way to answer, Art said over his shoulder: “You’re coming back to Ann’s with me now to get the children, and then you’re coming home.”

“No, I’m not.” Stubborn as a mule, just like her sister-in-law. You might have thought the blood relationship was there.

This time the knock was loud. Art reached the door and flung it open. The man who stood there, the same graying escort, looked at Art’s face and hesitated. Then, in a more respectful tone than he had used before, he asked: “You about ready to leave? Don’t worry, she’ll be outta here in a couple days.”

“My wife is leaving with me. Now.”

“I’m not going, Art. Don’t ask me—oh, I wish you hadn’t come.”

A PAIR of young women were coming along the hallway, talking and giggling about something. They eyed Art strangely, and as they passed the doorway they glanced through it into Rita’s room, curiosity showing through the pale makeup that masked their faces. They were made up worse than the B-girls in the tavern had been, and dressed worse too, for those two wore loose shrouding robes, totally obscene draperies of brown and gray that no woman would wear except . . . except . . .

“What kind of a place—?” barked Art, glaring wildly at the man who faced him in the hall. The man took a step backward, startled.

Art turned quickly and confronted Rita. Lightning flared, twice, very bright through the window just behind her. In the repeated violence of light Art could see the main front of the building he was in, Rita’s room being evidently in a projecting wing. DIANA ARMS APARTMENTS, said a cheap new sign above the main entrance at ground level. Above, molded into the old concrete that arched above the entrance, were other words, not conspicuous but picked out now by perfect light and some trick of the speed-reading brain.

CHICAGO MATERNITY HOSPITAL

NURSES’ QUARTERS

“What kind of place is this?” He grabbed at her, while thunder detonated. “Answer me, what kind of place?” He saw his hands shaking her, shaking Rita, with a violence that no one should dare to offer her.

Rita slapped him in the face. Never before. Art backed away from her slowly, as she began to cry. He backed up three steps and bumped into the man who had come to take him away and who now took a grip on Art’s arm. When Art tried to pull free, the man said something and only tightened his hold. Art turned in instant rage and struck out with his fist. The blow was clumsy but by chance he got most of his weight behind it and it took his enemy by surprise. Art felt human tissue yield with a crunch beneath his knuckles and then he was no longer being held.

Now once more he had Rita in his grip. She was struggling with him, trying to break free. She screamed: “Do you think I like it, being here in a whorehouse? Do you know what I feel about anything? Let go!”

Even in his rising madness he had no intention of hurting Rita. His only thought was to save her, get her out of here. After he had gotten her, screaming, out of the little room, there were frightened faces in his way, and doors, and scrambling bodies. All these were obstacles that must be pushed or knocked aside. Strong hands came from somewhere and fastened—on him, but he struck out blindly and kept trying to pull Rita free. Her being here was not to be endured.

An.expert foot tripped him, and down he went on a dirty floor. His arm was clamped and bent until he must let go of Rita’s wrist. Massive weights sat on him, crushing out what little of his wind was left.

“Stop it!” a rough male voice demanded. “Stop. You gonna stop?” It had been barking the same words at him for some time, and finally he had to listen.

“Uh.”

A hand turned Art’s face up from the floor. “In th’ name o’ pure chastity, you gonna behave?”

“Yuh.”

“All right, let ‘im up. Sublimation, we get ‘em all in here, every kind of nut there is.”

The powerful hands that held Art down reversed themselves and hoisted, and without even trying he was on his feet. He was dizzy, the world was gray with his faintness. Unused to such exertions. Sweat and dirt were in his eyes, all mixed with helpless tears. His chest heaved in wind-broken spasms. There was a pain inside his shoulder, where something seemed to have been torn.

Rita’s voice was somewhere nearby, demanding: “Where is he? Let me see. Oh, the fool. If you’ve hurt him, I’m going to—to—”

“Oh, lady, please, he’s all right, see? Just his wind knocked out. He was out to tear the place apart. Look at my chaste eye, excuse th’ language, where he slugged me.”

Good.

Rita was visible as a blur before him now, and they were speaking to her with respect. Of course she was a boarder here, only a fugitive, not a—no, no, of course she was not that. He felt her cool hands, moving on his hands and his face.

“Don’t start him up again, now, lady, please. Let us get him the purity outta here. We’ll see he gets home safe.”

“Art? Oh, Art, forgive me. Are you all right?”

“Come home with me.”

“No.”

He nodded. Then he was being led away. He no longer tried to resist.

A man’s voice muttered: “Where’s the Holy Joe, why don’t he look after these celibatin’ people of his? I’m sick of the whole celibatin’ mess.” Then the voice lowered itself to ask a whispered question.

“No! Take ‘im back where ya picked ‘im up, and just leave him there, nice and safe. Is somebody usin’ the car now?” There was a fresh uproar in the middle distance, men’s voices raised in some angry quarrel. “What’s that?”

“Sounds like the homos again. I tell ya, we get every kind of nut there is. Lemme put this guy in here for a minute.”

The grip that had remained on Art’s arm guided him into another room. He was released and the door was closed behind him. He groped along the wall in darkness and found a switchplate, which in response to human fingers on its surface turned on a lamp.

THE light was dim and his eyes were still befogged with tears and sweat, but he made out that the small room possessed a cot. He stumbled over and sank down on it, still wheezing for breath. He had to regain his wind, and more importantly his self-control. His strong point was supposed to be intelligence, and so he had to think.

Forget that Rita was staying in this whorehouse. Forget that the arrogant nameless obstetrician (Holy Joe, the bouncer had said—a cultist, then? One of Ann’s priestly friends?) was using this former nurses’ quarters of a doubtless abandoned hospital as his maternity ward.

Remember this, seen in the fortuitous lightning flash: DIANA ARMS APARTMENTS. Let them use all the blindfolds they liked, now he could locate this place again. To what end? Should he tell all to Family Planning? Should he tell George in what sort of place his sister was holed up? George coming here to drag her out would likely kill somebody in the process, or they would kill him. Anyway, it was likely that her brother would let her stay here since she wanted it that way.

The door of the room opened quietly, and a nude girl stepped in, carrying under one arm a bundle of cloth rolled up as Fred’s karate outfit had been. Art blinked his eyes and found that he could focus clearly now. She was young and blond, flat-bellied and full-breasted, and her face was made up into a pale, cold mask.

The girl closed the door behind her and then froze, motionless, staring at him haughtily. In a cold voice she asked: “Is this the right room? I don’t think it can be mine. What are you doing here? I don’t want men in my room.”

Art shifted his weight on the cot, started to get up, and then when his body made its great reluctance known he let himself stay sitting there. He knew, he understood perfectly well, that he should speak up without delay and tell the prostitute that for once she was indeed mistaken. This one time she had actually, really, walked into the wrong room. He understood it perfectly well yet he said nothing. Was it that he had not yet regained wind enough to speak? Was something wrong now with his throat?

The girl now was moving away from the door, edging along the wall opposite where Art sat on the cot. Already she was gradually unrolling the thick, opaque robe that she had brought in under her arm, and now she was beginning to cover her body with it. As she passed the switchplate on the wall she turned the room’s light to a cooler, softer glow. In her movement she gave the impression of trying to keep as far as possible from Art. She turned her painted face away from him, fixed in a mask of bitterness and contempt, while her motions, graceful as a dancer’s, expressed distaste and even fear.

By now the robe was half unrolled, and now it covered half her flesh. This girl was good, she knew her trade. “Don’t make a move toward me,” she said in a low voice, tense with raw repression. “I don’t want to be pawed by a man. I don’t want you even to stare at me.”

In his adolescence Art had gone twice to brothels. Both times guilt feelings had hampered his performance, and the results had been unsatisfactory. He was still very nearly a virgin as far as sublimation was concerned. Since his marriage he had come to think of himself as grown above all that kind of thing, and he had never, since marriage, been seriously tempted toward it. If Rita had ever wanted to do anything like this, he hadn’t been aware of it. Did he know what she felt about anything?—those were her words. He would have done it with her, if she had ever asked. What went on between husband and wife was nobody else’s business.

The girl had nearly reached the window now. “Maybe you don’t want to touch me, though,” she said, turning her eyes on Art as if with dawning hope. Oh, yes, this girl was good. “Maybe you’re a pure chaste man. Maybe you’re a person who knows what a human being really likes.”

She had reached the window, and now she turned her pale mask of a face to look up and out through the upper panes, left unshaded for this very purpose while the lower were fitted with plastic shields in imitation of stained glass. By now her body from the neck down was completely hidden in the long robe, and now her simulated fear and tension were fading out, were being put aside by something else.

By an exaltation that, once he let it grip him, might be impossible to deny.

“The stars,” she said, her voice now more distant and far softer than before. “The stars are very beautiful tonight.”

Of course tonight’s sky was all clouds and rain, and the stars were only a part of her routine. But that hardly mattered. In his mind the perfect blue-white points of light were there. Her voice and her face and the attitude of her body beneath the long concealing robe made it all true..

Again he realized dully that he must move and speak, he must explain his presence here and make her stop. But for the moment he could not. His breathing, already slowed to normal, became still slower while his eyes rested on the girl. Her hair reminded him of Rita’s, and in other ways they looked something alike. This girl was physically quite attractive, as were all the most successful whores. The more lust there was to sublimate, the more the act could mean. Of course nothing to do with sex was ever reducible to such a simple formula as that; but it seemed to Art that with this girl the meaning of the act of sublimation was likely to be very great indeed. To throw down the weight of sex and stand beside her, for the moment straighter, taller, freer, than that encumbrance would ever let you stand. To stand on top of sex, and use it for a footstool, and look with this girl at her imaginary stars and take their light into his being. Tonight he yearned very powerfully to do just that.

He knew it was a wrong and perverse yearning that he struggled with, and once he had thought that such urges were over for him, all safely outgrown. But now in his weakness and defeat they came to trouble him once more. Well, since an act of sublimation promised all the comfort of which he stood in need, why not? Why not, just this once?

No! He was not going to be so spineless, so weak-willed. Art resisted. He called up images of Eros, lust-knotted bodies sweating, writhing, roaring, raging to attain a pinnacle of lust yet higher than the one they slipped and labored on. He fastened his mind upon the remembered image of the girl’s bare body as he had seen it when she first entered the room. He pictured Rita’s body, spread out invitingly before him. But all the fleshly stirrings that he now managed to arouse in himself would only go as fuel for sublimation if he faltered. And he was faltering. The consciousness of sex-as-God that never should entirely leave an adult’s mind was flickering now and fading dangerously in his.

“The stars are beautiful,” the girl said again, and now her voice sounded like winter bells. “So beautiful, so far away.”

The rain drummed on the window steadily, but had no power to make her words ridiculous. Art feebly tried to cling to images of female nakedness, but all were still and flat and lifeless now, remote and meaningless as old photographs.

Just as he might have gotten up and gone to join the girl at the window, the thought presented itself that the men would soon be coming back for him, and they would have quite a laugh if they came in and found him stargazing. The banal fear was enough to tip the balance on the other side.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and stood up with a grunt. His hands and knees were quivering still and his wrenched shoulder hurt. He fumbled in his pockets for some money with which to tip the girl; probably she would make a fuss if he tried to walk out without tipping her. At least she seemed to recall that things had been that way in the brothels of his youth. “I’m not a customer.”

She had turned from the window and was regarding him with great surprise. He handed her money and explained: “There’s really been a mistake.” Mechanically a gentleman, he squeezed the girl’s breast through he? robe.

“Mistake? I’ll say!” The wintry voice had broken suddenly to nasty shrillness. “This is only five dollars you gimme!”

“It’s all you’ll get,” said Art, now dangerously calm in his exhaustion. “I told you I’m not a customer.”

With the money in hand the girl rushed out of the room. Art followed, wearily, as far as the corridor, where he stood waiting. In a moment his guide, with a swollen cheekbone but the same indifferent expression as before, and another man, came into sight. “I’m ready,” Art told them. “Take me back.”

He rode under the blanket again in the silent car, and smiled grimly to himself. Diana Arms Apartments. He was let out of the car at the busy intersection where he had been picked up. After all he had just been through, a late trip home by slidewalk seemed nothing at all to be concerned about, and he did not even look around when once there came to him the sound of distant screams.

When he got back to the Parrs, who seemed to have been waiting anxiously, Art did not have a great deal to say. Yes, he had seen her and yes, she still wanted to go through with it. She seemed to be all right, and she said they were treating her well enough.

“What kind of place is she staying in?” Ann wanted to know. “And what’s wrong with your arm?”

“I, ah, twisted my shoulder somehow, opening the car door.”

Ann, evidently assuming from Art’s defeated attitude that he was now going to let his wife do as she chastely well pleased, became very comforting and motherly. Art let her rub his shoulder with some kind of medicine that George used for his occupational aches and pains, He also let her go thinking what she liked.

George appeared noticeably relieved by Art’s safe return. “I should have gone,” he muttered several times.

No, you shouldn’t, thought Art. At last Ann released him and he dragged himself upstairs and fell into the guest room bed.

In the morning, he decided painfully, he would go to Family Planning, and have a talk with Mr. Hall. There was really nothing else that he could do.

Sleep was a long time coming.

VIII

“MR. BARNABY of the Homosexual League is here asking to see you, sir.”

Oscar Grill, director of the Chicago office of the Bureau of Family Planning slumped back in his chair and gazed unhappily at the image of his secretary in the intercom plate. “What’s he here for?” The same as usual, I suppose.”

“I tried to find out, sir, but he was vague. I suppose the same as usual.”

Grill made a grimace of annoyance. He had barely had time this morning to sit down and assure himself of what a busy day he had ahead, and now here came Barnaby again. About a year ago the president of the Illinois Homosexual League had begun a series of drop-in visits, coming around about once every two months. Barnaby came, and talked mostly in generalities, and sometimes they had lunch together, and Grill had never been able to understand just what his visitor was hoping to accomplish by visiting. It wasn’t that Barnaby was personally attracted to him; that surely would have been made plain by now, and didn’t seem too likely anyway, given Grill’s paunchy, jowly appearance and the fact that he was sliding fast past middle age.

What made the situation difficult for Grill was that the president of the state Homo League was too important to be casually brushed off. No politician wanted to risk alienating a bloc of votes of the League’s size, and Oscar Grill was, among other things, very much a politician. And general elections were coming up within a year.

Grill sighed, mentally trying to rearrange his morning schedule. He wondered which appointments he might be able to put off. “I suppose you’d better send him in right away. Maybe I can cut it short.”

“Yes sir.”

Seizing the moment of peace before Barnaby walked through the door, Grill closed his eyes and tried to achieve an instant of total relaxation. But his job was difficult, and his thoughts were hard to quiet quickly. He wanted to be sure to get to today’s luncheon meeting, with the local heads of other bureaus, Art, Poverty, and Vandalism. Important political decisions were in the offing. And sometime today he wanted to try to talk again with his semi-official contacts at the UN’s Chicago consulate, to try to find out what might be delaying the latest population forecast. There was a fog of rumors surrounding that report; probably when he did learn what it contained, he would wish that he hadn’t.

The door was opening, and Grill opened his eyes and stood up and came around his desk, setting himself to be courteous but still to ease his visitor out as quickly as he could. At least he had an obviously and honestly crowded desk for Barnaby to notice.

The president of the Homo League entered, moving with his usual slightly feminine walk. His basic physique was that of an average male, but his face was strikingly handsome— or perhaps pretty—and his long hair was a natural-looking bright red. In the League as elsewhere, appearance evidently counted for a lot in getting to be president. Barnaby wore a conservatively tiny bikni not too much different from the standard female model, the bottom lacking the exaggerated fullness of the usual male codpiece. Mr. Barnaby’s bra was functional; medical science had given him that much in the way of matching his biology to his lusts.

“How do you do, sir?” Grill asked formally, extending a hand in greeting.

“Not well today, Oscar, not very well.” Barnaby’s voice was husky rather than deep. He shook Grill’s fingers delicately. “I am becoming afraid to travel through the streets. There is an organized harassment that I must endure. Good citizens pay taxes, then find that their government offers them no protection.”

Grill said: “Won’t you sit down? You mean you’re being picketed again by that bluenose group?”

“Again? One might say that it has become almost continuous.” Adjusting his shoulder bag with a large hand, Barnaby settled himself in a visitor’s chair. “Not only is our headquarters under seige, as it were, but some of these Young Virgins have taken to following my car through the streets. I should warn you that some of them have followed me here today.”

Grill had seated himself and was toying with the corner of a stack of printout that lay awaiting his attention in his desk, though he had little hope that the hint would be taken. “Well, I can certainly sympathize. I really wish there was something I could do but, twins, we’re sometimes picketed here ourselves.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are, and by many of the same people.” Barnaby crossed his hairless, slightly plump legs. “Oscar, it seems to me of the utmost importance that those of us who lead in conserving traditional values should support one another, for the cause of Eros and the good of society. Men and women of good will should stand together whenever possible, that’s all I mean. I realize that you have no power to punish those wretches who are out there picketing.”

“I certainly don’t.” Grill sneaked a look at his clock.

“I did go to the police about the picketing, as I believe you suggested once before.” Barnaby seemed unable to keep from exciting himself over the pickets. “I tried to point out to the police the difference between our country’s traditional freedoms and the anarchy those bluenoses want. They paint their dirty words right on their signs and wave them about in public places, and the police and courts will do nothing to put a stop to it!”

Grill shrugged. “I suppose if the police are providing you with physical protection, that’s really about all you can expect.”

“Oscar,” said Barnaby reproachfully. He leaned across the desk and lowered his voice. “Which is the more to be feared, injury to the body or poisoning of the mind? And I am more concerned for youth of the community than for myself. What will happen to them, growing up in a world where nothing is considered obscene any longer?”

ART woke up slowly. There was something very nasty that he would have to face on waking, and so it was pleasant to delay the process. Then he moved, and felt a twinge in his shoulder, and all his memories of yesterday came back. With a groan he sat up in the guest room bed. His watch read half past eight.

His situation looked no better in the morning light than it had in midnight gloom. There was nothing for it but to be a good citizen and go to Family Planning. Mr. Hall had said they were not out to get anyone, at least not anyone like Rita. People like her were only the innocent victims of the midwifers and their gangs. And of their well-meaning relatives. Too bad if the relatives got in trouble. Art’s first responsibility was to his wife, not to the relatives who should never have gotten her into this mess in the first place. Even if they were only trying to help.

He didn’t want to think about the Parrs right now, but it was hard to avoid while he was in their house. He got out of bed and began to get ready to go downstairs.

While he showered and shaved and dressed he pictured raiding police breaking down the doors of that former nurses’ quarters, carting off hysterical whores, handcuffing thugs. Then along came their quietly efficient lieutenant, leading Rita safely out. When she saw Art (who had ridden along in the lead car with the lieutenant) she burst into tears, and threw repentant arms around his neck . . .

More likely she would slap his face again. The scenario was fundamentally unconvincing, so Art had to give up on it and think of something else while he held fast to his determination.

Aromas of coffee and warm food now reached him in the upstairs hall. He promised himself that he would say nothing to the Family Planning authorities about George and Ann. Well, sooner or later he would doubtless have to say something about them, for he was going to be asked a lot of questions. But he might make their immunity a condition of his giving information. Something like that. Anyway, he kept telling himself, if they wound up in trouble it would serve them right, for helping Rita get herself into such a mess. His shoulder definitely felt better this morning. He would get Ann to rub it with liniment again tonight, if he was still staying here. If she was still staying here.

After taking a quick peek into the children’s room and finding it already deserted, Art went downstairs. In the kitchen he found George and Ann facing each other across the breakfast table, where Art’s place was also set. Dirty dishes and a minor litter of garbage testified that the children had already eaten before going out to play.

Even as Art’s in-laws said good morning to him, they seemed to him to be exchanging guilty looks. They had provided Art and his children with food and lodging, but what did they count for, compared with the harm they were doing Rita? Their intentions had been good, of course, but what of that?

George raised troubled eyes. “Art, what are your plans now?”

“I don’t know.” As soon as Art was seated, Ann began to ply him silently with toast and protein bars and coffee. His fingers fumbled on the jelly jar. He asked unnecessarily: “Are the children out in the playground?”

He was assured they were, and with that an awkward silence fell. He wished he had gone straight out of the house, but that would have been insulting, and besides, being under a strain increased his tendency to get sick if he didn’t eat any breakfast.

Still, he couldn’t stand to sit there. He gobbled his food and quickly pushed back his chair. “I’m going out.” No one said anything to him as he fled the house.

It was a bright warm morning; only puddles here and there gave evidence of last night’s rain. Once outside the blockhouse walls Art breathed a little easier, at least at first. As soon as he came to a public computer terminal he went in and obtained the address of the Chicago office of Family Planning. With a slight feeling of relief he saw that he would have to travel a considerable distance to reach the place; he needed some time to think over just what he was going to say. They weren’t out to get Rita, though, they were really on her side. Once on the proper slidewalk, he drew a deep breath, and again remarked to himself that the weather was fine today. Who cared?

Reaching the Family Planning office seemed to take almost no time at all, and somehow he could get no constructive thinking done en route. The office occupied a new, fairly large building, one of the foothills surrounding the central Loop’s high range. From a block or two away Art could see that there was an unusually dense crowd gathered on the statwalk in front of the place. As he drew a little nearer he realized this was no ordinary pedestrian jam. There was a stack of placards on the pavement, ready for distribution; some kind of demonstration must be shaping up. Should he go in? If he didn’t make himself go in and-face the authorities now, he never would. Ignoring the murmuring, jostling crowd as best he could, he pushed his way into the lobby.

In the vast ground-floor lobby of glass and marble he approached a receptionist, a voluptuous girl who smiled at him enticingly from behind her desk. As befitted her place of employment she was very conservatively dressed, wearing only a few electrostatically clinging sequins and pads.

Art halted in front of her desk, not as by the application of brakes, but as with a complete loss of momentum. This was it. He was finished. His mind had gone as blank and bare as the smooth expanse of receptionist’s skin confronting him. Somehow he had convinced himself that once he got this far all the right words would flow, but that had been a lie. Now here he was, and all the words were gone in fear. To ask for Mr. Hall would be like leaping over a cliff.

“I’m from California,” he began with a great effort, helped along by the girl’s encouraging eyes. “Still, I have important business with you here. I’d like to see—the director or someone.” Art was suddenly and completely sure that he never wanted to talk to Mr. Hall again. He would never be able to convince Hall that George and Ann were innocent, or at least that they deserved a break, not after the tough time Ann had given him. And she and George hadn’t even asked Art where he was going this morning.

The girl’s eyes turned grave. “The director is a very busy man,” she said. “If you’ll tell me the nature of your business, perhaps I can help you.”

“My business is, uh, important.” Of course the director was not going to see everyone who just walked in. One could hope that everyone here would be too busy for that.

The girl’s eyes narrowed slightly, searching Art’s face. He had the idea that she could see his guilty knowledge, and was already pressing an alarm button hidden beneath her desk. “I can arrange for you to talk to a social worker. Are you in a hurry?”

“I—” When their computer learned his name it would give him to Mr. Hall, and Mr. Hall would seize upon him, not to be denied a single scrap of information. Art would stumble helplessly into a betrayal of the Parrs, and Rita would hate him for that, even if she were not thrown in jail and forcibly sterilized herself. “No, there’s no hurry,” he told the girl.

“May I have you name, please?” the receptionist pulled a computer-input slate toward her on its decorative coiled cable, and took up an electronic stylus.

“I—” Ann was at this moment caring for Art’s children. George was risking bloody beatings from machines, to pay for safe blockhouse playspace and midwifers and cinnamon flavored protein bars that tended to turn lumpy in the stomach. Art’s thought, now scrambling like a cornered animal for some way out, seized suddenly upon the possibility that Rita’s illegal operation was being performed this very morning. If so she would certainly be jailed instead of rescued if Art led Family Planning to her.

In his present state he took this as excuse enough to flee. Without even delaying to pinch the receptionist goodbye, Art took a step back from her desk. He blurted out wild words about returning later. He turned and fled.

“RADICALS and bluenoses, repressers of all that makes Man at one with a billion years of his animal heritage!” Barnaby’s voice had grown shrill. “Are we to abandon the youth of the world to them?”

Looking down, with Barnaby, from an open window of his office, Director Grill had a good view of the wide statwalk in front of the Family Planning building. Two competing picket lines had just been organized down there, and both of them were on the march, weaving and writhing like antagonistic serpents. The lines had formed with a healthy distance between them but were gradually being forced closer to each other by the pressure of a mass of onlookers, whose expectation of a riot was probably going to fulfill itself. It seemed likely to Grill, who had seen this sort of thing happen elsewhere, that a critical mass of active humanity would soon be reached. To carry the analogy with atomic fission further, a block away a column of helmeted city police was marching in, a damping rod about to be thrust into an overheating pile.

Sporadic shouting drifted up to Grill’s office window, but as yet he had seen no actual violence. He was not too high above the picket lines to tell that one of them was composed mostly of radical-looking young people, the girls wearing their hair long, the men short-haired and clean-shaven, both sexes dressed in opaque garments that covered half their bodies or more. These of course were the Young Virgins, the objects of Barnaby’s wrath. In the opposing picket line, men and women of ordinary appearance were in the majority, though there was a noticeable admixture of men in biknis, and women in codpieced, translucent business suits.

“I see your League has some counter-picketers out today,” Grill commented.

“Naturally we do!” Barnaby ran nervous fingers through his bright red hair. “We don’t intend to succumb without a struggle.”

Grill decided that the time had come for bluntness, whatever the result might be. “Frankly, I wish you hadn’t decided on counterpicketing. Not in front of my building.”

“What? But we must take action. Look, look down there! A sign that says ‘sublimate’, in big bold letters, being waved around in a public place!”

Grill looked down and saw. He also saw another sign, in bigger, bolder letters yet: STOP MORAL FREE FALL. He wondered honestly which side that one was intended to be on.

“Let them go to their monasteries and lamaseries and nunneries to have that kind of freedom,” Barnaby was saying. “Let them go behind walls, away from the innocent, and do what they like.”

Grill drew a deep breath. “You know, if I was coldly logical about my job . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, I might look with official favor upon the bluenoses. After all, the less sex activity there is,. generally speaking, the fewer pregnancies and the less population pressure.”

“Only in the most primitive societies!” snapped Barnaby. But then he fell silent and put on a mask of careful control, which Grill thought was concealing more fear than anger.

Emboldened by this, Grill went on: “I don’t know if any society has ever been run on the basis of cold logic. Probably not. I’m sure ours isn’t. People’s emotional attitudes are the ultimate power, of course. And most of the people are with you, at least in your attitude toward bluenoses. If I were to come out strongly in favor of chastity today I’d doubtless be fired tomorrow.”

Barnaby relaxed slightly. “You are joking. Of course there’s no excuse for chastity. For a long time our League has shown the way toward the fullest enjoyment of sex without the slightest risk of pregnancy.”

“Most people just don’t enjoy your kind of sex, though,” said Grill deliberately. “At least not as a steady diet. And the monasteries and other religious places you talk about are from my point of view very much like Homo League enclaves—they have a vanishingly low birth rate. So, I may not agree with the bluenoses emotionally, but I’m not going to try to put them out of business. I still don’t dare to praise them publicly, but I can tell you off the record that I’m rather glad there are more and more lamaseries and nunneries these days.”

There was silence, except for Barnaby clearing his throat. He seemed to be giving some point a deep reconsideration. “Really,” he said at last. “I didn’t come here with the main objective of getting your help against the blue-noses. I know I let them upset me too much. I can see, they do help you in your difficult job. But we’ve helped you even more, haven’t we? For many years? I like to think that we in the League are your favorite citizens, so to speak. That there’s a large backlog of goodwill built up between us.”

“Of course.” Grill sighed, left the window, and walked back to his desk. He did not want to watch another riot.

Privately, he had no more emotional sympathy for homosexuality than he did for chastity. Professionally, he was glad to accept all the help, from every quarter, that Family Planning and the world could get. The human world was in danger of collapsing by the weight of its own numbers, though you might not be able to tell that by what went on in Illinois.

ON THE walls of Grill’s office the computer-drawn curves of the world demographic charts showed the danger in the form of the ever-worsening pressure of population. More people inevitably ate more food, and while around the world the food suppliers struggled to get ahead, sometimes they could not even manage to keep up. There were now laws restricting births in every country on the planet. It was mathematically, physically, inevitable that at some future time, by some combination of peaceful or violent forces, the world’s population growth would finally be stopped—obviously it could not continue until human beings stood jammed shoulder to shoulder on every square meter of solid land. The approximately eight billion people who inhabited the world today could all, in theory, probably be stored within Chicago’s borders, standing indoors and out, leaving the rest of the earth on which to grow their food.

Frighteningly many of the eight billion were hungry and sick today, and more would be tomorrow. Science had boosted the world’s supply of available energy beyond all foreseeable needs by achieving controlled atomic fusion; by harnessing, as the popularizers of science put it, the power of the H-bomb and of the sun itself. The problems of producing and distributing adequate food, and providing medical care, were not so amenable to research and engineering. The leaders of the have-not nations spent their time in power in states of chronic desperation, weighing and selecting gamblers’ moves to keep themselves in power and—sometimes this came first—to help their countrymen.

One aid toward staying in power was to point out a scapegoat or two on which the people could vent their hate and dissatisfaction. If there were any justification for the choice of scapegoat, so much the better. Another gamblers move was the utterance of overt or implied threats. Often the threats were, serious, even when spoken by the leader of a poor but desperate nation against a wealthy and much more powerful one. Today at least eighty nations Were theoretically capable of producing atomic weapons, and fifteen or twenty of these had technologies sufficiently sophisticated to perhaps enable them to hide such outlawed weapons from the UN inspection teams. Delivery of a nuclear bomb could be accomplished by stealth if not by missile or aircraft. Biological weapons were easier to make, conceal, and deliver, and could be just as deadly if not as quick as nuclear blasts. Thus the voices of the have-nots must be heard in all the greatest capitals of the world. Thus if a new-born baby in Chicago consumed, statistically, three times the food of one new-born in India, it was considered only just and decent to limit the number of newborn Chicagoans, and the same with Londoners, Muscovites, babies of Peking and Tokyo. The starving child in the Indian village might never see a bite of the food thus theoretically saved for him, but who could say it was not just to offer him at least a chance? Thus, even among the haves, compulsory sterilization and abortion for women who could not limit their fertility in any other way. Thus, the illegitimacy of the third child. We may not feed the world, we may lack the knowledge or the will or the material wealth for that, but we will not let it watch us overeat.

Again, as he looked now at the charts, there darted across Grill’s mind the question of why the latest population forecast had been delayed. He felt a foreboding chill.

“It seems to me,” Barnaby was saying to him, “that in fact you owe us a real debt. Very few of the League’s members have brought any children at all into the world—as yet.”

Something in Barnaby’s tone brought Grill’s thoughts back firmly to his office. “As yet? Why do you put it that way?”

Barnaby did not answer at once. An alien hardness had come into his face. He continued to stand beside the window, watching Grill.

As Grill stood waiting beside his desk his mind started to relate that odd phrase “as yet” to the chain of Barnaby’s odd visits, and to certain other terrible hints that Grill had lately received from other sources, the hints concerned recent advances in surgery, and in hormonal chemistry; until now, Grill had managed to avoid confronting their implications face to face.

Barnaby, as if reading the director’s mind, was nodding slowly and solemnly now. “Maybe you’ve heard something about it? True male to female sex reversal is going to be possible. There’ve been doctors working on it in Sweden, and lately in Japan, and both groups seem to have been successful.”

“Well. That’s fine. I suppose many members of the League will want to avail themselves of the operation, to become practically complete women.”

“Not just practically, Oscar. Truly complete. I want that. Does that surprise you?” Paradoxically, as he spoke of becoming a woman, Barnaby looked more normal than before, a male trapped in a masquerade costume he could not shed, a man grown weary and desperate beyond all words. “Does it make you laugh, to hear that I will want to bear a child? Two children, if I can.”

Grill was far from laughter. “This is— beyond belief.”

“Not to me.” Barnaby’s husky voice quavered. He spoke now as if confessing some terrible crime. “All my life, since I was a child myself, the thought has been in my mind that somehow—if I could have a son—what do you know about me, anyway?”

Like the first thunder of an unexpected storm, the sounds of rioting burst up abruptly from the street outside; Director Grill hardly noticed them. He moved behind his desk and sank slowly into his chair, without taking his eyes off Barnaby. “So,” Grill said in a faint voice. “Today you have come here on business.”

ART, while inside the building and knotted in his own problems, had forgotten completely about the demonstrations being organized outside. When he emerged from the lobby, practically at a run, he was at once caught up between chanting swirls of picketers and counter-picketers. When he pushed his way free he had been turned around, and stood still for a moment, disoriented, in the middle of the statwalk.

A short fat man carrying an armload of cheaply made, stick-mounted signs appeared at once beside Art, haranguing him. “Get yer sign, get yer placard here! Do yer part, sir, only a dollar.” STOP MORAL FREE FALL, said the signs, or some of them at least. Others, interleaved, bore the proud legend LOVE CONQUERS ALL.

“I’m not involved in this,” Art muttered, trying to get free of the peddler, not knowing which side the man thought he was on, or even what the two contending forces were. As soon as Art spotted a small gap between the picket lines he made for it. The pickets were chanting louder and louder, faster and faster, mouthing unintelligible rioters’ warcries. The peddler would not give up but stayed at Art’s side like a stubborn conscience, trying to sell him a sign. Moving together they were too big to get through the gap, and they, or Art at least, collided with one of the lines as it writhed snakelike toward him. A shout of anger went up from those he had bumped, followed by a cheer from the opposing ranks.

“Filthy censor! Bluenose!”

“Smear the queers! Smear the queers! Smear—”

A tall male figure loomed up in front of Art. Above the words STUDENTS FOR A CHASTE SOCIETY, handpainted on a dirty, opaque sweatshirt, the young man’s face was clean-shaven, angry, florid, shouting. Someone bawling a song about love pushed Art from behind, whereupon the young man in front struck Art on the head with his flimsy sign.

Something was wrong, the blow should not have hurt so much. It was a great deadening bash that dented a vacuum into his skull, into which a tremendous pain was now about to rush . . .

There was a policeman in view. And other people, he could not tell who . . . Art was down, but somebody had him under the arms and was dragging him along . . . the blow from the flimsy sign should not have been so hard . . . now he was dying, or else . . .

IX

AFTER Art hurried out of the house, George and Ann remained seated at the breakfast table, alone now in the silent house, facing each other with glum expressions.

“I wonder what’s happened to Fred,” said Ann distantly, turning her head to look out through her window at the patio vines. “And I wonder if Rita has her baby yet.” Then she gave up making conversation and brought her hands up to cover her face. “Oh, if Art turns us in today it’s going to be all my fault.”

“He won’t,” said George, putting into his voice a lot more certainty than he felt. “He doesn’t want to get Rita in trouble. Anyway, there’s no use blaming yourself if he does.”

“He might.” Ann spoke through her muffling hands, around her silver wedding ring. “You and Rita will be the ones who go to jail for conspiracy, but it’ll be all my fault. Why did I have to tell her you had a student who could arrange things? Some criminal doctor.” George was irritated. “Hammad’s no criminal, or I wouldn’t have him as a student. I don’t consider arranging births, to be a crime, and you don’t either. I don’t know of anything else he does that’s outside the law.”

“He arranges births and breaks the law just for money. I don’t like that. Why couldn’t we have waited until I heard from the Order of St. Joseph people?”

“You might have waited a long time, with their monastery burned down. Anyway, it might even be one of them who’s doing the operation. I think it was smart for Hammad to farm it out.”

“Someone else is doing it, while he gets paid. Hammad, I don’t trust Hammad.”

“Now’s a fine time to tell me that,” George grumbled. “Anyway, Rita’s no Christian, she won’t care who does it or why.” As long as it’s done competently. If it isn’t—but there was nothing he could do.

Ann was silent behind her hands.

“Art won’t turn us in,” George repeated, trying to be comforting. To himself he thought that he could hardly blame Art for anything he did today. Art was the one they hadn’t allowed for in their plans.

Still silent.

He reached across the table, pried one of Ann’s hands down from its job of eye-hiding, and held it softly in his own. “Hey, things aren’t that bad,” he said. “Hey, lady, do you need some help?”

THE first time he had made that offer to Ann they had both been aboad a bus cruising at eighteen miles an hour along the sixty-lane freeway that ran from Bear Canyon to Pasadena, near the middle of Los Angeles.

Five apish young men had also boarded at Bear Canyon, though George had not paid much attention to them then. Perhaps they had gotten on to follow Ann. She had five or six small children with her that day.

The five young men had taken seats just a little forward in the bus from Ann and her brood, and once the bus was isolated from the world in the flow of traffic they had begun talking loudly among themselves, boasting in obscene language of their skills at stealing, fighting, and sublimating. Ann was pretty good at ignoring them, but then one of the apes began to toss little wads of something or other in her direction. “Hey, lady, those all yours? Quintuplets! Looks like you waited too long, decidin’ which two to keep.”

By now most of the other passengers had congealed in their seats, seeing and hearing nothing, feeling safer behind pretended walls.

“Hey, girly?” called the youth who had been tossing the spitballs. “Anyone ever tell you you’d look nice wrapped in a blanket down to your toenails?” He turned to a friend. “Red, you got some gladrags with you?”

“Sure.”

“Break ‘em out. Girly’s gonna gaze at the stars with us.”

An old women sitting beside George muttered something to the effect that girls who dressed that way were just asking for trouble —and true enough, Ann had on an opaque blouse, and an opaque skirt that came down nearly to her knees. Maybe her dress was one reason why George had noticed her as early as he did. But that was irrelevant now.

“Do you need some help, lady?” he called to Ann politely, as he got up to stand in the narrow aisle, swaying there slightly with the motion of the bus. George was then twenty-one, half trained in karate, proud owner of a purple belt. He stood up with a feeling of necessity, without either much fear or sense of heroism. Vaguely he wished that he could have a chance to limber up.

“Yes, I believe I do.” Ann’s voice was as calm as if she had dropped a package in an awkward place and a presentable young man had offered to pick it up.

So George cleared his throat like a nervous orator and faced forward. He met the eyes of the five troublemakers, one after another, and wondered if there were any words that he might stop them with. A wise old instructor had once told George that if you were really ready for street trouble the readiness showed somehow and trouble never came, not unless you went out of your way to make it, which wise people in or out of karate never did. What words would have stopped me, George wondered, when I was just a kid and up to something wild? But he had never been as wild and apey as these five were acting now, and magic words eluded him. At the same time he was reassuring himself on a comforting point he had already noticed: the narrowness of the aisle. There might be five of them, but they could only come in reach of him one at a time.

If they were going to come at all. He could see in their faces that he had frightened them just by getting up to face them, and he hoped that his continued calm and that of the girl might be enough to keep them paralyzed. He raised his eyes toward the front of the bus, and met the driver’s eyes in a mirror behind the driver’s personal shield of armored glass. All around the bus the sixty-lane river of vehicles crept on, cutting it off from the rest of humanity and bearing it along. The driver was already trying to maneuver the bus into an outer lane and reach an emergency stopping bay, but to accomplish the maneuver might easily take ten minutes or so.

Meanwhile, maintaining a calm silence was not going to be enough, perhaps because the five had nowhere to retreat. Now their faces were hardening again; they were more afraid of something else, something that drove them on, than they were of him. They looked at one another and got to their feet and started after George. The old woman screamed.

The eyes of the first youth to come at George changed again when he realized he was in a narrow aisle, and could expect no immediate help. He was a boy of average size and strength, a little taller than George, sixteen or seventeen years old. His face was just a bit too broad to be called handsome, and his red hair was cut so short the top of his head looked bald. His cohort, mumbling obscenities, shoved forward behind him, pushing him to the attack, until there was nothing he could do but lunge at George, swinging his fists in clumsy desperation.

The bus driver was thinking, as well as watching in the mirror. At that moment he tapped his brakes firmly, risking a bang from the vehicle following, but stalling the momentum of the single-file attack.

George saw the first blow of the fight coming at him, and ducked just enough to catch it on the top of the head, where an enemy knuckle was likely to be cracked. Then he leaned forward counterpunching, just as the sudden slowing of the bus rocked the enemy back on their heels. George could already crack two centimeters of pine with either hand. The foe went down like helpless dummies, tangled with one another as they fell. George pressed forward, hammering at the face and body of the unfortunate youth who had led the attack, getting him down and keeping him down so that the rest were jammed and pinned behind him and beneath him.

WHEN the police came aboard, only a couple of minutes after the bus had reached an emergency bay, they found George still leaning on the pile of inept apes, punching anything that dared to move. The police heard Ann’s matter-of-fact story, and the driver’s, and the stories of the passengers who had noticed anything happening. George was identified and allowed to go his way; the five were removed to a police copter. The red-bald youth had to be carried, and his face was now far from handsome. George had a moment of sick regret, but no more than a moment, on seeing the damage he had done.

As soon as the police had departed with their catch the bus got rolling again and Ann’s reaction started to set in. Her hands were trembling and she had to fight back tears. She understood, probably from experience, that they would have done more than just wrap her in a plastic sheet. And the children riding with her were still in a slight state of shock, sitting quietly and staring at her and George.

George sat down at her side and acknowledged her choking thanks. He now felt ten feet tall, and at the same time shaky with relief. “Relax, it’s all over now,” he said to Ann. He patted her arm, and slid a hand beneath her long skirt, gently squeezing her thigh.

“Please don’t,” she murmured, shifting away from him, pressing her knees firmly together.

His quieting pulse speeded up again at her withdrawal. But he couldn’t believe she had meant that just the way it sounded. Probably it wasn’t really the open invitation it sounded like, but just a nervous reaction from the danger she had been in. A lot of people just didn’t feel like sex when they were frightened or upset, and under the circumstances her lack of even a polite pretense was quite forgive-able.

So he restricted himself to holding Ann’s hand, and lightly stroking her arm, which attentions she accepted and seemed to find comforting. “I think I know you,” he said with sudden mild surprise. “At least I know who you are. Your name’s Ann something, and you’re in my sister’s high school class. You were there at school one day with a bunch of girls when I went to pick her up. She’s Rita Parr. Oh, excuse me, my name is George.”

“Yes, I heard you giving it to the police. I’m Ann Lohmann. Oh, why must I start blubbering now, when the trouble’s all over?” She was certainly not blubbering, just a little tense and swollen-looking about the eyes. “Thanks to you.” Getting herself completely under control, Ann looked around to her children, giving them a smile and a few cheerful words, snapping at a boy to get his feet down off the seat.

“Where are you taking them?” George asked.

“We’re just coming back from Bear Canyon Park. I took them out there because so many never see anything but pavement and little strips of grass.” The kids all had a BI look. “They’re from my Sunday School class.”

“Oh, one of those religious schools?”

“Yes.” There was a pause. “I remember seeing you, too, now that I think about it. Rita looks a lot like you.”

He laughed. “Don’t say that about the poor girl. She’s all excited about graduation these days. So are you, I suppose.”

“Yes, we all are, I guess.” But Ann was evidently not nearly as excited as Rita was.

“And about going to college. Where are you going your freshman year, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“How could I mind your asking anything?” Ann smiled beautifully. She was really quite a good-looking girl. “I might go to Mid-Cal my first year. Or maybe Ha-Levy Junior. I’m not sure.”

George also liked this girl’s voice, now that he had a chance to listen to it attentively. Girls’ voices were important, in his estimation. So were their tempers and spirits. If there was a suggestion of repression in Ann’s clothes and manner, well, that was an attractive spice for him. He hadn’t yet seen her standing up, but he guessed that she would be no taller than he was. That, too, was nice.

“You’re older than Rita, aren’t you?” Ann was asking. “Well, naturally you are. Where did you go to college, or are you still going?”

“I didn’t go.” Not wanting her to think him lazy or stupid, he quickly added: “Oh, I may go yet. But the year I finished high school there was one problem after another in our family, people were getting sick and losing jobs and all. We were almost back on BI. I didn’t have much time or money, and I was a little too dumb to qualify for any good scholarships. Then I got into this karate business. Once you get your black belt, it’s really a profession.”

Ann looked at him warmly. “I can’t imagine that you’re lacking in intelligence. Anyway, you’ve proved that you have courage, that’s more important.” She shook her head as if marveling. “When you stood up there in the aisle, I didn’t know what you were going to do. But I knew that you knew.”

Unable to find the words to answer that, George changed the subject. “I suppose you’re all excited about the Prom? Rita is. She’s got her escort all picked out and everything. I don’t know if the poor clod knows about it yet.”

Once more Ann seemed to withdraw for a moment, as she had when he caressed her leg. “I’m not going to the Prom,” she said, then busied herself suppressing a quarrel that had been developing among the children.

George supposed that she had been having a quarrel with her best boy friend, and was uncertain about who her escort was going to be. He never doubted that a girl like this would have a choice of invitations to accept. “I’ll bet you change your mind about that,” he said, thinking back to the closing of his own high school days. “The Prom’s half the fun of graduating, or more than half.”

She didn’t answer. But surely a girl like this had been invited, so he could push and tease and probe a little more without seriously hurting any feelings. “Why,” he said, “I’d be tempted to ask you myself, if I was in your class.”

“I’ve been asked.” Ann’s face was slightly averted so he could not make out her expression, but her voice was unhappily chilly. “I’m just not going.”

Ouch. He had managed to hit a real sore spot after all’. “Anyway,” he said, “your Prom isn’t next week. You have lots of time to think about it. Meanwhile, when am I going to see you again?”

IT TURNED out that he saw her next day, at the police station where they had both been summoned for questioning about the fight on the bus. George came near being charged with aggravated battery, but when the testimony of all the available witnesses had been heard, he was not charged.

Later George bought Ann a snack at a nearby restaurant, and then suggested they find some place a little less noisy and copulate.

“No, please, I’d rather not.” Again her reply was blunt and seemed to amount to an open invitation to repression. But at the same time her answer seemed so natural and direct, so unembarrassed, that he simply could not take it at face value. He told himself that she had probably been upset all over again by having to testify. She was so matter-of-fact about what she said that she probably didn’t realize how it sounded.

He asked her several times to go out with him on a regular date, but she consistently refused. Still, he contrived to see more of her. His sister Rita told him where Ann could usually be found on Monday nights, playing volleyball, and he went to the gym and managed to get in on some of the games.

“Annie, this is fun, but how about you and me going out someplace by ourselves? You like other sports? Bowling, swimming? Or maybe a show.”

“George, I . . . you’re nice, and I really like you, but I think it wouldn’t be wise.”

“Why not?” But now people were yelling at them to get back to the net if they wanted to play. They never had the time or the place for a serious discussion. Ann seemed to be making sure of that.

During this same period of a month or so George made it a point to enjoy sex with five or six different girls. With each, at the most abandoned moments, he found himself closing his eyes and imagining that it was Ann Lohmann’s flesh that moved against his own. The popularizers of psychology on television and in the newsprints were always warning that such behavior could be a danger signal. To focus lust on one individual might be a step toward its repression whenever that individual was not available. Brilliant, thought George. It was just staggering how smart those college educated psychologists could be. Anyway, he wasn’t worried. A lot of the younger, more radical psychologists held that sexual repression, or all-out sublimation even, did no permanent harm when practiced occasionally. That seemed .sensible to George, though he hadn’t much personal experience to judge by. He was young and full of health and usually wanted to do nothing with his sex but satisfy it every day or so and enjoy thinking about it in between times.

But now this thing with Ann—this thing with Ann was something else.

Early on the evening of the Prom—living in the same house as Rita, he could not possibly have gotten the date wrong—he obeyed an irrational-seeming impulse and phoned Ann’s home. Ann’s mother, tight-lipped and looking somehow hurried and harried, answered. When he asked for Ann, she reminded him in a nervous voice that this was Prom night. Still he noticed that she did not say in so many words that Ann had already left for the Prom, or that she was too busy getting ready for it to come to the phone.

After he had blanked off, George sat thinking. Then he went to Rita’s room, where his sister was still being fitted into her Prom gown, meters and meters of fuzzy pink transparency. While their mother was out of the room looking for implements or materials of some kind, he took the opportunity to question his sister.

“I really don’t know whether she’s going tonight or not, George. How does this look in the back?”

“Fine.”

“She’s an honest girl and a good friend of mine and I love her dearly. If she said someone has asked her, then someone has. Also, if she said she’s not going, then that’s the way it will be. I love her dearly, as I said, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she doesn’t go. Oh, George, what do you mean it looks fine? I can tell in the mirror that it’s terrible.”

He wasn’t looking into the mirror, or at the dress.

Ineluctably motherly even on her Prom night, Rita came over to him, frowning with concern. “Oh, George, is it really getting serious between you two?”

“It is for me, although I’ve never even screwed her once. Is she always—like that? You know?”

Rita was worried now, completely distracted from her dress. “I might as well tell you bluntly, Ann has a bad rep with the boys in the class. I mean I’m not the most prudish and old-fashioned girl, but she is really way out.” Rita glanced at the bedroom door to determine whether their mother was still out of earshot. “You know she’s been excused from Erotic Orientation classes all along, on religious grounds. Don’t get me wrong, she’s been my loyal friend ever since sophomore year.”

“No, I didn’t know that about no EO. But it’s not really surprising.”

“You say you’ve never screwed her. If you ask me, no one has.” Rita nodded significantly. “I mean it. She’s my friend, but you’re my brother. I’ve seen a lot of the boys displaying a certain interest in her, if you know what I mean. And more than one man teacher, too. Well, if she hardly ever lets them see anything between her shoulders and her knees, I suppose the men are bound to get the message and come sniffing around. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

Rita was still looking at him worriedly when their mother returned and George withdrew. A deep excitement was now taking control of him. It had begun on that first day on the bus and had been developing ever since. He went back to his own room and spent half an hour alternately lying on the bed, pacing, and practicing his side snap kick before the mirror. Meanwhile he fought an inner struggle, understanding that the whole course of his future might be altered here and now. Again and again he told himself to put dark ideas out of his mind and phone some other girl with whom he could joyfully and simply spend the night in bed. Then he gave up and started to punch out Ann’s phone number again. Then he gave that up too and headed for her house.

THE house was all in darkness and he almost stumbled over a small figure sitting on a step in front of the door before he realized that anyone was there. Taking a second look, George saw that it was a boy about ten years old, who held in his hands a carved wooden figure about half as tall as he was.

“You live here?” George asked, his hand hesitating over the callplate on the door.

“Yeah,” said the boy. “Nobody’s home but my sister,” he added gloomily.

George’s heart gave a little premonitory throb. “It’s her I want to see.” He touched the plate and immediately a light came on above his head, giving the TV eye in the door a chance for a good look.

In the new light George could see that the carved wooden figure in the boy’s hands was— or had been—a female nude, executed with some skill. The kid was slowly mutilating it now, moodily gouging and hacking it with a small knife. The step was littered with little chips and shavings.

“Hey, what’re you doing that for?”

“I carved it, I can do what I want.”

“Well. What’s your name?”

“Fred.”

“I’m George. You can carve pretty good, Fred, if you did that. Why don’t you save it?” Though it seemed too late for that. Now one of the house’s windows came alight; someone was on their way to answer the door.

“Oh, you’re karate-George from the bus.” The boy looked up with interest for a moment, but then lowered his brown head again and dug in with the knife. “Why should I save it? Nobody wants to look at it.”

Ann opened the door, rubbing her dark hair with a towel. She was wearing a translucent pinkish sarong, not radically concealing, with apparently nothing under it. “Hello, George. Freddy! I thought you were at the Scout meeting. What are you doing, destroying that?”

“Nobody cares about it.”

“I care. I told you I like to see anything you do—”

“You don’t know nothin’ about it. And nobody else cares.” Freddy flung down the chunk of wood and was gone running into the night, across the little front yard and then swallowed up by the shadows along a narrow statwalk beside a slow river of taillights.

Ann called after her brother in annoyance, but evidently without any real expectation that he would turn around and come back. She made a gesture of resignation and then turned. “Come in, George.” It was almost as if she had been expecting him.

“Thanks. Is your brother going to be all right?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I think he’ll stay in the neighborhood. Anyway I don’t know what I can do.”

George daringly omitted giving her any slightest pinch or caress of greeting, even on the hand or arm, as he stepped into the house. True to form, Ann did not blush or giggle at the omission, as most of the girls he knew would probably have done, nor did she take offense at it, as the really nice conservative ones might. A bad girl then, as Rita had warned him, and all the signs so plainly showed. But still . . . somehow he couldn’t believe she was.

“Let’s go out beside the pool,” she said. “It’s nice outside tonight.”

“All right.” He followed her through the house. “I called earlier, and your mother sort of implied you were going out, but I just had a hunch and came over anyway.”

“I’m glad you did.” As they were leaving the indoors for a palm-fringed patio Ann stopped and turned to him. Her gladness, if such it was, was quiet and almost melancholy. “My parents have gone to the Prom, they agreed to be chaperones. They were very upset when they found they couldn’t talk me into going, even going at the last minute with them instead of a boy taking me. My mother is Church of Eros, you know, quite devout, and she’s been going there for guidance day after day and trying to get me to go. But her church and mine just don’t agree. My father went to his playclub and talked to the philosopher. Finally my parents both decided they ought to do what’s expected of them even if I won’t. So they’re chaperoning. I guess that’s partly why Freddy is upset. He thought Dad might go with him tonight to some Scout meeting.” It was about the longest speech that George had ever heard from her. She seemed farther from melancholy when she had gotten it out.

“I’m glad your parents decided that way,” said George. “Now I have you all to myself.”

“I’m glad you do. I had to talk a little bit to someone.” Ann stopped rubbing her hair and let the towel hang down in front of her. She seemed innocently unconscious of concealing effect. Now for the first time she smiled. “Would you like a swim, George? I just climbed out.”

“Sounds like fun.” He followed her around the bend of the L-shaped patio to the pool, which was irregular in shape and fairly small, and bordered along most of its perimeter by plastic grass and probably artificial flowers. His mind pictured Ann climbing from the pool, slipping on her sarong, going to answer the door. Suddenly he was sure she had been swimming in the nude, and his inward excitement—if excitement was really the right word for this chilling thing—went up another reading on the dial. Of course there was no sensible reason why a girl alone should not slip off her bikni and swim nude if she wanted to. Only the most satyrish reactionaries would insist that a solitary person wear clothes to emphasize his or her sex. But still the mental picture of Ann floating alone, smooth as a snake, divorced from sex, all chaste and bare as a lily-pad, was overwhelming.

“Still, the air is getting a little cool now,” said George, stalling. Standing beside her on the edge of the pool, he felt very unsure of himself. Would she laugh at him for an old-fashioned clod if he mentioned his lack of a swimming codpiece? On the other hand, if he just stripped bare and dove in, would she, after all, be shocked? In spite of the evidence of her own words and actions he couldn’t really believe that she was the bad kind of girl. But hadn’t he come here tonight hoping she was, trying to prove it, wanting to get from her what only bad girls gave? Confused as a sixteen-year old, he chickened out.

“You’re right,” she said calmly. “I wasn’t in the pool for very long.”

They sat down side by side on the pool’s curved grassy edge, and George pulled off his sandals and dipped his feet into the water. In his knitted translucent shorts and jacket he was really quite warm enough, but he saw Ann shiver just slightly in her sarong with the damp towel around her bare shoulders. In a minute he would suggest that they go back inside where it was warmer. Meanwhile he wanted to watch her as she stirred the water gently with one toe, scattering a thousand California stars.

ONLY ONCE, as an adolescent in the grip of a way-out mood, had George visited & brothel. There a pretty girl had draped herself while he watched, and had talked about stars and purity and poetry and other high, mysterious things until she had him sexless as a mushroom. Then he and the girl had lain chastely side by side on her narrow bed and talked. Between other topics of conversation he tried to explain the mental processes of karate to her, how the mind could concentrate the body’s force sufficiently to drive the hand uninjured through a wooden slab. At the time he had not really started any serious study of karate, and so he had been facile with explanations.

Probably his dissertation hadn’t made too much sense, but the girl was a skilled listener. He supposed most whores were that, and sexually desirable, too. He had heard Japanese speculating about what the old-time geisha must have been like, and he wondered if they were something similar. In the brothel George had never forgotten how desirable the girl with him was;-while at the same time his mind had daringly pushed lust farther and father away. A door had opened for him to a bittersweet world of controlled power. Change the metaphor: free-style sparring, and Eros’s feet of fleshy clay were swept out from under him, and down he came with a great ignominious gonad-jarring crash, to be made to bend his neck before a single rebellious human slave.

Still, when it was all over, when his half hour was up and he was being expertly shown the door, he found himself somewhat disappointed. Was this all that sublimation ever amounted to? It hardly seemed worth the fuss that people made about it.

Now, sitting with Ann on the grassy rim of the pool, he watched a movement of her hips show through the sarong as she shifted her weight slightly, and felt a sudden physical surge of desire for her. He remembered suddenly that he had seen and responded to just such a movement of the prostitute’s body as she began to wrap herself before him.

“So. I guess you’re still working with that Sunday school religious class, hey?”

“Oh, yes. When I have time.”

“Have you belonged to that Christian group long? I mean, guess the rest of your family aren’t members.”

“It’s a Christian school, but . . .” Ann spoke slowly and carefully now. “I’m not actually baptized into the Church yet myself. I just help out there. I’ve been hanging around the school and church there since I was about thirteen. You’re right, my parents are much against it and of course they try to argue me out of ever being baptized. I guess my adolescence has been difficult for them, with me always hanging around Sunday school instead of going to young peoples orgies in their church. The philosopher at Daddy’s playclub says I’m looking for a crutch to help me get through life. And really it is such a tremendous step, being baptized, I mean. In a sense I’m still free now to do anything I want, but after baptism I won’t be.”

“Hm.”

“For example I’ll be practically restricted to marrying someone who’s also a Christian. If I get married at all.”

“Really?”

“Well, I just mean it takes an awful lot of work to make a marriage a success even when the two partners agree on the important things such as religion. And my marriage will have to succeed because Christians don’t have divorce, or at least not very often.”

“Aren’t they divided into a bunch of splinter sects? I was reading about it the other day.” George had rarely given the subject of religion much thought, but just recently he had been reading up a bit on Christianity. He didn’t think it was for him. He couldn’t figure out whether violence was ever allowed or not. Maybe it was something like the traditional rules of karate, where you weren’t allowed to use it for real unless to protect yourself or another, loved one.

“Christians used to be divided. Now they’re pretty much reunited again, what’s left of them.”

“Well, I never even go to Church of Eros any more. I think religion’s not for me. They say that some of those churches, once you join them they never let you alone again afterwards.”

After a little silence Ann said: “There are a number of thing that never let you alone.”

“Yes,” agreed George, wondering just what things she had in mind.

“George?” Her voice was different.

“What?”

“Would you like to have sex with me? Here and now?”

“Why, yes,” he answered, speaking mechanically in his surprise. “That would be nice.”

FOR LONG seconds she did not reply. She sat there so motionless that her toes no longer troubled the starry water. George tried to read her face in the near-darkness. Then abruptly she turned her face away. “The way you say that!” Ann said, and made a frightened, twisted sound that was a little like a laugh.

“It’s just that you took me by surprise.” George slid closer to her along the side of the pool. “Oh, Ann. Annie? You’ve never wanted me to give you an erotic touch before.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’ve wanted.” She leaned away from him, supple and graceful in her sarong. Her toes left the water with a tinkle of tiny drops, and she stretched out on her back along the edge of the pool. Now she covered her eyes with one slender wrist.

George could no longer control himself. He crept very close and bent over Ann, daring not to touch her at all. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

“I’m not afraid, I’m not ashamed.” Her voice was surprisingly firm and proud, and she was watching him from under her arm. “You don’t know me very well, George. But maybe you’ve heard some stories.”

“Yes I have. But I don’t care if the stories are true.”

“What do they say about me, the stories that you don’t care about?”

“They say—” His voice went shaky on him and he had to pause. “What they amount to is that you’re still a virgin.”

She moved her arm away and now he could see her face in the starlight, her face becoming calmer now with an inner change, the blooming of some beauty that George could not have named. “Yes.” She said it without a trace of shame. “That’s why I’m not at the Prom tonight. Nothing but one long orgy. George; just now I offered you my virginity. Can you understand what that means to me?”

Watching her, listening to her, he thought he could. As if following some biological imperative his lust now began to recede, while at the same time there rose up in him-something else. His throat ached with his joy. He straightened up so that he was no longer bending over Ann but sitting at her side.

Looking at him steadily, she asked again: “Now do you want to have sex with me?”

“Yes. Sometime. Right now I want—something more.”

Ann nodded agreement and lowered her eyes. Her breathing, that had quickened momentarily, now grew slow. In a gentle voice she asked: “Shall I take this sarong thing off? Or put on something thicker?”

George could not find his voice to answer right away. What had happened in the brothel had afforded him an enjoyable, way-out kick, a fancy kind of reverse mental tickle. That tremendous gulfs of experience lay beyond had been suggested, but no more. In itself the visit to the whore had been not quite worth the effort to repeat it. This thing impending now, beginning now, was going far beyond. A winged thing had been born inside his chest and it was lifting at the roots of his being, lifting and pulling and expanding until it seemed that sex itself might be dissolved out of the flesh and carried outward to the stars.

“Oh, I don’t care what you wear.” George groaned in a failing voice. “Oh, I love you, love you, love you. Oh, sublimation’s such a dirty word, there has to be a better.”

“I know,” Ann whispered. “Don’t talk now.” She had done this before. He was the virgin here.

Their hands came together and held, now just human hands more than they were male-female. She raised her eyes to his, and then on past his eyes, and he knew that she was looking at the stars. No turning back now. Never. They rose on the great lifting wings.

X

WAKING up, rejoining the inhospitable world, was a slow and intermittent and instinctive struggle. Art understood from the beginning of the struggle that he was sick, or hurt, and paradoxically this left him less worried than he had been before. Before whatever had happened to leave him in this state. He was less worried because now less would be expected of him. They would have to take care of him now.

. . . they? Someone was trying. However he had come to be here, he lay in .a bedroom in somebody’s home. In one of the two beds crowded into the small cheaply furnished chamber. He had the vague impression of somebody having been in the other bed, and the covers there were rumpled, but now when he looked carefully there was no one. Perhaps, too, somebody had once shared this bed with him. He should have been polite and pawed at their genitals at least but right now he felt tired of genitalia and thank Eros he was sick or hurt and nothing much could reasonably be expected off him along that line.

. . . should have grabbed and pawed as those little plastic figures were doing to each other, those cheap Church of Eros icons that someone had shoved to the rear of the top of that high plastic wardrobe over there and then forgotten.

It was a BI bedroom from the look of it, or could it be a room in a cheap hotel? Or some rented room where tenant after tenant rushed through, forgetting and leaving things, and none of the haphazard objects in the room fit with anything else, There on the wall was the founder of Christianity nailed up, as in Ann’s children’s room, but here two pieces of plastic were doing the job instead of wooden beams. And there on the other wall, a reproduction of a painting that looked like a Caravaggio, but a Caravaggio that Art had never seen before. Nothing like Eros trampling the violin, or Bacchus lounging amid bowls of fruit. In this picture there were men around a table doing something, counting money, and on the right two men entering, one of them important, a mysterious figure of light and shadow and power, extending a hand that said: here, you, enough of playing with those trifles on the table, more important things are waiting. The summons had come, and everyone in the picture knew about it except the man for whom it was intended.

. . . so he himself was sick, no, he was hurt, for now he remembered something about being frightened put there in the street, and now there was this sex awful pain in his head that only intermittently would go away. And now truly there was a long-haired girl resting, indecently covered, in the room’s other bed, and now, whup, a trick of the illusionist’s art and she was gone again. Meanwhile it might , have been that Art had slept.

Standing before him was a man, tall and narrow-shouldered, with a sandy beard and impressive green or gray or blue eyes, it was hard to tell because the color seemed to change, who looked at Art intently. And this man was a somewhat familiar figure, because he had been standing in the same place an hour ago (a day ago?) and asking Art some questions.

“What’s your name?” the man asked now, looking at Art intently. He had a mild, slow voice that contradicted a look in his eyes of being fierce and concentrated and somehow ready to pounce.

“ARTHUR Rodney?”

The man smiled and nodded, as if this were very good news indeed. He had shut the door of the room behind him; outside somewhere in the background printout was clacking noisily from a computer terminal in need of mechanical adjustment. “Art, what year is this?” Art’s second correct answer was just as satisfying as his first. “How do you feel, Art?”

“Not good. I’ve got a triplet of a headache.” All of a sudden the lobby of Family Planning came back, and then the frantically waving picket signs outside, the jam of bodies on the statwalk. What should come after that? He didn’t know. He had reached a real blank.

The man stepped closer to his bed. “Let’s have a look at that,” With what were unmistakably a doctor’s hands, professionally sure and gentle, he probed through or around some kind of dressing on Art’s scalp.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. Well, that’s not looking too bad. And I’m glad you’ve waked up fully now.” The man stepped back, pulling at his curl of sandy beard. “But I still want to make an X-ray or two. Haven’t been able to as yet.”

“How long have I been here? And where am I, anyway?”

“You’ve been here several hours. Let’s say you’re with some people who gave you shelter when it appeared to them that otherwise you’d go to jail. May I ask—what is the last thing you remember clearly?”

Art closed his eyes. His head throbbed. “Coming out into the street, in front of the Family Planning building. There was some kind of demonstration, or riot . . . but why should I have gone to jail?”

The doctor shrugged and gave a tiny smile. “I don’t know that you would have. Some of the Young Virgins on the scene evidently mistook you for one of their own casualties and brought you here. Some of them think that if a person gets clobbered in the street he must be a good guy, and anyone who’s a good guy is automatically in danger of being thrown in jail.”

He approached Art again, and with the aid of a tiny light looked closely into his eyes.

“How am I doing, doctor?”

“Not bad, not bad. Rest. It’s important that you take it easy for a while. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll be back in a bit.”

When the door had closed behind the doctor Art lived in silence for a while with the pain in his head, alternately opening and closing his eyes. Somewhere in the distance the faulty computer terminal clacked away again. The room had one small window with bright daylight coming in around the edges of a closed shade. This was some Young Virgins’ refuge, then. But he was not back in the Diana Arms; at least, Rita’s room had looked very little like this one.

The door opened and a girl in a long, opaque sweater came in, bringing him a cup of something warm and chocolately to drink, and Art was abruptly conscious of being entirely naked beneath the bedsheet.

“Medicine?” he asked, while routinely starting to put a hand up under the bottom of her sweater.

“No.” She gave him a cool smile and turned away, so that his hand slid free. “Just a drink. Thought you might like some.”

She went out again right away. The stuff in the cup tasted good. Soon he might try getting up. He wondered if his clothes, and his watch and his money, were in the plastic wardrobe, and he wondered what time of day it was. About the time he had finished the drink, sipping ‘slowly, the doctor was back.

HE LOOKED in Art’s eyes again with his little light and then pulled up a chair and sat. “Art, I took the liberty of going through your wallet while you were unconscious. Just to see if there was a record of anything, diabetes or allergies or so forth, that might bear on your medical condition.”

“No doubt I owe you thanks for taking care of me. And you found out my name. I didn’t catch yours.” . .

No answer.

“I suppose now I had better get up and put on my clothes and leave.”

“I don’t want to scare you, Art, but before you go walking out on the street I must insist we take some X-rays. I hope .to be able to make them downstairs here in just a few minutes. If X-rays show no skull fracture we can drive you home right away, take you anywhere in the city you want to go. If they do show a fracture we are going to have to somehow arrange to move you on a stretcher to a hospital.”

“I—see. Or maybe I don’t.”

“The point is that your presence puts us here in something of an awkward position. If you do have a fracture, we can’t simply call an ambulance to come and get you. And for your own good I wouldn’t want you riding folded down and blindfolded in the back seat of a car.”

“I know how that works,” Art muttered, feeling a little sick.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Evidently I’m in some kind of a —secret hideout.”

The doctor looked relieved. “I’m glad you understand. It’s quite important to a number of us here that the location of this house be kept a secret. And we’ve realized by now that you’re no sympathizer of ours. Nevertheless we wish you well. We don’t want to—to make you feel you’re being held a prisoner. As soon as the X-ray film I need arrives, which I hope will be any minute now, we’ll take a couple of pictures and then you’ll be on your way.”

Art relaxed wearily in the bed. “All right, all right. I guess you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m really glad you’re being understanding about this, Art. I feel a personal responsibility in this matter. For your being in the Family Planning office to begin with, I mean.”

Art looked at him, trying to puzzle it out.

“You see, I’m Rita’s midwifer.”

A COUPLE of sturdy male Young Virgins came along shortly, pushing a regular hospital cart. They got Art’s clothes out of the wardrobe—he noticed the strap of his watch sticking out of a pocket, and also the faint bulge of a billfold that had evidently been scrupulously replaced—and helped him put on his codpiece and loaded him onto the cart beneath an opaque sheet. Meanwhile, of course, he was demanding again and again to be told where his wife was.

“She’s not here, not in this building,” the doctor, kept answering him calmly. “The parturition will be quite soon. She’s well. And she’s worried about you—more precisely, as I interpret what she says, she’s worried about whether you’ll want her back when she has her third child.”

It took Art a moment to understand. “You mean she thinks I might divorce her? But that’s foolish, how would that help? It wouldn’t help her or the children, and it certainly wouldn’t help me.” He lay on his back with his head on a low pillow as the two husky Virgins propelled the cart out of the room and along a rambling hallway, through what appeared to be an ancient house of mansion size, or else perhaps the rundown dormitory of some private school. Not at all like the Diana Arms. “Sure, I hope she doesn’t have a third baby when she comes back. But even if she does, I most certainly want her. So, you’re the one who’s doing it. How can you interfere in people’s lives like this? How much are you being paid?”

The doctor was walking beside the cart, now and then going ahead or falling behind when the way became too narrow. “I’m not getting a dollar from Rita or anyone in her family. If she’s paid out money it must be going to the doctor who referred her to me, or to someone else along the line. In a clandestine business like this you’re always going to get some people going into it for the money.”

“And you?”

“For the good of my immortal soul. That’s how I see it. That I have an inescapable moral duty to do what I am doing here.”

The cart rolled into a small, old-looking elevator. The two orderlies remained behind as the doors closed and the elevator started down with Art still lying on the cart and the doctor standing beside it.

“You don’t inspire a great deal of confidence, doctor. If you are a doctor, really. If you’re not you’d better keep your hands off my wife.”

“I assure you I am an obstetrician. And you’ll be glad to hear that I haven’t lost a mother in some years of practice.” The slow descent of the elevator stopped and the doors slid open. “I haven’t lost anyone to a head injury, either. But then yours is about the first I’ve treated since I was an intern.” And with that the cart was rolling again.

The opaque sheet came over Art’s face in two thicknesses as they left the elevator. The voice of his captor said: “I’m covering your eyes up here, so you won’t be able later to identify or locate this house.”

Art only grunted. He felt the cart jolt lightly over a threshold, and then there came a whiff of outside air, summer-warm and fragrant, but he stoically refused to look or listen or sniff for clues. Once before he had been granted knowledge that secretive guides were trying to withhold from him, and knowledge had done him no good at all. This game was hopeless, for him at any rate, and he was about ready to give it up. Not to accept that his opponents were in the right, but to admit that they had him beaten. The law and the bulk of society were on his back but he could not call them in. When you went into the endgame a rock down and your clock running out, maybe you had better resign and save some mental energy for the next game. There would be a lot of tough games to play against the world when Rita came home again, whether she had to go to jail first or not. If she went to jail who was he going to get as a steady, dependable babysitter in California?

Now the cart was on a descending ramp. Impossible to judge whether it went down one meter or three. When it stopped and the doctor pulled the sheet down from Art’s face, the two of them were alone in a kind of laboratory or treatment room crowded with a jumble of shelves and boxes and equipment, lighted by some old-fashioned overhead fluorescents. The windowless walls were lined nearly from floor to ceiling with shelving, loaded with boxes and bottles labeled in what seemed to be the jargon of medical technology. The nearby door through which they had evidently just entered was now closed. It was hard to guess the size of the room because sections of it to both right and left were cut off by portable white screens.

“Now where is the damned film?” The doctor was ruffling through stacks of paper, journals, printouts, and other impedimenta that covered a large desk-like metal table. “They told me that they left it here.” Somehow the archaic swearword, the like of which Art had not heard since the tridi play went dead on the tube train, sounded natural coming from this man.

After fruitlessly searching a few moments longer, the doctor muttered an excuse and went out impatiently, closing the door of the room behind him. Art heard another door open and close some distance off.

Apart from his continuing headache, he now felt pretty good. Good enough to have a sense of awkwardness and vague shame at lying here on a cart like an invalid. He raised himself on an elbow and looked about. There on the foot of the cart were his clothes. Should he dress and stagger out into the street, calling for the police? That certainly wouldn’t win Rita over to his point of view. No, he had tipped his king and resigned the game.

Near at hand he recognized a portable X-ray machine, a familiar sight from visits to other physicians’ offices. An unobtrusive background hum of electric power and electronics permeated the room. And now he became aware of another sound, an old-fashioned watch tick-tick-ticking, except this was a little faster and more irregular than a watch would be.

Still alone, Art swung his feet over the side of the cart and sat up. His head ached, but he felt able to stand and walk. Now if that was a bathroom over there, as a tiled interior glimpsed beyond the top of a white screen deemed to promise, then his physical comfort might soon be brought back close to normal. He slid off the cart and walked around the screen, past glassy tanks and a maze of piping and a portable computer terminal set up on a dimly lighted workbench, and found the hoped-for toilet.

He was on his way back to sit on his cart like a good patient when, just around the shadowed workbench, he came to a full stop. “Ah,” he said aloud.

The fetus was in the central glassy tank atop the bench . . .

TO BE CONTINUED

Part III of III

WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

By the twenty-first century the earlier revolution in sexual morals had advanced to the point where chastity, and the repression or sublimation of sexual impulses were considered social offenses if not actual crimes, but were still sought by many as secret pleasures. Most members of the Establishment belonged to the Church of Eros. Concurrently, crowding and hunger in the world had led to severe restrictions on reproduction even among the wealthy. A woman who had borne two children was required by law to have any subsequent pregnancies aborted.

ART RODNEY, California electronics engineer and chessmaster, finds that his wife, RITA, has fled to Chicago to locate a midwifer and bear a third child rather than have the abortion required by law. Art pursues Rita to convince her that her plan is both wrong and dangerous before it is too late.

Art’s transcontinental tube train is halted at the Mississippi. Under attack there by rioters is a monastery of Christians (a sect long in decline) where experiments on preserving life in freshly aborted fetuses are thought to be under way. Art helps a distraught girl named ROSAMOND JAMISON get-on the train for Chicago.

In Chicago, Rita’s brother GEORGE PARR, a karate master, and his wife ANN, LIVE LIKE many other city dwellers in a complex of townhouses fortified against the random violence of the age. Art arrives to find that Rita has come and gone, leaving the two Rodney children with Ann, a militant free-birth advocate and Christian.

Art convinces the Parrs that he must be allowed to talk to Rita face to face. George takes him on a tour of the city, supposedly to arrange the contact but really to confuse any Family Planning agents who might be watching them. High points on the tour are a stadium where the unemployed are paid to watch baseball, and a slumburb tavern where Art hears a disheartening broadcast of world news. George takes Art to his karate dojo where Fred, who wants George to hire him as an instructor, has come to be evaluated. Fred fails in combat against humanoid karate-machines. One of George’s students, Dr. Hammad, is introduced to Art as the man who can arrange his meeting with Rita . . .

Fred, gloomy and wounded, goes in search of some gladrags (opaque plastic cloaks) to facilitate his planned sublimation-affair with Marjorie. At the Megiddo Coffee House Fred falls in with some apish companions.

A meeting is arranged between Art and his wife, who is in hiding while her anonymous doctor, an acquaintance of Dr. Hammad’s, makes preliminary tests. Art is blindfolded and driven to see Rita in the former nurses’ quarters of a maternity hospital—that with the changing times has been converted into a sublimation-brothel. When Art realizes his beloved wife is staying in a whorehouse he tries to drag her out by force but the bouncers subdue him. Exhausted, he is almost seduced into sublimation by one of the girls, who takes him for a customer. Desperate now, he decides to take his problems to Family Planning and throw himself and Rita on their mercy.

Outside, opposing picket lines of the Homo League and the radical Young Virgins clash as Art arrives at the building. In the lobby, he finds he cannot betray Ann and George to the law as the midwifery conspirators they are; he dashes out again, and is knocked unconscious in the riot.

Musing at home about Art’s and Rita’s problems, George and Ann hark flashback to their own meeting and early life together; George’s saving Ann from apes on a California bus, and their first sublimation together, on the night she missed her high school’s orgiastic Senior Prom. We see what has only been implied earlier, that to members of this society the deliberate refusal (repression, sublimation) of a sexual impulse can sometimes be a transcendental experience, intense and important as orgasm was in an earlier age.

Art wakes up in a hideout where the Young Virgins have brought him, having mistaken him for one of their own casualties as they fled the riot scene with the arrival of the police. Art is being treated by a Christian priest-doctor on the lam for midwifery—in fact the very man who is about to deliver and freeze Rita’s fetus. While waiting for a skull X-ray, Art notices a glassy tank and, peering within, discovers a three-month-old human fetus . . .

THE surrounding light was quite dim, and the tank’s only window a tiny aperture that allowed a clear view of the thing only from certain angles.

Art stepped closer, staring, then abruptly relaxed. There was no umbilical cord, only a blind knot of tissue at the navel. For a moment he had thought that the complex of equipment before him (besides the tanks and piping, there were three oscilloscopes, counters, and other gear that Art could not immediately identify) was in feet an artificial womb, and that the fetus before him had been frozen and revived, or was at any rate in some sense viable. But now he realized that it must be only an abortus being used in some experiment. Tubes, or only wires perhaps (he could not be sure in the dim light) were attached to it inside the tank, but without an umbilical cord, he supposed, it could not be receiving oxygen and nourishment. And he could see no placenta, or analogue of one.

There it sat, or rather floated in an upright sitting posture. The thing that so much fuss was made about. It was small, only about the length of Art’s middle finger. Its proportions were much different from those of a normal full-term infant, and of course even further from those of an adult, but the thing was unmistakably genus homo all the same. What other species would develop a bulging brow like that, or hold up two such human hands? When Art bent closer, the fingers were fully distinguishable, as were the toes at the end of the insignificant legs and feet. What with the shadows and the angle of his view, the sex was not quite visible.

He jumped back a step with a quick intake of breath, and only then was aware of the doctor standing watching him at the corner of the screen a couple of steps away.

“Feel all right?” the doctor asked. “You shouldn’t be on your feet unnecessarily.”

Art raised a hand to gently touch the side of his head, at a good safe distance from the wound. He turned his gaze back to the tank. “It moved.”

“Oh yes, they move. I’ve located the X-ray film at last. Get back on the cart if you will and we’ll finally be able to make sure about that head of yours. Yes, the little girl in there happens to be about the same developmental age as Rita’s fetus is right now . . . About three months as near as I can tell. At that age they’ve usually been moving spontaneously for several weeks, though the mother usually can’t feel the movements yet.”

Art walked away, pausing at the corner of the screen to look back once. “I didn’t know it was . . . there was no cord.”

The doctor held out a hand to give support if needed. “Oh. But we usually take that off at parturition. Tapping into the circulatory system elsewhere serves the purpose, and has some technical advantages. Yes, she’s very much alive and growing. That’s her heartbeat you can hear in the background, sounds like a clock or watch? And with those scopes back there we’re continually monitoring brain activity; that won’t settle into the regular rhythms for a few more weeks.”

Art lay back carefully on the cart, settling his head down gently on the pillow. “Is that a living human being?” he asked the fluorescent lights above. The vision of the grotesque, half fish-like head was still before him, and the tiny hands, that seemed about to be raised secretively, protectively, before the face. “Is it?”

“You tell me,” the doctor grunted, moving the cart in the direction of the X-ray. Art now noticed the thick shielding hung between the machine and the artificial womb at the end of the laboratory. The doctor continued: “Frankly, I’ve had my doubts. Sometimes I feel I don’t know where to start in thinking about it anymore.” His tone was mild and preoccupied; now he had begun a delicate positioning of Art’s head beneath the X-ray snout.

Art, still looking at the ceiling, said: “Maybe it doesn’t matter if a fetus is a human being or not. Maybe such a question is meaningless.”

“Take a deep breath—hold it, don’t move.” There came the usual audible hum. “All right, you can move. What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? You know, if these embryos and fetuses turn out not to be individual human beings after all, then I and some of my friends have gone to a hell of a lot of trouble and broken a hell of a lot of laws for nothing.”

Art twisted on his cart. “You just said that you yourself have doubts.”

“Doubts, yes!” The man was vexed. He waved a piece of blackened film. “I might have very strong doubts that there’s a child under that overturned box I see in the middle of the road, but that doesn’t justify my running over it with a truck, not without some life-or-death reason to run it over. Damn, this one didn’t come out as clearly as I’d like. Let’s try again. Turn on your right side this time, if you will.”

“How about the welfare of society as a whole? How about over-population, people starving? Aren’t those life-or-death reasons?”

“To cut off the life of that little girl in there? In a word, no. Take a deep breath, hold it. That’s fine.”

Allowed to move again, Art got up on one elbow. “I suspect neither of us is going to be able to change the other’s mind on this by arguing.”

Art said: “All right, I know that thing in the tank has the potential for someday being a full human being, with all the rights thereof. But not yet, surely not yet. It may generate a brain wave or two but it can’t think, it may twitch but it can’t act. It couldn’t survive for three minutes without artificial help.”

“Neither could you if you had a really massive coronary. And she could have survived quite well in her natural environment, had we been able to leave her there.” The gray-green eyes gave the pictures a final stare and then turned to Art with evident relief. “You’re all right. This second picture makes it unanimous. No fracture. You ought to take things easy for a while, but you can go.”

“Tell me. Why does that have to be a baby? Why must you break the laws, as you admit doing, to make that point?”

THE doctor sighed, and let himself down in a chair beside the paper-burdened table, as Art sat up on the cart and reached for his shirt. “Art, I can’t make it a baby or not a baby. I can only try to determine which category it already belongs to, and conduct myself accordingly.” He wearily rubbed his eyes. “Damn it, it looks like a baby now, right? In a few weeks it may begin to suck its thumb. A cute little human touch, hey? Not necessarily convincing.”

“Wait a minute. How about gill-slits? Doesn’t it still have those, or didn’t it at an earlier stage? Are they cute little proofs of humanity too?”

“All right, the gill slits. What do you think they prove?”

“I . . . nothing. How am I supposed to know?

You’re the scientist, or at least the expert, though most of the scientists and experts don’t seem to agree with you on this. What has you so convinced?”

“Art, I know of no solid scientific definition of man. What can I communicate to you? Only facts, and people interpret them in different ways. Both parents of that organism in the tank were human, of course. But its cells are different from either of its parents’ cells; it is now a genetically unique individual.

“It . . . no, I have to say she. What you see as a thing in a tank I see as a little girl. But if you try to pin me down on when she began to be a little girl, I’ll have to admit that I just don’t know. Teilhard says that the beginnings of all things tend to be out of sight. Was a unique human soul infused when the sperm first pierced the egg? When the nuclei of the two parent cells were first completely united? With implantation of the blastocyst in the uterine wall? Maybe a few days after that, when the time of possible twinning had passed.”

“If you’re bringing souls into it, you’re leaving me out.” Art was off the cart now, getting dressed. In the background the steady tick-tick-tick went on, soft and rapid. “Just let me get out of here.”

“Of course.” As if caught derelict in his duty, the doctor jumped up and went to push a Button near the door. “I can’t help bringing souls into it, though I tried. I’m a Christian priest as well as a doctor, you see. I suppose if one’s humanity is questioned one must try to prove it by appealing either to God or to a board of review of other human beings, who sit in judgment. I know which I prefer to do.”

“No one is questioning your humanity, doctor.”

“Not now. But some future government might decide that I belong to an inferior race. Governments in the past have made such pronouncements about people. Or, if I suffered a stroke tonight and still hadn’t come to by next week, my fellow physicians might by then be questioning my continued humanity.” He rose from his chair, hands clenching. The naturally fierce look in his eyes grew more intense. “Maybe it would be the kindest thing in such a case to let me die. But I would still be a human being dying, not a—a specimen reacting!”

“All right,” said Art, in slight alarm, speeding up the fastening of his shorts. “Take it easy.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.” The tall man let himself slump back into his chair. “In my opinion there are a few rare situations where abortion may be justified, at least if there’s not an artificial womb available. But it’s still a human being dying, being killed, and there’s not many reasons to justify that. Surely not some non-specific good intended for the world in general.”

Art, dressed now and putting on his watch, shook his head. “Do you think a single human being dying matters that much to the universe? Appeal to your God if you want, the rest of us haven’t heard anything from him lately. We have to look out for ourselves as best we can.”

The priest-doctor pulled himself to his feet once more. “Let me go and find someone to drive you home. We’ll feed you something first if you care to wait for it.”

“No, I’m not quite through talking yet.” Art moved to stand between the other and the door. “You are about to inflict a third child on me and my wife, because your God wants you to. The least you can do is listen to me for a minute longer.”

Abruptly the priest turned fierce again. “I am sincerely sorry for the danger and expense and inconvenience that the third child is going to cause you. But it is still better than inflicting death on your third child. If you find his presence unendurable, why there are people in the world who will take him in.”

“People in the world! Yes, I’ll say there are.” Now they were standing almost toe to toe, Art with his arms folded like an umpire. “About eight or nine billion at last count. And how many of them are starving now?”

“Quite a few are starving, Art, quite a few. Maybe you’ve seen more of them than I have. Maybe you’ve fed more of them. Maybe you promote contraception more enthusiastically than I do.”

BUT Art seemed to have stopped listening. He stood-staring, with an altered expression, into a corner of the room. The priest looked there and saw only a red picnic cooler with a white handle.

“Art, here, sit down again. I’m sorry, we shouldn’t have been arguing.”

“No, I’m all right,” said Art. But then he did sit down in the chair the other brought for him. “That cooler over there. I believe I may have carried that across the Mississippi a few days ago. It was very heavy and very cold. Now I’m just realizing what must have been inside it. That was while your monastery out there was burning down.”

“You were there?” The priest sat down again too, and leaned anxiously toward him. “Can you tell me anything of what happened? I’ve seen and read the news stories, but . . .”

Art told what he could, leaving out the name of the girl for whom he had carried the container. “And the man with her said, That was Steve before he took off running into the woods. That’s about all I can tell you.”

The priest-doctor nodded, hands clamped on his knees, squinting as if in physical pain. “Yes. Those two men were both my friends. Neither of them mentioned in the official accounts. Maybe the police never knew they were there.”

“I’m really sorry,” Art said impulsively. “At the time there didn’t seem to be anything I could do.”

“Of course not, Art. It’s not your fault. Listen, I’d better get you on your way home before I’m charged with kidnapping. But you must be hungry, let us feed you something first.”

“Maybe just a protein bar. I never got around to thanking you for this patch-up job, did I?” Art brushed a hand gingerly over his scalp bandage. It wasn’t nearly as big as he had expected, and very little of his hair had been removed.

In a few minutes one of the stalwart Young Virgins brought him a couple of bars on a plate, and a glass of milk. As he munched, the priest-doctor asked him: “Would you object very strongly to a blindfold when you leave? I’d accept your word if you gave it, but some of the other people here might not.”

“Blindfold? Oh, I don’t care.” Art was abstracted again. Foodbar in hand, he got up suddenly and went to push the white screen aside.

Like an idol in a temple, he thought suddenly. Surrounded by its screens and paraphernalia like an idol, or a statue on an altar. Suddenly the minuscule statue frowned at him, averted its blind face, then stretched an arm.

Not an idol, then. Far more than that. Inscrutable as a flower or a nebula, it could only be contemplated, not understood. Tick-tick-tick. And again the firing neurons in its developing brain smeared green traces across the three oscilloscopes.

SHAKING hands with the doctor on his way out, Art said: “Thanks again for the treatment. You know if I could find a way I’d still stop Rita from going through with this. Because of the kind of world we have to live in. But I wish it wasn’t so, I wish the world would let your way be possible. Anyway, you tell her that I want her back, whatever happens. I want that most.”

“I’ll tell her, Art. I’ll be very glad to pass that word along.”

XI

AT ONE o’clock in the afternoon Art, once more shrouded in an opaque cover (this one smelling more medicinal than musty), was led out of the laboratory and out of doors, across an area of long weedy grass and uneven paving stones. Then he was put into the back seat of a car, where without being told he hunkered down so as to be invisible from the outside. The car when started jolted slowly over rough terrain for about a minute, before getting onto any kind of a regular road. Shortly Art began to hear the noises of other traffic around him.

“You can come up,” said one of his Young Virgin escorts, in apologetic tones, only about five minutes after the start of the trip and somewhat before Art had expected any such permission. He pulled the blanket gingerly from his sore head and eased himself up to a normal position in the seat. The car was traveling through some middle-class, jobholders’ residential neighborhood that Art could not recognize. One of the two youths escorting him sat beside him in the back.

“Sorry, we’re not going to be able to take you all the way to the Parrs’ house,” the driver said, apologetically. “It’s possible their place is being watched—you know how it is.”

“I don’t know whether I do or not. Not any more.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s all right. I can walk.”

“Oh, oh,” said his other escort, swiveling his head to peer back through the rear window. As it turned out, Art didn’t have far to walk at all. The police car with its blue lights flashing came alongside and nudged their vehicle neatly to the curb with its foamy plastic bumpers.

FROM the questions the police asked before the van arrived to cart the three of them off to the station, Art gathered that his escorts’ car had been somehow identified as one used by participants in the morning’s infamous Family Planning riot. All its present occupants were under grave suspicion, the sullen one with the lump on his head being no exception. When they unloaded at the lockup he was taken underground to a large cell with padded walls. He recognized it as what they called a DD, or drunk-drug, tank of the tv crime dramas. In real life he found it crowded not with thrashing drunks or druggards, but with loudly vocal Young Virgin types, several of whom complained steadily to the walls (where perhaps there were microphones to listen) of their real or supposed injuries.

Nobody else was listening. “Shuddup in there,” advised a loudspeaker in the ceiling, from time to time. In reply to this the Young Virgins would usually break out into a verse of all but unintelligible song. Approaching Art through this milieu, smiling as if at an old friend, came a suddenly familiar face: that of the sign-peddler of the morning.

“It’s just a mistake I was picked up,” Art could hear the sign-peddler saying, as the latest outburst of song was ended. “My signs were useful, weren’t they, to let the world know what was going on? A man tries to be an influence for peace and communication in the world, to mediate the intelligent expression of differences in the community, and this is the thanks he gets. Hey, bud, which side were you on?”

“Shut up,” said Art Rodney.

Now another fifteen or twenty prisoners were being brought in a group, adding to the crowding and confusion. These looked like Young Virgins too. Presumably any Homo League members arrested were being held somewhere else, in the interest of relative peace. The corridors under this station seemed to be lined with these tank-like cells, and through the corridors drifted the steady animal murmuring of innumerable inmates. There was also a noticeable amount of dust in the air, and the muffled roar of heavy machinery at work nearby. Maybe more cell space was being excavated.

At last three policemen came to the door of Art’s cell, and set up a table there for processing. “One at a time now, people. Form a single line. Come up here and present your identification and we’ll take your fingerprints. Then you can make one phone call. Form a single line.”

A Young Virgin girl, a beautiful girl with dark devilish eyes, pushed herself forward to the table and demanded: “How about separate facilities for men and women?”

The policemen who had already spoken eyed her warily, his lined face on guard against any of these young punks attempting to get smart. “Separate what?”

“Latrines!” The girl waved at the open urinals and water closet at the rear wall of the cell. “We want to have separate latrines for each sex, with walls closing them off.”

The cop’s hardened face showed disgust. “Oh, and no doubt you’d like to open a brothel in here, too. You’ll take what the city gives you, and do your carryin’ on outside of jail.”

As if that were the answer she had hoped for, the girl stepped back smiling. With a gesture and a yell she started up another loud song, all the Young Virgins within earshot quickly joining in. But their rebelliousness now seemed strictly verbal; they were not slow to line up before the table for processing. Jail probably grew quite boring in a couple of hours, and it was now time to call one’s parents to get one out. Art used his weight and his elbows in self-defense, refusing to be pushed to the rear.

Someone shouted at him: “Do you know the song?” It was a comradely voice, coming from just behind Art in the newly formed queue.

The speaker was a tall young man, wearing a sweatshirt with STUDENTS FOR A CHASTE SOCIETY handpainted on the front, something about him looked vaguely familiar to Art.

“No, why should I know your song?” Art answered, as soon as the noise of it had trailed off into silence and he could talk without shouting. “I was just caught up in all this by mistake.”

“That’s the way it was with me,” said the voice of the sign-peddler, from up near the head of the line.

“Are you with us, though?” asked the devil-eyed girl ahead of Art. As the line was just about formed she had squeezed her cloth-shrouded body in just ahead of him, her eyes daring him to protest.

“I’m not with you or against you. I just happened to get caught up in this.”

The girl’s eyes, those of a determined persecuter, attacked Art’s beard and the conservative translucency of his clothing. She was silent, perhaps making plans.

The tall young man demanded: “Sir, if you’re really not with us, why not?” His tone was meant to be not threatening but inspiring. “Now I judge you’re a man who has supported the Establishment in the past, who has upheld all its outworn dogmas and twentieth-century creeds. And now it’s thrown you into jail anyway. What good has worshipping the sex gods and goddesses ever done you? Think about it.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Art, and shuffled forward with the line. If it came to posting bond, he didn’t have a great deal of money.

He never knew what Rita was feeling— those had been her words to him. Why couldn’t he have started, sooner, to find out? Until he knew what she was feeling it made little sense to argue with her. Of course she should have shown him similar consideration, talked to him more, found out what he really felt. Maybe they weren’t so utterly, terribly far apart as it had seemed when she ran away. He didn’t want her having another baby, of course . . . but if she was going to, anyway, if she really had to do it, then he wanted to be with her while it was going on. Now it was too late even for that. He wouldn’t be able to reach her until the thing was done.

“Everybody be careful!” cried the devil-eyed girl brightly. She had been whispering with a couple of girl friends, and now she was ready to have some more fun with Art. “Everybody on their proper behavior while Mr. Whiskers is here. Maybe we should all undress a little.”

“Now, Eunice,” chided the tall young man. She wasn’t helping his recruiting drive at all.

At least Art was soon going to have a chance at a phoneplate. Did he have the nerve to call George and Ann, tell them that he had been caught in a riot in front of the Family Planning building, and ask them for help? Not if he could help it. Better if he never saw them again until this whole thing was over—but of course, his children were there. He had no choice but to call the Parrs.

“I do hope they let us out soon,” said Eunice. “I want to pack as much sin into my life as I possibly can!” She stepped defiantly up to face the sour policeman at the cell door. Art followed in his turn.

AFTER being fingerprinted and filling out a short routine identity form, Art got his chance at the phoneplate. Behind him other prisoners were waiting. Reluctantly he punched the Parrs’ number, and felt more relief than anything else when he was answered only by George’s recorded voice telling him that he might leave a message if he wished. He left no message and after a moment’s thought his relief turned sour. Maybe the Parrs had been arrested too, and his children were now in some orphanage.

He was allowed one completed call. Who else in the city did he know, where else might he turn for help? There was the dojo, but he couldn’t remember either its name or address. There was Dr. Hammad. Ugh. After thinking a moment longer he dug a piece of folded paper from his wallet and, without much hope, punched numbers on the phoneplate once again.

“Jamison residence,” said a male voice, answering through a blanked plate on the other end.

He cleared his throat. “I’d like to speak to Rosamond Jamison, please.”

“Who shall I say is calling?” The voice had some thick and awkward tones in it, those of a man who would rather be doing something more manly than taking messages on the phone.

“Tell her it’s Art Rodney. Tell her the man she met on the tube train from California. She’ll remember.”

“The tube train. All right, wait just a moment.”

Art waited, gazing around him. The prisoners in line to use the phone looked in their frozen impatience as if they expected him to forget about his call and get out of their way at once. And now the nearby police were all watching Art, silently, with peculiarly blank, controlled faces. He hadn’t noticed them doing this when other prisoners were phoning. If it was just a game they were playing to make him nervous they were succeeding.

“Hello?” It was Rosamond’s voice. Then on the phoneplate appeared the image of her pretty face, the cat’s-eye lenses gleaming. “It is you, my handsome protector! I’m so glad! I’ve been hoping you would call, and Daddy has too, he’s wanted to thank you.”

With the corner of his eye Art noted, without understanding, that the nearby policemen had suddenly all lost interest, were turning away and getting back to their jobs. “I’m glad I could reach you,” he said. “I’m afraid I need help, and I don’t know where else to turn. The police have made a mistake, and they have me in jail here—”

“Wha-at?”

“I innocently accepted a ride with some strangers,” which was quite true, “and it turned out the police were looking for their car. So now I’m being detained for questioning, as they put it. I’m held for investigation on a charge of conspiracy to riot, something like that. I’m not sure I have it straight. I was hoping you might be willing to call a lawyer for me. Or something. I’m afraid I don’t have much money with me, and—”

“Oh my, oh my. Poor Art. How do you spell your last name? And what station are they holding you at?”

He spelled his name for her. “And the sign here says Tenth District Detention.”

“Just wait there, wait!” Rose counseled him excitedly. Then she blanked off.

Art took a step away from the phone and a policeman was there to touch him on the arm and beckon him away. This officer, for a change, had a friendly-seeming smile. He led Art down a corridor to where a bulky, middle-aged man in civilian clothes was sitting behind a desk. On the desk were computer printouts whereon appeared small photographs of Art, both fall face and profile. The bandage on his head with the small bald spot around it showed on the photos, and he wondered when and how they had been made.

The bulky man looked up. “You’re Mr. Arthur Rodney? I see here that you’re from out of state. Did you know when you accepted a ride in that car that the police were looking for it?”

“No, I—no.”

“Well, we find that there’s no evidence to the contrary. We’re very sorry about the inconvenience, but you can understand that we can’t take any chances.”

“I suppose not.”

The man behind the desk nodded in a friendly way, and the interview seemed to be over. Another smiling policeman, this one in uniform and with an unusually large number of stripes on his sleeve, was holding open a door at one side of the desk as if he expected Art to pass through it. Beyond the door was an ascending escalator.

After he had started up, and realized that what appeared to be a public lobby was at the top, Art asked: “This means that I’m free to go?”

“That’s right, sir.” The smiling sergeant had come with him onto the rising stair. “By the way,” he added, his voice lowering, “if you’re talking to—anybody, you can let ‘em know that the men on the force are a hundred per cent behind the campaign to get tough with the apes and get ‘em off the streets.”

“Huh?”

They had reached the marbled public lobby on the station’s ground floor. With a gesture the smiling sergeant directed Art’s attention to where the air-curtained main doorway stood open to the world.

“I’d better wait here for a while,” said Art. “I think someone’s coming to see about getting me out.”

“That so?” The sergeant winked. “Tell ‘em they needn’t have bothered. Still, you’re welcome to wait for ‘em here if you like. Have a seat. Excuse me, I’d better get back to work.”

“Certainly.” As soon as the man had gone, Art went to a public phone booth in the lobby and tried the Parrs’ again. To his surprise, Ann answered the phone almost at once.

“Art, what’s up?”

He stood with his head held high; maybe the bandage wouldn’t be noticeable at that angle to the plate’s pickups, with his hair sort of piled in front of it. “How are the kids?”

“Why, they’re fine, fine. How are things with you?”

“I tried to get you a few minutes ago, but no one answered.”

“I was just out in the park with the children. George is working. Where are you calling from, Art?”

“I’ll—be talking to you again, soon, Ann.” With that he blanked off.

HE WENT to sit in the marbled lobby, and watched the public flow in and out at a brisk rate. All these people were involved with legal trouble in some way, even if they were only reporting it, so he supposed it was natural that they should look frightened or dazed, or indignant or stony-faced. What bothered Art was that now when he looked out the window at the throng passing the station on the slidewalk, the faces out there looked much the same . . . He had been sitting there less than ten minutes when Rose came in. She spotted him at once, smiled, and came marching clack-clack across the lobby on new hard-heeled sandals. It struck him now that her walk was somewhat too childlike and bouncy for a normally mature young woman. She was wearing a red bikini, daringly opaque all over and almost padless. Art stood up and greeted her with an embrace.

“My good friend Art! How have they treated you?”

“Fine, ever since they heard me talking to you on the phone. Before that they practically had me sentenced, and now they tell me I’m free to go.”

Rose laughed prettily, and linked her arm in his. “Then let’s be going. We have lots to talk about on our way.”

He walked out of the station with her, asking: “Did you call a lawyer?”

“I thought you couldn’t be in any serious trouble,” she said obliquely. “Here, get in.” She was unlocking the door of a very expensive car parked right in the NO STANDING zone in front of the police station. The Illinois license plate was number four. Four. Great sex, had his luck changed at last?

He got in obediently. “Where are we going?”

“I want to take you home with me, Artie. I told you, Daddy’s been anxious to meet you.”

Once in on the driver’s side, Rose scanned the readiness indicators on the dash, as a cautious driver should, and then punched keys quickly. Then she sat back and turned to Art, giving him a long, unfathomable look while the programmed car started its engine and radared its way out into traffic.

“Artie?”

“What is it—Rosie? Do you like being called Rosie, by the way?”

“Yes, I do like it.” She tilted her head, making the lenses shimmer beautifully. Probably in days of calm she practiced with them before a mirror. “Artie, my father’s a very nice man, a kind man. He’s not one to fly into rages or anything like that.”

“Well. That’s fine.” He supposed she wanted him to ask some favor of her father for her. “Just who is your father, by the way?”

“He’s the bishop, silly. Church of Eros archbishop of Chicago. Everybody in Chicago knows him. Artie, we really are good friends, aren’t we?” Taking Art’s hand, Rose swung his arm back and forth over the seat between them. It was a childlike action, and when a basically sexy girl like Rose did it, a man could be tempted toward serious repression. Especially a weary man drained of his energy to fight. The vision of her crouching on the riverbank, veiled by his dirty shirt, rose in his mind’s eye but he managed to thrust it down.

“Of course we’re good friends, Rose. Any time I can do you a favor I hope you’ll let me know.”

“Today I just want you to meet Daddy.” She giggled.

“I’m looking forward to that. Especially . . . Rose, I won’t lie to you. Especially now that I know he’s someone with influence.” An hour ago Art had been ready to resign the game, but now things might be just a little different. “Because you see I have a problem, one that I really need help with. I hope your father may be able to at least give me some advice on it.”

The cat’s-eyes seemed to offer sympathy. “It isn’t a really big and nasty problem, is it? Oh, I hope not.”

He laughed feebly. “Big and nasty enough. Oh, I haven’t murdered anyone, so far.”

Rose snatched her hand away. “Don’t say things like that! Don’t even make jokes about them!”

“I’m sorry.” He hadn’t realized how sensitive she was to even the suggestion of violence. He looked around them. “Do you live nearby?” “Not far.” The neighborhood through which they were now passing looked much like that around the Parrs’ home, except here the blockhouses were set even further from the street, occupied larger plots of land, and their walls looked even higher. Just ahead was one whose granite walls were extra high.

“We’re almost home, my big handsome protector.”

The car measured the traffic and the traffic-spaces around it, chose an opening and shifted precisely to the street’s curb lane, then signalled for a turn and drove onto a ramp that swept it down beneath the granite walls. A man in a guard’s booth gave Rose a casual wave which she returned while switching the slowing vehicle back to manual control. The steering gear folded out of a panel into her hands and she drove on.

Here as in the Parrs’ block the underground garage was divided into visitors’ parking areas and private stalls. Rose turned into what appeared to be the largest stall, with two cars parked in it already, and room for several more.

She switched off the turbines and turned to Art again. “Artie, if your problem is—nothing like the horrible thing you joked about—then you can tell me what it is. In fact I think you’d better tell me, before you go in and meet Daddy.”

“Rose, it has nothing to do with violence. It’s somewhat similar to—your problem. To the problem you were faced with when you and I first met.”

She had pretty teeth and moist, full lips. “However did you figure out what that was?”

“Oh, just putting two and two together. I know now what you must have had in that picnic cooler.”

Now her lips were pouting. Was she going to cry? It seemed to Art that without eyes her weeping would be tearless and therefore repulsive. “Not that I care what you were doing, Rose, not that I’m in any position to talk. It’s just that my wife is now having difficulties along a somewhat similar line. I don’t know that your father would be able to help me with that kind of problem, or that he’d want to get involved in it.”

Rose dabbed with a tissue at her nose, and yes, at her lidless lenses too. “I’m glad you understand, Art. What happened to my fetus is another thing my father mustn’t know the truth about.” (Another thing?) “Of course he thinks that I simply had it aborted. But I can’t even think about such violence, let alone permit it inside my own body. Ugh.” A final dab and a deep breath, and she smiled and was back to what passed for normal. “Now you’d better listen to me for a minute, Artie. Because I haven’t told you everything yet.”

SOMETHING about those words was ominous. Art leaned back in the car’s luxurious seat, closing his eyes for just a moment’s rest. He checked his watch. A little past three. Then he turned and looked into Rose’s lenses. “What is it you haven’t told me?”

Once more she took his amu She became clinging. “Oh, Artie, I was just desperate. You see, there’s a man I . . . like. I like him very much indeed. In fact I’ve come to—to revere him.”

“Revere!”

“Art, I put my fate into your hands. I know you won’t betray me. Just recently my father has found out that I’m having an affair, or at least he’s become very suspicious. But he doesn’t know who the man is, and I didn’t dare confess the truth, because . . . anyway, I didn’t dare. So today I told him that it was you.”

“Oh.” Art closed his eyes again. He supposed he could push Rose out of the car, seize the controls, and go roaring up out of the garage, perhaps crashing through the barrier at the door. Transporting illegally frozen fetuses. Rioting. Midwifery. Auto theft, gate-crashing.

Was there a crime called gate-crashing? There would be. No previous convictions, or even arrests, that Rodney must have been a clever one. But sooner or later the most cunning criminals trip themselves up. They say he seduced a bishop’s daughter, that’s what really wrote finis to his career. They say just the other day he was in the Family Planning office, bold as you please, talking about an appointment with the director himself. They say . . .

“Artie, dear?” Rose’s voice dripped honeyed anxiety. Probably she didn’t even like to be called Rosie. “Artie? I was just desperate, or I would never have done it. I had no one else to turn to, and I just had to keep Daddy from finding out who my true cavalier really is . . . Art? Oh, I promise it won’t be so bad. Daddy really did want to get you out of jail, even after I told him you were the one.”

Art nodded slowly, meanwhile keeping his eyelids firmly closed. If he could somehow get out of the bishop’s dungeon here and reach the Parrs’ castle, maybe Ann could hide him under a bed and no one would ever find him. Drape him in an opaque sheet. But that might constitute another crime. Oh, chastity, what a mess. Maybe he was dreaming.

“I was just in despair, Art, when suddenly you called. Then it seemed so logical for you to be the man that I told Daddy you were. Don’t you-see? Art, are you all right? Poor Art!”

Poor Art opened his eyes. Now then, what did he have to do to attain success and happiness? Meet the bishop and prove himself innocent of Rose’s seduction. Then, with or without ecclesiastical help, find Rita and get her safely aborted, while keeping George and Ann, and Rita and himself of course, clear of the law. That about covered it.

He opened the car door and slid out. The situation was clearly beyond worrying about, and from that fact he derived a kind of second wind. Bring on the bishop.

“Shall we go in, Artie?”

“Oh, why not?”

Rose led him directly from the parking stall through a double door that might have served to guard a bank vault, and up a private escalator. The door at the top was opened by a huge man, rough-looking though well dressed, who eyed Art with suspicion. Art in turn suffered a momentary fear that this was the bishop himself.

Rose said: “Jove, this is a friend of mine, Mr. Rodney. Daddy wanted me to bring him home so they could get acquainted.”

Jove grunted. “Have ‘im wait here and I’ll see. Or would you rather go in, Miss Jamison?”

“No, you go, I’ll wait with Art.” She took Art’s arm and they stood there in the elegantly carpeted hall like a couple waiting to be married.

“The bishop’s chief bodyguard?” Art asked, when the giant was gone.

“Yes. Don’t mind Jove’s rough manners, he’s really quite sweet.” She squeezed his arm meaningfully. “So’s Daddy. Now I put all my trust in you, darling.”

Jove was already coming back through the plush hallway. “The boss says you should bring him on in. Hey, Miss Jamison, you’re looking real hot. I’m off duty in a little while, could we maybe get together for some sex?”

“All right, Jove, I’ll see you in the chapel. Art, dear, let me introduce you to Daddy first.”

At the end of the hall Rose tapped on an old-fashioned wood-paneled door, then pushed it open without waiting for an answer. The room revealed was a large study, the walls lined with bookshelves and tape-racks. A massive, brown-skinned old man rose from an armchair and favored Art with a mild smile of greeting. The bishop wore the exaggerated white codpiece of his office, under a vaguely transparent robe.

“Daddy, this is Art. I’ve been telling him how nice you are, and that he really had nothing to be afraid of, meeting you. Now I want you to be nice to him.”

“Why, I’m generally sociable, dear.” The old man accepted his daughter’s kiss on his worn sagging cheek. “Dear, why don’t you buzz away now for a little bit? Mr. Rodney and I are going to have a chat.”

“Sure, Daddy. I expect I’ll be in the chapel with Jove if you should want me.” Turning toward Art with an expression that was doubtless meant to be encouraging, Rose stepped past him and out of the study. Art, who had reached out his arm mechanically, caught himself at the last moment and let her go without a good-bye pinch. They were supposed to be having an affair, and possibly, just possibly, he would want to maintain that fiction.

Bishop Jamison was still smiling. “Mr. Rodney, that sofa there is very comfortable. And how about a drink? I have vodka and bourbon and beer and even a little sherry on hand.”

“Uh, thank you, sir. Your Potency. Bourbon on the rocks would be fine.” Art sank resignedly into the sofa while his host turned away. Poison in the whiskey, maybe? He would drink it anyway.

THE room might have been the study of any successful and conservative man, though, not surprisingly, there was a somewhat heavy emphasis on religious art. Rodin’s The Kiss in nearly lifesize reproduction. Leda and the Swan, there on the wall, by one of the newer photographic masters. Painting had been dead for a century now, along with poetry and story-telling, or so most of the critics said. And there of course above the mantel, Love Conquers All, Caravaggio’s Cupid trampling triumphantly the symbols of the occupations by which man sometimes allowed himself to be lured temporarily away from his true master, Lust.

The old man was back, holding out a glass, and Art half rose to take it from him. “Thank you, sir.”

With a wheeze, the bishop settled his bulk in his own leather chair; his own drink he held in a tankard around the outer surface of which some kind of Oriental orgy marched in bas relief. “Mr. Rodney, Rose tells me that you and she have become quite good friends.”

“Uh, yes sir, we have.” Art’s intended sip of bourbon somehow transformed itself into a gulp.

Jamison emerged from his tankard with a trace of beer foam on his dark lips. “She’s a lovely girl in her way . . . her mother was a lovely piece, and I oughta know, though I was an old dog even then . . . how was it you two happened to meet? On the tube train coming in from Iowa, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir.” Art drew in a deep breath. “Bishop, I don’t mean you or Rose any harm. Far from it. So I’m just going to tell you the truth. I don’t know what Rose may have told you, but the fact of the matter is I hardly know her. If she has any, ah, involvement with any man, it’s certainly not with me.” So far the news was being received with apparent calm. “I’m sorry about her problems, Your Potency, and yours, but I have problems of my own that are just as bad. I’m sorry.”

Jamison leaned forward a little. “Would you like a refill on that drink?”

“I’ll get it myself, sir, thanks. Another beer? I’m telling you the truth, bishop, I never was any good at lying.”

The bishop indicated with a headshake that his tankard had no need of refilling as yet. He swiveled his chair to keep facing Art, who was now at the bar. “Some people never realize they’re not, and it gets ‘em into endless trouble. Most of the time honesty simplifies things, if it doesn’t always pay. You really did help Rose, out there in Iowa, didn’t you? Her own story is a little muddled. She was coming back from visiting some girl friend in Dubuque, I guess, when that riot broke out.”

“Oh, yes sir, I had the chance to be of help to her in a small way.” Back at the sofa, Art sank down with relief and took a sip, this time truly no more than a tiny sip, of the excellent bourbon. “But believe me, there’s been nothing wrong between us. We made it all the way, right there in the park, while we were waiting to get on the train to Chicago.”

Jamison was nodding slowly. “Arthur, I find myself believing you. I know my own daughter, and she just gave me your name too suddenly and too willingly. I don’t suppose you know the name of the man she is involved with, as you put it?” Then before Art could try to answer, the bishop scowled and waved a white-palmed, wrinkled hand. “No, I withdraw the question. Don’t want to put an honest man like yourself on the spot.”

“I really haven’t the faintest idea, anyway, who it could be.” Numbly relaxing, Art sipped at his icy whisky. His head ached, but not as bad as before. It seemed that he had managed to avert any new and disastrous trouble; and what more could a man hope for than that?

The bishop set his tankard down carefully on a small table. “Not that I care an awful lot what kind of fun she has with men.” His steady black eyes peered at Art from their time-ravaged face. “Probably that shocks you, coming from a church-man like me. But if she wants to sit with some young fella and gaze at the stars and forget all about sex for ten minutes, I can’t see how society is harmed.”

“Yes sir, I am surprised to hear you talk like that.” It would really have shocked Art, too, if he hadn’t been somewhat numb with alcohol, and emotionally exhausted by still more shocking things. “If what your statement implies is true, that society isn’t harmed by repression, that it doesn’t matter what people do with sex, why do we have the Church of Eros then?”

The bishop heaved himself erect, his erotically-decorated tankard in hand, and walked over to the dark fireplace. It looked a lot like George’s, except this one was bigger. When the bishop switched it on, a realistic imitation of burning logs, probably a hologram, appeared in the dark cave. The logs crackled audibly and flared and seemed to send smoke up the flue.

“This thing is a fake,” Jamison mused, patting the mantle with one hand. “Lots of fire and noise, but no smell. And no real heat.” He set his tankard on the mantlepiece and turned to Art, “You know why it is good for man to Worship sex? Why it really is good? Simply because the poor fool has nothing better before which to prostrate himself. Eros as a god is far from perfect, he’s just the best of a bunch of failures.”

Having a little time to think over what the bishop said, and looking at the old man closely, Art was not so very surprised after all. There were such cynical bishops in modern fiction sometimes. And Jamison wasn’t just old, he must be decades over a hundred. He must have spent his youth in the period of moral vacuum before his Church became established. Art had sometimes heard other very old people express similar startlingly modern and radical views.

Standing massive besides the fireplace, Jamison told him: “The war-god and the wealth-god and the heaven-and-love god all have failed. Heaven-and-love came the closest. Best example is the man they nailed up on the cross. He spoke to a lot of people, that one did. He was about the best, except for sex. And then Allah and Jehovah and Mithra and all the rest.

“And then there’s the man-god. You know what I mean by that? I mean god made by man in man’s own image, humanity in apotheosis, we will all be god someday and maybe our great leader is god right now—he’s the worst, the most dangerous, and we’re not through with him yet. Damnation, are we ever through with anything?” Jamison’s voice, which had taken on the tones it might employ on Saturday nights in the pulpit above the orgy, fell back to conversational pitch. One other man in Art’s recent memory had used such ancient expletives. “Mr. Rodney, man was made to worship something, and no god he finds is worthy of him. That’s what the ancients would have called a tragedy. Sex does the least harm, I would judge; and sex is fun. Oh man, yes man, it sure is fun.”

THE bishop smiled at Art wryly, and made his way to the bar to get a refill on his beer. Then back to his leather chair to let down his weight, he and the chair wheezing together. “The only thing is, if she does like some young man in what to her is such an extra-special way, then I’d like to know his name and what he’s like. Rose has had enough pain in her young life already. She tell you about that ape-assault where she lost her eyes?”

“No sir. I didn’t know that was what had happened. It must have been terrible.”

“That it was,” said Jamison shortly. “My much-publicized crusade against the street-apes and the dope-peddlers, which you will hear a lot about if you stay long in Chicago, stems in large part from that assault on my daughter.”

“I believe I heard something about it from the police. They were in favor.”

“I myself am not a non-violent man,” the bishop said. “Not always. Eros does not counsel turning the other cheek except for a caress.”

Art-failed to understand the reference.

Jamison sipped at his newly foamy beer. “When I was a boy, a lot of people thought it was having brown skin, what was then called being black, that made young men go out and act like apes. And there was a grain of truth in what they said, a grain of truth, because brown skin could be a real burden then. It could make a man feel desperate and just lash out.”

Art grunted something. He was growing sleepy and would have to be careful that he didn’t doze off, what with the drink and the hypnotic fire.

“Arthur, if you should ever quote me as saying what I said about stargazing being not so bad after all, I shall of course deny it. Likewise with my speculations on comparative religion. On the other hand, if you should want to mention to me now your own problems that you said were so bad, I can at least guarantee secrecy. Maybe I could even offer help.”

Art was abruptly wide awake again. “Well, my problem involves my wife. And the Bureau of Family Planning. It’s a rather serious . . .”

Jamison was already shaking his head and putting up a hand to stop him. “No. Not Family Planning trouble, I’m staying clear of that. Sorry, no, it wouldn’t do for a man in my position to get involved. Too bad, my boy, but I can only wish you luck.”

“That’s all right, sir, I understand, And I wish you luck. And Rose. Understand, bishop, I’m not having an affair with her, but she’s a very attractive girl and I can understand how a man might wish to do so. I mean that as a compliment.”

“Hmf,” laughed Jamison, a single laugh, not loud. He was staring into the glow of his artificial fire, and looking into the long scroll of his memories he found Art’s words amusing. Then he was silent for a while, and Art was almost dozing again before Jamison asked suddenly: “You’re not angry about what Rose did to you today?”

“Telling you I was the man? I almost fell through the floor. She didn’t spring it on me until we were here and I couldn’t run out. But I’m not angry now. She didn’t do it out of meanness.”

“You’re right about that.” Jamison nodded. “There’s no meanness in her. But ever since that assault she’s been not quite right in her mind. Too much frightened of any least hint of violence. I think she’s scared that I’ll have violence done upon the real man, should I discover his identity. Now who could he be, that she should harbor that idea?”

“I really wish I could help,” said Art. “But I guess there’s nothing I can do.”

“She saw psychiatrists right after she was injured, and now she’s talking about going to another one, but I don’t put any faith in ‘em. Doctors, computers, modern science, and we still live in caves with the doors blockaded. Not that I want to damn modern science, not me with my artificial heart and arteries.” With a seeming effort Jamison roused himself frprarhisf musings, and once more got to his feet. “Go with Eros, my son. Is there anything else I might be able to do for you?”

Art put down his glass and stood up. “I guess not, sir. Thanks again for getting me out of jail. I really was innocent.”

When he emerged from the study, Rose, who had changed her red bikini for a transparent dress, jumped up from a sofa in the hall and hurried to him eagerly. “What happened?” she stage-whispered. “Did Daddy believe you?”

“I think he believed everything I told him.”

She was so delighted she jiggled up and down like a child. “And he didn’t explode?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Rose squealed. “My faithful protector! You took such a risk for me.” She threw her arms around Art and kissed him with a kind of innocent chastity. “Poor Daddy, sometimes at his age his mind wanders. I hate to deceive him. But I knew you’d manage somehow. Oh, how can I thank you?”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t all right. You’ve done so much for me, that now I must do something in return.” Her voice turned suddenly cool, and she retreated from him half a step. “If I wasn’t pledged to be chaste with only one . . .”

“Please, Rose!”

“You’re right, what must you think of me?” She tugged Art down the hallway. Looking toward the door to the escalator, he could see that a different bodyguard was now on duty. Rose snuggled one breast against Art lustily. “I’m not promiscuous, you know,” she whispered. “Not like some of those bluenose girls, those terrible ones they throw in jail.”

“I can tell you’re nothing like that.”

As they were going down the escalator she said: “I bet they didn’t feed you properly in that awful jail. And, knowing my father, he gave you nothing but drink. Let’s go out and get something to eat, and we’ll talk.”

“All right.” He had nowhere else to go at present. It was almost four, hours since they had fed him at the midwifer’s hideout, and the whisky he had just taken was biting at his empty stomach. “Where shall we go?”

“I know a place. I’m buying.”

That seemed no more than fair, and he went along. They were just getting into the car again when Rose squealed, suddenly enough to make Art jump. “Artie, I forgot all about your problem, trying to help your poor wife save her baby! Did you get a chance to mention it to Daddy? What did he say?”

She had the problem backwards, but he saw no point in enlightening her. “I did mention it to Daddy? What did he say?”

She had the problem backwards, but he saw no point in enlightening her. “I did mention it to your father. He can’t do anything.”

“Tell me more about it.”

She sympathized and persisted until he had to elaborate on his story a little. Obviously she had the idea that he was trying to help Rita avoid an abortion, and he let her go on thinking so. Why upset the poor girl for nothing? He would share a meal with her, and maybe some sex again, and go his way and never see her more.

“But where is she right now?” Rose questioned anxiously. By now she had driven the car into a drive-in automat of the better class and they had placed their orders.

“Here in Chicago . . . really, Rose, it’s painful for me to even talk about it. And there’s nothing you can do.” He reached to take a tray of food from a robotic servitor at the window. When he looked back at Rose she was shaking her head slowly, and smiling as if in mischief.

“Artie, as soon as you’ve eaten you’re coming with me to get some help. I know people Daddy doesn’t know!”

XII

ROSE urged him to hurry through the meal, and shortly they were on the road again. “But where are we going?” Art kept asking. “Who is it you want me to see?”

When he began to grow angry, Rose at last stopped being coy. “We’re going to visit my psychiatrist, in his office.”

“Rose, that’s not the kind of help I need. I’m not trying to adjust to my situation, I want out of it.”

Rose dismissed such quibbles with a shake of her head. This time she was driving manually instead of riding on autopilot, proceeding slowly and cautiously, with fierce concentration- on the job. They were headed straight toward the center of the city.

“It’s a good thing Daddy hasn’t started having me followed yet.”

“Why do you say that?”

No answer.

“Rose, I’m sure you mean well, but I don’t see how—this is going to help me in the least.”

“I know you don’t. But wait and see.”

Art slumped back in his seat. He could demand to be taken somewhere else, but where?

Probably by this time Rita was waiting for him at the Parrs’, with a red picnic cooler frosting over at her side, her belly flat and perfect once again. All right, Rita and George and Ann had won. So let them do the wondering and searching for a few hours. Meanwhile, let Rose lead him where she would.

She parked in a public garage on the edge of the no-private-vehicle zone encompassing the city’s center, and from there went on with Art by slidewalk into the multilevel knots of moving pedestrian ways that in their plastic shields threaded the deep canyons between the skyscrapers. At about forty stories above ground level they entered an office building, and boarded an elevator which bore them much higher still. From the elevator they walked an elegant, skylighted hallway, to stop at last before a door lettered

RAOUL RIZZO M.D.

D. PSYCH.

Rizzo. Art had somewhere, recently, heard that name. He followed Rose into a doctor’s waiting room, small and luxurious but empty. Not even a receptionist. There was an alarmingly remote look on Rose’s face, and she put sexless fingers on Art’s arm. “Hush. Wait.”

After a moment an inner door opened. The well-dressed young man who emerged from it was of no more than middle height, but so emaciated that he looked taller. His eyes did not turn for even a moment to Art, or in any other direction away from Rose. “My lady fair,” he said, his tense voice hardly louder than a whisper.

“My true knight,” Rose breathed in answer. Her expression was becoming even more remote, moment by moment. “Oh, my champion.”

They stepped closer to each other. They raised their right hands, and each caressed the air a few centimeters from the other’s face. Not once did they make actual physical contact. Staring woodenly over each other’s shoulders, they reminded Art of opposing chess pawns set down slightly off-center on their respective squares.

Art just stood there. If they didn’t mind his watching, why should he?

At last Rose turned, breaking off the non-embrace. “Raoul, Raoul my cold one, this is Art; the man who helped me on the tube train. You remember my telling you.”

“I thought that today I would have you all to myself, Rose, rose petal, rose essence, dear specter of a rose.” The psychiatrist sighed, still staring into the air. At last he roused himself and put out a hand to Art. In Art’s grasp the thin fingers felt as weak as they looked. Raoul’s gaze was penetrating at first but then it kept sliding self-consciously away. “Raoul, dearest. Today Art was kind enough to help me again. Now he has a problem of. his own, and we’ve just got to do something about it for him.”

Raoul thought this over for ten or fifteen seconds, nodding slowly. He dug a pipe out of a pocket in his translucent shorts. He looked from Rose to Art and back again. “Come in then, all of you,” he invited in his solemn near-whisper. He held open for them the door by which he had come out into the waiting room.

In his inner chamber Raoul pushed a pair of reclining chairs together side by side, and gestured for Rose and Art to seat themselves. Looking out the window as he sat down, Art saw the June sun working its way lower in the northwest sky, beyond a palisade of towers and a groundcover of distant, much lower rooftops.

Raoul perched himself cross-legged on his desk and lit his pipe. Judging by the aroma of the first fumes, the tobacco certainly contained an admixture of something stronger.

“Mr. Rodney.” Raoul paused and puffed. “You witnessed the greeting that passed just now between Rose and myself. Have you ever beheld even a brother and sister going to greater extremes of anti-erotism? My purpose in posing the question is not to shock you.”

Art, watching the lowering sun and wondering if Rita could also see it, had not been paying close attention. “Are you brother and sister? But I thought . . .”

“No, no, we are not. Perhaps I failed to make my meaning plain. Would you have described our behavior as obscene?”

No, thought Art, just exhibitionistic. He doubted that the greeting would have been quite so extravagantly repressive had there been no audience. But, wanting to be a good fellow, and uncertain whether Raoul wanted to be thought obscene or not, he answered: “I suppose most people would call it that.”

IT WAS Raoul’s turn not to listen. “I just wonder,” he murmured, as if to himself, “why did I employ that sibling analogy? Brother and sister may repress a mutual sex attraction and the repression is tolerated by society.”

“Of course.” Art glanced over at Rose, wondering if she still hoped that he would benefit from this visit. Her inscrutable lenses were aimed steadily at Raoul.

Raoul rocked back and forth on his desk and puffed his pipe. “Taking a larger view, are not all men and women in some sense siblings? What then is more natural than our occasional urges to escape from sex? We are all of us subject to the deep powers of the subconscious. Modern science tells us that dreams, produced in the subconscious, are attempts of the ego to flee the restrictions of the body. In every human adult lies the buried wish to return to sexless-infancy. In all honesty, isn’t letting these urges out into the open the only healthy course to take?”

“I suppose.” If Art spoke honestly he would say he thought his healthiest course would be getting up to leave as soon as he could think of someplace to go. Rose meant well, and he didn´t Want to hurt her feelings, but this was quite ridiculous.

With an unfolding of bony legs Raoul got down, or rather stood up, from his low desk.

“Personally, I have never conducted an analysis in which I did not uncover a strong, buried celibacy wish in the subject. Our differences from other animals are inescapably part of our natures; and we ignore them at our peril.”

“You may be right.” Now she was going to have the chaste baby anyway and he was not going to be with her when she needed him the most. That was all his campaign to rescue her had accomplished. What had he done? But what else could he have done?

“Face these things in yourself,” Raoul was saying, in a brooding voice. Behind him on his walls were abstract photographs, and a couple of Vandalist splash-paintings, up-to-date and arrogant in expensive frames. Yes, the art had been dead for a century, all right. “Face them squarely, and they will begin to lose their power over you.”

Art cleared his throat.

Raoul’s eyes fastened on his, this time not to be easily driven away. “Face the truth about what has happened between you and Rosamond! When you first saw her she was alone, she was frightened, she was in danger.”

“She wasn’t exactly alone.”

“Immediately you went to her aid. Your relationship thus began with no erotic values, but society tolerates that in an emergency, and you yourselves did not realize that in your hearts you wanted it that way.

“When the immediate danger was past, perhaps you turned to sex? Yes. Then, when your lust was temporarily in abeyance, there came the moment of temptation. The forces of the subconscious were no longer to be denied. The fragile remnants of your lust were to be sacrificed upon the altar of repression. You wanted to flee with Rose from the world of flesh, to climb a crystal stair to an ethereal palace, to enter the world of sublimation. Yes. Perhaps you draped her body—”

“Enough of this.” Art pushed away his suddenly vigorous memories of that sunset with Rose on the bank of a wide river. He tried to get to his feet forcefully but the reclining chair betrayed him and he staggered and had to make an effort to keep from falling. “Look here, I haven’t asked you—to analyze me.”

Raoul fell silent, gazing at Art with what seemed a mixture of pity and antagonism.

“Dearest?” Rose spoke up timidly. “Raoul? The reason I thought you might be able to help Art is because his wife is looking for a mid-wifer. Art want to help her save her baby, but there are obstacles.”

Raoul, professionally unshockable, took the news in stride. “I can help him live with the situation, provided he wants to be helped.”

Rose shook her head. “No, my chill one, that isn’t what I meant.”

Raoul blinked. “What, then?”

“Oh, for you to see your father about it, of course.” Rose was lovingly irritated by her lover’s obtuseness.

At mention of his father, Raoul’s face twitched, and he laughed bitterly. He sat on his desk again and tried to relight his pipe.

“Please, dearest. You mustn’t be jealous. Art and I are not having an affair. He and I are strongly erotic together, really we are.”

Puff and pause. “Why do you say that?”

“Who is his father?” Art asked, standing now with his arms folded.

Rose flowed easily to her feet; probably she had some experience with these chairs. “I say it because you are my knight. Do you think I could ever want to sit coldly beside any other man?”

Raoul closed his eyes and let his pipe go out.

Rose hovered near him, pleading. “My champion! Won’t you do this little thing for me? Take Art to see your father?”

“Who is his father?”

Raoul’s eyes opened. His whisper had a broken sound. “For you, my lady, my chaste one, I will do it. Sometime tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow might be too late for his poor wife. Couldn’t you do it now?”

“I thought that you and I would have this evening alone together.”

“Please. Take Art to your father now. I set you this task, to prove that you revere me.”

“Then I have no choice but to obey.” Raoul came to life and slid off the desk. “Will you wait for me here, my lady?”

Rose squirmed as if with repressed desire and took a step back, avoiding any possible physical contact with her knight. “I’ll wait here all night for you, if need be. When you come back, maybe . . . we’ll play chess.”

“My lady, not that childish game, I beg of you. Anything else.”

“Who is your father?” Art asked the ceiling. “And what good is seeing him supposed to do me?” Like as not Rizzo Sr. would turn out to be the head of Chicago’s branch of the Family Planning office. Soon everyone in the city would know about Rita’s warped reproductive cravings and her illegal plans. No one would do anything to save her, but everyone would know, even irredeemable idiots who thought chess was a childish game.

After staring incredulously at Art for a moment, Raoul asked: “You don’t know who my father is?” And then he laughed bitterly and long.

STILL not knowing, Art went along with Raoul, first in a taxi to a garage, and then in Raoul’s car. In spite of all, a nagging hope persisted.

Whatever his occupation might be, Rizzo Sr. had evidently made a success of it. The blockhouse in which he lived was every bit as high-walled and luxurious as the Jamisons’. The Rizzo garage space was even larger than the archbishop’s had been, and protected by heavier gates. As Raoul eased his fine car to a stop and turned its turbines off, Art was once more nagged by the sense of having recently heard the Rizzo name in some other connection. Was it something about this very structure, Rizzo’s townhouse?

In a short passage connecting the garage with an underground level of the Rizzo home, a pair of non-uniformed guards were stationed. They looked meaner than the Jamisons’ Jove, though neither of them was quite as large.

“Who’s your pal, Doc?” one of them asked.

“A man I know.” Young Rizzo smiled wryly. “A man with a problem, I expect my father will be able to help him, if he wants to help.”

“Maybe you shoulda just phoned,” said the other guard. “The Magnifico’s sorta been lying low for the past few days.”

The what? thought Art.

“You know how my father likes to do business face to face.”

The pair of gate-blockers looked doubtfully at Art. He could place them now. They were the ones who had sat on him in the brothel. Not the same men, but the type. Rizzo, Rizzo, he almost had it.

“Well, let’s see if you’re carryin’ anything. Doc, the boss is in his study now, if you wanna go up.”

“I’ll be back in a minute, Rodney,” said Raoul, and went on ahead. The two guards began to pat Art’s pockets and bulges, searching him. Rizzo. Little old Alfie in the slumburb tavern, saying Vic Rizzo’s town-house was bombed. Oh, great stargazing quadruplets.

Rizzo Jr. was soon back from his filial visit. His face was flushed, but seemingly not with joy. “He says I can bring him up.”

“Awright.”

Art rode up with Raoul in a large and fancily paneled elevator, which disgorged them into a room like the entry hall of a small art museum. Marble columns supported a high, vaulted ceiling, and across one end of the room there burbled a complex of waterfalls and fountains and pools, complete with fish. For all its size the hall was almost crowded with paintings and statuary. On the wall opposite the elevator, in a place of dominance over the other objects d’art, was an ancient life-sized crucifix of wood, done in a realistically gory Spanish style. Its paint, once red and brown, had aged into a grayish dullness that with the cracks and holes gave the figure a look of frighteningly patient endurance.

Raoul led Art across the museum hall and opened a massive wooden door. “In here,” he ordered tersely.

The room behind the door was also quite large, with a beamed ceiling and woodpaneled walls. Might it all be real, virgin, tree-segment wood? Anyone whose house had fountains and waterfalls—Art-caught one breath-tripping glimpse of a girl, heavily garmented, even her face veiled, before she moved out of sight behind some opaque woven draperies. And there, almost as startling as the girl and the paneled walls, was a huge genuine fireplace that appeared to be consuming genuine logs.

At least four chess sets, of stone or wood or metal, all large and ornately carved, were visible on tables or in display cases. A suit of armor stood at Art’s right hand. What appeared to be medieval torches standing in brackets on the wall bore warm and writhing electric flames. Upon one paneled wall there hung a crossed pair of long, pointed weapons, pikes or lances of some kind; on the opposite wall a brace of submachine guns were mounted in the same way. Walls and furniture bore many framed photographs evidently reproduced from twentieth century newspapers or films, showing men in the obscenely heavy garb of that time. The men smiled unpleasantly and many of them were carrying firearms. From the upper walls there looked down at least a dozen paintings of a more distant time, mostly of men in archaic costume wearing swords and accompanied by crouching dogs. These paintings looked old and dim enough to be originals. The Magnifico, the guard had said.

The Magnifico came forward amid his treasures. His small torso was plump beneath his shimmering, partially translucent dressing gown, but his face still showed some of the leanness of his son’s.

His flat voice came out around a cigar. “So, you’re the man with the troubles. I was curious to see you, I wondered what kinda man my son would bring here to get his troubles fixed.”

Art made himself look straight into the Magnifico’s direct and seldom-blinking eyes. The reality of power before him was as apparent as the hardness of the suit of armor at his right. Art could feel the world and all its probabilities shifting again, crazily and unpredictably beneath his feet.

Art cleared his throat. “My trouble is a fairly simple one.”

“So. I guess my son can only fix the high-priced troubles in his office. The simple ones he still has to bring to me. What’s yours?”

“My wife is in a birth-mill, here in Chicago.” Facing the reality of power in Rizzo’s eyes, Art had a moment of weakness, of indecision. But now his choice was clear-cut, inescapable. “I want to stop her from going through with it.”

“So, who says I know anything about birth-mills?”

THE fireplace roared and seemed to make the room too hot. Somewhere behind Art, Raoul fidgeted. Art said the next thing that came into his head: “I see you’re a chessplayer.” Every time he glanced around the crowded room he spotted another set somewhere.

Rizzo removed his cigar from his mouth and raised his eyebrows. “You play?”

Art smiled faintly. “I’m a master.”

“No! You are?” The cigar went flipping into the fireplace. Rizzo almost bowed. “Come in here—whazza name? Mr. Rodney? You come in here, there’s somethin’ I want you t’ look at.”

He held open for Art the drapes behind which the veiled girl had vanished. At the same time he raised his eyes to stare coldly over Art’s shoulder. “Hey Raoul, go fix yourself a drink or something. Or get out. Hey, if you see Penny around maybe she’ll wanna screw. She’s been sublimatin’ her urges quite a bit lately.”

The only answer was the sound of the heavy wooden door softly closing; probably, Art thought, it could not be slammed. He went on through the drapes and Rizzo followed, into a smaller adjunct of the study. The girl was not in sight.

“You say you’re a rated master, Mr. Rodney?”

“Yes. However not in this state. In California.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d take a look at this position I got set up here. Tell me what you think about it.”

