Three Books of Known Space
Author: Larry Niven
Date: 1996-09-03 04:00:00+00:00
Description: Let three complete books in one take you on a dazzling journey into science fiction's most famous future history: Known Space! World of Ptavvs Kzanol was a thrint from a distant galaxy. He had been trapped on Earth in a time-stasis field for two billion years. Now he was on the loose, and telepath Larry Greenberg knew everything he was thinking. Thrints lived to plunder and enslave lesser planets . . . and the planet Kzanol had in mind was Earth! A Gift from Earth Shrouded in lethal mists, the world named Mount Lookitthat was never meant for humans. Life existed only on one plateau, unreachabl
Publisher: Del Rey

also by Larry Niven

B Y   L A R R Y   N I V E N
P U B L I S H E D   B Y   B A L L A N T I N E   B O O K S :

The Known Space Series:

A GIFT FROM EARTH

THE LONG ARM OF GIL HAMILTON

NEUTRON STAR

PROTECTOR

RINGWORLD

THE RINGWORLD ENGINEERS

TALES OF KNOWN SPACE: The Universe of Larry Niven

WORLD OF PTAVVS

FLATLANDER

Other Titles:

ALL THE MYRIAD WAYS

CONVERGENT SERIES

CRASHLANDER

THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE

A HOLE IN SPACE

THE INTEGRAL TREES

LIMITS

THE SMOKE RING

A WORLD OUT OF TIME

With Steven Barnes:

THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME

With David Gerrold:

THE FLYING SORCERERS

With Jerry Pournelle:

FOOTFALL

LUCIFER’S HAMMER

Copyright

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

A Del Rey® Book Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright© 1966, 1968, 1975, 1990, 1996 by Larry Niven Copyright renewed 1994, 1996 by Larry Niven

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

http://www.randomhouse.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Niven, Larry.
Three books of Known Space / by Larry Niven
p. cm.
Includes the author’s two novels, World of Ptavvs and A gift from earth, and short stories.
ISBN 0-345-40448-3
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3564.I9T48 1996
813'.54—dc20       96-23217CIP

Text design by Fritz Metsch
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: November 1996
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

“Madness Has Its Place” was originally published in 1990 in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and in The Man-Kzin Wars IV (Baen Books) and N-Space (Tor Books). The other stories in this volume were previously published by Ballantine Books in the following collections: A Gift from Earth, Tales of Known Space, and World of Ptavvs.

“The Color of Sunfire” was originally published in 1993 in Bridging the Galaxies by Larry Niven, published by San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Septembre 1993.

CONTENTS

Introduction: My Universe and Welcome Back!

The Coldest Place

Becalmed In Hell

Wait It Out

Eye of an Octopus

How the Heroes Die

The Jigsaw Man

World of Ptavvs

At the Bottom of a Hole

Intent to Deceive

Cloak of Anarchy

The Warriors

Madness Has Its Place

A Gift from Earth

There Is a Tide

Safe at Any Speed

Afterthoughts

Bibliography: The Worlds of Larry Niven

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Bonus short-story:
The Color of Sunfire

Timeline for KNOWN SPACE

Timeline for KNOWN SPACE by Larry Niven

DATE:

1975

ACCOUNT:

The Coldest Place
Becalmed in Hell
Wait It Out
Eye of an Octopus

EVENTS:

Beginnings of organ bank technology. Indian government officials began robbing criminals of their organs for transplants in the 1960s. This practice continues in India, South America, and China. I seem to have predicted the past.

Cetacean civil rights. These have emerged, but I didn’t predict that snail dorters and spotted owls would be accorded the same rights.

Some manned exploration of the solar system. Some serious delays here. The bottleneck seems to be cheap ground-to-orbit transport.

First organ bank laws passed.

DATE:

2000

ACCOUNT:

(2040)
How the Heroes Die
(2099)
The Jigsaw Man

EVENTS:

Colonization of the Belt.

Third Mars expedition.

Belt becomes independent government.

Interstellar ramrobots launched; UN-Belt cooperation.

Colony slowboats launched.

DATE:

2100

ACCOUNT:

(2106)
World of Ptavvs
At the Bottom of a Hole
Intent to Deceive
The Adults (Protector, 1st half)
Death by Ecstasy
The Defenseless Dead
ARM
The Patchwork Girl
The Woman in Del Rey Crater
Cloak of Anarchy
(2135)

EVENTS:

Sea Statue unearthed and revived; first alien on Earth.

Organ bank problem at its worst. Organlegging common. Execution for transplant makes jails obsolete. Freezer Bills passed.

Phssthpok the Pak arrives in Sol system.

Cetaceans in United Nations.

Golden Age on Earth.

Colonies expanding on Jinx, Mt. Lookitthat, We Made It, Wonderland.

DATE:

2300

ACCOUNT:

(2340)
Vandervecken (Protector, 2nd half)
(2360)
The Warriors
Madness Has Its Place

EVENTS:

Home colonized.

Brennan in Sol cometary halo.

War with Pak scout ships.

First flyby of a “cold” neutron star, BVS-1.

First contact with kzinti.

First Man-Kzin War.

Institute of Knowledge on Jinx tailors boosterspice.

Home colony fails.

DATE:

2400

ACCOUNT:

(2410)
A Gift from Earth
(2425)
The Ethics of Madness

EVENTS:

Revolution on Mt. Lookitthat.

Safe ramscoop invented.

We Made It buys hyperdrive shunt from Outsider merchants.

End of First Man-Kzin War.

DATE:

2500

ACCOUNT:

EVENTS:

Manned ramscoop obsolete.

Subsequent Man-Kzin Wars.

Contract with Pierson’s Puppeteers and other aliens, some as parts of Kzinti Empire.

DATE:

2600

ACCOUNT:

(2640)
Neutron Star
A Relic of Empire
At the Core
Flatlander
The Handicapped
Grendel
The Borderland of Sol
Procrustes
Framing story for Crashlander
The Soft Weapon

EVENTS:

Second flyby of BVS-1.

Puppeteer development of Quantum II hyperdrive.

Discovery of galactic core explosion.

Puppeteer exodus and stock market crash in human space.

Contact with Grogs.

Louis Gridley Wu born.

Fertility Laws amended by Birthright Lotteries.

DATE:

2700

ACCOUNT:

EVENTS:

Expansion, consolidation, relative peace.

Thruster drive replaces fusion drives (but not entirely).

DATE:

2800

ACCOUNT:

(2830)
There is a Tide
(2850)
Ringworld
(2870)
The Ringworld Engineers
The Ringworld Throne

EVENTS:

Contact with Trinocs.

Scout flight to Ringworld.

Puppeteer exodus in progress.

Invading fleets to Ringworld.

DATE:

2900
3000
3100

ACCOUNT:

Safe at Any Speed

EVENTS:

Expansion. Known space becomes the Thousand Worlds.

Longevity strongly affects society.

*Lucas Launcelot Garner born 1939.

INTRODUCTION: MY UNIVERSE AND WELCOME BACK!

Thirty-two years ago I started writing. Thirty-one years ago I started selling what I wrote. And thirty-one years ago I started a future history—the history of Known Space.

Known Space now spans a thousand years of future history, with data on conditions up to a billion and a half years in the past. Most of the stories take place either in Human Space (the human-colonized worlds and the space between, a bubble sixty light-years across by Louis Wu’s time) or in Known Space (the much larger bubble of space explored by human-built ships but controlled by other species), but arms of exploration reach 200 light-years up along galactic north and 33,000 light-years to the galactic core.

The series now includes six novels (including the brand-new The Ringworld Throne) plus the stories in Flatlander (Gil the Arm’s tales) and Crashlander (the stories of Beowulf Shaeffer) and the stories you’re holding now, plus eight volumes of stories set during the period of the Man-Kzin Wars and written by other authors. See the updated Timeline for details.

Future histories tend to be chaotic. They grow from a common base, from individual stories with common assumptions, but each story must—to be fair to readers—stand by itself. The future history chronicled in the Known Space series is as chaotic as real history is. Even the styles vary in these stories, because my writing skills have evolved over eleven years of real time.

But this is the book with the crib sheets. These stories, including two novels, are published in chronological order. I’ve scattered supplementary notes between them to explain what is going on between and around the individual novels and stories in a region small on the galactic scale but huge in terms of human experience.

A few general notes are in order here:

1. The tales of Gil the Arm are missing. Gil’s career hits its high point around A.D. 2121, between World of Ptavvs and Protector. His stories appear all together in the collection called Flatlander.

2. I dithered over including certain stories. “The Coldest Place” was obsolete before it reached print. That story and “Eye of an Octopus” show the hand of the amateur. But these stories are part of the fabric of Known Space, so they’re here. And Mercury rotates once per solar orbit—in Known Space but not in the real universe!

3. You may feel that Mars itself is changing as you read through the book. Right you are. “Eye of an Octopus” is set on pre-Mariner Mars. Mariner IV’s photographs of the craters on Mars sparked “How the Heroes Die.” Sometime later, an article in Analog shaped the new view of the planet in “At the Bottom of a Hole.” If the space probes keep redesigning our planets, what can we do but write new stories? Mars continues to change, and I should be keeping up. But the field is seething with recent Mars stories. If the best writers in the field insist on writing my stories for me, what can I offer but gratitude?

4. I was sorely tempted to rewrite some of the older, clumsier stories. But how would I have known where to stop? You would then have been reading updated stories with the facts changed around. I’ve assumed that that isn’t what you’re after. I hope I’m right.

5. The Tales of Known Space cluster around six eras. First there is the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter century.

There is the era of Lucas Garner and Gil “the Arm” Hamilton: A.D. 2106-2130. Interplanetary civilization has loosened its ties with Earth, has taken on a character of its own. Other stellar systems are being explored and settled. The organ bank problem is at its sociological worst on Earth. The existence of nonhuman intelligence has become obtrusively plain; humanity must adjust.

There is an intermediate era centering around A.D. 2340. In Sol system it is a period of peace and prosperity. On colony worlds such as Plateau times are turbulent. At the edge of Sol system a creature that used to be Jack Brennan fights a lone war. The era of peace begins with the subtle interventions of the Brennan-monster (see Protector); it ends in contact with the Kzinti Empire.

The tales of the Man-Kzin Wars have been written mostly by others. It still amazes me that I could get these masters to play in my universe instead of their own. From them I’ve learned more about kzinti family life, intelligent female carnivores, esoteric cosmology, and military maneuverings than I ever guessed was there. Poul Anderson gives us ancient worlds covered in natural plastics and buckyballs (now “fullerenes”). Pournelle and Sterling did aerobraking through a sun, using a stasis field. Benford and Martin expanded the Known Space cosmology beyond this universe. Donald Kingsbury’s cowardly Kzin is beyond this universe. Donald Kingsbury’s cowardly Kzin is scary as hell. A kzinti scout died in India in Kipling’s time, a notch short of bringing the Patriarchy to Earth.

The fourth period, following the Man-Kzin Wars, covers part of the twenty-sixth century A.D. It is a time of easy tourism and interspecies trade in which the human species neither rules nor is ruled. New planets have been settled, some of which were wrested from the Kzinti Empire during the wars.

The fifth period resembles the fourth. Little has changed in two hundred years, at least on the surface. The thruster drive has replaced the less efficient fusion drives, and a new species has joined the community of worlds. But there is one fundamental change: the Teela Brown gene—the “ultimate psychic power”—spreading through humanity. The teelas have been bred for luck.

It always seems that I have more to say about Known Space.

Teela Brown was bred for luck. Or else she’s a fluke of statistics, no more remarkable than any lottery winner. How can you tell? Teela’s luck has some amazing implications, and it took me twenty-five years to find them.

Characters more intelligent than the author are the greatest challenge an author can face, and the Ringworld is crawling with them. They’re called “protectors.” Strangers around the globe keep telling me things I didn’t know about the Ringworld’s structure, and I’ve found a few of my own. I’ve been playing games of anthropology across habitable land three million times the surface area of the Earth.

But a fundamental change in human nature—and the teelas are that—makes life difficult for a writer. The period following Ringworld might be pleasant to live in, but it is short of interesting disasters. Only one story survives from this period—“Safe at Any Speed”—a kind of advertisement. There will be no others.

There is something about future histories, and Known Space in particular, that gets to people. They start worrying about the facts, the mathematics, the chronology. They work out elaborate charts or program their computers for close-approach orbits around point masses. They send me maps of Human, kzinti, and Kdatlyno space; dynamic analyses of the Ringworld; ten-thousand-word plot outlines for the novel that will wrap it all into a bundle; and treatises on the Grog problem. To all of you who have thus entertained me and stroked my ego, thanks.

The chronology in this book is the work of decades on the part of a whole army of people.

Tim Kyger, Spike MacPhee, and Jerry Boyajian got involved in the 1970s. I’ve updated it.

John Hewitt did the research that shaped Chaosium’s tabletop Ringworld game. He did that by bracing me at conventions and demanding that I make decisions: conflicting dates, shapes for tools and weapons, explanations and descriptions. His work “hardened” Known Space. He later helped me find the pages I needed to form a bible for the Man-Kzin Wars authors, and Jim Baen and I have been using it ever since.

The Guide to Larry Niven’s Ringworld, by Kevin Stein, is a guide to all of Known Space. I’ve found it more accurate than my fallible memory.

—Larry Niven
Tarzana, California
September 1995

THE COLDEST PLACE

In the coldest place in the solar system, I hesitated outside the ship for a moment. It was too dark out there. I fought an urge to stay close by the ship, by the comfortable ungainly bulk of warm metal which held the warm bright Earth inside it.

“See anything?” asked Eric.

“No, of course not. It’s too hot here anyway, what with heat radiation from the ship. You remember the way they scattered away from the probe.”

“Yeah. Look, you want me to hold your hand or something? Go.”

I sighed and started off, with the heavy collector bouncing gently on my shoulder. I bounced too. The spikes on my boots kept me from sliding.

I walked up the side of the wide, shallow crater the ship had created by vaporizing the layered air all the way down to the water ice level. Crags rose about me, masses of frozen gas with smooth, rounded edges. They gleamed soft white where the light from my headlamp touched them. Elsewhere all was as black as eternity. Brilliant stars shone above the soft crags; but the light made no impression on the black land. The ship got smaller and darker and disappeared.

There was supposed to be life here. Nobody had even tried to guess what it might be like. Two years ago the Messenger VI probe had moved into close orbit about the planet and then landed about here, partly to find out if the cap of frozen gasses might be inflammable. In the field of view of the camera during the landing, things like shadows had wriggled across the snow and out of the light thrown by the probe. The films had shown it beautifully. Naturally some wise ones had suggested that they were only shadows.

I’d seen the films. I knew better. There was life.

Something alive, that hated light. Something out there in the dark. Something huge…“Eric, you there?”

“Where would I go?” he mocked me.

“Well,” said I, “if I watched every word I spoke I’d never get anything said.” All the same, I had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn’t be going anywhere unless the ship went along.

“Touché,” said Eric. “Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?”

“Very little.” In fact, the frozen air didn’t even melt under the pressure of my boots.

“They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light.” He knew I hadn’t seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet.

“Okay, I’ll climb that mountain and turn it off for a while.”

I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the moon, without fear of a rock’s edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.

My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared.

I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth. The air renewer sucked air and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was sweating. The suit was almost too well insulated.

Our ion-drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving very fast, and disappeared as it hit the planet’s shadow. Time was passing. The charge in my pipe burned out and I dumped it.

“Try the light,” said Eric.

I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around; a white fairy landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking, looking…and saw it.

Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp. “The collector!” Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the collector’s peeper. The collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now.

After a moment I asked, “Should I come back?”

“Certainly not. Stay there. I can’t bring the collector back to the ship! You’ll have to wait and carry it back with you.”

The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector’s rocket went after it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter, “Got it.” The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.

When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it up by the tail and carried it home.

“No, no trouble,” said Eric. “I just used the scoop to nip a piece out of his flank, if so I may speak. I got about ten cubic centimeters of strange flesh.”

“Good,” said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up the landing leg to the airlock. Eric let me in.

I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship’s day.

“Okay,” said Eric. “Take it up to the lab. And don’t touch it.”

Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. “I’ve got a brain,” I snarled, “even if you can’t see it.” So can I.

There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an apology. Eric got there first. “Sorry,” he said.

“Me too.” I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart.

He guided me when I got there. “Put the whole package in that opening. Jaws first. No, don’t close it yet. Turn the thing until these lines match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the door. Okay, Howie, I’ll take it from there…” There were chugging sounds from behind the little door. “Have to wait till the lab’s cool enough. Go get some coffee,” said Eric.

“I’d better check your maintenance.”

“Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids.”

“Prosthetic aids”—that was a hot one. I’d thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin. Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric’s nerves reached out to master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric—but he was sensitive about having it put that way—were banked along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy beats a minute.

“How do I look?” Eric asked.

“Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?”

“Jackass! Am I still alive?”

“The instruments think so. But I’d better lower your fluid temperature a fraction.” I did. Ever since we’d landed I’d had a tendency to keep temperatures too high. “Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low.”

“Well, it’ll last the trip.”

“Yeah. ’Scuse me. Eric, coffee’s ready.” I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his “liver.” It’s too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar Eric would be dead.

If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can’t sleep unless I set his prosthetic aids.

I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled. “Hey!”

“What’s wrong?” I was ready to run in any direction.

“It’s only helium!”

He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.

“I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That’s all our monsters are. Nuts.”

Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill. “Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don’t throw away your samples. Check them for contaminants.”

“For what?”

“Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive.”

“There are plenty of other substances,” said Eric, “but I can’t analyze them well enough. We’ll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool.”

I got up. “Take off right now?”

“Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we’re just as likely to wait here while this one deteriorates.”

“Okay, I’m strapping down now. Eric?”

“Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive section. You can get up.”

“No, I’ll wait. Eric, I hope it isn’t alive. I’d rather it was just helium II acting like it’s supposed to act.”

“Why? Don’t you want to be famous, like me?”

“Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It’s just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium II.”

“It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the predawn crescent. Pluto’s day is long enough for that. You’re right, though; it doesn’t get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don’t have much imagination.”

Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of Mercury.

This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere, and rotates once for every two of its years.

The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.

LN

BECALMED IN HELL

I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.

“There goes a fish,” I said, just to break the monotony.

“So how’s it cooked?”

“Can’t tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish.”

Eric sighed noisily. “Do I have to?”

“You have to. Only way you’ll see anything worthwhile in this—this—” Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?

“Searing black calm.”

“Right.”

“Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface.”

I shivered. “What’s the outside temperature now?”

“You’d rather not know. You’ve always had too much imagination, Howie.”

“I can take it, Doc.”

“Six hundred and twelve degrees.”

“I can’t take it, Doc!”

This was Venus, planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth-to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric’s job, to regulate the tank’s pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten-mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.

“Temperature just went up to six-thirteen,” said Eric. “Look, are you through bitching?”

“For the moment.”

“Good. Strap down. We’re taking off.”

“Oh, frabjous day!” I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.

“We’ve done everything we came to do. Haven’t we?”

“Am I arguing? Look, I’m strapped down.”

“Yeah.”

I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We’d spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.

But he was taking too long. “What’s the trouble, Eric?”

“You’d rather not know.”

He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn’t making the extra effort to get human expression out of his “prosthetic” vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.

“I can take it,” I said.

“Okay. I can’t feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I’ve just had a spinal anesthetic.”

The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. “See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can’t feel them.”

“Okay.” One split second later, “They don’t. Nothing happens. Good thinking though.”

I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was, “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I’ve liked being half of this team, and I still do.”

“Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully.”

I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin’s forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.

Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric’s central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.

Space leaves no cripples; and don’t call Eric a cripple, because he doesn’t like it. In a way he’s the ideal spaceman. His life support system weighs only half what mine does, and takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse.

These connections were intact. I checked them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn’t be working.

“Test the others,” said Eric.

It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves might have “gone to sleep” from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyze his own blood sugar, hoping that the “liver” had goofed and was producing some other sugar compound. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric—inside the cabin.

“Eric, you’re healthier than I am.”

“I could tell. You look worried, and I don’t blame you. Now you’ll have to go outside.”

“I know. Let’s dig out the suit.”

It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The suit was a segmented armor job. I had watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn’t start again until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed to be staring back.

“You still can’t feel anything in the ramjets?”

“Not a twinge.”

I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval armor. Then I thought of something else. “We’re twenty miles up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?”

“No! Wouldn’t think of it. We’ll just have to go down.”

The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant until takeoff. When the time came Eric could get extra lift by heating the hydrogen to higher pressure, then cracking a valve to let the excess out. Of course he’d have to be very careful that the pressure was higher in the tank, or we’d get Venusian air coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally that would be disastrous.

So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve, and down we went.

“Of course there’s a catch,” said Eric.

“I know.”

“The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground level it’ll be six times that.”

“I know.”

We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on our tailfins. The temperature rose gradually. The pressure went up fast. I sat at the window and saw nothing, nothing but black, but I sat there anyway and waited for the window to crack. NASA had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles…

Eric said, “The blimp tank’s okay, and so’s the ship, I think. But will the cabin stand up to it?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Ten miles.”

Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic ion engine that was to take us home. We couldn’t get to it on the chemical rocket alone. The rocket was for use after the air became too thin for the ramjets.

“Four miles. Have to crack the valve again.”

The ship dropped.

“I can see ground,” said Eric.

I couldn’t. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said, “Forget it. I’m using deep infrared, and getting no detail.”

“No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and man-eating plants?”

“All I see is hot, bare dirt.”

But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the cabin wall. My neck and shoulder muscles loosened. I turned away from the window. Hours had passed while we dropped through the poisoned, thickening air. I already had most of my suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-finger gauntlets.

“Strap down,” said Eric. I did.

We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back, bumped again. And again, with my teeth rattling and my armor-plated body rolling against the crash webbing. “Damn,” Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above. Eric said, “I don’t know how we’ll get back up.”

Neither did I. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and I got up and went to the airlock.

“Good luck,” said Eric. “Don’t stay out too long.” I waved at his cabin camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred and thirty.

The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a complaining whine. With an empty bucket in each hand, and with my headlamp blazing a way through the black murk, I stepped out onto the right wing.

My suit creaked and settled under the pressure, and I stood on the wing and waited for it to stop. It was almost like being under water. My headlamp beam went out thick enough to be solid, penetrating no more than a hundred feet. The air couldn’t have been that opaque, no matter how dense. It must have been full of dust, or tiny droplets of some fluid.

The wing ran back like a knife-edged running board, widening toward the tail to where it spread into a tailfin. The two tailfins met back of the fuselage. At each tailfin tip was the ram, a big sculptured cylinder with an atomic engine inside. It wouldn’t be hot because it hadn’t been used yet, but I had my counter anyway.

I fastened a line to the wing and slid to the ground. As long as we were here…The ground turned out to be a dry, reddish dirt, crumbly, and so porous that it was almost spongy. Lava etched by chemicals? Almost anything would be corrosive at this pressure and temperature. I scooped one pailful from the surface and another from underneath the first, then climbed up the line and left the buckets on the wing.

The wing was terribly slippery. I had to wear magnetic sandals to stay on. I walked up and hack along the two-hundred-foot length of the ship, making a casual inspection. Neither wing nor fuselage showed damage. Why not? If a meteor or something had cut Eric’s contact with his sensors in the rams, there should have been evidence of a break in the surface.

Then, almost suddenly, I realized that there was an alternative.

It was too vague a suspicion to put into words yet, and I still had to finish the inspection. Telling Eric would be very difficult if I was right.

Four inspection panels were set into the wing, well protected from the reentry heat. One was halfway back on the fuselage, below the lower edge of the blimp tank, which was molded to the fuselage in such a way that from the front the ship looked like a dolphin. Two more were in the trailing edge of the tailfin and the fourth was in the ram itself. All opened, with powered screwdriver on recessed screws, on junctions of the ship’s electrical system.

There was nothing out of place under any of the panels. By making and breaking contacts and getting Eric’s reactions, I found that his sensation ended somewhere between the second and third inspection panels. It was the same story on the left wing. No external damage, nothing wrong at the junctions. I climbed back to ground and walked slowly beneath the length of each wing, my headlamp tilted up. No damage underneath.

I collected my buckets and went back inside.

“A bone to pick?” Eric was puzzled. “Isn’t this a strange time to start an argument? Save it for space. We’ll have four months with nothing else to do.”

“This can’t wait. First of all, did you notice anything I didn’t?” He’d been watching everything I saw and did through the peeper in my helmet.

“No. I’d have yelled.”

“Okay. Now get this.

“The break in your circuits isn’t inside, because you get sensation up to the second wing inspection panels. It isn’t outside because there’s no evidence of damage, not even corrosion spots. That leaves only one place for the flaw.”

“Go on.”

“We also have the puzzle of why you’re paralyzed in both rams. Why should they both go wrong at the same time? There’s only one place in the ship where the circuits join.”

“What? Oh, yes, I see. They’re joined through me.”

“Now let’s assume for the moment that you’re the piece of equipment with the flaw in it. You’re not a piece of machinery, Eric. If something’s wrong with you it isn’t medical. That was the first thing we covered. But it could be psychological.”

“It’s nice to know you think I’m human. So I’ve slipped a cam, have I?”

“Slightly. I think you’ve got a case of what used to be called trigger anesthesia. A soldier who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index finger or even his whole hand has gone numb, as if it were no longer a part of him. Your comment about not being a machine is important, Eric. I think that’s the whole problem. You’ve never really believed that any part of the ship is a part of you. That’s intelligent, because it’s true. Every time the ship is redesigned you get a new set of parts, and it’s right to avoid thinking of a change of model as a series of amputations.” I’d been rehearsing this speech, trying to put it so that Eric would have no choice but to believe me. Now I know that it must have sounded phoney. “But now you’ve gone too far. Subconsciously you’ve stopped believing that the rams can feel like a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you’ve persuaded yourself that you don’t feel anything.”

With my prepared speech done, and nothing left to say, I stopped talking and waited for the explosion.

“You make good sense,” said Eric.

I was staggered. “You agree?”

“I didn’t say that. You spin an elegant theory, but I want time to think about it. What do we do if it’s true?”

“Why…I don’t know. You’ll just have to cure yourself.”

“Okay. Now here’s my idea. I propose that you thought up this theory to relieve yourself of a responsibility for getting us home alive. It puts the whole problem in my lap, metaphorically speaking.”

“Oh, for—”

“Shut up. I haven’t said you’re wrong. That would be an ad hominem argument. We need time to think about this.”

It was lights-out, four hours later, before Eric would return to the subject.

“Howie, do me a favor. Assume for a while that something mechanical is causing all our trouble. I’ll assume it’s psychosomatic.”

“Seems reasonable.”

“It is reasonable. What can you do if I’ve gone psychosomatic? What can I do if it’s mechanical? I can’t go around inspecting myself. We’d each better stick to what we know.”

“It’s a deal.” I turned him off for the night and went to bed.

But not to sleep.

With the lights off it was just like outside. I turned them back on. It wouldn’t wake Eric. Eric never sleeps normally, since his blood doesn’t accumulate fatigue poisons, and he’d go mad from being awake all the time if he didn’t have a Russian sleep inducer plate near his cortex. The ship could implode without waking Eric when his sleep inducer’s on. But I felt foolish being afraid of the dark.

While the dark stayed outside it was all right.

But it wouldn’t stay there. It had invaded my partner’s mind. Because his chemical checks guard him against chemical insanities like schizophrenia, we’d assumed he was permanently sane. But how could any prosthetic device protect him from his own imagination, his own misplaced common sense?

I couldn’t keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do about it?

Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been, Eric’s and mine and the hundreds of men who had built his life support after the crash. There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact central nervous system, and no glands except the pituitary. “We’ll regulate his blood composition,” they said, “and he’ll always be cool, calm and collected. No panic reactions from Eric!”

I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so. He was out with his brother, the girl’s uncle, on a fishing trip. They were blind drunk when they started home, and the guy was riding on the hood while the brother drove. Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our hero left two important glands on the hood ornament.

The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about late pregnancy. His habits were developed.

Eric doesn’t need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional patterns were fixed long before the day he tried to land a moonship without radar. He’d grab any excuse to believe that I’d fixed whatever was wrong with the ram connections.

But he was counting on me to do it.

The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out to touch the quartz with my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the pressure. But it was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a rock into sand grains. How long would the cabin hold it back?

If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed finding it? Perhaps it had left no break in the surface of either wing. But how?

That was an angle.

Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were empty, the alien dirt safely stored away. I filled them with water and put them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40° absolute, then turned off the lights and went to bed.

The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker’s lungs. What Venus really needs, I decided, philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-nine percent of her air. That would give her a bit more than half as much air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the temperature livable. Drop Venus’s gravity to near zero for a few weeks and the work would do itself.

The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.

“Morning,” said Eric. “Thought of anything?”

“Yes.” I rolled out of bed. “Now don’t bug me with questions. I’ll explain everything as I go.”

“No breakfast?”

“Not yet.”

Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur’s gentlemen, and went for the buckets only after the gauntlets were on. The ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly neighborhood of absolute zero. “This is two buckets of ordinary ice,” I said, holding them up. “Now let me out.”

“I should keep you here till you talk,” Eric groused. But the doors opened and I went out onto the wing. I started talking while I unscrewed the number two right panel.

“Eric, think a moment about the tests they run on a manned ship before they’ll let a man walk into the life-system. They test every part separately and in conjunction with other parts. Yet if something isn’t working, either it’s damaged or it wasn’t tested right. Right?”

“Reasonable.” He wasn’t giving away anything.

“Well, nothing caused any damage. Not only is there no break in the ship’s skin, but no coincidence could have made both rams go haywire at the same time. So something wasn’t tested right.”

I had the panel off. In the buckets the ice boiled gently where it touched the surfaces of the glass buckets. The blue ice cakes had cracked under their own internal pressure. I dumped one bucket into the maze of wiring and contacts and relays, and the ice shattered, giving me room to close the panel.

“So I thought of something last night, something that wasn’t tested. Every part of the ship must have been in the heat-and-pressure box, exposed to artificial Venus conditions, but the ship as a whole, a unit, couldn’t have been. It’s too big.” I’d circled around to the left wing and was opening the number three panel in the trailing edge. My remaining ice was half water and half small chips; I sloshed these in and fastened the panel. “What cut your circuits must have been the heat or the pressure or both. I can’t help the pressure, but I’m cooling these relays with ice. Let me know which ram gets its sensation back first, and we’ll know which inspection panel is the right one.”

“Howie. Has it occurred to you what the cold water might do to those hot metals?”

“It could crack them. Then you’d lose all control over the ramjets, which is what’s wrong right now.”

“Uh. Your point, partner. But I still can’t feel anything.”

I went back to the airlock with my empty buckets swinging, wondering if they’d get hot enough to melt. They might have, but I wasn’t out that long. I had my suit off and was refilling the buckets when Eric said, “I can feel the right ram.”

“How extensive? Full control?”

“No, I can’t feel the temperature. Oh, here it comes. We’re all set, Howie.”

My sigh of relief was sincere.

I put the buckets in the freezer again. We’d certainly want to take off with the relays cold. The water had been chilling for perhaps twenty minutes when Eric reported, “Sensation’s going.”

“What?”

“Sensation’s going. No temperature, and I’m losing fuel feed control. It doesn’t stay cold long enough.”

“Ouch! Now what?”

“I hate to tell you. I’d almost rather let you figure it out for yourself.”

I had. “We go as high as we can on the blimp tank, then I go out on the wing with a bucket of ice in each hand—”

We had to raise the blimp tank temperature to almost eight hundred degrees to get pressure, but from then on we went up in good shape. To sixteen miles. It took three hours.

“That’s as high as we go,” said Eric. “You ready?”

I went to get the ice. Eric could see me, he didn’t need an answer. He opened the airlock for me.

Fear I might have felt, or panic, or determination or self-sacrifice—but there was nothing. I went out feeling like a used zombie.

My magnets were on full. It felt like I was walking through shallow tar. The air was thick, though not as heavy as it had been down there. I followed my headlamp to the number two panel, opened it, poured ice in and threw the bucket high and far. The ice was in one cake. I couldn’t close the panel. I left it open and hurried around to the other wing. The second bucket was filled with exploded chips; I sloshed them in and locked the number two left panel and came back with both hands free. It still looked like limbo in all directions, except where the headlamp cut a tunnel through the darkness, and—my feet were getting hot. I closed the right panel on boiling water and sidled back along the hull into the airlock.

“Come in and strap down,” said Eric. “Hurry!”

“Gotta get my suit off.” My hands had started to shake from reaction. I couldn’t work the clamps.

“No you don’t. If you start right now we may get home. Leave the suit on and come in.”

I did. As I pulled my webbing shut, the rams roared. The ship shuddered a little, then pushed forward as we dropped from under the blimp tank. Pressure mounted as the rams reached operating speed. Eric was giving it all he had. It would have been uncomfortable even without the metal suit around me. With the suit on it was torture. My couch was afire from the suit, but I couldn’t get breath to say so. We were going almost straight up.

We had gone twenty minutes when the ship jerked like a galvanized frog. “Ram’s out,” Eric said calmly. “I’ll use the other.” Another lurch as we dropped the dead one. The ship flew on like a wounded penguin, but still accelerating.

One minute…two…

The other ram quit. It was as if we’d run into molasses. Eric blew off the ram and the pressure eased. I could talk.

“Eric.”

“What?”

“Got any marshmallows?”

“What? Oh, I see. Is your suit tight?”

“Sure.”

“Live with it. We’ll flush the smoke out later. I’m going to coast above some of this stuff, but when I use the rocket it’ll be savage. No mercy.”

“Will we make it?”

“I think so. It’ll be close.”

The relief came first, icy cold. Then the anger. “No more inexplicable numbnesses?” I asked.

“No. Why?”

“If any come up you’ll be sure and tell me, won’t you?”

“Are you getting at something?”

“Skip it” I wasn’t angry any more.

“I’ll be damned if I do. You know perfectly well it was mechanical trouble. You fixed it yourself!”

“No. I convinced you I must have fixed it. You needed to believe the rams should be working again. I gave you a miracle cure, Eric. I just hope I don’t have to keep dreaming up new placebos for you all the way home.”

“You thought that, but you went out on the wing sixteen miles up?” Eric’s machinery snorted. “You’ve got guts where you need brains, Shorty.”

I didn’t answer.

“Five thousand says the trouble was mechanical. We let the mechanics decide after we land.”

“You’re on.”

“Here comes the rocket. Two, one—”

It came, pushing me down into my metal suit. Sooty flames licked past my ears, writing black on the green metal ceiling, but the rosy mist before my eyes was not fire.

The man with the thick glasses spread a diagram of the Venus ship and jabbed a stubby finger at the trailing edge of the wing. “Right around here,” he said. “The pressure from the outside compressed the wiring channel a little, just enough so there was no room for the wire to bend. It had to act as if it were rigid, see? Then when the heat expanded the metal these contacts pushed past each other.”

“I suppose it’s the same design on both wings?”

He gave me a queer look. “Well, naturally.”

I left my check for $5000 in a pile of Eric’s mail and hopped a plane for Brasilia. How he found me I’ll never know, but the telegram arrived this morning.

HOWIE COME HOME ALL IS FORGIVEN
DONOVAN’S BRAIN

I guess I’ll have to.

WAIT IT OUT

Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.

Something wrong there. Pluto’s rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.

It should have stopped.

I wonder if I may have made a mistake.

The planet’s small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.

I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes…

The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.

It figures.

Have I made a mistake? It won’t kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though…

I don’t feel mad. I don’t feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.

Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.

Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.

Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun—and to Earth—as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.

And so we came, Jerome and Sammy and I, in an inflated plastic bubble poised on an ion jet. We’d spent a year and a half in that bubble. After so long together, with so little privacy, perhaps we should have hated each other. We didn’t. The UN psycho team must have chosen well.

But—just to be out of sight of the others, even for a few minutes. Just to have something to do, something that was not predictable. A new world could hold infinite surprises. As a matter of fact, so could our laboratory-tested hardware. I don’t think any of us really trusted the Nerva-K under our landing craft.

Think it through. For long trips in space, you use an ion jet giving low thrust over long periods of time. The ion motor on our own craft had been decades in use. Where gravity is materially lower than Earth’s, you land on dependable chemical rockets. For landings on Earth and Venus, you use heat shields and the braking power of the atmosphere. For landing on the gas giants—but who would want to?

The Nerva-class fission rockets are used only for takeoff from Earth, where thrust and efficiency count. Responsiveness and maneuverability count for too much during a powered landing. And a heavy planet will always have an atmosphere for braking.

Pluto didn’t.

For Pluto, the chemical jets to take us down and bring us back up were too heavy to carry all that way. We needed a highly maneuverable Nerva-type atomic rocket motor using hydrogen for reaction mass.

And we had it. But we didn’t trust it.

Jerome Glass and I went down, leaving Sammy Cross in orbit. He griped about that, of course. He’d started that back at the Cape and kept it up for a year and a half. But someone had to stay. Someone had to be aboard the Earth-return vehicle, to fix anything that went wrong, to relay communications to Earth, and to fire the bombs that would solve Pluto’s one genuine mystery.

We never did solve that one. Where does Pluto get all that mass? The planet’s a dozen times as dense as it has any right to be. We could have solved that with the bombs, the same way they solved the mystery of the makeup of the Earth, sometime in the last century. They mapped the patterns of earthquake ripples moving through the Earth’s bulk. But those ripples were from natural causes, like the Krakatoa eruption. On Pluto the bombs would have done it better.

A bright star-sun blazes suddenly between two fangs of mountain. I wonder if they’ll know the answers, when my vigil ends.

The sky jumps and steadies, and—

I’m looking east, out over the plain where we landed the ship. The plain and the mountains behind seem to be sinking like Atlantis: an illusion created by the flowing stars. We slide endlessly down the black sky, Jerome and I and the mired ship.

The Nerva-K behaved perfectly. We hovered for several minutes to melt our way through various layers of frozen gases and get ourselves something solid to land on. Condensing volatiles steamed around us and boiled below, so that we settled in a soft white glow of fog lit by the hydrogen flame.

Black wet ground appeared below the curve of the landing skirt. I let the ship drop carefully, carefully…and we touched.

It took us an hour to check the ship and get ready to go outside. But who would be first? This was no idle matter. Pluto would be the solar system’s last outpost for most of future history, and the statue to the first man on Pluto would probably remain untarnished forever.

Jerome won the toss. All for the sake of a turning coin, Jerome’s would be the first name in the history books. I remember the grin I forced! I wish I could force one now. He was laughing and talking of marble statues as he went through the lock.

There’s irony in that, if you like that sort of thing.

I was screwing down my helmet when Jerome started shouting obscenities into the helmet mike. I cut the checklist short and followed him out.

One look told it all.

The black wet dirt beneath our landing skirt had been dirty ice, water ice mixed haphazardly with lighter gases and ordinary rock. The heat draining out of the Nerva jet had melted that ice. The rocks within the ice had sunk, and so had the landing vehicle, so that when the water froze again it was halfway up the hull. Our landing craft was sunk solid in the ice.

We could have done some exploring before we tried to move the ship. When we called Sammy he suggested doing just that. But Sammy was up there in the Earth-return vehicle, and we were down here with our landing vehicle mired in the ice of another world.

We were terrified. Until we got clear we would be good for nothing, and we both knew it.

I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.

We did have one chance. The landing vehicle was designed to move about on Pluto’s surface; and so she had a skirt instead of landing jacks. Half a gravity of thrust would have given us a ground effect, safer and cheaper than using the ship like a ballistic missile. The landing skirt must have trapped gas underneath when the ship sank, leaving the Nerva-K engine in a bubble cavity.

We could melt our way out.

I know we were as careful as two terrified men could be. The heat rose in the Nerva-K, agonizingly slow. In flight there would have been a coolant effect as cold hydrogen fuel ran through the pile. We couldn’t use that. But the environment of the motor was terribly cold. The two factors might compensate, or—

Suddenly dials went wild. Something had cracked from the savage temperature differential. Jerome used the damper rods without effect. Maybe they’d melted. Maybe wiring had cracked, or resistors had become superconductors in the cold. Maybe the pile—but it doesn’t matter now.

I wonder why I can’t remember the fear.

Sunlight—

And a logy, dreamy feeling. I’m conscious again. The same stars rise in formation over the same dark mountains.

Something heavy is nosing up against me. I feel its weight against my back and the backs of my legs. What is it? Why am I not terrified?

It slides around in front of me, questing. It looks like a huge amoeba, shapeless and translucent, with darker bodies showing within it. I’d guess it’s about my own weight.

Life on Pluto! But how? Superfluids? Helium II contaminated by complex molecules? In that case the beast had best get moving; it will need shade come sunrise. Sunside temperature on Pluto is all of 50° Absolute.

No, come back! It’s leaving, flowing down toward the splash crater. Did my thoughts send it away? Nonsense. It probably didn’t like the taste of me. It must be terribly slow, that I can watch it move. The beast is still visible, blurred because I can’t look directly at it, moving downhill toward the landing vehicle and the tiny statue to the first man to die on Pluto.

After the fiasco with the Nerva-K, one of us had to go down and see how much damage had been done. That meant tunneling down with the flame of a jet backpack, then crawling under the landing skirt. We didn’t talk about the implications. We were probably dead. The man who went down into the bubble cavity was even more probably dead; but what of it? Dead is dead.

I feel no guilt. I’d have gone myself if I’d lost the toss.

The Nerva-K had spewed fused bits of the fission pile all over the bubble cavity. We were trapped for good. Rather, I was trapped, and Jerome was dead. The bubble cavity was a hell of radiation.

Jerome had been swearing softly as he went in. He came out perfectly silent. He’d used up all the good words on lighter matters, I think.

I remember I was crying, partly from grief and partly from fear. I remember that I kept my voice steady in spite of it. Jerome never knew. What he guessed is his own affair. He told me the situation, he told me goodbye, and then he strode out onto the ice and took off his helmet. A fuzzy white ball engulfed his head, exploded outward, then settled to the ground in microscopic snowflakes.

But all that seems infinitely remote. Jerome stands out there with his helmet clutched in his hands: a statue to himself, the first man on Pluto. A frost of recondensed moisture conceals his expression.

Sunrise. I hope the amoeba—

That was wild. The sun stood poised for an instant, a white point-source between twin peaks. Then it streaked upward—and the spinning sky jolted to a stop. No wonder I didn’t catch it before. It happened so fast.

A horrible thought. What has happened to me could have happened to Jerome! I wonder—

There was Sammy in the Earth-return vehicle, but he couldn’t get down to me. I couldn’t get up. The life system was in good order, but sooner or later I would freeze to death or run out of air.

I stayed with the landing vehicle about thirty hours, taking ice and soil samples, analyzing them, delivering the data to Sammy via laser beam; delivering also high-minded last messages, and feeling sorry for myself. On my trips outside I kept passing Jerome’s statue. For a corpse, and one which has not been prettified by the post-surgical skills of an embalmer, he looks damn good. His frost-dusted skin is indistinguishable from marble, and his eyes are lifted toward the stars in poignant yearning. Each time I passed him I wondered how I would look when my turn came.

“You’ve got to find an oxygen layer,” Sammy kept saying.

“Why?”

“To keep you alive! Sooner or later they’ll send a rescue ship. You can’t give up now!”

I’d already given up. There was oxygen, but there was no such layer as Sammy kept hoping for. There were veins of oxygen mixed with other things, like veins of gold ore in rock. Too little, too finely distributed.

“Then use the water ice! That’s only poetic justice, isn’t it? You can get the oxygen out by electrolysis!”

But a rescue ship would take years. They’d have to build it from scratch, and redesign the landing vehicle too. Electrolysis takes power, and heat takes power. I had only the batteries.

Sooner or later I’d run out of power. Sammy couldn’t see this. He was more desperate than I was. I didn’t run out of last messages; I stopped sending them because they were driving Sammy crazy.

I passed Jerome’s statue one time too many, and an idea came.

This is what comes of not wanting to die.

In Nevada, three billion miles from here, half a million corpses lie frozen in vaults surrounded by liquid nitrogen. Half a million dead men wait for an earthy resurrection, on the day medical science discovers how to unfreeze them safely, how to cure what was killing each one of them, how to cure the additional damage done by ice crystals breaking cell walls all through their brains and bodies.

Half a million fools? But what choice did they have? They were dying.

I was dying.

A man can stay conscious for tens of seconds in vacuum. If I moved fast, I could get out of my suit in that time. Without that insulation to protect me, Pluto’s black night would suck warmth from my body in seconds. At 50° Absolute, I’d stay in frozen storage until one version or another of the Day of Resurrection.

Sunlight—

—And stars. No sign of the big blob that found me so singularly tasteless yesterday. But I could be looking in the wrong direction.

I hope it got to cover.

I’m looking east, out over the splash plain. In my peripheral vision the ship looks unchanged and undamaged.

My suit lies beside me on the ice. I stand on a peak of black rock, poised in my silvered underwear, looking eternally out at the horizon. Before the cold touched my brain I found a last moment in which to assume a heroic stance. Go east, young man. Wouldn’t you know I’d get my directions mixed? But the fog of my breathing-air hid everything, and I was moving in terrible haste.

Sammy Cross must be on his way home now. He’ll tell them where I am.

Stars pour up from behind the mountains. The mountains and the splash plain and Jerome and I sink endlessly beneath the sky.

My corpse must be the coldest in history. Even the hopeful dead of Earth are only stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Pluto’s night makes that look torrid, after the 50° Absolute heat of day seeps away into space.

A superconductor is what I am. Sunlight raises the temperature too high, switching me off like a damned machine at every dawn. But at night my nervous system becomes a superconductor. Currents flow; thoughts flow; sensations flow. Sluggishly. The one hundred and fifty-three hours of Pluto’s rotation flash by in what feels like fifteen minutes. At that rate I can wait it out.

I stand as a statue and a viewpoint. No wonder I can’t get emotional about anything. Water is a rock here, and my glands are contoured ice within me. But I feel sensations: the pull of gravity, the pain in my ears, the tug of vacuum over every square inch of my body. The vacuum will not boil my blood. But the tensions are frozen into the ice of me, and my nerves tell me so. I feel the wind whistling from my lips, like an exhalation of cigarette smoke.

This is what comes of not wanting to die. What a joke if I got my wish!

Do you suppose they’ll find me? Pluto’s small for a planet. For a place to get lost in, a small planet is all too large. But there’s the ship.

Though it seems to be covered with frost. Vaporized gases recondensed on the hull. Gray-white on gray-white, a lump on a dish of refrozen ice. I could stand here forever waiting for them to pick my ship from its surroundings.

Stop that.

Sunlight—

Stars rolling up the sky. The same patterns, endlessly rolling up from the same points. Does Jerome’s corpse live the same half-life I live now? He should have stripped, as I did. My God! I wish I’d thought to wipe the ice from his eyes!

I wish that superfluid blob would come back.

Damn. It’s cold.

EYE OF AN OCTOPUS

It was a well.

Henry Bedrosian and Christopher Luden bent over the lip, peering down into the jet darkness. Their balloon-tired motorcycle lay forgotten on the talcum sand, fine pink sand that stretched endlessly away to the flat horizon, borrowing its color from the sky. The sky was the color of blood. It might have been a flaming Kansas sunset, but the tiny sun was still at the zenith. The translucent hewn stone of the well-mouth stood like a blasphemy in the poisonous wilderness that was Mars.

It stood four feet above the sand, roughly circular, perhaps three yards across. The weathered stones were upright blocks, a foot tall by five inches wide by perhaps a foot thick. Whatever the material of those stones, they seemed to glow with a faintly blue inner light.

“It’s so human!” said Henry Bedrosian. His voice held a touch of bewildered frustration, echoed by his dark, chisel-nosed face.

Chris Luden knew what he meant. “It’s natural. A well’s like a lever or a wheel. There aren’t many changes you can make, because it’s too simple. Did you notice the shape of the bricks?”

“Yes. Odd. But they could still be man made.”

“In this air? Breathing nitric oxide, drinking red fuming nitric acid? But—” Chris drew a deep breath. “Why complain? It’s life, Harry! We’ve discovered intelligent life!”

“We’ve got to tell Abe.”

“Right.”

But it was a long moment before either moved. They stood leaning over the well, vivid green pressure suits against pink sand and dark red horizon, peering down into the blur of darkness at the bottom. Then they turned and mounted the Marsmobile.

The landing vehicle stood like an upright steel ballpoint pen. Its bottom half was three spreading legs, a restarting solid rocket, and a spacious cargo hold, two-thirds empty now. The upper half was the return-to-orbit stage. Far away across the crescent dunes was a white patch, the jettisoned drag chute.

The Marsmobile, a glorified two-seater motorcycle with big round tires and a number of special modifications, putt-putted up to a landing leg and stopped. Henry got off and climbed to the cabin to call Abe Cooper in the orbiter. Chris Luden mounted to the cargo hold and rummaged through a disorganized hash of necessities until he had a long coil of thin line, a metal bucket, and a heavy rock hammer, all treated to resist the corrosive atmosphere. He dropped the objects next to the Marsmobile and climbed down. “Now we’ll see,” he told himself.

Henry descended the ladder. “Abe’s having kittens,” he reported. “He says if we don’t call him every five minutes he’ll come down after us. He wants to know, how old is the well?”

“So do I.” Chris brandished the hammer. “We’ll knock a chip off and analyze it. Let’s go.”

The well was a mile and a half from the ship, and not of a conspicuous color. Probably they would have lost it if they hadn’t left a flag to mark it.

“Let’s see how deep it is first,” said Luden. He put the hammer in the bucket for a weight, tied a line to the handle and let it fall. In the eery silence of the Martian desert they waited, listening…The rope was nearly gone when the bucket struck something. In a moment the ghost of a splash came floating up from the depths. Henry marked the line so they could measure how deep it had gone. It looked about three hundred feet. They hauled it up.

The bucket was half full of a cloudy, slightly oily fluid.

Chris handed it to his partner. “Harry, you want to take this back and analyze it?”

Henry’s dark face grinned around the pointed beard. “I’ll match you for it. We both know what it’s gonna be.”

“Sure, but it has to be done. Even.” They matched fingers. Henry lost. He rode back to the ship, the bucket dangling from one hand, fluid slopping over the edge.

The stone which formed the well might have been quartz, or even some kind of unveined marble. It had been too badly weathered, too finely scored and polished and etched by the patient sand grains, to tell what it was. Chris Luden picked a likely looking block and brought the hammer down hard on what seemed to be a crack. He did it three times.

The hammer was ruined.

Luden shifted the hammer this way and that to examine the uneven, dulled edge and flattened corners. His blue eyes held a puzzled look. He knew the government might have quibbled about the weight of a tool for the Mars Project, but never the cost or quality. Here on Mars that hammer was worth tens of thousands of dollars. It must be made of some hard, durable steel alloy. Then—

He cocked his head in his helmet, tasting a strange idea…

“Harry!”

“Yeah?”

“How you doing?”

“I’m just coming in the airlock. Give me five minutes to find out that this stuff is nitric acid.”

“Okay, but do me a favor. Have you got your ring?”

“The diamond horseshoe? Sure.”

“Bring it back with you, outside your suit. Outside, that is.”

“Now wait a minute, Chris. That’s a valuable ring. Why not use your own?”

“I should have thought of that! I’ll just take off my pressure suit and—Uh! Can’t seem to get my helmet unfastened—”

“Stop! Stop! I get the point.” There was a click as Henry’s radio went off.

Luden sat down to wait.

The sun was sliding toward the horizon. They had landed shortly before sunset yesterday, so they knew how suddenly the desert could turn from pink to midnight black, and how little light the insignificant moons gave. But sundown was four hours away.