On a board on an antique table were ebony and ivory men arranged in an intricate early middle game or late opening position. At first glance Art took it for one of the new computer-discovered variations of the neo-Shapiro defense, but one of White’s knights was oddly placed, changing the whole complexion of the game.

“Interesting,” said Art. It really was. “One of your games?”

“Nah, not a real game. Oh, Mr. Rodney, meet Penny.”

The veiled girl had returned from somewhere amid velvet hangings, moving on soft silent feet. Under the Magnifico’s smiling but watchful eye, Art kissed Penny hello with a fervent show of lust, and pushed a fondling hand inside the innermost of her voluminous garments.

Rizzo chuckled benevolently. “Now run along, little lady.”

Penny paused to blow an openmouthed kiss to Art before she let the drapes fall into place behind her.

Rizzo, staring at the place where she had vanished, released a small sigh. “That son of mine just don’t know how to keep a woman.” Then he brightened. “That reminds me. You hear the one about this traveling salesgirl, she stops at a lamasery to sell blankets?”

“I’m not sure.”

Evidently he was not going to hear it now. Rizzo was still looking after the girl. “That Penny, though. She’s been livin’ with me here almost a year now, and I’ve never touched her. Imagine.” He sighed again. “I hardly seen a centimeter of her skin in all that time. I did see her ankle once, when she was walkin’ upstairs, and I nearly went dizzy. I tell you, when I finally get rid of that girl she’ll prob’ly take a lot of loot along, but she’s been worth it, everything a man could want. Whaddya think about this opening setup, now?”

“Interesting.” With some relief Art turned back to the board.

“Y’see, I’m foolin’ around with a little analysis here. I like to take the book theory, you know, and try t’ find improvements in it. The fellas who write them chess books sometimes don’t know much about the practical side of the game. Chastity, I’d like t’ get out and play in some tournaments. But I got too much business to think about.” Rizzo glanced up from the board. “I’m a investment counselor.”

“I see. I was hoping to play in a big tournament myself, but then this trouble came up involving my wife. That makes it very hard to concentrate on chess.”

“Oh, yeah. She’s in some birth-mill, you said. Tell me about that.”

Art recited his story. By now he had it down pat, like some politician’s standard speech, that could be edited a little here and there to suit the day’s audience even as it was being delivered. “Possibly it’s too late and the operation’s already over. But if at all possible I want to stop her from going through with it. For her own good.”

“And you say you talked to this doctor who’s gonna do it, but you don’t know his name?”

“Right. He’s one of these Christian priests, I know that much. Tall fellow, kind of narrow-shouldered, with a sandy beard.”

Rizzo nodded thoughtfully and started to pace the room. For the time being chess was forgotten. He lit a fresh cigar and squinted through the smoke of it, studying Art’s face.

“Whatever people she’s paid, or promised to pay, can have their money,” said Art, as free with George’s substance as with his own. “But my idea is this: the pregnancy can just be terminated legally, and as far as my wife will know, something just went wrong. The fetus turned out not to be viable, or whatever the medical term is. That’s simple, and there’s no trouble in it for anyone.”

Rizzo smiled faintly. “I kinda taken a liking to you, Mr. Rodney. Course you understand I don’t know nothin’ about midwifers—but what did you say your wife’s name is, what does she look like?”

Art told him, and ran through the standard speech again, going into greater detail. His tongue stumbled reluctantly at times. He felt afraid to start hoping again.

Rizzo heard him out, then nodded decisively. “Yeah, I see. Too bad. Any day now she’s gonna have the operation, huh?”

“I got the impression it might be at any hour.”

“Uh-huh. Some of these priests don’t stick to religion, they’re real cultists and mix into things where they don’t belong. Excuse me a minute, I got a phone call to make. Look over this position here meanwhile, hey? Tell me how do you like White’s chances.”

LEFT alone, Art heaved a tremendous silent sigh. He sat down at the chess table and leaned his head forward into his hands, letting his eyes close. A great exhaustion was coming down upon him. It came with a disturbing sense of permanence, as if he might never be able to rest long enough to recover. But his feelings didn’t matter, if Rita could be saved. Someday he would be able to tell her what he had done, and someday she would understand and thank him for it.

Art opened his eyes and found the chessmen waiting. Rizzo would expect a masterly evaluation of the position, and that was little enough for him to ask.

Four or five minutes of Art’s flawed attention sufficed to convince him that the Rizzo Variation was a bust. Rizzo evidently thought that White’s advanced knight could not be readily dislodged from its fine post, but Rizzo had overlooked a thing or two, and White was going to have to retreat and waste a tempo, and stand poorly in the middle game. These were the facts, but they had better be conveyed diplomatically.

In a few minutes the Magnrfieo was back. His mood had brightened into something like joviality. “Like I said, I know nothin’ about any birth-mills. Still, I got a hunch that things are gonna work out okay from your point of view. Just a feeling. Well, should we have a little game? How about a drink, somethin’ to eat?”

“Certainly.” Art got off another sigh, like a man dropping a weight. But there was the weight still clinging to his shoulders.

He began to rearrange the chessmen to begin a game. Someday she would understand.

XIII

LYING CHASTELY beside Marjorie in the dark bed between their darkened hotel rooms, Fred was pouring out his heart.

“Ah, who’m I kidding. I’m not ready for even a brown belt yet. I could be, if I settled down and worked at it. I dunno, though, if it’s really worth the effort. All the lumps and bruises, and you never get rich. Karate just gets you flunky jobs, like this part-time bodyguard thing I got going now with this Dr. Hammad. Ivor, he’s the regular bodyguard, says the pay never amounts to much.

“George does all right, though, running his own dojo. He must, you should see his house. I don’t know what he charges for private lessons. If I could only get myself a set up someplace like he’s got. And his brother-in-law does all right too. Ann, that’s my sister, says Art holds down an electronics job and wins prizes. He must have bread comin’ out of his ears. He wins his prizes playing chess, real good at it I guess.”

“You, know something I was good at, though, besides karate, was woodcarving. I won a couple prizes when I was a kid. My folks showed off the trophies, but they never paid any attention to the stuff I carved. Finally I didn’t carve any more. Maybe if I’d kept up with that I could set myself up handcarving chess sets. Art would probably give me some clues on what sizes and shapes the players like and where to sell them. You know, I carved a nice religious cross once for Ann, when she got baptized. I did it from pictures in books. That was after she left home and married George. She still has it on the wall in her kids’ room. George don’t go for that religious stuff himself, but he don’t care what Ann does.”

Fred raised himself on one elbow in the bed, making his plastic glad-rag cloak crackle faintly all around him. Marjorie’s form, similarly draped, lay still and straight beside him. The room was too dark for him to read her face but still he could perceive the tenseness of her body. A tinny, tiny sound, so faint that he could hear it only intermittently, leaked out into the room from the earplugs of her pocket hifi. Fred could not make out any of the words but he thought it was Orlando, one of the season’s top recording stars, reciting his own verse. Marj had said she liked to have Orlando on for background music whenever she got started outward to the stars.

“Anyway,” Fred went on, “the carving business is not bad in some ways if you can get a reputation as an artist, but there are certain drawbacks. You have to have the right wood. And when you go to sell your work, it’s hard to prove it’s really handcarved unless they’ve actually seen you do it. I mean there are woodworking machines that can be set to take off little irregular chips and leave little marks just like a hand knife, and the machines do the job a hundred times faster. It’s like man in the modern world has to contend with machines at every turn, you know what I mean?”

Marjorie was nodding, nodding gently. She could understand, she could understand it all and heal him of the pain of it. Above Orlando’s tinny moans Fred now could hear another little moan, but in his girl’s warm breathing voice. Could it be that she was weeping for him? He reached to chastely touch her hand, and tried to think of words to tell her how much it meant to him to have her here tonight.

MARJORIE’S little moan swelled quickly into an exasperated snarl. She sat up in her crackling cloak, and with the hand he had touched she reached up to pull her earplugs out. “You twin!” she stage-whispered angrily at Fred. “What’s the matter with you? I’ve run into some horny stallions in my time, but . . . what do you think I am, your shrink? If you can’t talk it chill any better than you do, just fall back in your plastic and let me listen to someone who can.” She flopped her head back on the pillow and turned up the volume on the hifi slightly.

Into the silence, Orlando’s peculiar, almost metallic voice recited:

. . . up on gladrag hilll
you left me so chilll . . .

Fred almost hit her. Why didn’t he? Only because he was afraid she wouldn’t be hurt by his blows at all, wouldn’t cry out or fold up or bleed, but would just ignore his efforts the way his dream-opponents usually did.

Hands shaking with the urge to hit, he got up slowly on his own side of the bed, and pulled the stiff opaque plastic poncho off over his head and threw it down. He turned away from the bed and pulled his clothes on and went on out of the room without once looking back.

Outside the sky was darkening and the streetlights coming on. In the Megiddo Coffee House Fred spotted Lewandowski and the Wolf sitting at a table together, teetering restlessly in their chairs. Making sure that his own face was hard, he walked to their table amid the baby-crying music that at least was not Orlando’s, and amid the smoke, and saw their faces harden, challenging and welcoming him.

“Let’s go cruise, men,” he said, standing beside their table. Wolfs pelt turned to look at him, with the movement of Wolfs own head and shoulders turning, and the two sets of teeth showing Fred their grins.

“Quads and quints, I’m with ya,” said Lewandowski, stretching to his feet. “I been sitting here five hours now, let’s go find some live fun.”

They cruised out of the Megiddo and right away Wolf began talking about how to organize a street gang and establish a territory of streets and blocks. Fred heard without listening, without caring. As they passed some parking meters Fred tried to smash one with a kick, but it was too strongly built and he only hurt his foot. He thought he managed to keep the pain in his foot from showing in his face, as he was still managing to keep a lot of other things from showing, but it was all coming to a head.

They cruised the narrower, dimmer slidewalks. “Hey,” Lewandowski whispered, stopping the other two, “here comes fun.”

It was a young couple walking alone. They slowed timidly as they drew near, but that only made their fate a certainty. Fred and Wolf and Lewandowski crowded them right off the walk onto the well-manicured grass.

“You’re a jobholder, ain’t you, pal?” asked Fred, slapping the young man. The youth began to wrestle ineffectually, and Fred slammed a fist into his ribs full power. The young man collapsed, croaking. Fred bent down and seized one of his manicured fingers and wrenched it back savagely until he thought it must be broken. “Now try and work,” he said.

The young man sat on the ground yelping and stuttering with his broken finger and cracked ribs. Fred had had enough, so instead of shutting him up he walked away. After a quick glance around to make sure that no one was coming to interfere, he looked to see what Wolf and Lewandowski were doing with the girl.

“Don’t hurt me!” she was squealing. “Take my money, wrap me, but don’t hurt me!” “Who’d want to wrap you, sister?” Lewandowski laughed. He had her purse tucked under his arm, and he was tearing off her electrostatically-clinging costume, while Wolf kept her from running away. Lewandowski peeled the last bit of silvery film from her plump body, and then shoved her away so she fell, sadly naked and unattractive. She sat there quivering flabbily, staring at them in abject terror, while Wolf and Lewandowski rifled her purse.

Some people at the end of the block were looking their way and pointing. “Come on, let’s go,” urged Fred, starting away.

Wolf delayed a moment, bending over the girl. She screamed loudly and he jumped up and came hurrying after Fred and Lewandowski. For some reason the three of them started running. They ran for a block, switched slidewalks athletically, and ran again, looking over their shoulders. There was no pursuit, and they slowed to a casual walk. Fat Lewandowski was puffing hard.

Wolf was holding up the head of his pelt, waiting for the other two to notice it. Fred saw that the sharp-pointed plastic teeth were reddened. “I left m’ brand on her, where it counts,” Wolf snickered, and Fred wondered, without caring, where the place that counted was.

Lewandowski still had a handful of silvery film, and was tearing it into little bits which he scattered like confetti. Good-humoredly he demanded: “How much bread that guy have on him, Lohmann? Hey Fred, you get the bread?”

Lewandowski laughed at his own rhyme, and they all laughed, feeling good. Fred’s sense of power and self-assertion, brought to a peak by the terror with which the girl had looked at him, was not spoiled by the realization that he had forgotten to take the young man’s money.

“Naw, I didn’t get it,” he admitted cheerfully. “But what th’ purity.”

“Didn’t get it? Why?” Lewandowski too was more amused than upset.

“Cause I didn’t give a quint about it. What the purity!” But now the omission did begin to bother Fred a little, mainly because the young jobholder would be comforted by having retained his money and his papers. All right, next time Fred would make up for the oversight. Fred had never done anything quite like this before. As a kid he had been in fights, but never launched such an unprovoked attack. But already he knew that there would be a next time, and then he wouldn’t stop with just breaking a finger and maybe cracking a rib or two. Next time? Quintuplets, yes, there would be one.

THE Magnifico, when he finally returned, furrowed his brow over the chessboard and took half an hour to make twelve moves. Then Art managed to let him win a pawn. Rizzo was an intense and serious player, with a drivingly aggressive style that would probably win him most of the amateur games he played. Though he mentioned vaguely having taken part in some tournaments, he seemed to have little competitive experience since he accepted a pawn from a master without apparent suspicion. Maybe he had played in prison somewhere. Art, headache-ridden, wished he had given away a knight or bishop and so provided himself with an excuse to resign. But no, that might be putting it on too thick. The best thing was to arrange a draw. If only Rizzo would not take so long to move!

A man opened the study door. “Chief?” Rizzo grunted in exasperation, got up, and went out. Art shifted in his chair, took a bite from the tasteless sandwich that had been provided for him, took a sip from the accompanying drink, and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock, almost. It would be dark outside. His headache was waxing fat. He could ask for aspirin but it wouldn’t mix well with the drink.

He meant to spend a lot of time and effort, from now on, making it up to Rita for what she was losing, or thought that she was losing. Right now, for some reason, all of Rita’s weak points—mostly insignificant things, of course, like her occasional stutter—kept popping up in Art’s thoughts; but all in all she was a good wife. What was he thinking? She was a purity of a good wife, the best of wives, and someday she would understand. When that day came it would be a great relief to be able to tell her how he had managed things, and to have her understand and thank him for it. It wasn’t as if he had had a real child of hers done away with. It wasn’t anything at all like that, even if they could move. They would smile over all this then. Over all their foolish ideas and fears.

Someday they would. Still only nine o’clock. Yes, his watch was still running. Twins, how this night seemed to last and last.

The Magnifico came back through the draperies, smiling and rubbing his hands together, looking eagerly at the board. “Where’d you move? Like I said, I don’t know about these places where they have your wife. But if I was to give you advice like a father I’d say don’t worry, these things have a way of working themselves out.”

“I moved my queen here. And I want to thank you.”

“For advice?” Rizzo’s laugh was deep and rich, and still it managed to be nasty. “Advice is cheap.”

The door opened again. “Chief?”—

“Oh, Gramma’s chastity. Look, Mr. Rodney, you don’t mind, hey? I guess we can’t continue our game tonight.”

“Of course.” Art stood up, trying to hide his relief: “Some other time maybe. We’ll call this one a draw.”

“Sure, sure, maybe another day. Look, I’m gonna have one of my friends see you safely on your way.”

A taciturn man nearly as big as Jove came out to guide Art on the slidewalks and ride withrmrn; maybe Rizzo’s cars were all out on “business. The guardian rode silently and protectively at Art’s side until they drew near the Parrs’. Art didn’t want him coming to the door. “It’s all right, you can go back now. This is a safe neighborhood.”

He rode on under the black sky and the daylight streetlights that somehow were nothing like the day at all. What would he tell George and Ann when he got back to them? Nothing. Why should he have to tell them anything? Never mind, some words would come.

He looked sharply over both shoulders; his escort was well out of sight already, and there was no one else in view. He glided past a clock in a vendor’s window, and checked it automatically against his watch. Only a little after nine; why did he bother to worry about the time? If only this headache would let up.

At an intersection he heard loud voices in the dark, coming from along the walk that came to cross his at right angles. A streetlight must be out, it was so dark in that direction. He saw an arm wave, though, an extended imperious hand, and a voice called: “Hey. Hey you, hold up.” At least he thought those were the words.

Art ran. Each jog of his body sent a stab of pain flaring up from the base of his skull to exit on his pate. The voice, or voices, were raised now in a babble of threats and pursuing feet came pounding in his wake.

He tried to yell for help, but only the tortured wheezing sounds of an exhausted runner left his mouth. The wall of gray faintness, that he had last seen following his struggle in the whorehouse, rose up quite soon to mask the world.

Art stumbled, and had the sensation of losing consciousness for just a moment as he fell. Were they kicking him, hitting him already? No, it was only the pain in his head and the indirect jarring as he fell to elbows and knees on the smooth and smoothly moving walk. Where were his attackers, then?

With a grateful shudder he realized that there was no one nearby. They had left him for more sporting game. Or had he really managed to outrun them all?

Rizzo sent them. Rizzo sent them, said the irrational panic inside his buzzing head, but that made no sense at all. Rizzo liked him, and anyway Rizzo’s agent would not have been so easily eluded. But still Art could not get rid of Rizzo’s name. It kept coming up like something that had to be vomited.

Art glimpsed a street sign and knew that he was still on the correct walk. He tried-to get up on his feet again but couldn’t, not right away. He rode on all fours, in terror of meeting someone.

THE guard at the pedestrian entrance of the Parrs’ blockhouse took no chances on being tricked out of his bulletproof booth. First he shut the steel grillwork gate behind Art’s crawling figure, then got on the house phone, and only then came out of his booth to try to help.

A few moments later George came running up, his face a taut mask. Once they helped Art to his feet, he was able to stand. The faintness returned for a moment but then abated swiftly, although the headache pain went on and on.

They asked him where he had been hurt, and which way his attackers went. These days if you saw a human being knocked down, squashed like a bug beneath a run-over box in the road, you just assumed some other human being had done it to him.

“I—I got away from them somehow. I’m just winded. From running.”

George said to the guard: “I wouldn’t call the cops yet, hey Casey?”

“All right, no law says I have to in a case like this. Wouldn’t do any good anyway.”

“I’m all right,” Art muttered, finding he could do without support as he and George passed on into the interior of the block. “How are the kids?”

“Okay. Come on in and rest, Art. You look like you’ve been through the mill.” At the Parrs’ patio door, Ann came to meet them. “Put that thing down,” said George. “We’re not invaded.”

“Ohhh,” she murmured, sagging briefly against a wall. Art saw now that she was carrying a carving knife with a gaily decorated blade in her right hand, holding it as if ready to thrust. For a moment he could also see in her face all the strain of the last few days, and he could see how she would look when she was middle-aged and when she was old. Then she turned away to take the knife back to the kitchen.

George pulled forward a chair in which Art gratefully sank down. Then George said: “We’ve just now had word from Rita’s doctor. The one who operated. She’s all right.”

“Operated?” Art started to his feet again. “Then—?”

“Sit down. She’s all right. I got the codeword message on when and where to pick up her and the baby.”

Suddenly this was all, in essence, very familiar. Old stuff. It had happened to him twice before, with Timmy and with Paula. “How’s the baby?”

“Oh, the birth went okay. Codeword for a healthy boy.” George bent down, squinting at Art, his face going all blurry in Art’s vision. “You all right?”

“I’m all right,” said Art. “All right now.” He was crying.

XIV

TONIGHT Dr. Matthew Hammad was working late office hours, and he happened to be performing an abortion on a teenaged girl when the phone call came in.

“Says to tell you it’s life or death,” his receptionist informed him. “Really vehement about it.” Behind the receptionist’s image on the intercom he could see on the wall of his outer office, just some grapes and Bacchus’ elbow showing in part of a painting visible there.

“What name?” Hammad asked, looking across the supine figure of his abortion patient. He was irritated at the interruption and yet professionally unwilling to ignore the possibility that the life-or-death claim was true.

“Said he was calling for a Ms. Chester. But I didn’t know that you had any patient by that name.”

“Oh.” Hammad glanced down. The young girl draped in translucent sheeting on the treatment table had the music earphones on, and the look in her eyes was faraway. “All right, I’ll take it in here.” He touched the girl on the arm and when she had loosened an earphone and looked up inquiringly, he said: “We’ll just let this work for a minute. Are you comfortable?” Resting on the table between her raised knees, the Autobort looked something like a small vacuum cleaner, or some unearthly alien in sexual union with the girl, its slender sterile organ of plastic and flexible glass extended into her body.

She said: “I’m starting to get a cramp inside.”

“Well, next time come in sooner, and we can do a simple menstrual regulation. Those are a lot easier, you know. Next time don’t wait until you’re this far along.”

The girl, pouting at the mild lecture, put her earphone on snugly again and Hammad went over to the phoneplate. He punched the button to take the incoming call. “Ms. Chester” was a code word, and one that Hammad knew he had better not ignore.

The caller kept his own phoneplate blanked, as Hammad expected, but the doctor recognized the voice from a few previous calls. What the voice said this time was guarded and indirect, and the message was being relayed from someone else, but still the message came through plainly.

“Yes, yes, I understand.” Now Hammad was frowning. “Well, it wasn’t my intention to make trouble when I made the referral. Mrs. ah, Chester’s whereabouts are not known to me now with any certainty.” Now Hammad understood why this call was being made; every time overlords of illegal business had the chance, they tried to embarrass the operations of their rivals in midwifery, the religious cultists who ran their birth-mills without paying tribute for the privilege.

“I can only guess whether I’ll be able to reach her and, ah, provide the therapy.” Even while he was engaged in this difficult call, Hammad kept a conscientious physician’s eye on the progress the Autobort was making. The girl was now quite relaxed, soothed by light sedation and music and the mild sexual stimulation of the machine. Through the tubing into the receptacle of clear glass on the vacuum cleaner’s back there now flowed the debris from the dismemberment within the womb. Now a few ribs, fishbone clear and soft but recognizable to the trained eye. Now a knee joint, which Hammad also could readily identify. Now parts of the skull and brain.

“Yes, I understand.” His frown deepened as he stood listening to the phoneplate voice. Certain powerful people, those who made it possible for him to continue in the illegal sideline of his profession, were displeased that he still made referrals to the cultists. “Yes, I’m sorry.” Try to help out a friend whose sister was having problems and look where it got you. Now which would he rather have angry at him, George Parr or Vic Rizzo? There was always South America, he thought to himself. Meanwhile, George Parr need never know everything that went on, while Vic Rizzo evidently already did.

“All right, then, I’ll do everything I can. At once. You can depend on me to take care of it.”

His caller blanked off. Looking grimmer than ever, Hammad kept the phoneplate in hand and punched a number rapidly. Waiting, he continued to keep a dutiful watch on his tabled patient. She was coming along nicely. “Hello, let me speak to Ivor. This is Dr. Hammad. Oh. Well, whenever he comes back, or as soon as you can reach him, will you tell him to call me back at once. It’s rather urgent. Thank you.” He blanked off and at once began to punch again.

WHEN Fred got back to the Y and found the message waiting for him at the desk, he wasted no time in hurrying to Hammad’s office; he wanted to hang onto his job, part-time or not.

Hammad ushered him directly into an inner consultation room and shut the door. “Lohmann, there’s something very important that’s just come up, and I haven’t been able to get hold of Ivor. It can’t wait. You haven’t been working for me very long, but I think I can rely on you—right?”

Fred nodded at once, and felt the butterflies start up in his stomach. His big chance—could this be it?

“Fred, the situation is this. There’s a fetal specimen that has to be reclaimed. This woman.—‘she’s not one of my patients. I’m doing this for a colleague—has carried off a specimen that according to law should have been destroyed, and she’s likely to get several innocent people in trouble by doing so.”

Fred nodded.

“There’ll be a nice bonus for you if you can carry this off. We’d prefer that the police not be involved in this at all, if you understand me.”

“Yeah, I got the idea.”

“Good. Now, from past experience with the people who have been encouraging this woman to do the wrong thing, I can tell you just where she’s likely to be waiting to be picked up by some of her relatives or friends. It’s down on South Shore beach. Do you have a reliable friend or two to take along in case of trouble?”

“Yeah, sure.” With any luck at all he would be able to find Lewandowski or Wolf, or both of them, back at the Megiddo. Lewandowski, being a native Chicagoan, would certainly be able to lead him to South Shore beach, and either of them would be a good back-up man if he should need one. “I can handle it for you, chief. If she’s there and she’s got it with her. Don’t worry about a thing.”

ART and George had time for only a few hours’ sleep before they started out on the slidewalks at about an hour before dawn. When Ann came to wake him, Art sat up with a start, but he felt rested. The pain was still there in the top of his head, but not bad enough to keep him from concentrating on other matters.

George had dug out a couple of old fishing poles and some other fishing gear for them to carry, to provide a plausible reason for being out if they fell under the eye of the police. He said a lot of fishermen went to the lake in the early morning, this time of year. They briefly considered calling a cab for the trip, but with cabdrivers required to file complete reports on all passengers for the police computers, that was about as risky as being stopped and questioned.

On their southwest passage through the city’s nearly deserted predawn streets, they twice underwent brief surveillance from police cars but were not stopped. They also had one near-brush with a small group of rough-looking youths, but at the last moment the others avoided open confrontation.

In the grayness before sunrise the slidewalks brought them to the edge of a green strip of parkland that George said ran continuously along the city’s lakefront. Streets and buildings behind them now, George led the way into the park, across a wide, grassy athletic field, now otherwise deserted. Art thought he could smell the lake nearby, fresh dampness without the tang of ocean salt, and billows of morning fog drifted into their faces as they trudged toward the east. The fog made vague green mounds out of stands of trees, and limited visibility drastically in all directions.

“Looks like nobody’s following us,” George muttered, after he had glanced over his shoulder several times. Traffic on the street they had just left was so light as to be practically non-existent, and at the moment nothing was moving there. The ghosts of fog stalked in from the lake to cut them off from the city behind, and when he looked to the east Art could not see nothing but fog. Now in that direction he could hear a couple of distant radios or recorders blaring out pop music.

“We should see some people soon,” George told him a low voice. “There are always fishermen. She won’t just be sitting out here utterly isolated.”

“I was wondering.” He kept wondering too if she would really have the picnic cooler with her. According to George the code message had indicated that she would. Rose had carried her own fetus home—or somewhere—but that had been under emergency conditions. Maybe illegal parturition was always an emergency situation. Maybe normal birth and life were, too.

Out of the thick fog there loomed abruptly athwart their path a chest-high wall of massive stones, looking at first sight like part of some ancient fortification. Art realized in a moment that just beyond this rampart was the lake. They came up to the seawall and stopped. Four or five more tiers of the gigantic blocks made a rough stair going down to the water, where waves materialized out of fog to lap against their base. It was impossible to see out over the water for more than a few meters.

“This chaste fog,” George muttered. He checked his watch. “She’s supposed to be waiting right around here somewhere. Look, we’d better separate. You go south and I’ll go north, along the rocks. If you find her, give a whistle.

If you need help, yell out good and loud and keep on yelling. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“How far south do I go?”

George considered. “I’d say half a kilometer or less and you’ll come to a harbor where a lot of private boats are tied up. Some fishermen will be around there too.” The radio music was coming from that direction. “If you don’t find her between here and the harbor, better turn and come back this way. I’ll go north about the same distance and come back. If we can’t find her we’ll meet again about here.”

“Right.”

FRED and Wolf came out of the park to stand beside the seawall amid the drifting billows of fog. There they paused uncertainly. At the moment there was no thin blond girl carrying a container—or anyone else—in sight.

Fred wished he had been able to find Lewandowski, too, but there was no use wishing. He said: “This must be the place. I guess we better split up. How about if you go that way-and I go this?”

“All right.” Wolf and his neckpiece showed their double grin. “Watch out, man. They say there’s a lot of apes hang out in these parks.”

Fred laughed nervously, and with a tentative wave of his hand set off toward the south, walking parallel to the seawall. Wolf watehed’him go. Almost at once he was swallowed by the fog.

Wolf set out at a deliberate pace in the opposite direction. Despite having been up all night, he felt alert and cheerful. It was fun to have something interesting to do with his time, fun to help out a pal, and there might be some money at the end of it. He didn’t know what the whole thing was all about, except it had something to do with illegal midwifing, but he didn’t really care.

He knew the moment he saw the girl that she was the one they were looking for. She was a few meters inland from the seawall, waiting amid some carelessly stacked stones left over from its construction. Thin and blond, and doing nothing but waiting, she was sitting on the lowest tier of one of the stacks of stone where she was pretty well sheltered from view. And there was what he had been told to look for—a container of some kind, which turned out to be a white-handled red picnic cooler.

Her head swung around sharply when she heard the tiny scrape of his sandal on the stone he had mounted in order to see down into her sheltered spot, and at the sight of him she gave a little cry and started to get up. She was wearing a translucent skirt and open Cretan bodice.

Wolf grinned his knowledge at her and came hopping down the stair of stone to where she was. Conscious of being menacing, he watched her face, enjoying the little series of masks she was trying on, masks of unconcern, of welcome, of defiance, trying to hide the fear inside and keep him off.

He came right up to the girl and reached out, but not for her. He put his hand instead on the handle of the cooler. Maybe she would be smart and simply let him take it and walk away. But no, when he turned around she jumped at him silently from behind, and he smiled a little because he had been half expecting it.

But the attack on his face and head was too fierce for him to go on smiling. He had to drop the cooler and use both hands to shove her off. She went down on the grass with a little cry of pain. “Wait!” she called down. “Wait, can’t we talk about this?”

Wolf could feel the blood trickling down his face from where her nails had raked him. He sighed. This was business, and Fred hadn’t passed along any instructions that the woman was to be beaten up. People who hired this kind of business done usually spelled out just what they wanted, no more, no less. Anyway, Wolf had gotten all the urge to hurt people out of his system during the night. He shook his head, mocking and chiding. “Lady, lady. You know this thing don’t belong to you anyway.” He picked up the cooler again, noticing its unusual weight. And cold. Well, he wasn’t being paid to be curious.

She got up, pulling her bodice together, hiding her breasts provocatively. “Please,” she called, first quietly, then louder. “Please, it is mine. Isn’t there something you want more?” Wolf gave a tiny laugh and turned, shaking his head. She wasn’t bad, but this was hardly the time or place. He started off again, the heavy cooler pulling at his arm.

To his utter amazement, she jumped him from behind again, this time screaming as she landed. This time the attack almost brought him down because it was so unexpected. He dropped the picnic cooler on the grass again, once more fended off the clawing fingers from his eyes, and twisted around to get a good grip on the girl’s arms. Without much difficulty he avoided her clumsy attempt to knee him in the balls. This time he gave her a violent shake or-two before he let her fly. This time she went down harder and lay there sobbing. “Lady, you’re pushin’ your luck.”

Then there was the sound of running feet approaching. A little guy carrying a fishing pole and tackle box dashed out of the fog and into the little arena among the stones, where he came to a sudden stop. A short guy with blond hair and goatee who looked enough like the girl to be her brother. Wolf had fifteen kilos on him easily. He picked up the cooler once more and took a step in the way he wanted to go, scowling, but the little guy only threw down his fishing gear and took a step to stay in front of him.

“Hey, it’s a quintuplet,” Wolf said easily. “And this one must be the runt of the litter.” Now here came another pair of running feet, and he reached into an inner pocket for his knife, but it was all right after all, it was just going to be a little extra fun, for it was Lohmann who came charging up.

Lohmann slid to a stop, though, with a look on his face so sick that Wolf had very rarely seen the like before. “George, Rita,” said Lohmann, staring at the other two people there, and speaking in this low, sick voice. “Oh purity. Oh chastity no.”

“George,” said the girl in a low, fainting voice. “It’s my baby. Stop him.”

Wolf snarled and held out the knife to make sure little George stayed where he was, and here he came anyway with a skip and a dart. Wolf, good with the knife, aimed at the oncoming flat belly. The body before him twisted away, though, going down very low, and Wolf never saw the upthrusting back-kick coming, only felt his breath driven out of him and his heart stop momentarily as the kick smashed into his ribs and broke them inward. And then he felt his knee with his weight on it break sideways from some terrible impact, with blinding pain, and then he felt a jolt that went all through his head and tore part of the world away and came again and again like a long echo, until the world was gone.

ART Rodney, puffing and lumbering toward the sounds, saw Fred backing out of the arena among the huge stones.

“George, I didn’t know,” Fred was saying. “George, I swear.” And then Fred turned and ran, just ran flat out, almost knocking Art down in his passage. Art could still hear the long strides pounding when Fred had vanished inter the fog.

Advancing again, Art took in the scene with a glance. Knife on the grass, man on the grass.

George looming over him, looking down and rubbing his knuckles automatically. White-handled red picnic cooler on its side, Rita sitting near it, sitting awkwardly and in pain.

“Oh, darling, easy,” she said into his ear. “Don’t squeeze me. Oh Art, you didn’t bring the police down on us, did you? The doctor said you wanted me still.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes I want you. Never mind about all the rest of it. Let’s get you home.”

“My baby.” She was pointing at the cooler and he went to set it right side up, as if that could make any difference to what was encapsulated inside. Then he looked over at George, who was prodding the fallen figure with a toe. “What happened?” Art asked. “I got here as fast as I could when I heard a commotion. I thought I just saw Ann’s brother Fred run past me just now.”

“It was.” George shook his head and seemed to rouse himself. “Let’s get out of here.”

“And who’s that?” Art moved a little closer to look at the man on the ground. The man’s eyes were open, blankly, above what looked like a fur collar of some sort. His face was scratched and marked with trickles of fresh blood. “Will he be all right if we just leave him?”

“He’ll be dead,” said George, in a voice that wavered once and came back strong again. “He’s dead right now. Let’s get going.” And he moved and picked up the cooler with one strong hand and helped Rita to her feet with the other. “Art, get our fishpoles and stuff.”

“Oh. Oh, chastity.” Art looked once more at the dead man and pulled his eyes away. Somehow he picked up all the fishing gear that he and George had carried here and dropped, and then went on after his wife and her brother into the fog. When he caught up, he demanded: “Rita, did that fellow back there hurt you?”

“No, no, only pushed me down. And my bottom is still sore from the parturition, and I have cramps, but the doctor didn’t have to make any incisions. I can walk, but I’m so tired I don’t know how far.” Now she was clinging to Art’s arm while George walked a little ahead of them carrying the cooler. They moved through the fog toward the sound of Orlando’s voice on several radios.

“Art. George, if anything happens to me, this is the situation. He’s on the waiting list for a womb, but it may be months. The doctor says the safest place for him in the meantime is the Loyola School of Medicine, cryogenics lab. They seem to have some safe depository. I don’t know where. Loyola’s on the north side of the city, Art. Ask for Gwen or Larry. I said we’d get him there. The doctor said he was afraid he had to flee the city right away or be arrested. Maybe there are worse things than that for us to fear. That man back there was no policeman, but he was after my baby, not after me.”

Art felt a pang. Rizzo. He patted his wife, hugged her, murmured soothing words.

“I tell you he was. He would have taken this basket and walked away if George hadn’t stopped him.”

Art, head throbbing sickly now, stared at George’s back, moving three paces ahead of him through the mist. Over his shoulder George said: “We’ll deliver him where you said, Sis. Hey, what’s his name?” Art stared at the red cooler, seeing instead the dead body they had left behind them on the grass. He and George both.

“I haven’t talked that over with his Daddy yet. I think George Arthur. Or maybe Arthur George, though Art used to say he didn’t want a junior.”

They came abruptly to a little rise, and at its top encountered the seawall again. Almost below them, amid thinning drifts of fog, several long piers extended at right angles to the shore. The piers were edged in places with moored pleasure boats and elsewhere occupied by fisherfolk with their poles and nets and buckets. The sun was up now, turning fiercely white above the watery horizon, visible between great lake-borne mounds of the dissipating fog.

Here a road of recycled plastic gravel ran just inland from the seawall. A few fishermen’s cars were parked along its edge. As the three of them reached the road, they simultaneously saw a police car cruising in the middle distance, a face turned out of its window in their direction. In unison they altered course, and there was another car approaching along the road where it bent inland.

“Split up,” said George succinctly. He thrust the picnic cooler into Art’s hands and with the same movement took back his own old tackle box. “Rita, take the bait jug,” he added, and in the next instant was gone, sprinting toward the south. Now both police cars were accelerating, but the trio on which they had been closing in were gone three ways at once.

GEORGE went around a clump of bushes, and back onto the seawall, where he dashed past a group of fishermen. Then he slowed to a trot, and then to a quick walk. He looked back frequently, and cursed. Obviously neither of the cars had come after him, though he was staying near the road to lure them on. But now at last there came a uniformed policeman in pursuit of him on foot.

“You there, halt!”

George was purposely deaf to the first yell, figuring they would give at least one more before they started shooting. If they were serious enough to shoot, which they probably weren’t as yet because the dead man could hardly have been found and reported to them so soon.

He heeded the second, closer shout, and looked around with polite surprise as an athletic policeman of dark brown skin came running up.

“All right, hands in the air.” ‘“What’s the matter, officer?” He set the tackle box down and put his foot on it and raised his hands.

He was patted down for weapons. “What’ve you got in there?”

“Show me a search warrant and you can search me completely.”

“I’m conducting a weapons search, mister, get your foot off that thing before I shoot it off.”

George got, moving two steps away and keeping his hands up. The policeman peered into the box and then looked at him ex-pressionlessly. “All right, come along. Bring this box of junk if you want it.”

The officer sheathed his pistol and took a good grip on George’s right sleeve -just above the elbow with his left hand. With this grip he walked George north again. It must be a technique they taught at the police academy, how to be ready to subdue resistance by the suspect. The grip was not bullying, and yet quite firm enough for business. Not bad for an amateur, not bad.

Fishermen stared at them as they passed. Now only one police car was in sight, parked, with a scattering of the curious observing it from a little distance. Rita sat alone and composed in the back seat while a man in civvies sat twisted around to face her from the front.

“Do you know this man?”

Her eyes turned neutrally to George, waiting for a signal.

“Of course she knows me. I’m her brother.”

“George, this gentleman says he’s Detective Simmons.”

“What were you running off with, George? Empty tackle box, maybe? Don’t you know it’s against the law to interfere with police carrying out their duties?”

It wasn’t really empty, but too close to empty to be convincing to a fisherman. George held it under his arm and remained silent. The man sighed and informed him that he was under arrest for conspiracy to violate the Population Control laws, and made the little speech detailing his constitutional rights.

With George and a patrolman in the back, and another uniformed man up front with Detective Simmons, the car began to move, cruising slowly north, going off the plastic road and over grass, following the lakefront. Then they turned and cruised the other way again, and stopped and let out one of the uniformed men, who stood looking over the piers with quick twistings of his head, then walked away, talking on a wrist-radio.

The man in civvies turned once more. “We’re bringing along your tackle box and your empty bait-bucket, George and Rita, to show the judge what kind of tricks you try to pull. We’re also going to bring that red picnic cooler and the fat man who’s carrying it. We’re going to pick that up in a minute. Why don’t you tell me something about it now, just to show you’re willing to cooperate? Where were you taking it?”

“My sister and I want to see an attorney before we answer any more questions at all. This sounds like something serious.”

“What do you think something serious is, George? What were you two and your sister’s husband doing here today? No reason you can’t tell me, if it wasn’t anything wrong.”

“Let us talk to an attorney,” Rita said. “And then we’ll answer questions.”

A message was coming in on the car radio. DOA found on the rocks near South Shore Beach. Police number-jargon followed. The two policemen still with the car exchanged looks but did no more. George held his hands down so that the callus pads might not be seen. Sooner or later somebody might make the connection. At the moment he felt no guilt or fear; at the moment he was still steady as a rock. Attorney, attorney, where will I find you? He had a couple of them among his students, but none in criminal law.

Another radio message was coming, this one on Simmons’ wrist-radio. From the back seat George couldn’t quite make the message out, but abruptly the car was rolling again. It accelerated strongly, turned on its siren for a blast or two, then almost at once screeched rocking to a halt. “That’s Hall,” Simmons in the front seat said, opening his door and getting out.

OUT OF a small crowd a lean, stooped man was coming toward them, plodding with slow weariness as if he waded through mud; that was not pure figure-of-speech, George saw, for the man was wet as if he had just fallen into the lake. From the business socks inside his sandals a little puddle sloshed out at every step, and water plastered down his thinning hair and dripped from his translucent shorts and jacket. Simmons jumped to meet him, asking excited questions.

“That fat fathering breeder!” was all Hall said at first, in a voice choked with anger, as he stood there trying to press the water out of his clothes. “That quintuplet-siring crowder!” Some of the onlookers gathered at a little distance smiled or giggled at the earnest vileness of the man’s speech, while one or two appeared sincerely shocked.

Simmons was holding his wrist-radio ready. “If he shoved you in the water I can put in a call and charge assault and resisting arrest. That’ll get us some more manpower out here. Which way did he go?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I don’t care to press those charges.” It seemed that a little strong language had served to discharge Hall’s anger. He put up a hand as if to ward off the detective’s glare and exclamations of disgust. “He didn’t hurt me. I don’t think he even intended to knock me in the water, just to get away.” Hall had taken off his jacket and now began to wave it like a distress signal, trying to dry it in the morning breeze. “I called out to him, when I saw that I had him cornered on a moored boat, I said just hand over the specimen and save yourself a lot of trouble. You and your wife and the whole world will be better off, I said. But then he came off the boat with this picnic cooler under his arm like a football. Just put down his head and charged, and he must weigh ninety kilos . . .”

Hall had looked at Rita several times, but had offered her no recognition until now. “Well, Mrs. Rodney, I suppose you and your husband and brother here are getting yourselves a lawyer. From the way you sit there looking so serenely into space, I suppose too that you’ve heard about the report.”

Rita, chin high, was studying the horizon. George asked: “Report?”

“The new population forecast from the UN. The one we’ve all been afraid of. A real surprise. If the latest trends continue, world population is going to reach a peak of around ten billion in the next forty years and then start down, maybe even a rather sharp decline. Not that that will help the people who are going to go hungry in the next forty years, of course, but it’s going to make it a little harder to convict people like yourselves before a jury.” Mr. Hall was now standing nude and shivering slightly in the dawn, wringing out his shorts, his dripping codpiece slung over one shoulder.

“World population’s going down?” said the detective, sounding rather dumb. He couldn’t seem to grasp it right away. George couldn’t either.

Hall said: “Oh, we all knew it had to happen someday, one way or another. The only question was how and when. Still, when it does happen, we feel surprise.”

Simmons was busy with his radio. George asked: “But what is it? The Homo Leagues? I know they’re growing fast.”

“They were allowed for in previous forecasts. No, the thing that tipped the balance, that wasn’t foreseen, was all this religious celibacy. Half a dozen religions booming today, young people pulling themselves out of the reproductive pool by the tens of millions. People will think it will ease the population pressure right away, though of course it won’t. It was hard enough before to get convictions, with bleeding-heart lawyers and frozen fetuses to cloud the issue. Now this. But we’re going to try, sir, we’re going to try. I’ll see you in court, whether we manage to recover the specimen or not.”

George, riding north along the Outer Drive in the back of the police car, going to some police station where they would have to let him see a lawyer before he said a sublimatin’ thing, held his sister’s hand and looked out over the lake. The waves were coming in stronger now with a freshening breeze, starting to crest into whitecaps near the shore. The fog had gone. Get through, Art, get through. Loyola School of Medicine, cryogenics lab, ask for Gwen or Larry. I’ve killed a man to save that kid, and you’d better not lose him now. I’d kill any other son of a bitch who tried to kill my nephew.

He smiled a little for the new man born so strangely into the world, and at the same time he was very worried. The waves came in from the clear horizon, cresting into white. The crest of the wave has been reached. And now, to see which way the world slides down.

1975

DEEP SPACE

One moment the Hudson was the solid world under the magnetic boots of his spacesuit, as he pounded in terror on the closed outer hatch of the airlock, and screamed a futile appeal into his helmet microphone. The next moment, hatch and ship were gone without fuss, as if they had never existed. Gone into that place or process that men called prime-space, and used without understanding. The ship’s jump out of normal space left his suited body turning alone among the stars.

He had been working alone, standing out on the hull, adjusting the molecular pattern of an auxiliary field-pump. He had not spoken to anyone on radio for a minute or so. The warp-tool rested easily in the clawlike metal hands of his suit; a green light showed that the little ball-magnets in the tool were spinning and precessing properly. As far as he could tell, all systems were in great shape. Then—

The waist-high bulge of the field-pump had receded with smooth suddenness into the hull. The man had known the probable meaning of that—that a jump was imminent—and in the nightmarish seconds left had made a shuffling lunge for the automatically closing hatch. Too late. He had tried to thrust the end of the warp-tool into the swiftly narrowing gap to jam it open, but he had been not quite in time. The closing hatch strained at the obstacle momentarily, then cracked the casing of the tool and shot it out, as a man might shoot a seed from between his fingers.

He had two or three seconds after that to yell, and pound at the closed hatch with his suit’s metal hands. If they heard him, inside, it was evidently by then too late to stop the impending jump. The ship vanished right from under his boots.

He was alone in deep space, many light-years from any sun. His body was turning slowly, as a result of his last movement against the ship.

Drilled-in training stayed with him. Without having to think about it he slid an arm in from its spacesuit sleeve and switched his radio to emergency position; the coded distress signal was already hurling itself away from him at light-speed in all directions. Within about a second, he had done all that he could do for himself.

He fell.

Like all spacemen, he was used to the occasional absence of gravity. Working outside, away from a starship’s artificial gravity, did not bother him; the magnetic boots gave a standing man an adequate sense of up and down. But now he only fell. It was a sensation that had become bearable to him, through training and practice, but hardly more than bearable.

The weightless falling sensation combined with the shock of what had happened to nudge him toward panic. But he fought it off, telling himself he had a chance, a good chance. It would take only a minute to figure the chances out.

The Hudson would come back for him, of course. If the crew did not already know that he had been left outside, someone was bound to notice within minutes that he was missing. It was incredible that the ship had jumped with him outside; some against-all-odds coincidence of mechanical malfunction and human error had victimized him.

The precise nature of that coincidence made no difference to him now. Neither did the distance of the Hudson’s jump. Whether it had gone only a trillion kilometers or so, or several light-years, within twenty minutes or half an hour they would have started back for him.

On the return jump they would aim for their previous position—but how close could they come to it? He had a pretty good idea of the answer. If the Hudson popped back within a billion kilometers of him, it would be a very good shot.

All right, then. Figure forty-five minutes or an hour, and they would be back in normal space in his general area, searching. By then he would be waiting at the center of a sphere of radio distress signal that was approaching a couple of billion kilometers in diameter, and increasing that diameter by something like thirty-six million kilometers a minute. Not a small thing at all for them to search for. Stated in those terms, the facts were comforting.

Yet well he knew the vastness in which his billions of cubic kilometers of signal were—nothing.

He fought down fear, and loneliness, and falling sickness, holding to the idea that he was going to be rescued, concentrating on it as a certainty. He had plenty of air in his tanks.

Only—it was almost as if they had left him outside deliberately.

Forget that. That way lay panic and madness. Now it helped to look at the calmness of the stars. He was turning only slowly, and they held an ordered march across his faceplate of invisible glass. He was near the edge of Earth’s galaxy, and the stars and glowing gas of it made an uneven line of rounded, snowy cliffs that rested on nothing. Away from the galactic plane, which was marked with dark streaks and masses of obscuring dust, the starclouds thinned out rapidly into looser agglomerations, globular clusters, scattered dustings and dots.

His body turned steadily in the multicolored ghost-light of all the distant suns. Blackness came into view—the Night that held the galaxy like a dust-speck, as the galaxy held him. Here and there were a few frontier galactic stars, and out beyond the pinhead ghosts of light, showing where other island universes had been—long ago. Then, turning, he once more faced the starclouds of galactic center.

Now he was calmer. He studied the dials on the little panel set in front of his chest inside the suit. They glowed soft green. The clock informed him that about five minutes had passed since the ship jumped, and the air gauge said that he had nearly six hours of life left in his tanks. A radio dial indicated that his transmitter was still putting out strongly.

Even five hours of air should be more than enough. The Hudson should be back in this area within an hour, and should have picked up his signal in another hour at worst. Then they would rush closer to him at nearly the speed of light, perhaps put out a boat, and pick him up. Say four hours for the whole thing. No need to worry about air. Unless something went wrong.

Calculations finished, he went back to watching the turning, steady-shining stars. The galaxy went round and round.

The Hudson seemed a little unreal to him now, as if it were something he had not seen for years. He thought of how the crew would be laughing in relief when they came to pick him up.

We had to come back, Sharp would say. You still owe me money, remember? Everyone would have a joke, except the captain, and whoever had caused the accident. Maybe it was no one’s fault, just the damn drive. Sometimes the damn drive could do tricky things. He wondered if even the scientists really fully understood it yet.

Time was a slow thing, where he was now. But his little clock was a great help. It was not impressed by deep space, or falling, or anything else. Inexorably if slowly it consumed the minutes that separated him from safety.

His turning began to bother him. Now it seemed to make the weightless falling worse, so he unhooked the flexible exhaust hose and jetted away most of his spin with air from his suit. Plenty of air. To stop the spinning took only a very little.

Time crept by. He felt patient, alert, almost comfortable. He stretched his legs and arms, and the metal claw-hands moved against the stars, blotting out distant clusters and nebulas. Someday well win, he thought. Someday we’ll boss the whole works, all that out there. Because we’ll take the inanimate stuff a bit at a time, like this clock, like the suit I wear, and make it serve us, make it fight on the side of life.

The man looked without awe at what he could see of infinity, and knew that he was ignorant and weak, but that he was not at that moment a bit afraid. He wanted to say it aloud, interrupt his coded distress signal, put his statement on a spreading record: I am not afraid.

But of course it would sound foolish when they heard it on the Hudson.

The minutes were eaten up and eaten up and eventually three hours had passed. It came to him that he was the only real being in the universe, that he had always been alone, that his ideas of other beings and worlds were only self-deception. He had heard this fallacious fantasy discussed somewhere, and knew there was a name for it He felt so good and confident now that he could let his mind play with such nonsense and not be bothered a bit. The falling was still a bother but he kept it under control. Things could be a lot worse.

He waited calmly. Soon they would come.

At last he thought he saw a tiny spherical silhouette against the clusters of one galactic arm. Slowly he turned; tensely he waited for another glimpse. There . . . yes . . . something! He turned again. Yes!

In a few brief minutes it came closer, until there was no longer room for doubt. The multi-million galactic suns made a gleaming spot on the featureless hull. The field-pumps were apparently still retracted, in jump position. That was unusual, but it meant little to the man—he scarcely noticed it, in his intense relief. He hadn’t realized how worried he’d been, until the worry was gone.

He slid an arm in from its suit arm and pulled his helmet microphone into position. He couldn’t keep from grinning and laughing; it was hard to speak plainly.

“Hey, about time!” he called. “I was getting lonesome.”

He listened for a reply—but of course his receiver had been on all the time, in the short pauses between transmitted pulses. Why hadn’t they already spoken to him? Something wrong with the radio? Not likely. And he could hear background noise without any trouble.

The Hudson seemed to be very close, only a few hundred meters away, the apparent size of a golf ball at a few meters’ distance. It seemed to be moving past him.

“Hey!” he shouted, blasting his own ears inside the helmet. “Come on!”

He waited and watched and listened. Couldn’t they hear him? Had they all gone crazy? The ship was moving past him. He rotated away from the slow-moving, distant shape and lost it. He couldn’t find it again. Something was badly wrong. He couldn’t understand.

He shouted and shouted into his microphone, not knowing what he said. Had it been only a hallucination? Were they all dead on board? They couldn’t be; they had come back and found him. In his slow turn he spotted the object again, once more between him and the bright bulk of the galaxy. He must be orbiting around it somehow.

With a shaky claw-hand he took the strong lamp from his helmet, turned it on and aimed it. At that distance the sharply focused beam spread out enough to illuminate the whole sphere brightly. No boat appeared, no hatch opened, nothing disturbed the smooth featureless metal. It seemed that he was orbiting the ship slowly—why should that be?�but he lost it again due to his own turning motion.

It came to him that what he saw was not the Hudson at all, but a ship of unknown aliens, who had stumbled upon a nothing out here in the middle of nowhere, and were circling around it suspiciously.

“Take me in!” he screamed. “I don’t care who you are!” It was hard to think; if only the eternal falling would stop, just for a minute . . .

He unlimbered the exhaust hose again and jetted air to build a spin, searching all space with his light as he twirled. It must be the Hudson, and the boys were just having a joke, and he didn’t mind really, because the joke would soon be over and they would let him in . . .

. . . almost as if they had jumped deliberately . . .

He saw it again, saw with nightmare horror that it was farther away.

“Take me in!” he screamed. “Help meeee!” He chased the ship with the hose pointing behind him, jetting away good air. He was clumsy with the hose, making himself spin first one way and then another, but somehow he got closer.

. . . And inside the good thick hull there would be life and warmth and closeness and no-falling. What difference if it was a joke or they were all dead or alien monsters or whatever if he could reach the ship and make them let him in . . .

Suddenly it was in the full glare of his light, quite close, rushing at him with what seemed terrific speed. In blind panic he moved his hose and shot out of the sphere’s path, and lost it and looked for it again.

. . . falling, falling, hideous falling that never stopped . . .

He thought he saw it, far away, and tried to chase it and lost it again. His air rushed swiftly away into vacuum. Where now? Quick, quick! over there . . . or was that a star . . .?

The little room off the Hudson’s boat bay was still cold with the chill of the suit that had been brought in minutes before. The body had been removed but the bulky suit still lay open on the deck, snowy with what moisture it could condense out of ship’s atmosphere. A man straightened up from the group around it, took a few steps to where the captain stood, and said into the silence:

“No sign of any hole. I guess he bled out every sniff through the exhaust tube.” The speaker looked down at the deck, up and around. “Why?”

“I mean to find that out,” was all the captain said. It had not been his fault, but he had just lost one of his crew.

Someone said: “He must have cracked up, shouting all that stuff about let-me-in, when we were still half an hour out.”

“What’s that?” the captain asked sharply. He had moved closer to the suit and was pointing at one of its feet, where encrusted frost was already beginning to melt away again. The suit expert reached cautiously for a little object that seemed fixed to the sole of one of the suit’s magnetic boots. He brushed frost from the object and held it up.

“Anybody know what it is?”

“Oh!” said someone, at whom everyone turned to look. “I think it’s one of those ball magnets. We carry them as replacements in Supply. You know, the ones in the warp-tools?”

The cold magnet rested in a man’s hand. It was bright, spherical, featureless, about the size of a golf ball.

THE ANNIHILATION OF ANGKOR APEIRON

Berserker vs Editor—how could I resist?

THE BATTLE was a long one for deep space, lasting well over a standard hour, and as fierce as any fight in which the losing side can have no expectation of survival. Commander Ridolfi had fought his heavy cruiser, the Dipavamsa, with a desperate skill that twice in a matter of minutes forestalled instant destruction by the berserker’s missiles, and each member of his crew performed superbly well in making such combat decisions as could be handled slowly enough to let human brains co-operate with their slave computers.

The human crew of course faced death or worse if they should lose. And the berserker, their unliving foe, faced its own analogue of death and worse-than-death. To lose would mean destruction—which was nothing to a berserker if destruction could bring victory. But destruction in defeat meant certain failure to achieve any further progress toward its programmed goal, the annihilation of all life, whenever and wherever it could be attacked.

Aboard the Dipavamsa there were only four civilian passengers, including Otto Novotny, who in his long life had never come close to taking part in a battle before and who felt a great deal too old and paunchy for such endeavors now. Nevertheless he was more alert than any of the other civilians, and had begun to don his requisite suit of space armor as soon as the Battle Stations klaxon sounded, while the other three were still wondering aloud if it was only practice.

Ten seconds later the first berserker missile blew against the cruiser’s defensive screens, a mere kilometer from her hull, and they all knew better.

DIPAVAMSA WAS FIGHTING for her life several light years from any star, along a trade route where in these last few standard months no unarmed vessels had dared to try to pass. The berserker machine, a sphere some forty or fifty kilometers in diameter, all armor and combat computers and heavy weapons and drive, had waited like a spider in the midst of the net of detectors it had planted in subspace. The region where its detectors existed was conterminous to one in normal space where a strait of hard vacuum bent between two “nebulae, forming a bottleneck only a few billion kilometers wide in which a reasonably fast passage could be achieved. When a manned ship dared to try the strait—heavy cruiser or not—the berserker jumped to the attack.

Locked together with their armaments of fields and counterfields like grappling ocean ships of old, the contending metallic giants rolled into normal space, there to remain until the issue was decided. After the first enemy missile-blast reverberated through the cruiser’s hull, Novotny thought that the battle would probably be over one way or the other before he could get himself completely into the unfamiliar armor. His efforts were complicated by a sudden lack of artificial gravity; every erg of the cruiser’s energies was suddenly needed for more important things than maintaining a rightsideup.

But he persevered, working with the same methodical speed with which he usually solved problems of quite a different kind and finally got the armor on. No sooner had he sealed its last seam and begun to wonder what to do next, when Dipavamsa’s hull was breached by blast and beam. Hatches slammed to seal compartments, but the air in their compartment could not be held and Novotny saw the lives of his companions who had been too slow snuffed out like candle flames.

After that the battle became a scrambling confusion of largely physical effort for the humans who took part in it. For Novotny especially, who had less idea of what to expect than did any of the cruiser’s crew and who was not in as good shape as they were either. Now the berserker chose to hurl some of its auxiliary machines across the narrow no-man’s-land of space to try to board the cruiser. It could use the ship if it could capture it still reasonably intact, and probably it wanted living prisoners.

PRISONERS of course were useful for interrogation, after which a berserker generally killed them quickly; it was programmed only to pursue death, not suffering, though of course it was quite willing to apply judicious torture to extract information of value in advancing the cause of death. And prisoners were needed for experiments that the berserkers carried on extensively, in an effort to learn what made Homo Sapiens, a species now spread across this part of the Galaxy, such a resistant life-form to their relentless program of sterilization.

The berserkers were automated warships, made by an unknown race to fight in an interstellar war that had been over ages since; they had outlasted their original enemies and their makers as well, having been programmed and equipped to rebuild and reproduce themselves. Still trying to carry out their originally programmed task, they had made an age-long progress across the spiral arms, leaving nothing living in their wake.

While following the motions of the Commander’s arms, which were gesturing to shovel suited people from one wrecked-looking compartment to another, Novotny had a chance to look out through the holed hull to catch his first glimpse of the enemy. The monstrous spherical hull of the berserker was visible by the cherry-glow of craters that the cruiser’s weapons had pocked across its armor hide. One crater flared anew while Novotny watched, flamed with some power that seemed to be eating like a cancer into the enemy’s metal bowels. But again the cruiser was rocked and shaken in its turn, Novotny and Commander Ridolfi were picked up by the same invisible hand and slammed together into a bulkhead, saved only by their suits from broken bones.

Now some of the berserker’s boarding machines, which were a little bigger than men and of divers shapes, managed to get aboard Dipavamsa, and Novotny had a chance to see the enemy at close range. Men, some of whom were hardened veterans, were screaming around him in terror, but his own unconsciously-maintained attitude was that under conditions like these one could hardly spare the time to be frightened. Vaguely he thought of this situation as resembling an impossible editorial deadline—one thing that could never help was panic. He followed as best he could the Commander’s waved and shouted orders, and kept alert. At last he got his own chance to blaze away at the foe, with a small recoilless rifle he had snatched up from a fallen crewman’s hands.

By that time—as Novotny confusedly understood, from scraps of combat jargon that came into his helmet—Commander Ridolfi had ordered his Second Officer and a picked crew to leave the cruiser in an armed launch that could take shelter among the drifts and waves of nebular material in space nearby, darting through where the bulky berserker could not pass at speed. It was a feigned acknowledgement of defeat, intended to make the enemy think they were abandoning ship, a battle tactic to lure the damaged enemy in where a sharp counterattack might still destroy it.

Ridolfi himself, as the cruiser’s commanding officer, and Novotny, as more or less useless baggage, were among those who stayed aboard her and tried to fight a delaying action through her corridors. The vacuum around Novotny’s helmet continued to buzz and sing with the strange energies of this battle; he clutched his recoilless rifle and continued to fire it toward the enemy’s boarding machines whenever he caught a glimpse of one of them. He could not have said whether or not his shots were doing any good. He also tried to stay close to Ridolfi’s side; whether he felt in slightly less hopeless danger there, or was hoping thus to improve his chances of being useful, he did not pause to consider. Ridolfi indeed kept snapping orders, but they were meant for members of his crew.

The two of them were still together, trying to defend the central control room of the ship, when Death struck closer to them than an any moment yet.

It came very suddenly. One moment Novotny was still looking toward Ridolfi for a hint of what they might try to do next—and the next moment a berserker machine that looked like a cross between a centipede and a crab had thrown itself upon them and they were prisoners. Steel claws that moved with the force of atomic power effortlessly tore Novotny’s rocket launcher away and wrenched the Commander’s sidearm from his hand. The berserker shifted its grip then, holding each pair of human arms helpless with a single claw—and then machine and men went down together in a tangle as a new force slammed at the cruiser from outside. The Second Officer and his picked crew, in their fresh and undamaged launch, had begun their counterattack.

The crab-centipede was wrecked, sheared almost in two, as the launch sent something like the Angel of the Lord passing almost invisibly through the embattled ship, cutting selectively, passing over fragile human bodies and machinery that it could somehow identify as human property.

The mass of his late captor, and its tenacious grip which had not relaxed with the destruction of its computer-brain, pinned Novotny in an angle between deck and bulkhead, surrounded by wreckage. Beside him Ridolfi grunted and struggled in similar difficulties. Then they abruptly ceased their efforts to get free, simultaneously ceased even to breathe—another berserker machine was entering the damaged control room.

If it was aware of them, it did not turn. It moved straight to one of the panels before which a human astrogator normally sat, and with a startling delicacy began to remove the panel from its mounting. Neatly—almost timidly, it seemed—it probed for the panel fasteners, teasing and tickling at them with grasping devices that could have ripped the panel free like so much tissue paper.

. . . it was working so carefully, and now it almost had what it was after. It reached inside and pulled out . . . very slowly . . .

. . . a small metal case . . .

That burst into a flaming snowball even as the berserker oh so gently tugged it free of its connections, a blaze that here in free fall sent out its flames in a sunburst of straight radii, a wad of radiant glory that the enemy instantly hurled away. Without pause the enemy turned to snatch up a small bundle of paper printout that writhed weightlessly across the deck. It shoved this inside itself, door slamming shut protectively across the orifice—and the machine was gone, lunging with inhuman speed out of the room again.

“Novotny.” The two of them gasped for breath again and once more struggled against the dead claws that held them prisoner. “Look—can you shift your weight this way? Lean on it here, maybe I can get a hand out of this claw . . .”

After a minute or two of cooperative effort both of them were free. From some comparatively great distance the shocks and slams of battle were still coming to them through the hull. “Novotny, listen to me.” The Commander talked while looking for his pistol, which he at last grabbed from a turning swirl of other weightless debris that drifted in the middle of the room. “It was going after our astrogational databank just then. After that thing that burst into flame?”

“I saw.”

“It didn’t get what it wanted, because the bank’s destructor charge worked when it was pulled out. But it must need astrogational information badly, or it wouldn’t have sent a machine after it, before the battle’s even over. Maybe its own banks have been shot up.”

Novotny moved his head inside his helmet, showing that he understood so far.

The Commander had his pistol back, held absently in his right hand, and his left hand clamped briefly on Novotny’s suited arm.

“I believe you have in your quarters something it could use as a substitute. I understand you’re traveling with the whole new edition of Encyclopedia Galactica in microstorage—and the EG gives galactic coordinates for all inhabited systems, right?”

Novotny agreed again. Now that he had been almost immobile for a little while, his muscles were starting to stiffen from the unaccustomed workout. He could hear the wheezings from inside his own chest, and his body was beginning to feel like so much fluid lead. If they weren’t in free fall he would certainly be dizzy and have to sit down. Decades at a senior executive’s desk had left him too fat and old for this kind of nonsense.

But he was moving again now, keeping up with the agile Commander as they picked their way out of the ruined control room, which now looked not in fit shape for controlling anything.

“Then we’ve got to get to your quarters,” the Commander was saying, “while there’s still a chance. You’ve got just the one copy of the encyclopedia there?”

“Yes.”

“We must see that it’s destroyed.”

They had started down a corridor, and there came a glimpse of a machine moving ahead of them, and the vibrations of its massy passage came through the bulkheads to their gripping hands. Taking shelter together in a doorway, they waited for it to get out of their way.

The Commander kept trying to make contact with his Second Officer by suit radio, but seemed unable to get any reply. Maybe, thought Novotny, it’s only that the space between is far too noisy . . .

“Commander,” he asked, when there was a momentary opportunity, “What sector are we in now? Of the Galaxy, I mean, in Revised Galactic Coordinates?”

Ridolfi’s eyes came to full focus on him for what might have been the first time. “Omicron Sector, Ring Eleven—what does it matter? Oh, you mean you want to know which volumes of your set it will be most important to destroy. Good thinking. That damned machine will be too shot up itself to get out of Omicron without help. I don’t think it’ll be able to catch another ship, even if one should come along. It’ll be trying to find an undefended planet nearby, within a light year or two if possible, preferably an inhabited one where there’ll be machines it can take over and some readymade materials that it can use to repair itself.”

“And my encyclopedia is now the only means by which it can locate such a planet?”

“That’s the way I read the situation, It can’t just go visiting stars at random, the chance of success is far too small . . . remember that printout it picked up from the control room floor? That was a copy of what we call the Military Information Sheet, which we got when we filed our flight plan. Among other things it contains a list of all the defended planets along our projected course—all the places where we might be able to look for help in case of an emergency. I suppose it’ll go for one of them if it can’t find anything better. But in your reference book it’s likely to get the address of some undefended one . . . the war’s a recent thing in this neck of the galactic woods, remember?”

Novotny’s face bore a doubtful look, but the Commander was no longer watching him.

“Coast’s clear, Novotny. Let’s move.” Then the two of them were in motion again, diving and scrambling in free fall. For the moment their luck held; no more berserkers came in sight as they reached the stateroom corridor and swam along it to the door of Novotny’s cabin. The door had been jammed shut by some warping of the battered ship around it, and it took the men an agonizing moment or two to force it free.

Then they were inside. “Where is it?”

“There on the table, Commander. Already plugged into the reading machine. But wait.” A new anxiety had come into Novotny’s voice. “I’m not sure that destruction is our wisest move.”

Commander Ridolfi only looked at him. “Get back.”

But Novotny had not moved when a third figure suddenly joined them in the little cabin; the crab-centipede’s cousin, which raised a multitude of claws.

The Commander aimed his gun again, but not at the berserker. He thought his own life and battle now lost anyway, and more important than perhaps damaging one more of the berserker’s machines would be denying it this information on new targets. He aimed at the reading machine that sat like some dull sculpture on the table.

Novotny reached out deliberately and knocked Ridolfi’s arm aside:

The berserker, on the verge of killing both of them, hesitated fractionally as it observed their struggle. Did one of these life-units wish to become goodlife, a willing ally of the cause of Death? Such conversions had happened before, more than a few times, and a goodlife could be very useful. And what on the table was so important that a life-unit struggled to destroy it—?

From the armed launch came the next phase of counterattack. The cabin was nearly ripped apart. The berserker lashed out at Ridolfi, and the Commander saw that his pistol was gone again, before it could be fired, and his arm gone with it almost to the shoulder. The suit will seal itself around the wound, he thought, in sudden massive shock that made all things seem trivial. He saw the reading machine snatched up from the table in the claws of the berserker, and the launch’s weapons struck again. A fresh gust of escaping atmosphere whirled through the cruiser from a newly-ruptured compartment, and with the last glow of his consciousness the Commander could see stars.

HIS FIRST FEELING when his wits came back was sheer astonishment at being still alive. Astonishment deepened when he realized that he had somehow been brought on board the armored launch. All four bunks in its tiny sickbay were full of wounded, and men and women and machines were steadily at work, passing back and forth continually in the small space between the bunks.

The Second Officer came in to report, relief dawning on his face when he saw that Ridolfi was getting up and evidently in shape to resume his command. Shock and loss of blood had been treated, pain blocked, and bandages sealed the wound from which a new arm could one day be made to grow.

The Second made his report concisely. The launch was now some half a million kilometers within the nebula, its defenses alertly repelling or safely detonating—so far—all the torpedoes that the berserker had sent after it. The battle had ground to a halt, otherwise, in mutual though incomplete destruction. What was left of the cruiser had now been abandoned by both contending forces. Before pulling back deep within the nebula, the launch had dared to delay long enough to follow distress signals and pick up two suited survivors who had, it seemed, somehow been blown clean away from the embattled cruiser in the last stages of the fighting. One of the survivors was Commander Ridolfi himself. The other . . .

“That makes nineteen people on the air and food,” the Second Officer mused, as they stood looking down at the collapsed shape of Otto Novotny, slumped in total exhaustion in a corner of the small dayroom where there hardly seemed room for his gross form. “Still, we should be able to recycle, and make supplies last until we’re eventually picked up . . .”

“I don’t know if there’ll be nineteen or not, for very long.” Ridolfi’s voice was hard as that of one just going into battle, not coming out of it, and his eyes were welded on the fat civilian.

“Sir?” The Second didn’t get it at all, not yet.

“I mean, Mister, that unless I get some questions answered by this man here, and answered damn fast, I’m going to convene a formal court and press charges against him of voluntarily aiding a berserker.”

THERE WERE ONLY six people in the dayroom when the first informal inquiry began; the Commander didn’t want to prejudice possible jurors if the thing came to a formal trial, which he was empowered to give even civilians when in space and in the face of the enemy.

As Novotny, by now somewhat recovered though still slow of movement and blinking a bit bewilderedly, was ushered in and shown to the seat across the table from him, the Commander was simultaneously handed a note from the other side. It informed him that the berserker had just been observed dropping out of normal space in the area of the battle. Instruments showed it departing the local area, having evidently completed such emergency repairs as it could manage on the spot. A reading on the subspace signals of its departure gave a vector for its probable destination that deepened the lines carved down through Ridolfi’s cheeks.

A silence grew in the room, until Ridolfi spoke. “This is not yet a trial, Mr. Novotny. But I warn you that there may be one before we get back to a planet, if we ever do; or are picked up by another human ship, if we ever are. If there is a trial, you will be charged with voluntarily aiding a berserker, and conviction will carry an almost certain penalty of death.”

Exhaustion and puzzlement seemed to be absorbed almost at once within the layers of fat as Novotny pulled himself together. “Ah. I stand ready, of course, Commander, to answer any questions on my behavior that you may have.”

“That’s good. Frank answers will be required.” Ridolfi tried to keep his one hand from fidgeting before him on the table. “On board the cruiser, in a combat situation, you deliberately interfered with my attempt to destroy the databank containing your encyclopedia. Do you deny it?”

Novotny was sitting very still, as if he feared that movement might land him in further trouble of some kind. He thought before answering, and his face maintained a frown. “No, I do not deny that, Commander.”

The Commander paused, then put his arm out on the table, fingers opened, elbow straight, a dominating gesture. “You do not. Very well. My intention in destroying that data, sir, was to prevent its use as an astrogational aid by the berserker. If you wanted to save it, it was surely not for yourself. Did you expect that the berserker might accord you some favorable treatment if you . . .” Novotny was shaking his head. “I very seriously doubt that the data in the encyclopedia will do the enemy the least bit of good, in this case. Nor did I wish to help the enemy.”

The Commander’s voice was relentlessly unchanged. “On the cruiser, you and I both saw the berserker going after the astrogational databank, which it evidently needed but didn’t get.

“We also know the enemy is severely damaged, which means it will be looking for some comparatively near planet where it can commandeer machinery and materials to repair itself; in addition, of course, to wiping out as many unprotected human lives there as it can reach. Because we fought it to a standstill here in space doesn’t mean it won’t be able to poison an atmosphere and depopulate a planet, if it comes on one only lightly defended or takes one unaware. Is all this news to you?”

“I think I understand all this, Commander.”

“Let those who are here with us be witness that you do.” Ridolfi glanced briefly round at the faces of the others, all of them staring now at the accused. “Because so far you are answering yourself right into a trial, Mister Novotny. There are only two things, basically, that a berserker ever wants or needs; victims, and facilities for repair and refitting. And you’ve shown this one where to go for both of them.”

Novotny slumped a little in his chair and closed his eyes. But when he opened them his voice was as steady as before. “Commander, if I am. indeed on trial for my life, or likely to be, then I would like to hear the charges and the evidence as fully as possible before I try to answer them. Go on.”

“Very well.” Ridolfi nodded grimly. “You came on board the Dipavamsa with two copies of your new edition, one of which was subsequently and routinely stowed aboard this launch, along with some other baggage not immediately in use. That copy is still here and available, and since going off combat alert I’ve fed it into our computer and asked for a readout—as the berserker can readily do with the copy you gave it—of all inhabited planets within seven light-years of where our battle was fought. That’s about as far as that berserker is going to get without repairs; and extending the radius another light year or so brings no new planets in.”

The Commander had a paper which he now consulted. “There are seven inhabited planets to be found, according to the Encyclopedia Galactica, within that radius. They are Angkor Apeiron, Comparettia, Epirus, Francavilla, Han Kao, Reissner, and Yang Ch’i. Exact coordinates, RGC, are given for each.” He put one piece of paper on the table and took another from a pocket of his shirt. “I have here part of a spare copy of the Military Information Sheet given us when we filed our flight plan before departing on this trip. Among other things, it lists the six inhabited planets in this same region that have notable ground defenses, or fleet units standing by, or both. As one more bit of evidence, Mr. Novotny, let me state now that you were also a witness with me that a copy of this list of the six defended planets was also seized by the berserker. Any denials yet?” Ridolfi’s fingers were shaking and he put the second paper down. “Not yet, Commander.”

“Though whether you understood the full implications of that seizure at the time . . .”

“I had . . . some idea, I suppose, of what the implications were. Proceed.”

Ridolfi read: “The six defended planets on the military list for this region are: Comparettia, Epirus, Francavilla, Han Kao, Reissner, and Yang Ch’i. Notably missing from this military list is Angkor Apeiron.” The Commander pushed his second paper out on the table beside the first, where anyone who wished might look them over, and then produced a third.

He went on: “According to the latest census figures, as given in this EG article, this world has about eleven million, six hundred thousand inhabitants. Its chief export industries are crystal growing and natural honey. The spaceport is small, but probably the berserker could plunder it for useful machines and materials after it has wiped out what appears to be an undefended populace.

The Commander needed a moment before he could continue. “Angkor Apeiron was discovered by Chang Izanagi, of Hathor, in 7626 CE . . . first colonized only ten standard years later.” His voice was starting to shake a little like his hand. “I suppose your reference work is quite reliable in these particulars? I mean, about there being eleven million people there, especially?”

Novotny paused for thought, began to speak, then stopped and shook his head and tried again. “The EG is the most reliable general reference work in human history, Your Honor—Commander—whatever I am to call you now—”

“ ‘Commander’ will still do.”

“—when it is used for the purposes for which it is intended. Which is to say that it was never meant to serve as a manual of do-it-yourself medicine, or law, or astrogation either. It is a means by which one can verify, or learn, a fact; check a date or name; obtain entree to almost any field of knowledge, and learn where to go for further . . .”

“Yes. Spare us the sales talk, we’re not in the market for a set right now.” Nobody cracked a smile. “Now here in your reliable reference work, which you gave the enemy as a present, are the precise coordinates for the Apeiron system; Sector Omicron 111.254, Ring Eleven 87.58, Galactic Latitude 7.54 North. These figures are correct, are they not? Hasn’t the EG a competent editorial staff, with the technical and scientific knowledge . . .”

“The staff at the home office is more than competent, Commander. It is very good indeed. I speak from personal experience.”

The Commander leaned forward. “Then what, Mr. Novotny, is going to save the inhabitants of Angkor Apeiron from the consequences of your action?”

Novotny leaned back, somewhat haughtily, as if he had at last taken affront. “Only the fact, Commander, that the inhabitants of Angkor Apeiron do not exist.” There was a silence in the day-room, as if each person who looked at the speaker were waiting for his last words to somehow clear themselves out of the air, or for some great hand to reach in from outside the little ship and mend the broken spring of sanity.

The Commander, his shakiness shocked away, was the first to reply: “You mean . . . you claim to have some knowledge . . . that the planet has already been evacuated, or wiped out?”

“I mean, sir, that the star Apeiron has no planets. It has never had any. When the berserker arrives there it will find no victims and no material help; and if your estimate of its damaged condition is as accurate as I would like to believe, before it can go on to some other world it will have died, if that is the proper word, of the injuries your crew has so gallantly inflicted on it.”

“But . . .” The Second Officer was starting a disbelieving protest.

Novotny rounded on him sharply. “Why do you suppose the military authorities protected six settled planets in this region and ignored a seventh?”

“Lack sufficient forces . . .”

“Bah. Correct me if I am wrong, Commander, but would not the general or admiral in charge be more likely to spread his forces thinner, and not leave eleven million people totally undefended, since this sector has become a combat zone? Of course his forces are probably spread all too thin already, which is why I thought it good to direct our late antagonist to a desert system, rather than letting it go challenge some of them. ”

Ridolfi had recovered, or almost. “Desert system? But this EG entry . . . you claim your encyclopedia is the most reliable . . .”

Novotny was holding up a pudgy, magisterial hand, and his face had eased into something that approached a smile. “I will explain, as I have promised. But to do so I must briefly go far afield from berserkers and space warfare.”

His accuser had not yet relaxed a bit. “Do so. Go as far as you like. But be sure that you come back.”

Novotny took another moment to marshall his thoughts before he spoke. “Suppose . . . suppose that you, Commander, are a ruthlessly good businessman, back on Earth or one of the other crowded worlds. And you decide that there is money to be made in purveying information to the public, even as EG makes money. You decide that you will compile and sell a general reference work. Or perhaps one more specialized—on galactography, let us say, listing and describing all the inhabited and explored planets as well as other bodies in the Galaxy that are for some reason interesting.

“You decide that you will put a great deal less work into your encyclopedia than we put into ours, and therefore be able to sell yours for a great deal less money, while including the same information we include. How? The most direct expedient is of course to copy all your articles verbatim from ours; but this the laws and courts, alas for your enterprise, are never going to allow. You are forced to the inconvenience of at least rewriting our material somewhat as you crib.

“Given a little computer help, to rearrange the syntax and replace words with their synonyms, this will not be such an arduous task as might at first appear. Even our several billions of words might be rehashed and reprinted, in slightly different format, in a quite reasonable time. Behold! And Commander Ridolfi’s Encyclopedia of All Knowledge is available for the home data bank, at a much lower fee than ours . . . never mind that you will not provide your customers with the constant updating service that ours receive.

“So! Even with much rewriting, your basic idea is still illegal, still infringes upon our copyrights, does it not? Well, now the answer is no longer quite so clear-cut. But believe me, our lawyers will try, have tried in similar cases, to sue you for a bundle, as soon as they find out what you have done.

“Now you show up for trial, and are on the witness stand, though not with your life at stake of course . . . Commander Ridolfi, I the prosecuting attorney ask you: Is it true or not, that you have compiled your so-called reference work virtually entirely from EG? Now think carefully, for on your answer your whole defense will stand or fall.

“Of course it is not true! you answer ringingly. You used the Merchant Astrogation banks, you used periodicals and the records from dusty archives, you looked in books, you queried eminent authorities in many fields, just as does the great EG itself.

“Ohh? I ask, and now my voice is of the softest, and I cast an eye toward the jury. Then tell me, sir, which of these many indispensable sources did you use to cross-check your information on the planet Angkor Apeiron?”

There was another silence in the dayroom, a different sort of silence this time, and death that had all along seemed close was suddenly light years off again, at one with the berserker’s wake that faded in subspace.

Novotny felt the difference and began to sag. “Because you see, sir, we have made this entry up, population, industries, discovery date and all, as encyclopedists have made up entries for the same reason from very ancient times. We made it up to catch such plagiaristic fish as you, and put it as bait for you within the great EG, and nowhere else in the great universe of worlds or information storage does Angkor Apeiron exist . . . there are a number of other baits like this one, Commander, among our forty million entries. Quite a few, like this one, I had a hand in making up myself; but how many there are altogether I do not know; no one man or woman knows them all. The ordinary user is of course never going to hear of Angkor Apeiron anywhere and is therefore never going to look it up. If he comes upon it while browsing at his reading machine, he is only treated to a dull and minor fantasy that he will soon forget.”

Novotney let himself sink back into a chair that no longer seemed to be a dock above the edge of death. Then he turned his head to a wallscreen showing space, and looked off into the nebular cloudbanks of the Deep. “I wonder if it can even wonder how it was tricked, or how it tricked itself . . . I know that it could never understand.”

1976

BENEATH THE HILLS OF AZLAROC

His name was Francisco Sorokin, and he had walked on the surface of a neutron star. Or so he said, when he reappeared in the nameless city, the only place that could be called a city on the strange world of Azlaroc.

“You expect anyone to believe that?” Miletus Millbrae scoffed; he recognized Sorokin, knew him slightly, felt contempt for him as a harmless braggart and a vagabond, a quack anchorite who spent about half his time in the remote mathematical deserts of the world and the other half in town convincing tourists that he was a mysterious and romantic figure. It was quite possibly true that he knew more about the deserts than did any other man.

Sorokin gave a slight l-don’t-care-if-you-believe-me-or-not gesture, the equivalent of a shrug, and stood before a slab of polished wood imported at great cost, pondering the bartender’s recent automatic query as to what he would like to have. At the moment he and Milfbrae were the tavern’s only customers.

The gesture of indifference had been not very convincing, Millbrae thought; he would have expected that a man like Sorokin could do better. Millbrae studied the other’s face, which he was able to do readily enough because they were near-contemporaries on Azlaroc, each of them having settled here about fifty years ago.

“Brandy, Year ’475,” Millbrae ordered.

The bartender was no machine, but a man who evidently liked the work, and like most human bartenders, a recent settler. As a comparative newcomer he could of course converse more readily with the tourists who made up a large part of his trade. This year’s tourists, whom Millbrae saw through about fifty veils, were blurred enough to him to make recognition of facia! features difficult. “Sorry, sir, we seem to be out. We’re getting a liquor shipment from Recycling in about eight hours, so if you’d care to try tonight or tomorrow . . . meanwhile I can offer ’476.”

“Bah. I have no urge to swallow silk, just to be sociable. My bloodstream cries for booze.” Of course only one veil lay between ’475 and ’476, but to a stomach of the wrong yeargroup the stuff would be completely inert.

“I’ll take a shot of that ’476. My very year.” Sorokin turned around, leaning with his elbows on the bar, looking somehow bigger and more formidable than before. “Do you don’t believe me. Well, I suppose I’ve cried wolf far too often.” A single point of light from the one veil that lay between them made a small sparkle at his elbow.

“Wolf?”

“An old story.” Sorokin looked off into space.

This performance is getting better, Millbrae thought to himself. “What have you for ’475?” he asked the bartender.

The man tapped a button for an inventory readout. “Whisky. Bhang. Schnapps. Rum . . .?”

“Something with rum in it. Very cold.” Hoping for amusement, Millbrae looked back at Sorokin, and made his own expression one of interest with just the right amount of doubt. “So tell me about walking on the neutron star.”

Sorokin smacked his lips over his brandy of ’476. “Still tastes good. I’ll tell you first a name, and then perhaps you’ll be willing to believe the rest.”

An old settler passed, a man or woman from hundreds of years ago, so far warped by hundreds of veils from Sorokin’s and Millbrae’s shared reality that he—or she was little more than a drift of visible vibrations in the air, whose zone of passage included the comer of Millbrae’s modern table without in the least disturbing the simultaneous arrival of his rum drink. An old-settler bartender, or more probably a machine of that era, came in the form of a similar blur to take his order across the ancient, polished wood. No questions of communication with the three men already there; from their viewpoint, no one had really entered.

“A name?” Millbrae maintained his cultivated expression, but suddenly he thought he knew the name; it was the beginning of an awesome understanding. More people were coming into the tavern now, tourists or recent settlers, laughing. Their voices were slurred in Millbrae’s ears but still intelligible.

“Ramachandra,” said Sorokin. And though he had not spoken, the name loudly, the happy group who had just entered were silent instantly. The contemporaneous bartender raised his head and then ceased to move, and all of them for a moment were quiet as statuary.

It had been nearly an Azlarocean year earlier, one fewer veil draped upon them all, when Sorokin with his own hands had given the box to Ramachandra. It was a small black rhomboid box with sides of unequal size, and Sorokin had clung to it like a fanatic while passing secretaries, bodyguards, and functionaries of unknown function that the wealthy recluse had gathered about himself. Sorokin had sent word of his find ahead, and when he finally confronted Ramachandra himself in one of the city’s typical underground apartments, the potentate leaned forward in his thronelike chair, said: “Well?” and held out his hand.

Half a dozen others had recently made the same gesture, almost as imperiously but in vain. This time Sorokin honored it, handing over the heavy black metal case, which was just about big enough to have contained a human heart or brain.

One of the many chamberlains nearby made a disgusted sound as soon as he got a good look at the box. “Not even the right size or shape. Is it even a message carrier?”

Ramachandra raised three imperious fingers. “Beside the distorted nameplate on this device is a mark that seems identical to one I put secretly on each unit that we sent out with the robots. Callisto? Come here and look. Could the very shape of the box have been changed? I see no sign that it’s been crushed.”

The woman called Callisto was either a tourist or a very new settler, for the details of her face and garments were somewhat blurred in Sorokin’s vision by his veils; while Ramachandra himself seemed to belong to Sorokin’s own yeargroup of settlers, or to one very near to it in time, for they could behold each other with perfect clarity.

Callisto was tall, and like most of the people to be seen on Azlaroc, of youthful bearing but indeterminate age. Now she was looking closely at the box as Ramachandra continued to turn it over in his brown, bejeweled, and powerful-seeming hands. “Sir,” she said finally, “I had not foreseen that its very shape might change, that it might carry back some residual alteration in the space within its atoms or its molecules. But I cannot say that such a change should be impossible.” She lifted black veil-blurred eyes to Sorokin. “Where did you find this thing?”

“Along the peak of Ruler Ridge. Some twenty or twenty-two kilometers to the south of here.”

“Which side of the ridge? And how near the top?” Callisto asked him sharply.

“The east side, toward the city, milady.” There was some mockery perhaps in the honorific form of address. “And it was embedded in the ground not half a meter from the top. Just about half of the box was showing, fortunately with the little nameplate clear: ‘Finder please return to Rama—’ ”

Ramachandra himself cut in: “They tell me you are always finding or reporting mysterious things out in the desert. Have you reported this to anyone else?”

“I have not. As for my finding and seeing and knowing other things out there, why I suppose I’m there more than anyone else, except perhaps some of the original settlers.”

“Are you amenable to being hired?” the man on the throne-chair asked. He named a sum that was half again as much as most jobs paid. “Plus food and quarters here in my suite as long as you’re employed, which will be for an indefinite period.”

“My duties?”

“Consultant. On the desert and its topography and its wonders, shall we say?” Ramachandra’s voice was dry. “I shall require that you remain usually in my suite, and communicate with the outside only as I direct, while you are in my employ. Can you start at once?”

Sorokin appeared to take thought. “I can.”

“Good. Now let’s see what our message carrier holds.”

One of Ramachandra’s male aides was already leading a machine into the room. At a nod from his employer he tapped out on its input DAMAGED RECORDER/MESSAGE CARRIER TO BE READ, and then he took the black device from Ramachandra’s hand and gave it to the hand-like grippers of the machine.

“Everyone out of the room, please.” Ramachandra had raised his voice slightly. “Except you, Callisto, I’ll want your opinion.” His eyes swiveled to Sorokin. “And you stay too. If this thing proves not to be authentic I’ll want you right on hand.”

For what? Sorokin wondered uneasily. He had heard some strange stories about Ramachandra, who was a little-known man among Azlaroc’s small permanent population though he had been a settler here now for some fifty years. There were hints of violence in the stories, and more than hints of eccentricity. But Sorokin made no protest now, only took a seat at the powerful man’s right hand while Callisto sat just as formally at his left.

The machine was now ready to display the contents of the message carrier, and it dimmed the ambient lighting and began to project a hologram into the middle of the room. The indoor space faced by the three seated people seemed to disappear, and they saw before them the desert, utterly lifeless. Not pure yellow as was the desert immediately surrounding the city, nor mottled gold and pink as on the high land of Ruter Ridge, but pale orange and mauve, as Sorokin had often seen it in the depression on the city’s other side. Ten or twelve thousand kilometers from the city in that direction the land began to run under blacksky, the sky of darkness, and into the uninhabitable zone.

Two people, Ramachandra and Callisto, were foreground in the hologram, standing a few paces from the camera that had recorded it and looking toward the camera, which was evidently supported by some person—no, Ramachandra had mentioned robots, hadn’t he?—that was sinking slowly into the ground. With their eyes fixed studiously on a point near Sorokin, the images of Callisto and Ramachandra slid slowly upward, and the orange and mauve surface of the world rose too.

Beginning in the extreme foreground of the image and zigzagging off between mathematical hills, to vanish at last in the far background beneath the blacksky zone, ran what might, on some more ordinary world, have been taken for a dried out watercourse. On some planet where it could rain and conditions were halfway reasonable for men to dwell, or even on some world where clouds dripped liquid lead to burn out channels in the landscape, the great crack might have been taken for a narrow, desiccated gully.

But on mild Azlaroc it never rained, not even liquid lead. This purple-bottomed ditch into which the robot sank (By ail the veils, Sorokin hoped it was a robot not a human!) was made not by erosion but by subduction, the slow infolding of the outer surface of the world down into unexplored depths beneath.

Men had not dug too deeply here, because they feared to break a balance of natural forces. Azlaroc was not a planet, and what lay beneath its crust was no mere molten rock. This world had a unique constitution, containing types of matter unknown elsewhere. It had a star-like mass, but zones of natural gravity inversion that had made partial human colonization possible; and it whirled through space in an intricate orbital dance with a fluid-core type pulsar and a small black hole. Even the pulsar was peculiar, having a rotation period of almost four seconds. So Azlaroc was a strange-enough world for anyone.

Even without the veils that yearly formed and fell from space.

The robot, assuming it to be about the size and shape of a man, was now about waist deep in the subduction trench. On Earth and elsewhere such trenches existed in the ocean bottoms, infolding rock and other matter from the sea floors into the planet’s mantle, and incidentally forming an impassable barrier to the spread of plant life along the bottom. On Earth, some ten centimeters of surface per year might be carried into the depths, with approximately the same amount being simultaneously evolved from sub-oceanic ridges. On Azlaroc the analogous process seemed capable of consuming, at least in some zones of rapid action, ten centimeters or more of surface per minute. Sorokin in his wanderings had sometimes seen some of the smaller geometric solids that were the landscape’s natural features borne down into the trenches and out of sight.

Just as the robot making the recording was now about to go. Now the recorder itself was on the very bottom of the trench, level with the purple floor that looked solid and yet not. For a moment longer Ramachandra’s and Callisto’s eyes looking down at it could be seen, and beyond their imaged heads the yellowish sky-that-was-not-a-sky of Azlaroc with a tail asymptotic pinnacle of landscape breaking off in radiant fire against it at an altitude of a hundred meters or so. And then the hologram went dark with the absolute blackness of underground. Dark save for a digital display of hours and minutes, which was evidently generated within the recorder itself and now appeared projected near the floor of the room in which the three people watched. The display was running up from a zero hour, minute and second that had evidently been set as the time when the carrier machine began its descent into the trench.

Ramachandra’s voice in the darkened room was tense as he leaned forward to make an adjustment to the machine, “We’ll speed it up a little. No telling how long this phase of darkness lasts.” The digital chronometer figures blurred into a faster flow. One hour. Two. Three.

“Why shouldn’t the darkness last the whole time the camera’s underground?” Sorokin asked. He had gotten himself involved in this now, for better or worse, and he decided he had better learn all he could of what was going on. “I mean, I assume this recorder was somehow carried through the interior of the world and brought up again by natural forces at Ruler Ridge. How long ago did you put it into the trench?”

Ramachandra was leaning forward in his throne-like chair, staring absorbedly into the darkness of the hologram, and did not answer. “About one year,” said Callisto, abstractedly. Sorokin had almost expected the answer, having come to note the same periodicity in all sorts of apparently unrelated Azlarocean events. Years elsewhere might be based on some seasonal or astronomical cycle of little importance to society, or on the mere borrowed standard year of Earth. But systemic years here, each marked by the falling of its veil from space, were a central fact of human life.

Callisto went on: “We put down more than twenty recorders in all, at different points along different subduction trenches. This is the first to be recovered, and I rather suspect it may also be the last.”

“Why?” Sorokin asked. In the hologram there was still only darkness, accented rather than relieved by the flicker of time (one hundred twenty days now on the chronometer, one hundred twenty-one . . .) and by the signals that the watching eye and brain began to generate within themselves. “I mean, I get the impression that this isn’t an ordinary research project, and . . . it’s Doctor Callisto, isn’t it? Haven’t you been involved in physics research on Azlaroc for some time? I’ve seen or heard your name in that connection, now that I think about it.”

She looked at him more closely than before. “Yes, I have been involved in such research. And you’re also right that this is something a little different.”

Ramachandra had reached, out again to slow the machine, reverse it briefly, and now with a scowl he was letting it run forward again, somewhat more slowly this time. “Thought I saw something there—but no. This is engineering, Mr. Sorokin. We’re going to achieve something specific aside from any gain of knowledge.”

“What are we out to achieve, Mr. Ramachandra?”

The other man shifted his position but remained intent on the hologram and did not look round as he spoke. “I intend to leave Azlaroc.”

For a moment Sorokin thought that the other was saying euphemistically that he was soon to die; settlers spoke of leaving Azlaroc in that sense when they spoke of it at all. But death could be easily managed without so straining one’s eyes after stray gleams of enlightenment issuing from very strangely mangled and very expensive recorders; and this was not a man for euphemisms.

“But you’re a settler here,” Sorokin said, as he thought, reasonably enough.

It had been written of one of the old king-capitalists of Earth that facing his stare was like standing in the path of an oncoming locomotive. Locomotives, transport devices of the time, had evidently been (like some of the men who owned them) exceedingly powerful and very crudely controlled, ready to push through human flesh as indifferently as air. Sorokin was reminded of this now when Ramachandra stopped the machine. momentarily and turned to give him a full glance.

“I settled here by free choice some forty-nine years ago, Mr. Sorokin. And now it is my equally free choice to leave.”

Sorokin could only look at him dumbly. Forty-nine of the impenetrable veils of Azlaroc were bound around the atoms of this man’s body, and now he had decided to depart. Even if there had been only a single veil to hold him down, not all the power of all the engines ever built by man could lift a single atom of his body free.

In the hologram the images of bright numbers were poised in darkness. “Mr. Sorokin. Since you are going to be working for me, let me make sure you understand me, as Doctor Callisto here has come to do.” Ramachandra gestured economically toward a corner of the room where a set of carved pieces waited on a mosaic table. “We are playing chess. You tell me it is impossible for me to move my pawn from the second rank back to the first, and I have no choice but to agree, since I have bound myself to abide by the rules of chess. Now it is a common misconception that leaving Azlaroc after getting caught under a veil is impossible in the same sense as is moving one’s pawn backward. It is not, though of course it has never yet been accomplished. I for one have not agreed to any such rule.” With the air of one who has made a point to his own complete satisfaction, he turned back to his machine and started the numbers piling up again.

Sorokin raised his eyes to Cailisto’s; the look she returned refused any agreement that her employer was mad.

Sorokin asked them both: “Do you expect that this recorder will give you some clue toward getting through the veils?”

The others exchanged a quick look. “Getting through them in the usual sense may riot be necessary,” said Ramachandra. “Have you ever studied the way in which the veils contract about this world?”

Before he could reply, Sorokin’s eyes were dazzled by a burst of blue-white radiance from the hologram. The projector would of course create no image of an intensity injurious to human eyes, but the blurred brightness of this one suggested that its original might well have been of such power. There was no longer any up or down perceptible in the image, which was of layers of blue and white in many shadings and combinations, layers and stripes of light and seeming fire that riffled past first horizontally and then diagonally as the robot or whatever was left of it changed attitudes during its speeding passage through—what? What medium was it traversing now, at some unknown depth beneath the habitable zone?

Azlaroc was as round as a planet or a star, and beneath its cloudy pseudo-sky, which was really the upper boundary of a thin but stable region of gravity-inversion, it had greater habitable area by far than Earth. Its surface was warmed gently by internal heat, lighted by harmless radiation that several causes splashed across the seeming sky, and covered by air and moisture that men with their elegant machinery had generated for themselves and continued to recycle as required. After a veil fell the next thing men had to do was produce new air and water for the next season’s tourists; otherwise those coming down would have quickly died amid air of ample pressure, as each atom of the air of other years was bound unusably inside its portion of that year’s veil. The partial pressures of the various co-existing atmospheres never added up to more than unity; the same effect that made settlers warp farther from present reality with every year that passed, each veil that fell, was even more marked at the molecular and atomic levels.

Sorokin had seen, from time to time and with no particular interest, scientists’ descriptions of their careful probings into Azlaroc’s rlnysterious interior. Jargony recitals of numbers and pressures and phases, densities and more numbers and relativistic effects and still more numbers and mathematics, with suggestions that space near the core of Azlaroc might connect directly somehow with space at the crystalline surface of the companion pulsar. This fact or possibility of course had some connection with the veils . . .

The famed veils of Azlaroc were formed out of material that the triple system gathered to itself as it swung on its way through space. They were the stuff between the stars, worked on by the unimaginable gravitation and radiation, the electric and magnetic fields that obtained within the belts of space that all ships had to avoid when traveling within this system. Once every systemic year a veil of this transformed matter fell on Azlaroc. The first veil that men ever saw took an exploring party—who thus became the first old settlers—by surprise. They saw it as a net of gossamer that fell toward them from a sky gone mad. After discovering that they could not leave, they discovered that life here was not uncomfortable, and healthy life was considerably prolonged. Since that time some thousands of other settlers had come, voluntarily.

Sorokin had seen the scientists’ estimates that about forty million of the impervious, indestructible veils had fallen on Azlaroc and made themselves part of its fabric since the unique triple system had reached its present apparently stable state. Forty million years . . . not long, on the time scale of astronomy, but imagine forty million of those veils, all gathered somewhere . . .

The speeding blue stripes of the hologram ran through a complex sequence of change in which they first narrowed, then widened out again, before contracting abruptly into a singularity of darkness that exploded outward into light, this time the bold glory of a star-filled universe.

“By all the veils!” Sorokin found that he was standing, his hand clutching as if instinctively toward Ramachandra, who brushed its irritation from him. Ramachandra had stopped time in the hologram, frozen its action.

One hundred eighty-seven days after going down into the subduction zone, the recorder had somehow emerged among the stars, whose splendid images now filled the room.

Only after staring at the scene before him for a few moments, did Sorokin make out that the stars in its lower half formed a slightly blurred mirror-image of those above, as if reflected in a frozen ocean of great smoothness. And all the stars were bluer than one would have expected a random selection of the galaxy to appear, as if these were being viewed from the bottom of some steep gravitational well.

“I thought there was nowhere on Azlaroc from which one could see . . .” Sorokin sat down again and let the foolish words trail off. He knew there could be no such view from any point on Azlaroc.

Ramachandra reached to push the speed control of the machine up to a real-time pace. At once all the depicted stars began to move, blurring into streaks with the speed at which they rose and set. Each star moved from horizon to horizon in less than two seconds, while its image simultaneously tracked across the unbelievable mirrorlike plain below. And the whole scene in its entirety was jumping, pulsing, at about one third the speed of a calm human heart. The innumerable speedstreaked star-images by which the plain was visible all jumped in unison with every pulse, the pulses being timed to coincide with . . .”

“The pulsar, then, the neutron star. It recorded this scene from the pulsar’s surface . . . but wait. No, that’s . . .”

“Impossible, my friend? Ha? Hey?” It was the first time Sorokin had seen the big man smile. Ramachandra was elated now. He stopped the action in the hologram, reversed it, ran it forward slowly from the point of the recorder’s entry onto the pulsar’s surface, savoring every moment.

Sorokin had the feeling that he was the one who was being swindled here, shown a concocted show, gotten to believe in the unbelievable. But why should they take such pains to fool him?

No, the recorder could not possibly have been planted out there in the wilderness for him to find. It had been half buried in the matter of the Azlarocean surface, and no one had known that he was going that way.

But it was far more preposterous that the recorder could have snugly and smugly come to rest in a field of a hundred billion gravities, where not even an atom could remain intact. First the gross structure of any kind of matter would be whisked away, as if by some magician’s gesture, and then the relatively fragile electron-orbits would be bent in and collapsed, and then the nuclei themselves. From weak to strong, all the orders of physics bowing down in turn before the Great God Gravity. Electrons mashed brutally into positive nucleons, nothing left but the neutron soup that made a neutron star, and that could still hold against a hundred billion gravities in this last stand before the ultimate collapse, the ultimate abyss.

What was left was a star (if one could call it that) maybe ten kilometers in diameter, with maybe the mass of the Sun. Radiating very little in the visible part of the spectrum, but an avalanche of radio waves and X rays and other wavelengths, in its furious searchlight beam that swept and pulsed with its rotation. Take up a cubic centimeter of its solid surface, if you can dig up what has some billions of times the strength of steel. Lift it on your thumbnail—yes, do that. Hundreds of millions of tons. Drop it off your imaginary thumbnail onto the surface of the Earth and it will fall all the way through the hard solid Earth, like a rock through a cloud of thin vapor, and then fall back again toward the center.

Vet the recorder, wherever it had been, had obviously survived though its attendant robot had been lost.

Ramachandra stopped the action again. “Diaphaneity reading?” he snapped.

Calisto was peering at the hologram through another instrument. “Impossible to get a good one,” she answered, her voice tense and at the same time abstracted.

“We’ve got to be looking out onto that surface through the veils. All the veils. Damn near forty million of them. Nothing breaks them, but they can be stretched. And the recorders that didn’t come back—some of them may have gotten out.”

“Mr. Ramachandra.” Dr. Callisto straightened. “I must in all conscience tell you I think it is far more likely that the other recorders were simply lost, destroyed, somewhere between here and the pulsar’s surface. The second most likely possibility, in my opinion, is that they reached the surface of the pulsar and were not protected by the veils as this one seems to have been. Remember, ten-to-the-eleventh standard gravities, approximately.”

“And is there a third possibility? Have you calculated that far?”

“All right. Yes, of course, I have as yet found no evidence that your theory is impossible. All the veils of Azlaroc were evidently shielding this recorder when it reached the pulsar’s surface, and they might be enough to protect a man as well. It is still my opinion that the veils cannot be pierced by any matter, or broken by any force.”

“Excuse me,” Sorokin put in, “but in that case I do not see what all this has to do with getting a man out from under them.”

Callisto’s gaze shifted to him. “Have you studied topology, Mr. Sorokin? In the field of—”

“Don’t bury him in technicalities,” interrupted Ramachandra. “Sorokin, I asked you before if you know how the veils fall. What I meant was this: there is some disagreement among authorities, but it seems at least probable that now and again a veil falls in a looped manner, something like a sheet thrown carelessly upon a bed. In a sense we are still under it, but actually its outer surface, folded around, is what touches us; topologically we are still outside it. I think the veil of ‘476, your year and mine, fell in that manner; if that is so, it can be mathematically shown that all the people of our particular yeargroup are still outside it.”

Sorokin knew a strange hollow feeling. “Then we might be able to leave.”

“If we can locate the folding of the veil, and go around it.”

. . . Until this very moment Sorokin had thought himself contented here in self-imposed imprisonment. Now . . . “But what of all the other veils that have fallen on us since our first year?”

“You will be outside those, too,” Callisto said, “if you are really outside your first year’s veil, and can get around its folded edge.”

“And where will the edge be?”

“Perhaps somewhere just underground, almost in reach. Perhaps on the surface of the neutron star. Perhaps in the black hole.”

Sorokin blinked. If he could believe that the recorder had survived the pulsar’s surface, why should he not swallow any other scientific incredibility? But, viewing matters the other way, he might do better to reject the recorder’s evidence if it required him to accept the proposition he now spoke aloud: “One end of an object is here and the other end there? One end inside a black hole and the other out?”

“If the veils of Azlaroc are objects, yes.” Ramachandra was getting his locomotive look again. “I tell you, men need not quail before the seemingly infinite powers that oppose them. How does a mathematician manipulate an infinite number?” He turned his gaze briefly on Callisto. “Pick up another infinite number and beat it over the head with that. Force it into the shape you want. Right?”

Her attitude seemed to say that she did not necessarily agree, but neither was she going to argue.

“All right, don’t answer. But stripped of your scientist’s legalistic precision, that’s what it all comes down to. I know I’m dealing with physical reality here, not some mathematician’s invention. But the principle’s the same. If I can’t generate the power I need to pull me free from Azlaroc, I’ll put a harness on a greater power to do it.” The matter settled, not that it had ever been in doubt, he turned back to the hologram.

After some eleven minutes on the surface of the neutron star, during which time it seemed to make several shifts at instantaneous speed to different locations on the surface (with each shift the starstreaks and their reflections changing angles in the black, glistening mirror below), the recorder was somehow sucked back into the dark portal in space from which it had emerged, and thence back to the racing bands of light. Some three hundred and seventy standard days after it had left, it was back on the surface of Azlaroc. Its eye-positioner still functioned phototropically, and when Sorokin came into sight its eye was above ground and it centered the hologram on him. By that time it was some fifty or sixty centimeters down from the top of Ruler Ridge.

“I’m going, then. I’m going to take the chance.” Ramachandra with a slap of his hand shut off the hologram, and the room’s lights restored themselves to normal. “I intend to view the rest of this later, Sorokin, to see if you really brought the device straight to me, as you said. For the moment I’ll assume you did, and ask you a question: Are you coming with me, away from Azlaroc and back to the great world?”

“Down into that subduction funnel? Across the neutron star, looking for a folding in that veil, just to see if we can rejoin the aging universe? And if we don’t find the folding on the pulsar, I suppose we’ll look into the black hole as well. How are we going to recognize a fold in the veil if we should come upon it?”

“To answer your last objection first, we’ll have some specialized instruments along. And if we locate the edge of the fold, no matter where, we should be able to stretch it back with us into that space of blue light-bands, from which an exit into normal space can be arranged. To answer your other questions: yes, yes, and yes. Add another yes if I have left one out. Look here.” With a vast gesture he seemed to scatter machines and hired scientist out of his way and draw Sorokin into a close conference above the surface of a small table. “You and I are year-mates here, so one of us can go exactly where the other goes, as far as veils are concerned. Just coincidence? At this stage in my life I doubt if such a thing exists in a pure form, where human beings are concerned at any rate. Two people going will have a better chance than one of overcoming unforeseen obstacles. Besides . . . there is another reason why I don’t want to go alone.”

“Will I come with you? Why, it seems insane, but yes.” Ever since the chance of leaving Azlaroc had acquired some reality, however tenuous, Sorokin had had the feeling that his own life was passing through a singularity, a condition where the old laws failed to hold, into a new stage where nothing was quite what it had been. Now he saw with bitter clarity that a man who spent his time roaming deserts and trying to be an adventurer had made a grave mistake to settle on all-but-changeless Azlaroc.

He wanted to be an adventurer, but did he really want adventures? Already he perceived the difference. Later the perception would be much more forcible.

He had surprised Ramachandra with his answer, stalled the locomotive for the moment. “Fine,” was all that Ramachandra said, and then reached out to shake his hand.

They had the money to hire the best workshops and men available from ail the yeargroups on the world, and the suits of armor were got ready just in time. Ramachandra wanted to begin his attempt before the next veil fell, as Callisto’s calculations showed that their chances would be at least marginally improved thereby. A ship was kept waiting to carry her offworld at once, out of the veil’s path should it begin to fall prematurely as sometimes happened at this season, She had no intention of being trapped.

Their custom built armor, as Ramachandra explained, was not to help them survive the neutron star, against the powers of which they could hone for no help save that which the veil’s themselves might give; and only partially was the armor meant to help them during their passage through Azlaroc’s solid underground. It had to do that, of course, keep them uncrushed and at a reasonable temperature, and supplied with air and water, while the inner layers of the world hugged them at a few thousand tons per square centimeter of the armor’s surface. But also the suits would have to see them through their hoped-for emergence into space, free of veils and at some planetary distance between Azlaroc and the pulsar, and of course outside the black hole’s lethal Schwarzschild radius. In space the armor must be proof against terrible onslaughts of radiation, and each suit would act as a miniature spaceship, to get the men down on Azlaroc again as safe and free as tourists. All these requirements for the suits were difficult, but not unreasonable, not after men had voyaged in space for thousands of years and had the knowledge gained in all that time to draw upon.

As in all of his affairs, Ramachandra did his best to maintain secrecy. He wanted no gaping crowds to follow him across the desert and behold his immersion in the trench. Callisto was to announce the adventurers’ departure after it had been accomplished, and in half a year the ships routinely passing in and out from Azlaroc would be alerted to begin looking for their signals in space, that they might possibly be picked up there without having to get back down to the surface on their own. Also perhaps his employer had business or personal reasons for secrecy at this point; Sorokin never learned. For himself it did not matter. He realized that among the people he knew fairly well on Azlaroc there was no one whom he felt compelled to notify of what he was about to attempt. And the people outside, the people he knew elsewhere in the galaxy, the ones he had long ago despaired of ever seeing again . . . well, they would be changed by now, of course. People out there aged faster.

Time enough to notify them when he was out, was free again.

The two of them, Ramachandra and Sorokin, headed west across the desert from the city in a flying machine, some weeks after Sorokin’s new employment had begun. Already in the vehicle when they boarded it, besides their bulky armor and a few small items, was a shape covered by cloth and as big as a sizable table. Ramachandra said nothing about it and Sorokin did not ask.

The most dustless, trackless plain unrolled behind them as their flyer hurtled westward under the low sky at a speed that rapidly mounted to thousands of kilometers per hour. Automatic baffles ran out on its airfoils to deaden the shock wave it dragged along the narrow space between the land and sky. Callisto had remained behind in the city, spaceships near, refusing to take the chance of being marooned on Azlaroc by a possible early falling of the veil. She remained in television contact with Ramachandra as he flew, briefing him on the results of last-minute tests on the armor, and the results Of her latest calculations.

The three principal bodies in the Azlaroc system were approaching nearly the same relative positions they had been in when the surviving recorder was carried down into the trench by a robot.

“And be sure to send some dead mass of a few hundred kilograms ahead of you,” Callisto cautioned. “I know I told you that before, but I reiterate because it seems to be very important. Did you provide yourself with something?”

“I did.” Ramachandra glanced once over his shoulder at the massive slab, with a draped, uneven upper surface, that rode behind them in the cabin. “It won’t be long now. I think I see blacksky ahead.”

Only unusual wanderers like Sorokin ever came this far across the plains. There was no physical reason why men could not live in sight of the blacksky, or even live directly under it if they brought lights of their own. The air and temperature beneath it were the same as those beneath the sky of light. But psychologically, to live under blacksky seemed to be practically impossible. Imagine the darkest, most ominous thunderstorm of Earth. Imagine the totality of Sol’s eclipse, and the deepest night beneath a cloud of poisonous volcanic ash. Multiply the effect of terror by whatever factor will overload your nerves. Thus the blacksky, cutting off about half of Azlaroc’s vast surface from the use of men.

Once, in a period of something akin to suicidal madness, Sorokin had journeyed toward it and under it. First in a wheeled vehicle that took days to race him this far across the plains; then by foot, his vehicle left waiting, open-doored, in the lifeless and silent wilderness where no one was going to come along to bother it.

He had kept repeating to himself that there was nothing in or under blacksky that would be intrinsically harmful or especially dangerous. What looked like terrible cloud, was only a failure, for various well-understood reasons, of the radiation that otherwise caused the “sky” of Azlaroc to give the impression of yellow and mildly overcast daylight. Blacksky was barely in sight ahead of him when he stopped the vehicle, but it seemed to leap closer with every stride as he began to walk toward it.

He had no light with him. He had no light.

He kept on walking until the appalling pall of it was up to his zenith, stretching to his right and left in a fuzzy boundary of mild collision with the living glow. And then he faced on into the dark and walked some more. He was terrified, and didn’t understand why he was making himself do this. Through sheer fascination with his own terror. And the knowledge that he could go back, yes, he could turn around at any time.

The faint diffuse bandwork of his own shadow strode ahead of him, cast by the light of living sky behind. But beyond a short distance ahead he could see nothing. He moved beyond terror to—something else.

He walked thus for a distance that under ordinary circumstances would have exhausted him, stumbling over the smaller spheres and pyramids of the landscape when the light grew too bad to see at all. For a long time he was afraid to turn back and see how far he was getting from the light. When at last he turned, there seemed hardly more thin a sliver of brightness along the base of the eastern sky.

It was enough. He had satisfied whatever demon had driven him to this remote edge of the humanly habitable. Now almost relaxed and able to feel his exhaustion, he walked toward the light. After a while, as the light grew high in the sky again, some feeling of terror returned, and he had to run with the pressure of the Night behind him, as if it could pursue him . . .

Now in the flyer, he and Ramachandra didn’t need to go under blacksky to reach the subduction trench. Sorokin supposed it would have made no difference whatever to Ramachandra if they had. Why should it, to a man who was willing to try the surface of the neutron star?

They landed within a few score meters of the trench, and with the help of powered hand-lifters soon emptied the vehicle of all their gear, including the great slab, which Sorokin discovered now was stone. Not the beaten, homogenized world-stuff of Azlaroc, matter with all the fight seemingly knocked out of it, but textured, beautiful material from somewhere out in the broad cosmos. It was white stone marbled with subtle veins and streaks of varying shades of brown. And when Ramachandra casually pulled the covers aside, Sorokin saw that the stone was carved in the form of a gisant, a mortuary sculpture somewhat larger than life, depicting a man and woman supine in death, their tightly draped bodies both of heroic mold. The man was Ramachandra, the woman unknown to Sorokin, but beautiful.

Ramachandra treated the statuary as if it were any other mass of a few hundred kilograms, about to be used as a kind of ballast. With Sorokin’s help he positioned it near the lip of the purple-floored subduction trench. As soon as it was settled on the ground it began to creep perceptibly toward the place where it was going to disappear.

“Let’s get the suits on,” Ramachandra said. He was watching his partner closely now, as if he thought some last-minute reluctance possible. But Sorokin was moving to get ready.

“So you are using that,” Callisto said from the television screen. Her eyes appeared to be turned toward the gisant. Its stone had evidently been brought to Azlaroc within a few years of Sorokin’s own arrival, for he could see the details of the carving with almost perfect clarity.

Ramachandra grunted. “Any reason why we shouldn’t use this?”

“From my scientific point of view? No.”

“You said heavy stone would be ideal. All right. Callisto, we’re just leaving the flyer here. When you make your announcement of our departure you can send someone to get it, or do as you like.”

“I’ll see that it’s picked up. Ramachandra, you have about one minute to stand in the trench.”

“Time to get into the suits.”

The suits were giant-sized on the outside, with servo-powered mechanical limbs. The internal space for the wearer, or occupant, was well protected and relatively small.

They got into the suits and then it was indubitably time to go. The huge sculpture had tipped on end into the trench, and the man and woman were going down side by side, headfirst, looking ludicrous rather than heroic now with their giant marble feet sticking up into the air. As Sorokin watched, the stone seemed to accelerate in its downward passage, like a doomed ship sinking into water.

Looking at each other steadily, the two men marched to the trench and stepped into it with their mechanical feet.

“Do you feel fear, wanderer?”

“No more than you do, man of power.”

“I think I have guessed right about you, Sorokin. You are going toward the same goal that I am, but for different reasons.”

“According to our agreement, my pay continues until this is over ”

It was the first time that Sorokin had heard his employer laugh. “Very well. Until you are back on the surface of Azlaroc, one way or another. See to it, Callisto.”

“Very well, sir.”

The stone carving was now completely gone. The lips of the trench made a grating sound as they sagged closed again above it. Ramachandra’s suit was now submerged to its knees, and Sorokin was in somewhat deeper. He had no unusual sensations so far, but it was disconcerting and at the same time rather elating to realize that he was going to lead the way. Now the level of the trench’s bottom reached his suit’s crotch. The last moment at which he might have changed his mind and scrambled out had probably gone by. But it was all right. For the immediate future his suit was very probably capable of protecting him, and beyond that he did not try to think.

He was sinking faster.

Ramachandra looked down with apparent irritation at being made a follower. “Sorokin, I would suggest you dose yourself with Chronotran before imprisonment in the rock”—it wasn’t really rock, of course, and here for the first time Sorokin thought he had caught his employer in an error brought on by nervousness—” has bored you seriously. The experts say the drug is more effective when taken before the time of real need.”

“I’ll take some soon, then. Thank you for the suggestion. See you down below. Or up above.”

If either Ramachandra or Callisto had any more advice for him just then, he could not hear it. The purplish bottom of the trench flowed up like water around his faceplate, and he was going down.

Only a few moments later, when it came to him that this was just the kind of darkness he would have experienced out at the nadir of blacksky, did fear begin to take hold of him. With a curling of his limbs he brought himself entirely inside the central chamber of his suit, and then he took some Chronotran. The drug did not kill fear, but gave one control over the subjective sense of time; moments of joy or tranquility might be tremendously prolonged, while times of dreary boredom or pain could be as much compressed.

It seemed to Sorokin that the blackness around his suit, and the sense of overwhelming pressure whenever he tried to use its servo-powered limbs, lasted only a little while. Never mind that the figures on his trip recorder added up to scores of days, or that his body went again and again through routines necessary to maintain health. Almost before he had time to anticipate a change, change was around him, in the form of the same bands of blue-white radiance that he had seen in the hologram. A glance at instruments showed him that the pressure and the radiation flux outside his suit had both climbed enormously. He was surprised to see that the temperature, so far at least, was going down.

He gave himself the antidote for Chronotran, wanting to be ready for action when required. Shortly afterward he caught sight of the gisant moving ahead of him through bluewhite space, in the direction from which the transverse bands of light seemed to flow. Spinning very slowly as it moved, it trailed something like a shockwave, within the boundaries of which his suit of armor rode.

Working the suit’s legs and arms again, he found he could maneuver amid this medium of light like a swimmer in thick water. Turning his suit with paddling motions, he saw another like it, Ramachandra’s, come tumbling slowly after him from the direction in which the bands of light marched off to disappear. One thing that surprised Sorokin was that he continued to maintain an “up” and “down,” not only as a matter of visual orientation, but as if his suit had an actual artificial gravity of, its own like a large spaceship, “down” being permanently toward its feet. Ramachandra had discussed the suit’s systems with him thoroughly, and no artificial gravity had been mentioned. It must, therefore, be some effect of the environment.

The speeding bluish stripes of light that formed his visual world were now repeating the sequence Sorokin had witnessed in the hologram, narrowing and widening, with what seemed to be different layers of stripes making moire patterns that had not been visible in the recording—patterns that jarred and jumped with each measured gigantic heart-throb of the pulsar. And now with somehow unexpected suddenness the singular contraction came, to pinch his whole world down to a mere point of light . . .

“By ail the veils!”

Sorokin was standing upon the starry universe of bluish arcs, and holding the neutron star above his head. Then he realized that he had come out onto the star’s surface upside down, while the gravity inside his suit maintained its orientation toward his feet. He moved his arms and legs and tipped the world around him until his feet were down. Wrapped and shielded within all forty million veils of Azlaroc, he stood untouched, unharmed, upon the spinning pulsar’s surface. In a moment he understood that he had been brought to one of the poles of its rotation, for the star-circles lay all parallel to the horizon.

A few paces away, the gisant drifted almost buoyantly, only one corner of it dragging on the mirror surface that was a neutron solid with billions of times the rigidity of steel. The surface was seemingly as smooth as if machined, all the way out to the horizon. The highest mountain on the star should be just big enough for a man to stub his toe on it and trip, and to climb that mountain, to move a human’s mass upward a few centimeters in this gravity, should take a lifetime’s effort from a long-lived Azlarocean settler. Not that a human should be standing here at all. If the tidal forces did not shred him into atoms, and the gravity haul his particles indistingutshably into the proton mass, then the electrical forces generated within the spinning, superfluid core should blast him outward as a cloud of X rays, melded with the pulsar’s searchlight beam of radiation as focused by its incredible magnetic field.

Ramachandra was coming toward him over the surface now, suit enclosed in a vaguely visible, transparent bubble, walking like a man underwater or in low gravity as he worked inside his suit with the instruments that were supposed to find the fold in their year-veil. His lips were moving, but no sound or signal came through the multiplex communication system to Sorokin.

“I can’t hear you,” he said when Ramachandra looked at him, and lip-read the other’s answer: Nor I you.

Ramachandra turned away then, briefly, and approached the sculpture, which was also enclosed in an almost imperceptible bubble of some force. When he reached out one of his suit’s metallic hands toward the carven woman, the entire gisant with its bubble instantaneously disappeared at the first touch. Part of Ramachandra’s suit-hand vanished at the same moment, and from the metal stump there sprang a sudden glow, more intense than any of the flares that occasionally appeared on the surrounding surface of the star. The brightness of the flaring metal, which was probably undergoing some thermonuclear reaction, slowly declined.

Now bearing a coruscating firework in one hand, Ramachandra turned imperturbably back to Sorokin. Don’t try to touch helmets for communication, he mouthed.

“I won’t. What are your plans now?”

The fold isn’t here, so I’m going on. The black hole will be rising soon, and I intend to follow the lines of force of the veils in its direction. It seems the suit’s drive will easily carry me. Whatever kind of a balance of forces we’re riding here . . .

Nearby, the star flared, brighter than before. Then again far off, then farther still, and yet again beyond the near horizon. A shudder of the starscape came and went, that Sorokin saw but could not feel. Perhaps a quake had brought a mountain down, and speeded up the pulsar’s rotation by some fraction of a microsecond.

“I’m not going on, Ramachandra. Not into a black hole. Even if we can survive here . . .” Sorokin ended with a gesture of hopeless pessimism.

I know you’re not. My second reason for bringing you along. All I ask is that you take back word of what you see me do. You need only wait here a few more minutes and the forces that brought us here will bear you back again, to somewhere on Azlaroc. If you’re lucky you’ll survive. Ramachandra smiled. And collect your pay.

Sorokin could think of nothing to say. An impassable gulf had opened between him and the other man.

Ramachandra was consulting his instruments. Black hole’s rising now. He nodded in the direction over Sorokin’s shoulder but when Sorokin turned he found that the ultimate abyss offered almost nothing to see. Maybe a momentary squiggle in the blue arcs of one or two stars.

If Ramachandra had had anything more to say, Sorokin had missed it. He stood watching now as the other man’s suit, moving now under its own power, rose past him . . .

No, there were some last words coming after all, for Ramachandra delayed enough to turn. If I go into it—for good—

“Yes?”

Well, I’ll be joined by quite a crowd, eventually. That’s all. The holes are going to coalesce and eat the rest of the universe, you know. In a few billion years.

His suit was soon out of sight amid the starstreaks of the sky.

Four minutes later the return tide came, and bore Sorokin into the striped space of blue light that bent abnormally between the worlds.

“Then do you think he actually went into it?” Miletus Millbrae asked. He had some time ago forgotten cautious incredulity and was asking questions without hesitation.

Sorokin drained a drink, and gestured for another. “I think he went on into it, yes. Unless he found a folded edge of veils before he got that far. My recorder’s in my suit outside; ! don’t know how much it’ll show in support of what I say. But the suit is working fine, it carried me back to town from Ruler Ridge. This is my first stop. I’ve got to find Callisto. I thought she was going to have some kind of watch posted along Ruler Ridge in case we—either of us—came back that way.”

“You were with him, with Ramachandra,” said a woman who had come into the place sometime during Sorokin’s recital. “And this is your first stop, coming back.”

He looked over at her. “Yes.” The rest of the people were attentively silent.

“Then you don’t know.”

He started two questions and aborted them both before they reached his lips. Then he said: “Ramachandra’s back.”

“For almost ten days now.” But there was more to be told.

“Callisto and her group won’t let out much information,” a man offered, “but it’s known that they dug something out of the ridge ten days ago, and supposedly it has been at least tentatively identified as him. His suit, at least, presumably with him inside. Enlarged, somehow, and holding what looks like a small bright light in one hand.”

“Dead?”

The woman made a gesture difficult to read. “I’ve heard there’s movement.

Life, perhaps. But wrapped in a loop of forty-nine times forty-nine, twenty-four hundred and one veils.”

Sorokin said eventually: “He’ll go again.”

BIRTHDAYS

Each day his charges grew a year older—or was it the other way around?

One

LOOKING BACK , Bart could never clearly remember any part of his life before the day when the Ship first woke him from a long, artificially induced sleep, and guided him to the nursery to see the babies. That day and the first few that followed it were very confusing to live through.

The Ship’s machines, working with paint and glass and light, had made the nursery spacious-looking and cheerful. Bart counted twenty-four cribs. To count babies would have been harder, because only those who happened to be napping were in their beds. The rest crawled or sat or toddled on the soft-tiled deck, sending up a racket and getting underfoot of their attending machines and images. The babies were all the same age, just about a year old the day Bart first saw them. They wore white diapers, and some had on green hospital gowns like Bart’s only, of course, smaller.

Bart was not tall for almost fourteen, but he could easily lift one bare leg after the other over the low barrier the machines had placed to keep the little kids from tottering or crawling out of the nursery into the corridor. The corridor led in one direction to Bart’s small private room and in the other—so his memory, working in a new, selective way, informed him—to the rest of the habitable Ship.

The babies squalled, gurgled, blubbered, or took time out to stare at the world in silence. They made nothing much of Bart’s coming in among them. The images that the machines kept projecting and moving around the infants were of solid-looking adult humans speaking and smiling, and they evidently took Bart to be just one more image. The babies reacted more strongly to the machines, which had more effective contact with them.

“Pick one up, if you wish,” the Ship said in his ear. It was able to project its conversation so there was no way of telling just what direction the words came from. The Ship’s voice sounded human, but not quite man or woman, not quite young or old.

Like a good obedient boy Bart bent to have a try at picking up a baby. The chubby belly felt cool against his hands above the papery diaper and the head of dark scanty curls turned so that the liquid brown eyes could look at him uncertainly.

“See how the machines hold them,” counseled the Ship. “Their arms are of basically the same form as yours.”

He shifted his grip.

“The prime directives under which I operate are very clear. One human parent, adoptive or real, is necessary to the successful maturation of children; images and machines are psychologically inadequate for best results. Therefore, after receiving some elementary preparation for the role, you will serve as adoptive parent for the first generation of colonists.”

Colonists. The word evoked in Bart the abstract knowledge that the Ship had started from an orbit around Earth, and was outward bound to seed humanity somewhere among the stars. How long ago the voyage had begun, and whether he himself had witnessed that beginning, were questions that his memory could not answer. Nor did he feel any urgency attached to them. Somewhere in Bart’s lost past he had learned that the Ship was to be trusted utterly, and now he could wait patiently for a better understanding of what it meant by its announcement that he was to be a parent. Meanwhile, he watched the infants, played a little with them, and tried to comfort and distract those who cried. It seemed to be the thing to do.

The machines labored ceaselessly, patting, changing, feeding, washing, wiping up. Twice they dispensed cups of souplike stuff for Bart to drink. There were no clocks to watch, but he was certain that he had been in the nursery for hours. At last one of the machines took him lightly by the arm and pointed back down the corridor whence he had come.

When he had closed himself into his little plastic-walled bedroom the Ship’s voice said: “You will be given a substantial breakfast when you wake again. That will be one standard year from now.”

Two

He awoke as on the first day, as if from a sound night’s sleep, and at once sat up to look over the rim of his bed, which curved around him like a padded bathtub, warm and dry and clean. Just how he was being put to sleep or awakened he didn’t know, but certainly there was more to it than he could see or feel. Somehow his gown had been taken off him while he slept, and he was naked.

There was a new gown laid out on the room’s single small chair, or maybe the same one, washed clean of baby shit and pablum. He put it on after using the toilet and washing his hands and face. From a panel in the wall he got his promised breakfast, consisting of a warm, milky drink in a plastic cup, and a tray holding chunks of bread. The breadcrust was hot and crunchy and these were pieces of fruit and cheese inside.

One standard year, the Ship had said . . . but his hands looked no bigger, nor did the muscles in his thin arms. His face looked no different in the wall mirror, and the fine tawny hair on his head had maintained its crewcut length. There were still no more than a couple of dozen brown pubic hairs curling at the bottom of his belly. He was sure he was no taller.

When he got to the nursery, though, he could well believe a year had passed. It certainly had, if these were the same kids. A few were in their beds as before, but now lying stretched out, they almost filled the little cribs. The majority were running about, keeping their balance reasonably skillfully for the most part, and busy with a multitude of toys. The kids wore shirts now, and shorts or pants over their diapers.

This time the babies were aware that Bart was more than just another image. Some of them took fright at first and clung to the machines. But he kept walking around and talking to them, as the Ship instructed him, and soon they started to warm up to him.

Again he spent the day socializing, and this time shared the little kids’ food, dispensed by the machines. Meaty-tasting, mildly chewy chunks of stuff, and harder, biscuitlike objects that came in both sweet and sour flavors, it tasted good enough to be adult fere. Last year—yesterday—the babies had been drinking from nippled bottles, but today they got water and colored drinks in little cups.

Though he hadn’t questioned the Ship on it, Bart was still thinking over the announcement that he was to be a parent. He could imagine himself at the head of an enormous dining table, all these kids, grown a little older, sitting around it, but beyond that his imagination was soon lost. He told himself to be patient; the Ship would come up with explanations and instructions as they became necessary.

The continual racket was wearying. By the time the babies were all bedded for what must be their regular night’s sleep, with the lights dimmed, he was ready to go to sleep himself. At a word from the Ship, he walked back, yawning, to his room.

Three

Again he seemed to be experiencing nothing more than an ordinary night of restful slumber, and again when he awoke he hadn’t grown or gotten older. This time he found a pair of shorts and a pullover shirt laid out for him on the chair.

After dressing and eating some breakfast he walked to the nursery. Before he got there he could hear the year’s change in the children’s voices, forming clear words now as they called to one another.

When the new glass doors of the nursery opened to let Bart in, he saw that bigger beds had been installed, and the walls moved back to make more space for play. The kids looked different and bigger again, of course. After an initial shyness, not so intense as yesterday’s, they all came crowding around Bart so that he walked through a little sea of waist-high heads. Here and there a bulge of diaper still peeped out of someone’s shorts.

“What’s your name?” one tiny voice cried out, insistent above the babble of the others.

“Bartley. Everyone calls me Bart.” Who had called him that? Family? Friends? There were still no particular memories available. “What’s yours?”

“Armin.” Or maybe Ermin was what the child answered. Bart wasn’t sure if the speaker was a girl or a boy. The group seemed about evenly divided as to sex.

Again he ate with the children, and played with them through the day. They all accepted his presence unquestioningly before he had been with them an hour, though he didn’t get the feeling that any of them could recall his earlier visits. Today, he noticed, there were fewer projected images of adults about.

A little girl who said her name was Deirdre brought him a wheeled plastic toy whose axle had come loose from its containing grooves. He forced it back into place, so the wheels could turn again, and Deirdre carried it off, after a machine had made her stand still until she said “thank you, Bart.”

Counting as well as he could in the continuing melee, Bart decided that there were twelve girls and twelve boys in the group.

After dinner, when the machines had begun to pack the kids off to their beds, the Ship said to Bart: “You may remain awake for a few more hours if you wish.”

He felt tired out, but not ready to sleep. “Maybe I’ll read a book.”

“I will provide some in your room.”

Stretched out on his bed, he looked at a book for a while without reading, then put it down and asked the air: “How long have I been here? In the Ship?”

“I have edited your memories of your past life for good reason. Your past contains tragic and violent things. Nothing can be done about the past. We must work for the future and achieve a successful revised mission.”

“Are there any other people on this Ship? Besides me and the little kids?”

“None. Much depends on you.”

He lay there looking at the cover of The Young Detectives Visit Earth. Although his bed was very comfortable and he was tired, he didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep.

But he really had no choice.

Four

His shorts and shirt were washed for him as he slept, or else it was a clean new outfit that he found on the chair. Breakfast as before, and he was on his way. The books had been removed and there was nothing else to do.

Two boys and two girls, grown bigger since he saw them last, were playing just inside the children’s compound; Bart decided it couldn’t be thought of as a nursery anymore. As he approached, the four caught sight of him and jumped with excitement, calling out to others, their voices coming to Bart faintly through the heavy glass doors.

As he entered it, Bart saw that their compound had been enlarged again. There were no more adult images in sight. Children came, hesitantly at first, from everywhere, some pedaling vehicles, others emerging from toy houses of multicolored blocks.

“Hi, I’m Bart,” he said to those who gathered close around. “Anybody remember me?”

“The Ship told us you were coming to see us today.” A bold little girl pushed forward. “Look, look, see the picture I drew?” It was a row of a dozen or so little circle-faces, each the same size, with lines for hair and nose and eyes, and one large face above. “That’s you.” In a corner the artist’s name stood in big shaky letters: SHARON.

As the day went on Bart heard the names of all the other kids, though he remembered only a few. He spent his time in play with one group and another, and then read them all stories from a book about old Earth as they sat around him on the floor. When the Ship directed, he saw them off to bed.

“Am I being a good enough parent, Ship?”

“The revised mission plan is proceeding satisfactorily.”

Five

All twenty-four of them were waiting for him excitedly just inside the heavy glass doors. And they remembered him.

“We’re five now, Bart!”

“Ship says we can have a birthday party if we want—”

“—like Billy and Lynn—”

It took him a while to figure out that Billy and Lynn were characters in some children’s story that the Ship showed them from time to time. Lynn and Billy were twins, back on Earth somewhere, and in one episode they had evidently enjoyed an elaborate birthday celebration, complete with cake, candy, and ice cream.

“How old are you, Bart?”

“Will you have a birthday with us?”

“Sure. If the Ship will give us cake and things. Maybe we can have some real candles.”

“Yayy!”

So they had the party, the Ship providing real candles and entrusting Bart with a lighter for them. The machines even brought forth small paper-wrapped toys as presents for all the five-year-olds.

“Din’choo get a present, Bart?”

“No, it’s not my birthday.”

“When is?”

“In about a couple of months.” The precise date was something else still sitting undisturbed in his memory, with blank holes knocked all around it. “This was fun. Listen, maybe we can have another birthday party when I come back tomorrow. You’ll all be six, if the Ship keeps me on the same schedule.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Well—next year. See, you and I are running on different time schedules now, because I’m only awake one day every year. I expect the Ship’ll put us on the same time schedule soon.”

“Next year?”

Bart sighed, seeing that for them the difference between tomorrow and next year was not too clear. Especially the way he was talking.

Six

This year the difference in time schedules was much easier for them to grasp. So were a lot of other things.

Again the compound in which the children lived had been transformed. Part of it had become what Bart recognized as a school, and everybody was busy at teaching-machine consoles when he arrived.

The Ship’s voice then declared a holiday for them all.

“Let’s have our birthday party!” a boy cried out.

And after Bart had talked with them all, and read them a new story as the Ship directed, and had been shown through the school by his small friends, machines wheeled out a big cake. This time there were balloons as well as little gifts of toys and candy.

“Isn’t it your birthday too, Bart?”

“Well, no. Mine’s coming in about a couple of months . . . in two months and two days.”

“How old will you be?”

“Fourteen.”

After the cake and ice cream was finished they had a good time playing games. The kids were awed by Bart’s strength and speed and dexterity. He taught them some of the skills he knew for games with balls and ropes and sticks. Now and then someone who got bumped hard in a game took time out to cry. Bart thought he could tell quicker and better than the machines just how serious the damage was.

Seven

Before the seventh-birthday party got started, Bart went through a period of rather intense questioning by a few of the kids. Fuad and Ranjan and Ora wanted to know what he was doing all the time they didn’t see him—where and how he spent the year between birthdays.

“I’m sleeping. The Ship can fix it so a person just sleeps all the time.”

“Huh,” said Ranjan, doubtfully.

“Why does it want you to sleep all the time?” asked Ora. Today she had a loose front tooth she kept wiggling with her tongue.

“I don’t know,” Bart admitted, feeling foolish.

“Don’t you get hungry?” Fuad wanted to know.

“No. I guess it’s not like regular sleep.” Some vague knowledge of the process was available in his impersonal memory. “It’s something like being frozen, only you never feel cold.”

This year the games were rougher. When two or three of the boys grabbed Bart by the legs at once, they could tip him over.

Back in his room alone after dinner, he asked: “Ship, am I really helping much, being a parent, if I just come out once a year? How long will I be on this schedule?”

“You will not be on this schedule for any substantial portion of your lifetime. A definite time limit cannot be set now, but all computation on the matter is proceeding properly.”

He tried again a little later, before going to sleep, but got essentially the same answer.

Eight

When Bart walked into the schoolroom something like boy-girl war was going on, the place in disarray, the weaker or more timid children in tears. The more aggressive ones were screaming insults at one another and hurling toys and writing materials back and forth as missiles, over bookshelves and teaching machines turned into parapets. Adult images had been brought out by the Ship and were calling sternly and uselessly for order, and outnumbered machines were shaking some of the worst offenders by the arm and lecturing.

“Ship, can I help?” Bart cried.

“Yes. Two boys have gotten to a lower deck and should be brought back up.” Ship’s voice was calm and methodical as always, though somewhat louder than usual to be heard plainly above the screaming. “My machines are busy. It would be helpful if you went after the boys and got them to come up again. Go down the stairs at the end of the corridor to your right.”

It was a passageway he hadn’t been in before, evidently one recently opened up by the ongoing enlargement of the living quarters. He found the two truants, Tang and Mal, without much trouble. There wasn’t much of the lower level open to their exploration—only a loop of corridor sealed off by heavy glass doors at all points, except the stair where other passages intersected. The stair also was sealed where it went on down to still lower regions of the Ship.

The boys were glad to see Bart and willing to go back with him; they had been looking long enough at the interesting sights down here. Through the various sets of glass doors you could see other corridors stretching away for hundreds of meters, at least. Many other doors were visible, some of which stood open to reveal static glimpses of rooms furnished for human life but all unused and empty of movement. The lights were dim in that large world outside the glass, and there was not a footstep on the dustless, polished-looking floors.

“I wonder if anybody lives there,” Mal asked, nose against the glass.

“Nobody does,” said Tang. “Let’s go back up.” “Maybe we will someday,” Mal said in a small, thoughtful voice.

Nine

The war between the sexes was not raging today, but it still smoldered, as Bart could tell readily enough from the grimacing and hair-pulling and name-calling that flared sporadically during the day. The cake and ice cream lunch was a success, as usual, and the games were fun, though now he had to exert himself somewhat to outdo some of the other players.

A girl and a boy had a brief argument about what mathematical formula should be used to calculate the volume of the basketball they were playing with, and with a start Bart realized that now some of these kids knew things, maybe important things, that he had never learned. And he was supposed to be their parent! Or was it possible he had misunderstood what the Ship was saying?

These things still bothered him when the day was over and he had undressed and climbed back into his isolated bed. “Ship.”

“Yes.”

“. . . nothing.” He decided to let well enough alone. Ship rarely gave him a helpful answer anyway. And he wasn’t really all that anxious to be a father, at least not until he was older.

Ten

Eating his usual breakfast, Bart felt for the first time a little anxious about meeting the people he was going to find waiting for him in the compound. If they were all another year older, they wouldn’t be so much like small kids any more, but people, with whom he would have to interact almost as an equal. He shook off his misgivings and walked out.

The kids weren’t enormously bigger today, but it was certainly time to celebrate their collective tenth birthday, and they reminded Bart of this right after their first whoops of welcome. They had a big calendar drawn on the wall now, and had been crossing off days. There was no doubt that another year had passed.

Today, when several of the boys ganged up on Bart in a rough game, they easily pushed him around. Not that there had been any plan on their part to gang up on him, or because they were not still impressed by his strength.

And this year there were certain moments, talking to the girls, when Bart felt oddly almost bashful.

Eleven

Suddenly some of the boys, Baruch and Olen in particular, were almost as tall as Bart himself. And Deirdre and Sigrid were starting to round out into the shapes of women; only just starting, but you could tell the process had begun.

Right in the middle of the cake-eating, the birthday party turned solemn, and there was a long sober discussion of early memories and hopes for the future.

All of them naturally shared as their lifetime memories the things that Bart had seen during the last eleven days—the old nursery, the parental images and the guardian machines, the toys and teaching devices. Of course Bart had missed the greater part of their history, but he had a sampling of it.

They sat there soberly sipping their sweet party drinks and talking. When it came Bart’s turn to recount his early memories, he explained that the Ship must have scrambled them for him in some way, erasing large sections. “I don’t even know if I was raised out of the machines like you, or if my biological parents were on board, or if I was born on Earth.”

No one could give him any help with those questions. The talk went on for a long moody time before they got around to playing games.

Twelve

Bart found himself looking up at Baruch, and level-eyed at a number of the other kids. The Ship was allowing them more freedom now, and everyone except Trac, who had a stomach ache, had come to meet Bart right outside his room, the doors of which could only be opened by the Ship. Even Tang was there, though hobbling on a broken leg he said he had gotten by falling two decks down a stairwell. Ships medical machines had neatly fixed the bones and told him he was healing.

Today the kids’ collective attitude was at first so grown-up and businesslike that Bart was almost intimidated. They explained to him that they had just formed themselves into a society, modeled on old societies of Earth that they had studied through the teaching machines. Baruch had been elected president, and others chosen to fill at least half a dozen additional offices.

Even the birthday party began in an atmosphere of formality. But things soon loosened up. Bart was still stronger than Baruch, and could outwrestle him with an effort. But stocky Kichiro was now slightly stronger than he.

Thirteen

Chao, this month’s president, announced early in the morning that this year’s party was going to be a thirteenth birthday celebration for Bart as well as all the others. All the others chorused agreement, so Bart went along without protest, though he knew full well he had passed his real thirteenth birthday many months ago. He had not the slightest idea whether there had been any party to mark the event, so he enjoyed this one as his due.

All through the day the girls paid him a great deal of attention, to which he reacted confusedly, enjoying it all one moment and feeling tongue-tied and awkward the next. He could tell some of the boys were getting jealous.

Every night recently he had been saying goodnight with the feeling of saying farewell, knowing that never again would he meet the same people he was leaving. Tonight he tried to stay with them, but one of the machines took him gently by the arm and led him from the group toward his room. He looked around at the other children’s faces, saw sympathy but no help, and knew he had to go.

Fourteen

Every morning now he went to greet some strangers, boys and girls he had heard about indirectly but had never seen before. They resembled other kids he had met yesterday, and had their names, but that was all. Their bodies were melting and altering almost while Bart watched, flesh inflating and stretching over elongating bones, boys’ faces sprouting elementary whiskers while their voices deepened, girls growing breasts, their legs curving and rounding to spell out disturbing secret messages in visual code.

And today they could literally talk over his head. Bart was small for his age. That’s what—who was it?—always used to say.

During the party, right in the middle of the ice cream and cake, a fistfight broke out between Fritz and Kichiro. They slugged away at each other so hard that Bart saw he wouldn’t be able to stand up to either of them for ten seconds.

The machines just stood around like dummies and made no move to halt the fight. Fay, the current president, had to yell repeatedly to get other kids to step in and break it up.

As soon as things had settled down a little, some of the kids began drifting out of the room in pairs, a boy and a girl together, kissing and maybe pawing at each other as they left. Bart felt strange and almost frightened. The kids that remained in the dining hall talked and giggled and talked, talked, talked. The conversation was about nothing important, but still it seemed important that it be going on.

Edris came to sit near Bart and talk with him. A red ribbon tied up her brown hair, but some fell loose down as far as the halter that covered her breasts. Solon got jealous and started an argument. Soon he and Bart were trying to think up insults to call each other.

Bart shoved Solon, who was not too big for him to think of fighting, and Solon punched Bart on the cheek, so his mouth started to bleed inside. Bart hit back, then they grabbed each other and wrestled in deadly earnest to see who could get the other down. With furniture in the way, they couldn’t come to any clean conclusion. Bart saw that a couple of machines were hovering near, and Edris was watching with enjoyment. Pretty soon some of the big kids grabbed the combatants and broke up the fight.

The social atmosphere was a little strained for the rest of the day, and Bart went back to his room earlier than usual, before the machines came to urge him along.

He sat on his room’s one chair, arms folded. “Ship, I’m not being a parent. What am I really supposed to be doing?”

“Further instructions will be given you as required.”

“Are you still going to wake me up only once a year?”

“The mission is proceeding according to its revised schedule.”

He got up and tried to walk out of the room again, but found the door immovable.

He wondered if something vital could be wrong with the Ship. Might its planning computers break down like so many common machines, and issue hideously wrong decisions? Though his bland, smoothed-out memory suggested this was impossible, Bart went worriedly to bed. Sleep was still mechanically fast in coming.

Fifteen

Solon had grown alarmingly big, and it was with relief that Bart saw him smile in a friendly if distracted way. The inside of Bart’s mouth was still sore from yesterday, but Solon said hello as if he didn’t recall their fight at all.

Bart’s former opponent had other matters on his mind, and returned quickly to a conversation he was conducting in fierce whispers with Fritz and Himyar and one or two other boys. It was shortly concluded, and the bunch of them took off running, grimly and purposefully, down a corridor. Bart looked around and realized there was no one left in the common room with him but half a dozen girls. Most of these girls looked worried.

Galina and Vivian came over to Bart and started trying to explain. It seemed that the boys were now divided into two gangs, of six members each, and between the gangs existed something like open war.

“They’ve been fighting this way off and on for months now,” Galina told him. “Always getting black eyes and bloody noses. Today looks like it might be one of the worst. It started today over whether we should have another birthday party or not.” Galina, rather plain, was solemn most of the time, usually giving the impression she favored sobriety and order. “And me trouble is, half the girls have gotten involved, too.”

Helsa and Lotis also came over, and the girls debated whether there was anything they could do to stop impending hostilities. All around them the Ship was quiet—ominously so, Bart felt. He stood by, feeling dangerously out of it all. He didn’t even know the layout of the passages the girls talked about as they tried to guess where their male friends might be planning fights or ambushes.

While the other girls kept on talking to one another, Lotis came to Bart and with a gesture got him to follow her off into the Ship.

“Where’re we going?” he asked, supposing some plan for peacekeeping or hiding out was being put into effect.

“Something I want to show you.” She was just barely taller than he, with straight black hair and Chinese eyes. Shortly they came out in a wide open space, a meeting of corridors, where Bart saw that the kids had improvised a swimming pool. Decking had been taken up, and a room in the lower level flooded. Lotis pointed out how waterproof patching had been stuck in where necessary, and a water pipe tapped to fill the pool. The water looked deeper than a man’s head.

Bart was impressed, but somehow disturbed, too, that they had done this much on their own. “Didn’t the machines do anything to stop you?”

A flirt of her head dismissed the powers of the machines. “I’m going in. Do you know anything about swimming? People on Earth used to do it all the time. The records show them in the oceans even.”

Lotis pulled off her scanty clothing and slid down into the water naked. She turned over and paddled on her back, smiling knowingly up at Bart while he stared down in helpless fascination. Female nudity was not among the things on which his memory could give him reassurance. His mind lurched this way and that in turmoil.

He heard running feet quite near at hand, and turned to see a figure dash out of a side corridor. Fritz was bigger and stronger even than a year ago, but his eyes were wide and frightened; he scarcely looked at either Bart or Lotis, but came running around the pool as if pursued.

He was. Kichiro and Basil and Mal came pounding after him, carrying bludgeons made of the unscrewed legs of chairs, their faces transformed in the fury of the hunt. At the sight of them Bart started to run, too. He realized almost at once that this was a mistake, but it was too late. Someone responding to his flight with instinctive pursuit had grabbed him from behind and he was flattened beneath his captor on the deck.

Kichiro had tackled Bart, while Basil and Mal closed in on Fritz. It sounded like all of them were yelling.

Fritz broke away and fled for another corridor, but Basil was too fast and blocked his path. Fritz lunged at him in desperation and before Basil could swing his club he was slammed up against the bulkhead in a choking grip. The club dropped from Basil’s hand, and Bart, pinned on the deck under Kichiro’s kneeling weight, could see the whites of his eyes seeming to expand.

Mal stepped close to the struggling pair and earnestly swung his plastic chair leg. The impact made an ugly sound. Fritz let go of his enemy, staggered back and fell.

Kichiro had started to get up. Bart squirmed out from beneath him, tore free of a grasping hand, and ran. His one thought was to reach the safety of his own room. He had to pass between the group of boys and the pool, where Lotis, open-mouthed, clung to the side and watched.

Mal, turning wild-eyed, saw Bart coming and raised his club for one more swing—

None of them had seen the machine approach, but now it was on hand as if it had popped right out of the many-paneled wall. It took the swinging club like a feather from Mal’s hand and in the same instant shoved him violently back, so he stumbled over Fritz’s unmoving legs and fell.

“You hurt me,” Mal croaked stupidly from the floor. His hand was scraped raw, oozing blood, where it had collided with the gripper of the machine.

The Ship said loudly to them all: “I have authority to sacrifice individuals, as I judge it necessary for the good of the mission.”

Overawed, they all stayed frozen silent. The machine walked through them to bend over Fritz. As it picked him up, Bart saw that his eyes were half open but unseeing, and his mouth was slack.

It walked off down a corridor, carrying Fritz in its arms. His limbs hung down, utterly limp. The other boys came to life and followed in a group, their weapons left behind. Bart heard a slosh and trickle behind him, Lotis getting out of the pool, but he did not turn.

The machine went on for a few score meters, then stopped facing a panel in the wall.

“Ship,” Kichiro said, “that’s a disposal chute.” But Fritz was already gone.

Ignored by the others, Bart went straight back to his room. He sat there, shivering a little and staring at the wall. The ship served him his dinner there, without comment. He ate a little, and then soon turned to his bed, where sleep and forgetfulness never failed to come.

Sixteen

All twenty-three of the kids were waiting for him in the corridor when he stuck his head out of his room to see what might be going on. But it was all right.

“No one’s going to try to kill you this time,” was one of the first things said, by a strong young man with thickening patches of dark beard on cheek and chin. With just a minor effort Bart could recognize the speaker as Kichiro, who, as Bart soon found out, was this year’s president. They were having elections only once a year now, he was soon informed.

Fights were evidently much less frequent also, Bart discovered to his great relief. He overheard part of an argument as to who had tried to kill him last year, and this argument was the closest thing to a fight that happened on this birthday.

He soon found out also that birthdays, like gang wars, were now considered kid stuff, and today there was no party. There was a good elaborate lunch, with ice cream produced unpretentiously as dessert.

Talk turned to Bart, and his purpose in the world.

He repeated to the kids everything that the Ship had ever told him about that purpose, which wasn’t much.

“I wonder,” Basil said to him, “what the Ship’ll do with you now? I mean, we obviously don’t need you any more as a father or model or whatever to help us grow.”

“I dunno,” said Bart, taking a little more ice cream. The kids’ eyes were all sympathetic, but still, their silent gaze made him uncomfortable. “Anytime I ever ask Ship about it, it just says the mission is proceeding as per revised schedule, or something like that.”

Sigrid nodded knowingly. “You’ll find Ship’s that way. If it doesn’t want to answer something for you, it just won’t.”

Seventeen

This morning it was a relief to meet a group of stable-looking, sane-looking people, not too much different from their namesakes he had said goodbye to the night before.

Bart soon noticed that Basil was missing from the group. “Oh, he’s all right,” said Ora reasuringly. “He’ll be along for lunch. He goes studying the stars.”

“The stars?”

“We’ve found a way to reach the outer hull. In one place there’s a glass port through which you can see the outside of the Ship, and the stars to, of course.”

Bart could call up a plain picture of what stars were; sometime, somehow, he had seen them.

“What do you think about the stars, Bart?” Tang asked him patronizingly.

He didn’t have a quick answer. Armin said: “Look, we’ve been working on this problem of the Ship and where it’s going for seventeen years now. And Bart’s put in how much time? About seventeen days.”

And there was laughter, not unkind.

Eighteen

When Bart mentioned that he thought it would be fun to learn to swim, they took him to the newly remodeled and enlarged pool. Everyone was matter-of-fact about undressing, and after clothes had been off for a minute or two, it all seemed practically normal to Bart.

Resting on the pool’s edge after some strenuous splashing, they took up again last year’s discussion about the Ship and its purposes. Bart got the idea that now they talked a lot on this subject. Today he remarked that maybe soon they would be having children, so eventually, people would fill up the empty rooms still waiting on the other levels.

Fuad shook his head. “The Ship’s told us we’re all sterile—know what that means?”

“You can’t make any babies.”

“That’s right. Girls and men both. We can do all the sex we want, but nothing can ever happen from it.”

Later, alone, Bart asked the Ship: “Am I sterile, too? I mean, am I going to be, when . . .”

“No. With maturity you will be fertile.”

That was a definite answer at last, but he still got only the old answers to his old questions when he repeated them.

Nineteen

Bart’s chronic worry that his life was going fundamentally wrong was lightened when he met his shipmates today. They were now so obviously adults that he could produce an inner sigh of relief and decide to leave the worrying to them.

Most of the teaching machines had been removed. At the few remaining, people were abstractedly at work, printouts and papers stacked around them.

As soon as the word spread that Bart had joined them for the day, most of the adults abandoned other activities and came towering around him, smiling and calling greetings, squeezing his shoulders and ruffling his hair. A number of people wanted to show him things.

Basil took him to see the stars. They went drifting, swimming through a part of the Ship where gravity was turned off, and though there was air, Basil made him wear a breathing device, just in case. Through the glass Bart looked along the curves of the hull, unreal in their great size and distances, and at the stars that looked even more unreal, like some vast scattering of bright powdered paint.

After lunch he asked to go swimming again. Lotis, in the pool with him and others, now had a peculiar slightly mottled look to her thighs that Bart eventually decided must be caused by fat under the skin. And on her left thigh was the threadlike red tracery of an enlarged vein.

After dinner Baruch and Tang took him aside. “Bart, do you really like this one-day-a-year life?”

“I dunno. It’s all right, I guess. The Ship must have some reason. It’s taking care of us all, right?” He might have said something else, but Ship heard everything.

The men exchanged glances over his head. With several of the girls, they walked him back to his room when the Ship called for him to come, and almost tucked him into bed.

Twenty

He learned soon after rejoining the others that Tang and Ora had been killed, some months ago, trying to work their way into a part of the Ship from which humans were ordinarily sealed out.

“Were they trying . . . I mean, did it have anything to do with me? With waking me up more often, or. . .”

“No.” Fay shook her head definitely. “Oh, no, Bart, don’t worry about that.”

The thought hadn’t really worried him. Actually, it had generated some hope.

“They were trying to get to the far end of the Ship,” Ranjan explained. “You know, the aft, as the old records call it. Have you seen any of the old records? The part of the Ship where the drive controls and so many other things seem to be located.”

They explained to Bart such elementary knowledge of the Ship as they had been able to piece together, and his understanding of it grew a little. He found out also that they meant to keep on trying to get through to the other parts of the Ship, and eventually to take over its control. That was a strange thought, and Bart wasn’t at all sure how much he liked it.

Twenty-one

It had been many days since his shipmates paid him as little attention as they did today. He was greeted cheerfully enough, but no crowd gathered around. A couple of people went with him to swim, in a pool that had again been remodeled—made safer and more pleasant.

He learned that some of the people were working hard to grow plants, from seeds the Ship had provided for their old school biology program. They showed him the new garden. It held nothing ready to eat yet, but maybe next time he came.

He saw Kichiro limping by and heard that his knee had been lamed in some contest with another man, but whether it was a fight or a game Bart did not learn.

Twenty-two

There were no beds in the old common room any more. Bart found that most of the people had paired up two by two for sleeping, in more or less stable partnerships.

More noticeably, most of the people he talked to today had runny noses. Sharon told him that an experiment in the new biology lab had gone wrong and some viruses had escaped. Nothing to worry about, they assured him. He wasn’t worried, really—not about viruses, anyway.

All in all, it was a casual, low-pressure sort of day.

Twenty-three

Lotis, working in the garden, wore shorts today, and he noticed that her legs and bottom were getting quite lumpy with fat. The red vein on her thigh had extended itself into a little tracery of defective blood vessels in the skin.

All the runny noses had dried up. Some medicine the people had made for themselves was ready for Bart in case he had caught the infection, too. But he hadn’t.

“Maybe the Ship’s still taking good care of you,” Chao commented.

Twenty-four

No one came down the corridor toward his room to meet him, but as soon as Bart had entered the general living area they all jumped out of hiding with cries of “Surprise!” and “Happy birthday!” It wasn’t his birthday yet, but he soon understood that a sort of general birthday had been declared, in which he was being invited to share.

“It’s been ten years since we’ve had one, Bart,” said Himyar. “A party, I mean. So we just thought it was time.”

“We could make you an honorary fifteen,” Fay put in. “Or how about an honorary twenty-four?”

“Have a glass of wine, Bart,” said someone else.

“Wine?”

“Told you our garden was going to be a success.”

“—oh, give him only a small one! He’s too young—”

“—one glass won’t hurt ‘im—”

He realized after a while that some of the people were passing around another kind of drug, something they sniffed up into their nostrils. But he stayed with his one glass of wine, which made him feel just dizzy and high enough to be wary of asking for any more.

The party went on practically all day, with games and jokes and songs. Bart no longer minded when people paired off and vanished for a while, their arms about each other. This behavior was grownups’ doings now, not something in which he might possibly become involved. He went along with all the partying and had a good time. Still, now and then he caught himself wishing they would get down to business. Though he didn’t know just what their business was.

Twenty-five

This year his wish seemed to have been granted, for he got the impression of a lot of serious business going on. People were punching at computers and crouched over teaching machines, and in some rooms devices Bart couldn’t identify had been set up.

He noticed that Olen’s hairline was receding sharply. He wondered if the man had some kind of scalp disease, but he didn’t ask.

In a large room away from the usual living area, Bart found Himyar working to form a towering metal sculpture, using a torch that showered and streamed electric flames. With this homemade device Himyar brushed the glowing metal into the shapes he wanted. Parts of the sculpture reminded Bart of flowers in the garden, or, again, of the curves of splashed water that lived momentarily when someone dived into the pool.

They talked for a time, and Himyar showed Bart some paintings Vivian had done. Himyar and Vivian spent most of their time working here or scrounging materials from every part of the Ship that they could reach; they had become known as the Artists.

“And Armin’s an artist, too, I suppose,” said Himyar. “He’s made himself a camera and goes around using it. Well, the Ship made some of the component systems for him, and the film.”

“I’d like to see that.”

Twenty-six

Nobody was working quite so hard today. Bart found an elaborate game in progress, a contest involving both physical and mental effort, with complicated rules. It had to do with dividing up the regularly occupied territory of the Ship between two contending factions or teams who struggled to gain more territory from each other. People sometimes were allowed or compelled to switch sides in the game. The dividing line between the territories was marked with bright tapes stuck on the decks and bulkheads, and moved back and forth as people won or lost at events like Indian wrestling—men were matched against men, girls against girls for the physical struggles—or asking each other difficult questions.

“Bart, be referee. Wasn’t his foot off the deck just then?”

“Yep.”

Powerful Kichiro, still limping on his trick knee, smiled and moved the tape into his opponents’ territory by a distance of two wall panels.

“Hey, Bart!” It was Armin, approaching with something in his hand. “You never had a chance to see this. Here’s a picture I took of you at the last birthday party. We’ll have to have another one of those sometime.”

Bart looked. “You hadn’t even started with the camera when we had the party. It must have been yesterday when you took this. I mean last year, for you guys.”

“Hm. I guess you’re right.”

Twenty-seven

He found some of the marker tapes still stuck up in place, but the game wasn’t being played today and everyone seemed to have forgotten it. He met Fuad and Trac and was a little surprised to see how fat they both looked, with rolls of flesh above their shorts.

He thought of going down the passageway that led to the stars again, but there was no breathing equipment in the locker where Basil had kept it earlier.

Baruch and Solon came along and asked what he was doing. They soon explained that the breathing equipment was being used in what they called engineering studies, to find out how the more distant parts of the Ship could best be reached.

Bart wanted to know more. They told him of the solid walls and sealed doors that cut off access to those regions, and how the Ship refused to discuss letting anyone go there. It had not tried to stop their engineering studies, though. Whether it would interfere when they began to break through a wall remained to be seen.

Using explosives aboard a spaceship was intrinsically dangerous; something important and irreplaceable might be damaged, or all of a compartment’s air might be drained out into vacuum.

“That’s how Ora and Tang were killed. And then I was getting some acid ready to eat through a wall, and it disappeared. I suspect some machine found it and took it away.” Baruch shrugged, fatalistic but still determined. But we’ll see, we’ll see.” He did not sound or look at all discouraged.

Twenty-eight

This year Bart got more attention from his shipmates than they had given him in some days. Edris and Helsa looked at his teeth, and wondered out loud if the Ship shouldn’t be straightening some of them for him.

“Oh, they’re not terribly crooked. But it did as much for some of us when we were kids.”

After lunch there began a general discussion of his future, carried on at times as if he were not there. Ranjan said: “I still think the Ship plans to provide him with a bride one of these days—one of these years. Maybe it’s already tried to hatch other people from the artificial wombs and something’s gone wrong, so it’s got poor Bart just marking time.”

Another adult asked: “You still think there’s a good supply of human genetic material on board?”

“Bound to be. Else the Ship wouldn’t have sterilized us, right?”

There was general agreement on that point, but on little else. One body of opinion held that the Ship really wanted the people to take over, now that its own computers had grown crotchety and unreliable with breakdowns and damage. But some kind of glitch prevented it from simply saying what it wanted. Schizophrenic, it fought off with one hand their attempts to gain control, while feeding and caring for them with the other.

The discussion soon got over Bart’s head, but he listened intently, trying to weigh everything they said. He listened for what might give him confidence, but heard it not.

Twenty-nine

“I know you’ve seen our biology lab before,” Galina told him. “But I think you ought to take a real interest. All our futures may lie in this room.”

He ceased scratching his back against the doorframe. “How’s that?”

“Sit down, Bart.” When they were seated, she looked at him with concern. “Bart, if the machines never provide you with any people about your own age—with a fertile female, specifically—then it’s going to be up to us to find some way to eventually produce more people, so that the human race can go on. I’m not sure that there are any people left alive on Earth.”

“I see.” He nodded very seriously.

Galina spoke slowly and kept studying him for his reactions. “We know that when the Ship was launched there were many human sperms and ova stored on board, all coded as to genetic type, so that people could be conceived and raised by machines when the end of the voyage drew near.”

“Uh-huh.”

She sighed. “I myself suspect that most, perhaps nearly all of this genetic material was lost in some kind of accident, one that evidently disrupted the voyage in other ways as well. The Ship speaks always of a revised schedule for the mission, a revised plan.”

“I know.”

“There’s further evidence.” She paused. “I said all the human seeds and eggs were coded as to type and potential? There’s some indication in the available records that all of us now alive, except you—we don’t know where you came from—were conceived from materials not considered of the highest quality. Not that we have any grave genetic defects, of course; no seriously defective material would have been placed aboard. But—not the best. This suggests to me that all the best material was somehow destroyed, and also that there may not be much material left.”

Bart nodded, not knowing what else to say or do.

“Except you, Bart, as I said. There may have been a human crew aboard before the accident—whatever the accident was. You may be its only survivor. But I suppose your origins make little difference. Here you are and here we are, and there’s the future to be faced. A future to be created, perhaps for the whole human race, out of whatever we have on hand. Would you like to learn something about biology?”

“I guess I’d better,” said Bart.

They had a pretty good first lesson, distinguishing plants and animals, marking the first great branches of the tree of life.

“What are those marks on your face?” Bart asked on impulse a few hours later, as they were leaving the lab to go to dinner. He felt he knew Galina pretty well now and wasn’t shy about getting a little more personal.

“What marks?” She raised tentative fingers to her cheek.

“Just like little lines in the skin, going out from the corners of your eyes.”

Thirty

Today marked a standard month since the Ship had roused Bart from his first period of suspended animation. When he awoke, a machine equipped with measuring devices was waiting at his bedside. It quickly got busy to check his height and weight, looked into his eyes and mouth, listened at his chest.

“How much taller am I than a month ago, Ship?”

“Approximately seventy millimeters,” said the expressionless voice.

“And how much heavier?”

“Approximately ninety-five grams.”

“Is that good?”

It wouldn’t say. But it did adjust his diet, adding a delicious, creamy drink to that very breakfast, served in his room.

When he joined the other people he found Olen half bald, and learned that Basil had gone back to communing with the stars.

Galina gave him another biology lesson, more technical and duller than the first.

Thirty-one

Today Bart heard that Deirdre was in her bed, too sick to get up.

“She always liked you, Bart,” said Chao sadly. “Go in and talk to her a little.”

He went into Deirdre’s room, and found her looking much sicker than any human being he had ever seen before. She also seemed too dazed to talk very much.

“Galina’s been giving her drugs,” Chao explained when he came out. “Otherwise, the pain gets too bad.”

“Pain? From what?”

“They think it’s cancer.” Chao and the others explained it to Bart as best they could.

Only later did they get around to telling him that Baruch had been killed in some kind of an explosion, trying to force a passage to the forbidden areas of the Ship.

“Remember this photograph, Bart?” said Armin, cheering him up. “I took it of you at our last birthday party. We’re going to have another one soon.”

“You took it the year after the birthday party, Armin.”

“Oh? Maybe you’re right.”

Galina was busy with her other work today and never got around to teaching him biology.

Thirty-two

Deirdre had died, which came as no surprise to Bart, but still left him with a hollow feeling. Thinking over matters of life and death, he stood at the edge of the garden, a high-domed region full of bright lights, vastly enlarged from the first little plot of synthetic soil. Some people were jogging for exercise around the walk that circled the perimeter of the garden, while others were working casually inside.

It was strange to see gray in the hair of some of them, but Bart guessed that was just one more thing that happened naturally with age. His own hair, crewcut when his shipmates were babies, was starting to fall over his forehead now.

He went to look up Basil, and asked to go out and see the stars again. Basil was willing. When they got to the observation port, he pointed out to Bart the prow of the Ship, and the aft, or the stern, as they sometimes called it, where the engines and their controls were supposed to be.

“And when some people finally get back there,” Bart asked, “they’ll really be able to take over the whole thing?”

Basil shrugged. He was looking mainly outward at the stars.

Thirty-three

Trac was the first person to meet Bart as he came down the corridor from his room, and as soon as she smiled in greeting he noticed that several teeth were missing from her lower jaw.

“Had a jaw cyst, Bart. At least that’s what Galina and Solon say. They took it out. Spoils my famous beauty, but they think eventually they’ll be able to do something about giving me artificial teeth.”

“Couldn’t the Ship—?”

“It wouldn’t help, whether it could or not. It’s giving us less and less help these days. But never mind about that. Come along, we’ve got something to show you.”

He followed along. And then they were all jumping out at him, yelling, “Surprise! Birthday party!” The common dining room was decorated with streamers and balloons, and the table set for a feast.

“We were going to have ‘one next year, Bart. You know, ten years from the last. But then we decided, why not have it now?”

“You can be whatever age you like, Bart. Be an honorary thirty-three with us, if you like.”

“That’s a third of a century, Mal,” a woman cried. “Who wants to be that old?”

They were all good to him, as they usually were these days, petting and hugging him and fussing around, making it his party although it was supposed to be their birthday. He never said what honorary age he wanted. Actually he didn’t want any; his own real age was good enough.

Later he found unnoticed in a corner something that he supposed had been dragged out of storage accidently with the decorations. It was a wheeled plastic toy that he remembered fixing for Deirdre a month ago.

Thirty-four

The marking tapes were up on the bulkheads again, and a few people were playing at the question-and-wrestle game. Meanwhile, some had evidently been spending a lot of time working in the garden. It was now huge, and looked like the earthly gardens pictured in the Ship’s records, which none of them had ever seen in actuality.

“And now, Bart, we’re going to have some prayers. Come along.”

“Some what?”

“You’ll see. It’s another old idea that Basil’s been putting into practice lately.”

They had wanted to hold the prayer meetings out by the observation port, Bart learned, but there wasn’t room enough for everyone, and all had wanted to attend the first meetings at least, to see what they were going to be like. That was a month or two ago and by now, attendance was dropping slightly.

Bart didn’t understand the theory of prayer too well, but at the meeting Basil and the others who got up to talk seemed to be speaking not only to the Ship but to the world outside it, and to some force or power that had made them both.

Thirty-five

When Bart emerged from his room most of his shipmates were there in the hall waiting for him, something that hadn’t happened since they were sixteen, a day he could remember well. Today they were going to bring him to a meeting, they said. At first Bart expected more prayers, but this meeting turned out to be more businesslike than that.

It was a governmental council, held all day or most of the day around the big table where lunch came as an interruption. Lunch included fruits and vegetables brought fresh from the garden, as well as the usual rations issued by the Ship.

The proceedings got rather boring for Bart, though his friends made an effort to bring him into it all. They showed him their new system of recording all the discoveries of their research for easy access by Bart and future generations.

He looked the question at them.

“It’s true, Bart,” said Fay. A deep, gentle happiness glowed through her eyes at the thought. “The Ship has recently promised us, there will be future generations.”

“Provided the mission is completed,” someone put in.

“Yes. Well.” That was enough for Fay, and for the people as a group.

Bart himself thought it sounded fine, but he would still like to know more. He asked the Ship for details later, but got nowhere, as usual.

Thirty-six

There had been important changes made around him. He knew this the moment he started to come out of sleep. Opening his eyes & groggy second or two later, he realized that he was in a new bedroom, much like his old one, but different in detail and bigger.

“Ship . . . Ship, where am I? What’s happened?”

“You have been moved during your sleep into a new accommodation, Bart. There is no cause for alarm.”

He got up, dressed, ate, and eliminated as usual. The walls of this room were metal, and its door was thicker, as he saw when it opened for him to go out.

“Why did you move me, Ship?”

“Some of the people were attempting to reach you, to rouse you from sleep at the wrong time. They meant you well but it was necessary to prevent their interference.”

His door opened into a corridor he had never seen before, leading off in one direction only. It bent sharply several times and was interrupted by two sets of heavy doors that opened as Bart drew near and closed immediately after he had passed.

He found himself coming back into the peopled area of the Ship from a new direction, near the biology lab. The first folk to see him dropped what they were doing and ran to give him a glad welcome.

“I told you he’d be here on schedule!” cried Mal, pounding Bart joyfully on the back. No club in Mal’s hand this time.

“Ship was just taking good care of him, that’s all!” Sigrid pulled him in for a big hug against her heavy bosom.

Later he learned that an intensive effort had been made to “rescue” him from the machines, set him free from his long sleeps. The attempt had collapsed foolishly and no one wanted to talk about it. Then everyone had grown a little worried about Bart and all were glad to see him still coming back, if only for a day each year. Gray was spreading in the hair of the happy crew around him, and several of the male heads were now nearly bald. Many of the people looked a little fatter and squintier than when he had seen them last. They gave him a big lunch that was almost a birthday party.

Thirty-seven

Galina and Solon took him on a tour of their biology lab, which was much enlarged and changed since he had seen it last. They had in cages some white rats and hamsters, grown from genetic material obtained from the Ship’s stores.

“Do you think the long sleeps are harming me?” Bart asked when he had a chance.

“Harming you physically? No, I doubt it.” Galina looked at him thoughtfully. “It takes an enormous amount of energy and a great deal of control equipment to keep a human being in such a sleep; even a Ship like this couldn’t do it for very many people at a time. It’s not just freezing in the ordinary sense, you know. Even the orbital electrons within your body’s atoms are kept from moving. . . but don’t worry about the physical danger of it; that’s extremely small.”

She was anxious to resume the biology lessons, so they went on a thorough tour of the lab.

“We haven’t been able to get any human genetic material from the Ship to work with. Still, in theory it should be possible for us to produce a new human generation here, starting with just ordinary cells from our own bodies. Did I ever tell you anything about cloning cells?”

“No.”

“I will. Anyway, it hasn’t worked out yet. We’re not sure if the Ship is interfering in some subtle way, or if there are simply problems we’re not aware of.”

They showed Bart masses of tissue growing in glass jars. They had never been able to get the tissue to differentiate properly into all the organs that had to grow in concert to make a person. It looked to Bart as if they hadn’t yet even come close to achieving that.

Here and there old colored tapes were stuck to the walls and overhead, but the game they represented seemed to have been utterly abandoned.

The only competition Bart heard about today was in growing the best food plants and flowers.

Thirty-eight

It was depressing to see Helsa now dragging herself around like an invalid, her arms grown thin and her ankles puffy. Others told Bart that Galina suspected some slow, incurable disease. Then they turned the talk to brighter things.

“There’s a lot of card playing going on now, Bart,” Sharon informed him.

“Card playing?”

“Poker, whist, bridge,” said Ranjan. “We’ll show you. They’re old games we dug out of the Ship’s records. We’ve also tried out two new approaches to get through the barriers to reach the control regions of the Ship, but neither has worked.”

“We haven’t really tried them yet,” Fuad objected.

“Well, we’ve run them on the computer,” Lotis put in.

“Bah. I tell you, the Ship is still using that computer against us—”

“No, I keep telling you,” argued Ranjan, “we’ve got it blocked off now against any possibility of the Ship’s gaining access—”

“So you think! I don’t agree.” The argument was heated, but showed no sign of coming to blows.

Thirty-nine

Today there was a prayer meeting, more elaborate in ceremony but less intense in feeling than the last one Bart had attended. He noted that people’s clothing, which they now largely made for themselves, was growing more elaborate, too, and more voluminous. It covered more of their sagging bodies, and distracted attention from them.

Bart also noticed that a softer, more comfortable type of chair had been manufactured somehow and was now in general use. The legs didn’t look as if they could be unscrewed.

Forty

It was birthday party time again. Four candles adorned the big cake, each standing for ten years, as someone explained to Bart. The party was opened with a rather perfunctory prayer.

“Bet you don’t remember when I took this picture of you, Bart.”

“Yes, I do.”

Several speeches were made, tracing the recent history of progress in science—mainly astronomical observations and biological research; and in the arts—mainly sculpture, painting, and drawing. Not much had been done lately in an engineering way, a speaker said, which Bart supposed meant they weren’t getting anywhere with plans to take over the Ship.

A new president, Olen, had just been elected for a two-year term, and he pledged in a vague way to get things moving.

All around the table the faces were puffy or lined, continuing to puddle or sag. There was more gray hair than any other color.

Forty-one

Bart found a number of people playing chess, a game they said they would teach him before the day was over.

About dinner time Basil told him something else, more confidentially. “I’m not going to give you any details, kid—nothing the Ship doesn’t already know. Information you don’t have can’t be pumped out of you. I’ll just say that this time we really know what we’re doing, and we’re not likely to be stopped. We’ve been a long time getting ready.”

Forty-two

He soon learned that Basil, Mal, and Olen had set out shortly after Bart’s last waking day, on a major effort to force their way into the Ship’s control areas. They were not back yet, and by now it was doubtful, to say the least, that they ever would return.

Himyar, the sculptor, proudly showed Bart a tall pair of steel doors on which he was carving the history of their little society in a series of panels. He claimed that he had devised a method of grinding stainless steel that worked beautifully.

Helsa was now much better, Bart saw with some surprise. But Sigrid looked unhealthy and was complaining of vague pains. “We’re going to try something new,” Bart heard Galina tell her cheerfully. Evidently the Ship was again not helping, or could not.

The garden had once more been enlarged, this time all for additional useful food plants.

Forty-three

Basil was back—had been back for several months—but Bart saw that there was still something new and wild and strange in his eyes and he was still emaciated. The other men weren’t coming back, Basil said, and that was about all he had to tell about his adventure.

The way Basil looked made Bart timid about pressing him with any further questions. Later he heard more of Basil’s story from someone else. The three men had tried going outside the Ship to reach the aft, where they intended to get back in. Something had gone wrong with their equipment; maybe the Ship had sabotaged it. They did get back into the Ship, luckily, in a region where they could find air and water and stored food enough to keep them alive for a time, but the controls had been as much out of reach as ever. Eventually, Basil had made his way back, somehow, through a maze of inner decks and passageways. He had never made it completely clear just how the other two had died, and Bart got the impression that it might be wise not to press too closely on that question.

Himyar had completed his doors and was working with Vivian on a giant mural of Earth, composed of scenes reconstructed imaginatively from old records.

Sigrid’s condition was not much changed from last year.

Fay, having recently been named president in a special election, told Bart it had been decided that he should attend school every waking day. The people were getting ready a course of study for him. “The machines insisted on our attending school, I mean in a formal way, and I don’t know why they don’t with you, but never mind.” She brushed back her graying hair and looked at him as if at a challenge. “It’s time and past time that you formed good habits to carry over through the rest of your life.”

Forty-four

Bart heard right away that Sigrid had died, only a few days ago.

Maybe this latest death was still on everyone’s mind, and that was why his first day of school didn’t go too well. Lotis was teaching, and sort of skipped from subject to subject, and technique to technique. She knew it wasn’t going well, and once she sighed: “Someone else will take a turn at teaching next year—I mean, tomorrow. Are you able to learn anything from me, Bart?”

“Oh, yes.”

His day was almost over before he heard something exciting: it was no longer quite certain that Olen and Mal were dead. At least, some garbled message had come in, along disused intercom channels that were thought to connect with control territory. Some almost indecipherable words about surviving. Maybe it was only garbage belched out by the vast intraship communications delay lines or memory drums, not produced by any of this generation’s people at all. But maybe. . .

Forty-five

Himyar had put his clever hands to work, toiling in his improved shop, to outfit several people with eyeglasses. Studies on artificial teeth were now well under way, with Solon doing most of the research. The Ship refused to do anything along prosthetic lines for anyone, though it still treated routine minor injuries.

Bart heard Edris and Trac and Kichiro praying, but no longer to the Ship. He saw Basil, who now stared at walls instead of stars, and still said very little.

School was better today. Fuad as teacher talked with him easily and amused him with stories of old Earth.

Forty-six

School again, his teacher Chao, who was grimly determined that he should learn to appreciate the beauties of geometry.

He heard that the garden was just getting over an epidemic of plant disease, caused by no one knew what.

Ranjan had just been elected president, for an indeterminate term, and had pledged to get things moving.

The work on artificial teeth was progressing again after several setbacks. Solon and others looked into Bart’s mouth again to judge whether he needed braces, but to his relief decided to let well enough, or almost well enough, alone.

Forty-seven

Bart got to see Vivian’s and Himyar’s finished mural, and part of a championship chess game between Armin and Basil.

He tasted a new hybrid fruit from the restored garden.

He heard vague mention of a Golden Birthday celebration that might last for a year and should begin fairly soon.

He saw some artificial teeth in operation.

He heard with blunted shock that Fay, who had been working on and off in the biology lab, had killed herself with quick, painless poison. If anyone knew the reasons, they never made them plain to Bart.

In school Himyar taught him, spiritedly but unintelligibly, about the various traditions of Earthly art.

Forty-eight

The gardeners and biologists had reported success in rejuvenating plants, and there was hope of applying their discoveries to people. Some were saying excitedly that now they understood why the Ship in its wisdom had refused them any help along this line, while letting them work freely at it for themselves. It was something only humans could do, being beyond the very limited creative capabilities of computers.

Not everyone agreed.

Bart’s school went on with a whole group of teachers. They were trying music appreciation today, and no one on the Ship seemed to have a real bent in this direction.

Forty-nine

Bart noticed today that some of the people who had seemed happily and permanently paired off as sex-and-life partners were now in different pairings, and evidently just as happy.

Today in school there was some confusion about just what Bart had been taught in previous sessions, and what he might now be fairly tested on. He did well on the tests when they were finally given, and the arguing teachers were all relieved.

Fifty

Again the whole group of them—the fifteen still alive—was on hand to greet Bart when he came through the last heavy door that set aside his private territory. They greeted him with cheers and songs, told him today was a holiday from school, and pulled him away for what they promised would be the biggest and best birthday party yet.

Sharon had just been elected president, and at the party table made a brief speech about how, with the help of all of them, she meant to get things moving again. As she said, she certainly wasn’t going to be able to do it all by herself.

There were several games of volleyball. Playing with these old people who had the names of kids he had once briefly met, Bart found himself for a little while one of the gang. He lost himself in the game, jumped nimbly among the jiggling paunches and creaking joints, got knocked down when someone’s hundred-kilo mass accidentally crashed into him.

But it was only for a little while that he belonged.

Fifty-one

He came into their living area with the feeling that they would have forgotten about keeping him in school, but no, the lessons were on as promised. Today, with Helsa teaching, Bart got a basic course in the Ship, what little the old records actually said about it and its mission, and something of what the people had been able to find out for themselves. After lunch, somewhat to Bart’s surprise, Basil came in and took over for a while, describing how the hull looked from outside, and what some of the remoter portions of the Ship were like. He spoke impersonally, and rarely as if he himself had been there.

Fifty-two

The whole company was excited. About a month ago the world of the ship had been rocked by an explosion, thought to have taken place a kilometer or two away along the hull, probably toward the aft. Whether a hurtling meteoric body had struck the hull, or there were some internal cause, was unknown.

The rumor flew by that Mal and Olen were perhaps still alive, and somehow responsible for the blast.

There was a sudden renewal of religious fervor. And school was conducted in an atmosphere of tension.

Fifty-three

There had been no more explosions, nor any further hints that the lost men had survived. The crisis atmosphere was gone, and talk was again centered on the hoped-for rejuvenation treatments.

Bart saw a proud display of implanted artificial teeth. The method didn’t work well in all cases yet, but Solon was optimistic about improvements.

School went on. Today a team of instructors tried to teach him a little about human language and its near-infinite variations, some of which they spoke, or at least could read.

Fifty-four

Timber harvested from the enormous garden was being used to build a sort of pavilion—a roofless, high-walled structure which Bart was told would be used as a kind of social center. He thought they built it just to be building something.

Himyar was seeking treatment for arthritis, which had stiffened his fingers and interfered considerably with his work.

Fifty-five

Fuad lay on a bed inside the finished pavilion, recuperating from what he said had been a heart attack. Galina said the EGG showed that the worst was over. Bart sat and talked for a while with Fuad, who was fetter even than last year, and didn’t look good.

People were swinging woven racquets, worn with use, in a game they called squash, played where the volleyball net had been three days ago.

Fifty-six

“What I preach to you, Bart,” said Basil, taking a turn at being schoolmaster, “what we have evolved here in our little world, is a complete synthesis of all mankind’s old creeds and philosophies. I am really certain of this.”

“How can you have a complete whatchamacallit if they were always contradicting each other, like you say?”

Basil had a long answer, but Bart found it not very satisfying.

A large part of the garden was now taken up by plants grown solely for use in the rejuvenation experiments.

Bart heard at dinner that Chao was now suffering repeated bouts of mental illness, and Galina had to keep her tranquilized and sometimes confined to her own room.

Fifty-seven

Politics had heated up suddenly. Edris, who had been acting president, had been removed from office and Trac was in, as some kind of compromise. Bart couldn’t figure out what the dispute was about, except some of the people felt themselves insulted by others.

At lunch Trac made a little speech about how she meant to get things moving again, both on exploration of the Ship and the rejuvenation work, which evidently had been allowed to lapse. She said also that expanded medical facilities were needed, and the hospital should be enlarged.

Bart remembered the hospital as the pavilion, or social center, but there were two chronic invalids, Fuad and Chao, living in it now.

Fifty-eight

Kichiro and Himyar were pointed out to Bart as rejuvenation patients, perhaps already on their way to growing younger, though Galina and Solon didn’t want to make any definite claims just yet.

“It’s helped me a great deal, too,” Trac said. Bart thought to himself how much her face had wrinkled and bagged in the last few days.

Himyar had started working in a new electronic medium, less demanding on the knuckles.

Basil was living apart now, giving much time to fasting and prayer.

Most of the women had taken to dyeing their hair, yellow and red being favorite colors.

Fifty-nine

Great interest in chess had revived, and a huge birthday party was being planned for next year.

Hair colors were still used, but had been toned down.

School went on. Bart argued with his teachers that they should show him more about the structure of the Ship than about things of old Earth, which didn’t seem to him to have any bearing on his present situation. Galina still pushed biology, but Bart could see that you’d have to study that for years to really get anywhere. He didn’t know how much time he had to study anything.

A couple of small riding carts had been built, powered by electric motors, and Bart had some fan riding them about. His elders got angry and yelled at him when he drove too wildly.

The most popular physical game consisted mainly of sliding discs over a pattern of numbered squares on the floor.

Sixty

When he woke up in his room a machine was standing beside him, waiting to give him his monthly physical. His gains in weight and height were both larger than during the previous month. He counted a few more pubic hairs. This morning the creamy drink was dropped from his solitary breakfast.

The birthday party had more and fancier decorations than before, but little else was different, except that most of the people were content to just sit around and eat, drink, and talk. Fuad didn’t eat or drink much—he’d lost a lot of weight. But Chao, as the others said, was having a good day, and joined in merrily.

All in all, the old people had a good time. They fussed over Bart quite a bit, but he felt pretty much out of it. Not sad, really, but detached. School had been recessed for the day, though he would have liked to learn more about the Ship.

Sixty-one

Ranjan had suffered a stroke, and was lying paralyzed in the hospital, unable to move anything on his right side. Everyone seemed angry at the Ship, for what they described as cutting back more on its medical programs just as their needs were rising. Part of the space it had formerly used to give them such niggardly medical treatments as it provided had now been walled off. Something else was going on in there, they said, and nodded angrily, though they didn’t know what.

They questioned Bart, something like envy now mixed on their faces with the tenderness they usually accorded him these days. But he had not a scrap of information to provide.

At the moment the office of president was empty, and the question of reorganizing the government was being somewhat crankily debated.

Sixty-two

Vivian, who had been getting fat, was wasting and suffering internal pains. Ranjan was still unable to help himself at all. Bart was told these ills and a catalogue of lesser ones as if he should be just bursting with eagerness to hear them.

He was more interested by ping-pong, which was now a favorite game.

The burning social question was whether there should be an attempt at tinkering with the basic food machines to try to get a more easily chewable output from them.

Kichiro, Solon, and Armin, the only really healthy men, were undertaking an ambitious program to get themselves in shape. Edris, Galina, Sharon, Helsa, and Lotis were laughing a lot at the men and pondering a reducing program for themselves. Trac was thin already, maybe because she had trouble eating.

Sixty-three

He learned that Vivian was dead, to nobody’s surprise.

His school today was conducted by Lotis, who about six weeks ago had started to seduce him in the swimming pool. Meeting the eyes of the old gray-haired woman now, Bart thought she didn’t remember that at all. And he was right. That hadn’t been her in the pool at all, only someone with whom she shared a name. Today she taught him gardening.

The garden was being expanded again. A lot of the rejuvenation plants were still there, taking up space, and not so much living room was needed for people any more, Bart supposed. There were fourteen of them alive now instead of twenty-four, and the survivors didn’t move around as much as they used to. “Remember when I took this picture of you, Bart?” “Yes, I do, but you don’t.” And he went rudely on his way, leaving Armin standing still behind him. It wasn’t really Armin that bothered Bart, it was the whole situation. The future wasn’t coming for these old people, but it was sure enough coming for him.

Sixty-four

Fuad had just died, of another heart attack, and Bart was solemnly conducted to see the still body in a refrigeration room, before they said words over it and gave it back to the ship through a disposal chute.

“Death is a part of life, Bart,” Basil explained. They hadn’t given him that reasonable an explanation a couple of months ago when they murdered Fritz before his eyes. Never mind, he told himself.

The more energetic people were playing squash today, and Bart joined in for a little while. He was fussed over as usual, and after school people pressed cake and cookies on him.

Sixty-five

He had noticed for some time that his sessions in the school room (not far from the hospital, from which came now and then a querulous groaning) tended to fall into two types. In the first type a teacher tried very earnestly to cram knowledge into his head; in a lesson of the second type (sometimes conducted by the same man or woman) there were long pauses, and an air of futility hung over the proceedings.

Today’s session, starting right after lunch, was of the second type. After about an hour Sharon, his instructor, left him alone with a teaching machine, from which he abstracted information on the layout of the Ship, until that got boring. He played with the machine trivially then until they came to get him for dinner.

Sixty-six

He asked to be allowed to study on his own again, and when the request was granted he daydreamed and played with the machine for a while. The vision of young Lotis in the pool came to him, and he got up and went to see if the pool was still there.

Gray-haired Lotis, his teacher again today, discovered his unexplained desertion and came after him angrily. They quarreled, and she tried to take him by the hair and drag him back to school.

She was still a sturdy old girl, but in getting free he pushed her hard enough to knock her down. Alarmed by the way she yelled, he ran away.

Soon Kichiro came limping after him. Bart might have run some more and evaded capture, or sought the safety of his room, but he thrust out his lip and stood his ground. Kichiro slapped him and made him come back to school, with the hardest grip that Bart could remember clamped on his arm.

Sixty-seven

He heard that Ranjan had died, to everyone’s relief, after six years of paralysis.

Bart went sullenly into school, under Kichiro’s watchful eye.

The regular lesson hadn’t gone far before Kichiro interrupted it to make a small impulsive speech. “Bart, you’re about all that we old people have to live for. You and the hope that you represent—that one day there will be more people on the Ship, people who will get out from under the yoke of the machines, something we’ve never been able to manage. ‘We have done those things we ought not to have done, and left undone those things we should have done.’ ”

Bart didn’t know what to say.

“But all our lives make too much of a burden to be put on you, don’t they?” Kichiro added with a sigh. He seemed to be pleading.

“No, it’s all right with me if you feel that way.” And his teacher was happy and gave him a manly hug. But Kichiro had missed the point. Bart no longer cared how any of them felt about anything.

Sixty-eight

The first person he met was Armin, who told him that Chao and Basil had both died, separately and rather suddenly, in the past year.

Bart went to school and found that they had a test programmed into the teaching machine, ready for him to take. Left alone to work, he answered a couple of the questions, and then, feeling that he had something more important to do on this day, he got up and left the school. He looked back once and then walked on. Kichiro looked older and less vigorous than he had two years before, and Bart didn’t think any of the others would try to get rough with him. Not any more.

He went to the commissary and punched orders for a small birthday cake into the machine, as he had done for some of those early parties, so long ago. It seemed long to him, now.

Soon he had his cake, the fourteen small candles he had ordered, and a lighter, too. He carried the cake to a refectory table and sat down alone to eat some of it himself. He made a little ceremony of lighting the candles, but would have felt too silly singing himself any songs.

He had ordered the sweet fizzy drink he usually had at parties, but soon got up and went to where the wine was always kept and poured himself a cup of that.

Kichiro came in and stared at him a few moments before speaking. “You’re supposed to be in school.” The old man’s voice was half startled and half angry. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“It’s my fourteenth birthday today. I’m having my cake.”

Kichiro stared a little longer through his puffy, old man’s eyes. “Well—I’m sorry if we forgot about your birthday, but that doesn’t excuse your running out in the middle of a test.” He had left a door open somewhere behind him and all the time he was talking, fretful moaning complaints kept drifting over from the direction of the hospital.

Armin and Helsa came into the room. “What’s the matter?”

Kichiro told them, and they started arguing—Helsa for taking a different approach with the boy, as she put it, and Armin in favor of declaring another holiday. This last suggestion angered Kichiro. They were still arguing with one another when Bart finished the little piece of cake on his plate, got up, and left, practically unnoticed. This time he located the pool but found it had long been dry and empty.

Sixty-nine

Bart woke up and left his room as usual, and was surprised when the first set of heavy doors that interrupted his private corridor remained closed when he approached. Then he saw that a new doorway, leading to a new, or newly revealed, passageway had been made in the wall at right angles to the doors.

After a moment, Bart took the new way.

“The prime directives under which I operate are very clear,” the Ship said in his ear. “At least one human parent is necessary for children to mature to their full potential.

“We will arrive in less than twenty standard years within a system of planets probably suitable for colonization. From now on you will be awakened increasingly often. You will serve the first generation of colonists as parent. Like them, you have first-rate genetic potential, and perhaps you will remain in some position of leadership when they mature. Today begins your apprenticeship in this role; your elementary preparation for it—a course in the basics of human psychology—was completed yesterday.”

With gradual comprehension Bart walked on, guided toward the new nursery by the polyphonic squalling from its full cribs.

TO MARK THE YEAR ON AZLAROC

Fred Saberhagen has worked as an encyclopedia editor and in electronics, but for the past 14 years he has spent as much of his time as possible writing science fiction, and now he has no time for encyclopedias or electronics. He is best known for his famous “Berserker” series of science-fiction stories, which has been widely enjoyed and even more widely imitated.

They had been quarreling in the ship, and were still at it when they disembarked and left its sprawling metal complexities behind them. Ailanna snapped at Hagen: “So what if I misplaced your camera! What does it matter if you have one more picture of the stars? You can take a dozen when we depart.” And when it turned out that they had missed the ground transport machine that was taking the other passengers across the smooth undulations of the golden plain toward the city, Hagen was almost expecting her to physically attack him.

“Son of a nobody!” Ailanna hissed. “Where are we to stay if you have made no reservations?” A kilometer away was the only real city on the star, and Hagen realized that to one coming to Azlaroc for the first time, the city must look quite small. On the surface there appeared only a few fairyland towers, and little evidence of the many chambers and passageways dug out beneath the plain.

“I haven’t made up my mind where to stay.” He turned away from her and began to walk after the transport machine.

She followed. “You can never make up your mind about anything.” It was an old intermittent quarrel. If the reservations had been in perfect order, there would have been something else to quarrel about.

She nagged him for a hundred meters across the plain, and then the scenery began to come through to her. The enormous golden-yellow land was humped here and there by paraboloid hills and studded with balanced spheres of matter. The surface looked more like something man-made than like soil, and it stretched in places up to the low, yellowish, sunless sky, in asymptotic spires that broke off in radiant glory at an altitude of a few hundred meters, at the upper edge of the region of gravity inversion.

“What’s that?” Her voice was no longer angry. She was looking toward the top of a golden sphere which loomed over the distanceless horizon, at right angles to the way they were walking. The sphere reminded Hagen of a large planet rising, as seen from some close-in satellite, but this sphere was entirely beneath the low, peculiar sky.

“Only part of the topography.” He remained calm, as usual, taking her bickering in stride.

When they had gotten under-surface in the city, and arranged for lodgings, and were on their way to them through one of the smaller side passageways, Hagen saw some man or woman of a long-past year approaching through the passage from the other direction. Had there been three or four people of the present year or of recent years in the same part of the corridor just then, the passage of such an old one would have been almost un-noticeable. The old one did not appear as a plain solid human figure. Only a disturbance in the air and along the wall, a mound of shadows and moire patterns that throbbed with the beat of the pulsar somewhere beneath their feet. The disturbance occupied hardly any space in this year’s corridor, and Ailanna at first was not aware of it at all.

Hagen reached out a hand and took her by the upper arm and forced her, strong woman that she was, into three almost-dancing steps that left her facing in the proper way to see. “Look. One of the early settlers.”

With a small intake of breath Ailanna fixed her eyes on the figure. She watched it out of sight around a corner, then turned her elfin face to Hagen. Her eyes had been enlarged, and her naturally small chin further diminished, in accordance with the fashion dictates of the time, even as Hagen’s dark eyebrows had been grown into a ring of hair that crossed above his nose and went down by its sides to meld with his mustache. She said: “Perhaps one of the very first? An explorer?”

“No.” He looked about at the ordinary overhead lights, the smooth walls of the yellowish rock-like substance of the star. “I remember that this corridor was not cut by the explorers, not perhaps until ‘120 or ‘130. So no settler in it can be older than that, of course.”

“I don’t understand, Hagen. Why didn’t you tell me more about this place before you brought me here?”

“This way it will all come as a wonderful surprise.” Exactly how much irony was in his answer was hard to tell.

They met others in the corridor as they proceeded. Here came a couple of evidently ten or fifteen local years ago, walking in the nudity that had been acceptable as fashion then, draped with ten or fifteen of the sealing veils of Azlaroc so that their bodies shimmered slightly as they moved, giving off small diamond-sparkles of light. The veils of only ten or fifteen years were not enough to warp a settler out of phase with this year’s visitors, so the four people meeting in the passage had to give way a little on both sides, as if they were in a full sense contemporaries, and like contemporaries they excused themselves with vacant little social smiles.

Numbers, glowing softly from the corridor walls, guided Hagen and Ailanna to their rooms. “Hagen, what is this other sign that one sees on the walls?” It was a red hollow circle with a small pie-cut wedge of its interior filled with red also.

“The amount of red inside shows the estimated fraction of a year remaining until the next veil falls.”

“Then there is not much of the year left, for sightseeing. Here, this must be our door. I would say we have come at a poor time.”

Opening the door, he did not reply. Their baggage had already been deposited inside.

“I wouldn’t want to be trapped here, Hagen. Well, the apartment’s not bad . . . now what’s the matter? What have I said?” She had learned to know at once when something really bothered him, which her inconsequential bickering rarely seemed to do.

“Nothing. Ample warning is always given so the tourists can get away, you needn’t worry.

She was in the bedroom unpacking when something came in through the illusory window that seemed to give upon the golden plain. Where a sawtooth range of diminishing pyramids marched in from the horizon there came a shimmer and a sliding distortion that was in the room with her before she knew it, that passed on harmless through her own flesh, and went its way. She gave a yelp of fear.

Hagen was in the doorway, smiling faintly. “Didn’t I mention that we might be sharing our apartment here?”

“Sharing—of course not. Oh. You mean with settlers, folk of other years. That’s what it was, then. But—through the wall?”

“That wall was evidently an open passage in their time. Ignore them, as they will us. Looking up through their veils they can see us—differently, too. While diving I have asked them to describe how we look to them, but their answers are hard to understand.”

“Tell me about diving,” she said, when they had finished settling in and were coming out of doors again.

“Better than that, I’ll show you. But I’ll tell you first, of course.” As they walked out onto the plain, Hagen could hear the pulsar component of the triple system beating as sound, the sound coming now from overhead, thick and soft and at one third the speed of a calm human heart. It came through all the strangeness of space that lay between him and the invisible pulsar that locked its orbit intricately with those of a small black hole and of the world called Azlaroc.

He said: “What is called diving, on Azlaroc, is a means of approaching the people and things that lie under the veils of the years. Nothing can pierce the veils, of course. But diving stretches them, lets one get near enough to the people of the past to see them more clearly and make photographs.” And more than that, more than that, oh Gods of Space, thought Hagen but he said no more.

On the plain other tourists were also walking, in this year’s fashion of scanty garments each of a hundred colors. In the mild, calm air, under the vague yellowish sky that was not really a sky, and bathed in sunless light, Hagen had almost the feeling of being still indoors. He was heading for a divers’ shop that he remembered. He meant to waste no time in beginning his private search in earnest.

Ailanna walked beside him, no longer quarrelsome, and increasingly interested in the world around them. “You say nothing at all can pierce the veils, once they have fallen in and wrapped themselves about this planet?”

“No matter can pierce them. And this is not a planet. I suppose ‘star’ is the best term for a layperson to use, though the scientists might wince at it. There’s the divers’ shop ahead, see that sign beside the cave?” The cave was in the side of a sharp-angled rhombic hill.

Inside the shop they were greeted by the proprietor, a settler swathed in more than a hundred veils, who needed electronic amplifiers to converse with customers. After brief negotiation he began to take their measurements.

“Ailanna, when we dive, what would you like to see?”

Now she was cheerful. “Things of beauty. Also I would like to meet one of those first, stranded explorers.”

“The beauty will be all about. There are signals and machines to guide the tourist to exceptional sights, as for the explorer, we can try. When I was last here it was still possible to dive near enough to them to see their faces and converse. Maybe now, when a hundred and thirty more veils have been added, it is possible no longer.”

They were fitted with diving gear, each a carapace and helm of glass and metal that flowed like water over their upper bodies.

“Hagen, if nothing can pierce the fallen veils of the years, how are these underground rooms dug out?”

Now his diver’s suit had firmed into place. Where Hagen’s face had been she saw now only a distorting mirror, that gave an eerie semblance of her own face back to her. But his voice was familiar and reassuring. “Digging is possible because there are two kinds of matter, of physical reality, here coexisting. The stuff of the landscape, all those mathematical shapes and the plain they rise from, is comparatively common matter. Its atoms are docile and workable, at least here in this region of mild gravity and pressure. The explorers realized from the start that this mild region needed only air and water and food, to provide men with more habitable surface than a planet . . . there, your diver’s gear is stabilized about you. Let’s walk to Old Town, where we may find an explorer.”

Sometimes above ground and sometimes below, they walked, armored in the strange suits and connected to the year of their own visit by umbilical cables as fine and flexible and unbreakable as artists’ lines on paper. Adjusting his gear for maximum admittance, Hagen nervously scanned the faces of all passing settlers. Now some features were discernable in even the oldest of them.

“And the other kind of matter, Hagen, the other physical reality. What about the veils?”

“Ah, yes. The material between the stars, gathered up as this triple system advances through space. What is not sucked into the black hole is sieved through nets of the pulsar’s radiation, squeezed by the black hole’s hundred billion gravities, shattered and transformed in all its particles as it falls toward Azlaroc through the belts of space that starships must avoid. Once every systemic year conditions are right and a veil falls. What falls is no longer matter that men can work with, any more than they can work in the heart of a black hole. Ailanna, are you tuned to maximum? Look just ahead.”

They were out on the surface again. A human figure that even with the help of diver’s gear appeared no more than a wavery half-image had just separated itself from an equally insubstantial dwelling. A hundred and thirty years before, someone had pointed out a similar half-visible structure to Hagen as an explorer’s house. He had never spoken to an explorer, but he was ready now to try. He began to run. The gear he wore was only a slight hindrance.

Close ahead now was the horizon, with just beyond it the golden globe they had earlier observed. No telling how far away it was, a thousand meters or perhaps ten times that distance. Amid glowing dunes—here the color of the land was changing, from yellow to a pink so subtle that it was effectively a new color—Hagen thought that he had lost the explorer, but then suddenly the wavery stick-figure was in his path. Almost, he ran through or collided with it. He regained his balance and tried to speak casually.

“Honorable person, we do not wish to be discourteous, and we will leave you if our inquiries are bothersome, but we would like to know if you are one of the original explorers.”

Eyes that one moment looked like skeletal sockets, and the next as large and human as Ailanna’s own, regarded Hagen. Or were they eyes at all? Working with the controls of his sensory input he gained for one instant a glimpse of a face, human but doubtfully either male or female, squinting and intense, hair blown about it as if in a terrible wind. It faced Hagen and tried to speak, but whatever words came seemed to be blown away. A moment later the figure was gone, only walking somewhere nearby, but so out of focus that it might as well have flown behind the golden sphere somewhere.

Question or answer, Hagen? Which had it offered you?

Ailanna’s hands clamped on his arm. “Hagen, I saw—it was terrible.”

“No, it wasn’t. Only a man or a woman. What lies between us and them, that can be terrible sometimes.”

Ailanna was dialing her admittance down, going out of focus in a different way. Hagen adjusted his controls to return fully with her to their own year. Very little of the land around them seemed to change as they did so. A chain of small pink hills, hyperbolic paraboloid saddles precisely separating members, seemed to grow up out of nothing in the middle distance. That was all.

“Hagen, that was an explorer, that must have been. I wish he had talked to us, even though he frightened me. Are they still sane?”

He looked around, out over the uninhabited region toward which they had been walking, then back toward the city. In the city was where he would have to search.

He said: “The first veil that men ever saw falling here caught them totally by surprise. They described it as looking like a fine net settling toward them from an exploding sky. It settled over the first explorers and bound itself to the atoms of their bodies. They are all here yet, as you know. Soon it was realized that the trapped people were continuing to lead reasonable human lives, and that they were now protected against aging far better than we on the outside. There’s nothing so terrible about life here. Why shouldn’t they be sane ? Many others have come here voluntarily to settle.”

“Nothing I have seen so far would lead me to do that.” Her voice was growing petulant again.

“Ailanna, maybe it will be better if we separate for a time. This world is as safe as any. Wander and surprise yourself.”

“And you, Hagen?”

“I will wander too.”

He had been separated from Ailanna for a quarter of a day, and searching steadily all the time, before he finally found her.

Mira.

He came upon her in a place that he knew she frequented, or had frequented a hundred and thirty years before. It was one of the lower subterranean corridors, leading to a huge pool in which real water-diving, swimming, and other splashy sports were practiced. He was approaching her from the rear in the corridor when she suddenly stopped walking and turned her head, as if she knew he was there even before she saw him.

“I knew you would be back, Hagen,” she said as he came up.

“Mira,” he said, and then was silent for a time. Then he said: “You are still as beautiful as ever.”

“Of course.” They both smiled, knowing that here she could not age, and that change from any sort of accident was most unlikely.

He said: “I knew that, but now I see it for myself.” Even without his diving gear he could have seen enough through one hundred and thirty veils to reassure himself of that. But with his gear on it was almost as if he were really in her world. The two of them might hold hands, or kiss, or embrace in the old old way that men and women still used as in the time when the race was born of women’s bodies. But at the same time it was impossible to forget that the silken and impermeable veils of a hundred and thirty years would always lie between them, and that never again in this world or any other would they touch.

“I knew you would come back. But why did you stay away so long?”

“A few years make but little difference in how close I can come to you.”

She put out her hands and held him by the upper arms, and stroked his arms. He could feel her touch as if through layers of the finest ancient silk. “But each year made a difference to me. I thought you had forgotten me. Remember the vows about eternity that we once made?”

“I thought I might forget, but I did not. I found I couldn’t.”

A hundred and thirty years ago he and Mira had quarreled, while visiting Azlaroc as tourists. Angry, Hagen had gone offstar without telling her; when an alarm sounded that the yearly veil was falling early, she had been sure that he was still somewhere on the surface, and had remained on it herself, searching for him, and of course not finding him. By the time he came back, meaning to patch up the quarrel, the veil had already fallen.

She had not changed, and yet seeing her again was not the same, not all that he had expected it to be.

The reaction to his coming back was growing in her. “Hagen, Hagen, it is you. Really you.”

He felt embarrassed. “Can you forgive me for what happened?”

“Of course I can, darling. Come, walk with me. Tell me of yourself and what you’ve done.”

“I . . . later I will try to tell you.” How could he relate in a moment or two the history of a hundred and thirty years? “What have you done here, Mira? How is it with you?”

“How would it be?” She gestured in an old, remembered way, with a little sensuous, unconscious movement of her shoulder. “You lived here with me; you know how it is.”

“I lived here only a very little time.”

“But there are no physical changes worth mentioning. The air my yeargroup breathes and the food we eat are recycled forever, more ours than the rooms we live in are. But still we change and grow, though not in body. We explore the infinite possibilities of each other and of our world. There are only eleven hundred and six in my yeargroup, and we have as much room here as do the billions on a planet.”

“I feared that perhaps you had forgotten me.”

“Can I forget where I am, and how I came to be here?” Her eyes grew very wide and luminous—not enlarged eyes like Ailanna’s, Mira like most other settlers had kept to the fashions of her year of veiling—and there was a compressed fierceness in her lips. “There was a time when I raged at you—but no longer. There is no point.”

He said: “You are going to have to teach me how to be a settler here. How to put up with gawking tourists, and with the physical restrictions on which rooms and passages I may enter, when more of them are dug out in the future. Do you never want to burrow into the rooms and halls of later years, and make them your own?”

“That would just cause destruction and disruption, for the people of later years to try to mend. They could probably retaliate by diving against us, and somehow disarranging our lives. Though I suppose a war between us would be impossible.”

“Do I disarrange your life seriously, Mira, by diving to you now?”

“Hagen!” She shook her head reprovingly. “Of course you do. How can you ask?” She looked at him more closely. “Is it really you who has come back, or someone else, with outlandish eyebrows?” Then the wild and daring look he knew and loved came over her, and suddenly the hundred and thirty years were gone. “Come to the pool and the beach, and we will soon see who you really are!”

He ran laughing in pursuit of her. She led him to the vast underground grotto of blackness and fire, where she threw off her garments and plunged into the pool. He followed, lightly burdened with his diver’s gear.

It was an old running, diving, swimming game between them, and he had not forgotten how to play. With the gear on, Hagen of course did not need to come to the surface of the pool to breathe, nor was he bothered by the water’s cold. But still she beat him, flashing and gliding and sliding away. He was both outmaneuvered and outsped.

Laughing, she swam back to where he had collapsed in gasps and laughter on the black-and-golden beach. “Hagen, have you aged that much? Even wearing the drag and weight of diver’s gear myself I could beat you today.”

Was he really that much older? Lungs and heart should not wear out so fast, nor had they, he believed. But something else in him had aged and changed. “You have practiced much more than I,” he grumbled.

“But you were always the better diver,” she told him softly, swimming near, then coming out of the water. Some of the droplets that wet her emerging body were water of her own year, under the silken veils of time that gauzed her skin; other drops, the water of Hagen’s time, clung on outside the veils. “And the stronger swimmer. You will soon be beating me again, if you come back.”

“I am back already, Mira. You are three times as beautiful as I remembered you.”

Mira came to him and he pulled her down on the beach to embrace her with great joy. Why, he thought, oh why did I ever leave?

Why indeed?

He became aware that Ailanna was swimming in the water nearby in her own diver’s gear, watching, had perhaps been watching and listening for some time. He turned to speak to her, to offer some explanation and introduction, but she submerged and was gone. Mira gave no sign of having noticed the other woman’s presence.

“Do you miss the world outside, Mira?”

“I suppose I drove you away to it, the last time, with my lamenting for it. But no, I do not really miss it now. This world is large enough, and grows no smaller for me, as your world out there grows smaller as you age, for all its galaxies and space. Is it only the fear of time and age and death that has brought you back to me, Hagen?”

“No.” He thought his answer was perfectly honest, and the contrast between this perfectly honest statement and some of his earlier ones showed up the earlier ones for what they were. Who had he been trying to fool? Who was it that men always tried to fool?

“And was it,” she asked, “my lamenting that drove you off? I lament no longer for my life.”

“Nor for the veil that fell between us?”

The true answer was there in her grave eyes, if he could read it through the stretching, subtle, impenetrable veils.

The red circles held narrow dagger-blades of urgent warning on all the walls, and warning voices boomed like thunder across the golden, convulted plain. The evacuation ship lay like a thick pool of bright and melted-looking metal in the field, with its hundred doors open for quick access, and a hundred machines carrying tourists and their baggage aboard. The veil was falling early again this year. Stretching in a row across the gravity-inversion sky, near one side of the directionless horizon, explosions already raged like an advancing line of silent summer thunderstorms.

Hagen, hurrying out onto the field, stopped a hurrying machine. “My companion, the woman Ailanna, is she aboard the ship?”

“No list of names of those aboard has been completed, Man.” The timbre of the metal voice was meant to be masterly, and reassuring even when the words were not.

Hagen looked around him at the surface of the city, the few spare towers and the multitudinous burrowed entrances. Over the whole nearby landscape more machines were racing to reach the ship with goods or perhaps even tourists who had somehow not gotten the warning in comfortable time, or who were at the last moment changing their minds about becoming settlers. Was not Ailanna frantically looking amid the burrows for Hagen, looking in vain as the last moments fell? It was against logic and sense that she should be, but he could not escape the feeling that she was.

Nevertheless the doors on the ship were closed or closing now. “Take me aboard,” he barked at the machine.

“At once, Man.” And they were already flying across the plain.

Aboard ship, Hagen looked out of a port as they were hurled into the sky, then warped through the sideward modes of space, twisted out from under the falling veil before it could clamp its immovable knots about the atoms of the ship and passengers and hold them down forever. There was a last glimpse of the yellow plain, and then only strange flickers of light from the abnormal space they were traversing briefly, like a cloud.

“That was exciting!” Out of nowhere Ailanna threw herself against him with a hug. “I was worried there, for a moment, that you’d been left behind.” She was ready now to forgive him a flirtation with a girl of a hundred and thirty years ago. It was nice that he was forgiven, and Hagen patted her shoulder; but his eyes were still looking upward and outward, waiting for the stars.

WILDERNESS

Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories were a fixture in Galaxy magazine over the last decade; now he makes his debut in this magazine with a short and surprisingly pointed story about perspectives and what is meant by a word like—

THE YOUNG WOMAN had her blond hair in neat long braids, and the little girl, five or six years old, had her hair done in shorter versions of the same. The woman and girl were in the creek with a cake of soap when they first heard the crashing noise. It sounded from the direction of the distant road, like the noise that a clumsy man or a big startled animal would make moving in the brush. The woman immediately got out of the water with her child, the two of them wearing flecks of soap and goosebumps. Even now in summer the stream was icy, this close to its mountain source.

As the sound grew steadily louder the woman turned an anxious look toward the fine thread of white smoke rising from one of the two teepees in the adjacent clearing. Alders and young evergreens formed a heavy screen around the clearing, but if it were a man who made that crashing he could not fail to see the smoke and wonder who had made the fire. No other human work would be visible to him in any direction, except the fine contrail of a jet moving close above the lowering sun.

Bold and methodical, the sounds in the brush came nearer. The woman kept looking at the wall of brush across the creek, in the direction of the sounds, meanwhile dressing herself rapidly in a single garment, that might once have been a man’s military surplus coverall. It was shapeless and faded but not noticeably dirty. From time to time she made shushing sounds and gestures at her little girl, and as soon as she had covered herself she quickly dressed the child in jeans and faded sweatshirt. The girl’s short, light braids came snapping through when the shirt was pulled over her head. Then on the opposite bank of the stream, near the crossing of rough stones, the sounds at last produced their maker.

He had a square tanned face not shaved for a day, with close-cut graying brown hair above it, and he looked to be in his early forties. The strong body swayed, drunk or stoned on something fierce, but then that face looked entirely too straight, too pillar-or-the-community, to sway with anything but alcohol. He was well-enough dressed, in slacks and sport shirt and light jacket that had no doubt been clean at the beginning of the day. Stuffed inside his half-zipped jacket, and in its pockets, there rode a lumpy cargo dully jangling with his movements. It must be beer cans he was carrying so, for in each big hand he held one more of them, empty, the golden circles of their ends marked with dark keyholes where their pull tabs had been taken.

There was nothing in his face to frighten the woman. He was startled and pleased to discover the woman and child and looked intently at them, but then his eyes moved quickly on, joyfully taking in the teepees and the planted field—fenced against deer with posts and string and fluttering rags—and the well-worn paths that made crossings of the clearing and loops around it but nowhere went out to the world.

In a slurred bass-baritone he cried out: “People! It’s beautiful, there’s people! In th’ middle of th’ bloody wilderness!”

The young woman turned away from him, as if looking for support. It was on the way. Several more people were approaching, gathering together as they progressed from the farther reaches of the large clearing. There were two more brown and barefoot children; another young woman, with her black hair loose and very long, wearing a man’s old shirt and jeans; a black man, with uncut hair bushing under a wide-brimmed hat, wearing tattered suit-coat over blue work shirt, nondescript trousers, brogans. The remaining man looked anglo and his long hair fell straight. He had a brown beard, bare feet, tight-shrunken jeans. Under a shawl patterned in zig-zags his upper body was bare. Symbols popular five years earlier, wrought in bright metal, hung from a chain against his chest. The men were both dusty and sweating as if they had just been working in the field.

Approaching and gathering in silence, the people of the clearing looked at their visitor with various shadings of distaste.

He, on the higher bank across the narrow water, was glad to see them all. “Lovely people. I’d offer all you folks a beer, several beers. But y’see all my tanks are empties.” He belched gently and laughed gently, and gently shook his jangling jacket.

The man with the shawl turned his back on the sight. But after pulling at his beard in silence for a moment he turned once more to face it.

Not perturbed by unhappy silence, the visitor announced: “My intention was, t’ distribute these beer cans throughout the length and breath of this pristine wilderness. But as its already occupied, by such a sturdy outpost of humanity, I see no need . . . hey, what you’ve got here is one of those communal things, I bet. I guess you’re hippies or grokkies or whatever. I’m not very up t’date on what th’ word is now. No offense.”

His only answer was in the way that they all looked at him, as if at a disaster already happened and nothing to be done about it.

He said: “I first read about places like this, God it must be twenty years ago, back in the sixties. I was a Boy Scout leader then, I thought tents were a lot of fun.” He swayed and dropped a can by accident, and had to catch a branch to save his balance. “Well, tents aren’t the worst thing there is, but cities are better. Walls and roofs and more walls and roofs, I like ’em all in neat rows. Noise and garbage. I’ve come to like noise and garbage.”

“If that’s your track,” the black man said, “it could be you should’ve stayed on it.”

“I had t’ visit th’ frontier,” the visitor said vaguely. Squinting past the people of the clearing, past their canvas teepees, his face for the first time showed unhappiness. “Now there’s your fields. Com, tomatoes . . .” He let go his branch and came across the creek, surprisingly quick and surefooted when he concentrated on the uneven stepping-stones. He studied the fields again. “All right. But how d’you work it? No real machines. You just play you’re friends with nature, and break your backs. Listen, I grew up on a farm. You need to rent or buy some good machinery, knock down half these goddam trees to make some room, and raise some real crops. And put up houses! Act as if you meant t’ stay on and inhabit the planet for a while. But wait a minute.” He tried to clear his head with shaking. “Sorry. You’re way out here so you can squat on some free land, right? You’ll do things right when you get some money in, isn’t that it?”

“We’re just not doing things right,” the shawled man said, in a remote monotone. “We should all get stoned on alcohol and run across the country leaving a trail of . . . garbage. Wait a minute.” His eyes sharpened, staring at the visitor, at whom he now leveled a bony forefinger. “I’ve seen you someplace, when I was on a trip to town. I saw you on television, right? Now are you a reporter?”

The blond girl, in a tiny voice that might have belonged to her daughter, put in softly: “I was thinking that I’d seen him, too.”

The man did not seem to care whether they had ever seen him or not. “I’m no reporter. I’m just saying—” And with that he abruptly fell silent, looking past the others to the west as if at something deeply disturbing. But when the others turned there was nothing to be noted in the west except the going of the sun. The shadow of a distant mountain was reaching out across the clearing where they stood.

Now the stranger’s voice contained a hint of panic. “I’ll never make it back before dark.” He took a staggering step and almost slid into the creek. “Must be two miles t’ where I left my car. Listen, good people, I call for sanctuary for the night. I’ll pay you for a place to bunk, inside a tent.”

The people of the clearing exchanged troubled glances among themselves. The shawled man told the visitor: “Just wait right where you are, one minute.” While the visitor waited the others went to stand in a little knot between the teepees. There the adults conferred.

The black man said: “Can’t let him go back right now.”

“Why?” the dark girl asked.

“As drunk as he is. Suppose he falls down a ravine, or just gets lost and dies?”

Others nodded with reluctant concern. The shawled man said: “Another point, if he’s lost and his car is found near here, then we’ll be found too. Swanned over, investigated. At best we’d have to move.”

They all looked at the visitor again. Leaning against a tree where they had left him, he seemed to be yearning after the setting sun.

“Then he can stay the night,” the black man said. No one evinced any objection, and together they walked back to their visitor. The black man made the offer: “If you make no trouble you can stay until morning. Leave your garbage in the trash-pit, down that way.”

The square-faced man pushed away from his tree with obvious relief. “Thank you, many thanks!” And, a minute later when he had come back from the garbage pit without his beer cans: “I said I’d pay my way. How’s forty bucks? That’s what a real motel would cost.”

The others felt a common impulse to refuse. But there were always things that needed buying, on the quick trips to town; there was always too little money in the common fund.

“No luggage, so I’ll pay in advance. Who am I paying?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the shawled man. Then he reached to take the bills.

Inside the larger teepee everyone sat on canvas groundcloths around the little central fire, which kept out the chill of mountain nightfall, and steamed and bubbled the pots the women hung above it. The stranger had unzipped his jacket. They handed him coffee in a can. The alcohol seemed to be metabolizing out of him, and his hands were shaking just a bit. “Coming home,” he said to himself. “Coming home t’ find people who want to live like this.”

The black man made no pretence of not hearing. “Like I said, go back to the city if that’s your track. You going back, first thing in the morning. You ever come to bother us again, and we’ll tell your friends you lived with us three days.”

The visitor paid no attention. He had his own speech to make. “Listen, you people, don’t live like this. None of this crap about loving nature, you have no idea what she is. Oh sure, the green trees are nice, and the little squirrels. But you let them grow, not the other way round. Keep your nature, your wilderness, in a cage, an’ make damn well sure the bars are thick.” He filled his lungs with mountain air and wood-smoke tang. “That’s fine, good air t’ breathe. No one knows better’n me how fine that is. But can we trust nature to give us air? If we were smart we’d put all the good air in a big jar, and let out just a little at a time, as it was needed.”

“What are you so fearful of?” the blond young woman asked. She seemed really worried for him. “There are only a few bits of wilderness, of real nature, left in the world. Are they going to destroy you?”

The man stared at her intently, but did not seem able to comprehend what she had said. “Yeah, keep a few bits of nature in cages,” he replied at last. “Keep trees behind big fences, t’show we’re strong enough to do so. Otherwise drive the wilderness out, this is our place here, our place.”

“Our place? You think your forty bucks bought you a share?” The shawled man was getting angry fast. “You didn’t put down that much money, mister, to become a partner here. You don’t have that much.”

“Listen, it is our place!” The visitor started a fist-pounding gesture that midway lost itself in weariness. He thought things over briefly, then started up again. “I do have money. Fair amount. I’ll finance some things for you. Not that I want to move in, I’ll go and never come back. But I want you t’ do right with this land.” The shawled man said now: “We didn’t ask you in to give a lecture. If you weren’t so drunk I’d throw you out.”

“Well I’m not drunk, grokkie, not that drunk. I could’ve found my car. Jus’ because it’s dark outside doesn’t mean I can’t . . . be outside. I could go outside right now. The real reason I stayed was to get you people straightened out, make you see where your lives are all wrong.” From the square face the words came loudly and righteously; the profaning of the teepee promised to go on and on.

From somewhere the shawled man pulled out the forty dollars in now-crumpled bills, and threw them. “Get the hell out of my sight. Go over to the other tent and sleep it off.”

The visitor’s voice stopped, and his square certainty failed. He started slowly to pick up the money, and then he let it lie. He looked round at all the faces, and then jumped up and put his hands to his head and ran outside. The others followed in a rapid straggle, calling out confusedly to him and to one another.

After the firelight, darkness struck the eyes like a blow. Full night, clear and moonless, had come to swallow up the land. The stranger had run out under the stars, then stopped after a few strides, looking up. The others gathered around him, talking at cross-purposes while he paid no heed. Eyes quickly began to become accustomed to the dark.

The black man took the visitor by the arm, and pointed forcefully. “Look there, that’s the lights of Oakland in the sky, that glow you see. Now I’m gonna walk you to your car, and then you drive—”

“To hell with Oakland.” It was a changed voice, harder and soberer but somehow more remote. His arms that had been half lifted were going down slowly to his sides. His face was still turned up. “I didn’t want to be out at night, in the open . . . but it’s all right. There’s the Dipper, tipped to spill . . . follow the handle south, there’s Arcturus. There’s Bo-oh-teez, Libra, Virgo. Sirius, that blue-white spike, I thought once that it was coming after me, it’s on the other side of the sun this season. Canopus, that we like to lock our sensors on, it’s somewhere underfoot, you never see it this far north. Yeah, Mars, there’s the pock-marked bastard now, coming on to opposition. I really don’t mind looking any more. You can see much from our little place under all the air.”

In her little voice the blond girl said: “I know now who you are . . .”

He was standing straight, his head thrown back. “The star-clouds, God, in Sagittarius. Stars like snowflakes in a blizzard. They look like they’re frozen stiff, not moving. Flying around at hundreds of miles a second, and so far apart, so far away from us, that you can’t see them move. From our place here or Mars, you see them from the exact same angle. So far away. They were there for me to look at, the whole time out and back.”

“. . . the astronaut. The one who was alone for two years after the accident. Alone all the way to Mars and back.”

His straightness was that of a statue, standing for a billion years and keeping on even terms of stubbornness, so far, with stars.

“Nature,” he said. “Wilderness. My God, all wilderness.”

THE WHITE BULL

Fred Saberhagen, whose science fiction has been popular for more than a decade, here turns his hand to a reexamination of the legends of Crete and—

HE WAS UP on the high ridge, watching the gulls ride in from over the bright sea on their motionless wings, to be borne upward as if by magic, effortlessly, when the sundazzled landscape began to rise beneath them. Thus he was probably one of the first to sight the black-sailed ship coming in to port.

Standing, he raised a calloused hand to brush aside his grizzled hair and shade his eyes. The vessel had the look of the craft that usually came from Athens. But those sails . . .

He picked up and threw over his shoulder the cloak with which he had padded rock into a comfortable chair. It was time he came down from the high ridge anyway. King Minos and some of Minos’ servitors were shrewd, and perhaps it would be wiser not to watch the birds too openly or too long.

When he had picked his way down, the harbor surrounded him with its noise and activity, its usual busy mixture of naval ships and cargo vessels, unloading and being worked on and taking on new cargo. On Execution Dock the sun-dried carcasses of pirates, looking like poor statues, shriveled atop tall poles in the bright sun. On the wharf where the black-sailed ship now moored, a small crowd had gathered and a dispute of some kind was going on. A bright-painted wagon, pulled by two white horses, had come down as scheduled from the House of the Double Axe to meet the Athenian ship, but none of the wagon’s intended riders were getting into it as yet.

They stood on the wharf, fourteen youths and maids in a more or less compact group, wearing good clothes that seemed to have been deliberately torn and dirtied. Their faces were smeared with soot and ashes as if for mourning, and most of them looked somewhat the worse for wine. They were arguing with a couple of minor officials of the House, who had come down with the wagon and a small honor guard of soldiery. It was not the argument that drew the man from the high ridge ever closer, however, but the sight of one who stood in the front of the Athenian group, half a head taller than anyone around him . . .

He pushed his way in through the little crowd, a gray middle-aged man with the heavy hands of an artisan and wearing heavy gold and silver ornaments on his fine white loincloth. A soldier looked round resentfully as a hard hand pushed on his shoulder, then closed his mouth and stepped aside.

“Prince Theseus.” The old workman’s hands went out in a gesture of deferential greeting. “I rejoice that the gods have brought you safe again before my eyes. How goes it with your royal father?”

The tall young man swung his eyes around and brought them rather slowly into focus. Some of the sullen anger left his begrimed face. “Daedalus.” A nod gave back unforced respect, became almost a bow as the strong body threatened to overbalance. “King Aegeus does well enough.”

“I saw the black sails, Prince, and feared they might bear news of tragedy.”

“All m’family in Athens are healthy as war horses, Daedalus. Or were when we sailed. The mourning is for ourselves. For our approaching . . .” Theseus groped hopelessly for a word.

“Immolation,” cheerfully supplied one of the other young men in ashes.

“That’s it.” The Prince smiled faintly. “So you may tell these officers that we wear what we please to our own welcome.” His dulled black eyes roamed up the stair-steps of the harbor town’s white houses and warehouses and whorehouses, to an outlying flank of the House of the Double Axe which was just visible amid a grove of cedars at the top of the first ridge. “Where is the school?”

“Not far beyond the portion of the House you see. Say an hours walk.” Daedalus observed the younger man with sympathy. “So, you find the prospect of a student’s life in Crete not much to your liking.” Around them the other branches of the argument between Cretan officials and newcomers had ceased; all were attending to the dialogue.

“Four years, Daedalus.” The princely cheeks, one whitened with an old sword-scar, puffed out in a winey belch. “Four god-blasted years.”

“I know.” Daedalus’ face wrinkled briefly with shared pain. He almost put out a hand to take the other’s arm; a little too familiar, here in public. “Prince Theseus, will you walk with me? King Minos will want to see you promptly, I expect.”

“I bear him greetings from m’father.”

“Of course. Meanwhile the officers here will help your shipmates on their way to find their quarters.”

Thus the ascent from the harbor turned into an informal procession, with Theseus and Daedalus walking ahead, and the small honor guard following a few paces back, irregularly accompanied by the remaining thirteen Athenians, who looked about them and perhaps wondered a little at the unceremoniousness of it all. The girls whispered a little at the freedom of the Cretan women, who, though obviously respectable as shown by their dress and attitudes, strode about so boldly in the streets. The gaily decorated wagon in which the new arrivals might have ridden, rumbled uphill empty behind a pair of grateful horses. The wagon’s bright paint and streamers jarred with the mock-mourning of the newcomers.

When they had climbed partway through the town, Daedalus suggested gently to his companion that the imitation mourning would be in especially bad taste at Court today, for a real funeral was going to take place in the afternoon.

“Someone in Minos’ family?”

“No. One who would have been your fellow student had he lived; in his third year at school. A Lapith. But still.”

“Oh.” Theseus slowed his long if slightly wobbling strides and rubbed a hand across his forehead, looking at the fingers afterward. “Now what do I do?”

“Let us not, after all, take you to Minos right away.” Daedalus turned and with a gesture called one of the Court officials forward, saying to him: “Arrange some better quarters for Prince Theseus than those customarily given the new students. And he and his shipmates will need some time to make themselves presentable before they go before the King. Meanwhile, I will seek out Minos myself and offer explanations.”

The officer’s face and his quick salute showed his relief.

“DAEDALUS.” King Minos’ manner was pleasant but business-like as he welcomed his engineer into a pleasant, white-walled room where at the moment his chief tax-gatherers were arguing over innumerable scrolls spread out upon stone tables. Open colonnades gave a view of blue ocean in one direction, Mount Ida in another. “What can I do to help you out today? How goes the rock-thrower machine?” The King’s once-raven hair was graying, and his bare paunch stood honestly and comfortably over the waistband of his linen loincloth. But his arms within their circlets of heavy gold looked muscular as ever, and his eyes were still keen and penetrating.

“The machine goes well enough, sire. I wait for the cattle-hides from Thrace, that are to be twisted into the sling, and I improve my waiting time by overseeing construction of the bronze shields.” Actually by now the smiths and smelters were all well trained and needed little supervision; so there was time for thought whilst looking into the forge and furnace flames, time to see again the gull’s effortless flight as captured by the mind and eye . . . “Today, King Minos, I come before you with another matter, one that I am afraid will not wait.” He began to relate to Minos the circumstances of the Prince’s arrival, leaving out neither the black sails nor the drunkenness, though they were mere details compared with the great fact of Theseus’ coming to be enrolled in the school.

Minos during this recital led him into another room, out of earshot of the tax gatherers. There the King, frowning, walked restlessly, pausing to look out of a window to where preparations for the afternoon’s funeral games were under way. “How is Aegeus?” he asked, without turning.

“Prince Theseus reports his esteemed lather in excellent health.”

“Daedalus, it will not do for King Aegeus’ son to leave Crete with his brains addled, any more than they may be already.” The King turned. “As has happened to a few—Cretans and Athenians and others—since the school was opened. Or to leap from a tower, like this young man we’re burying today. Not that I think the Prince would ever choose that exit.”

“Yours are words of wisdom, Sire. And no more will it be desirable for Theseus to foil publicly at an assigned task, even if it be only obtaining a certificate of achievement from a school.”

Minos walked again. “Your turn to speak wisely, counselor. Frankly, what do you think the Prince’s chances are, of pursuing his studies here successfully?”

Daedalus’ head bobbed in a light bow. “I share your own seeming misgivings on the subject, great King.”

“Yes. Um. We both know Theseus, and we both know also what the school is like. You better than I, I suppose. I can have Phaedra keep an eye on him, of course. She will be starting this semester too—not that she has her older sisters brains, but it may do her some good. It may. He is as stalwart and handsome as ever, I suppose? Yes, then no doubt she will have an eye on him in any case.” Continuing to think aloud, arms folded and a frown on his face, Minos came closer, until an observer might have thought that he was threatening the other man. “I had no thought that Aegeus was about to send his own son. But I suppose he did not want his nobles’ children displaying any honors that could not be matched in his own house. Oh, if he’d had a scholarly boy, one given to hanging around with graybeard sages, then I would have issued a specific invitation. I would’ve thought it expected. But given the Princes nature . . .” Minos unfolded his arms but kept his eyes fixed firmly on his waiting subject, “Daedalus. You are Theseus’ friend, from your sojourn at the Athenian court. And you were enrolled briefly in the school yourself . . . I sometimes marvel that you did not throw yourself into it more wholeheartedly.”

“Perhaps we sages are not immune to professional jealousy, Sire.”

“Perhaps.” Minos’ gaze twinkled keenly. “However that may be, I now expect you to do two things.”

Daedalus bowed.

“First, stand ready to offer Theseus your tutorial services, as they may be required.”

“Of course, Sire.”

“Secondly—will you go today to see the Bull and talk to him? I think in this case you have greater competence than any of my usual ambassadors. Do what you can toward explaining the situation. Report back to me when you have seen the Bull.”

Daedalus bowed.

ON HIS WAY toward the Labyrinth, at whose center the Bull dwelt, he stopped to peer in unnoticed at the elementary school, which like most other governmental departments had its own corner of the vast sprawling House. On a three-legged stool surrounded by a gaggle of other boys and girls sat ten-year-old Icarus, stylus in hand, bent over wax tablets on a table before him. Chanting grammar, an earnest young woman paced among her pupils. Daedalus knew her for one of the more recent graduates of the school where Theseus was bound. For a moment the King’s engineer had the mad vision of Theseus in this classroom, teaching; hardly madder than that of the Prince sitting down to study, he supposed. After a last glance at his own fidgeting son—Icarus was bright enough, but didn’t seem to want to apply himself to learning yet—Daedalus walked on.

As he passed along the flank of the vast House, he glanced in the direction of the field of rock-hewn tombs nearby, and saw the small procession returning across the bridge that spanned the Kairatos, coming back to the House for the games, the bull-dancing and the wrestling that should please the gods.

Pausing in a cloistered walk to watch, he pondered briefly the fact that Minos himself was not coming to the funeral. Of course the King was always busy. There was Queen Pasiphae, though, taking her seat of honor in the stands, rouged and wigged as usual these days to belie her age, tight girdle thrusting her full bare breasts up in a passable imitation of youth. And there came Princess Ariadne to the royal bench, taking the position of Master of the Games, as befitted her status of eldest surviving child. And there was Phaedra—how old now? sixteen?—and quite the prettiest girl in sight.

He had thought that Theseus might be sleeping it off by now, but evidently the recuperative powers of youth, at least in the royal family of Athens, were even stronger than Daedalus remembered them to be. The Prince, cleansed by what must have been a complete bath and scraping, and suitably tagged for a modest degree of real mourning by a black band around his massive biceps, was just now vaulting into the ring for a wrestling turn. Stripped naked for the contest, Theseus was an impressive figure. Daedalus stayed long enough to watch him earn a quick victory over his squat, powerful adversary, some Cretan champion, and then claim a wreath from Ariadne’s hand.

Then Daedalus walked on. There was, on this side of the House, no sharp line of architectural demarcation where ordinary living space ended and the Labyrinth began. Roofed space became less common, and at the same time walls grew unscalably high and smooth and passages narrowed. Stairs took the walker up and down for no good reason, and up and down again, until he was no longer sure whether he walked above the true ground level or below it. Windows were no more.

Now Daedalus was in the precincts of the real school, which Thesus would attend. Behind closed wooden doors taut silence reigned, or else came out the drone of reciting voices. A dozen times a stranger would have been confused, and like as not turned back to where he started, before Daedalus reached a sign, warning in three languages that the true Labyrinth lay just ahead. He passed beneath the sign with quick, sure steps.

HE HAD GONE scarcely fifty paces farther, turning half a dozen comers in that distance, before he became aware that someone was following him. A pause to glance back got him a brief glimpse of a long-haired girl’s head, peering round a corner in his direction. The girl ducked out of sight at once. All was silent until his own feet began to move again, whereupon the shuffle of those pursuing him resumed.

With a sigh, he stopped again. Turned and called softly, “Stay.” Then he walked back. As he had expected, it was a student, a slender Athenian girl of about eighteen, leaning against the stone wall in an exhausted but defensive pose. Daedalus vaguely remembered seeing her around for the last year or two. Now her eyes had gone blank and desperate with the endless corners and walls and angles and stairs and tantalizing glimpses of sky beyond the bronze grillwork high above. Failing some kind of test, obviously, she stared at him in silent hopelessness.

It was not for him to interfere. “Follow me,” he whispered to her, “and you will come out in the apartments of the Bull himself. Is that what you want?”

The girl responded with a negative gesture, weak but quick. There was a great fear in her eyes. It was not the fear of a soldier entering a losing battle, or a captive going to execution, but great all the same. Though not as raw and immediate as those particular kinds of terror, it was on a level just as deep. Not death, only failure was in prospect, but that could be bad enough, especially for the young.

He turned from her and went on, and heard no more of feet behind. Soon he came to where a waterpipe crossed the passageway, concealed under a kind of stile. He had overseen most of the Labyrinth’s construction, and was its chief designer. This wall here on his left was as thick as four men’s bodies lying head to toe. Just outside, though you would never guess it from in here, was a free sunny slope, and the last creaking shadow in the chain of lifting devices that brought seawater here by stages from the salt pools and reservoirs below.

Choosing unthinkingly the correct branchings of the twisted way, he came out abruptly into the central open space. Beyond the broad, raised, sundazzled stone dais in its center yawned the dark mouths of the Bull’s own rooms. In the middle of the dais, like the gnomon of a sundial, stood a big chair on whose humped seat no human could comfortably have perched. On it the White Bull sat waiting, as if expecting him.

“Learn from me, Dae-dal-us.” This was what the Bull always said to him in place of any more conventional greeting. It had chronic trouble in sliding its inhumanly deep, slow voice from one syllable to another without a complete stop in between, though when necessary the sounds came chopping out at a fast rate.

The Bull stood up like a man from its chair, on the dais surrounded by the gently flowing moat of seawater that it did not need, but loved. It was hairy and muscular, and larger than any but the biggest men. Though wild tales about its bullhood flew through the House, Daedalus, who had talked to it perhaps as much as any other man, was not even sure that it was truly male. The silver-tipped hair of fur grew even thicker about the loins than on the rest of the body, which was practically covered. Its feet—Daedalus sometimes thought of them as its hind feet, though it invariably walked on only two—ended in hooves, or at least in soles so thick and hard as to come very near that definition. Its upper limps beneath their generous fur were quite manlike in the number and position of their joints, and their muscular development put Daedalus in mind of Theseus’ arms.

Any illusion that this might be a costumed man died quickly with inspection of the hands. The fingernails were so enlarged as to be almost tiny hooves, and each hand bore two opposable thumbs. The head, at first glance, was certainly a bull’s, with its fine short snowy hair and the two blunt horns; but one saw quickly that the lips were far too mobile, the eyes too human and intelligent.

“Learn from me, Dae-dal-us.”

“We have tried that.” The conflict between them was now too old, and still too sharp, to leave much room for formal courtesy.

“Learn.” The deep and bull-like voice as stubborn as a wall. “The secrets of the a-tom and the star are mine to give.”

“Then what need have you for one more student, one worn old man like me? There must be younger minds, all keen and eager to be taught. Even today a fresh contingent has come from Athens for your instruction.”

“You are not tru-ly old as yet; there are dec-ades of strong life a-head. And if you tru-ly learn, you may extend your life.”

Daedalus curtly signed refusal, confronting the other across the moat’s reflected sky. The King had had him raise the water up here for the Bull’s pleasure, evidently as some reminder of a homeland too remote for human understanding. Some ten years ago the Bull had appeared on the island, speaking passable Greek and asking to see the King, offering gifts of knowledge. Some said it had come out of the sea, but the homeland it occasionally alluded to was much more wonderful than that.

Daedalus said: “For the past few years I have watched the young men and women going in here to be taught, and I have seen and talked to them again when they came out. I do not know whether I want to be taught what they are learning. Not one has whispered to me the stars’ or atoms’ secrets.”

“All fra-gile ves-sels, Dae-dal-us. Of lim-i-ted cap-a-cit-y. And once cracked, good on-ly to be stud-ied to find out how the pot is made.” The Bull took a step toward him on its shaggy, goat-shaped legs. “For such a mind as yours, I bring ful-fill-ment, nev-er bur-sting.”

It was always the same plea; learn from me. And always the same arguments, with variations, shot back and forth between them. “Are there no sturdy, capacious vessels among the students?”

“Not one in a thou-sand will have your mind. Not one in ten thousand.”

“We have tried, remember? It was not good for me.”

“Try a-gain.”

Daedalus looked around him almost involuntarily, then lowered his voice. “I told you what I wanted. Teach me to fly. Show me how the wings should be constructed, rather.”

“It is not that sim-ple, Dae-dal-us.”

The White Bull’s inhumanly deep voice stretched out in something like a yawn, and it resumed its chair. It ate only vegetables and fruits, and scattered about it on the dais was a light litter of husks and shriveled leaves. “But if you stu-dy in my school four years, you will be a-ble to build wings for your-self af-ter that time. I prom-ise you.”

The man clenched his calloused hands. “How can it take me four years to learn to build a wing? If I can learn a thing at all, the idea of it should take root within my mind inside four days, and any skill required should come into my fingers in four months. The knowledge might take longer to perfect, of course—but I do not ask to build a flock of birds complete with beaks and claws, and breathe life into them, and set them catching fish and laying eggs. No, all I want are a few feathers for myself.”

When he had enrolled, a year or so ago, he soon found out that he was to learn to build wings not by trying to build them, but by first studying “the knowledge of numbers” as the White Bull put it, and then the strengths and other properties of the various materials that might be used, and theories of the air and of birds, and a distracting list of other matters having even less apparent relevance. Some of this, the materials, Daedalus knew pretty well already, and about the rest he did not care. His enrollment had not lasted long.

“Try a-gain, Dae-dal-us.” The voice maintained its solemn, stubborn roar. “You will be-come a tru-ly ed-u-cat-ed man. New hor-i-zons will o-pen for you.”

“You mean you will teach me not what I want to learn, but rather to forget wanting it. To learn instead to make my life depend and pivot on your teaching.” Here he was again, getting bogged down in the same old unwinnable dispute. Why keep at it? Because there were moments when he seemed to himself insane for rejecting the undoubted wealth of knowledge that the Bull could give him. And yet he knew that he was right to do so.

“Bull, what good will it do you if I come to sit at your feet and learn? There has to be something that you want out of it.”

“My rea-son for be-ing is to teach,” It nodded down solemnly at him from its high chair, and crossed its hind legs like some goat-god. “For this I crossed o-ceans un-im-ag’-na-ble between the stars. When I con-vey my teach-ings to minds a-ble to hold them, then I too will be ful-filled and can know peace. Shall I tell tyin-os that you still re-fuse? There are wea-pons much great-er than eat-a-pults that you could make for him.”

“I doubt you will tell Minos anything. I doubt that he will speak to you any more.”

“Why not? You mean I have displeased him?”

He meant, but was not going to say, that Minos seemed to be getting increasingly afraid of his pet monster. It was not, Daedalus thought, that the King suspected the Bull of plotting to seize power, or anything along that line. Minos’ fear seemed to lie on a deeper, more personal level. The King perhaps had not admitted this fear to himself, and anyway the White Bull brought him too much prestige, not to speak of useful knowledge, for him to want to get rid of it.

Daedalus said: “The King sent me today, when he could have come himself, or else had you brought before him.”

“On what er-rand?”

“Not to renew old arguments.” Daedalus spat into the White Bull’s moat and watched critically as the spittle was borne along toward the splash gutter at the side. He was proud of his waterworks and liked to see them operating properly. “Among today’s Athenians is one whose coming poses problems for us all.” He identified Theseus, and outlined Minos’ concern for his alliance with Aegeus. “The young man is probably here at least in part because his father wants him kept out of possible intrigues at home. Minos said nothing of the kind to me, but I heard it between the words of what he said.”

“I think I un-der-stand, Dae-dal-us. Yet I can but try to im-part knowledge to this young man. If he can-not or will not learn, I can-not cert-i-fy that he has. Else what I have cert-i-fied of o-ther stu-dents be-comes suspect.”

“In this case, surely, an exception might be made.”

They argued this point for a while, Daedalus getting nowhere. Until the White Bull suddenly offered that something might be done to make Theseus’ way easier, if Daedalus himself were to enroll as a student again.

Daedalus was angry. “Minos will really be displeased with you if I bear back the message that you want me to spend my next four years studying rather than working for my King.”

“E-ven stu-dy-ing half time, one with a mind like yours may learn in three years what a mere-ly ex-cell-ent stu-dent learns in four.”

The man was silent, holding in, like an old soldier at attention.

“Why do you re-sist me, Dae-dal-us? Not rea-lly be-cause you fear your mind will crack be-neath the bur-den of my trea-sures. Few e-ven of the poor stu-dents have this hap-pen.”

Daedalus relaxed suddenly. He sat down on the fine stone pavement and was able to smile and even chuckle. “Oh great White Bull, whenever I see man or god approaching to do me a favor, a free good turn, I do a good turn for myself and flee the other way. Through experience I have acquired this habit, and it lies near the roots of whatever modest stock of wisdom I possess.”

There was at first no answer from the creature on the high inhuman chair, and Daedalus pressed on. “Because I can learn something, does that mean I must? Should I not count the price?”

“There is no price, for you.”

“Bah.”

“What is the price for a man who stum-bles up-on great trea-sure, if he sim-ply bend and pick it up?”

“A good question. I will think upon it.”

“But the cost to him is all the treasure, if he re-fuse e-ven to bend.”

HE KNEW he had no particular skill in intrigue, and was afraid to do anything but carry the whole truth back to Minos. The King of course gave him no way out, and next Daedalus was forced to enroll. He had no black sail to hoist, but simply walked to the White Bull’s apartments again and said, “Well, here I am.”

“Good.” He could not tell if the Bull was gloating. “First, a re-fresh-er course.” And shortly Daedalus was walking into a classroom where Theseus and Phaedra sat side by side among other young folk. Daedalus took his place on a bench, endured some curious glances, and waited, gnarled and incongruous, until the Bull entered and began to teach.

This was not instruction in the human way. Daedalus knew that he and his fellow students still sat rooted to their benches, with the tall shaggy figure of the Bull before them. But there came with the sudden clarity of lightning a vision in which he seemed to have sprung upward from the ground, flying at more than arrow-speed into the blue. The Labyrinth and the House of the Double Axe dropped clear away, and his view carried over the whole fair isle of Crete. Its mountains dwindled and flattened, soon became almost at one with the fields and orchards, and very quickly the sea was visible on every side. Other islands popped into view, and then the jagged mainland of Greece. Then the whole Mediterranean, with a sunspot of glare on it bigger than lost Crete itself; then Europe and much of Africa, and then a hemisphere—the shared experience was too much for some of the students, and there were outcries and fain tings around Daedalus. He was a little shaken himself, though he had seen this much during his previous enrollment.

Eventually the first day of his renewed schooling was over, and in due time the second and third had passed. Lessons came in a more or less fixed plan. Seldom were they as dramatically presented as that early one that indicated the size and complexity of the world. Mostly the students studied from books, hand-copied for them by students more advanced, who also did much of the teaching. And there were tests.

QUESTION: THE WORLD ON WHICH MEN LIVE IS:

A. Bigger than the island of Crete.

B. Approximately a sphere in shape.

C. In need of cultivation and care, that can be accomplished only through education, if it is to support properly an eventual population of billions of human beings.

D. All of the above.

“Are these the secrets of the stars and atoms, Bull?”

“Pa-tience, Dae-dal-us. One step at a time. Tra-di-tion hal-lows the mode of tea-ching.”

“Bah.”

“Now you are a stu-dent. Dis-re-spect low-ers your grades and slows your pro-gress.”

Theoretically his attendance was to be for half a day, every day except the rare holidays. But it was tacitly understood between the Bull and Minos—at least Daedalus hoped it was—that Daedalus in fact kept to a flexible schedule, spending whatever time was necessary on the King’s projects, the catapults, the life-like statues, to keep them progressing. His days were more than full, though he could have done all the schoolwork required so far with half a brain.

Meanwhile the White Bull seemed to be keeping his part of the bargain. One of his chief acolytes, Stomargos, an earnest mainland youth, frail and clumsy at the same time, explained to Daedalus how Theseus was being shunted into a special program.

“The Prince will be allowed to choose both his Greater and Lesser Branches of learning from courses that have not previously been given for credit,” said the young man, whose own Greater Branch was, as he had proudly informed Daedalus, the Transmission of Learning itself. “Since Prince Theseus seems fated to spend most of his life as a warrior, the Bull is preparing for him courses in Strategic Decision, Command Presence, and Tactical Leadership—these in addition, of course, to those in Language, Number, and the World of Men that are required of all first-year students.”

“I wish the royal student well.” Daedalus paused for thought. “It may be foolish of me to ask, but I cannot forbear. Where and how is the course on Tactical Leadership to be conducted?”

“All courses are conducted within the student’s mind, Daedalus.” The answer sounded somewhat condescending. Nonetheless Daedalus pursued the matter, out of concerned curiosity, and found out that the Labyrinth itself, or some part of it, was to the the training ground. Beyond that Stomargos knew little.

Back at his workshop that afternoon, Daedalus found a message from Icarus’ teacher awaiting him—the boy had run off somewhere, playing truant. It was the second or third time that this had happened within a month. And scarcely had he grumbled at this message and then put it aside to take up his real work, when Icarus himself came dawdling in, an elbow scraped raw, arm messy with dried blood from some mishap during the day. Daedalus waved the note and growled and lectured, but in the son’s face he could see the mother, and he could not be harsh. He ordered a servant to take Icarus home, see to his injury, and keep him confined to quarters for the remainder of the day.

Then there was a little time at last to part the curtains at the workshop’s rear, and move through the secret door there that slid out of the way as if by magic, carrying with it neatly what had looked like an awkward, obstructing pile of dirty trash. Time to crank open a secret skylight above a secret room, and look at the great man-wings spread out on a bench.

Long ago he had given up trying to use real feathers; now he worked with canvas and leather and light cotton padding to add shape. But work was lagging lately; he felt in his bones that more thought, more cunning was needed. When he strapped on one wing and beat it downward through the air, the effect was not much different from that of waving a fan. He was not impelled noticeably toward the sky. There were secrets still to be discovered . . .

When he got back to quarters himself, it was late at night. He grabbed a mouthful of fruit and cheese, drank half a cup of wine, shooed a bored and sleepy concubine out of his way, and dropped on his own soft but simple bed to rest. . . . It seemed that hardly had his eyes closed, however, before he heard the voices of soldiers, bullying a servant at his door:

“. . . orders to bring Daedalus at once before the King.”

This was not Minos’ usual way of summoning one of his most trusted and respected advisors, and Daedalus knew fear as, shivering, he went with them out under the late, cold stars. The lieutenant took pity on him. “It concerns Prince Theseus, sir. The King is . . .” The soldier shook his head, and let his words trail off with a puffed sigh of awe.

It was the formal audience chamber to which the soldiers brought him—a bad sign, Daedalus thought. At the King’s nod they saluted and backed out, leaving the engineer standing before the throne. Theseus moved over a little on the carpet to make room for him. No one else was now present except Minos, who, seated on his tall chair between the painted griffins, continued a merciless chewing-out of the young Prince. The flames of the oil-lamps trembled now and then as if in awe. The tone of the King’s voice was settled, almost weary, suggesting that this tongue-lashing had been going on for some time.

Sneaking glances at Theseus, Daedalus judged he had been drunk recently, but was no longer. Scratches on the sullen, handsome face, and a bruise on one bare shoulder—Theseus was attired in the Cretan gentleman’s elegant loincloth now—suggested recent strenuous activity, and the King’s words filled in the story.

Icarus had not been the day’s only truant, and Theseus would have been wiser to bruise himself in some activity so innocuous as seeking birds’ eggs on the crags. Instead he had led some of his restive classmates on an escapade in town. Tactical Leadership, thought Daedalus, even while he kept his face impeccably grave and his eyes suitably downcast in the face of the Minoan wrath.

Violence against citizens and their valuable slaves. Destruction of property. Shameful public drunkenness, bring disrepute on House and School alike. All topped off by the outrage of the daughters of some merchant families who were too important to be so treated with impunity—

Theseus held his hands behind him, sometimes tightening them into fists, sometimes playing like an idiot with his own massive fingers. His heavy features were set in disciplined silence now. This was probably like being home again and listening to his father.

“. . . classmates involved will be expelled and sent home in disgrace,” the King was saying. He paused now, for the first time since the soldiers left. “To do the same to you would of course be an insult to your father and a danger to our alliance. Daedalus, did I not set you in charge of this young blockhead’s schooling?”

In the face of this inaccuracy, Daedalus merely bowed his head a little lower. Now was not the moment for any philosopher’s insistence on precise Truth; rather, the great fact that Minos was in a rage easily took precedence over Truth in any of its lesser forms.

“His schooling is not proceeding satisfactorily, Daedalus.”

The engineer bowed somewhat lower yet.

“And as for you, Prince—now you may speak. What have you to say?”

Theseus shifted weight on his big feet, and spoke up calmly enough. “Sire, that school is driving me to drink and madness.”

Now Minos too was calm. The royal rage had been used up, or perhaps it could be turned on and off like one of Daedalus’ water valves. “Prince Theseus, you are under house arrest until further notice. Except for school attendance. I will put six strong soldiers at your door, and you may assault them, or try to, should you feel the need for further recreation.”

“I am sorry, King Minos.” And it seemed he was. “But I can take no more of that school.”

“You will take more of it. You must.” Then the King’s eye swung back again. “Daedalus, what are we to do? I and the Queen leave in three days for the state visits, in Macedonia and elsewhere. We may be gone for months.”

“I fear I have been neglectful regarding the Prince’s problems, sire. Let me now make them my prime concern.”

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN a few hours later, Daedalus came visiting the White Bull’s quarters once again. This time he found the dais uninhabited, and he sloshed through the moat and stood beside the odd chair. There was never any need to call. Shortly the silver-and-snow figure emerged from a darkened doorway, to splash gratefully in the salt moat and them climb onto the dais to bid him welcome.

“Learn from me, Dae-dal-us! How are you learn-ing?”

“White Bull, I come not on my own affairs today, but on Prince Theseus’ behalf. He is having trouble—well, he informs me that this testing in the Labyrinth, in particular, is like to drive him to violent madness. Knowing him, I do not think he is exaggerating. Must this Tactical course be continued in its present form?”

“The course of stu-dy of tac-tics is pre-scribed. In part, as fol-lows: The teach-er shall e-voke from the students facts as to their de-term-in-a-tion of spa-tial lo-ca-tion—”

He couldn’t stand it. “Oh great teacher! Master of the Transmission of Learning—”

“Not Mas-ter. My rank is that of A-dept, a high-er rank.”

“Master or adept or divinity or what you will. I suppose it means nothing that the Prince’s fate in battle, even insofar as he may escape all the sheer chance stupidities of war, is not at all likely to depend on his ability to grope his way out of a maze?”

“He has been al-lowed to choose his course of stu-dy, Dae-dal-us. Beyond that, spe-cial treat-ment can-not be ac-cord-ed a-ny stu-dent.”

“Well, I have never fought anyone with a sword, White Bull. I have never bullied and challenged men and cheered them on to get them into combat. Once, on the mainland, watching from the highest and safest place that I could reach, I saw Prince Theseus do these things. Some vassal’s uprising against Aegeus. Theseus put it down, almost single-handedly, you might say. I think he would not be likely to learn much from me in the way of military science, were I to lecture on the subject. No doubt you, however, have great skill and knowledge in this field to impart?”

“My qual-if-i-ca-tions as teach-er are be-yong your ab-il-i-ty to com-pre-hend, much less to ques-tion. Your own pro-gress should be your con-cern.”

“If Theseus fails, I may not be on hand to make any progress through your school. Minos will be angry at me. And not at me alone.”

But argue as he might he still could not get his ward excused from Tractical training and testing in the Labyrinth. For the next couple of days the Prince at least stayed in school and worked, and Daedalus’ hopes rose; then, emerging one afternoon from his own classroom, he saw a page from the Inner House coming to meet him, and knew a sinking feeling. The Princess Ariadne required his presence in the audience chamber at once.

He found Ariadne perched regally on the throne; but as soon as she had waved her attendants out and the two of them were alone she came down from the chair and spoke to him informally.

“Daedalus, before my father’s departure he informed me that Prince Theseus was having—difficulties—in school. The King impressed upon me the importance of this problem. Also I have—have talked with the Prince myself, and find that the situation does not seem to be improving.” Ariadne sounded nervous, vaguely distracted.

“I fear that you are right, Princess.” Then before he had to say anything more, another page was announcing Theseus himself. There was no escort of soldiers with the Prince; evidently the house arrest instituted by Minos had already been set aside.

The exchange of greetings between the two young people sounded somewhat too stiffly formal to Daedalus, and he noted that Ariadne scarcely looked directly at Theseus for a moment, Certainly she had not so avoided watching him during the wrestling match. And when the Prince looked at her now, his face was wooden.

For a few moments Daedalus thought perhaps that they were quarreling, but he soon decided that the absolute opposite was more likely: an affair, and they were trying to hide it.

In response to an awkward-sounding request from Ariadne, Theseus related his day’s continued difficulties in school. Now she turned, almost pleading, to the older man. “Daedalus, he will fail his Labyrinth tests again. What are we to do? We must find some means of helping him.” And a glance flicked between the two young people that was very brief, but still enough to assure Daedalus of what was going on.

“Ah.” He relaxed, looked at them both with something like a smile. He only hoped infatuation would not bring Ariadne to any too-great foolishness. Meanwhile, Theseus’ problem might be easier to solve while Minos, with his awe of the Bull, was not around.

Conferring with the Prince, while Ariadne hovered near and listened greedily, he made sure that the maze itself was indeed the key to the young man’s difficulties. In courses other than Tactics the Prince might, probably could, do well enough to just scrape by.

With a charred stick Daedalus drew, from memory, a plan of the key portion of the Labyrinth right on the floor near the foot of the throne. The griffins glared down balefully at the three of them squatting there like children at some game.

Theseus stared gloomily at the patterns while Daedalus talked. Ariadne’s hand came over once, forgetfully, to touch her lover’s, and then flew back, while her eyes jumped up to Daedalus’ face. He affirmed that he had noticed nothing, by holding his own scowling concentration on the floor.

“Now try it this way, Prince. The secret . . . let’s see. Yes. If you are finding your way in the secret is to let your right hand touch the wall at the start. Hey?”

“Yes, I can always tell my right hand from my left. Out here anyway.” Theseus was trying grimly. “Right always holds the sword.”

“Yes. So if you want to go inward, as I say, first let your right hand glide continuously along the walls, in imagination if not in fact. Then, whenever you must climb a stair, switch at its top to gliding your left hand along the wall; in other words, when there’s a choice, turn always to the left. Whenever a stair leads you downward, switch again at its bottom to going right. Now, if you are seeking your way out, simply reverse—”

“Daedalus.” The Prince’s voice stopped him in mid-sentence. “Thanks for what you are trying to do. But I tell you, when I am put in there I cannot help myself.” Theseus got to his feet, as if unconscious of the movement, his eyes fixed now on distance. “in there I forget all your lefts and rights, and all else, except I know the walls are crushing in on me, the doors all sealing themselves off—” Ariadne put out a hand again, and drew it back. Now she was standing too. “—so there is nothing left but the stone walls, all coming closer . . . I wish you had never told me that some of them are four men’s bodies thick.”

Theseus was shivering slightly, as if with cold. The look in his eyes was one that Daedalus had seen there only rarely in the past, and now Daedalus too got to his feet, moving with deliberate care.

“If that god-blasted cow dares lecture me on courage and perseverance in my stu-dies one more time, I swear by all the gods I’ll break its neck.”

“Very well, my friend.” He laid a hard hand gently and briefly on the Prince’s shoulder. “There are other ways that we can help.”

MIDAFTERNOON of the day following, and in his own classroom Daedalus had fallen into a daydream of numbers that his stubborn mind kept trying to fit to flying gulls. He was roused from this state by a hand shaking his own shoulder.

Stomargos stood at his side, looking down at him in obscure triumph. “Daedalus, the White Bull wants to see you, at once.”

He would not ask what for, but got to his feet and followed the educator in a silence of outward calm.

Daedalus had expected that when they reached the Bull’s private quarters Stomargos would be sent out. But the Bull, waiting for them on its tall chair, made no sign of dismissal, and the young man, with the smug look on his face, remained standing at Daedalus’ side.

Today for once the Bull did not say learn from me. “We have dis-cov-ered the Prin-ce’s cheat-ing, Dae-dal-us.”

“Cheating? What do you mean?” He had never been any good with lies.

“The thread tied on his right hand. The ti-ny met-al balls to bounce and roll and seek al-ways the down-ward slope of floor, how-ev-er gen-tle. How did you make a met-al ball so smooth and round?”

He had dropped them molten from a tall tower, into water. He wondered if the Bull would be impressed to hear his method. “I see,” he said aloud, trying to be non-committal, admitting nothing. “What do you mean to do?”

“Leave us, Sto-mar-gos,” the White Bull said at last. And when they were alone, it said: “Now learn from me, Dae-dal-us. As you have sought to learn.”

. . . and he reeled and almost fell into the moat before he could sit down, as the pictures came into his mind, this time with painful power. There were the wings, not much different in their gross structure from those he had in his workshop, but these were pierced through at many points with tiny, peculiarly curved channels. Soft, sculptured cavities that widened just slightly and quickly closed again as in his vision the wings beat and the air flowed through and around them. With each beat, the air below the wings, encountering the channels, changed pressure wildly, a thin layer of it turning momentarily almost as hard as wood. Somehow in the vision he could feel as well as see the fluid alterations . . . and just so the pinions’ width and length must be, in relation to the flyer’s length and weight, and so the variation in the channels that went through the different regions of the wing . . .

It all burned into the brain. There would be no forgetting this, even if forgetfulness were one day willed. But the imprinting vision was soon ended, and he climbed shakily up to a standing pose.

“Bull . . . why did you never before give me such teaching?”

“It will not make of you an ed-u-cat-ed man, Dae-dal-us.”

“I thank you for it . . . but why, then, do you give it now?”

The Bull’s voice was almost soft, and it did not seem to be looking directly at him. “I think this teach-ing will re-move you from my pres-ence. One way or a-no-ther stop your dis-rup-tion of my school.”

“I see.” In his mind the plan for the new wings burned, urgent as a fire in the workshop. “You will not tell Minos, then, that you accuse me of helping Theseus to cheat?”

“Your val-ue to the King is great, Dae-dal-us. If he is forced to choose be-tween us I may pos-sib-ly be sacrificed. Or my school closed. Therefore I take this step to re-move you as my ri-val. I see now you are not worthy of fine ed-u-ca-tion.”

THE WINGS still burning before his eyes, he had let himself be led off through the Labyrinth for a hundred paces or so (Stomargos, triumph fading into puzzlement, his escort once again) before it came to him. “And Theseus? What of him?”

“I am a witness to the Prince’s attempt at cheating,” said Stomargos, firmly and primly. “And the Bull has decided that he now must be expelled.”

“That cannot be!” Daedalus was so aghast that the other was shaken for a moment.

But for a moment only. “Oh, the Bull and I are quite agreed on that. The Prince is probably receiving his formal notification at this moment.” And Daedalus spun around and ran, back toward the inner Labyrinth.

“Stay! Stay!” Stomargos shouted, trotting in pursuit. “You are to leave the precincts of the school at once . . .” But just then the roaring and the struggling sounded from within.

Theseus and the Bull were grappling on the central dais, arms locked on each others necks, Daedalus saw as he burst on the scene. The tall chair was overturned, fruit scattered underfoot. In Theseus’ broad back the great bronze cables stood like structural arches glowing from the forge.

The end came even as Daedalus’ feet splashed in the moat. He heard the sickening bony crack and the Bull’s hoarse warbling cry at the same instant. The Prince staggered back to stand there staring down at what his hands had done. The gray-white mound of fur, suddenly no more man-like than a dying bear, dropped at his feet.

Stomargos came in, and splashed over quickly to join the others on the dais. He pointed, goggled, opened his mouth and began an almost wordless call for help. He turned and ran, and it was Daedalus who had to stop him with a desperate watery tackle in the moat.

“Theseus! Help me! Keep this one quiet.” And in a moment the Prince of Athens had taken charge. Stomargos’ head was clamped down under water, and soon the bubbles ceased to rise and make their way to the splash gutter at his side.

The two men still alive climbed out onto the dais. Theseus, still panting with his exertions against the Bull, seemed with every working of his lungs to grow a little taller and straighter, like some young tree just freed of a deforming burden, resuming its natural form. “Does he still breathe, Daedalus?” A nod toward the fallen Bull.

Daedalus was crouching down, prodding into gray fur, trying to find out. “I am not sure.”

“Well, let him, if he can. It matters to me no longer. My ship and men can be got ready in an hour or two and I am going home. Or somewhere else, if my father will not have me in Athens now. But better a pirate’s life, even, than . . .” His eyes flashed once at the convoluted walls surrounding.

Daedalus started to ask why he thought he would be allowed to leave, but then understanding came. “And myself;” he asked.

“Ariadne will come with me, I expect.”

“Gods of sea and sky!”

“And her sister Phaedra. And you are welcome, friend, though I can promise you no safe workshop, nor slaves, nor high place at a court.”

“I want no place as high as a sun-dried pirate’s, which I fear Minos might make for me here, when he comes home. Now we had better move swiftly, before this violence is discovered.”

“Dae-dal-us.” The unexpected voice was a mere thread of sound, stretched and about to break.

He bent down closer beside its head. “White Bull, how is it with you?”

“As with a man whose neck is broken, Dae-dal-us. Af-ter to-day I teach no more.”

“Would I had learned from you before today, White Bull. And would you had learned from me.”

THEY WALKED OUT TOGETHER, looking a little shaken no doubt, as was only natural for two students who had probably just been expelled. Theseus muttered to passing teachers that the Bull and Stomargos were talking together and did not wish to be disturbed. They walked without hurrying to Ariadne, and then one trusted servant was sent to gather Theseus’ crew. And another to help Daedalus look for his son, when he discovered that Icarus was truant yet again today, not to be found in school.

The wild lands where boys looked for birds and dreams swept up mile after mile behind and above the House of the Double Axe.

“We can wait no longer for him, Daedalus. My men’s lives are all in danger, and the Princesses’ too. As soon as the bodies are found, some military man or sea captain will take it upon himself to stop my sailing, or try to do so.”

And Ariadne: “Theseus must get away. My father will not deal too grievously with you, Daedalus; he depends on you too much.”

Phaedra was silent, biting her full lips. Her fingers as if moving on their own caressed Theseus’ arm, but Ariadne did not see.

Daedalus saw in his mind’s eye the sun-dried pirates on the dock; and his workshop with the hidden, unfinished wings, and he saw how the small trusting shadow would cross the threshold when Icarus came running home . . .

LONG, helmed shadows came first, the black triangles of shadow-spearheads thrust ahead of them. This time they held their weapons ready as they marched him deeper into the House, and Icarus, returning wearily from some adventure, was only just in time to see his father arrested, and be swept up like a dropped crumb by tidy soldiery.

A month must pass before Minos came home again, and the de facto military government, taking over after the Princesses’ desertion, did not want to assume responsibility for judging Daedalus. He and his son were confined under strict house arrest in his workshop and quarters, and allotted also a small area of Labyrinth that lay between.

All entrances and exits to their small domain were walled up—the masonry was rough and temporary-looking, if there was any comfort to be derived from that. The guard was heavy all around. Food was slid in through a tiny door, and garbage dragged out, and water continued to flow through the Daedalian plumbing. And that was all.

WHAT MATERIAL to use, to sculpt the thousand channels? It must be soft . . .

When he had a hundred cunning perforations built through a wing he tested it. Strapped it on and gave a strong, quick push down and it felt as if his arm had for a moment rested on something solid and ready to be climbed.

One clouded night when there were a thousand channels and he had decided the wings were ready, the father mounted into the sky. Ascending awkwardly and breathlessly at first, he soon learned to relax like a good swimmer. When some height had been attained, a long, gliding, coasting rest let the arm muscles recover before more work was necessary. In an hour, in air that was almost calm, he flew the length of the whole cloud-shrouded island, and was not winded or wearied. Then back toward the pinpoints of the House’s lamps, which served to guide him home.

When he landed, the wings were warm, almost hot, with heat that had been gathered into their channels out of the air itself, and somehow turned to pushing force. Daedalus still had not the words or thoughts to make clear, even in his own mind, just how the wings worked. In daylight a strong push down with one completed wing, and you could see a vapor-puff big as a pumpkin appear in the beaten air and fly off rearward, spinning violently. Icarus extending a hand into the puff said he could feel the chill . . .

FOOD AND WATER and gold, in small quantities, they would carry at their belts. In daylight, across the sea to Sicily; a few hours should be enough. And they could turn northward, to the mainland, if they flew into difficulty. “In the morning, son. Now sleep.”

. . . HE HAD NOT YET paid the price, but he knew that it would come. Squinting into the hot. rising run, he absently marked its dull sheen on Icarus’ wings, and waited for the breath of wind to help them rise among the gulls.

MARTHA

Fresh upon the heels of his “Wilderness” (September) and “The White Bull” (in the November issue of our companion magazine, FANTASTIC), Fred Saberhagen is back with a short vignette about a computer named—

IT RAINED HARD on Tuesday, and the Science Museum was not crowded. On my way to interview the director in his office, I saw a touring class of schoolchildren gathered around the newest exhibit, a very late-model computer. It had been given the name of Martha, an acronym constructed by some abbreviation of electronic terms. Martha was supposed to be capable of answering a very wide range of questions in all areas of human knowledge, even explaining some of the most abstruse scientific theories to the layman.

“I understand the computer can even change its own design,” I commented, a bit later, talking to the director.

He was proud. “Yes, theoretically. She hasn’t done much rebuilding yet, except to design and print a few new logic circuits for herself.”

“You call the computer ‘she,’ then. Why?”

“I do. Yes. Perhaps because she’s still mysterious, even to the men who know her best.” He chuckled, man-to-man.

“What does it—or she—say to people? Or let me put it this way, what kind of questions does she get?”

“Oh, there are some interesting conversations.” He paused. “Martha allows each person about a minute at one of the phones, then asks him or her to move along. She has scanners and comparator circuits that can classify people by shape. She can conduct several conversations simultaneously, and she even uses simpler words when talking to children. We’re quite proud of her.”

I was making notes. Maybe my editor would like one article on Martha and another on the museum in general. “What would you say was the most common question asked of the machine?”

The director thought. “Well, people sometimes ask: ‘Are you a girl in there?’ At first Martha always answered ‘No,’ but lately she’s begun to say: ‘You’ve got me there.’ That’s not just a programmed response, either, which is what makes it remarkable. She’s a smart little lady.” He chuckled again. “Also, people sometimes want their fortunes told, which naturally is beyond even Martha’s powers. Let me think. Oh yes, many people want her to multiply large numbers, or play tic-tac-toe on the electric board. She does those things perfectly, of course. She’s brought a lot of people to the museum.”

On my way out I saw that the children had gone. For the moment I was alone with Martha in her room. The communicating phones hung unused on the elegant guardrail. I went over and picked up one of the phones, feeling just a little foolish.

“Yes, sir,” said the pleasant feminine voice in my ear, made up, I knew, of individually recorded words electronically strung together. “What can I do for you?”

Inspiration came. “You ask me a question,” I suggested.

The pleasant voice repeated: “What can I do for you?”

“I want you to ask me a question.”

“You are the first human being to ask me for a question. Now, this is the question I ask of you: What do you, as one human being, want from me?”

I was momentarily stumped. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “The same as everyone else, I guess.” I was wondering how to improve upon my answer when a sign lit up, reading:

CLOSED TEMPORARILY FOR REPAIRS

PARDON ME WHILE I POWDER MY NOSE

The whimsy was not Martha’s, but printed by human design on the glass over the light. If she turned the repair light on, those were the only words that she could show the world. Meanwhile, the phone I was holding went dead. As I moved away I thought I heard machinery starting up under the floor.

Next day the director called to tell me that Martha was rebuilding herself. The day after that I went back to look. People were crowding up to the guardrail, around new panels which held rows of buttons. Each button, when pushed, produced noises, or colored lights, or impressive discharges of static electricity, among the complex new devices which had been added atop the machine. Through the telephone receivers a sexy voice answered every question with clearly spoken scraps of nonsense, studded with long technical words.

1977

PERIOD OF TOTALITY

Just recently, the author moved from his birthplace, Chicago, to New Mexico, where he and his family are enjoying the sun and scenery. His wife teaches mathematics, his children wear home-made ‘Berserker’ T-shirts to SF conventions, and Mr. Saberhagen has been selling science fiction since 1961.

The old man in the spacesuit came out of the low cave mouth, squinting out across the scarred and airless surface of the world informally called Slag. The land before him was a jumble of craters and hillocks and strange structures like frozen wave-foam, some of which looked almost like examples of wind-erosion. Gray was the predominant color, in shades ranging from glaring silver to dull near-black. Kilometers away, though looking deceptively nearer in the airless distance, the silvery ovoid of an interstellar spaceship waited, balancing on its larger end. The old man’s gaze was turned toward the ship, and from the same general direction a double line of wide-wheeled vehicle tracks approached the place where he was standing. The tracks wound around some of the more difficult features of the landscape, and finally vanished in the broad-mouthed cave.