The dunes all faced the same way, perfect crescents, as regular as if hand-made. Something must shape the winds here, causing them to blow always in one direction, like Earth’s trade winds. And the dunes would crawl across the sands, slower than snails, following the winds.

How old were the stones against his back? If they were really—a strange and silly thought, but Chris wouldn’t have volunteered for the Mars Project if he were not half a romantic—if they were really diamond, they must be terribly old, to be so worn by mere sand. Far older than the pyramids, and revered ancestor to the Sphinx. Maybe the race that carved those stones had since perished. Science-fiction writers often assumed an extinct Martian race. Why, perhaps the well had originally held water—

“Hello, Chris?”

“Here.”

“It’s dirty nitric acid, not too strong. Next time you’ll believe me.”

“Harry, they didn’t send us here to make astute guesses. They did all the guessing when they built the ship. We came to find out for sure, right? Right.”

“See you in ten minutes.” Click.

Luden let his eyes drift back across the desert. It was a moment before he realized what had caught his eye. One of the dunes was irregular. The curves were wrong, asymmetrical. The normal crescent had left one sprawling, trailing arm. It stood out like a pear in a line of apples.

He had ten minutes, and the dune wasn’t far. Luden got up and started walking.

He stood under the dune and looked back. The well was clearly visible. The distance was even shorter than he had thought. He had been deceived by the nearness of the horizon.

The lip of the dune was some fourteen feet high.

What had distorted it? An upthrusting spire of rock, perhaps, not quite high enough to show through the sand. They could find it with the sonar later.

It had to be under the one sprawling, twisted arm of sand.

“Chris! Where the hell are you? Chris?”

Chris jumped. He’d forgotten Henry. “Look due south of the well and you’ll see me.”

“Why don’t you stay where you’re put, you idiot? I thought you’d been buried by a sandstorm.”

“Sorry, Harry. I got interested in something.” Chris Luden was now standing on the twisted arm of sand. He sounded preoccupied. “Try scratching the blocks of the well with your ring.”

“That’s an odd thought,” Henry laughed.

“Do it.”

Silence. Luden felt the wind, looked down at the sand, tried to imagine what obstruction had dropped it here. Something not necessarily very large. It would not be beneath the dune; it would be on the windward side…at the beginning of the arch…there.

“I scratched it, Chris. There’s a scratch all right. So that effectively takes—Ooops. Aaargh! Chris, you’re doomed! Only death can save you from my wrath!”

“Why are you irritated with—”

“My diamond! It’s ruined!”

“Relax. You could replace it a million times over with just one block from the well.”

“Say, that’s true. But we’ll need the laser to cut it loose. They must have used diamond dust for the cement, too. And the fuel to get it back—”

“Harry, do me a favor. Bring—”

“That last favor cost me a three-thousand-dollar ring.”

“Bring the Marsmobile out here. I want to do some digging.”

“Be right there.”

A minute later Henry stopped the machine alongside Chris’s green suit. His smile showed that the scratches on his ring had not permanently scarred his psyche. “Where do we dig?”

“Right where I’m standing.”

The Marsmobile was equipped with two down-thrusting compressed-air jets for getting over steep obstructions. A large tank under the vehicle’s belly held the heavily compressed air, compressed directly from the thin Martian atmosphere by the motor. Henry turned on the jets and hovered over the spot where Chris had been standing, shifting his weight to keep the machine in place. Sand sprayed out in sheets. Chris ran to get out from under, and Henry grinned and doubled the thrust to send the fine grains showering over him. In half a minute the pressure became too low. Henry had to land. The Marsmobile shuddered and vibrated as its motor struggled to refill the pressure chamber.

“I hate to ask,” said Henry, “but what’s the point of all this?”

“There’s something solid down there. I want to expose it.”

“Okay, if you’re sure we’re in the right place. We’ve got six months of time to waste.”

They wasted a few minutes silently watching the Marsmobile fill its pressure tank.

“Hey,” said Henry. “You think we could stake a claim on this diamond mine?”

Chris Luden, sitting on the steep side of the dune, thoughtfully scratched the side of his helmet. “Why not? We haven’t seen any live Martians, and it’s for sure that nobody else has a claim. Sure, we’ll file our claim; the worst they can do is disallow it.”

“One thing. I didn’t mention it before because I wanted you to see for yourself, but the heck with it. One of those blocks is covered solid with deep scratches.”

“They all are.”

“Not like these. These are deep, and they’re all at forty-five degree angles, unless my imagination is fooling me. They’re too fine to be sure, but I think it’s some kind of writing.”

And without waiting for an answer, Henry took off on the air jets. He was good at it. He was like a ballet dancer. You could see Henry shifting weight, but the scooter never seemed to move.

Something was emerging from the sand. Something not a rock.

Something like a piece of modern metal sculpture, with no use and no meaning but with a weird beauty nonetheless. Something that had been a machine and was now—nothing.

Henry Bedrosian balanced above the conical pit his jets had dug. The artifact was almost clear now. Something else showed beside it.

A mummy.

The Marsmobile settled on the last of its air. Chris plunged down the side of the pit as Henry climbed off.

The mummy was humanoid, about four feet long, with long arms, enormous fragile tapered fingers, and a traditionally oversized skull. No fine detail was visible; it had all been worn away. Chris couldn’t even be sure how many fingers the—hominid—had had. One hand still held two; the other only one, plus a flattened opposable thumb. No toes showed on the feet. The thing lay face down.

The artifact, now uncovered, showed more detail. Yet the detail had no meaning. Thick bent metal bars, thin twisted wires, two enormous crumpled circles with something rotted clinging to what had been their rims—and then Henry’s imagination clicked, the same visual knack that had gotten him A’s in topology, and he said, “It’s a bicycle.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

“No, look. The wheels are too big, and—”

It was a fantastically distorted bicycle, with wheels eight feet across, a low, dwarf-sized saddle, and a system of gears to replace the chain. The gear ratio was very low. The saddle was almost against the rear wheel, and a tiller bar, now bent to scrap, had been fixed to the hub of the front wheel. Something had crumpled the bicycle like a crush-proof cigarette pack in a strong man’s hand, and then nitric acid rust had done its worst to the metal.

“Okay, it’s a bicycle,” said Chris. “It’s a Salvador Dali bicycle, but still a bicycle. They must have been a lot like us, hmmm? Bicycles, stone wells, writing—”

“Clothing.”

“Where?”

“It must have been there. He’s less worn around the torso, see? You can see the wrinkles in his skin. He must have been protected until his clothes rotted away.”

“Maybe. He kind of ruins our lost race theory, doesn’t he? He couldn’t possibly be more than a couple of thousand years old. Hundreds would be more like it.”

“Then he drank nitric acid after all. Well, that blows our diamond mine, partner. He’s got to have living relatives.”

“We can’t count on their being too much like us. These things we’ve found—clothing, writing, wells—they’re all things any intelligent being might be forced to invent. And parallel evolution might explain the biped shape.”

“Parallel evolution?” Henry repeated.

“Like the eye of an octopus. It’s nearly identical in structure to a human eye. Yet an octopus isn’t remotely human. Most marsupials, you can’t tell them from their mammal counterparts. Well, let’s try to pick him up.”

Any archaeologist would have shot them down in cold blood.

The mummy was as light and dry as cork, and showed no tendency to come apart in their hands. They strapped him gently over the luggage box and climbed on themselves. Chris drove back slowly and carefully.

Chris stood on the first rung of the ladder, adjusting the mummy’s balance on his left shoulder. “We’ll have to spray him with plastic before takeoff,” he said. “Do we have any plastic spray?”

“I don’t remember any. We’d better take lots of pictures in case it does come apart.”

“Right. There’s a camera in the cabin.” Chris started up, and Henry followed. They got the relic to the airlock without mishap.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Henry. “That nitric acid wasn’t dilute, exactly, but there was water in it. Maybe this guy’s chemistry can extract the water from nitric acid.”

“Good thought.”

They put the mummy gently on a pile of blankets and began searching for the camera. After five frustrating minutes Chris deliberately banged his head against a wall. “I took it out to catch the sunset last night. It’s in the cargo hold.”

“Go get it.”

Henry stood in the airlock, watching as Chris went down the ladder. After a moment in the cargo space Chris started up with the camera strap over his shoulder.

“I’ve been thinking too,” said Chris, his voice seemingly dissociated from his climbing figure. “Diamond can’t be that plentiful here, and carving it into blocks must have been real hard labor. Why diamond? And why write on a well?”

“Religious reasons? Maybe they worship water.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Of course you were. That plot’s as old as Lowell.”

Chris had reached the top. They squeezed into the airlock and waited for it to cycle.

The door opened. Both men had their helmets off by this time, and they both smelled it at once. Something chemical, something strong—

Thick, greasy smoke was pouring up from the ancient corpse.

Henry reacted first. He sprang for the double boiler in the small kitchen corner. The bottom half was still full of water; he snatched it up and threw the water over the smoldering Martian mummy while with his other hand he turned on the water faucet to get more.

The mummy went off like a napalm bomb.

Henry leaped away from the exploding flames and his head rammed something flat and very hard. He went down with his eyes full of leaping light. Immediately he sat up, knowing that something urgently needed doing but unable to remember what. He saw Chris, still in vacuum suit except for the helmet, run through the multi-colored flames, pick the mummy up by the ankles and throw it into the airlock. Chris hit the “Cycle” button. The inner door swung shut.

Then Chris was bending over him. “Where does it hurt, Harry? Can you talk? Can you move?”

Henry sat up again. “I’m okay.”

Chris expelled a gusty breath. Then he began to laugh.

Henry stood up a little shakily. His head ached. The fumes in the cabin weren’t intolerable, and already the air plant was whining its eagerness to make the air pure and scentless. Red smoke from the open outer airlock door blew past a porthole, dying away. “What made him explode?” he wondered.

“The water,” said Chris Luden. “What a wild chemistry he must have! I want to be there when we meet a live one.”

“But what about the well? We know he used water.”

“Yes he did. He sure as hell did. And did you know that an octopus eye is identical to a human eye?”

“Sure. But a well is a well, isn’t it?”

“Not when it’s a crematorium, Harry. What else could it be? There’s no fire on Mars, but water must dissolve a body completely. And wouldn’t I like to know what the morticians charge their customers for those cut diamond building blocks! The hardest substance known to Man or Martian! An everlasting monument to the dear departed!”

HOW THE HEROES DIE

Only sheer ruthlessness could have taken him out of town alive. The mob behind Carter hadn’t tried to guard the Marsbuggies, since Carter would have needed too much time to take a buggy through the vehicular airlock. They could have caught him there, and they knew it. Some were guarding the personnel lock, hoping he’d try for that. He might have; for if he could have closed the one door in their faces and opened the next, the safeties would have protected him while he went through the third and fourth and outside. On the Marsbuggy he was trapped in the bubble.

There was room to drive around in. Less than half the prefab houses had been erected so far. The rest of the bubbletown’s floor was flat fused sand, empty but for scattered piles of foam-plastic walls and ceilings and floors. But they’d get him eventually. Already they were starting up another buggy.

They never expected him to run his vehicle through the bubble wall.

The Marsbuggy tilted, then righted itself. A blast of breathing-air roared out around him, picked up a cloud of fine sand, and hurled it explosively away into the thin, poisoned atmosphere. Carter grinned as he looked behind him. They would die now, all of them. He was the only one wearing a pressure suit. In an hour he could come back and repair the rip in the bubble. He’d have to dream up a fancy story to tell when the next ship came…

Carter frowned. What were they—

At least ten wind-harried men were wrestling with the wall of a prefab house. As Carter watched, they picked the wall up off the fused sand, balanced it almost upright, and let go. The foam-plastic wall rose into the wind and slapped hard against the bubble, over the ten-foot rip.

Carter stopped his buggy to see what would happen.

Nobody was dead. The air was not shrieking away but leaking away. Slowly, methodically, a line of men climbed into their suits and filed through the personnel lock to repair the bubble.

A buggy entered the vehicular lock. The third and last was starting to life. Carter turned his buggy and was off.

Top speed for a Marsbuggy is about twenty-five miles per hour. The buggy rides on three wide balloon-tired wheels, each mounted at the end of a five-foot arm. What those wheels can’t go over, the buggy can generally hop over on the compressed-air jet mounted underneath. The motor and the compressor are both powered by a Litton battery holding a tenth as much energy as the original Hiroshima bomb.

Carter had been careful, as careful as he had had time for. He was carrying a full load of oxygen, twelve four-hour tanks in the air bin behind him, and an extra tank rested against his knees. His batteries were nearly full; he would be out of air long before his power ran low. When the other buggies gave up he could circle round and return to the bubble in the time his extra tank would give him.

His own buggy and the two behind him were the only such vehicles on Mars. At twenty-five miles per hour he fled, and at twenty-five miles per hour they followed. The closest was half a mile behind.

Carter turned on his radio.

He found the middle of a conversation. “—Can’t afford it. One of you will have to come back. We could lose two of the buggies, but not all three.”

That was Shute, the bubbletown’s research director and sole military man. The next voice, deep and sarcastic, belonged to Rufus Doolittle, the biochemist. “What’ll we do, flip a coin?”

“Let me go,” the third voice said tightly. “I’ve got a stake in this.”

Carter felt apprehension touch the nape of his neck.

“Okay, Alf. Good luck,” said Rufus. “Good hunting,” he added maliciously, as if he knew Carter were listening.

“You concentrate on getting the bubble fixed. I’ll see that Carter doesn’t come back.”

Behind Carter, the rearmost buggy swung in a wide loop toward town. The other came on. And it was driven by the linguist, Alf Harness.

Most of the bubble’s dozen men were busy repairing the ten-foot rip with heaters and plastic sheeting. It would be a long job but an easy one, for by Shute’s orders the bubble had been deflated. The transparent plastic had fallen in folds across the prefab houses, forming a series of interconnected tents. One could move about underneath with little difficulty.

Lieutenant-Major Michael Shute watched the men at work and decided they had things under control. He walked away like a soldier on parade, stooping as little as possible as he moved beneath the dropping folds.

He stopped and watched Gondot operating the airmaker. Gondot noticed him and spoke without looking up.

“Mayor, why’d you let Alf chase Carter alone?”

Shute accepted his nickname. “We couldn’t lose both tractors.”

“Why not just post them on guard duty for two days?”

“And what if Carter got through the guard? He must be determined to wreck the dome. He’d catch us with our pants down. Even if some of us got into suits, could we stand another rip in the bubble?”

Gondot reached to scratch his short beard. His fingertips rapped helmet plastic and he looked annoyed. “Maybe not. I can fill the bubble anytime you’re ready, but then the airmaker’ll be empty. We’ll be almost out of tanked air by the time they finish mending that rip. Another’d finish us.”

Shute nodded and turned away. All the air anyone could use—tons of nitrogen and oxygen—was right outside; but it was in the form of nitrogen dioxide gas. The airmaker could convert it three times as fast as men could use it. But if Carter tore the dome again, that would be too slow.

But Carter wouldn’t. Alf would see to that. The emergency was over—this time.

And so Lieutenant-Major Shute could go back to worrying about the emergency’s underlying causes.

His report on those causes had been finished a month ago. He had reread it several times since, and always it had seemed complete and to the point. Yet he had the feeling it could be written better. He ought to make it as effective as possible. What he had to say could only be said once, and then his career would be over and his voice silenced.

Cousins had sold some fiction once, writing as a hobby. Perhaps he would help. But Shute was reluctant to involve anyone else in what amounted to his own rebellion.

Yet—he’d have to rewrite that report now, or at least add to it. Lew Harness was dead, murdered. John Carter would be dead within two days. All Shute’s responsibility. All pertinent.

The decision wasn’t urgent. It would be a month before Earth was in reach of the bubbletown’s sending station.

Most of the asteroids spend most of their time between Mars and Jupiter, and it often happens that one of them crosses a planet where theretofore it had crossed only an orbit. There are asteroid craters all over Mars. Old eroded ones, sharp new ones, big ones, little ones, ragged and smooth ones. The bubbletown was at the center of a large, fairly recent crater four miles across: an enormous, poorly cast ashtray discarded on the reddish sand.

The buggies ran over cracked glass, avoiding the occasional tilted blocks, running uphill toward the broken rim. A sky the color of blood surrounded a tiny, brilliant sun set precisely at the zenith.

Inevitably Alf was getting closer. When they crossed the rim and started downhill they would pull apart. It was going to be a long chase.

Now was the time for regrets, if there ever was such a time. But Carter wasn’t the type, and he had nothing to be ashamed of anyway. Lew Harness had needed to die; had as much as asked to die. Carter was only puzzled that his death should have provoked so violent a reaction. Could they all be—the way Lew had been? Unlikely. If he’d stayed and explained—

They’d have torn him apart. Those vulpine faces, with the distended nostrils and the bared teeth!

And now he was being chased by one man. But that man was Lew’s brother.

Here was the rim, and Alf was still well behind. Carter slowed as he went over, knowing that the way down would be rougher. He was just going over the edge when a rock ten yards away exploded in white fire.

Alf had a flare pistol.

Carter just stopped himself from scrambling out of the buggy to hide in the rocks. The buggy lurched downward and, like it or not, Carter had to forget his terror to keep the vehicle upright.

The rubble around the crater’s rim slowed him still further. Carter angled the buggy for the nearest rise of sloping sand. As he reached it, Alf came over the rim, a quarter-mile behind. His silhouette hesitated there against the bloody sky, and another flare exploded, blinding bright and terrifyingly close.

Then Carter was on the straightaway, rolling down sloping sand to a perfectly flat horizon.

The radio said, “Gonna be a long one, Jack.”

Carter pushed to transmit. “Right. How many flares do you have left?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I won’t. Not the way you’re throwing them away.”

Alf didn’t answer. Carter left the radio band open, knowing that ultimately Alf must talk to the man he needed to kill.

The crater which was home dropped behind and was gone. Endless flat desert rose before the buggies, flowed under the oversized wheels and dropped behind. Gentle crescent dunes patterned the sand, but they were no barrier to a buggy. Once there was a Martian well. It stood all alone on the sand, a weathered cylindrical wall seven feet high and ten in circumference, made of cut diamond blocks. The wells, and the slanting script written deep into their “dedication blocks,” were responsible for the town’s presence on Mars. Since the only Martian ever found—a mummy centuries dead, at least—had exploded at the first contact with water, it was generally assumed that the wells were crematoriums. But it wasn’t certain. Nothing was certain about Mars.

The radio maintained an eerie silence. Hours rolled past; the sun slid toward the deep red horizon, and still Alf did not speak. It was as if Alf had said everything there was to say to Jack Carter. And that was wrong! Alf should have needed to justify himself!

It was Carter who sighed and gave up. “You can’t catch me, Alf.”

“No, but I can stay behind you as long as I need to.”

“You can stay behind me just twenty-four hours. You’ve got forty-eight hours of air. I don’t believe you’ll kill yourself just to kill me.”

“Don’t count on it. But I won’t need to. Noon tomorrow, you’ll be chasing me. You need to breathe, just like I do.”

“Watch this,” said Carter. The O-tank resting against his knee was empty. He tipped it over the side and watched it roll away.

“I had an extra tank,” he said. He smiled in relief at his release from that damning weight. “I can live four hours longer than you can. Want to turn back, Alf?”

“No.”

“He’s not worth it, Alf. He was nothing but a queer.”

“Does that mean he’s got to die?”

“It does if the son of a bitch propositions me. Maybe you’re a little that way yourself?”

“No. And Lew wasn’t queer till he came here. They should have sent half men, half women.”

“Amen.”

“You know, lots of people get a little sick to their stomachs about homosexuals. I do myself, and it hurt to see it happening to Lew. But there’s only one type who goes looking for ’em so he can beat up on ’em.”

Carter frowned.

“Latents. Guys who think they might turn queer themselves if you gave ’em the opportunity. They can’t stand queers around because queers are temptation.”

“You’re just returning the compliment.”

“Maybe.”

“Anyway, the town has enough problems without—things like that going on. This whole project could have been wrecked by someone like your brother.”

“How bad do we need killers?”

“Pretty badly, this time.” Suddenly Carter knew that he was now his own defense attorney. If he could convince Alf that he shouldn’t be executed, he could convince the rest of them. If he couldn’t—then he must destroy the bubble, or die. He went on talking as persuasively as he knew how.

“You see, Alf, the town has two purposes. One is to find out if we can live in an environment as hostile as this one. The other is to contact the Martians. Now there are just fifteen of us in town—”

“Twelve. Thirteen when I get back.”

“Fourteen if we both do. Okay. Each of us is more or less necessary to the functioning of the town. But I’m needed in both fields. I’m the ecologist, Alf. I not only have to keep the town from dying from some sort of imbalance, I also have to figure out how the Martians live, what they live on, how Martian life forms depend on each other. You see?”

“Sure. How ’bout Lew? Was he necessary?”

“We can get along without him. He was the radio man. At least a couple of us have training enough to take over communications.”

“You make me so happy. Doesn’t the same go for you?”

Carter thought hard and fast. Yes, Gondot in particular could keep the town’s life-support system going with little help. But—“Not with the Martian ecology. There isn’t—”

“There isn’t any Martian ecology. Jack, has anyone ever found any life on Mars besides that man-shaped mummy? You can’t be an ecologist without something to make deductions from. You’ve got nothing to investigate. So what good are you?”

Carter kept talking. He was still arguing as the sun dropped into the sea of sand and darkness closed down with a snap. But he knew now it was no use. Alf’s mind was closed.

By sunset the bubble was taut, and the tortured scream of incoming breathing-air had dropped to a tired sigh. Lieutenant-Major Shute unfastened the clamps at his shoulders and lifted his helmet, ready to jam it down fast if the air was too thin. It wasn’t. He set the helmet down and signaled thumbs-up to the men watching him.

Ritual. Those dozen men had known the air would be safe. But rituals had grown fast where men worked in space, and the most rigid was that the man in charge fastened his helmet last and unfastened it first. Now suits were being removed. Men moved about their duties. Some moved toward the kitchen to clean up the vacuum-induced havoc so Hurley could get dinner.

Shute stopped Lee Cousins as he went by. “Lee, could I see you a minute?”

“Sure, Mayor.” Shute was “the Mayor” to all bubbletown.

“I want your help as a writer,” said Shute. “I’m going to send in a quite controversial report when we get within range of Earth, and I’d like you to help me make it convincing.”

“Fine. Let’s see it.”

The ten streetlamps came on, dispelling the darkness which had fallen so suddenly. Shute led the way to his prefab bungalow, unlocked the safe, and handed Cousins the manuscript. Cousins hefted it. “Big,” he said. “Might pay to cut it.”

“By all means, if you can find anything unnecessary.”

“I’ll bet I can,” Cousins grinned. He dropped on the bed and began to read.

Ten minutes later he asked, “Just what is the incidence of homosexuality in the Navy?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Then it’s not powerful evidence. You might quote a limerick to show that the problem’s proverbial. I know a few.”

“Good.”

A little later Cousins said, “A lot of schools in England are coeducational. More every year.”

“I know. But the present problem is among men who graduated from boys’ schools when they were much younger.”

“Make that clearer. Incidentally, was your high-school coeducational?”

“No.”

“Any queers?”

“A few. At least one in every class. The seniors used to use paddles on the ones they suspected.”

“Did it help?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Okay. You’ve got two sets of circumstances under which a high rate of homosexuality occurs. In both cases you’ve got three conditions: a reasonable amount of leisure, no women, and a disciplinary pecking order. You need a third example.”

“I couldn’t think of one.”

“The Nazi organization.”

“Oh?”

“I’ll give you details.” Cousins went on reading. He finished the report and put it aside. “This’ll cause merry hell,” he said.

“I know.”

“The worst thing about it is your threat to give the whole thing to the newspapers. If I were you I’d leave that out.”

“If you were me you wouldn’t,” said Shute. “Everyone who had anything to do with WARGOD knew they were risking everything that’s happened. They preferred to let us take that risk rather than risk public opinion themselves. There are hundreds of Decency Leagues in the United States. Maybe thousands, I don’t know. But they’ll all come down on the government like harpies if anyone tried to send a mixed crew to Mars or anywhere else in space. The only way I can make the government act is to give them a greater threat.”

“You win. This is a greater threat.”

“Did you find anything else to cut out?”

“Oh, hell yes. I’ll go through this again with a red pencil. You talk too much, and use too many words that are too long, and you generalize. You’ll have to give details or you’ll lose impact.”

“I’ll be ruining some reputations.”

“Can’t be helped. We’ve got to have women on Mars, and right now. Rufe and Timmy are building up to a real spitting fight. Rufe thinks he caused Lew’s death by leaving him. Timmy keeps taunting him with it.”

“All right,” said Shute. He stood up. He had been sitting erect throughout the discussion, as if sitting at attention. “Are the buggies still in radio range?”

“They can’t hear us, but we can hear them. Timmy’s working the radio.”

“Good. I’ll keep him on it until they go out of range. Shall we get dinner?”

Phobos rose where the sun had set, a scattering of moving dots of light, like a crescent of dim stars. It grew brighter as it rose: a new moon becoming a half-moon in hours. Then it was too high to look at. Carter had to keep his eyes on the triangle of desert lit by his headlights. The headlight beams were the color of earthly sunlight, but to Carter’s Mars-adapted eyes they turned everything blue.

He had chosen his course well. The desert ahead was flat for more than seven hundred miles. There would be no low hills rising suddenly before him to trap him into jet-jumping in faint moonlight or waiting for Alf to come down on him. Alf’s turnover point would come at high noon tomorrow, and then Carter would have won.

For Alf would turn back toward the bubble, and Carter would go on into the desert. When Alf was safely over the horizon, Carter would turn left or right, go on for an hour, and then follow a course parallel to Alf s. He would be in sight of the bubble an hour later than Alf, with three hours in which to plan.

Then would come the hardest part. Certainly there would be someone on guard. Carter would have to charge past the guard—who might be armed with a flare pistol—tear the bubble open, and somehow confiscate the supply of O-tanks. Ripping the bubble open would probably kill everyone inside, but there would be men in suits outside. He would have to load some of the O-tanks on his buggy and open the stopcocks of the rest, all before anyone reached him.

What bothered him was the idea of charging a flare pistol…But perhaps he could just aim the buggy and jump out. He would have to see.

His eyelids were getting heavy, and his hands were cramped. But he dare not slow down, and he dared not sleep.

Several times he had thought of smashing the come-hither in his suit radio. With that thing constantly beeping, Alf could find him anytime he pleased. But Alf could find him anyway. His headlights were always behind, never catching up, never dropping away. If he ever got out of Alf’s sight, that come-hither would have to go. But there was no point in letting Alf know that. Not yet.

Stars dropped into the black western horizon. Phobos rose again, brighter this time, and again became too high to watch. Deimos now showed above the steady shine of Alf’s headlights.

Suddenly it was day, and there were thin black shadows pointing to a yellow horizon. Stars still glowed in a red-black sky. There was a crater ahead, a glass dish set in the desert, not too big to circle around. Carter angled left. The buggy behind him also angled. If he kept turning like this, Alf couldn’t help but gain on him. Carter sucked water and nutrient solution from the nipples in his helmet, and concentrated on steering. His eyes felt gritty, and his mouth belonged to a Martian mummy.

“Morning,” said Alf.

“Morning. Get plenty of sleep?”

“Not enough. I only slept about six hours, in snatches. I kept worrying you’d turn off and lose me.”

For a moment Carter went hot and cold. Then he knew that Alf was needling him. He’d no more slept than Carter had.

“Look to your right,” said Alf.

To their right was the crater wall. And—Carter looked again to be sure—there was a silhouette on the rim, a man-shaped shadow against the red sky. With one hand it balanced something tall and thin.

“A Martian,” Carter said softly. Without thinking he turned his buggy to climb the wall. Two flares exploded in front of him, a second apart, and he frantically jammed the tiller bar hard left.

“God damn it, Alf! That was a Martian! We’ve got to go after it!”

The silhouette was gone. No doubt the Martian had run for its life when it saw the flares.

Alf said nothing. Nothing at all. And Carter rode on, past the crater, with a murderous fury building in him.

It was eleven o’clock. The tips of a range of hills were pushing above the western horizon.

“I’m just curious,” Alf said, “but what would you have said to that Martian?”

Carter’s voice was tight and bitter. “Does it matter?”

“Yah. The best you could have done was scare him. When we get in touch with the Martians, we’ll do it just the way we planned.”

Carter ground his teeth. Even without the accident of Lew Harness’s death, there was no telling how long the translation plan would take. It involved three steps: sending pictures of the writings on the crematory wells and other artifacts to Earth, so that computers could translate the language; writing messages in that language to leave near the wells where Martians would find them; and then waiting for the Martians to make a move. But there was no reason to believe that the script on the wells wasn’t from more than one language, or from the same language as it had changed over thousands of years. There was no reason to assume the Martians would be interested in strange beings living in a glorified balloon, regardless of whether the invaders knew how to write. And could the Martians read their own ancestors’ script?

An idea…“You’re a linguist,” said Carter.

No answer.

“Alf, we’ve talked about whether the town needed Lew, and we’ve talked about whether the town needs me. How about you? Without you we’d never get the well-script translated.”

“I doubt that. The Cal Tech computers are doing most of the work, and anyhow I left notes. But so what?”

“If you keep chasing me you’ll force me to kill you. Can the town afford to lose you?”

“You can’t do it. But I’ll make you a deal if you want. It’s eleven now. Give me two of your O-tanks, and we’ll go back to town. We’ll stop two hours from town, leave your buggy, and you’ll ride the rest of the way tied up in the air bin. Then you can stand trial.”

“You think they’ll let me off?”

“Not after the way you ripped the bubble open on your way out. That was a blunder, Jack.”

“Why don’t you just take one tank?” If Alf did that, Carter would get back with two hours to spare. He knew, now, that he would have to wreck the bubble. He had no alternative. But Alf would be right behind him with the flare gun…

“No deal. I wouldn’t feel safe if I didn’t know you’d run out of air two hours before we got back. You want me to feel safe, don’t you?”

It was better the other way. Let Alf turn back in an hour. Let Alf be in the bubble when Carter returned to tear it open.

“Carter turned him down,” said Timmy. He hunched over the radio, holding his earphones with both hands, listening with every nerve for voices which had almost died into the distance.

“He’s planning something,” Gondot said uneasily.

“Naturally,” said Shute. “He wants to lose Alf, return to the bubble, and wreck it. What other hope has he?”

“But he’d die too,” said Timmy.

“Not necessarily. If he killed us all, he could mend the new rip while he lived on the O-tanks we’ve got left. I think he could keep the bubble in good enough repair to keep one man alive.”

“My Lord! What can we do?”

“Relax, Timmy. It’s simple math.” It was easy for Lieutenant-Major Shute to keep his voice light, and he didn’t want Timmy to start a panic. “If Alf turns back at noon, Carter can’t get here before noon tomorrow. At four he’ll be out of air. We’ll just keep everyone in suits for four hours.” Privately he wondered if twelve men could repair even a small rip before they used up the bottled air. It would be one tank every twenty minutes…but perhaps they wouldn’t be tested.

“Five minutes of twelve,” said Carter. “Turn back, Alf. You’ll only get home with ten minutes to spare.”

The linguist chuckled. A quarter mile behind, the blue dot of his buggy didn’t move.

“You can’t fight mathematics, Alf. Turn back.”

“Too late.”

“In five minutes it will be.”

“I started this trip short of an O-tank. I should have turned two hours ago.”

Carter had to wet his lips from the water nipple before he answered. “You’re lying. Will you stop bugging me? Stop it!”

Alf laughed. “Watch me turn back.”

His buggy came on.

It was noon, and the chase would not end. At twenty-five miles per, two Marsbuggies a quarter of a mile apart moved serenely through an orange desert. Chemical stains of green rose ahead and fell behind. Crescent dunes drifted by, as regular as waves on an ocean. The ghostly path of a meteorite touched the northern horizon in a momentary white flash. The hills were higher now, humps of smooth rock like animals sleeping beyond the horizon. The sun burned small and bright in a sky reddened by nitrogen dioxide and, near the horizon, blackened by its thinness to the color of bloody India ink.

Had the chase really started at noon? Exactly noon? But it was twelve-thirty now, and he was sure that was too late.

Alf had doomed himself—to doom Carter.

But he wouldn’t.

“Great minds think alike,” he told the radio.

“Really?” Alf’s tone said he couldn’t have cared less.

“You took an extra tank. Just like me.”

“No I didn’t, Jack.”

“You must have. If there’s one thing I’m sure of in life, it’s that you are not the type to kill yourself. All right, Alf, I quit. Let’s go back.”

“Let’s not.”

“We’d have three hours to chase that Martian.”

A flare exploded behind his buggy. Carter sighed raggedly. At two o’clock both buggies would turn back to bubbletown, where Carter would probably be executed.

But suppose I turn back now?

That’s easy. Alf will shoot me with the flare gun.

He might miss. If I let him choose my course, I’ll die for certain.

Carter sweated and cursed himself, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t deliberately turn into Alf’s gun.

At two o’clock the base of the range came over the horizon. The hills were incredibly clear, almost as clear as they would have been on the moon. But they were horribly weathered, and the sea of sand lapped around them as if eager to finish them off, to drag them down.

Carter rode with his eyes turned behind. His watch hands moved on, minute to minute, and Carter watched in disbelief as Alf s vehicle continued to follow. As the time approached and reached two-thirty, Carter’s disbelief faded. It didn’t matter, now, how much oxygen Alf had. They had passed Carter’s turnover point.

“You’ve killed me,” he said.

No answer.

“I killed Lew in a fistfight. What you’ve done to me is much worse. You’re killing me by slow torture. You’re a demon, Alf.”

“Fistfight my aunt’s purple asterisk. You hit Lew in the throat and watched him drown in his own blood. Don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing. Everybody in town knows you know karate.”

“He died in minutes. I’ll need a whole day!”

“You don’t like that? Turn around and rush my gun. It’s right here waiting.”

“We could get back to the crater in time to search for that Martian. That’s why I came to Mars. To learn what’s here. So did you, Alf. Come on, let’s turn back.”

“You first.”

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Karate can defeat any hand-to-hand weapon but a quarterstaff, and Carter had quarterstaff training too. But he couldn’t charge a flare gun! Not even if Alf meant to turn back. And Alf didn’t.

A faint whine vibrated through the bubble. The sandstorm was at the height of its fury, which made it about as dangerous as an enraged caterpillar. At worst it was an annoyance. The shrill, barely audible whine could get on one’s nerves, and the darkness made streetlamps necessary. Tomorrow the bubble would be covered a tenth of an inch deep in fine, moon-dry silt. Inside the bubble it would be darker than night until someone blew the silt away with an O-tank.

To Shute the storm was depressing. Here on Mars was Lieutenant-Major Shute, Boy Hero, facing terrifying dangers on the frontiers of human exploration! A sandstorm that wouldn’t have harmed an infant. Nobody here faced a single danger that he had not brought with him.

Would it be like this forever? Men traveling enormous distances to face themselves?

There had been little work done since noon today. Shute had given up on that. On a stack of walls sat Timmy, practically surrounding the buggy-pickup radio, surrounded in turn by the bubble’s population.

Timmy stood up as Shute approached the group. “They’re gone,” he announced, sounding very tired. He turned off the radio. The men looked at each other, and some got to their feet.

“Tim! How’d you lose them?”

Timmy noticed him. “They’re too far away, Mayor.”

“They never turned around?”

“They never did. They just kept going out into the desert. Alf must have gone insane. Carter’s not worth dying for.”

Shute thought, But he was once. Carter had been one of the best: tough, fearless, bright, enthusiastic. Shute had watched him deteriorate under the boredom and the close quarters aboard ship. He had seemed to recover when they reached Mars, when all of them suddenly had work to do. Then, yesterday morning—murder.

Alf. It was hard to lose Alf. Lew had been little loss, but Alf—

Cousins dropped into step beside him. “I’ve got that red-pencil work done.”

“Thanks, Lee. I’ll have to do it all over now.”

“Don’t do it over. Write an addendum. Show how and why three men died. Then you can say, ‘I told you so.’”

“You think so?”

“My professional judgment. When’s the funeral?”

“Day after tomorrow. That’s Sunday. I thought it would be appropriate.”

“You can say all three services at once. Good timing.”

To all bubbletown, Jack Carter and Alf Harness were dead. But they still breathed—

The mountains came toward them: the only fixed points in an ocean of sand. Alf was closer now, something less than four hundred yards behind. At five o’clock Carter reached the base of the mountains.

They were too high to go over on the air jet. He could see spots where he might have landed the buggy while the pump filled the jet tank for another hop. But for what?

Better to wait for Alf.

Suddenly Carter knew that that was the one thing in the world Alf wanted. To roll up alongside in his buggy. To watch Carter’s face until he was sure Carter knew exactly what was to come. And then to blast Carter down in flames from ten feet away, and watch while a bright magnesium-oxidizer flare burned through his suit and skin and vitals.

The hills were low and shallow. Even from yards away he might have been looking at the smooth flank of a sleeping beast—except that this beast was not breathing. Carter took a deep breath, noticing how stale the air had become despite the purifier unit, and turned on the compressed-air jet.

The air of Mars is terribly thin, but it can be compressed; and a rocket will work anywhere, even a compressed-air rocket. Carter went up, leaning as far back in the cabin as he could to compensate for the loss of weight in the O-tanks behind him, to put as little work as possible on gyroscopes meant to spin only in emergencies. He rose fast, and he tilted the buggy to send it skating along the thirty-degree slope of the hill. There were flat places along the slope, but not many. He should reach the first one easily…

A flare exploded in his eyes. Carter clenched his teeth and fought the urge to look behind. He tilted the buggy backward to slow him down. The jet pressure was dropping.

He came down like a feather two hundred feet above the desert. When he turned off the jet he could hear the gyros whining. He turned the stabilizer off and let them run down. Now there was only the chugging of the compressor, vibrating through his suit.

Alf was out of his buggy, standing at the base of the mountains, looking up.

“Come on,” said Carter. “What are you waiting for?”

“Go on over if you want to.”

“What’s the matter? Are your gyros fouled?”

“Your brain is fouled, Carter. Go on over.” Alf raised one arm stiffly out. The hand showed flame, and Carter ducked instinctively.

The compressor had almost stopped, which meant the tank was nearly full. But Carter would be a fool to take off before it was completely full. You got the greatest acceleration from an air jet during the first seconds of flight. The rest of the flight you got just enough pressure to keep you going.

But—Alf was getting into his buggy. Now the buggy was rising.

Carter turned on his jet and went up.

He came down hard, three hundred feet high, and only then dared to look down. He heard Alf s nasty laugh, and he saw that Alf was still at the foot of the mountains. It had been a bluff!

But why wasn’t Alf coming after him?

The third hop took him to the top. The first downhill hop was the first he’d ever made, and it almost killed him. He had to do his decelerating on the last remnants of pressure in the jet tank! He waited until his hands stopped shaking, then continued the rest of the way on the wheels. There was no sign of Alf as he reached the foot of the range and started out into the desert.

Already the sun was about to go. Faint bluish stars in a red-black sky outlined the yellow hills behind him.

Still no sign of Alf.

Alf spoke in his ear, gently, almost kindly. “You’ll just have to come back, Jack.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I’d rather not have to. That’s why I’m telling you this. Look at your watch.”

It was about six-thirty.

“Did you look? Now count it up. I started with forty-four hours of air. You started with fifty-two. That gave us ninety-six breathing hours between us. Together we’ve used up sixty-one hours. That leaves thirty-five between us.

“Now, I stopped moving an hour ago. From where I am it’s almost thirty hours back to base. Sometime in the next two and a half hours, you’ve got to get my air and stop me from breathing. Or I’ve got to do the same for you.”

It made sense. Finally, everything made sense. “Alf, are you listening? Listen,” said Carter, and he opened his radio panel and, moving by touch, found a wire he’d located long ago. He jerked it loose. His radio crackled deafeningly, then stopped.

“Did you hear that, Alf? I just jerked my come-hither loose. Now you couldn’t find me even if you wanted to.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Then Carter realized what he’d done. There was now no possibility of Alf finding him. After all the miles and hours of the chase, now it was Carter chasing Alf. All Alf had to do was wait.

The dark fell on the west like a heavy curtain.

Carter went south, and he went immediately. It would take him an hour or more to cross the range. He would have to leapfrog to the top with only his headlights to guide him. His motor would not take him uphill over such a slope. He could use the wheels going down, with luck, but he would have to do so in total darkness. Deimos would not have risen; Phobos was not bright enough to help.

It had gone exactly as Alf had planned. Chase Carter to the range. If he attacks there, take his tanks and go home. If he makes it, show him why he has to come back. Time it so he has to come back in darkness. If by some miracle he makes it this time—well, there’s always the flare gun.

Carter could give him only one surprise. He would cross six miles south of where he was expected, and approach Alf s buggy from the southeast.

Or was Alf expecting that too?

It didn’t matter. Carter was beyond free will.

The first jump was like jumping blindfolded from a ship’s airlock. He pointed the headlights straight down, and as he went up he watched the circle of light expand and dim. He angled east. First he wasn’t moving at all. Then the slope slid toward him, far too fast. He back-angled. Nothing seemed to happen. The pressure under him died slowly, but it was dying, and the slope was a wavering blur surrounded by dark.

It came up, clarifying fast.

The landing jarred him from coccyx to cranium. He held himself rigid, waiting for the buggy to tumble end-for-end down the hill. But though the buggy was tilted at a horrifying angle, it stayed.

Carter sagged and buried his helmet in his arms. Two enormous hanging tears, swollen to pinballs in the low gravity, dropped onto his faceplate and spread. For the first time he regretted all of it. Killing Lew, when a kick to the kneecap would have put him out of action and taught him a permanent, memorable lesson. Snatching the buggy instead of surrendering himself for trial. Driving through the bubble—and making every man on Mars his mortal enemy. Hanging around to watch what would happen—when, perhaps, he could have run beyond the horizon before Alf came out the vehicular airlock. He clenched his fists and pressed them against his faceplate, remembering his attitude of mild interest as he sat watching Alf’s buggy roll into the lock.

Time to go. Carter readied himself for another jump. This one would be horrible. He’d be taking off with the buggy canted thirty degrees backward…

Wait a minute.

There was something wrong with that picture of Alf’s buggy as it rolled toward the lock surrounded by trotting men. Definitely something wrong there. But what?

It would come to him. He gripped the jet throttle and readied his other hand to flip on the gyros the moment he was airborne.

—Alf had planned so carefully. How had he come away with one O-tank too few?

And—if he really had everything planned, how did Alf expect to get Carter’s tanks if Carter crashed?

Suppose Carter crashed his buggy against a hill, right now, on his second jump. How would Alf know? He wouldn’t, not until nine o’clock came and Carter hadn’t shown up. Then he’d know Carter had crashed somewhere. But it would be too late!

Unless Alf had lied.

That was it, that was what was wrong with his picture of Alf in the vehicular airlock. Put one O-tank in the air bin and it would stand out like a sore thumb. Fill the air bin and then remove one tank, and the hole in the hexagonal array would show like Sammy Davis III on the Berlin Nazis football team! There had been no such hole.

Let Carter crash now, and Alf would know it with four hours in which to search for his buggy.

Carter swung his headlights up to normal position, then moved the buggy backward in a dead-slow half circle. The buggy swayed but didn’t topple. Now he could move down behind his headlights…

Nine o’clock. If Carter was wrong then he was dead now. Even now Alf might be unfastening his helmet, his eyes blank with the ultimate despair, still wondering where Carter had got to. But if he was right…

Then Alf was nodding to himself, not smiling, merely confirming a guess. Now he was deciding whether to wait five minutes on the chance that Carter was late, or to start searching now. Carter sat in his dark cabin at the foot of the black mountains, his left hand clutching a wrench, his eyes riveted on the luminous needle of the direction finder.

The wrench had been the heaviest in his toolbox. He’d found nothing sharper than a screwdriver, and that wouldn’t have penetrated suit fabric.

The needle pointed straight toward Alf.

And it wasn’t moving.

Alf had decided to wait.

How long would he wait?

Carter caught himself whispering, not loudly. Move, idiot. You’ve got to search both sides of the range. Both sides and the top. Move. Move!

Ye gods! Had he shut off his radio? Yes, the switch was down.

Move.

The needle moved. It jerked once, infinitesimally, and was quiet.

It was quiet a long time—seven or eight minutes. Then it jerked in the opposite direction. Alf was searching the wrong side of the hills!

And then Carter saw the flaw in his own plan. Alf must now assume he was dead. And if he, Carter, was dead, then he wasn’t using air. Alf had two hours extra, but he thought he had four!

The needle twitched and moved—a good distance. Carter sighed and closed his eyes. Alf was coming over. He had sensibly decided to search this side first; for if Carter was on this side, dead, then Alf would have to cross the range again to reach home.

Twitch.

Twitch. He must be at the top.

Then the long, slow, steady movement down.

Headlights. Very faint, to the north. Would Alf turn north?

He turned south. Perfect. The headlights grew brighter…and Carter waited, with his buggy buried to the windshield in the sand at the base of the range.

Alf still had the flare gun. Despite all his certainty that Carter was dead, he was probably riding with the gun in his hand. But he was using his headlights, and he was going slowly, perhaps fifteen miles per hour.

He would pass…twenty yards west…

Carter gripped the wrench. Here he comes.

There was light in his eyes. Don’t see me. And then there wasn’t. Carter swarmed out of the buggy and down the sloping sand. The headlights moved away, and Carter was after them, leaping as a Moonie leaps, both feet pushing at once into the sand, a second spent in flying, legs straddled and feet reaching forward for the landing and another leap.

One last enormous kangaroo jump—and he was on the O-tanks, falling on knees and forearms with feet lifted high so the metal wouldn’t clang. One arm landed on nothing at all where empty O-tanks were missing. His body tried to roll off onto the sand. He wouldn’t let it.

The transparent bubble of Alf’s helmet was before him. The head inside swept back and forth, sweeping the triangle created by the headlights.

Carter crept forward. He poised himself over Alf’s head, raised the wrench high, and brought it down with all his strength.

Cracks starred out in the plastic. Alf looked up with his eyes and mouth all wide open, his amazement unalloyed by rage or terror. Carter brought the weight down again.

There were more cracks, longer cracks. Alf winced and—finally—brought up the flare gun. Carter’s muscles froze for an instant as he looked into its hellish mouth. Then he struck for what he knew must be the last time.

The wrench smashed through transparent plastic and scalp and skull. Carter knelt on the O-tanks for a moment, looking at the unpleasant thing he’d done. Then he lifted the body out by the shoulders, tumbled it over the side, and climbed into the cabin to stop the buggy.

It took him a few minutes to find his own buggy where he’d buried it in the sand. It took longer to uncover it. That was all right. He had plenty of time. If he crossed the range by twelve-thirty he would reach bubbletown on the last of his air.

There would be little room for finesse. On the other hand, he would be arriving an hour before dawn. They’d never see him. They would have stopped expecting him, or Alf, at noon tomorrow—even assuming they didn’t know Alf had refused to turn back.

The bubble would be empty of air before anyone could get into a suit.

Later he could repair and fill the bubble. In a month Earth would hear of the disaster: how a meteorite had touched down at a corner of the dome, how John Carter had been outside at the time, the only man in a suit. They’d take him home and he could spend the rest of his life trying to forget.

He knew which tanks were his empties. Like every man in town, he had his own method of arranging them in the air bin. He dumped six and stopped. It was a shame to throw away empties. The tanks were too hard to replace.

He didn’t know Alf’s arrangement scheme. He’d have to test Alf’s empties individually.

Already Alf had thrown some away. (To leave space for Carter’s tanks?) One by one, Carter turned the valve of each tank. If it hissed, he put it in his own air bin. If it didn’t, he dropped it.

One of them hissed. Just one.

Five O-tanks. He couldn’t possibly make a thirty-hour trip on five O-tanks.

Somewhere, Alf had left three O-tanks where he could find them again. Just on the off chance: just in case something went terribly wrong for Alf, and Carter captured his buggy, Carter still wouldn’t go home alive.

Alf must have left the tanks where he could find them easily. He must have left them near here; for he had never been out of Carter’s sight until Carter crossed the range, and furthermore he’d kept just one tank to reach them. The tanks were nearby, and Carter had just two hours to find them.

In fact, he realized, they must be on the other side of the range. Alf hadn’t stopped anywhere on this side.

But he could have left them on the hillside during his jumps to the top…

In a sudden frenzy of hurry, Carter jumped into his buggy and took it up. The headlights showed his progress to the top and over.

The first red rays of sunlight found Lee Cousins and Rufe Doolittle already outside the bubble. They were digging a grave. Cousins dug in stoic silence. In a mixture of pity and disgust he endured Rufe’s constant compulsive flow of words.

“…first man to be buried on another planet. Do you think Lew would have liked that? No, he’d hate it. He’d say it wasn’t worth dying for. He wanted to go home. He would have, too, on the next ship…”

The sand came up in loose, dry shovelfuls. Practice was needed to keep it on the shovel. It tried to flow like a viscous liquid.

“I tried to tell the Mayor he’d have liked a well burial. The Mayor wouldn’t listen. He said the Martians might not—hey!”

Cousins’s eyes jerked up, and the movement caught them—a steadily moving fleck on the crater wall. Martian! was his first thought. What else could be moving out there? And then he saw that it was a buggy.

To Lee Cousins it was like a corpse rising from its grave. The buggy moved like a blind thing down the tilted blocks of old glass, touched the drifted sand in the crater floor, all while he stood immobile. At the corner of his eye he saw Doolittle’s shovel flying wide as Doolittle ran for the bubble.

The buggy only grazed the sand, then began reclimbing the crater. Cousins’s paralysis left him and he ran for the town’s remaining buggy.

The ghost was moving at half speed. He caught it a mile beyond the crater rim. Carter was in the cockpit. His helmet was in his lap clutched in a rigid death-grip.

Cousins reported. “He must have aimed the buggy along his direction finder when he felt his air going. Give him credit,” he added, and lifted a shovelful from the second grave. “He did that much. He sent back the buggy.”

Just after dawn a small biped form came around a hill to the east. It walked directly to the sprawled body of Alf Harness, picked up a foot in both delicate-looking hands, and began to tug the corpse across the sand, looking rather like an ant tugging a heavy bread crumb. In the twenty minutes it needed to reach Alf’s buggy the figure never stopped to rest.

Dropping its prize, the Martian climbed the pile of empty O-tanks and peered into the air bin, then down at the body. But there was no way such a small, weak being could lift such a mass.

The Martian seemed to remember something. It scrambled down the O-tanks and crawled under the buggy’s belly.

Minutes later it came out, dragging a length of nylon line. It tied each end of the line to one of Alf’s ankles, then dropped the loop over the buggy’s trailer-attachment knob.

For a time the figure stood motionless above Alf s broken helmet, contemplating its work. Alf’s head might take a beating, riding that way; but as a specimen Alf’s head was useless. Wherever nitrogen dioxide gas had touched moisture, red fuming nitric acid had formed. By now the rest of the body was dry and hard, fairly well preserved.

The figure climbed into the buggy. A little fumbling, surprisingly little, and the buggy was rolling. Twenty yards away it stopped with a jerk. The Martian climbed out and walked back. It knelt beside the three O-tanks which had been tied beneath the buggy with the borrowed nylon line, and it opened the stopcocks of each in turn. It leapt back in horrified haste when the noxious gas began hissing out.

Minutes later the buggy was moving south. The O-tanks hissed for a time, then were quiet.

THE JIGSAW MAN

Transplant technology, through two hundred years of development, had come into its own…and raised its own problems. The Belt escaped the most drastic social effects. Earth did not.

LN

In A.D. 1900, Karl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O, according to incompatibilities. For the first time it became possible to give a shock patient a transfusion with some hope that it wouldn’t kill him.