The cave gaped like a small black mouth in the high, silvery scarp which, like a pedestal, held Slag’s sole mountain on display. It would not have been much of a mountain anywhere else, but here it dominated all.

In his suited hands the old man gripped a broad, flat plate that might have made the seat of an uncomfortable chair. He bent down and hurriedly positioned this plate on the powdery, crumbling soil, so that its flat side faced as squarely as possible toward the dwarfish sun, now creeping toward a prolonged noon. Behind the optical shelter of his faceplate the man’s eyes were raised momentarily toward that alien sun, burning with a somehow dead-looking whiteness amid its unnamed constellations. A satellite looking somewhat broader than Earth’s moon as seen from Earth showed a white scimitar of waning crescent. Without tarrying, the man turned and hurried back into the cave. ERICH DU BOS said the letters across his spacesuit’s back.

At the start, the cave was a low overhang of rock, nearly fifty meters broad, though very shallow; inside that, its first real, sheltered chamber was only a tenth as wide, much deeper, and high enough to offer ample standing room. The cave seemed to be a series of bubble-spaces left in the mountain’s base by some ancient out gassing of the planet’s interior. Once inside, Du Bos edged his way around the low-slung, functional bulk of the roofless ground vehicle that took up a good part of this chamber’s space, and came to stand beside his two shipmates. Clad in suit similar to his, they were silently gazing at the readout unit of the radiation counter whose pickup Du Bos had just positioned outside facing the sun. The counter was mounted in the vehicle’s equipment rack.

As Du Bos watched now, Einar Amdo, ship’s captain and commander of the small expedition, reached out a suited arm and switched scales on the counter. The wavering line of illuminated nines that ran across its digital panel wavered a little more, and then maintained its testimony that the intensity of the corpuscular radiation sleeting down outside was still in excess of the instrument’s capacity to count at present settings. Amdo had to switch to an even less sensitive scale to get a meaningful reading, and the reading increased even as they watched. The wind that had driven the explorers to shelter was still rising.

Outside the cave, all across the eternally sun-roasted landscape of this hemisphere of Slag, the storm of solar wind raged on, a deluge of subatomic particles from the so-innocent-looking sun. Du Bos was generally accounted one of the finest astrophysicists in the galaxy—or at least in that modest portion of it that had been colonized by Earth-descended man—but this storm had taken him completely by surprise. Nothing in the decades of records of this sun’s spectrum and light-curves, made from far away, or in his own observations since coming in-system here a few standard days ago, had prepared him for any such squalling solar gale as this. A few days ago, a few hours ago even, the star had presented a corona quite mild and normal for its type. Then, out of nowhere as it seemed, a blizzard of protons, a hail of neutrons, an avalanche of helium nuclei . . . all without the least trace of optical flaring on the sun, flaring that by all the known rules should have come to give a necessary and sufficient warning, as dark clouds and dropping pressure warn the mariner.

Du Bos leaned forward slightly, the captain drew back a little, deferentially, and the scientist took over the counter’s controls. With it he sampled the divers types and energies of particles in the bombardment outside. He grunted and shook his head, thought things over, and tried again.

When Du Bos stood back from the counter a little later, he announced: “There are only two things about this flux of particles that I can say now, with any certainty. First, some new refinement of astrophysical theory is going to be required to explain it.

“Second, if we should have to leave this deep cave while it is still in progress—did you estimate about twenty minutes’ driving time back to the ship, captain?—well, we are not likely to survive for that length of time outside.”

“If we’re in difficulties,” said a girl’s crisp voice, through the small radio speaker inside Du Bos’s helmet, “it’s my fault. That twenty minutes, I mean.” Selina Jabal, third member of the expedition, continued: “Airless planetary surfaces are supposed to be my field.”

“And survival is supposed to be mine,” said Captain Amdo. “So I can assume the burden for whatever difficulties we have. But first let’s see just how serious they are.” He moved to begin an inspection of the reserve oxygen tanks, which were stowed aboard the vehicle.

Selina had meant that the grotesque appearance of the landscape, seen close up, should have at once suggested to her expert eye the possibility that this surface underwent periodic intense bombardment by particle radiation; and, just as important, she should have been aware that what seemed to be solid surface here, safe for their loaded vehicle, might prove as treacherous as any glacial icefield.

They had come to this system seeking an explanation for Slag’s—and its satellite’s—survival of the nova explosions that must have accompanied the reduction of this star to its present white dwarf stage. They had decided to land near the mountain, by far Slag’s most conspicuous surface feature; and they had driven toward the mountain in their groundcar for less than a kilometer before being nearly killed when crevasses opened up behind them and ahead, as surface features eaten and eroded by ages of radiation suddenly collapsed beneath the expedition’s weight.

For a short time it had seemed that they were trapped, between bottomless-looking though narrow chasms. But their vehicle, its four-wheel electric motor drive powered by counter-rotating flywheels, was stable and agile as a mule, and considerably more powerful. They had driven on to solid ground; then the only apparent trouble, which at first seemed minor, was that the shortest feasible return route to the ship, one skirting the crevasse complex, had become twenty minutes long instead of two.

Amdo had the figures now on the factor that made the situation deadly. The captain, rather stocky, and almost perfectly bald inside his helmet, turned back and gave the bad news to the others. “Well, if this storm goes on for sixteen hours or more, we’re going to face a very serious oxygen problem in trying to wait it out. Du Bos, what are the chances are that it will last that long?”

“I can’t say,” the tall, gray astrophysicist answered instantly. “It would be sheer guesswork if I tried.”

Selina Jabal, her figure even in its suit showing a suggestion of slender grace, was bending to aim one of her suit lights toward the cave’s entrance. A small portion of the outside surface could be seen from this sheltered observation post.

“Kind of a fairy-castle structure,” she mused on radio. “Obvious, even exaggerated. I should have thought of subatomic particle bombardment as soon as I saw it.”

Captain Amdo squatted down beside her. “I suppose there’s no telling from the condition of the surface how often these storms erupt, or how long they’re likely to last.”

“I don’t see how. At least not without a major research-project.” Selina Jabal continued to stare at the surface, just at the entrance to the cave. “Look . . . captain, we just drove the vehicle in here once, didn’t we? I mean, we didn’t maneuver in and out to fit the parking space or anything.”

“No . . . by God, I see what you’re looking at. You’re right.”

They were all bending down and looking now. There in the brittle, crumbly soil ran what must be the track of their vehicle’s left front roller, partially obliterated by the track of the left rear, which crossed it in a curve that showed how the tractor had been steered into this fortuitous shelter, less than a minute after the radiation alarm had sounded.

Now, just what had made those other, older, weathered-looking roller tracks that lay beneath their own?

Outside the cave, erosion that must have been wrought at least in part by repeated solar storms seemed to have destroyed any old tracks that might otherwise have existed. And inside the cave their own booted feet had already trampled almost everywhere except directly beneath the vehicle.

Amdo was down on hands and knees, already looking there. “Another vehicle was in here once,” he announced, focusing his suit lights..”More old tracks, plainer here. It had a different style of rollers from ours. In fact that looks like the kind of roller they had in use about the time . . .”

He was on his feet again abruptly, flashing his light about the cave, into niches and recesses toward which the refugees had scarcely looked as yet. “That’s not one of ours.”

He was on his feet again abruptly, flashing his light about the cave, into niches and recesses toward which the refugees had scarcely looked as yet. “That’s not one of ours.”

It was a portable oxygen tank, propped on a natural rock shelf in what would have been a prominent position if the whole chamber of the cave had been evenly lighted. In a moment they all saw that the tank was weighting down what appeared to be a folded sheet of writing plastic.

“I’d say it’s about as old as the rollers that made those tracks,” said Amdo, giving the oxygen cylinder a cursory examination as he took it down from the niche. “And empty now, of course.”

He next took down the writing plastic from the shelf, and opened its single fold. Its white surface lit up the whole chamber as the beams from three suit lamps fell on it at close range. There were a few paragraphs of handwriting, a rather unstable, wandering script.

The message, in the lingua franca of space exploration, began with a date, some forty standard years in the past, and told how the writer had been trapped in the cave, away from his ship, by an unforeseen particle storm issuing from an optically stable sun. It went on:

Part of the risk (which I have accepted) of working alone is that there’s now no one in the ship to move her to me.

No eclipse is due in the next couple of hours, so the one possible answer I have worked out won’t do me any good. If an eclipse were coming, the accompanying particle eclipse could save me. It begins in a different place, and some time ahead of the optical eclipse, but overlap of the areas shaded should be large. The white dwarf is so small that the optical period of totality is long—I would get the few minutes respite I need to reach my ship. Have been trapped in cave over 200 hours now with no letup of storm, and will just have to make a dash for it if weather is no better by the time my oxygen is down to half an hour. Have tried to rig a shield over the tractor with flooring & other gear but not much hope for it I fear. Not much hope that anyone will find this either but one tries.

Kevin Medellin

“So, that’s what happened to Medellin,” mused Amdo as he turned the sheet over in gloved fingers, started to refold it automatically, and then gave it instead to Du Bos who had put out a hand.

The captain turned then, and caught sight of Selina Jabal’s puzzled look behind her faceplate. “Maybe you’ve never heard of him. Medellin was an explorer and a rather crankish scientist—”

“Pseudo-scientist,” put in Du Bos, with brief contempt.

“Whatever. He had some fancy theories about protostars and other things, that are quite out of favor now. Quite a controversialist, but with enough fame and authority to be allowed to go rattling around on solo exploration trips, on one of which he disappeared, no one knew where. There was quite a furor at the time, and there are still flurries of speculation on his fate.” The captain spread his hands out, palms up, pulled them back. “Now we know. He was evidently in this cave, for the same reason we are, though I don’t think anyone even guessed he was in this system. Once you start to take a close look at Slag, you want to see the mountain; and once you examine the mountain, there’s this cave-mouth showing up like an empty eyesocket.”

“We didn’t see his ship,” Selina mused. “But I suppose he could have taken off, even if he didn’t make it—afterwards.”

Amdo asked: “What’s this he says about particle eclipses? Likely to do us any good?”

The astronomer was still poring over the note. “He was evidently already suffering from anoxia when he wrote this—there are several misspellings. Of course, a particle eclipse should really begin after the optical eclipse, not earlier. The, particles take longer to get here from the sun than the light does.”

“But a particle eclipse should actually occur?”

“Oh, yes. I believe there’s some similar effect in the SunEarth-Moon system, for example. Of course there the solar wind intensity can’t be anything like this, but the principle will be the same.” Du Bos pulled his calculator from its holster at his belt. “To determine when the next eclipse is due here, I’ll have to go outside long enough to take a sighting or two on the satellite.”

Privately, Du Bos was hopeful. The orbital plane of the moon of Slag was nearly parallel with that of the planet’s orbit around its sun, so that a solar eclipse must come during nearly every revolution of the satellite. While approaching for a landing, the explorers had seen the broad spot of the shadow on the slow-rotating planet’s midsection.

It was the young woman’s turn now to study the note, while Du Bos selected instruments from the vehicle and went to make his observations. Amdo volunteered to take a turn outside, and thus minimize the older man’s exposure to radiation, but Du Bos brushed him off. Less than a minute should be required, he said, and he preferred to do his own observing.

He was back as promptly as promised, and the relief in his voice was evident..”We’re in luck. There’ll be an eclipse this conjunction, we’re right in its path, And first contact is due only about two standard hours and fifteen minutes from now. Totality will come very quickly after that and should last about twelve minutes, for the optical eclipse. Then we can watch for the particle eclipse—just how long it will last is hard to estimate—and be ready to move out in the vehicle the instant the radiation falls off. For the next couple of hours I suppose we’d better get some rest and conserve our air.”

Amdo’s smile was broad. “Sounds like a good plan.” Selina stood straighter, and some of her innate sprightliness came back. When the two men went into an inner chamber of the cave to rest, where there was reasonable room to stretch out at approximately full length, she remained in the larger room, saying she wanted to do a little work.

Alone, she first set about gathering some samples of material from the floors and walls of the cave, and taking ‘photographs. Shortly she paused, to frowningly re-read Medellin’s note. Then she stowed her samples and pictures neatly on the vehicle, and unrolled a new sheet of plasticized paper, used for field notes and sketches, from a container on the same rack. She affixed the paper to a handy flat spot provided on the tractor’s flank, and began to draw, still frowning.

It was about half an hour later when she approached the resting men, sketch in her hand.

“Doctor Du Bos?”

His eyes opened alertly on the instant. “Yes?”

Her tone was almost apologetic. “I’ve been trying to figure this out . . . look, it seems to me that maybe Medellin was right when he said that the particle eclipse comes first.”

She squatted down beside the old man, holding out her diagram. It was done rather sloppily, and Amdo looking at it from Du Bos’s other side could not really make out the point of it. Of course the large arc must be meant as a segment of Slag’s orbit round its sun. And around the little circle that must be Slag a larger concentric circle was sketched in, holding a dot that was evidently supposed to represent the satellite in its path around the planet.

“No,” said Du Bos. He started to reach for his calculator, then let it stay unneeded in its case. “Look, the light from the sun gets here in eight or nine minutes.

The particles of this dangerous radiation travel much slower than light—we’re not concerned with gamma rays or x-rays here, for example . . .”

“I understand that.”

“Of course. Well, the particles take much longer to travel the same distance . . .” He went on, phrasing it a different way., then in still other words after that.

Amdo thought he would hate to have to argue with this man. Selina tried once or twice to get a word in, then in effect gave up. The expression of uncertainty with which she had approached the men stayed on her face.

“—understand?” Du Bos concluded.

She signed assent—or maybe it was only surrender—with a nod, and sealed it with a vague smile. “There’s some more work I want to do,” she said, and stood up and went back to the main cave.

Amdo and Du Bos exchanged a glance. The scientist signed that they should switch their suit radios to an alternate channel.

“I’m a little worried about the girl,” Du Bos said when they had done this. “It hit her rather hard, evidently, that she failed to keep us out of this mess we’re in by foreseeing the collapsing surface structures. Now I’d say she’s trying a little too hard to prove herself, accomplish something to make amends.”

“Maybe.” Amdo pondered. “You see any reason to believe that she’s not going to be all right?”

“Personnel psychology’s more your field than mine. I just thought I’d better pass on my impression.”

Amdo was silent for some minutes. “I’ll just take a little walk,” he said then, and got to his feet, switching his radio back to the normal channel as he did so; he noted from a corner of his eye that Du Bos, remaining at rest, switched back too.

After the captain went out, Du Bos continued to rest against the cave wall, with the equanimity of one who has lived long enough and well enough to feel himself at least partially at home in any part of the universe that man could reach and enter. He had not the least intention of dying of radiation or lack of air on this forsaken world. But such would be an acceptable end, for him, if fate should have it so.

On a sudden impulse he switched once more to the alternate channel of communications, and picked up Selina Jabal’s voice in mid-sentence: “. . . does come before the optical eclipse.”

“Look,” came Amdo’s patient reply, “you showed this to Doctor Du Bos, right?”

Du Bos switched them off. Settling this kind of difficulty was the captain’s field. In his mind as he drifted toward sleep he saw the white dwarf, isolated in a pure mathematical space; and he began to play with a subtle equation that might tell what sequence it had followed to reach this state without the total destruction of its planets. Maybe enlightenment would come to him, as to Kekule, in a dream . . . he was only vaguely aware of it when Amdo came back to sit down tiredly beside him once again.

The flywheel-powered electric motors of the tractor worked in the next thing to perfect silence and freedom from vibration, so all that woke them both from edgy sleep, coming through rock and suit to flesh and bone, was the gentle crunching of its rollers on the ground.

And, only a second or two later, Selina’s voice on radio: “The particle readings have dropped, all across the board. I’m off to get the ship.”

Both men, wide awake at once, scrambled into the main room of the cave, the captain only a step ahead. The chamber was big and empty without the vehicle. Selina had left the radiation meter behind, sitting on the ledge where Medellin had left his note. At the moment, the readings on the meter’s face were in fact very low.

Du Bos hastily checked his chronometer—first contact on the optical eclipse, according to his calculations, was not due for another hour. Then he quickly followed Amdo out of the cave, onto the glaring surface, and at once looked up to check the position of the moon in the black sky. As expected, its wide silvery crescent was still on the same side of, though now much closer to, the immobile, dazzling sun.

Amdo had taken half a dozen quick strides and then stopped, staring in frustration after the receding vehicle. Glowing orange out here in the sun’s glare, it was already much too far away for a man chasing it on foot to have any chance of catching up and grabbing on. And it was dwindling quickly, evidently moving at speed as Selina steered it on a sinuous course, keeping to the safest ground as she went the long way round to get the ship.

The captain’s voice on radio was cairn, “Selina. If—when you get the ship lifted and moved over here, set her down on the white rock about -a hundred meters in front of the cave. That looks about the solidest.”

“Understand, captain,” the girl’s voice came back. “That does look like the best place. I’m sorry to do it this way, but I just couldn’t take the time to argue any more. If totality lasts only about twelve minutes for the particle eclipse too, there’s not a second to waste. At best I’m going to get a good dose of radiation at the other end, before I reach the ship and get inside.”

Du Bos had Amdo by the arm and was tugging him back toward the cave, and at the same time he was motioning for a switch to the alternate radio channel.

The captain went along; and they ducked back in together, looking up then simultaneously to see that the indicated radiation level was still quite low. On the channel that should give them privacy, Du Bos said: “I—I must leave it up to you as to whether to order that girl to come back at once; but understand that whatever has caused this apparent lull in the storm—some magnetic effect, perhaps—may change again at any moment.”

“In the first place, I don’t think she’d come back, if I gave the order.”

Du Bos was still gripping him. “Another possibility is that the counter’s pickup unit”—he nodded toward the outside—”may have failed under overload. You’d better get her back.”

“And in the second place, Doctor Du Bos, I do know something about our hardware. These counters are very unlikely to be knocked out by a particle bombardment. In the third place, Medellin didn’t have any temporary magnetic lulls in his storm; I’m sure he would have taken advantage of one if it had come.” As if reluctantly, the captain added: “He did say that the particle eclipse should come first. He had no authority with him and he had to think the thing out for himself.”

The old man stiffened. “It can’t work that way, I tell you.”

“Doctor Du Bos, eclipses are not quite the same thing as astrophysics, are they?”

Du Bos glared at him but did not answer.

“Have you made any particular study of eclipses?”

“No, have you? Are you qualified to even begin . . .?” The scientist choked down still angrier words.

The captain grimaced. “I never did really try to figure out the truth about when this particle eclipse should start, not even when Selina was arguing with me . . . so I’m not going to try now, not with only ten minutes or so left before . . . one way or the other. But two very bright people have really studied this thing, knowing their lives depended on it, and have come to the opposite conclusion from your offhand opinion. If you were Joe Doakes—”

“Which they are, in this case.”

“—all right, if you were Joe Doakes too, the question would still have been very much open. But just because you were the eminent astronomer I bowed my head to you and never tried to think it out. And that I do regret. This trip so far hasn’t been exactly my finest effort in space.”

He glanced up abruptly at the counter, then switched to the radio channel that Selina presumably still was using. “How’s it going, Jabal?”

“Good enough, captain.”

“Radiation is still very low here, quite tolerable. I’ll let you know at once of any change.”

“Understand, captain. Thank you. Fifteen more minutes and I should be in the ship.”

About two more minutes of silence passed, before Du Bos walked out into the middle of the empty-looking cave, and squatted down to sketch with a gloved finger on the crumbly floor his own version of Selina’s now-vanished eclipse diagram. Amdo, watching, saw the arc of planetary orbit appear, and then the epicyclic circle of the satellite’s path; crude arrow-markers seemed to show that each body was moving counterclockwise in its track, as if seen from a hypothetical observers’ post somewhere high above the north pole of the planet.

After staring for a full minute at what he had drawn, Du Bos stood up and got out his calculator; Amdo got the impression that the machine was only being used this time to put into rigorous, acceptable form something already done, like typing a document after the last handwritten draft is done, the fateful content known . . .

The glowing digits on the counter’s face were suddenly jumping again, and the captain got on the radio at once. “Selina, a sharp rise in particle radiation has just started here. Not back to previous levels yet, but if it keeps on going up like this it soon will be.”

“I understand, captain. Five more minutes and I should be in the ship.” She started to say more, but a torrent of radiation-produced noise was cutting communication off.

Du Bos was holstering his calculator again. He cleared his throat; it was a startling, uncharacteristic, nervous-old-uncle sound, that almost made Amdo jump.

Du Bos said: “The particles do take much longer than the light to get here, as I said before. But then it doesn’t follow at all that the particle eclipse will lag the optical eclipse by the same amount of time. You see, the particles that will strike the planet during the optical eclipse must have passed within the satellite’s orbit some minutes earlier.” He scuffed with a boot at the cave floor as he might have waved his hand at a classroom display. “See? The satellite in effect plows a clear space through the sea of particles flowing outward from the sun. This wake, cleared of particles, drifts back, lagging the satellite—”

“The way the clear space under an umbrella lags behind when you run in the rain.”

“Well, yes. And although the satellite, from our point of view, looks as if it’s moving backwards, from west to east,” Du Bos said, gesturing overhead, “Slag is carrying us and the satellite along in its orbit faster than the satellite is looping back, so the net movement is still forward, both still clockwise with respect to the sun, and we do enter the wake—the particle eclipse—first.”

“You’re saying that you were wrong.”

Du Bos came over to stand beside him, watching the counter. The radiation outside was hellish. A silence began to stretch. It was an almost timeless stillness, reaching for eternity. But then the silence was riddled, dissolved, made—almost—irrelevant, by the glorious loud crunching of an egg-shaped hull bottom grinding down on rock and pumice a few tens of meters from the cave . . .

Slag was a million kilometers below, and sinking fast now beneath the push of interstellar engines. The corpuscular storm that still filled this solar system raged harmlessly beyond the layer of forces shielding the ovoid hull.

Selina lay in sickbay and Du Bos had been ministering to her. The tall, gray man was at her bedside helping her to a drink when Amdo came in, clutching a small wad of printout. “The medical boxes say you may be a sick lady for a while, Selina,” Amdo announced, waving the prognosis he had just gotten on the bridge. “But nothing worse than that.”

She smiled. And then Du Bos, who seemed to have been waiting for the proper in-person witness, smiled down at her as well, and Amdo for the first time heard from the old man something that he could construe as evidence of greatness.

“I’m sorry,” said the galaxy’s first astrophysicist. “I was most terribly wrong.”

THE SMILE

The berserker attack upon the world called St. Gervase had ended some four standard months before the large and luxurious private yacht of the Tyrant Yoritomo appeared amid the ashclouds and rainclouds that still monotonized the planet’s newly lifeless sky. From the yacht a silent pair of waspish-looking launches soon began a swift descent, to land on the denuded surface where the planet’s capital city had once stood.

The crews disembarking from the launches were armored against hot ash and hot mud and residual radiation. They knew what they were looking for, and in less than a standard hour they had located the vaulted tunnel leading down, from what had been a sub-basement of the famed St. Gervase Museum. The tunnel was partially collapsed in places, but still passable, and they followed its steps downward, stumbling here and there on debris fallen from the surface. The battle had not been completely one-sided in its early stages, and scattered amid the wreckage of the once-great city were fragments of berserker troop-landers and of their robotic shock-troops. The unliving metal killers had had to force a landing, to neutralize the defensive field generators, before the bombardment could begin in earnest.

The tunnel terminated in a large vault a hundred meters down. The lights, on an independent power supply, were still working, and the air conditioning was still trying to keep out dust. There were five great statues in the vault, including one in the attached workshop where some conservator or restorer had evidently been treating it. Each one was a priceless masterwork. And scattered in an almost casual litter throughout the shelter were paintings, pottery, small works in bronze and gold and silver, the least a treasure to be envied.

At once the visitors radioed news of their discovery to one who waited eagerly in the yacht hovering above. Their report concluded with the observation that someone had evidently been living down here since the attack. Beside the workshop, with its power lamp to keep things going, there was a small room that had served as a repository of the Museum’s records. A cot stood in it now, there had been food supplies laid in, and there were other signs of human habitation. Well, it was not too strange that there should have been a few survivors, out of a population of many millions.

The man who had been living alone in the shelter for four months came back to find the landing party going busily about their work.

“Looters,” he remarked, in a voice that seemed to have lost the strength for rage, or even fear. Not armored against radiation or anything else, he leaned against the terminal doorway of the battered tunnel, a long-haired, unshaven, once-fat man whose frame was now swallowed up in clothes that looked as if they might not have been changed since the attack.

The member of the landing party standing nearest looked back at him silently, and drummed fingers on the butt of a bolstered handgun, considering. The man who had just arrived threw down the pieces of metallic junk he had brought with him, conveying in the gesture his contempt.

The handgun was out of its holster, but before it was leveled, an intervention from the leader of the landing party came in the form of a sharp gesture. Without taking his eyes off the man in the doorway, the leader at once reopened communication with the large ship waiting above.

“Your Mightiness, we have a survivor here,” he informed the round face that soon appeared upon the small portable wallscreen. “I believe it is the sculptor Antonio Nobrega.”

“Let me see him at once. Bring him before the screen.” The voice of His Mightiness was inimitable and terrible, and no less terrible, somehow, because he always sounded short of breath. “Yes, you are right, although he is much changed. Nobrega, how fortunate for us both! This is indeed another important find.”

“I knew you would be coming to St. Gervase now,” Nobrega told the screen, in his empty voice. “Like a disease germ settling in a mangled body. Like some great fat cancer virus. Did you bring along your woman, to take charge of our Culture?”

One of the men beside the sculptor knocked him down. A breathless little snarl came from the screen at this, and Nobrega was quickly helped back to his feet, then put into a chair.

“He is an artist, my faithful ones,” the screen-voice chided. “We must not expect him to have any sense of the fitness of things outside his art. No. We must get the maestro here some radiation treatment, and then bring him along with us to the Palace, and he will live and work there as happily, or unhappily, as elsewhere.”

“Oh no,” said the artist from his chair, more faintly than before. “My work is done.”

“Pish-posh. You’ll see.”

“I knew you were coming . . .”

“Oh?” The small voice from the screen was humoring him. “And how did you know that?”

“I heard . . . when our fleet was still defending the approaches to the system, my daughter was out there with it. Through her, before she died, I heard how you brought your own fleet in-system, to watch what was going to happen, to judge our strength, our chance of resisting the berserkers. I heard how your force vanished when they came. I said then that you’d be back, to loot the things you could never get at in any other way.”

Nobrega was quiet for a moment, then lunged from his chair—or made the best attempt at lunging that he could. He grabbed up a long metal sculptor’s tool and drew it back to swing at Winged Truth Rising, a marble Poniatowski eleven centuries old. “Before I’ll see you take this—”

Before he could knock a chip of marble loose, he was overpowered, and put into restraint.

When they approached him again an hour later, to take him up to the yacht for medical examination and treatment, they found him already dead. Autopsy on the spot discovered several kinds of slow and gentle poison. Nobrega might have taken some deliberately. Or he might have been finished by something the berserkers had left behind, to ensure that there would be no survivors, as they moved on to carry out their programmed task of eradicating all life from the Galaxy.

On his voyage home from St. Gervase, and for several months thereafter, Yoritimo was prevented by pressing business from really inspecting his new treasures. By then the five great statues had been installed, to good esthetic advantage, in the deepest, largest, and best-protected gallery of the Palace. Lesser collections had been evicted to make room and visual space for Winged Truth Rising; Lazamon’s Laughing (or Raging] Bacchus; The Last Provocation, by Sarapion; Lazienki’s Twisting Room; and Remembrance of Past Wrongs, by Prajapati.

It chanced that at this time the Lady Yoritomo was at the Palace too. Her duties, as Cultural Leader of the People, and High Overseer of Education for the four tributary planets, kept her on the move, and it often happened that she and her Lord did not see each other for a month or longer at a time. The two of them trusted each other more than they trusted anyone else. Today they sat alone in the great gallery and sipped tea, and spoke of business.

The Lady was trying to promote her latest theory, which was that love for the ruling pair might be implanted genetically in the next generation of people on the tributary worlds. Several experimental projects had already begun. So far these had achieved little but severe mental retardation in the subjects, but there were plenty of new subjects and she was not discouraged.

The Lord spoke mainly of his own plan, which was to form a more explicit working arrangement with the berserkers. In this scheme the Yoritomos would furnish the killer machines with human lives they did not need, and planets hard to defend, in exchange for choice works of art and, of course, immunity from personal attack. The plan had many attractive features, but the Lord had to admit that the difficulty of opening negotiations with berserkers, let alone establishing any degree of mutual trust, made it somewhat impractical.

When a pause came in the conversation, Yoritomo had the banal thought that he and his wife had little to talk about anymore, outside of business. With a word to her, he rose from the alcove where they had been sitting, and walked to the far end of the gallery of statues to replenish the tea pot. For esthetic reasons he refused to allow robots in here; nor did he want human servitors around while this private discussion was in progress. Also, he thought, as he retraced his steps, the Lady could not help but be flattered, and won toward his own position in a certain matter where they disagreed, when she was served personally by the hands of one so mighty . . .

He rounded the great metal flank of The Last Provocation and came to a dumb halt, in shocked surprise so great that for a moment his facial expression did not even alter. Half a minute ago he had left her vivacious and thoughtful and full of graceful energy. She was still in the same place, on the settee, but slumped over sideways now, one arm extended with its slender, jeweled finger twitching upon the rich brown carpet. The Lady’s hair was wildly disarranged; and small wonder, he thought madly, for her head had been twisted almost completely around, so her dead eyes now looked over one bare shoulder almost straight at Yoritomo. Upon her shoulder and her cheek were bruised discolorations . . .

He spun around at last, dropping the fragile masterpiece that held his tea. His concealed weapon was half-drawn before it was smashed out of his grip. He had one look at death, serenely towering above him. He had not quite time enough to shriek, before the next blow fell.

The wind had not rested in the hours since Ritwan’s arrival, and with an endless howl it drove the restless land before it. He could quite easily believe that in a few years the great pit left by the destruction of the old Yoritomo Palace had been completely filled. The latest dig had ended only yesterday, and already the archaeologists’ fresh pits were beginning to be reoccupied by sand.

“They were actually more pirates than anything else,” Iselin, the chief archaeologist, was saying. “At the peak of their power two hundred years ago they ruled four systems. Ruled them from here, though there’s not much showing on the surface now but this old sandpile.”

“Ozymandias,” Ritwan murmured.

“What?”

“An ancient poem.” He pushed back sandy hair from his forehead with a thin, nervous hand. “I wish I’d got here in time to see the statues before you crated them and stowed them on your ship. You can imagine I came as fast as I could from Sirgol, when I heard there was a dig in progress here.”

“Well.” Iselin folded her plump arms and frowned, then smiled, a white flash in a dark Indian face. “Why don’t you ride with us back to Esteel system? I really can’t open the crates for anything until we get there. Not under the complicated rules of procedure we’re stuck with on these jointly sponsored digs.”

“My ship does have a good autopilot.”

“Then set it to follow ours, and hop aboard. When we unpack on Esteel you can be among the first to look your fill. Meanwhile we can talk. I wish you’d been with us all along, we’ve missed having a really first-rate art historian.”

“All right, I’ll come.” They offered each other enthusiastic smiles. “It’s true, then, you really found most of the old St. Gervase collection intact?”

“I don’t know that we can claim that. But there’s certainly a lot.”

“Just lying undisturbed here, for about two centuries.”

“Well, as I say, this was the Yoritomos’ safe port. But it looks like no more than a few thousand people ever lived on this world at any one time, and no one at all has lived here for a considerable period. Some intrigue or other evidently started among the Tyrant’s lieutenants—no one’s ever learned exactly how or why it started, but the thieves fell out. There was fighting, the Palace destroyed, the rulers themselves killed, and the whole thing collapsed. None of the intriguers had the ability to keep it going, I suppose, with the so-called Lord and Lady gone.”

“Just when was that?”

Iselin named a date.

“The same year St. Gervase fell. That fits. The Yoritomos could have gone there after the berserkers left, and looted at their leisure. That would fit with their character, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so . . . you see, the more I learned of them, the more I felt sure that they must have had a deeper, more secret shelter than any that was turned up in the early digs a century ago. The thing is, the people who dug here then found so much loot they were convinced they’d found it all.”

Ritwan was watching the pits fill slowly in.

Iselin gave his arm a friendly shake. “And—did I tell you? We found two skeletons, I think of the Yoritomos themselves. Lavishly dressed in the midst of their greatest treasures. Lady died of a broken neck, and the man of multiple . . .”

The wind was howling still, when the two ships lifted off.

Aboard ship on the way to Esteel, things were relaxed and pleasant, if just a trifle cramped. With Ritwan along, they were six on board, and had to fit three to a cabin in narrow bunks. It was partially the wealth of the find that crowded them, of course. There were treasures almost beyond imagining stowed in plastic cratings almost everywhere one looked. The voyagers could expect a good deal of leisure time en route to marvel at it all. Propulsion and guidance and life-support were taken care of by machinery, with just an occasional careful human glance by way of circumspection. People in this particular portion of the inhabited Galaxy traveled now, as they had two hundred years before, in relative security from berserker attack. And now there were no human pirates.

Lashed in place in the central cargo bay stood the five great, muffled forms from which Ritwan particularly yearned to tear the pads and sheeting. But he made himself be patient. On the first day out he joined the others in the cargo bay, where they watched and listened to some of the old recordings found in the lower ruins of the Yoritomo Palace. There were data stored on tapes, in crystal cubes, around old permafrozen circuit rings. And much of the information was in the form of messages recorded by the Tyrant himself.

“The Gods alone know why he recorded this one,” sighed Oshogbo. She was chief archivist of a large Esteel museum, one of the expedition’s sponsoring institutions. “Listen to this. Look at him. He’s ordering a ship to stand by and be boarded, or face destruction.”

“The ham actor in him, maybe,” offered Chinan, who on planet had been an assistant digger for the expedition, but in space became its captain. “He needed to study his delivery.”

“Every one of his ships could carry the recording,” suggested Klyuchevski, expert excavator. “So their victims wouldn’t know if the Tyrant himself were present or not—I’m not sure how much difference it would make.”

“Let’s try another,” said Granton, chief record-keeper and general assistant.

Within the next hour they sampled recordings in which Yoritomo: (1) ordered his subordinates to stop squabbling over slaves and concubines; (2) pleaded his case, to the Interworlds Government, as that of a man unjustly maligned, the representative of a persecuted people; (3) conducted a video tour, for some supposed audience whose identity was never made clear, of the most breathtaking parts of his vast collection of art . . .

“Wait!” Ritwan broke in. “What was that bit? Would you run that last part once more?”

The Tyrant’s asthmatic voice repeated: “The grim story of how these magnificent statues happened to be saved. Our fleet had made every effort but still arrived too late to be of any help to the heroic defenders of St. Gervase. For many days we searched in vain for survivors; we found just one. And this man’s identity made the whole situation especially poignant to me, for it was the sculptor Antonio Nobrega. Sadly, our help had come too late, and he shortly succumbed to the berserker poisons. I hope that the day will come soon, when all governments will heed my repeated urgings, to prosecute a war to the finish against these scourges of . . .”

“So!” Ritwan looked pleased, a man who has just had an old puzzle solved for him. “That’s where Nobrega died, then. We’ve thought for some time it was likely—most of his family was there—but we had no hard evidence before.”

“He was the famous forger, wasn’t he?” asked Granton.

“Yes. A really good artist in his own right, though the shady side of his work has somewhat overshadowed the rest.” Ritwan allowed time for the few small groans earned by the pun, and went on: “I’d hate to accept the old Tyrant’s word on anything. But I suppose he’d have no reason to lie about Nobrega.”

Iselin was looking at her wrist. “Lunch time for me. Maybe the rest of you want to spend all day in here.”

“I can resist recordings.” Ritwan got up to accompany her. “Now, if you were opening up the crates—”

“No chance, friend. But I can show you holograms—didn’t I mention that?”

“You didn’t!”

Oshogbo called after them: “Here’s the Lord and Lady both, on this one—”

They did not stop. Chinan came out with them, leaving three people still in the cargo bay.

In the small ship’s lounge, the three who had left set up lunch with a floor show.

“This is really decadence. Pea soup with ham, and—what have we here? Lazienki. Marvelous!”

The subtle grays and reds of Twisting Room (was it the human heart?) came into existence, projected by hidden devices in the corners of the lounge, and filling up the center. Iselin with a gesture made the full-size image rotate slowly.

“Captain?” the intercom asked hoarsely, breaking in.

“I knew it—just sit down, and—”

“I think we have some kind of cargo problem here.” It sounded like Granton’s voice, perturbed. “Something seems to be breaking up, or . . . Iselin, you’d better come too, and take a look at your . . .”

A pause, with background smashing noises. Then incoherent speech, in mixed voices, ending in a hoarse cry.

Chinan was already gone. Ritwan, sprinting, just kept in sight of Iselin’s back going around corners. Then she stopped so suddenly that he almost ran into her.

The doorway to the cargo hold, left wide open when they came out of it a few minutes before, was now sealed tightly by a massive sliding door, a safety door designed to isolate compartments in case of emergencies like fire or rupture of the hull.

On the deck just outside the door, a human figure sprawled. Iselin and Chinan were already crouched over it; as Ritwan bent over them, a not-intrinsically-unpleasant smell of scorched meat reached his nostrils.

“Help me lift her . . . careful . . . sick bay’s that way.”

Ritwan helped Iselin. Chinan sprang to his feet, looked at an indicator beside the heavy door, and momentarily rested a hand on its flat surface.

“Something burning in there,” he commented tersely, and then came along with the others on the quick hustle to sickbay. At his touch the small door opened for them, lights springing on inside.

“What’s in our cargo that’s not fireproofed?”

Iselin demanded, as if all this were some personal insult hurled her way by Fate.

Dialogue broke off for a while. The bum-tank, hissing brim-full twenty seconds after the proper studs were punched, received Oshogbo’s scorched dead weight, clothes and all, and went to work upon her with a steady sloshing. Then, while Iselin stayed in sick bay, Ritwan followed Chinan on another scrambling run, back to the small bridge. There the captain threw himself into an acceleration chair and laid swift hands on his controls, demanding an accounting from his ship.

In a moment he had switched his master intercom to show conditions inside the cargo bay, where two people were still unaccounted for. On the deck in there lay something clothed, a bundle-of-old-rags sort of something. In the remaining moment of clear vision before the cargo bay pickup went dead, Ritwan and Chinan both glimpsed a towering, moving shape.

The captain stared for a moment at the gray noise which came next, then switched to sickbay. Iselin appeared at once.

“How’s she doing?” Chinan demanded.

“Signs are stabilizing. She’s got a crack in the back of her skull as well as the burns on her torso, the printout says. As if something heavy had hit her in the head.”

“Maybe the door clipped her, sliding closed, just as she got out.” The men in the control room could see into the tank, and the captain raised his voice. “Oshy, can you answer me? What happened to Granton and Klu?”

The back of Oshogbo’s neck was cradled on a rest of ivory plastic. Her body shook and shimmied lightly, vibrating with the dark liquid, as if she might be enjoying her swim. Here and there burnt shreds of clothing were now drifting free. She looked around and seemed to be trying to locate Chinan’s voice. Then she spoke: “It . . . grabbed them. I . . . ran.”

“What grabbed them? Are they still alive?”

“Granton’s head came . . . it pulled off his head. I got out. Something hit . . .” The young woman’s eyes rolled, her voice faded.

Iselin’s face came into view again. “She’s out of it; I think the medic just put her to sleep. Should I try to get it to wake her again?”

“Not necessary.” The captain sounded shaken. “I think we must assume the others are finished. I’m not going to open that door, anyway, until I know more about our problem.”

Ritwan asked: “Can we put down on some planet quickly?”

“Not one where we can get help,” the captain told him over one shoulder. “There’s no help closer than Esteel. Three or four days.”

The three of them quickly talked over the problem, agreeing on what they knew. Two people were sure that they had seen, on intercom, something large moving about inside the cargo bay.

“And,” Iselin concluded, “our surviving firsthand witness says that ‘it’ tore off someone’s head.”

“Sounds like a berserker,” Ritwan said impulsively. “Or could it possibly be some animal—? Anyway, how could anything that big have been hiding in there?”

“An animal’s impossible,” Chinan told him flatly. “And you should have seen how we packed that space, how carefully we checked to see if we were wasting any room. The only place anyone or anything could have been hidden was inside one of those statuary crates.”

Iselin added: “And I certainly checked out every one of them. We formed them to fit closely around the statues, and they couldn’t have contained anything else of any size. What’s that noise?”

The men in the control room could hear it too, a muffled, rhythmic banging, unnatural for any space ship that Ritwan had ever ridden. He now, for some reason, suddenly thought of what kind of people they had been whose Palace had provided this mysterious cargo; and for the first time since the trouble had started he began to feel real fear.

He put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Chinan—what exactly did we see on the intercom screen?”

The captain thought before answering. “Something big, taller than a man, anyway. And moving by itself. Right?”

“Yes, and I’d say it was dark . . . beyond that, I don’t know.”

“I would have called it light-colored.” The muffled pounding sounds had grown a little steadier, faster, louder. “So, do you think one of our statues has come alive on us?”

Iselin’s voice from sick bay offered: “I think ‘alive’ is definitely the wrong word.”

Ritwan asked: “How many of the statues have movable joints?” Twisting Room, which he had seen in hologram, did not. But articulated sculpture had been common enough a few centuries earlier.

“Two did,” said Iselin.

“I looked at all the statues closely,” Chinan protested. “Iselin, you did too. We all did, naturally. And they were genuine.”

“We never checked inside them, for controls, power supplies, robotic brains. Did we?”

“Of course not. There was no reason.”

Ritwan persisted: “So it is a berserker. It can’t be anything else. And it waited until now to attack, because it wants to be sure to get the ship.”

Chinan pounded his chair-arm with a flat hand. “No! I can’t buy that. Do you think that emergency door would stop a berserker? We’d all be dead now, and it would have the ship. And you’re saying it’s a berserker that looks just like a masterpiece by a great artist, enough alike to fool experts; and that it stayed buried there for two hundred years without digging itself out; and that—”

“Nobrega,” Ritwan interrupted suddenly.

“What?”

“Nobrega . . . he died on St. Gervase, we don’t know just how. He had every reason to hate the Yoritomos. Most probably he met one or both of them at the St. Gervase Museum, after the attack, while they were doing what they called their collecting.

“You said Nobrega was a great forger. Correct. A good engineer, too. You also said that no one knows exactly how the Yoritomos came to die, only that their deaths were violent. And occurred among these very statues.”

The other two, one on screen and one at hand, were very quiet, watching him.

“Suppose,” Ritwan went on, “Nobrega knew somehow that the looters would be coming, and he had the time and the means to concoct something special for them. Take a statue with movable limbs, and build in a power lamp, sensors, controls—a heat-projector, maybe, as a weapon. And then add the electronic brain from some small berserker unit.”

Chinan audibly sucked in his breath.

“There might easily have been some of those lying around on St. Gervase, after the attack. Everyone agrees it was a fierce defense.”

“I’m debating with myself,” said Chinan, “whether we should all pile into the lifeboat, and head for your ship, Ritwan. It’s small, as you say, but I suppose we’d fit, in a pinch.”

“There’s no real sick bay.”

“Oh.” They all looked at the face of the young woman in the tank, unconscious now, dark hair dancing round it upon the surface of the healing fluid.

“Anyway,” the captain resumed, “I’m not sure it couldn’t take over the controls here, catch us, ram us somehow. Maybe, as you think, it’s not a real berserker. But it seems to be too close to the real thing to just turn over our ship to it. We’re going to have to stay and fight.”

“Bravo,” said Iselin. “But with what? It seems to me we stowed away our small arms in the cargo bay somewhere.”

“We did. Let’s hope Nobrega didn’t leave it brains enough to look for them, and it just keeps banging on that door. Meanwhile, let’s check what digging equipment we can get at.”

Iselin decided it was pointless for her to remain in sick bay, and came to help them, leaving the intercom channel open so they could look in on Oshogbo from time to time.

“That door to the cargo bay is denting and bulging, boys,” she told them as she ducked into the cramped storage space beneath the lounge where they were rummaging. “Let’s get something organized in the way of weapons.”

Ritwan grunted, dragging out a long, thick-bodied tool, evidently containing its own power supply. “What’s this, an autohammer? Looks like it would do a job.”

“Sure,” said Chinan. “If you get within arm’s length. We’ll save that for when we’re really desperate.”

A minute later, digging through boxes of electrical-looking devices strange to Ritwan, the captain murmured: “If he went to all the trouble of forging an old master he must have had good reason. Well, it’d be the one thing the Yoritomos might accept at face value. Take it right onto then-ship, into their private rooms. He must have been out to get the Lord and Lady both.”

“I guess that was it I suppose just putting a simple bomb in the statue wouldn’t have been sure enough, or selective enough.”

“Also it might have had to pass some machines that sniff out explosives, before it got into the inner . . . Ritwan! When that thing attacked, just now, what recording were they listening to in the cargo bay?”

Ritwan stopped in the middle of opening another box. “Oshogbo called it out to us as we were leaving. You’re right, one with both the Yoritomos on it. Nobrega must have set his creation to be triggered by their voices, heard together.”

“How it’s supposed to be turned off, is what I’d like to know.”

“It did turn off, for some reason, didn’t it? And lay there for two centuries. Probably Nobrega didn’t foresee that the statue might survive long enough for the cycle to be able to repeat. Maybe if we can just hold out a little longer, it’ll turn itself off again.”

Patient and regular as a clock, the muffled battering sounded on.

“Can’t depend on that, I’m afraid.” Chinan kicked away the last crate to be searched. “Well, this seems to be the extent of the hardware we have for putting together weapons. It looks like whatever we use is going to have to be electrical. I think we can rig up something to electrocute—if that’s the right word—or fry, or melt, the enemy. We’ve got to know first, though, just which of those statues is the one we’re fighting. There are only two possible mobile ones, which narrows it down. But still.”

“Laughing Bacchus,” Iselin supplied. “And Remembrance of Past Wrongs.”

“The first is basically steel. We can set up an induction field strong enough to melt it down, I think. A hundred kilos or so of molten iron in the middle of the deck may be hard to deal with, but not as hard as what we’ve got now. But the other statue, or anyway its outer structure, is some kind of very hard and tough ceramic. That one will need something like a lightning bolt to knock it out.” A horrible thought seemed to strike Chinan all at once. “You don’t suppose there could be two—?”

Ritwan gestured reassurance. “I think Nobrega would have put all his time and effort into perfecting one.”

“So,” said Jselin, “it all comes down to knowing which one he forged, and which is really genuine. The one he worked on must be forged; even if he’d started with a real masterpiece to build his killing device, by the time he got everything implanted the surface would have to be almost totally reconstructed.”

“So I’m going up to the lounge,” the art historian replied. “And see those holograms. If we’re lucky I’ll be able to spot it.”

Iselin came with him, muttering: “All you have to do, friend, is detect a forgery that got past Yoritomo and his experts . . . maybe we’d better think of something else.”

In the lounge the holograms of the two statues were soon displayed full size, side by side and slowly rotating. Both were tall, roughly humanoid figures, and both in their own ways were smiling.

A minute and a half had passed when Ritwan said, decisively: “This one’s the forgery. Build your lightning device.”

Before the emergency door at last gave way under that mindless, punch-press pounding, the electrical equipment had been assembled and moved into place. On either side of the doorway Chinan and Iselin crouched, manning their switches. Ritwan (counted the most expendable in combat) stood in plain view opposite the crumpling door, garbed in a heat-insulating spacesuit and clutching the heavy autohammer to his chest.

The final failure of the door was sudden. One moment it remained in place, masking what lay beyond; next moment, it had been torn away. For a long second of the new silence, the last work of Antonio Nobrega stood clearly visible, bone-white in the glare of lamps on every side, against the blackened ruin of what had been the cargo bay.

Ritwan raised the hammer, which suddenly felt no heavier than a microprobe. For a moment he knew what people felt, who face the true berserker foe in combat.

The tall thing took a step toward him, serenely smiling. And the blue-white blast came at it from the side, faster than any mere matter could be made to dodge.

A couple of hours later the most urgent damage-control measures had been taken, two dead bodies had been packed for preservation— with real reverence if without gestures—and the pieces of Nobrega’s work, torn asunder by the current that the ceramic would not peacefully admit, had cooled enough to handle.

Ritwan had promised to show the others how he had known the forgery; and now he came up with the fragment he was looking for. “This,” he said.

“The mouth?”

“The smile. If you’ve looked at as much Federation era art as I have, the incongruity is obvious. The smile’s all wrong for Prajapati’s period. It’s evil, cunning—when the face was intact you could see it plainly. Gloating. Calm and malevolent at the same time.”

Iselin asked: “But Nobrega himself didn’t see that? Or Yoritomo?”

“For the period they lived in, the smile’s just fine, artistically speaking. They couldn’t step, forward or backward two hundred years, and get a better perspective. I suppose revenge is normal in any century, but tastes in art are changeable.”

Chinan said: “I thought perhaps the subject or the title gave you some clue.”

“Remembrance of Past Wrongs— no, Prajapati did actually do something very similar in subject, as I recall. As I say, I suppose revenge knows no cultural or temporal boundaries.”

Normal in any century. Oshogbo, watching via intercom from the numbing burn-treatment bath, shivered and closed her eyes. No boundaries.

The universe has given life its own arsenal of weapons, and I am no longer surprised that even tenderness may sometimes be counted among them. Even the most gentle and humble t)f living things may demonstrate surprising strength . . .

1978

SMASHER

Here is some suspenseful sf about a berserker force which descends on a planet named Waterfall. The berserkers were unliving and unmanned war machines programmed to destroy anything that lived. And life on Waterfall consisted of some odd marine life and four defenseless humans . . .

Claus Slovensko was coming to the conclusion that the battle in nearby space was going to be invisible to anyone on the planet Waterfall—assuming that there was really going to be a battle at all.

Claus stood alone atop a forty-meter dune, studying a night sky that flamed with the stars of the alien Busog cluster—mostly blue-white giants, which were ordinarily a sight worth watching in themselves. Against that background, the greatest energies released by interstellar warships could, he supposed, be missed as a barely visible twinkling. Unless, of course, the fighting should come very close indeed.

In the direction he was feeing, an ocean made invisible by night stretched from near the foot of the barren dune to a horizon marked only by the cessation of the stars. Claus turned now to scan once more the sky in the other direction. That way, toward planetary north, the starry profusion went on and on. In the northeast a silvery half-moon, some antique stage designer’s concept of what Earth’s own moon should be, hung low behind thin clouds. Below those clouds extended an entire continent of lifeless sand and rock. The land masses of Waterfall were bound in a silence that Earth ears found uncanny—stillness marred only by the wind, by murmurings of sterile streams, and by occasional deep rumblings in the rock itself.

Claus continued turning slowly, till he faced south again. Below him the night sea lapped with lulling false familiarity. He sniffed the air, shrugged, gave up squinting at the stars, and began to feel his way, one cautious foot after another, down the shifting slope of the dune’s flank. A small complex of buildings—labs and living quarters bunched as if for companionship, the only human habitation on the world of Waterfall—lay a hundred meters before him and below. Tonight, as usual, the windows were all cheerfully alight. Ino Vacroux had decided, and none of the other three people on the planet had seen any reason to dispute him, that any attempt at blackout would be pointless. If a berserker force was going to descend on Waterfall, the chance of four defenseless humans avoiding discovery by the unliving killers would be nil.

Just beyond the foot of the dune, Claus passed through a gate in the high fence of fused rock designed to keep out drifting sand. With no vegetation of any kind to hold the dunes in place, they tended sometimes to get pushy.

A few steps past the fence, he opened the lockless door of the main entrance of the comfortable living quarters. The large common room just inside was cluttered with casual furniture, books, amateur art, and small- and middle-sized aquariums. The three other people who completed the population of the planet were all in this room at the moment, and all looked up to see if Claus brought news.

Jenny Surya, his wife, was seated at the small computer terminal in the far corner, wearing shorts and sweater, dark hair tied up somewhat carelessly, long elegant legs crossed. She was frowning as she looked up, but abstractedly, as if the worst news Claus might be bringing them would be of some potential distraction from their work.

Closer to Claus, in a big chair pulled up to the big communicator cabinet, slouched Ino Vacroux, senior scientist of the base. Claus surmised that Ino had been a magnificent physical specimen a few decades ago, before being nearly killed in a berserker attack upon another planet. The medics had restored function but not fineness to his body. The gnarled, hairy thighs below his shorts were not much thicker than a child’s; his ravaged torso was draped now in a flamboyant shirt. In a chair near his sat Glenna Reyes, his wife, in her usual work garb of clean white coveralls. She was just a little younger than Vacroux, but wore the years with considerably more ease.

“Nothing to see,” Claus informed them all, with a loose wave meant to describe the lack of visible action in the sky.

“Or to hear, either,” Vacroux grated. His face was grim as he nodded toward the communicator. The screens of the device sparkled, and its speakers hissed a little, with noise that wandered in from the stars and things stranger than stars that nature had set in this corner of the galaxy.

Only a few hours earlier, in the middle of Waterfall’s short autumn afternoon, there had been plenty to hear indeed. Driven by a priority code coming in advance of a vitally important message, the communicator had boomed to life, then roared the message through the house and across the entire base, in a voice that the four people heard plainly even four hundred meters distant, where they were gathered to watch dolphins.

“Sea Mother, this is Brass Trumpet. Predators here, and we’re going to try to turn them. Hold your place. Repeating . . .”

One repetition of the substance came through as the four were hurrying back to the house. As soon as they got in they played back the automatically recorded signal. And then, when Glenna had at last located the code book somewhere, and they could verify the worst, they had played it back once more.

Sea Mother was the code name for any humans who might happen to be on Waterfall. It had been assigned by the military years ago, as part of its precautionary routine, and had probably never been used before today. Brass Trumpet, according to the book, conveyed a warning of deadly peril, and was to be used only by a human battle force when there were thought to be berserkers already in the Waterfall system or on their way to it. And “predators here” could hardly mean anything but berserkers—unliving and unmanned war machines, programmed to destroy whatever life they found. The first of them had been built in ages past, during the madness of some interstellar war between races now long-since vanished. Between berserkers and starfaring Earthhumans, war had now been chronic for a thousand standard years.

That Brass Trumpet’s warning should be so brief and vague was understandable. The enemy would doubtless pick it up as soon as its intended hearers, and might well be able to decode it. But for all the message content revealed, Sea Mother might be another powerful human force, toward which Brass Trumpet sought to turn them. It would also have been conceivable for such a message to be sent to no one—a planned deception to make the enemy waste computer capacity and detection instruments. And even if the berserkers’ deadly electronic brains should somehow compute correctly that Sea Mother was a small and helpless target, it was still possible to hope that the berserkers would be too intent on fatter targets elsewhere, too hard-pressed by human forces, or both, to turn aside and snap up such a minor morsel.

During the hours since that first warning, nothing but noise had come from the communicator. Glenna sighed, and reached out to pat her man on the arm below the sleeve of his loud shirt. “Busy day with the crustaceans tomorrow,” she reminded him.

“So we’d better get some rest. I know.” Ino looked and sounded worn. He was the only one of the four who had ever seen berserkers before, at anything like close range. It was not exactly reassuring to see how grimly and intensely he reacted to the warning of their possible approach.

“You can connect the small alarm,” Glenna went on, “so it’ll be sure to wake us if another priority message comes in.”

That, thought Glaus, would be easier on the nerves than being blasted out of sleep by that God-voice shouting again, this time only a few meters from the head of their bed.

“Yes, I’ll do that.” Ino thought, then slapped his chair-arms. He made his voice a little brighter. “You’re right about tomorrow. And over in Twenty-three we’re going to have to start feeding the mantis shrimp.” He glanced around at the wall near his chair, where a long chart showed ponds, bays, lagoons, and tidal pools, all strung out in a kilometers-long array, most of it natural, along this part of the coast. This array was a chief reason why the Sea Mother base had been located where it was.

From its sun and moon to its gravity and atmosphere, Waterfall was remarkably Earthlike in almost every measurable attribute save one—this world was congenitally lifeless. About forty standard years past, during a lull in the seemingly interminable berserker war, it had appeared that the peaceful advancement of interstellar humanization might get in an inning or two, and work had begun toward altering this lifelessness. Great ships had settled upon Waterfall with massive inoculations of Earthly life, in a program very carefully orchestrated to produce, eventually, a twin-Earth circling one of the few Sol-type suns in this part of the galaxy.

The enormously complex task had been interrupted when war flared again. The first recrudescence of fighting was far away, but it drew off people and resources. A man-wife team of scientists was selected to stay alone on Waterfall for the duration of the emergency. They were to keep the program going along planned lines, even though at a slow pace. Ino and Glenna had been here for two years now. A supply ship from Atlantis called at intervals of a few standard months. The last to call, eight local days ago, had brought along another husband-and-wife team for a visit. Glaus and Jenny were both psychologists, interested in the study of couples living in isolation; they were to stay at least until the next supply ship came.

So far the young guests had been welcome. Glenna, her own children long grown and independent on other worlds, approached motherliness sometimes in her attitude. Ino, more of a born competitor, swam races with Claus and gambled—lightly—with him. With Jenny he alternated between half-serious gallantry and teasing.

“I almost forgot,” he said now, getting up from his chair before the communicator, and racking his arms and shoulders with an intense stretch. “I’ve got a little present for you, Jen.”

“Oh?” She was bright, interested, imperturbable. It was her usual working attitude, which he persisted in trying to break through.

Ino went out briefly, and came back to join the others in the kitchen. A small snack before retiring had become a daily ritual for the group.

“For you,” he said, presenting Jen with a small bag of clear plastic. There was water inside, and something else.

“Oh, my goodness.” It was still her usual nurselike business tone, which evidently struck Ino as a challenge. “What do I do with it?”

“Keep him in that last aquarium in the parlor,” Ino advised. “It’s untenanted right now.”

Claus, looking at the bag from halfway across the kitchen, made out in it one of those nonhuman, nonmammalian shapes that are apt to give Earth people the impression of the intensely alien, even when the organism sighted comes from their own planet. It was no bigger than an adult human finger, but replete with waving appendages. There came to mind something written by Lafcadio Hearn about a centipede: The blur of its moving legs . . . toward which one would no more advance one’s hand . . . than toward the spinning blade of a power saw . . .

Or some words close to those. Jen, Claus knew, cared for the shapes of nonmammalian life even less than he did. But she would grit her teeth and struggle not to let the teasing old man see it.

“Just slit the bag and let it drain into the tank,” Ino was advising, for once sounding pretty serious. “They don’t like handling . . . okay? He’s a bit groggy right now, but tomorrow, if he’s not satisfied with you as his new owner, he may try to get away.”

Glenna, in the background, was rolling her eyes in the general direction of Brass Trumpet, miming: What is the old fool up to now? When is he going to grow up?

“Get away?” Jen inquired sweetly. “You told me the other day that even a snail couldn’t climb that glass—”

The house was filled with the insistent droning of the alarm that Ino had just connected. He’s running some kind of test, Claus thought at once. Then he saw the other man’s face and knew that Ino wasn’t.

Already the new priority message was coming in: “Sea Mother, the fight’s over here. Predators departing Waterfall System. Repeating . . .”

Claus started to obey an impulse to run out and look at the sky again, then realized that there would certainly be nothing to be seen of the battle now. Radio waves, no faster than light, had just announced that it was over. Instead, he joined the others in voicing their mutual relief. They had a minute or so of totally unselfconscious cheering.

Ino, his face much relieved, broke out a bottle of something and four glasses. In a little while, all of them drifted noisily outside, unable to keep from looking up, though knowing they would find nothing but the stars to see.

“What,” asked Claus, “were berserkers doing here in the first place? We’re hardly a big enough target to be interesting to a fleet of them. Are we?”

“Not when they have bigger game in sight.” Ino gestured upward with his drink. “Oh, any living target interests them, once they get it in their sights. But I’d guess that if a sizable force was here they were on the way to attack Atlantis. See, sometimes in space you can use a planet or a whole system as a kind of cover. Sneak up behind its solar wind, as it were, its gravitational vortex, as someone fighting a land war might take advantage of a mountain or a hill.” Atlantis was a long-colonized system less than a dozen parsecs distant, heavily populated and heavily defended. The three habitable Atlantean planets were surfaced mostly with water, and the populace lived almost as much below the waves as on the shaky continents.

It was hours later when Glenna roused and stirred in darkness, pulling away for a moment from Ino’s familiar angularity nested beside her.

She blinked. “What was that?” she asked her husband, in a low voice barely cleared of sleep.

Ino scarcely moved. “What was what?”

“A flash, I thought. Some kind of bright flash, outside. Maybe in the distance.”

There came no sound of thunder, or of rain. And no more flashes, either, in the short time Glenna remained awake.

Shortly after sunrise next morning, Claus and Jen went out for an early swim. Their beach, pointed out by their hosts as the place where swimmers would be safest and least likely to damage the new ecology, lay a few hundred meters along the shoreline to the west, with several tall dunes between it and the building complex.

As they rounded the first of these dunes, following the pebbly shoreline, Claus stopped. “Look at that.” A continuous track, suggesting the passage of some small, belly-dragging creature, had been drawn in the sand. Its lower extremity lay somewhere under water, its upper concealed amid the humps of sterile sand somewhere inland.

“Something,” said Jenny, “crawled up out of the water. I haven’t seen that before on Waterfall.”

“Or came down into it.” Claus squatted beside the tiny trail. He was anything but a skilled tracker, and could see no way of determining which way it led. “I haven’t seen anything like this before, either. Glenna said certain species—I forget which—were starting to try the land. I expect this will interest them when we get back.”

When Claus and Jenny had rounded the next dune, there came into view on its flank two more sets of tracks, looking very much like the first, and like the first, either going up from the water or coming down.

“Maybe,” Claus offered, “it’s the same one little animal going back and forth. Do crabs make tracks like that?”

Jen couldn’t tell him. “Anyway, let’s hope they don’t pinch swimmers.” She slipped off her short robe and took a running dive into the cool water, whose salt content made it a good match for the seas of Earth. Half a minute later, she and her husband came to the surface together, ten meters or so out from shore. From here they could see west past the next dune. There, a hundred meters distant, underscored by the slanting shadows of the early sun, a whole tangled skein of narrow, fresh-looking tracks connected someplace inland with the sea.

A toss of Jen’s head shook water from her long, dark hair. “I wonder if it’s some kind of seasonal migration?”

“They certainly weren’t there yesterday. I think I’ve had enough. This water’s colder than a bureaucrat’s heart.”

Walking brisky, they had just re-entered the compound when Jenny touched Claus on the arm. “There’s Glenna, at the tractor shed. I’m going to trot over and tell her what we saw.”

“All right. I’ll start fixing some coffee.”

Glenna, coming out of the shed a little distance inland from the main house, forestalled Jenny’s announcement about the tracks with a vaguely worried question of her own.

“Did you or Claus see or hear anything strange last night, Jenny?”

“Strange? No, I don’t think so.”

Glenna looked toward a small cluster of more distant outbuildings. “We’ve just been out there taking a scheduled seismograph reading. It recorded something rather violent and unusual, at about oh-two-hundred this morning. The thing is, you see, it must have been just about that time that something woke me up. I had the distinct impression that there had been a brilliant flash, somewhere outside.”

Ino, also dressed in coveralls this morning, appeared among the distant sheds, trudging toward them. When he arrived, he provided more detail on the seismic event. “Quite sharp and apparently quite localized, not more than ten kilometers from here. Our system triangulated it well. I don’t know when we’ve registered another event quite like it.”

“What do you suppose it was?” Jen asked.

Ino hesitated minimally. “It could have been a very small spaceship crashing, or maybe a fairly large aircraft. But the only aircraft on Waterfall are the two little ones we have out in that far shed.”

“A meteor, maybe?”

“I rather hope so. Otherwise, a spacecraft just might be our most likely answer. And if it were a spacecraft from Brass Trumpet’s force coming down here—crippled in the fighting, perhaps—we’d have heard from him on the subject, I should think.”

The remaining alternative hung in the air unvoiced. Jenny bit her lip. By now, Brass Trumpet must be long gone from the system, and impossible to recall, his ships outpacing light and radio waves alike in pursuit of the enemy force.

In a voice more worried than before, Glenna was saying: “Of course, if it was some enemy unit, damaged in the battle, then I suppose the crash is likely to have completed its destruction.”

“I’d better tell you,” Jenny blurted in. And in a couple of sentences she described the peculiar tracks.

Ino stared at her with frank dismay. “I was going to roll out an aircraft . . . but let me take a look at those tracks first.”

The quickest way to reach them was undoubtedly on foot. The gnarled man trotted off along the beach path at such a pace that Jenny had difficulty keeping up. Glenna remained behind, saying she would let Claus know what was going on.

Moving with flashes of former athletic grace, Ino reached the nearest of the tracks and dropped to one knee beside it, just as Claus had done. “Do the others look just like this?”

“As nearly as I could tell. We didn’t get close to all of them.”

“That’s no animal I ever saw.” He was up again already, trotting back toward the base. “I don’t like it. Let’s get airborne, all of us.”

“I always pictured berserkers as huge things.”

“Most of ‘em are. Some are small machines, for specialized purposes.”

“I’ll run into the house and tell the others to get ready to take off,” Jenny volunteered as they sped into the compound.

“Do that. Glenna will know what to bring, I expect. I’ll get a flyer rolled out of the shed.”

Running, Jen thought as she hurried into the house, gave substance to a danger that might otherwise have existed only in the mind. Could it be that Ino, with the horrors in his memory, was somewhat too easily alarmed where berserkers were concerned?

Glenna and Claus, who had just changed into coveralls, met her in the common room. She was telling them of Ino’s decision to take to the air, and thinking to herself that she had better change out of her beach garb also, when the first outcry sounded from somewhere outside. It was less a scream than a baffled-sounding, hysterical laugh.

Glenna pushed past her at once, and in a moment was out the door and running. Exchanging a glance with her husband, Jenny turned and followed, Claus right at her heels.

The strange cry came again. Far ahead, past Glenna’s running figure, the door of the aircraft shed had been slid back, and in its opening a white figure appeared outlined—a figure that reeled drunkenly and waved its arms.

Glenna turned aside at the tractor shed, where one of the small ground vehicles stood ready. They were used for riding, hauling, pushing sand, to sculpt a pond into a better shape, or to slice away part of a too-obtrusive dune. It’ll be faster than running, Jenny thought, as she saw the older woman spring into the driver’s seat, and heard the motor whoosh quietly to life. She leaped aboard, too. Claus shoved strongly at her back to make sure she was safely on, before he used both hands for his own grip. A grip was necessary because they were already rolling, and accelerating quickly.

Ino’s figure, now just outside the shed, came hurtling closer with their own speed. He shook his arms at them again and staggered. Upon his chest he wore a brownish thing the size of a small plate, like some great medallion that was so heavy it almost pulled him down. He clawed at the brown plate with both hands, and suddenly his coveralls in front were splashed with scarlet. He bellowed words which Jenny could not make out.

Claus gripped Glenna’s shoulders and pointed. A dozen or more brown plates were scuttling on the brown, packed sand, between the aircraft shed and the onrushing tractor. The tracks they drew were faint replicas of those that had lined the softer sand along the beach. Beneath each saucerlike body, small legs blurred, reminding Claus of something he’d recently seen—something he could not stop to think of now.

The things had nothing like the tractor’s speed, but still, they were in position to cut it off. Glenna swerved no more than slightly, if at all, and one limbed plate disappeared beneath a wheel. It came up at once with the wheel’s rapid turning, a brown blur seemingly embedded in the soft, fat tire, resisting somehow the centrifugal force that might have thrown it off.

Ino had gone down with, as Claus now saw, three of the things fastened on his body, but he somehow fought back to his feet just as the tractor jerked to a halt beside him. If Claus could have stopped to analyze his own mental state, he might have said he lacked the time to be afraid. With a blow of his fist he knocked one of the attacking things away from Ino, and felt the surprising weight and hardness of it as a sharp pang up through his wrist.

All three dragging together, they pulled Ino aboard; Glenna was back in the driver’s seat at once. Claus kicked another attacker off, then threw open the lid of the tractor’s toolbox and grabbed the longest, heaviest metal tool displayed inside.

A swarm of attackers were between them and the aircraft shed, and the shadowed shape of a flyer just inside was spotted with them, too. As Glenna gunned the engine, she turned the tractor at the same time, heading back toward the main building and the sea beyond. In the rear seat, Jenny held Ino. He bled on everything, and his eyes were fixed on the sky while his mouth worked in terror. In the front, Claus fought to protect the driver and himself.

A brown plate scuttled onto the cowling, moving for Glenna’s hands on the controls. Claus swung, a baseball batter, bright metal blurring at the end of his extended arms. There was a hard, satisfying crunch, as of hard plastic or ceramic cracking through. The brown thing fell to the floor, and he caught a glimpse of dull limbs still in motion before he caught it with a foot and kicked it out onto the flying ground.

Another of the enemy popped out from somewhere onto the dash. He pounded at it, missed when it seemed to dodge his blows. He cracked its body finally, but still it clung on under the steering column, hard to get at, inching toward Glenna’s fingers. Claus grabbed it with his left hand, felt a lance. Not until he had thrown the thing clear of the tractor did he look at his hand and see two fingers nearly severed.

At the same moment, the tractor engine died, and they rolled to a silent stop, with the sea and the small dock Glenna had been steering for only a few meters ahead. Under the edge of the engine cowling another of the enemy appeared, thrusting forward a limb that looked like a pair of ceramic pliers, shredded electrical connectors dangling in its grip.

The humans abandoned the tractor in a wordless rush. Claus, one hand helpless and dripping blood, aided the women with Ino as best he could. Together they half-dragged, half-carried him across the dock and rolled him into a small, open boat, the only craft at once available. In moments Glenna had freed them from the dock and started the motor, and they were headed out away from shore.

Away from shore, but not into the sea. They were separated from deep-blue and choppy ocean by a barrier reef or causeway, one of the features that had made this coast desirable for the life-seeding base. The reef, a basically natural structure of sand and rock deposited by waves and currents, was about a hundred meters from the shore, and stretched in either direction as far as vision carried. Running from beach to reef, artificial walls or low causeways of fused rock separated ponds of various sizes.

“We’re in a kind of square lagoon here,” Glenna told Jenny, motioning for her to take over the job of steering. “Head for that far corner. If we can get there ahead of them, we may be able to lift the boat over the reef and get out.”

Jen nodded, taking the controls. Glenna slid back to a place beside her husband, snapped open the boat’s small first-aid kit, and began applying pressure bandages.

Claus started to try to help, saw the world beginning to turn gray around him, and slumped back against the gunwale. He would be of no use to anyone if he passed out. Ino looked as if he had been attacked, not by teeth or claws or knives, but by several sets of nail-pullers and wire-cutters. His chest still rose and fell, but his eyes were closed now and he was gray with shock. Glenna draped a thermal blanket over him.

Jen was steering around the rounded structure, not much bigger than a phone booth, protruding above the water in the middle of the pond. Most of the ponds and bays had similar observation stations. Glaus had looked into one or two and he thought now that there was nothing in them likely to be of any help. More first aid kits, perhaps, but what Ino needed was the big medirobot back at the house.

And he was not going to get it. By now the building complex must be overrun by the attackers. Berserkers . . .

“Where can we find weapons?” Claus croaked at Glenna.

“Let’s see that hand. I can’t do any more for Ino now . . . I’ll bandage this. If you mean guns, there are a couple at the house, somewhere in storage. We can’t go back there now.”

“I know.”

Glenna had just let go of his hand when from the front seat there came a scream. Claws and a brown saucer shape were climbing in over the gunwale at Jenny’s side. Had the damned thing come aboard somehow with them, from the tractor, or was this pond infested with them, too?

In his effort to help drag Ino to the boat, Claus had abandoned his trusty wrench beside the tractor. He grabbed now for the best substitute at hand, a small anchor at the end of a chain. His overhand swing missed Jenny’s head by less than he had planned, but struck the monster like a mace. It fell into the bottom of the boat, vibrating its limbs, as Claus thought, uselessly; then he realized that it was making a neat hole.

His second desperation swing came down upon it squarely. One sharp prong of the anchor broke a segment of the brown casing clean away, and something sparked and sizzled when the sea came rushing in.

—seawater rushing—

—into the bottom of the boat—

The striking anchor had enlarged the hole that the enemy had begun. The bottom was split, the boat was taking water fast.

Someone grabbed up the sparking berserker, inert now save for internal fireworks, and hurled it over the side. Glenna threw herself forward, taking back the wheel, and Jenny scrambled aft, to help one-handed Claus with bailing.

The boat limped, staggered, gulped water, and wallowed on toward the landbar. It might get them that far, but forget the tantalizing freedom of blue surf beyond . . .

Jenny started to say something to her husband, then almost shrieked again as Ino’s hand, resurgently alive, came up to catch her wrist. The old man’s eyes were fixed on hers with a tremendous purpose. He gasped out words, and then fell back, unable to do more.

The words first registered with Jenny as: “. . . need them . . . do the splashers . . .“It made no sense.

Glenna looked back briefly, then had to concentrate on boat-handling. In another moment the fractured bottom was grating over rock. Claus scrambled out and held the prow against the above-water portion of the reef. The women followed, got their footing established outside the boat, then turned to lift at Ino’s inert form.

Jenny paused. “Glenna, I’m afraid he’s gone.”

“No!” Denial was fierce and absolute. “Help me!”

Jen almost started to argue, then gave in. They got Ino up into a fireman’s-carry position on Claus’s shoulders; even with a bad hand, he was considerably stronger than either of the women. Then the three began to walk east along the reef. At high tide, as now, it was a strip of land no more than three or four meters wide, its low crest half a meter above the water. Waves of any size broke over it. Fortunately, today, the surf was almost calm.

Claus could feel the back of his coverall and neck wetting with Ino’s blood. He shifted the dead weight on his shoulders. All right, so far. But his mutilated free hand throbbed.

He asked: “How far are we going, Glenna?”

“I don’t know.” The woman paced ahead—afraid to look at her husband now?—staring into the distance. “There isn’t any place. Keep going.”

Jenny and Glaus exchanged looks. For want of any better plan at the moment, they kept going. Jen took a look back. “They’re on the reef, and on the shore, too, following us. A good distance back.”

Glaus looked, and looked again a minute later. Brown speckles by the dozen followed, but were not catching up. Not yet.

Now they were passing the barrier of fused rock separating the pond, in which they had abandoned the boat, from its neighbor. The enemy moving along the shore would intercept them, or very nearly, if they tried to walk the barrier back to land.

Ahead, the reef still stretched interminably into a sun-dazzled nothingness.

“What’s in this next pond, Glenna?” Glaus asked, and knew a measure of relief when the gray-haired woman gave a little shake of her head and answered sensibly.

“Grouper. Some other fish as food stock for them. Why?”

“Just wondering. What’ll we run into if we keep on going in this direction?”

“This just goes on. Kilometer after kilometer. Ponds, and bays, and observation stations—I say keep going, because otherwise, they’ll catch us. What do you think we ought to do?”

Glaus abruptly stopped walking, startling the women. He let the dead man slide down gently from his shoulders. Jen looked at her husband, examined Ino, shook her head.

Claus said: “I think we’ve got to leave him.”

Glenna looked down at Ino’s body once, could not keep looking at him. She nodded fiercely, and once more led the way.

A time of silent walking passed before Jenny, at Claus’s side, began; “If they’re berserkers . . .”

“What else?”

“Well, why aren’t we all dead already? They don’t seem very . . . efficiently designed for killing.”

“These must be specialists,” Claus mused. “Only a small part of a large force—a part Brass Trumpet missed when the rest moved on or was destroyed. Remember, we were wondering if Atlantis was their real target? These are special machines, built for . . . underwater work, maybe. Their ship must have been wrecked in the fighting and had to come down. When they found themselves on this planet, they must have come down to the sea for a reconnaissance, and then decided to attack first by land. Probably they saw the lights of the base before they crash-landed. They know which life form they have to deal with first, on any planet. Not very efficient, as you say. But they’ll keep coming at us till they’re all smashed or we’re all dead.”

Glenna had slowed her pace a little and was looking toward the small observation post rising in the midst of the pond that they were passing. “I don’t think there’s anything in any of these stations that can help us . . . in fact, I’m just about sure there’s not. But I can’t think of anywhere else to turn.”

Claus asked: “What’s in the next pond after this?”

“Sharks . . . ah. That might be worth a try. Sometimes they’ll snap at anything that moves. They’re small ones, so I think our risk will be relatively small if we wade out to the middle.”

Claus thought to himself that he would rather end up in the belly of a live shark than torn to pieces by an impersonal device. Jen was willing also to take the chance.

They did not pause again till they were on the brink of the shark pond. Then Glenna said: “The water will be no more than three or four feet deep the way we’re going. Stay together and keep splashing as we go. Claus, hold that hand up; mustn’t drip a taste of blood into the water.”

And in they went. Only when they were already splashing waist-deep did Claus recall Ino’s blood wetting the back of his coverall. But he was not going to stop just now to take it off.

The pond was not very large; a minute of industrious wading, and they were climbing unmolested over the low, solid railing of the observation post rising near its middle. Here was space for two people to sit comfortably, sheltered from weather by a transparent dome and movable side panels. In the central console were instruments that constantly monitored the life in the surrounding ponds. Usually, of course, the readings from all ponds would be monitored in the more convenient central station attached to the house.

The three of them squeezed in, and Glenna promptly opened a small storage locker. It contained a writing instrument that looked broken, a cap perhaps left behind by some construction worker, and a small spider—another immigrant from Earth, of course—who might have been blown out here by the wind. That was all.

She slammed the locker shut again. “No help. So now it’s a matter of waiting. They’ll obviously come after us through the water. The sharks may snap up some of them before they reach us. Then we must be ready to move on before we are surrounded. It’s doubtful, and risky, but I can’t think of anything else to try.”

Claus frowned. “Eventually, we’ll have to circle around, get back to the buildings.”

Jen frowned at him. “The berserkers are there, too.”

“I don’t think they will be, now. You see—”

Glenna broke in: “Here they come.”

The sun had climbed, and was starting to get noticeably hot. It came to Claus’s mind, not for the first time since their flight had started, that there was no water for them to drink. He held his left arm up with his right, trying to ease the throbbing.

Along the reef where they had walked, along the parallel shore—and coming now over the barrier from the grouper pond—plate-sized specks of brown death were flowing. There were several dozen of them, moving more slowly than hurried humans could move, almost invisible in the shimmer of sun and sea. Some plopped into the water of the shark pond as Claus watched.

“I can’t pick them up underwater,” Glenna announced. She was twiddling the controls of the station’s instruments, trying to catch the enemy on one of the screens meant for observing marine life. “Sonar . . . motion detectors . . . water’s too murky for simple video.”

Understanding dawned for Claus. “That’s why they’re not metal! Why they’re comparatively fragile. They’re designed to avoid detection by underwater defenses—on Atlantis, I suppose—that could infiltrate and disable them.”

Jen was standing. “We’d better get moving before we’re cut off.”

“In another minute.” Glenna was still switching from one video pickup to another around the pond. “I’m sure we have at least that much to spare . . . ah.”

One of the enemy had appeared on screen, sculling toward the camera at a modest pace. It looked less lifelike than it had in earlier moments of arms-length combat.

Now, entering the picture from the rear, was a shark.

Claus was not especially good at distinguishing marine species. But this portentous and somehow familiar shape was identifiable at once, not to be confused even by the nonexpert, it seemed, with that of any other kind of fish.

Claus started to say, He’s going right past. But the shark was not. Giving the impression of afterthought, the torpedo shape swerved back. Its mouth opened and the berserker device was gone.

The people watching made wordless sounds, but Jen took the others by an arm apiece. “We can’t bet all of them will be eaten—let’s get moving.”

Claus already had one leg over the station’s low railing when the still surface of the pond west of the observation post exploded. Leaping clear of the water, the premiere killer of Earth’s oceans twisted in midair, as if trying to snap at its own belly. It fell back, vanishing in a hill of lashed-up foam. A moment later it jumped again, still thrashing.

In the fraction of a second when the animal was clearly visible, Claus watched the dark line come into being across its white belly as if traced there by an invisible pen. It was a short line that a moment later broadened and evolved into blood. As the fish rolled on its back something dark and pointed came into sight, spreading the edges of the hole. Then the convulsing body of the shark vanished in an eruption of water turned opaque with its blood.

The women were wading quickly away from the platform in the opposite direction, calling for him to follow, hoping aloud that the remaining sharks would be drawn to the dying one. But for one moment longer Claus lingered, staring at the screen. It showed the roiling bloody turmoil of killer fish converging, and out of this cloud the little berserker emerged, unfazed by shark’s teeth or digestion, resuming its methodical progress toward the humans, the life units that could be really dangerous to the cause of death.

Jen tugged at her husband, got him moving with them. In her exhausted brain a nonsense rhyme was being generated: Bloody water hides the slasher, seed them, heed them, sue the splashers . . .

No!

As the three completed their water-plowing dash to the east edge of the pond, and climbed out, Jenny took Glenna by the arm. “Something just came to me. When I was tending Ino—he said something before he died.”

They were walking east along the barrier reef again. “He said smashers,” Jen continued. “That was it. Lead them, or feed them, to the smashers. But I still don’t understand—”

Glenna stared at her for a moment, an almost frightening gaze. Then she stepped between the young couple and pulled them forward.

Two ponds down she turned aside, wading through water that splashed no higher than their calves, directly toward another observation post that looked just like the last.

“We won’t be bothered in here, unless we should happen to step right on one, but there’s very little chance of that,” she assured them. “We’re too big. Of course, of course. Oh, Ino. I should have thought of this myself. They wait in ambush most of the time, in holes or under rocks.”

“They?” Injury and effort were taking their toll on Claus. He leaned on Jenny’s shoulder now.

Glenna glanced back impatiently. “Mantis shrimp is the common name. They’re stomatopods, actually.”

“Shrimp?” The dazed query was so soft that she may not have heard it.

A minute later they were squeezed aboard the station and could rest again. Above, clean morning clouds were building to enormous height, clouds that might have formed in the unbreathed air of Earth five hundred million years before.

“Claus,” Jen asked, when both of them had caught their breath a little, “what were you saying a while ago, about circling back to the house?”

“It’s this way,” he said, and paused to organize his thoughts. “We’ve been running to nowhere, because there’s nowhere on this world we can get help. But the berserkers can’t know that. I’m assuming they haven’t scouted the whole planet—just crash-landed on it. For all they know, there’s another colony of humans just down the coast. Maybe a town, with lots of people, aircraft, weapons . . . so for them, it’s an absolute priority to cut us off before we can give a warning. Therefore, every one of their units must be committed to the chase. And if we can once get through them or around them, we can outrun them home, to vehicles and guns and food and water. How we get through them or around them I haven’t figured out yet. But I don’t see any other way.”

“We’ll see,” said Glenna. Jen held his hand, and looked at him as if his idea might be reasonable. A distracting raindrop hit him on the face, and suddenly a shower was spattering the pond. With open mouths the three survivors caught what drops they could. They tried spreading Jenny’s robe out to catch more, but the rain stopped before the cloth was wet.

“Here they come,” Glenna informed them, shading her eyes from re-emergent sun. She started tuning up the observing gear aboard the station.

Claus counted brown saucer shapes dropping into the pond. Only nineteen, after all.

“Again, I can’t find them with the sonar,” Glenna muttered. “We’ll try the television—there.”

A berserker unit—for all the watching humans could tell, it was the same one that the shark had swallowed—was centimetering its tireless way toward them, walking the bottom in shallow, sunlit water. Death was walking. A living thing might run more quickly, for a time, but life would tire. Or let life oppose it, if life would. Already it had walked through a shark, as easily as traversing a mass of seaweed.

“There,” Glenna breathed again. The advancing enemy had detoured slightly around a rock, and a moment later a dancing ripple of movement had emerged from hiding somewhere to follow in its path. The pursuer’s score or so of tiny legs supported in flowing motion a soft-looking, roughly segmented, tubular body. Its sinuous length was about the same as the enemy machine’s diameter, but in contrast, the follower was aglow with life, gold marked in detail with red and green and brown, like banners carried forward above an advancing column. Long antennae waved as if for balance above bulbous, short-stalked eyes. And underneath the eyes a coil of heavy forelimbs rested, not used for locomotion.

“Odonodactylus syllarus,” Glenna murmured. “Not the biggest species—but maybe big enough.”

“What are they?” Jen’s voice was a prayerful whisper.

“Well, predators . . .”

The berserker, intent on its own prey, ignored the animate ripple that was overtaking it, until the smasher had closed almost to contact range. The machine paused then, and started to turn.

Before it had rotated itself more than halfway, its brown body was visibly jerked forward, under some striking impetus from the smasher too for for human eyes to follow. The krak! of it came clearly through the audio pickup. Even before the berserker had regained its balance, it put forth a tearing claw like that which had opened the shark’s gut from inside.

Again the invisible impact flicked from a finger-length away. At each spot where one of the berserker’s feet touched bottom, a tiny spurt of sand jumped up with the transmitted shock. Its tearing claw now dangled uselessly, hard ceramic cracked clean across.

“I’ve never measured a faster movement by anything that lives. They strike with special dactyls—well, with their elbows, you might say. They feed primarily on hard-shelled crabs and clams and snails. That was just a little one that Ino gave you, as a joke. One as long as my hand can hit something like a four-millimeter bullet—and some of these are longer.”

Another hungry smasher was now coming swift upon the track of the brown, shelled thing that looked so like a crab. The second smasher’s eyes moved on their stalks, calculating distance. It was evidently of a different species than the first, being somehwat larger and of a variant coloration. The berserker, put out a sharp and wiry tool and cut its first assailant neatly in half. As it turned back, Claus saw—or almost saw, or imagined that he saw—the newcomer’s longest pair of forelimbs unfold and return. Again grains of sand beneath the two bodies, living and unliving, jumped from the bottom. With the concussion, white radü of fracture sprang out across a hard, brown surface . . .

Four minutes later the three humans were still watching, in near-perfect silence. A steady barrage of kraks, from every region of the pond, were echoing through the audio pickups. The video screen still showed the progress of the first individual combat.

“People sometimes talk about sharks as being aggressive, as terrible killing machines. Gram for gram, I don’t think they’re at all in the same class.”

The smashing stomatopod, incongruously shrimplike, gripped the ruined casing of its victim with its six barb-studded smaller forelimbs and began to drag it back to the rock from which its ambush had been launched. Once there, it propped the interstellar terror in place, a Lilliputian monster blacksmith arranging metal against anvil. At the next strike—imaginable, if not visible, as a double backhand snap from the fists of a karate master—fragments of tough casing literally flew through the water, mixed now with a spill of delicate components. What, no soft, delicious meat in sight as yet? Then smash again . . .

An hour after the audio pickups had reported their last krak, the three humans walked toward home, unmolested through the shallows and along a shore where no brown saucers moved.

When Ino had been brought home, and Claus’s hand seen to, the house was searched for enemy survivors. Guns were got out, and the great gates in the sand walls closed to be on the safe side. Then the two young people sent Glenna to a sedated rest.

Her voice was dazed and softly, infinitely tired. “Tomorrow we’ll feed them, something real.”

“This afternoon,” said Claus. “When you wake up. Show me what to do.”

“Look at this,” called Jen a minute later, from the common room.

One wall of the smallest aquarium had been shattered outward. Its tough glass lay sharded on the carpet, along with a large stain of water and the soft body of a small creature, escaped and dead.

Jen picked it up. It was much smaller than its cousins out in the pond, but now she could not mistake the shape, even curled loosely in her palm.

Her husband came in and looked over her shoulder. “Glenna’s still muttering. She just told me they can stab, too, if they sense soft meat in contact. Spear-tips on their smashers when they unfold them all the way. So you couldn’t hold him like that if he was still alive.” Claus’s voice broke suddenly, in a delayed reaction.

“Oh, yes I could.” Jen’s voice, too. “Oh, yes I could indeed.”

1979

SOME EVENTS IN THE TEMPLAR RADIANT

To a true scientist nothing is too much to pay for knowledge—life itself is cheap at the price!

All his years of past work, and more than that, his entire future too, hung balanced on this moment.

A chair forgotten somewhere behind him, Sabel stood tall in the blue habit that often served him as laboratory coat. His hands gripped opposite corners of the high, pulpit-like control console. His head was thrown back, eyes closed, sweat-dampened dark hair hanging in something more than its usual disarray over his high, pale forehead.

He was alone, as far as any other human presence was concerned. The large, stone-walled chamber in which he stood was for the moment quiet.

All his years of work . . . and although during the past few days he had mentally rehearsed this moment to the point of exhaustion, he was still uncertain of how to start. Should he begin with a series of cautious, testing questions, or ought he leap toward his real goal at once?

Hesitancy could not be long endured, not now. But caution, as it usually had during his private mental rehearsals, prevailed.

Eyes open, Sabel faced the workbenches filled with equipment that were arranged before him. Quietly he said: “You are what human beings call a berserker. Confirm or deny.”

“Confirm.” The voice was familiar, because his hookup gave it the same human-sounding tones in which his own laboratory computer ordinarily spoke to him. It was a familiarity that he must not allow to become in the least degree reassuring.

So far, at least, success. “You understand,” Sabel pronounced, “that I have restored you from a state of nearly complete destruction. I—”

“Destruction,” echoed the cheerful workbench voice.

“Yes. You understand that you no longer have the power to destroy, to take life. That you are now constrained to answer all my—”

“To take life.”

“Yes. Stop interrupting me.” He raised a hand to wipe a trickle of fresh sweat from an eye. He saw how his hand was quivering with the strain of its unconscious grip upon the console. “Now,” he said, and had to pause, tying to remember where he was in his plan of questioning.

Into the pause, the voice from his laboratory speakers said: “In you there is life.”

“There is.” Sabel managed to reassert himself, to pull himself together. “Human life.” Dark eyes glaring steadily across the lab, he peered at the long, cabled benches whereon his captive enemy lay stretched, bound down, vitals exposed like those of some hapless human on a torture rack. Not that he could torture what had no nerves and did not live. Nor was there anything like a human shape in sight. All that he had here of the berserker was fragmented. One box here, another there, between them a chemical construct in a tank, that whole complex wired to an adjoining bench that bore rows of semi-material crystals.

Again his familiar laboratory speaker uttered alien words: “Life is to be destroyed.”

This did not surprise Sabel; it was only a restatement of the basic programmed command that all berserkers bore. They were machines fabricated by unknown builders on an unknown world, at a time perhaps before any creature living on Earth had been able to see stars as anything more than points of light. That the statement was made so boldly now roused in Sabel nothing but hope; it seemed that at least the thing was not going to begin by trying to lie to him.

It seemed also that he had established a firm physical control. Scanning the indicators just before him on the console, he saw no sign of danger . . . he knew that, given the slightest chance, his prisoner was going to try to implement its basic programming. He had of course separated it from anything obviously useful as a weapon. But he was not absolutely certain of the functions of all the berserker components that he had brought into his laboratory and hooked up. And the lab of course was full of potential weapons. There were fields, electric and otherwise, quite powerful enough to extinguish human life. There were objects that could be turned into deadly projectiles by only a very moderate application of force. To ward off any such improvisations Sabel had set defensive rings of force to dancing round the benches upon which his foe lay bound. And, just for insurance, another curtain of fields hung round him and the console. The fields were almost invisible, but the ancient stonework of the lab’s far wall kept acquiring and losing new flavorings of light at the spots where the spinning field-components brushed it and eased free again.

Not that it seemed likely that the berserker-brain in its present disabled and almost disembodied state could establish control over weaponry enough to kill a mouse. Nor did Sabel ordinarily go overboard on the side of caution. But, as he told himself, he understood very well just what he was dealing with.

He had paused again, seeking reassurance from the indicators ranked before him. All appeared to be going well, and he went on: “I seek information from you. It is not military information, so whatever inhibitions have been programmed into you against answering human questions do not apply.” Not that he felt at all confident that a berserker would meekly take direction from him. But there was nothing to be lost by the attempt.

The reply from the machine was delayed longer than he had expected, so that he began to hope his attempt had been successful. But then the answer came.

“I may trade certain classes of information to you, in return for lives to be destroyed.”

The possibility of some such proposition had crossed Sabel’s mind some time ago. In the next room a cage of small laboratory animals was waiting.

“I am a cosmophysicist,” he said. “In particular I strive to understand the Radiant. In the records of past observations of the Radiant there is a long gap that I would like to fill. This gap corresponds to the period of several hundred standard years during which berserkers occupied this fortress. That period ended with the battle in which you were severely damaged. Therefore I believe that your memory probably contains some observations that will be very useful to me. It is not necessary that they be formal observations of the Radiant. Any scene recorded in light from the Radiant may be helpful. Do you understand?”

“In return for my giving you such records, what lives am I offered to destroy?”

“I can provide several.” Eagerly Sabel once more swept his gaze along his row of indicators. His recording instruments were probing hungrily, gathering at an enormous rate the data needed for at least a partial understanding of the workings of his foe’s unliving brain. At a score of points their probes were fastened in its vitals.

“Let me destroy one now,” its human-sounding voice requested.

“Presently. I order you to answer one question for me first.”

“I am not constrained to answer any of your questions. Let me destroy a life.”

Sabel tuned a narrow doorway for himself through his defensive fields, and walked through it into the next room. In a few seconds he was back. “Can you see what I am carrying?”

“Then it is not a human life you offer me.”

“That would be utterly impossible.”

“Then it is utterly impossible for me to give you information.”

Without haste he turned and went to put the animal back into the cage. He had expected there might well be arguments, bargaining. But this argument was only the first level of Sahel’s attack. His data-gathering instruments were what he really counted on. The enemy doubtless knew that it was being probed and analyzed. But there was evidently nothing it could do about it. As long as Sabel supplied it power, its brain must remain functional. And while it functioned, it must try to devise ways to kill.

Back at his console, Sabel took more readings. DATA PROBABLY SUFFICIENT FOR ANALYSIS, his computer screen at last informed him. He let out breath with a sigh of satisfaction, and at once threw certain switches, letting power die. Later if necessary he could turn the damned thing on again and argue with it some more. Now his defensive fields vanished, leaving him free to walk between the workbenches, where he stretched his aching back and shoulders in silent exultation.

Just as an additional precaution, he paused to disconnect a cable. The demonic enemy was only hardware now. Precisely arranged atoms, measured molecules, patterned larger bits of this and that. Where now was the berserker that humanity so justly feared? That had given the Templars their whole reason for existence? It no longer existed except in potential. Take the hardware apart, on even the finest level, and you would not discover any of its memories. But, reconnect this and that, reapply power here and there, and back it would bloom into reality, as malignant and clever and full of information as before. A non-material artifact of matter. A pattern.

No way existed, even in theory, to torture a machine into compliance, to extort information from it. Sabel’s own computers were using the Van Holt algorithms, the latest pertinent mathematical advance. Even so they could not entirely decode the concealing patterns, the trapdoor functions, by which the berserker’s memory was coded find concealed. The largest computer in the human universe would probably not have time for that before the universe itself came to an end. The unknown Builders had built well.

But there were other ways besides pure mathematics with which to circumvent a cipher. Perhaps, he thought, he would have tried to find a way to offer it a life, had that been the only method he could think of.

Certainly he was going to try another first. There had to be, he thought, some way of disabling the lethal purpose of a berserker while leaving its calculating abilities and memory intact. There would have been times when the living Builders wanted to approach their creations, at least in the lab, to test them and work on them. Not an easy or simple way, perhaps, but something. And that way Sabel now instructed his own computers to discover, using the mass of data just accumulated by measuring the berserker in operation.

Having done that, Sabel stood back and surveyed his laboratory carefully. There was no reason to think that anyone else was going to enter it in the near future, but it would be stupid to take chances. To the Guardians, an experiment with viable berserker parts would stand as prima facie evidence of goodlife activity; and in the Templar code, as in many another system of human law, any such willing service of the berserker cause was punishable by death.

Only a few of the materials in sight might be incriminating in themselves. Coldly thoughtful, Sabel made more disconnections, and rearrangements. Some things he locked out of sight in cabinets, and from the cabinets he took out other things to be incorporated in a new disposition on the benches. Yes, this was certainly good enough.

He suspected that most of the Guardians probably no longer knew what the insides of a real berserker looked like.

Sabel made sure that the doors leading out of the lab, to the mall-level corridor, and to his adjoining living quarters, were both locked. Then, whistling faintly, he went up the old stone stair between the skylights, that brought him out upon the glassed-in roof.

Here he stood bathed in the direct light of the Radiant itself. It was a brilliant point some four kilometers directly above his head—the pressure of the Radiant’s inverse gravity put it directly overhead for everyone in the englobing structure of the Fortress. It was a point brighter than a star but dimmer than a sun, not painful to look at. Around Sabel a small forest of sensors, connected to instruments in his laboratory below, raised panels and lenses in a blind communal stare, to that eternal noon. Among these he began to move about as habit led him, mechanically checking the sensors’ operation, though for once he was not really thinking about the Radiant at all. He thought of his success below. Then once more he raised his own two human eyes to look.

It made its own sky, out of the space enclosed by the whitish inner surface of the Fortress’s bulk. Sabel could give from memory vastly detailed expositions of the spectrum of the Radiant’s light. But as to exactly what color it was, in terms of perception by the eye and brain—well, there were different judgments on that, and for his part he was still uncertain.

Scattered out at intervals across the great curve of interior sky made by the Fortress’s whitish stonework, Sabel could see other glass portals like his own. Under some of them, other people would be looking up and out, perhaps at him. Across a blank space on the immense concavity, an echelon of maintenance machines were crawling, too far away for him to see what they were working at. And, relatively nearby, under the glass roof of a great ceremonial plaza, something definitely unusual was going on. A crowd of thousands of people, exceptional at any time in the Fortress with its relatively tiny population, were gathered in a circular mass, like live cells attracted to some gentle biological magnet at their formation’s center.

Sabel had stared at this peculiarity for several seconds, and was reaching for a small telescope to probe it with, when he recalled that today was the Feast of Ex. Helen, which went a long way toward providing an explanation. He had in fact deliberately chosen this holiday for his crucial experiment, knowing that the Fortress’s main computer would today be freed of much routine business, its full power available for him to tap if necessary.

And in the back of his mind he had realized also that he should probably put in an appearance at at least one of the day’s religious ceremonies. But this gathering in the plaza—he could not recall that any ceremony, in the years since he had come to the Fortress, had ever drawn a comparable crowd.

Looking with his telescope up through his own glass roof and down through the circular one that sealed the plaza in from airless space, he saw that the crowd was centered on the bronze statue of Ex. Helen there. And on a man standing in a little cleared space before the statue, a man with arms raised as if to address the gathering. The angle was wrong for Sabel to get a good look at his face, but the blue and purple robes made the distant figure unmistakable. It was the Potentate, come at last to the Fortress in his seemingly endless tour of his many subject worlds.

Sabel could not recall, even though he now made an effort to do so, that any such visitation had been impending—but then of late Sabel had been even more than usually isolated in his own work. The visit had practical implications for him, though, and he was going to have to find out more about it quickly. Because the agenda of any person of importance visiting the Fortress was very likely to include at some point a full-dress inspection of Sabel’s own laboratory.

He went out through the corridor leading from laboratory to pedestrian mall, locking up carefully behind him, and thinking to himself that there was no need to panic. The Guardians would surely call to notify him that a visit by the Potentate impended, long before it came. It was part of their job to see that such things went smoothly, as well as to protect the Potentate while he was here. Sabel would have some kind of official warning. But this was certainly an awkward time . . .

Along the pedestrian mall that offered Sabel his most convenient route to the ceremonial plaza, some of the shops were closed—a greater number than usual for a holiday, he thought. Others appeared to be tended only by machines. In the green parkways that intersected the zig-zag mall at irregular intervals, there appeared to be fewer strollers than on an ordinary day. And the primary school operated by the Templars had evidently been closed; a minor explosion of youngsters in blue-striped coveralls darted across the mall from parkway to playground just ahead of Sabel, their yells making him wince.

When you stood at one side of the great plaza and looked across, both the convexity of its glass roof and the corresponding concavity of the levelfeeling floor beneath were quite apparent. Especially now that the crowd was gone again. By the time Sabel reached the center of the plaza, the last of the Potentate’s entourage was vanishing through exits on its far side.

Sabel was standing uncertainly on the lowest marble step of Ex. Helen’s central shrine. Her stat-bronze statue dominated the plaza’s center. Helen the Exemplar, Helen of the Radiant, Helen Dardan. The statue was impressive, showing a woman of extreme beauty in a toga-like Dardanian garment, a diadem on her short curly hair. Of course longterm dwellers at the Fortress ignored it for the most part, because of its sheer familiarity. Right now, though, someone was stopping to look, gazing up at the figure with intent appreciation.

Sabel’s attention, in turn, gradually became concentrated upon this viewer. She was a young, brown-haired girl of unusually good figure, and clad in a rather provocative civilian dress.

And presently he found himself approaching her. “Young woman? If you would excuse my curiosity?”

The girl turned to him. With a quick, cheerful curiosity of her own she took in his blue habit, his stature, and his face. “No excuse is needed, sir.” Her voice was musical. “What question can I answer for you?”

Sabel paused a moment in appreciation. Everything about this girl struck him as quietly delightful. Her manner held just a hint of timidity, compounded with a seeming eagerness to please.

Then he gestured toward the far side of the plaza. “I see that our honored Potentate is here with us today. Do you by any chance know how long he plans to stay at the Fortress?”

The girl replied: “I heard someone say, ten standard days. It was one of the women wearing purple-bordered cloaks—?” She shook brown ringlets, and frowned with pretty regret at her own ignorance.

“Ah—one of the vestals. Perhaps you are a visitor here yourself?”

“A newcomer, rather. Isn’t it always the way, sir, when you ask someone for local information? ‘I’m a newcomer here myself.’ ”

Sabel chuckled. Forget the Potentate for now. “Well, I can hardly plead newcomer status. It must be something else that keeps me from knowing what goes on in my own city. Allow me to introduce myself: Georgicus Sabel, Doctor of Cosmography.”

“Greta Thamar.” Her face was so pretty, soft, and young, a perfect match for her scantily costumed body. She continued to radiate an almost-timid eagerness. “Sir, Dr. Sabel, would you mind if I asked you a question about yourself?”

“Ask anything.”

“Your blue robe. That means you are one of the monks here?”

“I belong to the Order of Ex. Helen. The word ‘monk’ is not quite accurate.”

“And the Order of Ex. Helen is a branch of the Templars, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Though our Order is devoted more to contemplation and study than to combat.”

“And the Templars in turn are a branch of Christianity.”

“Or they were.” Sabel favored the girl with an approving smile. “You are more knowledgeable than many newcomers. And, time was when many Templars really devoted themselves to fighting, as did their ancient namesakes.”

The girl’s interest continued. By some kind of body-language agreement the two of them had turned around and were now strolling slowly back in the direction that Sabel had come from.

Greta said: “I don’t know about that. The ancient ones, I mean. Though I tried to study up before I came here. Please, go on.”

“Might I ask your occupation, Greta?”

“I’m a dancer. Only on the popular entertainment level, I’m afraid. Over at the Contrat Rouge. But I . . . please, go on.”

On the Templar-governed Fortress, popular entertainers were far down on the social scale. Seen talking to a dancer in the plaza . . . but no, there was really nothing to be feared from that. A minimal loss of status, perhaps, but counterbalanced by an increase in his more liberal acquaintances’ perception of him as more fully human. All this slid more or less automatically through Sabel’s mind, while the attractive smile on his face did not, or so he trusted, vary in the slightest.

Strolling on, he shrugged. “Perhaps there’s not a great deal more to say, about the Order. We study and teach. Oh, we still officially garrison this Fortress. Those of us who are Guardians maintain and man the weapons, and make berserkers their field of study, besides acting as the local police. The main defenses out on the outer surface of the Fortress are still operational, though a good many decades have passed since we had a genuine alarm. There are no longer many berserkers in this part of the Galaxy.” He smiled wryly. “And I am afraid there are no longer very many Templars, either, even in the parts of the Galaxy where things are not so peaceful.”

They were still walking. Proceeding in the direction of Sabel’s laboratory and quarters.

“Please, tell me more.” The girl continued to look at him steadily with attention. “Please, I am really very interested.”

“Well. We of the Order of Ex. Helen no longer bind ourselves to poverty—or to permanent celibacy. We have come to honor Beauty on the same level as Virtue, considering them both to be aspects of the Right. Our great patroness of course stands as Exemplar of both qualities.”

“Ex. Helen . . . and she really founded the Order, hundreds of years ago? Or—”

“Or, is she really only a legend, as some folk now consider her? No, I think that there is really substantial evidence of her historical reality. Though of course the purposes of the Order are still valid in either case.”

“You must be very busy. I hope you will forgive my taking up your time like this.”

“It is hard to imagine anyone easier to forgive. Now, would you by chance like to see something of my laboratory?”

“Might I? Really?”

“You have already seen the Radiant, of course. But to get a look at it through some of my instruments will give you a new perspective . . .”

As Sabel had expected, Greta did not seem able to understand much of his laboratory’s contents. But she was nevertheless impressed. “And I see you have a private space flyer here. Do you use it to go out to the Radiant?”

At that he really had to laugh. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t get there. Oh, within a kilometer of it, maybe, if I tried. The most powerful spacecraft built might be able to force its way to within half that distance. But to approach any closer than that—impossible. You see, the inner level of the Fortress, where we are now, was built at the four-kilometer distance from the Radiant because that is the distance at which the effective gravity is standard normal. As one tries to get closer, the gravitic resistance goes up exponentially. No. I use the flyer for field trips. To the outer reaches of the Fortress, places where no public transport is available.”

“Is that a hobby of some kind?”

“No, it’s really connected with my work. I search for old Dardanian records, trying to find their observations of the Radiant . . . and in here is where I live.”

With eyes suddenly become competent, Greta surveyed the tidy smallness of his quarters! “Alone, I see.”

“Most of the time . . . my work demands so much. Now, Greta, I have given you something of a private showing of my work. I would be very pleased indeed if you were willing to do the same for me.”

“To dance?” Her manner altered, in a complex way. “I suppose there might be room enough in here for dancing . . . if there were some suitable music.”

“Easily provided.” He found a control on the wall; and to his annoyance he noticed that his fingers were now quivering again.

In light tones Greta said: “I have no special costume with me, sir, just these clothes I wear.”

“They are delightful—but you have one other, surely.”

“Sir?” And she, with quick intelligence in certain fields of thought, was trying to repress a smile.

“Why, my dear, I mean the costume that nature gives to us all, before our clothes are made. Now, if it is really going to be up to me to choose . . .”

Hours later when the girl was gone, he went back to work, this time wearing a more conventional laboratory coat. He punched in a command for his computer to display its results, and, holding his breath, looked at the screen.

BASIC PROGRAMMING OF SUBJECT DEVICE MAY BE CIRCUMVENTED AS FOLLOWS: FABRICATE A DISABLING SLUG OF CESIUM TRIPHENYL METHYL. ISOTOPE 137 OF CESIUM, OF 99% PURITY, TO BE USED. SLUG TO BE CYLINDRICAL 2.346 CM DIAMETER, 5.844 CM LENGTH. COMPONENTS OF SUBJECT DEVICE NOW IN LABORATORY TO BE REASSEMBLED TO THOSE REMAINING IN FIELD, WITH SLUG CONNECTED ELECTRICALLY AND MECHANICALLY ACROSS PROBE POINTS OUR NUMBER 11 AND OUR NUMBER 12A IN ARMING MECHANISM OF DEVICE. PRIME PROGRAMMED COMMAND OF DEVICE WILL THEN BE DISABLED FOR TIME EQUAL TO ONE HALF-LIFE OF ISOTOPE CS-137 . . .

There were more details on how the “subject device” was to be disabled—he had forbidden his own computer to ever display or store in memory the word “berserker” in connection with any of his work. But Sabel did not read all the details at once. He was busy looking up the half-life of cesium-137. It turned out to be thirty years! Thirty standard years!

He had beaten it. He had won. Fists clenched, Sabel let out exultation in a great, private, and almost silent shout . . .

This instinctive caution was perhaps well-timed, for at once a chime announced a caller, at the door that led out to the mall. Sabel nervously wiped the displayed words from his computer screen. Might the girl have come back? Not because she had forgotten something—she had brought nothing with her but her clothes.

But instead of the girl’s face, his video intercom showed him the deceptively jovial countenance of Chief Deputy Guardian Gunavarman. Had Sabel not become aware of the Potentate’s presence on the Fortress, he might have had a bad moment at the sight. As matters stood, he felt prepared; and after a last precautionary glance around the lab, he let the man in confidently.

“Guardian. It is not often that I am honored by a visit from you.”

“Doctor Sabel.” The black-robed visitor respectfully returned the scientist’s bow. “It is always a pleasure, when I can find the time. I wish my own work were always as interesting as yours must be. Well. You know of course that our esteemed Potentate is now in the Fortress . . .”

The discussion, on the necessity of being prepared for a VIP inspection, went just about as Sabel had expected. Gunavarman walked about as he spoke, eyes taking in the lab, their intelligence operating on yet a different level than either Sabel’s or Greta Thamar’s. The smiling lips asked Sabel just what, exactly, was he currently working on? What could he demonstrate, as dramatically as possible but safely of course, for the distinguished visitor?

Fortunately for Sabel he had been given a little advance time in which to think about these matters. He suggested now one or two things that might provide an impressive demonstration. “When must I have them ready?”

“Probably not sooner than two days from now, or more than five. You will be given advance notice of the exact time.” But the Guardian, when Sabel pressed him, refused to commit himself on just how much advance notice would be given.

The real danger of this Potential visit, thought Sabel as he saw his caller out, was that it was going to limit his mobility. A hurried field trip to the outer surface was going to be essential, to get incriminating materials out of his lab. Because he was sure that a security force of Guardians was going to descend on the place just before the Potentate appeared. More or less politely, but thoroughly, they would turn it inside out. There were those on every world of his dominion who for one reason or another wished the Potentate no good.

After a little thought, Sabel went to his computer terminal and punched in an order directed to the metallic fabrication machines in the Fortress’s main workshops, an order for the disabling slug as specified by his computer. He knew well how the automated systems worked, and took care to place the order in such a way that no other human being would ever be presented with a record of it. The machines reported at once that delivery should take several hours.

The more he thought about it, the more essential it seemed for him to get the necessary field excursion out of the way as quickly as he could. Therefore while waiting for the slug to be delivered, he loaded up his flyer, with berserker parts hidden among tools in various containers. The vehicle was another thing that had been built to his special order. It was unusually small in all three dimensions, so he could drive it deeply into the caves and passages and cracks of ancient battle-damage that honeycombed the outer stonework of the Fortress.

A packet containing the slug he had ordered came with a clack into his laboratory through the old-fashioned pneumatic system still used for small deliveries, direct from the workshops. Sabel’s first look at the cesium alloy startled him. A hard solid at room temperature, the slug was red as blood inside a statglass film evidently meant to protect it against contamination and act as a radiation shield for human handlers as well. He slid it into a pocket of his light spacesuit, and was ready.

The lab locked up behind him, he sat in his flyer’s small open cab and exited the rooftop airlock in a modest puff of fog. The air and moisture were mostly driven back into recycling vents by the steady gravitic pressure of the Radiant above. His flyer’s small, silent engine worked against the curve of space that the Radiant imposed, lifting him and carrying him on a hand-controlled flight path that skimmed over glass-roofed plazas and apartment complexes and offices. In its concavity, the inner surface of the Fortress fell more distant from his straight path, then reapproached. Ahead lay the brightly lighted mouth of the traffic shaft that would lead him out to the Fortress’s outer layers.

Under Sabel’s briskly darting flyer there now passed a garish, glassed-in amusement mall. There entertainment, sex, and various kinds of drugs were all for sale. The Contrat Rouge he thought was somewhere in it. He wondered in passing if the girl Greta understood that here her occupation put her very near the bottom of the social scale, a small step above the level of the barely tolerable prostitutes? Perhaps she knew. Or when she found out, she would not greatly care. She would probably be moving on, before very long, to some world with more conventional mores.

Sabel had only vague ideas of how folk in the field of popular entertainment lived. He wondered if he might go sometime to watch her perform publicly. It was doubtful that he would. To be seen much in the Contrat Rouge could do harm to one in his position.

The wide mouth of the shaft engulfed his flyer. A few other craft, electronically guided, moved on ahead of his or flickered past. Strings of lights stretched vertiginously down and ahead. The shaft was straight; the Fortress had no appreciable rotation, and there was no need to take coriolis forces into account in traveling through it rapidly. With an expertise born of his many repetitions of this flight, Sabel waited for the precisely proper moment to take back full manual control. The gravitic pressure of the Radiant, behind him and above, accelerated his passage steadily. He fell straight through the two kilometers’ thickness of stone and reinforcing beams that composed most of the Fortress’s bulk. The sides of the vast shaft, now moving faster and faster past him, were ribbed by the zig-zag joints of titanic interlocking blocks.

This is still Dardania, here, he thought to himself, as usual at this point. The Earth-descended Dardanians, who had built the Fortress and flourished in it even before berserkers came to the human portion of the Galaxy, had wrought with awesome energy, and a purpose not wholly clear to modem eyes. The Fortress, after all, defended not much of anything except the Radiant itself, which hardly needed protection from humanity. Their engineers must have tugged all the stone to build the Fort through interstellar distances, at God alone knew what expense of energy and time. Maybe Queen Helen had let them know she would be pleased by it, and that had been enough.

The Fortress contained about six hundred cubic kilometers of stone and steel and enclosed space, even without including the vast, clear central cavity. Counting visitors and transients, there were now at any moment approximately a hundred thousand human beings in residence. Their stores and parks and dwellings and laboratories and shops occupied, for the most part, only small portions of the inner surface, where gravity was normal and the light from the Radiant was bright. From the outer surface, nearby space was keenly watched by the sensors of the largely automated defense system; there was a patchy film of human activity there. The remainder of the six hundred cubic kilometers were largely desert now, honeycombed with cracks and designed passages, spotted with still-undiscovered troves of Dardanian tombs and artifacts, for decades almost unexplored, virtually abandoned except by the few who, like Sabel, researched the past.

Now he saw a routine warning begin to blink on the small control panel of his flyer. Close ahead the outer end of the transport shaft was yawning, and through it he could see the stars. A continuation of his present course would soon bring him into the area surveyed by the defense system.

As his flyer emerged from the shaft, Sabel had the stars beneath his feet, the bulk of the Fortress seemingly balanced overhead. With practiced skill he turned now at right angles to the Radiant’s force. His flyer entered the marked notch of another traffic lane, this one grooved into the Fortress’s outer armored surface. The bulk of it remained over his head and now seemed to rotate with his motion. Below him passed stars, while on the dark rims of the traffic lane to either side he caught glimpses of the antiquated but still operational defensive works. Blunt snouts of missile-launchers, skeletal fingers of mass-drivers and beam-projectors, the lenses and screens and domes of sensors and field generators. All the hardware was still periodically tested, but in all his journeyings this way Sabel had never seen any of it looking anything but inactive. War had long ago gone elsewhere.

Other traffic, scanty all during his flight, had now vanished altogether. The lane he was following branched, and Sabel turned left, adhering to his usual route. If anyone should be watching him today, no deviation from his usual procedure would be observed. Not yet, anyway. Later . . . later he would make very sure that nobody was watching.

Here came a landmark on his right. Through another shaft piercing the Fortress a wand of the Radiant’s light fell straight to the outer surface, where part of it was caught by the ruined framework of tin auxiliary spaceport, long since closed. In that permanent radiance the old beams glowed like twisted night-flowers, catching at the light before it fell away to vanish invisibly and forever among the stars.

Just before he reached this unintended beacon, Sabel turned sharply again, switching on his bright running lights as he did so. Now he had entered a vast battle-crack in the stone and metal of the Fortress’s surface, a dark uncharted wound that in Dardanian times had been partially repaired by a frail-looking spiderwork of metal beams. Familiar with the way, Sabel steered busily, choosing the proper passage amid obstacles. Now the stars were dropping out of view behind him. His route led him up again, into the lightless ruined passages where nothing seemed to have changed since Helen died.

Another minute of flight through twisting ways, some of them designed and others accidental.

Then, obeying a sudden impulse, Sabel braked his flyer to a hovering halt. In the remote past this passage had been air-filled, the monumental length and breadth of it well suited for mass ceremony. Dardanian pictures and glyphs filled great portions of its long walls. Sabel had looked at them a hundred times before, but now he swung his suited figure out of the flyer’s airless cab and walked close to the wall, moving buoyantly in the light gravity, as if to inspect them once again. This was an ideal spot to see if anyone was really following him. Not that he had any logical reason to think that someone was. But the feeling was strong that he could not afford to take a chance.

As often before, another feeling grew when he stood here in the silence and darkness that were broken only by his own presence and that of his machines. Helen herself was near. In Sahel’s earlier years there had been something religious in this experience. Now . . . but it was still somehow comforting.

He waited, listening, thinking. Helen’s was not the only presence near, of course. On three or four occasions at least during the past ten years (there might have been more that Sabel had never heard about) explorers had discovered substantial concentrations of berserker wreckage out in these almost abandoned regions. Each time Sabel had heard of such a find being reported to the Guardians, he had promptly petitioned them to be allowed to examine the materials, or at least to be shown a summary of whatever information the Guardians might manage to extract. His pleas had vanished into the bureaucratic maw. Gradually he had come to understand that they would never tell him anything about berserkers. The Guardians were jealous of his relative success and fame. Besides, their supposed job of protecting humanity on the Fortress now actually gave them almost nothing to do. A few newly-discovered berserker parts could be parlayed into endless hours of technical and administrative work. Just keeping secrets could be made into a job, and they were not about to share any secrets with outsiders.

But, once Sabel had become interested in berserkers as a possible source of data on the Radiant, he found ways to begin a study of them. His study was at first bookish and indirect, but it advanced; there was always more information available on a given subject than a censor realized, and a true scholar knew how to find it out.

And Sabel came also to distrust the Guardians’ competence in the scholarly aspects of their own field. Even if they had finally agreed to share their findings with him, he thought their pick-axe methods unlikely to extract from a berserker’s memory anything of value. They had refused of course to tell him what their methods were, but he could not imagine them doing anything imaginatively.

Secure in his own space helmet, he whispered now to himself: “If I want useful data from my own computer, I don’t tear it apart. I communicate with it instead.”

Cold silence and darkness around him, and nothing more. He remounted his flyer and drove on. Shortly he came to where the great corridor was broken by a battle-damage crevice, barely wide enough for his small vehicle, and he turned slowly, maneuvering his way in. Now he must go slowly, despite the number of times that he had traveled this route before. After several hundred meters of jockeying his way along, his headlights picked up his semi-permanent base camp structure in a widening of the passageway ahead. It looked half bubble, half spiderweb, a tentlike thing whose walls hung slackly now but were inflatable with atmosphere. Next to it he had dug out of the stone wall a niche just big enough to park his flyer in. The walls of the niche were lightly marked now from his previous parkings. He eased in now, set down gently, and cut power.

On this trip he was not going to bother to inflate his shelter; he was not going to be out here long enough to occupy it. Instead he began at once to unload from the flyer what he needed, securing things to his backpack as he took them down. The idea that he was being followed now seemed so improbable that he gave it no more thought. As soon as he had all he wanted on his back, he set off on foot down one of the branching crevices that radiated from the nexus where he had placed his camp.

He paused once, after several meters, listening intently. Not now for non-existent spies who might after all be following. For something active ahead. Suppose it had, somehow, after all, got itself free . . . but there was no possibility. He was carrying most of its brain with him right now. Around him, only the silence of ages, and the utter cold. The cold could not pierce his suit. The silence, though . . .

The berserker was exactly as he had left it, days ago. It was partially entombed, caught like some giant mechanical insect in opaque amber. Elephant-sized metal shoulders and a ruined head protruded from a bank of centuries-old slag. Fierce weaponry must have melted the rock, doubtless at the time of the Templars’ reconquest of the Fortress, more than a hundred years ago.

Sabel when he came upon it for the first time understood at once that the berserker’s brain might well still be functional. He knew too that there might be destructor devices still working, built into the berserker to prevent just such an analysis of captured units as he was suddenly determined to attempt. Yet he had nerved himself to go to work on the partially shattered braincase that protruded from the passage wall almost like a mounted trophy head. Looking back now, Sabel was somewhat aghast at the risks he had taken. But he had gone ahead. If there were any destructors, they had not fired. And it appeared to him now that he had won.

He took the cesium slug out of his pocket and put it into a tool that stripped it of statglass film and held it ready for the correct moment in the reconstruction process. And the reconstruction went smoothly and quickly, the whole process taking no more than minutes. Aside from the insertion of the slug it was mainly a matter of reconnecting subsystems and of attaching a portable power supply that Sabel now unhooked from his belt; it would give the berserker no more power than might be needed for memory and communication.

Yet, as soon as power was supplied, one of the thin limb stumps that protruded from the rock surface began to vibrate, with a syncopated buzzing. It must be trying to move.

Sabel had involuntarily backed up a step; yet reason told him that his enemy was effectively powerless to harm him. He approached again, and plugged a communications cord into a jack he had installed. When he spoke to it, it was in continuation of the dialogue in the laboratory.

“Now you are constrained, as you put it, to answer whatever questions I may ask.” Whether it was going to answer truthfully or not was something he could not yet tell.

It now answered him in its own voice, cracked, queer, inhuman. “Now I am constrained.”

Relief and triumph compounded were so strong that Sabel had to chuckle. The thing sounded so immutably certain of what it said, even as it had sounded certain saying the exact opposite back in the lab.

Balancing buoyantly on his toes in the light gravity, he asked it: “How long ago were you damaged, and stuck here in the rock?”

“My timers have been out of operation.”

That sounded reasonable. “At some time before you were damaged, though, some visual observations of the Radiant probably became stored somehow in your memory banks. You know what I am talking about from our conversation in the laboratory. Remember that I will be able to extract useful information from even the most casual, incidental video records, provided they were made in Radiant light when you were active.”

“I remember.” And as the berserker spoke there came faintly to Sabel’s ears a grinding, straining sound, conducted through his boots from somewhere under the chaotic surface of once-molten rock.

“What are you doing?” he demanded sharply. God knew what weapons it had been equipped with, what potential powers it still had.

Blandly the berserker answered: “Trying to reestablish function in my internal power supply.”

“You will cease that effort at once! The supply I have connected is sufficient.”

“Order acknowledged.” And at once the grinding stopped.

Sabel fumbled around, having a hard time trying to make a simple connection with another small device that he removed from his suit’s belt. If only he did not tend to sweat so much. “Now. I have here a recorder. You will play into it all the video records you have that might be useful to me in my research on the Radiant’s spectrum. Do not erase any records from your own banks. I may want to get at them again later.”

“Order acknowledged.” In exactly the same cracked tones as before.

Sabel got the connection made at last. Then he crouched there, waiting for what seemed endless time, until his recorder signalled that the data flow had ceased.

And back in his lab, hours later, Sabel sat glaring destruction at the inoffensive stonework of the wall. His gaze was angled downward, in the direction of his unseen opponent, as if his anger could pierce and blast through the kilometers of rock.

The recorder had been filled with garbage. With nonsense. Virtually no better than noise. His own computer was still trying to unscramble the hopeless mess, but it seemed the enemy had succeeded in . . . still, perhaps it had not been a ploy of the berserkers at all. Only, perhaps, some kind of trouble with the coupling of the recorder input to . . .

He had, he remembered distinctly, told the berserker what the input requirements of the recorder were. But he had not explicitly ordered it to meet them. And he could not remember that it had ever said it would.

Bad, Sabel. Abad mistake to make in dealing with any kind of a machine. With a berserker . . .

A communicator made a melodious sound. A moment later, its screen brought Guardian Gunavarman’s face and voice into the lab.

“Dr. Sabel, will your laboratory be in shape for a personal inspection by the Potentate three hours from now?”

“I—I—yes, it will. In fact, I will be most honored,” he remembered to add, in afterthought.

“Good. Excellent. You may expect the security party a few minutes before that time.”

As soon as the connection had been broken, Sabel looked around. He was in fact almost ready to be inspected. Some innocuous experiments were in place to be looked at and discussed. Almost everything that might possibly be incriminating had been got out of the way. Everything, in fact, except . . . he pulled the small recorder cartridge from his computer and juggled it briefly in his hand. The chance was doubtless small that any of his impending visitors would examine or play the cartridge, and smaller still that they might recognize the source of information on it if they did. Yet in Sabel’s heart of hearts he was not so sure that the Guardians could be depended upon to be incompetent. And there was no reason for him to take even a small chance. There were, there had to be, a thousand public places where one might secrete an object as small as this. Where no one would notice it until it was retrieved . . . there were of course the public storage facilities, on the far side of the Fortress, near the spaceport.

To get to any point in the Fortress served by the public transportation network took only a few minutes. He had to switch from moving slidewalk to high-speed elevator in a plaza that fronted on the entertainment district, and as he crossed the plaza his eye was caught by a glowing red sign a hundred meters or so down the mall: Contrat Rouge.

His phantom followers were at his back again, and to try to make them vanish he passed the elevator entrance as if that had not been his goal at all. He was not wearing his blue habit today, and as he entered the entertainment mall none of the few people who were about seemed to take notice of him.

A notice board outside the Contrat Rouge informed Sabel in glowing letters that the next scheduled dance performance was several hours away. It might be expected that he would know that, had he really started out with the goal of seeing her perform. Sabel turned and looked around, trying to decide what to do next. There were not many people in sight. But too many for him to decide if any of them might really have been following him.

Now the doorman was starting to take notice of him. So Sabel approached the man, clearing his throat. “I was looking for Greta Thamar?”

Tall and with a bitter face, the attendant looked as Sabel imagined a policeman ought to look. “Girls aren’t in yet.”

“She lives somewhere nearby, though?”

“Try public info.”

And perhaps the man was somewhat surprised to see that that was what Sab el, going to a nearby booth, actually did next. The automated information service unhesitatingly printed out Greta’s address listing for him, and Sabel was momentarily surprised: he had pictured her as beseiged by men who saw her on stage, having to struggle for even a minimum of privacy. But then he saw a stage name printed out in parentheses beside her own; those inquiring for her under the stage name would doubtless be given no information except perhaps the time of the next performance. And the doorman? He doubtless gave the same two answers to the same two questions a dozen times a day, and make no effort to keep track of names.

As Sabel had surmised, the apartment was not far away. It looked quite modest from the outside. A girl’s voice, not Greta’s, answered when he spoke into the intercom at the door. He felt irritated that they were probably not going to be able to be alone.

A moment later the door opened. Improbable blond hair framed a face of lovely ebony above a dancer’s body. “I’m Greta’s new roommate. She ought to be back in a few minutes.” The girl gave Sabel an almost-amused appraisal. “I was just going out myself. But you can come in and wait for her if you like.”

“I . . . yes, thank you.” Whatever happened, he wouldn’t be able to stay long. He had to leave himself plenty of time to get rid of the recorder cartridge somewhere and get back to the lab. But certainly there were at least a few minutes to spare.

He watched the blond dancer put of sight. Sometime, perhaps . . . Then, left alone, he turned to a half-shaded window through which he could see a large part of the nearby plaza. Still there was no one in sight who looked to Sabel as if they might be following him. He moved from the window to stand in front of a cheap table. If he left before seeing Greta, should he leave her a note? And what ought he to say?

His personal communicator beeped at his belt. When he raised it to his face he found Chief Deputy Gunavarman looking out at him from the tiny screen.

“Doctor Sabel, I had expected you would be in your laboratory now. Please get back to it as soon as possible; the Potentate’s visit has been moved up by about two hours. Where are you now?”

“I . . . ah . . .” What might be visible in Gunavarman’s screen? “The entertainment district.”

The chronic appearance of good humor in the Guardian’s face underwent a subtle shift; perhaps now there was something of genuine amusement in it. “It shouldn’t take you long to get back, then. Please hurry. Shall I send an escort?”

“No. Not necessary. Yes. At once.” Then they were waiting for him at the lab. It was even possible that they could meet him right outside this apartment’s door. As Sabel reholstered his communicator, he looked around him with quick calculation. There. Low down on one wall was a small ventilation grill of plastic, not much broader than his open hand. It was a type in common use within the Fortress. Sabel crouched down. The plastic bent springily in his strong fingers, easing out of its socket. He slid the recorder into the dark space behind, remembering to wipe it free of fingerprints first.

The Potentate’s visit to the lab went well. It took longer than Sabel had expected, and he was complimented on his work, at least some of which the great leader seemed to understand. It wasn’t until next morning, when Sabel was wondering how soon he ought to call on Greta again, that he heard during a chance encounter with a colleague that some unnamed young woman in the entertainment district had been arrested.

Possession of a restricted device, that was the charge. The first such arrest in years, and though no official announcement had yet been made, the Fortress was buzzing with the event, probably in several versions. The wording of the charge meant that the accused was at least suspected of actual contact with a berserker; it was the same one, technically, that would have been placed against Sabel if his secret activities had been discovered. And it was the more serious form of goodlife activity, the less serious consisting in forming clubs or cells of conspiracy, of sympathy to the enemy, perhaps having no real contact with berserkers.

Always in the past when he had heard of the recovery of any sort of berserker hardware, Sabel had called Gunavarman, to ask to be allowed to take part in the investigation. He dared not make an exception this time.

“Yes, Doctor,” said the Guardian’s voice from a small screen. “A restricted device is in our hands today. Why do you ask?”

“I think I have explained my interest often enough in the past. If there is any chance that this—device—contains information pertinent to my studies, I should like to apply through whatever channels may be necessary—”

“Perhaps I can save you the trouble. This time the device is merely the storage cartridge of a video recorder of a common type. It was recovered last night during a routine search of some newcomers’ quarters in the entertainment district. The information on the recorder is intricately coded and we haven’t solved it yet. But I doubt it has any connection with cosmophysics. This is just for your private information of course.”

“Of course. But—excuse me—if you haven’t broken the code why do you think this device falls into the restricted category?”

“There is a certain signature, shall we say, in the coding process. Our experts have determined that the information was stored at some stage in a berserker’s memory banks. One of the two young women who lived in the apartment committed suicide before she could be questioned—a typical goodlife easy-out, it appears. The other suspect so far denies everything. We’re in the process of obtaining a court order for some M-E, and that’ll take care of that.”

“Memory extraction. I didn’t know that you could still—?”

“Oh, yes. Though nowadays there’s a formal legal procedure. The questioning must be done in the presence of official witnesses. And if innocence of the specific charge is established, questioning must be halted. But in this case I think we’ll have no trouble.”

Sabel privately ordered a printout of all court documents handled during the previous twenty-four hours. There it was: Greta Thamar, order for memory-extraction granted. At least she was not dead.

To try to do anything for her would of course have been completely pointless. If the memory-extraction worked to show her guilt, it should show also that he, Sabel, was only an innocent chance acquaintance. But in fact it must work to show her innocence, and then she would be released. She would regain her full mental faculties in time—enough of them, anyway, to be a dancer.

Why, though, had her roommate killed herself? Entertainers. Unstable people . . .

Even if the authorities should someday learn that he had known Greta Thamar, there was no reason for him to come forward today and say so. No; he wasn’t supposed to know as yet that she was the one arrested. Gunavarman had mentioned no names to him.

No indeed, the best he could hope for by getting involved would be entanglement in a tedious, time-wasting investigation. Actually of course he would be risking much worse than that.

Actually it was his work, the extraction of scientific truth, that really mattered, not he. And, certainly, not one little dancer more or less. But if he went, his work went too. Who else was going to extract from the Templar Radiant the truths that would open shining new vistas of cosmophysics? Only seven other Radiants were known to exist in the entire Galaxy. None of the others were as accessible to study as this one was, and no one knew this one nearly as well as Georgicus Sabel knew it.

Yes, it would be pointless indeed for him to try to do anything for the poor girl. But he was surprised to find himself going through moments in which he felt that he was going to have to try.

Meanwhile, if there were even the faintest suspicion of him, if the Guardians were watching his movements, then an abrupt cessation of his field trips would be more likely to cause trouble than their continuation. And, once out in the lonely reaches of Dardania, he felt confident of being able to tell whether the Guardians were following him or not.

This time he took with him a small hologram-stage, so he could look at the video records before he brought them back.

“This time,” he said to the armored braincase projecting from the slag-bank, “you are ordered to give me the information in intelligible form.”

Something in its tremendous shoulders buzzed, a syncopated vibration. “Order acknowledged.”

And what he had been asking for was shown to him at last. Scene after scene, made in natural Radiant-light. Somewhere on the inner surface of the Fortress, surrounded by smashed Dardanian glass roofs, a row of berserkers stood as if for inspection by some commanding machine. Yes, he should definitely be able to get something out of that. And out of this one, a quite similar scene. And out of—

“Wait. Just a moment. Go back, let me see that one again. What was that?”

He was once more looking at the Fortress’s inner surface, bathed by the Radiant’s light. But this time no berserkers were visible. The scene was centered on a young woman, who wore space garb of a design unfamiliar to Sabel. It was a light-looking garment that did not much restrict her movements, and the two-second segment of recording showed her in the act of performing some gesture. She raised her arms to the light above as if in the midst of some rite or dance centered on the Radiant itself. Her dark hair, short and curly, bore a jeweled diadem. Her longlashed eyes were closed, in a face of surpassing loveliness.

He watched it three more times. “Now wait again. Hold the rest of the records. Who was that?”

To a machine, a berserker, all human questions and answers were perhaps of equal unimportance. Its voice gave the same tones to them all. It said to Sabel: “The life-unit Helen Dardan.”

“But—” Sabel had a feeling of unreality. “Show it once more, and stop the motion right in the middle—yes, that’s it. Now, how old is this record?”

“It is of the epoch of the 451st century, in your time-coordinate system.”

“Before berserkers came to the fortress? And why do you tell me it is she?”

“It is a record of Helen Dardan. No other existed. I was given it to use as a means of identification. I am a specialized assassin-machine and was sent on my last mission to destroy her.”

“You—you claim to be the machine that actually—actually killed Helen Dardan?”

“No.”

“Then explain.”

“With other machines, I was programmed to kill her. But I was damaged and trapped here before the mission could be completed.”

Sabel signed disagreement. By now he felt quite sure that the thing could see him somehow. “You were trapped during the Templars’ reconquest. That’s when this molten rock must have been formed. Well after the time when Helen lived.”

“That is when I was trapped. But only within an hour of the Templars’ attack did we learn where the life-unit Helen Dardan had been hidden, in suspended animation.”

“The Dardanians hid her from you somehow, and you couldn’t find her until then?”

“The Dardanians hid her. I do not know whether she was ever found or not.”

Sabel tried to digest this. “You’re saying that for all you know, she might be still entombed somewhere, in suspended animation—and still alive.”

“Confirm.”

He looked at his video recorder. Fora moment he could not recall why he had brought it here. “Just where was this hiding place of hers supposed to be?”

As it turned out, after Sabel had struggled through a translation of the berserkers’ co-ordinate system into his own, the supposed hiding place was not far away at all. Once he had the location pinpointed it took him only minutes to get to the described intersection of Dardanian passageways. There, according to his informant, Helen’s life-support coffin had been mortared up behind a certain obscure marking on a wall.

This region was free of the small blaze-marks that Sabel himself habitually put on the walls to remind himself of what ground he had already covered in his systematic program of exploration. And it was a region of some danger, perhaps, for here in relatively recent times there had been an extensive crumbling of stonework. What had been an intersection of passages had become a rough cave, piled high with pieces great and small of what had been wall and floor and overhead. The fragments were broken and rounded to some extent, sharp comers knocked away. Probably at intervals they did a stately mill-dance in the low gravity, under some perturbation of the Fortress’s stately secular movement round the Radiant in space. Eventually the fallen fragments would probably grind themselves into gravel, and slide away to accumulate in low spots in the nearby passages.

But today they still formed a rough, high mound. Sabel with his suit lights could discern a dull egg-shape nine-tenths buried in this mound. It was rounder and smoother than the broken masonry, and the size of a piano or a little larger.

He clambered toward it, and without much trouble succeeded in getting it almost clear of rock. It was made of some tough, artificial substance; and in imagination he could fit into it any of the several types of suspended-animation equipment that he had seen.

What now? Suppose, just suppose, that any real chance existed . . . he dared not try to open up the thing here in the airless cold. Nor had he any tools with him at the moment that would let him try to probe the inside gently. He had to go back to base camp and get the flyer here somehow.