The movement to abolish the death penalty was barely getting started, and already it was doomed.

Vh83uOAGn7 was his telephone number and his driving license number and his social security number and the number of his draft card and his medical record. Two of these had been revoked, and the others had ceased to matter, except for his medical record. His name was Warren Lewis Knowles. He was going to die.

The trial was a day away, but the verdict was no less certain for that. Lew was guilty. If anyone had doubted it, the prosecution had ironclad proof. By eighteen tomorrow Lew would be condemned to death. Broxton would appeal the case on some grounds or other. The appeal would be denied.

The cell was comfortable, small, and padded. This was no slur on the prisoner’s sanity, though insanity was no longer an excuse for breaking the law. Three of the walls were mere bars. The fourth wall, the outside wall, was cement padded and painted a restful shade of green. But the bars which separated him from the corridor, and from the morose old man on his left, and from the big, moronic-looking teenager on his right—the bars were four inches thick and eight inches apart, padded in silicone plastics. For the fourth time that day Lew took a clenched fistful of the plastic and tried to rip it away. It felt like a sponge rubber pillow, with a rigid core the thickness of a pencil, and it wouldn’t rip. When he let go it snapped back to a perfect cylinder.

“It’s not fair,” he said.

The teenager didn’t move. For all of the ten hours Lew had been in his cell, the kid had been sitting on the edge of his bunk with his lank black hair falling in his eyes and his five o’clock shadow getting gradually darker. He moved his long, hairy arms only at mealtimes, and the rest of him not at all.

The old man looked up at the sound of Lew’s voice. He spoke with bitter sarcasm. “You framed?”

“No, I—”

“At least you’re honest. What’d you do?”

Lew told him. He couldn’t keep the hurt innocence out of his voice. The old man smiled derisively, nodding as if he’d expected just that.

“Stupidity. Stupidity’s always been a capital crime. If you had to get yourself executed, why not for something important? See the kid on the other side of you?”

“Sure,” Lew said without looking.

“He’s an organlegger.”

Lew felt the shock freezing in his face. He braced himself for another look into the next cell—and every nerve in his body jumped. The kid was looking at him. With his dull dark eyes barely visible under his mop of hair, he regarded Lew as a butcher might consider a badly aged side of beef.

Lew edged closer to the bars between his cell and the old man’s. His voice was a hoarse whisper. “How many did he kill?”

“None.”

“?”

“He was the snatch man. He’d find someone out alone at night, drug him and take him home to the doc that ran the ring. It was the doc that did all the killing. If Bernie’d brought home a dead donor, the doc would have skinned him down.”

The old man sat with Lew almost directly behind him. He had twisted himself around to talk to Lew, but now he seemed to be losing interest. His hands, hidden from Lew by his bony back, were in constant nervous motion.

“How many did he snatch?”

“Four. Then he got caught. He’s not very bright, Bernie.”

“What did you do to get put here?”

The old man didn’t answer. He ignored Lew completely, his shoulders twitching as he moved his hands. Lew shrugged and dropped back in his bunk.

It was nineteen o’clock of a Thursday night.

The ring had included three snatch men. Bernie had not yet been tried. Another was dead; he had escaped over the edge of a pedwalk when he felt the mercy bullet enter his arm. The third was being wheeled into the hospital next door to the courthouse.

Officially he was still alive. He had been sentenced; his appeal had been denied; but he was still alive as they moved him, drugged, into the operating room.

The interns lifted him from the table and inserted a mouthpiece so he could breathe when they dropped him into freezing liquid. They lowered him without a splash, and as his body temperature went down they dribbled something else into his veins. About half a pint of it. His temperature dropped toward freezing, his heartbeats were further and further apart. Finally his heart stopped. But it could have been started again. Men had been reprieved at this point. Officially the organlegger was still alive.

The doctor was a line of machines with a conveyor belt running through them. When the organlegger’s body temperature reached a certain point, the belt started. The first machine made a series of incisions in his chest. Skillfully and mechanically, the doctor performed a cardiectomy.

The organlegger was officially dead.

His heart went into storage immediately. His skin followed, most of it in one piece, all of it still living. The doctor took him apart with exquisite care, like disassembling a flexible, fragile, tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle. The brain was flashburned and the ashes saved for urn burial; but all the rest of the body, in slabs and small blobs and parchment-thin layers and lengths of tubing, went into storage in the hospital’s organ banks. Any one of these units could be packed in a travel case at a moment’s notice and flown to anywhere in the world in not much more than an hour. If the odds broke right, if the right people came down with the right diseases at the right time, the organlegger might save more lives than he had taken.

Which was the whole point.

Lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling television set, Lew suddenly began to shiver. He had not had the energy to put the sound plug in his ear, and the silent motion of the cartoon figures had suddenly become horrid. He turned the set off, and that didn’t help either.

Bit by bit they would take him apart and store him away. He’d never seen an organ storage bank, but his uncle had owned a butcher-shop…

“Hey!” he yelled.

The kid’s eyes came up, the only living part of him. The old man twisted round to look over his shoulder. At the end of the hall the guard looked up once, then went back to reading.

The fear was in Lew’s belly; it pounded in his throat. “How can you stand it?”

The kid’s eyes dropped to the floor. The old man said, “Stand what?”

“Don’t you know what they’re going to do to us?”

“Not to me. They won’t take me apart like a hog.”

Instantly Lew was at the bars. “Why not?”

The old man’s voice had become very low. “Because there’s a bomb where my right thighbone used to be. I’m gonna blow myself up. What they find, they’ll never use.”

The hope the old man had raised washed away, leaving bitterness. “Nuts. How could you put a bomb in your leg?”

“Take the bone out, bore a hole lengthwise through it, build the bomb in the hole, get all the organic material out of the bone so it won’t rot, put the bone back in. ’Course your red corpuscle count goes down afterward. What I wanted to ask you. You want to join me?”

“Join you?”

“Hunch up against the bars. This thing’ll take care of both of us.”

Lew had backed up against the opposite set of bars.

“Your choice,” said the old man. “I never told you what I was here for, did I? I was the doc. Bernie made his snatches for me.”

Lew felt the bars touch his shoulders and turned to find the kid looking dully into his eyes from two feet away. Organleggers! He was surrounded by professional killers!

“I know what it’s like,” the old man continued. “They won’t do that to me. Well. If you’re sure you don’t want a clean death, go lie down behind your bunk. It’s thick enough.”

The bunk was a mattress and a set of springs mounted into a cement block which was an integral part of the cement floor. Lew curled himself into fetal position with his hands over his eyes.

He was sure he didn’t want to die now.

Nothing happened.

After a while he opened his eyes, took his hands away and looked around.

The kid was looking at him. For the first time there was a sour grin plastered on his face. In the corridor the guard, who was always in a chair by the exit, was standing outside the bars looking down at him. He seemed concerned.

Lew felt the flush rising in his neck and nose and ears. The old man had been playing with him. He moved to get up…

And a hammer came down on the world.

The guard lay broken against the bars of the cell across the corridor. The lank-haired youngster was picking himself up from behind his bunk, shaking his head. Somebody groaned; the groan rose to a scream. The air was full of cement dust.

Lew got up.

Blood lay like red oil on every surface that faced the explosion. Try as he might, and he didn’t try very hard, Lew could find no other trace of the old man.

Except for the hole in the wall.

He must have been standing…right…there.

The hole would be big enough to crawl through, if Lew could reach it. But it was in the old man’s cell. The silicone plastic sheathing on the bars between the cells had been ripped away, leaving only pencil-thick lengths of metal.

Lew tried to squeeze through.

The bars were humming, vibrating, though there was no sound. As Lew noticed the vibration he also found that he was becoming sleepy. He jammed his body between the bars, caught in a war between his rising panic and the sonic stunners which might have gone on automatically.

The bars wouldn’t give. But his body did; and the bars were slippery with…He was through. He poked his head through the hole in the wall and looked down.

Way down. Far enough to make him dizzy.

The Topeka County courthouse was a small skyscraper, and Lew’s cell must have been near the top. He looked down a smooth concrete slab studded with windows set flush with the sides. There would be no way to reach those windows, no way to open them, no way to break them.

The stunner was sapping his will. He would have been unconscious by now if his head had been in the cell with the rest of him. He had to force himself to turn and look up.

He was at the top. The edge of the roof was only a few feet above his eyes. He couldn’t reach that far, not without…

He began to crawl out of the hole.

Win or lose, they wouldn’t get him for the organ banks. The vehicular traffic level would smash every useful part of him. He sat on the lip of the hole, with his legs straight out inside the cell for balance, pushing his chest flat against the wall. When he had his balance he stretched his arms toward the roof. No good.

So he got one leg under him, keeping the other stiffly out, and lunged.

His hands closed over the edge as he started to fall back. He yelped with surprise, but it was too late. The top of the courthouse was moving! It had dragged him out of the hole before he could let go. He hung on, swinging slowly back and forth over empty space as the motion carried him away.

The top of the courthouse was a pedwalk.

He couldn’t climb up, not without purchase for his feet. He didn’t have the strength. The pedwalk was moving toward another building, about the same height. He could reach it if he only hung on.

And the windows in that building were different. They weren’t made to open, not in those days of smog and air conditioning, but there were ledges. Perhaps the glass would break.

Perhaps it wouldn’t.

The pull on his arms was agony. It would be so easy to let go…No. He had committed no crime worth dying for. He refused to die.

Over the decades of the twentieth century the movement continued to gain momentum. Loosely organized, international in scope, its members had only one goal: to replace execution with imprisonment and rehabilitation in every state and nation they could reach. They argued that killing a man for his crime teaches him nothing, that it serves as no deterrent to others who might commit the same crime; that death is irreversible, whereas an innocent man may be released from prison if his innocence can be proved. Killing a man serves no good purpose, they said, unless for society’s vengeance. Vengeance, they said, is unworthy of an enlightened society.

Perhaps they were right.

In 1940 Karl Landsteiner and Alexander S. Wiener made public their report on the Rh factor in human blood.

By mid-century most convicted killers were getting life imprisonment or less. Many were later returned to society, some “rehabilitated,” others not. The death penalty had been passed for kidnapping in some states, but it was hard to persuade a jury to enforce it. Similarly with murder charges. A man wanted for burglary in Canada and murder in California fought extradition to Canada; he had less chance of being convicted in California. Many states had abolished the death penalty. France had none.

Rehabilitation of criminals was a major goal of the science/art of psychology.

But—

Blood banks were world-wide.

Already men and women with kidney diseases had been saved by a kidney transplanted from an identical twin. Not all kidney patients had identical twins. A doctor in Paris used transplants from close relatives, classifying up to a hundred points of incompatibility to judge in advance how successful the transplant would be.

Eye transplants were common. An eye donor could wait until he died before he saved another man’s sight.

Human bone could always be transplanted, provided the bone was first cleaned of organic matter.

So matters stood in mid-century.

By 1990 it was possible to store any living human organ for any reasonable length of time. Transplants had become routine, helped along by the “scalpel of infinite thinness,” the laser. The dying regularly willed their remains to organ banks. The mortuary lobbies couldn’t stop it. But such gifts from the dead were not always useful.

In 1993 Vermont passed the first of the organ bank laws. Vermont had always had the death penalty. Now a condemned man could know that his death would save lives. It was no longer true that an execution served no good purpose. Not in Vermont.

Nor, later, in California. Or Washington. Georgia, Pakistan, England, Switzerland, France, Rhodesia…

The pedwalk was moving at ten miles per hour. Below, unnoticed by pedestrians who had quit work late and night owls who were just beginning their rounds, Lewis Knowles hung from the moving strip and watched the ledge go by beneath his dangling feet. The ledge was no more than two feet wide, a good four feet beneath his stretching toes.

He dropped.

As his feet struck he caught the edge of a window casement. Momentum jerked at him, but he didn’t fall. After a long moment he breathed again.

He couldn’t know what building this was, but it was not deserted. At twenty-one hundred at night, all the windows were ablaze. He tried to stay back out of the light as he peered in.

The window was an office. Empty.

He’d need something to wrap around his hand to break that window. But all he was wearing was a pair of shoesocks and a prison jumper. Well, he couldn’t be more conspicuous than he was now. He took off the jumper, wrapped part of it around his hand, and struck.

He almost broke his hand.

Well…they’d let him keep his jewelry, his wristwatch and diamond ring. He drew a circle on the glass with the ring, pushing down hard, and struck again with the other hand. It had to be glass; if it was plastic he was doomed.

The glass popped out in a near-perfect circle.

He had to do it six times before the hole was big enough for him.

He smiled as he stepped inside, still holding his jumper. Now all he needed was an elevator. The cops would have picked him up in an instant if they’d caught him on the street in a prison jumper, but if he hid the jumper here he’d be safe. Who would suspect a licensed nudist?

Except that he didn’t have a license. Or a nudist’s shoulder pouch to put it in.

Or a shave.

That was very bad. Never had there been a nudist as hairy as this. Not just a five o’clock shadow, but a full beard all over, so to speak. Where could he get a razor?

He tried the desk drawers. Many businessmen kept spare razors. He stopped when he was halfway through. Not because he’d found a razor, but because he knew where he was. The papers on the desk made it all too obvious.

A hospital.

He was still clutching the jumper. He dropped it in the wastebasket, covered it tidily with papers, and more or less collapsed into the chair behind the desk.

A hospital. He would pick a hospital. And this hospital, the one which had been built right next to the Topeka County courthouse, for good and sufficient reason.

But he hadn’t picked it, not really. It had picked him. Had he ever in his life made a decision except on the instigation of others? Friends had borrowed his money for keeps, men had stolen his girls, he had avoided promotion by his knack for being ignored. Shirley had bullied him into marrying her, then left him four years later for a friend who wouldn’t be bullied.

Even now, at the possible end of his life, it was the same. An aging body snatcher had given him his escape. An engineer had built the cell bars wide enough apart to let a small man squeeze between them. Another had put a pedwalk along two convenient roofs. And here he was.

The worst of it was that here he had no chance of masquerading as a nudist. Hospital gowns and masks would be the minimum. Even nudists had to wear clothing sometime.

The closet?

There was nothing in the closet but a spiffy green hat and a perfectly transparent rain poncho.

He could run for it. If he could find a razor he’d be safe once he reached the street. He bit at a knuckle, wishing he knew where the elevator was. Have to trust to luck. He began searching the drawers again.

He had his hand on a black leather razor case when the door opened. A beefy man in a hospital gown breezed in. The intern (there were no human doctors in hospitals) was halfway to the desk before he noticed Lew crouching over an open drawer. He stopped walking. His mouth fell open.

Lew closed it with the fist which still gripped the razor case. The man’s teeth came together with a sharp click. His knees were buckling as Lew brushed past him and out the door.

The elevator was just down the hall, with the doors standing open. And nobody coming. Lew stepped in and punched O. He shaved as the elevator dropped. The razor cut fast and close, if a trifle noisily. He was working on his chest as the door opened.

A skinny technician stood directly in front of him, her mouth and eyes set in the utterly blank expression of those who wait for elevators. She brushed past him with a muttered apology, hardly noticing him. Lew stepped out fast. The doors were closing before he realized that he was on the wrong floor.

That damned tech! She’d stopped the elevator before it reached bottom.

He turned and stabbed the Down button. Then what he’d seen in the one cursory glance came back to him, and his head whipped around for another look.

The whole vast room was filled with glass tanks, ceiling height, arranged in a labyrinth like the bookcases in a library. In the tanks was a display more lewd than anything in Belsen. Why, those things had been men and women! No, he wouldn’t look. He refused to look at anything but the elevator door. What was taking that elevator so long?

He heard a siren.

The hard tile floor began to vibrate against his bare feet. He felt a numbness in his muscles, a lethargy in his soul.

The elevator arrived…too late. He blocked the doors open with a chair. Most buildings didn’t have stairs: only alternate elevators. They’d have to use the alternate elevator to reach him now. Well, where was it?…He wouldn’t have time to find it. He was beginning to feel really sleepy. They must have several sonic projectors focused on this one room. Where one beam passed the interns would feel mildly relaxed, a little clumsy. But where the beams intersected, here, there would be unconsciousness. But not yet.

He had something to do first.

By the time they broke in they’d have something to kill him for.

The tanks were faced in plastic, not glass: a very special kind of plastic. To avoid provoking defense reactions in all the myriads of body parts which might be stored touching it, the plastic had to have unique characteristics. No engineer could have been expected to make it shatterproof too!

It shattered very satisfactorily.

Later Lew wondered how he managed to stay up as long as he did. The soothing hypersonic murmur of the stun beams kept pulling at him, pulling him down to a floor which seemed softer every moment. The chair he wielded became heavier and heavier. But as long as he could lift it, he smashed. He was knee deep in nutritive storage fluid, and there were dying things brushing against his ankles with every move; but his work was barely a third done when the silent siren song became too much for him.

He fell.

And after all that they never even mentioned the smashed organ banks!

Sitting in the courtroom, listening to the drone of courtroom ritual, Lew sought Mr. Broxton’s ear to ask the question. Mr. Broxton smiled at him. “Why should they want to bring that up? They think they’ve got enough on you as it is. If you beat this rap, then they’ll prosecute you for wanton destruction of valuable medical resources. But they’re sure you won’t.”

“And you?”

“I’m afraid they’re right. But we’ll try. Now, Hennessey’s about to read the charges. Can you manage to look hurt and indignant?”

“Sure.”

“Good.”

The prosecution read the charges, his voice sounding like the voice of doom coming from under a thin blond mustache. Warren Lewis Knowles looked hurt and indignant. But he no longer felt that way. He had done something worth dying for.

The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all.

Lewis Knowles had struck back.

“The state will prove that the said Warren Lewis Knowles did, in the space of two years, willfully drive through a total of six red traffic lights. During that same period the same Warren Knowles exceeded local speed limits no less than ten times, once by as much as fifteen miles per hour. His record had never been good. We will produce records of his arrest in 2082 on a charge of drunk driving, a charge which he was acquitted only through—”

“Objection!”

“Sustained. If he was acquitted, Counselor, the Court must assume him not guilty.”

WORLD OF PTAVVS

1

There was a moment so short that it had never been successfully measured, yet always far too long. For that moment it seemed that every mind in the universe, every mind that had ever been or that would ever be, was screaming its deepest emotions at him.

Then it was over. The stars had changed again.

Even for Kzanol, who was a good astrogator, there was no point in trying to guess where the ship was now. At .93 lights, the speed at which the average mass of the universe becomes great enough to permit entry into hyperspace, the stars become unrecognizable. Ahead they flared painful blue-white. Behind they were dull red, like a scattered coal fire. To the sides they were compressed and flattened into tiny lenses. So Kzanol sucked a gnal until the ship’s brain board made a thudding sound, then went to look.

The brain screen said, “Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun: 1.72 days.”

Not good, he decided. He should have come out much closer to Thrintun. But luck, more than skill, decided when a hyperspace ship would make port. The Principle of Uncertainty is the law of hyperspace. There was no need to be impatient. It would be several hours before the fusor recharged the battery.

Kzanol swung his chair around so he could see the star map on the rear wall. The sapphire pin seemed to twinkle and gleam across the length of the cabin. For a moment he basked in its radiance, the radiance of unlimited wealth. Then he jumped up and began typing on the brain board.

Sure there was reason to be impatient! Even now somebody with a map just like his, and a pin where Kzanol had inserted his sapphire marker, might be racing to put in a claim. The control of an entire slave world, for all of Kzanol’s lifetime, was his rightful property; but only if he reached Thrintun first.

He typed: “How long to recharge the battery?”

The brain board thudded almost at once. But Kzanol was never to know the answer.

Suddenly a blinding light shone through the back window. Kzanol’s chair flattened into a couch, a loud musical note rang, and there was pressure. Terrible pressure. The ship wasn’t ever supposed to use that high an acceleration. It lasted for about five seconds. Then—

There was a sound like two lead doors being slapped together, with the ship between them.

The pressure eased. Kzanol got to his feet and peered out the rear window at the incandescent cloud that had been his fusor. A machine has no mind to read; you never know when it’s going to betray you—

The brain board thudded.

He read, “Time to recharge battery:” followed by the spiral hieroglyph, the sign of infinity.

With his face pressed against the molded diamond pane, Kzanol watched the burning power plant fade among the stars. The brain must have dropped it the moment it became dangerous. That was why it had been trailed half a mile behind the ship: because fusors sometimes exploded. Just before he lost sight of it altogether, the light flared again into something brighter than a sun.

Thud, said the brain. Kzanol read, “Reestimate of trip time to Thrintun:” followed by a spiral.

The shock wave from the far explosion reached the ship. It sounded like a distant door slamming.

There was no hurry now. For a long time Kzanol stood before his wall map, gazing at the sapphire pin.

The tiny star in the tiny jewel winked back at him, speaking of two billion slaves and a fully industrialized world waiting to serve him; speaking of more wealth and power than even his grandfather, the great Racarliw, had known; speaking of hundreds of mates and tens of thousands of personal retainers to serve his every whim during his long, lazy life. He was chain-sucking, and the eating tendrils at the corners of his mouth writhed without his knowledge, like embattled earthworms. Useless regrets filled his mind.

His grandfather should have sold the plantation when Plorn’s tnuctip slaves produced antigravity. Plorn could and should have been assassinated in time. Kzanol should have stayed on Thrintun, even if he had to slave it for a living. He should have bought a spare fusor instead of that extra suit and the deluxe crash couch and the scent score on the air plant and, with his last commercial, the sapphire pin.

There had been a day when he’d sat clutching a blue-green plastic cord which would make him a spacecraft owner or a jobless pauper. Bowed white skeletal shapes had raced round and round him: mutated racing viprin, the fastest animal anywhere in the galaxy. But, by the Power! Kzanol’s was faster than all the rest. If only he’d thrown away that thread…

For a time he relived his life on the vast stage tree plantation where he had become an adult. Kzathit Stage Logs, with its virtual monopoly on solid fuel takeoff logs, now gone forever. If only he were there now…

But Kzathit Stage Logs had been a spaceport landing field for almost ten years.

He went to the locker and put on his suit. There were two suits there, including the spare he’d bought in case one ceased to function. Stupid. If the suit failed he’d be dead anyway.

He ran a massive, stubby finger around the panic button on his chest. He’d have to use it soon; but not yet. There were things to do first. He wanted the best possible chance of survival.

At the brain board he typed: “Compute a course for any civilized planet, minimum trip time. Give trip time.”

The brain purred happily to itself. Sometimes Kzanol thought it was happy only when it was working hard. He often tried to guess at the emotionless thoughts of the machine. It bothered him that he couldn’t read its mind. Sometimes he even worried about his inability to give it orders except through the brain board. Perhaps it was too alien, he thought; thrintun had never made contact with other than protoplasmic life. While he waited for his answer he experimentally tried to reach the rescue switch on his back.

He hadn’t a chance; but that was the least of his worries. When he pushed the panic button the suit stasis field would go on, and time would cease to flow inside his suit. Only the rescue switch would protrude from the field. It had been placed so that Kzanol’s rescuer, not Kzanol, could reach it.

Thud! The screen said, “No solution.”

Nonsense! The battery had a tremendous potential, even after a hyperspace jump it must still have enough energy to aim the ship at some civilized planet. Why would the brain…?

Then he understood. The ship had power, probably, to reach several worlds, but not to slow him down to the speed of any known world. Well, that was all right. In his stasis field Kzanol wouldn’t care how hard he hit. He typed: “Do not consider decrease of velocity upon arrival. Plot course for any civilized planet. Minimize trip time.”

The answer took only a few seconds. “Trip time to Awtprun 72 Thrintun years 100.48 days.”

Awtprun. Well, it didn’t matter where he landed; he could hop a ship for Thrintun as soon as they turned oil his field generator. Would some other prospector find Racarliwun in seventy-two years? Probably.

Spirit of the Power! Hurriedly he typed: “Cancel course to Awtprun.” Then he sagged back in his chair, appalled at his narrow escape.

If he had hit Awtprun at more than nine-tenths light, he could have killed upward of a million people. That was assuming he hit an ocean! The shock wave would knock every flying thing out of the air for a thousand miles around and scour the land clean, sink islands, tear down buildings half around the world.

For a blunder like that, he’d draw death after a year of torture. Torture in the hands of a telepathic, highly scientific society was a horrible thing. Biology students would watch, scribbling furiously, while members of the Penalty Board carefully traced his nervous system with stimulators…

Gradually his predicament became clear to him. He couldn’t land on a civilized planet. All right. But he couldn’t land on a slave planet either; he’d be certain to knock down a few overseers’ palaces, as well as killing billions of commercials’ worth of slaves.

Perhaps he could aim to go through a system, hoping that the enlarged mass of his ship would be noticed? But he dared not do that. To stay in space was literally unthinkable. Why, he might go right out of the galaxy! He saw himself lost forever between the island universes, the ship disintegrating around him, the rescue button being worn down to a small shiny spot by interstellar dust…No!

Gently he rubbed his closed eyes with an eating tendril. Could he land on a moon? If he hit a moon hard enough, the flash might be seen. But the brain wasn’t good enough to get him there, not at such a distance. A moon’s orbit is a twisty thing, and he’d have to hit the moon of a civilized planet. Awtprun was the closest, and Awtprun was much too far.

And to top it off, he realized, he was sucking his last gnal. He sat there feeling sorry for himself until it was gone, then began to pace the floor.

Of course!

He stood stock still in the middle of the cabin, thinking out his inspiration, looking for the flaw. He couldn’t find one. Hurriedly he tapped at the brain board: “Compute course for a food planet minimizing trip time. Ship need not slow on arrival. Give details.”

His eating tendrils hung limp, relaxed. It’s going to be all right, he thought, and meant it.

For protoplasmic life forms, there are not many habitable planets in the galaxy. Nature makes an unreasonable number of conditions. To insure the right composition of atmosphere, the planet must be exactly the right distance from a G type sun, must be exactly the right size, and must have a freakishly oversized moon in its sky. The purpose of the moon is to strip away most of the planet’s atmosphere, generally around 99 percent of it. Without its moon a habitable world becomes shockingly uninhabitable; its air acquires crushing weight, and its temperature becomes that of a “hot” oven.

Of the 219 habitable worlds found by Thrintun, 64 had life. Seventeen had intelligent life; 18 if you were broad minded. The 155 barren worlds would not be ready for Thrintun occupancy until after a long seeding process. Meanwhile, they had their uses.

They could be seeded with a tnuctipun-developed food yeast. After a few centuries the yeast generally mutated, but until then the world was a food planet, with all its oceans full of the cheapest food in the galaxy. Of course, only a slave would eat it; but there were plenty of slaves.

All over the galaxy there were food planets to feed the slave planets. The caretaker’s palace was always on the moon. Who would want to live on a world with barren land and scummy seas? Not to mention the danger of bacteria contaminating the yeast. So from the moons a careful watch was kept on the food planets.

After the yeast had mutated to the point where it was no longer edible, even to a slave, the world was seeded with yeast-eating whitefood herds. Whitefoods ate anything, and were a good source of meat. The watch was continued.

At his present speed Kzanol would hit such a planet hard enough to produce a blazing plume of incandescent gas. The exploded rock would rise flaming into space, vivid and startling and unmistakable even to a watcher on the moon. The orange glow of the crater would last for days.

Chances were that Kzanol would end underground, but not far underground. The incandescent air and rock which move ahead of a meteorite usually blow the meteorite itself back into the air, to rain down over a wide area. Kzanol, wrapped safely in his stasis field; would go right back out his own hole, and would not dig himself very deep on the second fall. The caretaker could find him instantly with any kind of rock-penetrating instrument. A stasis field is the only perfect reflector.

The brain interrupted his planning. “Nearest available food planet is F124. Estimated trip time 202 years 91.4 days.”

Kzanol typed: “Show me F124 and system.”

The screen showed specks of light. One by one, the major planets and their moon systems were enlarged. F124 was a steamy, quick-spinning ball: a typical food planet, even its moon’s rotation was almost nil. The moon seemed overlarge, but also overdistant. An outer planet made Kzanol gasp in admiration. It was ringed! Gorgeously ringed. Kzanol waited until all the major worlds had been shown. When the asteroids began to appear in order of size he typed: “Enough. Follow course to F124.”

He’d left his helmet off. Other than that he was fully dressed for the long sleep. He felt the ship accelerating, a throb in the metal from the motors. The cabin’s acceleration field canceled the gees. He picked up his helmet and set it on his neck ring, changed his mind and took it off. He went to the wall and tore off his star map, rolled it up and stuck it through the neck ring into the bosom of his suit. He had the helmet ready to tog down when he started to wonder.

His rescuer could claim a large sum for the altruistic act of rescuing him. But suppose the reward didn’t satisfy him? If he were any kind of thrint he would take the map as soon as he saw it. After all, there was no law against it. Kzanol had better memorize the map.

But there was a better answer.

Yes! Kzanol hurried to the locker and pulled out the second suit. He stuffed the map into one arm. He was elated with his discovery. There was plenty of room left in the empty suit. Briskly he moved about the cabin collecting his treasures. The amplifier helmet, universal symbol of power and of royalty, which had once belonged to his grandfather. It was a light but bulky instrument which could amplify the thrint’s native Power to control twenty to thirty non-thrints into the ability, to control an entire planet. His brother’s farewell present, a disintegrator with a hand-carved handle. He had a thought which made him put it aside. His statues of Ptul and Myxylomat. May they never meet! But both females would be dead before he saw them again, unless some friend put them in stasis against his return. His diamond-geared, hullfab-cased watch with the cryogenic gears, which always ran slow no matter how many times it was fixed. He couldn’t wear it to F124; it was for formal events only. He wrapped each valuable in one of his extra robes before inserting it into the suit.

There was room left over.

In a what-the-hell mood he called the little racarliw slave over from the storage locker and made it get in. Then he screwed the helmet down and pushed the panic button.

The suit looked like a crazy mirror. All the wrinkles remained, but the suit was suddenly more rigid than diamond or hullfab. He propped it in a corner, patted it fondly on the head, and left it.

“Cancel present course to F124,” he typed. “Compute and follow fastest course to F124 using only half of remaining power, completing all necessary power maneuvers within the next day.”

A day later, Kzanol was suffering mild gnal withdrawal symptoms. He was doing everything he could think of to keep himself busy so that he wouldn’t have to think about how much he wanted a gnal.

He had, in fact, just finished an experiment. He had turned off the field in the second suit, placed the disintegrator in its glove, and turned on the field again. The stasis field had followed its metal surface. The digging instrument had gone into stasis along with the suit.

Then the drive went off. Feeling considerable relief, Kzanol went to the board and typed: “Compute fastest course to eighth planet of F124 system. Wait ½ day, then follow course.” He put on his suit, picked up the disintegrator and some wire line, and went out the airlock. He used the line to stop his drift until he was motionless with respect to the ship.

Any last thoughts?

He’d done the best he could for himself. He was falling toward F124. The ship would reach the unwatched, uninhabitable eighth planet years before Kzanol hit the third. It should make a nice, big crater, easy to find. Not that he’d need it.

There was a risk, he thought, that the rescue switch might be set off by reentry heat. If that happened he would wake up underground, for it took time for the field to die. But he could dig his way out with the disintegrator.

Kzanol poised a thick, clumsy finger over the panic button. Last thoughts?

Regrettably, there were none.

Kzanol pushed the panic button.

Larry Greenberg climbed out of the contact field and stood up. His footsteps echoed in the big dolphin tank room. There were no disorientation effects this time, no trouble with his breathing and no urge to wiggle nonexistent flippers and tail. Which was natural enough, since the “message” had gone the other way.

The dolphin named Charley was lying on the bottom of the tank. He had sunk from under his own specially designed contact helmet. Larry walked around to where Charley could see him through the glass, but Charley’s eyes weren’t looking at anything. The dolphin was twitching, all over. Larry watched with concern, aware that the two marine biologists had come up beside him and were looking just as worried. Then Charley stopped twitching and surfaced.

“That wasss willd,” said Charley in his best Donald Duck accent.

“Are you all right?” one of the seadocs asked anxiously. “We kept the field at lowest power.”

“Sssure, Billl, I’mm ffine. But that was wild. I feel like I sshould have arms and legs and a long nose overhanging my teeth insstead of a hole in my head.” Whatever accent Charley had, there was nothing wrong with his vocabulary. “And I havvv thiss terrible urge to make love to Larry’s wife.”

“Me, too,” said Doctor Bill Slater, but under his breath.

Larry laughed. “You lecherous fish! Don’t you dare! I’ll steal your cows!”

“We trade wives?” Charley buzzed like an MG taking off, then flipped wildly around the tank. Dolphin laughter. He ended the performance by jetting straight out of the water and landing on his belly. “Has my accent improved?”

Larry decided there was no point in trying to brush off the water. It had soaked through to his skin. “Come to think of it, yes, it has. It’s much better.”

Charley switched to dolphinese—or to pidgin dolphinese, which is dolphinese scaled down to the human range of hearing. The rest of his conversation came in a chorus of squeaks, grunts, ear-splitting whistles, and other extremely rude noises. “When’s our next session, mind buddy?”

Larry was busy squeezing water out of his hair. “I don’t know, exactly, Charley. Probably a few weeks. I’ve been asked to take on another assignment. You’ll have time to talk to your colleagues, pass on whatever you’ve learned about us walkers from reading my mind.”

“You sure you want me to do that? Seriously, Larrry, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you.”

“Squeak on.”

Charley deliberately speeded up his delivery. Nobody but Larry Greenberg could have followed the rapid chorus of barnyard sounds. “What’s chances of a dolphin getting aboard the Lazy Eight III?”

“Huh? To Jinx? Jinx’s ocean is a foot deep in scum!”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, some other world, then.”

“Why would a dolphin be interested in space travel?”

“Why would a walker? No, that’s not an honorable question. I think the truth is you’ve given me the space bug, Larrry.”

A slow grin spread across Larry’s urchin face. He found it curiously hard to answer. “It’s a damn contagious disease, and hard to get rid of.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll think about it, Charley. Eventually you’ll have to contact the UN about it, but give me time first. We’d have to carry a lot of water, you know. Much heavier than air.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Give me some time. I’ve got to go practically right now.”

“But—”

“Sorry, Charley. Duty calls. Dr. Jansky made it sound like the opportunity of the decade. Now roll over.”

“Tyrant,” hissed Charley, which isn’t easy. But he rolled over on his back. The three men spent a few minutes rubbing his belly. Then Larry had to leave. Momentarily he wondered if Charley would have any trouble assimilating his memories. But there was no danger; at the low contact power they’d been using, Charley could forget the whole experience if he had to. Including the conquest of space.

Which would be a shame.

That night he and Judy had dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Dorcas Jansky. Dr. Dorcas Jansky was a huge West Berliner with a blond beard and the kind of flamboyant, extrovert personality that had always made Larry slightly uncomfortable. Had he but known it, Larry had a very similar psyche; but it was housed in a much smaller body. It looked different that way. Mrs. Jansky was about Judy’s size and almost as pretty. She was the quiet type, at least when English was being spoken.

The conversation ranged explosively during dinner. As Larry said later, “It’s fun to meet someone who likes to argue about the same things you do.” They compared Los Angeles’ outward growth to West Berlin’s reaching skyscrapers.

“The urge to reach the stars,” said Jansky.

“You’re surrounded by East Germany,” Larry maintained. “There’s nowhere you can go but up.”

They spent useless time deciding which of the eleven forms of communism most closely resembled Marxism, and finally decided to wait and see which government withered away the fastest. They talked smog—where did it come from, now that there were neither industrial concerns nor hydrocarbon-powered vehicles in the Major Los Angeles Basin? Mainly cooking, thought Judy. Cigarettes, said Jansky, and Larry suggested that electrostatic air conditioning might concentrate impurities in the outside air. They talked about dolphins. Jansky had the nerve to question dolphin intelligence, merely because they’d never built anything. Larry, touched to the quick, stood up and gave the most stirring impromptu lecture of his life. It wasn’t until the coffee hour that business was mentioned.

“You were not the first man to read a dolphin’s mind, Mr. Greenberg.” Jansky now held a gigantic cigar as if it were a professor’s blackboard pointer. “Am I right in thinking that the dolphin contacts were only training of a sort?”

Larry nodded vigorously. “Right. Judy and I were trying for a berth on the Lazy Eight III, bound for Jinx. I knew from the standard tests that I had some telepathic aptitude, and when we got the word about the bandersnatchi I knew we were in. Nobody’s gotten anywhere trying to learn the bandersnatchi language, and there aren’t any contact men on Jinx. So I volunteered for the dolphin work and Judy started studying linguistics, and then we put in for the trip as a husband-wife team. I thought our sizes would be the clincher. The dolphin work was just practice for contacting a bandersnatch.” He sighed. “But this fool economic war with the Belt is fouling up the whole space effort. The bastards.”

Judy reached across and took his hand. “We’ll get there yet,” she promised.

“Sure we will,” said Larry.

“You may not need to,” said the doctor, emphasizing his words with jerky gestures of his cigar. “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet—” He paused expectantly.

“You don’t mean you’ve got a bandersnatch here?” Judy sounded startled, and well she might. Bandersnatchi weighed thirty tons apiece.

“Am I a magician? No bandersnatchi, but something else. Did I mention that I am a physicist?”

“No.” Larry wondered what a physicist would want with a contact man.

“Yes, a physicist. My colleagues and I have been working for some twelve years on a time-retarding field. We knew it was possible, the mathematics are well known, but the engineering techniques were very difficult. It took us years.”

“But you got it.”

“Yes. We developed a field that will make six hours of outer, normal time equivalent to one second of time inside the field. The ratio of outer time to inner time moves in large, ahh, quantum jumps. The twenty-one-thousand-to-one ratio is all we have been able to get, and we do not know where the next quantum is.”

Judy spoke unexpectedly.

“Then build two machines and put one inside the field of the other.”

The physicist laughed uproariously. He seemed to shake the room. “Excuse me,” he said when he had finished, “but it is very funny that you should make that suggestion so quickly. Of course, it was one of the first things we tried.” Judy thought black thoughts, and Larry squeezed her hand warningly. Jansky didn’t notice. “The fact is that one time-retarding field cannot exist inside another. I have worked out a mathematical proof of this.”

“Too bad,” said Larry.

“Perhaps not. Mr. Greenberg, have you ever heard of the Sea Statue?”

Larry tried to remember, but it was Judy who answered. “I have! Lifetimes did a pictorial on it. It’s the one they found off the Brazilian continental shell.”

“That’s right,” Larry remembered aloud. “The dolphins found it and sold it to the United Nations for some undersea gadgetry. Some anthropologists thought they’d found Atlantis.” He remembered pictures of a misshapen figure four feet tall, with strangely carved arms and legs and a humped back and a featureless globe of a head, surfaced like a highly polished mirror. “It looked like an early rendition of a goblin.”

“Yes, it certainly does. I have it here.”

“Here?”

“Here. The United Nations Comparative Culture Exhibit loaned it to us after we explained what it was for.” He crushed his now tiny cigar butt to smithereens. “As you know, no sociologist has been able to link the statue to any known culture. But I, the doctor of physics, I have solved the mystery. I believe.

“Tomorrow I will show you why I believe the statue is an alien being in a time-retarder field. You can guess what I want you to do. I want to put you and the statue in the time-retarder field, to cancel out our, er, visitor’s own field, and let you read its mind.”

They walked down to the corner at ten the next morning, and Judy stayed while Larry pushed the call button and waited for the cab. About two minutes passed before a yellow-and-black-checked flyer dropped to the corner.

Larry was getting in when he felt Judy grasping his upper arm. “What’s wrong?” he asked, turning half around.

“I’m frightened,” she said. She looked it. “Are you sure it’s all right? You don’t know anything about him at all!”

“Who, Jansky? Look—”

“The statue.”

“Oh.” He considered. “Look, I’m just going to quickly make a couple of points. All right?” She nodded. “One. The contact gadget isn’t dangerous. I’ve been using it for years. All I get is another person’s memories, and a little insight into how he thinks. Even then they’re damped a little so I have to think hard to remember something that didn’t happen to me personally.

“Two. My experience with dolphins has given me experience with unhuman minds. Right?”

“Right. And you always want to play practical jokes after a session with Charley. Remember when you hypnotized Mrs. Grafton and made her—”

“Nuts. I’ve always liked practical jokes. Third point is that the time field doesn’t matter at all. It’s just to kill the field around the statue. You can forget it.

“Four. Jansky won’t take any chances with my life. You know that, you can see it. Okay?”

“All that scuba diving last summer—”

“That was your idea.”

“Uh? I guess it was.” She smiled and didn’t mean it. “Okay. I thought you’d be practicing next on bandersnatchi, but I guess this is the acid test. And I’m still worried. You know I’m prescient.”

“Well—oh, well. I’ll call you as soon as I can.” He got into the cab and dialed the address of the UCLA physics school level.

“Mark will be back with the coffee in a minute,” said Dorcas Jansky. “Let me show you how the time-retarding field works.” They were in a huge room whose roof contained two of those gigantic electrodes which produce ear-splitting claps of artificial lightning to impress groups of wide-eyed college students. But Jansky didn’t seem concerned with the lightning maker. “We borrowed this part of the building because it has a good power source,” he said, “and it was big enough for our purposes. Do you see that wire construction?”

“Sure.” It was a cube of very fine wire mesh, with a flap in one side. The wire covered the top and floor as well as the sides. Busy workmen were testing and arranging great and complex-looking masses of machinery, which were not as yet connected to the wire cage.

“The field follows the surface of that wire. The wire side boundary between slow, inside time and fast, outside time. We had some fun making it, let me tell you!” Jansky ran his fingers through his beard, meditating on the hard work to which he had been put. “We think the field around the alien must be several quantum numbers higher than ours. There is no telling how long he has been in there—except by the method we will use.”

“Well, he might not know either.”

“Yes, I suppose so. Larry, you will be in the field for six hours of outer time. That will be one second of your time. I understand that the thought transfer is instantaneous?”

“Not instantaneous, but it does take less than a second. Set things up and turn on the contact machine before you turn on the time field, and I’ll get his thoughts as soon as he comes to life. Until he does that I won’t get anything.” Just like the dolphins, Larry told himself. It’s just like contacting a Tursiops truncatus.

“Good. I wasn’t sure. Ahh.” Jansky went to tell Mark where to put the coffee. Larry welcomed the interruption, for suddenly he was getting the willies. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been the night before his first session with a dolphin, but it was bad enough. He was remembering that his wife was sometimes uncomfortably psychic. He drank his coffee gratefully.

“So,” Jansky gasped, having drained his cup at a few gulps. “Larry, when did you first suspect that you were telebaddic?”

“College,” said Larry. “I was going to Washburn University—it’s in Kansas—and one day a visiting bigwig gave the whole school a test for psi powers. We spent the whole day at it. Telepathy, esper, PK, prescience, even a weird test for teleportation which everybody flunked. Judy came up high on prescience, but erratic, and I topped everyone on telepathy. That’s how we met. When we found out we both wanted to go starhopping…”

“Surely that wasn’t why you two married?”

“Not entirely. And it sure as hell isn’t why we haven’t gotten divorced.” Larry grinned a feral grin, then seemed to recollect himself. “Telepathy makes for good marriages, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jansky smiled.

“I might have made a good psychologist,” Larry said without regret. “But it’s a little late to start now. I hope they send out the Lazy Eight III,” he said between his teeth. “They can’t desert the colonies anyway. They can’t do that.”

Jansky refilled both cups. The workmen wheeled something through the huge doorway, something covered by a sheet. Larry watched them as he sipped his coffee. He was feeling completely relaxed. Jansky drained his second cup as fast as he had finished the first. He must either love it, Larry decided, or hate it.

Unexpectedly Jansky asked, “Do you like dolphins?”

“Sure. Very much, in fact.”

“Why?”

“They have so much fun,” was Larry’s inadequate-sounding reply.

“You’re glad you entered your profession?”

“Oh, very. It would have surprised my father, though. He thought I was going to be a pawnbroker. You see, I was born with…” His voice trailed off. “Hey! Is that it?”

“Um?” Jansky looked where Larry was looking. “Yes, that is the Sea Statue. Shall we go and look at it?”

“Let’s.”

The three men carrying the statue took no notice of them. They carried it into the cubical structure of fine wire mesh and set it under one of the crystal-iron helmets of the contact machine. They had to brace its feet with chocks of wood. The other helmet, Larry’s end of the contact link, was fixed at the head of an old psychoanalyst’s couch. The workmen left the cage, single file, and Larry stood in the open flap and peered at the statue.

The surface was an unbroken, perfect mirror. A crazy mirror. It made the statue difficult to see, for all that reached the eye was a distorted view of other parts of the room.

The statue was less than four feet tall. It looked very much like a faceless hobgoblin. The triangular hump on its back was more stylized than realistic, and the featureless globular head was downright eerie. The legs were strange and bent, and the heels stuck out too far behind the ankle. It could have been an attempt to model a gnome, except for the strange legs and feet and the stranger surface and the short, thick arms with massive Mickey Mouse hands.

“I notice he’s armed,” was Larry’s first, slightly uneasy comment. “And he seems to be crouching.”

“Crouching? Take a closer look,” Jansky invited genially. “And look at the feet.”

A closer look was worse. The crouch was menacing, predatory, as if the supposed alien was about to charge an enemy or a food animal. The gun, a ringed double-barreled shotgun with no handle, was ready to deal death. But—

“I still don’t see what you’re driving at, but I can see his feet aren’t straight. They don’t lie flat to the ground.”

“Right!” Jansky waxed enthusiastic. His accent thickened noticeably. “That was the first thing I thought of, when I saw a picture of the statue in the Griffith Park Observatory. I thought, the thing wasn’t made to stand up. Why? Then I saw. He is in free flight!”

“Yeah!” It was startling how obvious the thing became. The statue was in a weightless spaceman’s crouch, halfway toward fetal position. Of course he was!

“That was when the archaeologists were still wondering how the artist had gotten that mirror finish. Some of them already thought the statue had been left by visitors from space. But I had already completed my time field, you see, and I thought, suppose he was in space and something went wrong. He might have put himself in slow time to wait for rescue. And rescue never came. So I went to Brasilia Ciudad and persuaded the UNCCE to let me test my t’eory. I aimed a liddle laser beam at one finger…

“And what happened? The laser couldn’t even mark the surface. Then they were convinced. I took it back here with me.” He beamed happily.

The statue had seemed formidable, armed and crouched and ready to spring. Now it was merely pitiful. Larry asked, “Can’t you bring him out of it?”

Jansky shook his head violently. “No. You see that unshiny bump on his back?”

Larry saw it, just below the apex of the triangular hump. It was just duller than the perfect mirror surface which surrounded it, and faintly reddened.

“It sticks out of the field, just a little. Just a few molecules. I think it was the switch to turn, off the field. It may have burned off when our friend came through the air, or it may have rusted away while he was at the bottom of the ocean. So now there is no way to turn it off. Poor designing,” he added contemptuously.

“Well, I think they are ready.”

Larry’s uneasiness returned. They were ready. Machinery hummed and glowed outside the cage. The disk were steady on the humped contact machine, from which two multicolored cables led to the helmets. Four workmen in lab smocks stood nearby, not working but not idling. Waiting.

Larry walked rapidly back to the table, poured and drained half a cup of coffee, and went back into the cage. “I’m ready too,” he announced.

Jansky smiled. “Okay,” he said, and stepped out of the cage. Two workmen immediately closed the flap with a zipper twenty feet long.

“Give me two minutes to relax,” Larry called.

“Okay,” said Jansky.

Larry stretched out on the couch, his head and shoulders inside the metal shell which was his contact helmet, and closed his eyes. Was Jansky wondering why he wanted extra time? Let him wonder. The contact worked better when he was resting.

Two minutes and one second from now, what wonders would he remember?

Judy Greenberg finished programming the apartment and left. Larry wouldn’t be back until late tonight, if then; various people would be quizzing him. They would want to know how he took the “contact.” There were things she could do in the meantime.

The traffic was amazing. In Los Angeles, as in any other big city, each taxi was assigned to a certain altitude. They took off straight up and landed straight down, and the coordinator took care of things when two taxis had the same destination. But here, taxi levels must have been no more than ten feet apart. In the three years they had been living here Judy had never gotten used to seeing a cab pass that close overhead. The traffic was faster in Kansas but at least it was set to keep its distance.

The taxi let her off at the edge of the top strip, the transparent pedestrian walk thirty stories above the vehicular traffic, in a shopping district. She began to walk.

She noticed the city’s widely advertised cleanup project at work on many of the black-sided buildings. The stone came away startlingly white where the decades, sometimes centuries, of dirt had washed off. Judy noticed with amusement that only corner buildings were being cleaned.

“I should have said, ‘What do you mean, experience in reading alien minds? Dolphins have been legally human since before you were born!’ That’s what I should have said,” said Judy to herself. She began to laugh quietly. That would have impressed him! Sure it would!

She was about to enter a women’s leather goods store when it happened. In the back of her mind something slowed, then disappeared. Involuntarily Judy stopped walking. The traffic around her seemed to move with bewildering speed. Pedestrians shot by on twinkling feet or were hurled at suicidal velocities by the slidewalks.

She had known something was coming, but she had never imagined it would feel like this, as if something had been jerked out of her.

Judy went into the shop and began searching for gifts. She was determined not to let this throw her. In six hours he would be back.

“Zwei minuten,” Doctor Jansky muttered, and threw the switch.

There was a complaining whine from the machinery, rising in pitch and amplitude, higher and louder until even Jansky blinked uncomfortably. Then it cut off, sharply and suddenly. The cage was an unbroken mirror.

The timing mechanism was inside the cage. It would cut the current in “one second.”

“It is thirteen twenty,” said Jansky. “I suggest we should be back here at nineteen hours.” He left the room without looking back.

Kzanol dropped the wire and pushed the button in his chest. The field must have taken a moment to build up, for the universe was suddenly jagged with flying streaks of light.

Gravity snatched at him. If there were other changes in his personal universe Kzanol didn’t notice. All he knew was the floor beneath him, and the block of something beneath each heel-spur, and the weight which yanked him down. There was no time to tense his legs or catch his balance. He bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

Jansky was the last to arrive. He came promptly at nineteen hours, pushing a keg of beer on a cart. Someone took it from him and wheeled it over to a table. His image wavered as it passed the cube; the wire wall couldn’t have been quite flat.

A newcomer was in the building, a dumpy man about forty years old, with a blond Mohican haircut. When Jansky was rid of the keg he came forward to introduce himself. “I’m Dr. Dale Snyder, Mr. Greenberg’s experimental psychologist. I’ll want to talk to him when he gets out of there, make sure he’s all right.”

Jansky shook hands and offered Snyder a fair share of the beer. At Snyder’s insistence he spent some time explaining what he hoped to accomplish.

At nineteen twenty the cage remained solid. “There may be a little delay,” said Jansky. “The field takes a few minutes to die. Sometimes longer.”

At nineteen thirty he said, “I hope the alien time field hasn’t reinforced mine.” He said it softly, in German.

At nineteen fifty the beer was almost gone. Dale Snyder was making threatening noises, and one of the technicians was soothing him. Jansky, not a diplomat, sat staring fixedly at the silvered cube. At long intervals he would remember the beer in his paper cup and pour it whole down his throat. His look was not reassuring.

At twenty hours the cube flickered and was transparent. There was a cheer as Jansky and Snyder hurried forward. As he got closer Jansky saw that the statue had fallen on its face, and was no longer under the contact helmet.

Snyder frowned. Jansky had done a good job of describing the experiment. Now the psychologist suddenly wondered: Was that sphere really where the alien kept its brain? If it wasn’t, the experiment would be a failure. Even dolphins were deceptive that way. The brains were not in the bulging “forehead,” but behind the blowhole; the “forehead” was a weapon, a heavily padded ram.

Larry Greenberg was sitting up. Even from here he looked bad. His eyes were glassy, unfocused; he made no move to stand up. He looks mad, thought Dorcas Jansky, hoping that Snyder wouldn’t think so too. But Snyder was obviously worried.

Larry climbed to his feet with a peculiar rolling motion. He seemed to stumble, recovered, tottered to the edge of the wire curtain. He looked like he was walking on raw eggs, trying not to break them. He stooped like a weight lifter, bending his knees and not his back, and picked up something from where it lay beside the fallen statue. As Jansky reached the wire, Larry turned to him with the thing in his hands.

Jansky screamed. He was blind! And the skin of his face was coming apart! He threw his arms over his face, feeling the same torment in his arms, and turned to run. Agony lashed his back. He ran until he hit the wall.

A moment earlier she’d been sound asleep. Now she was wide awake, sitting straight up in bed, eyes searching the dark for—she didn’t know what. She groped for the light switch, but it wasn’t in the right place; her swinging arm couldn’t even find the bed control panel. Then she knew that she was on Larry’s side of the bed. She found his panel on her right and turned on the lamp.

Where was he? She’d gone to sleep about seventeen, completely beat. He must be still at UCLA. Something had gone wrong, she could feel it!

Was it just a nightmare?

If it had been a nightmare she couldn’t remember a single detail. But the mood clung, haunting her. She tried to go back to sleep and found she couldn’t. The room seemed strange and awful. The shadows were full of unseen crawling monsters.

Kzanol bleated and threw both arms out to break his fall.

And went insane. The impressions poured riotously through his flinching senses and overwhelmed him. With the desperation of a drowning man trying to breathe water, he tried to sort them out before they killed him.

First and most monstrous were the memories of an unfamiliar breed of slave calling itself Larry Greenberg. They were more powerful than anything that had ever reached his Power sense. If Kzanol had not spent so many years controlling alien life forms, growing used to the feel of alien thoughts, his whole personality would have been drowned.

With a tremendous effort he managed to exclude most of the Greenberg mind from his consciousness. The vertigo didn’t pass. Now his body felt weird, hot and malformed. He tried to open his eye, but the muscles wouldn’t work. Then he must have hit the right combination and his eye opened. Twice! He moaned and shut it tight, then tried again. His eye opened twice, two distinct and separate motions, but he kept them open because he was looking down at his own body. His body was Larry Greenberg.

He’d had enough warning. The shock didn’t kill him.

Gingerly Kzanol began to probe the Greenberg mind. He had to be careful to get only a little information at a time, or he would be swamped. It was very different from ordinary use of the Power; it was a little like practicing with an amplifier helmet. He got enough to convince him that he really had been teleported, or telepathed, or some ptavv-sired thing, into an alien slave body.

He sat up slowly and carefully, using the Greenberg reflexes as much as he dared because he wasn’t used to the strange muscles. The double vision tended to confuse him, but he could see that he was in a sort of metal mesh enclosure. Outside…Kzanol got the worst shock of all, and again he went insane.

Outside the enclosure were slaves, of the same strange breed as his present self. Two of them were actually coming toward him. He hadn’t sensed them at all—and he still couldn’t.

Powerless!

A thrint is not born with the Power. Generally it takes around two thrintun years for the Power sense to develop, and another year before the young thrint can force a coherent order on a slave. In some cases the Power never comes. If a thrint reaches adulthood without the Power, he is called a ptavv. He is tattooed permanently pink and sold as a slave, unless he is secretly killed by his family. Very secretly. There is no better ground for blackmail than the knowledge that a wealthy family once produced a ptavv.

An adult thrint who loses the Power is less predictable. If he doesn’t go thrint-catatonic he may commit suicide; or he may go on a killing spree, slaughtering either every slave or every thrint that crosses his path; or he may compulsively forget even the existence of a Power. The Powerloss is more crippling than going blind or deaf, more humiliating than castration. If a man could lose his intelligence, yet retain the memory of what he had lost, he might feel as Kzanol felt; for the Power is what separates Thrint from Animal.

Still daring to hope, Kzanol looked directly at the advancing aliens and ordered them to STOP! The sense wasn’t working, but maybe…The slaves kept coming.

They were looking at him! Helplessly he cast about for some way to stop them from looking. They were witnessing his shame, these undersized furry whitefoods who now considered him an equal. And he saw the disintegrator, lying near the abandoned Kzanol body’s out-flung hand.

He got to his feet all right, but when he tried to hop he almost fell on his face. He managed to walk over, looking like a terrified novice trying to move in low gravity. The nearest slave had reached the cage. Kzanol bent his funny knees until he could pick up the disintegrator, using both hands because his new fingers looked so fragile and delicate and helpless. With a growl that somehow got stuck in his throat, he turned the digging instrument on the aliens. When they were all cowering on the floor or against the walls he whirled and ran, smashed into the wire, backed off and disintegrated a hole for himself and ran for the door. He had to let Greenberg through to open the door for him.

For a long time he thought only of running.

There were green lights below, spaced sparsely over the land between the cities. You had to fly high to see two at a time. Between cities most cars did fly that high, especially if the driver was the cautious type. The lights were service stations. Usually a car didn’t need servicing more than twice a year, but it was nice to be able to see help when you were in open country. The loneliness could get fierce for a city man, and most men were city men.

It was also nice to know you could land near a green light without finding yourself on top of a tree or halfway over a cliff.

Kzanol steered very wide of the cities, and avoided the green lights too. He couldn’t have faced a slave in his present state. When he left the physics level he had gone straight to the roof parking levels, to the haven of his Volkswagen, and taken it straight up. Then he had faced the problem of destination. He didn’t really want to go anywhere. When he reached altitude he set the car for New York, knowing that he could change back to California before he got there. Henceforth he let the car drive itself, except when he had to steer around a city.

He did a lot of steering. The green country was more nearly islands in a sea of city than vice versa. Time and again he found narrow isthmuses of city, lines of buildings half a mile across following old superhighways. He crossed these at top speed and went on.

At one hour he had to bring the car down. The drive had been grueling. Only his mad urge to flee had kept him going; and he was beginning to know that he had nowhere to flee to. He felt aches and pains that were sheer torture to him, although Greenberg would have ignored them from habit. His fingers were cramped and sore; they seemed more delicate than ever. He was not mistaken in this. The Greenberg memory told him why the little finger of his left hand ached constantly: a baseball accident that had healed wrong. And Greenberg had taken this crippling disaster for granted! Kzanol was almost afraid to use his hands for anything. There were other pains. His cramped muscles ached from sitting in one position for five hours. His right leg was in agony from its constant pressure on the throttle during override maneuvers. He itched everywhere that clothing pressed against his body.

He brought the car down in the middle of a stunted wood in Arizona. Hurriedly lie got out and stripped off his clothes. Much better! He tossed them into the right-hand seat—he might need them again sometime—got back in and turned on the heater. Now he itched where he touched the seat, but he could stand it.

He had been letting Greenberg’s reflexes drive the car, and in the process had gotten used to the presence of Greenberg in his mind. He could draw on the memory set with little discomfort and without fear. But he had not become used to the alien body he now wore, and he had no slightest intention of adjusting to the loss of the Power. Kzanol wanted his body back.

He knew where it was: he’d seen it when he got the disintegrator. The Greenberg memories filled in the details for him. Obviously he had thrown the disintegrator when he put his arms out to protect himself. The body would keep until he found some way of getting back to it.

To do that he would need a way to operate the men who operated the contact machine. He would need a great deal of technological help to break the Kzanol body out of stasis; he’d seen, as Greenberg, the rusted spot on his back. But to get all this help he needed the Power. How? His human brain didn’t have the Power in it.

But there was one chance. Humans had space travel, remembered Kzanol/Greenberg. Pitiful space travel: ships that took decades to cross between the inhabited worlds, and days even to cruise the planets of the “solar system.” But space travel it was. If he could find the F124 system, and if it were close enough to reach, he could get the amplifier helmet. And Greenberg had had rudimentary telepathy.

The helmet could boost his tiny talent into a semblance of thrintun Power.

Where was he now? He must have missed F124, Kzanol decided, and gone on to a haphazard collision with this planet Earth. Where and when had he landed? Could he reach the lost planet within Greenburg’s lifetime?

Greenberg’s body wanted dinner (it was 1:20 hours), water, and a cigarette. Kzanol had no trouble ignoring the hunger and thirst, for a thrint would kill himself if he ate enough to satisfy his hunger, and rupture his storage sac if he drank until he wasn’t thirsty. The battle for food had been very fierce among the thrint’s dumb ancestors. But he had cigarettes. He smoked and found that he liked it, although he had to fight an urge to chew the filter.

Where was he? He let Larry Greenberg’s memory come to the surface. High school. History class, with lousy grades. The race for space; Moon bases; Mars bases. The Belt. Colonization of the Belt. The economics behind the Belt. Confinement Asteroid. Overpopulation on Earth. Fertility Laws; Fertility Board; Superman Insurrection. Sanction against the Belt, during an argument over the use of the Jovian moons. There was a lot of extraneous material coming through, but Kzanol was getting a good picture of the solar system. He was on the third planet, and it was binary. He had been extremely lucky to hit it.

The UN power sender on Mercury. Failure of the economic sanction. Limits of Belt autonomicity. Industrial warfare. Why was the Belt being treated as a villain? Forget it. Belt mining of Saturn’s rings for water. Saturn’s rings. Rings!

“Youch!” Kzanol hurled the cigarette butt away and stuffed his burnt fingers in his mouth.

F124. So this is F124, he thought. It doesn’t look like F124. He started to shiver, so he turned up the heater.

At one-thirty Judy got up and went out. The nightmare feeling had become too much to bear, alone in the dark. And Larry hadn’t called.

A cab dropped to the corner in answer to her ring. She didn’t know the address of the UCLA Physics Level, but there was a phone in the cab. She had Information type the address on the cab destination board. The cab whirred and rose.

Judy leaned back in the soft seat. She was tired, even though she couldn’t sleep.

The enormous pillar that was UCLA blazed with light; but these were night lights, to protect the structure from aircraft. Yet—a level halfway up was three times as bright as the rest. Judy guessed which level this was, even before the cab started down. As they swooped toward the landing balcony she noticed other details.

The big square vehicle was an ambulance, one with large capacity. Those little cars with the extended motor housings were police. There were tiny figures moving around.

Automatically Kzanol lit his last cigarette. His mouth and throat were raw; was that normal? He remembered that it wasn’t, except when he had been smoking far too much.

…And then the Time of Ripening would come. Suddenly everyone would be in a hurry; Dad and Grandpa would return to the house very late and bone-tired, and the slaves never rested at all. All day and night there was the sound of trees being felled, and the low whirr of the stripping plant.

Before he was old enough to help, he used to sit beneath the guardian sunflowers and watch the trees go into the stripping plant. They would go in looking like any other mpul tree: perfectly straight, with the giant green flower at the top, and the dark blue stalk ending in a tapering tap root. In the stripping plant the flower and the soft bark and the tap root would be removed. The logs would come out shining in the sun, with nothing left but the solid fuel rocket core and the thin iron-crystal skin beneath the bark. Then the logs would be shipped to all the nearby civilized worlds, in ships which lifted on other stage tree logs.

But first there was the testing. A log was selected at random and fitted into the testing block. Grandfather and Dad would be standing by, each looking like he had sucked a sour gnal. They watched with single-minded concentration as the log was fired, ready to disapprove a whole crop at the slightest sign of misfire. Kzanol used to try to imitate their expressions. The little tnuctip technicians would be running around setting instruments and looking harried and important. They seemed too small to be intelligent animals, but they were. Their quaint biological science had mutated the stage trees out of worthless mpul trees. They had created the sunflowers which guarded the house: a hedge of twelve-foot trunks, each bearing a flexible silver mirror to focus sunlight on the green photosynthetic node, or to shift that focus onto an attacking enemy. Tnuctipun had built the gigantic, mindless yeast-eating whitefoods which fed the family and the carnivorous tnuctipun themselves. They had been given more freedom than any other slave race, because they had proven the worth of their freethinking brains.

A tnuctip would set off the log. The flame would shoot out over the valley, blue-white and very straight, darkening at the end to red smoke, while instruments measured the log’s precise thrust and Grandfather smiled in satisfaction. The flame shook the world with its sound, so that little Kzanol used to fear that the thrust was increasing the planet’s spin…

Kzanol/Greenberg reached to knock the ash off his last cigarette and saw his second-to-last burning in the ash tray, two-thirds smoked. He hadn’t done that since high school! He cursed a thrintun curse and almost strangled on it; his throat positively wasn’t built for overtalk.

He wasn’t gaining anything with his reminiscing, either.

Wherever in the universe he was, he still had to reach a spaceport. He needed the amplifier. Later he could figure out why there were aliens on F124, and why they thought they had been here longer than was possible. He started the motor and punched for Topeka, Kansas.

He’d have to steal a ship anyway. It might as well be an armed ship (since this region of space was lawless by definition, having no thrintun), and there was a military spaceport near Topeka.

Wait a moment, he thought. This couldn’t be F124. There were too many planets! F124 had only eight, and here there were nine.

Now that he was started he noticed other discrepancies. The asteroid belt of F124 had been far thicker, and her moon had had a slight rotation, he remembered. He was in the wrong system!

Merely a coincidence! Kzanol grinned. And what a coincidence! The habitable planet, the ringed planet, the ordered sizes of the worlds…come to think of it, he was the only thrint ever to have found two slave planets. He would be the richest being in the galaxy! He didn’t care, now, if he never found the map. But, of course, he still needed the amplifier.

Judy felt that she was on the verge of a tantrum. “But can’t they talk at all?” she begged, knowing she was being unreasonable.

Los Angeles Police Chief Lloyd Masney’s patience was wearing thin. “Mrs. Greenberg,” he said heavily. “You know that Doctor Jansky is having his eyes and face replaced at this moment. Also a wide patch of skin on his back, which was taken off almost down to the spinal cord. The others are almost as badly off. Dr. Snyder has no eye damage, but the part of his face that he didn’t cover with his hands is being replaced, and the palms of his hands, and some skin from his back. Knudsen did have his spinal cord opened, and some ribs too. The autodoc won’t let us wake any of them up, even under police priority, except for Mr. Trimonti. He is being questioned while the ’doc replaces skull and scalp from the back of his head. He has had a bad shock, and he is under local anesthetic, and you may not disturb him! You may hear the transcription of our interview when we have it. Meanwhile, may I offer you some coffee?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Judy. She thought he was giving her a chance to get a grip on herself, and was grateful. When he came back with the coffee she sipped it for a few moments, covertly studying the police chief.

He was a burly man who walked like he had bad feet. No wonder if he did; his hands and feet were both tiny in proportion to the rest of his body. He had straight white hair and a dark complexion. His bushy mustache was also white. He seemed almost as impatient as she. She had not yet seen him sit in normal fashion; now his legs were draped over one arm of his swivel chair while his shoulders rested against the other.

“Have you any idea where he is now?” She couldn’t restrain herself.

“Sure,” Masney said unexpectedly. “He just crossed the Kansas-Colorado border at a height of nine thousand feet. I guess he doesn’t know how to short out his license sender. But then, maybe he just didn’t bother.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t like cities,” said the old man in the corner. Judy had thought he was asleep. He had been introduced as Lucas Garner, an Arm of the UN. Judy waited for him to go on, but he seemed to think he had explained himself. Masney explained for him.

“You see, we don’t advertise the fact that all our override beamers are in the cities. I figure that if he knows enough to go around the cities, which he’s been doing, he must know enough to short out his license so that we can’t follow him. Luke, have you got some reason to think he doesn’t like cities?”

Luke nodded. Judy thought he looked like the oldest man in the world. His face was as wrinkled as Satan’s. He rode a ground-effect travel chair as powerful as a personal tank. “I’ve been expecting something like this for years,” he said. “Lloyd, do you remember when the Fertility Laws went into force, and I told you that a lot of homicidal nuts would start killing bachelors who had gotten permits to have children? And it happened. This is like that. I thought it might happen on Jinx, but it happened here instead.

“Larry Greenberg thinks he’s an alien.”

Judy was stunned. “But he’s done this before,” she protested.

“No.” Garner drew a lit cigarette from the arm of his chair. “He hasn’t. He’s worked with men and dolphins. Now he’s run into something he can’t take. I’ve got a hunch what it is, and I’d give my wheel chair”—Judy looked, but it didn’t have wheels—“to know if I’m right.

“Mrs. Greenberg. Has your husband ever been asked to read the mind of a telepath?”

Mutely Judy shook her head.

“So,” said Garner. Again he looked like he’d gone to sleep, this time with a cigarette burning between his fingers. His hands were huge, with muscles showing beneath the loose, mottled skin, and his shoulders belonged on a blacksmith. The contrast between Garner’s massive torso and his helpless, almost fleshless legs made him look a little like a bald ape. He came to life, sucked in a massive dose of smoke, and went on talking.

“Lloyd’s men got here about fifteen minutes after Larry Greenberg left. Trimonti called the cops, of course; nobody else could move. Lloyd himself was here in another ten. When he saw the wounds on the men Greenberg shot, he called me in Brussels.

“I’m an Arm, a member of the UN Technological Police. There was a chance the weapon that made those wounds would have to be suppressed. Certainly it needed investigation. So my first interest was the weapon.

“I don’t suppose either of you ever heard of Buck Rogers? No? Too bad. Then I’ll just say that nothing in our present technology could have led to a weapon like this.

“It does not destroy matter, which is reassuring. Rewriting one law of physics is worse than trying to eat one peanut. The weapon scatters matter. Lloyd’s men found traces of blood and flesh and bone forming a greasy layer all over the room. Not merely microscopic traces, but clumps too small to see at all.

“Trimonti’s testimony was a godsend. Obviously the Sea Statue dropped the weapon, and Greenberg used it. Why?”

Masney rumbled, “Get to the point, Luke.”

“Okay, here it comes. The contact helmet is a very complicated psionics device. One question the psychologists have wondered about is this. Why don’t the contact men get more confused when extraneous memories pour in? Usually there’s a few minutes of confusion, and then everything straightens out. They say it’s because the incoming memories are weak and fuzzy, but that’s only half an answer. It may even be a result, not a cause.

“Picture it. Two men sit down under crystal-iron helmets, and when one of them gets up he has two complete sets of memories. Which one is him?

“Well, one set remembers a different body from the one he finds himself in. More important, one set remembers being a telepath and the other doesn’t! One set remembers sitting down under a contact helmet with the foreknowledge that when her gets up he will have two sets of memories. Naturally the contact man will behave as if that set were his own. Even with eight or ten different memory sets, the contact man will automatically use his own.

“Well, let’s say the Sea Statue is a telepath. Not a telepathy-prone, like Larry Greenberg, but a full telepath, able to read any mind whenever be chooses. Suddenly all bets are off. Greenberg wakes with two sets of memories, and one set remembers reading hundreds of other minds, or thousands! Got it?”

“Yes. Oh, yes,” said Judy. “I warned him something was going to happen. But what can we do?”

“If he doesn’t pass over a city soon we’ll have to send up interceptors. We’d better wait ’til Snyder gets out of the ’doc.”

Kzanol dropped the car again half an hour later. He had been wondering about the peculiar gritty feeling in his eyes, and when he felt he was about to lose consciousness he became frightened. Then his Greenberg memories told him what was wrong. He was sleepy.

He didn’t even waste time worrying about it. Kzanol was getting used to the humiliations that came with Greenberg’s body. He put the car down in a plowed field and slept.

He woke at first light and took the car up at once. And then, incredibly, he began to enjoy himself. Towns and cities appeared before the speeding car, and he circled them cautiously; but the countryside began to attract his attention. The fields of grain and alfalfa were strange in their small size and checkerboard design. There was other vegetation, and he dropped low to examine the trees. Trees with shapeless woolly green heads instead of flowers. Trees that sometimes hugged the ground as if fearing the sky. Perhaps the winds were dangerous on this world. Trees that almost never grew completely straight. They were weird and asymmetrical and beautiful, and the Greenberg memory could tell him little about them; Greenberg was a city man. He curved out of his way to see them. He dipped low over quaint houses with peaked roofs, delighted by their novel architecture, and he wondered again about Earth’s weather. Greenberg, jogged this time, remembered a Kansas tornado. Kzanol was impressed.

Kzanol was as happy as a tourist. True, he was even more uncomfortable, for he was hungry and thirsty and in need of nicotine or gnals. But he could ignore these minor discomforts; he was a thrint, he knew that a gnal would be deadly poison, and it had been Greenberg’s fixed belief that he could stop smoking whenever he pleased. Kzanol believed him and ignored the craving. Normally he would trust anything he found in the Greenberg memory.

So he gawked at the scenery like any tourist doing something new and different.

After two hours it began to pall. The problem of where in space he was was worrying him again. But he saw the solution already. The Topeka Public Library was the place to go. If a nearby solar system had been found which was nearly identical with this one, he would find it listed there. The Belt telescopes, unhampered by atmospheric distortion, were able to see planets circling other suns; and the interstellar ramscoop robots had been searching out man-habitable systems for nearly a century. If the F124 system had not yet been found, it was beyond the reach of terran ships, and he might as well decently commit suicide.

Amazing, how nearly alike were the F124 system and the solar system. There were the two habitable binary thirds, the giant fifths, the asteroid belts, similar in position if not in density, the correspondence of size and position of the first eight planets of each system, the ringed sixth—it was almost too much to believe.

Oh, Powerloss. Kzanol/Greenberg sighed and cracked his knuckles, badly frightening himself. It was too much to believe. He didn’t believe it.

Suddenly he was very tired. Thrintun was very far away in an unknown direction. The amplifier helmet, and everything else he owned, were probably equally unreachable in a completely different direction. His Power was gone, and even his body had been stolen by some terrifying slave sorcery. But worst of all, he had no idea what to do next!

A city rose in the distance. His car was making straight for it. He was about to steer around it when he realized it must be Topeka. So he put his head in his arms and wished he could lose consciousness again. The strength seemed to have leaked out of him.

This had to be F124.

But it couldn’t be. The system had an extra world and not enough asteroids.

But, he remembered, Pluto was supposed to be a stowaway in the solar system. There was its queer orbit, and some mathematical discrepancy in its size. Perhaps it was captured by Sol before he awakened.

But in three hundred years? Highly unlikely.

Kzanol raised his face, and his face showed terror. He knew perfectly well that three hundred years was his lower limit; the brain board had given him a three-hundred-year journey using half the ship’s power. He might have been buried much longer than that.

Suppose he accepted Pluto. What about the slave race, happily living where there should have been only yeast, covering the oceans a foot deep, or at most whitefoods, big as brontosaurs and twice as pretty, wandering along the shorelines feeding on mutated scum?

He couldn’t explain it, so he dropped it.

But the asteroid belt was certainly thinner than it had been. True, it would have thinned out anyway in time, what with photon pressure and solar wind pushing dust and the smaller particles outward into deep space, and collisions with the bigger planets removing a few rocks, and even some of the most eccentric asteroids being slowed and killed by friction with the solar atmosphere—which must extend well past Earth. But that was not a matter for a few hundred years. Or even thousands. Or hundreds of—

And he knew.

Not hundreds of years, or hundreds of thousands. He had been at the bottom of the sea while the solar system captured a new planet, and lost a good third of its asteroid belt, while oceans of food yeast mutated and went bad, and mutated again, and again…At the bottom of the sea he had waited while yeast became grass and fish and now walked on two legs like a thrint.

A billion years wouldn’t be long enough. Two billion might do it.

He was hugging his knees with both arms, almost as if he were trying to bury his head between them. A thrint couldn’t have done that. It was not the pure passage of time that frightened him so. It was the loss of everything he knew and loved, even his own race. Not only Thrintun the world, but also Thrint the species, must be lost in the past. If there had been thrintun in the galaxy they would have colonized Earth long ages ago.

He was the last thrint.

Slowly he raised his head, to stare, expressionless, at the wide city beneath him.

He could damn well behave like a thrint.

The car had stopped. He must be over the center of Topeka. But which way was the spaceport? And how would he get in? Greenberg, worse luck, had had no experience in stealing spacecraft. Well, first find out where it was, and then…

The ship was vibrating. He could feel it with those ridiculously delicate fingertips. There was sound too, too high to hear, but he could feel it jangling in his nerves. What was going on?

He went to sleep. The car hung for a moment longer, then started down.

“They always stack me in the rear of the plane,” Garner grumbled.

Lloyd Masney was unsympathetic. “You’re lucky they don’t make you ride in the baggage compartment—seeing as you refuse to leave that hot rod there alone.”

“Well, why not? I’m a cripple!”

“Uh huh. Aren’t the Ch’ien treatments working?”

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking. My spinal cord is carrying some messages again. But walking ten paces around a room twice a day just about kills me. It’ll be another year before I can walk downtown and back. Meanwhile my chair rides with me, not in the luggage compartment. I’m used to it.”

“You’ll never miss that year,” Masney told him. “How old are you now, Luke?”

“Hundred and seventy next April. But the years aren’t getting any shorter, Lloyd, contrary to public opinion. Why do they have to stack me in the rear? I get nervous when I see the wings turn red hot.” He shifted uncomfortably.

Judy Greenberg came back from the rest room and sat down next to Lloyd. Luke was across the aisle, in the space made by removing two chairs before takeoff. Judy seemed to have recovered nicely; she looked and moved as if she had just left a beauty parlor. From a distance her face was calm. Garner could see the slight tension in the muscles around the eyes, in the cheeks, through the neck. But Garner was very old. He had his own, non-psychic way of reading minds. He said, as if to empty air, “We’ll be landing in half an hour. Greenberg will be sleeping peacefully until we get there.”

“Good,” said Judy. She leaned forward and turned on the tridee screen in the seat ahead.

Kzanol felt a brand new and horribly unpleasant sensation, and woke up sputtering. It was the scent of ammonia in his nostrils. He woke up sputtering and gagging and bent on mass murder. The first slave he saw, he ordered to kill itself in a horrible manner.

The slave smiled tremulously at him. “Darling, are you all right?” Her voice was terribly strained and her smile was a lie.

Everything came back in a rush. That was Judy…“Sure, beautiful, I’m fine. Would you step outside while these good people ask me some questions?”

“Yes, Larry.” She stood up and left, hurrying. Kzanol waited until the door was closed before he turned on the others.

“You.” He faced the man in the travel chair. He must be in charge; he was obviously the oldest. “Why did you subject Judy to this?”

“I was hoping it would jog your memory. Did it?”

“My memory is perfect. I even remember that Judy is a sentient female, and that the idea of my not being Larry Greenberg would be a considerable shock to her. That’s why I sent her away.”

“Good for you. Your females aren’t sentient?”

“No. It must be strange to have a sentient mate.” Kzanol dug momentarily into Greenberg’s memories, smiled a dirty smile, then got back to the business at hand. “How did you bring me down?”

The old one shrugged. “Easy enough. We put you to sleep with a sonic, then took over your car’s autopilot. The only risk was that you might be on manual. By the way, I’m Garner. That’s Masney.”

Kzanol took the information without comment. He saw that Masney was a stocky man, so wide that he seemed much shorter than his six feet two inches, and his hair and eating tendrils or whatever were dead white. Masney was staring thoughtfully at Kzanol. It was the kind of look a new biology student gives a preserved sheep’s heart before he goes to work with the scalpel.

“Greenberg,” he said, “why’d you do it?”

Kzanol didn’t answer.

“Jansky’s lost both his eyes and most of his face. Knudsen will be a cripple for nearly a year; you cut his spinal cord. With this.” He pulled the disintegrator out of a drawer. “Why? Did you think it would make you king of the world? That’s stupid. It’s only a hand weapon.”

“It’s not even that,” said Kzanol. He found it easy to speak English. All he had to do was relax. “It’s a digging or cutting tool, or a shaping instrument. Nothing more.”

Masney stared. “Greenberg,” he whispered, as if he were afraid of the answer, “who do you think you are?”

Kzanol tried to tell him. He almost strangled doing it. Overtalk didn’t fit human vocal cords. “Not Greenberg,” he managed. “Not a…slave. Not human.”

“Then what?”

He shook his head, rubbing his throat.

“Okay. How does this innocuous tool work?”

“You push that little button and the beam starts removing surface material.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh. Well, it suppresses the…charge on the electron. I think that’s right. Then whatever is in the beam starts to tear itself apart. We use the big ones to sculpture mountains.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We did.” He started to choke, caught himself. Masney frowned.

Garner asked, “How long were you underwater?”

“I think between one and two billion years. Your years or mine, they aren’t that much different.”

“Then your race is probably dead.”

“Yes.” Kzanol looked at his hands, unbelievingly. “How in—” he gurgled, recovered, “how under the Power did I get into this body? Greenberg thought that was only a telepathy machine!”

Garner nodded. “Right. And you’ve been in that body, so to speak, all along. The alien’s memories were superimposed on your brain, Greenberg. You’ve been doing the same thing with dolphins for years, but it never affected you this way. What’s the matter with you, Greenberg? Snap out of it!”

The slave in the travel chair made no move to kill himself. “You,” Kzanol/Greenberg paused to translate, “whitefood. You despicable, decaying, crippled whitefood with defective sex organs. Stop telling me who I am! I know who I am!” He looked down at his hands. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran itching down his cheeks, but his face remained as expressionless as a moron’s.

Garner blinked at him. “You think you are what’s-his-name, the alien terror from Outer Space? Nuts. The alien terror is down on the first floor of this building, and he’s perfectly harmless. If we could get him back to normal time he would be the first to call you an impostor. Later I’ll take you down and show him to you.

“Part of what you said is true. I am, of course, an old man. But what is a, er, whitefood?” He made the word a separate question.

Kzanol had calmed down. “I translated. The whitefood is an artificial animal, created by the tnuctipun as a meat animal. A whitefood is as big as a dinosaur and as smooth and white as a shmoo. They’re a lot like shmoos. We can use all of their bodies, except the skeleton, and they eat free food, which is almost as cheap as air. Their shape is like a caterpillar reaching for a leaf. The mouth is at the front of the belly foot.”

“Free food?”

Kzanol/Greenberg didn’t hear him. “That’s funny. Garner, do you remember the pictures of bandersnatchi that the second Jinx expedition sent back? Greenberg was going to read a bandersnatch mind someday.”

“Sure. Hey!”

“Bandersnatchi are whitefoods,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “They don’t have minds.”

“I guessed that. But, son, you’ve got to remember that they’ve had two billion years to develop minds.”

“It wouldn’t help them. They can’t mutate. They were designed that way. A whitefood is one big cell, with a chromosome as long as your arm and as thick as your little finger. Radiation could never affect them, and the first thing that would be harmed by any injury would be the budding apparatus.” Kzanol/Greenberg was bewildered. What price another coincidence? “Why would anyone think they were intelligent?”

“Well, for one thing,” Garner said mildly, “the report said the brain was tremendous. Weighed as much as a three-year-old boy.”

Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. “They were designed for that, too. The brain of a whitefood has a wonderful flavor, so the tnuctip engineers increased its size. So?”

“So it’s convoluted like a human brain.”

Why, so it was. Like a human brain, and a tnuctip brain, and a thrint brain, for that matter. Now why—

Kzanol/Greenberg cracked his knuckles, then hurriedly separated his hands so that he couldn’t do it again. The mystery of the intelligent “bandersnatch” bothered him, but he had other things to worry about. Why, for example, hadn’t he been rescued? Three hundred years after he pushed the panic button, he must have struck the Earth like the destroying wrath of the Powergiver. Someone on the moon must have seen it.

Could the lunar observation post have been abandoned?

Why?

Garner crashed into his thoughts. “Maybe something bigger than a cosmic ray made the mutations. Something like a machine-gun volley or a meteor storm.”

Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “Any other evidence?”

“Oh, hell yes. Greenberg, what do you know about Jinx?”

“A good deal,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. Larry’s knowledge of Jinx had been as thorough as any colonist’s. The memories clicked into place, unbidden, at the sound of the word. Jinx…

Moon of Binary, third planet out from Sirius A. Binary was a banded orange giant, bigger than Jupiter, and much warmer. Jinx was six times as big as Earth, with a gravity of one point seven eight, and with a period of rotation more than four days long. Of all the factors which had shaped Jinx, the most important had been its lack of radioactive materials. For Jinx was solid all through its rocky lithosphere and halfway to the center of its nickel-iron core.

Long ago—before even his time, Kzanol’s time—Jinx had been much closer to Binary. So close that the tides had stopped her spin and pulled her into an egg shape. Later, those same tides had pushed her outward. Not unusual. But, though the atmosphere and ocean assumed a more spherical shape, Jinx did not. The body of the moon was still egg shaped.

Jinx was an Easter egg, banded in different colors by the varying surface pressures.

The ocean was a broad ring of what must be extremely salty water running through the poles of rotation. The regions which the colonists called the Ends, marked by the points nearest to and furthest from Binary, were six hundred miles “higher” than the ocean: six hundred miles further from the moon’s center of mass. They stuck right out of the atmosphere. In the photographs masered in from the first expedition, the Ends had shown bone white, with a tracery of sharp black shadows. Further from the Ends the shadows disappeared beneath the atmosphere, and clouds began to appear. The clouds became thicker and thicker, with brown-and-gray earth showing more and more rarely, until suddenly the clouds were in full control. The ocean was forever hidden beneath a band of permanent fleecy cloud thousands of miles wide. At sea level the air was terrifically dense, with a constant temperature of two hundred and seventy degrees Fahrenheit.

The colony of Sirius Mater was on the Eastern continent, three thousand miles east of the ocean, a triangle of cultivated land and inflatable buildings at the fork of two rivers. The first colonists had picked a landing place with a high surface pressure, knowing that the denser atmosphere would help protect them from the temperature changes during the long days and nights, and from the ultraviolet scourge of blue-white Sirius A. Sirius Mater now boasted a population of almost two hundred punsters of all ages…

“Good,” said Garner. “Then I won’t have to explain anything. Can I borrow the phone, Lloyd?”

“Sure.” Lloyd hooked a thumb at one wall.

The phone screen was a big one; it covered half the wall. Luke dialed thirteen quick motions of the forefinger. In a moment the screen cleared to reveal a slender young woman with wavy brunette hair.

“Technological Police, Records Office.”

“This is Lucas Garner, operative-at-large. Here’s my ident.” He held a plastic card up to the camera. “I’d like the bandersnatchi sections from the Jinx report of 2106.”

“Yes sir.” The woman rose and walked off camera.

Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward to watch. The last report from Jinx had arrived only two months ago, and most of it had not been made public. He remembered seeing stills of the bandersnatchi, but no more. Now, with new eyes eager to compare, he would see whether a bandersnatch was really a whitefood.

It should not have mattered. By all rights he should have felt as he had when Masney’s sonic sleeping pill first wore off. Friendless, homeless, disembodied, defeated past all hope. But a prisoner’s first duty is always to escape: by collaboration, by treachery, by theft and murder, by any means at all. If he could lull these arrogant slaves into thinking he would cooperate, would give information freely—

And he had to know. Later he would decide why the question seemed so important. Now he only knew that it was. The suggestion that a whitefood might be intelligent had hit him with the force of a deadly insult. Why? But never mind why. Was it true?

The girl was back, smiling. “Mr. Garner, I’ll now turn you over to Mayor Herkimer.” She touched something below the edge of her desk.

The picture dissolved and reformed, but now it was ragged, shot with random dots of colored light. A maser beam had crossed nine light years to bring this picture and had been somewhat torn up on the way, by dust and gee fields and crossing light waves.

Mayor Herkimer had brown hair and a bushy brown beard over a square jaw. His voice was ragged with interference, but his enunciation was clear and careful—and twisted by an unknown accent.

“—Since everything that wasn’t welded down had long since been removed from the Lazy Eight II, and since the fusion plant in the Lazy Eight I was not damaged in the original landing and will give us power for a god-dam century, and since there was little work to be done until spring in any case, the Authority voted to risk the Lazy Eight II in exploring Jinx’s oceanic regions. Accordingly six of us red-hot explorers, namely—” Herkimer named names, “took the ship up and went west. A circular flying wing isn’t exactly a goddam airplane, but the ship was lighter than during first landing, and we had enough power to stay up forever or to make a straight-up landing anywhere we could find flat land.

“One problem was that the goddam visibility kept dropping—”

Garner whispered, “Their slang seems to have changed somewhat since they moved to Jinx.”

“Oh, you noticed that?”

Kzanol/Greenberg twitched in annoyance at the interruption. That would have marked him for an alien anywhere! In 2106 you learned not to hear extraneous noises before you went insane.

“—Couldn’t see at all. The light from the fusion drive didn’t show us the ground until we were two hundred feet up. We landed on the solid jets, near the shoreline, and started the cameras. Right away we were surrounded by—these.”

Mayor Herkimer had a sense of drama. As he stopped talking, the scene jumped to a sandy, sloping beach. The sand in the foreground was blackened and blown into a curving wall. Beyond, the ocean. There were no waves on that ocean. The water seemed—thick. Thick and gray and living.

Something moved into view. Something white; something like an enormously magnified slug, but with a smooth, slick skin. From the front of the beast reared a brontosaur neck with no head at all. At its base the neck was as wide as the animal’s shoulders. It rose in a conical slope. The tip was thick and rounded, featureless but for two tufts of black bristles.

The camera watched as the beast approached; saw it stop at the scorched sand. Others of its kind came out of the mist. The camera swept a full circle, and everywhere there were enormous white bulks like albino sperm whales swimming through sand.

Their rounded tips swung back and forth; the tufted bristles blew without wind. Of course the bristles were sense organs; and of course the mouths were invisible because the mouths were all closed. Unusual in a whitefood. But they were whitefoods, and no mistake.

Mayor Herkimer spoke. “These pictures were taken in visible light, but with a long exposure, which accounts for the damn blurring. To us it was like night. Winston Doheny, our biologist, took one look at these monsters and dubbed them Frumious bandersnatch. This species name is now in the goddam log. Harlow went out in a segmented armor suit and shot a bandersnatch for dissection, and the rest ran off. Fortunately the suit stood up to the heat and pressure.”

Films showed the action. Tracer bullets stitching six lines from off-camera through the bulky front of a bandersnatch. The silent death, evidenced only by a suddenly drooping tip. White shapes fading ghostlike into the mist. Herkimer continued, “They run on a rippling belly foot, and as you can see, they move goddam fast.

“According to Doheny this animal is one big cell. Nerves are similar to human nerves in structure, but have no cell body, no nuclei, nothing to separate them from other specialized protoplasm. The brain is long and narrow, and is packed into a bone shell at the elevated tapering tip. This skull is one end of a jointless, flexible, very strong internal cage of bone. Apparently God never intended the beast to shift position.” Garner winced at the unconscious blasphemy. “The mouth, which was closed in the film, is just ahead of the belly foot, and is good for nothing but scooping up yeast from the ocean.”

The film showed details from the dissection of the bandersnatch. Evidently the two cops at the door had decided not to look; but Masney and Garner watched in keen interest. Autopsies were nothing new to them. The beast was turned on its side to expose the belly foot, and its jaws were opened with a pulley. Slides were shown of tissue sections. There was a circulatory system, with six hearts weighing eleven pounds apiece; there were strange organs in the left side, which only Kzanol/Greenberg recognized as budding apparatus. He watched with manic concentration as the brain case was opened to show the long, narrow brain, gray and deeply convoluted, in its canoe of a skull. The form was familiar in detail, though he’d never seen one raw. Then it was over, and Mayor Herkimer was back.

“The ocean is a uniform foot thick in some unknown breed of yeast. Herds of bandersnatchi move along the shoreline, feeding continuously. The shore is no goddam tourist trap. It’s always dark, the waves are smothered by the yeast and the gravity, and the banderanatchi wander along the shore like the lost souls of worn-away mountains. We’d have liked to leave right then, but Doheny couldn’t find the sex organs, and he wanted to make a few more dissections.

“So we sent out the copters to find another specimen. But no bandersnatch ever came close enough to be shot from a copter. The banderanatchi had been curious and unafraid. Now they ran whenever a copter got close. All of them. They couldn’t possibly have all known about us, unless they were either telepathic or had a language.

“Yet at least one goddam bandersnatch was always within sight of each copter. They seemed to know the range of our guns.

“On the third day of the hunt Doheny got impatient. He assumed that it was the copters that the bandersnatchi were afraid of, and he landed his goddam copter and went hunting on foot. The moment he was out of shooting range of the copter, a bandersnatch charged in and flattened it like a goddam freight truck running down a pedestrian. Doheny had to walk back.

“Several hundred miles east of the shore, we found other forms of native—”

Mayor Herkimer was cut off in midsentence. The slender brunette’s voice came from a blank screen: “Mr. Garner, there is another section of the report listed under ‘bandersnatchi.’ Do you want it?”

“Yes, but just a minute.” Garner turned to face Kzanol/Greenberg. “Greenberg, were those whitefoods?”

“Yes.”

“Are they telepathic?”

“No. And I’ve never heard of them avoiding a meat packer’s ship. They just go on eating until they’re dead.”

“Okay, miss, we’re ready.”

Again there was the square, bearded face of the mayor. “We returned to Sirius Mater five Jinx days after our departure. We found that Frumious bandersnatch had preceded us. A single specimen. It must have traveled three thousand miles without yeast, and without any other food source that it could use, just to visit our settlement. To do this it must have gorged itself for months, maybe years, in order to build up enough fat for the trip.

“The colonists let it alone, which was goddam sensible of them, and the bandersnatch didn’t come too close. By this time its skin, or its cell wall, was light blue, possibly for protection from sunlight. It went straight to Northwest Cultivation Area, spent two hours running tracks across it in what Vicemayor Tays claims was the damnedest dance he ever saw, then moved off toward the ocean.

“Since we had both copters, we were the first to see the tracks from above. These are films of the tracks. I am convinced that this is a form of writing. Doheny says it can’t be. He believes that a bandersnatch could have no use for intelligence, hence would not develop it. I have to admit the sonofabitch has a good argument. The bandersnatch makes a beached dolphin look like a miracle of dexterity. Would you please analyze this and let us know whether we share this world with an intelligent species?”

“The machines couldn’t make anything out of this,” Garner put in. “Concepts were too alien, maybe.”

From the phone screen came kaleidoscopic color static, then a fuzzy picture. Curved lines, like snail tracks, on brown earth. The earth was plowed in mathematically straight furrows, but the lines were broader and deeper. Hillocks and tree stumps distorted them. A helicopter had landed among the wavy tracks; it looked like a fly on a printed page.

Kzanol/Greenberg choked, gurgled, and said, “‘Leave our planet at once or be obliterated, in accordance with the treaty of—’ I can’t read the rest. But it’s tnuctip science language. Could I have some water?”

“Sure,” Masney said kindly. He jerked a thumb at the cooler. After a moment Kzanol/Greenberg got up and poured his own water.

Lloyd went over to Garner’s chair and began talking in a low voice. “Luke, what was that all about? What are you doing?”

“Just satisfying curiosity. Relax, Lloyd. Dr. Snyder will be here in an hour, then he can take over. Meanwhile there are a lot of things Greenberg can tell us. This isn’t just a man with hallucinations, Lloyd.

“Why would the ET’s race have thought that the bandersnatch was just a dumb animal? Why does he react so violently when we suggest that the thing might be sentient? Greenberg thinks he’s the prisoner of aliens, he thinks his race is billions of years dead and his home lost forever, yet what is it that really interests him? Frumious bandersnatch. Did you see the way he looked when the dissection was going on?”

“No. I was too interested myself.”

“I get almost scared when I think of what’s in Greenberg’s brain—the information he’s carrying. Do you realize that Dr. Snyder may have to permanently repress those memories to cure him?

“Why would a race as sophisticated as the tnuctipun must have been”—he pronounced the word as Kzanol/Greenberg had, badly—“have worked for Greenberg’s adapted race? Was it because of the telepathy? I’m just—”

“I can tell you that,” Kzanol/Greenberg said bitterly. He had drunk five cups of water, practically without a breath. Now he was panting a little.

“You’ve got good ears,” said Masney.

“No. I’m a little telepathic; just enough to get by on. It’s Greenberg’s talent, but he didn’t really believe in it so he couldn’t use it. I can. Much good may it do me.”

“So why did the tnuctipun work for you?” Masney messed up the word even worse than Garner had.

The question answered itself.

Everyone in the room jerked like hooked fish.

There was no fall. An instant after he put out his arms, Kzanol was resting on his six fingertips like a man doing pushups. He stayed there a moment, then got to his feet. The gravity was a little heavy.

Where was everybody? Where was the thrint or slave who had released him?

He was in an empty, hideously alien building, the kind that happen only on free slave worlds, before the caretakers move in. But…how had he gotten here, when he was aimed at a deserted food planet? The next sight he had expected was the inside of a caretaker’s palace. And where was everybody? He badly needed someone to tell him what was going on.

He Listened.

For some reason, neither human nor thrintun beings have flaps over their ears resembling the flaps over their eyes. The thrintun Power faculty is better protected. Kzanol was not forced to lower his mental shield all at once. He chose to do so, and he paid for it. It was like looking into an arc lamp from a foot away. Nowhere in the thrintun universe would the telepathic noise have been that intense. The slave worlds never held this heavy an overpopulation; and the teeming masses of the thrintun worlds kept their mind shields up in public.

Kzanol reeled from the pain. His reaction was immediate and automatic.

STOP TRINKING AT ME! he roared at the bellowing minds of Topeka Kansas.

In the complex of mental hospitals still called Menninger’s, thousands of doctors and nurses and patients heard the command. Hundreds of patients eagerly took it as literal and permanent. Some became stupid and cured. Others went catatonic. A few who had been harmlessly irresponsible became dangerously so. A handful of doctors became patients, a mere handful, but the loss of their services compounded the emergency when the casualties began pouring in from downtown. Menninger’s was miles from Topeka Police Headquarters.

In the little room, everyone jerked like hooked fish. Then, all but Kzanol/Greenberg, they stopped moving. Their faces were empty. They were idiots.

In the first instant of the mental blast, Kzanol/Greenberg’s mental shield went up with an almost audible clang. A roaring noise reverberated through his mind for minutes. When, he could think again, he still didn’t dare drop the mind shield.

There was a thrint on Earth.

The guards at the door now squatted or sat like rag dolls. Kzanol/Greenberg pulled cigarettes from a dark blue shirt pocket and lit one, from the burning butt between Masney’s lips, incidentally saving Masney a nasty burn. He sat and smoked while he thought about the other thrint.

Item: That thrint would see him as a slave.

Item: He, Kzanol, had a working mind shield. That might convince the thrint, whoever he was, that he, Kzanol, was a thrint in a human body. Or it might not. If it did, would the other thrint help? Or would he regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a mere ptavv, a Powerless thrint?

In ugly fact, Kzanol/Greenberg was a ptavv. He had to get his body back before the other found him.

And with that, incredibly, he stopped thinking about the other thrint. There was every reason to wonder about him. What was he doing on Earth? Would he claim Earth as his property? Would he help Kzanol/Greenberg reach Thrintun (or whatever new planet passed for Thrintun these days)? Did he still look thrintish, or had two billion years of evolution turned thrintun into monsters? But Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the subject and began to think about reaching Neptune. Perhaps he knew who the other thrint was, but wasn’t ready to face the fact.

Cautiously he Listened. The thrint had left the building. He could find out nothing more, for the other’s mind shield was up. He turned his Attention, such as it was, to the men in the room.

They were recovering, but very slowly. He had to Listen with excruciating concentration because of the limitations of Greenberg’s brain, but he could feel their personalities reintegrating. The most advanced seemed to be Garner. Next was Masney.

Another part of the Greenberg memory was about to become useful. Greenberg had not lied about his dolphin-like sense of the practical joke. To implement it he had spent weeks learning a technique for what we shall charitably call a party trick.

Kzanol/Greenberg bent over Lloyd Masney. “Lloyd,” he said, in a distinct, calm, authoritative voice. “Concentrate on the sound of my voice. You will hear only the sound of my voice. Your eyelids are getting heavy. So heavy. Your fingers are becoming tired. So tired. Let them go limp. Your eyes wish to close; you can hardly keep them open…”

He could feel the Masney personality responding beautifully. It gave no resistance at all.

The gravity was irritating. It was barely enough to notice at first, but after a few minutes it was exhausting. Kzanol gave up the idea of walking after he had gone less than a block, though he didn’t like the idea of riding in a slave cart.

I’m not proud, he told himself. He climbed into a parked Cadillac and ordered the slack-lipped driver to take him to the nearest spaceport. There was a fang-jarring vibration, and the car took off with a wholly unnecessary jerk.

These slaves were much larger than the average land-bound sentient being. Kzanol had plenty of head room. After a moment he cautiously took off his helmet. The air was a little thin, which was puzzling considering the heavy gravity. Otherwise it was good enough. He dropped the helmet on the seat and swung his legs over beside it; the seat was too wide for comfort.

The city was amazing. Huge and grotesque! The eye was faced with nothing but rectangular prisms, with here and there a yellow rectangular field or a flattish building with a strangely curved roof. The streets couldn’t decide whether to be crooked or straight. Cars zipped by, buzzing like flying pests. The drone from the fans of his own car rasped on his nerves, until he learned to ignore it.

But where was he? He must have missed F124 somehow, and hit here. The driver knew that his planet—Earth?—had space travel, and therefore might know how to find F124. And the eighth planet of its system.

For it was already obvious that he would need the second suit. These slaves outnumbered him seventeen billion to one. They could destroy him at any time. And would, when they knew what he was. He had to get the control helmet to make himself safe. Then he would have to find a thrintun planet; and he might need a better spaceship than the humans had produced so far. They must be made to produce better ships.

The buildings were getting lower, and there were even gaps between them. Had poor transportation made these slaves crowd together in clumps? Someday he must spend the time to find out more about them. After all, they were his now.

But what a story this would make someday! How his grandchildren would listen and admire! When the time came he must buy balladeers; pruntaquilun balladeers, for only these had the proper gift of language…

The spaceport was drawing near.

There was no apparent need to be subtle. Once Kzanol/Greenberg had Masney fully under, he simply ordered Masney to take him to the spaceport. It took about fifteen minutes to reach the gate.

At first he couldn’t guess why Masney was landing. Shouldn’t he simply fly over the fence? Masney wasn’t giving away information. His mind would have been nearly normal by now, and it was normal for a hypnotized person. Masney “knew” that he wasn’t really hypnotized; he was only going along with it for a joke. Any time now he would snap out of it and surprise Greenberg. Meanwhile he was calm and happy and free from the necessity for making decisions. He had been told to go to the spaceport. Here he was at the spaceport. His passenger let him lead.

Not until they were down did Kzanol/Greenberg realize that Masney was waiting to be passed through by the guards. He asked, “Will the guards let us through?”

“No,” said Masney.

Coosth, another setback. “Would they have let me through with—” he thought, “Garner?”

“Yes. Garner’s an Arm.”

“Well, turn around and go back for Garner.”

The car whirred. “Wait a minute,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Sleep.” Where were the guards?

Across a tremendous flat expanse of concrete, painted with large red targets in a hexagonal array, he could see the spaceships. There were twenty or thirty ramjet-rocket orbital craft, some fitted out to lift other spacecraft to orbit. A linear accelerator ran down the entire south side of the field: a quarter mile of wide, closely set metal hoops. Fusion-drive military rockets lay on their sides in docks, ready to be loaded onto the flat triangular ramjet-rockets. They all looked like motor scooters beside two truly gigantic craft.