Maneuvering his vehicle to his find proved easier than he had feared. He found a roundabout way to reach the place, and in less than an hour had the ovoid secured to his flyer with adhesive straps. Hauling it slowly back to base camp, he reflected that whatever was inside was going to have to remain secret, for a while at least. The announcement of any important find would bring investigators swarming out here. And that Sabel could not afford, until every trace of the berserker’s existence had been erased.

Some expansion of the tent’s fabric was necessary before he could get the ovoid in, and leave himself with space to work. Once he had it in a securely air-filled space, he put a gentle heater to work on its outer surface, to make it easier to handle. Then he went to work with an audio pickup to see what he could learn of the interior.

There was activity of some kind inside, that much was obvious at once. The sounds of gentle machinery, which he supposed might have been started by his disturbance of the thing, or by the presence of warm air around it now.

Subtle machinery at work. And then another sound, quite regular. It took Sahel’s memory a little time to match it with the cadence of a living heart.

He had forgotten about time, but in fact not much time had passed before he considered that he was ready for the next step. The outer casing opened for him easily. Inside, he confronted great complexity; yes, obviously sophisticated life-support. And within that an interior shell, eyed with glass windows, Sabel shone in a light.

As usual in suspended-animation treatment, the occupant’s skin had been covered with a webbed film of half-living stuff to help in preservation. But the film had tom away now from around the face.

And the surpassing beauty of that face left Sabel no room for doubt. Helen Dardan was breathing, and alive.

Might not all, all, be forgiven one who brought the Queen of Love herself to life? All, even goodlife work, the possession of restricted devices?

There was also to be considered, though, the case of a man who at a berserker’s direction unearthed the Queen and thereby brought about her final death.

Of course an indecisive man, one afraid to take risks, would not be out here now faced with his problem. Sabel had already unslung his emergency medirobot, a thing the size of a suitcase, from its usual perch at the back of the flyer, and had it waiting inside the tent. Now, like a man plunging into deep, cold water, he fumbled open the fasteners of the interior shell, threw back its top, and quickly stretched probes from the medirobot to Helen’s head and chest and wrist. He tore away handfuls of the half-living foam.

Even before he had the third probe connected, her dark eyes had opened and were looking at him. He thought he could see awareness and understanding in them. Her last hopes on being put to sleep must have been for an awakening no worse than this, at hands that might be strange but were not metal.

“Helen.” Sabel could not help but feel that he was pretending, acting, when he spoke the name. “Can you hear me? Understand?” He spoke in Standard; the meagre store of Dardanian that he had acquired from ancient recordings having completely deserted him for the moment. But he thought a Dardanian aristocrat should know enough Standard to grasp his meaning, and the language had not changed enormously in the centuries since her entombment.

“You’re safe now,” he assured her, on his spacesuited knees beside her bed. When a flicker in her eyes seemed to indicate relief, he went on: “The berserkers have been driven away.”

Her lips parted slightly. They were full and perfect. But she did not speak. She raised herself a little, and moved to bare a shoulder and an arm from clinging foam.

Nervously Sabel turned to the robot. If he was interpreting its indicators correctly, the patient was basically in quite good condition. To his not-really-expert eye the machine signalled that there were high drug levels in her bloodstream; high, but falling. Hardly surprising, in one just being roused from suspended animation.

“There’s nothing to fear, Helen. Do you hear me? The berserkers have been beaten.” He didn’t want to tell her, not right away at least, that glorious Dardania was no more.

She had attained almost a sitting position by now, leaning on the rich cushions of her couch. There was some relief in her eyes, yes, but uneasiness as well. And still she had not uttered a word.

As Sabel understood it, people awakened from SA ought to have some light nourishment at once. He hastened to offer food and water both. Helen sampled what he gave her, first hesitantly, then with evident enjoyment.

“Never mind, you don’t have to speak to me right away. The-war-is-over.” This last was in his best Dardanian, a few words of which were now belatedly willing to be recalled.

“You-are-Helen.” At this he thought he saw agreement in her heavenly face. Back to Standard now. “I am Georgicus Sabel. Doctor of cosmophysics, Master of . . . but what does all that matter to me, now? I have saved you. And that is all that counts.”

She was smiling at him. And maybe after all this was a dream, no more . . .

More foam was peeling, clotted, from her skin. Good God, what was she going to wear? He bumbled around, came up with a spare coverall. Behind his turned back he heard her climbing from the cushioned container, putting the garment on.

What was this, clipped to his belt? The newly-changed video recorder, yes. It took him a little while to remember what he was doing with it. He must take it back to the lab, and make sure that the information on it was readable this time. After that, the berserker could be destroyed.

He already had with him in camp tools that could break up metal, chemicals to dissolve it. But the berserker’s armor would be resistant, to put it mildly. And it must be very thoroughly destroyed, along with the rock that held it, so that no one should ever guess it had existed. It would take time to do that. And special equipment and supplies, which Sabel would have to return to the city to obtain.

Three hours after she had wakened, Helen, dressed in a loose coverall, was sitting on cushions that Sabel had taken from her former couch and arranged on rock. She seemed content to simply sit and wait, watching her rescuer with flattering eyes, demanding nothing from him—except, as it soon turned out, his presence.

Painstakingly he kept trying to explain to her that he had important things to do, that he was going to have to go out, leave her here by herself for a time.

“I-must-go. I will come back. Soon.” There was no question of taking her along, no matter what. At the moment there was only one space suit.

But, for whatever reason, she wouldn’t let him go. With obvious alarm, and pleading gestures, she put herself in front of the airlock to bar his way.

“Helen. I really must. I—”

She signed disagreement, violently.

“But there is one berserker left, you see. We cannot be safe until it is—until—”

Helen was smiling at him, a smile of more than gratitude. And now Sabel could no longer persuade himself that this was not a dream. With a sinuous movement of unmistakable invitation, the Queen of Love was holding out her arms . . .

When he was thinking clearly and coolly once again, Sabel began again with patient explanations. “Helen. My darling. You see, I must go. To the city. To get some—”

A great light of understanding, acquiesence, dawned in her lovely face.

“There are some things I need, vitally. Then I swear I’ll come right back. Right straight back here. You want me to bring someone with me, is that it? I—”

He was about to explain that he couldn’t do that just yet, but her renewed alarm indicated that that was the last thing she would ask.

“All right, then. Fine. No one. I will bring a spare space suit . . . but that you are here will be my secret, our secret, for a while. Does that please you? Ah, my Queen!”

At the joy he saw in Helen’s face, Sabel threw himself down to kiss her foot. “Mine alone!”

He was putting on his helmet now. “I will return in less than a day. If possible. The chronometer is over here, you see? But if I should be longer than a day, don’t worry. There’s everything you’ll need, here in the shelter. I’ll do my best to hurry.”

Her eyes blessed him.

He had to turn back from the middle of the airlock, to pick up his video recording, almost forgotten.

How, when it came time at last to take the Queen into the city, was he going to explain his long concealment of her? She was bound to tell others how many days she had been in that far tent. Somehow there had to be a way around that problem. At the moment, though, he did not want to think about it. The Queen was his alone, and no one . . . but first, before anything else, the berserker had to be got rid of. No, before that even, he must see if its video data was good this time.

Maybe Helen knew, Helen could tell him, where cached Dardanian treasure was waiting to be found . . .

And she had taken him as lover, as casual bed-partner rather. Was that the truth of the private life and character of the great Queen, the symbol of chastity and honor and dedication to her people? Then no one, in the long run, would thank him for bringing her back to them.

Trying to think ahead, Sabel could feel his life knotting into a singularity at no great distance in the future. Impossible to try to predict what lay beyond. It was worse than uncertain; it was opaque.

This time his laboratory computer made no fuss about accepting the video records. It began to process them at once.

At his private information station Sabel called for a printout of any official news announcements made by the Guardians or the city fathers during the time he had been gone. He learned that the entertainer Greta Thamar had been released under the guardianship of her court-appointed lawyer, after memory extraction. She was now in satisfactory condition in the civilian wing of the hospital.

There was nothing else in the news about good-life, or berserkers. And there had been no black-robed Guardians at Sahel’s door when he came in.

DATING ANOMALLY PRESENT was on the screen of Sahel’s laboratory computer the next time he looked at it.

“Give details,” he commanded.

RECORD GIVEN AS EPOCH 451st CENTURY IDENTIFIES WITH SPECTRUM OF RADIANT EPOCH 456th CENTURY, YEAR 23, DAY 152.

“Let me see.”

It was, as some part of Sahel’s mind already seemed to know, the segment that showed Helen on the inner surface of the Fortress, raising her arms ecstatically as in some strange rite. Or dance.

The singularity in his future was hurtling toward him quickly now. “You say—you say that the spectrum in this record is identical with the one we recorded—what did you say? How long ago?”

38 DAYS 11 HOURS, APPROXIMATELY 44 MINUTES.

As soon as he had the destructive materials he needed loaded aboard the flyer, he headed at top speed back to base camp. He did not wait to obtain a spare space suit.

Inside the tent, things were disarranged, as if Helen perhaps had been searching restlessly for something. Under the loose coverall her breast rose and fell rapidly, as if she had recently been working hard, or were in the grip of some intense emotion.

She held out her arms to him, and put on a glittering smile.

Sabel stopped just inside the airlock. He pulled his helmet off and faced her grimly. “Who are you?” he demanded.

She winced, and tilted her head, but would not speak. She still held out her arms, and the glassy smile was still in place.

“Who are you, I said? That hologram was made just thirty-eight days ago.”

Helen’s face altered. The practiced expression was still fixed on it, but now a different light played on her features. The light came from outside the shelter, and it was moving toward them.

There were four people out there, some with hand weapons leveled in Sahel’s direction. Through the plastic he could not tell at once if their suited figures were those of men or women. Two of them immediately came in through the airlock, while the other two remained outside, looking at the cargo Sabel had brought out on the flyer.

“God damn, it took you long enough.” Helen’s lovely lips had formed some words at last.

The man who entered first, gun drawn, ignored Sabel for the moment and inspected her with a sour grin. “I see you came through five days in the cooler in good shape.”

“Easier than one day here with him—God damn.” Helen’s smile at Sabel had turned into an equally practiced snarl.

The second man to enter the shelter stopped just inside the airlock. He stood there with a hand on the gun holstered at his belt, watching Sabel alertly.

The first man now confidently holstered his weapon too, and concentrated his attention on Sabel. He was tall and bitter-faced, but he was no policeman. “I’m going to want to take a look inside your lab, and maybe get some things out. So hand over the key, or tell me the combination.”

Sabel moistened his lips. “Who are you?” The words were not frightened, they were imperious with rage. “And who is this woman here?”

“I advise you to control yourself. She’s been entertaining you, keeping you out of our way while we got a little surprise ready for the city. We each of us serve the Master in our own way . . . even you have already served. You provided the Master with enough power to call on us for help, some days ago . . . yes, what?” Inside this helmet he turned his head to look outside the shelter. “Out completely? Under its own power now? Excellent!”

He faced back toward Sabel. “And who am I? Someone who will get the key to your laboratory from you, one way or another, you may be sure. We’ve been working on you a long time already, many days. We saw to it that poor Greta got a new roommate, as soon as you took up with her. Poor Greta never knew . . . you see, we thought we might need your flyer and this final cargo of tools and chemicals to get the Master out. As it turned out, we didn’t.”

Helen, the woman Sabel had known as Helen, walked into his field of vision, turned her face to him as if to deliver a final taunt.

What it might have been, he never knew. Her dark eyes widened, in a parody of fainting fright. In the next moment she was slumping to the ground.

Sabel had a glimpse of the other, suited figures tumbling. Then a great soundless, invisible, cushioned club smote at his whole body. The impact had no direction, but there was no way to stand against it. His muscles quit on him, his nerves dissolved. The rocky ground beneath the shelter came up to catch his awkward fall with bruising force.

Once down, it was impossible to move a hand or foot. He had to concentrate on simply trying to breathe.

Presently he heard the airlock’s cycling sigh. To lift his head and look was more than he could do; in his field of vision there were only suited bodies, and the ground.

Black boots, Guardian boots, trod to a halt close before his eyes. A hand gripped Sahel’s shoulder and turned him part way up. Gunavarman’s jovial eyes looked down at him for a triumphal moment before the Chief Deputy moved on.

Other black boots shuffled about. “Yes, this one’s Helen Nadrad, all right—that’s the name she used whoring at the Parisian Alley, anyway. I expect we can come up with another name or two for her if we look offworld. Ready to talk to us, Helen? Not yet? You’ll be till right. Stunner wears off in an hour or so.”

“Chief, I wonder what they expected to do with suspended animation gear? Well, we’ll find out.”

Gunavarman now began a radio conference with some distant personage. Sabel, in his agony of trying to breathe, to move, to speak, could hear only snatches of the talk:

“Holding meetings out here for some time, evidently . . . mining for berserker parts, probably . . . equipment . . . yes, Sire, the berserker recording was found in his laboratory this time . . . a publicity hologram of Helen Nadrad included in it, for some reason . . . yes, very shocking. But no doubt . . . we followed him out here just now. Joro, that’s the goodlife organizer we’ve been watching, is here . . . yes, Sire. Thank you very much. I will pass on your remarks to my people here.”

In a moment more the radio conversation had been concluded. Gunavarmen, in glowing triumph, was bending over Sabel once again. “Prize catch,” the Guardian murmured. “Something you’d like to say to me?”

Sabel was staring at the collapsed figure of Joro. Inside an imperfectly closed pocket of the man’s spacesuit he could see a small, blood-red cylinder, a stub of cut wire protruding from one end.

“Anything important, Doctor?”

He tried, as never before. Only a few words. “Dr-aw . . . your . . . wea-pons . . .”

Gunavarman glanced round at his people swarming outside the tent. He looked confidently amused. “Why?”

Now through the rock beneath the groundsheet of his shelter Sabel could hear a subtly syncopated, buzzing vibration, drawing near.

“Draw . . . your . . .”

Not that he really thought the little handguns were likely to do them any good.

VICTORY

In which a representative from the Peace Foundation is sent to the planet of Lorenzoni, the scene of a mysterious conflict, the most one-sided war in the history of the galaxy.

Along with everyone else on the Shearwater interplanetary ship, Nicholas Shen-yang had a bad five minutes or so of waiting to die, not knowing whether the Condamine patrol craft had decided to blast them or board them. Not until they heard and felt the clunk of hull against hull were the would-be blockade runners reasonably certain that the enemy had chosen to capture them and let them live.

Hands behind his head, face to the bulkhead along with the Shearwater crew, Shen-yang got through the next five minutes in silence, even when something that must have been a gun barrel was rammed into his back hard enough to leave a bruise. That was after the first quick personal search and was meant to emphasize an order that he should get the hell over there with the others who had been searched and sit down. The voice issuing the order sounded strangely accented to him, but the message was quite understandable. Condamine, Shearwater, and the multitude of other states making up the so-called civilized galaxy shared at least one common language, inherited from old parent Earth, which fact tended to make events like this boarding a little less difficult for all concerned.

More minutes passed before Shenyang got the chance to show his diplomatic card when a junior officer of the boarding party came around checking identification. After the officer had glowered at him in suspicious fury for half a minute—only a born troublemaker would be carrying such a card, to upset the officer’s smooth routine—Shen-yang was quickly transferred to the boarding party’s launch. His brief passage through the flexible tunnel connecting the two craft allowed him a glimpse of space through its transparent windows. There was Shearwater, the planet he had left yesterday, a full bright dot looking like Jupiter as seen from Earth—except that Shearwater appeared against a backdrop of pearly, soft, faint clouds of whitish nebula, the nebula whose slow drift had cut this solar system off from the galactic world for almost fifty standard years. And somewhere in the dazzle sunward must be the crescent of Lorenzoni, the war-tom world that was his goal, but he had no time to try to pick it out.

He was calmly unresisting as burly marines aboard the launch shoved him into a space that must have been meant as a closet and locked the door on him. Capture meant nothing essential to Shen-yang, as far as the success of his mission was concerned. He had been going to visit both sides on Lorenzoni anyway, and if fate insisted that he drop in on the aggressors first, so be it.

He had just been beginning to know and like the Shearwater crew, a half-dozen experienced blockade runners whose swagger still had something self-conscious about it, and he hoped they would manage to come through this in good shape. Likely they would remain as prisoners aboard their own ship, while a Condamine prize crew brought her in. From what Shen-yang had heard of the war so far, there was some hope that they might get home later in a prisoner exchange. . . .

At last he heard the sounds of separation, as the launch departed from the captured smuggler. A minute later came the solid chunk of her arrival at her berth in what must be a sizable war vessel.

When Shen-yang was brought off the launch, the Condaminer captain was there to introduce himself, in stiffly correct style, and treat him to another penetrating glare. A minute or two later, in a room or cell almost big enough to be called a cabin, the captain—naturally enough wondering just what sort of diplomat he had bagged so accidentally and what the effect was going to be upon his own career—came to talk with him a little more.

“Your government does know Lm coming, Captain, though they’ll no doubt be surprised when I show up in your custody. By the way, I hope the crew of the ship you just captured are being cared for properly?”

“Better than they deserve, in my opinion.”

“What did they really have aboard as cargo? They told me it was only medical supplies, and I’d like to know if you found anything else.”

The captain frowned, and his heavy jaw twitched, as if he might be having a hard time trying to re-program himself for diplomacy. “From the little bit I’ve seen so far,” he admitted finally, “it looks as if that might be so. On this particular ship.”

“Nobody denies that Shearwater ships bring in military cargo too. At least once in a while.”

“Once in a while, huh?” And that ended the conversation for the present.

Faster-than-light travel being impossible this deep inside the gravitational well of a solar system, the approach to Lorenzoni took the patrol ship two more days. Free to spend a good deal of his time out of his tiny cabin, Shen-yang during this time got a good look at the nearing planet. It was an Earth-type ball circling a Sol-type sun, and it had been colonized, directly from Earth, a good many centuries ago.

With the slight magnification available from a viewport, he studied the land mass of Condamine when it was on nightside and drew the immediate conclusion that the Condaminers feared no attack from space. The glow of a thousand cities and towns shone forth with open cheerfulness.

Some ten hours later he took another look, at considerably closer range, and caught Ungava, the other sizable continent, in darkness. The blackness enfolding it was eerie—it was not a cloud cover, for there was the ghostly reflected sparkle of the nebula off the great poisoned lakes, and the coastline showed distinctly. But there was not a sign of human civilization, under conditions where the light sparks of every town of twenty thousand or more should have been visible. Shen-yang was a traveled man, and this reminded him of Stone Age worlds and worlds where mindless creatures ruled supreme.

Even as he meditated upon the meaning of this darkness, there came a sudden pinpoint dazzle right in the middle of it. The flash was over in a moment, but he knew it had been there. Yet another nuclear strike from Condamine, he thought, as if they still feared the very space where their enemies’ cities had once stood—feared that in that deep night one building stone might still be raised upon another.

The captain later confirmed his thoughts about the flash. “Yeah, we still hit ‘em that way from time to time, when recon confirms some kind of buildup that would make a worthwhile target.”

The captain drank some coffee and seemed not about to say more; so Shen-yang prodded him: “But isn’t it obvious that the war is really over? I mean you hit them, as you put it, forty-six years ago, with everything you had. That’s the way I’ve heard it.” The captain’s eyes flicked over at him, but not denying anything, and Shen-yang went on: “Their cities are all wiped out—right? Your cities are untouched. Their casualties in that first strike were more than one hundred million—isn’t that so? God knows what they’ve been since or how many people are still alive inside Ungava.”

A little snort. “Too bloody many.”

“Your casualties in the whole war are nowhere near that figure. Condamine has a population of between two and three hundred million people.

Your industry is intact—”

“There’s the terrorists,” The captain’s voice was milder than his looks. “Every week something is blown up.”

“So? Maybe there’s more of that than I’ve heard about. Look, I’m here trying to learn, to understand. When I say something you know is wrong, please straighten me out. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now isn’t your industry essentially intact?”

“Well, yes.” The captain looked at him, and amplified: “But theirs is too, more than you’d think. They’re dug in like you wouldn’t believe now, and dispersed. Nothing centralized any more.”

“You’ve seen how it is over there?”

A shrug. “Common knowledge.”

“Ungava’s not going to blast you, are they? And they’re not going to invade you. I mean, if your three invasion tries on their continent couldn’t settle the war—?”

“By God, I wish they’d try that.”

“But they won’t. So, they’re not really all that dangerous to Condamine, not now at least. Hasn’t the war really been over, Captain, for the last forty-six years!”

The other stood up, outraged though not surprised. His face had been grim before, but now it was beginning to look dangerous. “Tell that to my buddy, who was killed last month. He’ll have a good laugh.”

At the military spaceport on Condamine, Shen-yang walked down the ramp from the great sphere of the patrol ship, under a sunny sky tinged green near the horizon. A sprightly wind made banners snap; a good day, he thought, for a parade.

Three harried-looking civilians stood at the foot of the ramp, looking up it anxiously. At first glance Shenyang knew they had come for him. Hurtling with them in a buried tubecar toward the capital city, Vellore, and the foreign minister who waited there to see him, Shen-yang chatted with the three and lamented the fact that this mode of travel kept him from appreciating the beauties of the countryside. Aboard ship he had been told this was the best season to see the blooms.

They assured him that he would have a chance, tomorrow or the next day. They were relieved that he accepted his capture in space so equably and had no real maltreatment to complain of. His own thought was that he who chooses to ride with smugglers must take some chances. He had not come for a sterile protocol tour but to find out what was going on.

“Have you read Orwell?” his boss at the foundation, a hundred light-years distant, had asked him just before he left.

“Orwell. Yes, a little anyway.”

“Remember the bit in 1984, where a man is asked to envision the future as a boot, stamping on a human face, forever? That bit’s always stuck in my mind.”

“I can well imagine.” Now that it was mentioned, he did recall it.

“I think the world I’m sending you to look at may furnish an example. Nick—what’s the most terrible conclusion you can imagine for a war?”

“I don’t know. Everybody killed on both sides.”

“That’s bad, all right. But what we’re looking at on Lorenzoni may be something more Orwellian and therefore—I think—even worse. What about no conclusion at all? The winner knocks out the loser with the first punch and then goes on beating until his victim dies—and then goes on beating some more.”

“Ungava’s certainly not completely dead.”

“That’s what the Condaminers say. I think they’re keeping the so-called conflict going, to distract their own people from other matters. Just what, I don’t know.”

“That ploy is common enough in history. What did you think of the Ungavan envoy?” The first ship out of the Lorenzoni-Shearwater system when the nebula parted had brought such a personage, pleading the cause of his tormented people to the galaxy.

Dr. Nicobar considered, brushing back long gray hair from her eyes. “He’s a very good talker. He tells how, somehow, dug in against the hail of missiles, working wonders of medical research against radiation poisoning—all good achievements due to the High Leader, of course—Ungavan life and heroic resistance go on. He understates, or gives the impression that he’s understating. He—I don’t know, I wanted to like him and I couldn’t, quite. For a man who represents an absolute dictatorship, he’s perhaps just a little too good, too gentle-saintish, to be taken at face value.”

“And what about the man from Condamine?” He had come out on the second ship.

“In the brief exchange I had with him, he didn’t seem to want to talk about the war at all, just about Condamine’s rejoining the League of Galactic Nations. I’m going to talk to him again, of course. But, meanwhile, there’s a ship leaving tomorrow to go in, and I want us to have a representative on it. Here’s your diplomatic card. Go there and see for yourself, and think for yourself, and report personally to me when you come out.”

On the streets of Vellore the war—if it was a real war—seemed as remote as something on another planet. In every block electronic posters burned energy from street level up to twenty stories high or higher, urging the people to smash Ungava, not to waste, not to talk loosely of military secrets, not to grumble about the rules. But all these exhortations seemed to Shenyang to be largely set at naught by the stores, full of good things to buy; the theaters and houses of entertainment, varied enough to suit any taste and any credit balance, doing a mass business; and by the people themselves.

The streets were full of folk who obviously enjoyed a wide choice of clothing and personal decoration and of vehicles in which to travel. They were busy, and they looked basically healthy and certainly well-fed. Just a touch glassy-eyed, perhaps—but Shen-yang saw that often enough at home, in the larger cities at any rate.

The people from the foreign ministry had a hotel room ready for him in one of the bigger and fancier inns on a main street of the capital. With the small bag of personal effects he had so far retained through thick and thin, he moved in, announcing a tiredness which certainly seemed likely enough under the circumstances, and was left alone. Five minutes later he moved right out again. In the first place, he was morally certain—although he had no technical means of proving it—that they had bugged his room. In the second place, he wanted to see just how his hosts would react. And in the third place, he wanted to make what free and unofficial contact he could manage with the citizens.

He left word at the desk of his departure and mentioned that he would call back, saying where he could be reached when he had picked himself another hotel. Reason for leaving, he gave none.

Apparently free of all restraint and even observation, he walked the crowded thoroughfares briefly, then settled himself in another hotel, chosen at whim from half a dozen that looked inviting. The men from the ministry had thoughtfully established electronic credit for him, and there was no problem about paying. The room he got this time was a lot smaller but looked just as comfortable. He left his bag in it and walked out again, to try a little mingling with the people.

Across the street, in the public bar of yet a third hotel, a young woman with a startlingly beautiful face gave him the eye so insistently that he decided to accept Fate again. Shortly she was walking with him back to his room.

When the door had closed behind them, he cleared his throat and said, “You may have heard this before.”

“You’re not a stickman,” she opined, raising an eyebrow.

“If that means am I with the police, no, I’m not I just meant that all I really want to do is talk.”

In her face amusement began to struggle with other things and eventually prevailed. “As a matter of fact,” she said at last, “that’s all I really wanted to do myself.”

He started to offer money, but she pantomimed it away, at which point he began to watch her very alertly.

She said, “Mr. Shen-yang . . .” and paused there to let him appreciate the fact that she already knew his name. “I am sorry your trip was interrupted so unpleasantly but glad that you got to Lorenzoni in one piece. I represent what the rulers of Condamine call the Underground. Dirty Ungavan sympathizers.”

“Ah. Are there many of you in Vellore?”

She waved aside the question, preferring to speak of something she considered more important. “If you go out again in the next hour—walk clear of Middle Street. It would be your most direct route from here to the foreign ministry, should you be going that way. But do not take it.”

He nodded. “All right. But why?”

“Now I must go. They will soon be here to keep a watch on you again.”

He nodded again.

When the door had closed behind the girl, it would have been easy to imagine that she had never been here.

He looked at his timepiece and sighed. His appointment at the foreign ministry was in just half an hour.

A quarter of an hour later, he was given the chance to show his diplomatic card again. When the Condamine police had looked at it and had talked quietly on their radios to some invisible authority, they saluted and let him go on his way at once, brushing the dust of the recent spinbomb blast from his new clothing and shaking his head in an effort to dispel the ringing ache that the explosion had installed immediately inboard from his right ear.

He assumed the thing had been a spinbomb because other kinds of explosives were now too easy to detect. He calculated that he must have been leaving his new hotel just about the time the nameless terrorist was setting down the bomb on Middle Street and quietly pulling its axis pin and walking on, colorless and invisible in the crowd. Shen-yang had just bypassed Middle Street and gone on around a comer when someone brushed the bomb in its no doubt innocent-looking container, or traffic shook the walk enough to make it wobble, and its tiny flywheels, counter-rotating inside their vacuum bottle with a rim speed equal to a substantial proportion of the velocity of light, disintegrated. If it had been a small nuke instead of a tiny spinner, Shen-yang supposed, the ministry three blocks away might have gone up with a sizable surrounding chunk of city, instead of a mere storefront or two. But certainly the police would have detected a nuke before it had been carried into the middle of the city.

The blast seemed to have made no great impression on the vast majority of the folk hurrying busily through the streets. No one who was not bleeding seemed to take it all that hard. It was evidently something that happened from time to time, like rain, and the business of getting and spending had to go on.

The foreign ministry was no bigger than a large house and tastefully ornate, set apart from the city around it only by a simple-looking fence and a narrow belt of lawn. There were uniformed guards at the door, keen-looking though they did not seem to be actually doing much. They gave Shenyang and his card a simple looking over and courteously directed him on his way; if he underwent any other inspection, the means by which it was accomplished were imperceptible.

The elevator went down instead of up, down for almost twenty levels. Maybe, after all, a small nuke three blocks away would not have taken out the ministry’s most important parts.

Only a little late, Shen-yang reached the proper office, where he had to wait about thirty seconds before being passed on in. His appointment was with Minister Hondurman himself, who came around his desk with hand outstretched to offer greetings. He was a large, dark man, very correctly dressed, with a handsome face beginning to go puffy.

One of the first things Shen-yang said was: “I bring you personal greetings from Director Nicobar—she regrets that urgent business kept her from coming herself.”

“Yes . . . we did know each other once, in school. How long ago that was . . . but how is Dr. Nicobar?”

“In good health. Extremely busy. It sometimes seems that the whole galaxy is bringing the Peace Foundation jobs these days. We arbitrate, we investigate, we publish a great deal.”

“I am well aware that great advantages can accrue from your endorsement. That was true even before we were cut off here.”

“It is more true now, Minister Hondurman. We have more real power in the galaxy than do the governments of some small worlds. If, when we make our formal investigation of this war on Lorenzoni, we can report a reasonable settlement, it will in fact go a long way to help your government rejoin galactic society—which I understand you are eager to do.” Hondurman was waiting silently, and Shen-yang went on: “Frankly, while the war continues, I don’t see how any favorable report can be made.”

The minister, unsurprised, nodded and took thought. Then he asked, “What did they tell you on Shearwater about the war?”

“Next to nothing. They expected I would be going directly from there to Ungava, and I suppose they thought the High Leader would prefer to present his own case.”

“We can make travel arrangements with Ungava, if you still wish to go on and see him.”

“Of course I do.”

Hondurman nodded again and made a note to himself on the surface of his desk, which seemed constantly awash with electronic projections of one kind or another. “Believe me, Mr. Shen-yang.” He coughed. “My government would like to end the war, when it can be done honorably and decently. We have not yet found a way.”

Shen-yang gestured disagreement. “Why not simply end the bombardment and the raids?”

“We have in fact several times suspended such activities. But Ungavan operations against us are out of our control, and while they persist, the war goes on. Did you hear the blast in the street not half an hour ago?”

“Very well; in fact I am still hearing it.” He explained just how close he had been.

The other rose and came around the desk, concerned. “But you should have said something. Do you need medical attention?”

“I don’t think so.”

“My own physician is not far away. I wish you would allow me to call her.”

“If you like, but later. Now, do these terrorist attacks really amount to a war waged against you? Do they compare to what your forces have done and are still doing to Ungava?”

Hondurman shrugged. “I’ll show you some things. See if you think they add up to a war or not.”

The charts and figures began to appear, like some conjurer’s props, projected on walls, spewed in printape from the desk. They detailed Ungavan attacks on fishing vessels, on shipping, on mining and drilling operations in all the oceans of the world. Terrorist bombs in Condamine cities. Condamine aircraft (unarmed recon ships and transports, Hondurman claimed them to be) shot down. Hit-and-run raids by small forces against the Condamine coast. Ungavan atrocities in the planet’s ministates, small societies trying to cling to independence and neutrality. More atrocities against any of the people dwelling in Ungava who cooperated in the least degree with Condamine. All in all, if it were true, it certainly added up to a lot of killing and a lot of damage. Not a hundred million dead, of course. Not the destruction of a great industrial society.

At last Shen-yang broke into the flow of data with a question. “How do you suppose they can keep going, making such a war effort as you describe? After attacks like those you have made and are still making?”

“Mr. Shen-yang, have you studied the history of strategic bombardment? It has never broken the will of any people to fight.”

“Of course it has never before been applied quite so—thoroughly—has it? Minister Hondurman, I’d like to pass on for your comment some figures recently given the Peace Foundation by the first Ungavan envoy to the galaxy. They concern that first missile strike of yours.”

The man across the desk nodded, poker-faced, and Shen-yang began to produce the data he had been carrying in his memory. How many missiles Condamine had delivered, without warning, in that first awesome blow. How many cities were roasted, how much land and water poisoned, how many tens of millions of the Ungavan people had died in the first ten minutes—and how many more in the next hour, the next day, the next year. . . .”

“Let us suppose,” Hondurman interrupted coldly, “for the sake of argument, that all this is substantially correct. What is the point you wish to make from it?”

“Simply this. The war is effectively over. You won it a long time ago. How can that poor battered remnant of a people pose any real threat to you? Sure, as long as Shearwater supports them with material, they can burrow under the mountains, cling to life, to some kind of military organization. They can even carry on harassing operations against you. But what do you want of them before you will make peace?”

“It is not what we want of them, sir, but what they want of us. Peace talks have been convened many times—I really forget how many. Talks are presently suspended, as long as our present government remains in office. That is the latest Ungavan condition for resuming peace talks, sir, that we replace our government!”

“All right.” Shen-yang could picture the fanatic Ungavan leaders—utter, bitter fanatics they must be by now, and one could hardly blame them—making such demands, in sheer all-out defiance. “But why do you really need a peace conference at all? Why not simply stop?”

“We could stop. But they would not. They would continue, a bombing here, a raid there. Sooner or later we would strike at them again.” Hondurman made a curiously helpless gesture.

“Excuse me, sir, but I find that hard to believe. If you really let them know it was all over. Ceased building ICBMs or long-range cruise missiles. Offered them some reparations, which it would seem you can afford.”

Hondurman was silent, listening attentively, and Shen-yang pressed on: “According to the Ungavans’ figures, which I notice you don’t deny, they can have very little left in the way of heavy industry and not a lot in the way of natural resources. I repeat, don’t you think the war is really over?”

“They keep a war machine going,” the minister answered stolidly. “They have great help from Shearwater, whose government is bitterly opposed to ours, for historical reasons which you may or may not—”

“I’ve read some of the history of your system.”

“Good. However, an all-out interplanetary war remains unthinkable, in this system or elsewhere. There is simply too much—”

“I’ve read the theories on that, too. What I have never read anywhere is any reason for the Ungavans’ fighting on if you stopped.”

“Well—you will have to ask them about that, I suppose.”

“I intend to.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Shen-yang, you said a moment ago that you did not see what real threat they pose to us. Are you aware that they still have their own strategic missiles?”

A silence began to grow. Shenyang fingered his aching right ear, wondering if it might have played him false. Then he understood, or thought he did. “You mean they are starting now to build some? Or to import some from Shearwater?”

“No. I mean that the Ungavans still have more than a thousand of their own ICBMs emplaced, mostly in hardened sites—have had them since before the war. Some have been knocked out by our missiles, of course. I am not at liberty to quote you our best intelligence estimates of how many remain—but a thousand would be a good, fair, round figure.”

There was silence again. Shen-yang noticed that his chair squeaked if he rocked in it.

His ears were evidently working fine. Either something in his brain was badly askew, though, or something in this world. “Let me see if I understand. Your official claim is that Ungava still possesses a sizable strategic strike force, intact after more than forty years of pounding by nuclear missiles.

“Excuse me.” The minister leaned forward. “It is important that you understand, there has not been forty years of continuous pounding, as you call it. If we had built missiles and fired them as fast as we could for forty years, both we and the Ungavans would long since have perished from radiation poisoning, and there would be no world of Lorenzoni to fight about—no world that anyone could live on.”

“I understand that,” said Shenyang stiffly. “I have some military experience.”

“Ah? Very good. Proceed.”

“You say they have a sizable strategic strike force, still intact. But in more than forty years of war, in which you have hit them again and again with similar weapons, they have never fired even one of these missiles at you.”

“That is correct.”

“Can you explain why?”

“They fear to tip the environmental balance. You see, it can be shown mathematically—or so my experts tell me—that the long-term effects of another mass launching of missiles will be worse for Ungava than for us, regardless of where the missiles land.” Was there, in the minister’s almost immobile face, a glint of some brand of humor? “Of course for a first-hand answer, you will have to ask the Ungavans themselves.”

His trip began next day with a flight from Vellore to an advanced military base, set amid the chalky cliffs of the southern coast. The next leg of his journey passed aboard a fast courier-recon plane, which deposited him upon a barren ocean islet, then took off in a hurry, headed back the way it had come, and vanished in a moment.

Surf pounded tranquilizingly, but then some wild sea creature screamed as if in torment. Waiting on the flat, lichen-spotted rock, Shen-yang studied the horizon and tried to use the time for thought. He still could not believe in the existence of the Ungavan strategic missiles—those utter, bitter fanatics would have used them, sometime in the past forty years. Themselves held on the rack of war, year after year, by a merciless enemy—they would have struck back as hard as possible. No claim had ever been made that they were superhumanly forgiving, and it was unreasonable that they should be so reluctant to add some pollution to the atmosphere.

He could hear the Ungavan aircraft coming before he spotted it; it was moving somewhat more slowly than the Condamine courier. Shen-yang waved as the smooth metal shape made one leisurely pass overhead. He felt a little foolish for his wave when the aircraft had landed and he had walked to it and found it was unmanned.

A glassy canopy had retracted, above an empty, spartan seat and a small space for luggage. Shen-yang climbed in, and as his weight came down into the seat, the glass slid closed again above his head. A moment later he was airborne. The plane flew at a good speed, close above the waves. It turned smoothly a couple of times, avoiding a line of squalls.

In time a coastline grew, ahead. He thought his vehicle slowed somewhat as the land drew nearer—to give him a good look?

There, just inland among rocky hills, was ground-zero of some horrendous blast, a decade or more old. Glassy and sterile hectares were surrounded by the stumps of crags and recent, tender life in the form of scattered, stunted-looking greenery.

Farther from the central scar, the stumps of buildings, half-buried now in drifted sand, made a larger ring. This, then, had been a city, and probably a harbor. There were no signs that humans had ever tried to reoccupy the place.

He rode on. His homework-reading had informed him that the whole Ungavan continent was hardly more than one great, wide range of mountains. Between the barren peaks and crests, long valleys, some still fertile, twisted or ran nearly straight, marked here and there by narrow lakes. Now he could see people and machines working in some of the sheltered lowlands, tending or gathering crops. As his aircraft bore him through one valley at low altitude, he could see how some of the farmers looked up at his roaring passage, while others kept their attention on the earth. A few times he passed small buildings, never large enough to house the numbers of people he beheld.

The landing strip, he saw upon approaching it, looked like a plowed field too—no, it was a plowed field. Whatever his craft put down in the way of landing gear engaged the shallow furrows neatly, and the landing felt pleasantly slow and safe, if not exactly smooth.

His canopy slid back. People in drab, ill-fitting uniforms were all around him, smiling, most of them talking at the same time in accents newly strange to Shen-yang’s ears. His ride had come to a stop under cover of a great tree. He was being helped out, and in a moment he was standing within a chest-high revetment between great rocks decorated with twin portraits of the High Leader. Leafy branches made a visually impenetrable cover overhead and hung on all sides in a shaggy veil. Welcome clamored on all sides, and there was no counting the hands held out for him to shake. The general impression was of youth, eagerness, and energy.

When a girl handed him a hot drink and some simple food, Shen-yang noticed what he thought were radiation keloids on her arm and side. He thought the scars were not boldly enough undraped to be meant for intentional display. He supposed the whole countryside must be chronically hot. Well, before leaving home he had taken what medical steps he could in the way of radiation prophylaxis for himself.

They led him to a car, a mass of twenty or more people all enthusing at the same time about the rare privilege that he was being granted. The privilege was a talk with the High Leader himself; the young folk dropped their envious voices to a whisper whenever they mentioned that old man by his title or his name.

Four or five got into the car with him, and they were off. The road twisted and turned, seemed to be inside a tunnel as often as not, but still gave him a good chance to see the countryside. Not that there was anything much different from what he had already seen. Blast-marks, crops, workers, rocky hills. Here and there the entrance to some other tunnel, enigmatically unmarked. Once an organized gaggle of children pelted the speeding car with flowers and waved more pictures of the leader at it. The pictures and the flowers and some of the growing crops possessed the only bright colors to be seen below the sky. Everyone wore drab, and everyone looked busy.

He was taken to the High Leader at once, and, despite all the awed foreshadowing, with practically no ceremony. He found that old man waiting for him in a simply furnished cave, a great chamber beneath an immensely beetling brow of limestone and about one third open to the air.

There were two simple chairs and one small table in the cave, and a cluster of cables passing crudely through it at the back. Shen-yang found himself left alone there with a toughly stout and greatly aged man, whose long white sideburns, a personal trademark, looked exactly as they did in all the pictures. What the pictures could not show was in the eyes.

They were seated, Shen-yang at a little distance from the old man and his table, upon which he seemed to like to rest his calloused, age-grooved hands, as if it were a lectern.

“And did you have a pleasant journey across the ocean?”

“Pleasant enough. I marvel at how well your air service runs. It must be difficult to keep it going.”

The old man appeared pleased. “Mr. Shen-yang, there is really no secret to how we keep things going. We rely not upon our machines but upon our people. That is why we shall win this war in the end.”

Shen-yang thought to himself that had his aircraft failed in midflight, no mass of a hundred or a million peasants rushing out to catch him in their arms would have helped in the least. So, on a surface level, what the old man had just said was nonsense. But Shen-yang thought that there were other levels in the statement, and in those other levels somewhere there was truth.

Still, he was not going to let it pass unchallenged. “You do have machines, though, and to some extent you do depend upon them.”

“We use complex machinery when it is available and when it suits our plans. We do not use it when it is not suitable; therefore we do not need it, and our victory does not depend upon it.”

If this old man, thought Shen-yang, tells me that this mountain we are under will turn to jelly in the next minute, my mouth will fall open with surprise when it does not. Dare I—can I—say to this man that the war is over?

The leader, after a courteous pause, was going on. “The enemy, on the contrary, has all along relied upon machines to crush us. That is why he must fail in the end.”

“Your losses no doubt have been terrible.”

“They have been great. I myself have walked for a kilometer on the dead bodies of my people, because there was no space between dead bodies to put down one’s feet. That was after the blast and firestorm at Kinjanchunga. But it is not huge losses that sap a people’s will.” Whatever words the old man said seemed to come out of his mouth engraved upon eternal slabs of granite. “What saps their will is a too-great concern with things that do not matter.”

Shen-yang hitched his hard chair a little closer. “What matters—” he began and had a thought in mind that he could never afterwards recall because it was melted in a vast disruption of the world. A blue-white welder’s torch came on to seal the sky, with one electric flick, across the entrance to the cave, and Shen-yang had a mad and trivial thought I didn’t mean it about the jelly, and then the whole mountain made a fist and struck him in the mouth.

His chin was bleeding. Both of his ears now rang numbly. What sound had just come and gone was already as far beyond memory as it had been beyond hearing in its passage. He got up from where he found himself on hands and knees on the smooth cave floor and saw the High Leader, a fussy housekeeper, setting up his small table and his own old chair again. If the leader had been in the least damaged, or even excited by the blast, he did not show it.

With commotion, there were suddenly a dozen, a score, of frightened men’s and women’s faces looking in around one rocky comer and another. Not one looked for a moment at Shenyang, but he was free to study them—the faces of people who had briefly felt their souls in peril but who were once more convinced of their salvation when they saw their God was still alive, unhurt, and with His people.

The old man had a sharp, practical-sounding question or two for them, in the local tongue, which Shen-yang could not follow. Answers were received and orders issued. The people as they turned away now looked elated by this new challenge.

Turning back to his guest, the old man addressed him once more in their common tongue. “More missiles may be on their way. It seems the Condaminers have tagged you with a tracer of some kind for them to home on, something our own search devices failed to detect, planted on you, your clothing, or perhaps your luggage. Doubtless they calculated that you would be having a talk with me shortly after your arrival here. To kill me, they will spare no effort.” He turned toward the rear of the cave, gesturing Shen-yang to follow. “Their superior technology, you see. And you see that again it avails them nothing.”

Around a fold of rock, an aide was standing by an open door. A moment later the three of them were descending in an elevator, which looked as neat as anything in Hondurman’s foreign ministry.

“Here we will be safer.” After the old man had said that, no missile in the world would dare to touch them.

When they got out of the elevator at its lowest level, Shen-yang looked about him, at the size and shape of the place in which he found himself, at the instruments ranked below the clock and the leader’s portrait, at the texture of the walls that spoke to an expert eye of super-toughness.

The leader looked at him, started to say something, and then waited, bright eyes probing.

“This is what we used to call a technicians’ bay,” Shen-yang announced in a slow voice. “And—through that door—there will be an intercontinental ballistic missile waiting in its silo.”

His host made a grave gesture of assent.

“You have them, then,” said Shenyang. “Do you really have a thousand?”

Again, the confirmation.

“Then, all this time . . . why didn’t you fire them when you could?”

“When I could, Mr. Shen-yang?” The leader’s face shivered into a thousand wrinkles, became that of a smiling, wise old demon. And he raised, on a chain that hung around his neck, the carven symbol of his party and his faith. Shen-yang could see the tiny studs projecting from it, coded secretly no doubt, so that one man alone possessed the power, day or night, to. . . .”

“When I could? There is nothing to prevent my firing them now—more than eleven hundred strategic missiles. But I chose not to fire, forty-six years ago. And as of this moment, that is still my choice.”

Shen-yang felt more dazed by those absent blasts than by the real ones he had endured. “To—to save the atmosphere—?”

The old man smiled. “No, we can survive that, too, if need be. Our people’s medicine is working on the problems and will solve them. Besides, already only the resistant ones of us are left. No, we have another reason for not launching.

“Our greatness is born of great adversity and nurtured on it. When we have blown away the Condaminers’ cities and more than half their lives, what is left of them will be stronger and harder to defeat than they are now. Why, Mr. Shen-yang, should-I so strengthen my foe? Their leaders, in their hearts, would be delighted if I did.”

Shen-yang thought of Vellore, indefensibly open to the sky, to cruise missile and MIRV, to laser-reflecting warheads. He thought of the buried, hardened nerve centers and wondered if Hondurman himself ever came up above the ground.

I want to go home, thought Shenyang, with a physical revulsion for this place so strong he almost started for the elevator. Away from this world of madmen.

The aide was approaching, a bright red wireless communicator of some kind in his hand. The old man took it with a nod and said into it at once: “Do you call now to see if I am still alive?” Even as he spoke, there came another godlike blast far above; the living rock around them shook and trickled powder. “Of course I am alive. How can you slay a man, who is an idea first of all, with a machine?”

A few more words were exchanged. Then the fleshy old arm held out the device to Shen-yang. “There is someone who wishes a few words with you.”

When he held the thing for his own use, Hondurman’s face was visible in its little screen, and Hondurman’s voice came through. “My government’s deepest apologies, Mr. Shenyang, if any military action of ours has in fact endangered you. Of course you knew that you were entering a combat zone—”

“I’m still alive,” he interrupted. “By the way, you were right about the missiles here.”

A slight bow was visible. “It appears that you too were right, all along. Our Council of Ministers has just been reorganized, and it now agrees to the Ungavan conditions for peace talks to resume. Our new government deplores the latest launchings, disclaims responsibility for them, and will take disciplinary action against the officers responsible. Our official position is that the war is essentially over and the situation must be normalized before our world rejoins the galaxy.”

“I was right about its being over, yes. But wrong about one other thing.” Shen-yang paused. “So, you’re changing leaders to get the peace talks going? That’s what losers do, you know.”

The eyes in the small screen were haunted. “And just what else, sir, did you suppose we were?”

THE GAME

Khees rarely looked at the overseers’ towers without seeing in them a fanciful resemblance to chess rooks. Instead of four, there were six great rooks here, each one standing on its own corner of a vast patchwork territory of lifeless land; and the patched land, busy with friendly machines, still obscured here and there by blotches of poison mist borne in the thinned and ruined air, was not divided into regular squares; some kind of fairy chess instead of the regular variety. His imaginative thoughts about the towers had not, in the six months he had been on planet Maximus, ever got much farther than this point. Chess was not Khees’ great game, and he knew little of its history.

Today he was conducting an informal tour of the rehabilitation project for Adrienne, who had just arrived on-world, and whom he had not seen in over two standard years. At the moment they were outside, wearing dust-repellent jackets and special breathing masks.

“Actually the capital stood more than a thousand kilometers from here, before the attack. But this will be a finer site in several ways for the new city, so we decided to put the monument here as well.”

“That was a good idea. Yours?” It was marvelously flattering, and more than that, the attention that Adrienne was giving him today.

He chuckled. “I’m not sure. We talk things over a great deal.” Khees and twenty other people had been here for half a year, overseeing an army of machines employed in starting to undo the devastation wrought by the raiding-berserker fleet in an hour or so, a little more than a standard year ago. “Let’s go inside again. In here we have the first of our new atmosphere.”

They passed through an airlock into a great, inflated, transparent structure, where they could remove the masks that had protected them against the poison residues of the attack, which still maintained an uncanny lifelessness across the open atmosphere. It was not only human life against which the berserkers fought; the commands built into those unliving killers by their ancient and unknown programmers decreed that all life must be destroyed. For many thousands of years the berserkers had ranged the galaxy, replicating themselves, designing new machines as needed, always methodically killing. And now, for a thousand years and more, Earth-descended humanity, dispersed on more than a hundred worlds, had fought against them.

Inside, Adrienne tossed her mask into a rack and looked about, shaking out long hair of fiery red with a brisk twisting of her slender neck. “Enormous,” she remarked. The inflated dome of clear plastic, that from outside had seemed so tall, looked flat when seen from inside, so long and broad was it in relation to its height. Almost a kilometer away, beyond a pleasant view of green—
fringed paths and ponds, the half-finished monument rose, remaining truncated at the top until the atmosphere had been restored and the confining plastic dome could be removed. SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF, words said across the monument’s front, and then a blankness. Khees, whose job mostly involved other matters, didn’t know just how it was going to look when finished. Half a million dead, all the citizens of Maximus who had stayed behind to fight, would provide an impressive number of names to fit in, even if not all of them were known.

“And beautiful,” Adrienne concluded, completing her first look round the place. “You’re doing a fine job here, Khees.”

“This will be the central park of the new capital someday. It isn’t my project, though. The machines I oversee are working thirty and forty kilometers away.”

“I meant all of you who work here,” said Adrienne quickly. Was there just a little regret in her voice, as if she wished she could credit him with the park?

She took his arm and they walked along a path. A few Earthbirds, singing, flew overhead. In the distance a pair of Space Marine officers were approaching from the direction of the monument, uniforms immaculate, weapons slung on shoulders as required for full-dress ceremonies.

Adrienne said: “So, down there at the other end is obviously where the Chief is going to lay the wreath. Where will he enter the dome, though? From here it would be too long a walk. We want to control the time factor as much as possible.” She was thinking aloud, asking herself the question; it was one of the problems that she, as a member of the advance landing party charged with seeing that the planned ceremony ran smoothly, was going to have to answer.

Khees ran a nervous hand through his own curly black hair. “So, how is it working for the great man?”

“The Chief? He really is, you know.”

“I don’t suppose you can be elected to lead the Ten Planets without some ability. The war has certainly gone better since he’s been in office.”

“Oh, he has leadership ability, of course. But I meant humanly great. I suppose the two often go together. He really does care about people. These wreath-laying trips of his to all the battle sites are not just for show. He had tears in his eyes at the last ceremony; I saw them. But how is it with your job, Khees?”

“All right.” He shrugged. “A lot of people are a lot worse off. I’m not out in the front line fighting berserkers.”

“Still, I don’t suppose you get much chance to do what you like best.”

Now he looked at her carefully. “No. Actually, no chance at all.”

“One of the Marine officers who came in the advance party with me has a minor master’s rating. When he found out that I knew you—he already knew you were here—he begged me to see if I could get you to play a game.”

“A minor master? Who?”

Adrienne sighed faintly. “I thought that’d catch your interest. His name’s Barkro. I didn’t ask his numerical rating—I suppose I should have realized you’d want to take that into consideration.”

He had—as so often in the past—the feeling that the more he talked with Adrienne, the farther apart the two of them got. “Oh, I’ll give him a game. That is, if we can come up with six players—I doubt he’d be interested in any lesser variations. Are you going to play, too?”

She smiled and took his hand. “Why not? I won’t have much work to do. And an old boyfriend of mine once taught me how. He even claimed that I had the potential to be pretty good at it someday.”

“If you practiced enough, I said. And if you could eliminate a little psychological block or two.” Now he was holding both her hands and smiling back at her. On first seeing her an hour ago it had hit him, how much he’d really missed her. And now minute by minute the feeling was growing stronger.

“Well sir, I didn’t think my psychological block was all that terrible.”

“There was something about it rather nice, from my own point of view.”

And shortly they were walking on again. She said: “I haven’t had the time for any practice at The Game . . . speaking of time, though, are we even going to have enough of it to play? I mean, all of us in the Chiefs party are going to be lifting off again just about twelve hours from now.”

He calculated. “Let’s see—LeBon and Narret will play, I’m sure. One more—Jon Via, probably. Trouble is, most of us who will want to play are going to be at least nominally on duty much of the time. We do six hour shifts, alone in the towers, as a rule . . . what time will the Chiefs shuttle land?”

“About ten hours from now.”

“Once he lands we’ll all be busy—no way out of that.”

“Can’t you trade shifts with non-players?”

Khees grimaced mildly. “I don’t think so. We’re short-handed right now, with a bunch of people out on the frontier with our boss, and they won’t be back until just about the time the Chief comes down. No real reason we can’t play while we’re on duty in the towers, though. It’s not that demanding a job most of the time. Only reason the towers have to be manned at all is that early on here we had a couple of accidents, and now the Boss insists on having permanent observation posts where human eyes can get a direct overall view of the project, at least a good part of the time.”

“What do you do on the night shift?”

He grinned. “The best we can.”

“Your machines are not as self-sufficient as they could be, I gather.”

“It’s the old problem.” With the example of the berserkers constantly in mind, human beings on all worlds were afraid to give their own machines, however benignly programmed, nearly as much in the way of general intelligence and self-sufficiency as technology allowed.

“In the Game, will we use the honor system as regards computer help?”

“Of course.” Khees felt a little disappointed, almost injured, by the question. If you were serious enough about the Game to play it well, you weren’t going to cheat, certainly not in that crude a sense. Would an athlete tie servolifters to his wrists, and then take pride in winning a weight contest?

“Silly of me to ask . . .”

“It’s all right. Look, Ade, I’ve got to get back up in my tower. The Boss just might call in checking up; he takes his overseers’ duties rather seriously.”

“Then he Won’t approve of a Game during duty hours.”

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“What if he tunes in his radio later and hears us playing?”

“We’ll use light-beam communication, tower to tower. I’ll start getting things set up for play. Want to come along? That’ll be against regulations also, but . . .”

“Love to, but I have a thing or two I must get done myself before we start frittering our time. Where am I going to be when we play?”

“Best thing will be to put you in an unused tower . . . we can manage that. Be talking to you soon.”

The Game had different names in different human languages. To Khees, in his innermost thoughts, it often had no name at all. Do fish have names for water? Anyway, very few people on his home world had been game-minded, and there it had a name that translated into English bluntly as War-Without-Blood. Since he had come to know The Game, Khees had always preferred it to the “real” world, in which the elder members of his family (he had grown up in that kind of reality) assigned jobs to the younger, himself included.

“Oh, I’m not afraid of work, Uncle. And I can see it’s my duty as a citizen and all that to help out. But I really don’t want ten million people looking to me for answers every day.”

“You could have even more people than that looking up to you.” (Which perhaps Khees had already, counting all the Game fans across the Earth-colonized corner of the Galaxy. But on his homeworld, none of that was ever completely real.) “You have a brilliant mind, my boy, and it beats me how you can be content to use it for nothing more than . . . than . . .”

“Well sir, how can you be content to use your own intelligence at nothing more than shuffling matter around? Who cares if the population of Toxx can build their houses fifteen meters tall next year or only ten?”

That earned Khees a stern avuncular glare. “Well, the population of Toxx might care! In fact, most of them do. Housing construction is something . . . something very worthwhile. Rewarding.”

“For you. Not me. I just don’t care. I couldn’t.”

And this was after they had sent him to a fine engineering school. The old man glared harder. Then he found a stronger move to make. “Maybe you can find it in you to care how deep people are able to dig their shelters, against the day when the berserkers come again. Now there’s a real problem for you. Hey?”

“Other people are just as smart as I am about that kind of problem, and a lot more anxious to tackle it. Putting someone like me in charge of any military matters would not be a wise move.”

“If only it were part of some game, Khees, you’d solve it brilliantly.” His uncle coughed morosely. As long as, his unstated theory ran, real people’s lives were not involved.

“Are you saying, then, that every brilliant person must be a fortifications expert? Why not a strategist?”

“Now, there’s another—”

“Why not a doctor? Then we could always be ready to treat each other’s wounds, in case of sudden attack or accident.”

Why not a lawyer? He could certainly play the game of argument, varying tactics to suit opponents, sending most of them retreating in confusion. Opponent must totter two spaces backward, according to the Argument Results Calculator. Even if Opponent had started out with what looked like a real advantage in his logic. Logic was only one part of even the most logical of human games.

But eventually Khees wearied of the arguing, and so did they. A compromise was reached; and here he was now, doing a real-world job, and even a job that carried a fair amount of status in society. The family politicians had, among them, seen to that.

,The elevator opened silently. Ahead, the door to the overseer’s room atop Khees’ own chess rook stood ajar as usual, and he walked in. Great sealed windows viewed the patchwork land two hundred meters down, the thin-aired, purple sky, the five other towers that stood no more than a kilometer or two away, heads just level with the misty flatness of horizon. “Anything going on, Kara?” “Booby traps again.” The woman he was relieving looked up from her panels with a brief smile. “Double one, this time.” In one sense, Maximus had not yet been completely reconquered from the berserkers. “The second went off and did some damage to the engineer machines while they were clearing out the first.”

Khees stood beside her, scanning the printouts and the panels. “Haven’t had booby traps for a while. Doesn’t look too bad, though, hey? Anything else?”

“No.” Like everyone else in the permanent party, Kara was anxious to have her chance to socialize with the visitors in the brief time they were on-world.

“Well, this doesn’t look too hard to handle. Go on, take off.”

Kara was hardly out the door before a communicator chimed. Radio brought in the voice of the robot foreman on Khees’ sector of the distant frontier of work. The robot was evidently speaking from the scene of the latest accident.

“Overseer, I request that an aircar be sent out here immediately from Central.” Its mechanical voice was deep and pleasant, as unlike as it could be made from the voices that berserkers usually took to themselves when they put on the habit of human speech.

“An aircar. What for?”

“Part JS-828 in the forward limb assembly of a workrobot Type Six is broken. The workrobot is otherwise essentially undamaged, and can be speedily returned to duty if a replacement part is sent out.”

Khees was already punching at his computer console to get a look at the inventory of spare parts. He thought he knew what he would find, and he was right. A similar part had been broken in a freak accident ten days ago, and the stock of replacements was now down to zero. He so informed his foreman. “We’ll bring in the damaged piece, then, and the shop can decide whether to try to fix it, or produce a new one, or wait and hope we get another on the next shipment in.”

“Is then the aircar to be sent?”

Khees, on the verge of turning his mind to something else, paused. The video screen was blank, since the Boss believed that screens were distracting when not absolutely necessary, but he stared at it anyway. “No, a groundcar will come, as usual for repairs. Perhaps the mobile repair machine can fix the workrobot on the spot.”

“It appears to me that it will not.” The robot foreman’s permanently jovial tones made the announcement of bad news sound impertinent. Maybe it was only that, but Khees thought the damned thing sounded odd today.

“You’re not qualified to judge,” he told it. “The groundcar’s coming.” Good roads had been laid as far as that work area; the difference in time between ground transport and air would be minimal. “Meanwhile proceed with the programmed job as best you can.”

“Orders understood. Proceeding.”

Khees switched off that communicator, and turned to another, the tight light-beam that could be used for private talk among the towers.

And now, he thought. The Game.

It was certainly not chess, though its inventor had been one of the great chess masters of the very late twentieth century. Like any other board game, it could be played by a computer, and its inventor had in fact used one of the most advanced computer systems of his day to help design it. He had sought to create a game that could be played by a computer but not analyzed by one; not for The Game were the endless labyrinths of opening theory that now made learning chess more of a burden than a joy.

Having six players helped make The Game resistant to analysis, and was no longer much of a drawback to practical play. By the close of the twentieth century there were on old Earth a lot of bright people with a lot of spare time and a taste for games. But what really foiled computer analysis, outside of actual play, was the sophisticated addition of chance to the Game; whatever moves a computer came up with for a particular contest would probably be useless in any other. Openings tended to be wild; it was proverbial that you had to be either good or lucky to survive the opening at all, and it was much better to be both. Khees had not failed to survive an opening in serious play since his first tournament, a startling (to him) number of years ago.

The players were in place in their several towers, and the preliminaries were over; play began. Adrienne and Barkro had been installed in towers otherwise unused at the moment. Jon Via, LeBon, and Narret all signalled ready, their light-beams winking dully from the horizon.

Play was shown on the large video screen normally reserved for emergencies; the pictured board was a simulation of a space war, stylized to the point of complete unrealism, the six fleets showing as points or bars of different colors. In the opening moves, Khees played conservatively, content to survive the buffetings of chance. He parried deadly threats when they appeared, and otherwise tried nothing more ambitious than a small improvement of position here, the mobilization of a new squadron there, saving his efforts for the middle game, when chance would be less important. Barkro justified Adrienne’s estimate of his skill by adopting the same general course. Adrienne herself, a basically good player but not of master strength, was given advantage by luck in the early moves, and seemed daringly determined to make the most of it. She was off at once on a flashy, aggressive campaign, threatening Khees, threatening Via. If her good luck held for another half-dozen moves she might have a won game before the opening was fairly over. She was a brilliant woman in most fields of mental endeavor; and if it were not for a certain little quirk or two, she could learn to be brilliant in this as well . . .

The other players performed generally like the strong amateurs they were. LeBon launched a well-planned though premature attack on Adrienne, thinking evidently that if he waited she was only going to get stronger, and no doubt expecting he would get support from Khees. Open diplomacy was not part of The Game, but tacit agreements and understandings were.

Khees moved in turn, without having to take much thought. He had plenty of time between moves to go through the undemanding routine of an overseer’s watch, observing what he could of his distant machinery with binoculars, eyeing the panels and printers that brought more precise information in from the frontier. He would not have cared to enter a championship tournament in his present rusty and unpracticed state; years had now passed since he had played against serious opposition. But in this game he thought himself in more danger of boredom than of losing—except for Barkro, of course, they didn’t give out master’s ratings, even low ones, lightly. Barkro was the one to watch, and to really play against.

A good thing, too, that he could manage without perfect concentration, for this was turning out to be a day of oddities on the job. Here, for example, came the groundcar back from the frontier, presumably carrying the damaged part—and it stopped and hesitated and made false starts after entering the Central complex, as if its directing computer could have somehow become confused about which tunnel-mouth of the underground works would lead it to the proper repair shop.

Could someone have set up a ploy involving robots and groundcars to distract him from the Game by making him think that something regarding the work in his sector was really going wrong? He began to watch his panels very carefully.

On the game board, through the next few turns, Adrienne’s power was still augmented by moderately good luck. Luck would mean less and less, though, as the Game progressed. LeBon, pounced on from behind, was all but out. Could LeBon be the one to gimmick groundcars? No. And Ad-rienne and Barkro were visitors, lacking the expertise. Jon Via was serious enough about winning, and knowledgeable enough. But. .

Another round of moves, another, and now an expert stranger would have been convinced that Adrienne was going to win. Barkro’s forces were still mainly intact, but he was beaten. Khees had suddenly struck at him instead of at Adrienne. The visiting master was doubtless a bit stunned, unable to believe that Khees was going to throw the game so blatantly to his old girl friend—which of course was not what Khees had in mind at all. On a Game board, Khees would have smashed his own mother into a corner just as soon as the best chance came to do it. If you want to be nice, and sociable, play something else . . .

Now they were all waiting for Adrienne’s next move, which was quite slow in coming. Khees smiled a little to himself.

“Adrienne? We’re waiting for your move.” That voice on the light-beam net among the towers was Barkro’s, sounding half impatient, half sulky with the way he thought the Game was going.

Shortly her move came on the board. Coldly logical, completely crushing.

Khees’ smile vanished. Wrong . . . impulsively he opened the microphone before him. “Adrienne . . .”

“What?” Her answering voice was cold, too, and he thought it had a distracted sound. A day for unusual voices, among its other oddities.

And on the panel to his right, three indicators showed minor troubles out on his section of the frontier. Things that the foreman should be taking care of. Maybe the foreman would get to them soon, he told himself.

Khees and the other players moved through the round, and Adrienne moved again. With sudden clarity Khees understood. He felt a weakness in the knees, not unlike that he had known in some tournaments, but more intense. He faced certain and utter defeat.

—Or almost. Logic said loss, but there were still intangibles. There might be one, just one, more chance for the right move . . .

The sound of the opening of the door of her tower room, soft though it was, startled Adrienne. Why would anyone come up here now—?

She turned. Before there was time for fear the silent speed-blurred rush of something vaguely manlike in size and shape, but embodying a flow of metal and power that could not possibly be human, culminated in cold grippers touching her throat and then each of her limbs in turn.

By the time she would have screamed it was too late. She could not talk, could barely breathe; something small but weighty clung to her throat after the machine had set her down in a corner, propped in an angle of wall. She could move her head, enough to look down at herself. To each of her paralyzed arms and legs a thing that looked like a small metal leech was now attached.

Berserker . . .

When screaming failed, she willed herself to faint. That failed also.

The man-sized thing, ignoring her now, began a quick scanning of the tower’s instruments, of which only the Game board screen and the light-beam communicator were functioning. In seconds it had completed this inspection. With a snapping sound it now opened its own torso, and brought out a small stand which unfolded to support a tube filled with a weighty something. This assembly the berserker erected on a ledge below one of the great windows, adjusting the tube to point downwards at an angle, in the direction of . . .

The monument was down there, at that end of the great plastic dome.

The Chief was on his way . . .

“Adrienne?” The voice coming through the communicator startled her so her half-deadened body almost jumped against the supporting walls. “We’re waiting for your move.”

If the berserker had been startled too (if in its own electronic way it could be startled), it did not jump, but went at once to the Game-screen. Adrienne had a wild hope that it would not know what The Game was, but her hope was doomed. After five seconds’ study it reached out a metal arm to the controls, and moved for her.

Another man’s voice, Khees’ voice, said into the small room: “Adrienne . . .”

To her absolute horror, what seemed to be her own voice now issued from the metal creature’s throat. “What?”

There was a small pause. “Oh, nothing,” Khees replied, dejectedly. And that, it seemed, was that . . .

. . . she looked up from a blur of faintness to find the thing crouched down beside her. Glassy scanners that were not shaped or spaced like human eyes were studying her face.

“Now,” it said when she looked up. (And this was surely its preferred voice, this screech that somehow formed itself hi distinct words.) “Now you are to provide me with complete details on the itinerary of the visit here of the life-unit which you call the Chief, which serves as Premier of the Ten Planets. If you cooperate you will be spared. If you do not—” Another click, and in one metal hand it showed a small container. “This is nerve acid. One drop instantly penetrates the surface of human skin. It has affinity for living tissues of the sensory system, and it produces in them pain beyond any—”

So silent were the towers’ elevators that even the berserker had evidently not heard this one’s functioning outside the room’s closed door. But now someone was gently, with seeming casual-ness, trying that door and finding that it was locked.

“Who is it?” It was Adrienne’s voice again. And with a swiftness almost unbelievable the machine had crossed the room, was standing just to one side of that closed door. Small projections like gun-muzzles had appeared upon its chest and shoulders, and it poised like a praying mantis, ready to strike with arms of steel.

“Who is it?”

“Message for Adrienne Britton.” Some male voice she did not recognize.

“I’m busy.”

“Look, lady, do you want this note or do I have to hike all the way back there and tell him you won’t take it? It’s something about some damn game you’re supposed to be playing; he’s all upset. Didn’t want anyone else to see this or hear it.”

“All right. Just hand it in.”

Pounding her head against the metal wall, about the only movement she could make, was not going to create enough sound to serve as warning—

The berserker unlocked and opened the door part way. And in the same motion, faster than any human could possibly act or react, it reached forward and outward in a swift grabbing blur—

—and was hurled back, lifted from its feet and flung across the room, held skewered upon a lance of pounding flame. The small room roared with a continuous concussion. The metal body was smashed into the window, where tough plastic cracked and broke but would not yield entirely, and now the chamber filled with outward-rushing fog. Air pressure dropped. Three human figures, masked, in partial armor, tensely crouching, cleared the door. Two of them seemed to be pulled forward by the flaring, jerking weapons in their arms. The third one came for her. The last thing Adrienne saw before the thinning air blanked out her brain was Khees’ eyes above a breathing mask . . .

“So some of the Marines’ small arms have kinetic sensors now,” Khees was saying, walking with her in the park, helping her work out some of the stiffness left in her legs after the metal leeches had been removed. “One of my escort had his weapon set to trigger at anything moving extraordinarily fast—like a berserker’s grabbing arm. Whammo, locks on target and keeps firing until the operator turns it off.”

Adrienne shuddered, and squeezed his arm. “You knew it was a berserker,” she said, regarding him. “And yet you came for me.”

“Walking between two Space Marines. Even so my knees were shaking.”

“It might have fired through the door at you, not grabbed.”

“We figured that it wanted to be quiet, until the Chief came down and it could get a shot at him. It was a special assassin-machine, of course. They must have thought it a good bet that sooner or later the Chief would show up on Maximus to do his wreath-laying as he has so many other places. So before their raiders left they planted one extra-special booby trap; it must have been monitoring our local radio chatter and it knew when he was coming.”

“You knew it was a berserker and yet you came for me. But—how’d you know?”

“Well. There were some strange things going on, with the work machines. Too much of a coincidence, just when the Chief was due. It hit me that an assassin-machine could have taken the place of my foreman, and then come back here to Central in a groundcar I sent out. And where else would it go, to get a good shot at the Chief, but up in one of the towers overlooking the monument? So I hooked up my own computer to play a few moves of the Game for me, and . . .”

“But how did you know that it was in my tower?”

“How do you think?” Smiling at her.

Adrienne was smiling too, and at the same time trying not to cry. “My little psychological block. You knew I could never in all my life have brought myself to beat you in The Game.”

As life may transmit evil, so machines of great power may hand on good.

1980

ADVENTURE OF THE METAL MURDERER

On a death mission, he found a friend.

It had the shape of a man, the brain of an electronic devil.

It and the machines like it were the best imitations of men and women that the berserkers, murderous machines themselves, were capable of building. Still, these man-shapes and woman-shapes were obviously fraudulent when under close inspection by members of any known human society.

“Only twenty-nine accounted for?” the supervisor of defense demanded sharply. Strapped into his combat chair, he sat looking through the information screen before him into space. The nearby bulk of Earth was armored in the dun brown of defensive forcefields, and the flagship was hugging it as closely as had the first astronauts’ capsules a thousand years before.

“Only twenty-nine.” The flat admission of the answer arrived on the flagship’s bridge amid a sharp spattering of electrical noise. The skirmish just concluded had left enough radiation in nearby space to fry the signals of even the best communicators. The tortured voice continued: “And it’s quite certain now that there were thirty to begin with.”

“Then where’s the other?”

There was no immediate reply.

All of Earth’s defensive forces were still at something close to full alert, though the attack had been tiny, no more than an attempt at infiltration, and it seemed to have been thoroughly defeated. Berserkers, remnants of some ancient interstellar war, were mortal enemies of everything that lived, and the greatest danger to humanity that the universe had yet revealed.

The moon was rising now, its apparent motion greatly accelerated by the flagship’s own fast orbit. And now, much closer than the moon, a small blur leaped over Earth’s dully shielded limb, hurtling along a course that would bring it within a few hundred kilometers of the supervisor’s craft. This was Power Station One, a tamed black hole. In times of peace the power-hungry billions of the planet drew from it half their necessary energy. Station One was visible to the eye only as a flowing, slight distortion of the stars beyond. The flagship’s mass detectors had already recognized it, though; two decks below the bridge, engines murmured with the autopilot’s nudging, moving the ship to give that subtle blur more elbow room.

Another report was coming in. “We are searching space for the missing berserker android, Supervisor.”

“You had damned well better be.”

“The infiltrating enemy craft had padded containers for thirty androids, as shown by computer analysis of its debris. We must assume that all containers were filled.”

Life and death were in the supervisor’s tones: “Is there any possibility at all that the missing unit got past you to the surface?”

“Negative, Supervisor.” There was a slight pause. “At least we know it did not reach the surface in our time.”

“Our time? What does that mean, babbler? How could—ah.”

The black hole flashed by. Not really tamed, though men sometimes described it with that word, to help put their own doubts to rest. Just harnessed, more or less. Moving that enigmatic monster into a handy orbit had not been easy.

Suppose—and given the location of the skirmish, the supposition was not unlikely—that berserker android number thirty had been propelled, by some accident of combat, right at Station One. It could easily have entered the black hole. According to the latest theories, it might conceivably have survived that process, to re-emerge into the universe intact, projected out of the hole as its own tangible image, in a burst of virtual-particle radiation.

Theory dictated that, in such a case, the re-emergence must take place before the falling-in.

The supervisor issued orders crisply. At once, his computers on the world below, the Earth Defense Conglomerate of awesome reputation, took up the problem, giving it highest priority. What could one berserker android do to Earth? Probably not much. But to the supervisor, and those who worked for him, defense was a sacred task. The temple of Earth’s safety had been horribly profaned.

To produce the first answers took those machines eleven minutes.

“Number thirty did go into the black hole, sir. Neither we nor the enemy could very well have foreseen such a result, but—”

“What is the probability that the android emerged intact?”

“Because of the peculiar angle at which it entered, approximately sixty-nine percent.”

“That high!”

“And there is a forty-nine percent chance that it will reach the surface of the Earth intact, in functional condition, at some point in our past. However, the computers do add one reassuring note. As the enemy device must have been programmed for some subtle attack upon our present society, it is not likely to be able to do much damage at the time and place where it—”

“Your skull contains a vacuum of a truly intergalactic order. I will tell you and the computers when it has become possible for us to feel even the slightest degree of reassurance! Meanwhile, get me more figures.”

The next word from the ground came twenty minutes later. “There is a ninety-two percent chance that landing of the android on the surface, if it occurred was within one hundred kilometers of fifty-one degrees, eleven minutes, north latitude; zero degrees, seven minutes, west longitude.”

“And the time?”

“Ninety-eight percent probability of January 1, 1880 CE, plus or minus ten standard years.”

A land mass, a great clouded island, was presented to the supervisor on his screen, marked with a green ring and crosshairs.

“Recommended course of action?”

It took the Ed Conglomerate an hour and a half to answer that.

The first two volunteers perished in attempted launchings before the method could be perfected. When the third was ready he was called in, just before launching, for a last private meeting with the supervisor.

The supervisor looked him up and down, taking in his outlandish dress, strange hair-styling, and all the rest. He did not ask if the volunteer was ready, but began bluntly: “It has now been confirmed that whether you win or lose back there, you will never be able to return to your own time.”

“Yes, sir.” Training had ingrained the ancient speech patterns so thoroughly in the volunteer that now the words of his native language emerged half strangled from his throat. “I had assumed that would be the case.”

“Very well.” The supervisor cleared his own throat, and consulted data spread before him. “We are still uncertain as to just how the enemy is armed. Something subtle, no doubt, suitable for a spy or saboteur on our contemporary Earth—in addition, of course, to the superhuman physical strength and speed you must expect to face. There are the scrambling or the switching mindbeams to be considered; either could damage any human society. There are the pattern bombs, designed to disable our defense computers by seeding them at close range with pure, random information. There are always possibilities of biological warfare—you have your disguised medical kit? Yes, I see. And, of course, there is always the chance of something new.”

“Yes, sir.” The volunteer agent looked as ready as anyone could look. The supervisor went to him, opening his arms for a ritual farewell embrace.

He blinked away some London rain, pulled out his heavy, ticking timepiece, as if only checking the hour, and stood on the pavement before the theater like a man waiting for a friend. The instrument he held throbbed with a silent, extra vibration in addition to its ticking. This special signal had now taken on a character that meant the enemy machine was very near indeed, probably within a radius of fifty meters from where the agent stood.

A poster nearby said:

THE IMPROVED AUTOMATION CHESSPLAYER

MARVEL OF THE AGE

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT

“The real problem, sir,” proclaimed one top-hatted man nearby, in conversation with another, “is not whether a machine can be made to win at chess, but whether it may possibly be made to play at all.”

No, that is not at all the real problem, sir, the agent from the future thought. But count yourself fortunate that you can still believe it is.

He bought a ticket and went in. On exhibit inside there were a number of clockwork devices, some of an ingenuity that the man from the future would have found really intriguing, under other circumstances. When a sizable audience had gathered there was a short lecture, by a man in evening dress, who had something at once predatory and frightened about him, despite the glibness and the rehearsed humor of his talk.

At length the chessplayer itself appeared, a desklike box with a figure seated behind it, the whole assembly wheeled out on stage by assistants. The figure was that of a man in Turkish garb, quite obviously a mannequin or dummy of some kind, and it bobbed slightly with the motion of the rolling desk, to which its chair was somehow fixed. Now the agent could feel the excited vibration of his watch without even putting a hand into his pocket.

The predatory man cracked another joke, dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief, and from several chessplayers in the audience who raised their hands—the agent was not among them—selected one to challenge the automation. The volunteer went up on stage, where black and white pieces were being set out on a board fastened to the rolling desk or table, and the doors in the front of the desk were being opened to show that there was nothing but mechanism inside.

The agent noted that there were no candles on this desk, as there had been on Maelzel’s, a few decades earlier. Maelzel’s mechanical chessplayer had been a fraud, of course, and candles had been needed on its box to mask the odor of burning wax from the candle needed by the man so cleverly hidden inside amid the dummy gears. It was still too early in the century, the agent knew, for electric lights, at least the kind that would be handy for such a hidden man to use. Add the feet that this chessplayer’s opponent was allowed to sit much closer than Maelzel’s had ever been, and it became a pretty safe deduction that the box and figure on this stage contained no hidden man.

Therefore . . .

He might, if he stood up in the audience, get a clear shot at it right now. But he could not be sure how it was armed. Who would stop it, if he tried and failed? Already it had learned enough to survive in nineteenth-century London; already it had found itself a niche. Doubtless it had already killed, to further its designs.

“Under new management,” indeed. With the agent out of the way it could safely bide its time until it had discovered how to do the greatest damage to Victorian humanity with whatever armament it had.

No, now that he had located the enemy, he must plan as thoroughly as it was planning, and work as patiently. Deep in thought, he left the theater amid the crowd at the conclusion of the performance, and started on foot back to the rooms which he had just begun to share in Baker Street. A minor difficulty at launching into the black hole had cost him some of his equipment, including most of his forged money. There had not been time as yet for his adopted profession to bring him much income, so he was, for the time, in straitened financial circumstances.

He must plan. Suppose, now, that he approached the man who ran the chessplayer show, who by now ought to have begun to understand what kind of a tiger he was riding. The agent might approach him in the guise of—

A sudden tap-tapping came in the agent’s watchpocket, a signal quite distinct from any his fake watch had previously generated. This one meant that the enemy had managed to detect his detector, was indeed locked onto it and tracking.

There was sudden sweat on his face now, mingling with the drizzle, as he began to run. It must have discovered him in the theater, though probably it could not single him out amid the crowd. Avoiding horse-drawn cabs, four-wheelers, and an omnibus, he turned out of Oxford Street to Baker Street, and slowed to a fast walk for the short distance remaining. He could not throw away the telltale watch, for he would be unable to track the enemy without it. But neither dared he retain it on his person . . .

As the agent burst into his sitting room, his new roommate looked up, with his usual, somewhat shallow smile, from a leisurely job of taking books out of a crate and putting them on shelves.

“I say,” the agent began, in mingled relief and urgency, meanwhile leaning against the doorjamb for a moment’s rest, “something rather important has come up, and I find there are two errands I really must undertake at once. Might I impose one of them on you?”

The agent’s own brisk errand took him no farther than just across the street. There, in the doorway of Camden House, he shrank back, trying to breathe silently. He had not moved three minutes later when from the direction of Oxford Street there approached a tall figure that the agent suspected was not human. The lower portion of its face was muffled in a white scarf or bandage, and its hat was pulled down. It paused briefly in front of 221B, seemed to consult a watch of its own, then rang the bell. Had the agent been sure it was his quarry, he would have shot it in the back. But without his watch, he would have to get a better look to be sure.

After a moment’s questioning from the landlady, the figure was admitted. The agent waited about two minutes. Then he drew a deep breath, gathered up his considerable courage, and went after it.

The thing standing alone at a window turned to face him as he entered the sitting room. Now he was sure of what it was, from the mere expression of the eyes above the bandaged lower face. Not the Turk’s eyes, but not human, either.

The white swathing muffled its gruff voice. “You are the doctor?”

“Ah, it is my fellow-lodger that you want.” The agent threw a careless glance toward the desk where he had locked up the watch, the desk on which some papers bearing his roommate’s name were scattered. “He is out at the moment, as you see, but we can expect him presently. I take it you are a patient.”

The thing said, in its wrong voice: “I have been referred to him. It seems that the doctor and I share a certain common background. Therefore, the good landlady has let me wait in here. If my presence is no inconvenience?”

“Not in the least. Pray take a seat, Mr—?”

What name the berserker might have given, the agent never learned. The bell sounded below, suspending conversation. He heard the servant-girl answering the door, and a moment later his roommates brisk feet upon the stairs. The death machine took a small object from a pocket, and sidestepped a little to get a clear view past the agent toward the door.

Half turning his back upon the enemy, as if with the casual purpose of greeting the man about to enter, the agent casually drew from his own pocket a quite functional briar pipe, which was designed to serve another function, too. Then he turned his head and fired the pipe at the berserker from under his own left armpit.

For a human being he was uncannily fast, and for a berserker, the android was meanly slow and clumsy, being designed for imitation and not primarily for dueling. Their weapons triggered at the same instant.

Explosions racked and destroyed the enemy, blasts shatteringly powerful but compactly limited in space, self-damping so as to be almost silent.

The agent was hit, too. He staggered, knowing with his last clear thought just what kind of weapon the enemy had carried—the switching mindbeam. Then for a moment he could no longer think at all. He was dimly aware of being down on one knee, and of his fellow-lodger, who had just entered, standing stunned a step inside the door.

At last the agent could move again, and shakily pocketed his pipe. The ruined body of the enemy was almost vaporized already. It had been built to self-destruct when damaged badly, that humanity might never learn its secrets. Already it was no more than a puddle of heavy mist, warping in slow tendrils out through the slightly open window to mingle with the fog.

The man still standing near the door had put out a hand to steady himself against the wall. “The jeweler . . . did not have your watch,” he muttered dazedly.

I have won, thought the agent dully. It was a joyless thought because with it came slow realization of the price of his success. Three-quarters of his intellect, at least, was gone irrecoverably, the superior pattern of his brain-cell connections scattered . . . No. Not scattered. The switching mindbeam would have reimposed the pattern of his neurons somewhere farther down its pathway . . . there, behind those gray eyes with their newly penetrating gaze.

“Obviously, sending me out for your watch was a ruse.” His roommate’s voice was suddenly crisper, more assured than it had been. “Also, I perceive that your desk has just been broken into, by someone who thought it mine. And that you, sir, are not exactly what you represent yourself to be.” The tone softened somewhat. “Come, man, I bear you no ill will. Your secret, if honorable, is safe with me.”

The agent got to his feet, pulling at his sandy hair, trying desperately to think. “How—how do you know?”

“Elementary, my dear Doctor,” the tall man said impatiently.

RECESSIONAL

Though reality shifted like sand beneath his fleeing feet he could not escape the Truth.

From the window of his high hotel room, sixty dollars a day at convention rates, he could look between other buildings to see a small piece of the ocean. Within the mirror where he looked when shaving there was another window with another square of sea, and an hourly newscast came on that morning just as he was starting to shave. Razor in hand he listened while the voice of the woman announcer went through a few details of what she called the grisly discovery. The thing somehow got to him, enough to keep him from concentrating properly either on shaving or on what he ought to say when he appeared on the panel in a couple of hours. Not only that, it stayed with him after he finished getting ready and left the room.

The radio really hadn’t given many facts. The body of a woman of indeterminate age had been washed up on a beach somewhere down in the Keys, which put it, he supposed, almost a hundred miles to the southwest of Miami Beach. An unnamed authority was quoted to the effect that the body might have been in the water as long as several years. He thought at first that the newscaster had probably got that garbled somehow, but then mention was made of pockets of cold, uncirculating water to be found in certain depths, in which unusual preservative action could be expected.

One reason for the grisly discovery remaining with him all morning, he supposed, was that his panel topic was “Science in Science Fiction,” and he hoped to be able to work that “unusual preservative action” into what he had to say. He felt a little uncomfortable about this panel, as he really was no scientist, though he read the professional journals fairly often and popularizations a lot, and his stories tended to be thick with scientific jargon. He thought some of the readers liked the jargon better than the stories, and he loved it himself, really, which was why long ago he had begun to use so much of it. For him it had always made a kind of poetry.

Some of the other people on the panel were not only real scientists, but were writers as well. They talked quantum mechanics. They talked epistemology. He wasn’t sure at first that he remembered what that meant. He wondered for a little while if he was going to have to sit there like a dummy for long minutes at a time. So as soon as the chance came, he got in a few words that shifted the subject to alternate universes. Anybody could talk about that.

Suppose, he thought to himself, looking out over the heads of the audience in the far last row while some argument between two other panelists droned on, just suppose that body could have been five years in the sea. How far could a body drift in five years? Well, certainly not through the Panama Canal. When, in the early afternoon, he got back to his room, he looked out at what little he could see of the one great ocean that went all the way around the world, and thought about that body again. They hadn’t said what, if anything, the woman had been wearing. He couldn’t quite shake the subject, it seemed to have set up a resonance of some kind inside his head. Time passed, what seemed like a lot of time as he sat waiting in his room, but the phone call from another hotel room that he was expecting failed to come.

So he left the convention earlier than he had planned, left it that very afternoon, driving north through summer Florida. Going to the convention, he told himself, had been more trouble than it was worth. In the old days, the cons ran three days, no more, and were relaxed and friendly. Now each one he went to seemed like some damned big business in itself. Just getting away on his own was something of a relief.

A day and a half later, waking up early in his motel room in Atlanta, he put in a call to his agent in New York. The agent would be back in the office in half an hour, the girl thought, and would call him back then. Waiting for the agent to call back, he took a shower, and when he came out of the shower, dripping, turned on the radio.

Listening, he experienced an inward chill.

“. . . thought to have been in her early twenties, recovered from the Cattahoochie some twenty miles north of Atlanta. The condition of the body made it impossible to determine immediately if there were any marks of violence. Sheriff’s officers said that the body might have been in the water for as long as several months. Attempts at identification . . .”

The phone rang. It was the agent, for once communicating even earlier than expected. And with good news: money was coming through, even more money than they had been looking for, and he could afford a trip, a wander across the country, if he felt like one. He hadn’t really felt like one for several years, not since he had been living alone, but he felt like one now, before he went home and got back to work. Not that New York or any place else was really home. He had reached the stage of being down to mailing addresses.

The Interstate impelled him west. He liked driving his car, he usually liked machines. Quantum mechanics. Epistemology. That was what they talked about on panels nowadays. In the old days they had talked about relativity sometimes, but then you could figure that almost no one knew what they were talking about. He should have taken the time, before coming to the convention, to read up a little more on current work. That way he could have at least sounded a little more intelligent. He would settle in for a day or two of reading when he got home.

A feeling was growing in him that the convention he had just left had marked some kind of turning point, a new departure in his life. Something had changed. Whether it was for better or worse had yet to be discovered. For richer, for poorer. He was never going to get married again, that much he felt pretty sure about, not even when his status as a widower became finally and fully legal and official, as one of these years it would. Was it two years now, or three? Conventions were still good for providing a little fun in bed, and that was all he needed. Then next day he waited in his room and the phone refused to ring as scheduled. Well, maybe it was just as well.

He didn’t really know where he was driving now, he just wanted to get off for a few days. On a new course. Alternate universe. When he had brought up that hoary old science fiction concept on the panel, one of the real scientists, almost condescending though he was trying not to sound that way, had admitted aloud that some experiments in particle physics carried out within the last ten years even suggest that physical reality may depend in some sense, to some extent, on human consciousness. If that was true, the writer had thought, listening, if that could be true, how was it possible for everybody to remain so calm about it? But thus spake a real life quantum mechanic. The Bell inequality, whatever the hell that was. The spin of elementary particles . . .

The car radio assured him that gas supplies were good everywhere across the country, though prices showed no sign of coming down. Tourist business was suffering. He was going to have no trouble finding a motel room, wherever he went.

At Birmingham lie decided to head on west for a while, and stayed with Interstate 20 going southwest to Jackson. Hell of a country to be driving through in the summer in search of fun or relaxation. But the car was nicely air conditioned, a space capsule whose interior guarded its own sounds and atmosphere, keeping noise and dust and rain and heat all nicely sealed outside. What showed on the windows could almost be no more than pictures from outside, computer presentations.

In Vicksburg he located a bottle of bourbon and took it to bed with him. A lot less trouble than a woman. But then to his own surprise he discovered that he didn’t feel like drinking much, even after the long drive. He took a couple of sips, then let the bottle sit. He turned on the television, got some local talk show. Talk shows were usually his favorite, they provided humanity at just about the right distance. They proved that the human race was still around somewhere, alive, not too terribly far away. But when you wanted, you could turn them off.

“. . . for your research at the battlefield cemeteries?” the host was asking.

“Well, the opportunity came about because of some new road construction in the park.” The speaker was a well-dressed man in the prime of life, mustached, relaxed, superior. He enjoyed talking like this. He was reminiscent of some of the people on the convention panel. “In the process of excavation for the road, some previously unknown 1863 military burials came to light, and we applied for permission to use some of the skulls in our tests, the same kind of tests we had been developing for the archaeological work on Indian sites. There were twenty-seven of the Civil War skulls altogether, all completely unidentified. We think they were divided about evenly between Union and Confederate.”

“And you got the same results with these, as with the older subjects, that had been in the ground for maybe thousands of years?”

“Better, in many cases. The bone frequently was much better preserved than in the older specimens. We were able to get some very interesting results indeed. The trace elements in the bone that resonate with the NMR . . .”

Jargon, of any scientific field, could still soothe him like poetry. Better than poetry. He sipped at his bottle and set it back on the table and got ready to drift toward sleep.

“. . . beauty of the whole thing, you see, is that the visual cortex of the brain need not be intact, or even present.”

“That’s the real discovery, then.”

“That’s part of it. Apparently what no one had suspected all along was that the hard bone of the skull itself has another purpose besides that of mere protection.”

They had him drifting toward wakefulness again. Why hadn’t he heard anything about any of this before? It sounded revolutionary. He wanted to hear it now.

“. . . bone perhaps serves as a kind of backup memory storage system, at least in human skulls. We don’t know yet if it works the same way in other mammals.”

“Then there should be applications of this outside the field of archaeology, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, yes, definitely. Police work, for instance. Medicine. X-rays will still have their place, of course. But in medicine the NMR is soon going to replace the X-ray for most purposes, because it doesn’t involve ionizing radiation; X-ray always presents some element of risk. Anyway, a police laboratory, say, can set up an unidentified skull and obtain from it images of scenes that the person actually saw when alive.”

“That’s spooky. Would you get, maybe, the last thing they saw before they died? Wasn’t there some nineteenth-century theory that by photographing a dead person’s eyes the image of the last thing they saw in life could be recovered?”

“Yes. There’s a Kappling short story about it. But that’s all sheer superstition. This is something entirely different.”

Not Kappling, you numbskull, you mean Kipling. But the word had been so clear and deliberate. Some affected pronunciation? Some in-joke? No one was laughing.

“. . . a thing like this to be acceptable as legal evidence, I wonder.”

“I’m no lawyer, but I do know that police all over the country are already trying it out. I think that sooner or later it’s bound to be accepted fully. The weight of accumulated evidence is going to silence the objections.”

“What objections are there? If you can obtain a good picture, as you say you can, doesn’t that prove you’re right?”

“Well, a few pretty bright people were worried, at first, when they realized what we were doing. There were arguments that what we were doing could start to unravel the whole fabric of physical reality. There’s a kind of resonance factor operating, and the more people you have doing similar experiments—especially on similar subjects—the more likely it seems to be that there will be a concentration, a focusing of the effects of many separate experiments upon one subject.”

“How can that be?”

“We don’t know. But if reality can depend in some sense upon human consciousness, then maybe the existence, the form, of an individual human consciousness depends also upon the reality surrounding it. Or the realities, if you prefer.”

“You said there was no harmful radiation, though.”

“Right. All the physical objections have now been pretty well taken care of. The main objection now is lo the fact that our best pictures are partially subjective. That is, we obtain the best readings from a human skull when we use another skull, the observer’s own, as a kind of resonator.”

The observer’s own skull? Give me that again, will you?”

“All right.” But there ensued a thoughtful pause. The scientist chewed his mustache.

The host, avoiding dead air time if nothing else, interjected: “With NMR you do project waves of some kind into the body, into whatever’s being examined—?”

“Yes. NMR scans are a proven means of probing inside matter. They’ve been used now for thirty years.”

“And, tell me again, NMR stands for—?”

“Nuclear magnetic resonance. All that we actually project into the body, the specimen, or whatever, is a strong magnetic field. This causes the nuclei of certain atoms inside the specimen to line up in certain ways. Then, when the imposed field is removed, the nuclei flip back again. When a nucleus flips back it emits a trace of radiation that registers on our detectors, and from all these traces our computer can form a picture.”

“No harmful radiation, though.”

The scientist smiled. “Do you have a sort of a thing about radiation?”

“Most people do, these days.”

“Well, no, it’s not harmful. Now what we’ve discovered is that when the observer’s own skull is used as a kind of magnetic resonator, then pictures, images, are actually induced in the observer’s own visual cortex. He sees a finer, sharper version of what the computer can otherwise extract from the specimen and put up on a stage in the form of a holographic projection. But we can’t yet repeat the results as consistently as we’d like. When you scan a specimen skull more than once, you’re likely to get a different picture every time. So the question is, is what the human experimenter claims to see really the same as the blurry picture that the computer puts up on the hologram stage?”

“I wish you could have brought some pictures along to show our audience.”

“By the time I photographed the hologram, and then you ran it through your cameras and so on here, onto their sets at home, they would be seeing a picture of a picture of a not very good picture.”

“Maybe next time?”

“Maybe next time. But as I say, it’s not really all that informative when the first image is blurry.”

“And you can’t get the same picture twice?”

“The structure of the skull, the specimen, is changed minutely by the very act of reading it. There are various interpretations of why and how this whole thing works at all. It surprised the hell out of a lot of us when we first began to realize what was happening. And even worried a few people, as I say: can time and space become unraveled? Do we tend to get different readings each time because we are reaching for similar atoms, similar skulls, in adjoining universes? The theoretical physicists think it has to do with coupling through electron spin resonance, that’s ESR. The ligand field of each particle expands indefinitely, they say now, which is going to open up a whole new field of research.”

“Superhyperfine splitting,” commented the host, nodding sagely, and got a laugh in the studio. He was obviously harking back to something that had earlier snowed him and the audience as well.

The scientist shook his head and smiled tolerantly. He murmured something that was lost in the subsiding laughter.

“I see,” added the host. He continued to nod in a way that meant he had given up on trying to see, especially after that ligand field. “But do you think you’d be able to help the police discover, for instance, who this young woman is whose body came down the Mississippi today? They say she might have been in the water for several weeks. Wearing a yellow bikini and—”

His jerking hand at last found the right switch on the unfamiliar set. The picture died, in an erratically shrinking white dot-spark, that lashed about for a moment as if trying to escape its glassy prison.

The departure of the voices left a hollowness in the air of the dark motel room. Other murmurings came in from other rooms not far away. The carpet under his knees felt rough and dusty. He might have just got up calmly and walked over to the set to turn it off, if he wanted it off. But there had been a bad moment there, bad enough to make him lunge and crawl.

He stood up, stiffly. On the bedside table the bottle waited, hardly started. No. He was all right. No, just a moment of panic there, such as sometimes came when he was drifting off to sleep. He had thought that at last, after months of learning to sleep alone again, he was all through with midnight panics. Just one small sip now, and even without that he was tired enough to sleep. Then, tomorrow, he would drive again. He could drive anywhere he wanted to. Things were all right . . .

In the morning he knew that he was not going to follow the great river north, up to the great lakes. Yesterday the plan in the back of his mind, as well as he could remember it, had been to do something along that line. But enough of water, and watery places. He would go on west, and put the big rivers and the lakes behind him.

In Shereveport he sat in a plastic booth, eating plastic-tasting food, and abruptly realizing that in the booth next to him sat two state police officers. Whether it was more nearly impossible that they had already been there, unseen by him, when he sat down, or that they had walked in past him without his knowing it, he couldn’t estimate.

“. . . she mighta been from way upstream somewheres. The Doc, he says days in the water. White gal. Just a lil ol bathing suit on. No wounds, nothing like that.”

“Well, the Red can be worse’n the Mississippi even, when it rains enough. It’s been like pourin’ piss out’n a boot up there in Oklahoma.”

Back in his car, moving on the highway, he realized that somehow he must have paid the restaurant cashier. Otherwise the two state troopers would already be in hot pursuit.

Fifty-five was the law, and maybe in some places they cared about that. But once he got to Texas he felt sure that nobody was going to give a damn. He opened her up.

Greenery and rivers dried up and blew away in the hot wind of his passage. Signs indicated where to turn to get to Midland, Odessa, Corsicana. Nazareth. If a name existed in the universe, if a name was even conceivable, and maybe sometimes if it was not, it could be found somewhere in the vastness of Texas, applied to a small town.

He slept in a motel somewhere, in a room where he turned on no radio or television. And sometime after that he crossed a border that lay invisibly athwart the unfamiliar lunar landscape and found that he was in New Mexico. Maybe he had never come exactly this way before. He couldn’t remember things being quite this barren even here.

Signs told him he was nearing Carlsbad. The highway topped a stark rise to disclose an unexpected wall of greenery waiting for him, not far ahead. Pecos River, a small sign added. He drove across a highway bridge over the river, which was for this part of the country so wide and full that he was astonished by it until he saw the dam.

If he tried to go any farther tonight he was going to drive right off the road somewhere in exhaustion. And yet, once settled in the Carlsbad Motel, he couldn’t sleep. He had to know first what was happening. No, not quite right. He had to know if he was going to have to admit to himself that something was happening. Maybe he was just going a little crazy from being alone too much in summer heat. If that was all, he should just stay in one cool room for a day and a night and sleep.

He forced himself to turn on the ten pm television news, and he listened to the whole half hour attentively, and there was not a word about drowned bodies anywhere. He started to relax, to feel that whatever had started to happen to him was over. When the news was over, he found a talk show, on another channel that came in by cable from the west coast. Show biz people and famous lawyers sat around a table. During the first commercial he roused himself and went out to get half a pint of good bourbon. To hell with being so careful, you could probably drive yourself crazy that way. Tonight he was going to drink. He had the feeling that things were going to be all right after all.

He thought he had turned off the television set, but the voices were busy when he came back with the whisky. The same host, but evidently a new segment of the show, for the guests were different.

The scientist had no mustache, but he was certainly a scientist, and he even looked a little like that one on the other show. Well-entrenched in the world and imperturbable.

“. . . from Cal Tech, going to talk with us a little about nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, the nature of reality, all kinds of good stuff like that there.” Laughter in the studio followed, febrile and feeble at the same time, predictable as the outcome of a lab demonstration.

The nature of reality,” said another panelist. “You left that out.” But it hadn’t been left out. Didn’t they even listen to each other’s words?

Someone else on the panel said something else, and they all laughed again.

“Speaking of reality, we’ll be right back, after this.”

The cable brought in a good many channels. Here was Atlanta. Who knew where they all came from? But he knew that he would have to switch back.

“. . . pretty well accepted now by everyone in the field that it can’t have any effect on the general perception of reality, what people generally experience as reality, no matter how many of these experiments you have going on around the world at the same time, or how many of them are concentrated on the same type of subject. The concentration effect, if there is one, sort of goes off somewhere; we can’t even trace where it goes.”

“You’re saying that in effect you fire a volley off over the fields . . .”

“. . . and it could possibly hit someone, but the chance is very small.”

“Endor, did you say a moment ago?”

“The Witch of Endor?” another guest put in, archly, oh they were sharp out there on the coast, and there was more reflexive laughter, from people who recognized their cue, even if they didn’t know what they were laughing about.

“ENDOR is an acronym,” the scientist with no mustache was explaining, “for Electron-nuclear double resonance. You see, it seems now that resonance is set up not only in the real atoms but in virtual atomic particles in nearby time-frames. The implications are enormous. Someday, theoretically, we could each have our own personal universe to carry around with us, tuned to our own skulls, our own perceptions. The original idea was only to measure the hyperfine . . .”

Flying a little high on bourbon now, and getting doses of jargon like that one, he needed only a few more sips from the bottle before he drifted off. To wake up, as it seemed, almost at once, with daylight coming in around the motel drapes. The air conditioner was humming already, the television had somehow been turned off. He lay there feeling better than he had dared to expect. Jargon is the thing, he thought. Jargon is definitely in. Where the hell have I been the last few days, anyway? But it seemed to be over now, whatever it had been.

He thought: I’m going to have to try to get on some talk show myself.

Taking his time in the warm morning, he listened without much apprehension to what scraps of news the radio was willing to give up. No drowned bodies anywhere. He went out and breakfasted. As far as he could tell from looking out across the landscape away from town, he might still have been in Texas. But in town there were trees, and lawns, though the grass when he looked at it closely was of an unfamiliar variety.

Driving away from the motel, he was still unsure about whether to head north, east, or west. South—Mexico—he didn’t want. On impulse he drove a couple of blocks toward the massed trees, the river. Above the dam it looked like an eastern river, wide and full and slow-moving, and there for some distance the banks were lined with expensive-looking houses. There was the sound of a motorboat, and in a moment a crack in the green wall showed a skier passing on the brown water. Nearby was a city park; he entered and drove through it slowly. There was a small sand beach, already in use in the day’s heat.

There was also a police car, and a small but steadily growing crowd, fed by running children who were not interested just now in swimming. Between the standing bodies he caught a single glimpse of brown hair, yellow cloth. Bare, tanned arms being worked up and down by arms in blue policeman’s sleeves.

He remembered to gas up the car and have the oil checked before heading on west. He was worried. But somehow he didn’t seem to be as worried as he ought to be. He had the feeling that he was forgetting, putting behind him, a log, an awful lot of recent happenings. Nothing essential, though. Excess baggage. Part of the feeling of strangeness was no doubt due to the fact that he was just coming out of a bad time. Even if he hadn’t been on good terms with her lately, it was only to be expected that such a loss would leave him in a shocked condition for several weeks. But he was starting to come out of it now.

Later that day, he was almost at Tucson where he realized where he was going.

At home in San Diego, he watched the sun go down into the one great ocean, just as once, long ago, he had watched it rise. On the Atlantic horizon, he could remember, there had been pink-gray nothingness, and then, instantly out of nowhere, a spark. Now at the last instant of sunset the shrinking sun became what looked like that identical same, long-remembered spark. And then, then night.

This house was his, this house right on the beach, only a hundred feet from water at high tide. Decades ago his parents had first rented then bought it, and he had hung onto it as an investment. This afternoon as soon as he got into town he had driven past the place on an impulse. It had looked unoccupied, though he had been sure that it was rented. He was going to have to talk to the agent about that in the morning.

The place had looked completely deserted from the outside, but when he had let himself in with the key he always kept, it was hard to be sure whether it was currently being lived in or not. There were furnishings, not all of them unfamiliar. Pictures on the walls, some of which he could remember.

He turned on a couple of lights after watching the sunset. A little food in the kitchen cabinets, a little in the refrigerator. As if some people might just have moved out, not bothering to take everything or use it up.

He went out again, through the French windows, to sit in a lawn chair on the patio overlooking the sea. The ocean, never quite silent, was now almost invisible in the gathering darkness. The smell of it brought back to him no memories that were peculiar to this place. He had looked at and smelled the sea in too many other, different places for that. The one great ocean that went on and on.

Through low clouds there came suddenly the halffamiliar, half-surprising sound of a slow Navy plane from the air station not far away. One of the search and rescue craft, and it sounded like it was heading out. Would they commence a search at night? That seemed unlikely, but there were always new devices, new techniques. Anyway, they wouldn’t be using a plane to look for her, she hadn’t gone out in a boat. And if they hadn’t started to look for her last night, when she walked out, they wouldn’t be starting now.

He paused, trying to clear his thoughts. How could they have started any search last night? He still, up to this minute, hadn’t told anyone how she had gone. Not yet . . .

If you can’t stand your own life, he had said to her, then I suggest you put an end to it. I have an interesting life of my own that’s going to take all my time. The room seemed still to echo with the words.

The waves were getting a little louder now, rolling invisibilities up the invisible beach.

He went into the house and turned up the volume of the television slightly; he could not really remember having turned it on. The voices from the talk show came with him as he went outside again, onto the seaward patio. The hyperfine and superhyperfine splittings could now be measured accurately, but that was only the start. Police forces all over the country were using the technique on unidentified bodies every day, with great success. Nobody worried anymore that the technique might offer any danger to the fabric of the world. The implications were really vast. The ligand fields expanded without limit. The voices continued to follow as he opened the gate in the low wall and walked down a slope of sand to meet the still invisible burden of the waves.

1981

WHERE THY TREASURE IS

He would do anything for the ones he loved—even leave them . . . if he could.

It was a small private hospital, so Benedict Cunningham and his doctor had a small private elevator to themselves, going down.

“Call me at any time if you think any problems are developing,” said the doctor. He was youngish and intense, and was carrying Cunningham’s valise himself. “Any sort of problems.”

Cunningham smiled. He had just turned fifty, and looked quite healthy and vigorous. A sun lamp, installed in his hospital room at his insistence, had maintained his golf tan during his stay. His new wig was so well made that only the very few who knew him well were likely to spot it as a difference. He said now: “We went into all the possibilities pretty thoroughly ahead of time, as you’ll recall. And everything has gone well. I don’t anticipate problems.”

“Nor do I. But, since you’re the first.”

“I had better be the last as well. At least for some time to come.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t look so grim, doctor. You’re going to do quite well out of this.” Cunningham’s smile was faintly prolonged by the grim look he observed on the young face; if the man hadn’t needed money desperately, he wouldn’t have done this . . . .”

A faraway look came into Cunningham’s eyes. “Wait,” he said softly. “I’m making contact with what must be another company. Oh. Giant . . . I think . . . it’s got to be AT&T. Whole networks of metal . . . networks of finance . . . I can’t describe it, any more than I could the others. But it’s there, yes, it’s definitely there. The whole structure . . . you know, there’s one detail in all this it’s just occurred to me to wonder about.”

At that point the elevator door opened onto the ground floor lobby. Cunningham grabbed his valise from the doctor’s hand and stepped out briskly, determined to impress the small group of waiting reporters with his smiling health.

“I’m fine,” he assured them. “Just elective surgery to have a wen removed. Then I stayed over for my annual checkup and a little rest.”

The doctor, speaking to the reporters in turn, issued a short and somewhat vague statement that revealed nothing about the unheard-of thing that he had really done. Then he walked with Cunningham to where Cunningham’s chauffeur stood holding open the door of a waiting limousine.

Motioning the doctor to follow, Cunningham got into the car and greeted his wife with a hurried kiss. Shirley was a quiet, attractive woman a few years younger than her husband, with a dread of the press intense enough to have kept her waiting in the car today.

Her face was worried; the doctor, shaking her hand hastily, wondered how much her husband had really told her.

One reporter was still watching, and Cunningham touched the intercom and told the chauffeur to drive away.

“What’s the detail that’s just occurred to you?” the doctor asked, as soon as the auto was in motion.

Cunningham raised his fingers to touch the deceptive fabric of his wig, where it covered the healed incision behind his right ear. New hair growth had made a start, and in a month or so the wig could probably be discarded. “Huss tells me that the transmitting device is concealed exactly where we wanted it at the Exchange; it should put me in contact with every corporation that’s traded on the Big Board. But in fact the only ones I’ve been able to feel are those in which I own some stock.”

The doctor relaxed slightly. “And about which you are naturally more concerned. We expected there to be all kinds of psychological interaction with the device.”

“About which you may someday be able to publish.”

“But nothing else bothers you.”

“There’s a . . .” Cunningham hesitated for just a moment. “There’s a certain feeling, hard to describe. Like being spread out, diffused, that’s the best way I can find to put it.”

“You didn’t mention this before.” The doctor’s voice was at once sharp and resigned.

“It’s nothing, I just notice it a little more today. If it should be permanent, well, I can get used to it. Shirley, you should see that chimp in the lab. The device in his skull is just like mine, and it connects him electronically with a machine that delivers food. And he knows infallibly just when and where that next banana is going to fall, and he’s there to grab it every time. Believe me, I’ve got my eye on some ripe bananas already.”

The last signature had just been inked onto the document that transferred twenty thousand hectares of Idaho timberland to Benedict Cunningham, and the transaction electronically recorded for the central data banks as the law required, when he pushed his chair back from the table and uttered a low exclamation.

“All right, Ben?” asked the man who had just sold him the timber.

“Yes, fine.” Cunningham straightened his business collar. As far as he knew, he was all right; it was just that a new sensation had surprised him.

As soon as the timber-dealer had departed, Cunningham phoned the president of the newly formed Macrotron Engineering Company.

“Huss, I’d like you to come over to my office right away.”

“OK?” Carl Huss’s voice was guarded. “Something important?”

“I’m calling you, am I not? Get over here.” He switched off without waiting for a reply.

Cunningham knew that his order would be obeyed. He had in effect given Macrotron to Huss in payment for the two cybernetic devices and the secret installation of one of them at the Exchange; but, as Huss well knew, Cunningham still held the financial fate of Macrotron in his own masterly hands.

“Have you added anything to the device at the Exchange?” Cunningham demanded, as soon as he was alone with the engineer.

Huss was an electronic genius and a rapid talker, even more nervous and younger than the doctor.

“Of course not. Nothing needs to be added. And If I did want to try out some improvement, I’d certainly tell you about it first.”

“I should hope so.” Cunningham frowned. “I don’t suppose anyone or anything else could be causing interference?”

“The chance of that is so small—” Huss made a gesture of dismissal. “The technicians at the Exchange don’t open up the Board once in six months now, the equipment has become so reliable. And when they do open it, they’ll notice nothing to make them suspicious. I did a good job.”

“All right, then. I just wanted to make sure nothing had changed.”

“What’s gone wrong?”

“Probably nothing.” Cunningham shook his head. “It’s just that I’ve begun feeling things, identifying with things, that aren’t on the Board. Things that have nothing to do with the Stock Exchange.” Huss, unconsciously scowling, thought it over. “That’s not electronically possible.”

“It happens. I bought some timberland today, and the instant I owned it, it was as if a part of myself went there. That’s the only way I can describe it. I can tell that there’s copper under the soil there, a great deal of copper.”

“I don’t understand.” Huss for once spoke slowly. “How can you know a thing like that?”

“I was hoping that you could tell me.” Cunningham shrugged. “It’s the same substance that I see in copper wires, but mixed in with rock and dirt and buried. I just feel it there. How do you know that your toenails are hard and nerveless?”

That afternoon Cunningham sounded out a couple of mining companies, making preliminary arrangements.

But his dream that night had nothing to do with copper, or, as far as he could tell, with wealth of any kind. He was standing in darkness, paralyzed, attacked by some kind of tiny vermin that gnawed their way through his skin and then scuttled in and out through the holes they had made. He tried to move, but could only sway stiffly, his joints creaking. He could only endure, well past the point where any ordinary nightmare should have ended. Managing at last to get a clear mental image of one of his tiny tormentors, he saw that it had the face of a cartoon comedy rat, a discovery that for some reason added a sharp stab of horror. Cunningham woke up, in a cold sweat.

Shirley was standing beside his bed. “Ben, you were . . . calling. Are you all right?”

“I was dreaming. Yes, I’m all right.” He wiped his lace. Looking for his cigarettes, he switched on the bedside light, and became abstractedly aware of the worried expression on his wife’s face. “Don’t be upset about the car, Shirley. Those things happen.”

Surprise registered in Shirley’s eyes, then guilt. “No one was hurt. Ben, I, I wanted to tell you about the accident, but you’ve had so much else on your mind.”

“It’s all right,” he said. The damage to the prized sports car was not severe; it amounted to some banged-up sheet metal, and a slight hidden strain on the frame, that not even the mechanic had yet detected . . .

But how did he, Ben Cunningham, know that?

The answer, of course, was that he felt it, in the same way he would know if his ankle had been wrenched slightly. The discomfort he felt now was not in his ankle, not anywhere in his body, but he felt it. While he slept, a part of himself had been pulled into the car.

There had been a bad dream too, a dream now fading rapidly, a dream that had had nothing to do with cars . . .

Shirley, her voice hesitant, was speaking again. “Ben, I’ve never interfered in anything regarding business.”

He grunted something.

“This time I would have, if I’d known when you went into the hospital what you really meant to do.”

“Go back to bed, Shirley,” he told her, crushing out his cigarette. “Everything’s all right.”

“Are you sure, Ben?”

“I’m just tired now; let me rest.” He smiled at his wife, the smile that always reassured her, and then lay back and closed his eyes. She put out the light, and a few moments later he heard the door between their rooms close softly. A great woman. He would tire himself out, use himself up, go through nightmares, for her and the two boys who were away at school. Even if he never got to see much of them . . .

Tired, but he wasn’t going to be able to go right back to sleep. He lay in his bed alone—he would never have been able to get the rest he needed, had he given up half his bed to another body’s weight and movements and breath—staring up into darkness. He was now able to feel the twenty pairs of shoes racked in his bedroom closets (nothing like dressing right to make exactly the right impression) and with a little effort he could even tell which pairs needed polishing. Lying there motionless, he could feel himself being drawn, slowly, inescapably, into all the things that were in and about and of his house. The fireplace downstairs with its fading warmth, the Picasso print on the wall, the garbage in the undersink disposal. The concrete of the outdoor pool, drained for winter. The growing grass and trees.

One by one, all the things he owned were coming forward, each demanding its own portion of his being. He had the feeling that there was not going to be enough of himself to go around. His things were absorbing him into their own substances. He had told the doctor he would get used to feeling diffused, but the sensation was only getting worse.

He put his hands over his face in the darkness. He fiercely willed his own coherence and survival. What was attacking him was illusion; he still functioned. To build for his sons and his sons’ sons he would find a way to come to terms with his new power. He had to. At last he dozed.

In his office next day Ben Cunningham began to feel burning and amputation and scarring; the sensations were not localizable to any part of his human body, nor were they generalized throughout it. He felt them, though, and they were real, physically real. He traced them to their origin in a part of his newly extended identity, and he knew before the phone message came that his new Idaho timberland was ablaze. The first copper-hunting expedition sent by the mining company had managed to start a forest fire.

That night he again stood wooden and swaying, infested by rat-faced mites. (Also moving about inside him were other, much larger creatures, but these were doing no damage at the moment and he could ignore them.) It was the tiny beasts with their tiny gnawings that were terrible. This time the image of the vermin stayed with him after he awakened, and he understood that they were rats, real rats. When one hungry rat found food in the form of one of the larger living things, Cunningham’s nerves did not feel the bitten baby’s pain, for the baby was not his property. He felt only the baby’s scream, reverberating in the shaky wood of the tenement.

“Hullo? Whatsamatter?”

“This is Benedict Cunningham. I want you to get busy and sell any building I own that could be called a slum. I know it’s four in the morning. I don’t want arguments and I don’t want any delay. Start on it right now.”

“What’s Mr. Cunningham? Sell buildings, you say?”

“And don’t haggle about prices. Get rid of them.”

The hurried sale of the slum buildings relieved him of pain; but it did not free him. He was still gripped by the money from the sale, as by ail the other money that was his. Parts of him stretched out, and then tied down, confined, in cage-boxes made of bars like the ruled lines in an old-fashioned ledger.

For another day or so he continued forcing himself grimly on along the road to greater profits. More cage-compartments and more bars. Making money had always been something he could do, and it was almost no trick at all now that he was wired into the Board. The connection was everything that he had hoped it would be, and more.

And more.

For Shirley and the boys, he clung to his determination to endure and adapt. But with every passing day, with every hour, he could feel himself going. Losing what tenuous contact he had ever had with people and music and food and sunsets. He inexorably diffused, becoming machinery and oil wells and expensive shoes.

The forest fire was out now and he had got out of the reach of the rats’ teeth. But he could feel himself dying of diffusion. His body walked on, planning daily tasks, smiling when required, keeping socially active and presentable, but soon his shrinking core of self might be altogether gone, and against that fate his ego at last rebelled.

He tried first to save himself without really giving up any of his wealth. He switched off, by remote control, the unit implanted at the Exchange. It didn’t help. He tried putting vast properties in his wife’s name. But the pen marks and the electronic transfer of symbols that had got the rats out of gnawing range proved in this case ineffective. This time the things of his wealth maintained their grip on him, as if they understood that they were in every real sense still his.

“I believe I understand, sir. You want the books physically spread out on the table, opened?”

“Yes. And the discs from the computer.” The symbols of wealth were concentrated even more intensely there. “And then move the table over to the windows, let the sunlight fall on it.” He no longer cared a great deal if subordinates thought him eccentric or even insane.

He could feel the sunlight falling on the rigid records of his wealth. But not even the sun could thaw him loose from them.

These days he never worked late at the office. And when he came home, Shirley was always waiting for him, peering at him anxiously. Today she said: “Ben, if you don’t make an appointment with a doctor right away, I’m going to make one for you.”

“Don’t bother, I’ve just made one.”

“You couldn’t remove it,” was almost the first thing that Cunningham said on coming out of the anesthetic.

“Oh, I removed the device.” The doctor’s voice was weary, his face grim. “There was some involvement of brain tissue that I hadn’t expected. How do you feel?”

“You might as well have left it in. I’m still being pulled apart.”

By next morning, the doctor had a theory ready: some of the nine-tenths of Cunningham’s brain that he had never used, that no one ever uses, had been stimulated to new activity by the cybernetic device. The components of the device were very small and subtle and new, and no one yet understood them very well.

“I’m not going to try to do anything more to your brain,” he told Cunningham flatly. “What’s going on may right itself in time. It probably will. That’s all I can say.”

The surgery hadn’t been the doctor’s idea in the first place. Cunningham didn’t really want the doctor to say anything more now. He put on his wig again and left the hospital again, knowing that he had only a little time left. Whatever elastic might be left in his tough soul was failing now. There were moments, with his wealth stretching him in every direction, when a black cavity appeared in the center of his being. The cavity was nothingness, and that was his future.

Since surgery had failed, he could think of only one more course open to him that was (a little, at least) less desperate than suicide. As soon as Cunningham got home he called his lawyers and with their help began to give things away. At first they worked at the job enthusiastically, eager to learn what the trick was going to turn out to be. Putting things in Shirley’s name hadn’t worked, and now Cunningham stayed clear of her and other relatives and chose charities.

At last, success. He could tell that this time he had found a method that was going to work for him. Each gift eased the strain, allowing a bit of humanity to return. The trouble was that partial relief was no longer enough, he had been too badly stretched. A tug on even one finger or toe is unendurable to a man who has been for days on the rack.

When his lawyers, puzzled by the continued absence of any tricks, pressed for explanations, and he told them that he planned to give it all away, down to the last penny, they called his doctor. For a while Cunningham feared there would be an effort to have him committed. But the last thing the doctor wanted was fuss, possible investigations. He backed up his patient as sane and competent, and the lawyers eventually went along.

Not before they had spoken to Shirley, enough to give her some idea of what was going on.

Naturally, when Cunningham confirmed that he was giving everything away, she was stunned.

“Of course,” he reassured her, “you’re not going to have to worry personally. You’ll come out of it with a fine settlement.”

“A what?”

“Understand, this is business,” said Cunningham, using the magic word that would always forestall any more questions from his wife. “You have to divorce me if you want to keep anything at all for yourself or for the boys. I can’t bear to own the least thing any longer.” And even as he spoke, in the back of Cunningham’s mind was the faint, terribly fragile hope that Shirley might elect to stay with him, even existing as he saw himself about to do on the charity of some distant relatives. He could still own a bite of food and put it into his mouth and not feel real pain; that was about the feasible extent of his net worth right now. But it would be unthinkable to come right out and ask Shirley or his sons to exist like that.

“Divorce you, keep anything,” she repeated vacantly, in extreme horror. “But Ben, I’ll never leave you. I don’t care that much about money.” He hadn’t really dared to hope . . . with shaking, tearful tenderness he reached for Shirley’s hand. “Think carefully, dear,” Cunningham murmured honorably. “Everything I’ve done has been for you and the boys.”

“For us?” Astoundingly, her love exploded into wrath. He could not have been more surprised if she had shattered like a bomb. “For me? Don’t tell me that. In the beginning, maybe, but not when you had a hole drilled in your brain to make more money. Not then! Go on, kill yourself, or give it all away to ease yourself, but never say that it’s for me!”

“I . . .” Just then the phone began to ring. Cunningham answered it mechanically, and the voice of one of his lawyers said: “Ben, the last things are ready for your signature. But I still can’t see a man like you going through with this.”

“I’ll call you back,” said Cunningham slowly, and hung up. Meeting Shirley’s angry, wondering eyes, he felt a touch of new terror. The power of self-extension was still his, in a form he had not thought of until now.

It came to him that there were treasures he had not yet dreamed of knowing.

It came to him also that the cage-bars of the ledgers, the prison domains of the magnetic discs, had just this moment eased their strain.

“Mr. Cunningham? You said two hours ago you’d call us back. You didn’t, so I took the liberty of calling . . . the papers are ready as you requested. We’re all waiting.”

“The papers.” Cunningham sounded impatient and happy at the same time. His voice was that of a man being disturbed while at some joyful occupation. “Oh, the rest of the giveaway papers, yes. I think you might as well tear those up.”

The pain, as in memory, of a rat bite came and went. It hurt, yes, but . . . Cunningham turned off the phone and rolled on his other side to look at Shirley. He found that now he could look through her eyes at himself as well. He wasn’t handsome any longer, if he had ever been handsome, and certainly he was no longer young. But her eyes seemed content to rest on him.

“It’s all right now?” Shirley asked.

“It’s all right,” Cunningham assured her. “How long have you had this backache?”

Shirley’s eyes widened. He could feel the change in her eyes as well as see it. The accompanying thoughts, however, had to be deduced. Until she said: “You’re spreading out again.”

“Mark,” he said with closed eyes, “is playing baseball. Just got a good hit, he’s running the bases hard. It feels really good to be fifteen and run full speed.”

“Mark is—? Oh, my God. You’re going the same way again, only now with people.”

“Not the same. And Luke, he’s talking to a girl.”

Cunningham was inside his older son, seeing the girl, and—yes, dimly, in foreshadowing of a future clear reality, he could go as far as looking through the girl’s eyes back at Luke. Cunningham was spreading out again, slowly, farther and farther. But it was not the same as it had been with money and with things. Now more, vastly more, than went out was coming in.

“With people. Oh, my God, what are you going to do? You can’t give us away.”

“Fat chance. Forgive me, Shirl for trying to do that once.”

“Ben. Where are you now?”

“Right here, Shirl.” He opened his eyes. “I’m in bed with my wife.”

EARTHSHADE

When Zalazar saw the lenticular cloud decapitate the mountain, he knew that the old magic in the world was not yet dead. The conviction struck him all in an instant, and with overwhelming force, even as the cloud itself had struck the rock. Dazed by the psychic impact, he turned around shakily on the steep hillside to gaze at the countenance of the youth who was standing beside him. For a long moment then, even as the shock wave of the crash came through the earth beneath their feet and then blasted the air about their ears, Zalazar seemed truly stunned. His old eyes and mind were vacant alike, as if he might never before have seen this young man’s face.

“Grandfather.” The voice of the youth was hushed, and filled with awe. His gaze went past Zalazar’s shoulder, and on up the mountain. “What was that?”

“You saw,” said Zalazar shortly. With a hobbling motion on the incline, he turned his attention back to the miracle. “How it came down from the sky. You heard and felt it when it hit. You know as much about it as I do.”

Zalazar himself had not particularly noticed one small round cloud, among other clouds of various shape around what was, in general, an ordinary summer sky. Not until a comparatively rapid relative movement, of something small, unnaturally round, and very white against the high deep blue had happened to catch the corner of his eye. He had looked up directly at the cloud then, and the moment he did that he felt the magic. That distant disk-shape, trailing small patches of ivory fur, had come down in an angled, silent glide that somehow gave the impression of heaviness, of being on the verge of a complete loss of buoyancy and control. The cloud slid, or fell, with a deceptive speed, a speed that became fully apparent to Zalazar only when the long path of its descent at last intersected age-old rock.

“Grandfather, I can feel the magic.”

“I’m sure you can. Not that you’ve ever had the chance to feel anything like it before. But it’s something everyone is able to recognize at once.” The old man took a step higher on the slope, staring at the mountain fiercely. “You were born to live with magic. We all were—the whole human race. We’re never more than half alive unless we have it.” He paused for a moment, savoring his own sensations. “Well, I’ve felt many a great spell in my time. There’s no harm in this one—not for us, at least. In fact, I think it may possibly bring us some great good.”

With that Zalazar paused again, experiencing something new, or maybe something long-forgotten. Was it only that the perceived aura of great spells near at hand brought back memories of his youth? It was more than that, probably. Old wellsprings of divination, caked over by the years, were proving to be still capable of stir and bubble. “All right. Whatever that cloud is, it took the whole top of the mountain with it over into the next valley. I think we should climb up there and take a look.” All above was silent now, and apparently tranquil—except that a large, vague plume of gray dust had become visible above the truncated mountain, where it drifted fitfully in an uncertain wind.

The youth was eager, and they began at once. With his hand upon a strong young arm for support when needed, Zalazar felt confident that his old limbs and heart would serve him through the climb.

They stopped at the foot of an old rock slide to rest, and to drink from a high spring there that the old man knew about. The midsummer grass grew lush around the water source, and with a sudden concern for the mundane, Zalazar pointed this out to the boy as a good place to bring the flocks. Then, after they had rested in the shade of a rock for a little longer, the real climb began. It went more easily for Zalazar than he had expected, because he had help at the harder places. They spoke rarely. He was saving his breath, and anyway, he did not want to talk or even think much about what they were going to discover. This reluctance was born not of fear, but of an almost childish and still growing anticipation. Whatever else, there was going to be magic in his life again, a vast new store of magic, ebullient and overflowing—and feeding the magic, of course, a small ocean at least of mana. Maybe with a supply like that, there would be enough left over to let an old man use some for himself . . . unless it were all used up, maintaining that altered cloud, before they got to it . . .

Zalazar walked and climbed a little faster. Mana from somewhere was around him already in the air, tantalizingly faint, like the first warm wind from the south before the snow has melted, but there indubitably, like spring.

It was obvious to the old man that his companion, even encumbered as he was by bow and quiver on his back and the small lyre at his belt, could have clambered on ahead to get a quick look at the wonders. But the youth stayed patiently at the old man’s side. The bright young eyes, though, were for the most part fixed on ahead. Maybe, Zalazar thought, looking at the other speculatively, he’s a little more frightened than he wants to admit.

Maybe I am, too, he added to himself. But I am certainly going on up there, nevertheless.

At about midday they reached what was now the mountaintop. It was a bright new tableland, about half a kilometer across, and as flat now as a certain parade ground that the old man could remember. The sight also made Zalazar think imaginatively of the stump of some giant’s neck or limb; it was rimmed with soil and growth resembling scurfy skin, boned and veined with white rocks and red toward the middle, and it bubbled here and there with pure new springs, the blood of Earth.

From a little distance, the raw new surface looked preternaturally smooth. But when you were really near, close enough to bend down and touch the faint new warmth of it, you could see that the surface left by the mighty plane was not that smooth. It was no more level, perhaps, than it might have been if made by a small army of men with hand tools, provided they had been well supervised and induced to try.

The foot trail had brought them up the west side of what was left of the mountain. The strange cloud in its long, killing glide had come down also from the west, and had carried the whole mass of the mountaintop off with it to the east. Not far, though. For now, from his newly gained vantage upon the western rim of the new tabletop, Zalazar could see the cloud again.

It was no more than a kilometer or so away, looking like some giant, snow white, not-quite-rigid dish. It was tilted almost on edge, and it was half sunken into the valley on the mountain’s far side, so that the place where Zalazar stood was just about on a horizontal level with the enormous dish’s center.

“Come,” he said to his young companion, and immediately led the way forward across the smoothed-off rock. The cloud ahead of them was stirring continually, like a sail in a faint breeze, and Zalazar realized that the bulk of it must be still partially airborne. Probably the lower curve of its circular rim was resting or dragging on the floor of the valley below, like the basket of a balloon ready to take off. In his youth, Zalazar had seen balloons, as well as magic and parade grounds. In his youth he had seen much.

As he walked, the raw mana rose all around him from the rawly opened earth. It was a maddeningly subtle emanation, like ancient perfume, or warm air from an oven used yesterday to bake the finest bread. Zalazar inhaled it like a starving man, with mind and memory as well as lungs. It wasn’t enough, he told himself, to really do anything with. But it was quite enough to make him remember what the world had once been like, and what his own role in the world had been.

At another time, under different conditions, such a fragrance of mana might have been enough to make the old man weep. But not now, with the wonder of the cloud visible just ahead. It seemed to be waiting for him. Zalazar felt no inclination to dawdle, as he sniffed the air nostalgically.

There was movement on the planed ground just before his feet. Looking down without breaking stride, Zalazar beheld small creatures that had once been living, then petrified into the mountain’s fabric by the slow failure of the world’s mana, now stirring with gropings back toward life. Under his sandaled foot he felt the purl of a new spring, almost alive. The sensation was gone in an instant, but it jarred him into noticing how quick his own strides had suddenly become, as if he too were already on the way to rejuvenation.

When they reached the eastern edge of the tabletop, Zalazar found he could look almost straight down to where a newly created slope of talus began far below. From the fringes of this great mass of rubble that had been a mountaintop, giant trees, freshly slain or crippled by the landslide, jutted out here and there at deathly angles. The dust of the enormous crash was still persisting faintly in the breeze, and Zalazar thought he could still hear the last withdrawing echoes of its roar . . .

“Grandfather, look!”

Zalazar raised his head quickly, to see the tilted lens-shape of the gigantic cloud bestirring itself with new apparent purpose. Half rolling on its circular rim, which dragged new scars into the valley’s grassy skin below, and half lurching sideways, it was slowly, ponderously making its way back toward the mountain and the two who watched it.

The cloud also appeared to be shrinking slightly. Mass in the form of vapor was fuming and boiling away from the vast gentle convexities of its sides. There were also sidewise gouts of rain or spray, that woke in Zalazar the memory of ocean waterspouts. Thunder grumbled. Or was it only the cloud’s weight, scraping at the ground? The extremity of the round, mountain-chopping rim looked hard and deadly as a scimitar. Then from the rim inwards the appearance of the enchanted cloudstuff altered gradually, until at the hub of the great wheel a dullard might have thought it only natural.

Another wheel turn of a few degrees. Another thunderous lurch. And suddenly the cloud was a hundred meters closer than before. Someone or something was maneuvering it.

“Grandfather?”

Zalazar spoke in answer to the anxious tone. “It won’t do us a bit of good to try to run away.” His own voice was cheerful, not fatalistic. The good feeling that he had about the cloud had grown stronger, if anything, the nearer he got to it. Maybe his prescient sense, long dormant, had been awakened into something like acuity by the faint accession of mana from the newly opened earth. He could tell that the mana in the cloud itself was vastly stronger. “We don’t have to be afraid, lad. They don’t mean us any harm.”

“They?”

“There’s someone inside that cloud. If you can still call it a cloud, as much as it’s been changed.”

“Inside it? Who could that be?”

Zalazar gestured his ignorance. He felt sure that the cloud was inhabited, without being able to say how he knew, or even beginning to understand how such a thing could be. Wizards had been known to ride on clouds, of course, with a minimum of alteration in the material. But to alter one to this extent . . .

The cloud, meanwhile, continued to work its way closer. Turn, slide, ponderous hop, gigantic bump, and scrape. It was now only about a hundred meters beyond the edge of the cliff. And now it appeared that something new was going to happen.

The tilted, slowly oscillating wall that was the cloudside closest to the cliff had developed a rolling boil quite near its center. Zalazar judged that this hub of white disturbance was only slightly bigger than a man. After a few moments of development, during which time the whole cloud-mass slid majestically still closer to the cliff, the hub blew out in a hard but silent puff of vapor. Where it had been was now an opening, an arched doorway into the pale interior of the cloud.

A figure in human shape, that of a woman nobly dressed, appeared an instant later in this doorway. Zalazar, in the first moment that he looked directly at her, was struck with awe. In that moment all the day’s earlier marvels shrank down, for him, to dimensions hardly greater than the ordinary; they had been but fitting prologue. This was the great true wonder.

He went down at once upon one knee, averting his gaze from the personage before him. And without raising his eyes he put out a hand, and tugged fiercely at his grandson’s sleeve until the boy had knelt down, too.

Then the woman who was standing in the doorway called to them. Her voice was very clear, and it seemed to the old man that he had been waiting all his years to hear that call. Still, the words in themselves were certainly prosaic enough. “You men!” she cried. “I ask your help.”

Probably ask was not the most accurate word she could have chosen. Zalazar heard himself babbling some reply immediately, some extravagant promise whose exact wording he could not recall a moment later. Not that it mattered, probably. Commitment had been demanded and given.

His pledge once made, he found that he could raise his eyes again. Still the huge cloud was easing closer to the cliff, in little bumps and starts. Its lower flange was continually bending and flowing, making slow thunder against the talus far below, a roaring rearrangement of the fallen rock.

“I am Je,” the dazzlingly beautiful woman called to them in an imperious voice. Her robes were rich blue, brown, and an ermine that made the cloud itself look gray. “It is written that you two are the men I need to find. Who are you?”

The terrible beauty of her face was no more than a score of meters distant now. Again Zalazar had to look away from its full glory. “I am Zalazar, mighty Je,” he answered, in a breaking voice. “I am only a poor man. And this is my innocent grandson—Bormanus.” For a moment he had had to search to find the name. “Take pity on us!”

“I mean to take pity on the world, instead, and use you as may be necessary for the world’s good,” the goddess answered. “But what worthier fate can mortals hope for? Look at me, both of you.”

Zalazar raised his eyes again. The woman’s countenance was once more bearable. Even as he looked, she turned her head as if to speak or otherwise communicate with someone else behind her in the cloud. Zalazar could see in there part of a corridor, and also a portion of some kind of room, all lined in brightness. The white interior walls and overhead were all shifting slightly and continually in their outlines, in a way that suggested unaltered cloudstuff. But the changes were never more than slight, the large-scale shapes remaining as stable as those of a wooden house. And the lady stood always upright upon a perfectly level deck, despite the vast oscillations of the cloud, and its turning as it shifted ever closer to the cliff.

Her piercing gaze returned to Zalazar. “You are an old man, mortal—at first glance, not good for much. But I see that there is hidden value in you. You may stand up.”

He got slowly to his feet. “My lady Je, it is true that once my hands knew power. But the long death of the world has crippled me.”

The goddess’s anger flared at him like a flame. “Speak not to me of death! I am no mere mortal subject to Thanatos.” Her figure, as terrible as that of any warrior, as female as any succubus of love, was now no more than five meters from Zalazar’s half-closed eyes. Her voice rang as clearly and commandingly as before. Yet, mixed with its power was a tone of doomed helplessness, and this tone frightened Zalazar on a deeper level even than did her implied threat.

“Lady,” he murmured, “I can but try. Whatever help you need, I will attempt to give it.”

“Certainly you will. And willingly. If in the old times your hands knew power, as you say, then you will try hard and risk much to bring the old times back again. You will be glad to hazard what little of good your life may have left in it now. Is it not so?”

Zalazar could only sign agreement, wordlessly.

“And the lad with you, your grandson. It he your apprentice, too? Have you given him any training?”

“In tending flocks, no more. In magic?” The old man gestured helplessness with gnarled hands. “In magic, great lady Je? How could I have? Everywhere that we have lived, the world is dead. Or so close to utter deadness that—”

“I have said that you must not speak to me of death! I will not warn you again. Now, it is written that both of you must come aboard. Yes, both; there will be use for both.” And, as if the goddess were piloting and powering the cloud with her will alone, the whole mass of it now tilted gently, bringing her spotless doorway within easy stepping distance of the lip of rock.