One thing like a monstrous tin of tuna, a circular flying wing resting on its blunt trailing edge, was the re-entry, cargo, and life-support system of the Lazy Eight III. Anyone would have recognized her, even without the blue human’s sign of infinity on her flank. She was 320 feet in diameter, 360 in height. The other, far to the right, was a passenger ship as big as the ancient Queen Mary, one of the twin luxury transports which served the Titan Hotel. And—even at this distance it was apparent that everybody, everybody was clustered around her entrance port.

Listening as hard as he could, Kzanol/Greenberg still couldn’t find out what they were doing there; but he recognized the flavor of those far-too-calm thoughts. Those were tame slaves, slaves under orders.

The other thrint was here. But why wasn’t he taking his own ship? Or had he landed here? Or—was the spawn of a ptavv making a leisurely inspection of his new property?

He told Masney, “The guard has told us to go ahead. Take the car over to that honeymoon special.”

The car skimmed across the concrete.

Garner shook his head, let it fall back into place. His mind was as the mind of a sleeping child. Across that mind flitted thoughts as ephemeral as dreams. They could not stay. Garner had been ordered not to think.

I must look terribly senile, he thought once. The idea slipped away…and returned. Senile. I’m old but not senile. No? There is drool on my chin.

He shook his head, hard. He slapped his face with one hand. Garner was beginning to think again, but not fast enough to suit him. He fumbled at the controls of his chair, and it lurched over to the coffee faucet. When he poured a cup his hand shook so that hot coffee spilled on his hand and wrist. Enraged, he hurled the cup at the wall.

His mind went back to white dullness.

A few minutes later Judy Greenberg wobbled through the door. She looked dazed, but her mind was functioning again. She saw Garner slumped in his travel chair wearing the face of a decrepit moron, and she poured cold water over his head until he came to life.

“Where is he?” Garner demanded.

“I don’t know,” Judy told him. “I saw him walk out, but it didn’t seem to matter to me. Chief Masney was with him. What happened to us?”

“Something I should have expected.” Garner was no longer a decrepit old man, but an angry Jehovah. “It means things have gone from worse to terrible. That alien statue—I knew there was something wrong with it the moment I saw it, but I couldn’t see what it was. Oh, nuts.

“It had both arms out, like it was turning chicken halfway through a swan dive. I saw a little projection on his chest, too. Look. The alien put himself into a freeze field to avoid some disaster. After that the button that turned on the field was in the field, and so was the alien’s finger pushing it in. So the button wouldn’t need a catch to hold it in. It wouldn’t have one.

“But the alien had both arms out when I saw it. When Jansky put his own field around the statue, the alien dropped Greenberg’s ‘digging instrument’ and the button too. The button must have popped out. Why he didn’t come to life right then I don’t know, unless the freeze field has inertia like hysteresis in an electric current. But he’s alive now, and that was him we heard.”

“Well, it’s quite a monster,” said Judy. “Is that what Larry thinks he is?”

“Right.” Garner’s chair rose and made a wind in the room. The chair slid out the door, picking up speed. Judy stared after it.

“Then if he sees that he isn’t who he thinks he is…” she began hopefully. Then she gave it up.

One of the policemen got to his feet, moving like a sleepwalker.

Kzanol took the guards with him on his tour of the spaceport. He also took all the repairmen, dispatchers, spacemen, and even passengers he happened to meet while moving around. The man who owned the Cadillac seemed to regard even a trip to Mars as a hazardous journey! If that was the state of Earth’s space technology, Kzanol wanted a bundleful of expert opinions.

A couple of dispatchers were sent back to the office to try to find F124 on the star maps. The rest of the group came with Kzanol, growing as it moved. Just two men had the sense to hide when they saw the mob coming. By the time he reached the passenger liner Kzanol was towing everyone at the spaceport but Masney, Kzanol/Greenberg, and those two cautious men.

He had already chosen the Lazy Eight III, the only interstellar ship on the field. While he was getting the rescue switch on his back repaired, slaves could finish building and orbiting the ship’s drive and fuel tanks. It would be at least a year before he was ready to leave Earth. Then he would take a large crew and pass the journey in stasis, with his slaves to wake him whenever a new child became old enough to take orders. Their descendants would wake him at journey’s end.

Kzanol had stood beneath the blunt ring which was the ship’s trailing edge and looked up into the gaping mouth of a solid fuel landing motor. He had probed an engineer’s mind to find how the spin of a ship could substitute for artificial gravity. He had walked on the after wall of the central corridor and peered through doors above his head and beneath his feet, into the Garden whose rows of hydroponic tanks served in place of his own tnuctip-bred air plant, and into the huge control room with three walls covered in nightmare profusion with dials and screens and switchboards. His own ship had needed only a screen and a brain board. Everywhere he saw ingenuity replacing true knowledge, complex makeshifts replacing the compact, simple machines Kzanol had known. Dared he trust his life to this jury-rigged monster?

He had no choice. The remarkable thing was that humans would do so; that they would scheme and fight to do so. The space urge was a madness upon them—a madness which should be cured quickly, lest they waste this world’s resources.

This prospecting trip, Kzanol thought wryly, is taking longer than I dreamed. And then, not at all wryly: Will I ever see Thrintun again?

Well, at least he had time to burn. As long as he was here, he might as well see what a human called a luxury liner.

He was impressed despite himself.

There were thrintun liners bigger than the Golden Circle, and a few which were far bigger; but not many carried a greater air of luxury. Those that did carried the owners of planets. The ramjets under the triangular wing were almost as big as some of the military ships on the field. The builders of the Golden Circle had cut corners only where they wouldn’t show. The lounge looked huge, much bigger than it actually was. It was paneled in gold and navy blue. Crash couches folded into the wall to give way to a bar, a small dance floor, a compact casino. Dining tables rose neatly and automatically from the carpeted floor, inverting themselves to show dark-grained plastic-oak. The front wall was a giant tridee screen. When the water level in the fuel tanks became low enough, an entrance from the lounge turned the tank into a swimming pool. Kzanol was puzzled by the layout until he realized that the fusion drive was in the belly. Ramjets would lift the ship to a safe altitude, but from then on the fusion drive would send thrust up instead of forward. The ship used water instead of liquid hydrogen, not because the passengers needed a pool, but because water was safer to carry and provided a reserve oxygen supply. The staterooms were miracles of miniaturization.

There were, thought Kzanol, ideas here that he could use when he got back to civilization. He sat down in one of the lounge crash couches and began leafing through some of the literature stuffed into the backs. One of the first things he found, of course, was a beautifully colored picture of Saturn as seen from the main dance bubble of the Titan Hotel.

Of course he recognized it. He began to ask eager questions of the men around him.

The truth hit him all at once.

Kzanol/Greenberg gasped, and his shield went up with a clang. Masney wasn’t so fortunate. He shrieked and clutched his head, and shrieked again. In Topeka, thirty miles away, unusually sensitive people heard the scream of rage and grief and desolation.

At Menninger’s, a girl who had been catatonic for four years forced doughy leg muscles to hold her erect while she looked around her. Someone needed help; someone needed her.

Lucas Garner gasped and stopped his chair with a jerk. Alone among the pedestrians around him, who were behaving as if they had very bad headaches, Garner listened. There must be information buried in all that emotion! But Garner learned nothing. He felt the sense loss becoming his own, sapping his will to live until he felt he was drowning in a black tide.

“It doesn’t hurt,” said Kzanol/Greenberg in a calm, reassuring, very loud voice. The loudness, hopefully, would carry over Masney’s screaming. “You can feel it but it doesn’t hurt. Anyway, you have enormous courage, more than you have ever had in your whole life.” Masney stopped screaming, but his face was a mask of suffering. “All right,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Sleep.” He brushed Masney’s face with his fingertips. Masney collapsed. The car continued weightlessly across the concrete, riding its cushion of air, aiming itself at the cylindrical shell that was the Lazy Eight III. Kzanol/Greenberg let it go. He couldn’t operate the controls from the back seat, and Masney was in no shape to help. He could have cut the air cushion, by stretching, but only if he wanted to die.

The mental scream ended. He put his hand on Masney’s shoulder and said, “Stop the car, Lloyd.” Masney took over with no sign, physical or mental, of panic. The car dropped gently to the ground two yards from the outer hull of the giant colony ship.

“Sleep,” said Kzanol/Greenberg, and Masney slept. It would probably do him good. He was still under hypnosis, and would be deeper when he awakened. As for Kzanol/Greenberg, he didn’t know what he wanted. To rest and think perhaps. Food wouldn’t hurt him either, he decided. He had recognized the mind that screamed its pain over hail of Kansas, and he needed time to know that he was not Kzanol, thrint, lord of creation.

By and by there was a roar like a fusor exploding. Kzanol/Greenberg saw a wave of flaming smoke pour across the concrete, then gradually diminish. He couldn’t imagine what it was. Cautiously he lowered his mind shield and found out.

Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit.

Ships and scopes and Confinement Asteroid—by these you may measure the Belt.

A century ago, when the Belt was first being settled, the ships used ion drives and fission batteries and restarting chemical attitude jets. Now they use fusion tubes, based on a method of forcing the inner surface of a crystal-zinc tube to reflect most forms of energy and matter. The compact air converter has replaced tanked air and hydroponics, at least for months-long hops, though the interstellar colony ships must grow plants for food. Ships have become smaller, more dependable, more versatile, cheaper, far faster, and infinitely more numerous. There are tens of thousands of ships in the Belt.

But there are millions of telescopes. Every ship carries at least one. Telescopes in the Trojan asteroids watch the stars, and Earth buys the films with seeds and water and manufactured products, since Earth’s telescopes are too near the Sun to avoid distortion by gravity bend and solar wind. Telescopes watch Earth and Moon, and these films are secret. Telescopes watch each other, recomputing the orbit of each important asteroid as the planets pull it from its course.

Confinement Asteroid is unique.

Early explorers had run across a roughly cylindrical block of solid nickel-iron two miles long by a mile thick, orbiting not far from Ceres. They had marked its path and dubbed it S-2376.

Those who came sixty years ago were workmen with a plan. They drilled a hole down the asteroid’s axis, filled it with plastic bags of water, and closed both ends. Solid fuel jets spun S-2376 on its axis. As it spun, solar mirrors bathed it in light, slowly melted it from the surface to the center. When the water finished exploding, and the rock had cooled, the workmen had a cylindrical nickel-iron bubble twelve miles long by six in diameter.

It had been expensive already. Now it was more so. They rotated the bubble to provide half a gee of gravity, filled it with air and with tons of expensive water covered the interior with a mixture of pulverized stony meteorite material and garbage seeded with select bacteria. A fusion tube was run down the axis, three miles up from everywhere: a very special fusion tube, made permeable to certain wavelengths of light. A gentle bulge in the middle created the wedding-ring lake which now girdles the little inside-out world. Sunshades a mile across were set to guard the poles from light, so that snow could condense there, fall of its own weight, melt, and run in rivers to the lake.

The project took a quarter of a century to complete.

Thirty-five years ago Confinement freed the Belt of its most important tie to Earth. Women cannot have children in free fall. Confinement, with two hundred square miles of usable land, could house one hundred thousand in comfort; and one day it will. But the population of the Belt is only eight hundred thousand; Confinement’s score hovers around twenty thousand, mostly women, mostly transient, mostly pregnant.

Lars held a raw carrot in one hand and the knob of a film scanner in the other. He was running six hours of film through the machine at a rate which would have finished the roll in fifteen minutes. The film had been taken through one of the Eros cameras, all of which now pointed at Earth.

For most of the next week, Eros would be the closest asteroid to Earth. The films would be running constantly.

Suddenly Lars stopped chewing. His hand moved. The film ran back a little. Stopped.

There it was. One frame was whited out almost to the corners.

Lars moved the film to a larger scanner and began running it through, slowly, starting several frames back. Twice he used the magnifying adjustment. Finally he muttered, “Idiots.”

He crossed the room and began trying to find Ceres with a maser.

The duty man picked up the earphones with his usual air of weary patience. He listened silently, knowing that the source was light-minutes away. When the message began to repeat he thumbed a button and said, “Jerry, find Eros and send the following. Recording. Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. Well get right on it, Lars. Now I’ve got news for you.” The man’s colorless voice took on a note of relish. “From Tanya. The ’doc says in seven months you’ll be the father of healthy twin girls. Repeat, twin girls…”

Carefully, with a constant tapping of fingers on attitude jet buttons, Lit Shaeffer brought his ship into dock at Confinement’s pole. A constant thirty miles below, Ceres was a pitted boulder spotted with glassy-looking bubbles of flexible transparent plastic. He rested for a little—docking was always tricky, and Confinement’s rotation was unsettling even at the axis—then climbed out the lock and jumped. He landed in the net above the nearest of the ten personnel airlocks. Like a spider on a web, he climbed down to the steel door and crawled in. Ten minutes later, after passing through twelve more doors, he reached the locker room.

A mark piece rented him a locker and he stowed his suit and jet pack inside, revealing himself as a scrawny giant with dark, curly hair and a mahogany tan confined strictly to his face and hands. He bought a paper coverall from a dispenser. Lit and Marda were among the several hundred Belters who did not become nudists in a shirtsleeve environment. It marked them as kooks, which was not a bad thing in the Belt.

The last door let him out behind the heat shield, still in free fall. A spring lift took him four miles down to where he could get a tricycle motor scooter. Even Belters couldn’t keep a two-wheeler upright against Confinement’s shifting Coriolis force. The scooter took him down a steep gradient which leveled off into plowed fields, greenhouses, toiling farm machinery, woods and streams and scattered cottages. In ten minutes he was home.

No, not really home. The cottage was rented from what there was of a Belt government. A Belter’s home is the interior of his suit. But with Marda waiting inside, dark and big-boned and just beginning to show her pregnancy, it felt like homecoming.

Then Lit remembered the coming fight. He hesitated a moment, consciously relaxing, before he rang.

The door disappeared, zzzip. They stood facing each other.

“Lit,” said Marda, flatly, as if there was no surprise at all. Then, “There’s a call for you.”

“I’ll take care of that first.”

In the Belt as on Earth, privacy was rare and precious. The phone booth was a transparent prism, soundproof. Lit sneaked a last look at Marda before he answered the call. She looked both worried and determined.

“Hello, Cutter. What’s new?”

“Hello, Lit. That’s why I’m calling,” said the duty man at Ceres. Cutter’s voice was colorless as always. So was his appearance. Cutter would have looked appropriate dispensing tickets or stamps from behind a barred window. “Lars Stiller just called. One of the honeymoon specials to Titan just took off without calling us. Any comments?”

“Comments? Those stupid, bubbleheaded—” The traffic problem in space was far more than a matter of colliding spacecraft. No two spacecraft had ever collided, but men had died when their ships went through the exhaust of a fusion motor. Telescopic traffic checks, radio transmissions, rescue missions, star and asteroid observations could all be thrown out of whack by a jaywalker.

“That’s what I said, Lit. What’ll we do, turn ’em back?”

“Oh, Cutter, why don’t you go to Earth and start your own government?” Lit rubbed his temples hard with both hands, rubbing away the tension. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Marda’s having trouble, and it’s bugging me. But how can we turn back thirty honeymooning flatlanders, each a multimillionaire? Things are tense enough now. Want to start the Last War?”

“I guess not. Sorry to hear about Marda. What’s wrong?”

“She didn’t get here in time. The baby’s growing too fast.”

“That’s a damn shame.”

“Yeah.”

“What about the honeymooner?”

Lit turned his thoughts away from the coming storm. “Assign somebody to watch her and broadcast her course. Then write up a healthy bill for the service and send it to Titan Enterprises, Earth. If it isn’t paid in two weeks we send a copy to the UN and demand action.”

“Figures. ’Bye, Lit.”

Conceived in free fall, gestated in free fall for almost three months, the child was growing too fast. The question could smash a marriage: Let the ’doc abort now? Or wait, slow the child’s growth with the appropriate hormone injections, and hope that it wouldn’t be born a monster?

But there was no such hope.

Lit felt like he was drowning. With a terrible effort he kept his voice gentle. “There’ll be other children, Marda.”

“But will there? It’s so risky, hoping I can get to Confinement before it’s too late. Oh, Lit, let’s wait until we’re sure.”

She’d waited three months between ’doc checks! But Lit couldn’t say so now, or ever. Instead he said, “Marda, the autodoc is sure, and Dr. Siropopolous is sure. I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking. We could take a house right here in Confinement until you’re pregnant again. It’s been done before. Granted it’s expensive—”

The phone rang.

“Yes?” he barked. “Cutter, what’s wrong now?”

“Two things. Brace yourself.”

“Go ahead.”

“One. The honeymooner is not going to Titan. It seems to be headed in the direction of Neptune.”

“But—Better give me the rest of it.”

“A military ship just took off from Topeka Base. It’s chasing the honeymooner, and they didn’t call us this time either!”

“That’s more than peculiar. How long is the honeymooner on its way?”

“An hour and a half. No turnover yet, but of course it could be headed for any number of asteroids.”

“Oh, that’s just great.” Lit closed his eyes for a moment. “It almost sounds like something’s wrong with the honeymooner, and the other ship’s trying a rescue mission. Could something have blown in the life-support system?”

“I’d guess not, not in the Golden Circle. Honeymooners have fail-safe on their fail-safe. But you’d better hear the punch line.”

“Fire.”

“The military ship took off from the field on its fusion drive.”

“Then—” There was only one conceivable answer. Lit began to laugh. “Somebody stole it!”

Cutter smiled thinly. “Exactly. Once again, shall we turn either of them back?”

“Certainly not. For one thing, if we threaten to shoot we may have to do it. For another, Earth is very touchy about what rights they have in space. For a third, this is their problem, and their ships. For a fourth, I want to see what happens. Don’t you get it yet, Cutter?”

“My guess is that both ships have been stolen.” Cutter was still smiling.

“No, no. Too improbable. The military ship was stolen, but the honeymooner must have been sabotaged. We’re about to witness the first case of space piracy!”

“O-o-oh. Fifteen couples, and all their jewels, plus, uh, ransom—you know, I believe you’re right!” And Lit Shaeffer was the first man in years to hear Cutter laugh in public.

In the dead of August the Kansas countryside was a steam bath with sunlamps. Under the city’s temperature umbrella it was a cool, somewhat breezy autumn, but the air hit Luke Garner like the breath of Hell as his chair shot through the intangible barrier between Cool and Hot. From there he traveled at top speed, not much caring if his chair broke down as long as he could get into an air conditioned hospital.

He stopped at the spaceport checkpoint, was cleared immediately, and crossed the concrete like a ram on a catapult. The hospital stood like a wedge of Swiss cheese at the edge of the vast landing field, its sharp corner pointed inward. He got inside before heat stroke could claim him.

The line before the elevator was discouragingly long. His chair was rather bulky; he would need an elevator almost to himself. And people were no longer over-polite to their elders. There were too many elders around these days. Garner inhaled deeply of cool air, then went back out.

Outside the doors he fumbled in the ashtray on the left arm of his chair. The motor’s purr rose to a howl, and suddenly it wasn’t a ground-effect motor any more. If Masney could see him now! Six years ago Masney had profanely ordered him to get rid of the illegal power booster or be run in for using a manually operated flying vehicle. Anything for a friend, Luke had reasoned, and bad hidden the control in the ashtray.

The ground dwindled. The edge of the building shot downward past him: sixty stories of it. Now he could see the scars left by Greenberg and Masney. The wavering fusion flame had splashed molten concrete in all directions, had left large craters and intricate earthworm-track runnels, had crossed the entrance to a passenger tunnel and left molten metal pouring down the stairs. Men and machines were at work cleaning up the mess.

The sun deck was below him. Luke brought the travel chair down on the roof and scooted past startled sunbathing patients and into the elevator.

Going down it was dead empty. He got out on the fifty-second floor and showed his credentials to a nurse.

They were all in one ward. Miday, Sandier, Buzin, Katz—there were twenty-eight of them, the men who had been closest to Kzanol when he threw his tantrum. Seven were buried in plastic cocoons. The alien had forgotten to order them to cover, and they had been in the way of the blast when the Golden Circle took off. The others were under sleep-inducers. Their faces twisted sometimes with the violence of their dreams.

“I’m Jim Skarwold,” said a blond, chubby man in an intern’s uniform. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Garner. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“There better be.” Garner sent his glance down the line of treatment tanks. “Can any of these men stand a dose of scopolamine? They may have information I need.”

“Scop? I don’t think so. Mr. Garner, what happened to them? I took some psychiatry in college, but I never heard of anything like this. It isn’t withdrawal from reality, it isn’t straight or crooked fear…They’re in despair, but not like other people.

“I was told they got this way from contact with an ET. If you could tell me more about it, I’d have a better chance of treating them.”

“Right. Here’s what I know,” said Garner. He told the doctor everything that had happened since the statue was retrieved from the ocean. The doctor listened in silence.

“Then it isn’t just a telepath,” he said when Garner finished. “It can control minds. But what could, it have ordered them to do that would produce this?” He gestured at the row of sleeping patients.

“Nothing. I don’t think he was giving orders at the time. He just got a helluva shock and started feeling out loud.” Luke dropped a huge hand on the doctor’s shoulder, and Skarwold twitched his surprise at the weight. “Now, if I were planning to treat them, I’d find out first who they think they are. Themselves? Or the alien? The ET may have superimposed his own emotional pattern on theirs, or even his memory pattern.

“Being me, and an Arm, I want to know why both Greenberg and the ET separately stole spaceships and went rocketing off. They must know they’ve got interplanetary ships, not interstellar colony craft. Is there an alien base somewhere in the solar system? What are they after?

“Perhaps we can scratch both problems at the same time, Dr. Skarwold.”

“Yes,” said Skarwold slowly. “Perhaps you’re right. Give me an hour to find the man with the strongest heart.”

That was why Luke always carried paperbacks in the glove compartment of his chair. His career involved a lot of waiting.

Arthur T. Katz, qualified ramjet-rocket booster pilot (types C, D, and H-1), thrashed violently. His arms flailed without purpose. He began to make noises.

“It’ll be a few minutes,” said Skarwold. “He’s out of the sleep-inducer, but he has to wake up naturally.”

Garner nodded. He was studying the man intently, with his eyes narrowed and his lips tightened slightly. He might have been watching a strange dog, wondering whether it wanted to lick his face or tear his throat out.

Katz opened his eyes. They became very round, then closed desperately tight. Cautiously Katz opened them again. He screamed and waved his arms meaninglessly in the air. Then he started to choke. It was horrible to watch. Whenever he somehow managed to catch his breath he would gasp for air for a few seconds, open his mouth, and begin to choke again. He was terrified, and, thought Garner, not merely because he might suffocate.

Skarwold pushed a switch and Katz’s autodoc sprayed sedative into his lungs. Katz flopped back and began to breathe deeply. Skarwold turned on Katz’s sleep-inducer.

Abruptly Garner asked, “Are any of these people the least bit psychic?”

Arnold Diller, fusion drive inspector (all conventional types), took a deep breath and began turning his head back and forth. Not gently. It seemed he was trying to break his own neck.

“I wish we could have found someone with a high telepathic aptitude,” said Garner. Between the palms of his hands he rolled the sawdust fragments of a cigarette. “He would have stood a better chance. Look at the poor guy!”

Skarwold said, “I think he’s got a good chance.”

Garner shook his head. “He’s only a poor man’s prescient. If he were any good at that he’d have been running instead of hiding when the ET blew up. How could it protect him against telepathy anyway? He—” Skarwold joggled his arm for silence.

“Diller!” said Skarwold, with authority. Diller stopped tossing his head and looked up. “Can you understand me, Diller?”

Diller opened his mouth and started to strangle. He closed it again, and nodded, breathing through his nose.

“My name is Skarwold, and I’m your doctor.” He paused as if in doubt. “You are Arnold Diller, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” The voice was rusty, hesitant, as if from long disuse. Something inside Garner relaxed, and he noticed his handful of sawdust and dropped it.

“How do you feel?”

“Terrible. I keep wanting to breathe wrong, talk wrong. Could I have a cigarette?” Garner handed him a lighted one. Diller’s voice began to sound better, more proficient. “That was strange. I tried to make you give me a cigarette. When you just sat there I wanted to get mad.” He frowned. “Say, how do I rate a human doctor, anyway?”

“What happened to you isn’t programmed into the ’docs,” Skarwold said lightly. “It’s a good thing you had the sense to hide when you did. The others were closer. They’re in much worse shape. Is your prescient sense working?”

“It’s not telling me anything. I can never count on it anyway. Why?”

“Well, that’s why I picked you. I thought if you missed it you could get over the notion that you were a certain alien.”

“A certain—” Diller started strangling. He stopped breathing entirely for a moment, then resumed slowly, through distended nostrils. “I remember,” he said. “I saw this thing coming across the field, with a bunch of people trailing after it, and I wondered what it was. Then something went wrong in my head. I didn’t wait any more. I just ran like hell and got behind a building. Something going on in my head kept bugging me, and I wanted to get closer to it but I knew that was wrong, and I wondered if I was going crazy, and then, aarrrghgh—” Diller stopped and swallowed; his eyes were mad with fear until he could breathe again.

“All right, Diller, it’s all right,” Skarwold kept repeating. Diller’s breathing went back to normal, but he didn’t talk. Skarwold said, “I’d like to introduce Mr. Garner of the United Nations Technological Police.”

Diller gave a polite nod. His curiosity was plain. Garner said, “We’d like to catch this alien before he does any more damage. If you don’t mind, I think you may have some information that we don’t.”

Diller nodded.

“About five minutes after that telepathic blast hit you, the alien took off for outer space. An hour later he was followed by a man who has reason to believe that he is the alien. He has false memories. They’re both headed in the same general direction. They’re after something. Can you tell me what it is?”

“No,” said Diller.

“You may have gotten something in that mental blast. Please try to remember, Diller.”

“I don’t remember anything, Garner.”

“But—”

“You old fool! Do you think I want to choke to death? Every time I start to think about what happened I start strangling! I start thinking funny too; everything looks strange. I feel surrounded by enemies. But worst of all, I get so depressed! No. I don’t remember anything. Get out.”

Garner sighed and ostentatiously put his hands on the chair controls. “If you change your mind—”

“I won’t. So there’s no need to come back.”

“I won’t be able to. I’m going after them.”

“In a spaceship? You?”

“I’ve got to,” said Garner. Nevertheless he glanced involuntarily at his crossed legs—crossed this morning, by hand. “I’ve got to,” he repeated. “There’s no telling what they want, but it must be something worthwhile. They’re going to too much trouble to get it. It could be a weapon, or a signal device to call their planet.”

The travel chair whirred.

“Half a minute,” said Diller.

Garner turned off the motor and waited. Diller leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. His face began to change. It was no longer an expression he wore, a mirror of his personality, but a random dispersal of muscle tension. His breathing was ragged.

Finally he looked up. He started to speak and failed. He cleared his throat and tried again. “An amplifier. The—the bastard has an amplifier buried on the eighth planet.”

“Fine! What does it amplify?”

Diller started to choke.

“Never mind,” said Garner. “I think I know.” His chair left the room, going much too fast.

“They’re both runnin’ scared,” said Luke. “Headed for Neptune at one gee, with your husband an hour and a half behind.”

“But aren’t you sending someone after him?” Judy begged. “He isn’t responsible, he doesn’t know what he’s doing!”

“Sure. We’re sending me. He’s got my partner, you know.” Seeing Mrs. Greenberg’s reaction, he quickly added, “They’re in one ship. We can’t protect Lloyd without protecting your husband.”

They sat in Judy’s hotel room sipping Tom Collinses. It was eleven hundred of a blazing August morning.

“Do you know how he got away?” Judy asked.

“Yah. The ET knocked everybody crosseyed when he threw that tantrum at the port. Everybody but Greenberg. Your husband simply picked out a ship that was on standby and had Lloyd take it up. Lloyd knows how to fly a Navy ship, worse luck.”

“Why would Mr. Masney be taking Larry’s orders?”

“Because Larry hypnotized him. I remember the whole performance.”

Judy looked down at her lap. The corners of her mouth began to twitch. She began to giggle, and then to laugh. Just as the laughter threatened to become sobs, she clenched her teeth hard, held the pose for a moment, then sagged back in her chair.

“I’m all right now,” she said. Her face held no laughter, only exhaustion.

“What was that all about?”

“It doesn’t matter. Why would they be going to Neptune?”

“I don’t know. We’re not even sure that’s where they’re going. Don’t you have some sort of telepathic link with your husband?”

“Not any more. Since he went into Dr. Jansky’s time field I can’t feel anything any more.”

“Well, it wouldn’t feel like him anyway. Do you remember how you felt at twenty hours night before last?”

“At twenty? Let me see.” She closed her eyes. “Wasn’t I asleep…? Oh. Something woke me up and I couldn’t go back to sleep. I had the feeling that something was terribly wrong. Monsters in the shadows. I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Yes. Especially if it was Larry’s mind you felt.” He gave that a moment to sink in. “And since then?”

“Nothing.” Her small hand tapped rhythmically on the chair arm. “Nothing! Except that I want to find him. Find him! That’s all I’ve wanted since he took the ship! Find him before he…”

Find it! But there was no question of finding it, he told himself for the hundredth time. He had to find it first! He had to find it before Kzanol, the real Kzanol, did. And for the hundredth time he wondered if he could.

The Earth had been invisible for hours. Kzanol/Greenberg and Masney sat speechless in the control bubble, speechless and motionless. The control bubble was three quarters of the ship’s living space. One could stand upright only in the airlock.

There weren’t many distractions for Kzanol/Greenberg.

True, he had to keep an eye on Masney. He had to do more than that. He had to know when Masney was uncomfortable, and he had to know it before Masney knew it. If Masney ever came out of hypnosis it might be difficult to get him back. So Kzanol/Greenberg had to send Masney to the lavatory; had to give him water before he was thirsty; had to exercise him before his muscles could cramp from sitting. Masney was not like the usual slave, who could take care of himself when not needed.

Other than that, the self-styled ptavv was dead weight.

He spent hours at a time just sitting and thinking. Not planning, for there was nothing to plan. He either reached the eighth planet first, or he didn’t. Either he put on the amplifier helmet, or the real Kzanol did, and then there would be no more planning, ever. No mind shield could face an amplifier helmet. On the other hand, the helmet would make him Kzanol’s master. Using an amplifier on a thrint was illegal, but he was hardly in danger of thrintun law.

(Would an amplifier boost the Power of a slave brain? He pushed the thought aside—again.)

The far future was bleak at best. He was the last thrint; he couldn’t even breed the real Kzanol to get more. Yes, he would be master of an asteroid belt and a heavily populated slave world; yes, he would be richer than even Grandfather Racarliw. But Grandfather had had hundreds of wives, a thousand children!

Kzanol/Greenberg’s hundreds of wives would be human slaves, as would his thousand children. Lower-than-ptavvs, every one.

Would he find “women” beautiful? Could he mate with them? Probably. He would have to try it; but his glands were emphatically not Kzanol’s glands. In any case he would choose his women by Larry Greenberg’s standards of beauty—yes, Greenberg’s, regardless of how he felt, for much of the glory in being rich is showing it off, and he would have nobody to impress but slaves.

A dismal prospect.

He would have liked to lose himself in memories, but something held him back. One barrier was that he knew he would nevermore see Thrintun the homeworld, nor Kzathit where he was born, nor Racarliwun, the world he had found and named. He would never look at the world through his own eye; he would see himself only from outside, if ever. This was his own body, his fleshly tomb, now and forever.

There was another barrier, a seemingly trivial matter. Several times Kzanol/Greenberg had closed his eyes and deliberately tried to visualize the happy past; and always what came to mind were whitefoods.

He believed Garner, believed him implicitly. Those films could not have been faked. Copying an ancient tnuctip inscription would not have been enough to perpetrate such a fraud. Garner would have had to compose in tnuctip!

Then the bandersnatchi were intelligent; and the bandersnatchi were undeniably whitefoods. Whitefoods were intelligent, and always had been.

It was as if some basic belief had been shattered. The whitefoods were in all his memories. Whitefoods drifting like sixty-ton white clouds over the estates of Kzathit Stage Logs, and over the green-and-silver fields of other estates when little Kzanol was taken visiting. Whitefood meat in a dozen different forms, on the family table and in every restaurant waiter’s memorized menu. A whitefood skeleton over every landowner’s guest gate, a great archway of clean polished white bone. Why, the thrint hadn’t been born who didn’t dream of his own whitefood herd! The whitefood gate meant “landowner” as surely as the sunflower border.

Kzanol/Greenberg cocked his head; his lips pursed slightly, and the skin puckered between his eyebrows. Judy would have recognized the gesture. He had suddenly realized what made the intelligent whitefood so terrible.

A thrint was master over every intelligent beast. This was the Powergiver’s primal decree, made before he made the stars. So said all of the twelve thrintun religions, though they fought insanely over other matters. But if the whitefood was intelligent, then it was immune to the Power. The tnuctipun had done what the Powergiver had forbade!

If the tnuctipun were stronger than the Powergiver, and the thrintun were stronger than the tnuctipun, and the Powergiver were stronger than the thrintun—

Then all priests were charlatans, and the Powergiver was a folk myth.

A sentient whitefood was blasphemy.

It was also very damned peculiar.

Why would the tnuctipun have made an intelligent food animal? The phrase had an innocuous sound, like “overkill” or “euthanasia,” but if you thought about it—

Thrintun were not a squeamish race. Power, no! But—

An intelligent food animal! Hitler would have fled, retching.

The tnuctipun had never been squeamish, either. The lovely simplicity of their mutated racing viprin was typical of the way they worked. Already the natural animal had been the fastest alive; there was little the tnuctipun could do in the way of redesigning. They had narrowed the animal’s head and brought the nose to a point, leaving the nostril like a single jet nacelle, and they had made the skin almost microscopically smooth against wind resistance, but this had not satisfied them. So they had removed several pounds of excess weight and replaced it with extra muscle and extra lung tissue. The weight removed had been all of the digestive organs. A mutated racing viprin had a streamlined sucker of a mouth which opened directly into the bloodstream to admit predigested pap.

The tnuctipun were always efficient, but never cruel.

Why make the whitefood intelligent? To increase the size of the brain, as ordered? But why make it immune to the Power?

And he had eaten whitefood meat.

Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head hard. Masney needed attention, and he had planning to do. Didn’t he? Planning, or mere worrying?

Would the amplifier work on a human brain?

Could he find the suit in time?

“‘Find him,’” Garner quoted. “That could fit. He’s looking for something he believes he needs badly.”

“But you already knew that. It doesn’t help.”

“Mrs. Greenberg, what I really came for is to find out everything you can tell me about your husband.”

“Then you’d better talk to Dale Snyder. He got here this morning. Want his number?”

“Thanks, I’ve got it. He called me too. You know him well?”

“Very.”

“I’ll also want a chance to talk to Charley, the dolphin anthropologist. But let’s start with you.”

Judy looked unhappy. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Anywhere.”

“Okay. He’s got three testicles.”

“I’ll be damned. That’s fairly rare, isn’t it?”

“And sometimes troublesome, medically, but Larry never had any problems. We used to call it ‘that little extra something about him.’ Is this the kind of thing you’re after?”

“Sure.” Luke didn’t know. He remembered that the better he knew the man he was chasing, the more likely he was to catch him. It had worked when he was a cop, decades ago. It ought to work now. He let her talk, interrupting very rarely.

“I never noticed what a practical joker he was until after he began working with dolphins, but he’s told me some of the things he pulled at college. He must have been a real terror. He was terrible at team athletics, but he plays fair squash and demon tennis…” She needed no prompting now. Her life came out in a stream of words. Her life with Larry Greenberg.

“…must have known a lot of women before he met me. And vice versa, I might add. Neither of us has ever tried adultery. I mean, we have an arrangement that we can, but we’ve never used it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.” Luke saw that she was. She was amused that he should have to ask.

“…It shocks him when I can make a prediction that accurate. I don’t think he really believes in prescience, so it scares him when I get a flash. He thinks it’s some sort of magic. I remember one day, we’d been married less than a year, and I’d gone out on a shopping spree. He saw me come in with a load of packages, and when I dumped them and went out and came back with the second load he said, ‘Honest to God, beautiful, you’re spending blue chips like the Last War was starting tomorrow!’ I didn’t say anything. I just gave him this brave little smile. He went absolutely white…”

Relevant or irrelevant, it was all coming out. Judy talked faster and faster. She was doing just what he’d told her to, but with an urgency that was puzzling.

“…Most of the couples we know never got married until someone was pregnant. When you pass the Fertility Board you hate to risk throwing it away by marrying a sterile partner, right? It’s too big a thing. But we decided to take the chance.” Judy rubbed her throat. She went on hoarsely. “Besides, the ’doc had okayed us both for parenthood. Then there was Jinx. We had to be sure neither of us got left behind.”

“By me that was good thinking, Mrs. Greenberg. I’ll quit now, while you’ve still got a voice. Thanks for the help.”

“I hope it did help.”

The speed at which she’d talked—the detail. Luke sent the elevator straight to the top. He knew now why she’d painted so complete a portrait of Larry Greenberg. Whether she knew it or not, she didn’t expect to see him again. She’d been trying to make him immortal in her memory.

2

The Jayhawk Hotel was the third tallest building in Topeka, and the rooftop bar had a magnificent view. As he left the elevator Luke met the usual continuous roar. He waited ten seconds while his ears “learned” to ignore it: an essential defense mechanism, learned by most children before they were three. The hostess was a tall redhead, nude but for double-spike shoes, her hair piled into a swirling, swooping confection which brought her height to an even eight feet. She led him to a tiny table against a window.

The occupant rose to meet him. “Mr. Garner.”

“Nice of you to do this for me, Dr. Snyder.”

“Call me Dale.”

Garner saw a dumpy man with an inch-wide strip of curly blond hair down the center of his scalp. Temporary skin substitute covered his forehead, cheeks and chin, leaving an X of unharmed skin across his eyes, nose, and the corners of his mouth. His hands were also bandaged.

“Then I’m Luke. What’s your latest word on the Sea Statue?”

“When the Arms woke me up yesterday afternoon to tell me Larry had turned alien. How is he?”

Avoiding details, Luke filled the psychologist in on the past twenty-four hours. “So now I’m doing what I can on the ground while they get me a ship that will beat Greenberg and the ET to Neptune.”

“Brother, that’s a mess. I never saw the statue, and if I had I’d never have noticed that button. What are you drinking?”

“I’d better grab a milk shake; I haven’t had lunch. Dale, why did you want us to bring the statue here?”

“I thought it would help if Larry saw it. There was a case once, long before I was born, where two patients who both thought they were Mary, Mother of God, showed up at the same institution. So the doctors put them both in the same room.”

“Wow. What happened?”

“There was a godawful argument. Finally one of the women gave up and decided she must be Mary’s mother. She was the one they eventually cured.”

“You thought Greenberg would decide he was Greenberg if you showed him he wasn’t the Sea Statue.”

“Right. I gather it didn’t work. You say they can use my help at Menninger’s?”

“Probably, but I need it first. I told you what I think Greenberg and the Sea Statue are after. I’ve got to chase them down before they get to it.”

“How can I help?”

“Tell me everything you can about Larry Greenberg. The man on his way to Neptune has an extraterrestrial’s memories, but his reflexes are Greenberg’s. He proved that by driving a car. I want to know what I can count on from the Greenberg side of him.”

“Very little, I’d say. Count on something from the Greenberg side of him and you’d likely wind up naked on the Moon. But I see your point. Let’s suppose the, uh, Sea Statue civilization had a law against picking pockets. Most countries had such laws, you know, before we got so crowded the cops couldn’t enforce them.”

“I remember.”

Snyder’s eyes widened. “You do? Yes, I suppose you do. Well, suppose Larry in his present state found someone picking his pocket. His impulse would be to stop him, but not to yell for a policeman. He’d have to make a conscious decision to do that. This would be unlikely until after the fight was over and he’d had time to think.”

“If I caught him by surprise I could count on his human reflexes.”

“Yes, but don’t confuse reflexes with motivations. You don’t know what his motivations are now.”

“Go on.”

Snyder leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. A waiter glided up and produced drinks from a well in its torso. Garner paid it and shooed it away.

Abruptly Snyder was talking. “You know what he looks like: five feet seven inches tall, dark and fairly, handsome. His parents were Orthodox, but they weren’t millionaires, they couldn’t afford a fully kosher diet. He’s very well adjusted, and he has enormous resilience, which is why he was able to take up contact telepathy.

“He does have some feelings about his height, but nothing we need bother about. They are partly compensated by what he calls ‘that little extra something about me.’”

“Mrs. Greenberg told me.”

“Partly he means his telepathy. Partly it’s the medical anomaly I assume Judy mentioned. But he’s in dead earnest in regarding himself as something special.

“You might also remember that he’s been reading minds for years, human and dolphin minds. This gives him an accumulation of useful data. I doubt if the dolphins are important, but there were physics professors, math students, and psychologists among the volunteers who let Larry read their minds by contact. You could call him superbly educated.” Snyder straightened. “Remember this, when you go out after him. You don’t know the Sea Statue’s intelligence, but Larry has his own intelligence and nobody else’s. He’s clever, and adaptable, and unusually sure of himself. He’s suspicious of superstition, but genuinely religious. His reflexes are excellent. I know. I’ve played tennis with him: Judy and I against him alone, with Larry guarding the singles court.”

“Then I’d better stay alert.”

“Absolutely.”

“Suppose his religion was threatened. How would he react?”

“You mean Orthodox Judaism?”

“No, I mean any religion he now happens to hold. Wait, I’ll expand that. How would he react to a threat against something he’s believed in all his life?”

“It would make him angry, of course. But he’s not a fanatic. Challenge him and he’d be willing to argue. But to make him change his mind about something basic, you’d have to offer real proof. You couldn’t just cast doubts. If you see what I mean.”

On the great white screen in the Space Traffic Control Center, two dark blobs hung almost motionless. Halley Johnson swung his phone camera around so Garner could see it.

“The military ship is going just a teeny bit faster than the honeymooner. If they’re really going all the way to Neptune they’ll pass each other.”

“Where else could they be going?”

“A number of asteroids. I have a list.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Johnson read off the names of fourteen minor Greek deities. “A lot more have been crossed off,” he added. “When the ship passes turnover point and keeps accelerating, we mark it out.”

“Okay. Keep me posted. How ’bout my ship?”

“Be here at twenty. You’ll be in orbit by twenty-one.”

The Struldbrugs’ Club is not the only club with a lower age limit on its members. (Consider the Senate.) It is the only club whose age limit rises one year for every two that passes. In 2106 every member was at least one hundred and forty-nine years old. Naturally the Struldbrugs’ autodocs were the best in the world.

But the treatment tanks still looked like oversized coffins.

Luke pulled himself out of the tank and read the itemized bill. It was a long one. The ’doc had hooked by induction into his spine and done deep knee bends to build up muscle tone; recharged the tiny battery in his heart; and added hormones and more esoteric substances to his bloodstream. Localized ultrasonic pulses had applied the Ch’ien treatment; Luke could feel the ache from the base of his skull all the way down his spine, to where sensation almost disappeared in the small of his back. A manicure and pedicure had finished the checkup.

Luke used his Arm ident to punch for a six months’ supply of the hormones, antiallergens, selective pest killers, and general rejuvenators which kept him alive and healthy. What came out of the slot was a hypodermic the size of a beer can, with instructions all down the sides in fine print. Luke tightened his lips at the sight of the needle; but you can’t use a spray hypo when you’ve got to hit the vein. He told the ’doc where to send the bill.

One more chore and he could take a cat nap.

Because of the decrepit state of many Struldbrugs, the club phone booths had been made large enough for travel chairs—barely. Already Luke had the air translucent with cigarette smoke. “How do you talk to a dolphin?” he asked, feeling unaccountably diffident.

Fred Torrance said, “Just the way you would have talked to Larry. But Charley will answer in dolphinese, and I’ll translate. You couldn’t make out his English over the phone.”

“Okay. Charley, my name’s Lucas Garner. I’m with the Arms. Do you know what’s happened to Larry?”

Grunts, chortles, whistles, squeals, and squeaks! Only once had Luke heard the like of it. Eighteen years ago he had been a witness at a murder trial. Three other witnesses—and the victim, who of course was not present—had been dolphins.

Torrance translated: “He knows Larry’s lost his sense of identity. Dr. Jansky called and told us all about it.”

“Well, yesterday Larry got away from us and took off in a stolen ship. I’m going after him. I want to know everything Charley can tell us about him.”

Dolphin language. Torrance said, “Charley wants a favor in return.”

“Oh, really? What?” Luke braced himself. Since the cracking of the swimmer-dolphin language barrier, the dolphins had proved very able bargainers. Fortunately or not, the dolphins’ rigid, complex moral code had adapted easily to the walker concept of trade.

“He wants to talk to you about the possibility of dolphins taking part in the seeding of the stars.”

Of the three present, Torrance the seadoc had the clearest understanding of what was being said. Charley was speaking slowly and clearly, staying well below the ultrasonic range, but even so Torrance often had trouble translating. To him the bilingual conversation went like this:

“I’ll be damned in writing,” said Garner. “Charley, is this a new idea? I’ve never heard of a dolphin wanting to go starhopping.”

“Not…brand new. The question has been discussed on the abstract level, and many are in favor of it, if only from the fear that swimmers will be left out of something. But I, myself, never felt the urge until three days ago.”

“Greenberg. He had the space bug bad, did he?”

“Please use the present tense. Yes, he has the bug all right. I’ve had a couple of days to get used to Larry in my head. I won’t say I quite understand this urge to reach Jinx, but I can explain a little of it.

“I dislike using an outmoded term, but part of it is”—Charley used the English words—“’anifesst desstinee. Part is the fact that on Jinx he could have as many children as he wants, four or five even, and nobody would complain. Partly it is the same urge I sometimes get in this tank. No room to swim. Larrry wants to walk down a street without the slightest fear of stepping on someone’s toes, having his pocket picked, or getting caught in a pedestrian traffic jam and being carried six blocks the wrong way. Notice that I’ve put considerably more thought into analyzing this than Larrry ever did.”

“And how do you feel about it? You’re a dolphin. You probably never looked at the stars—”

“Missterr ’Arrnerr, I assure you that we swimmers know what the stars look like. There are many astronomy and astrophysics tapes in the illustrated texts your agents sold us. And, after all, we do have to come up for air sometimes!”

“Sorry. But the point remains: you’ve got plenty of elbow room, you’ve never had your toes stepped on, and nothing but a killer whale could possibly be interested in picking your pocket. So what’s in it for you?”

“Perhaps adventure. Perhaps the forming of a new civilization. You know that there has been only one swimmer civilization for many thousands of years. The seas are not isolated, as are the continents. If there is a better way of doing things, the way for us to find out is to build many communities on many worlds. Is this logical?”

“Yes!” There was no mistaking the emphasis in Garner’s voice. “But it may not be as easy as you think. We’d certainly have to design you an entirely new ship, because we’d have to include swimming water. And water is heavy, dammit. I’ll bet shipping a dolphin would cost ten times as much as shipping a man.”

“You use water for reaction mass for the landing motors. Could you put lights in the water tanks?”

“Yes, and we could fill them only two-thirds full, and we could install filters to remove the fish and the algae and so on before the water reaches the motors. We could even install small tanks somewhere that you could ride in while the tanks were being emptied during landing. Charley, are you beginning to get some picture of the cost of all this?”

“Beginning to, yes. Money is complex.”

“You know it. But you couldn’t possibly buy your way on, not with what the dolphins produce. Oh, you could get a pair to Wonderland, but how could two dolphins stay sane alone? What would they live on? Seeding an ocean isn’t like planting a wheat field, even when you have to make the topsoil yourself. Fish swim away! Seeding an ocean has to be done all at once!

“Hmm. You can’t even claim it’s your right to be on a starship. Dolphins don’t pay UN taxes…hmm,” said Luke, and scratched his scalp. “Charley, just how many dolphins could be persuaded to leave their oceans forever?”

“As many as we need. Selected by lot, if necessary. The Law permits such selection in cases of extreme need. Of the hundreds of swimmers who took part in early walker experiments to prove us intelligent, and of the twenty or thirty who died as a result, nearly all had been so selected.”

“Oh…really? And nobody ever guessed.” Torrance wondered at Garner’s peculiar expression. Almost a look of horror. It had been so long ago; why should he be so shocked? Garner said, “Let it pass. How many genuine volunteers?”

“They would all be genuine. But you want to know how many would volunteer without the lots? No more than fifty to a hundred, I would think, out of all the oceans.”

“All right. Now what we’ll have to start with is a massive advertising campaign. The dolphins will have to contribute a share of the cost of a dolphin spaceship. Just a gesture. It would be nominal compared to the final cost, but to you it will be expensive. Then we’ll have to convince most of the walker world that a planet without dolphins isn’t worth living on. Needless to say, I already believe this.”

“Thank you. Thank you for all of us. Would swimmers be taking part in this advertising?”

“Not directly. We’d want pronouncements, statements from prominent swimmers like the one the newspapers call the Lawyer. You know who I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Understand that I’m just guessing. We’ll have to hire a ‘public opinions consultant,’ a publicity agent, and let him do the work. And it might be all for nothing.”

“Could we lower the cost by shipping swimmers in Doctor Jansskee’s time retarder field?”

Garner looked utterly astonished. Torrance grinned, recognizing the reaction: Is This A Dolphin Talking? “Yes,” said Garner, nodding to himself. “Right. We won’t even need tanks. Let the humans do the crew work, and keep you frozen until they can find and seed a small sea, like the Mediterranean…”

It went on and on.

“…So it’s settled,” said Garner, a long time later. “Talk it over with the dolphins, especially the ones with power, but don’t make a move until I get back. I want to pick a publicity agent. The right publicity agent.”

“I hate to remind you, but isn’t there a chance you won’t come back?”

“Holy Hannah! I completely forgot.” Garner glanced down at his wrist. “There goes my cat nap. Quick, Charley, start talking about Greenberg. What’s your opinion of him?”

“Prejudiced, I’m afraid. I like him and envy him his hands. He is very alien to me. And yet, perhaps not.” Charley let himself sink to the bottom of the tank. Torrance took the opportunity to clear his throat, which felt like he’d been eating used razor blades.

Charley surfaced and blew steam. “He is not alien. Negative! He thinks a lot like me, because he took contact from me several times before we chanced it the other way around. He is a practical joker—no, that is very far from the true concept. Well, it will have to do. Larrry is a dolphin type of practical joker. Years ago he selected a few of our most famous jokes, old japes which we consider classics, translated them into something he could use as a walker, and then decided not to use them because he might go to prison for it. If he is no longer afraid of prison he might be tempted to play his jokes.”

“Uh huh.”

“Such as something I have not tried yet with a swimmer. I must use the English word: hypnotism.”

Torrance said, “I didn’t get that.”

“Defined as an induced state of monomania.”

“Oh, hypnotism.”

“Larrry has studied it thoroughly, and even tried it out, and for him it works. On a swimmer it might be ineffective.”

“He’s already tried it,” said Garner. “Anything else?”

“Garrnnrr, you must understand that the dolphin gurgle-buzz-SQUEEEE is not truly a practical joke. It is a way of looking at things. Putting a monkey wrench in machinery is often the only way to force somebody to repair, replace, or redesign the machinery. Especially legal or social machinery. Biting off somebody’s fin at exactly the right time can change his whole attitude toward life, often for the better. Larrry understands this.”

“I wish I did. Thanks for your time, Charley.”

“Negative! Negative! Thank you for yours!”

An hour to the long jump. Luke’s throat felt well used. He might still have time for a fifteen-minute cat nap, but he’d wake up feeling worse than ever.

He sat in the Struldbrugs’ reading room and thought about Greenberg.

Why had he become an alien? Well, that was easy. With two sets of memories to choose from, he’d naturally chosen the identity most used to sorting itself out from other identities. But why cling to it? He must know by now that he was not the Sea Statue. And he’d had a happy life as Larry Greenberg.

His wife was something to envy—and she loved him. According to Dr. Snyder, he was stable, well adjusted. He liked his work. He thought of himself as something special.

But the Sea Statue was all alone in the universe, the last of its race, marooned among hostiles. The Greenberg Sea Statue had also lost his ability of—well, telepathic hypnosis was close enough.

Any sane person would rather be Greenberg.

Garner thought, I’ll have to assume that Greenberg as Greenberg literally cannot think with the Sea Statue memories in his mind. He must remain the Sea Statue to function at all. Otherwise he’d have at least tried to change back.

But that peculiar arrogance he’d displayed under interrogation. Not—a slave. Not human.

A robot bonged softly next to his ear. Garner turned and read in flowing light on the waiter’s chest: “You are requested to call Mr. Charles Watson at once.”

Chick Watson was fat, with thick lips and a shapeless putty nose. He wore crew-cut, bristly black hair and, at the moment, a gray seventeen-hundred shadow over cheeks and jaw. He had a harmless look. Centered on his desk was a large screen viewer running film at abnormal speed. Not one in a thousand could read that fast.

A buzzer sounded. Chick snapped off the reader and turned on the phone. For a fat man he moved quickly and accurately.

“Here.”

“Lucas Garner calling, sir. Do you want to see him?”

“Desperately.” Chick Watson’s voice belied his appearance. It was a voice of command, a deep, ringing bass.

Luke looked tired. “You wanted me, Chick?”

“Yeah, Garner. I thought you could help me with some questions.”

“Fine, but I’m pressed for time.”

“I’ll make it quick. First, this message from Ceres to Titan Enterprises. The Golden Circle made a takeoff under radio silence yesterday, from Topeka Base, and the Belt intends to submit a bill for tracking. Titan sent the notice here. They say their ship must have been stolen.”

“That’s right. Kansas City has the details. It’s a very complicated story.”

“An hour later the Navy ship Iwo Jima—”

“Also stolen.”

“Any connection with the Sea Statue incident at UCLA?”

“Every connection. Look, Chick—”

“I know, get it from Kansas City. Finally…” Chick fumbled among the spools of film on his desk. His voice was suspiciously mild as he said, “Here it is. Your notification that you’ll be leaving Topeka on a commandeered Navy ship, the Heinlein; departure: Topeka Base at twenty-one hundred; destination: unknown, probably Neptune; purpose: official business. Garner, I always said it would happen, but I never really believed it.”

“I haven’t gone senile, Chick. This is urgent.”

“Fastest attack of senility I ever heard of. What could possibly be urgent enough to get you into space at your age?”

“It’s that urgent.”

“You can’t explain?”

“No time.”

“Suppose I order you not to go.”

“I think that would cost lives. Lots of lives. It could also end human civilization.”

“Melodramatic.”

“It’s the literal truth.”

“Garner, you’re asking me to assume my own ignorance and let you go ahead on your own because you’re the only expert on the situation. Right?”

Hesitation. “I guess that’s right.”

“Fine. I hate making my own decisions. That’s why they put me behind a desk. But, Garner, you must know things Kansas City doesn’t. Why don’t you call me after takeoff? I’ll be studying in the meantime.”

“In case I kick off? Good idea.”

“Don’t let it slip your mind, now.”

“Sure not.”

“And take your vitamins.”

Like a feathered arrow the Golden Circle fell away from the sun. The comparison was hackneyed but accurate, for the giant triangular wing was right at the rear of the ship, with the slender shaft of the fuselage projecting deep into the forward apex. The small forward wings had folded into the sides shortly after takeoff. The big fin was a maze of piping. Live steam, heated by the drive, circled through a generator and through the cooling pipes before returning to start the journey again. Most of the power was fed into the fusion shield of the drive tube. The rest fed the life-support system.

In one respect the “arrow” simile was inexact. The arrow flew sideways, riding the sun-hot torch which burned its belly.

Kzanol roared his displeasure. The cards had failed again! He swept the neat little array between his clublike hands, tapped them into deck formation, and ripped the deck across. Then, carefully, he got to his feet. The drive developed one terran gravity, and he hadn’t quite had time to get used to the extra weight. He sat down at the casino table and dug into the locker underneath. He came out with a new deck, opened it, let the automatic shuffler play with it for a while, then took it out and began to lay it out solitaire style. The floor around him was littered with little pieces of magnetized plastic card.

Perhaps he could think up some fitting punishment for the pilot, who had taught him this game.

The pilot and copilot sat motionless in the control room. From time to time the pilot used his hands to change course a trifle. Every fourteen hours or so the copilot would bring Kzanol a bowl of water and then return to her seat. Actinic gas streamed from the belly of the ship, pushing it to ever higher velocities.

It was a beautiful night. Years had passed since Garner last saw the stars; in the cities they couldn’t shine through the smog and the neon glare, and even the American continents were mostly city. Soon he would see them more clearly than he had in half a century. The air was like the breath of Satan. Garner was damp with sweat, and so were Anderson and Neumuth.

“I still say we could do this by ourselves,” said Anderson.

“You wouldn’t know what to look for,” Garner countered. “I’ve trained myself for this. I’ve been reading science fiction for decades. Centuries! Neumuth, where are you going?”

Neumuth, the short dark one, had turned and was walking away. “Time to get strapped down,” he called back. “Bon voyage!”

“He’s going forward, to the cockpit of the booster,” said Anderson. “We go up that escalator to the ship itself.”

“Oh. I wish I could see it better. It’s just one big shadow.”

The shadow was a humped shadow, like a paper dart with a big lizard clinging to its back. The paper glider was a ramjet-rocketplane, hydrogen fueled in the ramjet and using the cold liquid hydrogen to make its own liquid oxygen in flight. The slim cylinder clinging to its upper surface was a fusion drive cruiser with some attachments for rescue work. It carried two men.

Using its fusion motor in Earth’s atmosphere would have been a capital offense. In taking off from ground eighteen hours earlier, Masney and Kzanol/Greenberg had broken twelve separate local laws, five supranational regulations and a treaty with the Belt.

Another ship roared a god’s anger as it took off. Garner blinked at the light. “That was our rendezvous ship,” Anderson said matter-of-factly.

Luke was tired of having to ask silly-seeming questions. He wasn’t going to like Anderson, he decided. If the kid wanted to tell him why they needed a rendezvous ship, he would.

They had reached the bottom of the escalator. “Meet you at the top,” said Garner, reaching into his ashtray. Anderson stared, jolted, as an invalid’s travel chair became a flying saucer. An Arm using an illegal flying machine? An Arm?

Anderson rode up the stairs, whistling. This trip might be fun after all.

“Just leave the chair on the escalator platform,” he said at the top. “We’ve made arrangements to have it delivered to the local Struldbrugs’ Club. They’ll take good care of it. I’ll carry you in, sir.”

“You get my medikit. I’ll walk,” said Garner. And he did, wobbling and using his arms freely. He barely reached his gee chair. Anderson found the medikit and followed. He checked Garner’s crash web before he used his own.

“Neumuth? Ready,” said Anderson, as if into empty air. He continued, “The other ramjet-rocket carried a bundle of solid fuel rockets as big as this ship. They’re strap-ons. We don’t have any more power than the Golden Circle, and we’re a day and a half behind them, so we use the strap-ons to give us an initial boost. Inefficient, but if it works—”

“—It’s good,” Garner finished for him. His voice was thickened by the pull of the linear accelerator. For five seconds the soundless pressure lasted, two gravities of pull. Then the rams fired and they were off.

It would take two days of uncomfortable two-gee acceleration to get there first, thought Garner, compressed in his chair. His old bones would take a beating. Already he was missing the gadgets in his own chair. This trip wasn’t going to be fun.

Lars was eating a very messy sardine-and-egg sandwich when the buzzer buzzed. He put it down gently, using both hands, so that it wouldn’t bounce in the nearly nonexistent gravity. He wiped his hands on his coverall, which he washed frequently, and went to the transceiver.

The maser beam had crossed the void in one instantaneous beep. The radio translated it into sound, then thoughtfully scaled it down against the minute Doppler shift. What came out was the colorless voice of Cutter, duty man at Ceres.

“Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. No more emergencies this time, Lam. Topeka Base called us eight hours ago, giving us the time of takeoff and predicted course. According to your report the takeoff was four minutes late, but that’s typical. Keep us posted.

“Thank you, Eros, your—”

Lars switched it off and went back to his sandwich. Briefly he wondered if Cutter had noticed that the Navy ship was following the two he had tracked eighteen hours ago. No doubt he had.

“You’re taking it too hard,” said Dale Snyder.

Judy shrugged.

Again Dale took in the puffy eyelids showing beneath the makeup, the unfamiliar lines in Judy’s pretty twenty-eight-year-old face, the death-grip on her coffee glass, her rigid position in what should have been an easy chair. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve got far too many things working on you. Have you considered—I mean, have you given any thought to invoking your agreement with Larry concerning adultery? At least you could eliminate one of your tensions. And you’re not helping him by worrying.”

“I know. I’ve thought about it. But—” she smiled, “not with a friend, Dale.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” Dale Snyder said hastily. And blushed. Fortunately the bandages covered most of it. “What about going to Vegas? The town’s full of divorcees of both sexes, most of them temporarily terrified of getting married again. Great for a short-term affair. You could cut it short when Larry comes back.”

He may have put too much assurance into the last sentence, because Judy’s grip tightened on her glass and relaxed immediately. “I don’t think so,” she said listlessly.

“Think about it some more. You could even do some gambling.”

Two gravities! Twelve hours ago he would have sneered at himself. Two gravities, lying on his back? Luke could have done it on his head. But that was twelve hours ago, twelve hours of double weight and throbbing metal and noise and no sleep. The strap-on fission/fusion motors roared in pairs outside the hull. Two had been dropped already. Ten remained, burning two at a time. It would be a day and a half before ship’s weight returned to normal.

The stars were hard, emphatic points. Never had the sky been so black; never had the stars been so bright. Luke felt that they would have burned tiny holes in his retinae if he could have held his eyes fixed on one point. Tiny multicolored blindnesses to add to his enviable collection of scars. The Milky Way was a foggy river of light, with sharp actinic laser points glaring through.

So here he was.

He’d been seventy-two the day they launched the first passenger ship: an orbital craft, clumsy and spavined and oversized by today’s standards, nothing more than a skip-glider. They’d told him he was too old to buy a ticket. What was he now? He wanted to laugh, but there was pressure on his chest.

With an effort he turned his head. Anderson was locking a sheet of transparent plastic over part of the complex wraparound control panel. Most of the panel was already under the plastic sheets. He saw Luke looking at him, and he said, “Nothing to do from now on but watch for rocks. I’ve put us above the plane of the Belt.”

“Can we afford the extra time?”

“Sure. If they’re going to Neptune.” Anderson’s voice came cheerful and energetic, though slurred by the extra weight on his cheeks. “Otherwise they’ll beat us anyway, to wherever they’re going. And we won’t know it until they make turnover.”

“We’ll have to risk that.”

The extra weight wasn’t bothering Anderson at all.

One gravity is standard for manned spacecraft. Some rescue ships; and a few expresses in the Belt, have attachments for clusters of fusion/fission strap-on engines to cut their transit time. Often it makes sense. More often it doesn’t. Given continuous acceleration, the decrease in trip time varies as the square root of the increase in power. Greenberg and the ET should have expected their pursuers, had they known of them, to stay a day and a half behind all the way to Neptune.

A strap-on can only be used once. The smooth cylindrical shell contains only hydrogen gas under pressure and a core of uranium alloy. The fusion shield generator is external; it stays with the ship when the strap-on falls away. The moment the shield forms on the inside of the shell, neutrons from the core begin to reflect back into the uranium mass, and everything dissolves in the chain reaction. As time decreases the pressure inside the trapped star, the tiny exhaust aperture is designed to wear away, keeping the acceleration constant.

This time the strap-ons were vital. The Heinlein would beat the others to Neptune by six hours—

If they were headed for Neptune! But if Diller were wrong, or if Diller had lied—if Diller, like Greenberg, thought he was an alien—if the fleeing ships were en route to some asteroid—then the Heinlein would overshoot. When the others made turnover it would be too late. The Heinlein would be going too fast.

Of course, there were always the missiles. And the Belt would consider it a violation of treaty if the Golden Circle or the Iwo Jima landed in the Belt. They might be persuaded to attack.

But there was Lloyd Masney.

With a full minute’s delay in transmission, his discussion with Chick Watson had been both tiring and unproductive. Now Chick knew everything he knew, except for the exhaustive details he’d collected on Greenberg’s life. They’d reached some obvious decisions. They would not send any more ships from Earth, ships which would obviously arrive far too late to help. Earth would fire at sight if either of the target ships reached anywhere and started back. Chick would keep his communications open for Garner, ready to search out any information he might need. And one other decision—

“No, we can’t call on the Belt for help.” Chick’s expression dismissed the idea with the contempt he felt it deserved. “Not with Belt relations the way they are now. They know what they’d do to us with an embargo on uranium, and we know what we’d do to them by holding off their vitamins, and both sides are just itching to see who’d collapse first. You think they’d believe a story like ours? All the proof we can offer is second hand, from their point of view. They’d think we were setting up our own mining operation, or trying to claim a moon. They’d think anything at all, because all they can tell for sure is that three ships from Earth are on their way to Neptune.

“Worse yet, they might just assume that this telepathy amplifier won’t reach beyond Earth. In which case they could make a better deal with Greenberg, king of the world, than they can with us.”

“I’ll never buy that,” Garner had answered. “But you’re right, there’s no point in crying for help. There may be a better answer.”

And so they waited. If they were right, if the stolen ships were going to the eighth planet, they would be turning in six days. Luke and Anderson had nothing to do until the ET’s gave them their orders.

Luke went to sleep, finally, smiling. He smiled because the gees were pulling on his cheeks. Anderson was sleeping too, letting the autopilot do the work.

At twenty-one hundred the next day the last pair of strap-ons burned out, and were dropped. Now six tumbling pairs of thick-walled metal cylinders followed the Heinlein in a line millions of miles long. In a century all would reach interstellar space. Some would eventually pass between the galaxies.

The ship went on at a comfortable one gee. Luke scowled ferociously to exercise his facial muscles, and Anderson stepped into the airlock to do isometric exercises.

The rocks of the Belt slipped by below, faster every second.

He was a clerkish-looking man with a droning voice, and he called himself Ceres Base. From his appearance he might never have had a name of his own. He wanted to know what an Earth Navy ship was doing in the Belt.

“We have passage,” Anderson told him curtly.

Yes, said Ceres, but what is the Heinlein’s purpose?

Garner whispered, “Let me have the mike.”

“Just talk. He can hear you.”

“Ceres, this is Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN. Why the sudden shift?”

“Mr. Garner, your authority does not exist here in—”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You just now realized we’re following the Golden Circle. Didn’t you?”

“Are you really? To what purpose?”

“None of your business. But I may tell one of your superiors, if you pick the right superior. Get him on fast, were getting further away every minute.”

“The Belt will not allow you passage unless you explain your purpose here.”

“The Belt won’t touch us. Good-by.”

At the sound of the bell Marda rolled off the couch and walked smoothly into the phone booth. Already there was only a slight pull in her abdomen from the surgical cement, though the operation was just twelve hours old. A slight pull when she moved, to remind her of what she had lost.

“Lit!” she called. “Ceres. It’s for you.”

Lit trotted in from the garden.

Cutter looked apprehensive for once. “Remember the two bandit ships from Topeka Base? Someone’s joined the procession.”

“Took them long enough. We warned them days ago. When did it take off?”

“Two days ago.”

“Two days, Cutter?”

“Lit, the Heinlein gave us plenty of warning and an accurate course projection. She also used strap-on boosters. The time/position curve looks completely different from the curves for the bandits. It took me this long to see that everybody’s going in the same direction.”

“Damn it, Cutter—never mind. Anything else?”

“The Heinlein’s passing Ceres now. Do you want to talk to Lucas Garner, Arm of the UN?”

“An Arm? No. What’s an Arm doing out here?”

“He won’t say. He might tell you.”

“What makes you so sure the Belt won’t stop us?”

“Well, they can’t catch us and board us. All they could do is throw missiles at us, right?”

“You make me so happy.”

“Belters aren’t stupid, Anderson. Uh, oh.”

A space-tanned Caucasian with black hair and wrinkled eyes looked out of the screen at them and said, “Do I have the honor of addressing Lucas Garner aboard the Heinlein?”

“Right. Who’s this?”

“Charles Martin Shaeffer. First Speaker, Belt Political section. May I ask—”

“‘Little’ Shaeffer?”

The mahogany man’s face froze for an instant, then barely smiled. “They call me Lit. What are you up to, Garner?”

“You I’ll tell, Shaeffer. Now don’t interrupt, because it’s a long story…”

It took fifteen minutes to tell. Shaeffer listened without comment. Then there were questions. Shaeffer wanted details, clarification. Then some of the questions were repeated. There were veiled accusations, which became less veiled. Anderson kept the beam fixed and sensibly let Luke do the talking. After an hour of question-and-answer, Luke shut it off.

“That’s as much cross examination as I’m taking today, Shaeffer.”

“What did you expect me to do, swallow your tale whole? Your opinion of Belters needs revision.”

“No, Shaeffer, it doesn’t. I never expected to be believed. You can’t afford to believe me; the propaganda value would be enormous if Earth took you in on such a wild story.”

“Naturally. On the other hand, what you’re trying to tell me is that an alien monster is threatening all of human civilization. In view of this it seems odd that you object to answering a few questions.”

“Nuts. Shaeffer, do this. Send a few armed—”

“I’m not taking orders—”

“Don’t interrupt me, Shaeffer. Send a few armed ships to follow me to Neptune. I’m sure that’s where they’re going; they’ve already passed turnover for most of the asteroids. It’ll take your ships a while to catch us. They may get there in time to help us out, and they may not. If you think I’m a liar, then send your ships along only to make sure I don’t do any poaching. Regardless of what you suspect me of, you’ll need ships to stop me, right? But arm them, Shaeffer. Arm them good.

“Your only other choice is to start a war, right? Right. If you want my story confirmed call the Arms office in Los Angeles, then call the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit in Brasilia Ciudad and ask if they’ve still got the Sea Statue. That’s all you can do. So call me back and tell me how many ships you’re sending.” Luke gestured to Anderson, who turned him off.

“Jerk,” said Anderson, with feeling.

“Not at all. He did the right thing. He’ll keep on doing it. First he’ll send ships after us, including one with antiradar which will have to get there later than the others because of the extra weight. He’ll call Earth and get my story confirmed as well as he can. The worst he can think of me then is that I’m thorough. Finally he’ll call us and tell us he’s sending one less ship than he is, leaving out the antiradar. That ship gives the Belt every chance to catch me red-handed, doing whatever illegal treaty-breaking thing they think I’m doing, especially since I don’t know the Belt’s discovered antiradar—”

“Uh huh.”

“But if they don’t catch me at anything then they cooperate with me.”

“Uh huh. It’s perfect. But will they be able to handle it when we turn out to be telling the truth?”

“Sure. They’ll be armed for us, and a weapon is a weapon. Besides which, some of them will believe me. Belters, they’re always waiting for the first alien contact. They’ll be armed for bear, regardless.” Garner rubbed his scalp. “I wonder what the Sea Statue is armed for?”

A dry tooth socket is not extremely painful. The pain is mild. What drives the unfortunate victim to thoughts of suicide is, the pain never lets up. There is no escape.

Marda felt the gentle, reminding pull in her abdomen every time she moved.

Many Belt women were childless. Some had been spayed by solar storms. Some were frigid, and their frigidity let them endure the loneliness of a singleship. Some had undesirable recessive genes; and, contrary to popular terran belief, the Belt had fertility laws. Some could not conceive in free or nearly free fall. They were a special class, the exiles from Confinement.

What was Lit doing in that phone booth? It had been over an hour.

He was furious, she could see that. She’d never seen him so mad. Even after the screen went dark, he just sat there glaring at the screen.

Something made Marda get up and push open the soundproof door. Lit looked around. “That Arm. That flatlander. Marda, can you imagine an Arm getting huffy with me?”

“He really pushed all your buttons, didn’t he? What happened, Lit?”

“Oh…” Lit banged the heels of his hands together. “You remember those two ships that took off from Topeka Base without—”

“I never heard about it.”

“Right. I forgot.” She’d hardly been in a mood to listen then. “Well, two days ago…”

By the time he finished he was almost calm. Marda felt safe in saying, “But, Lit, you cross-examined him for a full hour. What else could he do but cut you off or admit he was lying?”

“Good point. What I’m really mad about is that tale he told me.”

“You’re sure he was lying? It sounds almost too fantastic.”

“Aw, honey. It is too fantastic.”

“Then forget it.”

“That’s not the point. What’s he want with Neptune? Why’s he need three ships? And why, in the name of Reason, does he commandeer the Golden Circle from Titan Enterprises?”

“To back up his story?”

“No. I think it’s the other way around. His story was tailored to fit the facts.”

Slowly he turned back to face the blank screen. He sat for a while, with Marda watching him, and then he said, “I’m going to have to do just as he told me. That burns me. Remind me to tell you someday why I hate Arms.”

“Okay. Later today, then.”

“Good girl.” But he’d already forgotten her. Still he stared at the blank screen, not willing to give Ceres its orders until he’d thought them out completely. Finally he muttered, “I can get the jump on him. I’ll send the ships from the lead Trojans; he’ll be passing right over them. We’ll be after him faster than he thinks.” His hand darted out. “And—mph. I can send a radar proof. Operator? Get me a maser to Achilles, fast.”

Of course, the whole ploy could be a red herring, he thought, waiting for the operator to call back. A distraction for something going on right here in the Belt. Well, they won’t get away with that either. Every ship that leaves Earth or the Moon is going to be questioned. We’ll board some of them, and follow the ones that won’t allow it. Earth will get its share too. I’ll make our espionage system think the end of the world is coming.

Four and a half days later neither Kzanol nor Kzanol/Greenberg had turned ship. It seemed they really were going to Neptune. If so they would be turning in eighteen hours.

It was already time for Anderson to turn ship. He did. “We’ll get there six hours ahead of them,” he told Garner.

“Good.”

“Of course, they could be headed for outer space. It could be a coincidence that they’re going in that direction. Then we’ll lose them.”

“In those ships? Besides, I never doubted they were going to Neptune. I just didn’t want to take chances.”

“Uh huh. I’m just hypothesizing. How about some lunch?”

“Good.” It was high noon. The life-support system didn’t include enough room to walk around in, but it did have a mechanized kitchen; and one thing the space conquerors had learned early was that caviar is cheaper than corn flakes. Caviar has far more food value per payload ounce. So Garner and Anderson ate prefrozen crepes Veronique and wondered how long it would be before they could exercise off the extra pounds.

While they were feeding the plates back into the food slot, Garner found something else to worry about. “Can we turn our telescope around?”

“Sure. Why?”

“To follow the other ships. They’re still ahead of us, and we’re moving ass-backwards.”

“We can’t see them now because the glare of our exhaust blocks our view. But we’ll be passing them in six hours, and we can watch them from then on.”

“We’ll never catch them,” said the man in the lead ship. He was a tall, spindly Negro with prematurely white hair and an habitual poker face. “They’ll be three days ahead of us all the way. Poachers!”

Somebody, Smoky from his accent, said, “It’d be four if we hadn’t started from Achilles.”

“Something on the scope,” said one of the other ships. All five were singleships, hurriedly converted to war potential from their mining duties in the lead cluster of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

“Like what?”

“Specks of hydrogen light. Moving almost as fast as the Arm, judging by the red shift. Way ahead of him.”

“Is it too late to call Ceres?”

“Direct, yes. She’ll be behind the Trojans for a while.”

“Tartov! Call Phoebe and say that there are three ships past Uranus, all en route to Neptune, all moving at approx the same speed. I want ETAs for each of them.”

“I hear you, Lew.”

The fleet of five ships looked like a small swarm of fireflies. They were only thousands of miles apart; they stayed that close to avoid irritating message delays. The distance would still have hidden them from each other if they had been using chemical fuels or ion jets, but the searing light of the fusion drives showed brighter than any of the surrounding stars.

“Lew?”

“Here.”

“I’m sure one of them is a honeymoon special. It’s got a strong oxygen line in its spectrum.”

“Yeah? The Arms are thorough, you’ve got to give them credit.”

Tartov said, “They must be after something big. Something tremendous.”

None of the others spoke. Perhaps they were reserving judgment. Behind the swarm, falling further behind with each second, a lone firefly struggled in pursuit.

Something went by like a falling comet, if there were such a thing. “There goes Greenberg,” said Anderson, grinning. The blue-white light faded slowly into the background of stars.

“The Golden Circle should be by in a few minutes,” he added. “Greenberg’s ship is just a touch faster.”

Garner didn’t answer.

Anderson turned to look at him. “Something bugging you?” he asked kindly.

Garner nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it for days. I just now realized that there isn’t any good answer. It’s like trying to keep a teleport in jail.”

“What is?”

“Trying to keep either of those birds from picking up the amplifier.”

He slapped his chair absently for the cigarette button, caught himself and scowled. “Look. We can’t get to it first. We don’t know how they plan to find it themselves. Probably they just remember where they put it. We don’t even know how big it is! We can’t arrest them; at least we can’t arrest the ET because he’d just turn us into spare butlers, and we’ll have trouble with Greenberg because he’s got an armed ship and Masney can use the guns. He may be better than you, son.” Garner looked horribly like a Greek tragic mask, but his voice was the voice of a very worried man. “It seems to me that the only thing we can do is shoot on sight.”

“You can’t do that!” Anderson protested. “You’ll kill Greenberg and Masney both!”

“I don’t want to kill anyone. Give me another choice!”

“Well, give me a chance to! I haven’t even thought about it yet!” He screwed his young face into a smooth semblance of Garner’s. “Hey!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Yeah, I’ve got something. You don’t have to shoot on sight. You can wait to find out if what they’re looking for is really on Neptune.”

“What good will that do?”

“They could have left something on one of the moons, or in orbit. But if it’s on Neptune, they can’t get at it! Neither of their ships develops more than one gee. Neptune’s pull is higher than that. They can’t land.”

“No good. The ET has a winged ship. But that’s good thinking anyway, son.”

“You bet it is,” Anderson said angrily. “How the hell is he going to get back up?”

Luke Garner looked like he’d seen a vision. After a moment he asked, “Son, have you ever thought of joining the Arms?”

“Why—” Anderson began modestly.

Who are you?

The two stared at one another.

WHO ARE YOU???????

“Lucas Launcelot Garner. Arm.”

“Leroy. George Anderson’s boy. The astronaut.”

I DON’T WANT YOU FOLLOWING ME. The Mind was blasting, angry. Even when merely “thinking aloud,” it held Garner and Anderson physically and mentally paralyzed. Then it came to a decision. Anderson reached toward the control panel. His fingernails rapped against plastic. He began fumbling at the catches on the guard panel.

Garner pushed him back with one hand.

It lashed him. Garner felt it stop his heart, and he gasped, horribly. Right now? he wondered. His sight turned red and went out.

He came back to life with a singing in his head. Anderson was looking terribly haggard. He had a spray hypo in his hand. “Thank God,” he blurted. “I thought you were gone.”

“Heart stopped,” Garner wheezed. (Not this time.) “First time it’s ever happened. What did you use?”

“Adrenalin in the heart. Are you all right?”

“Sure. Considering.”

The young pilot was still pale. “You know what he told me to do? I was going to turn off the fusion shield! They’d have seen it on Earth.” He shuddered. “In daylight they’d have seen it! Very lucky thing you stopped me. But how did you know?”

“I knew what he wanted for a result. Never mind. How did you know it was my heart?”

“I felt him do it. Well, we don’t have to worry about him until we get to Neptune. He went out of range right after he stopped your heart.”

“We’ll have to shoot first with that bird.”

“It’ll be a pleasure,” Anderson said furiously.

Kzanol strained to hang onto the enemy minds, but it was no use. Not only was distance against him; the difference in velocities was even more of a barrier. A slight relativistic difference in time rates could make communication impossible, even between two thrints.

He turned his attention back to the cards. The pilot, who was English, called this game Patience. It was well named. Kzanol was learning patience the hard way. The floor of the lounge was littered with scraps of torn plastic; but this one deck had already survived ten lost games. It was the last deck on board.

Growling deep in his throat, like the carnivore he was, Kzanol scraped the cards together and shuffled them. He was learning coordination, too. And he had learned something about himself: he would not let a slave see him cheating at cards. He had cheated once, and the pilot had somehow guessed. He would not cheat again.

Kzanol jumped. Another one! This one was too far to the side to control, but easily close enough to sense. And yet…the image had a fuzziness that had nothing to do with distance. As if the slave were asleep. But…different.

For half an hour it stayed within reach. In that time Kzanol satisfied himself that there was no other slave on board. He did not think of another thrint. He would have recognized the taste of a thrint command.

At six hundred hours the next morning, Greenberg’s ship turned around. Three minutes later the Golden Circle did the same. Anderson found the prints in the scope camera when he woke up: two lights which stretched slowly into bright lines, then contracted with equal deliberation into somewhat brighter points.

The time passed slowly. Garner and Anderson were already deep in a tournament which they played on the viewer screen: a rectangular array of dots to be connected by lines, with victory going to the player who completed the most squares. Almost every day they raised the stakes.

On the morning of the last day Garner got back to even. At one point he had been almost eleven thousand dollars in debt. “See?” he said. “You don’t give up all your pleasures as you get older.”

“Just one,” Anderson said thoughtlessly.

“More than that,” Garner admitted. “My taste buds have been wearing out for, lo, these many years. But I guess someday someone will find a way to replace them. Just like my spinal cord. That wore out too.”

“Wore out? You mean—it wasn’t an accident? The nerves just—died?”

“Just went into a coma would be more like it.”

A swift change of subject was in order. “Have you got any better idea of what we do when we get to Neptune? Do we hide on one of the moons and watch?”

“Right,” said Garner.

But half an hour later he asked, “Can we reach Earth from here?”

“Only by maser,” Anderson said dubiously. “Everyone on Earth will be able to listen in. The beam will spread that far. Have you got any secrets from the man on the slidewalk?”

“Don’t worry about it. Aim a maser at Earth.”

It took half an hour for Anderson to center the beam and set it tracking. “If it’s ‘Love to Mother,’ you’re dead,” he warned Garner.

“My mother passed away some time ago. In fact, it’s been just about a century. And she thought she was an old woman! Hello, Arm Headquarters. This is Lucas Garner calling the United Nations Technological Police.”

Anderson nudged him with an elbow. “Are you waiting for an answer, shnook?”

“Of course not!” Habits are hard to break. “This is Garner calling Arm Headquarters, Earth. Please aim your reply at Neptune. We urgently need the following information from Dorcas Jansky. Does his retarder field stop radar completely? Repeat, completely. Would the ET suit do the same?” He put down the mike. “Okay, son, repeat that a few times.”

“All right, it’s on repeat. Now what was that all about?”

“I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out,” Garner said smugly. “The ET has been frozen for about two billion years, according to Greenberg. I think he was telling the truth. He couldn’t know that there’s something on Neptune unless he put it there two billion years ago. And how could he assume that it hasn’t fallen apart or rusted to death or whatever, after all that time?”

“It’s in a retarder field.”

“Right.”

Anderson looked at the chron. “You’ll be getting your answer in a little over eight hours, not counting the time it takes to get what’s-his-name. Figure an hour; they’ll be calling around nineteen thirty. So let’s get some sleep. We’ll be coming in about three tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. Sleeping pills?”

“Uh huh.” Anderson punched buttons on the medicine box. “Luke, I still think you were waiting for Earth to answer.”

“You can’t prove it, son.”

Twenty-one forty-five. Garner studied the board for a moment, then drew one short line between two dots of light. The scanner, set to follow the movements of the tip of his stylus, reproduced the line on the board.

The radio boomed to life.

“This is Arm Headquarters calling spaceship Heinlein. Arm Headquarters calling Lucas Garner, spaceship Heinlein. Garner, this is Chick. I got hold of Jansky this morning, and he spent three hours doing experiments in our lab. He says a retarder field does, repeat does, reflect one hundred percent of energy of any frequency, including radar, and including everything he could think of. Visible, ultraviolet, infrared, radio, X rays. If you’re interested, he thinks there’s a mathematical relation between a retarder field and a fusion shield. If he finds one, do you want to know? Is there anything else we can help you with?”

“You can help me with this game,” Luke muttered. But Anderson had erased it, along with the six-inch curve Luke had drawn when he jerked his arm at the sound of the radio.

The man in the lead ship ran fingers through his cottony hair like a man sorely puzzled. He barely had room in the tiny control bubble. “All ships,” he said. “What the hell did he mean by that?”

After a few moments someone suggested, “Code message.” Others chorused agreement. Then Tartov asked, “Lew, does Earth have something called a retarder field?”

“I don’t know. And there’s nowhere we can beam a maser that some Earth ship won’t get in it.” He sighed, for masers are always a chore to use. “Someone ask the Political Section about retarder fields.”

“Retarder fields?”

“Retarder fields. And they sent us the full text of the message to Garner.”

Lit smiled with one side of his mouth. “Retarder fields were part of Garner’s story. I knew he’d be thorough, but this is ridiculous.” He thought of the thousands of Belt ships he’d put on standby alert, just in case Garner’s fleet was intended to distract attention from things closer to home; and he thought of five mining ships and a priceless radar proof headed for what might as well be outer space. Garner was causing more than his fair share of activity. “All right, I’ll play his silly game. Beam Arm Headquarters and ask them what they know about retarder fields.”

Cutter was shocked. “Ask the Arms?” Then he got the joke, and his face was chilled by a smile. On Cutter a smile always looked false.

It wasn’t until Arm Headquarters cautiously denied all knowledge of retarder fields, that Lit Shaeffer began to have doubts.

With the first jarring clang of the alarm Garner was awake. He saw Anderson groan and open his eyes, but the eyes weren’t seeing anything. “Meteor strike!” he bawled.

Anderson’s eyes became aware. “Not funny,” he said.

“No?”

“No. Are you the type who yells ‘Red Alert’ on a crowded slidewalk? What time is it?”

“Oh three oh four.” Garner looked out at the stars. “No Neptune. Why?”

“Just a sec.” Anderson fooled with the attitude jets. The ship swung around. Neptune was a blue-green ball, dim in the faint sunlight. Usually a world that close is awe-inspiring, if not blinding. This world only looked terribly cold. “There it is. What’ll I do with it?”

“Put us in a search orbit and start scanning with the radar. Can you set it to search for something as dense as dwarf star matter?”

“You mean, set it to search below the crust? Will do, Captain.”

“Anderson?”

“Uh huh?” He was already at work on the instrument panel.

“You will remember that we have a time limit?”

Anderson grinned at him. “I can put this thing in a forced orbit and finish the search in five hours. Okay?”

“Great.” Luke started punching for breakfast.

“There’s just one thing. We’ll be in free fall some of the time. Can you take it?”

“Sure.”

Anderson moved in. When he finished, the ship balanced nose down, one thousand miles above the surface, driving straight at the planet with a force of more or less one gee. The “more or less” came from Anderson’s constant readjustments.

“Now don’t worry,” Anderson told him. “I’m trying keep us out of the atmosphere, but if we do happen to land in the soup all I have to do is turn off the motor. The motor is all that’s holding us in this tight orbit. We’d fall straight up into outer space.”

“So that’s what a forced orbit is. How are you working the search?”

“Well, on a map it would look like I’m following lines of longitude. I’ll turn the ship sideways for a few minutes every time we cross a pole, so we can keep changing our line of search. We can’t just let the planet turn under us. It would take almost sixteen hours.”

The world rolled beneath them, one thousand miles below—more or less. There was faint banding of the atmosphere, but the predominant color was bluish white. Anderson kept the radar sweeping at and below the ward horizon, which on the radar screen looked like stratified air. It was solid rock.

“Understand, this is just to find out if it’s there,” Anderson said an hour later. “If we see a blob, we’ll have pinned within five hundred miles. That’s all.”

“That’s all we need.”

At nine hours Anderson turned the ship around, facing outward. He ached from shoulders to fingertips. “It’s not there,” he said wearily. “Now what?”

“Now we get ready for a fight. Get us headed toward Nereid and turn off the drive.”

The bright stars that were two fusion-drive spacecraft were too close to the tiny Sun to be easily seen. Anderson couldn’t even find the Golden Circle. But Greenberg’s ship came steadily on, blue and brightening at the edge of the Sun’s golden corona. Garner and Anderson were on a ten-hour path to Nereid, Neptune’s outermost moon. They watched as Greenberg’s light grew brighter.

At nine thirty the light began to wiggle. Greenberg was maneuvering. “Do we start shooting?” Anderson wanted to know.

“I think not. Let’s see where he’s going.”

They were on the night side of the planet. Greenberg was diving toward Neptune at a point near the twilight line. He was clearly visible.

“He’s not coming toward Nereid,” said Anderson. They were both whispering, for some reason.

“Right. Either he left it on Triton, or it’s in orbit. Could it be in orbit after that long?”

“Missile’s tracking,” Anderson whispered.

Greenberg was past Triton before he started to decelerate. “In orbit?” wondered Garner. “He must have nuts.”

Twenty minutes later Greenberg’s ship was a wiggling between the horns of Neptune’s cold blue crescent. They watched its slow crawl toward one of the horns. He was in a forced orbit, covering a search pattern of surface. “Now what?” Anderson asked.

“We wait and see. I give up, Anderson. I can’t understand it.”

“I swear it’s not on Neptune.”

“Uh, oh.” Garner pointed. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” A tiny spear of light was going by the lighted edge of the planet.

The blue-green ball was larger than he had anticipated. For the first time Kzanol regretted his carelessness in not finding out more about the eighth planet when he had the chance, some two billion years ago. He asked the pilot and copilot, who remembered that Neptune had 1.23 gee at surface. Earth gee, of course. For Kzanol it would be about two and a half.

Kzanol stood at one of the small windows, his jaw just above the lower edge, his leathery lips drawn back in a snarl of worry. Not long now! One way or another. For the pilot was nudging the ship into a search orbit.

Someone was already there.

It was the half-asleep free slave he’d passed at the halfway point. He was almost around the curve of the world, but he would be back in eighteen diltun or so. Kzanol had the pilot put the Golden Circle in orbit and turn off the motor. Let the slave do the searching.

The ship went by underneath, spitting fire at the stars. The slave was indeed marking out a search pattern. Kzanol let him go on.

And he wondered. How was he going to get down, on a motor which simply didn’t have the power?

He let the pilot think about it, and the pilot told him. On rockets, wings, and rams, all going at once. But even the pilot couldn’t think of a way back up.

Kzanol/Greenberg, of course, had no warning at all. At its present setting his radar would have shown Kzanol’s ship as more transparent than air. Even the planet itself was translucent. Kzanol/Greenberg kept watch over the radar screen, sure that if Masney missed the suit, he wouldn’t.

“Why isn’t the other ship searching too?” Anderson wondered. “It’s just floating.”

“Ordinarily,” said Garner, thinking out loud, “I’d think they were in cahoots. There’s no need for them both to search. But how—? Oh. I get it. The ET has taken control of Masney and Greenberg. Either that or he’s letting them do his job for him without their knowing it.”

“Wouldn’t the job get done quicker if they both searched?”

“I’m beginning to wonder if this alien isn’t the aristocrat’s aristocrat. Maybe he thinks that anyone who works is a slave. Since he’s a master…But the real question is, what are they searching for, and where is it?

“Look, son, why don’t you warm up the radio and point the maser at our fleet of Belters. I might as well fill them in.”

One thing about the Belt ships: at least the air plant could handle pipe tobacco. The man in the third ship was the only man in the fleet who took advantage of the fact, one of exactly six in the entire Belt. He was known, not too affectionately, as Old Smoky.

Once he had been a flatlander. For nearly thirty years he had piloted a succession of circumlunar tourist boats. His nights he had spent in a small, cheap apartment a few stories above the vehicular traffic level in Los Angeles. On holidays he went to the beach, and was lucky to find enough clear sand to sit on; his vacations were spent in foreign cities, strange and novel and undeniably fascinating but generally just as crowded as Los Angeles. Once he stayed two weeks in what was left of the Amazon jungle. He smuggled some cigarettes in with him, risking two years in prison, and ran out in five days. When he found he was telling every friend and stranger how much he wanted a smoke, he went back to the cities.

He had met Lucas Garner in the line of duty; Garner’s duty. There was a massive sit-in to protest rumored corruption in the Fertility Board; and when the law hauled Smoky off the top strip he met Garner in the uniform of a police chief. Somehow they got to be friends. Their respective views on life were just close enough to make for violent, telling, fun arguments. For years they met irregularly to argue politics. Then Luke joined the Arms. Smoky never forgave him.

One day Smoky was rounding the Moon nose down with a load of tourists, when he felt a sudden, compelling urge to turn nose out and keep driving until all the stars were behind him. He fought it down, and landed in Death Valley that evening as he had landed seven-thousand-odd times before. That night, as he approached his apartment through the usual swirling mob, Smoky realized that he hated every city in the world.

He had saved enough to buy his own mining ship. Under the circumstances the Belt was glad to have him. He learned caution before the Belt killed him, and he earned enough to keep his ship in repair and himself in food and tobacco.

Now he was the only man in the fleet who could recognize Lucas Garner’s voice. When the radio burst to life he listened carefully to the message, then called Lew to report that it really was Garner.

For Smoky, the broadcast removed all doubt. It was Garner himself. The old man was not above a judicious lie, but he was not prone to risk his life. If he was near Neptune in a leaky terran Navy crate, he must have an outstanding reason to be there.

Thoughtfully Old Smoky checked through his arsenal of two radar missiles, one heat seeker, and a short-range laser “cannon.” The war of the worlds was here at last!

Kzanol was baffled. After six hours of searching, the slave Masney had covered the entire planet. The suit wasn’t there!

He let the slave begin his second search, for the sake of thoroughness. He took his own ship to Triton. The Brain could not compute the course of moons; one of them may have gotten in the way of the ship as it speared toward Neptune. Very likely it had been Triton. That moon was not only closer than Nereid, it was far bigger: 2500 miles thick as compared to 200.

A nerve-wracking hour later, an hour of flying upside down over Triton’s surface with the jet firing outward and the lightly pitted moon showing flat overhead, Kzanol admitted defeat. No white flash had shown itself on the radar screen, though Neptune itself had glowed through the transparent image of the larger moon. He turned his attention to the small moon.

“So that’s it!” Anderson’s face glowed. “They thought it was on the surface and it wasn’t. Now they don’t know where it is!” He frowned in thought. “Shouldn’t we get out of here? The honeymooner’s aiming itself at Nereid, and we’re too close for comfort.”

“Right,” said Garner. “But first we turn the missile loose. The one that’s homed on the alien. We can worry about Greenberg later.”

“I hate to do it. There’re two other people on the Golden Circle.” A moment passed. Lengthened. “I can’t move,” said Anderson. “It’s that third button under the blue light.”

But Luke couldn’t move either.

“Who’d have thought he could reach this far?” he wondered bitterly. Anderson couldn’t help but agree. The ship continued to fall toward Nereid.

To the Power, distance was of little importance. What mattered was numbers.

Nereid was a bust. The deep radar went through it as through a warped window pane, and showed nothing. Kzanol gave it up and watched the half-asleep slave for a while. His tiny flame burned bravely against the Neptunian night.

Kzanol was in a bad state of mind. It seemed that his ship had missed not only Neptune but both its moons. What could have gone wrong with the Brain? Probably it had never been intended to last three hundred years. But deep in the bottom of his mind, he knew better. The Brain had missed deliberately. Kzanol had ordered it to commit suicide, not realizing what he asked. The Brain—which was a machine, not a slave, not subject to the Power—had disobeyed. His ship must have hurtled through the solar system and gone on into interstellar space at .97 light. By now it would be beyond the curve of the universe.

He felt the muscles pulling at his mouth, flattening the eating tendrils against his cheeks to protect them, opening his jaws as wide as they would go, and wider, pulling his lips back from the teeth until they were ready to split. It was an involuntary reaction, a reaction of fear and rage, automatically readying the thrint for a battle to the death. But there was nothing to fight. Soon Kzanol’s jaws closed and his head drooped between his massive shoulders.

All in all, the only pleasure he had was to watch the last ship searching Neptune for the third time—and to see its bright flame suddenly lengthen, then shorten again. The sleepy slave had given up.

Then Kzanol knew that he too was going to Triton. A feeling of noble pity stole over him, and he remembered the tradition that the family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave. Kzanol went to meet the sleeper at Triton.

“One…two…I can’t find Garner’s ship. He must have landed somewhere, or turned off his drive. The others are just milling around.”

“Funny he hasn’t called us. I hope nothing’s happened to him.”

“We’d have seen the explosion, Smoky. Anyway, he was going for Nereid when his drive stopped. If it failed, we can find him later.”

When Kzanol was close enough, he Told the sleeper to turn ship and join him. In an hour the Navy ship and the Golden Circle were alongside.

Kzanol’s pilot and copilot were worried about the fuel situation, so as soon as the sleeper’s ship was close enough Kzanol Told him to transfer his fuel to the Golden Circle. He waited while various clanking and banging sounds rang through the ships. Fortunately the cards were magnetized, and there was webbing to hold him in his seat. He followed-the movements of his three personal slaves with the back of his mind: the sleeper near the tail, the pilot and copilot motionless in the cockpit. He didn’t want to risk their lives by letting them help the sleeper.

Naturally he jumped like a terrified gazelle when his airlock door swung open and a slave walked in.

A slave with a mind shield.

“Hi!” it said, incomprehensibly in English. “I guess we’ll need a translator.” And it coolly walked forward to the control room. At the door it stopped and gestured—with Kzanol’s disintegrator.

A man of Leeman’s talent and education should never have been given such a boring job. Leeman knew it could never have happened in the Belt. Someday soon he would migrate to the Belt, where he would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, Geoffrey Leeman was the foreman of the Lazy Eight III’s skeleton maintenance crew.

Leeman envied the crew of the other section, the drive section at Hamburg. Busybodies with good intentions were constantly ordering minor changes in the starship’s drive while they waited for politics to let them launch. The Lazy Eight III’s life system hadn’t been altered in two years.

Until today.

Now Leeman and his three subordinates watched a horde of technicians doing strange things to the number three “stateroom.” A complete balloon of fine wire mesh was being strung over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Heavy machinery was being welded to what would be the ship’s floor and was now the outer wall. Taps were let into the power system. Leeman and his men found themselves running errands through the ring-shaped corridor, bringing coffee and sandwiches and detail diagrams, tools and testing machinery and cigarettes. They had no idea what was going on. The newcomers were willing to answer questions, but the answers were gibberish. As:

“We’ll be able to triple the number of passengers!” said the man with a head like a speckled brown egg. He shook an ammeter for emphasis. “Triple!”

How?

The man waved his ammeter to include the room. “We’ll have them standing in here like rush-hour commuters in an elevator,” he confided. When Leeman accused him of levity he became mortally offended and refused to say another word.

By the end of the day Leeman felt like a flatworm in a four-dimensional maze.

Somehow he managed it so that the entire group went to dinner together, for mutual brain-picking. Things became clearer during dinner. Leeman’s ears went up when he heard the phrase “retarder field.”

Dinner turned into a party. It was almost two hundred before Leeman could make a phone call. The other man almost hung up. But Leeman knew the words to stop him.

The Lings’ first honeymoon had been spent at Reno, Nevada, thirty years ago. Since then Ling Wu had become rich in wholesale pharmaceuticals. Recently the Fertility Board had granted the couple the rare privilege of having more than two children. And here they were.

Here, before the crystal wall of the main dance bubble, looking out and down at a ringed and banded world. They didn’t hear the music behind them. It was magic music, the sound of imagination, brought to life by the wild, desert loveliness before them. Soft curves of ice ran out to a horizon like the lip of a nearby cliff; and above the cliff hung a bauble, a decoration, an aesthetic wonder such as no habitable world has ever known.

Ask an amateur astronomer about Saturn. He won’t just tell you; he’ll drag out his telescope and show you. He’ll break your arm to show you.

Ling Dorothy, fourth generation San Franciscan, pushed the palms of her hands against the crystal wall as if half wanting them to go through. “Oh, I hope. I hope,” she said, “I hope it never comes for us!”

“What, Dot?” Ling Wu smiled up at her, for she was an inch taller than he was.

“The Golden Circle.”

“It’s five days late already. I love it here too, but I’d hate to think people died just to let us stay a little longer.”

“Haven’t you heard, Wu? Mrs. Willing was just telling me that somebody stole the Golden Circle right off the spaceport field!”

“Mrs. Willing is a romantic.”

“Givvv me ti’, givvv me ti’,” Charley mimicked. “First Larrry, then ’Arrnerr. Time is all we get. Do they want the stars all for themselves?”

“I think you underrate them,” said the older dolphin.

“Surely there’s room for both of us on any world.” Charley hadn’t been listening. “They practically didn’t know we were here until a short time ago. We could be useful, I know we could.”

“Why shouldn’t they have time? Do you know how much time they themselves needed?”

“What do you mean?”

“The first walker story about a trip to the moon is thousands of years old. They didn’t get there until a hundred and fifty years ago. Have a little patience,” said the one with the worn teeth and the scarred jaw.

“I don’t have thousands of years. Must I spend my life looking at the sky until my eyes dry out?”

“You wouldn’t be the first. Not even the first swimmer.”

Dale Snyder walked down the hall like a conqueror planning new conquests. When he passed patients he smiled and nodded, but his brisk walk discouraged conversation. He reached the door to the nurses’ lounge and turned in.

It took him fifteen seconds to reach the coffee stand. In that time Dale Snyder aged forty years. His body sagged; his shoulders slumped; his cheeks slid half an inch downward, leaving a mask of puffy-eyed discouragement. He poured a foam-plastic cup of black coffee, regarded it with curled lip, and poured it down the drain. A moment of indecision before he refilled the cup from another spigot. Yerba mate. At least it would taste different.

It did. He flowed into a chair and stared out the window, the cup warming his hand. Outside, there were trees and grass and what looked like brick walks. Menninger’s was a labyrinth of buildings, none more than four stories tall. A mile-high skyscraper would have saved millions in land, even surrounded by the vitally necessary landscaping; but many woman patients would have run screaming from the sexual problems represented by such a single, reaching tower.

Dale shook himself and gulped at the brew. For ten minutes he could forget the patients.

The patients. The “alien shock” patients. They had fooled him at first, him and others, with their similar behavior. Only now was it becoming obvious that their problems were as different as their fingerprints. Each had gone into some kind of shock when the alien cut loose. Dale and his colleagues had tried to treat them as a group. But that was utterly wrong.

Each had borrowed exactly what he needed from the ET’s tantrum of rage and shock and grief and fear. Each had found what he had needed or feared. Loneliness, castration syndrome, fear of violation, xenophobia, claustrophobia—there was no point even in cataloguing the list.

There weren’t enough doctors. There wasn’t room for the number of doctors they would need. Dale was exhausted—and so was everyone else. And they couldn’t show it.

The cup was empty.

“On your feet, soldier,” Dale said aloud. At the door he stood aside for Harriet Something, a cheerfully overweight woman who looked like everybody’s mother. His mind held the afterimage of her smile, and he wondered, how does she do it? He didn’t see the smile drain away behind his back.

“It’s the details,” said Lit. “The double damned details. How could they have covered so many details?”

“I think he told you the truth,” Marda said decisively.