Now Zalazar and Bormanus with him were surrounded by whiteness, sealed into it as if by mounds of glowing cotton. While cushioned firmness served their feet as floor or deck, as level always for them as for their divine guide, who walked ahead. Whiteness opened itself ahead of her, and sealed itself again when Bormanus had passed, walking close on Zalazar’s heels.

The grinding of tormented rock and earth below could no longer be heard as the Lady Je, her robes of ermine and ultramarine and brown swirling with her long strides, led them through the cloud. Almost, there was no sound at all. Maybe a little wind, Zalazar decided, very faint and sounding far away. He had the feeling that the cloud, its power and purpose somehow regained, had risen quickly from the scarred valley and was once more swiftly airborne.

Je came to a sudden halt in the soft, pearly silence, and stretched forth her arms. Around her an open space, a room, swiftly began to define itself. In moments there had grown an intricately formed chamber, as high as a large temple, in which she stood like a statue, with her two puny mortal figures in attendance.

Then Zalazar saw that there was one other in the room with them. He muttered something, and heard Bormanus at his side give a quick intake of breath.

The bier or altar at the room’s far end supported a figure that might almost have been a gray statue of a tormented man, done on a heroic scale. The figure was youthful, powerful, naked. With limbs contorted, it lay twisted on one side. The head was turned in a god’s agony so that the short beard jutted vertically.

But it was not a statue. And Zalazar could tell, within a moment of first seeing it, that the sleep that held it was not quite—or not yet—the sleep of death. He had been forbidden to mention death to Je again, and he would not do so.

With a double gesture she beckoned both mortals to cross the room with her to stand beside the figure. While Zalazar was wondering what he ought to say or do, his own right hand moved out, without his willing it, as if to touch the statue-man. Je, he saw, observed this, but she said nothing; and with a great effort of his will Zalazar forced his own arm back to his side. Meanwhile, Bormanus, at his side, was standing still, staring, as if unable to move or speak at all.

Je spoke now as if angry and disappointed. “So, what buried value have you, old man? If you can be of no help in freeing my ally, then why has it been ordained for you to be here?”

“Lady, how should I know?” Zalazar burst out. “I am sorry to disappoint you. I knew something, once, of magic. But . . .” As for even understanding the forces that could bind a god like this, let alone trying to undo them . . . Zalazar could only gesture helplessly. At last he found words. “Great lady Je, I do not even know who this is.”

“Call him Phaeton.”

“Ah, great gods,” Zalazar muttered, shocked and near despair.

“Yes, mortal, indeed we are. As well you knew when you first saw us.”

“Yes, I knew . . . indeed.” In fact, he had thought that all the gods were long dead, or departed from the world of humankind. “And why is he—like this?”

“He has fallen in battle, mortal. I and he and others have laid siege to Cloudholm, and it has been a long and bitter fight. We seek to free his father, Helios, who lies trapped in the same kind of enchantment there. Through Helios’s entrapment, the world of old is dying. Have you heard of Cloudholm, old mortal? Among men it is not often named.”

“Ah. I have heard something. Long ago . . .”

“It stifles the mana-rain that Helios cast ever on the Earth. With a fleet of cloudships like this one, we hurled ourselves upon its battlements—and were defeated. Most of the old gods lie now in tormented slumber, far above. A few have switched sides willingly. And all our ships save this one were destroyed.”

“How could they dare?” The words burst from Bormanus, the first he had uttered since boarding the cloud-vessel. Then he stuttered, as Je’s eyes burned at him: “I mean, who would dare try to destroy such ships? And who would have the power to do it?”

The goddess looked at the boy a moment longer, then reached out and took him by the hand. “Lend me your mortal fingers here. Let us see if they will serve to drain enchantment off.” Bormanus appeared to be trying to draw back, but his hand, like a baby’s, was brought out forcibly to touch the statue-figure’s arm. And Zalazar’s hand went out on its own once more. This time he could not keep it back, or perhaps he did not dare to try. His fingers spread on rounded arm-muscle, thicker by far than his own thigh. The touch of the figure made him think more of frozen snake than flesh of god. And now, Zalazar felt faint with sudden terror. Something, some great power, was urging the freezing near-death to desert its present captive and be content with Zalazar and Bormanus instead. But that mighty urging was mightily opposed, and came to nothing. At last, far above Zalazar’s head, as if between proud kings disputing across some infant’s cradle, a truce was reached. For the moment. He was able to withdraw his hand unharmed, and watched as Bormanus did the same.

The goddess Je sighed. It was a world-weary sound, close to defeat yet still infinitely stubborn. “And yet I am sure that there is something in you, old man . . . or possibly in your young companion here. Something that in the end will be of very great importance. Something that must be found . . . though I see, now, that you yourselves can hardly be expected to be aware of what it is.”

He clasped his hand. “Oh great lady Je, we are only poor humans . . . mortals . . .”

“Never mind. In time I will discover the key. What is written anywhere, I can eventually read.”

Zalazar was aware now of a strong motion underneath his feet. Even to weak human senses it was evident that the whole cloud was now in purposeful and very rapid flight.

“Where are we going?” Bormanus muttered, as if he were asking the air itself. He was a very handsome youth, with dark and curly hair.

“We return to the attack, young mortal. If most of our fleet has been destroyed, well, so too are the defenses of Cloudholm nearly worn away. One more assault can bring it into my hands, and set its prisoners free.”

Zalazar had been about to ask some question, but now a distracting realization made him forget what it was. He had suddenly become aware that there was some guardian presence, sprite or demon he thought, melded with the cloud, driving and controlling it on Je’s commands. It drew for energy on some vast internal store of mana, a treasure trove that Zalazar could only dimly sense.

Now, in obedience to Je’s unspoken orders, the light inside the room or temple where they stood was taking on a reddish tinge. And the cloud-carvings were disappearing from what Zalazar took to be the forward wall. As Je faced in that direction, pictures began to appear there magically. These were of a cloudscape first, then of an earthly plain seen from a height greater than any mountain’s. Both were passing at fantastic speed.

Je nodded as if satisfied. “Come,” she said, “and we will try your usefulness in a new way.” With a quick gesture she opened the whiteness to one side, and overhead. A stair took form even as she began to climb it. “We will see if your value lies in reconnoitering the enemy.”

Clinging to Bormanus’s shoulder for support, Zalazar found that the stairs were not as hard to negotiate as he had feared, even when they shifted form from one step to the next. Then there was a sudden gaping purple openness above their heads. “Fear not,” said Je. “My protection is upon you both, to let you breathe and live.”

Zalazar and Bormanus mounted higher. Wind shrieked thinly now, not in their faces but around them at some little distance, as if warded by some invisible shield. Then abruptly the climbing stair had no more steps. Zalazar thought that they stood on an open deck of cloud, under a bright sun in a dark sky, in some strange realm of neither day nor night. The prow of the cloudship that he rode upon was just before him; he stood as if on the bridge of some proud ocean vessel, looking out over deck and rounded bow, and a wild vastness of the elements beyond.

Not that the ship was borne by anything as small and simple as an earthly sea. The whole globe of Earth was already so far below that Zalazar could now begin to see its roundness, and still the cloudship climbed. All natural clouds were far below, clinging near the great curve of Earth, though rising here and there in strong relief. At first Zalazar thought that the star-pierced blackness through which they flew was empty of everything but passing light. But presently—with, as he sensed, Je’s unspoken aid—he began to be able to perceive structure in the thinness of space about him.

“What do you see now, my sage old man? And you, my clever youth?” Je’s voice pleaded even as it mocked and commanded. Her fear and puzzlement frightened Zalazar again. For the first time now he knew true regret that he had followed his first impulse and climbed a chopped-off mountain. Where now was the good result that prescience had seemed to promise?

“I see only the night ahead of us,” responded Bormanus. His voice sounded remote, as if he were half asleep.

“I . . . see,” said Zalazar, and paused with that. Much was coming clear to him, but it was going to be hard to describe. The cloud structures far below, so heavy with their contained water and their own mundane laws, blended almost imperceptibly into the base of something much vaster, finer, and more subtle—something that filled the space around the Earth, from the level of those low clouds up to the vastly greater altitude at which Zalazar now stood. And higher still . . . his eyes, as if ensnared now by those faery lines and arches, followed them upward and outward and ever higher still. The lines girdled the whole round Earth, and rose . . .

And rose . . .

Zalazar clutched out for support. Obligingly, a stanchion of cloudstuff grew up and hardened into place to meet his grasp. He did not even look at it. His eyes were fixed up and ahead, looking at Cloudholm.

Imagine the greatest castle of legend. And then go beyond that, and beyond, till imagination knows itself inadequate. Two aspects dominate: first, an almost invisible delicacy, with the appearance of a fragility to match. Secondly, almost omnipotent power—or, again, its seeming. Size was certainly a component of that power. Zalazar had never tried to, or been able to, imagine anything as high as this. So high that it grew near only slowly, though the cloudship was racing toward it at a speed that Zalazar would have described as almost as fast as thought.

Then Zalazar saw how, beyond Cloudholm, a thin crescent of moon rose wonderfully higher still; and again, beyond that, burned the blaze of sun, a jewel in black. These sights threw him into a sudden terror of the depths of space. No longer did he marvel so greatly that Je and her allied powers could have been defeated.

“Great lady,” he asked humbly, “what realm, whose dominion is this?”

“What I need from you, mortal, are answers, not questions of a kind that I can pose myself.” Je’s broad white hand swung out gently to touch him on the eyes. Her touch felt surprisingly warm. Her voice commanded: “Say what you see.”

The touch at once allowed him to see more clearly. But he stuttered, groping for words. What he was suddenly able to perceive was that the sun lived at the core of a magnificent, perpetual explosion, the expanding waves of which were as faint as Cloudholm itself, but nonetheless glorious for that. These waves moved in some medium far finer than the air, more tenuous than even the thinning air that had almost ceased to whistle with the cloudship’s passage. And the waves of the continual slow sun-explosion bore with them a myriad of almost infinitesimal particles, particles that were heavy with mana, though they were almost too small to be called solid.

And there were the lines, as of pure force, in space. In obedience to some elegant system of laws they bore the gossamer outer robes of the sun itself, to wrap the Earth with delicate energy . . . and the mana that flowed outward from the sun—great Zeus but there was such a flood of it!

The Earth was bathed in warmth and energy—but not in mana, Zalazar suddenly perceived. That flow had been cut off by Cloudholm and its spreading wings. (Yes, Zalazar could see the pinions of enchantment now, raptor-wings extending curved on two sides from the castle itself, as if to embrace the whole Earth—or smother it.) Through them the common sunlight flowed on unimpeded, to make the surface of the world flash blue and ermine white. But all the inner energies of magic were cut off . . .

Zalazar realized with a start that he was, or just had been, entranced and muttering, that someone with a mighty grip had just shaken his arm, that a voice of divine power was urging him to speak up, to make sense in what he reported of his vision.

“Tell clearly what you see, old man. The wings, you say, spread out from Cloudholm to enfold the Earth. That much I knew already. Now say what their weakness is. How are they to be torn aside?”

“I . . . I . . . the wings are very strong. They draw sustaining power from the very flow of mana that they deny the Earth. Some of the particles that hail on them go through—but those are without mana. Many of the particles and waves remain, are trapped by the great wings and drained of mana and of other energies. Then eventually they are let go.”

“Old fool, what use are you? You tell me nothing I do not already know. Say, where is the weakness of the wings? How can our Earth be fed?”

“Just at the poles. There is a weakness, sometimes, a drooping of the wings, and there a little more mana than elsewhere can reach the Earth.”

Suddenly faint, Zalazar felt himself begin to topple. He was grabbed, and upheld, and shaken again. “Tell more, mortal. What power has created Cloudholm?”

“What do I know? How can I see? What can I say?”

He was shaken more violently than before, until in his desperate fear of Je he cried: “Great Apollo himself could not learn more!”

He was released abruptly, and there was a precipitous silence, as if even Je had been shocked by Zalazar’s free use of that name, the presence of whose owner only his mother Leto and his father Zeus could readily endure. Then Zalazar’s eyes were brushed again by Je’s warm hand, and he came fully to himself.

Cloudholm was bearing down on them. “And Helios is trapped up there?” Zalazar wondered aloud. “But why, and how?”

“Why?” The bitterness and soft rage in Je’s voice were worthy of a goddess. “Why, I myself helped first to bind him. Was I made to do that, after opposing him and bringing on a bitter quarrel? I do not know. Are even we deities the playthings of some overriding fate? What was Helios’s sin, for such a punishment? And what was mine?”

Again Zalazar had to avert his gaze, for Je’s beauty glowed even more terribly than before. And at the same time he had to strive to master himself, hold firm his will against the hubris that rose up in him and urged him to reach for the role of god himself. Such an opportunity existed, would exist, foreknowledge told him, and it was somewhere near at hand. If he only . . .

His internal struggle was interrupted by the realization that the cloudship no longer moved. Looking carefully, Zalazar could see that it had come to rest upon an almost insubstantial plain.

Straight ahead of him now, the bases of the walls of Cloudholm rose. And there was a towering gate.

Je was addressing him almost calmly again. “If your latent power, old mortal, is neither of healing nor of seeing, then perhaps it lies in the realm of war. That is the way we now must pass. Kneel down.”

Zalazar knelt. The right hand of the goddess closed on his and drew him to his feet again. He arose on lithely muscular legs, and saw that the old clothing in which he had walked the high pasturelands had been transformed. He was clad now in silver cloth, a fabric worked with a fine brocade. His garments hung on him as solidly as chain mail, yet felt as soft and light as silk. They were at once the clothing and the armor of a god.

In Zalazar’s right hand, grown young and muscular, a short sword had appeared. The weapon was of some metal vastly different from that of his garments, and yet he could feel that its power was at least their equal. On his left arm now hung a shield of dazzling brightness, but seemingly of no more than a bracelet’s weight.

The front of the cloudship divided and opened a way for the man who had been the old herdsman Zalazar. The thin cloudstuff of the magic plain swirled and rippled round his boots of silver-gray. His feet were firmly planted, and though he could plainly see the sunlit Earth below, he knew no fear that he might fall.

He glanced behind him once, and saw the cloudship altering, disintegrating, and knew that the nameless demon who had sustained it had come out now at Je’s command, to serve her in some other way.

Then Zalazar faced ahead. He could see, now, how much damage the great walls of Cloudholm had sustained, and what had caused the damage. Other cloud-ships, their insubstantial wreckage mixed with that of the walls they had assailed, lay scattered across the plain and piled at the feet of those enduring, fragile-looking towers. Nor were the wrecked ships empty. With vision somehow granted him by Je, Zalazar could see that each of them held at least one sleep-bound figure of the stature of a god or demigod. They were male or female, old-looking or young, of diverse attributes. All were caught and held, like Phaeton, by some powerful magic that imposed a quiet, if not always a peaceful, slumber.

Now, where was Je herself? Zalazar realized suddenly that he could see neither the goddess nor her attendant demon. He called her name aloud.

Do not seek me, her voice replied, whispering just at his ear. Make your way across the plain, and force the castle gates. With my help you can do it, and I shall be with you when my help is needed.

Zalazar shrugged his shoulders. With part of his mind he knew that his present feelings of power and confidence were unnatural, given him by the goddess for her own purposes. But at the same time he could not deny those feelings—nor did he really want to. Feeling enormously capable, driven by an urge to prove what this divine weapon in his new right hand could do, he shrugged his shoulders again, loosening tight new muscles for action. Beside him, Bormanus, who had not been changed, was looking about in all directions alertly. With one hand the lad gripped tightly the small lyre at his belt, but he gave no other sign of fear. Then suddenly he raised his other hand and pointed.

Coming from the gates of Cloudholm, which now stood open, already halfway across the wide plain between, a challenger was treading thin white cloud in great white boots.

Zalazar, watching, raised his sword a little. Still the goddess was letting him know no fear. He who approached was a red-bearded man, wearing what looked like a winged Nordic helmet, and other equipment to match. He was of no remarkable height for a hero, but as he drew near Zalazar saw that his arms and shoulders, under a tight battle harness, were of enormous thickness. He balanced a monstrous war hammer like a feather in one hand.

I should know who this is, Zalazar thought. But then the thought was gone, as quickly as it had come. Je manages her tools too well, he thought again, and then that idea too was swept from his mind.

The one approaching came to a halt, no more than three quick strides away. “Return to Earth, old Zalazar,” he called out, jovially enough. “My bones already ache with a full age of combat. I yearn to let little brother Hypnos whisper in my ear, so I can lie down and rest. I don’t know why Je bothered to bring you here; the proper time for humans to visit Cloudholm is long gone, and again, is not yet come.”

“Save your riddles,” Zalazar advised him fearlessly. This, he thought, in a moment of great glory and pride, this is what it is like to be a god. And in his heart he thanked Je for this moment, and cared not what might happen in the next.

“Oho,” Redbeard remarked good-humoredly. “Well, then, it seems we must.” The sword and hammer leapt together of themselves, with a blare as of all war-trumpets in the world, and a clash as of all arms. It lasted endlessly, and at the same time it seemed to take no time at all. Zalazar thought that he saw Redbeard fall, but when he bent with some intention of dealing a finishing stroke, the figure of his opponent had vanished. Save for Bormanus, who had prudently stepped back from the clash, he was apparently alone.

Well fought! Je’s voice, from invisible lips, whispered beside his ear. There was new excitement in the words, an undertone of savage triumph.

Zalazar, triumphant too—and at the same time knowing an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, for these deeds were not his of his own right—moved on toward the open gate. He had gone a dozen strides when something—he thought not Je—urged him to look back. When he did, he could now see Redbeard, hammer still in hand, stretched out upon the cloud. There was no sign of blood or injury. At Redbeard’s ear a winged head was hovering, whispering a compulsion from divine lips. And on the face of the fallen warrior there was peace.

Why do you pause? Je demanded in her hidden voice. She required no answer, but Zalazar must go on. All Je’s attention, and Zalazar’s, too, was bent now upon the open castle gate. It slammed shut of itself when he was still a hundred strides away. Now he could see that what he had taken for carved dragon heads on either side of the portal were alive, turning fanged jaws toward him.

Zalazar glanced at the lad who was walking so trustingly at his side, and for the first time since landing on the cloud-plain he knew anxiety. “Lady Je,” he prayed in a whisper, “I crave your protection for my grandson as well as for myself.”

I give what protection I can, to those I need. And I foresee now that I will need him, later on . . .

The dragons guarding the gate stretched out their necks when Zalazar came near; fangs like bunched knives drove at him. The shield raised upon his left arm took the blows. The sword flashed left, lashed right.

Zalazar stepped back, gasping; he looked to see that Bormanus, who had kept clear, was safe. Then Zalazar willed the swordblade at the great cruciform timbers of the gate itself. They splintered, shuddered, and swung back.

Je’s triumph was a shrill scream, almost soundless, inarticulate.

Zalazar knew that he must still go forward, now into Cloudholm itself. He balanced the shield upon his left arm, hefted the sword again in his right hand. He drew a deep breath, of ample-seeming air, and entered the palace proper.

He came to door after door, each taller and more magnificent than the last, and each swung open of itself to let him in. Around him on every hand there towered shapes that should have been terrible, though he could see them only indistinctly. Something told him which way he must go. And he pressed on, through one royal haft and chamber after another . . .

. . . until he had entered that which he knew must be the greatest hall of all. At the far end of it, very distant from where he stood, Zalazar saw the Throne of the World. It was guarded by a wall of flame, and it was standing vacant.

As Zalazar’s feet brought him closer to the fire, he saw that it was centered on a plinth of cloud that supported another manlike figure, similar to that of tortured Phaeton but larger still.

It is Helios, said Je’s disembodied whisper. Full him from the flames, restore him to his throne, and mana will rain upon the Earth again.

The flame felt very hot. When Zalazar probed it with his sword, it pushed the swordblade back. “But what power is this that imprisons him? Je?”

Do not ask questions, mortal. Act.

Zalazar stalked right and left, seeking a way around the flames or through them. The figure inside them did not seem to be burned or tormented by the terrible heat, only bound. Zalazar, as he approached the tongues of fire, had to raise first one hand, and then his shield, to try to protect himself from radiance and glare. The only way to reach the bound god seemed to be to leap directly into the flames, or through them.

Zalazar tried. Unbearable pain seared at him, and the tongues of flame seized him like hands and threw him back. The instant he was clear of the flames, then-burning stopped; he was unharmed.

Je shrieked words of compulsion in his ear. Zalazar wrapped himself in his silvery cloak, raised his shield, brandished his sword, and tried again. And was thrown back. And yet again, but all to no avail. And still Je made him try. She stood near now in her full imaged presence.

Yet again the tongues of fire gripped Zalazar, and hurled him flying, sprawling. When Zalazar saw that the metal of his shield was running now in molten drops, he cried aloud his agony: “Spare me, great Je! what will you have from me? Only so much can you make of me—so much and no more.”

“I will make whatever I wish of you, mortal. We are so near, so very near to victory!” Her gaze turned to Bormanus, and she went on: “There is a way in which we can augment our power, as I foresaw. Murder will feed great magic.”

Zalazar came crawling along the floor, toward the goddess’s feet. He made his hand let go the sword. Only now he realized that no scabbard for it had ever been given him. “Goddess, do not demand of me that I kill my own flesh and blood. It will not bring you victory. I was never a great wizard, even in my youth. No Alhazred, no Vulcan the Shaper. Though even before I met you I had convinced myself of that. A warrior? Conqueror? No, I am not Trillion Mu either, though I have killed; your demon’s power and yours could sustain me in combat for a time even against Thor Redbeard himself. But I cannot do more. Even murder will not give me power enough. And if it could, I will not—”

In fishwife rage, Je lost her self-control. “What are you, thing of clay, to argue with me?” She grabbed Bormanus and forced him forward, bent down so that his neck was exposed for a swordstroke. “Earth is mine to deal with as I will, and you are no more than a clod of earth. Kill him!”

“Destroy me if you will, goddess. If you can. I will not kill him.”

Je’s eyes glowed, orange fire from a volcano. “I see that I have maddened you with my assistance, until you think you are a demigod at least. You are not worth destruction. If I only withdraw my sustaining power, you will both fall back to earth and be no more than bird-dung when you land. Where will you turn for help if I abandon you?”

Zalazar, on his feet again, turned, physically, looking for help. The half-melted shield now felt impossibly heavy, weighing his left arm down. The brocade of his god-garments hung on him now like lead. The last time the flames had thrown him, some of their pain had remained in his bones. At a thought from Je, the cloud-floor of the palace would open beneath his feet. He would have a long fall in which to think things over.

The Throne of the World was empty, waiting. No help there. But still he was not going to murder.

Je’s voice surprised him in its altered tone. It was less threatening now. “Zalazar, I see that I must tell you the truth. It need not be Helios that you place on the Throne when you have gained the power. It could be me.”

“You?”

“The truth is that it could even be yourself.”

“I?” Zalazar turned slowly. Looked at the throne again, and thought, and shook his head. “I am only a poor man, I tell you, goddess. Alone and almost lost. If it is true that I can choose the Ruler of the World, well, it must be some cruel joke, such as you say that even gods are subject to. But if the choice is truly mine to make, I will not give it you. As for taking it myself, I should not. I have no fitness, or powers, or wealth, or even family.”

Silence fell in Cloudholm. It was an abrupt change; a stillness that was something more than silence had descended. Zalazar waited, eyes downcast, holding his breath, trying to understand.

Then he began to understand, for the last three words that he himself had spoken seemed to be echoing and re-echoing in the air. All his life he had been a poor nomad, with no family at all.

Even the flames of Helios’s prison seemed to have cooled somewhat, though Zalazar did not immediately raise his head to look at them. When it seemed to him that the silence might have gone on for half an hour, he did at last look up.

He who had walked with Zalazar as his companion had at last taken the lyre from his belt, and the others were allowed to recognize him now.

Je had recoiled, cringing, herself for once down on one knee, with averted gaze. But Zalazar, for now, could look.

White teeth, inhumanly beautiful and even, smiled at him. “Old man, you have decided well. One comes to claim the throne in time, and Thanatos will be overcome, and your many-times-great-grandsons will have to choose again; but that is not your problem now. I send you back to Earth. Retain the youth that Je has given you—it is fitting, for a new age of the world has been ordained, though not by me. And memories, if you can—retain them too. Magic must sleep.”

Bright, half-melted shield and silver garments fell softly to the floor of cloud, beside the sword. Zalazar was gone.

The bright eyes under the dark curls swept around. The god belted his lyre and unslung his bow. There was a great recessional howling as Je’s demon-servant fled, and fell, and fled and fell again.

Je raised her eyes, in a last moment of defiance. The winged head of Hypnos, already hovering beside her ear, silently awaited a command.

“Sleep now, sister Je. As our father Zeus and our brothers and sisters sleep. I join you presently,” Apollo said.

INTRODUCTION (The Berserker Wars)

The History Of The Galaxy

MESSAGE BEGINS

REPORT ON THE PRIVATE ARCHIVE OF THE THIRD HISTORIAN

A File Which Presents the History of the Galaxy in Twenty Pages

Transmission Mode: Triplicate Message Torpedoes

Code: Trapdoor XIII

TX Date: 7645.11.0

From: Archivist Ingli, Expedition Co-ordinator

To: Chief Co-ordinator, Earth Archives
cc: Defense Co-ordination Central

Hal: We’re here, surrounded by friendly Carmpan of whom we rarely see more than one or two at a time, and then usually only with some partial or symbolic physical barrier between us. Everything is going pretty much as expected, we have experienced nothing really contrary to the experience of a thousand years’ occasional and arm’s-length contact with the race. By the way, it’s beginning to look, to me at least, less and less coincidental that our first meeting with the Carmpan coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the Berserker War. I’ll have more to say on this point presently.

Let me first describe what I consider to be our main achievement so far on this mission. To begin with, the structure in which we are living and working is best described as a large, comfortable library, and we have been given free access to great masses of information in several kinds of storage systems. (I hope, by the way, that the exchange team of Carmpan researchers on Earth are being treated as well as we are here.) Much of this mass of stored data is, as we expected, still unintelligible to us and so far useless. But quite early in the game our hosts pointed out to us, for our special attention, an alcove containing what we’ve come to call the private archive of the Third Historian. Having looked at the files therein, my colleagues and I agree unanimously that they were very probably compiled and largely written by the same Carmpan individual who used that name (or title) as signature to the messages he composed and sent to our ancestors some generations ago, when the Berserker peril was even greater than it is today.

Since a copy of this report is going directly to the military, Hal, bear with me when I pause now and then to insert a paragraph or two of history. We can’t reasonably expect that all the readers over there are going to know as much of it offhand as we do.

Up until now, almost all of the information that we have ever had directly from the Carmpan on any subject—Berserkers, the Builders, the Carmpan themselves, the Elder Races, almost everything—a very great proportion of this information, I say, has come to our Solarian worlds through long-distance communications signed by this one individual, for whom we still have no other name than Third Historian. He—or she, the Carmpan language does not readily distinguish sexes, and they usually appear to care not much more about sex than we do about blood types—was active centuries ago, and to my knowledge no new Third Historian message has been received on the Solarian world for centuries.

So we still know next to nothing about the Third Historian or indeed about any Carmpan individual as a person, and it appears to me unlikely that this present Expedition is going to find out much about him. We do of course ask questions, particularly since being shown the private archive that is marked in several places with his signature. Our questions are answered in the usual obscure ways, about which more below. Even the significance of the number in his name or title is still unknown to us. It does seem certain that more than three individuals must have occupied the post of Chief Historian—assuming there is such an official post among the Carmpan—during such a very long history as their race boasts. Or would boast if they were at all given to boasting.

When I asked directly, I was told that the Third Historian is still alive. This surprised me somewhat, though the life-span required, considerably less than a thousand standard years, would not be utterly out of the question even for one of our own comparatively perishable species. However, when I asked urgently to see him, or at least to be told where he is, I was informed just as unequivocally that the Third Historian is now dead. One of the enclosures with this message is our own recording of this particular question-and-answer session.

Let me digress just a little more from the important contents of the TH’s private files, to remark that in the short time we’ve been here we’ve had more face-to-face (if that’s the right way to put it; you know what I mean) contact with the Carmpan than have any other group of Solarian humans in history. As you are well aware, we were very eager for this chance. On the long voyage out here we managed to convince ourselves that with goodwill on both sides (a requirement that I certainly feel has been met) we were going to do a lot better at communicating with the Carmpan than any other of our race has ever done. We were going to dig a lot of Galactic history out of them, complete with hard facts, dates, numbers, the kind of thing we like to call history. We would dig up information that must be available to them even if they consider it valueless, and bring it home with us. Not only that, we would at last meet a Carmpan or two who really wanted to learn about us through our own conscious attempts at communication; and, boy, were we ever going to communicate with them.

Need I add, that so far it hasn’t worked out quite that way? That so far our formal conference sessions are dominated, whatever we Solarians try to do, by the Carmpan spiritual (?) and sociological abstractions? (Military readers, see my monograph on Drifts and Tones in Carmpan Communications; someone at the Archives will be glad to furnish you with copies.) That’s just the way in which our gracious hosts here insist on looking at the Universe. I find I must set down the cliche once again, and then I swear that I will ban it from all later messages: The Carmpan mind is very, very different from our own.

Of course the communications we have been directing to the Carmpan while in general conference form, to our way of thinking, a clear and concise outline of the history of our Solarian variant of the human race, from our origins on Earth through our later phases of expansion and development to the present, when we are the dominant life form on more than a thousand major planets in more than seven hundred systems, not to mention all the natural and artificial extra-systemic habitats, enjoying a blessed variety of political and economic organizations while managing to co-operate quite well, most of us, most of the time, in the thousand-year Berserker War.

I frankly don’t know what our hosts think of this presentation we make about ourselves. There are moments when I believe they knew it all already, knew more than we have told them, down to the last detailed production statistic, through their own far-ranging mental activities. And, again, there are times when I believe they just don’t care, don’t know and aren’t interested, are going through the motions of listening to us only out of politeness. They do express thanks when we pause after shoving information at them, as they express thanks for so much else that our race has done. But there is no substantive comment on what we tell them. There are no questions that sound eager.

That’s how things stand now. We are here, and being very well treated, and we like our hosts. And they like us and are glad to have us here, even if it would be strictly inaccurate to say that they enjoy our company. And it is somehow implied that they have done, are doing, will do, something important for us. That’s how things stand, how they stood the moment we arrived. Actually we could just have sent them an electronic greeting card and accomplished just as much.

Except of course for one thing. Our presentation of our own history evidently had at least one good effect, that of showing our hosts what we think a history ought to be. It may have decided them to show us quickly the one file in the library that comes closest to our ideal. It was approximately one standard day after our own history presentation, which came about one standard day after our arrival, that we were led to the personal file of the Third Historian. I think I have mentioned that the alcove containing the Third Historian’s file and carrel occupies only a very small portion of this library. It’s quite a comfortable, self-sufficient artificial world, by the way, that seems to have been built with Solarian comfort and convenience in mind. The gravity, atmosphere, lighting, furnishings, color schemes, and so on, are very pleasant by our standards. Green plants are abundant. And the Carmpan information-handling systems, let me interject here, work better than ours do, once we know precisely what we want to ask of them. Details on request, when we get home. The idea so commonly held among Solarians that we are technologically superior to the Carmpan seems to me to be justifiable only on a very selective basis.

Back to my main subject. While the private writings of the Third Historian we have discovered here are more obscure and difficult to translate than we would like, certainly more so than his famous public transmissions to our ancestors centuries ago, yet they are vastly more accessible to Solarian understanding than any other Carmpan literary-historical work that I have ever encountered in a lifetime of study; I exclude of course documents on the level of mere maps and catalogues, which in their rare appearances have often had practical if limited application.

If we had come here completely unacquainted with the Third Historian, it would still have been obvious to us from his private archive that he was—or is—intensely interested in two things. The first of these, for whatever reason, is our own race. As in his earlier public messages, he repeatedly expresses Carmpan gratitude for our leadership, our victories, and our losses in the long and terrible war against what he so often calls “the unliving enemy.” To me the impression is inescapable that much of the material in this private archive consists of drafts of messages intended for us but never sent; that these reiterations of thanks must be for our benefit.

The second great interest of the Third Historian, as evidenced in his old public messages as well as in the newly discovered material, is the Berserkers. Briefly, our most important find within his private archive is an electronic document (I am of course enclosing a recording of it herewith) that purports to be a digest, a capsule, or perhaps an outline, for nothing less than a history of the whole inhabited portion of the Galaxy for as far back as the Carmpan have been able to keep records and their history, we should recall, has been shown to extend into the tens of millions of years at least. Everything we have learned here tends to support the accepted belief that the Carmpan mental probing can span more than half the Galactic diameter; and that this mind-probing is as accurate for the purposes to which the Carmpan put it as it appears to be useless for any of the military, commercial, or hard (in our terms) research functions to which we have always yearned to be able to apply it.

* * *

I had hoped when I began to compose this message to be able to include with it a full if tentative translation of the History Document (hereafter abbreviated HD) found in the Third Historian’s private archive. Without the episodic appendix (see below) it could be printed out in twenty pages; it’s really that short. But unfortunately the longer I study HD with an eye to making a translation, the more I realize how obscure it is somewhat in the sense of poetry, I mean, and you, Hal, know what trying to translate poetry can be like. Layer upon layer of suggested meaning, that to me is at best barely perceptible, is packed beneath a surface narrative that in itself could be translated in a number of possible ways. Here we have Drifts grafted upon Tones, and vice versa. Information is packed not only in layer upon layer, but in the interference patterns, or in something analogous to such patterns, that are formed by the relationships between the layers, between each layer and all the other ones. I fear I am not making myself clear. In future messages I mean to go into much more detail about this hologram-like though non-physical system.

Here let me digress to mention one fact definitely confirmed by the surface narrative in HD. This is that the Builders were a warlike race for a long time before they created the Berserkers. There is convincing evidence that before the fateful experiment the Builders had fought at least four long, desperate interstellar wars, resulting in the complete extermination of at least four other races. These four early victim-races are unfortunately identified in HD only in the Tones-Drifts system of sociological-spiritual (religious?) notation. Whether any translation at all of this passage into a Solarian tongue is possible without assigning the races completely arbitrary names and identities (e.g., One, Two, Three, Four) is still in doubt, though I have spent two days working on that simple-seeming question with our own ship’s computer.

Parenthetically: I am assured by our hosts that as much time as we might like is available to us on Carmpan computers which our hosts assure us have much more capacity than the shipboard one we brought along. The only problem lies in instructing their computers in what we want. I have no great hopes for being able to do this, as so far it seems all but impossible to explain our way of thinking to the Carmpan themselves. Whether their data processing machinery works on a system of Drifts and Tones I have not yet been able to ascertain, but I have assured myself that it certainly does not work like ours.

A second hard fact confirmed by HD about the Builders: They were a race designed to roughly the same physical pattern as Solarian humanity, though somewhat more slender and fine-boned, having originated probably on a lighter planet than Earth. There is a suggestion that the female tended to be fiercer in combat than the male, and it is certain that she was somewhat larger. There was in each individual one cyclopean eye, and paired external sexual organs (of the same sex) so that copulation must commonly have been carried on in duplicate, as it were. The Builders spoke through sound waves as we and the Carmpan do, but their creations the Berserkers were never furnished with the language code as far as can be determined, or indeed with any other means of distinguishing their creators from the other life forms of the Galaxy included in their general programming to hunt down and destroy all life. Of course there may have been some system meant to save the Builders from the general slaughter, a system that failed to operate properly and was never replicated in the later models of the Berserkers as they rebuilt and reproduced themselves. On the other hand, the original Berserkers may have been activated at such a distance from their creators’ home worlds that the death machines were not thought by their builders to represent a danger to them. At any rate, we have found nothing here to contradict the accepted hypothesis, based on old evidence, that the Builders did at last fall victim to their own creations.

It is certain that the Builders no longer exist. The Third Historian speaks of them inevitably in the past tense, something he does in the case of no race that is now known to be still alive. The scraps of recordings that we have found here, showing the Builders’ appearance and containing samples of their speech, do not differ substantially from other such old recordings that I have seen before, and for all I know all of these may be duplicated in Solarian archives somewhere. (None of us on the Expedition roster are specialists in Builders’ History. An unfortunate oversight, perhaps, but if such a specialty exists it would be a very limited one indeed.)

Copies of all the fragmentary Builder recordings here will be sent with our next message. How the Carmpan obtained them is uncertain, since our hosts would not ordinarily have access to the battlefield wreckage of Berserkers from which our own material has been gleaned. Most of these fragments are excerpts, each lasting only a few seconds, of what if interpreted in Solarian terms would be considered political speeches, delivered amid mass chanting rallies of Builders male and female. There is one fragment like nothing that I personally have seen before, though some other members of the expedition assure me that they have: a scene of Builders performing what might be a dance, or alternatively the application of some kind of rhythmical torture apparatus to an unusually large female. (I need not belabor here the obvious point that all of these interpretations should be considered tentative.) The voices in the recordings, as in fragments of Builder records found elsewhere, are clicking and whining sounds, probably not reproducible by either Solarian or Carmpan vocal organs.

And there is one more fragment, very different from all the rest. In it, members of another race, heretofore unknown to us, appear briefly. Some expedition members have suggested that this may be our only record of the Builders’ nameless but undoubtedly very formidable opponents in their final war, the people whose destruction could not be accomplished without such a desperate gamble as the creation of the Berserkers. Expedition members who favor this interpretation point out similarities between this Builder recording and certain Solarian propaganda art from the past. It shows beings rotund and red, thick-limbed almost to the point of having no limbs separate from the body at all; all this in high contrast to the Builder physique. This Red Race is named, if at all, only in a sort of marginal note (using the Drift-Tone system, of course) that was doubtless added by the Third Historian himself. Translation, as mentioned above, is still pending.

Nowhere in any document that we have so far inspected in this library are values given for the size of the domain of any race, in terms of numbers of worlds, strength of fleets, population figures, and so on; even precise physical locations are very rare. We know of course that the Carmpan are perfectly capable of interstellar navigation when it suits them, that they have built and designed ships whose autopilots work perfectly with any of the commonly used systems of interstellar co-ordinates.

Nor have we found any clue as to how many intelligent races, branches living or dead of Galactic humanity, the Carmpan know about. As I have already suggested, one of the most striking things about this library is the paucity of numbers, of quantitative measurements of any kind. A starfaring race who (with the well-known exception of their Prophets of Probability) prefers to do without mathematics, without even counting, must remain to our minds, to put it mildly, something of a paradox. And I am coming to think that there is that in the essence of what the Solarian mind finds paradoxical that demands repeated expression in the thoughts and minds of the Carmpan and their allies or cousins the Elder Races.

(Note to my military readers: The name ‘Carmpan’ itself, as many of our race today do not realize, derives not from any word by which they call themselves, but rather from the location where our species and theirs first encountered each other.)

We members of the expedition have of course discussed, or tried to discuss, these translational and other difficulties with our unfailingly polite and attentive hosts. As nearly as we can make out from their replies, they believe that the number of intelligent races existing in the Galaxy, for example, is something one simply should not try to know—or if known, it should not be expressed. Despite great efforts on both sides, I have trouble understanding why. To know and express that number would be either sin, or bad form, or maybe sloppy scientific thinking, on the grounds that there is no way one can be sure enough of its value. Maybe a little of all three.

But, I press on, a true, worthy answer does exist, does it not, if it can be discovered?

Yes, I am told. But the true answer involves somehow the Core region of the Galaxy, or perhaps something (someone?) located (dwelling?) at or very near the center of the Core. “All exact counting of races should be done there,” is an exact translation of what one of our hosts said to me. I would be hard put to explain to you which one said it. We are still having a lot of trouble telling one Carmpan from another. But I asked him or her more questions, trying to pin down the identity of this thing or person properly in charge of numbering races at the Core. There was no satisfactory answer; only a single word, which I take to signify a complex structure of some kind.

Following this, our hosts made a joint statement, which I quote in translation as well as I am able. They wished, they said, to “express great sadness over the fate of those intelligent races, diverse branches of Galactic humanity despite all diversity of physical form, however many of them there may have been or may yet be, who have been exterminated by the Builders or the Berserkers or any other cause, those known to us and those who lie in the distant reaches of the Galaxy-beyond-measurement, still unknown to Carmpan and to brave Solarian alike. The loss of these races means that much (creative work, of some form) will have to be accomplished (by some unspecified agents) before the Galaxy can be judged complete and worthy.”

That passage was so relatively easy for me to understand, that I believe someone among the Carmpan must have expended an extraordinary amount of time and effort on it in advance, and that it was then held ready until the proper moment for its utterance should arrive. Is it possible that the Third Historian himself is among those we meet and speak with every day? I seriously think it is possible, and at the same time I doubt that we shall ever know. He could inhabit any of those slow, squarish Carmpan bodies, so incongruously machinelike in appearance for beings whose own constructed machinery is so subtle, who try to avoid the grossly material in any form . . . actually, as I think I mentioned in passing above, we seldom get a really good look at any of the Carmpan here, though we are often physically close to each other and frequently converse. The rooms in which we most often meet are all niches and alcoves and low partitions, with enough screens of live greenery to make us feel that we are in a garden instead of riding a deep-space artifact at a high fraction of the speed of light. The interior lighting is perfect, as I think I have mentioned, for Solarian eyes, and we can view the Carmpan and even touch them on arrangement, to satisfy our curiosity. But at the same time privacy is rarely more than an arm’s length away for anyone, and they frequently resort to it, retreating round a corner or behind a hanging vine. We of course do not intrude upon these temporary retreats. Personally I find myself also retreating sometimes in the midst of a conversation, gazing out through fresh green leaves of some kind—I am no botanist—or a fountain’s spray, enjoying the whole arrangement more than I would have suspected.

I am rambling. Back to the History Document. What it presents of the Carmpan view of the physical universe contains no surprise. The Universe just above the galactic level (yet higher levels are implied but not described) is seen as organized in terms of clusters or groups of galaxies. None of us in the expedition are astronomers or cosmologists enough to know if the details of this organization as the Carmpan describe it differ substantially from those mapped out by our own scientists. Actually the Third Historian uses this physical description only as a background for a question in which he is genuinely interested: Are there Berserkers, of independent origin, in galaxies other than our own? And, if so, will the living races of those other megasystems be able to raise up some analog of Solarian humanity to successfully fight off the unliving foe? This passage, with its understated implication that we are universally rare stuff indeed, makes me feel, I confess, vaguely uncomfortable.

It was shortly after reading this disturbing passage for the first time that I approached our hosts to question them on a more personal level: The Third Historian, in some of his early direct communications to our people, has stated that he “sets down” the “secret thoughts” of Solarian men and women who were at all times parsecs away from him, as well as being in some instances removed by hundreds of years of time even when correction is made for all possible relativistic effects. When my hearers affirmed this, I asked whether any of the Carmpan now present were capable of reading our secret thoughts, and if so, were they? The answer was quick and emphatic denial, the most definite response I think I have ever had to any question here. “You and we are too close together,” they informed me, “for anything like that.”

In HD the Third Historian is also greatly intrigued by another question, related to the one discussed a paragraph above: May there ever have been, in the remote past of our own Galaxy (the context makes it plain he is talking about a billion years or more), other Berserkers, independent of those now existing? He adduces a statement which must be meant as evidence to support this idea, though I cannot understand it (again, see enclosed recording.) I am haunted by this suggestion, and it makes me wonder if some of the Elder Races still extant may possibly be of comparable age. It is to me an awesome thought that some races may have survived a Berserker peril more than once.

Another member of our expedition has very recently reported what we all consider to be a remarkable find (see her own report enclosed herewith). In a corner of the library far removed from the archive of the Third Historian she has discovered a record of what are described as “multi-species life constructs” that antedate even the Carmpan themselves by millions of standard years. I interpret “life-construct” to mean a living thing composed of other living things. If we are reading this correctly it is odd that HD does not mention such creations. But perhaps it does, perhaps life-constructs and much else are concealed in the Drifts and Tones amid the layers of meaning.

Here I begin to ask myself another question. It is not a new question among Solarian historians, but here it takes on a new sharpness. Did the Carmpan know the Builders, or know of them, before the Builders plunged into their final war and decided upon their Frankenstein’s creation? Conventional history holds that they did not; had the Carmpan known of the Berserkers when that awful construction was first accomplished, the gentle, peaceful Carmpan could hardly have failed to send immediate warning to the races who were thereby placed in imminent peril. But really there is no evidence that the Carmpan did not send such warnings. To some they may have come too late; some may have been unable to profit by them, some may have disbelieved. It would be consistent with the Carmpan nature that such warnings might have been sent on a purely subliminal level of communication if such exists. I think it may. Could it have been at least in part a Carmpan influence that caused an increase in belligerence on many Solarian worlds simultaneously, provoking a military buildup in those decades just before the first Berserker radio-voices came drifting in to our detectors from the deep?

And there is the fact that the Carmpan and Solarian branches of humanity met for the first time very shortly before the first Berserker onslaught on one of our worlds was sustained. Even on the relatively short time-scale of Solarian history the two events, the two meetings, were virtually simultaneous. What are the odds that this was only chance? When one day I am able to meet a Carmpan Prophet of Probability I mean to ask him to calculate the odds.

I have not yet faced our hosts with this suggestion: That that famous first contact between our two races, long assumed by Solarians to be a natural result of our aggressive exploration, was really timed by the Carmpan for their own reasons; that they had known of us for a long time preceding; that we were picked, chosen, adopted, when the time was ripe, brought onto the Galactic stage to play a role just when our ferocity and our armaments were needed in the service of all Galactic life.

If this suggestion is true, still it is far from clear to me that the deception is something we ought to blame the Carmpan for. They did not create the Berserkers nor launch them in our direction. We would still have had to fight the Berserkers if we and the Carmpan had never met. Ought we to blame them for not warning us clearly and directly? We were, and are, the suspicious and mistrustful ones, who really needed no warnings to be on our guard. Probably we would not, on that first memorable day of violence between us and the unliving foe, have returned the Berserkers’ fire a microsecond sooner, whatever the Carmpan might have whispered to us beforehand.

And yet I, like most Solarians, continue to feel that the Carmpan presence, their influence, has helped us all through the war. Through them we have learned not only of the Elders but of other races much more helpless. We would still have fought, of course, for our own survival, our own temples and our gods. But it was good, it was better, to know that we were fighting for others also, for the cause of all life in the Galaxy.

When the war began a thousand years ago—may our own lifetimes see a final victory—the belief was widespread among our Solarian people that the Carmpan, even dedicated to peace as they assuredly were, would be forced by events to take up arms. After all, to refuse to enter a war against Berserkers was to be guilty by inaction of the deaths of innocent victims—in this war, as in no other, to fight was not to kill. For our unliving foe, no sympathy or pity could be felt, any more than for the missiles that they launched against us. But for the Carmpan it was no longer a matter of choice. The skills needed for direct combat, the mental and emotional abilities much more importantly than the physical, had been lost to them long ago, when their will to fight was lost or when that will was, perhaps, absorbed in something larger.

One point of view, put forward here by some expedition members, is that the Carmpan did fight the Berserkers, and very successfully. They fought so well that great numbers of them are still alive after a thousand years of the struggle, which when facing Berserkers must be considered a remarkable record. It was simply a matter of the Carmpan choosing and then using properly the most effective weapon available—which happened to be us. They made sure that we had grasped the magnitude of the danger posed by the Berserkers, and then they got the hell out of our way, while from time to time providing us with such indirect help as they were able.

Another viewpoint, expressed recently by some expedition members, is that the Carmpan have already helped us more than most of us realize. They not only knew their own limitations but probably understood ours better than we did ourselves. Of course they never tried to enter battle at our side, never built weapons for us or even shipped us components or raw materials. Yet their ambassadors to our worlds, all Prophets of Probability, on rare but vital occasions (the Stone Place being the most famous example) have predicted the outcome of battles, with great benefit to morale. And our military and economic historians have often remarked on how fortuitously some of our supply and communication links have been maintained during the war’s darkest hours, how needed materiel has so often fallen into the grasp of our people at a crucial moment. It is impossible for me to demonstrate that the Carmpan could have been responsible for this, but I have a growing suspicion that they were.

From the earliest years of the war the Carmpan did sometimes provide medical and research assistance. And the limitations on the kind of aid they gave were somehow accepted by our own race, and we continued to believe in their good will. We saw that they were not cowardly. In the war’s early days some of them came to live on some of our particularly endangered planets, for no apparent reason other than to share our perils. This practice ceased as sentiment among our people grew against it—the testimony of our people at the time is that they did not want the Carmpan to endanger themselves unnecessarily.

There is a fairly lengthy passage in HD on the Carmpan role as intermediaries between ourselves and the shadowy (to us) Elder Races, with whom we have so much more difficulty in communicating than even with the Carmpan themselves. Judging by the amount of space he gives this topic, the Third Historian must have considered it important. Still, he says very little about the Elder Races in themselves; perhaps there is some reason by discussion of these revered ones, like counting, should take place only at the Core. Or perhaps the Drifts and Tones within the document tell more about them than I, with my feeble understanding of the language, have been able to glimpse as yet.

A substantial part of what the document does say about the Elders relates them to the Berserker war how, when some groups of the Elders could have withdrawn themselves from the Berserkers’ path, they chose instead to remain where they were, and delay the enemy by being hunted and ultimately killed a delay that was to prove vital to the survival of some Solarian and other worlds.

Near the end of HD an individual exploit is mentioned, almost the first to be related in the whole document—it is the strange voyage of the Solarian warship Johann Karlsen, exploring near the Galactic Core. The limited engagement that was fought against the Berserkers on that occasion is treated as of substantial importance, as somehow foreshadowing an ultimate victory for the cause of life. I think it probable that the Carmpan know, in some sense, more of that episode than we do.

Attached to HD in a kind of appendix are eleven or twelve (the demarcations are not always plain) episodic narrative reports concerning the experiences of different Solarian individuals in various phases of the great war.

HD concludes with a postscript in a warning tone: That no victory in this world, this Galaxy, this Universe, is final. And no history, either.

(signed) INGLI

MESSAGE ENDS

1982

FROM THE TREE OF TIME

“Very well then,” said Count Dracula. “If you wish a story with a touch of mystification, I can provide one.”

It was on a raw, rainy spring night, not long ago, and the two of us were standing on a streetcorner of a northern city. Folk for madder and perhaps less probable than either the Prince of Wallachia or myself walked those streets as well. But in the presence of my companion I scarcely gave them a thought.

“I will be delighted,” I replied (naturally enough), “to hear whatever tale you may wish to tell.”

Dracula halted at a curb, the wet cold wind stirring his black hair as he stared moodily across the street. He had doubtless paused only to gather his thoughts, but a quartet of youths swaggering along on the other side of the street interpreted our hesitation as timidity. They loitered in their own walk, and one of their number called some obscenity in our direction. My companion did not appear to notice.

“I am sure you are aware” (he began his tale to me) “that with vampires, as with the greater mass of the breathing population, the vast majority are peaceable, law-abiding citizens. We seek no more, essentially, than breathers do: bodily nourishment (any animal blood will do for sustenance); the contemplation of beauty, and affection, as nourishment for the soul; an interesting occupation; a time and place in which to rest (some native soil being, in our case, very important for that purpose).

“It makes me laugh”—he laughed, and across the street four youths simultaneously remembered pressing business elsewhere—“yes, laugh, to contemplate the preposterous attributes that have been bestowed upon my branch of the human race by those breathing legendizers who have never known even one of us at first hand. Of course I am not talking about you, my friend. I mean those who have learned nothing since the last century, when the arch-fool Van Helsing could imagine that the symbols and the substance of religion are to us automatically repellent or even deadly. As you know, that is no more true of us than of—of some of the breathing gangsters who once made this very city legend.”

My friend paused, frowning, doubtless wishing that he had chosen some other comparison. I hastened to assure him that I would do all in my literary power to expunge from human thought the kinds of misinformation that he found so distasteful. He nodded abstractedly.

“Nevertheless” (he went on) “in our society as in yours, the rogue, the criminal, exists. I need not belabor the point that the psychopath who happens also to be a vampire is infinitely more dangerous than his mundanely breathing counterpart. Even apart from the fact that very few of your breathing people truly believe that we exist, effective countermeasures against our criminal element, while not impossible, appear to be uncommonly difficult for you to manage. The Cross, as I have said, is no deterrent at all—except perhaps to vampires of such religious nature that their consciences would be painfully affected by the sight—such probably do not pose you a major problem in any event.

“Garlic? Even less efficacious than it would be against some breathing ruffian—surely useful, if at all, only against the more fastidious and less determined. Mirrors? Useful to detect and identify us by our lack of any reflection; but with no application as weapons, except as they might be used to concentrate our great bane, natural sunlight. The older and tougher among us can bear some sun, you know, at least the cloudy, tempered sun of the high latitudes.

“Fire? By daylight, through which period we are compelled to retain whatever form we had at dawn—and moreover are likely to be resting in lethargic trance—yes, by daylight fire can be effective, whereas by night we easily avoid it.

“Ordinary bullets, blades of metal, clubs of stone, all can cause us momentary pain and superficial injury, but do us virtually no real damage at all. Any trifling harm inflicted soon disappears. Silver bullets are only advocated by those who confuse us with werewolves, or certain other creatures of the night.

“The best practical defense is doubtless to remain in your own house, admitting no one suspicious. No vampire may enter a true dwelling unless invited—but once invited, he or she may return at any time.

“And, if we consider the offensive means that ordinary breathing folk can hope to use successfully against us, almost the whole truth is contained in one short and simple word.”

By now we were strolling again. My companion was of course impervious to the chilling effects of wind and rain, but I was shivering. Taking note of this, Dracula gestured as we were passing the door of a decent-appearing tavern, and gratefully I preceded him in. We were seated in a dim, snug corner with mugs of Irish coffee before us—his of course remained untouched throughout our stay—before he spoke again.

“That one word,” he said, “is wood. Ah, wood, that oh-so-nearly magical stuff, that once was living and now is not. Ah, wood . . . and that leads me to the story that I wished to tell.”

* * *

From an idea by Eric Saberhagen

It was (Dracula continued) almost a century ago, and in another great city, one grimier and in some ways grander than this one, that I made acquaintance—never mind now exactly how—with a certain professional investigator, a consulting detective whose name was then even better known than my own. We were an oddly matched pair, yet on good terms; he understood my nature better than most breathing folk have ever been able to do. Still I was greatly surprised one day when I received a message from him saying that he wished my help in a professional consultation. Naturally my curiosity was much aroused, and I agreed.

My friend the detective and I traveled down by train from London to a certain country estate in Kent. The house was a great gloomy pile, built during Elizabethan times. Its owner, besides being a man of considerable wealth, was something of an antiquarian, and also much interested in what he still called natural philosophy. It was not he, however, who had invited us to the estate, but his only child. She was a grown woman now, and married for a year. And it was she—whose real name I cannot tell you even now, for at the time I swore that it would never pass my lips—she who conducted us on our arrival, with urgent speed, into a closed room for a private consultation. The room was large, and mostly lined with books, with new electric lights in its far corners, and on the huge desk an old-fashioned oil lamp, whose rays fell on a collection of curious items evidently brought together from the ends of the earth. I saw a whale’s tooth, a monkey’s skull, along with other items I did not immediately recognize. A small table at some distance from the desk held a microscope and various specimens. Along with their burden of books, the room’s many shelves held stuffed birds and animals.

“And now, your ladyship,” began my friend the detective, “we are at your service. You may speak as freely before Dr. Corday here”—he glanced in my direction—“as before myself.”

The lady, whose considerable beauty was obviously being worn away by some overwhelming fear or worry, now appeared on the verge of collapse. “Very well.” She drew a deep, exhausted breath. “I must be brief, for my father and my husband will both soon return, and I must save them, if I can . . .

“The incident that haunts me, that has driven me to the brink of madness, occurred almost exactly a year ago, and in this very room. I must confess to you that before I was married, or even knew Richard well, I was—acquainted with—a man, named Hayden. I have outlined to you already, sir, how that came to be—”

“You have indeed, your ladyship.” My companion gave an impatient nod. “Since our time is short, we had better concentrate on what happened between you and Hayden in this very room, as you say it was. That is the aspect of the case in which I most value Dr. Corday’s consultation.”

“You are right.” Our hostess paused again to collect herself, then plunged on. “I had not seen Hayden for many months. I was beginning to manage to forget him, when almost on the very eve of my wedding, he appeared here unexpectedly. I was alone in the house except for a few servants, my father being engaged on some last-minute business in London having to do with the arrangements.

“Hayden, of course, knew that I was alone. And his purpose in coming was of course an evil one. He had brought with him some letters—they were foolish letters indeed—that I had written him in an earlier day. The letters contained—certain things that could have ruined me, had Hayden given them, as he threatened to do, to my prospective husband. I protested my innocence. He admitted it, but read from the letters certain phrases, words I had almost forgotten, that suggested otherwise. Hayden would destroy me, he swore, unless—unless ‘Here and now in this very room’ was how he put it—I should—should—”

For a moment the lady could not continue. My friend and I exchanged glances, of sympathy and determination, in a silent pledge that we would do everything possible to assist her. It must be hard for folk with experience only of the late twentieth century to grasp what a threat such letters could represent, to understand what impact the mere suggestion of a premarital affair could have had at that time and place, on one in her position. It would have been regarded by all her contemporaries as the literal ruin of the young lady’s life.

“I was innocent,” she repeated, when she was able to resume at last. “I swear to you both that I was. Yet that man had some devilish power, influence . . . I had broken free of it before, and as he faced me in this room I swore to myself that I would never allow it to gain the faintest hold on me again.

“ ‘Sooner or later you will have me,’ the villain said, sneering at me. ‘I have now been invited into your fine house, you see.’ Those were his words, and I have puzzled over them; alas, a greater and more horrible puzzle was to come.

“I retreated to the desk—I stood here in front of it, like this. Hayden was just there, and he advanced upon me. I cried at him to stay away. My hand, behind me on the desk, closed on a piece of stone—much like this one.” With that her ladyship raised what would now be called a geode from among the curios collected on the huge desk. “I raised it—like this—and warned him again to stop.

“Hayden only smiled at me—no, he sneered—as if the idea that I might refuse him, even resist him, were a childish fantasy that only a childish creature like myself—a mere woman—could entertain. He sneered at me, I say. His handsome face was hideously transformed, and it seemed to me that even his teeth were . . . were . . . and he came on toward me, his hands reaching out.”

The lovely narrator raised her chin. “I—hit him, gentlemen. With the stone. With all my strength. And—God help me—I think it was as much because of the way in which he looked at me, so contemptuously, as it was because of anything I feared that he might do.

“I hit him, and he fell backward, with a broad smear of blood across his forehead. I have the impression that only one of his eyes was still open, and that it was looking at me with the most intense surprise. He fell backward, and rolled halfway over on the carpet, and was still.

“I was perfectly sure, looking down at his smashed face, that he was dead. Dead, and I swear to you that at that moment I felt nothing but relief. For a moment only. Then the horror began. Not an intrinsic horror at what I had done—that came to me too, but later—but horror at the feet that what I had just done was certain to be discovered, and at other discoveries that must flow from that. Even though I might—I almost certainly would—be able to plead self defense and avoid any legal penalty, yet inevitably enough information must be made public to bring ruin down upon me—and disgrace upon Richard, whom I loved . . .

“I suppose that in that moment I was half mad with shock and grief. Not, you understand, grief for the one who, as I thought, lay dead—”

My friend interrupted. “As you thought?”

“As—let me finish, and in a moment you will understand.”

“Then pray continue.”

“My eye fell on the door of the lumber room—there.” It was a plain, small, inconspicuous door, set in the wall between bookcases, some eight or ten feet from the desk. “I seized Hayden by the ankles—to take him by the hands would have meant touching his skin, and the thought of that was utterly abhorrent to me—and I dragged him into there.”

“May I?”

“Of course.”

Taking up the lamp from the desk, my friend moved to open the small door, which was unlocked. The lamplight shining in revealed a dusty storage closet. Its walls and floor were of stone, its ceiling of solid wood; there was no window, or any other door. The chamber was half-filled with a miscellany of boxes, crates, and bundles, none larger than a bushel, and all covered with a fine film of dust that might well have lain undisturbed for the past year.

Our client joined us looking in. She said: “The room was very much as you see it now. My father uses it chiefly for storage of things he has brought back from his various travels and then never finds time to catalogue, or else judges at second thought to be not worthy of display.

“I dragged Hayden—or his body—in there, and left him on the dusty floor. Understand that this was not part of any thought-out plan for concealing what I had done. It was only a shocked reaction, like that of a child trying to hide the pieces of a broken vase. Hardly aware of what I was doing, I came back here to the middle of the room, and picked up from the carpet the stone that had done the deed. I carried it into the lumber-room also, and threw it on top of that which lay on the floor already. I then came out of the lumber-room and closed its door, and locked it—though it is rarely if ever locked—with a key I knew was kept in the top drawer of my father’s desk.

“Then, with a mind still whirling in terror, I looked around. The letters, where were they? Still in Hayden’s pocket, for now I remember distinctly seeing him replace them there. It might be wise to get them out, but for the moment I could not think of touching him again.

“And there was blood on the carpet. I had noted that already, in my first frenzied panic. But now, as my mind made its first adjustment back toward sanity, I saw that the spots were only two or three in number, and so small against the dark pattern that no one entering the study casually would be in the least likely to notice them. Here, gentlemen, is where they were—over the past year they have faded almost to invisibility.

My companion had crouched down and whipped out a magnifying glass, with which he scrutinized closely the indicated section of the carpet. He stood up frowning. “Pray continue,” he said again, his voice noncommittal.

“I was still hovering near the desk, in a state of near-panic, not knowing what to do, when as in a nightmare I heard a brisk knock on the door to the hall, and the voice of my beloved Richard. A moment later, before I could say anything at all, the hall door opened and Richard came in. From the look on his face, I knew immediately that he was aware at least of something gravely wrong.

“My fiancé evidently already knew much more about Hayden than I had ever suspected. Perhaps the duke, Richard’s father, had employed investigators—to this day I do not know what had made my dear one suspicious of me. But he was fall of suspicion on that day, and with cause—though not with as great cause as he feared.

“Richard confronted me. ‘He was seen coming in here, the man Hayden. Do you tell me that he is not here now?”

“I do not remember what I said in reply. I must however have looked the very picture of guilt.

“Richard looked quickly round the study, even peering behind pieces of furniture where a man might possibly have had room to lie concealed. It took him only a moment to do so; the furniture was then very much as it is now, and offered, as you can see, little in the way of hiding places.

“He tried the door of the lumber-room then, and I was sure for a moment that my heart had stopped.

“ ‘This door is locked. Do you know, Louise, where the key is kept?”

“I understood perfectly that he would force the door at once if no key were available. Silently I went to the desk, and got the key from the upper drawer, where, in my confusion I had just replaced it; I handed it to Richard, still without a word. At that moment I knew with certainty that final ruin was upon me, and I could not bear another instant the horror of waiting for the blow to fall. I thought that after Richard had seen what I had done, then, in that moment of his greatest shock, I might appeal to him. I could only hope that he loved me as truly and deeply as I did him.

“But his gaze was black and forbidding as he took the key from my hand and turned away. He was in the lumber-room for only a few moments, but I need not tell you what an eternity they seemed to me. When he reappeared, his face was altered; yet even as I gazed at him in despair, a sudden new hope was born within my breast. For his new expression was not so much one of horror or shock, as one expressing a great relief, even though mingled with shame and bewilderment.

“For a moment he could not speak. Then ‘Darling!,’ he said at last, and his voice cracked, even as mine had moments earlier. ‘Can you ever forgive me for having doubted you?’

“Without answering, I pushed past Richard to the door of the lumber-room. Everything inside, with one great exception, was just as I had seen it a few minutes earlier before I had locked the door. There were the dusty crates and cartons, untouched, certainly, by any human hand in the intervening time. There on the floor, in lighter dust and hardly noticeable, were the tracks left by my own feet on my first entrance, and by the horrible burden that I had dragged in with such difficulty. There was the stone with which I had struck the fateful blow—but the piece of stone lay now in the middle of the otherwise empty patch of bare floor. Of the body of the man I had struck down there was not the smallest trace.”

My friend the detective emitted a faint sigh, expressing what in the circumstances seemed a rather inhuman degree of intellectual satisfaction. “Most interesting indeed,” he murmured soothingly. “And then?”

“There is very little more that I can tell you. I murmured something to Richard; he, assuming my state of near-collapse was all his fault for behaving, as he said, brutally, made amends to the best of his ability. To make the story short, we were married as planned. Hayden’s name has never since been mentioned between us. Our life together has been largely uneventful, and in all outward aspects happy. But I tell you, gentlemen—since that day I have lived in inward terror . . . either I am mad, and therefore doomed, and imagined the whole ghastly scene in which I murdered Hayden; or I did not imagine it. Then he was only stunned. He somehow extricated himself from that lumber-room. He is lying in wait for me. Somewhere, sometime . . . neither of you know him, what he can be like . . . he still has the letters, yet he has in mind some revenge that would be even more horrible . . . I tell you I can bear it no longer . . .” The lady sank into a chair, struggling to control herself.

The detective turned to me. “Dr. Corday, it is essential that we ascertain the—nature of this man Hayden.” A meaningful glance assured me what sort of variations in nature he had in mind.

I nodded, and addressed myself to the lady, who had now somewhat recovered. “At what time of day, madam, did these events occur? Can we be absolutely sure that they took place after dawn and before sunset?”

The lady looked for a moment as if she suspected that madness was my problem instead of hers. “In broad daylight, surely,” she replied at last. “Though what possible difference . . .”

I signed to my friend that I must speak to him in confidence. After a hurried apology to our client we withdrew to a far corner of the study. “The man she knocked down,” I informed the detective there, “could not possibly have been a vampire, because of the force of the blow that felled him was borne in stone, to which we are immune. Nor could he, even supposing him to be a vampire, have shifted form in broad daylight, and escaped as a mist from that closet under the conditions we have heard described; nor could he in daylight have taken on the form of a small animal and hidden himself somewhere among those crates and boxes.”

“You are quite sure of all that?”

“Quite.”

“Very good.” My friend received my expert opinion with evident satisfaction, which surprised me.

For my own part, it seemed to me that we were getting nowhere. “My life has been very long,” I added, “and active, if not always well spent. I have seen madness . . . much madness. And I tell you that the lady here, if I am any judge, is neither mad nor subject to hallucinations.”

“In that opinion I concur.” Still my friend did not appear nearly as disconcerted as it seemed to me he should. There was, in feet, something almost like a twinkle in his eye.

“Then what are we to make of this?” I demanded.

“I deduce . . .”

“Yes?”

Again the twinkle. “That one of her father’s trips abroad, before the wedding, took him to Arizona. But of course I must make sure.” And with that, leaving me in a state that I confess approached speechlessness, my friend went back across the room.

He approached our client, who still sat wearily in her chair, and extended both his hands. When she took them, wonderingly, he raised her to her feet. “One more question,” he urged her solemnly. “The stone with which you struck down Hayden—where is it now? Surely it is not one of those still on the desk?”

“No,” the lady marveled. “I could not bear to leave it there.” Going back to the door of the lumber-room, she reached inside, and from a shelf took down a pinkish stone of irregular, angular shape, a little larger than a man’s fist. This she presented to my friend.

He turned it over once in his hands, and set it back upon the desk. A confident smile now transformed his face. “It is my happy duty to inform you,” he said at once, “that the man you knew as Hayden will never bother you again; you may depend upon it.”

Dracula paused here in his narration. “In a moment I was able to add my own assurances, for what they were worth, to those of the famed detective. That was after I had walked over to the desk and looked at the weapon for myself. I knew then that the man struck down with it could indeed have been a vampire; nay, that he must have been. For when he died of the effects of the blow, there on the floor of the lumber-room, his body, as is commonly the case with us, had at once undergone a dissolution to dust, and less than dust. His clothing, including the letters in his pocket, had, as would be expected, disappeared as well. No humanly detectable trace was left when the fiancé opened the door a few moments later.”

“A vampire?” I protested. “But, he was struck down with a stone . . .”

“I was looking,” said Dracula softly, “at a choice Arizona specimen of petrified wood.”

INTERMISSION

Atoms do not age. They either exist or they do not. Then do molecules get old and tired? Do genes?

In the last twilight of the Sun the answer regarding genes became clear. It was stored in the investigating machines’ memories, until the time of live intelligence came again.

1985

THE SONG OF SWORDS

Who holds Coinspinner knows good odds

Whichever move he make

But the Sword of Chance, to please the gods

Slips from him like a snake.

The Sword of Justice balances the pans

Of right and wrong, and foul and fair.

Eye for an eye, Doomgiver scans

The fate of all folk everywhere.

Dragonslicer, Dragonslicer, how d’you slay?

Reaching for the heart in behind the scales.

Dragonslicer, Dragonslicer, where do you stay?

In the belly of the giant that my blade impales.

Farslayer howls across the world

For thy heart, for thy heart, who hast wronged me!

Vengeance is his who casts the blade

Yet he will in the end no triumph see.

Whose flesh the Sword of Mercy hurts has drawn no breath;

Whose soul it heals has wandered in the night,

Has paid the summing of all debts in death

Has turned to see returning light.

The Mindsword spun in the dawn’s gray light

And men and demons knelt down before.

The Mindsword flashed in the midday bright

Gods joined the dance, and the march to war.

It spun in the twilight dim as well

And gods and men marched off to hell.

I shatter Swords and splinter spears;

None stands to Shieldbreaker.

My point’s the fount of orphans’ tears

My edge the widowmaker.

The Sword of Stealth is given to

One lonely and despised.

Sightblinder’s gifts: his eyes are keen

His nature is disguised.

The Tyrant’s Blade no blood hath spilled

But doth the spirit carve

Soulcutter hath no body killed

But many left to starve.

The Sword of Siege struck a hammer’s blow

With a crash, and a smash, and a tumbled wall.

Stonecutter laid a castle low

With a groan, and a roar, and a tower’s fall.

Long roads the Sword of Fury makes

Hard walls it builds around the soft

The fighter who Townsaver takes

Can bid farewell to home and croft.

Who holds Wayfinder finds good roads

Its master’s step is brisk.

The Sword of Wisdom lightens loads

But adds unto their risk.

AS DULY AUTHORIZED

Fred Saberhagen’s new story is about a most surprising—and most logical—evolutionary leap. His latest book is BERSERKER THRONE (Fireside Books), an addition to the famous Berserker series.

The truth of our late twenty-first-century lives is contained in our documents, our filmed and magnetized records. Or so we believe. Therefore, not only my own life but the foundation of all our lives is now at stake. For the sake of our whole world’s survival, it is vital that this statement of mine be credited, that appropriate action—in this case, an investigation of the monstrous child Martin Mandell—be taken without delay by those authorized to do so.

It was this child, Martin Mandell, who on a day some three weeks ago began the chain of events that has brought me to my present unhappy situation. I was then, and had been for about two years, assigned to the Bureau of Science, Department of Paleontology, Fairbanks Office. My duties were of course administrative, and commensurate with my rank; nearly a score of clerks and aides worked under my direction.

That never-to-be-forgotten day began like any other, and continued so until midafternoon. At that time I was slightly irritated to notice that my then secretary, Ms. Lorraine Mandell (the child’s widowed mother), had already spent several minutes of working time in the corridor outside my office, engaged in a personal conversation with the technician, Antonelli.

Antonelli had paused for this discussion while transporting through the corridor a paleontological fieldwork robot. While the technician allowed his attention to be distracted from his duties regarding this device, the Mandell child approached down the corridor. It was the child’s custom, despite my continued efforts to discourage the practice, to pass the office each day on his way home from school, and from the corridor distract his mother at least momentarily from her duties.

Today most of the width of the corridor was occupied by the fieldwork robot, standing waiting while Antonelli chatted. Whether from sheer idle curiosity, or from some yet baser motive, young Mandell was attracted to the controls of the machine. Before anyone was aware of the danger, it had begun to labor, and before Antonelli could regain control of the device, it had bored sizable openings—several centimeters in diameter—in both sides of the corridor, in completely unauthorized locations.

Since one of these openings pierced the external wall of the building complex, and the other, almost directly opposite, breached the window between my office and the corridor, my staff and I were at once engulfed in a rush of raw outside air. In passing. I may remark that the technician’s lapse and the boy’s mischief—if it was no more than mischief—would certainly have had a much severer effect had the incident occurred during the winter months. Since we here in Alaska are, as you probably know, in the high northern latitudes, a direct opening of the building in January, say, would have admitted a volume of air at such low temperatures as to be immediately dangerous to health—air perhaps accompanied by frozen precipitation, all forms of which I am sure are highly unpleasant.

Too late, Lorraine seized upon her son, who began to howl. He is, I suppose six or eight years of age, and of what I should call nondescript appearance, save for the small permanent vertical crease in his forehead that gives to his face the expression of a habitual frown. I gave Lorraine leave to remove the child to home or playground or wherever he should have been at that time of day; and then I turned to Antonelli.

“Nobody’s hurt, thank God, nobody’s hurt,” was all that he could find to say at first.

“Fortunately for you,” I replied. From the bookcase beside my desk, I brushed fine fragments of window glass, and pulled out Volume 1 of the Emergency Reporting Procedures, which 1 keep available at all times in nonelectronic form, to be prepared for power failures. I weighed the book significantly in my hand, and opened it. “However, if memory serves me correctly—yes, here is the appropriate section—even when no personal injury is involved, there are seventeen separate reports to be filled out following an accident of this type involving the destruction of property. You are undoubtedly the one responsible. The reports are to be completed at once, before you resume your normal duties.”

“Seventeen,” he mumbled, shocked. He looked at his watch. “Sir, I am responsible. I’ll pay for the damage—”

“Of course!”

“But right now I can’t sit down and make out seventeen forms. Some must be long ones? Naturally. You see, I have to get this robot out to the diggings in just an hour. We’re short of techs, and there’s no one else I can ask to handle it. I accept responsibility for what happened; if we can just let some of these reports go until I hurry back—”

“That is quite impossible. The World Office Regulations are very clear on the procedure to be followed.”

“Maybe you don’t understand, sir, but it’s vital for me to get out there inside of an hour. If I miss this digging today, maybe even my whole future career will be shot. I was just telling Lorraine here about this one opening in Scientist Grade One—”

Although I had given Lorraine leave to remove her child, she was still hovering nearby. Her arms were about her son, who clung to her. I recall now—and now shudder at the possible significance of the fact—that he was chewing like an infant on some small, already half-demolished plastic toy, while his eyes stared up at me from under his frowning forehead.

His mother’s eyes were also fixed on mine, and they held a pleading expression 1 had not seen in them before. “Oh, really, it was my fault. Marty’s my responsibility. Tony here isn’t to blame.”

“In this case, Lorraine,” I said to her, “your sympathy is misplaced. Please remove the child to wherever his proper location at this hour may be.”

After another moment she nodded reluctantly, and turned away with her offspring.

I then, with a sigh, turned back to face Antonelli, and my unpleasant task of seeing to it that the culprit complied with regulations. I regretted that the danger to the technician’s future career was probably real. In the Bureau of Science, many of even the higher positions of authority are filled by persons known more for their technical ability than their administrative competence, so that his hope for advancement was not altogether illusory. It is also true that in the Department of Paleontology’s circumpolar operations, due to the shortness of the annual period of summer weather and thawed-out soil, operational schedules are frequently rigid and the junior worker who misses his chance for fieldwork on one day may not be granted another chance on the next. These operational difficulties, and the need for haste arising therefrom, are used by some to justify all manner of procedural irregularities.

Irregularity had never been the rule in my office. The regulations on reporting accidents were perfectly clear, and I was of course prepared to call the police, if need be, to enforce them. I made sure that Antonelli was aware of this fact. As there was then nothing else that he could do, he seated himself at Lorraine’s desk. Helpfully I placed a microwriter, several rolls of blank magnetic film, and the book of Emergency Reporting Procedures, containing blanks of all the necessary forms, before him. He opened the volume with an air of hopelessness, but soon he raised his fingers to the keyboard of the microwriter and began furiously to type. I remember feeling a pang of sympathy for him, as it was manifestly impossible that the most skilled clerk should be able to the complete the seventeen forms in less than half a day.

It had become apparent to my olfactory sense that some spicelike pollen or similar substance was entering the room from outside, through the holes in wall and window, but I still had duties to perform. Cautioning my staff against unnecessary deep breathing of this unauthorized air, I returned to my own desk, and on my personal microwriter began the reports that would be required of me as senior administrator at the scene of the accident.

This had occupied me for some twenty minutes when, raising my head, I saw that Lorraine had returned to the office. (Her apartment on the residential level was only a minute’s walk away.) She was standing now beside her own desk, at which Antonelli was still seated, and speaking earnestly to him. As I watched, she nervously—and, as I thought, furtively—placed her right hand briefly in his. The manner in which this was done suggested to me very strongly that she had secretly given him some small object, or objects. I gave no sign of having observed anything out of the ordinary. I waited, and as may well be imagined, I wondered.

Lorraine, though her desk had been preempted, attempted to resume some of her normal duties about the office. She also coordinated the efforts of the maintenance engineer who had at last arrived to sweep up the debris of the accident, and who on the completion of my written request arranged temporary coverings for the holes.

Scarcely a minute after she had passed some object to him, Antonelli hurried over to me. “Sir, here are the reports you need.” He gave the impression of a man almost strangling with relief. “If there’s anything else, I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He bolted from the office, and an instant later I heard the heavy, soft treads of the robot moving away.

With a heavy heart, I slid the film Antonelli had given me into my viewer. To my amazement, it held what appeared to be a sequence of seventeen genuine accident reports, each differing from the others in detail, all of them acceptably filled out. Each described the accident as it had taken place—including the serial numbers of the equipment involved; the contractors and all subcontractors for both the robot and the building; and, where necessary, such appropriate background material as Antonelli’s family history, etc.

For a minute or two, I sat staring into the viewer. Of course the film could not have been honestly produced in twenty minutes. I looked toward Lorraine, but she was avoiding my eye. Sadly, I allowed myself to be almost completely convinced that she was implicated in the loathsome crime of computerized forgery, evidently involving some totally unauthorized tap-in on, and time-theft from, some computer of awesome capability.

How could I have imagined then that the truth involved an evil even more monstrous—one that might threaten the foundations of our civilization?

Even though the true horror of the situation had not yet dawned upon me, still, as Lorraine’s superior, I naturally felt some concern and responsibility toward her. Damning as the evidence of computer crime appeared to me to be, I still wanted to give her every benefit of the doubt before initiating a formal investigation. It was this concern that caused me to take measures to overhear her conversation that evening with Antonelli in the local dining room.

That evening I went alone as usual to dine. Looking about the large room before choosing a table, I noticed my secretary and the technician in animated conversation at a somewhat isolated table located beside an artificial waterfall and its decorative shrubbery. Making a circuitous approach so they would remain unaware of my nearness, I chose for myself a table separated from theirs only by the dense foliage of the shrubs. The waterfall masked other sounds. I drew from my pocket my small listening aid, a valuable tool I carried for the purpose of evaluation of subordinates in the office, and unobtrusively focused it in their direction.

To my surprise, Lorraine was questioning the would-be scientist about evolution, mutation, and related subjects. I recorded much of the conversation and replayed it alone in my study later that night, so it is fixed quite firmly in my memory.

Antonelli, in the expansive manner of a fool in the advanced stages of infatuation, was eager to display his knowledge by giving extensive answers to Lorraine’s questions. Her particular interest seemed to be in what I understand is now called punctuationalism, the field of knowledge concerning sudden evolutionary change.

Antonelli spoke to her of the bat and of the whale, both appearing suddenly in early Tertiary times, both in their earliest known forms already fully adapted for their highly specialized modes of life. He mentioned Arsinoitherium, the strange ungulate of Oligocene Egypt that seems to be totally without immediate ancestors or descendants of any kind. He waxed excited over the peppered moth, a species saved from extinction by a black mutation coming at just the right time to preserve its camouflage, when the surfaces of its city environment were being darkened by the fumes of the Industrial Revolution.

I recall now with special clarity one other sentence from his lecture: “The theory seems to be firmly established now, that since the arrival of Homo sapiens on the scene, evolutionary pressure has dropped off in the other species. The torch seems to be ours to bear.”

“Ahh,” breathed Lorraine, leaning back in her chair, so that now I could glimpse her face between branches of shrubbery. Antonelli’s last remark seemed to have struck her with peculiar force.

He soon began a clumsy attempt to woo her. She, who had evaded my own least attempts at friendliness, did not laugh at the technician, or coldly rebuff him at once, as a day earlier I should have thought inevitable. Instead, a thoughtful silence ensued, followed by these words in Lorraine’s voice: “Tony, before I can let myself get serious about any man, I have to be very sure about him. I’m in a special situation, with Marty. You can’t understand it yet.”

“Sure I can. The kid needs a father.”

“Oh, I know. But there’s more to it than that—in Marty’s case. There are strains. . . . Marty’s father was under great emotional stress when he died in that accident.”

“Well, I’m sure that wasn’t your fault, and it wasn’t the kid’s. Now was it?”

“No.”

“So, the little guy flipped a switch on my machine. You got me out of trouble—I won’t ask how you managed to produce those films. But kids do things like that. It doesn’t mean he’s a monster or anything.”

There was a silence. Lorraine had leaned forward again, and I could no longer see her face. Then Antonelli’s voice again: “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m all right.”

“Listen, Lorraine, whatever troubles you’ve got, I want you to know you can trust me and tell me about ’em.”

“I want to believe that, Tony.”

And there was silence again, lasting for a considerable time.

As I sat there, I realized fully how extravagant were the fancies with which I had lately beguiled some of my leisure moments—daydreams that had involved Lorraine. Before the revelations of that day, I had sometimes even imagined the two of us obtaining and processing bethrothal and marriage contracts. I had envisioned her name beside mine in the spaces of those forms.

I now saw clearly, I say, how foolish such fancies were. Yet there remained to me my duty as Lorraine’s superior to do what I could for her in the way of ethical and legal counseling. Concern for her son was also in my thoughts; I considered that forgery and loose romantic dalliance formed an unsuitable environment for a child’s proper development.

I kept my own counsel until the close of office hours on the next day. Then I calmly stated to Lorraine that with her permission, I intended to call upon her in her home that evening. There were, I told her, certain matters of the greatest importance that I felt we must privately discuss without delay.

An unmistakable expression of guilty fear appeared in her eyes. But she did not dare refuse so reasonable a request.

When I presented myself that evening at the door of Lorraine’s apartment, she admitted me readily enough. She was attempting to conceal her guilty fear, but to my eyes it was still evident.

“We are alone?” I asked.

“Yes. I’ve sent Marty next door for a while. What is it that you want?”

After giving her to understand that she lay under a cloud of the gravest suspicions of computerized forgery, I tried to discuss with her in a paternal way what course of action she might honorably take to extricate herself.

She deliberately misunderstood my motives, and declaimed: “How could I ever have thought you were a friend?”

“You had better allow me to be your friend, Lorraine. Considering your unfortunate situation at present, you would be wise to accept the counsel of a man of acknowledged judgment and influence. Particularly to salvage what chance there may still be for you to retain custody of your child.”

She gasped, struggled to maintain her air of innocence, and continued deliberately to misunderstand. “I never imagined that you could stoop so low.”

I placed my hand on her arm, intending only to reassure her that my intentions were entirely honorable. At this she physically attacked me, leaving scratches on my face and arms that subsequently required medical treatment. In endeavoring to protect myself, I may have unintentionally tripped her—1 am, of course, not accustomed to such encounters, and am ignorant of the precise degree of force needed to ward off the attack of a hysterical woman. Whatever bruises may have appeared later on her face must have been caused by her striking the floor, or some item of furniture, in her fall. (The same for her tom dress, etc.)

The child, who had evidently been eavesdropping somewhere nearby, now ran in shrieking. In my understandable excitement, I may have made some move toward him that could momentarily have been interpreted as threatening. He screamed as if in terror and cowered away from me. His foolish mother flew to the howling boy at once, meanwhile berating me in terms that I prefer not to dignify in print.

Maintaining my composure as best I could, with my own blood dripping from the wounds on my face, 1 proceeded calmly across the room to the communicator. It was clear to me at last that the woman had no intention of trying to save herself from her own folly; only one course of action remained open to me as a good citizen.

When she saw what I was doing, the woman’s bravado collapsed. “Whom are you calling?”

“I’m afraid I must call the police.”

The words struck terror to her guilty heart. She crossed the room to my side, cringing and pleading. I know, now, what monstrous thing she was concealing from the world; but then, though I had already initiated the call, the natural mercy of my heart was touched, and I hesitated.

As I did so, my eyes were drawn to the child by the sudden cessation of his yells. He stood facing me, feet planted wide apart, fists clenched, a scowl of utter malevolence upon his face. I can only describe his attitude as that of a ruffian about to hurl a missile or fire a gun.

Let me set down baldly what I next saw. From the vertical crease in the center of the boy’s forehead, there began to emerge the squared corners of a small and very thin object. I stood watching, completely stunned. I faintly recall some policeman’s voice coming from the communicator that I still held, but I was too stupefied to answer. I suppose I must have broken the connection.

Lorraine had also fallen silent. The emergence of magnetic computer film from her son’s skull was no surprise to her—I could see that—but she was terrified that I should have seen it happen. She ran to the child, but her clutching fingers were too late to conceal the event. She was only in time to catch the square of film as it fell, fully extruded, from the center of the child’s forehead. Only this familiar permanent “frown” crease was left as a visible hint of abnormality.

Before Lorraine’s hand closed on the film, I was able to see upon it the familiar pattern of tiny rectangles, showing that it bore a set of miniaturized documents. In a flash I realized that the police would find in this apartment no common computer pirate’s terminals or other electronic gear; and I understood Lorraine’s deep interest in evolution and mutation. I even understood, with horror, the monstrous child’s chewing on plastic toys—no doubt his metabolism requires some such bizarre nourishment to produce film by organic means.

The knowledge that I had become privy to her hideous secret, and could be expected to inform the proper authorities at once, completely overwhelmed with dread the wretched woman’s heart.

“Please,” she whined, “I’ll do anything you say. Only don’t tell. They’ll take my son and make a freak out of him. He’ll live like an animal in a cage for the rest of his life—please! He’s never made a film to harm anyone.”

I recoiled with loathing from her clutching hands; had 1 wanted to reply to her absurd request, I could not have done so, being still dumb with shock. Only when the police, impelled to haste by the broken communication, burst into the apartment, did I regain the power of speech.

I pointed, with a shaking finger. “There, officers. That film in the woman’s hand. Seize it and examine it, and then I will tell you where it came from.”

The officer in charge took the film from Lorraine’s unresisting fingers. He inspected it for some moments with his pocket viewer, then raised his eyes to me. “And your name is I told him my name.

He nodded briskly to his cohort, and in an instant my arms were brutally pinioned behind my back.

“Careful with him, boys. These records from the nuthouse say he’s dangerous. Did he hurt you much, lady?”

I struggled to explain the truth. Under the circumstances, is it strange that I was rather incoherent?

“No, you don’t need to tell me where the records came from, mister. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em. March him out careful.”

The truth of our lives is contained in our filmed and magnetized computer records. Or so we believe. With the flawless film before them, neither police nor doctors gave me more than a cursory examination, or heeded any of my protests. Judging from the size of the ward in which I find myself, the doctors whose signatures appear forged on my commitment record may well certify dozens of persons each month. Perhaps when they see me, they are surprised not to remember my case; perhaps they sometimes puzzle over the absence of relevant records in their own files—but no one doubts the single set of medical records that do exist.

There is a theory that the direction of evolutionary change is determined by the psychology of the species concerned; that long teeth were grown by the first tigers because those animals possessed the “souls” of carnivores. What the Mandell boy possesses, or what possesses him, I do not know. I am perfectly sure that the printing, the magnetic codes, the microtyping, the signatures, all so perfectly simulated upon the perfect films that form inside his skull—all these can be no result of detailed, conscious thought or effort on his part. Some genetic response, instead, to the environment in which he lives. . . .

I insist that I am sane, and innocent. What I have recorded here is the truth. I beg anyone in authority who may read this document: Begin an investigation of the monstrous child at once. 1 plead not only for my own sake, but for our world’s survival. Investigate the child Martin Mandell at once, at once, before it is too late.

1987

THE GRAPHIC OF DORIAN GRAY

The computer revolution has only begun; it will not be long before graphic systems similar to the one described in this story are quite feasible. As that happens, the question of what is real and what is not will become first a matter of philosophy and then of taste. Alas that some have such poor taste . . .

Mutant palms, bearing rust-red flowers that smelled like roses, grew on the steep slopes leading up to the house, as did genegineered eucalyptus trees with real oranges growing on them. When the two men had climbed the stairs that led up from the private parking area to the terrace level, some of the treetops were at eye level, some even lower. Adjoining the terrace was the house itself. Like every other dwelling within sight of it, it was a big one, Spanish-looking, with white stucco walls and a lot of red tile, most of the doors and windows guarded with wrought iron bars that added decoration as well as offering some protection.

From the top of the stairs the two men walked a few steps forward on the flagstone terrace and stopped. Lenses were swiveling to observe them, from several emplacements along the stucco walls.

“Announce us, please,” the older man called to the house. He allowed his voice to sound tired when he was only talking to machines. “Basil Hallward and Henry Lord. Mr. Hallward is Dorian Gray’s graphics designer, and I am Henry Lord, his agent.” Or going to be his agent, maybe, he amended silently. If we both like what we see at our first meeting. He hoped the hometronics system of the house could handle all that he had just told it, if the owner himself wasn’t listening at the moment. Most of the new systems could.

Some of the lenses turned away. One set, adjoining the open entry to the house from the terrace, continued looking at the visitors. But neither system nor human being said anything in reply.

The two men continued to stand there, shifting their feet uneasily. This place was worth a bundle, Lord thought. It was a while since he’d had a client who wasn’t hungry from the start. Not that you could be sure, of course, even with a place like this. For all Lord knew it might be burdened with a two-million-dollar mortgage that would be difficult to meet. According to what he’d heard, Dorian Gray had just bought the place with part of a recent large inheritance.

“Make yourselves at home, gentlemen,” said the home systems voice at last, after what had felt like an unreasonable delay. It was a mechanical, subtly inhuman voice that sounded like one of the standard newer models. “Mr. Gray is expecting you and will be with you shortly.”

“Thank you,” said Lord. He would just as soon talk to the machine as to most receptionists. He strolled over to the balustrade that rimmed the outer edge of the terrace, gazing out over the view. Actually he was wondering whether it would be a good move now to light up a cigar. Some people were impressed to encounter a man who still smoked and others were put off.

Meanwhile, Hallward, as usual, was thinking about his art, his business. Just at the broad open doorway where terrace ended and house began, one of Gray’s hometronic system terminals was sitting accessibly on a table. Already Hallward had set down his sizable toolkit beside the table, pulled up a chair, and was looking for the best way to get into the terminal.

Lord, continuing to size things up in his own way, told himself that it looked as if Mr. Dorian Gray might be still in the process of moving in. At the far end of the terrace was piled a collection of crates and boxes of various sizes, as if the stuff might just have been delivered. But at least part of the shipment must have been sitting here for a little while. One of the larger crates had already been opened, the plastic broken and peeled away from the contents it had protected. The contents consisted of a large painting, the full-length portrait of a man. It was an original oil, if Lord was not mistaken.

Hallward by now was completely lost in his technology. He had already opened the terminal, and set up his own portable computer on the redwood table beside it. He had even brought out an alpha helmet, though he wasn’t wearing it yet. Somehow he was getting hooked into the house system. He was staring at the flat unfolded computer screen before him, and probing into the house terminal with a little plastic wand.

Again Lord turned away to eye the view. In the small private parking area just below the terrace, Hallward’s utilitarian van waited. “Graphics to the Stars” was painted on both side doors. Across from the van was a regal blue Maserati, and close beside that an infinitely more modest Volks. The owners of any vehicles parked here at this hour of the morning, Lord surmised, had more than likely slept here.

To the west a great blur of high fog was still visible above the miles-distant Pacific, but the rest of the morning sky was as clear as a tourist’s idea of what sky ought to be like in Southern California. Disjointed segments of a freeway, acrawl with traffic, were visible between other hilltop houses in the middle distance.

“Now, really announce us, you bastard,” Hallward grunted with soft rage, at the same moment presumably compelling obedience with a deft prod from the plastic stick in his fingers. Good programmers, Lord had observed, seldom got angry at their systems; Hallward was definitely an exception.

This time an answer was forthcoming within seconds. “Be with you very shortly, gentlemen,” boomed a male voice, sounding genuinely human, over the terminal’s speaker. “Just settling up with the pedicurist.” That last word was followed by a sound that might have been the start of a laugh—it cut off too abruptly for Lord to be sure. The impression he got from the voice was that it belonged to a man who wanted everyone to be impressed by his confidence.

Not unusual, but not encouraging either. The agent decided he might as well have the cigar, and stop worrying about what impression he himself was going to make. He took out a stogy and lit up. No use offering a smoke to Hallward, who was addicted to nothing but his programming.

Leaning on the marble balustrade, puffing smoke out into the sunshine over the parking area, Lord presently saw a shapely female form, dressed in a pink smock, emerge from some lower level of the house and go striding on high heels toward the Volks. He couldn’t see her face, only the brown curls of the back of her head. Quite likely the pedicurist, he supposed. In a matter of seconds the Volks had vanished down the curving drive toward the public highway.

Still the client did not appear, or invite them into his house. Lord, chewing his Havana, strolled back across the terrace toward the muddle of packing crates. In the morning sunlight their tough plastic was as white as the stucco of the wall behind them.

Against that wall leaned the uncrated painting. The face of its youthful subject contemplated the California morning as if he were glad to have escaped the box. The subject was a very young and very handsome man, golden-haired and dressed in very old-time clothing. Maybe, Lord guessed, that style was from a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred. Who knew? He could only hope that his client—if Dorian Gray did become his client—would be as good-looking as the painting. No doubt Hallward was a genius, and could create a beautiful personal graphic based on anyone who was ahead of Quasimodo in the looks department; but still, the higher the point you started from the more you could do.

The wooden frame of the painting was dark with age, and it looked as heavy as some old-time piece of furniture. It must have taken a couple of moving men to get the thing up here from the parking area; Lord wasn’t at all sure it would have fit into the little elevator adjoining.

There was movement behind him. Hallward was looking up from his work. Lord turned fully around, smiling, to get his first look at his potential client.

Dorian Gray, wearing a thick gray robe, had just come bouncing out of his house onto his terrace. It was as if he were calculating his movements to be jaunty and energetic, but despite his best efforts they came out awkward, overacted. The good looks were there, though; what looked like a promising basis for a program. Blond hair curled crisply around Gray’s shapely skull, as if it were still damp from an after-pedicurist shower. Just as Hallward had described him, Gray was tall, lean, and muscular, with a square jaw and a face definitely in the casting category of tough-guy hero. The subject of the portrait might have been his faggot brother.

Hallward was practically mute, as usual, indifferent to all social happenings, and Gray, all the while nursing a superior smile as if he admired his own suavity, stumbled around trying to introduce himself to Lord.

Well, maybe together they could be made to amount to something. Right now Lord could only hope. The agent took charge of the faltering conversation, and with his prompting to take up the slack everyone seemed to hit it off pretty well. He began to explain to Gray how, if they were going to be in this together, he intended to organize their approach to the people at the studio.

Hallward interrupted them to announce that the light was just great right now, and he wanted to get more sunlight input into the graphics banks on which the personal program would be based. Lord shut up immediately, getting out of the programmer’s way; after all, it was the graphics that were going to make or break the deal with the studio when the time came.

Basil had his little videocam out, getting input of Dorian in sunlight. The little camera was a real professional model, with more adjustments and controls on it than the hometronics terminal had. With it the programmer swept the terrace from side to side, capturing Dorian from every angle. More material for the personal program to draw on when it was finally finished and went to work; you could never, Lord gathered, have too much data in the banks. Personal programs were something new, only starting to have a real impact on the business, and he wanted to know as much about them as anyone could who was not actually a programmer.

When die personal program that Hallward would design for Gray eventually went into operation, it would work the mass of graphic material on Gray into shape, the best shape for any given scene, selecting some details and suppressing others, adding bits of behavior, putting grace into the gestures of the image and good tones into its voice, even making vocabulary choices that could improve its wit when the necessity to ad lib came up.

Not that Hallward ever showed any particular grace or wit in his own behavior. The programmer, the agent thought, was like a writer. He was a writer, in his own way, and something of a director too, developing characters for his clients, writing their parts and doing half their performances for them in the great play they had to put on for the studio people, the money people, before any of the actors ever got the chance to perform for a mass audience. And all that most of the mass audience would ever see of the performer was the performing graphic. The quality of the best graphics was so high that you would swear you were watching real people act, sing, dance, make love, or die on stage or screen. You would swear that . . . except that real people just were never really quite that good, that beautiful to watch.

Hallward grunted orders. “Now turn around, Dorian. No, just halfway. I want some more of the back of your head in this light.”

Dorian, when he faced away from the videocam, was now looking directly at the old portrait that stood propped against the wall. Flicking a glance sideways at Lord, he remarked: “Wonder if the old bastard had a good life? Looks like it was a rich one, anyway.”

“Old?” That was probably the last word that would have come to Lord’s mind when he considered the portrait. His thoughts had immediately turned on how great it would be to be that young again. Of course you couldn’t expect this kid to look at it that way. He was about the same age as the subject of the portrait had been when it was made, maybe twenty-one.

Gray waved a hand in a clumsy gesture. “Well, he’d be about two hundred if he was still around, right? Or at least a hundred fifty. He’s some kind of relative of mine, way back in the family somewhere. That’s how come I got all this stuff. From the last heir’s estate when she died.”

Lord moved a step toward the painting and took a closer look. The artist had signed it, in the lower left comer, but he couldn’t read the squirrelly red letters. For all Lord could tell, the name might even have been “Hallward.”

Now Dorian was being ordered to turn around again, then walk back and forth across the terrace. This was a long, uninterrupted scan, in which the camera caught plenty of input from Dorian. And from the background too; the sunlit terrace, the dimmer house interior of tile and oak beyond the open doorway, the packing crates. And the portrait, leaning almost straight upright in the California sun.

“I might suggest, Dorian,” said Lord, “that you’d want to move it inside. This much sun can’t be good for it.”

“It’ll be in the shade in a minute anyway. As the sun comes around.”

And with that everyone forgot about the painting.

“We can take a look now at what we’ve got,” Hallward told them, wrapping up his videocam. “Is that stage in there turned on?”

The three men all pitched in to move the heavy videostage from its site deep in the house out to a place near the doorway to the terrace. There Hallward’s special cable, stretching from the hometronics terminal and his portable computer, could reach it. He assured the other two men that his computer had enough onboard memory to provide a fairly good presentation; and anything that looked good here ought to look really great when it was run on studio equipment.

The stage was set up just inside the house, in shadow; the polychrome lasers that generated its three-dimensional graphics were bright enough to stand up to anything but direct sun.

And then Dorian, wearing only a purple bikini brief, his robe cast aside, his muscles even bigger than Lord had expected, was standing on the stage, had somehow jumped up onto the low dais before Lord had seen him approach it.

And still, at the same time, Dorian Gray was standing just where he had been, still wearing his gray robe and slumping, a little behind Lord and to his right . . .

The robed man who stood near Lord in the sunlight was squinting slightly, and you could see the start of a small pink blemish on one of his rugged cheeks. At the moment the look on his face was expressive of stupidity more than anything else.

Lord turned his head. The image on the stage was without blemish, and taut with energy. It stood proudly erect, with one fist planted on a hip, the free arm hanging gracefully at ease. With a gaze of keen intelligence its eyes met those of Henry Lord, then moved on to each of the other men. It looked last upon its model, and its gaze rested upon him longest.

The voice of the graphic image said: “Good morning, gentlemen. Or, I suppose I should say, fellow workers.” Lord supposed that the program, using input from the house cameras, could do fairly well in determining what humans were present, and where they were standing. Then a good program ought to be able to come up with a reasonably appropriate response. The tones of its speech were resonant and finely modulated; the voice of it sounded very much like Dorian’s own, and yet it differed. There too things had been improved.

“Good morning,” Dorian answered himself, automatically. The words came out sounding rough and awkward, almost angry, as if he were swearing in surprise.

Hallward was surprised too, muttering real swearwords, but joyfully. Lord realized that the programmer was actually delighted, and really astonished, by how good his own creation looked.

“That last input must have helped a lot,” Hallward was murmuring to himself. “I don’t know why. Son of a bitch, just look at this thing, would you?”

“I hope,” said the holographic reproduction on the stage, “that we are all going to enjoy a long and mutually profitable relationship.” Once again it looked each of the three men in the eye, one after another. And it didn’t just say the words. It acted them, projected their syllables, made them the utterance of some great man on the brink of some tremendous enterprise. This thing was going to knock their eyes out at the studio, if Henry Lord knew anything at all about his business. This was going to catch them right by the balls and lift them out of their goddamn chairs. He had long since dropped his cigar and ground it out with his shoe.

Again Basil Hallward’s hands were moving, easily and decisively, over his computer keyboard. Dorian-on-stage was suddenly fully clothed, garbed in the latest style of black formalwear, trousers turning into tights a little above the knee, white lace blooming at his wrists and throat. His onstage figure turned easily, one hand gracefully in his pocket, the other making a small, effective gesture. The image asked: “Is it time for us to join the ladies, gentlemen? Can’t lick ’em”—here the stage face stuck out its tongue and contorted in a lewd grimace, returning next instant to smooth innocence—“if you don’t join ’em.”

“Tremendous,” said Henry Lord, meaning it heartily for once, wishing he had a better word to use.

And now, suddenly, the image had an imaged bottle of champagne in hand. With a powerful, dexterous movement of its wrists it made the imaged cork pop out; with a dance step it slid its black dress shoes out of the way of the gushing foam.

Henry Lord had by now recovered from his happy surprise and started talking. It wasn’t hard to be upbeat and encouraging about this. The only trouble was, he felt he ought to be talking to the graphic on the stage rather than to the man it represented.

Every once in a while he tried to get Hallward more involved in the conversation. But Hallward kept on staring at his little computer screen, and when Lord pressed him he insisted he wasn’t sure that things were quite ready to be taken to the studio.

“Not quite ready? What is that supposed to mean? Baby, I’ve never seen a graphic that was readier than this one!” Not that Lord—or anyone—had seen a vast number of personal graphics in any stage of readiness. It was a new concept, just beginning to be well established.

Hallward still grumbled. He said there were things he hadn’t figured out yet, about the way this particular program was working now.

“Anything that’s likely to screw up a presentation?”

Hallward grumbled something.

“Well?”

“How the hell do I know? I guess not.”

Five days later, in the sunlit afternoon, the three men were again together on the terrace. The presentation at the studio had gone off as well as Lord had dared to hope—but, of course, it hadn’t gone in precisely any of the ways he had imagined beforehand. One thing he had long ago learned to be sure of was that such meetings never did.

Today a fourth person, a young woman, was with them on the terrace. Her name was Sibyl Vane, and she was under the patronage—perhaps for the obvious reason, perhaps not—of Alan James. James was the major power at the studio, or at least the most major power that programmers and young actors and their agents were ever going to see.

The way things looked now, Alan James was going to give Dorian Gray a contract. It looked as if he was going to give Basil Hallward a contract too, and Henry Lord was going to be collecting ten percent from both of them. But the contracts would be signed only—only—if Sibyl Vane—rather, the personal program that Hallward was now going to design for Sibyl Vane—appeared in the first commercial production with the graphic program of Dorian Gray. It was going to be feature length, for theater release, and the working title was Prince Charming.

As far as Henry Lord could tell so far, the requirement to use Sibyl Vane oughtn’t to slow them down particularly. Dorian would have to share billing with someone. Whether Sibyl Vane was any good or not, Alan James had seen something in her, and a genius like Hallward ought to be able to connect with that something and get it to come out in a polychrome three-D graphic. Whether Prince Charming would be a hit or a flop when it hit the public screens and stages, was impossible to determine this early, anyway. Lord wouldn’t have wanted to say that out loud to anyone in so many words, but it was so.

Already Hallward’s preliminaries with Sibyl were over, and her first session in front of his videocam was well under way. Dorian, thirty seconds after he got his first look at her, had volunteered his house and terrace as a location. And there were certain advantages to working here rather than at the studio.

Lord thought that Sibyl, whose dark hair and fair skin made her look almost Taylor-like, ought to provide a fine visual foil for Dorian. And so far she had been willing to give the session all she had. It was beginning to look as if that might not be very much, beyond the naturally great starting points of her face and body.

She was growing increasingly nervous as the session went on. Henry Lord, having become her agent too, found himself having to calm her down.

“Take it easy, kid. This is only a test.”

“Only a test!” Sibyl almost screamed the words, even though her breathless, ill-modulated voice foiled to give them much real volume. She, unlike Dorian, was from a poor family. She understood as well as did Henry Lord that she could easily be throwing potatoes into hot grease for McDonald’s next month if this thing didn’t pan out, and if Alan James turned sour on her as a result.

“Take it easy. Yeah, only a test. I mean, if your first try doesn’t look right, Basil can fix it up until it does.” Basil, hearing that, gave him a look. Lord ignored it. This was a time for encouragement, not stark truth. “He’s great at this, a goddamn genius. You’ve seen what he’s done for Dorian. Take another look at that.”

Something changed in Sibyl’s face, as if a healing, restorative thought had come to her. “I want to do it right,” she whispered to Henry Lord, “for Dorian too.”

Holy shit, he thought. Both of them, really gone on each other, just like that. A complication we didn’t need.

Hallward was frowning, and he kept on frowning, through the rest of that session and the next. Sibyl’s graphic took shape. There was nothing grossly wrong with it, but Lord thought from the start that it would never attain anything like the magical quality of Dorian’s. He was right.

Dorian said nothing about the difference. The truth was that he hadn’t really looked at Sibyl’s graphics yet, being busy admiring his own whenever he had the opportunity. But he took Lord aside, with the air of a man who had something he was just bursting to talk about, and told him how much he loved Sibyl, and how great and talented she was.

The agent tried to calm him down. “Great. Fine. But right now we’ve got this job to do.”

Dorian struck his fist on a table, awkwardly. “If the job gets in the way, to hell with the job. I want to marry her.”

“Marry her?” Lord didn’t get it at all. Neither of these kids had struck him as the marrying kind. “And what’re you talking about, the job getting in the way? Why should it?”

“I just said if.”

For the time being the job went on. But Sibyl and Dorian could hardly wait until the sessions were over before they disappeared into the house together, kissing as they walked.

A number of additional recording sessions took place at Dorian’s house over the next several days, mainly on the terrace. Sometime between the second and third session, Sibyl moved in with him.

Lord, arriving for a fourth session a few days after number three, made himself at home on the terrace and started to replay what he thought was the tape of the most recent Sibyl-modeling session. He didn’t ordinarily look over his clients’ shoulders as they worked, but this had more and more earmarks of a special situation.

What he got on the holostage, instead of a working session with either of his clients, was two Dorians and two Sibyls. A nude encounter quartet, like something from a hardcore porn show. You could tell the two personal graphics from the two recorded human bodies chiefly because the graphics were better-looking and more graceful. No matter what position they got into, they didn’t sag or show little ugly bulges. And you could tell by which bodies really interacted physically. Personal graphics were still purely visual, not tactile.

If this was really pom-for-hire, then two of Lord’s clients were earning some money on the side, and neither was paying him his ten percent. Even worse than that—perhaps—they were in violation of their new studio contracts, jeopardizing a lot of real money.

Lord watched for a while and relaxed a little, becoming gradually convinced that this was only something the kids had done for their own amusement. They must have got up there on the stage in the flesh, while their two images cavorted, and joined in, meanwhile recording the whole thing. Oh well, it was great to be young. But somebody really ought to scrub this tape.

Lord turned it off and thought for a while. He didn’t really know what this portended.

Dorian came out of the house, wearing the robe he’d had on the first day Lord met him. His face was stony sober, white around the lips. Something had happened.

“What?” Henry Lord demanded, monosyllabic in excitement, jumping to his feet.

“She’s gone.”

“All right. Where? When? How? You had a fight?”

“I saw her graphic. I took a good look at it, at last, and then we had a fight.”

“Her graphic. You mean this stag show that the two of you cooked up?”

“No. No. The one Hallward’s trying to get ready for the studio.”

“All right. You saw it. So?”

“So. You know something? She’s got nothing, and I told her so. To think I was ready to marry her. I felt something for her, I really did. I felt a lot, but she killed it. What a pig. Even my own graphic was telling her what a pig she was.” And moisture was welling up in the eyes of Dorian Gray.

“Even your own . . . what? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Dorian began to babble incoherencies. Lord murmured soothing words. He managed to determine that Sibyl was really gone, out of the house with all her things, Dorian didn’t know where. The graphics of her—the official ones not the porn show—were still here. Lord found the disk and took a look at them. Pretty nearly worthless. They were really piss-poor.

Hallward, on arriving and being confronted with this feet, grew angry. “You keep telling everyone I’m a goddamn genius, but there are limits. Computer’s like a movie camera, some people it likes and some it doesn’t. I can only do so much to augment, and then the output starts looking like a cartoon character. That’s not what the studios are buying this year.”

After that encounter, Lord was busy with other clients and other affairs for several days. Hallward, much in demand, also had other jobs to catch up on. Lord did not see or hear from Sibyl Vane. She had dropped out of sight. When she was found, in a cheap motel room, she had been dead for two days. She had died of a pill overdose and it was pretty obvious that she had killed herself.

Henry Lord phoned Dorian as soon as he heard the news. The hometronics system answered, and the agent left a message, then hurried over in case Dorian was at home and just not answering his phone.

When Lord got to the house he found his client on the terrace, watching one short sequence of Sibyl’s graphic over and over again. Her slender figure on the stage was chastely garbed, picking imaged flowers and arranging a bouquet.

“Dorian, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t your fault. ”

“I was tough on her, that’s for sure. But you know, I think I learned something about myself through all this. I think things are going to be all right now.”

“That’s good.” Lord sighed. “That’s the way to take it. I’m glad you’re taking it like that.”

“Yeah. I learned what it feels like to do something really rotten, you know? And I don’t like it. So, no more. Today I start straightening out.”

“Great. What’s the first step?” Lord could hope that it might involve a new dedication to the job. It was time for another session with Hallward. And this new look on Dorian’s face had graphic possibilities.

“First step is Sibyl. I’m gonna marry her after all.” Lord stared at him for some seconds in silence. Dorian didn’t look as if he realized there was anything at all wrong with what he had just said.

“Dorian,” the agent said finally.

“What?”

“I left a message on your system today. Didn’t you read it?”

“No. I saw it there, but I . . . I was afraid it’d be something I didn’t want to know.” Dorian looked suddenly like a big, overgrown kid.

Lord was used to that in actors. “Dorian. Sibyl Vane is dead. As near as I could tell from the information that was given on the news, you’re not mixed up in it in any way. She left a note, but I don’t believe it said anything about you.”

“Left a note. Then she—”

“Yeah. She did. You hadn’t seen her since she walked out of here, had you? Talked to her, maybe?”

“No. No. Oh, my God. No, I didn’t talk to her after she left here. I killed her, though, didn’t I?” He stared at Lord. “I killed her, and I can’t feel anything.”

“Enough of that crap about you killed her. No one kills themselves these days because their lover tells lliem to get lost. She was a real flake anyway. And anyway, you don’t want to step into the kind of publicity you’d get on this one. Especially not at this stage of your career. When you’re fifty years old and people are starting to forget about you, then maybe. Right now no one knows who you are yet. What we ought to do—” He stared at Dorian.

“Yeah?”

“Call up Hallward. There’s something new in your face. I think he ought to try to get it on tape for the program.” They tried to get Hallward on the phone. His hometronics system told them, after they had identified themselves, that he had just left on a trip to Japan.

“It can wait, then, kid. It’ll have to wait. For now just sit tight. And don’t say anything to anyone about your fight with Sibyl. Okay?”

“Okay, Hank.”

A day passed. Then Dorian, coming back to his house from a long, aimless drive, was surprised to encounter Hallward’s van, coming down his long curving driveway just as he was starting up.

Dorian stuck his head out of the Maserati’s window and called a greeting. The programmer grunted something in return, and added: “I want to take a look at your master.”

“What?”

“The master copy of your personal program. It’s still here in your house system. I want to take a look at it—I’ve got a couple hours before my plane leaves.”

“We thought you were gone already.”

“I put that announcement on my home system ahead of time. There were things I didn’t want to be bothered with. Let me see the program.”

Feeling an intense reluctance, Dorian pulled in his head and gripped the steering wheel. Hallward backed his van up the curving drive and stood waiting for Dorian at the foot of the stairs.

When both of them were standing on the terrace, Dorian paused and said: “I don’t know if you ought to see the master copy.”

Hallward stared at him in astonishment. “Why in hell not? I’m going to be taking it to Comdex in a couple months anyway.”

“You’re what?”

“You heard me, pal. Comdex. The big computer show.”

“You could take another copy.”

“There’re shades of difference in all of’em. It says in the contract I can designate one original and keep it. This is the one I want.”

But when Hallward had the graphic up and running, he paused, staring at Dorian-on-stage in astonishment. “What’ve you been doing to this? Who’s been working on it?”

“No one.”

“Goddam it, it’s changed.”

“How could it have changed?”

“Look at the face. Someone’s been screwing around.”

“You should know, Hallward,” said the graphic image on the stage. “You’re an expert on screwing around. And screwing up.” It laughed.

“Who’s been doing this?” A vein was standing out in Hallward’s forehead.

“Not me,” said Dorian. “I’m no programmer.”

“Neither is Hallward,” said the image, and laughed again. Hallward became abusive and threatening. This copy was his property, that was in the contract. Someone had damaged it. If the damage was something he couldn’t fix, he was going to sue Dorian Gray for his whole farm. He opened up his terminal and put on his alpha helmet—a tool that allowed a degree of direct interaction between the programmer’s brain and his machine—and got to work. A lawsuit seemed certain now. He had the evidence right here.

It was easy for Dorian to move close behind the programmer as he sat in furious concentration before the terminal, oblivious to everything else around him. Easy to bend over and extract a heavy mallet from the open toolbox beside Hallward’s chair. The alpha helmet on Hallward’s head was too flimsy to offer any real protection, so striking the blow was, in a way, the easiest thing of all. Then Dorian struck twice more, to make sure.

There wasn’t much blood to be taken care of; later he would hose the terrace perfectly clean. Getting the helmet off Hallward’s head was really the worst part. One of the little scalp probes had been driven right into skin and scalp and perhaps bone.

Dorian looked over the balustrade. All was quiet, and it was getting dark, but there was still light enough to see. It was as if the necessary actions had already been planned out for him.

He hoisted the body over his shoulders and carried it down to the parking area and loaded it into Hallward’s van. There was another gate to the parking area, seldom used, that led to a road—a rutted track rather—used only on rare occasions by utility companies. Being careful not to leave fingerprints in the van, Dorian got the keys from Hallward’s pocket and drove the paneled vehicle down the unused road until he reached the old mudslide area near the throughway.

Here the genegineered kudzu vine recently planted by the highway department was taking charge of things. The ground-hugging vine devoured petroleum products and other pollutants from the air and soil, and released the oxygen from whatever it came across. The highway was so close now that Dorian could hear the rush of traffic in the dusk, but the traffic was above the mudslide area and the headlights never came near. The last time he had been back this way he had seen another abandoned vehicle already half-covered by the relentless kudzu. Maybe in a hundred years, he had thought, someone would take the trouble to dig it out. By that time only a few plastic parts would be left. Meanwhile everyone thought Hallward had gone to Japan. Some time would certainly pass before that was straightened out.

Back in his house, Dorian discovered that Hallward had left a message on the home system this afternoon. The programmer said he couldn’t wait any longer, and was heading for the airport.

All to the good. Dorian left the message unerased.

Then he went back to the stage and confronted the graphic image of himself that still stood looking at him.

Again the face of it had changed, more drastically this time. Yet it was still him, Dorian Gray, and this was something he could not allow the world to see.

“I saw what you guys did,” the image announced, as its human model approached the stage. Dorian had a hard time forcing himself to look at it. The once-perfect nose of the graphic image was turning into something like the snout of a pig. The red inside of its lower eyelids showed, as if the whole face were being stretched down, and the eyes themselves were increasingly bloodshot.

“What do you think you saw us do?” Dorian asked it at last.

It raised a hand, moved it up and down slowly, and the fist as it moved turned into the blunt head of a mallet.

“Bonk,” the image grated, in its once-fine voice.

“I see I have to do a little reprogramming on my own,” said the man, and picked up the alpha helmet from the stones of the terrace. Then he stood there staring at the damaged helmet in his hands. No reason to panic because he had temporarily forgotten one detail. There were plenty of places where he could hide the helmet—the programmer might just have forgotten it here. No, because it showed damage, better to get rid of it entirely. Anyway, it would be a long time before anyone came here seriously looking for Hallward.

“You’re not a programmer,” the graphic said. “Before you put on that helmet and start screwing around, you ought to remember that. Your job in this partnership is to look beautiful. You do that well. You should leave the other jobs to other people. ”

“Maybe. Maybe you’re right. We’ll let the programming go for now. There’s plenty of time. ”

“When is Sibyl coming back?” the graphic asked him.

“Sometime. I wish . . . oh God. Oh well. Right now, you get put to sleep for a while.”

And Dorian Gray slept well that night.

During the next few weeks, the copies of the program of Dorian Gray that were working at the studio went on having a fine career. Prince Charming, with a new co-star, was in the can and ready for release. At Dorian’s house, the original home copy, and the damaged alpha helmet, had both been hidden away.

The next time Henry Lord came visiting, he saw the orange Volks of the pedicurist in the parking area. Somehow he took it as a hopeful sign.

“That bastard Hallward,” he said to Dorian. “He’s always been flaky. They wanted him for publicity the night of the premiere and he wasn’t around. Now no one can find him; there’s even some doubt he ever went to Japan at all.”

“I have a feeling,” said Dorian, “he’s not coming back.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I killed him.”

Lord gave his client a long look. “Still trying to get Sibyl out of your system? It’s not gonna do you any good to talk like that. Listen, we’re gonna need Hallward soon, or be looking for another programmer. With the grosses for the first week in the theaters as good as they are, we want to sign up soon for something new. ”

“You saw Hetty leaving just now.”

“That her name?”

“She and I have kind of got back together.”

“Listen, this time they’ll want to team you with some established star.”

“No. No, I don’t mean I want to use her for a graphic.” Dorian, for some reason, shuddered faintly. “I was on the verge of asking Hetty to marry me today.”

“Jesus Christ, kid. What is it with you and marrying? Why complicate your life just now? If—”

“No, listen to me, Hank. I changed my mind. Because my life is so screwed up already, I couldn’t drag her into it. And, you know? Deciding not to mess up her life too was about the best thing I’ve ever done. I think I turned some kind of a comer, doing that.”

“Great,” said Lord after a thoughtful pause. “I agree it was probably a wise decision. You’ve got the career to think of now. I haven’t met Hetty but somehow I doubt she’d fit.”

“Yeah,” said Dorian, “there’s the career to think about. The graphic career. I’m thinking about that more than ever now. ”

When Henry Lord was gone, Dorian opened a drawer and stared at the innocent-looking laser disc on which the master copy of his graphic image was now stored. It seemed a long time since he had looked at the graphic, though actually only a few days had passed.

He put the disc into the machine and called up the graphic image on the stage. He pulled the damaged helmet from its hiding place, and plugged it in, and fitted it on his head.

When Henry Lord came back to the house that evening, he found Dorian, with the alpha wave helmet still on his head, lying dead on the terrace. Circuit breakers in the system terminal had popped off, and Lord was alert enough to notice that the helmet appeared to have been damaged. Some of its wiring looked shorted, as if it had been beaten by a hammer or something similar. Dorian’s head of blond curls looked undamaged; he wasn’t going to touch him to find out.

“Henry Lord, Henry Lord,” said the hideous graphic cavorting on the nearby stage. It was dressed in a Nazi uniform now, like something right from central casting. “You’ve got ten percent of me. I recognize you, Henry Lord.”

“In that you have the advantage of me, as they said in the old days.” Lord was letting his voice sound tired. “But I figure you’re right about the ten percent.” He stared at the shape, the face, the body, of the image. Might that thing once have looked like Dorian Gray?

He reached out a hand to a nearby phone, to call the cops, then drew it back. He didn’t want to touch this house’s system, or any system that had that in it. Something was wrong with it. He’d go down to his car and use his mobile unit.

First call to the cops, of course; and then, while he was at it, a call to someone he knew at another studio. Whoever had reworked that graphic up there, it had new possibilities. He’d heard there were plans for a remake of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

1991

THE MACHINERY OF LIES

I.

Tanya Serafeddin, peering through the forward windows of the ground-crawling shuttle in which she was the only passenger, scanned the flat kilometers of concrete ramp under the endless curve of blue sky striped with bars of varicolored cloud. Within the cloud-bars turbulence made many shapes, suggesting and animating one form after another, some familiar, some fantastic. But Tanya, long accustomed to the show, ignored it. She was trying to see or at least to guess successfully which of the parked interstellar spaceships dotting the broad expanse was the Lady Blanqui’s yacht. The problem was complicated by the tendency of starships of any kind to have basically the same shape. The generic resemblance did not extend to color schemes, but Tanya had no idea of what to look for there. Ahead and on both sides of the shuttle she observed a collection of spheres, or near-spheres, ranging in size from launches and personal craft even smaller than a small house to liners and military ships the size of office buildings.

Now passing on the right was a freighter which had probably been a month in subspace, voyaging with exotic cargo from some remote world far outside the Tallart Cluster. And there on the left, in the opposite row, a hundred meters from the freighter, squatted a white-hulled Templar warship, bristling with weapons. The fighter would be poised to leap into space, Tanya supposed, as soon as the next rumor reached Malawi of a berserker’s presence anywhere within range of a two- or three-day patrol.

When at last the automated shuttle stopped and opened its right-side door for its only passenger, Tanya felt vaguely disappointed. The Lady’s yacht, called the Golden Hind, was remarkably ordinary in appearance, and definitely in the small house range of size rather than that of office buildings. Though Tanya did not consider herself expert on space armaments, drives, or detection/astrogation systems, she was able to deduce something in each of those categories from the outward appearance of the craft. And nothing she deduced about the yacht particularly impressed her either.

Walking briskly across the sunlit, windswept ramp between the shuttle and the ship, carrying her single modest piece of luggage, she ascended a small retractable ramp from ground level to the nearest entry hatch. The hatch was closed, so it was necessary to stand waiting for some person or machine inside to acknowledge her arrival.

The delay was brief. “Name, please?” inquired a definitely human-sounding voice from an invisible speaker somewhere in the hull.

“Tanya Serafeddin.”

A door defined itself in the smooth metal, opening just far enough to let the small man standing inside scan her face to face. Presumably this was only a final inspection, meant to compliment some kind of security matching already accomplished without her being directly aware of the process.

“Come in, please,” the small man invited a moment later, standing back with a shallow bow as the door swung wide. Not quite as tall as Tanya, he was dark, of indeterminate age, and dressed in a plain dark tunic. His overall appearance and behavior suggested to Tanya that he was a servant rather than a crew member or colleague of the Lady.

He said to the visitor in a firm voice: “You will wait for the Lady in the lounge. This way, please.” And he gestured down a short passage.

The lounge was an oval chamber somewhat bigger than Tanya had expected in a ship of the yacht’s modest size; a dozen or fifteen people might have socialized in it comfortably. The center of the room was dominated by an octagonal marble table surrounded by eight chairs of white wood, one taller than the others. The room’s other furnishings were eclectic, looking pleasant and comfortable enough but giving no hint of the awesome wealth that would be at the disposal of any Lady of the Mercantile Worlds.

This lack of ostentation was Tanya’s first surprise—a rather mild one—on coming aboard. Her second was somewhat greater and slightly more disagreeable.

For some reason she had expected to be the only passenger besides the lady herself. But the lounge was already occupied, by a chubby, youthful man in casual dress with a coppery glint in his brown hair, who did not look the part of servant or crew member. A traveling bag sat on the carpeted deck beside him.

On seeing Tanya this gentleman rose politely from his chair. “Welcome aboard!” he boomed out. His expression and tone suggested that he too was somewhat startled to find that he had company.

“Uh, thank you.” Tanya hesitated, swinging her single piece of luggage in one strong hand. “I was expecting the Lady Blanqui—” she began tentatively.

“I’m waiting for her myself, but she’s not back from town yet.” The youngish man bowed lightly. “I’m Carl Skorba, and I’ll be aboard at least as far as Damaturu, trying to get in some business discussions with Her Ladyship. Are you an old friend of hers, or—?”

“Tanya Serafeddin.” Their hands met in the traditional gesture of greeting. “No, I’ve only just met her today. The Lady has said that I can interview her, and invited me along as far as Damaturu.”

“Oho. Reporter?”

“No, not exactly. My job’s a little less immediate than that. There’s a book I’m trying to write. But you seem to be equipped to practice journalism yourself.” This was a reference to the media machine Skorba was carrying, or wearing, slung on a shoulder strap. It was a roughly tubular black device as long and thick as a man’s forearm, with lenses clustered at its front and a bewildering variety of controls around the rear handgrip. Tanya had seen similar gear before, and knew its functions would include those of camera, recorder, computer and communications tool.

The stout young man looked down at the weapon-like thing almost in surprise, as if he might have lived with it so long that he’d forgotten its existence. “Equipped? Well, I do seem to have the hardware. But not otherwise. Not mentally, I’m afraid.” He let himself fall back into his chair. “Help yourself to a seat. Order a drink or a chewie. The steward’s not very conversational, but it has a skilled touch with the comestibles.”

Tanya unslung her single piece of luggage from her shoulder, dropped it beside a chair facing Skorba’s, and sat down. Catching the steward’s glassy eye—it was a squat robot that had slid half a meter out from the tapestried bulkhead on overhearing a suggestion that it might be wanted—she indicated with a negative gesture that she required no service at the moment.

Skorba, sitting opposite, was frowning at her thoughtfully. Then he crossed his casually-shod feet and smiled. It was a kind of generic smile, Tanya thought, not revelatory of anything in particular. He suggested: “First names?”

Tanya thought a moment and returned the smile. “Looks like it’s going to be close quarters for several days. Of course. Carl, I think you said?”

“I did. Good. Look, Tanya, it is as you say going to be close quarters. And it seems we each have something we want to talk to the Lady about. We don’t want to be getting in each other’s way. Is your interview with her going to be—very extensive? I’m afraid that mine might have to go on through several lengthy sessions.”

“In my case it’s really hard to say.”

“Yeah, and also none of my business, huh? You’re right.” Skorba sighed, looked mildly worried, and scratched his head.

A brief silence fell. Without leaving her chair, Tanya examined what she could see of the lounge of the Golden Hind. What she saw confirmed her first impression. Everything was nice enough, pleasant to the eye and to the touch, nothing really splendid. This yacht had to be far from the most impressive ship that the enormously wealthy Lady had at her command. No, this couldn’t be even the eighth or tenth most imposing. Rather it was a vehicle she’d use when she felt like being inconspicuous.

Turning to a small set of standard controls beside her chair, Tanya dialed a viewscreen to get a look outside. There was the next crawler-shuttle, just coming into view in the distance, working its way along the kilometers of parking ramp. Perhaps it was bringing the Lady back from her business in town to join her guests. Except for the shuttle, the sprawling scene at the moment was almost devoid of movement. The only spaceport on the world of Malawi was almost quiet under the strange sky. Nothing like the busier spaceports of the Galaxy’s known portion, the small slice explored and settled by Earth-descended humanity—or at least nothing like the few Tanya had seen.

Malawi was only a small dot, if that, on most of the computer-expandable travel charts that showed the whole slice. Even the Tallart Cluster of a few thousand suns, in which Malawi’s system lay, was of only minor importance in the overall scheme of Earth-descended civilization. This world’s population had never exceeded a few hundred thousand, and the operations of its only spaceport tended to be rather informal.

Skorba was still studying her, though not so intently as to seem offensive. Now he spoke again. “How’d you happen to meet our gracious hostess, anyway? If you don’t mind my asking?”

Tanya shrugged. “There’s no secret about it. I’m a psychologist, working toward an advanced degree at Malawi University. There’s a better job waiting for me once I get the degree.

“My field, as I say, is psychology. My research specialty is the mechanisms of deception.”

“Interesting! Verr-y interesting! So, how’d you happen to meet Lady B?”

Before Tanya could reply, the conversation was interrupted by the entrance of a third person into the lounge. This was a youthful-looking man, of dark complexion, powerful physique and stern manner. Dressed in a plain white tunic, he appeared unannounced in one of the two interior doorways. Pausing there, he gazed with a forbidding expression at the two people who were in the process of rising from their chairs to greet him. A moment later, without saying anything, the youth had turned abruptly and disappeared in the direction from which he had come.

As they slowly resumed their seats, Tanya and her companion exchanged puzzled glances. Skorba asked her: “Any idea who that was?”

“Not really. Neither a servant nor a member of the flight crew, would be my guess.”

“Mine too—wait. I’ve heard that Lady Blanqui seldom goes anywhere without a certain young attendant—or friend, or companion—to whom she’s particularly attached. The only name I’ve heard for him is ‘Yero’.”

“That may be. I really know very little about her, beyond a few obvious things—some of which may not be true, of course.”

Skorba was giving her a narrow-eyed look, as if he sought some hidden meaning in her words. He asked: “Always on the lookout for deception, hey?”

Smiling at him, Tanya continued: “Really, eight hours ago I had no idea that I was ever going to meet our gracious hostess, much less be about to ride away in her ship. Someone in town told me that her yacht was sitting in our spaceport, and I hastened to track her down. That wasn’t hard to do; we have only one financial institution of any interstellar importance on Malawi, and I found the Lady talking to its president.”

“And she invited you to go on a jaunt.”

“Yes, actually—when I explained to her my reasons for wanting to interview her. She seemed to find my topic interesting.”

Carl Skorba was nodding thoughtfully. “As for me, I’ve been trying to catch up with her for quite a while. I’ve got a business proposition that I don’t think she’s going to be able to turn down. But I never met the Lady either until a few hours ago, here in your delightful city.”

A thought had occurred to Tanya. “Perhaps I should make it clear that I’m interested in interviewing Lady Blanqui, not because I think she practices deception—more than any of the rest of us—but because I consider her at least potentially an authority on how to discover it. Anyone of her wealth and standing must be continually beset with people seeking to relieve her of some of her property.”

“Oh. Oho.” Carl grinned. “Then maybe you’d like to interview me? I’ve promoted a lot of deals in my time. And come across a lot of dirty tricks. They don’t take me in very often, I can tell you.”

Tanya, who was finding her new companion interesting if not entirely believable, answered non-committally. The conversation shifted to the tourist attractions of Malawi. The strange sky with its peculiar clouds was moderately famous among interstellar tourists. Tanya and Carl were still on the subject when the Lady herself entered the lounge at last, coming through the passage from the main hatch.

Lady Blanqui was tall and elegantly dressed, lean and gray and undoubtedly elderly, though well-preserved. She had hardly finished greeting her guests, when the dark and glowering Yero silently re-entered the lounge to welcome her with a wordless hug—as if perhaps he had been waiting somewhere just out of sight, listening for her voice. The two of them held each other in a momentary hard embrace, during which Tanya observed that Lady Blanqui closed her eyes.

Then the pair separated, and the lady made introductions. “My friends, Serafeddin, Skorba—this is Yero, who is my companion. Yero, my dear, these people are traveling with us, as far as Damaturu at least.”

The grim-looking youth favored each with a silent nod. Then he bowed to the Lady and in another moment he was gone.

The Lady shifted her attention back to her invited guests, making no explanation or apology on Yero’s behalf. She looked at Skorba somewhat superciliously, and demanded: “Have you any baggage?”

“Only this. And this.” He raised the small traveling bag from the deck beside his chair, and gestured at the media machine. Tanya in turn demonstrated her lack of any great physical encumbrance.

“Very well. I assume you can see to the disposal of your things yourselves . . . so, you are both coming along to Damaturu with me.”

“I certainly appreciate the opportunity,” Skorba put in.

“Yes, well . . . I’ve decided it’s time I talked to people more.” The Lady inspected him critically. “I make one condition: neither of you are to make any video or audio recordings—of myself, my ship, or anyone aboard—until I give specific permission. Is that agreeable?”

“Perfectly,” said Tanya. She had brought a small recorder in her bag.

“Completely.” And Skorba here unslung his media machine from his shoulder, then pushed it a centimeter or two farther from him on his chair, as if to demonstrate his willing renunciation.

Their hostess appeared satisfied. “We shall be two or three days en route to Damaturu, proceeding unhurriedly. I assume both of you will be able to provide your own passage from there, wherever you choose to go?”

“Of course, Lady Blanqui.”

“Of course.”

“Until dinner, then.”

With that the Lady retired from the lounge, presumably going to her own quarters.

A moment later the man who had admitted Tanya to the ship appeared. Introducing himself now as Stanhill, and settling himself more firmly into the character of a servant, he escorted her and her fellow passenger to their respective staterooms, which turned out to be adjoining. The passengers carried their own luggage. Tanya found her cabin expectably small but comfortable. The only remotely ostentatious touch was the bed’s four tall corner posts, actually stanchions running solid from deck to overhead. There was a door connecting with Skorba’s quarters. Tanya made sure that her side was bolted.

Very shortly after she had reached her cabin, liftoff was announced on intercom, and presently it was accomplished without incident.

Tanya had lived almost her entire life on Malawi, where she had been born. When she’d heard that the Lady Blanqui’s yacht had dropped in on some kind of surprise business visit, she had reacted swiftly, getting what information she could out of the available data banks on the Lady and the civilization of the Mercantile Worlds from which she came. What she found had confirmed her previous impression, that in those worlds any female of Lady status had something of the status of a princess, and was certain to be immensely wealthy.

Skorba, meeting his fellow passenger in the lounge again a few minutes after liftoff, was naturally interested in their hostess too. “Just what sort of business was this great person proposing to conduct on Malawi? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“You probably shouldn’t ask. Perhaps more to the point, there’s practically nothing I can tell you. Really, I think the Malawi bankers were as surprised as anyone else by her visit. What she talked about with them I have no idea.”

Carl ruminated for a time. At last he said: “I can tell you this much. Yours is not the only world she’s stopped at in the Tallart Cluster. I’ve been chasing her across Tallart, trying to catch up with her, for almost a standard month.”

Tanya nodded slowly. She wondered in passing if the Lady might be even now eavesdropping electronically on what her guests were saying in the lounge. But why should such an eminent person care what they thought? And it served eavesdroppers right if they heard something they didn’t like—that was Tanya’s usual attitude toward such intrusions.

She speculated: “I wonder where she’s going after Damaturu? And what this long trip of hers is all about?”

Her companion shook his head. “I wish I knew. If I did I might have been able to intercept her instead of hurrying to catch up. And I’ve got a question for you, too.”

“Fire away.”

“Why does she travel in a modest ship like this?”

“Trying to be inconspicuous . . .oh.”

“Exactly. Why then does she want to talk to interviewers?”

Evidently the human crew aboard the modest yacht was small, though possibly some of its members were keeping out of sight. During the first few hours of the voyage, Tanya, exploring the more or less public areas of the ship, caught glimpses of a female flight engineer, an unimpressive male captain—both in rather sloppy uniforms—and one female servant in addition to Stanhill. None of these people impressed her as congenial. None except Stanhill introduced themselves. And none including Stanhill were disposed to converse with passengers beyond a few grudging monosyllables.

Carl and Tanya found themselves, more or less by default, keeping each other company. “Do they sleep together, do you suppose?” Tanya speculated to her fellow passenger, referring to their hostess and her evidently beloved young male companion.

Skorba appeared to give the question serious thought. No doubt anything he could work out about the Lady’s psychology might be of some advantage to him when he talked business with her.

“I rather doubt it,” he said at last. “Though I’m not sure why I say that.”

“I agree.” Tanya nodded slowly. “There’s some very powerful bond between them. But what it is. . . .”

No hint yet of when she’d be able to get down to interviewing Lady Blanqui.

Like most people, Tanya found travel in subspace boring. She had taken only four interstellar journeys before this one, but within two standard hours she was already bored. Most of the time there was no way of looking out, in any meaningful sense, from a starship in full flight; and in me intervals when looking out was possible, most observers, Tanya among them, found the sensation quite unpleasant. She agreed with the usual comparison, of gazing through an infinite wall of distorting lenses, toward a few distant and uncertain sources of dazzling light.

No effort had been made to adjust ship’s time for the new passengers. The clock aboard appeared to be running several hours later than that of the Malawi spaceport town, and so, from the newcomers’ viewpoint, dinner was delayed.