Lit looked at his wife in surprise. Marda was notoriously slow to reach decisions. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “The Arms could have attended to all these—little things. What bothers me is the work it must have taken. Hiding Greenberg. Coaching his wife. Tearing things up in the starship’s life system. They can put everything back later, of course, but imagine going to all that trouble! And the disturbance at Menninger’s. My God, how could they have worked that? Training all those patients! And they flatly couldn’t have borrowed the Golden Circle. Ninety millionaires at the Titan Hotel are all screaming murder because they can’t go home on time. Thirty more on Earth are going to miss their honeymoon trips. Titan would never have let that happen! The Arms must have out-and-out stolen that ship.”

“Occam’s Razor,” said Marda.

“Occam’s—? Oh. No. Either way, I have to make just too many assumptions.”

“Lit, how can you take the chance? If Garner isn’t lying, the whole solar system’s in danger. If he is, what’s his motive?”

“You’re really convinced, aren’t you?”

Marda bobbed her head vigorously.

“Well, you’re right. We can’t take the chance.”

When he came out of the phone booth he said, “I just sent the fleet the record of my interview with Garner. The whole bloody hour. I’d like to do more, but Garner’ll hear everything I say. At this distance he’s bound to be in the maser beam.”

“They’ll be ready this way.”

“I wonder. I wish I could have warned them about the helmet. The very worst thing I can think of is that Garner might get his hands on the damn thing. Well, Lew’s bright, he’ll think of that himself.”

Later he called Ceres again, to find out how the other side of the check was going. For more than two weeks now, Belt ships had been stopping and searching Earth ships at random. If Garner’s snark hunt was an attempt to cover something, it wasn’t going to work! But Ceres reported no results to date.

Ceres was wrong. The search-and-seizure tactics had had at least one result. Tension had never been so high between Earth and Belt.

The copilot sat motionless listening to Kzanol/Greenberg’s side of the conversation. He couldn’t understand overspeak, but Kzanol/Greenberg could; and Kzanol listened to the shielded slave through the mind of the copilot.

“I ought to get rid of you right away,” Kzanol mused. “A slave that can’t be controlled can’t be trusted.”

“That’s truer than you know.” A hint of bitterness showed in Kzanol/Greenberg’s voice. “But you can’t kill me yet. I have some information that you need very badly.”

“So? What information?”

“I know where the second suit is. I also know why we weren’t picked up, and I’ve figured out where the rrgh—where our race is now.”

Kzanol said, “I think I also know where the second suit is. But for whatever else you may know, I won’t kill you.”

“Big of you.” Kzanol/Greenberg waved the disintegrator negligently. “I’ll tell you something you can’t use first, to prove I know my stuff. Did you know whitefoods were intelligent?”

“Whitefood droppings.”

“Humans have found them on Sirius A-III-1. They’re definitely whitefoods. They’re also definitely sentient. Can you think of any way they could have developed intelligence?”

“No.”

“Of course not. If any form of life has ever been mutation-proof, it’s the whitefoods. Besides, what does a herbivore with no manipulatory appendages, and no natural defenses except sentient herders to kill off natural enemies, want with intelligence? No, the tnuctipun must have made them sentient in the first place. Making the brains a delicacy was just an excuse for making them large.”

Kzanol sat down. His mouth tendrils stood straight out, as if he were smelling with them. “Why should they do that?”

He was hooked.

“Let me give it to you all in one bundle,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He took off his helmet and sat, found and lighted a cigarette, taking his time, while Kzanol grew silently but visibly enraged. There was no reason why the thrint shouldn’t get angry, Kzanol/Greenberg thought, as long as he didn’t get too angry.

“All right,” he began. “First point is that the whitefoods are sentient. Second point, you remember that there was a depression when Plorn’s tnuctipun came up with antigravity.”

“Powerloss, yes,” Kzanol said fervently—and untactfully. “He should have been assassinated right away.”

“Not him. His tnuctipun. Don’t you see? They were fighting an undeclared war even then. The free tnuctipun must have been behind it all the time: the tnuctip fleet that escaped into space when Thrintun found the tnuctip system. They didn’t try to reach Andromeda. They must have stayed between the stars, where nobody ever goes…went. A few civilized tnuctip must have taken their orders. The whitefoods were their spies; every noble in the galaxy, everyone who could afford to, used to keep whitefoods on his land.”

“You’re a ptavv fool. You’re basing all these suppositions on the idiotic idea that whitefoods are intelligent. That’s nonsense. We’d have sensed it.”

“No. Check with Masney if you don’t believe me. Somehow the tnuctipun must have developed a whitefood brain that was immune to the Power. And that one fact makes it certain that the whole ploy was deliberate. The whitefood spies. The antigravity, released to cause a depression. There may have been other ideas, too. Mutated racing viprin were introduced a few years before antigravity. They put all the legitimate viprin ranches out of business. That started the depression, and antigravity sped it along. The sunflowers were usually the only defense for a plantation; and everyone who had land had a sunflower border. It got the landowners used to isolation and independence, so that they might not cooperate in wartime. I’d give odds the tnuctipun had a spray to kill sunflowers. When the depression was in full swing they struck.”

Kzanol didn’t speak. His expression was hard to read.

“This isn’t all supposition. I’ve got solid facts. First, the bandersnatchi, whitefoods to us, are sentient. Humans aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Second, it’s a fact that you weren’t picked up when you hit F124. Why?”

“That is an ingesting good question. Why?”

This was the starting point, the hurt that had rankled in Kzanol/Greenberg’s breast for sixteen days of retrospection and introspection, sixteen days during which he had had nothing to do but supervise Masney and brood on his bad luck. His mind had followed a path that started with a brooding, silent bandersnatch and ended in a war fought aeons ago. But he could have missed it all, he might have been spared all this torment and danger, if only that fool of a caretaker had seen the flash. He had not, and there could be only one reason.

“Because there wasn’t anyone on the Moon. Either the caretaker was killed in the revolt, or he was off fighting somewhere. Probably he was dead. The tnuctipun would have moved at once to cut off our food supply.”

“To what?” Kzanol was clearly lost. Thrintun had never fought anything but other thrintun, and the last war had been fought before star travel. Kzanol knew nothing of war.

The thrint tried to get back to basics. “You said you could tell me where the thrintun are now.”

“With the tnuctipun. They’re dead, extinct. If they weren’t dead they would have reached Earth by now. That goes for the tnuctipun too, and nearly every other species that served us. They must have all died in the war.”

“But that’s insane. Somebody has to win a war!”

He sounded so sincere that Kzanol/Greenberg laughed. “Not so. Ask any human. Ask a Russian or a Chinese. They’ll think you’re a fool for needing to ask, but they’ll tell you all about Pyrrhic victory. Shall I tell you what may have happened?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “This is pure conjecture, but it makes sense to me, and I’ve had two weeks to think about it. We must have been losing the war. If we were, some thraargh—excuse me. Some members of our race must have decided to take all the slaves with them. Like Grandfather’s funeral ceremony, but bigger. They made an amplifier helmet strong enough to blanket the entire galaxy. Then they ordered everything within reach to commit suicide.”

“But that’s a horrible attitude!” Kzanol bristled with moral outrage. “Why would a thrint do a thing like that?”

“Ask a human. He knows what sentients are capable of when someone threatens them with death. First they declaim that the whole thing is horribly immoral, and that it’s unthinkable that such a threat would ever be carried out. Then they reveal that they have similar plans, better in every respect, and have had them for years, decades, centuries. You admit the Big Amplifier would have been technically feasible?”

“Of course.”

“Do you doubt that a slave race in revolt would settle for nothing less than our total extinction?”

Tendrils writhed in battle at the corners of Kzanol’s mouth. When he finally spoke, he said, “I don’t doubt it.”

“Then—”

“Certainly we’d take them with us into extinction! The sneaky, dishonorable lower-than-whitefoods, using our concessions of freedom to destroy us! I only desire that we got them all.”

Kzanol/Greenberg grinned. “We must have. How else can we explain that none of our slaves are in evidence except whitefoods? Remember whitefoods are immune to the Power.

“Now, that other information. Have you looked for your second suit?”

Kzanol returned to the present. “Yes, on the moons. And you searched Neptune. I’d have known if Masney found it. Still, there’s one more place I’d like to search.”

“Go ahead. Let me know when you’re finished.”

Gyros hummed faintly as the Golden Circle swung around. Kzanol looked straight ahead, his Attention in the control room. Kzanol/Greenberg lit a cigarette and got ready for a wait.

If Kzanol had learned patience, so had his poor man’s imitation. Otherwise he would have done something foolish when the thrint blithely took over Masney, his own personal slave. He could have killed the thrint merely for using his own body—Kzanol/Greenberg’s own stolen body, by every test of memory. And the effort of dealing with Kzanol, face to his own personal face!

But he had no choice.

The remarkable thing was that he was succeeding. He faced a full-grown thrint on the thrint’s own territory. He had gone a long way toward making Kzanol accept him as another thrint mind, a ptavv at least. Kzanol still might kill him; he wished that the thrint would pay more attention to the disintegrator! But he had done well so far. And was proud of it, which was all to the good. Kzanol/Greenberg’s self-respect had been very low.

There was no more to be done now. He had better stay out of Kzanol’s way for a while.

Kzanol’s first move was to radar Kzanol/Greenberg’s ship. When that failed to turn up the suit, Kzanol took over Masney again and made him search it from radar cone to exhaust cone, checking the assumption that the shielded slave had somehow sneaked the suit aboard and turned off the stasis field. He found nothing.

But the other seemed so sure of himself! Why, if he didn’t have the suit?

They searched Triton again. Kzanol/Greenberg could see Kzanol’s uncertainty growing as the search progressed. The suit wasn’t on Neptune, wasn’t on either moon, positively wasn’t on the other ship, couldn’t have stayed in orbit this long. Where was it?

The drive went off. Kzanol turned to face his tormentor, who suddenly felt as if his brain was being squeezed flat. Kzanol was giving it everything he had: screaming sense and gibberish, orders and rage and raw red hate, and question, question, question. The pilot moaned and covered his head. The copilot squealed, stood up and turned half around, and died with foam on her lips. She stood there beside the gaming table, dead, with only the magnets in her sandals to keep her from floating away. Kzanol/Greenberg faced the thrint as he would have faced a tornado.

The mental tornado ended. “Where is it?” asked Kzanol.

“Let’s make a deal.” Kzanol/Greenberg raised his voice so that the pilot could hear. In the corner of his eye he saw that the thrint had gotten the point: the pilot was coming in from the control bubble to take the copilot’s place as translator.

Kzanol took out his variable-knife. He treated the disintegrator with supreme disregard. Perhaps he didn’t think of it as a weapon. In any case, nothing uses a weapon on a thrint except another thrint. He opened the variable-knife to eight feet and stood ready to wave the invisibly thin blade through the rebellious sentient’s body.

“I dare you,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. He didn’t bother to raise the disintegrator.

GET OUT, Kzanol told the pilot. Kzanol/Greenberg could have shouted. He’d won! Slaves may not be present at a battle, or a squabble, between thrint and thrint.

The pilot moved slowly toward the airlock. Too slowly. Either some motor area had been burned out in the mind fight, or the slave was reluctant to leave. Kzanol probed.

ALL RIGHT. BUT HURRY.

Very quickly, the pilot climbed into his spacesuit before leaving. The family of Racarliw had never mistreated a slave…

The airlock door swung shut. Kzanol asked, “What kind of deal?”

He couldn’t understand the answer. Feeling disgusted with himself, he said, “We’ll have to turn on the radio. Ah, here it is.” He bent his face against the wall so that a pair of eating tendrils could reach into the recess and flip a switch. Now the pilot could hear Kzanol/Greenberg speaking through his suit radio.

It never occurred to either that they were circling Robin Hood’s barn. The slave couldn’t be present in person.

“I repeat,” said Kzanol. “What kind of deal?”

“I want a partnership share in control of Earth. Our agreement is not to be invalidated if we find other, uh, beings like you, or a government of same. Half to you, half to me, and your full help in building me an amplifier. You’d better have the first helmet; it might not fit my brain. I want your oath, your…Wait a minute, I can’t pronounce it.” He picked up a bridge sheet and wrote, “prtuuvl,” in the dots and curlicues of overspeak. “I want you to swear by that oath that you will protect my half ownership to the best of your ability, and that you will never willingly jeopardize my life or my health, provided that I take you to where you can find the second suit. Swear also that we’ll get humans to build me another amplifier, once we get back.”

Kzanol thought for a full minute. His mental shield was as solid as the door on a lunar fort, but Kzanol/Greenberg could guess his thoughts well enough. He was stalling for effect. Certainly he had decided to give the oath; for the prtuuvl oath was binding between thrint and thrint. Kzanol need only regard him as a slave…

“All right,” said Kzanol. And he gave the prtuuvl oath without missing a single syllable.

“Good,” Kzanol/Greenberg approved. “Now swear to the same conditions, by this oath.” He pulled a bridge sheet from his breast pocket and passed it over. Kzanol took it and looked.

“You want me to swear a kpitlithtulm oath too?”

“Yes.” There was no need to spell it out for Kzanol, nor even to repress his dolphin grin. The kpitlithtulm oath was for use between thrint and slave. If he swore the kpitlithtulm oath and the prtuuvl oath he would be committed for keeps, unless he chose to regard Kzanol/Greenberg as a plant or a dumb animal. Which would be dishonorable.

Kzanol dropped the paper. His mind shield was almost flickering, it was so rigid. Then his jaws opened wide and his lips pulled back from the needle fangs in a smile more terrible than Tyrannosaurus rex chasing a paleontologist, or Lucas Garner hearing a good joke. Seeing Kzanol, who could doubt that this was a carnivore? A ravenous carnivore which intended to be fed at any moment. One might forget that Kzanol was half the weight of a man, and see instead that he was larger than one hundred scorpions or three wildcats or a horde of marching soldier ants or a school of piranha.

But Kzanol/Greenberg recognized it as a smile of rueful admiration, a laughing surrender to a superior adversary, the smile of a good loser. With his thrint memories he saw further than that. Kzanol’s smile was as phony as a brass transistor.

Kzanol gave the oath four times, and made four invalidating technical mistakes. The fifth time he gave up and swore according to protocol.

“All right,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “Have the pilot take us to Pluto.”

“A-a-all right, everybody turn ship and head for three, eighty-four, twenty-one.” The man in the lead ship sounded wearily patient. “I don’t know what the game is, but we can play just as good as any kid on the block.”

“Pluto,” said someone. “He’s going to Pluto!” He seemed to take it as a personal affront.

Old Smoky Petropoulos thumbed the transmitter. “Lew, hadn’t one of us better stop and find out what’s with the other two ships?”

“Uh. Okay, Smoky, you do it. Can you find us later with a maser?”

“Sure, boss. No secrets?”

“Hell, they know we’re following them. Tell us anything we need to know. And find out where Garner is! If he’s in the honeymooner I want to know it. Better beam Woody in Number Six too, and tell him to go wherever Garner is.”

“Of course, Pluto. Don’t you get it yet?” It was not the first time Kzanol/Greenberg had had doubts about his former self’s intelligence. The doubts were getting hard to ignore. He’d been afraid Kzanol would figure it out for himself. But—?

“No,” said Kzanol, glowering.

“The ship hit one of Neptune’s moons,” Kzanol/Greenberg explained patiently, “so hard that the moon was smacked out of orbit. The ship was moving at nearly lightspeed. The moon picked up enough energy to become a planet, but it was left with an eccentric orbit which still takes it inside Neptune at times. Naturally that made it easy to spot.”

“I was told that Pluto came from another solar system.”

“So was I. But it doesn’t make sense. If that mass dived into the system from outside, why didn’t it go back out again to complete the hyperbola? What could have stopped it? Well, I’m taking a gamble.

“There’s only one thing that bothers me. Pluto isn’t very big. Do you suppose the suit may have been blown back into space by the explosion when it hit?”

“If it was, I’ll kill you,” said Kzanol.

“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” begged Garner. “Aha! I’ve got it. Smoky Petropoulos. How are you?”

“Not as good as your memory. It’s been a good twenty-two years.” Smoky stood behind the two seats, in the airlock space, and grinned at the windshield reflection of the two men. There wasn’t room to do much else. “How the hell are you, Garner? Why don’t you turn around and shake hands with an old buddy?”

“I can’t, Smoky. We’ve been ordered not to move by a BEM that doesn’t take no for an answer. Maybe a good hypnotherapist could get us out of this fix, but we’ll have to wait ’til then. By the way, meet Leroy Anderson.”

“Hi.”

“Now give us a couple of cigarettes, Smoky, and put them in the corners of our mouths so we can talk. Are your boys chasing Greenberg and the BEM?”

“Yeah.” Smoky fumbled with cigarettes and a lighter. “Just what is this game of musical chairs?”

“What do you mean?”

Old Smoky put their cigarettes where they belonged. He said, “That honeymoon special took off for Pluto. Why?”

“Pluto!”

“Surprised?”

“It wasn’t here,” said Anderson.

“Right,” said Garner. “We know what they’re after, and we know now they didn’t find it here. But I can’t imagine why they think it’s on Pluto. Oops! Hold it” Garner puffed furiously at his cigarette: good honest tobacco with the tars and nicotine still in it. He didn’t seem to have any trouble moving his face. “Pluto may have been a moon of Neptune once. Maybe that has something to do with it. How about Greenberg’s ship? Is it going in the same direction?”

“Uh uh. Wherever it is, its drive is off. We lost sight of it four hours ago.”

Anderson spoke up. “If your friend is still aboard he could be in trouble.”

“Right,” said Garner. “Smoky, that ship could be falling into Neptune with Lloyd Masney aboard. You remember him? A big, stocky guy with a mustache.”

“I think so. Is he paralyzed too?”

“He’s hypnotized. Plain old garden-variety hypnotized, and if he hasn’t been told to save himself, he won’t. Will you?”

“Sure. I’ll bring him back here.” Smoky turned to the airlock.

“Hey!” Garner yelped. “Take the butts out of our mouths before our faces catch fire!”

From his own ship Smoky called Woody Atwood in Number Six, the radar proof, and told his story. “It looks like the truth, Woody,” he finished. “But there’s no point in taking chances. You get in here and stick close to Garner’s ship; if he makes a single move he’s a bloody liar, so keep an eye open. He’s been known to be tricky. I’ll see if Masney is really in trouble. He shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“Pluto’s a week and a half away at one gravity,” said Anderson, who could do simple computations in his head. “But we couldn’t follow that gang even if we could move. We don’t have the fuel.”

“We could refuel on Titan, couldn’t we? Where the hell is Smoky?”

“Better not expect him back today.”

Garner growled at him. Space, free fall, paralysis, and defeat were all wearing away at his self-control.

“Hey,” he whispered suddenly.

“What?” The word came in an exaggerated stage whisper.

“I can wiggle my index fingers,” Garner snapped. “This hex may be wearing off. And mind your manners.”

Smoky was back late the next day. He had inserted the pointed nose of his ship into Masney’s drive tube to push Masney’s ship. When he turned off his own drive the two ships tumbled freely. Smoky moved between ships with a jet pack in the small of his back. By this time Atwood had joined the little group, and was helping Smoky, for it would have been foolish to suspect trickery after finding Masney.

Not because Masney was still hypnotized. He wasn’t. Kzanol had freed him from hypnosis in the process of taking him over, and had, kindly or thoughtlessly, left him with no orders when he departed for Pluto. But Masney was near starvation. His face bore deep wrinkles of excess skin, and the skin of his torso was a loose, floppy, folded tent over his ribcage. Kzanol/Greenberg had repeatedly forgotten to feed him, remembering only when hunger seemed about to break him out of hypnosis. Kzanol would never have treated a slave that way; but Kzanol, the real Kzanol, was far more telepathic than the false. And Kzanol/Greenberg hadn’t learned to think of daily food intake as a necessity. So much food was a luxury, and a foolish one.

Masney had started an eating spree as soon as the Golden Circle was gone, but it would be some time before he was “stocky” again. His ship’s fuel was gone, and he was found drifting in a highly eccentric orbit about Triton, an orbit which was gradually narrowing.

“Couldn’t possibly be faked,” Smoky said when he called the Belt fleet. “A little bit better fakery, and Masney would be dead. As it is, he’s only very sick.”

Now the four ships fell near Nereid.

“We’ve got to refuel all these ships,” said Garner. “And there’s a way to do it.” He began to tell them.

Smoky howled. “I won’t leave my ship!”

“Sorry, Smoky. See if you can follow this. We’ve got three pilots, right? You, Woody, Masney. Me and Anderson can’t move. But we’ve got four ships to pilot. We have to leave one.”

“Sure, but why mine?”

“Five men to carry in three ships. That means we keep both two-man ships. Right?”

“Right.”

“We give up your ship, or we give up a radar proof ship. Which would you leave?”

“You don’t think we’ll get to Pluto in time for the war?”

“We might as well try. Want to go home?”

“All right, all right.”

The fleet moved to Triton without Number Four, and with half of Number Four’s fuel transferred to Masney’s ship, the Iwo Jima. Garner was Masney’s passenger, and Smoky was in the Heinlein with Anderson. The three ships hovered over the big moon’s icy surface while their drives melted through layer after layer of frozen gases, nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide, until they reached the thick water ice layer. They landed on water ice, each in its own shallow cone. Then Woody and Smoky went after Number Four.

Smoky brought the singleship down with its tank nearly empty. They drained what was left into the Iwo Jima, and followed it with the Heinlein’s supply. Woody turned off the cooling unit in the singleship’s hydrogen tank, dismantled the heater in the cabin and moved it into the tank. He had to cut a hole in the wall to get in.

The next few hours were spent cutting blocks of water ice. Masney was still convalescing, so the Belters had to do all the work. When they broke off they were exhausted, and two laser cutting tools were near death; but Number Four’s fuel tank was filled with warm, not very clean water.

They hooked up the battery from Number Six to electrolyze the melted ice. Hydrogen and oxygen, mixed, poured into the Heinlein’s tank. They set the thermostat above the condensation point of hydrogen; but the oxygen fell as snow, and Smoky and Woody alternated positions in the bottom of the tank, shoveling the snow out. Once they had to take Number Six up and fly her around to recharge her batteries. Always there was the flavor of time passing, of the “war” leaving them further behind with each passing minute.

In two days they had fueled all three ships. The tanks were not full, but they would carry the little secondary fleet to Pluto, driving all the way, with fuel to spare. Number Four was useless, her tank clogged with dirt.

“We’ll be three days late for whatever happens,” Woody said glumly. “Why go at all?”

“We can stay close enough for radio contact,” Smoky argued. “I’d like to have Garner close enough to tell the fleet what to do. He knows more about these Bug Eyed Monsters than any of us.”

Luke said, “Main argument is that it may take the fleet three days to lose. Then we get there and save the day. Or we don’t. Let’s go.”

Woody Atwood masered the fleet immediately, knowing that the others could not intercept the conversation. If they had moved into the maser beam their radio would have blown sky high.

“Matchsticks!” Kzanol’s voice dripped with thrintun contempt. “We might just as well be playing Patience.” It was a strange thing to say, considering that he was losing.

“Tell you what,” Kzanol/Greenberg suggested. “We could divide the Earth up now and play for people. We’d get about eight billion each to play with, with a few left over. In fact, we could agree right now that the Earth should be divided by two north-south great circle lines, leave it at that ’til we get back with the amplifier, and play with eight billion apiece.”

“Sounds all right. Why north-south?”

“So we each get all the choices of climate there are. Why not?”

“Agreed.” Kzanol dealt two cards face down and one up. “Seven stud,” announced the pilot.

“Fold,” said Kzanol/Greenberg, and watched Kzanol snarl and rake in the antes. “We should have brought Masney,” he said. “It might be dangerous, not having a pilot.”

“So? Assume I’d brought Masney. How would you feel, watching me operate your former slave?”

“Lousy.” In point of fact, he now saw that Kzanol had shown rare tact in leaving Masney behind. Lloyd was a used slave, one who had been owned by another. Tradition almost demanded his death, and certainly decreed that he must never be owned by a self-respecting thrint, though he might be given to a beggar.

“Five stud,” said the pilot. He sat where he could see neither hand, ready to wrap his human tongue around human, untranslatable poker slang when Kzanol wished to speak, and ready to translate for Kzanol/Greenberg. Kzanol dealt one up, one down.

“That’s funny,” said Kzanol/Greenberg. “I almost remembered something, but then it slipped away.”

“Open your mind and I’ll tell you what it was.”

“No. It’s in English anyway. From the Greenberg memories.” He clutched his head. “What is it? It seems so damned appropriate. Something about Masney.”

“Play.”

“Nine people.”

“Raise five.”

“Up ten.”

“Call. Greenberg, why is it that you win more than I do, even though you fold more often?”

Kzanol/Greenberg snapped his fingers. “Got it! ‘When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.’ Stevenson.” He laughed. “Now what made me…”

“Deuce for you, queen for me,” said the pilot. Kzanol continued in thrintun: “If men had telepathic recorders they wouldn’t have to meddle with sounds that way. It has a nice beat, though.”

“Sure,” Kzanol/Greenberg said absently. He lost that hand, betting almost two hundred on a pair of fours.

Somewhat later Kzanol looked up from the game. “Communicator,” he said. He got up and went to the pilot room. Kzanol/Greenberg followed. They took seats next to the control room door and the pilot turned up the volume.

“…Atwood in Number Six. I hope you’re listening, Lew. There is definitely an ET on the honeymooner, and he definitely has wild talents. There’s nothing phony about any of this. The alien paralyzed the Arm and his chauffeur from a distance of around a million miles. He’s pretty callous, too. The man in the second ship was left drifting near Triton, half starved and without fuel, after the alien was through with him. Garner says Greenberg was responsible. Greenberg’s the one who thinks he’s another ET. He’s on the honeymooner now. There are two others on the honeymooner, the pilot and copilot. Garner says shoot on sight, don’t try to approach the ship. I leave that to you. We’re three days behind you, but we’re coming anyway. Number Four is on Triton, without fuel, and we can’t use it until we clean the mud out of the tank. Only three of us can fly. Garner and his chauffeur are still paralyzed, though it’s wearing off a little. We should have a hypnotherapist for these flatlanders, or they may never dance again.

“In my opinion your first target is the amplifier, if you can find it. It’s far more dangerous than any single ET. The Belt wouldn’t want it except for research, and I know some scientists who’d hate us for giving up that opportunity, but you can imagine what Earth might do with an amplifier for telepathic hypnosis.

“I’m putting this on repeat.

“Lew, this is Atwood in Number Six. Repeat, Atwood in…”

Kzanol/Greenberg pulled a cigarette and lit it. The honeymooner had a wide selection; this one was double filtered, mentholated, and made from de-nicotinized tobaccos. It smelled like gently burning leaves and tasted like a cough drop. “Shoot on sight,” he repeated. “That’s not good.”

The thrint regarded him with undisguised contempt. To fear a slave—! But then, it was only a ptavv itself.

Kzanol/Greenberg glared. He knew more about people than Kzanol did, after all!

“All ships,” said the man in the lead ship. “I say we shoot now. Comments?”

There were comments. Lew waited them out, and then he spoke.

“Tartov, your humanitarian impulses do you credit. No sarcasm intended. But things are too sticky to worry about two flatlanders in a honeymoon special. As for finding the amplifier, I don’t think we have to worry about that. Earth won’t find it before we do. They don’t know what we know about Pluto. We can post guard over the planet until the Belt sends us an automatic orbital guardian. Radar may show us the amplifier; in that case we drop a bomb on it, and the hell with the research possibilities. Have I overlooked anything?”

A feminine voice said, “Send one missile with a camera. We don’t want to use up all our firepower at once.”

“Good, Mabe. Have you got a camera missile?”

“Yes.”

“Use it.”

The Iwo Jima had been a week out from Earth, and Kzanol/Greenberg had been daydreaming, as usual. For some reason he’d remembered his watch: the formal elbow watch with the cryogenic gears, now buried in the second suit. He’d have to make a new band.

But what for? It always ran slow. He’d had to adjust it every time he came back from a visit…From a visit to another plantation. From a trip through space.

But of course. Relativity had jinxed his watch. Why hadn’t he seen that before?

Because he’d been a thrint?

“Raise thirty,” said Kzanol. He had a five down to match his pair showing and it wasn’t that he thought Kzanol/Greenberg was bluffing, with his four-straight showing. He hadn’t noticed that the numbers were in sequence.

Stupid. Thrintun were stupid. Kzanol couldn’t play poker even when drawing on the pilot’s knowledge. He hadn’t guessed that his ship must have hit Pluto. He didn’t need brains; he had the Power.

Thrintun hadn’t needed intelligence since they’d found their first slave race. Before, the Power hadn’t mattered; there was nothing to use it on. With an unlimited supply of servants to do their thinking, was it any wonder they had degenerated?

“Raise fifty,” said Kzanol/Greenburg. The thrint smiled.

“I never thought the Arms was a grand idea,” said Luke. “I think they’re necessary. Absolutely necessary. I joined because I thought I could be useful.”

“Luke, if flatlanders need thought police to keep them alive, they shouldn’t stay alive. You’re trying to hold back evolution.”

“We are not thought police! What we police is technology. If someone builds something that has a good chance of wiping out civilization, then and only then do we suppress it. You’d be surprised how often it happens.”

Smoky’s voice was ripe with scorn. “Would I? Why not suppress the fusion tube while you’re at it? No, don’t interrupt me, Luke, this is important. They don’t use fusion only in ships. Half Earth’s drinking water comes from seawater distilleries, and they all use fusion heat. Most of Earth’s electricity is fusion, and all of the Belt’s. There’s fusion flame in crematoriums and garbage disposal plants. Look at all the uranium you have to import, just to squirt into fusion tubes as primer! And there are hundreds of thousands of fusion ships, every last one of which—”

“—turns into a hydrogen bomb at the flip of a switch.”

“Too right. So why doesn’t the Arms suppress fusion?”

“First, because the Arms was formed too late. Fusion was already here. Second, because we need fusion. The fusion tube is human civilization, the way the electrical generator used to be. Thirdly, because we won’t interfere with anything that helps space travel. But I’m glad—”

“You’re begging the…”

“MY TURN, Smoky. I’m glad you brought up fusion, because that’s the whole point. The purpose of the Arms is to keep the balance wheel on civilization. Knock that balance wheel off kilter, and the first thing that would happen would be war. It always is. This time it’d be the last. Can you imagine a full-scale war, with that many hydrogen bombs just waiting to be used? Flip of a switch, I think you said.”

“You said. Do you have to stamp on human ingenuity to keep the balance wheel straight? That’s a blistering condemnation of Earth, if true.”

“Smoky, if it weren’t top secret I could show you a suppressed projector that can damp a fusion shield from ten miles away. Chick Watson got to be my boss by spotting an invention that would have forced us to make murder legal. There was—”

“Don’t tell me about evidence you can’t produce.”

“All right, dammit, what about this amplifier we’re all chasing? Suppose some bright boy came up with an amplifier for telepathic hypnosis? Would you suppress it?”

“You produce it and I’ll answer.”

Masney said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, you two!”

“Dead right,” Anderson’s voice answered. “Give us innocent bystanders an hour’s rest.”

The man in the lead ship opened his eyes. Afterimages like pastel amoebae blocked his vision; but the screen was dark and flat. “All ships,” he said. “We can’t shoot yet. We’ll have to wait ’til they turn around.”

Nobody questioned him. They had all watched through the camera in its nose as Mabe Doolin’s test missile approached the Golden Circle. They had watched the glare of the honeymooner’s drive become blinding, even with the camera picture turned all the way down. Then the screens had gone blank. The fusing hydrogen turned missiles to molten slag before they could get close.

The honeymooner was safe for another day.

Kzanol/Greenberg reached a decision. “Hold the fort,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

Kzanol watched him get up and pull on his space suit. “What are you doing?”

“Slowing down the opposition, if I’m lucky.” The near-ptavv went up the ladder into the airlock.

Kzanol sighed, pocketed the one-man matchsticks of the ante, and shuffled for solitaire. He knew that the slave with the ptavv mind was making a tremendous fuss over nothing. Perhaps it had brooded too long on the hypothetical tnuctip revolt, until all slaves looked dangerous.

Kzanol/Greenberg emerged on the dorsal surface of the hull. There were a number of good reasons for putting the airlock there, the best being that men could walk on the hull while the drive was on. He put his magnetic sandals on, because it would be a long fall if he slipped, and walked quickly aft to the tail. A switch buried in the vertical fin released a line of steps leading down the curve of the hull to the wing. He climbed down. The hydrogen light was terribly bright; even with his eyes covered he could feel the heat on his face. When he knelt on the trailing edge the wing shielded him from the light.

He peered over the edge. If he leaned too far he would be blinded, but he had to go far enough to see…Yes, there they were. Five points of light, equally bright, all the same color. Kzanol/Greenberg dropped the nose of the disintegrator over the edge and pulled the trigger.

If the disintegrator had had a maser type of beam, it could have done some real damage. But then, he could never have hit any of those tiny targets with such a narrow beam. Still, the cone spread too rapidly. Kzanol/Greenberg couldn’t see any effect. He hadn’t really expected to. He held the digger pointed as best he could the five clustered stars. Minutes ticked by.

“What the hell…Lew! Are we in a dust cloud?”

“No.” The man in the lead ship looked anxiously at frosted quartz of his windshield. “Not that our instruments can tell. This may be the weapon Garner told about. Does everyone have a messed-up windshield?”

A chorus of affirmatives.

“Huh! Okay. We don’t know how much power there is that machine, but it may have a limit. Here’s what do. First, we let the instruments carry us for a while. Second, we’re eventually going to break our windshields so we can see out, so we’ll be going the rest of the way in closed suits. But we can’t do that yet! Otherwise our faceplates will frost up. Third point.” He glared round for emphasis, though nobody saw him. “Nobody outside for any reason! For all we know, that gun can peel our suits right off our backs in ten seconds. Any other suggestions?”

There were.

“Call Garner and ask him for ideas.” Mabel Doolin in Number Two did that.

“Withdraw our radar antennae for a few hours. Otherwise they’ll disappear.” They did. The ships flew on, blind.

“We need something to tell us how far this gun has dug into our ships.” But nobody could think of anything better than “Go look later.”

Every minute someone tested the barrage with a piece of quartz. The barrage stopped fifteen minutes after it had started. Two minutes later it started again, and Tartov, who was out inspecting the damage, scrambled into his ship with his faceplate opaqued along the right side.

Kzanol looked up to see his “partner” climbing wearily down through the airlock. “Very good,” he said. “Has it occurred to you that we may need the disintegrator to dig up the spare suit?”

“Yeah, it has. That’s why I didn’t use it any longer than I did.” In fact he’d quit because he was tired, but he knew Kzanol was right. Twenty-five minutes of a most continuous operation was a heavy drain on the battery. “I thought I could do them some damage. I don’t know whether I did or not.”

“Will you relax? If they get too close I’ll take them and get us some extra ships and body servants.”

“I’m sure of that. But they don’t have to get that close.”

The gap between the Golden Circle and the Belt fleet closed slowly. They would reach Pluto at about the same time, eleven days after the honeymooner left Neptune.

“There she goes,” said somebody.

“Right,” said Lew. “Everyone ready to fire?”

Nobody answered. The flame of the honeymooner’s drive stretched miles into space, a long, thin line of bluish white in a faint conical envelope. Slowly it began to contract.

“Fire,” said Lew, and pushed a red button. It had a tiny protective hatch over it, now unlocked. With a key.

Five missiles streaked away, dwindling match flames. The honeymooner’s fire had contracted to a point.

Minutes passed. An hour. Two.

The radio beeped. “Garner calling. You haven’t called. Hasn’t anything happened yet?”

“No,” said Lew into the separate maser mike. “They should have hit by now.”

Minutes dragging by. The white star of the honeymoon special burned serenely.

“Then something’s wrong.” Garner’s voice had crossed the light-minutes between him and the fleet. “Maybe the disintegrator burned off the radar antennae on your missiles.”

“Son of a bitch! Sure, that’s exactly what happened. Now what?”

Minutes.

“Our missiles are okay. If we can get close enough we can use them. But that gives them three days to find the amplifier. Can you think of a way to hold them off for three days?”

“Yeah.” Lew was grim. “I’ve an idea they won’t be landing on Pluto.” He gnawed his lip, wondering if he could avoid giving Garner this information. Well, it wasn’t exactly top secret, and the Arm would probably find out anyway. “The Belt has made trips to Pluto, but we never tried to land there. Not after the first ship took a close-up spectroscopic reading…”

They played at a table just outside the pilot room door. Kzanol/Greenberg had insisted. He played with one ear cocked at the radio. Which was all right with Kzanol, since it affected the other’s playing.

Garner’s voice came, scratchy and slightly distorted, after minutes of silence. “It sounds to me as if it all depends on where they land. We can’t control that. We’d better think of something else, just in case. What have you got besides missiles?”

The radio buzzed gently with star static.

“I wish we could hear both sides,” Kzanol growled. “Can you make any sense of that?”

Kzanol/Greenberg shook his head. “We won’t, either. They must know we’re in Garner’s maser beam. But it sounds like they know something we don’t.”

“Four.”

“I’m taking two. Anyway, it’s nice to know they can’t shoot at us.”

“Yes. Well done.” Kzanol spoke with absent-minded authority, using the conventional overspeak phrase to congratulate a slave who shows proper initiative. His eye was on his cards. He never saw the killing rage in his partner’s face. He never sensed the battle that raged across the table, as Kzanol/Greenberg’s intelligence fought his fury until it turned cold. Kzanol might have died that day, howling as the disintegrator stripped away suit and skin and muscle, without ever knowing why.

Ten days, twenty-one hours since takeoff. The icy planet hung overhead, huge and dirty white, with the glaring highlight which had fooled early astronomers. From Earth, only that bright highlight is visible, actually evidence of Pluto’s flat, almost polished surface, making the planet look very small and very dense.

“Pretty puny,” said Kzanol.

“What did you expect of a moon?”

“There was F-28. Too heavy even for whitefoods.”

“True. Mmph. Look at that big circle. Looks like a tremendous meteor crater, doesn’t it?”

“Where? Oh, I see it.” Kzanol listened. “That’s it! Radar’s got it cold. Powerloss,” he added, looking at the radar telescope through the pilot’s eyes, “you can almost see the shape of it. But we’ll have to wait for the next circuit before we can land.”

Slowly the big ship turned until its motor faced forward in its orbit.

The Belt fleet stayed a respectful distance away—very respectful, four million miles respectful. Without the telescopes Pluto barely showed a disc.

“Everybody guess a number,” said Lew. “Between one and one hundred. When I get yours I’ll tell you mine. Then we call Garner and let him pick. Whoever gets closest to Garner’s number is It.”

“Three.” “Twenty-eight.” “Seventy.”

“Fifty. Okay, I’ll call Garner.” Lew changed to maser. “One calling Garner. One calling Garner. Garner, we’ve about decided what to do if he doesn’t go down. None of our ship radars are damaged, so we’ll just program one ship to aim at the honeymooner at top speed. We watch through the telescopes. When our ship gets close enough we blow the drive. We want you to pick a number between one and one hundred.”

Seconds passing. Garner’s fleet was closer now, nearing the end of its trip.

“This is Tartov in Number Three. He’s going down.”

“Garner here. I suggest we wait and use the radar proof, if we can. It sounds like you’re planning for one man to ride in somebody’s airlock until he can reach the Belt. If so, wait for us; we may have room for an extra in one of the Earth ships. You still want a number? Fifty-five.”

Lew swallowed. “Thanks, Garner.” He turned off his maser-finder.

“Three again. You’re saved by the bell, Lew. He’s going down on the night side. In the predawn area. Couldn’t be better. He may even land in the Crescent!”

Lew watched, his face pale, as the tiny light burned above Pluto’s dim white surface. Garner must have forgotten that a singleship’s control bubble was its own airlock; that it had to be evacuated whenever the pilot wanted to get out. Lew was glad the flatlander fleet had followed. He did not relish the idea of spending several weeks riding on the outside of a spaceship.

Kzanol/Greenberg swallowed, swallowed again. The low acceleration bothered him. He blamed it on his human body. He sat in a window seat with the crash web tightly fastened, looking out and down.

There was little to see. The ship had circled half the world, falling ever lower, but the only feature on an unchanging cue-ball surface had been the slow creep of the planetary shadow. Now the ship flew over the night side, and the only light was the dim light of the drive, dim at least when reflected from this height. And there was nothing to see at all…until now.

Something was rising on the eastern horizon, something a shade lighter than the black plain. An irregular line against the stars. Kzanol/Greenberg leaned forward as he began to realize just how big the range was, for it couldn’t be anything but a mountain range. “What’s that?” he wondered aloud.

“One hundredth diltun.” Kzanol probed the pilot’s mind. The pilot said, “Cott’s Crescent. Frozen hydrogen piled up along the dawn side of the planet. As it rotates into daylight the hydrogen boils off and then refreezes on the night side. Eventually it rotates back to here.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Evanescent mountains of hydrogen snow, smooth and low, like a tray of differently sized snowballs dropped from a height. They rose gently before the slowing ship, rank behind rank, showing the tremendous breadth of the range. But they couldn’t show its length. Kzanol/Greenberg could see only that the mountains stretched half around the horizon; but he could imagine them marching from pole to pole around the curve of the world. As they must. As they did.

The ship was almost down, hovering motionless a few miles west of the beginning rise of the Crescent. A pillar of fire licked a mile down to touch the surface. Where it touched, the surface disappeared. A channel like the bed of a river followed below the ship, fading into the darkness beyond the reach of the light.

The ship rode with nose tilted high; the fusion flame reached slightly forward. Gently, gently, one mile up, the Golden Circle slowed and stopped.

Where the flame touched, the surface disappeared. A wide, shallow crater formed below the descending ship. It deepened rapidly. A ring of fog formed, soft and white and opaque, thickening in the cold and the dark, closing in on the ship. Then there was nothing but the lighted fog and the crater and the licking fusion fire.

This was the most alien place. He had been wasting his life searching out the inhabited worlds of the galaxy; for never had they given him such a flavor of strangeness as came from this icy world, colder than…than the bottom of Dante’s Hell.

“We’ll be landing on the water ice layer,” the pilot explained, just as if he’d been asked. He had. “The gas layers wouldn’t hold us. But first we have to dig down.”

Had he been searching for strangeness? Wasn’t that a Greenberg thought slipping into his conscious mind? Yes. This soul-satisfaction was the old Greenberg starlust; he had searched for wealth, only wealth.

The crater looked like an open pit mine now, with a sloping ring wall and then an almost flat rim and then another, deeper ring wall and…Kzanol/Greenberg looked down, grinning and squinting against the glare, trying to guess which layer was which gas. They had been drilling through a very thick blanket of ice, hundreds or thousands of feet thick. Perhaps it was nitrogen? Then the next layer, appearing now, would be oxygen.

The plain and the space above it exploded in flame.

“She blows!” Lew crowed, like a felon reprieved. A towering, twisting pillar of yellow and blue flame roared straight up out of the telescope, out of the pale plain where there had been the small white star of the Golden Circle. For a moment the star shone brightly through the flames. Then it was swamped, and the whole scope was fire. Lew dropped the magnification by a ten-factor to watch the fire spread. Then he had to drop it again. And again.

Pluto was on fire. For billions of years a thick blanket of relatively inert nitrogen ice had protected the highly reactive layers below. Meteors, as scarce out here as sperm whales in a goldfish bowl, inevitably buried themselves in the nitrogen layer. There had been no combustion on Pluto since Kzanol’s spaceship smashed down from the stars. But now hydrogen vapor mixed with oxygen vapor, and they burned. Other elements burned too.

The fire spread outward in a circle. A strong, hot wind blew out and up into vacuum, fanning great sheets of flame over the boiling ices until raw oxygen was exposed. Then the fire dug deeper. There were raw metals below the thin sheet of water ice; and it was thin, nonexistent in places, for it had all formed when, the spaceship struck, untold eons ago, when food yeast still ruled Earth. Sodium and calcium veins; even iron burns furiously in the presence of enough oxygen and enough heat. Or chlorine, or fluorine; both halogens were present, blowing off the top of Pluto’s frozen atmosphere, some burning with hydrogen in the first sheets of flame. Raise the temperature enough and even oxygen and nitrogen will unite.

Lew watched his screen in single-minded concentration. He thought of his future great-great-grandchildren and wondered how he could possibly make them see this as he saw it now. Old and leathery and hairless and sedentary, he would tell those children: “I saw a world burning when I was young…” He would never see anything as strange.

Pluto was a black disc almost covering his scope screen, with a cold highlight near the sunward arm. In that disc the broad ring of fire had almost become a great circle, with one arc crawling over the edge of the world. When it contracted on the other side of the world there would be an explosion such as could only be imagined. But in the center the ring was darkening to black, its fuel nearly burned out.

The coldest spot within the ring was the point where the fire had started.

The Golden Circle had gone straight up, ringing and shivering from the blast, with sheets of fire roaring past the wing and hull. Kzanol/Greenberg had the wind knocked out of him. Kzanol was just now recovering consciousness. The ship was not yet harmed. It certainly hadn’t been harmed by the heat of combustion. The ship’s underbelly was built to withstand fusion heat for weeks.

But the pilot was out of control. His reflexes had taken over at the instant the shock wave hit, and then his conscious mind…He found himself his own master for the first time in weeks, and he made his decision. He turned off the fuel feed. The drive couldn’t possibly be started again. Kzanol raged and told him to die, and he did, but it was too late. The ship, deprived of power, bucked and swooped in the burning wind.

Kzanol/Greenberg cursed fluent and ancient English. Below him a wall of fire tens of miles high retreated toward the horizon. The ship hadn’t turned over; the gyros must still be working.

The buffeting from below eased as the firelight died. The ship began to fall.

Deliberately, reluctantly, Lew took his eyes off the screen and shook himself. Then he turned on the radio. “All ships,” he said. “Drive to Pluto at max. We can watch the fireworks on the way. Tartov, program us a course to land us on the dawn side of whatever’s left of Cott’s Crescent. Hexter, you haven’t done anything useful lately. Find Ceres with a maser so I can fill them in to date. Comments?”

“This is Tartov. Lew, for Pete’s sake! The planet’s on fire! How can we land?”

“We’ve got four million miles to drive. The fire should be out when we get there. Oh, all right, get us into an orbit, but you’re still gonna program our landing.”

“I think we ought to leave a ship in orbit. Just in case.”

“All right, Mabe. We’ll gamble for who stays up. More comments?”

Three men and a woman pushed buttons that squirted volatilized uranium into fusion tubes and followed it with hydrogen. A growing storm of neutrons produced fission which produced heat which produced fusion. Four blue-white stars formed, very long and very thin. The bright ends swung toward Pluto. They began to move.

“That’s that,” Masney said wearily. “And a good thing, too. Do you suppose there ever was a telepathy amplifier?”

“I’m sure there is. And it’s not over yet.” Luke was flexing his fingers and looking worried. Pluto showed on the screen before him, with the edge of the fire a straight line creeping west to east. “Lloyd, why do you think I didn’t want the Belt to beat us to Pluto? Why did we come after them, anyway? That amplifier is a new weapon! If the Belt takes it apart and makes one that humans can use, we could see the worst and most permanent dictatorship in history. It might never end at all.”

Masney looked at the future Luke had painted and, judging by his expression, found it evil. Then he grinned. “They can’t land. It’s all right, Luke. They can’t get down to the helmet with that fire going.”

“That fire isn’t burning any more where the honeymooner came down.”

Masney looked. “Right. Is Pluto still explosive?”

“I don’t know. There might still be pockets of unburned material. But they can go down if they want, regardless. All they have to do is land on the day side, where there’s no hydrogen, and land so fast they don’t burn through the nitrogen layer. They’d sink into it, of course, from heat leakage through the hulls, so they’d eventually have to dig their way out. But that’s nothing. What counts is the hydrogen. Miss that and you probably won’t start a fire.

“Now, they’ll almost certainly go down for the amplifier as soon as the fire stops. We’ve got to destroy it before they get it. Or after.”

“Take a look,” said Lloyd.

Four bright points formed in a cluster on the screen. In seconds they had grown into lines a mile long, all pointing in the same direction.

“We’ve got some time,” said Masney. “They’re millions of miles from Pluto.”

“Not far enough.” Luke reached to close the intership circuit. “Calling Heinlein. Anderson, the Belt fleet just took off for Pluto from four million miles away. How long?”

“They started from rest?”

“Close enough.”

“Lessee…mmmmmmmmmm…five hours ten minutes, approx. No less, maybe more, depending on whether they’re scared of the fire.”

“How long for us?”

“Fifty-nine hours now.”

“Thanks, Anderson.” Luke turned off the radio. Strange, how Smoky had sat there without saying a word. In fact, he hadn’t said much of anything lately.

With a chill, Luke realized that Smoky’s thoughts must run very like his own. With the ET a dead issue, the question was: Who got the helmet? Belt or Earth? And Smoky wasn’t about to trust Earth with it.

Larry Greenberg opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was cold. “The lights don’t work,” said a voice in his mind.

“Did we crash?”

“We did indeed. I can’t imagine why we’re still alive. GET UP.”

Larry Greenberg got up and marched down the aisle between the passengers’ seats. His muscles, bruised and aching, seemed to be acting by themselves. He went to the pilot seat, removed the pilot and sat down. His hands strapped him, then folded themselves into his lap. There he sat. Kzanol stood beside him, barely in the range of his peripheral vision.

“Comfortable?”

“Not quite,” Larry confessed. “Could you leave one arm free for smoking?”

“Certainly.” Larry found his left arm would obey him. He still couldn’t move his eyes, though he could blink. He pulled a cigarette and lit it, moving by touch.

He thought, “It’s a good thing I’m one of those people who can shave without a mirror.”

Kzanol asked, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It means I don’t get uncoordinated without my eyes.”

Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry knew what he wanted. He wouldn’t do it; he wouldn’t ask.

What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.

He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a smallish, handsome, somewhat undergroomed thrint. But when he’d walked past Kzanol on his way to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying, something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant earthworms writhing at the corners of a mouth like a slash in a child’s rubber ball, with sharply pointed metallic teeth, with oversized arms and huge three-fingered hands like mechanical grabs.

The thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards. “Are you wondering about my oath?”

“Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it.”

“You can no longer claim to be a thrint in a human body. You are not the being I gave my oath to.”

“Oaths.”

“I still want you to help me manage Earth.”

Larry had no trouble understanding even the inflections in overspeak, and Kzanol, of course, could now read his mind. “But you’ll manage me,” said Larry.

“Yes, of course.”

Larry raised his cigarette and tapped it with a forefinger. The ash fell slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. “There’s something I should tell you,” he said.

“Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something.”

“I don’t think you should own the Earth any more. I’ll stop you if I can.”

Kzanol’s eating tendrils were doing something strange. Larry couldn’t see what it was. “You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You have no conceivable reason to warn me.”

“That’s my problem.”

“Quite. DON’T MOVE UNTIL I RETURN.” The command carried overtones of disgust. A dark blur that was Kzanol moved and vanished.

Alone in the pilot room, Larry listened to the clanking, squeaking, and mental cursing that meant Kzanol was searching for something. He heard when the thrint sharply ordered the pilot to return to life and show him AT ONCE where he’d hidden the contaminated portable radar…The command, a mere explosion of frustration, stopped suddenly. So did the sounds of search.

Presently Larry heard the airlock chugging to itself.

The clerk was a middleman. It was his job to set priorities on messages sent into and received from deep space. At three in the morning he answered the ring of the outside phone.

“Hello, Arms Maser Transceiving Station,” he said a little sleepily. It had been a dull night.

It was no longer dull. The small brunette who looked out of his screen was startlingly beautiful, especially to the man who saw her unexpectedly in the dead hours.

“Hello. I have a message for Lucas Garner. He’s on the way to Neptune, I think.”