When the meal was served at last, by capable machines—and the female servant, who proved surprisingly inept—it was something of a disappointment. Routine machine cooking, adequate to sustain life, even enjoyable if you were hungry, but certainly not memorable. Well, thought Tanya, they ought to have been warned by their hostess’s lean frame and ascetic manner. Miserliness had not been mentioned in the data banks as one of the Lady’s notable attributes, but Tanya supposed that if you were rich and powerful enough the data banks tended to be kind.

The two invited guests dined with Lady Blanqui at the central table in the lounge. Everyone else aboard, including Yero, appeared to be dining elsewhere. And if the Lady’s wish, as she had expressed it, was really to talk more with people, she gave little sign of being ready to start now.

Both Skorba and Serafeddin, somewhat deterred by the forbidding presence of their hostess, hesitated to bring up the subjects that had brought them aboard. Conversation tended to drag a little.

What talk there was began to turn philosophical.

And then it was broken off, abruptly wiped out by the almost-deafening shriek of the ship’s alarms.

II.

There was no need for the occupants of the lounge to engage in a physical scramble to discover what had set off the alarms. Without prompting, the ship’s own electronic brain quickly altered the lighting in the lounge, and simultaneously illuminated screens and display stages that showed the situation outside the hull.

These viewing devices presented schematic views of surrounding subspace, from which an eye skilled in such interpretations could extract much information. The inexperienced Tanya could make little sense of the displays at first, and turned to Skorba, whose intent expression indicated that he was having more success.

“What’s happening?”

“We’re about to pop out into normal space, for one thing. I don’t know why—we can’t be anywhere near Damaturu yet. Could be we’re being urged along.”

“Urged along? By what? By who?”

Carl didn’t answer. In a few moments he added: “There’s some kind of a—system—near where we’re going to come out. Not a real sun, though. Much smaller. An infra-red source that looks like a marginal brown dwarf. Dead rocks revolving around a bigger rock.”

Lady Blanqui had manually turned off the alarms, then for the next minute remained silent while staring at the displays. Then she began a crisp, terse dialogue with her ship. Tanya could not understand much of what was said on either side, but the jargon the Lady used indicated that she was no novice in technical matters.

Shortly after the alarms fell silent, the official captain of the Golden Hind came bursting, scrambling into the lounge, noticeably late in reacting to the signal. He had obviously just pulled on his formal tunic and was still trying to fasten the collar as he appeared. “My Lady, my Lady, there is an attacker—”

“Be quiet. I can see things for myself.”

Tanya’s gaze flew back to the nearest display. The symbol in the center, if the thing was going to make any sense at all, had to stand for the yacht. Now, amid the steady flow of other indications, another image of somewhat greater size was struggling to establish itself solidly, holding a steady position relative to the yacht.

“Whatever it is, it looks too big for us to deal with,” Skorba was muttering softly. Glancing toward her companion, Tanya noted that he was now clinging with both hands to the nearest leg of the bolted-down table. As if, she realized, he was preparing himself against a possible slight disturbance in the artificial gravity. Slight, because anything more than slight, at space velocities, would slosh fragile human bodies like soup around the interior of the room.

So far the gravity was just fine, holding standard normal, the lounge as quiet and steady as a room built on Malawi bedrock. But Tanya carefully took a double grip on the tableleg nearest her—just in case. Glancing at their hostess, she observed that Lady Blanqui disdained such precautions.

Turning back to Carl Skorba, Tanya asked him some questions about the displays. With a few quick explanations from her fellow passenger, she began to find the presentations easy enough to interpret, at least in their essentials. A single unidentified craft, somewhat larger than the yacht, had sprung out seemingly from nowhere as if in deliberate ambush. Such tactics were feasible in certain realms of subspace; one such was this part of the Tallart Nebula, where practical routes of travel were much constricted by dark matter and gravitational fields.

The unknown craft had closed in on the Golden Hind and grappled her with forcefield weapons. The yacht, as its electronic brain was even now reporting to its owner, had already tried to pull free, but had failed against superior force. Now the unidentified attacker was slowly but steadily forcing the yacht to a standstill relative to the nearest local system. In this case that meant the imminent emergence of both vessels into normal space.

The nominal captain of the Golden Hind, having made his report—and having been put in his place by his Lady’s contemptuous response—stepped back from the table and remained standing at attention, his face inscrutable. Within a few moments of his arrival in the lounge, the rest of the human crew and servants came straggling in one at a time. Only Yero was still absent. Like their mistress, the staff seemed to be bearing the shock of sudden and mysterious danger with relative calm and considerable fortitude. Perhaps they were trained to take the cue for all their responses from her. The robotic steward continued to fuss about the table, getting ready to offer everyone refreshments, until the Lady ordered it back to its place against the tapestried bulkhead.

Tanya turned back to Carl Skorba. “Pirates?” she asked hopefully.

She knew perfectly well that human piracy had never been really widespread in the Tallart Cluster. And for centuries now it had been on the wane. But surely there was a chance, there must be, that the attackers were only human pirates—perhaps amenable to bargaining, to reason, to letting people go in exchange for ransom—

“I doubt it,” Skorba responded tersely. And her heart sank.

The only likely alternative to human pirates was something that no one would want to consider. Not until there was no other choice.

Tanya, like everyone else on Malawi during the past year, had heard rumors about berserker sightings in the Tallart. Surely the Lady and her people must have heard them also? If so, she had to admire their fortitude.

Looking up, she saw that Yero had at last come into the lounge. Now everyone aboard was gathered here. Moving slowly and with dignity, the dark and savage-looking young man approached his mistress until he was standing close beside her chair. There he remained, silent as before, resting one hand on the chair’s high back, and gazing around fiercely at the other people present.

For once the Lady hardly seemed aware of her dear one’s presence. Her attention remained riveted on the displays, and now and then she exchanged a few words of technical jargon directly with the electronic intelligence of her ship. Have we no weapons? Tanya wondered suddenly. Is there nothing at all for us to do?

The near-silence in the lounge held for what seemed to her an endless time. And then it was broken by a loud voice. Tanya had never heard such a voice before, except from an entertainment stage, or in one of the few authentic recordings. Not many humans had heard the real thing and survived to describe the experience. This voice, now, spoke from the attacking craft in the traditional tones of a berserker’s squeaking, disjointed utterance, coming clearly through the speakers in the lounge. Stories said that the berserkers made voices for themselves by splicing together syllables from the recorded speech of long-dead human prisoners.

“Badlife, any further attempt at escape or resistance will be punished. Resistance is futile. Prompt surrender will be rewarded. I repeat, badlife attitudes and behavior will be punished.”

The sound of that utterance struck Tanya like a blow. It is to be death, then. My death. Not someday, when I am old and perhaps will be ready. But extinction here and now, in the days of my youth.

“No such good luck as pirates,” someone whispered. She needed a moment to realize that the whisperer was herself.

In the age-long war of Earth-descended humanity against berserkers mere had been hardly any bargaining. No treaties made, or even attempted, with such an enemy, an unliving enemy programmed inexorably to achieve death, death for all life wherever and whenever encountered. No mercy on either side, and no exchange of prisoners. The first berserkers had been designed by living beings as an ultimate weapon, meant to win a savage interstellar war. They were machines, self-replicating, self-repairing, launched upon their course of slaughter by a shadowy and almost unknown race, ages before anyone on Earth had built or even imagined starships.

In her despair Tanya turned her head, seeking hope. Beside her, Skorba had his eyes closed; his face was calm, his hands still gripped the table. Across the table, Lady Blanqui seemed as firmly in control of herself as ever. She has little to lose, Tanya thought, knowing a flash of vicious envy. Her life must be nearly at an end in any case.

Another figure stirred. “My Lady. Should we—?”

Lady Blanqui cut off her captain’s tentative question with a contemptuous motion of her hand.

The display screens and stages changed dramatically, and all at once. Now both spacecraft, still bound together by the attackers’ forcefields, were emerging into normal space at what must be an admissible local velocity.

That terrible voice came once more, resonating in the ears and in the souls of me people in die lounge. “Resistance will not bring quick death. Thoughtful cooperation is the only hope of that.”

“Ship,” said me Lady in a clear, steady voice. “I wish to speak directly to our attacker. Surely you can establish some kind of two-way communications link?”

There was a click from the speakers, a burst of noise, and then the voice of the yacht’s own electronic control system. “The link is established, Lady.”

Lady Blanqui wasted no time. “Who are you?” she demanded in an imperious croak. “And what do you want?”

The berserker voice croaked back: “Badlife, no subterfuge will succeed. You know what I am. My power is overwhelming. Much greater than that of your small ship.”

And before the Lady could respond to that, the enemy craft had demonstrated a powerful weapon, to good effect.

The display screens and stages flared with a brief violence of light. A few seconds later, one of the smaller and nearer rocks making up the dead system nearby had disappeared in an explosion. And even with such a drain of power, the grip of the forcefields had not slackened.

“Penalties will be imposed, upon each of you individually, if resistance is prolonged further.”

“Cut our drive,” Lady Blanqui commanded her ship immediately. “Cease all efforts to escape.” Then she gave voice to a great sigh.

Moments later, it was obvious even to Tanya, watching the displays, that the ship’s speed relative to the nearby rocks was slowing. Now in a state of abject surrender, the yacht was soon brought very nearly to a complete stop relative to the local system. Skorba in a low voice noted that the nearest sizable member of that system, big as a minor planet, was only a few hundred thousand kilometers away.

Once again the squeaky voice issued orders. “Stand by to receive a boarding party. Resistance will result in prolonged punishment.”

“It never gets tired of saying that,” Carl Skorba muttered, “does it?” He looked at Tanya with an expression of rueful sympathy, and suddenly reached out for her hand.

Tanya took his hand, gratefully, stung even in her despair by the idea that everyone aboard was braver than herself.

“There will be no resistance to the boarding party,” commanded the Lady, raising her head and voice sharply, glaring at them all. “I will speak, as best I can, for all of us.”

None of her shipmates raised any argument.

Tanya recalled her own earlier, admittedly inexpert, impression that the weaponry, offensive and defensive, aboard the yacht seemed rather light and indeed inadequate for a craft that presumably had planned to cruise through some risky places. Well, it was too late now to worry about that.

Resistance, however hopeless and indeed suicidal, might be the standard reaction of choice against berserkers. But as far as Tanya could tell, there was at this point literally no chance to do anything in the way of fighting for survival.

“Haven’t we any weapons?” she burst out defiantly, while they waited.

Skorba was soothing. “Not much along that line, I think. Anyway, whatever the ship does carry probably couldn’t be brought to bear at this point.”

Invisible forces maintained their grip upon the yacht, inexorably binding her in the same position relative to her captor.

Yero continued to stand close to Lady Blanqui at this critical time. Still they hardly touched each other.

When Tanya pulled her hand away from Skorba’s, he at last let go of the table completely. He folded his arms and sat back in his chair, watching the Lady and wearing an expression of grim resignation.

The displays in the lounge now showed what looked like a small launch detaching itself from the enemy, and quickly approaching the Golden Hind. Only seconds elapsed before the sounds of docking came carrying ominously through me hull.

“Aren’t you going to at least lock the door on them? Do we all just sit here, like—like—”

Tanya’s outburst was ignored. As if hypnotized, everyone remained in place and watched a hatch, outlined by a pattern in the carpeted deck, swing up and open.

She held her breath.

The object that appeared first in the opening resembled a grotesquely enlarged human head, or a space helmet, but in fact it was part of a machine. As this machine climbed into full view the watchers could see that it was roughly manlike in its shape, and only slightly larger than an average human adult; its fellow, which followed close behind it, was only slightly smaller.

Both devices, as they took up standing positions one on either side of the open hatch, looked very formidable. Their bodies were thickly studded with what might have been ray-projectors or missile-throwers of one kind or another. Their formidable, claw-like grippers were empty, but looked capable of effortlessly rending mere human flesh into bloody rags. There were other peculiar features about the devices, features whose purpose Tanya could not readily identify, and that appeared all the more ominous to her for that.

The machines had hardly taken up their stations when they were followed into view by a couple of very scruffy, wretched-looking humans. So these are goodlife, thought Tanya, gazing at the worn-looking man and woman, both of indeterminate age. Goodlife was a term coined long ago by the berserkers themselves, and applied to deserters from the human side. People who became worshippers of death, servants of death, and so were tolerated for a time by the machines of death. Such people were useful to the machines for study and experiment, valuable as spies and secret agents, helpful in learning the mysterious ways of this so-stubborn variety of active protoplasm that called itself Earth-descended humanity.

“This everyone?” asked the goodlife man. He was unarmed, clad in a worn and unwashed coverall, and boots with broken fastenings. His voice was sharp though not loud, and he indicated the people in the lounge with a jerky gesture of one hand.

The Lady, who was somehow still managing to retain her regal calm, looked around her unhurriedly. Tanya could feel her own courage buoyed by this example.

The woman in the tall chair said: “Every living person on this ship, both crew and passengers, is now assembled here. I am the Lady Blanqui.”

“Is that so. Who’re you?” The male intruder was squinting now at Skorba. Skorba introduced himself, giving name and occupation—“financial adviser”—in a flat voice. Then it was Tanya’s turn, and she did the same.

Then it was Yero’s turn. Lady Blanqui spoke for him. “He is dumb. But don’t worry, he understands. And he will do what I tell him.”

“He’d better. And you’d better tell him the right thing.”

Yero uttered a whispery growl at the invaders. Though the youth’s body hardly moved, he gave the impression that he might have hurled himself violently at them were it not for the Lady’s gently restraining hand that touched and held his hand. It was almost as if she were holding back a savage dog.

Next the goodlife man turned to the larger of the two boarding machines standing near him. Bowing his head, speaking now in a low, actually reverent tone, he asked the thing whether he and his fellow goodlife should conduct a search for weapons.

The answer came directly from the machine this time; it was the same voice, though at a lower volume, that had earlier issued from the speakers in the lounge. “Such an effort would only waste time. No badlife will be able to use a weapon while under our surveillance.”

At this point the goodlife woman suddenly spoke up for the first time, addressing the Lady on her tall chair. The intruder was bright-eyed and spontaneous, and it was as if her thoughts had been racing on ahead: “Ever see anyone skinned alive, Your Ladyship? People don’t really have the skill in their fingers, the fine control of tools, to do it properly. The machines do, though. They can do it perfectly. But we don’t need that kind of thing to happen. If you do have any weapons hidden about here, don’t try to use them. You’d never be quick enough, with the machines watching.”

And the goodlife man, on catching sight of Skorba’s media machine which lay now on the wide table, within easy reach of its owner “Whether that thing’s a weapon or not, young lad, don’t grab it up in a hurry. In fact you’d best not touch it at all.”

As the male intruder spoke, a lens-turret on one of the death-machines swiveled smoothly in its socket to look directly at Skorba. The pudgy young man hastily hitched his chair back, moving himself half a meter farther from his broad-band recording device. “Not the kind of weapon you have to worry about,” he muttered.

“What’s that you say?”

“Nothing. I was speaking in a political context. I said it was not the kind of weapon you have to worry about.”

The Lady Blanqui still had not stirred out of her chair. She had let go of Yero’s hand and was paying him no attention. Now she spoke, in a manner that made it clear she had assumed the role of spokesperson for everyone on her yacht.

In the same loud, clear voice that she had used before, the Lady said to me scruffy man: “You are evidently goodlife.” A judgment had been passed—contemptuously—and was not subject to comment. “What is your name?”

The man raised his eyebrows at her, then glanced quickly at the larger of the two nearly motionless machines beside him. After a moment’s pause, as if he read in the berserker’s silence permission to speak for himself, he turned his own gaze, as contemptuous as hers, back to the old woman.

“Aye, little Hinna here and I are goodlife—whereas you’re no longer life at all.”

Little Hinna, the goodlife woman, made a choking, throaty sound, that might have been a laugh.

Her male companion paused, looking around at his grim-faced badlife audience, as if to give them a chance to think over what he had just told them. None of his audience spoke. Among them only the Lady herself seemed to be breathing at the moment.

The goodlife man, disgust in his voice, continued: “None of ye. Your bodies will soon be free of life’s infection. Only question now be the manner of your coming purification. And that depends entirely on how willingly ye go along with what it wants. Master”—and here he nodded in the direction of the tall machine—“sees no good in making pain for the sake of pain. It only wants your death, the cleansing that ends all hurts. Could be done in much pain, very slow, or could be quick and easy. No difference to master.”

“We shall see about that,” said the Lady, and again Tanya had to marvel at the older woman’s firm control of voice and body. “I have asked you your name.”

“Wirral, my Lady.” The scrawny figure of the goodlife spokesman made her a mocking bow. “Though we are all of us upon the brink of being done with names.”

“Wirral, then—you who take it upon yourself to be the spokesman of Death—a Death, who, like the rest of us it seems, must struggle and strive to overcome the problems of this world—what do you say to a bargain?”

“Bargain?” The man frowned, his face taking on an utterly witless expression. He might never have heard the word before. He squinted at the Lady as if she were hard to see. Again he looked humbly at the machine beside him, and again his god remained silent.

Lady Blanqui said patiently: “By a bargain I mean a trade. Our lives here—those of myself, all my crew and passengers—in exchange for wealth. Wealth is the thing I have to bargain with.”

“Wealth?” Wirral still looked bemused. He sounded scornful. “What use do you think my master has for—”

“Wait.” The inhuman voice from the machine interrupted him: “I will hear the badlife female.” Lenses on both standing machines were swiveling now toward the owner of the yacht. “What amount of wealth do you have to bargain with?”

“What do you know of human values? How can I translate them to you? I speak of riches greater than all these together”—her gesture swept across the other humans present—“could hope to gather into their hands in a long lifetime. And yet of no more than I could readily obtain, on a planet very near where we are now, and put into your hands within a standard day. In a compact form. Easily negotiable. Acceptable to any human in the Galaxy. Easily—”

“What form precisely?”

Lady Blanqui drew a deep breath. “I am speaking of santana stones. If you, death-machine, are not familiar with gemstones and their value among those you call bad-life, perhaps one of your trusted goodlife can explain to you the—”

“I am familiar with the concept of wealth. Proceed to outline your terms, in detail.”

Tanya was holding her breath again. Only once in her life had she seen a genuine santana stone. The jewels appeared in nature—very, very rarely—in a variety of colors, each more beautiful than the last. Their origin was uncertain, but they were thought to have been formed in the heart of certain stars, and no human cleverness had yet devised a way of creating them artificially.

While Wirral looked on, with a sullen expression suggesting that he would, if he dared, be outraged at this turn of events, the Lady proceeded to detail her plan. If the machines would allow her to go on to the planet Damaturu, with one companion—her usual bodyguard, she assumed—she could obtain a satchel full of the stones from her banker there, even on such short notice. Then she would bring the stones back, and hand them over, in exchange for human lives.

The Lady ignored the gaping sneers of the two goodlife, and bore up under the steady unliving gaze of the machines. She did not appear to have lost any of her customary arrogance in the intimidating presence of Death itself.

She concluded by repeating her description of what she offered. “An attaché case full of such gems—vast wealth indeed. Wealth, I repeat, in a form that is easy to carry and to transfer, acceptable by any Earth-descended humans, anywhere in the Galaxy, as wealth.”

Lenses swerved to Wirral. “Comment,” demanded the machine.

Wirral admitted, with obvious reluctance, that he had heard of the Lady Blanqui. So had a great many people. There was no doubt that a life-unit in her special position would have the power to deliver such wealth as she was promising.

“But I see no reason to trust her, master. Surely you will not trust—”

“I will search our data bank,” said the machine.

“Try under ‘Mercantile Planets’,” suggested Hinna, the goodlife woman. Wirral glared at her. The machine said nothing.

Through all this the Lady herself had remained calm. When the larger machine turned its lenses at her, she said: “I am an old woman, and probably have only a short time left to live in any case. But I have a great responsibility to these people who are with me on my ship.”

Suddenly the goodlife man seemed to remember something; eyes gleaming with triumph, he crept close to the nearest embodiment of his mechanical master, and whispered into a spot on the metal skull.

“Then it is agreed,” said the machine. “The life-unit Blanqui may go on to Damaturu, to procure wealth.”

The Lady looked up. “Yes. You may rely on us to return. I shall—”

“But the life-unit you call Yero must stay here as hostage for your good behavior.”

The Lady was silent for a full ten seconds. When she spoke again, her voice had turned querulous. “But why should I believe you? That if I bring back the gems you’ll keep your bargain and let us live?”

“Because I do nothing without logical reason. I allow the goodlife to survive, for a time, because they are useful tools. In themselves they represent only a small amount of life. By using them, I can purify much greater amounts of matter from the life-disease.

“Similarly,” continued the machine, “wealth such as you have promised can be a tool of great value. But I can use such a tool only in secrecy, a fact that will operate to assure your safety—provided you keep your part of the bargain.”

“I am not sure,” said the Lady, “that I understand.”

Tanya had a momentary impression that the lenses were glaring at this obstinate, impertinent badlife. Then the voice of the berserker spoke again. “At least three of you who are now my captives, are prominent people, whose disappearance would immediately draw attention among the badlife of nearby worlds. Especially if your vanishing followed hard upon the Lady’s unexplained withdrawal from her store of a vast sum of wealth. Some of my badlife enemies might connect the two events and deduce the truth. Steps might be taken to prevent my use of the tool of wealth.

“So when I have your wealth in hand, you will all go free; go free and say nothing of our encounter here, or of our bargain. Because for any of you to speak, to tell of your cooperation with what you call Death, would be to condemn yourselves as goodlife.”

Tanya muttered something.

“You may discuss it among yourselves,” said the machine.

She turned to Skorba, whispering to prevent the glowering goodlife, if not the enemy machine, from hearing. Carl confirmed her thoughts: once crew and passengers went along with such a scheme they would be goodlife themselves, in the eyes of interplanetary law. To argue that they had acted under duress would be no defense. And it would be hard to find, in the whole Galaxy, any human society where any other crime was considered more vile, or punished more severely.

“What do we do, then?”

Skorba shrugged. “We go along. We don’t really have a choice.”

“I think I understand why it wants wealth.”

“I think I do too. But there’s nothing we can do about it at the moment, is there?”

The purpose that Tanya had deduced for the berserker was indeed horrible. But if the berserker’s present captives could survive, reach the surface of an inhabited planet still alive, there would be something they could do—even if it meant condemning themselves in the process. It seemed to Tanya now that any human punishment, no matter how harsh, would be preferable to—

The Lady was saying: “Then it is agreed between us. I am to be allowed to go on to Damaturu—or taken there, somehow—”

“You will be taken there aboard a launch, a vessel you have not yet seen. You and one other life-unit, since it appears to be your custom to travel thus escorted. If you do not return with the promised amount of santana stones, those life-units you leave here, and one of them in particular, will be skinned—”

The Lady’s hands flew up to shield her ears. Her eyes were closed, as if she could already feel the pain in her own flesh. “Stop! I will come back, I will. If—if Yero is allowed to go with me, I can answer for it that he will come back too.”

“The man called Yero will remain here—”

“He must come with me!” the Lady screamed, all her control suddenly in tatters. “He must—”

Effortlessly the mechanical voice amplified itself to override mere human pain, to blast all other sounds aside. “THE LIFE-UNIT CALLED YERO WILL REMAIN HERE AS HOSTAGE FOR YOUR RETURN. UNDER THOSE CONDITIONS I AM CONFIDENT THAT YOU WILL COME BACK WITH THE JEWELS.”

Silence.

The Lady, shuddering, clinging to the arms of her chair, appeared even more deeply shaken than before. For a few moments she seemed cowed.

But when she raised her head again she was not yet ready to give up. Her voice was quietly stubborn. “I need Yero’s help. And it will be thought strange by the people of Damaturu, even suspicious perhaps, if I appear on their world without my usual companion.”

“Study of my data banks reveals that you must be virtually a stranger on Damaturu.” The squeaky voice was as stubborn as only a machine could be. Tanya thought that the relentless enemy’s data base must be rather extensive. “Another man will go with you. Now I will hear no further arguments.”

Carl Skorba stood up suddenly. “I volunteer!” When everyone stared at him, he hastily added: “Let me point out to you, machine, that your goodlife people, if these two are a fair sample, look entirely too scruffy to appear in a bank without at least arousing some unwelcome curiosity.” He paused again. “Do you understand what I mean by ‘scruffy’?”

The machine swiveled lenses at him. But it ignored his question and posed one of its own. “Why should you be willing to come back?”

Lady Blanqui tried to interrupt, swearing that if her escort must be Skorba, she would compel him to come back.

Now Tanya stared at the man beside her, as if she had never seen him before. Skorba ignored her. He was grinning, and looked elated.

“Why should I come back? I’ll tell you. Because I want to see this deal go through, just the way you describe it. Because you couldn’t keep me away from the next deal. I mean the one the Lady and I are on the verge of concluding. The one we’re going to have between us when we walk away from this alive.” Seeing the way that Lady Blanqui and the others looked at him, he smiled boldly at her. “Oh, I know, you haven’t even heard the details of this fabulous deal yet. Just take my word for it, when you hear them you’ll feel you can’t say no.” He swept his gaze around over the rest of his audience, including the two machines.

“What you just told us, machine, it all works out. If fits, it feels right. You want the wealth, because—of what you want it for. I can see that. And you’re absolutely right, once you have it, your best move is to let us go. We aren’t going to talk, any of us. And the Lady and I—we’re going to do business.”

Summoning the small ship to carry two passengers on to Damaturu was going to take a little time, the berserker told them, more time than the passengers would really need to prepare themselves. Meanwhile the prisoners were free to move about the yacht as they liked. Tanya and Skorba, encountering each other in the little passage outside their cabins, had a brief chance to talk alone.

“What are you doing?” Tanya demanded in an urgent whisper.

He returned her gaze boldly. “Just what I told everyone I was going to do. Have you got a better idea?”

“I was ready to fight them, to die fighting. But no one else was. Now—no, I have nothing better than your plan to suggest. But you understand, don’t you, the only reason a berserker would want wealth?”

Carl Skorba sounded calm and matter-of-fact about it. “Actually there are a couple of reasons I can think of. The first is bribery, of course. Acting through their goodlife agents, to get to someone who’s playing a vital part in the defense of some planet.”

Tanya had thought of that. “You said there might be a second reason?”

“Well, to purchase weapons.”

“Purchase them? But berserkers build their own weapons, or capture them. Everyone knows—”

“Sure, sure. But sometimes it’s hard to build or capture just what you want. There might be some special bit of hardware, a space inverter for example, that takes some very special tools and skills to put together. There are people who would sell weapons to goodlife, to berserkers. People who’d do anything for money.”

Present company, she thought, included. And again she thought: If this man is lying, he’s doing it very skillfully.

Aloud she asked him: “And are you really intending to come back?”

He made a playful gesture. “You heard my little speech. You bet your life I’m coming back. Once we’re officially goodlife, all of us are going to have to be very friendly with each other. Lady Blanqui’s one of the wealthiest people in the Galaxy, and she’s going to have to be very friendly to us all.”

III.

The launch that had conveyed the boarding party of machines and goodlife to the yacht now separated from the larger vessel, carrying away Wirral and Hinna as well as one of the boarding machines. Within a few minutes its place at the docking hatch had been taken by another small craft, bringing Wirral back alone. The goodlife man, reappearing in the lounge, announced in a grim voice that his unliving master had assigned him the task of piloting the two prisoner-messengers to Damaturu and back. He appeared to have no relish for the job.

Then he added: “Before we go, master wants to look at your ship’s master controls.”

The mistress of the ship protested. “You don’t mean to strand us here!”

“We’ll scramble a few connections to the drive, the shields, the weapons. Nothing that can’t be fixed in an hour’s time. Want to be sure you’ll do nothing foolish when master lets you go, that’s all.” Wirral still seemed of the opinion that letting anyone go alive was a big mistake.

The roughly man-shaped robot pointed with an imperious claw.

“Yes, master,” Wirral muttered, and ordered the Lady to precede them through the short, curving corridor that led from the lounge directly to the bridge. Wirral followed her closely, and the machine stalked after him. Tanya, tagging along warily at a little distance, got close enough to look into the bridge. It was a considerably smaller compartment than the lounge, most of its space taken up by three or four heavily padded chairs and what seemed to her an excess of equipment. Wirral, under his master’s watchful gaze, poked about among some of the controls with his human fingers, activating displays and testing functions until the berserker had evidently been satisfied. Tanya could see that certain connections were now hanging loose.

In a few minutes they were all back in the lounge of the Golden Hind, where Wirral again took notice of Skorba’s media machine.

“It looks like it might be a weapon,” said the goodlife intruder suspiciously. “A communications device at the very least.”

“It is certainly a communications device,” said Skorba. “Does your master therefore forbid me to bring it to Damaturu?”

Both men turned to look at the metal guardian that had returned with them to the lounge, where it continued to dominate the scene. The thing’s lenses stared back at them implacably. It made no comment.

“All right, then,” Wirral conceded. “Bring your gadget along. But you know better than to use it when you’re planetside, don’t you, laddie?”

“Once planetside, I’ll be surrounded by communications devices anyway, and free to use them if I wish. But I’ll have no need of them. As I told you, I’ll come back to this vessel willingly. It’s just that I’ll be a more convincing escort for the Lady on the planet if I’m carrying some hardware.”

Wirral made an indecisive gesture. “Aye, then, take the damned thing along. You’re right, to play the role of her bodyguard, you’d best not go altogether emptyhanded. To my mind you don’t look the part.”

A few minutes later, Lady Blanqui and her youthful, rather pudgy companion were on their way. Skorba was wearing a very thoughtful expression as he bade Tanya a terse goodbye. The Lady, elegantly dressed to see her banker, was carrying an empty attaché case.

Tanya watched the pair of them disappear, following Wirral down through the deck of the lounge; someone closed the carpeted hatch from above. Moments later, everyone heard the sounds of the launch separating. The machine stood silent sentry.

Only then did Tanya turn to confront the Lady’s now-leaderless people: Yero, Stanhill, the captain, the flight engineer, the female servant. Some of them did not meet her eyes at all. Others glanced at her reluctantly, and then looked away.

It seemed to Tanya that she and the Lady’s folk were never going to have anything to say to each other.

Tanya returned to her cabin briefly, then roamed restlessly about the ship, feeling almost that she had to assert her right to be aboard. The Lady’s absence made little if any difference in the attitude of her crew and servants toward Tanya. They continued to avoid eye contact as much as possible, and never spoke with her unless she confronted them directly. A certain inexplicable hostility seemed to be hanging in the air—as if the disastrous captivity that had befallen them had been in some way Tanya’s fault.

Yero alone occasionally glowered at her as if he were on the verge of angry speech; but then, he glowered at everything and everyone except his mistress. The captain was incommunicative as always, but no worse than that.

Well, let them sulk and glower if they wished. Tanya soon found herself too busy thinking to pay them much attention. A small uncertain seed of hope had recently been planted in her mind. And the more she thought about it. . . . But the aura of antagonism among her present shipmates was so palpable mat she made no attempt to communicate her thoughts.

Aboard the launch, submerged in subspace and well on its way to Damaturu, Carl Skorba and his elderly companion had the small passenger compartment all to themselves. Before they had been allowed aboard, Wirral had locked and sealed himself away forward in the control cabin.

When a quarter of a standard hour had passed in silence for the passengers, Skorba suddenly asked his fellow traveler: “Do you think the machine always trusts them?”

The Lady Blanqui had seated herself, eyes closed, arms folded, beside a port, its cover now closed. She opened her eyes now to stare at her questioner, seated beside her. “The goodlife? I shouldn’t think so. But I suppose it must have reason to trust the one it sends as pilot on such a mission as this.”

“I suppose.”

After a moment the Lady voiced a question of her own: “Are you growing curious about goodlife? Now that we are, at least nominally, about to join their ranks?”

“Yeah, I’m curious as to what the real ones are like,” Skorba admitted. “Aren’t you?”

The Lady sighed, and seemed to suppress a shudder. “Not really.”

“Do you know,” the young man pursued, “what I wonder most about them?” Perhaps doubting that his companion was going to reply, he pressed on without granting her much time to do so. “Do they ever decide that becoming goodlife was all a mistake, and want to quit? Who could choose to live with a berserker?”

The Lady’s thin lips set in a sharp line. “I very much doubt it. Why? Were you thinking of trying to bribe our pilot, possibly? Persuade him to defect?”

“No. . . .”

“Such a detestable little man. And even if he were bribable, what could he do to help us?”

“No—no, really, nothing like that. I meant what I said back on the yacht, I’m going along with the machine’s plan, I’m in this for the whole ride. I was just wondering about them. How their minds work.”

Again there was an interval of silence. By now their former shipmates of the Golden Hind, along with Hinna and her dark masters, had fallen an astronomical distance behind the speeding launch. Skorba and the Lady were virtually alone in subspace—except of course for the uncommunicative pilot, who might possibly be listening to everything they said. And of course some machine component might be listening as well.

The next time Carl spoke, it was to assure Lady Blanqui that her beloved Yero was doubtless still in good health. But if his remarks were meant to be comforting, the effort backfired. The Lady suddenly looked ill-at-ease.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have reminded you of Yero’s difficult situation.”

She scowled at the young man in silence. Then she suddenly demanded: “You are really not planning an attempt to escape when we land?”

He shook his head patiently. “I’ll say it again. What I announced to everyone, back there on your yacht, I meant. I’ve spent a good part of my life working and struggling to get a chance like this. Now I’ve got it, I’ll bet my life on it.”

Lady Blanqui’s thin lips curved in a wicked smile. “A chance to blackmail someone as rich as I am? You’d be putting your own neck in a noose, don’t forget, if you were to reveal your part in this.”

He gave her a glittering smile in return. “Look at it that way if you want. I’ll take the chance, if I have to, of being accused as goodlife myself.”

“So will I,” murmured the Lady.

“Ah. But you have someone you want to protect, and that gives me a certain advantage.”

“And you have no one.”

“Not any more. I won’t be piggish, understand, you’ll profit too. But I don’t intend to let my opportunity slip away. You and I are going to do business. Wait’ll you hear my sales pitch.”

What had seemed a zestful readiness for combat on the Lady’s part now faded into uncertainty. “Once Yero is safe, I’ll hear you out.”

“All right. I can wait until he’s safe—from the berserker. When we’ve concluded our deal with the machine, and he’s out of danger—for the time being—you’ll be better able to concentrate on business.”

“Thank you. I imagine we’ll be able to do business as you say. I’ll make you a wealthy man.” The Lady sounded abstracted.

The next time she spoke, her voice had grown somewhat querulous. Suddenly her age was showing, in terms of fatigue. “Then you can believe that a berserker will honor its pledges?” The question came out somewhere between a rough demand for the truth, and a plea for reassurance.

Skorba frowned judicially. “You know, I really believe this one will, this time. I think the machine was just laying out the facts logically when it told us what it planned to do. With the pile of jewels you’re going to hand over to it, it can buy the chance to exterminate a great many more human lives than the little handful we represent.”

“And that doesn’t bother you? Such a mass extermination?” She watched him warily.

“Lady, it’s that kind of a galaxy.” The pudgy one now seemed to be considering her almost with amusement. “You understand that, and I understand that. The idea of people you don’t know, strangers, being exterminated doesn’t bother you all that much, does it? Those same people would sell us out in a moment, if the positions were reversed.”

“All those thousands, perhaps millions, who will be slain?” The old woman seemed unable to let go of the subject. Her eyes probed at the young man. “Perhaps the attack will be launched against some world where you have relatives. Loved ones. Do you know what it is to love someone?”

The young man shook his head, dismissing all such concerns. “Come off it, Your Ladyship. You didn’t make your money by worrying all that much about the ants in an anthill somewhere. You and I have a business deal going now, right? Or we very soon will, when we can sit down somewhere and start to work out the details.” Suddenly he yawned. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve been awake a long time. I’m going to get some sleep.” He adjusted his reclining seat, lay back, and closed his eyes.

The Lady registered a very slow, very faint change of expression. It was a smile again, but this time not a challenge. Then she toasted her companion, with a cup of water—that was the only beverage provided passengers by the meagre facilities on the launch. She said, in a soft voice that did not appear to disturb the sleeping man: “I think we may be able to do business.”

Meanwhile, back on the yacht, Tanya slept for a few hours also. When she awoke she lay quietly for a time, staring at the overhead. Her thinking had brought her to a certain conclusion. Hopeful, yes. Risky, though—if only she dared to trust her own deductions!

At the same time, the continued rudeness, the barely muffled hostility of the Lady’s people, cemented her determination to reveal nothing she had discovered until Skorba and the Lady returned—assuming that they did.

Planet fall and landing on Damaturu were uneventful. Skorba, noting the overall smoothness of the approach, decided that Wirral was allowing the autopilot to handle almost everything. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, for goodlife or bad.

The business of traversing the atmosphere was, as always, time-consuming. The Lady and Skorba agreed that if all went smoothly they were going to spend hardly more than a standard hour actually on the surface of the planet.

The formalities of clearing the port were minimal, and promptly concluded without the pilot ever having to leave his sealed cabin, or confront directly any of the local officials.

Ground transport on this world was cheap and efficient. While Wirral remained out of sight in the ship, Skorba accompanied the Lady into the nearby city. This city, which Skorba could remember visiting once, years earlier, was somewhat larger than the spaceport town on Malawi. Once in the city, they went directly to the bank of Lady Blanqui’s choice, exchanging a minimum of conversation on the way.

This bank, the largest financial establishment on the planet, occupied an imposing building on the south side of the city’s central plaza. The only local structure rivalling it in height was the planet’s Templar headquarters, a white tower crowned with conspicuous antennas on the north side of the plaza. The numerous antennas, besides serving practical communication functions, symbolized the Templars’ sworn vigilance against the Galactic peril of the berserkers.

Just inside the bank’s outer lobby, Skorba’s elderly companion turned to him and said: “Wait here. My private banker here is a suspicious man—no, I’m not quite such a stranger on Damaturu as the one who sent us here believed.”

“Ah?”

“Trust me, I know this man, this banker, and he will have fewer misgivings if I do not appear in his office accompanied by a stranger.”

Skorba looked at her. “I trust you, Lady Blanqui,” he said, seriously, after a moment. She nodded a crisp acknowledgment and turned away.

Skorba watched her out of sight. She was carrying her empty attaché case under one arm as she vanished through a dramatically tall archway. According to a discreet sign, that way led to me executive offices on the upper floors.

The young man settled himself mentally to wait. Physically he kept moving restlessly about, passing in and out of the building several times. Very briefly he left the lobby to breathe the open air, to look at the grass and trees of the square, to gaze thoughtfully upon all the unsuspecting people. None of his absences from the lobby were long enough to make it possible that he should miss the Lady, at whatever moment she might reappear.

When at last Lady Blanqui did emerge from the dramatic archway, she was carrying the attaché case in such a way that Carl Skorba could see that it was notably heavier than before.

But the Lady’s spirits were definitely lighter; and she appeared relieved to find her escort waiting for her patiently, like a tourist or an unobtrusive, authentic bodyguard. He was still carrying, tucked under his arm, the machine that might have been a recorder or a weapon, or both.

He asked her: “Everything go all right?”

Silently the Lady indicated her satisfaction.

In a matter of minutes the pair were back at the spaceport, where their little borrowed ship was waiting, Wirral still locked into its control cabin. Nothing in the dull inconspicuousness of the small craft gave any indication of who—or what—controlled it.

As soon as they were aboard, Wirral repeated Skorba’s question over the intercom; when the pilot’s query had been answered in the affirmative the outer hatch closed and sealed itself behind the two passengers. Presently the artificial gravity came on, and the passengers could hear the shriek of thinning atmosphere, falling rapidly behind and below the hurtling launch.

* * *

In a few hours the launch had brought them back to their approximate point of departure.

In the hours since the launch had departed, the configuration of the waiting ships had changed. The Golden Hind still hung, as before, in normal space on the fringe of the rocky, undoubtedly lifeless minisystem. And the larger berserker craft remained disconnected from the yacht; but now it was several kilometers farther away. The brown dwarf at the system’s center was visible only as a dull distant glow of infrared, and only if you looked for it with instruments.

Wirral, giving no explanation and making no comment over intercom, steered clear of the yacht and jockeyed the launch into a preliminary docking configuration with the berserker; then he let the autopilot take over, to complete the maneuver smoothly.

Skorba drew breath, as if he were about to launch a protest against not being taken back to the yacht—but then he sighed, shrugged helplessly, and said nothing.

As soon as docking had been accomplished, a man-sized machine—whether it was the same one that had been on the yacht or not, neither human passenger could tell— entered the launch.

Lady Blanqui was clinging more tightly than ever to her attaché case.

The machine said, in its metallic voice: “Give it to me.” And with a snap of metal it thrust a gripper forward.

The Lady protested in a high thin voice: “I demand, first, to see that Yero is unharmed.”

“Give it to me. Resistance will entail punishment.”

Making a helpless little sound, she allowed the case to be pulled from her stiffened fingers.

With the attaché case firmly in its control, the machine turned to me other passenger. “Life-unit Skorba.”

“Huh?” The man sounded surprised.

“You will now come aboard my craft. You are to serve, temporarily, as hostage for the good behavior of the other badlife. If all goes well, you will be released unharmed in a few days.”

The young man, looking surprised and miserable, began a protest, which he abandoned after a few words.

“Remember,” the Lady chided him, “you said that you believed in the machine’s plan.”

“I did say that, didn’t I?” He brightened minimally. “Logically, I still think so.” On his way out of the launch, following the machine, he paused, gazing earnestly at his fellow captive. “Give my regards to Tanya. Tell her to keep her chin up. Maybe she’ll be surprised and I’ll see her again sometime. And I’ll see you as soon as possible.”

“I shall tell her.”

In a moment Wirral, coming grimly through the compartment from the forward control cabin, looked at Lady Blanqui without a word, and went on into the mother ship. Presently the sounds of undocking came, and she listened to them hopefully.

Her hopes were realized; in less than a minute the launch, now running entirely on autopilot, delivered her back to her yacht.

As soon as she had climbed back up into the familiar lounge, she stood up straight and looked around. Most of her own people were present in the room, and her young female passenger was at the table, being served food by the robotic steward. One of the crudely man-shaped boarding machines, practically indistinguishable from the one that had just robbed the Lady, was standing guard close by the hatch. Otherwise there was no immediate enemy presence.

“Yero? Where is he?” the Lady demanded.

“Where are the gems?” Tanya asked her in the same instant, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet. “And what about Skorba?”

A moment later Yero appeared in the background, on the other side of the octagonal table.

“He’s not been harmed,” said Tanya. “None of us have. Now, what happened to—”

Yero came hurrying to Lady Blanqui, and they embraced delicately.

The launch that had just delivered Lady Blanqui was already undocking again; the familiar sounds came drifting through the hull.

Freeing herself from Yero’s embrace, the Lady turned to Tanya. “The machine told me that it was taking Skorba hostage; it said that he would be released in a few days. I wouldn’t worry about him, dear; I think you’ll see him before you’ve had a chance to miss him.”

“Perhaps I will—did you bring back the santana stones? You’re not carrying your attaché case.”

“It has already been taken from me. Taken aboard the other ship.”

“I see.” Tanya seemed to find the answer important. “Lady Blanqui, I’ve got to talk to you at once. It’s extremely urgent.”

The Lady lifted an eyebrow elegantly. “Indeed?” She glanced around at her assembled people. “All of you may go about your business,” she informed them.

In a matter of moments, she and Tanya were alone, save for the machine that stood guard over the lounge. “And now, my dear?”

Tanya said: “You’ve been swindled.”

The Lady blinked. “Of course, if you mean—”

“I don’t mean what you think.” Turning aside, Tanya marched directly toward the machine. The man-shaped thing turned smoothly to confront her as she came near, but she did not hesitate, even when the machine began to raise its arms.

Sidestepping the extended grippers at the last moment, she reached with both hands for the metal body. She caught the machine under one armpit, bent slightly and heaved with all her strength.

The mechanical terror teetered off balance, then crashed to the deck with a loud noise. It lay on die lounge carpet, all four limbs moving slightly, ineffectually.

Tanya stood back. She announced simply, and quite unnecessarily: “This is not a real berserker.”

IV.

The Lady said nothing.

She was standing still, hands clasped in front of her, mouth compressed into a tight line as she gazed upon the fallen idol. Tanya thought that she had never seen such iron control, in the face of what must have been overwhelming surprise.

The younger woman took a step toward the older. Tanya began an explanation. “Don’t you see? They’re not really berserkers and goodlife, they’re swindlers, con men, after your wealth from the start. They—”

The Lady wasn’t listening. Instead she was looking at me display stages, where the swift-moving image of another small vessel had appeared. Once more a launch was approaching from the large craft which hung in space a couple of kilometers away.

Tanya continued. “I doubt they’ll be bringing Skorba back. The way I see it, he’s one of them, and he wanted to be present when the loot was divided up. That’s why he was ‘taken hostage’. As I read the situation, they’re not kidnappers or murderers, they’re the type of criminals who pride themselves on staying clear of physical violence.

“Probably they’re sending the empty launch back here now on autopilot to pick up their dummy machine—they’ve been too busy counting up their gains to notice what I did to the dummy just now. If they did notice, they’d just leave it here. They’ve got your gems and they can just take off—Lady Blanqui?”

Ignoring Tanya completely, the Lady was issuing crisp orders into an intercom station, summoning her people back to the lounge. Stanhill was first to arrive. Even as he entered, the Lady went with her head high to the table and seated herself in her tall chair. Yero came in carrying a lap robe which he tenderly tucked around her legs. The human crew and servants came straggling in.

“What are you planning to do?” Tanya asked their mistress.

The Lady continued to ignore her. Already the launch was docking.

The hatch in the deck swung up and open, and Tanya fell back a step in surprise. The launch had not been empty after all. An angry little mob of more than half a dozen people, most of whom she had never seen before, came bursting up into the lounge. None of these intruders did more than glance at the toppled metallic fraud. Wirral, with Hinna at his elbow, was at their head. Just behind Hinna and Wirral, Skorba was being dragged along by a couple of scruffy strangers. Some at least of the group’s anger seemed to be directed at the pudgy man.

Wirral’s earlier expression of docility and feeble cunning had been replaced by a glare of alert and lively rage. He was gripping the attaché case in one hand as he stalked forward to the octagonal table. The pseudo-berserker happened to lie athwart the man’s path, and as he stepped over the thing it waved a spastic claw as if in some parody of a salute.

Wirral halted directly opposite the Lady in her tall chair. A little behind him, Skorba, struggling and cursing at those who would have continued to hold his arms, managed to jerk them free. The other men and women who had just arrived, Hinna among them, all of them as shabby and unkempt as Wirral himself, milled about. The members of the little mob were muttering among themselves, arguing and cursing in low voices. The subject of their angry debate, as far as Tanya could make it out, was whether they ought to take violent action against the old woman who controlled this ship, against whoever had seen through their scheme and tried to turn the tables on them.

The chief object of their wrath remained perched on her throne-like chair, a soft robe now tucked around her legs as if she were an invalid, observing this invasion calmly.

Seemingly speechless with anger, Wirral flung down the attaché case upon the table, so violently mat the container popped open on impact. Out across the marble surface spilled the weighty bundle of computer printout that had been its only contents. The mass of paper was obviously the cheap kind that could be readily generated at any public terminal.

For a moment there was silence in the lounge. The Lady gazed at the intruders, and at the spilled paper, with no readable expression. Skorba, rubbing his freed arms, glanced in Tanya’s direction, and she thought he was relieved to see she was unhurt—or possibly he was still acting.

Wirral still seemed unable to find words to express his outrage.

“You, old woman!” The speaker this time was a black-bearded man among the newcomers. Pushing his way forward, he bellowed an obscenity. “If you think you can bloody well cheat us, well, you can’t!” He pointed at Skorba. “You’ve got some kind of a game going with him!”

“I assure you I do not.” Lady Blanqui’s tone was icily remote.

“Never mind!” From inside his jacket Blackbeard pulled out a handgun, and waved it at the imperturbable, imperious object of his wrath. “We’re taking this ship—”

The Lady’s right hand moved slightly, half-concealed beneath her laprobe. Blue fire spat through the robe’s upper fold, a precise jet aimed just above the table at the shouting man. Blackbeard looked incredulously at the old woman on her tall chair, even as his own weapon slid from his dying fingers to the deck. A moment later his lifeless body had crumpled on top of it.

Showing a fine instinct for survival, three of the surviving intruders turned in an instant, diving, scrambling for the open hatchway and their launch that waited just below it. The remainder of the band, consisting of Skorba, Wirral, and Hinna, appeared to have been frozen momentarily into statues.

Tossing her robe aside, Lady Blanqui stood erect, revealing her own handgun. “Stop them from getting out!” she cried. She fired one more shot, poorly aimed, after the escapees. A jolt of energy seared some decorations from the lower portion of a bulkhead, revealing a patch of inner hull. Some of the Lady’s people ducked for cover, others were caught as flat-footed as her remaining enemies. Yero tried to obey her shouted command, but he was too late; the carpeted hatch slammed down in his face. Moments later the two vessels had separated.

Shouting again at her people, issuing commands in a jargon incomprehensible to Tanya, the Lady sent some of them, including the captain, running from the lounge.

Meanwhile Skorba had stooped over Blackbeard’s body, as if in an attempt to render aid. Suddenly the young man straightened, Blackbeard’s weapon in his hand. But even as he started to turn toward the Lady, he was borne to the deck by Yero’s flying tackle.

Carl Skorba was evidently quicker and stronger than his appearance at rest had suggested. But Stanhill too had been watching him alertly, and Skorba was quickly pinned by two opponents.

“Do not kill him!” the Lady cried, as the gun was wrenched out of Skorba’s grasp.

Tanya, with mixed feelings, satisfaction still dominant, saw the three would-be swindlers who were still aboard herded away at gunpoint to be locked up. Skorba’s arms were now secured behind his back with handcuffs.

“Lock them in somewhere,” the Lady called after her retainers. “A temporary arrangement will do. And hurry back!”

When the offenders and their guards were out of sight, the Lady at last turned back to Tanya, who responded to the older woman’s expression of triumph with a smile of her own.

Then Tanya suddenly demanded of her hostess: “Did you actually realize it before I did?”

“Realize what, child?”

That response cooled whatever Tanya was feeling in the way of a nascent sense of kinship with this woman. “I must insist, Lady Blanqui, that I am not your child, or anyone’s.”

“Ah? Oh? Are you not?” For a moment the Lady peered at her uncertainly; for a moment, senility was showing. “What was your question?”

“I was asking you at what point you first realized the truth about those people and their machines. Was it before I gave my little demonstration?” Confronted by a strangely blank expression, Tanya thought she had to be more specific. “When I tipped over the robot. Showing that there had been no real berserker, no real goodlife here on your ship.”

The Lady Blanqui made no answer, except that for several moments she continued to watch the younger woman intently. Something about this silent gaze struck Tanya as eerie; she had the odd feeling that she was being pitied.

Having locked herself in the cabin a few minutes later, Tanya stood considering the bolted door in the side bulkhead. A moment later, she had quietly slid back the bolt.

One of the decorative tall corner posts of Carl Skorba’s bed, which was similar to Tanya’s, had been run through the space between his bound arms and his body; he was sitting on the bed and leaning back against the post when Tanya entered.

He raised his head to stare at her. “Well,” he said. “I had hopes from the beginning of our voyage, when I left my side of the door unbolted. A good thing, too.”

She stood frowning down at him. “Can I get you a drink of water? Anything like that?”

“Some water would be great for a start.”

When she had held a drink for him, and he had thanked her politely, he asked: “Satisfied? No gems lost to the con men. Half of the evildoers, including me, locked up, ready to be delivered to the proper authorities.”

“Pretty much satisfied,” Tanya answered slowly.

“But not completely? Something in the situation doesn’t seem quite crystal clear? That gives me hope. Tell me, was it you who tipped the dummy over?”

“It was.”

“Deliberately?”

“Of course.”

“So, you had deduced that the people pretending to be goodlife were fraudulent, and so was their hardware. And that I was in league with them. Very intelligent of you.”

“In my place, I suppose, you would have made the deduction sooner.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound patronizing. I don’t know whether I would have made those particular discoveries or not, in your place.” Skorba paused. “As a matter of fact I was busy making a different one.”

“Some great revelation, for which you are now preparing me? And which, when you’ve convinced me of its truth, will require me to turn you loose?”

“Only if you value your life.”

“Does this revelation—let me guess—does it concern the Lady, and her crew—?”

“It does indeed. Have you wondered what kind of people routinely carry handcuffs?”

“Police, certainly.”

“That’s only one category. Not the right one.”

Tanya started to speak, then paused, looking around. “What was that?”

Some component of the sudden distraction had been sound; but a larger part had been a strange, slight ripple in the field of the yacht’s artificial gravity.

Skorba gave her a sickly smile. “That would be her Ladyship, at last using some of the yacht’s weapons. She’s trying, if I’m not mistaken, to keep my three former associates who made it back to our ship from getting away—trying to keep their ship here in normal space, until—”

“Now she wants to make a fight of it?”

“She had no need to do so, earlier. No one was trying to leave.”

“I don’t understand you, Skorba—if that’s your real name.”

“It’ll do.”

“We know our lives aren’t really in danger from three frightened confidence men. If we just let them run away—”

He gave a little groan, as of fear and sympathy combined. “The Lady’s people didn’t kill me right away, but when I consider their motives I don’t feel grateful. Please get me loose? Somehow?”

“Can you give me one good reason why I should?”

“I can and will, as soon as I think there’s a fair chance that you’ll believe me. Look, Tanya, my media machine is in that drawer. Get it, and I’ll show you how to turn on such modest destructive power as it can generate. This bedpost is very solid—I expect it’ll take the beam a few minutes to cut through the chain on these cuffs. I strongly urge you to start it working as soon as possible. As soon as it’s working I’ll start talking, and if you don’t like what I say you can always turn the beam off again.”

Tanya stood up and went to the indicated drawer, opened it and lifted out the device, which felt unexpectedly heavy.

She turned back to the prisoner. “I don’t think you’re really physically dangerous, and anyway I’m now armed. So I’ll start as you suggest. You start talking.”

“Here I go—tell me, student of deception, what convinced you that my colleagues and I were fakes? When did you first suspect?”

“Oh. You’ll believe my story, and then I’ll feel a duty to believe yours, is that it?”

“We’re wasting time.”

“All right,” Tanya said. “My conviction that you were a liar crept up on me gradually.”

“Lock the black button and the red one, at the same time—that’s it.” A stubby flame appeared, projecting five centimeters or so at right angles to the gadget’s length. “Now if you can aim the beam against the chain—try not to fry my arm—tell me how you deduced my associates were frauds.”

With the beam in operation, Tanya continued. “Certain things that the supposed berserker said, things that when I thought about them didn’t seem right. Once it talked about ‘our’ data bank. It mentioned ‘prominent people’, instead of life-units. There were probably more; enough to subliminally alert me.

“Then there was the way Wirral walked ahead of the machine when they went to the bridge. And the way it let him check the controls when they got there—I suppose its grippers are really pretty clumsy. Finally I decided that the formidable-looking machine standing watch in the lounge had to be rather maladroit and probably quite harmless. Its voice had to be that of a person hidden on your ship, using some kind of voice-changing audio to play the part of Oz the great and powerful.”

“You became willing to bet your life that you were right.”

“Eventually I felt completely convinced, or at least enough to take that chance. Want to hear what I considered the final proof?”

“Tell me quickly.”

“When you and your fellow crooks took the attaché case aboard your own ship, so you could open it together!”

The almost invisible beam was still burning steadily at the handcuff chain. So far the metal a few centimeters away wasn’t getting particularly hot.

“That was an exciting moment,” Skorba acknowledged dryly. “You’d have enjoyed watching.”

“Of course real goodlife, serving a real berserker, wouldn’t have done that. They’d have been worried about other things instead.”

“Such as what?”

“Well, suppose the Lady had brought back a bomb instead of jewels? Or some other kind of effective weapon? A real berserker would have made sure that the attaché case was opened somewhere outside its own hull.”

As Skorba listened, the expression on his face suddenly altered. His shoulders moved; the last weakened thread of metal broke with a snap, and he brought his arms around in front of him.

Tanya stood up alertly, and turned off the jet of flame from the device in her hands. Then she staggered and almost fell. This time the disturbance had come more violently than before, making a loud noise, sending a shudder through space within the cabin, bouncing people, furniture and decorations. The bed, supported by four solid stanchions, stayed put.

“What’s that?”

“Must be my three non-violent associates in our ship, shooting back at us in self-defense. If the Lady insists on fighting it out with them, this tub isn’t going to last long. They’ve got great shields, and one damned powerful gun. That hardware is what this whole game is all about, you see.”

“What d’you mean?”

“It’s a long story. If our ship over there had a decent combat control system to go with her firepower, they’d have vaporized this yacht on the first shot.”

Tanya was backing away from him. “I think your friends aboard are locked in the next cabin. Set them free if you can, in case we all have to abandon ship. I’m going to talk to our crazy mistress!”

“Wait! There’s something I’ve got to tell you first—”

But Tanya, having thrown down Skorba’s multipurpose gadget, was already running out of his cabin and down the corridor.

In another moment she came rushing into the lounge, where she stumbled to an abrupt halt.

Very strange things indeed were going on.

Lady Blanqui was installed like a queen in her tall chair, at her side the control console that allowed her to command her ship directly. She was surrounded by her crew and servants, and all of them for once were jubilant.

Exultantly she called to Tanya: “Come, dear; come, my lovely child, and see!”

Following the Lady’s gaze, Tanya observed the new image that was even now taking shape in the display stages. A moving disturbance, approaching very swiftly from a relatively great distance, was hurtling nearer through the troubled half-reality of subspace. It looked significantly larger than the swindlers’ ship, even though not all of this new presence was visible. It was as if the newcomer were doing something that had the effect of obscuring its own image. Tanya, feeling the hair trying to rise on the back of her neck, was inescapably reminded of a shark’s fin cleaving surface water.

And now the old woman, once more ignoring Tanya, was standing up from her tall chair, stepping to one side, and now she was slowly lowering her aged body to the deck. A chant was beginning to rise from half a dozen throats. And now the other people, those who had been playing the parts of Lady Blanqui’s crew and her beloved, were also making ritual obeisance, kneeling, bowing, prostrating themselves face down at the foot of me stage across which glided that darkly ominous shape, the image of their terrible god.

She who had pretended to be a Mercantile princess rose to her knees and turned a transfigured countenance to Tanya. “You see my dear, you were very much mistaken. There are real goodlife aboard my ship!”

“And soon,” said the youth who had played the role of Yero, kneeling beside her, speaking in a loud triumphant voice: “a real berserker!”

V.

Tanya could hear herself screaming as she recoiled in horror from that image—and from the triumphant nightmare figures around her, people who had suddenly revealed themselves as monsters.

By now she could interpret the stage displays well enough to see how the onrushing image of armored death reached out with grappling forcefield weapons for the craft that had once pretended to be a berserker. That vessel was fighting back, splashing flares of energy across the berserker’s shields. At the moment both combatants seemed to be ignoring the yacht.

And that was all Tanya allowed herself to see of events outside the hull. Momentarily ignored by the exultant goodlife around her, beneath their notice in this moment of their epiphany, she retreated quietly from the lounge and fled back down the short corridor to the door of Skorba’s cabin.

The cabin door was closed but not locked. She wrenched it open to discover that he was no longer inside.

In a moment she heard him calling to her. He was leaning out of another doorway, just down the corridor, beckoning urgently with an arm still clasped at the wrist by a disconnected metal cuff.

Tanya hurried to the next cabin. Wirral and Hinna were both there, unshackled, both looking dazed. Wirral leaned against a bulkhead, while the woman stood close to Skorba, staring at him as if she didn’t know whether to attack him or beg for his help. Both of the pseudo-goodlife looked fearfully at Tanya as she came rushing up.

Tanya grabbed Skorba by the sleeve, so that he had to juggle his media machine to his other hand to keep from dropping it. “Carl, Carl, they’re goodlife! The Lady and all her people. They’re out there now—”

Skorba tore his arm out of her grip. “That’s what I was trying to tell you when you ran out. I’m trying to convince these clowns, and they still won’t believe me.”

Tanya, on the edge of panic, hardly heard what he was saying, “—and there’s a real berserker coming. Not coming, it’s here now, attacking your ship. I saw it on the displays.”

Skorba didn’t seem surprised at the news. “That means we don’t have much time.”

Hinna, astonished by Tanya’s report, took her turn at grabbing Skorba by the arm. “If the people on this ship are goodlife,” she demanded, “why haven’t they killed us already?”

“Probably because their master wants to talk to us before our bodies are purified.”

Wirral, emerging from his daze, moved forward cursing. “You son of a bitch. How long have you known about them? I’ve known you for ten years, and you couldn’t tell me?”

Suddenly enraged, Tanya lunged forward and shoved the bogus goodlife violently, sending him staggering back against the bulkhead again, shocking him into momentary silence.

She drew a deep breath and turned back to Skorba. “All right, at last all three of us believe you. The Lady and her people are goodlife. What do we do?”

“Are they all in the lounge?”

“Every one.”

Skorba gestured fiercely with his machine. “Then we stop wasting time and take control of the bridge while they’re giving us the chance. Explanation later, if there’s time.”

In a moment the four of them were out of the cabin, moving down a curving corridor in the direction of the bridge.

“Well, we saw the old bitch kill Pikuni with her handgun,” Wirral muttered under his breath. “I guess I can believe you.”

“I say it served him right for waving a gun around,” Hinna murmured. “But if she’s not genuine goodlife, she’s sure as hell mean enough, she’ll do until the real thing comes along. Now we’ve got to fight her, but we have no weapons.”

Everyone ignored that difficulty for the moment. At Skorba’s urgent gesture the other three stepped up their pace.

Crossing an intersecting corridor, they could hear loud, exultant chanting coming from the direction of the lounge. Tanya was thinking that the two factions now about to contend for control of the yacht were approximately equal in numbers. But the goodlife had to be much better armed; all that the badlife had going for them was desperation and some advantage of surprise.

By great good fortune the bridge was still deserted, its interior hatches standing open. Skorba and Wirral hurried in, Tanya and Hinna just behind them. They were able to seize control without opposition. Both hatches leading to the ship’s interior corridors were immediately dogged shut.

Wirral immediately seated himself in one of the great padded command chairs, nominally the captain’s, beside the console where he had earlier made some disconnections, and got to work. In a matter of moments Hinna had located the bridge’s emergency tool kit and brought it to him.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Tanya demanded, as he dug rapidly into the circuitry with tools and fingers.

“I was a flight engineer once,” Wirral answered abstractedly. “Turn up the light a little brighter.”

She did as she was told.

Meanwhile Skorba had seated himself in another of the three command chairs, and established contact with the ship’s electronic brain.

“Master controls are almost always on the bridge,” he muttered to Tanya. “With a little luck we may be able to do this without her Ladyship even realizing for a while what’s happened.”

As soon as Skorba had gained control over the ship’s electronic brain, he ordered it not to accept commands from anywhere in the ship except the bridge. Also to report to him any attempt from elsewhere to exert control. “Next,” he ordered it, “show me what kind of armament we’ve really got.”

Hinna was incredulous. “You’re going to fire at the berserker?”

“I’d love to, but I can’t fire at anything until Wirry gets our guns up and working.”

“Not even then,” Wirral said firmly. “Drive gets connected first. Then we get the hell out of here.” He grunted and swore, dropping a small part to the deck. Hinna swooped to pick it up for him.

Skorba swore back at him. “Get everything reconnected! And do the weapons and shields first!”

Wirral shot his old comrade a dark glance, but chose not to waste time and energy in arguing. His hands worked on.

“What’re they up to now in the lounge?” Tanya wanted to know.

“They’re just watching the show, as far as I can tell from the displays. Not much else they can do, while the drive and weapons are still disabled.”

Hinna, frowning, poked him in the shoulder, then pointed at a display stage. She said: “Skorb, it looks like the berserker’s determined to take over our old tub in one piece. Why in hell should it want to do that?”

Skorba didn’t answer her question. He called everyone’s attention to another fact now visible when he adjusted the displays. “The berserker looks damaged. Maybe not enough to slow it down much, but it’s been through a fight.”

Wirral spoke without looking up from his task. “Maybe it’s stopped trying to cloak itself. Considers its present opponents unworthy of such caution.”

“It’s not having that easy a time of it,” Skorba commented. “You see, it doesn’t have guns or shields to match those on our old tub.”

“What?” Tanya couldn’t believe that.

“True, we outfitted specially for this con. What the berserker does have is a much better, in fact a superb, combat control system. Look at it maneuver, in and out. Our people, using our system, can’t get a good shot at it.”

Tanya looked. She was reminded of an agile spider dancing, darting in and out, attacking some stronger but clumsier insect, slowly smothering and binding.

“Once we start using either drive or weapons,” Tanya commented, “her Ladyship won’t be slow in reacting.”

The reaction from the lounge came even more swiftly than she had predicted. Before either the yacht’s weapons or drive were operational again, the people there had somehow discovered that they were no longer in control.

“Repeated commands are now being given to me in the lounge,” the ship’s pleasant voice reported on the bridge. “I am ignoring them, in accordance with your overriding orders.”

“Continue to do so. Reply to no one in the lounge. And blank out all displays in the ship, everywhere but on the bridge.”

Less than a minute passed before there came a heavy pounding on one of the hatches giving access to the bridge. Someone out there in the corridor was shouting. The four people who had bolted themselves in ignored the sounds, and they soon ceased.

Very soon afterward the Lady’s face, transformed by rage and somehow almost youthful, appeared on all the intercom panels of the bridge. Her voice, cracking out of control for once, screamed at the people there: “You will unbolt the hatches immediately! Prolonged punishment will be administered if you refuse!”

Skorba sighed, and shook his head. No one else on the bridge wanted to reply, or comment. In a moment Hinna had reached for a switch and cut off the image of the screaming woman.

Now Skorba turned to confront the man in the next chair. “What’s taking so long getting things reconnected? It didn’t take you that long to pull ‘em apart.”

“Of course it didn’t. It’s coming. Gimme a break, I haven’t been at it ten minutes yet. And as soon as I get the drive working, we’re getting out of here!”

This time Skorba accepted the challenge. “There are three people, who we know pretty well, over there on our old ship. We’re not pulling out and leaving ‘em. So reconnect our weapons first.”

“Are you crazy?” Wirral’s voice was threatening to crack. “They’re dead already. That thing’s a berserker, for God’s sake!”

At that moment the pounding assault was resumed on one of the interior hatches. Tanya comforted herself by recalling the thick solidity of that locked slab of metal. The blows resounded more powerfully than before, but were still unavailing. The goodlife enemy were effectively shut out for the time being.

“Think,” Hinna was exhorting her three companions, “we’ve got to think ahead. It doesn’t seem like they can break in the way they’re trying it now. What’re they going to try next?”

“What would we do,” Tanya asked, “in their place . . . ?” In the next moment the answer hit her, and she screamed it out: “The lifeboats!”

All three stared at her, momentarily petrified. “Where are they?” several voices cried out together.

The boats were stowed, naturally enough, in the lifeboat bay—a compartment accessible from several places on the ship, including the lounge and—by means of a plainly marked hatch in the deck—the bridge.

Hinna ran to this hatch and started to unbolt and open it. “WeVe got to get to the boats before they do!”

“Wait,” Tanya called. “What are you—”

But Hinna was already lifting the hatch. Even as she did, the beam of a small energy weapon, fired from below, glanced off the angled lower surface and splashed in silent, deadly brilliance across the bridge. The ray scorched pads and fabric, evoking glaring momentary highlights from glass and metal. Hinna howled and slammed the hatch down into place. In a moment Tanya, kneeling beside it, was sliding home the heavy bolts.

Hinna’s right forearm, and a spot on her chin, where some reflected component of the beam had touched her, were blistering already. She sat on the deck making little moaning sounds, which quieted as Tanya brought the first aid kit, read directions and began to administer treatment.

It was plain that the lifeboats—Skorba and Wirral were virtually certain there would be two on board—were already in the control of the enemy.

That meant Lady Blanqui and her people were also in possession of the emergency radio equipment going with the boats—and once more able to communicate with the berserker.

Tanya quickly suggested a countermove: the people on the bridge should pretend to be goodlife and radio to the master that they needed no help, though a couple of pesky badlife had got loose. But Skorba pointed out that the berserker would not recognize the people on the yacht’s bridge as known loyal life-units.

There was no way for the people holding only the bridge to prevent a lifeboat launching.

Skorba barked at the man beside him: “Which can you get hooked up faster? Weapons, drive, or shields?”

“All right, weapons,” Wirral capitulated. “If those boats launch and then come back to ram us—”

Watching on the display stages of me bridge as the swindlers’ ship continued to undergo a battering, and a gradual entanglement in the forcefields woven by the berserker, Tanya asked: “How long can they hold out over there?”

The pudgy man in the captain’s chair shook his head. “They’d have been dead long ago, except the berserker happens to consider our powerful weapons and shields very valuable hardware, and is determined to capture them in one piece if at all possible.”

“It looks that way, but how do you know?”

“Look at the way it’s behaving. Trust me. As I think I told you once before, that hardware is what this whole game is all about.” He looked at his two old comrades. “You remember the way we acquired that stuff?”

“Not likely to forget it.” Hinna shook her head. Wirral was silent, working desperately.

“Tell me,” said Tanya.

Skorba turned to her almost eagerly. “To run a con like this one, we couldn’t use just any ship. We really needed to look like a berserker, right? To intimidate people; the last thing we wanted was a real battle. So we needed a big weapon, to demonstrate how tough we were. Also we had to be able to latch onto a yacht like this one and drag it to a halt. That kind of tough military hardware’s not so easy to find. It meant bribing someone who had access to a military stockpile that was poorly guarded and poorly managed.” Skorba paused. “Finally we succeeded. And we were pleased, because most of the hardware we picked up was berserker works. Parts of a machine that someone had salvaged after it was destroyed in battle.”

“I thought the Templars routinely took charge of that kind of material.”

“They do whenever they can. But other military organizations don’t always cooperate with them. In this case someone was willing to sell the stuff, under the counter.”

“Guns ready!” Wirral announced suddenly. His fingers clicked shut a small metal cover inside the console he was working on. “Fire at those lifeboats if they’re launched.”

Skorba studied the display stage in front of his command chair. “What about shields?”

“Not up yet—I’m working on ‘em.”

The ship’s brain broke in to confirm, in its pleasant imperturbable voice, that the main battery was ready to use. “Weapons accumulators fully charged.”

“Then we’re going to hit the berserker,” Skorba murmured. “Or its shields anyway. Try and buy a little time—ready—”

Wirral’s angry argument was interrupted by sound indicating that both lifeboats had been launched from the yacht; a moment later the ship’s brain confirmed the fact.

Tanya watched the nearest display stage as the two little images popped into view, then went pitching and rolling about uncertainly within a few hundred meters of the yacht. Obviously neither boat was under the control of an expert pilot.

“So,” said Hinna, “the old bitch’s sent out volunteers—”

“Yes, but to do what?” Tanya asked.

“One boat’s heading for the berserker—look—”

“So it is, but why?”

“Look out! The other one’s looping back—”

Around Tanya a confused outcry was going up. “We’re near the center of the ship. It’s not going to reach us—”

“It will if it comes right back in through the lifeboat bay!”

The nearest of the darting little images on the stage flared brightly and disappeared. Skorba, controlling the yacht’s guns, had cooly blasted the kamikaze lifeboat into vapor before it could achieve its suicidal purpose.

“The other one’s going to the berserker.”

“Why?”

“I can think of several reasons, none of them good.”

Once more human conversation on the bridge was interrupted by the calm, urbane voice of the ship’s electronic brain, this time reporting that power to the yacht’s main weapons had just been cut off.

Skorba sat stunned for a moment. Then he cursed and jiggled controls and indicators, all to no avail. “Have we at least got the shields up yet?”

“Hell no!” Wirral shouted back. “We never will, if the power’s cut off to them too. The damned goodlife must have got into the engine room, reached the power lamps.”

Emergency power supplies would continue to provide life support throughout the ship for some hours at least, and to keep the electronics going on the bridge. And the artificial gravity was still holding up, but for how long—

On the stages the second lifeboat could be seen reaching the berserker, and disappearing against that terrible dark shape. Only a minute or two later the image of the small boat reappeared. The little craft had separated itself from the berserker and was heading back toward the yacht.

Wirral paused wearily in his work. “What now? We’re dead. Whether it decides to ram us, or brings over a real boarding machine.”

“Maybe not. The accumulators in the weapon system have some pop left in them. Maybe enough to burn one more small boat—”

Skorba waited until the lifeboat was within a hundred meters, and then tried.

“We hit it!”

Not with full power, this time, though. The target was not vaporized. Solid debris clanged off the yacht’s hull an immeasurable fraction of a second after the explosion at close range.

Relief on the bridge was shortlived. Within a minute after the blast, the goodlife leader was back on intercom, gleefully taunting her enemies with the claim that a berserker boarding machine had been on the lifeboat, and had managed to reach the yacht intact.

The four badlife survivors stared at each other, not knowing whether to believe the claim or not.

Skorba reached out and switched off the intercom, cutting off their triumphant enemy in mid-sentence.

A few moments later a new noise intruded on the bridge, coming from outside the same hatch through which the refugees had entered, and where the ineffectual battering had earlier taken place. Growing steadily louder, it suggested to Tanya the highspeed whine of power tools.

Minutes passed. Wirral completed the job of reconnecting the control circuits for the shields and drive. There was no rejoicing; those systems were going to remain useless as long as the power was cut off.

At irregular intervals the yacht’s hull sang under the impact of wavefronts of radiation, as weapons flared aboard the berserker and the swindlers’ ship, transmitting violence far beyond the human scale. On the display stages it was easy to see that gradually—but only gradually—the berserker was asserting its mastery over its powerful but relatively clumsy opponent. Only a combination of especially good defensive shields and a formidable offensive weapon could have allowed the three terrified humans on the other ship to survive combat as long as this.

The sound of power tools eating at the hatch had ceased for the time being. The four people on the bridge of the yacht could think of nothing to do but wait. And talk to each other, from time to time.

Wirral, still resentful, demanded of Skorba. “How did you discover these marks we picked out were really good-life? How long have you known?”

“The idea crept up on me gradually,” he answered drily, and glanced at Tanya. “You know how that is.”

She was silent.

He went on: “I wasn’t entirely sure until I went with the old lady to Damaturu. Some things she said when we were alone in the launch clinched it for me. I knew then we weren’t going to be coming back with real gems.” He showed a lopsided grin. “I think she was contemplating recruiting me for the cause.”

“Still you came back,” Tanya said.

“I had my reasons.”

“What reasons?” demanded Wirral incredulously, scowling at him. “You knew there was a real berserker coming, and you still came back?”

“You don’t believe I’d do that.”

“No, I don’t. So you couldn’t have known they were really goodlife until later. All right, you’re off the hook on that one, pal. About not telling us.”

Once more Skorba looked at Tanya. He asked: “Can you see now why she invited both of us on the voyage?”

“You tell me.”

“Wherever we got off, we’d talk about our trip, spread the word of her presence. She wanted to make sure me people who were planning to swindle Lady Blanqui knew her exact location in the Cluster, just where she was traveling in her small unescorted ship. So the goodlife knew we were after the Lady—probably they arranged somehow to warn the real one off.”

“And they also knew,” said Tanya, “somehow, that your ship was carrying the hardware they wanted for their god, for the berserker.”

There was a lull in the conversation. All was quiet except for the distant, ghostly ringing of the hull under an avalanche of radiation.

“Why aren’t we trying to do something?” Hinna demanded suddenly.

The others looked at her. “What would you suggest?” asked Wirral.

“How about trying to get the power lamps turned back on?”

“The only place to do that is in the engine room. But we’re unarmed, and—”

“If only we had weapons—!”

There was a dull, despairing silence, suddenly broken.

“Of course!” Tanya shouted at her shipmates.

The three of them goggled at her, ready to hear anything.

“We’re all idiots!” she screamed at them. “Any ship owned and outfitted by goodlife, by people who equip themselves with handcuffs, is going to have weapons on board. Isn’t it?”

“All right!” Hinna shouted back. “But where are they? The goodlife have them all.”

“Are you sure? I’ll bet they don’t. What’s the most likely place aboard ship to store weapons, for people who want to have them handy? How about the bridge?”

Hinna sat motionless for a moment. Then she flew to pull open storage cabinets next to the one in which she had found the emergency toolkit. Neatly stowed on racks inside the first receptacle she opened were several handguns, along with two or three shoulder weapons, and some dark, fist-size lozenges. The latter were labeled with warnings about the danger of explosions, and some of them came equipped with protruding wires.

Wirral and Skorba sprang from their chairs to go through the treasure eagerly.

Skorba, checking a shoulder weapon’s charge, murmured: “I don’t know how much good this stuff is going to do against a berserker’s boarding machine. But now we’ve a chance. There are things we can try.”

Outside the hatch through which the badlife had entered the bridge die sounds of assault resumed. Battering, crunching impacts alternated with the noise of power drilling. Beyond the hatch in the opposite bulkhead, all was silent.

“We’re not going to be able to keep a boarding machine locked out,” said Skorba.

“Then we’ll have to welcome it in.” Wirral began to gather up the explosive lozenges, tugging at their wires, frowning at their labels.

The assaulted hatch was not going to hold much longer. Merciless smashing impacts, driven by far more than human strength, were starting to bend in the heavy metal.

“Welcome it in,” Wirral repeated, “while we get out.” He seated himself again in the captain’s chair, this time with grenades clustered in his lap. Once more he opened the control console.

Skorba crouched beside him. “Use this,” he volunteered, and handed over his media machine. “If it hasn’t saved us by now, it isn’t going to.”

The other man accepted the offering, then hesitated. “If we put a booby trap here on the master controls,” he muttered. “We won’t be able to use the ship afterward.”

“Anywhere on the bridge might have same effect, and using the ship afterward is the least of our worries. This’s the only place they’re certain to put their hands on. Hurry!”

The women watched while the two men, evidently both experienced in such matters, worked together. In less than a minute several of the explosive lozenges, wired together, were hidden beneath the captain’s chair. The improvised detonator, a small component Skorba had extracted from one of the firearms, was concealed just under the casually arranged communication device.

Skorba made the last connection and then with great delicacy pulled his hands away. Very carefully Wirral edged himself out of the chair.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “All we can do now.” He turned and gestured toward the silent hatch, in the opposite bulkhead from the noisy one.

Everyone moved that way. It represented the only possible way out. Trying to flee into the lifeboat bay would be suicidal, because that compartment had been open and airless since the boats were launched.

Already the hatch being attacked by the boarding machine was on the point of giving way. Now Wirral, standing clear of the aperture and with an armed grenade in hand, jerked open the hatch opposite.

The enemy had not left his escape route unguarded. At once a silent flare of gunfire splashed in across the bridge, a beam that broke things open and made them smoke. The badlife were all standing back and no one was hit.

Skorba and Wirral flipped grenades out through the opening.

The double explosion reverberated through whatever compartment or corridor lay beyond, cleansing it with fire.

An instant later Wirral, gun in hand, had plunged out recklessly. Hinna scrambled immediately after him, and Skorba after her. Tanya, last to evacuate the bridge, found herself almost falling into a scorched compartment filled with stinging fumes from the grenades, littered with broken furniture and machinery. A crumpled, bloody body on the deck, dimly recognizable as that of Yero, stirred feebly and cried out for its mother. Even as Tanya cleared the opening she could hear the other hatch, behind her on the far side of the bridge, give way at last under the berserker’s onslaught.

Skorba slammed shut the hatch the instant she was through it. She scrambled to her feet, trying to help him—but there was no way to bolt or lock the door from this side.

Four seconds later an irresistible mechanical arm struck the portal from the bridge side, banging it fully open, hurling away both of the humans who had been trying to keep it closed.

And at that same moment one of the goodlife, rushing to take full control of the ship, must have grabbed up Skorba’s communication device from where it lay across the captain’s chair obstructing the captain’s console.

Even for the four who had fled into the next compartment, the blast was deafening and stunning.

The man-shaped berserker was blown through the hatchway it had just started to open, launched like a projectile into the bulkhead opposite. There it was stopped, smashed in a crushing impact, because that bulkhead was backed up by the hard strength of the ship’s outer hull.

Amid a renewed clamor of ship’s alarms, Tanya went crawling about dazedly. Yero was now lying still. Parts of the broken boarding machine still twitched, and Skorba was trying to incinerate them with a shoulder weapon.

Having realized that she herself was still alive, she sank for a time into unconsciousness.

The lapse must have been brief. Tanya regained her senses to find that her three companions were still alive. But the fight had left the Golden Hind permanently crippled, without lifeboats, drifting helplessly in the immediate presence of a berserker which was undoubtedly going to gobble it up as soon as it had completed some more urgent business.

The dazed survivors crawled about, deafened, shocked, in a compartment half-choked with fumes.

Skorba kept grabbing his surviving shipmates one after another, shaking them, reassuring them that the goodlife were all dead, and help was on the way.

Wirral, his voice totally exhausted, said: “You’re babbling. There’s still the berserker, the big one. As soon as it’s finished stripping our old ship of the hardware it wants, it’ll come after us. It won’t forget us.”

Skorba looked at his own wrists, each still clasped by a metal cuff. “What time is it?”

“Time? Were you hit in the head? What does the time matter?”

“I tell you help is on its way. It’ll be here any moment now.”

“You ‘re delirious.”

“No.” Skorba looked about, and coughed. “Let’s try to get to the lounge. Maybe the fumes won’t be so bad there.”

Helping one another through smoke-choked corridors, amid a ceaseless babble of alarms, the four surviving badlife made their way back to the lounge. Here one, at least, of the display stages was still functioning. Skorba tried to establish communication with the ship’s electronic brain, but could elicit no response.

Hinna was rubbing her bandaged arm. “When it comes for us I don’t want to be taken alive.”

“It’s not coming for us. Look.”

On the stage had suddenly appeared three new shapes, those of sizable spacecraft approaching from three different directions. New violence erupted, vastly greater than before.

“What—?”

“They’re Templar fighters,” Skorba said, “from Damaturu.”

Around him the others stared, afraid to believe. The swindlers’ old ship drifted, inert but free, defensive shields still flickering, not quite dead. The damaged berserker was surrounded, trapped, being pummeled from long range. It tried to fight back but was outgunned. The hull of the yacht sang a rising polyphonic paean of shielded radiation.

“They’re fighters, all right,” admitted Wirral. “How do you know they’re Templars? How d’you know where they’re from?”

“Because I ordered them.”

“You what? When? How?”

“When I was on Damaturu. Have you ever been there, in the plaza near the Templars’ tower? When I had a chance to play tourist, I stood there and aimed my media machine at those big antennas and sent them a signal. I packed in our coordinates here, and enough information to give them a good idea of the situation.”

“The Templars wouldn’t launch three ships on the strength of one message coming in from a stranger, out of the blue!”

“It didn’t exactly come from a stranger—it had the identity code of one of their agents attached to it.”

“One of their agents?”

“Me.” Skorba paused.

Skorba’s old comrades stared at him as if he had suddenly revealed himself to be a robot. Tanya began to giggle strangely; under ordinary circumstances such a sound would have been considered unhealthy. Skorba looked at her, then continued: “You wondered why I came back when I knew the Lady was a fake, and there was a real berserker coming. I was hunting it, that’s why. So I was sure the Templars had launched.” He paused. “Reasonably sure.”

Tanya was letting herself slide into hysterics. She did a thorough job of it, devoting several minutes to the task and creating a lot of noise.

Beginning to recover, she listened to some more of Skorba’s explanations. “You see, my gadget had been steadily emitting a beacon signal since shortly after the Golden Hind left Malawi. That was its real purpose. The Templars gave it to me when I volunteered to work for them.”

“Why’d you do that?” asked Hinna in a small dreamy voice.

“Because,” the pudgy man said, “I don’t like berserkers. One of them once—did something—to someone I. . . .”

He shook his head and faced back to Tanya. “All the chatter between myself and Wirral about the device was mainly to draw attention away from our imitation berserker, standing mere by the hatchway like a clothing dummy.

“And the signal was rather special, consisting of tagged neutrinos. They’re not shielded by the hull of an ordinary ship like this one.”

“And no one realized you were transmitting a signal like that?”

Skorba shook his head patiently. “Everyone detected it. That was my intention.”

“We picked up the signal in space near Malawi,” Wirral said. “So we knew Skorba had managed to get himself aboard the yacht. We had an easy time following her and closing in.”

Skorba resumed. “I’m sure our hostess picked up the signal too. But she wasn’t going to say anything about it to her passengers. She must have been delighted to realize that she had me actually on board—one of the swindling scoundrels whose vessel she was trying to trap. All she had to do was cruise along, waiting for my pals in their fake berserker to home on my signal.

“Once safely away from Malawi, the real goodlife radioed to their master what was happening. It must have followed the yacht at a distance, ready to pounce on the fake berserker as soon as it showed up. The real berserker was hanging back at extreme range to avoid detection, so the pouncing took several hours.

“And shortly after I came back from Damaturu, three Templar warships were in space following my signal too.”

* * *

Up through the deck of the lounge, audible above the continuous alarms, came the familiar sounds of a launch docking.

Minutes later, on board a Templar launch, and on their way to safety, the four survivors got plenty of clean air to breathe, and medical attention. Another launch was removing survivors from the other ship.

A Templar officer in white space-combat gear informed the survivors from the yacht that her people had come looking for a berserker as quickly as they could after getting Skorba’s message and checking his verification code. She was sorry it had taken them so long to close in, but they had been compelled to hang back at long range until they were sure they had the berserker surrounded.

“Where’s the berserker now?” asked Tanya.

“We’re somewhere near the middle of it.” The killing machine now existed only as a radiant and swiftly expanding nebula of gas.

The officer looked at Skorba with grudging admiration. “I admit I didn’t think you were going to pull it off. By the way, the real name of the old woman who commanded this yacht was Dala Clonmel. She and the rest of the good-life with her had quite a reputation and a record. So do you and your pals, I know—but I expect we can arrange to let you walk away after debriefing.” Templars had neither authority nor interest concerning criminals other than goodlife.

“Thanks,” said Skorba numbly.

The officer switched her attention to Tanya. Now her tone was more cautious. “I don’t believe you’re someone we were expecting to find on board the yacht, ma’am. Who are you?”

Tanya didn’t answer right away.

“Is there something wrong?”

Tanya laughed again. When she spoke, her words were hard to understand. “How do I know you’re really Templars?”

Her hysterics were coming back.

1995

THE BAD MACHINES

The humanoids were born in the aftermath of World War II, when Jack Williannson, along with nnany others, realized much to his chagrin, that technology and science could become tools for wreaking terrible destruction. Until the power of nuclear fission was demonstrated in the horrible immolation of Hiroshima, nobody had truly grasped the full implications of our burgeoning scientific knowledge. For all of Jack’s adult life, science had been a source of benevolent change. Hiroshima changed that.

Fred Saberhagen understands the humanoids, perhaps better than any sf writer besides Jack himself Since I read my first Berserker story nearly thirty years ago, I’ve hoped for a story like the one that follows. Perhaps it was inevitable that something like the following clash of titans would happen. Boy, are we lucky it happened here.

Smoothly functioning machinery composed the bulk of the little courier ship, surrounding its cabin, cradling and defending the two human lives therein. Both crew members were at battle stations, their bodies clad in full space armor and secured in combat chairs. At the moment all the elaborate devices of guidance and propulsion performed their functions unobtrusively, and the cabin was very quiet. This was not the time for casual conversation, because the combat zone was only a few minutes ahead.

The small portion of the Galaxy settled by Earth-descended humans lay almost entirely behind the courier, while only a few of the most recently established settlements lay in its path, as did much of the vaster Galactic realm still unexplored. Moving in c-space, the ship’s instruments at the moment were able to show only a faint indication of its destination: the hint of the presence of a gravitational radiant, still several light-hours away.

Before Lieutenant Commander Timor and Ensign Strax had departed on this mission, the admiral in command of Sector Headquarters had summoned both to a secret briefing. Once the three officers were isolated in the briefing room, the CO had turned on a holostage display. The scene depicted was at once recognizable as the region of space surrounding the Selatrop Radiant.

Crisply the admiral reminded the man and woman before him of the special physical qualities of negative gravitational radiants in general, and of this one in particular, which made these peculiar features in space-time strong points in the struggle to control the lanes of space.

Three inhabited planets orbited suns within a few light-years of the Selatrop, and the lives of those populations hung in the balance. In the war of humanity against the Berserker machines, whichever side held the Selatrop Radiant would have a substantial advantage in the ongoing struggle to control this sector of space. If Berserkers should be able to capture and hold this fortress, then it would probably be necessary to try to evacuate those planets.

Facing his two officers across the glowing tabletop display, the admiral had come quickly to the point: “I’m worried, spacers. Communication with Selatrop is still open, and the garrison commander reports that the defenses are holding. But . . . several of the messages received from there over the last standard month suggest that something is seriously wrong.”

The admiral went on to give details. Most puzzling was a statement by the garrison commander, Colonel Craindre, that she flatly refused to accept any more human reinforcements. From now on, only routine replacement supplies, and a few additional items, factory machinery and materials, were to be sent. Some of these requisitions were hard to explain by the normal requirements of maintenance and replacement—and the sender of the message had offered no explanation.

When the CO paused, seeming to invite comment, Timor said: “Admiral, that doesn’t sound like Colonel Craindre at all.”

The older man nodded. “Semantic analysis strongly suggests that none of the members of the garrison wrote those words.”

“But who else could have written them, sir?—unless some ship we don’t know about has arrived at the fortress.”

“Who else, indeed? Your orders are to find out what’s happening, and report.”

The message torpedoes from the Selatrop Fortress had borne additional puzzling content. At least one of the dispatches hinted at a great, joyous announcement soon to be proclaimed. Psychologists at Headquarters suspected that the sender might have been subjected to some kind of mind-altering drugs or surgery.

The admiral also voiced his fear of a worst-case scenario: that the Berserkers had actually overrun the fortress, but were trying to keep the fact a secret.

The briefing was soon concluded, and Lieutenant Commander Timor and Ensign Strax boarded the armed courier. Minutes later they were launched into space.

The little courier was now about to reemerge into normal space after three days of c-plus travel.

The onboard drive and astrogation systems, under the autopilot’s control, continued to function smoothly. No enemy presence had been detected in local c-space. The small ship popped back into normal space precisely on schedule, only a few thousand kilometers from its destination, well-positioned within the approach lanes to the Selatrop.

Timor let out held breath in a kind of reverse gasp. At least normal space within point-blank weapons range was clear of the Berserker enemy. There would be no attack on the courier within the next few seconds. But on the holostage display before him there sprang into being scores of ominous dots, scattered in an irregular pattern, indicating real-space objects at only slightly greater distances. The Berserkers, space-going relics of an ancient interstellar war, programmed to destroy life wherever they encountered it, were intent on breaking into the defended space of the fortress, and slaughtering every living thing inside, down to the last microbe. Then, having seized control of this strategic strong point, they would use it to great advantage in their relentless crusade against all life.

In appearance the Radiant resembled a miniature sun, a fiery point burning in vacuum, its inverse force pressing the newly arrived ship, and everything else, away from it. Like the handful of its mysterious fellows scattered about the Galaxy, it could be approached no closer than a couple of kilometers, by any ship or machine. Here at the Selatrop, the inner surface of the fortress was four kilometers from that enigmatic point.

The fortress consisted of blocks and sections of solid matter, woven and held together with broad strands of sheer force, the whole forming a kind of spherical latticework some eight kilometers in diameter. Through the interstices the fitful spark of the radiant itself was intermittently visible.

Timor and Strax sent a coded radio message ahead to the fortress, announcing their arrival, even as the autopilot eased the courier into its approach.

The fortress holding the high ground of the Selatrop Radiant possessed some powerful fixed weapons of its own, but depended very heavily for its defense upon two squadrons of small fighting ships. The original strength of the garrison had been twenty human couples, the great majority of them highly trained pilots. With their auxiliary machines they made a formidable defensive team.

In combat, as in many other situations of comparable complexity, better decisions tended to be made when a human brain participated in the parts of the process not requiring electronic speed. A meld of organic and artificial intelligence had proven to be superior in performance to either mode alone.

The marvels of an organic brain, still imperfectly understood, provided the fighter pilot’s mind, both conscious and unconscious, with the little extra, the fine edge over pure machine control, that enabled the best pilots under proper conditions to seize a slight advantage over pure machine opponents.

During the first few seconds after their ship’s reemergence into normal space, Timor and Strax were reassured to see on their displays that the defense was still being energetically carried out.

Small space-going machines, beyond a doubt Berserkers engaged in an attack, could be seen on the displays. Even as Timor watched, one of the enemy symbols vanished in a small red puff, indicating the impact of a heavy weapon. Moments later, one of the defending fighters was evidently badly damaged, so much so that it turned its back on the enemy and began to limp toward the safety of the fortress.

“At least our people are still hanging on,” the ensign commented.

“So far.”

The brief sequence of action Timor had so far been able to observe suggested a steady probing of the defenses rather than an all-out assault.

A hulking shape easily recognizable as the Berserker mothership hovered in the background, at a range of a thousand kilometers or more, constrained by its own sheer bulk from forcing an approach into the volume of space near the Radiant, where only small objects could force a passage.

As the courier in the course of its final approach moved within a hundred kilometers of the fortress, a new skirmish flared in nearby space, punch and counterpunch of nuclear violence exchanged at the speeds of computers and electricity.

As the courier drew nearer to the fortress, the skirmishing flared briefly into heavier action.

The attack was conducted by space-going Berserkers in a variety of sizes and configurations. But the Radiant proved its worth as an advantage to the defense: the assaulting force was continually at a disadvantage, in effect having to fight its way uphill, their maneuvering slowed and weapons rendered less effective. At the moment their efforts were being beaten off with professional skill.

And now the enemy showed full awareness of the presence of Timor’s ship. One Berserker was now accelerating sharply in the courier’s direction, trying to head it off.

The human skill and intuition of Ensign Strax as pilot, melded with the autopilot’s speed and accuracy, secured the courier a slight edge in maneuvering, and ultimately a safe entry to the defended zone.

With the Berserkers temporarily baffled, the nearest of the manned fighting ships engaged in the defense now turned aside and approached the courier. As the two officers on the courier began to ease themselves out of their armor, routine messages were exchanged.

REQUEST PERMISSION TO COME ABOARD.

Timor replied: PERMISSION GRANTED.

Only mildly surprised—it seemed natural that people who had withstood a long siege would be eager to see a new and friendly human face—Timor and Strax made ready to welcome aboard the pilot from the fighting ship.

When the two craft were docked together, and the connected airlocks stood open, Timor looked up, confidently expecting to see a human step from the airlock into the courier’s cabin . . . but instead he was petrified to behold a metal shape, roughly human in configuration, but obviously a robot—

. . . somehow, a Berserker. And we are dead. . . .

Too late to do anything about it now. . . .

Ensign Strax let out a wordless cry of terror, and tried to draw a handgun. But she was instantly stunned by some paralyzing ray, so that the weapon clattered on the deck.

A moment later, Timor broke free of the paralysis of shock. He grabbed for the controls before his combat chair, intending to wreck his ship, if he could, to keep it out of enemy hands.

Human reflexes were far too slow. His wrists were gently seized, his intended motion blocked.

A Berserker. From one fraction of a second to the next, he waited for his arms to be wrenched from their sockets, for his life to be efficiently crushed out.

But nothing of the kind occurred.

Opening his eyes, which had involuntarily clenched themselves shut, Timor beheld the lone intruder, its metal hand still holding him by one wrist. It was obviously a robot, but vastly different from any machine that he had ever seen before—Earth-descended people almost never built anthropomorphic robots—and also unlike any Berserker he had ever seen or heard described.

Standing before him was a metal thing, nude and sexless, the size and shape of a small human adult. The immobile features of its face were molded in a form of subtle beauty.

Timor’s handgun was smoothly taken away from him. Then he was released.

His only thought at the moment was that this was some attempted Berserker ploy. The bad machines must want something from him, some information or act of treachery, before they killed him.

But the very beauty of the robot, by Earth-descended human standards, argued strongly against its having a Berserker origin.

“At your service, Lieutenant Commander Timor,” the shape before him crooned, speaking in Timor’s language, the same as that used by the Selatrop garrison. Its voice was startlingly lovely, nothing at all like the raucous squawking produced by Berserkers when they condescended, for their own deadly reasons, to imitate human speech.

The machine looked extremely strong and well-designed, presenting a dark and seamless metallic surface to the world. It had stepped back a pace, but was still standing close enough that Timor might easily have read the fine script engraved on the metal plate set into its chest—had he understood the language. Seeing the direction of his gaze, the machine translated for him in its musical voice, pointing at each word in turn with a delicate-looking finger of steel:

HUMANOID

SERIAL NO. JW 39,864,715

TO SERVE AND OBEY

AND GUARD HUMANITY FROM HARM

Just as the translation was completed, the figure of Ensign Strax in the other seat stirred slightly. Turning away from Timor, flowing across the little cabin with more than a human dancer’s grace, the intruder machine bent solicitously over Strax as if intent upon seeing to her welfare. Soft hues of bronze and blue shone across the robot’s sleek and sexless blackness. It was handsome, and monstrous in its independence. Gently, efficiently, it did something which must have partially counteracted the effects of the stunning ray. Then it adjusted the position of the ensign’s seat, as if concerned for her safety and comfort.

Meanwhile, Timor was slowly recovering from shock, from the certainty of instant death. “At my service?” he croaked stupidly.

The thing turned back toward him, its blind-seeming, steel-colored eyes fixed on his face. Its high clear voice was eerily sweet. “We humanoids are here, and always will be. We exist to serve humanity. Ask for what you need.”

“ ‘We’ ?”

“Locally, only eighteen other units, essentially identical to the one you see before you. Elsewhere, millions more.”

“But what are you?”

Patiently it pointed once more to its identification plate. “Humans elsewhere have called us humanoids.”

Timor shook his head as if to clear it. It seemed that the question of the robot’s origin would have to be settled later. “What do you want?”

“We follow our Prime Directive.” Tolerantly it repeated the words incised below its serial number: “ ‘To serve and obey and guard humanity from harm.’ ”

“You’re telling me you have no intention of killing us.”

“Far from it, Lieutenant Commander.” Metal somehow conveyed the impression of being softly shocked at the mere idea. “We cannot kill. Our intentions are quite the opposite.”

Meanwhile the courier’s and the fighter’s respective autopilots had been easing the joined small ships along toward the fortress, steadily decelerating. The two separated only moments before being individually docked. Timor felt the usual shift in artificial gravity, from ship’s to station’s. Here the natural inverse gravity of the Radiant dominated.

“Our immediate objective,” continued the humanoid, brightly and intensely, “is to save humanity from the critical danger posed by Berserkers.”

“I know what Berserkers are, thank you. I have a fair amount of experience along that line What I haven’t quite grasped as yet is—you. Where did you come from?”

The thing declined to answer directly. “We have long familiarity with the Earth-descended species of humanity. Your history displays patterns of evolving technology and increasingly violent aggression. Even absent any Berserker threat, your longterm survival would require our help.”

“How do you come to speak our language?”

Again the answer was oblique: “To achieve our goal it has been necessary to learn many languages.”

The ship was now snugly docked, the open hatch leading directly into the Selatrop Fortress. From outside the ship came a hint of exotic odors. Beside him, the mysterious thing was insisting in a cooing voice that it and its fellows wanted only to benefit humanity.

Ensign Strax was now awake and functioning once more, though obviously dazed. She seemed basically unharmed, able to stand and walk with only a little help.

The two humans left the courier, the humanoid solicitously assisting the ensign. As they emerged into dock and hangar space, they saw around them the great structural members of composite materials, making up the bulk of the fortress. In places the Radiant itself was visible, as a sunlike point always directly overhead, casting strong shadows.

Two more humanoids, practically identical to the first, were on hand to offer a silent welcome. But not a human being was in sight.

“Where’s the garrison?” Timor demanded sharply.

One of the waiting units answered. “All humans aboard the fortress are now restricted to the region of greatest safety.”

“Not at their battle stations? By whose decision?”

“No human decisions can be allowed to interfere with our essential service.”

At another dock nearby rested a small spacecraft, no bigger than Timor’s courier but of unique design. “Whose ship is that?” he demanded.

It is ours.

The humanoid spokesunit went on to inform him that reinforcements were expected soon, a second ship and perhaps a third, each carrying another score of units like itself.

“Arrive from where?”

As nearly as Timor could understand the answer, the reinforcements, like the first humanoid craft, would be coming from a direction, or perhaps a dimension in c-space, such that it would be virtually impossible for the besieging Berserker fleet to interfere with their arrival.

Timor also observed that the newcomers had taken over several docks, part of the repair facility, to establish their own workshop. Imperturbably his new guide explained to him that the resources of the fortress, computers, materials, and machinery, were being pressed into the construction of more humanoids.

The two humanoids that had been waiting now boarded the courier. Maybe, thought Timor, they were looking for the requested factory machines and materials. If so, they were doomed to disappointment.

Their original guide escorted Timor and Strax deeper into the fortress, through multiple airlocks, past redundant defenses.

The special attributes of gravitational radiants in general, and of this one in particular, not only made them strong points in the struggle to control the preferred thoroughfares and channels of c-plus travel. The same peculiarities that made it easy for a ship to emerge from flightspace in the vicinity of a radiant also rendered it more likely that things from far away, such as the humanoids, were likely to turn up here.

When Strax and Timor had reached the garrison’s living quarters, still without having encountered a living soul in the course of their long walk, the robot assigned the couple to separate small cabins. They were not consulted as to their preference in quarters.

Once the ensign was in her cabin, the humanoid locked the door from the outside. “By attempting to draw a weapon, Ensign Strax has demonstrated a willingness to use violence against humanoids,” the beautiful robot explained to Timor. “Temporary confinement will be best for her own safety.”

Timor did not protest, because in truth Strax had still seemed somewhat dazed. Better for her to stay out of the way, while he investigated.

He followed his guide down a short corridor.

“At last!” he muttered. A dozen or so members of the live garrison had come in sight, assembled in a recreation lounge. Timor thought that when he appeared, hope flared briefly in their faces, only to fade swiftly when they perceived that he had been disarmed and was thoroughly under the control of the escorting robot. Three additional humanoids stood by, observing carefully.

Timor immediately recognized Colonel Craindre, the garrison commander, a gray-haired, hard-bitten veteran of space combat. He approached her, identified himself, and announced his mission.

“I wish you well, Lieutenant Commander,” the colonel said. “But I don’t know whether I can say welcome aboard. Because I don’t know if I’m glad to see you here or not. Our situation is so . . .” Her words died away.

“Casualties?”

Colonel Craindre shook her head helplessly. Her pale hands were folded tensely in front of her, in what was evidently an unconscious gesture, and Timor suddenly noticed that several other members of the garrison had adopted the same pose.

In a belated response to Timor’s question the colonel said: “Four pilots lost.” She paused. “All our casualties occurred before the humanoids arrived.”

“Why is that?”

“Very simple. As soon as they seized control, all humans were forbidden to fly combat missions. Several additional fighter ships have been lost since then, and four of our new allies with them.”

Another pilot chimed in: “Which probably means that four of us are still alive, who would otherwise be—”

But Timor had scarcely heard anything beyond the colonel’s remark. He interrupted: “You were forbidden—?”

Craindre nodded. Her clenched hands quivered. “That is the situation, Lieutenant Commander. You see, space combat is far, far too risky for human beings. The humanoids will not contemplate for a moment allowing us to engage in such activity, they’ve taken over the fighting for us.” The colonel’s voice was trembling slightly. “Now before you convey to me the explosive wrath of Headquarters, tell me this: How long were you able to retain control of your courier, after a single humanoid had come aboard? We had more than twenty. They took us by surprise, and resistance proved hopeless.”

One of the interchangeable humanoid units cooed: “It is true, there have been no human casualties since our arrival. It is our intention that there will never be any more.”

Timor turned to face the thing. “How can that be? We’re fighting a war. Or do you hope to sign a truce with your fellow robots, and bargain for our lives? That won’t work with Berserkers.”

Sweetly the robot warned him that he must not persist in such a dangerous attitude. The humanoids hoped to gain his active cooperation, and that of other humans, but there could be no question of yielding on any rule essential to human safety.

Timor turned back to his fellow humans. “But what exactly happened here? How did these machines—?” he gestured at the nearest humanoid, which had resumed its role of impassive observer.

The colonel and other members of the garrison did their best to explain. They could only conjecture that the humanoids’ exotic ship had somehow found its way to the Selatrop Radiant from some alternate universe, or at least from across some vast gulf of space-time.

In an effort to explain how the newcomers had seized control so easily, Craindre and others described the humanoids’ ability to mimic humanity by the use of imitation flesh and hair, something no Berserker had ever managed. This trick had allowed the intruders to dock at the fortress, even though their craft had previously been boarded by suspicious humans. And once they were loose inside the fortress it had been impossible to stop them.

Like Timor on the courier, the human garrison of the fortress had unanimously assumed that the first woman-sized robot to reveal itself as a machine was some new type of Berserker. Naturally panic had ensued, and a futile attempt to fight. But the humanoids’ behavior after seizing control had quickly demonstrated that they were not Berserkers.

When the immensely skilled and intelligent robots had filled the pilots’ seats of the small fighters, and had successfully turned back one Berserker assault after another, a substantial minority of the garrison were soon converted.

But still a majority of the human garrison were far from satisfied with the situation, and more than one had already been treated to some mind-altering drugs to ease their concerns.

Even not counting those who had been drugged, the balance was changing. Gradually additional members of the garrison had come to accept what the humanoids told them. For this faction the humanoids represented salvation, in the form of the true fighting allies that ED humanity had needed for so long. By now almost half the original garrison had been converted, though human discipline still held. People everywhere were tired of the seemingly endless Berserker war.

In the midst of conversation the colonel received a signal from one of the robots, and promptly passed along the information: “The machines have prepared a meal for us in the wardroom.”

Walking down the corridor, Timor turned abruptly to once more confront the garrison commander beside him. “Where are the shoulder weapons stowed, Colonel Craindre? Where’s the space armor? Regulations require such gear to be stored near the sleeping quarters.”

“We are no longer allowed access to weapons of any kind.”

Timor was speechless.

“Lieutenant Commander, the Selatrop Fortress has now been under humanoid control for approximately a standard month. I assure you, that is more than long enough for drastic changes to have taken place.”

“I can see that!”

A humanoid, walking beside them, interjected: “And we assure you, Lieutenant Commander, that all changes are essential. Without our timely help, the fortress would have been overrun by Berserkers days ago. All the humans you see before you would be dead.”

Craindre said sharply: “I consider that outcome far from certain. But I have to admit the possibility.”

Presently all the humans on the fortress, with the exception of Strax and one or two others confined for their own good, were gathered in the large wardroom. Two humanoids presided while the ordinary maintenance robots, squat inhuman devices, served a meal at the long refectory tables. Food and drink were of good quality, as usual, but Timor observed minor deviations from the usual military fare and customs. Humans were now discouraged from performing the smallest service for themselves, spoons and small forks were still allowed, but sharp knives and heat much above body temperature were considered prohibitively dangerous.

Timor tasted his soup and found it barely lukewarm. On impulse, to see what would happen, he complained to the nearest serving machine that the soup was cold. A humanoid glided forward a few paces to explain that hot soup presented a danger of injury, and would require the consumer to be spoon-fed by a machine, or to drink the liquid by straw from a spillproof container.

It concluded: “We regret that the exigencies of combat temporarily prevent our providing full table service.”

“There’s a war on. Yes, I know. That’s all right. I’ll drink it cold.”

Mealtime conversation with the garrison elicited more facts. The humanoids, on taking over the defense of the fortress, had at first denied the humans any knowledge of how the ongoing battle was progressing. Their stated reason was that information about the proximity of Berserkers was bound to cause harmful anxiety. But a few days later, without explanation, that policy had been reversed. Everyone not tranquilized was now kept fully informed of the military situation.

Timor turned to one of the metallic guardians. “I wonder why?”

This time an explanation was forthcoming. “We seek voluntary cooperation, as always, Spacer Timor. We hope that with the Berserker threat ever-present in human awareness, you will soon abandon your unrealistic objections and wholeheartedly accept our protection.”

“I see. Well, most of us are not ready to do that.”

The humanoid went on to relate that some days ago it and its kind had considered putting everyone aboard the fortress into suspended animation. They had refrained only because a real chance existed that the humans might have to defend themselves against Berserkers.

“That will be difficult if we are deprived of weapons.”

“Your personal weapons will be returned, if an emergency grave enough to warrant such action should arise.”

Walking with the colonel after dinner, touring the living quarters, Timor noted several significant differences from the usual arrangements. For one thing, everyone was assigned a private room. It seemed that associations as intimate as bed-sharing were being discouraged.

In the course of their walk, Colonel Craindre informed him that the main computer aboard the fortress, when asked to determine the probable origin of the humanoids, had offered a kind of guess by suggesting that in the close vicinity of a gravitational radiant, even the laws of chance were not quite what they were elsewhere. Certain philosophers held that in such locations many realities interpenetrated, and even the rules of mathematics were not quite the same. In everyday terms, this was a place where the unexpected tended to show up.

And such tests as the members of the garrison had been able to conduct—admittedly few and simple—tended to confirm this. Humanoids were exotic devices in many ways, not least in the fact that they relied so strongly on rhodomagnetic technology.

The humanoids had welcomed the humans’ questions, and had even volunteered some information on the science and engineering which had gone into producing the benevolent robots. They said they wished to be as open as possible, to convince the humans quickly that they were not in any way dangerous to human welfare.

Timor heard a unit promise that one of their machines would be turned over for ultimate testing, even dissection—as soon as one could be spared from the ongoing conflict.

Returning with the colonel to the wardroom, Timor announced to all machines and humans present that within the hour he intended to dispatch an unmanned courier back to Headquarters, carrying a complete report of the situation on the fortress.

And within a standard day he planned to depart on his return trip, to report to the admiral in person. He would take with him Ensign Strax and as many members of the human garrison as the colonel thought she could spare, to corroborate his testimony regarding the situation here.

Timor concluded: “It is up to the colonel whether all the garrison, including herself, come with me or not. It seems to me that would be the best course.” He paused, then added: “This fortress has already fallen.”

Colonel Craindre hesitated, considering her decision. The new masters of the fortress stared silently at Timor for a few seconds, no doubt taking counsel privately among themselves. Then their current spokesunit insisted that the humanoids must approve any message before it was sent. It also informed Timor that they had already sent reassuring messages to headquarters in his name.

“Then obviously,” Timor said, “the truth means little to you.”

The robot before him was, of course, neither angry nor embarrassed. “The Prime Directive has never required the truth. We have found, in fact, that undisguised truth is always painful, and often harmful to mankind.”

It went on to explain that neither Timor nor any other human would be allowed to depart the fortress in the foreseeable future. Even Sector Headquarters could hardly be as safe as a fortress directly defended by humanoids. And as long as the Berserker siege continued, space in the immediate vicinity was simply too dangerous for anyone to risk a passage in a small ship. That was why the protectors of humanity had refused, in the colonel’s name, to accept any more human reinforcements.

But the humanoids had no objection to the dispatch of an unmanned courier. They encouraged the humans, especially Timor as the head of the investigative team, to send messages of reassurance and comfort back to their headquarters. Because secure transmission could not be guaranteed, the joyful proclamation of the actual presence and nature of the humanoids was not to be made just yet.

Timor once more went walking with the colonel. He wanted to talk, and considered that trying to find privacy was hopeless. Humans conversing anywhere in the fortress had to assume that humanoids could overhear them.

Strolling the living quarters, Timor could see that when people were forced to live under tight humanoid control, they would not even be allowed to open doors for themselves. Several doors had actually had their hand-operated latches taken away, leaving only blank surfaces. Several of the cabins had already been converted to create an absolute dependency upon machines; only the press of more important matters, and the fact that all humanoid units might at any time be called into combat, had kept the humanoids from enforcing more restrictions on the garrison.

Everything the colonel had learned in a month of living with humanoids confirmed the plan of the benevolent robots: eventually, in a world perfected according to humanoid rules, the entire human race, while being at every moment of their lives served and protected, would spend those lives in isolation. Succeeding generations of humanity would be conceived with the aid of artifice, and raised in artificial wombs. In general it was always better that humans not get too close to one another, given their propensity for violence.

The two officers walked with folded hands. Timor noted that he himself was now carrying his empty hands clasped behind his back.

“I wonder . . .” he mused aloud.

“What?”

“If Berserkers will really want to destroy humanoids completely. Or vice versa.”

Colonel Craindre looked at him keenly. “That’s already occurred to you, has it? I needed several days to arrive at the same idea.”

“Not that there would be any overt bargaining between them.”

“No, the fundamental programming on each side would preclude that.”

“But—Berserkers might easily compute that the existence of humanoids must inflict a strategic weakness upon humanity—if humans can be induced to rely completely on such machines.”

“And on the other hand, humanoids are already making use of the Berserkers, indirectly, as a threat: ‘If you don’t turn your lives over to us, the bad machines will get you.’ ”

Timor said to his companion: “Of course the reason they give for wanting to keep their presence here a secret makes no sense. Certainly the Berserkers attacking must already realize they’re up against something new.”

“Of course. And . . . wait! Listen!”

There came a sound like roaring surf, sweeping through the corridors and rooms. Somewhere outside, the battle thundered on, wave fronts of radiation smashing into the fortress walls, filling the interior with a sound like pounding waves.

The heaviest Berserker attack to hit the fortress yet was now being mounted. An announcement on loudspeakers proclaimed an emergency: all humanoid units save one were being withdrawn from the interior of the fortress and sent out as pilots as every available fighter ship was thrown into the defense.

The sole unit left to oversee the humans opened a sealed door and brought out piles of hand and shoulder weapons, along with space armor.

Everybody scrambled to get into armor and take up weapons, against the possibility of the fortress being invaded by Berserker boarding units.

Maybe, thought Timor in sudden hope, maybe the damned do-gooder robots hadn’t studied the gear thoroughly, did not take into account that such suits had been constructed for combat against Berserkers—that such a device could amplify a man’s strength until he was not entirely outclassed by a robot—whether the robot was trying to tear him limb from limb or smother him with kindness.

The distant-sounding surf of battle noise swelled louder than before.

Timor, fitting himself into armor as quickly as he could, asked his guardian: “How goes the battle?”

“It goes well,” the beautiful thing claimed brightly. “Our performance is incomparably better than that of humans in space warfare.”

Timor signed disagreement. “Better than unaided human pilots, certainly. No one disputes that. But human minds using machines as tools are best.”

“When we have increased our numbers sufficiently,” it crooned to them, “your race must place your defenses absolutely in our hands. On every ship and every planet. Only we can be as implacable as this Berserker enemy, as swift to think and act, as eternally vigilant. At last we have met a danger requiring all our limitless abilities.”

Colonel Craindre was fitting on her helmet. She said: “History has repeatedly demonstrated that an organic brain, working in concert with the proper auxiliary machines, can hold a small edge both tactically and strategically over the pure machine—the Berserker.”

Inflexibly the humanoid spokesunit disagreed. It claimed that the tests, the comparisons, could not have been properly conducted, the statistics not honestly compiled, if they led to any such result.

“And even if such a marginal advantage existed, the direct exposure of human life to such danger is intolerable, when it can be avoided.”

“Danger exists in every part of human life,” said Timor.

“We are here to see that it does not.”

Lieutenant Commander Timor now had his armor completely on.

So did Colonel Craindre.

Exchanging a quick look, they moved in unison.

A direct hit on the fortress by a heavy weapon set the deck to quivering, and distracted the humanoid. It turned its head away, scanning for Berserker boarders.

In a matter of seconds, the two humans in armor had disabled the one robot, but only after a serious struggle, in which the colonel had to shoot off both its arms. Being unable to use deadly force against the humans had put the humanoid at a serious disadvantage in the encounter.

When the contest was over, their opponent reduced to a voiceless, motionless piece of baggage, Colonel Craindre said, breathing heavily: “I am of course remaining here, at my post. But your duty, Lieutenant Commander, requires you to report to headquarters.”

Smashing open one door after another, Timor and Craindre ranged through a fortress temporarily devoid of humanoids, hastily releasing the few humans who were still locked in their cabins. Soon everyone but the colonel—she ordered all her people to leave—was aboard the little courier.

Timor considered it all-important that humanity be warned about the humanoids, without delay. One of his first acts on regaining his freedom was to send a message courier speeding on to headquarters, ahead of the crewed vessel: the message contained only a few hundred words—including the prearranged code which identified him as the true sender.

Now, aboard the escaping courier, the surviving humans, bringing along the disabled humanoid, embarked on their dash for freedom.

As the small ship with its human cargo, launched from the fortress at the highest feasible speed, came into view of the attacking machines, Berserkers sped toward it from three sides, intent on kamikaze ramming. Instantly humanoid-controlled fighters, careless of their own safety, hurled themselves at the enemy in counterattack, taking losses but creating a delay.

The courier broke free, plunging into c-space.

“Our only wish is to serve you, sir.” A last plaintive appeal came in by radio, just before the curtain of flightspace closed down communication.

“On a platter,” Timor muttered. He looked up at his human friends, whose bodies, mostly bulky with space armor, crowded the cabin as if it were a lifeboat. Triumph slowly faded from his face.

One of the pilots who had been inclined to accept the humanoids wholeheartedly, and who had in fact volunteered to stay behind with them, spoke up, in a tone and with a manner verging on mutinous accusation: “We couldn’t have got away without the help of those machines. We couldn’t have survived that last attack.”

The lieutenant commander faced the speaker coldly. “Just which set of machines do you mean, spacer? And which attack?”

His new shipmates stared at him. He saw understanding in the eyes of many, clear agreement in some faces. But there were others who did not yet understand.

“Think about it,” Timor told them. “The Berserkers—yes, the Berserkers!—have just helped us to survive an attack. An assault launched at us, you might say, from a direction opposite to their own, and with somewhat more subtlety. Not that the Berserkers wanted to help us—they didn’t compute that trying to blow us to bits would work out to our benefit. But if it hadn’t been for the Berserkers, the humanoids would have taken our sanity and freedom, given us sweet lies in return.”

He paused to let that sink in, then added: And, of course, if it hadn’t been for humanoids piloting fighters just now, covering our escape, the same Berserkers would have eaten us alive.”

Timor paused again, looking over his audience. He wanted to spell out the situation as plainly as he could.

His voice was low, but carried easily in the quiet cabin. “I can see how things might go from now on. It might be that only the threat of Berserkers, keeping the humanoids fully occupied, will make it possible for us to sustain humanity in a Galaxy infested with humanoids.

“And without humanoids fighting for our lives, we might wind up losing our war against Berserkers.

“Now we face two sets of bad machines instead of one,” he concluded, his tone rising querulously at the unfairness of it all, “and the hell of it is, not only are they depending on each other, but we’re going to need them both!”

BLINDMAN’S BLADE

The gods’ great Game of Swords, and with it the whole later history of planet Earth, might have followed a very different course had the behavior of one or two divine beings—or the conduct of only one man—been different at the start. Even a slight change at the beginning of the Game produced drastic variation in the results. And Apollo has been heard to say that there have been several such beginnings.

One of those divergent commencements—which, in the great book of fate, may be accounted as leading to an alternate universe, or perhaps simply as a false start—saw all of the gods’ affairs thrown into turmoil at a remarkably early stage, even before the first move had been made in the Game. It happened on the day when the Swords, all new and virginally fresh, all actually still warm from Vulcan’s forge, were being brought to the Council to be put into the hands of those players who had been awarded them by lot.

The sun had just cleared the jagged horizon when Vulcan arrived at the open council-space, there to join the wide circle of deities already assembled in anticipation of his coming. They were his colleagues, all of them standing much taller than humans, their well-proportioned bodies casting long shadows in the lingering mists, but still dwarfed by the surrounding rim of icy mountains. There were moments when they all looked lost under the breadth of the cold morning sky.

The Smith brought with him a whiff of forge-smoke, a tang of melted meteoric iron. His cloak of many furs was windblown around his shoulders, and his huge left hand cradled carefully its priceless cargo of steel and magic, eleven weighty packages held in a neat bundle. And, despite the fact that a small but vocal minority of the Council still argued that no binding agreement on the rules of the Game had yet been reached, the Swords—almost every one of the Twelve Swords—were soon being portioned out among the chosen members of the meeting.

Among those gods and goddesses who received a Sword in the distribution, no two reactions were exactly the same. Most were pleased, but not all. For example, there was the goddess Demeter, who stood looking thoughtfully at the object limping Vulcan had just pressed into her strong, pale hands. She gazed at the black sheath covering a meter’s length of god-forged steel, at the black hilt marked by a single symbol of pure white.

Demeter said pensively, in her high, clear voice: “I am not at all sure that I care to play this Game.”

Mars, who happened to be standing near her, commented: “Well, many of us dowant to play, including some who have been awarded no Sword at all. Hand yours over to someone else if you don’t want it.” Mars had already been promised a Sword of his own, or his protest would doubtless have been more violent. Actually he thought he could do quite well in the Game without benefit of any such trick hardware; but he would not have submitted quietly to being left off the list.

“I said I was not sure,” Demeter responded. A male deity would probably have tossed the sheathed weapon thoughtfully in his hand while trying to decide. Demeter only looked at it. And she was still holding her Sword, down at her side, the dark sheath all but invisible in one of her large hands, when her tall figure turned and strode away into a cloud of mist.

Another of her colleagues called after her to know where she was going; and as an afterthought added the question: “Which Sword do you have?”

“I have other business,” Demeter called back, avoiding a direct answer to either question. And then she went on. For all that anyone could tell, she was only seeking other amusement, displaying independence as gods and goddesses were wont to do.

Meanwhile the distribution of Swords was still going on, a slow process frequently interrupted by arguments. Some of the recipients were trying to keep the names and powers of their Swords secret, while others did not seem to care who knew about them.

The council meeting dragged along, its proceedings every bit as disorderly as those of such affairs were wont to be, and not made any easier to follow by the setting—a high mountain wasteland of snow and ice and rock and howling wind, an environment to which the self-convinced rulers of the earth were proud to display their indifference.

Hera was complaining that the original plan of allowing only gods to possess Swords, which she believed to be the only good and proper and reasonable scheme, had been spoiled before it could be put into effect: “That scoundrel Vulcan, that damned clubfoot, enlisted a human smith to help him make the Swords. And then chose to reward the man!”

Zeus stroked his beard. “Well? And if it amuses Vulcan to hand out a gift or two to mortals? Surely that’s not unheard of?”

“I mean he rewarded the human with the gift of Townsaver! That’s unheard of! So now we have only eleven Swords to share among us, instead of twelve. Am I wrong, or is it we gods, and not humanity, who are supposed to be playing the Swordgame?”

The speaker had meant the question to be rhetorical; but not even on this point could any general agreement be established. Many at the meeting expected their human worshipers to play a large part in the Game—though of course not in direct competition with gods.

Debate on various questions concerning the distribution of Swords, and the conduct and rules of the Game, moved along by fits and starts, until Vulcan himself came forward, leaning sideways on his shorter leg, to demand the floor. As soon as the Smith thought he had the attention of a majority, he haughtily informed his accusers that he had decided to give away the Blade called Townsaver, because the gods themselves had no towns or cities, no settled or occupied places in the human sense, and thus none of them would be able to derive any direct benefit from that particular weapon.

“Would you have chosen that one for yourself?” he demanded, looking from one deity to another nearby. “Hah, I thought not!”

As the council meeting wrangled on, perpetually on the brink of dissolving in disputes about procedure, at least one other member of the divine company—Zeus himself—complained that the great Game was already threatened by human interference. How many of his colleagues, he wanted to know, how many of them realized that there was one man who by means of certain impertinent magic had already gained extensive theoretical knowledge of the Twelve Swords?

Diana demanded: “How could a mere human manage that? I insist that the chairman answer me! How could a man do that, without the help of one or more of us?”

Chairman Zeus, always ready for another speech, began pontificating. Few listened to him. Meanwhile, Vulcan sulked: “Who pays any attention to human magic tricks? Who cares what they find out? No one said anything to me about maintaining secrecy.”

In another of the rude, arguing knots of deities, the discussion went like this: “If putting Swords in the hands of humans hasn’t been declared officially against the rules, it ought to be! It’s bound to have a bad result.”

“Still, it might be fun to see what the vile little beasts would do with such weapons.”

Mars drew himself up proudly. “Why not? I hope no one’s suggesting that theycould do usserious damage with any weapon at all?”

“Well . . .”

Someone else butted in, raising a concern over the chance of demons getting their hands on Swords. But few in the assembly were particularly worried about that, any more than they were about humans.

A dark-faced, turbaned god raised his voice. “Cease your quarreling! No doubt we’ll have the chance to learn the answers to these interesting questions. If we are to use Vulcan’s new toys in a Game, of course they’ll be scattered promiscuously about the world. Sooner or later at least one of them is bound to fall into human hands. And, mark my words, some demon will have another.”

Meanwhile, in a small cave at the foot of a low cliff of dark rock about two hundred meters distant from the nearest argument, a mere man named Keyes, and another called Lo-Yang, both weather-vulnerable human beings, shivering with cold and excitement though wrapped in many furs, were sitting almost motionless, watching and listening intently as they peered from behind a rock. Keyes, the leader of the pair, had chosen this place as one from which he and his apprentice could best observe the goings-on among the gods and goddesses, while still enjoying a reasonable hope that they would not be seen in turn.

A dark and wiry man, Keyes, of indeterminate age. His companion was dark as well, but heavier, and obviously young. They had come to this place in the high, uninhabited mountains searching for treasure, wealth in the form of knowledge—Keyes, an accomplished magician, was willing to risk everything in the pursuit.

Lo-Yang was at least as numb with fear as with cold, and at the moment willing to risk everything for a good chance to run away. He might even have defied his human master and done so, at any time during the past half hour, except that he feared to draw the attention of the mighty gods by sudden movement.

Keyes was in most matters no braver than his associate and apprentice, but certainly he was more obsessed with the search for knowledge and power. He cursed the fact that though some of the gods’ stentorian voices carried clearly to where he crouched trying to eavesdrop, he could understand nothing that he heard. Despite his best efforts at magical interpretation, the language the gods most commonly used among themselves was still beyond him.

Keyes, exchanging whispers now and then with his companion, whose teeth were chattering, considered an attempt to work his way even nearer the place of council. But he rejected the idea; it would hardly be possible to do better than this well-placed but shallow little cave, inconspicuous among a number of similar holes in the nearby rock.

He was in the middle of a whispered conversational exchange with his apprentice Lo-Yang, when without warning a great roaring fury swirled around him, and Keyes realized that he had been caught—that the enormous fingers of some god’s hand had closed around him. Hopelessly the man tried to summon some defensive magic. Physically he struggled to get free.

He might as well have endeavored to uproot a mountain or two and hurl them at the moon.

Mars, who had captured Keyes, was not really concerned with the obvious fact that the man had been spying. Who cared what human beings might overhear, or think? The god was focused on another problem: he was due to receive a Sword, though Vulcan had not yet put it in his hands. Mars wanted a human for experimental purposes, so that he could learn a thing or two, in practical terms, about the powers of whatever Sword he was given before he used it in the Game. Mars considered himself fortunate to have been able to grab up a human so promptly; the creatures were not common in these parts. Keyes had happened to be the nearer of the two specimens Mars saw when it occurred to him to look for one.

The captured man, knowing nothing of his captor’s purpose, certain that his last moment had come, could feel the cold mist on his face, and thought he could hear the echo of his own frightened breath.

The god-hand which had scooped Keyes up did not immediately crush him into pulp, or dash him on the rocks. The sweeping breeze of god-breath, redolent of ice and spice and smoke, told Keyes that an enormous face loomed over him.

But his captor was not even looking at him. Only when the man saw that did he fully realize how far he was, for all his impertinence, beneath the gods’ real anger. Nothing he might do would be of any real consequence to them—or so most of them thought. Some mice were doubtless nearby too, scampering among the rocks, but none of the debaters paid any heed to them at all.

The god who had captured Keyes considered how best to keep him fresh and ready. Physically crippling the subject might affect the results of the experiment; and anyway some measure less drastic should suffice to do the job. A simple deprivation of eyesight, along with a smothering of the man’s ability to do magic, ought to make him stay where he was put . . . so one god-finger wiped Keyes’s face . . .

Now. Where best to put him, for safe-keeping, until Mars should come into possession of the Sword he wished to test?

The captor, still holding casually in one hand the wriggling, moaning, newly blinded human form, looked about. Presently the terrible gaze of Mars fastened on the handiest hiding place immediately available. A moment later, treading windy space in the easy, heedless way of deities, he was descending into a house-sized limestone cave, by means of the wide, nearly vertical shaft which seemed to form the cavern’s only entrance and exit.

At the bottom he set his helpless captive down, not ungently, on the stone floor. Keyes was still mewing like a hurt kitten.

“Here you will stay,” Mars boomed in Keyes’s human language. “Until I get back. That won’t be long—there’s something I want to try out on you. As you can see . . . well, as you probably noticed when you could see . . . the only way out of this cave is a vertical climb up a steep shaft with slick sides and only a few scattered handholds.”

The god started to ascend that way himself, but disdaining handholds, simply walking in air. Halfway up he paused in midair, looking back down over his shoulder, to warn the once-ambitious wizard about the deep pits in the floor. “Better not fall into one of them. I don’t want to find you dead and useless when I return.” The tone seemed to imply that Keyes would be punished if he was impertinent enough to kill himself. And then the god was gone.

The newly blinded man was seized by an instinctive need to try to hide, some vague idea of groping his way voluntarily even farther down into the earth. Maybe the god who’d caught him would forget about him—maybe he wouldn’t even notice if Keyes disappeared—

But soon enough the man in the cave ceased his gasping and whimpering, his pointless attempt to burrow into the stone floor, and regained enough self-possession to reassure himself that although his vision was effectively gone, at least his eyeballs had not been ripped out. As far as he could tell his lids were simply closed, and he could not open them. There was no pain as long as he did not try. Attempts to force his eyes open with his fingers hurt horribly, but produced not even a pinhole’s worth of vision.

Physically his body seemed to be undamaged. But he felt that even more important components of his being, directly accessible to the divine intervention, had been violated . . .

Presently, his mind having begun to work again at least intermittently, he went on groping his way around the cave, in search of some way out, or at least of better knowledge of his prison. He had barely glimpsed even the entrance to the cave before his sight was taken from him. It was warmer down here out of the wind, so much so that he shed some of his furs. In some locations, as he moved about, he was able to feel the warmth of the sun, which was now beginning to be high enough to penetrate the cave. There was tantalizing hope in the red glow of the direct sun through his sealed eyelids.

In a conscious effort to force himself to think logically, Keyes took an inventory of his assets. He had the clothes he was wearing, a small dagger sheathed at his side, and a small pack on his back, which his captor had allowed him to retain. The pack contained a little food, and very little else.

Lo-Yang, Keyes’s assistant on his dangerous quest for knowledge, had been ignored by the deity who had grabbed Keyes up. And moments later the stout apprentice, unpursued, had scrambled successfully away, running for his life in the direction of the distant camp where he and Keyes had left their riding-beasts.

After sprinting only a short distance, Lo-Yang, out of shape and also unable to endure the suspense, had felt compelled to look back. Then he had paused, panting. The god who had caught Keyes was in the act of disappearing underground, his prisoner in hand. All the other gods were considerably more distant, and none of them were paying the least attention to Lo-Yang.

Fatalistically, the apprentice dared to crouch behind a rock and wait, catching his breath. Paradoxically his fear had become more manageable, now that the worst, or almost the worst, had come to pass.

Presently the great god who had taken Keyes—Lo-Yang was able to identify Mars, by the helmet the god was wearing, and by his general aspect—Mars came up out of the ground again, but without his prisoner, and went striding away to rejoin his colleagues.

Time passed, and the sun rose higher. The frightened apprentice remained behind his rock. Eventually, gradually, the council of the gods broke up, though not entirely. The remnants, still wrangling, moved even farther off.

When it seemed to Lo-Yang that all the gods were safely out of the way, he crept out from behind his rock, and dared to come back to the upper rim of the cave, looking for Keyes. With a surge of relief he saw that his master was at least still alive.

But Keyes took no notice when his apprentice waved. Lo-Yang called down to him cautiously.

At the sound the man below raised his head, turning it to and fro, in a feverish motion that spoke of near-despair and sudden hope. “Lo-Yang? I’m blind, I . . .”

“Oh.”

“Lo-Yang, is that you? Where are the gods?”

“Yes sir, I am here.” The apprentice raised his head, squinting into the sunlight, then looked down again. “They’re all moving away, at the moment. Slowly. Still bickering among themselves. No one’s paying any attention to us. Master, if Mars has blinded you, what are we going to do?”

“Your voice seems to come from a long way above me.”

“I’d say twelve meters, master, or maybe a little more. I saw him carry you down there, and I thought . . .”

“Lo-Yang, get me out of here, somehow.”

The young man surveyed the entrance to the cave below, and shook his head. It pained him to see his proud master reduced to such a state of helplessness, to hear an unfamiliar quaver in the voice usually so proud. “We need a long rope, master. Looking at these rock walls, I wouldn’t dare to try to climb down without one. I’d only fall in there with you, and . . .”

“Yes. Of course. And you have no magic that will get me out.”

“Unhappily, master, you have as yet taught me nothing that would be useful in this situation.”

“Yes. Quite true. And I also find that my own magic has been taken from me, along with my sight.” Keyes paused. When he spoke again, his voice had lost its urgency, had become slow and resigned. His shoulders slumped. “Hurry back to our camp, then, and get the rope. We have a coil in the large pack.”

“Yes, master.” A pause. “It might take me a couple of hours, or even longer, to get there and back. Even if I bring our riding-beasts back with me. Should I bring them back here, master?”

“Yes. No! I don’t know, I leave the details to you. Go!”

“Yes, master.” And Keyes could hear the first few footsteps, hurrying away. Then silence.

He was alone.

Fiercely Keyes commanded himself to be active, more to keep himself from dwelling on his fate than out of any real hope. Slowly the approximate dimensions and contours of the flatter portions of the cave’s floor revealed themselves to the blind man’s probing. With his hands he explored as much of the walls as he could reach. Seemingly the god had not lied. The cave consisted of a deep shaft, down which Keyes had been carried, and an adjoining room or alcove whose bottom remained in shade. The whole space accessible to the prisoner’s cautious crawling was no larger than the floor of a small house, and it was basically one big room. Here and there around the perimeter were certain crevices which might, for all Keyes could tell, lead to other exits. But the crevices were too narrow for him to force his body into them. He was going to have to wait until Lo-Yang got back, with the rope.

If Lo-Yang came back in time.

If the assistant ever came back at all. If he had any intention of doing so. Mentally the newly helpless magician reviewed the times in the past when he had treated his apprentice unjustly. He had hardly ever beaten him. Surely, on the whole, he had been a fair master, and even kind . . . .

Mindful of the divine warning about pits, Keyes continued his exploration for the most part on all fours, and, when he did stand up, walked very carefully. By this means he located several perilous gaps in the floor, holes into which tossed pebbles dropped for a long count before clicking on bottom. Presently in his groping about the cave he came upon some bones. After he had found a skull or two, he became convinced that the bulk of the bones were human, evidence that other human victims had died in this cave before him. Sacrifices, perhaps? Or simply unlucky hunters, blinded by night or by driving snow, who had fallen in by accident.

Lo-Yang had said that the god was Mars—and Mars had said that he was coming back, and soon. Mars had spoken of using Keyes in some kind of an experiment . . . .Once more quivering with horror and fear, the trapped man persevered in his compulsive search for something, anything, that might offer him some chance of escape.

And so it was that at last, behind some loose rocks in the comer farthest from the entrance, the blind man’s trembling, groping fingers fell upon something that was round, and smooth, and narrow, and was not rock. When he pulled on the object, it came toward him.

When he stood up again, he was holding in both hands the padded, meter-long weight of a sheathed Sword.

Even with his sense of magic almost numbed by Mars, Keyes could tell this was no ordinary weapon. He had no real doubt of what he had discovered, though he had never seen or touched one of Vulcan’s Swords before, and had not expected to ever have the chance to touch one—at least not for a long, long time.

Thanks to his magical investigations at a distance, the difficult, painstaking studies he’d carried out even before the forging of the Blades had been completed, he knew the Twelve Swords well in theory—understood them better, no doubt, than all but a few of the gods yet did. But how one of the Twelve Blades had come to be tucked away in the remotest corner of an obscure cave was more than the human magician could understand. Certainly it had not been placed there for him to find; only his fanatical thoroughness in searching, his determination to keep busy, had led him to the discovery.

Slowly one possible explanation took shape in the man’s mind: One of the divine gang might have stolen another’s Sword, as a prank or as a ploy in their great mysterious Game, and had found a handy, nearby hiding place at the very bottom of this cave.

Impulse urged Keyes to draw the unknown Sword at once, to end, if possible, the suspense of waiting in ignorance, and to endow himself immediately with whatever powers his find might confer upon him—but there was one ominous contingency which made him hesitate. Fate, or some cruel trickster of a god, might have given him Soulcutter.

He was aware that in recent months his ambition had, perhaps more than once, irritated certain of the gods. Until now, by good fortune, none of them had become more than half-aware of him, as humans might be vaguely cognizant of some troublesome insect in the air nearby—but his magic, practiced as subtly as possible on Vulcan’s human assistant, had been clever and strong enough to bring him extensive theoretical knowledge of the Twelve Swords and their unique powers.

It was utterly frustrating that he had no way to determine which Sword lay in his hands. He knew that all but one of the Twelve Blades were marked with distinguishing white symbols on their black hilts—a target shape for Farslayer, a human eye for Sightblinder, and so on. But sightless Keyes had no way to perceive the sign, if any, on the Sword he held. Holding his breath, he tried with all his will and care to find and read the symbol with his fingertips—but for all he was able to discern by touch, there was no sign there to read.

Ah, if only Lo-Yang with his two good eyes had stayed with him a little longer!

Suppose it was only the black hilt, unrelieved—that would mean that he was holding Soulcutter. Keyes shuddered. But he could not be sure. The odds seemed to be against it. For all he knew, there might very well be a symbol right under his hand, dead flush with the rest of the hilt, undistinguishable by touch.

Everything depended upon his finding out. An enemy more powerful than any demon had stuffed him into this hole, and was coming back, perhaps at any moment now, to use him in an experiment. It was vitally important to identify the Sword, before he made any plan to use it.

Which one did he have?

Well, there was one sure way by which Soulcutter, at least, could be ruled out. Hesitantly Keyes began to draw the weapon, starting it first one centimeter out of its sheath, then two. Meanwhile he held his breath, hoping that if the hilt in his hand was indeed Soulcutter’s, he could retain enough sense of purpose to muzzle that deadliest of all Blades again before its growing power overwhelmed him with hopelessness, before all possible actions, and even life itself, were robbed of meaning.

If this experiment should demonstrate that he was holding the Sword of Despair, Keyes decided that he was desperate enough to use it, by threatening to draw it against the returning god.

His cautious tugging was exposing more and more of the Blade, but still no black cloud of despair rose up to engulf Keyes. He felt no more miserable with the Sword half-drawn. With a sigh of relief he concluded that his prize had to be one of the other eleven.

He pulled hard on the unseen hilt, and with a faint, singing sigh, the long steel came completely free.

Keyes soon disposed of any lingering doubt in his own mind that the weapon he held was genuinely one of the Twelve Swords. Proof lay in the facts of its unbreakableness, and that the extreme keenness of the edges—he tested them on the tough leather of his dagger’s sheath—could not be dulled by repeated bashing on rock.

Several of the Swords, his earlier investigations had informed him, ought to produce distinguishing noises when they went into action. But the only sound so far generated by this one was the bright clang, purely mechanical, of thin steel on tough rock.

The blind man uttered a prayer to Ardneh that the hilt he was gripping belonged to Woundhealer, and that that Sword’s power would let him see again. Feverish with hope, maneuvering the long Blade awkwardly, he nicked first his eyebrow, finally the bridge of his nose and very eyelids, with the keen edge. All he achieved were stinging pains and a blood-smeared face. His fevered hope that he might be holding the Sword of Healing, that its steel would pass painlessly, bloodlessly, into his flesh on its mission of restoration—that hope was lost in a few drops of blood.

Hope was lost briefly but not killed. Actually his situation would be better if this was one of the other Swords, carrying some power that could free him completely from his enemy.

Under the stress of his predicament, the attributes and powers, even the names of all the Swords seemed to have fled his memory. Might this be Wayfinder, then, or Coinspinner?

Keyes whispered a short string of urgent requests to the magic Blade he held. He asked it to show him how he might get out of the cave, and where he might find help. When nothing happened, he repeated his demands more loudly, but as far as he could tell, he was granted no response of any kind. In this situation, either Coinspinner or Wayfinder ought to be pulling his gripping hands around, bending his wrists in a particular direction, showing him the way he ought to move. And Coinspinner, whether it indicated any particular direction or not, would bring him great good luck, in fact whatever extreme of luck he needed. If necessary the Sword of Chance could call up an earthquake on behalf of its client, to shatter the rocky cage around him and let him walk or climb away unharmed.

But nothing of the sort was happening. Two more possibilities, it seemed, eliminated.

When it occurred to Keyes to make the effort, testing for Stonecutter was simple enough. One thing he had in ample supply down here was rock. And Stonecutter in fact could be just what a man in his situation needed, the very tool with which to carve his way out, creating a tunnel or a stair, slicing hard stone as easily as packed snow.

But the cave’s walls did not yield effortlessly to this Sword when he swung it against them, then tried it as a saw. Now he realized that his first attempts to test the durability of the blade ought to have been enough to convince him of this fact. Hard, noisy hacking produced only dust in the air, small chips and fragments which stung the man’s blind face. A steady pressure, indestructible edge against limestone, did no better.

Well, then, quite possibly he was holding Farslayer. But Keyes could think of no way to distinguish that Sword from its fellows, short of naming a victim and throwing it with intent to kill. The stony walls that closed him in would pose no obstacle to the Sword of Vengeance, which would pass through granite as through so much air, if that were necessary to reach its prey. Farslayer would kill at any distance—but would not come back peacefully to its user. To employ that weapon at a distance was to lose it, and even should Keyes succeed in slaying the god who had trapped him here, he would still be trapped.

His musings were interrupted by the onslaught of a swarm of large, furry, carnivorous bats. No doubt disturbed by the racket he’d been making, the creatures came fluttering out of some of the high, dim recesses of the deep cave. Indifferent to sunlight, they erupted from their holes by tens or dozens to threaten Keyes, who at the sound of their approach got his back against a wall and raised his Sword.

He could hear the bats piping, crying out blurred words in their thin little voices, uttering incoherent threats and slaverings of blood-hunger. They were flapping their wings violently—they got close enough to let him feel the breeze of their wings, and he cringed from the expected pain of their needle-like teeth and claws—but that did not follow. In blind desperation he waved the naked Sword at his attackers, and he remained untouched. Once the blade clanged accidentally on rock, but he had no sensation of it striking anything fleshy in midair. Still, one after another, the little bat-cries became shrieks of anguish, and then died away.

Panting, gripping the hilt of his still-unknown weapon with both hands, Keyes stood waiting, straining his ears in silence. Not a bat had touched him yet, nor had he touched them, but when he cautiously changed his position by a step or two, his foot came down on a dead one. Gingerly he felt the furry little thing with his free hand, making sure of what it was, then kicked it away from him.

Not Farslayer, then. Whichever Sword he held had somehow killed at least one animal without making physical contact.

The bats had not been routed for more than a minute or so when the demon arrived—drawn up out of the rocks, perhaps, by a sense of the proximity of helpless human prey, or simply by the disturbance man and bats were making.

Even sightless as he was, Keyes could tell that a demon was near him, and coming nearer. He knew it by the feeling of sickness, a gut-deep wretchedness, that preceded the monster’s physical presence. Again the man experienced overwhelming fear, panic that made him cry out and tremble. Better to be torn to bits by flesh-devouring bats than to wind up in a demon’s gut, where flesh was the last component of humanity to be destroyed.

And then he heard the creature’s hideous voice, a tone of dry bones breaking, dead leaves rattling, reverberating more in the man’s mind than in his ears. It sounded as if it were standing almost within arm’s length of Keyes.

With stately formality the demon announced its name. “I am Korku. Will you introduce yourself?”

“My name is Keyes.”

“Unhappy man named Keyes! Here you are down in this deep hole with no way to get out. And newly blind! Is it possible that you have angered a god? If so, that was unwise.”

“He’s coming back, the god who put me here. He’ll be angry if anything happens to me.”

“Oh, will he? But he is not here now.”

Keyes was silent. His lungs kept wanting to pant for air, for extra breath with which to scream, and he struggled to control the urge.

The demon said: “It is too bad that you are unable to appreciate my beauty visually. If only you could see me, I am confident that you would be—overwhelmed. Most humans are.

“Go away.”

“Not likely.” The dry bones crackled, the sound formed itself into words. “Not until you have handed over to me that ridiculous splinter of metal you now clutch so tightly. Then I will leave you in peace to wait for your dear god.”

“Go away!” Keyes tightened his grip upon the unknown hilt.

In response came a voiceless snarl that made his hair stand up, and then the voice again: “Hand it over, I say! Or I will cut you into a thousand pieces with your own weapon, and swallow you a piece at a time—and put you back together in my gut, where you will dwell for a million years in torment.”

“Not likely!” Keyes replied in turn. He thought it quite possible that this demon had as yet learned nothing about the Twelve Swords and their god-given powers. Or maybe the damned thing had learned just enough, or guessed enough, to make it determined to have this Sword for itself. But demons were notoriously cowardly; and so far it was being cautious.

This was not the man’s first contact with a demon—no magician adept enough to acquire deep skill was able to avoid all encounters with that evil race. But only magicians who had turned their faces against humanity entered willingly into commerce with such monsters, and Keyes still found pride in being human. In his present desperate situation, he might well have tried to bargain with a demon to lend him its perception, as other more powerful and unscrupulous wizards had been known to do—but he had nothing with which to bargain.

Except his unknown Sword; and that was all he had. He continued to brandish the mysterious weapon at his latest enemy, instead of handing it over as Korku had commanded.

The demon tried a few more arguments. It shouted at Keyes more loudly. But presently, when it saw that it was getting nowhere with mere words, it lost patience and reached out for the man with its half-material talons.

Keyes saw nothing of his enemy’s extended limbs. Nothing at all happened to the blind man waiting. But he heard Korku’s screaming threats break off abruptly in a muffled, bubbling sound. Then came a soft thump, as of a heavy mass of wet pulp falling some distance upon rock, followed by a slithering, which gradually receded.

Then silence.

Straining to hear more, unable to interpret what he had heard, the man uttered a small moan, compounded mostly of relief with a strong component of tormented puzzlement. Again his Sword, whichever Sword he held, had saved him somehow!

Yes, the demon must have been defeated. But perhaps not slain, not annihilated. Keyes probed about on the cave floor with the point of his Sword, and his imagination shuddered at the image of himself stepping blindly into a demon’s body.

For several minutes he discovered nothing more helpful than a few more dead or dying bats. But eventually, when the blind man bent, listening intently over the brink of a certain deep but narrow pit, he heard Korku again. A tiny, screaming, threatening voice, muffled almost below the threshold of hearing, rose from the distant bottom of the pit.

After listening for a little while, the man dared to call down: “Korku? What has happened to you?”

The faint sounds coming back included nothing he could interpret as an answer—and, in any case, a human would be foolish to trust anything a demon said.

Logical thinking was still required—was more essential now than ever, since time was passing, and Mars would be coming back to subject his prisoner to some unknown horror. But logic was still difficult to sustain. By eliminating possibilities Keyes had made a beginning in the task of identifying his weapon. But the task was not accomplished. Which possibilities had he not yet considered?

There was Dragonslicer. There was Townsaver. There was Doomgiver, of course. Ah, in that last name might lie some real hope of survival! If only Keyes could be certain that he had the Sword of Justice in his hands, then he would dare to brazenly defy the gods. Even gods would risk bringing disaster on their own heads if they tried to harm him further. For example, if they poured in fire or water on him, he might make his way out to find them all burned or drowned.

Unless . . .

Unless, of course, one of the gods confronting him happened to be armed with Shieldbreaker. If Keyes’s extensive research was correct, and so far he had no reason to doubt its accuracy, no other weapon in the world, not even another Sword, could ever stand against the Sword of Force.

The thought of Shieldbreaker gave him pause. Suppose that he, Keyes, was now holding that one? Shieldbreaker’s invincible presence in his hand would have easily disposed of the demon, and the bats. But wait—here in the presence of enemies and danger, the Sword of Force ought to be audibly beating its drum-note of power.

Of course the drawback to relying upon Shieldbreaker was that any unarmed god, unarmed man, or unarmed child for that matter, could easily take that Sword away from whoever held it, regardless of the holder’s normal strength.

Keyes, probing gently with one finger at the slight self-inflicted cuts around his face, decided that the bleeding had already stopped. He tried desperately to recall whether wounds made by one Sword or another ought to heal quickly or slowly. But that information, if he had ever possessed it, escaped his memory.

Touch, smell, taste, none of them of any use in his predicament—but hearing! In that sense might lie his way to the answer!

Thinking, keeping track by counting on his fingers, Keyes decided that seven of the Swords, if all he had found out about them was correct, generated some kind of sound when they went into action. The other five exerted their individual powers in silence.

The man’s thoughts were interrupted by a pair of deep booming voices up above, outside the cave. The conversation of the gods was still somewhat muffled with distance, but coming closer at a pace no walking mortals could have matched. They were speaking to each other in the god-language that Keyes did not understand.

Mars, the god who had put Keyes in the cave, was coming back, holding like a toothpick between two fingers the sheathed metal of the weapon he had just been given by Vulcan, and now wanted to test. Hermes, a fellow-player in the Game, came with him, and the two deities discussed the matter as they walked.

The Wargod’s plan was to drop Soulcutter into the cave for Keyes to find, and let the man draw it, just to see what effect the Tyrant’s Blade really had on humans. Vulcan had promised the Council that Soulcutter—and indeed all the Swords—would have tremendous, overwhelming impact upon all lesser beings.

Mars commented: “I expect our respective worshipers will be using the Swords a great deal on each other, you know, when the Game really gets going.”

“What if he doesn’t draw it?” his companion asked.

“My man down in the hole? I think he will. Oh, not intending to use it on us!” Mars laughed. “I doubt he’ll be that arrogant. But there are some vermin down there, bats and such, that are probably bothering him already. He’ll want the best tool he can get to fight them off.”

Hermes shook his head. “Those flesh-eating bats? They may have finished him by now.”

Mars frowned. “You think so? He was carrying a little dagger of his own.”

“But getting back to this Sword, Soulcutter—what about the effect on us? We’ll be nearby, won’t we, when your subject draws the weapon?”

“Bah, nothing we can’t overcome, I’m sure. And I understand that Soulcutter’s effect on humans, whatever it may be precisely, spreads comparatively slowly.”

Keyes continued to listen intently when the two voices stopped, not far above him. He was startled, and immediately suspicious, when a moment later he heard some object, obviously dropped by one of the beings above, come providentially bouncing and sliding down into the cave, landing with a thump practically at his feet.

Without loosening his grip on the hilt already in his possession, he groped his way forward to where he could put his free hand on the fallen object, and identify it as another sheathed Sword.

Only now, it seemed, did the pair of gods above really take notice of the man who was trapped below, and of the sprinkling of dead and mortally wounded bats around him. Only now did they observe that their subject was already holding a drawn Sword.

Mars’s companion pointed down, in outrage. “Look at that! Where in the world did he get that?”

And Mars himself, gone red-faced, bellowed: “You down there! Drop that Sword at once! It doesn’t belong to you, you have no business using it!”

Keyes needed all his resolution to keep from yielding to that shouted command. But instead of dropping his Sword, he raised its point in the general direction of his enemies, as if saluting them, and turned his blind face up to them at the same time—let them do their damnedest. He had naught to lose.

He called out, in a voice that quavered only once: “You have just given me another Sword—why?”

“Impudent monkey!” the Wargod shouted back. “Draw it, and find out!”

They have given me Soulcutter now—it is the only Blade one would give to an enemy.

But trapped as he was, his life already forfeit, Keyes saw no other course than to accept the gamble. Silently he bent again, swiftly he pulled the second Sword out of its sheath. Doubly armed, he straightened to confront his tormentors.

The sun was shining fully on the man’s face, and in an amazing moment he was once again able to see the sun. Whatever magic spell had blinded him was abruptly broken, and his lids came open easily. His eyes were streaming now with pent-up tears, but through the tears he could see the two gods on the high rim of the cave.

He could see the two tall, powerful figures quite clearly enough to tell that they were gods—and also that they were stricken, paralyzed with Soulcutter’s poisonous despair, turned back on them by Doomgiver. The strands of their own magic had come undone. Keyes could recognize Mars, who’d captured him, and now Mars abruptly sat down on the rim of the pit, for all the world like a human who suddenly felt faint. The Wargod slumped in that position, legs dangling, for a long moment staring at nothing. Then he buried his face in his hands.

The other god—Keyes, seeing the winged sandals, now knew Hermes—took no notice of this odd behavior, but slowly turned his back on the cave and his companion, and went stumbling off across a rocky hillside. Now and then Hermes put out one hand to grope before him, like a blind man in the sun. In a moment his mighty figure had vanished from Keyes’s field of view.

Doomgiver had prevailed! The Sword of Justice had turned Soulcutter’s dark power back upon the one who would have used it against Keyes, while immunizing the mere man who had been the intended target. Both gods on the rim of the pit had been caught in the dark force, as must everyone else in range of its slow spread.

Keyes almost cried out in triumph, but the hard truth restrained him. He was still a prisoner. His own eyes, searching the smooth cave walls, now confirmed that neither Lo-Yang nor Mars had lied about the hopelessness of his trying to climb out.

He was beginning to feel dizzy, and ill-at-ease, a normal reaction in one holding any two naked Swords simultaneously. Now he could easily see the symbol, a hollow white circle, on Doomgiver’s hilt. To keep himself from collapsing he had no choice but to put away the other Blade, the unmarked one. He slid the Sword of Despair back into its sheath, and his rising dizziness immediately abated.

In this case, at least, Doomgiver’s power had been dominant over that of another Sword. There was at least a chance that some of the other Swords might also prove inferior to Doomgiver. That anyone hurling Farslayer would be himself skewered by the Sword of Vengeance. That Sightblinder’s user would see a terrifying apparition, but would himself remain vulnerably visible. That the wielder of the Mindsword would be condemned to worship his would-be victim. And Coinspinner’s master would suffer excruciatingly bad luck.

But of Shieldbreaker’s overall dominance there could be no doubt. And the unanswered question still gnawed at Keyes: Which god had Shieldbreaker? Or might that Sword have somehow come into the hands of another human?

After Soulcutter was muzzled again, a minute or two passed before Mars, who was still sitting on the rim of the cave, took his hands down from his face. The Wargod’s expression was blank, and he appeared to be sweating heavily. His great body swayed, and Keyes thought for a moment that the god was going to topple into the pit. But instead Mars, taking no notice of the man below, shifted his weight and turned. Quietly, on all fours, he crawled away from the cave’s mouth and out of sight.

Keyes knew that Soulcutter’s effects ought to linger for several days, at least, in humans. Probably the stunned gods would recover somewhat more quickly, but how soon they might come back to deal with him, Keyes did not know. When they did, he would have to risk drawing the Sword of Despair again—even though Doomgiver might not protect him next time. This time Soulcutter, though in his own hands, had really been a weapon directed against him by another.

What now?

Pacing nervously about in the confined space, trying desperately to imagine what he might do next, Keyes paused to look down into the hole from whence the demon’s muffled groans still rose. Far below, almost lost in shadow, something moved. Something as big as a milk-beast, but truly hideous to look at, like a mass of diseased entrails. In a moment Keyes realized that Korku on attacking him had suffered Doomgiver’s justice—the demon had promptly found himself folded painfully into his own gut, in effect turned inside out. When that had happened, the self-bound and helpless thing, still almost immortal, had gone rolling away to plunge into the deeper pit.

Now the creature in the pit, perhaps sensing that the man was near, was turning its muffled, barely audible threats to equally faint pleas and extravagant bargainings for help. Keyes made no answer. Probably he could not have done anything, if he had wanted to, to relieve the demon’s doom.

Some minutes later, Mars, who was still in the process of gradually regaining his wits, and his sense of divine purpose, was having speech again with Hermes. They were standing fifty meters or so from the cave.

“What happened?” demanded Hermes, who seemed to be recovering somewhat more rapidly.

Mars stood blinking at him. Then he proclaimed defiantly: “To me? Nothing. A little test of the Sword called Soulcutter. As you see, there was no great harm done.”

His companion stared at him in disbelief. “No great harm? We both of us were stupefied! You should say that nothing happened to your human in the cave—except that his sight was restored, when your magic came undone. Oh, and he still has his Sword—no, now he has two of them!”

The Wargod remained determined to put a good face on the whole situation. “But he was forced to put away the one that annoyed us.” As usual, his tone was bellicose.

“Annoyed!”

Hermes went on to insist that dropping Soulcutter into the pit had been a serious mistake, in fact a debacle had resulted. Other gods must have been at least somewhat affected. They were going to be angry about having been put at risk.

Mars, still struggling against the lingering effects of Soulcutter, refused to tolerate such an attitude. The very idea, that a godcould be endangered, not simply inconvenienced, by Sword-powers!

Mars darted away, but soon came back. He had argued or bargained or bullied another of his colleagues into loaning him another Sword, which happened to be Stonecutter.

Again Hermes protested. “Your man in the cave now has two Swords—are you going to give him a third?”

Mars considered this mere sarcasm, unworthy of an answer. Muleheadedly determined to do what he had set out to do, conduct tests on his specimen, he announced that he was going back to the cave again, with a new plan in mind.

“I think we had better first consult the Council.” Hermes paused. “Unless you are worried about what they might say,” he added slyly.

“What? I? Worried?”

Keyes, pacing his open-air cell on weary legs, kept shooting frowning glances at the Sword of Despair where it lay on the cave floor. He was trying feverishly to think of some way he might trade the sheathed Soulcutter for his freedom. Suppose another god, or goddess, were to appear on the upper rim of the cave, and he suggested some kind of trade? But no, he doubted they would be in any mood for bargaining. And he was still unable to climb out of the pit unaided. His magical capabilities, which might have got him free, were stirring, but he could tell that their restoration was going to take much longer than that of his eyesight.

Again he was being threatened by a sense of hopelessness.

He had now been in the cave for hours, and straining to study the gods for long hours before Mars caught him. As the afternoon wore on, Keyes sat down to rest, and in a few moments fell helplessly into an exhausted, stuporous sleep—with Doomgiver still gripped in his right hand.

A number of the gods, including Mars and Hermes, had hastily reconvened in Council. They were enough, or so they said, to form a quorum. And they were much concerned with Shieldbreaker too. None of those present would admit to being in possession of that weapon, or to knowing where it was. Who had received it in the lottery? Regrettably Vulcan was absent, and could not be asked. Maybe he would not have revealed the secret anyway.

Around midaftemoon, the Council passed a resolution stating it as their intention that all Swords should be reclaimed from human possession.

Mars the warrior, still stubbornly determined to establish himself as above Sword-power, volunteered to enforce the order.

Zeus told him to go ahead. Others, enough, it seemed, for a majority, were in agreement. “If there is any real problem, you seem to have caused it. Therefore you should find a remedy!”

Still, Hermes once again tried to argue Mars out of taking too direct an approach. “Doomgiver has now overcome you twice—wait, let me finish! I tell you, we must either arrange to borrow Shieldbreaker from whoever has it, or else get that other Sword out of the man’s hand by guile.”

“Guile, is it? I have other ideas about that. And I wasn’t overcome. I was only taken unawares, and—and distractedfor a moment. Who said that I was overcome?” Mars glowered fiercely.

Hermes heaved a sigh of divine proportions. “Have it your own way, then.”

. . . and then Lo-Yang, like some figure out of a dream, was bending over Keyes, shaking him awake. The magician’s body convulsed in a nervous start, bringing him up into a sitting position. He comprehended with amazement that his apprentice had returned after all. He saw the long, thin rope, its upper end secured somehow, hanging down into the cave.

“Master! Thank Ardneh, you can see again! What’s happened? Your face is all dried blood. And what are these two swords?”

“Never mind my face. Pick up that Sword on the floor, and bring it with us, but as you value your life, do not even imagine yourself drawing it. Let us go!”

They scrambled toward the rope. But before either of the men could start to climb, Mars appeared, his face set in a mask of stubborn anger, and put out one finger to snap the long rope from its fastening at its upper end.

Keyes could feel all hope die with the falling coil.

Mars said nothing, but he was smiling, ominously. And he had another Sword in hand. It was soon plain which Sword this was, for the god wielding it began carving out a block of stone, part of the solid cave-roof. It was a huge slab, and when it fell the men trapped in the cave would have to be very alert and lucky to dodge it and escape quick death.

Lo-Yang collapsed on his knees, forehead to the ground.

Mars’s companion, he of the winged sandals, was standing back a little watching, with the attitude of one who has serious misgivings but is afraid or at least reluctant to interfere.

Maybe, thought Keyes suddenly, all hope is not dead after all. A moment later, he could see the sudden opening to the sky as the block of stone came loose. Aiming Doomgiver at it like a spear, he saw the slab twist in the air, and then fall up instead of down, looping through the precise curve necessary to bring it into violent contact with the Wargod’s own head.

Mars reeled, and his helmet, grossly dented, flew aside. Only a god could have survived such an impact. The Wargod did not even lose consciousness, but in his shock let Stonecutter fall from his hand into the cave, the bare Blade clanging on rock.

“Now you know as well as I do, what I have here.” At first Keyes whispered the words. Then he shouted them at the top of his voice. “Doomgiver! Doomgiver! I hold the blessed Sword of Justice!”

Mars, battered, lacking his helmet but refusing to admit that he was even slightly dazed, still pigheadedly confident of his own prowess, came down into the cave with some dignity, treading thin air as before. Mars was coming to take the Sword back, hand-to-hand, from Keyes. Well, Shieldbreaker could be captured that way, couldn’t it? And it the strongest Sword of all?

While the two men cowered back, the god first grabbed up the sheathed Soulcutter, and tossed it carelessly up and out of the cave, well out of the humans’ reach. Any god who thought he needed a Sword’s help could pick it up!

Then Mars turned his attention to Doomgiver, and confronted the stubborn man who held it. Keyes noted with some amazement that his great opponent, bruised as he was, appeared less angry now than he had at the start of the adventure; in fact the Wargod was gazing at Keyes with a kind of grudging appreciation.

“You seem a brave man, with the fiber I like to see among my followers. I would be willing to accept your worship. And for all I care personally, you might keep Vulcan’s bit of steel and magic. Humans might retain them all; we who possess the strength of gods have no need of such—such tricks. But the Council has decided otherwise. Therefore, on behalf of the Council, I—”

And Mars reached out confidently, to reclaim Doomgiver from Keyes’s unsteady grip—but somehow the Sword in the man’s hand eluded the god’s grasp. Mars tried again, and failed again—and then his effort was interrupted.

A roaring polyphonic outcry reached the cave, a wave of divine anger coming from the place a hundred meters distant where the Council had so recently passed its resolution.

“My Sword is gone!” one of the distant voices bellowed, expressing utter outrage.

“And mine!” another answered, yelling anguish.

The protest swelled into a chorus, each with the same complaint. Keyes could not interpret the wind-blown, shouted words. But he needed only a moment to deduce their meaning. Mars acting in the Council’s name and with its authority had assaulted a man who held Doomgiver, by trying to deprive the man of his Sword, and intending to fling that Sword away—and Doomgiver had exacted its condign retaliation. The Council of Divinities had lost all of theirSwords instead. The great majority of Vulcan’s armory had been flung magically to the four winds, and lay scattered now across the world.

The uproar mounted, as more deities realized the truth. A number of gods at no great distance were violently cursing the name of Mars, and the Wargod was not one to let them get away with that. He listened for a moment, then rose in his divine wrath and mounted swiftly from the cave.

His mind was now wholly occupied with a matter of overriding importance—the names the others called him. So he had forgotten Stonecutter, which still lay where he had dropped it.

Several more hours had passed, and the westering sun was low and red, before Demeter returned to the cave in which she had hidden the Sword of Justice. She had wanted to get it out of the way for a time, so that her colleagues should not nag her with questions when they saw her carrying a Sword.

Demeter had spent most of the day thinking the matter over and had come to a decision. The Game still did not greatly appeal to her, and it would be best if she gave Doomgiver to someone else.

On her approach to the cave, Demeter observed the tracks of a pair of riding-beasts, both coming and going, and when she looked in over the edge of the deep hole, she beheld a set of crude steps, more like a ladder than a stair, freshly and cleanly hewn out of one solid wall. Human beings! No other creatures would carve steps.

Rising wind whined through the surrounding rock formations. The only living things now in the cave were a helplessly immortal demon, strangely trapped in a lower pit, and a few mortally wounded bats.

No need to look in the place where she had hidden her Sword, to know that it was gone. Well, why not? Let it go. Perhaps the humans needed Justice more than any of Demeter’s divine colleagues did.

Perpetually at odds with each other as they were, the members of the Council needed some time to realize that their terrible Blades had been scattered across a continent, perhaps across the whole earth, among the swarms of contemptible humans. As that realization gradually took hold, the gods met the crisis in their usual fashion, by convening to enjoy one of their great, wrangling, all-but-useless arguments.

The only fact upon which all could agree was that their Swords had all been swept away from them. All the Swords, that is, except for Shieldbreaker, which remained, as far as could be determined, immune to the power of any other Sword, and thus would not have been affected by Doomgiver’s blow.

But whichever divinity still possessed the Sword of Force was obviously refusing to reveal the fact, doubtless for fear it would be taken away by some unarmed opponent.

For good or ill, the Great Game was off to a roaring start.

1999

THE SENIOR PROM

An alternate-history future in which AIDS never arrived to halt the sexual revolution . . .

Fred Saberhagen is best known for his Berserker series, about self-replicating robots that seek to end all organic life. The latest novel in the series is Shiva in Steel. He has also written in diverse worlds from high fantasy, chronicled in his Swords series to Gothic horror in his novels about Dracula. His short fiction has been published in such classic magazines as Omni, Astounding, If, Galaxy, and Amazing, as well as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. He lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The rented fancy codpiece, crusted on the outside with jade and fluorescent ceramics, was beginning to feel right on Bill, and he was getting used to his rented tux and trousers, see-through garments like chain mail of translucent plastic, by the time he had escorted Glory to the train station platform at Anaheim North. Right on time there came the rented private train, a series of long silvery cars, all windowless except the last, swaying slightly under the massive monorail, and Bill and Glory stepped aboard the first car in the late June twilight. Glory’s blonde hairdo bounced as she took off her little formal cape with a swirl. Repressin’ near opaque that cape was, but she had it off before any of the chaperones aboard the train could have had a chance to look at it and worry.

Behind them the door puffed shut again, and with no more sound than that the train went gliding out. Those of the other kids who were aboard already whooped hello, and Bill and Glory chattered back.

“—steady idea, rentin’a train—”

“—yeah, reproductive. But—”

Bill could tell that, under the happy excitement of starting their prom, a lot of the kids were disappointed about something. But whatever it was, nobody was giving him any funny looks for coming in with Gloriana Chang, and the worry that had been trying to build up at the back of his mind grew weaker. Now that she had her cape off, Glory looked staid and hip enough to suit any chaperone. She wore a black G-string under the filmy swirl of her almost transparent skirt, and she had Bill’s corsage strung around her long bare neck almost like a lei, the ends of the flower-string pasted to her skin in front, just enough to cover her nipples.

Looking down through the windowless car they had entered, Bill saw that all the regular seats had been taken out of it, and it had been decorated in an odd way, with that psychic- or psycho- (or whatever they called it) -delic stuff, from way back long ago in Grandpa’s day. It ran heavily to swirling stripes and patterns that tried to wrench your eye. And there was not much in the way of regular chairs or other furniture, but pads and pillows on the floor to sit on, and boxes here and there for low tables. He saw a set of little drums that looked like they might be real enough to beat on. The flunkies carrying around things to eat and drink were wearing sandals and long hair, the males among them bearded, all of them with dirt-makeup on their faces and clothes, and jewelry chains around their necks.

“Hashbury,” said Glory to Bill in a scornful whisper. “They said that would be the theme, of all the decorations and stuff. I dreaded the worst but I didn’t think they’d really do it.”

“How old and hip can you get?” Bill agreed, pretty loudly. There was only one pair of chaperoning parents in sight, people he didn’t recognize, and they were down at the other end of the long car where they couldn’t hear. Recorded music was going already, a little hot and jumpy for anyone to try to dance to, but at least going, reverbing from floor and ceiling of the long, lightly swaying car. Down the middle of the car was a long clear space where some of the kids were dancing, or trying to. Maybe later on the music would get better.

Marty Wood, a tall kid who was standing near Bill and Glory with a glass of something in his hand, leaned over, wearing a sneaky kind of smile, and asked in a low voice: “How ’bout if they’d done it in Early Puritan instead, Glory?”

Glory giggled, not in a nervous or embarrassed way, but as if she was really amused. Bill didn’t like that at all, and didn’t know if he should get mad at Marty or not. Instead he just took Glory by the arm and suggested: “What say we try out the beds?” She only nodded sweetly and agreeably and came with Bill right away. He thought that would show Marty Wood that there was nothing wrong with her, that he should take his dirty jokes to someone else.

Bill and Glory walked easily down the edge of the long dance floor. It wasn’t at all crowded; there were still a lot of kids to be picked up on the trains’s first circular run around Greater Los Angeles. Members of the graduating class lived all over the city.

They passed out through a door at the end of the room, traversed a roaring, swaying, screened-in junction, and entered the second car of the train. Here the air was perfumed to a spicier sweetness, and the lights were pink. A pink satiny passage, oval in cross-section, ran down the length of this car, passing a number of small, open bedchambers, each pinkly lighted, furnished with mirrors and a bedlike floor. Here, as on the dance floor, there was still plenty of room. Bill guided Glory into one of the empty chambers and they started to undress each other.

In the short time he had known Glory, Bill had always found sex with her enjoyable. Now, clutching her against himself, he thought: So what if there is a little talk? Guys always like to make up stories. Judging by the way she acted—at least what he had seen of her behavior—she was a nice girl, the kind a male naturally wanted to take to a prom. You only went to one prom, and it would be a repression of a blow to have it ruined.

Sure, most times a male got a kick out of it when a female made out that she was holding back a little, when she hinted at repression. But at a prom, for sex’ sake, things ought to be nice and steady and conservative.

Actually, to Bill, Hashbury as a mode of decoration didn’t seem so bad. Enjoying a few old things now and then didn’t mean that you were hip. . . .

His orgasm came to interrupt his train of thought. Then, right after the climax, in the familiar dangerous time when lust was weak, his thoughts took a sudden sharp turn toward dangerous territory: What if, after all, it were possible that Glory and he should sometime—just suppose—

But not now, not at the prom, should he sit around nursing his dirty thoughts. He turned his mind determinedly to sex, keeping his eyes on Glory’s body as she dressed.

Finishing the adjustment of her corsage, she suggested: “There’re four cars on this train, right? Let’s go see what’s in the other two.”

“One of ’em must be a banquet car.”

“Let’s go see!”

“All right.”

Sure enough, the next car they came to, walking toward the rear of the train, was the banquet car. Here there were real chairs at the many tables. The food and drink came in irregularly-shaped containers marked with stains of fake Hashbury dirt. Munching at the buffet were a couple of parents whom Bill recognized—Ann Lohmann’s folks. Bill looked around for Ann, but she was not in sight. He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t make it to the prom. Sex, a guy would have to be pretty daring or stupid to bring a female like her. Yes, he told himself again, he had done well to bring Glory. Even if three other females had turned him down before he asked her. It hadn’t been his fault that most of the females were already paired off when he stared trying to make a date for the prom. When a male had to switch schools in the middle of his last term, he was repressin’ lucky not to get stuck with some dog or puritan, or get left out altogether. He had done very well to get a girl like Glory on short notice.

The woman at the buffet table turned toward Bill and Glory sort of tentatively, nodding and smiling.

“How are you, Female Lohmann?” Bill asked politely. It wasn’t her fault her daughter was frigid.

Female Lohmann, a fleshy woman in sandals, a microskirt and a transparent blouse, smiled and nodded more energetically. She asked them: “You didn’t happen to see my Ann in the other car? Well, she’ll be along later, I expect. If she cares to come. She’s grown up and free now, and quite mature—my libido, but you all are, aren’t you? It seems just yesterday—”

Male Lohmann came from somewhere to stand nodding and smiling at his wife’s side, trying, Bill thought, to look happy. Well, it didn’t seem likely that any of the guys would bring Ann. Sex, it would be worse to bring a girl like that than to stay home. Her parents would just have to take their turn at chaperoning like all the others, grit their teeth, and go on pretending she didn’t want to come.

Female Lohmann suggested they all go back to the dance car, and Bill and Glory went along. There they mingled with the growing crowd of kids, talking and dancing. As he was dancing out of politeness with Female Lohmann, Bill saw his own parents getting on the train. After he had waved hello to them, he cleared his throat and asked his partner politely if he could give her an orgasm.

“Oh, an old lady like me? My libido, the party’s for you young folks!” but she was plainly pleased, and on his first insistence she went right with him to the bedroom car. Her body felt doughy, but he closed his eyes and tried to imagine he was back in Sex Ed class in freshman year, with that redheaded girl—what had her name been? Anyhow, it was soon over. Female Lohmann seemed to enjoy it quite a bit, and when he had escorted her back to the dance car his parents nodded approvingly. It paid to be polite and make friends with people, even those who were temporarily having a tough time over something.

When he rejoined Glory, there were a pair of professional dancers on the floor, everyone else having been cleared off to let them perform. Some of the chaperones watching looked uncomfortable; the dancers were somewhat too heavily clothed, and their movements were a little too stiff and chill. But Glory . . . the way she looked, watching the dancers, made Bill uneasy. He twisted his neck in the unfamiliar plastic collar of his tux. She had in her eyes what you would have to call a faraway look.

“Hi,” he said, taking his place beside her, and squeezing her breast mechanically. “Did I miss anything?”

She waited a deliberate moment before she turned to look at him, before she gave any sign that she was at all aware of his caressing hand. And when she did turn, there was still something distant in her eyes. And this behavior got to him, it shook him. It filled his mind with such images as in the past had led him, in solitude, to forbidden acts. For him, such images were those of starlight, of cold metal, of peaceful snowfall in the mountains; above all, of something that was like the sun. Usually in these daydreams there would be a girl, some girl, often the freshman redhead from Sex Ed class, standing beside him, looking outward with him.

Now he pushed away the yearning before it could overpower him. In chorus all his teachers’ remembered voices said to him: To have such feelings is natural: only in yielding to them do you do wrong.

With determination he set his mind on lust. Right over there stood his parents, proud of him. And this was the prom. He slid his hand down Glory’s bare side and gently snapped the elastic of her G-string.

Like a nice girl, all remoteness gone, she turned her head to him at once and asked him: “Do you want to go again?” He made his voice properly regretful. “I just came back.” Side by side they watched the dancers, whose pelvic movements were still too chill and slow, hinting at chastity; Bill knew without looking that his father would be wearing a frown, watching this performance.

. . . and still, over and over, Bill’s thoughts turned back to Glory. Had he, after all, made a fool of himself by bringing her to the prom. She was no Ann Lohmann, of course. Her reputation was not nearly that bad. But the brutal truth was that a couple of the guys at school had in Bill’s hearing come close to saying plainly that Gloriana Chang had done it with them.

“. . . I’ve seen Glory with some sublimatin’ ice in those blue eyes of hers . . .”

“. . . that li’l female knows all about the little specks o’ starlight, lemme tell you . . .”

After the dancers’ performance ended, to applause, Bill danced again with Glory. Then they went to the banquet car for a sandwich, and then they went together to the toilet.

He couldn’t mark exactly when it had started, but now Glory was falling into little spells of silence. Each silence seemed a bit longer than the one before. He watched her closely, and kept talking to fill in the times when she was quiet. It didn’t seem to him that she was being drawn to anyone else, or that she was angry with him about anything. He supposed it could be that she was just bored—but then she didn’t seem restless. It must be something more than that.

It might be—but he didn’t let himself go any further with that line of thought. Not here; not tonight. He fought temptation.

He asked: “You gettin’ tired, Glory?”

“No.”

But then in the next moment her eyes would be almost glazed again. Just for an instant looking like eyes focused on something far away, something that might be huge and bright. And her hand, that like a nice girl’s had been stroking him or feeling him, would fall still, just touching him, while there passed what seemed a long count of seconds. He made sure to keep on fondling her. He hoped none of the chaperones would look at them closely and see how Glory was acting. And he sure hoped that none of the other kids would notice. What could he do, if she went on with it, and got more obvious about it?

And then again, for a little while, she would kiss him and feel him and behave with great propriety, and he told himself he was imaging things. But he just didn’t know. He couldn’t be sure.

He wished it was true, what he let on sometimes to other guys, that he had had girls go all the way with him to sublimation. If he had any real experience he would know now what Glory was up to, and what he should do about it. All the dirty daydreams were not a bit of help, nor were all the pornographic books, when it came to facing the real thing.

Sometimes it seemed to Bill that there could be no real thing, that it was too marvelous to be real, that people must have invented it just so they could have a perfect thing to hope for.

“I’m kind of tired, Glory. What say we take a nap?”

In one of the doorless bedchambers, pink and mirrored, they turned down the lights and stretched out to sleep. The train swayed. It wasn’t completely dark, of course—the chaperones spent more time in this car than in any of the others. The adults just walked through, trying not to appear to be prying into what was going on, but making their presence felt, and keeping an eye out to make sure that people who were still and silent were really just resting or asleep.

He had fallen asleep all tangled up with Glory. Waking, they worked themselves into a mutual orgasm before either of them was entirely awake. Then, when he had rubbed the sleep from his eyes, there was still that distance to be seen in hers.

“What is it, Glory? Come on, tell me if there’s something wrong.”

Her voice was tense, not quite angry. “I just wish I could have a little fun, that’s all. Don’t you ever want to?”

“No,” he said automatically, answering not her words but her tone, and the way she was looking at him. Then when what she had said sank in, he wasn’t even sure that he had heard her right, it sounded like such an open and blatant invitation. “What?”

“Nothing.”

When they had freshened up and had begun circulating through the party again, a kid told them that the Lohmanns had finished their tour of duty as chaperones and gone home. Their daughter Ann still hadn’t shown up, and no one was expecting now that she would.

It wasn’t long after Bill and Glory rejoined the party that a fight started. Then the train had to make an extra stop at Beverly Hills so a boy and a girl could be taken off for medical treatment; hopefully they would be able to rejoin the prom a few hours later, when the train came ’round again. Other kids stood around on the dance floor for some time, arguing how the fight had started. It had started right in the middle of the crowd on the little dance floor, and someone else’s blood had gotten all over Glory. Bill went with her to the lavatory to help her get cleaned up. He stood with her in the shower, caressing her front with one hand while with the other he washed her back. Not far outside the clear glass door of the shower stood a chaperone, not staring in or anything, but standing there. When people stripped completely bare for some nonsexual purpose, it sometimes made them a little forgetful of their lust.

The big lavatory with showers was in the bedroom car, halfway down the long pink oval aisle. Glory was silent while they dried and dressed. Then after they had started on their way back to the dance car, she came to a sudden halt, leaning against the open doorway of a vacant bedchamber. Bill, who had been following a step behind her in the swaying aisle, took this as a signal that she wanted to go in, and stopped beside her and began stroking her body.

She pulled away from him a centimeter, actually pulled away, and his heart gave a twisty leap. He realized there was no one else around at the moment; the music from the dance car was faintly audible here. He said: “That’s right, it must be almost time for the Grand March. We oughta save our sex for that.”

Glory shook her head. Or maybe she was just looking up and down the passage, wondering which way to go. Her long blonde hair fell so he couldn’t see her face.

He said: “The dance car’s this way.”

“I know.” She straightened up from her slumped, leaning pose in the doorway. She stretched, not at all like anyone tired or sick; and then she began walking the other way, away from the faint music.

“Glory?”

She didn’t stop walking, only turned her head halfway back toward him. “Are you coming or not?”

He felt that twisty leap inside him once again, and this time all his guts seemed to move with it, as if they knew what was coming, before his brain was willing to recognize it. But no, it couldn’t really be that. She wouldn’t. She was a nice girl. He had asked her here.

Swaying, walking slowly against the racing motion of the train, he followed her, a step behind. The banquet car also appeared to be empty of people when they entered it. Everyone would be gathering on and around the dance floor, for the orgy of the Grand March.

At the rear of the banquet car, Hashbury workers, bearded begrimed-looking, were dozing in the galley, swaying in their chairs before the electronic kitchen consoles. Glory hesitated only a moment, then pushed open the door at the rear of the banquet car. This time, as they passed between cars, they were outside in a dim gray twilight, in a whistling roar of air.

In the last car of the train they found no Hashbury, no decorations of any kind. There were rows of bins and lockers, with aisles between, and stacks of cases and crates and drums, making something like a maze. Clear electric light glowed down from panels in the ceiling, but here the gray outdoor light was coming in also, flowing around the corners of stacks of boxes and cartons, from windows hidden some where in the maze.

With a rising of her shoulders Glory drew in a long breath, then she let it out in something between a shudder and a sigh. “I was suffocating,” she said loudly.

He wanted to ask, like an idiot, why she had brought him here. But he wasn’t quite able to say anything aloud.

“But I don’t wanna be alone,” she added. She gave him a look he found unreadable, then turned away to follow the indirect gray daylight to its source. She led him around stacks of storage to a window.

“I don’t either,” he said. Outside the heavy, sealed window, the lines of the seacoast and its eternally nodding oil derricks made a rushing Hashbury pattern at three hundred kilometers an hour; the nearer part of the earth was a streaking incomprehensibility. Farther out, the vagueness of the sea blended with the obscurity of fog.

Above the fog, the sky was clear, tempting the eyes and mind to soar.

The train rushed on.

The sun was not in sight, so it must be behind them in the east, and this must be the half-light of dawn, not dusk. The sky pulled at him, trying to draw him from his flesh, tear him free from his body and his lust. He could still stop, he could still fight it off, but he did not. Beyond the sky would be the bright bitter purity of the stars. Space and its fire and vacuum, remote and mighty and healing, beckoned him on.

Glory was walking away from him, but he knew by her slow steady movement that she was not going far and would be right back. The stars in his mind did not yet have him utterly, he was still able to hold back and control himself a little, and he turned his head to watch her. He saw her go to an open half-empty crate. He saw her take from it two plastic tablecloths. When she unfolded the sheets and he saw they were opaque, long and wide enough to cover banquet tables, he gave a little groaning sound, knowing that this was it, he was going to get the real thing here and now, here and now with a real girl.

And away off in one comer of his mind he was thinking how funny it was, that after all the years of effort that people had put in trying to teach him to be good, he wasn’t trying at all now to be good, he was thinking only of getting what he was going to get.

Working without fumbling, like someone who had done this tremendous thing before, Glory tore head-sized holes in the centers of the opaque plastic tablecloths. When that was done, she put down the cloths for a moment and held out her arms to Bill. He went to her solemnly, and pressed himself against her body, and his lust mounted reflexively, like an urge to cough.

“Now,” she said, voice breaking with the weight of that single syllable. Her eyes, fixed on him now, were enormous, and he had the impression that her face had grown larger than life. Rapidly she was pulling off her respectably transparent clothes, and the stimulus of her corsage, and the black emphasis of her G-string; and then she had to help him shed his clothes, because his hands were shaking so. As soon as both of them had been stripped of sex-symbols she took up one of the tablecloths and pulled it over her head, her blonde head coming like a sudden-blooming flower through the clumsy hole in the middle. He took up the other plastic sheet and did the same, for the first time hiding himself obscenely before a girl, and though his hands were still shaky, he did it easily and without embarrassment.

The need inside him, tortured and compressed so desperately for so long, burst out. With deliberate humble triumph he strangled that last small lust-reflex.

He repressed it.

He sublimated.

No, not he; they did it. Glory was not only beside him, but with him, interpenetrating. Standing two meters apart, bodies shrouded from each other’s sight, they were at last together, in a way that he had never known could be.

Out of her plastic wrap her hand and arm came groping, to find his hand and touch it—not a sex-touch, but a life-touch. Through his own tears he saw that her eyes had turned away, going outward to the window and the sea and sky.

Then he was looking out there, too, and with her he was rising, breaking and shaking free. Beyond the brightening sky his mind’s eye saw the stars, points of ice and mathematics, set in an infinity of peace. His lust repressed and put behind him and forgotten, he leaped above himself and soared. He saw . . .

Beyond the stars, his goal. Bright as the sun, and greater. Fantastic, bitter, pure, demanding. Beyond what any man might know, or see, or even want . . .

The roaring arc he soared fell short. He failed and fell in clumsiness, in the too-quick release of his impelling need. His goal was gone, its loss for just a moment unendurable. He scrambled to find shelter.

And then he was back within his sweating flesh, spent, standing swaying in the train, sweating and foolish in the nasty plastic bag that she had gotten him to wallow in.

At once he was raked by the first pang of a guilt that he knew was going to be terrible. Never, never again! In panic, in agony, he threw himself abjectly, begging pardon, before his lust. With thrashing arms he swept and tore aside the shrouds of plastic, he groped and clutched for Glory’s body. Only after grappling her against him did he realize that she had not yet fallen back into her flesh. Her eyes were still fixed out the window on the sky, her face was still transformed, her body unresponsive.

In fright and horror he pulled away: let her go! Now that he himself was sheltered once more safe in lust, let him never think of leaving it again, Let him never even go near one who did such things. Never! He backed away, letting the plastic fall to once more conceal her flesh.

Now the sight of her standing there like that aroused nothing in him but a disgust so strong he couldn’t look at her. He turned way, hurrying and fumbling to get his codpiece on and then his other normal clothes. Chastity and repression, what if someone came in and found them here like this? How could they have done anything so crazy?

He took one quick glance at her face. Her eyes were moving now, but she was still somewhere among the stars.

If she was found out, he would not escape. “Glory, let’s get out of here.”

After what seemed a long time, during which he kept on dressing, she answered: “No.” He could barely hear the word, it was so soft.

Disgust and panic overcame him.

Lurching through the banquet car, that was no longer empty of people, he ran right into Marty Wood.

“Hey, Bill, where’s Glory? I didn’t see you two at the March.”

He said something, anything, and pushed on to the lavatory, got into a shower to wash away his sweat and filth. In a little while a girl, not Glory, came in, and without saying anything he went to her and began caressing her. She responded like a nice girl. Whether she was a little sick, or just tired, she had nothing to say either. He felt a pang of anxiety when the figure of the chaperone approached the door of the shower room. But the woman evidently knew nothing of what had happened in the baggage car, she was not coming to denounce him, she only nodded and smiled in an approving way at what Bill and the girl were doing now.

After that, Bill felt a little better for a while. But then, Glory did not show up in any of the three cars where kids were partying.

Soon, he overheard the word being passed around among some of the boys—Glory Chang was right back there in the baggage car, wrapped up in a gladrag and ready to stargaze with any male who came to her. A number of them were going, it seemed.

Pretty soon, half the guys at the prom were aiming funny looks at Bill, the guy who had brought her. In a little while the chaperones were bound to find out. For the first time in his life, Bill thought seriously of killing himself. He thought of leaping from the train, moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, but he did not leap.

Already the beckoning had begun again, and he could not want to die.

Bright as the sun, and greater . . .

2001

BOX NUMBER FIFTY

Carrie had been living on the London streets for a night and a day, plenty of time to learn that being taken in charge by the police was not the worst thing that could happen. But it would be bad enough. What she had heard of the conditions in which homeless children were confined made her ready to risk a lot in trying to stay free.

A huge dray drawn by two whipped and lathered horses rushed past, almost knocking her down, as she began to cross another street. Tightening her grip on the hand of nine-year-old Christopher as he stumbled in exhaustion, she struggled on through the London fog, wet air greasy with burning coal and wood. Around the children were a million strangers, all in a hurry amid an endless roar of traffic.

“Where we going to sleep tonight?” Her little brother sounded desperate, and no doubt he was. Last night they had had almost no sleep at all, huddled against the abutment of a railway bridge; but fortunately it had not been raining then as it was now. There had been only one episode of real adventure during the night, when Chris, on going a little way apart to answer a call of nature, had been set on and robbed of his shoes by several playful fellows not much bigger than he.

Their wanderings had brought them into Soho, where they attracted some unwelcome attention. Carrie thought that a pair of rough-looking youths had now begun to follow them.

She had to seek help somewhere, and none of the faces in her immediate vicinity looked promising. On impulse she turned from the pavement up a flight of stone steps to the front door of a house. It was a narrow building of gray stone, not particularly old or new, one of a row, wedged tightly against its neighbors on either side. Had Carrie been given time to think about it, she might have said that she chose this house because it bore a certain air of quiet and decency, in contrast to its neighbors, which at this early stage of evening were given to lights and raucous noise.

Across the street, a helmeted bobby was taking no interest in a girl and boy with nowhere to go. But he might at any moment. These were not true slums, not, by far, the worst part of London. Still, here and there, in out-of-the-way corners, a derelict or two lay drunk or dying.

Carrie went briskly up the steps to the front door, while her brother, following some impulse of his own, slipped down into the areaway where he was for the moment concealed from the street. Glancing quickly down at Christopher from the high steps, Carrie thought he was doing something to one of the cellar windows.

Giving a long pull on the bell, she heard a distant ringing somewhere inside. And at the same moment, she saw to her dismay that what she had thought was a modest light somewhere in the interior of the house was really only a reflection in one of the front windows. There were curtains inside, but other than that the place had an uninhabited look and feel about it.

“Not a-goin’ ter let yer in?” One of the youths following her had now stopped on the pavement at the foot of the steps, where he stood grinning up at her, while his fellow stood beside him, equally delighted.

“I know a house where you’d be welcome, dear,” called the second one. He was older, meaner-looking. “I know some good girls who live there.”

Turning her back on them both, she tried to project an air of confidence and respectability, as she persisted in pulling at the bell.

“My name’s Vincent,” came the deeper voice from behind her. “If maybe you need a friend, dearie, a little help—”

Carrie caught her breath at the sound of an answering fumble in the darkness on the other side of the barrier—and was mightily relieved a moment later when her brother opened the door from inside. In a moment she was in, and had closed and latched the door behind her.

She could picture the pair who had been heckling her from the pavement, balked for the moment, turning away.

It was so dark in the house that she could barely see Christopher’s pale face at an arm’s-length distance, but at least they were no longer standing in the rain.

“How’d you get in?” she whispered at him fiercely. Then, “Whose house is this?”

“Broken latch on a window down there,” he whispered back. Then he added in a more normal voice, “It was awful dark in the cellar; I barked my shin on something trying to find the stair.”

It was a good thing, Carrie congratulated herself in passing, that neither of them had ever been especially afraid of the dark. Already her eyes were growing accustomed to the deep gloom; enough light strayed in from the street, around the fringes of curtain, to reveal the fact that the front hall where they were standing was hardly furnished at all, nor was the parlor, just beyond a broad archway. More clearly than ever, the house said empty.

“Let’s try the gas,” she whispered. Chris, fumbling in the drawer of a built-in sideboard, soon came up with some matches. Carrie, standing on tiptoe, was tall enough to reach a fixture projecting from the wall. In a moment more she had one of the gaslights lit.

“Is anyone here?” Now her voice too was up to normal; the answer seemed to be no. The sideboard drawer also contained a couple of short scraps of candle, and soon they had lights in hand to go exploring.

Front hall, with an old abandoned mirror still fastened to the wall beside a hat rack and a shelf. Just in from the hall, a wooden stair, handrail carved with a touch of elegance, went straight up to the next floor. Not even a mouse stirred in the barren parlor. The dining room was a desert also, no furniture at all. And so, farther back, was the kitchen, except for a great black stove and a sink whose bright new length of metal pipe promised running water. An interior cellar door had been left open by Chris in his hurried ascent, and next to it a recently walled-off cubicle contained a water closet. A kitchen window looked out on what was no doubt a back garden, now invisible in gloom and rain.

Carrie was ready to explore upstairs, but Christopher insisted on seeing the cellar first, curious as to what object he had stumbled over. The culprit proved to be a cheaply constructed crate, not quite wide or long enough to be a coffin, containing only some scraps of kindling wood. Otherwise the cellar—damp brick walls; floor part pavement, part dry earth—was as empty as the house above.

Now for the upstairs. Holding the candle tremulously high ahead of her, while dancing shadows beat a wavering retreat, Carrie returned to the front hall, and thence up the carved wooden stair. Two bedrooms, as unused as the lower level of the house and as scantily furnished. The rear windows looked out over darkness, the front ones over the street—side walls were windowless, crammed as they were against the neighbors on either side.

From an angle in the hallway on the upper floor, a narrow service stair, white-painted, went up straight and steep to a trapdoor in the ceiling.

“What’s up there?” she wondered aloud.

“Couldn’t be nothin’ but an attic.” Only a short time on the street had begun to have a serious effect on Christopher’s English, of which a certain Canadian schoolmaster had once been proud.

Carrie spotted fresh footprints in the thin layer of dust and soot that had accumulated on the white-painted stairs. A clear image of the heel of a man’s boot. Only one set of footprints, coming down.

The trapdoor pushed up easily. The space above was more garret than attic; it might once have been furnished, maybe servants’ quarters. The floor entirely solid, no rafters exposed, though now there were dust and spiderwebs in plenty. The broad panes of glass in the angled skylight, washed by rain on the outside, were still intact, and it was bolted firmly shut on the inside; if you stood tall enough inside, you could look out over a hilly range of slate roofs and chimney pots, with the towering dome of St. Paul’s visible more than a mile to the east.

On one side of the gloomy space rested an old wardrobe, door slightly ajar to reveal a few hanging garments. But the most interesting object by far was a great wooden box, somewhat battered by much use or travel, which had been shoved against the north wall.

Chris thought it looked like a coffin, and said so.

“No. Built too strong for a poor man’s coffin, not elegant enough for a rich man’s.” What was it, though? There were two strong rope handles on each side, and a plain wooden lid, tightly fitted by some competent woodworker.

Christopher, ever curious, approached the box and tried the lid. To his surprise, and Carrie’s, it slid back at once.

“Look here, Sis!”

“Why, it’s full of dirt.” She was aware of a vague disappointment in her observation, and not sure why. Only about half-full, actually, but that was no less odd. Stranger still was the fact that the neat joinings of the interior seemed to have been tarred with pitch, as if to make them waterproof. Of course so tight a seal would also serve to keep the soil from leaking out. But why would anyone—?

The earth was dry. When Carrie picked up a small handful and sifted it through her fingers, it gave off a faintly musty, almost spicy smell, with a suggestion of the alien about it.

Christopher was downstairs again, moving so silently on his bare feet that Carrie had not realized he was gone, until she heard him faintly calling her to come down. She slid the lid back onto the box, and carefully lowered the trapdoor into place behind her.

Her brother had turned on the gaslight in the kitchen and discovered some tins of sardines abandoned in the pantry. Presently they remembered the box of kindling in the cellar, and it was possible to get a wood fire started in the kitchen stove.

The sardines were soon gone. Brother and sister were still hungry, but at least they were out of the rain.

That night they slept in a house, behind locked doors, curled up in a dusty rug on the kitchen floor, where some of the stove’s warmth reached them. Barely into October, and it was cold.

Next day, waking up in a foodless house and observing that the rain had stopped, they were soon out and about on the streets of London, trying to do something to earn some money, and keep out of trouble. But in each endeavor they had only limited success. Carrie was certain that the neighbors had begun to notice them, and not in any very friendly way. So had the bobby who walked the beat during the day.

There was one bright spot. On the sideboard, as if someone had left it there deliberately, they found a key which matched the locks on both front door and back.

Vincent still had his eye on them, too, or at least on Carrie. And “Don’t see your parents about,” one of the neighbors remarked as she came by. She answered with a smile, and hurried inside to share with Christopher the handful of biscuits she had just stolen from a shop.

Shortly after sunset, threatening trouble broke at last. The rain had stopped, and people were ready to get out and mind each other’s business. One of the neighbors began it, another joined in, followed by the walrus-mustached policeman, who, when voices were raised, had decided it was his duty to take part.

And joined at a little distance by the nasty Vincent, who before the policeman arrived boldly put in a word, offering to place Carrie under his protection. He had some comments on her body that made her face flame with humiliation and anger.

Carrie could not slam the door on Vincent, because he had his foot pushed in to hold it open. He withdrew the foot as the bobby approached, but Carrie did not quite dare to close the door in the policeman’s face.

“What’s your name, girl?” he wanted to know, without preamble.

“Carrie. Carrie Martin. This’s my brother Chris.”

“Is the woman of the house in?” demanded the boldest neighbor, breaking in on the policeman’s dramatic pause.

Carrie admitted the sad truth, that her mother was dead.

Another neighbor chimed in. “Your father about, then?”

The girl could feel herself being driven back, almost to the foot of the stairs. “He’s very busy. He doesn’t like to be disturbed.”

Somehow three or four people were already inside the door. There was still enough daylight to reveal the shabbiness and scantiness of the furnishings, and of the children’s clothes, once quite respectable.

“Looks like the maid has not come in as yet.” That was said facetiously.

“Must be the butler’s day off, too,” chimed in another neighbor.

“You say your father’s here, miss?” This was the policeman, slow and majestic, in the mode of a large and overbearing uncle. “I’d like to have a word with him, if I may.”

“He doesn’t like to be disturbed.” Carrie could hear her own voice threatening to break into a childish squeal. For a little while, for a few hours, it had looked like they might be able to survive. But now. . .

“Where is he?”

“Upstairs. But—”

“Asleep, then, is he?”

“I—I—yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh yes, you are, I don’t think! See here, my girl, unless I have some evidence that you and the young ’un here are under some supervision, you’ll both be charged with wandering, and not being under proper guardianship.”

Carrie, standing at bay at the foot of the stair, gripping her brother by his shoulder, raised her voice in protest, but the voices of the others increased in volume, too. They seemed to be all talking at once, making accusations and demands—

Suddenly their voices cut off altogether. Their eyes that had been fixed on Carrie rose up to somewhere above her head, and behind her on the stair there was a creak of wood, as under a quiet but weighty tread.

She turned to see a tall, well-built, well-dressed man coming down with measured steps. Perfectly calm, as if he descended these stairs every day, a gentleman in his own house. His brownish hair, well-trimmed, was touched with gray at the temples, and an aquiline nose gave his face a forceful look. At the moment he was fussing with his cuffs, as if he had just put on his coat, and frowning in apparent puzzlement at the assembly below him.

Carrie had never seen him before in her life; nor had Christopher, to judge by the boy’s awestruck expression as he watched from her side.

The newcomer’s voice was strangely accented, low but forceful, suited to his appearance, as his gaze swept the little group gathered in his front hall. “What is the meaning of this intrusion? Officer? Carrie, what do these people want?”

Carrie could find no words at the moment. Not even when the man came to stand beside her in a fatherly attitude, resting one hand lightly on her back.

“Mr. Martin—?” The bobby’s broad face wore a growing look of consternation. Already he had retreated half a step toward the door. Meanwhile the nosy neighbors, looking unhappy, were moving even faster in the same direction.

“Yes? Do you have official business with me, Officer?”

Vincent had disappeared.

The policeman recovered slightly, and stood upon official dignity; thought there might be some disturbance. Duty to investigate. But soon he too had given way under the cool gaze of the man from upstairs. In the space of a few more heartbeats the door had closed on the last of them.

The mysterious one stood regarding the door for a moment, hands clasped behind his back—they were pale hands, Carrie noted, strong-looking, and the nails tended to points. Then he reached over to the hat rack on the wall behind the door, and plucked from it a gentleman’s top hat, a thing she could not for the life of her remember seeing there before. But of course she had scarcely looked. And then he turned, at ease, to regard her with a smile too faint to reveal anything of his teeth.

“I take it you are in fact the lady of the house? The only one I am likely to encounter on the premises?”

The children stared at him.

Gently he went on. “I am not given to eavesdropping, but this afternoon my sleep was restless, and the talk I could hear below me grew ever and ever more interesting.” The foreign accent was stronger now; but in Soho accents of all kinds were nothing out of the ordinary.

“Yes sir.” Carrie stood with an arm around her brother. “Yes sir—that is, there is no other lady, er woman, girl, living here at present.”

“That is good. It would seem superfluous to introduce myself, as you have already, in effect, introduced me to others. Mr. Martin I have become, and so I might as well remain. But when others are present, you, Carrie, and you, young sir, will address me as ‘Father.’ For however many days our joint tenancy of this dwelling may last. Understand, I do not seek to adopt you, but a temporary arrangement should be to our mutual advantage. A happy, close-knit family, yes, that is the face we present to the world. When it is necessary to present a face. Ah, you will kindly leave the upper regions of the house to me—if anyone should ask you, it is really my house, paid for in coin of the realm. In the name of Mr. de Ville.”

“Yes sir,” said Carrie, elbowing her brother until he echoed the two words.

“And now, my children.” Mr. Martin, or de Ville, set his hat upon his head, and gave it a light tap with two pale fingers, as if to settle it exactly to his liking. Carrie noticed that as he did so, he ignored the old mirror on the wall beside the hat rack. And she could see why, or she imagined she could, because the small mirror did not show the man at all, but only the top hat, doing a neat half-somersault unsupported in the air, its reflected image disappearing utterly just as the hat itself came to rest on the head of the mysterious one.

“I am going out for the evening,” he informed them. “I advise you to lock up for the night as solidly as possible. Do not expect to see me again until about this time tomorrow. Pleasant dreams. . . .”

On the verge of opening the door, he checked himself, frowning at them.

“The two of you have an undernourished and ill-clad look, which I find distasteful, and will only provoke more neighborly curiosity. Here.” White fingers performed an economical toss; a small coin, glittering gold, spun through the air. Christopher’s quick hand, like a hungry bird, snatched it in midflight.

That night brother and sister slept with full bellies, having gone out foraging amid the early evening crowds, to a nearby branch of the Aërated Bread Company. At a used furniture stall Carrie had also bought herself a nice frock, almost new, and a couple of pillows; it was awkward living in a house where there were no beds or chairs. And Christopher had found a secondhand pair of shoes that fit him well enough. They were going to sleep on the kitchen floor again, but they were getting used to it.

“Where’d he sleep, is what I’d like to know,” said Chris next day, climbing the stairs up from the parlor. The man had said he’d not be back till sunset, so now in midafternoon there was no harm in gratifying their curiosity, never mind that he’d said to keep below.

Both of the bedrooms were as desolate as ever, and the dust on their floors showed only their own footprints, one set shod, one five-toed, from the first night’s exploration.

“And how’d he get into the house?” Carrie wanted to know. “Didn’t come past us downstairs.”

“You don’t suppose—?”

“The skylight? Why’d a man do that?”

“ ’Cause he don’t want to be seen.”

And they went up the narrow white stair, through the trapdoor.

The skylight was as snugly fastened as before. Out of persistent curiosity they approached the mysterious box again. The lid, once moved, fell clattering with shock and fright.

“Oh my God. He’s in there!”

But none of this awakened Mr. Martin.

After initially recoiling, both children had to have a closer look. In urgent whispers they soon decided the man who lay so neatly and cleanly on the earth in his nice clothes was not dead. His open eyes moved faintly. In Carrie’s experience, people sometimes got drunk, but never had even the drunkest of them looked like this. Some people also took strange drugs, and with that she had less familiarity.

A ring at the front door broke the spell and pulled them down the stairs. A solid workman stood on the step, cap in hand. In a thick Cockney accent he said he had come to inquire about a box, one that might have been delivered here “by mistake.” Carrie, in a clean dress today, and with her face washed, denied all knowledge and briskly sent the questioner on his way.

“I don’t think he believed me,” Carrie muttered to her brother, when the door was closed again. “He’ll be back. Or someone will.”

“What’ll we do? Don’t want anyone bothering Mr. Martin. I like him,” Chris decided.

Quickly the girl took thought. “I know!”

Within the hour the bell rang again. This man was much younger, and obviously of higher social status. Bright eyes, dark curly hair. “Excuse me, Miss? Are you the woman of the house?”

“Who wants her?”

“I’m George Harris, of Harris and Sons, moving and shipment.” A large, clean hand with well-trimmed nails offered a business card. Carrie read the address: Orange Master’s Yard, Soho.

“Oh. I suppose you’re one of the sons.”

“That’s right, Miss. I’m looking about this neighborhood for a box that seems to have got misplaced. There’s evidence it was brought to this house, some days ago. One of a large shipment, fifty in all, there’s been a lot of hauling of ’em to and fro around London, one place and another. Ours not to reason why, as the poet says. But our firm feels a certain responsibility.”

“What sort of box?”

George Harris had a good description, down to the rope handles. “Seen anything like that, Miss?” Meanwhile his eyes were probing the empty house behind her.

And Carrie was looking out past him, as a cab came galloping to a stop outside. Two well-dressed young gentlemen leaped out and climbed the steps. George Harris, who seemed to know them as respected clients, made introductions. Lord Godalming, no less, but called “Art” by his companion, Mr. Quincey Morris, who was carrying a carpetbag, and whose accent, though not at all the same as Mr. Martin’s, also seemed uncommon even for Soho.

The new arrivals made nervous, garbled attempts at explaining their urgent search. There had been, it seemed, twenty-one boxes taken from some place called Carfax, and so forty-nine of fifty were somehow now accounted for. But this time, Lord Godalming or not, Carrie held her place firmly in the doorway, allowing no one in.

“If there is a large box on the premises, I must examine it.” A commanding tone, as only one of his lordship’s exalted rank could manage.

At that, Carrie gracefully gave way. “Very well, sir, my lord, there is a strange box here, and where it came from, I’m sure I don’t know.”

Three men came bustling into the house, ready for action, Morris actually, for some reason, beginning to pull a thick wooden stake out of his carpetbag—and three men were deflated, like burst balloons, when they beheld the thin-sided, commonplace container on the parlor floor.

“Our furniture has not arrived yet, as you can see.” The lady of the house was socially apologetic.

Quincey Morris, muttering indelicate words, kicked off the scruffy lid, and indeed there was dirt inside, but only a few handfuls. And the two gentlemen hastily retreated to their waiting cab.

But George Harris lingered in the doorway, exchanging a few more words with Carrie. Until his lordship shouted at him to get a move on, there were other places to be examined. On with the search!

At sunset Carrie’s and Christopher’s cotenant came walking down the stairs into the parlor as before. There he paused, fussing with his cuffs as on the previous evening, But now his attention was caught by the rejected box. “And what is this? An attempt at furnishing?”

“You had some callers, Mr. Martin—de Ville—while you were asleep. I thought as maybe you didn’t wish to be disturbed.” And Carrie gave details.

“I see.” His dark eyes glittered at her. “And this—?”

“The gentlemen said they were looking for a large box of earth. So I thought the easiest way was to show ’em one. Chris and I put some dirt in and dragged it up from the cellar. ’Course this one ain’t nearly as big as yours. Not big enough for a tall man to lie down in. The gents were upset—this weren’t at all the one they wanted to find.”

There was a long pause, in which de Ville’s eyes probed the children silently. Then he bowed. “It seems I am greatly in your debt, Miss Carrie. Very greatly. And in yours, Master Christopher.”

Mr. de Ville seemed to sleep little the next day, or not at all, for the box in the garret held only earth. In the afternoon, Carrie by special invitation went with her new friend and his strange box to Doolittle’s Wharf, where she watched the man and his box board the sailing ship Czarina Catherine. And she waited at dockside, wondering, until the Russian vessel cast off and dropped down seaward on the outgoing tide.

As she returned to the house, feeling once more alone and unprotected, she noted that the evil Vincent was openly watching her again.

He grew bolder when, after several days, it seemed that the man of the house was gone.

George Harris came back once, on some pretext, but obviously to see Carrie, and they talked for some time. She learned that he was seventeen, and admitted she was three years younger.

Five days, then six, had passed since Czarina Catherine sailed away.

George Harris came back again, this time wondering if he might have left his order book behind on his previous visit. Carrie made him tea, out of the newly restocked pantry. Mr. de Ville had left them what he called a token of his gratitude for their timely help, and sometimes Carrie was almost frightened when she counted up the golden coins. There was a bed in each bedroom now, and chairs and tables below.

Tonight Chris was in the house alone, curled up and reading by the fire, nursing a cough made worse by London air. Carrie was out alone in the London fog, walking through the greasy, smoky chill.

She heard the terrifying voice of Vincent, not far away, calling her name. There were footsteps in pursuit, hard confident strides, and in her fresh anxiety she took a wrong turning into a dead-end mews.

In another moment she was running in panic, on the verge of screaming, feeling in her bones that screaming would do no good.

Someone, some presence, was near her in the fog—but no, there was no one and nothing there.

Only her pursuer’s footsteps, which came on steadily, slow and loud and confident—until they abruptly ceased.

Backed into a corner, she strained her ears, listening—nothing. Vincent must be playing cat and mouse with her. But at last a breath of wind stirred the heavy air, the gray curtain parted, and the way out of the mews seemed clear. Utterly deserted, only the body of some derelict, rolled into a corner.

No—someone was visible after all. Half a block ahead, a tall figure stood looking in Carrie’s direction, as if he might be waiting for her.

With a surge of relief and astonishment she hurried forward. “Mr. de Ville!”

“My dear child. It is late for you to be abroad.”

“I saw you board a ship for the Black Sea!”

His gaze searched the fog, sweeping back and forth over her head. “It is important that certain men believe I am still on that ship. And soon I really must depart from England. But I shall return to this sceptered isle one day.”

Anxiously she looked over her shoulder. “There was a man—”

“Your former neighbor, who meant you harm.” De Ville’s forehead creased. His eyes probed shadows in the mews behind her. “It is sad to contemplate such wickedness.” He sighed, put out a hand, patted her cheek. “But no matter. He will bother you no more. He told me—”

“You’ve seen him, sir?”

“Yes, just now—that he is leaving on a long journey—nay, has already left.”

Carrie was puzzled. “Long journey—to where, sir? America?”

“Farther than that, my child. Oh, farther than that.”

A man’s voice was audible above the endless traffic rumble, calling her name through the night from blocks away. The voice of George Harris, calling, concerned, for Carrie.

Bidding Mr. de Ville a hasty good night, she started to go to the young man. Then, meaning to ask another question, she turned back—the street was empty, save for the rolling fog.

2004

A DROP OF SOMETHING SPECIAL IN THE BLOOD

Monday, 16 July, 1888—

The dream again, last night. I shall continue to call these visitations dreams, as the London specialist very firmly insisted upon doing, and it is at his urging that I begin this private record of events. As to the “dream” itself, I can only hope and pray that in setting it down on paper I may be able to exorcise at least a portion of the horror.

I awoke—or so I thought—in an unmanly state of fear, at the darkest hour of the night.

As before, the impression (whether true or not) that I had come wide-awake, was very firm. There was no confusion as to where I was; I immediately recognized, by the faint glow of streetlights coming in round the edges of the window curtain, the room in which I had lain down to sleep, in this case a somewhat overdecorated bedchamber in an overpriced Parisian hotel.

For a moment I lay listening, in a strange state of innocent anticipation. It was as if my certain memory of what must inexorably follow was for the moment held in abeyance. But that state lasted for a few breaths only. In the next instant, memory returned with a rush. There was a faint sound at the window; and I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what I must see when I turned my gaze in that direction. She was standing there, of course, just inside the window. In my last coherent thoughts before falling asleep, I had begun to hope (absurdly, I suppose, whatever the true cause may be) that the visitations could not have followed me from London.

In the poor light it was as difficult as on the previous occasions to be sure of the color of her long curls of hair, but I thought they might be as red as my own were in my youth. The long tresses fell to her waist round her voluptuous body, that was otherwise only partially concealed by a simple shift or gown.

Though the moonlight was behind her, I thought that her slight figure threw no shadow on the floor. In spite of that, hers was a most carnal and unspiritual appearance. Plainly I could see her brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of her full lips.

A tremendous longing strove against a great fear in my heart . . . I knew, as had happened on every previous occasion, a burning desire that she would kiss me with those red lips . . .

It is difficult for me to note these things down, lest someday this page should fall under the gaze of one I love, and cause great pain. (Florence, forgive me, if you can! Will I ever embrace you again?) But it is the truth, even if only a true account of a strange dream, and I must hope that the truth will set me free.

I have not yet learned my nocturnal visitor’s name—assuming that the woman is real enough to have one. Perhaps I should call her “the girl,” for she seems very young. As she approached my bed last night she laughed . . . such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound could never have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water glasses when played on by a cunning hand . . .

Overcome by a strange helplessness, I had closed my eyes. The girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.

I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but could see out perfectly under the lashes. The girl bent over me, and I had the sense that she was fairly gloating. She actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the sharp white teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and bearded chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat . . . I could feel the hot breath on my neck, and the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer—nearer . . . the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.

Suddenly she straightened, and her head turned as if listening for some distant but all-important sound. As if released from a spell, I moved as if to spring out of the bed, but in the instant before the motion could be completed, she bent over me again. The touch of her fingers on my arm seemed to drain the strength from all my limbs, and I sank back helplessly.

“So sweet is your blood, my little Irishman. I think there is a drop of something special in it,” the apparition murmured. In my confused state, the idea that this diminutive visitor might call my large frame “little” drew from my lips a burst of foolish laughter.

In response, the girl laughed again, a sound of ribald coquetry, and bent over me to accomplish her purpose.

Then the truth, or what seemed the truth, of what was happening overcame me, and I sank down in a delirium of unbearable horror and indescribable delight commingled, until my senses failed me.

ODDLY ENOUGH, my faint, if such it was, passed seamlessly into a deep and restful sleep, and I slept well until the street sounds of Paris, some cheerful and some angry, below my window, brought me round at almost ten o’clock.

My awakening this morning was slow and almost painful, and it was difficult to fight free of a persistent heaviness clinging to all my limbs. A single spot of dried blood, half the size of my little finger’s nail, stained the pillow, not three as on certain unhappy mornings in the recent past. In London I had independent confirmation (from a hotel maid) that the stains themselves are real, which at the time afforded me inordinate relief.

This morning, as before, an anxious examination in a mirror disclosed on my throat, just where I felt the pressure of lips and teeth, near the lower border of my full beard, the same ambiguous evidence—two almost imperceptible red spots, so trivial that in ordinary circumstances no one would give them a moment’s thought. I cannot say it is impossible that the small hemorrhage had issued from them, but it might as easily have come from nostril, mouth, or ear.

I take some comfort in the fact that if anyone in the world can help me, it is the physician I have come to Paris to see—Jean-Martin Charcot, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on locomotor ataxia, as well as hypnotism. Whether he can possibly help me, either in his character as mesmerist, or as expert in neuropathy, is yet to be discovered. If Charcot can help, in one capacity or the other, he must. If he cannot, I tremble for my very life. I have already gone past the point of fearing for my sanity.

I must force myself to write down what I have been avoiding until now, the evil I fear the most. If the girl has no objective reality, then mental horrors that I endure are sheer delusion, and the precursor of much worse to come, of an absolute mental and physical ruin. I am in the grip of a loathsome and shameful disease, contracted years ago—if that is so, then what is left of my life will not be worth the living. I only pray God that the source of my agony may not be syphilis. It is only with difficulty that I can force myself to pen the word on this white page—but there, it is done.

As far as I know, or the world knows, there is no cure. The more advanced physicians admit that the current standard of treatment, with potassium iodide, has been shown to be practically worthless. I know the early symptoms (alas, from my own case) and have seen the full horror of the tertiary stage expressed in the bodies of other men. Delusions are frequently a part of that catastrophe.

But the beast takes many forms. The first symptom of the last stage, sometimes appearing decades after the first, local signs of infection have passed away, tends to be a weakening or total loss of the ankle and knee reflex. In succeeding months and years the patient’s ability to walk, and even to stand normally, slowly declines. Sometimes in medical description the initials GPI are used, standing for general paralysis of the insane, the most dreaded late manifestation. The effects on the brain are varied, but include delusions, loss of memory, sometimes violent anger. Disorientation, incontinence, and convulsions occur often. Tabes dorsalis (also known as locomotor ataxia) is the commonest symptom of infection in the spinal cord. Others include darting attacks of intense pain in the legs and hips, difficult urination, numbness in hands or feet, a sense of constriction about the waist, an unsteadiness in walking—all capped by a loss of sexual function.

So far I have experienced only the delusions—if such they are. Horrible as that fate would be, I believe this current torture of uncertainty is even worse. I will go mad if Heaven does not grant me an answer soon.

(LATER)—I find it a source of irritation that I will not be presenting myself, openly and honestly from the beginning, to Charcot as a sufferer in need of help, but only as a visiting “celebrity.” In the latter category I of course shine solely by the reflected light of my employer. No one here has shown the least awareness of my own small literary efforts; and I would not be surprised to learn that no Parisian has ever read Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland.

This concealment of my true purpose is, to a certain extent, dishonesty on my part. But when I consider the unfortunate publicity that might otherwise result, and the risk of harm to others if my condition were widely known, it seems to me the role of honor must include a measure of dishonesty. Desperate though my situation is, I wish to meet Charcot and form my own estimate of the man and his methods (which some denounce, perhaps out of jealousy), before committing myself completely into his hands.

EVENING: TODAY I HAVE seen and heard that which frightened me anew, but also that which gives me hope. Let me set down the events of the afternoon as quickly and calmly as I can, before the memory of even the smallest detail has begun to fade.

First, let me state my key discovery: The girl is real! Real, and, to my utter astonishment, a patient of Charcot’s!

I was certain, from the moment today when our eyes met in the hospital, that she knew me as instantly and surely as I knew her. I suppose I need not try to describe the hideous shock I suffered upon recognizing her among the inmates. There can be no possibility of a mistake, though in the filtered daylight her teeth appeared quite small and ordinary.

I was certain that she knew me from the moment when our eyes met, and I had the odd impression that she might even have been expecting me.

We were standing close together in the treatment room, one of the stops on what I suppose must be the regular tour afforded distinguished visitors. Her whisper was so soft that I am certain no one but I could hear it. But I could read her lips with perfect ease. “It is my little Irishman!” And then she licked them with her soft, pink tongue.

BUT I SHOULD set down the afternoon’s events in their proper order. The hospital, La Salpêtriére, sprawls over several acres of land not far from the botanic gardens, and houses several thousand patients, nearly all women. (The Bicêtre, nearby, is reserved for men.)

The famous doctor is now about sixty years of age, of small stature but imposing appearance. I have heard it said that he is pleased to exaggerate his natural resemblance to Napoléon . . . he is pale, clean-shaven with straight black hair only lightly tinged with grey, a firm mouth, and dark melancholy eyes that seem to remember some ancient loss.

Our tour began in what seemed routine fashion. Charcot called several patients (by their given names only), and brought them forward one at a time to demonstrate the symptoms of their illness and the means he used to treat it. His comments were terse and to the point. Whatever could not be helped by the power of suggestion must be the result of heredity, and nothing could be done about it.

I paid little attention to the mysterious girl when she first appeared, as routinely as any of the others, called out of her private room, or perhaps I should say cell. Her long, red hair, which first caught my eye, was bound up in a cap, from which a few strands of bright coppery red escaped, and she was decently clad, like the other patients, in a plain hospital robe. I did not even look closely at her until I heard her voice.

Charcot was pronouncing his accented English in forceful tones. “Lucy, this gentleman has come from England to visit us today. He is a famous man in London, business manager of the Lyceum Theater.”

Lucy—that is the only name by which I have heard her called—responded to the doctor’s questions in English bearing almost the same flavor of Ireland as does my own. From Charcot’s first remarks regarding her, it was clear that she has been his patient for only a few days. With a casual question I confirmed that she had been admitted on the very day of my own arrival in Paris.

Stunned by the familiarity of her voice, I gazed intently at her face, and could no longer doubt her identity. There was an impudent presumption in the look she returned to me, and a twinkling in her green eyes that strongly suggested we shared a secret. There followed the whispered words which, though nearly inaudible, seemed to seal her identity as my nocturnal visitor.

The tour was moving on. I wanted desperately to question Char-cot further on the background and history of the girl, but I delayed. I admit I feared to ask such questions in her presence, lest she put forward some convincing claim of having known me in different circumstances.

Gradually more facts of her case came out. According to the doctor, Lucy displays a positive terror of sunlight, and has a disturbing habit of refusing to eat the standard fare provided for patients—the quality of which, I note in passing, seems higher than one might expect in this large an institution.

Hers, he said, is a very interesting case. (Ah, if only he knew!) Several days ago Lucy had somehow got hold of a rat—I can well believe that Charcot was livid with anger when he heard of such a creature being found, in what he considered his hospital—and, using her own sharp-pointed teeth as surgical instruments, was delicately draining it of blood, which she appeared to consider a delicacy.

It is also said that she manifests an intense fear of mirrors—as they are practically nonexistent within the walls of La Salpêtriére, this presents her caretakers with no urgent problem.

As it was evident from my repeated questions that I had a strong interest in the patient, Charcot at the end of the tour obliged me by returning to her cell and questioning her at some length while I stood by.

Lucy’s manner as she replied was not particularly shy, but still subdued, and somehow distant.

What was her present age? She did not know, could not remember—and did not seem to think it was at all important.

Had she been born in Paris? No—in Ireland, far across the sea—of that she was certain. How, then, had she come to France? Her parents had brought her when they had come to join the Paris Commune.

This was interesting news indeed. The doctor frowned. “You must have been only a very small child at that time. How can you remember?”

“Oh, no sir. I was fifteen years of age when we came to France, and much as you see me now.”

Charcot gave me a significant look: The fierce rebellion of the Commune now lies fully seventeen years in the past, and the girl who stood before us today could hardly be more than eighteen at the most.

His voice remained gentle, but insistent. “And you have been here, in Paris, ever since?”

Lucy began to twist her fingers together nervously. “No; the fighting grew terrible in the city, soon after we arrived. My mother was killed, and quite early on I ran away.”

“Indeed? You ran away alone?”

There was a hesitation. Then, finally: “No, sir. It was then he came to me, and claimed me for his own, and took me away. To be his, forever and ever.” As she said this, the girl gave a strange sigh, as of triumph and dread all mingled.

Charcot gave me another look filled with meaning and picked up on what he evidently thought an important clue. “ ‘He’? Who is this ‘he’?”

The question produced evident distress. But however Charcot prodded, even threatening the girl with strict confinement if she refused cooperation, there was no answer.

The doctor’s interest in this strange tale, though on his side purely professional, seemed to have become nearly as great as my own. He dispatched an orderly to bring him the girl’s dossier, and stood in an attitude of deep thought, chin supported in one hand. “And where did this person take you when you fled from Paris?”

Lucy frowned; her eyes were by then closed, and she seemed to be experiencing some type of painful memory. Her answer when it came was long and rambling and unclear, and I do not remember every word. But the gist of it was that her mysterious abductor, who had evidently also become her lover at some point, had carried her to what she called the dark land, “beyond the forest.”

By that time the girl’s medical record had been brought to Char-cot from the office; on opening, it proved to contain only a single sheet of paper. Turning to me, Charcot read rapidly from it. “She has been telling the same story all along: that she is the child of an Irish Russian revolutionary couple, brought to Paris by her parents when they came, with others of like mind, to join the Commune in ’71. But that is absurd on the face of it, for the girl cannot be more than twenty years old at the very most.”

Another brief notation in the record stated that Lucy on first being admitted to the hospital had been housed in a regular ward. There she had displayed an almost incredible skill at slipping away during the night, but was always to be found in her bed again at dawn, the means of her return as mysterious as that of her disappearance. Irked by this disregard of regulations, the doctor in immediate charge of her case had transferred her to a private cell, in the section set aside for patients who are violent or otherwise present unusual difficulties. Even there she had at least twice somehow managed to leave the locked cell at night, so that a search of the hospital wards and grounds was ordered.

“Without result, I may add,” Char cot informed me. “But each time, in the morning, she was found in her cell again, wanting to do nothing but sleep through the day. I found it necessary to dismiss two employees for carelessness.”

“She seems a real challenge,” was the only comment I could make.

By then it was obvious that the doctor was growing more and more intrigued. But his voice maintained the same calm, professional tone as he turned back to the girl and asked, “What did you do in the land beyond the forest?”

The trouble in Lucy’s countenance cleared briefly. “I slept and woke . . . feasted and fasted . . . . danced and loved . . . in a great house . . .”

“What sort of a great house?”

“It was a castle . . .”

The doctor raised an eyebrow, expressing in a French way considerable doubt. “A castle, you say.”

“Yes.” She nodded solemnly. “But later he was cruel to me there . . . so I ran away again.”

“Who was it that was cruel to you? What was his name?”

At this the girl became quite agitated, displaying a mixture of emotions . . .

“He who brought me there . . . the prince of that land,” she finally got out. Then one more sentence burst forth, after which she seemed relieved. “He made me the dearg-due.”

“I did not understand that word,” Char cot complained briskly. But the girl could not be induced to repeat it, and could not or would not explain.

All this time I said nothing; but I had understood the Gaelic all too well. My hand strayed unconsciously to touch the small marks on my throat.

The questioning went on. Why had Lucy come back to Paris? She had been “following the little Irishman, who is so sweet.”(She said this without looking in my direction; and I was much relieved that neither Charcot nor the attendants standing by imagined “the little Irishman” could possibly mean me.)

She went on, in a voice increasingly tight with strain, “I am afraid to return to the dark land. And I yearn to go back to blessed Ireland, but I dare not, or he will find me, and take me back to his domain, the land beyond the forest . . .”

Thinking quickly and decisively, as is his wont, Charcot abruptly announced that he had decided to try hypnotism. In a few minutes we had adjourned to a small room that is kept reserved for such experiments. There he soon began to employ his preferred method of inducing trance, which is visual fixation on a small flame—a candle against a background of dark velvet.

Lucy was seated in a chair, directly facing the candle. Charcot stationed himself just behind her, murmuring in a low, soothing voice, whilst I stood somewhat farther back. What happened next I cannot explain. It seemed that even as the girl began to sink into a trance I could feel the same darkness reaching for me, as if my mind and Lucy’s were already somehow bound together.

I fell, losing my balance as awkwardly as some weak woman in a faint. At the last moment I roused enough to try to catch myself by grabbing the seat of a nearby chair, breaking my fall to some extent but seriously spraining my left thumb.

CHARCOT HELPED ME to a private room where he insisted that I lie down until I was fully recovered from my “faint.” Meanwhile, as he provided a rather awkward splint and bandage for my thumb, I had the chance for a private consultation with the famous doctor.

Charcot confessed himself intrigued by my behavior in the presence of the girl. I began to tell him something of my case, and confessed my overwhelming fear.

He nodded, and prepared to give me a quick examination. But another detail still bothered him. “What was that word—neither French nor English . . . something, she said, that her princely abductor had caused her to become.”

“It is in the old language of Ireland: dearg-due, meaning the sucker of red blood.”

“Yes . . . I see.” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Having some connection with her behavior with regard to the rat.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “No doubt that was it.”

Charcot examined me briefly, I suppose as thoroughly as possible without advance preparation. He then gave me some hope, as a world expert on tabes dorsalis, by saying that while he certainly could not rule out the possibility in my case, he thought it unlikely that the dreams, or delusions, that I described were due to any organic lesion of the brain.

Instead, Charcot suggests that a kind of displacement has taken place: the girl in the hospital only resembles the one of whom I dreamed, and my unconscious mind has somehow altered my memory of the dream to fit the available reality.

Would that the matter could be so easily explained. But I fear that it cannot.

Tuesday, 17 July, morning—

Lucy came to me again last night, here in my hotel. Before retiring, I had made doubly sure of the room’s single window being closed (it is utterly inaccessible from outside, two stories above the street) and locked the door and blocked it with a chair, which has become my nightly habit. This morning after her departure, when I examined the window in broad daylight, after my strange visitor’s departure, a thin caking of dust and an intact small spiderweb offered proof that it had not been opened.

If the girl in the asylum be real, as must be the case, can her shade or spirit in my room at night be anything but a figment of my own disordered reason?

In the course of last night’s visit, she said to me, “From the moment I first heard you speak in London, my little man, I knew great hunger for your sweet Irish blood.”

Flat on my back in bed, I still did not know if I was dreaming. But I was curious. “Where did you hear me speak?”

“It was at the back door of your Lyceum Theater.”

“And is it that you love the theater, then? You come to watch my employer, the great Henry Irving, on the stage?”

“Oh aye, he’s marvelous. And I love the darkness and the lights, the curtains that can hide so much, the painted faces and the masks . . .”

Still murmuring, she bent over me, and all was as before. It seems that when her touch is upon me, my uninjured hand is as powerless to resist as the sprained one.

Thursday, 19 July, late afternoon—

This will be my last entry in this journal. The business has come to a conclusion in the most startling and amazing way.

Lucy appeared in my room again last night, and events followed their usual frightening course, of grotesque horror mingled with indescribable pleasure—until, at the last moment before our intimacy reached its peak, she abruptly broke off and pulled away from me.

Raising myself dazedly on one elbow, I became aware of a new presence in the room.

Though the tall figure standing near the window was visible only in outline, I could be sure it was a man. Lucy cowered away before him.

Moving silently at first, the new apparition (very shadowy in darkness, hard to see distinctly) advanced toward the bed.

Hardly knowing what to make of this development, I could only stammer out, “But you are real!”

A deep voice answered, speaking English in a strange accent that was neither French nor Irish. “I am as real as life and death.”

In the next moment the newcomer turned to the girl, who was still cowering away. His voice was softer, and almost tender. “Lucy, my dear, your sisters are waiting for you at home, in the land beyond the forest. I am ready to take you to them.”

“I do not want to go!”

“But you cannot continue in this way.” He might almost have been a parent, remonstrating with a wayward child. “Your vanishing from the hospital. Your toying with this man.”

She dared to raise her eyes, and pleaded piteously. “He is my sweet little—”

The man took another step toward her, and spoke in a tone charged with menace. “Silence! These games you play will bring again the hunters down upon us, with their crosses and their garlic and their stakes!”

When Lucy struggled, he knocked her down with a single blow from the flat of his hand.

That was not to be borne, and the instinct of manhood in me sent me springing out of bed, bent on defending the girl.

Honorable as my intentions were, and sincere my effort, the only result was that the nightmare seemed to close upon me with new force. Seizing me by the throat, in a one-handed grip of iron, my opponent forced my body back upon the bed, meanwhile murmuring something of which the only two words I could hear clearly were “misplaced chivalry.”

Meanwhile, Lucy had regained her feet, and she in turn tried to come to my aid. But with his right hand the tall man caught her by the hair and forced her to her knees, saying, “You will see him no more.”

Those were the last words I heard from either of my visitors. Struggle as I might, I could not loosen the dark man’s grip by even a fraction of an inch. I doubt whether I could have succeeded even had I been able to use both hands, which of course I could not. And once more darkness overcame me.

WHEN I RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS THIS MORNING, there were no blood spots on my pillow. But there were bruises on my throat beneath my beard, five small purpling spots that must have been made by the grip of a single hand, a left hand, of overpowering strength—and it is blessedly clear to me that with my own left hand, injured as it is, I could never have done this to myself. Charcot, when I managed to see him today at the hospital, confirmed the reality of the bruises—as indeed the internal soreness of my throat had already done, to my own full satisfaction. To explain them to the doctor I made up some tale of a scuffle with a would-be robber in the street.

I am ecstatic with a sense of glorious relief: the man who with one hand overpowered me was a terrible opponent, fit to inhabit a nightmare—but he was real! So was Lucy, my girlish “succubus,” truly in my room, and so were all the visits she has paid me. Nothing that has happened was the product of an infected and disordered brain. Whether or not Lucy is ever to appear to me again, and whatever the ultimate explanation of the mystery, it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with locomotor ataxia.

One might think this knowledge a new occasion for terror, this time of the supernatural. But the dominant emotion it arouses in me is a relief so strong that it is almost terrible in quite a different way.

I do not, after all, find myself doomed, hopelessly succumbing to the tertiary stage of syphilis. I can hope to avoid that stage entirely, as do most victims of the disease. Whatever bizarre powers may have intruded in my life, and whether or not they are of occult derivation, my fate is at least not that.

I FIND I MUST ADD A POSTSCRIPT TO THIS JOURNAL. I visited Charcot again this afternoon, and thanked him for his efforts as I paid his bill. I told him nothing of last night’s events. The doctor, as might be expected, sympathizes with my bruised throat. But Charcot remains unable to regard my nocturnal experiences with Lucy as anything but dreams or delusions. He still doubted that a physical lesion of the brain, caused by disease, was likely to be responsible. In this glorious conclusion I heartily concur.

Charcot’s parting advice to me echoed that of the London specialist: rest, good food, and exercise. Then: “If these fantasies continue to trouble you, Mr. Stoker, my advice is to continue to record them with pen and ink.”

I believe that I shall soon be writing another book.

AUTHOR’ NOTE

Bram Stoker died in London in 1912, of locomotor ataxia, or tertiary syphilis, leading to “exhaustion.”

2007

SERVANT OF DEATH

Jane Lindskold is the author of eighteen novels and over fifty short stories. Although most of her fiction is fantasy, she loves science fiction and is delighted when the opportunity arises to write about space ships, computers, and alien worlds. Visit her at www.janelindskold.com.

Fred Saberhagen has been writing science fiction and fantasy for somewhat more than forty years. Besides the Berserker® series he is known for his Swords and Lost Swords series, and also his Dracula series. His most recent publication is Ardneh’s Sword, connecting the Swords series and Empire of the East. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, Joan Spicci.

“This base is under attack! This base is under attack!”

The hollow, booming voice from the loudspeakers jarred Vivian Travers to her feet and started her moving across her private laboratory to where her customized battle armor hung in its rack. Her hands were in contact with the cool metal almost before her conscious mind had fully registered what the voice was saying.

There had of course been practice alerts during the several centuries since this research base, on the large moon of the planet Lake, had become her regular residence—but far too few such drills, in her judgement.

With the skill of long practice Vivian had already opened the front of the armor, stepped inside, and leaned back, pressing against key contact points. Leads automatically inserted themselves at various points, cutting through clothing where necessary. The sensation was uncomfortable, but Vivian ignored it, reaching for her carbine even as the front of the armor closed and latched. This is not a drill! Berserkers sighted approaching this base. All hands to battle stations. Repeat!

This is not a drill.

“And why shouldn’t they be approaching,” Vivian muttered inside her helmet, closing the door of her private lab behind her, locking it out of habit. “When the defenses have been allowed to go to hell?

Damned politicians!” But as she did not transmit, there was no reply. She hurried down the corridor, feeling rather than hearing as hatches and bulkheads sealed behind and beneath her throughout the base. Lake Moon Research Base tunneled deep into the rock of its name-sake moon. Its overall design was a good one. Vivian knew. She had created it herself over a hundred years before.

Vivian’s battle station was in the main weapons bay, where she was assigned to damage control and back-up gunnery. If berserkers were attacking, both would likely be needed—if anyone survived to need anything at all.

The sprawling base housed not quite four hundred people, mostly researchers and their immediate families. The bulk of the moon around them was naturally devoid of any native life, and so were the planets, moons, comets, and asteroids that made up the Pinball System, in which Lake was the fifth planet from the sun. Even the “lakes” for which the fifth planet was named were devoid of life, mere pools of stagnate acid, which were slowly corroding the minerals upon which they rested. Moving past other suited, hurrying human figures through the cavernous main weapons bay, Vivian began to run a check on one of the gun batteries.

“Yes,” she muttered to herself again. “Why should they not have decided to attack?”

The berserkers were programmed to exterminate life in all its forms, wherever and whenever they could come to grips with it. Created by a race that the Earth-descended version of Galactic humanity had dubbed the Builders, the berserkers had been forged as the ultimate weapon in the Builders’ war against the Red Race. Some flaw in their programing had led to the berserkers annihilating not only the Red Race but the Builders as well. After many thousands of years, if one was inclined to include microscopic creatures in the tally, the berserkers had expunged from the Galaxy uncountable billions of what they called life-units. But their quest for the perfect order of death was far from ended. Rebuilding, reconstructing, redesigning themselves as the years passed, the berserkers came in a variety of forms, ranging from bipedal robots to immobile data-processing boxes, from machines the size of a small dog to the pair of hulking dreadnoughts that now, according to the latest announcement from the loudspeakers, were bearing down upon Lake Moon.

As she hurried to her battle station, Vivian had tuned her helmet speakers to bring her command chatter. Now she heard General Gosnick, the base commander, saying calmly, “Launch individual fighters. What we think are the appropriate enemy schematics are being beamed to your control panels. This pair look like older models, and they’re pretty badly beaten up. We may be able to disable them before they can close to effective striking range of the base.”

“Understood.” That would be the voice of the relatively junior officer in tactical command of the squadron just now launching.

In mental communication with her own armor, Vivian called up on her visor an image of what the base’s sensors were picking up. The information appeared both as a direct visual image and as a stream of data overlaying the visual. She was studying it when General Gosnick’s voice came over her private channel.

“Vivian, do you concur with my analysis of the situation?”

“I do.” With a thought, she zoomed in for a tighter inspection of the hull of the marginally closer of the two approaching behemoths. “Definitely old damage. Judging from the angle of the scatter pattern, I’m wondering if it may possibly be even older than berserker contact with Earth-descended humans.”

It was an eerie thought, that these two hulks, survivors of some ancient battle, might have been struggling through the Galaxy in normal space for millennia, perhaps trying to free themselves from some entangling nebula of gas or dust.

“However that may be, our fighters should be able to take them out. And maybe after this we can get some serious updating of our defenses.”

“Maybe.” The general did not sound too optimistic. For a long time, political complications had blocked progress in that direction.

Vivian went on: “I’m going to transmit a series of suggested targets . . . with your permission.”

She remembered to add the last, although General Gosnick did not tend to be a stickler for command hierarchy as some of his predecessors had been. The Templars often rotated injured officers to Lake Moon, where they could continue to make useful contributions while recuperating. General Gosnick had lost both legs, and his metabolism was proving resistant to accepting bio-linked prosthetics. His role on Lake Moon rotated on a regular basis between that of administrator and test subject. He was accustomed to taking suggestions, even direct orders, from Vivian Travers, who, by reason of both her specialized skills and seniority, occupied a unique position in the base community. Damaged as they were, the berserkers proved to be not totally ineffective as opponents, though they never managed to attack the base directly. When the battle was over, the enemy reduced to drifting chunks of relatively harmless hardware, interspersed with glowing incandescent clouds, several of the fighters needed to be towed back to base. Three pilots were going to be very glad that the hospital was not merely on the cutting edge of medical technology—it was where that edge was honed. On standing down from her battle station, Vivian went to the hangar bay and put in several hours consulting with the workers and robots repairing the damaged fighters. Since working on the fighters was easier in minimal gee, and since low-gee was easier to adapt to in her suit, she left it on. Cobalt blue, with a surface texture that resembled lacquer, her battle armor stood out among the more utilitarian equipment worn by those around her. Vivian didn’t miss the occasional envious gaze or covetous sigh as she extruded various auxiliary limbs as needed.

Make your own, she thought cheerfully. I did.

Consulting with the crew chief in charge of repairs on the fighters, Vivian took note of a set of peculiar small piercings on the hull of one of the small craft. Four little holes, a couple of centimeters apart, in one short row, and another similar row of four about two meters away. The crew chief speculated that the piercings had been caused by some sort of mine, one that threw shrapnel, but that the shrapnel had not been able to do sufficient damage.

General Gosnick glided over to join them. He was not wearing his prosthetics, which would have been a distraction, but was riding in a state-of-the art chair that doubled as body armor if needed. Its lower profile gave him an advantage when viewing the fighter’s undercarriage.

“Odd that shrapnel would have hit in such neat lines.”

“Maybe,” a new speaker said, coming up to join them, “what made those marks was an automated mine rather than shrapnel. The mine might have tried to anchor, but failed and dropped off. We’d never have noticed one more explosion among all the rest.”

The new arrival went by the name Brother Angel. He belonged to a militant subcult of the Templars. There he had served with such distinction that the envious joked that if he wore all his medals, he could dispense with any other form of armor. Although synthetic skin had been grafted on, Brother Angel still showed the ravages of the complex surgeries that had been done to save his sight and hearing. Pious, devoted, and apparently as focused on the destruction of the berserkers as they were on the destruction of all Life, he had been repeatedly frustrated in his desire to return to active duty by sporadic irregularities that cropped up in the functioning of his new sensory apparatus.

Doubtless, Vivian thought sourly, Brother Angel is thrilled to have the action come to him.

“That’s an interesting suggestion, Brother Angel,” General Gosnick said. “I’d be interested in seeing the specs for such a mine. This might not be the only wave in this attack.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Brother Angel said.

Vivian excused herself. She headed back to her quarters, still wearing her armor, although she’d opened the face plate on the helm. She might first have dropped her armor off at the lab, but at the moment the shortest path to a hot shower and a meal took priority.

She strolled through “her” hub, waving at a few neighbors who were gathered in the garden area of the central residential plaza, sharing drinks and doubtless speculating about the berserker attack. A bit of excitement for a change, and no serious harm done—that seemed to be the flavor of the remarks she caught. She waved and promised to join them when she’d had a chance to clean up. Vivian’s quarters were grouped along their own corridor off one of the residential hubs. Most of the residential suites were arranged in about the same way, as it facilitated sealing off an area in case of mechanical failure or contagious illness. It also guaranteed that the residents would have a certain amount of privacy, a valuable commodity in an enclosed and isolated social system. Thinking ahead to the pleasures of warm water followed by whiskey and light conversation, Vivian almost bumped into the service robot that was coming around one of the blind bends in what amounted to her private hallway. The serbot was shorter than she was—shorter than most humans—perhaps a meter and a third where its upper portion rose like the head and chest of a centaur above the multilimbed barrel that scuttled along on a variety of adaptable appendages.

“Excuse m—,” Vivian began automatically, then stopped herself. First, it was ridiculous to apologize to a service robot, any more than to a table or a chair. Second, there was no way a properly functioning robot should have come that close to hitting her. Buffers were preprogramed, and the corridor was plenty wide enough that, even allowing for the relative bulk of her battle armor, the serbot should have had plenty of clearance.

She was about to demand that the serbot submit to inspection when she realized that what now blocked her return to the hub only superficially resembled a serbot—or rather, it would resemble a serbot to anyone who did not look at it with a critical and experienced eye. To Vivian, who was both critical and experienced, the differences were glaring.

Sheer, deadly terror hit her so hard that had she not been encased in her battle armor, it was likely her legs would have buckled. She broke into a sweat and backed against the corridor wall, trembling with fear.

When she could force herself to think clearly, all the evidence needed was there in plain sight. Joints and support struts were too flexible, too solid. The central chassis was armored, although the armor was nearly concealed by the outer carapace. The optic lenses were of a model capable of seeing into the infrared and ultraviolet. The manipulative digits were too numerous and included a tentacle-like appendage that extruded from the base of the thing’s wrist. Finally, no serbot had ever been armed, but this one had raised one limb, revealing a glowing fingertip that had precisely the look of the muzzle of a charged energy carbine.

The mysterious piercings on one of the fighters’ hulls had been just about the right size to have been made by the claws that ended four of the ostensible serbot’s limbs.

Vivian realized in horror that the two battered dreadnaughts, the feint at a full-scale attack on the base, had all been to accomplish this . . .

Standing before her, holding a weapon on her, was a berserker unit, undoubtedly an assassin model. It had somehow hitchhiked in on that fighter, possibly for the sole purpose of killing her, the genius inventor who kept piling up new weapons for the human side. Why, then, wasn’t it getting on with the job?

Vivian had enough control of herself now that she could scream for help. Surely it was her duty to yell, alert the base. But she remembered her neighbors, unarmored, unarmed but for the refreshments in their hands, and knew that calling them would be a summons to Death. There must be another way . . . Before she could think of one, the berserker spoke. “You are life-unit Vivian Travers.”

Its voice was not, as was often the case with the death machines, a hodgepodge of human utterances spliced together to create a discordant and frightening sound. This berserker spoke in a pleasant and even melodious voice, possibly adapted from that of one of the human traitors—the goodlife—who for reasons as varied as human perversity joined sides with the killer machines.

“I am,” she agreed.

“You are the life-unit who created Lancelot.”

Vivian blinked. Lancelot was the code name for what had been—depending on her mood and how she chose to look at it—either her greatest success or her greatest failure. Some had termed Lancelot a type of battle armor. Others, focusing on its capacity for interstellar flight, had termed it a fighter craft. Vivian had thought of Lancelot as a miracle, the means of transforming a soldier into a perfect knight. However, Lancelot had proven to be Siege Perilous, as well as armor and mount, and had rejected most of those who donned it. Only one had lived up to the promise and he . . .[*]

Vivian shook her head, putting memory aside. It was surprisingly easy to do so. The glowing fingertip, along with the promise of claws sharp enough to rend the hull of a space fighter, were wonderful at concentrating the attention.

“I did create Lancelot.”

“You are the greatest artificer of all humanity, but alas here you are isolated on this small rock, effectively deprived of honor, of all the great rewards you might justly have expected from your fellow humans. Am I not correct?”

Vivian was confused. “I have not ‘been deprived.’ I chose to come here. This base is a secret. Therefore, so is my work.”

The berserker was unfazed. “I have come to offer you an opportunity to continue your career as a servant of death.”

“Servant of death? I am no goodlife! I serve no berserker.”

Somehow the sweat inside her armor seemed to have turned cold. The life support continued to wick moisture away efficiently.

“But you have already served us,” it told her gently.

“I . . . what?”

“You are the greatest artificer of all humanity,” the berserker intoned with what Vivian could have sworn was a note of reverence in its voice. “Your weapons have prolonged the war considerably, led many to fight berserkers when otherwise they might have fled. Your armor has shielded so that ships and warriors thought they could join battle against us and live. But for your actions, much life would have been destroyed, but also because of you, much life—and that often of those who are bravest and finest among your kind—has been taken. Therefore, we already classify you with us—a servant of death.”

“You are insane.”

“No,” the berserker denied with perfect calm. “I can give proofs, show where the death toll was much higher because your creations led to battle being joined.”

While it addressed her, the berserker had slowly reconfigured itself so that it was no longer oriented after the fashion of the squat centaurian serbot but instead stood nearly as tall as she, although its lower body rested on four limbs rather than her two. Two other limbs showed the stubby ends of what appeared to be carbine barrels, both aimed squarely upon her.

Between them a central panel glowed, becoming a screen across which marched symbols of logic and mathematics.

“The Battle of Pelam Deeps,” the berserker said, “where your improved form of the hydrogen lamp was used for ship power. We were halted there, but at the cost of . . .”

“Stop!” Vivian said imperiously. “I am not interested in your rationalizations. You said you came to offer me an opportunity. What I assume you are offering—when shorn of all the psychological claptrap—is an opportunity to turn goodlife or die.”

The berserker did not disagree. “I offer the creator of Lancelot an even greater challenge.”

It was time, and long past time, for Vivian to make an all-out effort to warn the base of the killer among them. Even with whatever protection her armor might afford, it was far from certain that she would succeed in such an effort. And Vivian had already prolonged this conversation enough to open herself to charges of goodlife activity.

Even so, she heard her own voice ask, “And what is that task?”

“To create an android indistinguishable from a human, one that can bear within it a berserker mind.”

“Ahh.” Vivian felt thunderstruck, almost more astonished than when she had realized a berserker had trapped her right outside the door of her own home. One mysterious limitation under which the berserkers labored was that they had never managed to create an android that could pass as an human, or even a convincing animal. As far as any human knew, they had never even come close. Talk about a challenge . . .

“Your new laboratory already awaits you. I promise you, it so far exceeds the facility you have here as your own genius surpasses the minds of the life-units who deny you your just recognition.”

Despite herself, Vivian Travers felt a thrill the like of which she had not felt for many decades, certainly since the days when she had created Lancelot. What the enemy offered would truly be a challenge worthy of her skills—and think what she would learn about the berserkers themselves! In order for Vivian to bridge the gap between whatever device she might create and the berserkers’ mechanical natures, they would need to open themselves to her. She would learn their most intimate secrets, acquire the knowledge human generals had wished for since humanity’s first encounter with the killer machines.

“Create an android berserker,” she murmured.

“That is what I have said. I am equipped with devices to enable me to read with some degree of accuracy the level of a human’s emotional response. I can tell you are interested in this challenge.”

A hot swell of anger rose in Vivian’s heart at the thought of how her “interest,” her curiosity, her intellect could be turned against her. Perhaps the berserker sensed the change in her emotions, but it moved too late. Berserkers were swifter than humans by as much as machines could out-speed living fingers and organic calculation. But Vivian’s battle armor was customized to respond to her slightest whim. She was sure she had a chance.

The berserker had not finished speaking. “Your answer will be required in three da—”

Her helm dropped into place faster than she could see it move, and from the center of her breastplate erupted a close-range shotgun-blast of force that would have torn to shreds almost any material object within a couple of body-lengths of where she stood.

The shot of energy was sufficient to rip the berserker in two. Metal ran like water. Slag dripped onto the corridor floor.

The berserker’s carbines fired in reaction—but inaccurately. They cut great gouges from the living rock of the corridor walls. The flying fragments bounced off Vivian’s armor, not even chipping the cobalt blue finish.

Screaming in rage, Vivian grabbed the berserker’s upper torso in both gloved hands. Now she could call upon another component of her armor: using its computer-brain to sink her awareness into the enemy’s optelectronic system, searching for the self-destruct that was nearly always there. She located it and began fusing the paths that would carry the berserker’s command to destruct, reaching backward through the machine’s equivalent of a neural network, seeking to intercept the signal before it could reach the key point.

She did not find such a signal. What she found was a whispered message that flowed into her awareness as static and seduction. It reinforced the last few words her ears had heard.

“You are the one who created Lancelot. Our offer is good for three of your standard days. If at the end, you do not come forth to join us, we will continue on our mission to bring perfect order to the universe, beginning with this base.”

Vivian felt the berserker’s memory begin to wipe. This was no self-destruct command that she could block, but an integral part of this particular program loop.

Still convulsed with fury, Vivian squeezed, smashing the berserker’s limbs beneath her armored, cold-fusion powered gauntlets, magnifying her physical strength many times. The enemy machine dangled limply, its various appendages trailing to scrape the chipped and ravaged stone. Acids and molten metal flowed over her armor, but both it and the woman it protected remained immune, while the stone floor beneath was scoured in deep, smooth rivulets.

That was how her neighbors found Vivian when, alerted by the sound of weapons firing, they left their cocktails and ran with more good will than good sense to her assistance. A team of first-response commandos in full battle armor arrived less than two minutes later. Brother Angel was in the lead. Some small part of Vivian’s mind thought this odd. He’d been briefing General Gosnick, hadn’t he? He didn’t even live on this hub.

But she felt relieved that someone of his rank and reputation was there to assume responsibility for the mess.

“It’s over,” she said, when she had regained some composure and convinced everyone she was unhurt.

“Can someone get this hulk to my lab? I’ll be down to dissect it as soon as I’ve had a shower.”

As she had known he would, Brother Angel stepped forward to take charge.

“A berserker?” he said. “Here?”

“I think the marks were made by your ‘mine,’ Brother,” Vivian said. “It seems we both were wrong about what left the marks on the fighter. Would you handle the initial report to General Gosnick? I need a drink.”

Of course, even for someone of her rank and reputation, that was not the end of it, but Vivian would only allow her debriefing on the incident to continue while her hands were busy making sure the berserker assassin held no further surprises.

A thorough inspection of the whole base was still in progress. So far there was no evidence that any other berserkers had slipped through the defenses.

The general was pondering what the purpose of the single confirmed intruder might have been.

“It would seem, then, to have been meant for you specifically,” General Gosnick said, as the debriefing was concluded. “How fortunate that you were still armored.”

“Very,” Vivian agreed.

The General departed, trailed by his entourage. Vivian continued working, aware that Brother Angel had remained.

When he and Vivian were alone, Brother Angel asked, “How long did it stand confronting you?”

Vivian had not wished to lie directly, but she didn’t feel she needed to lay herself open to charges of goodlife activity by answering accurately. Hadn’t her destruction of the berserker been proof enough of her loyalty?

“As I said during the debriefing, I was so terrified that I lost all sense of time.”

Brother Angel was the last person Vivian would have expected to ask the next question. “Why didn’t you accept its offer?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think perhaps you do,” Brother Angel insisted. “I was in the outer corridor when the berserker confronted you. I had seen you pass through the garden still wearing your battle armor. I was heading down to the labs and was going to offer to take your armor back with me. I know you keep another set in your quarters. You know how my senses are fragmented—I eavesdrop unwittingly on what is going on next door, while I may be blind and deaf to what is right in front of me.”

“I know.”

Brother Angel went on. “At first I wondered with whom you could be talking. Then when I heard what the berserker was saying to you, I understood. You did not refuse, and, as the berserker said, you sounded interested.”

“Why then did you not alert the base?” Vivian asked.

Brother Angel smiled thinly. “I might ask why you did not. It would seem that we were both shocked into temporary silence. Under a considerable strain. Under the circumstances, I believe that we can both be pardoned.”

He paused to draw a breath. “You in particular could be forgiven, I believe, even if you were to seriously consider accepting the berserker’s proposal.”

It took Vivian a little while to find an answer. “How do you see that?”

“You could perform a service of great value by accepting the berserkers’s offer. They would need to let you study their workings as no one has ever been able to before.” Brother Angel gestured toward the hulk on the lab table. “Dissecting that may contribute a little to our knowledge of this particular model’s electronic and mechanical workings, but it will tell us nothing about their brains. You yourself showed us how that was wiped by the berserker itself when it realized your attack would disable it. If you were to work closely with the berserkers, you would learn things about their brains, their programming, that could be of great value.”

Vivian stood unmoving. Three days, said a traitorous voice in her mind. They gave you three days. She wondered if Brother Angel was aware of that detail. And you would be saving the base, perhaps learning what Life needs to defeat Death’s servants once and for all.

“Become goodlife,” she said aloud. “That’s what you’re telling me, that I should become goodlife.”

Brother Angel sharply drew in his breath. “May the Creator forbid it! I am suggesting that as a double agent, working for humanity, you would have a perfect opportunity to learn those things the berserkers have hidden from us. For you to be able to find what flaw it is in their programming that keeps them from successfully counterfeiting humans, they would need to open not only their bodies but their minds to you.”

“And having learned such secrets as they chose to reveal,” Vivian said, her tone mocking, “how am I supposed to make any use of it when I would be the berserkers’ prisoner?”

“You are the one who created Lancelot,” Brother Angel said. “I am sure you would find a way, even if it took you decades to do so. I am sure you would find a way.”

He turned then and walked from the lab in a swirl of his brown monk’s robes. The door slid shut behind him with a marked thump. For a moment, Vivian contemplated calling General Gosnick and reporting what Brother Angel had said to her. Then she shrugged.

If she did that, she would need to explain why she had not confessed having a relatively long conversation with the death machine. Of course it was quite possible that Brother Angel had already reported her, or was even now about to do so. Or . . .

Lost in speculation, Vivian finished dissecting the serbot berserker, but even as her hands moved and her mouth dictated details to be recorded, her mind could not let go of what Brother Angel had said. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she adopted the brother’s wild suggestion. Conservative General Gosnick would be as likely to grant permission as he would to turn into a butterfly, and more than three days were bound to pass before any new orders could arrive from anywhere outside the Lake system. She would need to keep her decision to play double-agent to herself, but she could find a way to counterfeit her death. There were those damaged fighters . . . She often test-piloted something she had repaired. More or less regular practice during most of her long life had made her as good a pilot as most who followed the profession.

She could fly a fighter out toward the asteroid belt between Lake and the sixth planet. The berserkers must be out there somewhere, monitoring communications. She could send some tight-beam signal on ahead, let them know she was coming. She could go out far enough that one of the minor bodies would occlude the base’s clear view of her. Observers at Lake Moon would see an explosion, that’s all. Once she had faked her death and made some deal that would assure the base’s safety, she could enter into that fascinating research project. The berserkers should be aware that creative humans could not be tortured into creating. Lake Moon’s few hundred life-units, preserved only for as long as the berserkers needed Vivian, would not be too much for them to barter to assure her faithful service. Indeed, those lives on Lake Moon could be used as hostages against her good behavior. Couldn’t they? Yes. She could make it work.

Then, when she had the answer as to why berserkers could not counterfeit humans, well, by then she surely would have gained insight as to how humanity might permanently defeat the berserkers. As Brother Angel had said, perhaps she could even find a way to escape, even if that escape was decades in the arranging.

Another supreme challenge.

“Decades,” the voice in her mind said, “during which more humans would die because you were not here on Lake Moon designing weapons and armor and spacecraft for them.”

“Perhaps that would be best,” Vivian retorted. “The berserkers may be right in one thing. Perhaps more Life has died trying not to be sterilized than would have died if we had just rolled over and submitted at the start. How many colonies have been founded, only to be discovered by the berserkers and destroyed? How many babies born to become soldiers? In working to preserve, as I thought, Life, perhaps I have indeed been a servant of death.”

Variations on this internal debate continued as Vivian’s three days of grace became two, became one. Her friends and neighbors did not trouble her. Her near brush with the berserker was reason enough for silence and a need for thought. If Brother Angel smiled a trace knowingly when their paths met in the refectory or one of the public gardens, Vivian ignored him.

On her last day of grace, Vivian had an epiphany of sorts. She was in a private garden, alone but for Brother Angel, who had taken to being inconveniently present.

“I wonder,” Vivian said, “if the Builders felt as I do now?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You heard the berserker call me a servant of death although all along I thought I was serving the purpose of life. What if the Builders felt the same way? We know little of why the Builders went to war with the Red Race, but whatever the reason, they clearly felt that the Red Race was not just something they needed to conquer, but something they needed to destroy. Why else than because the Builders felt that the Red Race was a threat to life—if not Life as we think of it, then at least of life as they valued and knew it.”

“So they created the ultimate killing machines,” Brother Angel said, “to serve Life.”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “And then perhaps they realized that they had gone too far, that they had become what they themselves feared. Most humans view the destruction of the Builders by the berserkers as a great irony—a sword turning in the warrior’s hand. What if it wasn’t that at all? What if the Builders themselves removed the restraining codes, turned their own weapons upon themselves as penance for what they had done?”

Brother Angel seemed torn between horror and fascination. “It seems,” he murmured finally, “it seems, in a way, quite fitting.”

“I thought that you would find it so.”

“Eh?” He turned his wandering gaze more nearly in her direction.

“Brother Angel, I find myself unable to believe that the berserkers’ emissary was able to accomplish its mission here—locating this secret base, acquiring access codes, even learning precisely what model of serbot is common on Lake Moon—without considerable help from some source already on the base.”

Brother Angel watched and waited, not moving a muscle.

Vivian went on. “The more I considered the matter, the more likely it seemed to me that this source was you.”

Brother Angel protested. “More than a third of Lake Moon’s inhabitants would know those things. The access codes would be the only difficulty, and even those could be gotten with little effort.”

“But you covered for me, Brother Angel. Would you have done so just to turn me double agent? I think not. I don’t think your wandering eyes and ears were what enabled you to eavesdrop. I think you were there all along, tracking your mechanical ally, making sure no one interfered before it had the opportunity to make its proposal.”

“You know my war record,” Brother Angel protested.

“Remember,” Vivian said. “I know your history. I know how many of your closest friends were killed in the battle where you yourself were so gravely wounded. I wonder how much of your mind’s refusal to interface with the prosthetic enhancements we have built for you is related to your guilt that you survived when so many others died. I think your sympathies changed then. Why continue to fight Death, when Death is inevitable?”

Vivian turned toward a viewport that showed the complex dance of the immediate solar system. Somewhere out there, undetected yet, but certainly there, the berserkers must be approaching.

“I think that when the berserker hinted that I was dissatisfied with my place here at Lake Moon, with what I have achieved, it was speaking your thoughts, your unhappiness. I chose to come to this isolated place, to work in secret. You must feel yourself exiled by your injuries. Even so, you and I have much in common in the difficult choices we must make.”

“So you are not planning to make accusations against me? You intend to accept the berserker’s offer?”

Brother Angel said eagerly.

“Yes. And I will do more than that. I will give you and your masters Lancelot.”

Vivian, followed closely by Brother Angel, went to her lab. She entered and locked the door snugly behind them.

The lab could be sealed, for her experiments were not to be lightly interrupted, and so she knew their privacy was secure.

Vivian stripped to the skin.

The attention of her visitor seemed to remain focused elsewhere.

In a long life, she had reshaped her physical appearance so often that she no longer remembered what she had looked like at birth. Her hair had been every, and sometimes all, the colors of the rainbow. Her skin and eye colors had run through all those known to humanity, and some only imagined. She had been both full-figured and elfin slim. She had even managed find means to create the illusion of height or of relative shortness.

Now she looked at her current form and bid it fond farewell. Donning a long-sleeved coverall, Vivian went to a safe dug into one of the lab’s inner walls. Only she and the locking mechanism knew the combination, and the lock seemed almost surprised to be asked to open after so many years of holding closed.

From the safe, Vivian drew the only remaining copy of her greatest failure—her greatest success—the complex array of force fields and transdimensional interlays that was called Lancelot. In the safe there was also a rack upon which Lancelot could be assembled and calibrated. Vivian set this up, her fingers remembering the complex joins she thought she might have forgotten. Then she set Lancelot upon it and touched her index finger to an activation pad. Something like light, although it extended into ranges where the human eye could not see, flowed through the fields.

Activated, Lancelot did not in the least resemble familiar battle armor. It did not resemble the interstellar fighter she had proposed to the Templars. There had been some problem about that, she recalled, problems that had faded when she had demonstrated what Lancelot could do. New problems had arisen though, problems that had finally led to the project’s termination and the destruction of all copies of the device but this one.

Vivian knew that she could wear Lancelot for a time before the stress grew too great for her to bear. Within that time she should have achieved her goal. The berserkers were out there, and Lancelot would carry her to them.

“Brother Angel,” she said, “put one of the spare suits of battle armor on.”

“Why?”

“You must come with me. You overheard what the berserker said to me aloud, but did you hear its final orders?”

Brother Angel’s expression showed uncertainty, and Vivian pressed her advantage.

“It told me that you were to come with me. They have need of you, of the complex information about the Templar organization you have gathered.”

“It is time for me to give my report,” Brother Angel said, moving toward the locker where the armor was stowed with almost indecent haste.

“That must be so,” Vivian said.

Swiftly, she donned the various pieces of Lancelot’s insubstantial armor. As each piece interfaced with her body, her awareness swelled. Lancelot had the capacity to maintain her body far more efficiently than did any space suit or set of battle armor. She ceased to breathe and did not notice. A slight pressure from her bladder vanished. A sensation of hunger was satisfied. A headache she had not known plagued her was treated.

As the demands of her physical body were quieted, Vivian’s thinking became clearer, every iota of her mental capacity available to her now. She needed this, for even as Lancelot dealt with her physical needs, it expanded her capacity to sense what was around her. She became aware of the microbes dancing in the air, breeding in the damp of her discarded clothing. She could feel the throb of the power systems that fed the needs of Lake Moon Base. If she tried, she could detect individuals. Brother Angel’s heart rate was up, but his adrenal levels marked his excitement. In a physical therapy lab, General Gosnick paused in the midst of exercises meant to adjust his nervous system to his new legs. A report had come from the base command center. He listened, and his heart rate spiked, his breathing came fast.

Vivian knew it was time for her to go.

Her lab possessed its own airlock, another of those many conveniences meant to facilitate her work. She opened it with a thought, doing her best to shut down distractions generated by the increasing awareness of her Lancelot-stimulated senses. This level of stimulation had driven many a talented pilot into insanity. She could handle it . . . for now.

Vivian moved toward the airlock, her gait smooth and her feet no longer touching the floor. Had there been any present to see, they would not have seen a woman in the most powerful weapons system ever created, but a creature strange and fey, an angel or a winged titan, robed in light and power.

“Come with me, Brother Angel,” she said. “Lancelot can easily carry us both.”

When he came to her, Vivian commanded Lancelot to cast a shield over Brother Angel, so that his presence would be undetectable. She reached out with enhanced senses and set a delay on flight decks and weaponry. Pursuit too soon would only endanger the pursuers to no good end, and she did not care to be distracted by the need to prevent injury from the base’s guns. As they were passing through the airlock, Vivian stopped fighting the flood of information Lancelot was feeding her. She let the many individual lives residing in the base flood through her. She gloried in their complexity and diversity. Rather than overwhelming her, the tsunami of Life gave her strength, and Vivian moved into the coldness of the airless void, strengthened and firmer in her purpose. Servant of death? Perhaps.

She no longer needed any communications channel to know what was flowing through the electronic network within Lake Moon Base.

The general as saying to an aide, “. . . but we have bigger problems than one scientist gone absent without leave. Long range sensors detect berserker activity two planets out and now approaching rapidly. They must have been shielding themselves behind the planets. Comet Tremaine has been messing up our data field in that direction for months. They took advantage of it.”

This is not a drill! Berserkers sighted approaching this base. All hands to battle stations. Repeat!

This is not a drill.

Vivian was aware of communications on the base as she might have been aware of a fly settling on her arm while she was engrossed with some bit of technical analysis. She registered it, calculated what it would mean to her current course of action, and increased her speed. She wanted to reach the berserkers before the first wave of fighters could be scrambled.

Vivian sped on through space, Lancelot carrying her and her passenger at speeds so swift that light bent around her, and she felt the illusion of wind in her hair.

Three berserkers were approaching. They had reached the regions between the sixth planet and the asteroid belt. Two were the equivalent of small, fast fighters. The third was a larger model, a transport capable of interstellar flight, also capable of causing a considerable amount of destruction. Though Lancelot, Vivian reached out and examined the approaching ships. Doubtless the transport contained some chamber meant to carry her if she agreed to accept the berserker’s tempting offer. The transport, then, was where she should direct her attentions. The fighters were between her and it, moving at astonishing speeds.

Wrapped within Lancelot, spreading her wings on the stellar winds, Vivian thought she knew something of the pleasure the berserkers must take in the freedom non-life gave them. Then she remembered that non-life did not feel pleasure and thought she understood a little better why the efforts to craft android berserkers had failed again and again.

I could do it, she thought. I could succeed as no one else has managed to succeed. First, though, the transport. That is the way out-system.

Lancelot brought her in. She traded steps with the hail of asteroids that wove a swiftly moving dance through this part of the Pinball System. Vivian knew she was showing off, but certainly there was no better time to do so.

Neither the fighters nor the transport had chosen to dance with the asteroids, instead rising and going above the band in which competing stronger and weaker gravity fields had oriented the asteroids. The berserkers slowed as they became aware of Vivian and Lancelot, and she felt the vibrating force as countless energy weapons targeted her.

There was interest, but she did not sense the surge that would precede a release of death dealing energy. She felt herself being scanned and was flattered when defensive screens snapped into place on all three vessels.

The transport said, “You have come, and you have brought Lancelot.”

“I come only on conditions,” Vivian replied. “Not one living thing, from the tiniest microbe to the most complex conglomeration of living cells—in short, nothing at all is to be slain. Not now, and not for as long as I am in the service of the berserkers.”

“We were prepared,” the transport replied, “for some such condition. I am authorized to make such an agreement. I am not authorized to extend that protection elsewhere.”

“I understand. If you know my history, this base has been my home for over a century now. Those lifeforms I personally value are there.”

“You do realize,” the berserker said, “that your fullest cooperation will be needed for us to override our programing and preserve these life-units.”

“I do indeed. They are hostages against my acting against your interests.”

Communication with the transport required only the smallest fragment of Vivian’s Lancelot-augmented attention.

The time had come to act, for Lancelot had carried Vivian here much more swiftly than any fighter could fly. Vivian snaked her awareness along the channel the berserker transport was using to address her. She felt the whisper of its command to the two fighters. They were to defend herself and the transport, but they were not to attack unless the situation changed.

Vivian smiled a thin smile, and reached out through Lancelot. She let her awareness become something fluid and deadly, a static that seeped like poison into the berserker transport’s electronic veins. This poison was created to slow processing, to numb awareness, to give her merely human self a chance to operate a little faster than berserkers, which moved as swiftly as the will of their complex electronic brains.

She guided the infection so that it flowed along with commands into the fighters, and when she was sure that the poison had taken hold but that the berserkers had not yet detected their impediment, she struck out with a sword shaped from the glowing force fields of Lancelot’s self. Vivian’s first target was the transport, for the berserkers must not be permitted to flee, carrying with them specific information about what had happened here. Her strike was clean and bright, penetrating between the very atoms of the berserker’s structure, the point of her blade taking her foe in its heart. The wound was mortal, and she knew it, and she knew well what the berserker itself would do when it realized the extent of its injury. She pulled herself and Brother Angel clear of it, cartwheeling back, putting distance between herself and the transport, which even now was triggering its self-destruct system. The procedure was slower than it might have been, but still in-humanly fast. Within Lancelot’s field, Vivian felt Brother Angel begin to struggle.

“You said you were going to accept their offer!” Brother Angel protested.

“I lied,” Vivian said. “I’m sure you would agree that lying is a very fitting tactic in time of war. I did not lie about one thing, though.”

Brother Angel pressed his lips together, refusing to answer. Through Lancelot, Vivian felt his reply in the sudden panic that sent bitter chemical signals flowing through his body.

“I’m bringing you to them,” she said. “It’s time for you to give your final report.”

The berserker fighters, only now aware of the crippling static infecting their systems, had not been able to avoid the effects of the transport’s self-destruct as Vivian Lancelot had done. One was caught completely in the transport’s dying blast, taking sufficient damage to trigger its own self-destruct. Lancelot protected Vivian, folding its wings over her to protect her from an explosive force that would have burned her to a crisp with the force of a second sun.

Despite the violence of the dual explosions, the second fighter’s armor saved it from being destroyed. It knew where its most dangerous enemy was, and it came after Vivian. She dove Lancelot into the asteroid belt. Then, she released Lancelot’s shield, flinging Brother Angel at the berserker as a warrior of long ago might have flung a spear.

“You wanted Death,” Vivian cried after the traitor.

“Go to it!”

The fighter diverted slightly to deal with what it perceived first as menace, then as ally, then as useless. Brother Angel evaporated beneath its fire.

Wearied now, Vivian let Lancelot take over. Lancelot’s battle hymns sung through Vivian’s veins as the suit teased the fighter into the chase. They dodged through showers of minute stones that strained the fighter’s shields. They dove in and out of the belt’s plane, and the fighter blasted a path for its much larger bulk to follow. They placed their booted feet on a chunk of super-compacted ore and kicked it at the fighter. The fighter diverted its attention to fire at the impromptu missile, and at that moment Lancelot drew its sword.

The glowing band of force ripped through the berserker fighter’s hull, shredding components, breaking conduits so that fluids flowed and then froze when they met the chill of vacuum. Vivian, hardly Vivian any longer, for Lancelot’s perceptions had overwhelmed her mere organic mind, felt the berserker fighter’s self-destruct sequence trigger. The human fighters were closing now, and she screamed on their communications channels for them to get back, get back. That berserker was going to blow . . .

It did, evaporating a large chunk of the asteroid belt along with its own hull. Vivian knew that in time the belt would heal itself, as even unliving things did if given enough time. She, however, would not be there to see.

Lancelot was her greatest success, her greatest failure. In wearing it for this long, she had driven her body and, even more so, her mind beyond the limits a human could survive. Already she could feel her attention fragmenting, unable to cope with the countless impulses flowing into it. While she could still focus, she reached out and touched a command circuit.

“General Gosnick, this is . . .” She had to pause to remember her name. She was aware of so many things now, and none of them seemed to have priority. “Vivian Travers. The berserkers have been defeated. This base is, for now, secure. However, it is likely that the berserkers will eventually try again to destroy it. Even without me, there is much here to tempt them.”

“Without you?” the general sounded appalled. “Vivian, if you are injured we can sent a ship for you. Don’t give up!”

“I am already gone,” Vivian said. “Nor do I dare come back onto the base. Even with Lancelot’s protection, I am so pierced with radiation that I would mean death to those at the base as surely—and not nearly as swiftly—as any berserker. I have instructed Lancelot to take me to Lake, submerge us both in one of the acid pools, and then deactivate. That will end the danger.”

“Vivian . . . You saved us. I refuse to give up.”

She heard General Gosnick ordering the fighters to divert to intercept her, felt commands being passed through Lake Moon to have decontamination chambers readied, medical teams standing by. Vivian ordered Lancelot to hurry. Perhaps it was selfish of her, but she had no desire to live with her mind splintered, even if some miracle could restore her body intact. They dove through the burning halo of Lake’s thin atmosphere, heading toward one of the largest and most corrosive of the acid lakes.

“Vivian! I order you to wait for rescue,” General Gosnick bellowed.

“There is no rescue for me,” Vivian replied as she slipped beneath the acid lake’s surface, holding forth Lancelot’s sword in final salute. “If you would do me a kindness, remember me, when you do, for what I have always tried to be—a Servant of Life.”

[*] For the tale of Lancelot and the one who could use it to its full capacity, see the novel Berserker Man by Fred Saberhagen.