“Lucas Garner? What—I mean, what’s the message?”

“Tell him that my husband is back to normal, and he should take it into consideration. It’s very important.”

“And who is your husband?”

“Larry Greenberg. That’s G-r-e”

“Yes, I know. But he’s beyond Neptune by now. Wouldn’t Garner already know anything you know about Greenberg?”

“Not unless he’s telepathic.”

“Oh.”

It was a tricky decision for a clerk. Maser messages cost like uranium, less because of the power needed and the wear and tear on the delicate machines than because of the difficulty of finding the target. But only Garner could decide whether an undependable “hunch” was important to him. The clerk risked his job and sent the message.

The fire had slowed now. Most of the unburned hydrogen had been blown before the fire, until it was congested into a cloud mass opposite on Pluto from the resting place of the Golden Circle. Around that cloud bank raged a hurricane of awesome proportions. Frozen rain poured out of the heavens in huge lens-shaped drops, hissing into the nitrogen snow. The layers above nitrogen were gone, vaporized, gas diluting the hydrogen which still poured in. On the borderline hydrogen burned fitfully with halogens, and even with nitrogen to form ammonia, but around most of the great circle the fires had gone out. Relatively small, isolated conflagrations ate their way toward the new center. The “hot” water ice continued to fall. When it had boiled the nitrogen away it would begin on the oxygen. And then there would be a fire.

At the center of the hurricane the ice stood like a tremendous Arizona butte. Even the halogens were still frozen across its flat top, thousands of square miles of fluorine ice with near-vacuum above. Coriolis effects held back the burning wind for a time.

On the other side of the world, Kzanol stepped out of the Golden Circle.

He turned once to look back. The honeymoon ship was flat on her belly. Her landing gear was retracted, and a wide, smooth crater was centered under the drive exhaust cone. Star-hot hydrogen had leaked from the fusion tube for some time after its fuel was cut off. The fuselage was twisted, though not broken. Her forward wings had been jarred open, and now hung broken from their sockets. One tip of the triangular major wing curled up where it had stabbed against rock-hard ice.

She was doomed, she was useless. Kzanol walked on.

The thrintun space suit was a marvelous assemblage of tools. No changes had been made in it for centuries before Kzanol’s time, for the design had long been perfect, but for an unsuspected flaw in the emergency systems, and the naïve thrintun had never reached that level of sophistication which produces planned obsolescence. The temperature inside the suit was perfect, even a little warmer than in the ship.

But the suit could not compensate for the wearer’s imagination. Kzanol felt the outer chill as his ship fell behind. Miles-thick blankets of nitrogen and oxygen snow had boiled away here, leaving bubbly permafrost which showed dark and deep green in the light of his helmet lamp. There was fog, too, not dense but very deep, a single bank that stretched halfway around the world. The fog narrowed his universe to a circular patch of bubbly ice.

Moving in great, easy flying hops, he reached the first rise of the crescent in forty minutes. It was six miles from the ship. The crescent was now a slightly higher rise of permafrost, scarred and pitted from the fire that had crossed it. Kzanol’s portable radar, borrowed from the Circle’s lockers, showed his goal straight ahead at the limit of its range. About a mile ahead, and almost a thousand feet deep in permafrost.

Kzanol began to climb the slope.

“We’re out of arrows,” the man in Number Two ship said gloomily. He meant missiles. “How do we protect ourselves?”

Lew said, “We’ll be on our way home before Garner comes within sniffing distance of Pluto. The best he can do is shoot at us as we pass. His arrows aren’t good enough to hit us when we’re moving that fast, except by accident. He knows it. He won’t even try, because it might start the Last War.”

“He may decide the stakes are high enough.”

“Dammit, Tartov, what choice have we got? Garner must not be allowed to leave here with that amplifier! If he does, we’ll see a period of slavery such as nobody has even dreamed of up to now,” Lew exhaled noisily through his nostrils. “We’ve got to go down and destroy the thing by hand. Land on the dawn side and mount an expedition. Hexter, can you dismount a ship’s radar so it’ll still work?”

“Sure, Lew. But it’ll take two men to carry it.”

Tartov said, “You miss my point. Of course we’ve got to wreck the damn amplifier. But how can we prove to Garner that we did wreck it? Why should he trust us?”

Lew ran spatulate fingers through tangled cotton hair. “My apologies, Tartov. That’s a damn good question. Comments?”

Kzanol aimed the disintegrator thirty degrees downward and flipped the firing switch.

The tunnel formed fast. Kzanol couldn’t see how fast for there was nothing but darkness inside after the first second. A minor hurricane blew out of the tunnel. He leaned against the wind as against a wall. In the narrow cone of the beam the “wind” was clear, but beyond the edge it was a dust storm. The wind was dust, too, icy dust torn to particles of two and three molecules each by the mutual repulsion of the nuclei.

After ten minutes Kzanol decided the tunnel must be getting too wide. The opening was less than a foot across; he used the disintegrator to enlarge it. Even when he turned off the digging tool he couldn’t see very far into it.

After a moment he walked into the darkness.

With his left hand Larry reached out and shook the pilot’s shoulder. Nothing. It was like a wax figure. He would probably have felt the same way. But the man’s cheek was cool. He was not paralyzed, but dead.

Somewhere in the back of his mind was Judy. It was different from the way it had been in the past. Now, he believed it. Even when separated by over three billion miles, he and Judy were somehow aware of each other. But no more than that.

He couldn’t tell her anything. He couldn’t warn her that the Bug Eyed Whoosis was hours or minutes from owning the Earth.

The pilot couldn’t help him. He had had an instant to make a choice, that professional hauler of millionaires, and he had made first a right choice and then a wrong one. He had decided to die, killing everyone aboard ship, and that was right. But he should have turned off the fusion shield, not the fuel feed! Now he was dead, and Kzanol was loose.

It was his fault. Without Larry Greenberg, Kzanol would have been blasted to gas when he made turnover for Pluto. He’d never have known the suit was on Pluto! The knowledge was galling.

Where was his mind shield? Two hours ago he had held an impenetrable telepathic wall, a shield that had stood up to Kzanol’s most furious efforts. Now he couldn’t remember how he’d done it. He was capable of it, he knew that, and if he could—hold it.

No, it was gone. Some memory, some thrintun memory.

Well, let’s see. He’d been in Masney’s office when the thrint had screamed at everybody to shut off their minds. His mind shield had—but it had already been there. Somehow he had already known how to use it. He had known ever since.

Sunflowers eight feet across. They turned round and round, following the sun as it circled the plantation at Kzathit’s pole. Great silver paraboloid platters sending concentrated sunlight to their dark green photosynthetic nodes. Flexible mirrors mounted on thick bulging stalks, mirrors that could ripple gently to put the deadly focus wherever they wanted it: on a rebellious slave or a wild animal or an attacking enemy thrint. That focus was as deadly as a laser cannon, and the sunflowers never missed. For some reason they never attacked members of the House they protected.

In the grounded luxury liner, Larry Greenberg tingled. Fish on fire! The sunflowers must have been controlled by the tnuctipun house slaves! He had not the slightest proof, but he knew. On a day in the past, every sunflower in the galaxy must have turned on its owner…He thought, We thrintun—those thrintun really set themselves up. Suckers!

Remembering again, he saw that the sunflowers weren’t as big as they looked. He was seeing them from Kzanol’s viewpoint, Kzanol one and a half feet tall, a child of eight thrintun years. Kzanol half grown.

The maser beam reached for Pluto, spreading itself wide, dropping ever so slightly in frequency as it climbed out of the Sun’s gravitational well. By the time it reached its target more than five hours had passed, and the wave front was a quarter of a million miles across.

Pluto didn’t stop it. Pluto barely left a noticeable hole. There was enormous power behind this beam. The beam went on into the void, moving almost straight toward the galactic center, thinned by dust clouds and distance. It was picked up centuries later by beings who did not resemble humanity in the least. They were able to determine the shape of the conical beam, and to determine its apex. But not accurately enough.

In its wake—

Tartov said, “You were right, Lew. There’s no fire where we’re going.”

“That’s that, then. You three go on down. I’ll warp into an orbit.”

“We really ought to draw again, you know.”

“Nuts, Mabe. Think how much I’ll win at poker after using up all my bad luck out here. Got my orbit, Tartov?”

“Hook in your idiot savant and I’ll give it the data direct.”

“Autopilot on.”

BEEP.

Lew felt his ship turning as the sound of the beep ended. The spears of fusion light alongside him began to dwindle in size. Could they manage without him? Sure, they were Belters. If danger came it would come here, in orbit. He said, “All ships. Good luck. Don’t take any stupid chances.”

“Hexter calling. Something on the Earth channel, Lew.”

Lew used his frequency dial. “Can’t find it.”

“It’s a little low.”

“Oh. Typical…Dammit, it’s in code. Why should it be in code?”

“Maybe they’ve got little secrets,” Tartov suggested. “Whatever it is, it’s bound to be a good reason to finish this fast.”

“Yeah. Look, you go ahead and land. I’ll send this to Ceres for decoding. It’ll take twelve hours to get an answer, but what the hell.”

Why should it be in code?

Lit Shaeffer would have known.

Even now, sitting in his office deep in the rock of Ceres, with the bubble of Confinement winding its snail-slow orbit thirty miles overhead, Lit was preparing a note of apology to the United Nations. It was the hardest work he’d ever done! But there seemed, no way out.

A week and a half ago there had been a maser message from Neptune. Garner’s story was true: he had gone to Neptune in pursuit of a wildly dangerous ET. Lit had scowled and ordered an immediate end to the harassment of Earth shipping.

But the damage was done. For two weeks the Belt had persecuted Earth’s meager shipping; had used codes in maser transmissions, even in solar weather forecasts, in violation of a century’s tradition; had used their espionage network so heavily that its existence became insultingly obvious. Secretiveness and suspicion were the rule as never before. Earth had retaliated in kind.

Now the Belt had stopped using codes, but Earth had not.

Did the coded messages contain vital information? Almost certainly not, Lit would have guessed. Certain messages decoded at random bore him out. But the Belt couldn’t be sure, which, of course, was the whole point.

And Belt ships were searched at Earth’s ports, with insulting thoroughness.

This mistrust had to be stopped now. Lit gritted his teeth and continued writing.

The message started to repeat, and Lloyd switched it off with a decisive click.

“She felt him die,” said Luke. “She didn’t know it, but she felt him die.”

His thoughts ran on without him…She’d felt him die. What was it that let some people know things they couldn’t possibly know? There seemed to be more and more of them lately. Luke had never been remotely psychic, and he’d envied the lucky few who could find lost rings or lost criminals without the slightest effort, with no more explanation than, “I thought you might have dropped it in the mayonnaise,” or, “I had a hunch he was hiding in the subway, living off the tenth-mark peanut machines.” Parapsychologists with their special cards had proven that psy powers exist; and had gone no further than that, in close to two hundred years, except for psionics devices like the contact machine. “Psionics,” to Luke, meant “I don’t know how the damn thing works.”

How did Judy know that the Golden Circle had crashed? You couldn’t know the answer, so you hung a tag on it. Telepathy.

“And even then,” said Luke, not knowing that he spoke. “she managed to fool herself. Marvelous!”

“Did she?”

Luke’s head jerked up and around. Lloyd was scared and not trying to hide it. He said, “The Golden Circle was a tough ship. Her drive was in her belly, remember? Her belly was built to stand fusion heat. And the explosion was below her.”

Luke felt his own nerves thrill in sympathetic fear. “We’ll find out right now,” he said, and touched the control panel. “All ships, listen in. Anderson, what do you know about the Golden Circle?”

“Yeah, I heard it too. It could be; it just could be. The people who built the honeymooners knew damn well that one accident or one breakdown could ruin a billion-mark business. They built the ships to stand up to anything. The Golden Circle’s life system is smaller in proportion than the life system of any ship here, just because they put so much extra weight in the walls and in the failsafe systems.”

In a dull voice, Smoky said, “And we’re out of it.”

“Hell we are. That message was in code. Lloyd, get the maser pointed at Pluto. We’ve got to warn the Belters. Smoky, is there a Mayday signal we can use?”

“No need. They’ll hear you. It’s too late anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re going down.”

Kzanol walked slowly through a tunnel which gleamed dull white where the light fell. With practice he had learned to stay the right distance behind the disappearing far wall, following his disintegrator beam, so that he walked in a sloppy cylinder six feet in diameter. The wind roared past him and ceased to be wind; it was flying dust and ice particles, flying in vacuum and low gravity, and it packed the tunnel solidly behind him.

The other suit was two hundred feet beyond the end of the sloping tube.

Kzanol looked up. He turned off the disintegrator and stood, stiffly furious, waiting. They had dared! They were just beyond control range, too far away and moving in fast, but they were decelerating as they closed in. He waited, ready to kill.

Mature consideration stopped him. He needed a ship in which to leave Pluto; his own was shot to heat death. Those above him were single seaters, useless to him, but he knew that other ships were coming. He must not frighten them away.

He would let these ships land.

Lew’s singleship hung nose down over the surface of Pluto. He’d set the gyros that way. The ship would be nose down for a long time, perhaps until the gyros wore out. Yet he could see nothing. The planetary surface was hidden beneath a curtain of boiling storm clouds.

He knew that he had passed Cott’s Crescent some minutes ago. He had heard the hum of an open intership circuit. Now, coming toward him over the curved horizon, was a storm within a storm: the titanic whirling hurricane he had passed over twice already. Pluto takes months to rotate. Only a monumental flow of air, air newly created, rushing around from the other side of the planet, could have carried enough lateral velocity to build such a sky whirlpool from mere Coriolis effects. Flames flickered in its roiling rim; but the center was a wide circle of calm, clear near-vacuum all the way down to the icy plateau.

Over the radio came the sound of Garner’s voice.

“…Please answer at once so we’ll know you’re all right. There is a real chance that the ET survived the crash, in which case—”

“Now you’re telling me, you know-it-all son of a bitch!” Lew couldn’t talk. His tongue and his lips were as frozen as the rest of his voluntary muscles. He heard the message all the way through, and he heard it repeated, and repeated. Garner sounded more urgent than he had ten minutes ago.

The hurricane was almost below him now. He looked straight down into the eye.

From one of the murky fires in the rim of the eye, a tongue reached inward.

It was like the first explosion, the one he’d watched through the telescope. But this wasn’t the telescope! The whole plateau was lost in multicolored flame in the first twenty seconds. With the leisurely torpor of a sleepy ground sloth on a cold morning, the fire stood up and reached for him. It was fire and ice, chunks of ice big enough to see, ice burning as it rose in the clutch of the height and might, a blazing carnivore reaching to swallow him.

Viprin race. Bowed skeletal shapes like great albino whippets seemed to skim the dirt surface of the track, their jet nacelle nostrils flaring, their skins shining like oil, racing round and round the audience standing breathless in the center of the circle. The air was thick with Power: thousands of thrintun desperately hurling orders at their favorites, knowing perfectly well that the mutant viprin didn’t have the brains to hear. Kzanol on one of the too-expensive seats, clutching a lavender plastic cord, knowing that this race, this race meant the difference between life as a prospector and life as a superintendent of cleaning machinery. He would leave here with commercials to buy a ship, or with none.

Larry dropped it. It was too late in Kzanol’s life. He wanted to remember much earlier. But his brain seemed filled with fog, and the thrintun memories were fuzzy and hard to grasp. As Kzanol/Greenberg he had had no trouble with his memory, but as Larry he found it infuriatingly vague.

The earliest thing he could remember was that scene of the sunflowers.

He was out of cigarettes. The pilot might have some in his pocket, but Larry couldn’t quite reach it. And he was hungry; he hadn’t eaten in some ten hours. A gnal might help. Definitely one would help, for it would probably kill him in seconds. Larry tore a button from his shirt and put it in his mouth. It was round and smooth, very like a gnal.

He sucked it and let his mind dissolve.

Three ships rested on the other side of what remained of Cott’s Crescent. In the control bubbles the pilots sat motionless, waiting for instructions and thinking furious, futile thoughts. In the fourth…Kzanol’s eating tendrils stood away from his mouth as he probed.

It was rather like probing his own memory of the crash. A brightly burning wind, a universe of roaring, tearing flame and crushing shocks.

Well, it wasn’t as if he needed Lew. Kzanol turned his disintegrator on and began walking. Something bright glimmered through the dark ice wall.

“They don’t answer,” said Lloyd.

Luke let himself sag against the constant one-gee deceleration. Too little, too late…the Belt was beaten. And then his eyes narrowed and he said, “They’re bluffing.”

Masney turned inquiringly.

“Sure. They’re bluffing, Lloyd. They’d be fools not to. We handed them such a perfect chance! Like four spades up in a five stud hand. The perfect opportunity to get us fighting the wrong enemy.”

“But we’d be getting this same scary silence if they were really caught.”

Luke spoke jerky phrases as the answers came. “Right. We get quiet radios either way. But we get the same answer either way, too. Shoot to kill. Either the fleet is on its way back with amplifier, or the ET has it and is on its way to conquer the Earth. Either way, we have to attack.”

“You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Tell me.”

“We’ll have to kill Atwood and Smoky first. And Anderson.”

“O-o-oh. Right, about Atwood. He’d never let us shoot at his friends, whether they’re slaves or not. But we can hope Anderson can control Smoky.”

“How’s your coordination?”

“My—?” Luke pondered his uncertain, shaky hands and newly clumsy fingers, his lack of control over his sphincter muscles. Paralysis hangover. “Right again. Smoky’d make mincemeat of Anderson.” A gusty sigh. “We’ll have to blow both ships.”

“Luke, I want a promise.” Masney looked like Death. He was an old man in his own right, and he had been starved for some time. “I want you to swear that the first smell we get of the thought amplifier, we destroy it. Not capture, Luke. Destroy!”

“All right, Lloyd. I swear.”

“If you try to take it home, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”

His finger, an oversized finger in an oversized mouth with tiny needle teeth. He was on his side, more a lump of flesh than anything else, and he sucked his finger because he was hungry. He would always be hungry.

Something huge came in, blocking light. Mother? Father. His own arm moved, jerking the finger contemptuously away, scraping it painfully on the new teeth. He tried to put it back, but it wouldn’t move. Something forceful and heavy told him never to do that again. He never did.

No mind shield there. Funny, how sharp that picture was, the memory of early frustration.

Something…

The room was full of guests. He was four thrintun years old, and he was being allowed out for the first time. Shown proudly by his father. But the noise, the telepathic noise, was too loud. He was trying to think like everybody at once. It frightened him. Something terrible happened. A stream of dark brown semiliquid material shot out of his mouth and spread over the wall. He had defecated in public.

Rage, red and sharp. Suddenly he had no control over his limbs; he was running, stumbling toward the door. Rage from his father and shame from himself—or from his father? He couldn’t tell. But it hurt, and he fought it, closed his mind to it. Father went like a blown flame, and the guests too, and everybody was gone. He was all alone in an empty world. He stopped, frightened. The other minds came back.

His father was proud, proud! At the age of four little Kzanol already had the Power!

Larry grinned a predatory grin and got up. His vac suit—? In the lounge, on one of the seats. He got it and screwed it down and went out.

Kzanol tugged at the great bright bulk until it came out of the ice. It looked like a great rippled goblin lying on its back.

The ice had packed the tunnel solidly behind him; air tight, in fact. That was fortunate. Kzanol had used compressed air from his own suit to pressurize his icy chamber. He frowned at the dials on his upper chest, then took his helmet off.

The air was cold and thin. But now he needn’t carry the amplifier helmet back to the ship. He could put it on here.

He looked down at the suit and realized that he’d want help getting it back. Kzanol turned his Attention to Larry Greenberg. He found a blank.

Greenberg was nowhere.

Had he died? No, surely Kzanol would have sensed that.

This wasn’t good, not even a little bit good. Greenberg had warned him that he would try to stop him. The slave must be on his way now, with his mind shield in full working order. Fortunately the amplifier would stop him. It would control a full-grown thrint.

Kzanol reached down to turn the suit on its face. It was…not heavy, but massive…but it moved.

It was snowing. In the thin air the snow fell like gravel thrown by an explosion. It fell hard enough to kill an unprotected man. Where it hit it packed itself into a hard surface, just crunchy enough for good walking.

Luckily Greenberg didn’t have to see. He could sense exactly where Kzanol was and he walked confidently in that direction. His suit wasn’t as good as Kzanol’s. The cold seeped gently through his gauntlets and boots. He’d suffered worse than this on skiing trips, and loved it.

Then the Power came lashing at his brain. His mind shield went up hard. The wave was gone in a moment. But now he couldn’t find Kzanol. The thrint had put up his mind shield. Larry stopped, bewildered, then went on. He had a compass, so he would not walk in circles. But Kzanol must now know he was coming.

Gradually the afterimage pushed into his mind. In every sense, in eye and ears and touch and kinesthetic nerves, he felt what Kzanol had been doing when his Power lashed out.

He’d been bending over the second suit.

It was too late.

He couldn’t run; the vac suit wasn’t built for it. He looked around in a rising tide of desperation, and then, because there was no help for it, he walked on.

Walk. Knock the ice off your faceplate, and walk.

Walk until you’re Told to stop.

Half an hour later, an hour after he’d left the ship, he began to see powdery snow. It was light and fluffy, very different from the falling icy bullets. It was the residue of Kzanol’s digging. He could use it as a guide.

The powder snow grew deeper and deeper, until suddenly it reared as a towering mountain of packed snow. When he tried to climb it Larry kept slipping down the side in a flurry of snow. But he had to get up there! When Kzanol opened the suit it would be all over. He kept climbing.

He was halfway up, and nearly exhausted, when the top began to move. Snow shot out in a steady stream and fell in a slow fountain. Larry slid hastily down for fear of being buried alive.

The snow continued to pour out. Kzanol was digging his way back…but why wasn’t he wearing the helmet?

The fountain rose higher. Particles of ice, frozen miles up in Pluto’s burned and cooling atmosphere, pelted through the drifting fountain and plated itself on Larry’s suit. He kept moving to keep his joints free. Now he wore a sheath of translucent ice, shattered and cracked at the joints.

And suddenly he guessed the answer. His lips pulled back in a smile of gentle happiness, and his dolphin sense of humor rose joyfully to the surface.

Kzanol climbed out of the tunnel, tugging the useless spare suit behind him. He’d had to use the disintegrator to clear away the snow in the tunnel, and he’d had to climb it at a thirty-degree rise, dragging a bulk as heavy as himself and wearing a space suit which weighed nearly as much. Kzanol was very tired. Had he been human, he would have wept.

The sight of the slope down was almost too much. Plow his feet through that stuff—? But he sighed and sent the spare suit rolling down the mountainside. He watched it hit the bottom and stay, half buried. And he followed it down.

The ice fell faster than ever, hundreds of thousands of tons of brand new water freezing and falling as the planet tried to regain its equilibrium state, forty degrees above absolute zero. Kzanol stumbled blind, putting one big chicken foot in front of the other and bracing for the jar as it fell, keeping his mind closed because he remembered that Greenberg was around somewhere. His mind was numb with fatigue and vicarious cold.

He was halfway down when the snow rose up and stood before him like a thrintun giant. He gasped and stopped moving. The figure slapped one mitten against its faceplate and the thick ice shattered and fell. Greenberg! Kzanol raised the disintegrator.

Almost casually, with a smile that was purest dolphin, Larry reached out a stiff forefinger and planted it in Kzanol’s chest.

For thirty-four hours the singleship had circled Pluto, and it was too long by far. Garner and Masney had been taking turns sleeping so that they could watch the scope screen for the actinic streak of a singleship taking off. There had been little talk between the ships. What talk there was was a strain for all, for every one of the five men knew that battle was very close, and not one was willing even to hint at the possibility. Now Lew’s singleship showed in the scope screen even with its drive off. Now Luke, watching although it was his off watch, watching though he knew he should sleep, watching through lids that felt like heavy sandpaper, Luke finally said the magic words.

“They’re not bluffing.”

“Why the sudden decision?”

“It’s no good, Lloyd. Bluff or no bluff, the fleet would have taken off as soon as they found the amplifier. The longer they wait, the closer we get to their velocity, and the more accurate our arrows get. They’ve been down too long. The ET has them.”

“I thought so all along. But why hasn’t he taken off?”

“In what? There’s nothing on Pluto but singleships. He can’t fly. He’s waiting for us.”

The conference was a vast relief to all. It also produced results. One result was that Woody Atwood spent a full thirty hours standing up in the airlock of the Iwo Jima.

Four million miles respectful had been good enough for the Belter fleet. It would have to do for Garner. His ship and one other came to an easy one-gee stop in mid-space. The third had taken a divergent path, and was now several hundred miles above the still-shrouded surface.

“It’s funny,” said Smoky. “Every time you decide one of our ships is expendable, it turns out to be a Belt ship.”

“Which ship would you have used, Old Smoky?”

“Don’t confuse me with logic.”

“Listen,” said Masney.

Faintly but clearly, the radio gave forth a rising and falling scream like an air raid siren.

“It’s the Lazy Eight’s distress signal,” said Anderson.

Number Six was now a robot. The Heinlein’s drive controls now operated the singleship’s drive, and Anderson pushed attitude jet buttons and pulled on the fuel throttle as he watched the Heinlein’s screen—which now looked through Number Six’s telescope. They had had to use the singleship, of course. A two-man Earth ship must be just what the ET desperately needed.

“Well, shall we take her down?”

Woody said, “Let’s see if Lew’s all right.”

Anderson guided the singleship over to where the lead ship circled Pluto, turned off the drive and used attitude jets to get even closer. At last he and four others looked directly through the frosted, jagged fragments of Lew’s control bubble. There were heat stains on the metal rim. Lew was there, a figure in a tall, narrow metal armor spacesuit; but he wasn’t moving. He was dead or paralyzed.

“We can’t do anything for him now,” said Smoky.

“Right,” said Luke. “No sense postponing the dreadful moment. Take ’er down.”

The distress signal was coming out of a field of unbroken snow.

Anderson had never worked harder in his life. Muttering ceaselessly under his breath, he held the ship motionless a mile over the distress signal while snow boiled and gave him way. Mist formed on the Heinlein’s screen, then fog. He turned on an infrared spotlight, and it helped, but not much. Smoky winced at some of the things young Anderson was saying. Suddenly Anderson was silent, and all five craned forward to see better.

The Golden Circle came out of the ice.

Anderson brought the singleship down as gently as he knew how. At the moment of contact the whole ship rang like a brass bell. The picture in the screen trembled wildly.

In the ensuing silence, a biped form climbed painfully through the topside airlock in the Golden Circle. It climbed down and moved toward them across the snow.

The honeymooner was no longer a spaceship, but she made an adequate meeting hall and hospital. Especially hospital, for of the ten men who faced each other around the crap table, only two were in good health.

Larry Greenberg, carrying a thrintun spacesuit on each shoulder, had returned to find the Golden Circle nearly buried in ice. The glassy sheathing over the top of the ship was twenty feet thick. He had managed to burn his way through the hard way, with a welder in his suit kit, but his fingers and toes were frostbitten when he uncovered the airlock. For nearly three days he had waited for treatment. He was very little pleased to find Number Six empty, but he had gotten his message across by showing the watchers at her scope screen. All’s safe; come down.

Smoky Petropoulos and Woody Atwood, doing all the work because they were still the only ones able, had moved the paralyzed Belters to the Golden Circle in the two-man ships. The four were still unable to use anything but their eyes and, now, their voices. Lew’s hands and wrists and feet and neck all had a roasted look where the skin showed through the blisters. His suit cooling system had been unable to cope with the heat during those seconds of immersion in flaming gases. If the gas hadn’t been so extremely thin, some plastic connection in his air pack or his cooling system would surely have melted—as he would tell eager listeners again and again in the years to come. But that was for later. Later, the others would remember that they had all been wearing suits because they’d been forced to break their windshields, and that if Smoky and Woody hadn’t found them that way they’d have starved in their ships. For now, they were safe.

Garner and Anderson were nearly over their induced paralysis, which now showed only in an embarrassing lack of coordination.

“So we all made it,” said Luke, beaming around at the company. “I was afraid the Last War would start on Pluto.”

“Me too,” said Lew. His voice was barely slurred. “We were afraid you wouldn’t take the hint when we couldn’t answer your calls. You might have decided that was some stupid piece of indirection.” He blinked and tightened his lips, dismissing the memory. “So what’ll we do with the spare suit?”

Now he had everybody’s attention. This was a meeting hall, and the suit was the main order of business.

“We can’t let Earth have it,” said Smoky. “They could open it. We don’t have their time stopper.” Without looking at Luke, he added, “Some inventions do have to be suppressed.”

“You could get it with a little research,” said Garner. “So—”

“Dump it on Jupiter,” Masney advised. “Strap it to the Heinlein’s hull and let Woody and me fly it. If we both come back alive you know it got dumped on schedule. Right?”

“Right,” said Lew. Garner nodded. Others in the lounge tasted the idea and found it good, despite the loss of knowledge which must be buried with the suit. Larry Greenberg, who had other objections, kept them to himself.

“All agreed?” Lew swept his eyes around the main lounge. “Okay. Now, which one is the amplifier?”

There was a full two seconds of dismayed silence.

Greenberg pointed. “The wrinkled one with both hands empty.”

Once it had been pointed out, the difference was obvious. The second suit had wrinkles and bumps and bulges; the limbs were twisted; it had no more personality than a sack. But the suit that was Kzanol—

It lay in one corner of the lounge, knees bent, disintegrator half raised. Even in the curious shape of arms and legs, and in the expressionless mirror of its face, one could read the surprise and consternation which must have been the thrint’s last emotions. There must have been fury too, frustrated fury that had been mounting since Kzanol first saw the fused, discolored spot which was the rescue switch on his second suit.

Garner tossed off his champagne, part of the stock from the honeymooner’s food stores. “So it’s settled. The Sea Statue goes back to the UN Comparative Cultures Exhibit. The treasure suit goes to Jupiter. I submit the Sun might be safer, but what the hell. Greenberg, where do you go?”

“Home. And then Jinx, I think.” Larry Greenberg wore what Lucas Garner decided was a bittersweet smile, though even he never guessed what it meant. “They’ll never keep Judy and me away now. I’m the only man in the universe who can read bandersnatchi handwriting.”

Masney shook his head and started to laugh. He had a rumbling, helpless kind of laugh, as infectious as mumps. “Better not read their minds, Greenberg. You’ll end up as a whole space menagerie if you aren’t careful.”

Others took up the laughter, and Larry smiled with them, though only he knew how true were Masney’s words.

Or had Garner guessed? The old man was looking at him very strangely. If Garner guessed that, two billion years ago, Kzanol had taken a racarliw slave as a pet and souvenir—

Nonsense.

So only Larry would ever know. If the suit were opened it could start a war. With controlled hydrogen fusion as common today as electrical generators had been a century and a half back, any war might be the very last. So the suit had to go to Jupiter; and the doomed racarliw slave had to go with it, buried in dead, silent stasis for eternity.

Could Larry Greenberg have sacrificed an innocent sentient, even for such a purpose? To Larry plus dolphin plus thrint, it wasn’t even difficult.

Just a slave, whispered Kzanol. Small, stupid, ugly: worth half a commercial at best.

Can’t defend himself, thought Charley. He has no rights.

Larry made a mental note never to tell Judy, even by accident, and then went on to more pleasant thoughts.

What was he thinking? Garner wondered. He’s dropped it now; I might as well stop watching him.

But I’d give my soul if I could read minds for an hour, if I could pick the hour.

AT THE BOTTOM OF A HOLE

After more than a century of space travel, Man’s understanding of his own solar system was nearly complete. So he moved on to industrial development.

The next hundred years saw the evolution of a civilization in space. For reasons of economy the Belters concentrated on the wealth of the asteroids. With fusion-driven ships they could have mined the planets; but their techniques were more universally applicable in free fall and among the falling mountains. Only Mercury was rich enough to attract the Belt miners.

For a time Earth was the center of the space industries. But the lifestyles of Belter and flatlander were so different that a split was inevitable. The flatland phobia—the inability to tolerate even an orbital flight—was common on Earth, and remained so. And there were Belters who would never go anywhere near a planet.

Between Earth and the Belt there was economic wrestling, but never war. The cultures needed each other. And they were held together by a common bond: the conquest of the stars. The ramrobots—the unmanned Bussard ramjet probes—were launched during the mid twenty-first century.

By 2100 AD, five nearby solar systems held budding colonies: the worlds were Jinx, Wunderland, We Made It, Plateau, and Down. None of these worlds was entirely Earthlike. Those who programed the ramrobots had used insufficient imagination. Some results are detailed in this collection.

On Earth, three species of cetacean had been recognized as intelligent and admitted to the United Nations. Their lawsuit against the former whaling nations had not been resolved, and in fact never was. The cetaceans enjoyed the legal gymnastics too much ever to end it.

LN

Twelve stories below the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer’s Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, a sky alive with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors.

Lucas Garner was half-daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government’s invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first time, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience—a rare thing for a man seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil.

“There’s nothing immoral about smuggling,” said Lit Shaeffer.

The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn’t. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter’s occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don’t need houses. A Belter’s home is the inside of his pressure suit.

Garner returned his attention to his host. “You mean smuggling’s like picking pockets on Earth?”

“That’s just what I don’t mean,” Shaeffer said. The Belter reached into his coverall pocket, pulled out something flat and black, and laid it on the table. “I’ll want to play that in a minute. Garner, picking pockets is legal on Earth. Has to be, the way you crowd together. You couldn’t enforce a law against picking pockets. In the Belt smuggling is against the law, but it isn’t immoral. It’s like a flatlander forgetting to feed the parking meter. There’s no loss of self-respect. If you get caught you pay the fine and forget it.”

“Oh.”

“If a man wants to send his earnings through Ceres, that’s up to him. It costs him a straight thirty percent. If he thinks he can get past the goldskins, that too is his choice. But if we catch him we’ll confiscate his cargo, and everybody will be laughing at him. Nobody pities an inept smuggler.”

“Is that what Muller tried to do?”

“Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar. Then he did something stupid. He tried to whip around a hole.

“He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two gee. His mining ship wouldn’t throw more than point five gee, so eventually they’d pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he noticed Mars was just ahead of him.”

“The hole.” Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their slang.

“The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course. Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely around it, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom, God forbid. But miners don’t carry good autopilots. They carry cheap autopilots, and they stay clear of holes.”

“You’re leading up to something,” Garner said regretfully. “Business?”

“You’re too old to fool.”

Sometimes Garner believed that himself. Sometime between the First World War and the blowing of the second bubbleworld, Garner had learned to read faces as accurately as men read print. Often it saved time—and in Garner’s view his time was worth saving.

“Go on,” he said.

“Muller’s second thought was to use the hole. An in-and-out spin would change his course more than he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so Mars would hide him from Ceres when he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars’s atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander’s dreams.”

“Thanks a lot. Lit, isn’t Mars UN property?”

“Only because we never wanted it.”

Then Muller had been trespassing. “Go on. What happened to Muller?”

“I’ll let him tell it. This is his log.” Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man’s voice spoke.

April 20, 2112

The sky is flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky.

It’s the bottom of a hole, and I must have been crazy to risk it. But I’m here. I got down alive. I didn’t expect to, not there at the end.

It was one crazy landing.

Imagine a universe half of which has been replaced by an ocher abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you’ve ever heard before, like the sound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting warm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don’t have enough problems, the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur.

That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, the four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red.

That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola I’d be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling tank. My lifesystem wouldn’t keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn’t much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I’d seen to it the goldskins couldn’t come to me.

But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth.

But what then? I’d still have two weeks to live.

I remembered the old Lacis Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get the old lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere.

Right or wrong, I went down.

The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now I know why they call planet dwellers “flatlanders.” I feel like a gnat on a table.

I’m sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside.

Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ashtrays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came down the deep-radar showed me fragments of much larger craters deep under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway up the lifesystem.

I set down just beyond the lip of one of the largest craters, the one which houses the ancient flatlander base. From above the base looked like a huge transparent raincoat discarded on the cracked bottom.

It’s a weird place. But I’ll have to go out sometime; how else can I use the base lifesystem?

My Uncle Bat used to tell me stupidity carries the death penalty.

I’ll go outside tomorrow.

April 21, 2112

My clock says it’s morning. The Sun’s around on the other side of the planet, leaving the sky no longer bloody. It looks almost like space if you remember to look away from gravity, though the stars are dim, as if seen through fogged plastic. A big star has come over the horizon, brightening and dimming like a spinning rock. Must be Phobos, since it came from the sunset region.

I’m going out.

LATER:

A sort of concave glass shell surrounds the ship where the fusion flame splashed down. The ship’s lifesystem, the half that shows above the dust, rests in the center like a frog on a lilypad in Confinement Asteroid. The splashdown shell is all a spiderweb of cracks, but it’s firm enough to walk on.

Not so the dust.

The dust is like thick oil. The moment I stepped onto it I started to sink. I had to swim to where the crater rim slopes out like the shore of an island. It was hard work. Fortunately the splashdown shell reaches to the crater rock at one point, so I won’t have to do that again.

It’s queer, this dust. I doubt you could find its like anywhere in the system. It’s meteor debris, condensed from vaporized rock. On Earth dust this fine would be washed down to the sea by rain and turned to sedimentary rock, natural cement. On the moon there would be vacuum cementing, the bugaboo of the Belt’s microminiaturization industries. But here, there’s just enough “air” to be absorbed by the dust surface…to prevent vacuum cementing…and not nearly enough to stop a meteorite. Result: it won’t cement, nohow. So it behaves like viscous fluid. Probably the only rigid surfaces are the meteor craters and mountain ranges.

Going up the crater lip was rough. It’s all cracked, tilted blocks of volcanic glass. The edges are almost sharp. This crater must be geologically recent. At the bottom, half-submerged in a shallow lake of dust, is bubbletown. I can walk okay in this gravity; it’s something less than my ship’s gee max. But I almost broke my ankles a couple of times getting down over those tilted, slippery, dust-covered blocks. As a whole the crater is a smashed ashtray pieced loosely together like an impromptu jigsaw puzzle.

The bubble covers the base like a deflated tent, with the airmaking machinery just outside. The airmaker is in a great cube of black metal, blackened by seventy years of Martian atmosphere. It’s huge. It must have been a bitch to lift. How they moved that mass from Earth to Mars with only chemical and ion rockets, I’ll never know. Also why? What was on Mars that they wanted?

If ever there was a useless world, this is it. It’s not close to Earth, like the moon. The gravity’s inconveniently high. There are no natural resources. Lose your suit pressure and it’d be a race against time, whether you died of blowout or of red fuming nitrogen dioxide eating your lungs.

The wells?

Somewhere on Mars there are wells. The first expedition found one in the 1990s. A mummified something was nearby. It exploded when it touched water, so nobody ever knew more about it, including just how old it was.

Did they expect to find live Martians? If so, so what?

Outside the bubble are two two-seater Marsbuggies. They have an enormous wheelbase and wide, broad wheels, probably wide enough to keep the buggy above the dust while it’s moving. You’d have to be careful where you stopped. I won’t be using them anyway.

The airmaker will work, I think, if I can connect it to the ship’s power system. Its batteries are drained, and its fusion plant must be mainly lead by now. Thousands of tons of breathing-air are all about me, tied up in nitrogen dioxide, NO_2. The airmaker will release oxygen and nitrogen, and will also pick up what little water vapor there is. I’ll pull hydrogen out of the water for fuel. But can I get the power? There may be cables in the base.

It’s for sure I can’t call for help. My antennas burned off coming down.

I looked through the bubble and saw a body, male, a few feet away. He’d died of blowout. Odds are I’ll find a rip in the bubble when I get around to looking.

Wonder what happened here?

April 22, 2112

I went to sleep at first sunlight. Mars’s rotation is just a fraction longer than a ship’s day, which is convenient. I can work when the stars show and the dust doesn’t, and that’ll keep me sane. But I’ve had breakfast and done clean-ship chores, and still it’ll be two hours before sundown. Am I a coward? I can’t go out there in the light.

Near the sun the sky is like fresh blood, tinged by nitrogen dioxide. On the other side it’s almost black. Not a sign of a star. The desert is flat, broken only by craters and by a regular pattern of crescent dunes so shallow that they can be seen only near the horizon. Something like a straight lunar mountain range angles away into the desert; but it’s terribly eroded, like something that died a long time ago. Could it be the tilted lip of an ancient asteroid crater? The Gods must have hated Mars, to put it right in the middle of the Belt. This shattered, pulverized land is like a symbol of age and corruption. Erosion seems to live only at the bottom of holes.

LATER:

Almost dawn. I can see red washing out the stars.

After sundown I entered the base through the airlock, which still stands. Ten bodies are sprawled in what must have been the village square. Another was halfway into a suit in the administration building, and the twelfth was a few feet from the bubble wall, where I saw him yesterday. A dozen bodies, and they all died of blowout: explosive decompression if you want to be technical.

The circular area under the bubble is only half full of buildings. The rest is a carefully fused sand floor. Other buildings lie in stacks of walls, ceilings, floors, ready to be put up. I suppose the base personnel expected others from Earth.

One of the buildings held electrical wiring. I’ve hooked a cable to the airmaker battery, and was able to adapt the other end to the contact on my fusion plant. There’s a lot of sparking, but the airmaker works. I’m letting it fill the stack of empty O-tanks I found against a pile of walls. The nitrogen dioxide is draining into the bubble.

I know now what happened to the flatlander base.

Bubbletown died by murder. No question of it. When nitrogen dioxide started pouring into the bubble I saw dust blowing out from the edge of town. There was a rip. It was sharp-edged, as if cut by a knife. I can mend it if I can find a bubble repair kit. There must be one somewhere.

Meanwhile I’m getting oxygen and water. The oxygen tanks I can empty into the lifesystem as they fill. The ship takes it back out of the air and stores it. If I can find a way to get the water here I can just pour it into the john. Can I carry it here in the O-tanks?

April 23, 2112

Dawn.

The administration building is also a tape library. They kept a record of the base doings, very complete and so far very boring. It reads like ship’s log sounds, but more gossipy and more detailed. Later I’ll read it all the way through.

I found some bubble plastic and contact cement and used them to patch the rip. The bubble still wouldn’t inflate. So I went out and found two more rips just like the first. I patched them and looked for more. Found three. When I got them fixed it was nearly sunup.

The O-tanks hold water, but I have to heat them to boil the water to get it out. That’s hard work. Question: is it easier to do that or to repair the dome and do my electrolysis inside? How many rips are there?

I’ve found six. So how many killers were there? No more than three. I’ve accounted for twelve inside, and according to the log there were fifteen in the second expedition.

No sign of the goldskins. If they’d guessed I was here they’d have come by now. With several months’ worth of air in my lifesystem, I’ll be home free once I get out of this hole.

April 24, 2112

Two more rips in the bubble, a total of eight. They’re about twenty feet apart, evenly spaced around the transparent plastic fabric. It looks like at least one man ran around the dome slashing at the fabric until it wasn’t taut enough to cut. I mended the rips. When I left the bubble it was swelling with air.

I’m halfway through the town log, and nobody’s seen a Martian yet. I was right, that’s what they came for. Thus far they’ve found three more wells. Like the first, these are made of cut diamond building blocks, fairly large, very well worn, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Two of the four have dirty nitrogen dioxide at the bottoms. The others are dry. Each of the four has a “dedication block” covered with queer, partially eroded writing. From a partial analysis of the script, it seems that the wells were actually crematoriums: a deceased Martian would explode when he touched water in the nitrogen dioxide at the bottom. It figures. Martians wouldn’t have fire.

I still wonder why they came, the men of the base. What could Martians do for them? If they wanted someone to talk to, someone not human, there were dolphins and killer whales right in their own oceans. The trouble they took! And the risks! Just to get from one hole to another!

April 24, 2112

Strange. For the first time since the landing, I did not return to the ship when the sky turned light. When I did start back the sun was up. It showed as I went over the rim. I stood there between a pair of sharp obsidian teeth, staring down at my ship.

It looked like the entrance to Confinement Asteroid.

Confinement is where they take women when they get pregnant: a bubble of rock ten miles long and five miles across, spinning on its axis to produce one gee of outward pull. The children have to stay there for the first year, and the law says they have to spend a month out of each year there until they’re fifteen. I’ve a wife named Letty waiting there now, waiting for the year to pass so she can leave with our daughter Janice. Most miners, they pay the fatherhood fee in one lump sum if they’ve got the money; it’s about sixty thousand commercials, so some have to pay in installments, and sometimes it’s the woman who pays; but when they pay they forget about it and leave the women to raise the kids. But I’ve been thinking about Letty. And Janice. The monopoles in my hold would buy gifts for Letty, and raise Janice with enough left over so she could do some traveling, and still I’d have enough commercials left for more children. I’d have them with Letty, if she’d agree. I think she would.

How’d I get onto that? As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, my ship looks like the entrance to Confinement—or to Farmer’s Asteroid, or any underground city. With the fuel tanks gone there’s nothing left but the drive and the lifesystem and a small magnetically insulated cargo hold. Only the top half of the lifesystem shows above the sea of dust, a blunt steel bubble with a thick door, not streamlined like a ship of Earth. The heavy drive tube hangs from the bottom, far beneath the dust. I wonder how deep the dust is.

The splashdown shell will leave a rim of congealed glass around my lifesystem. I wonder if it’ll affect my takeoff?

Anyway, I’m losing my fear of daylight.

Yesterday I thought the bubble was inflating. It wasn’t. More rips were hidden under the pool of dust, and when the pressure built up the dust blew away and down went the bubble. I repaired four rips today before sunlight caught me.

One man couldn’t have made all those slashes.

That fabric’s tough. Would a knife go through it? Or would you need something else, like an electric carving knife or a laser?

April 25, 2112

I spent most of today reading the bubbletown log.

There was a murder. Tensions among fifteen men with no women around can grow pretty fierce. One day a man named Carter killed a man named Harness, then ran for his life in one of the Marsbuggies, chased by the victim’s brother. Neither came back alive. They must have run out of air.

Three dead out of fifteen leaves twelve.

Since I counted twelve bodies, who’s left to slash the dome?

Martians?

In the entire log I find no mention of a Martian being seen. Bubbletown never ran across any Martian artifact, except the wells. If there are Martians, where are they? Where are their cities? Mars was subjected to all kinds of orbital reconnaissance in the early days. Even a city as small as bubbletown would have been seen.

Maybe there are no cities. But where do the diamond blocks come from? Diamonds as big as the well material don’t form naturally. It takes a respectable technology to make them that big. Which implies cities—I think.

That mummy. Could it have been hundreds of thousands of years old? A man couldn’t last that long on Mars, because the water in his body would react with the nitrogen dioxide around him. On the Moon, he could last millions of years. The mummified Martian’s body chemistry was and is a complete mystery, barring the napalm-like explosion when water touched it. Perhaps it was that durable, and perhaps one of the pair who left to die returned to cut the dome instead, and perhaps I’m seeing goblins. This is the place for it. If I ever get out of here, you try and catch me near another hole.

April 26, 2112

The sun shows clear and bright above a sharp-edged horizon. I stand at the port looking out. Nothing seems strange anymore. I’ve lived here all my life. The gravity is settling in my bones; I no longer stumble as I go over the crater lip.

The oxygen in my tanks will take me anywhere. Give me hydrogen and you’ll find me on Luna, selling my monopoles without benefit of a middleman. But it comes slowly. I can get hydrogen only by carrying water here in the base O-tanks and then electrolyzing it into the fuel-cooling tank, where it liquefies.

The desert is empty except for a strange rosy cloud that covers one arm of horizon. Dust? Probably. I heard the wind singing faintly through my helmet as I returned to the ship. Naturally the sound can’t get through the hull.

The desert is empty.

I can’t repair the bubble. Today I found four more rips before giving up. They must circle the bubble all the way round. One man couldn’t have done it. Two men couldn’t.

It looks like Martians. But where are they?

They could walk on the sand, if their feet were flat and broad and webbed…and there’d be no footprints. The dust hides everything. If there were cities here the dust must have covered them ages ago. The mummy wouldn’t have shown webbing; it would have been worn away.

Now it’s starlessly black outside. The thin wind must have little trouble lifting the dust. I doubt it will bury me. Anyway the ship would rise to the surface.

Gotta sleep.

April 27, 2112

It’s oh-four-hundred by the clock, and I haven’t slept at all. The sun is directly overhead, blinding bright in a clear red sky. No more dust storm.

The Martians exist. I’m sure of it. Nobody else was left to murder the base.

But why don’t they show themselves?

I’m going to the base, and I’m taking the log with me.

I’m in the village square. Oddly enough, it was easier making the trip in sunlight. You can see what you’re stepping on, even in shadow, because the sky diffuses the light a little, like indirect lighting in a dome city.

The crater lip looks down on me from all sides, splintered shards of volcanic glass. It’s a wonder I haven’t cut my suit open yet, making that trip twice a day.

Why did I come here? I don’t know. My eyes feel rusty, and there’s too much light. Mummies surround me, with faces twisted by anguish and despair, and with fluids dried on their mouths. Blowout is an ugly death. Ten mummies here, and one by the edge of town, and one in the admin building.

I can see all of the crater lip from here. The buildings are low bungalows, and the square is big. True, the deflated bubble distorts things a little, but not much.

So. The Martians came over the lip in a yelling swarm or a silent one, brandishing sharp things. Nobody would have heard them if they yelled.

But ten men were in a position to see them.

Eleven men. There’s a guy at the edge…no, they might have come from the other direction. But still, ten men. And they just waited here? I don’t believe it.

The twelfth man. He’s half into a suit. What did he see that they didn’t?

I’m going to go look at him.

By God, I was right. He’s got two fingers on a zipper, and he’s pulling down. He’s not half into a suit, he’s half out of it!

No more goblins.

But who cut the dome?

The hell with it. I’m sleepy.

April 28, 2112

A day and a half of log to catch up on.

My cooling tank is full, or nearly. I’m ready to try the might of the goldskins again. There’s air enough to let me take my time, and less chance of a radar spotting me if I move slowly. Goodbye, Mars, lovely paradise for the manic-depressive.

That’s not funny. Consider the men in the base.

Item: it took a lot of knives to make those slits.

Item: everyone was inside.

Item: no Martians. They would have been seen.

Therefore the slits were made from inside. If someone was running around making holes in the bubble, why didn’t someone stop him?

It looks like mass suicide. Facts are facts. They must have spread evenly out around the dome, slashed, and then walked to the town square against a driving wind of breathing-air roaring out behind them. Why? Ask ’em. The two who aren’t in the square may have been dissenters; if so, it didn’t help them.

Being stuck at the bottom of a hole is not good for a man. Look at the insanity records on Earth.

I am now going back to a minute-to-minute log.

1120

Ready to prime drive. The dust won’t hurt the fusion tube, nothing could do that, but backblast might damage the rest of the ship. Have to risk it.

1124

The first shot of plutonium didn’t explode. Priming again.

1130

The drive’s dead. I can’t understand it. My instruments swear the fusion shield is drawing power, and when I push the right button the hot uranium gas sprays in there. What’s wrong?

Maybe a break in the primer line. How am I going to find out? The primer line’s way down there under the dust.

1245

I’ve sprayed enough uranium into the fusion tube to make a pinch bomb. By now the dust must be hotter than Washington.

How am I going to repair the primer line? Lift the ship in my strong, capable hands? Swim down through the dust and do it by touch? I haven’t anything that’ll do a welding job under ten feet of fine dust.

I think I’ve had it.

Maybe there’s a way to signal the goldskins. A big, black SOS spread on the dust…if I could find something black to spread around. Have to search the base again.

1900

Nothing in the town. Signaling devices in plenty, for suits and Marsbuggies and orbital ships, but only the laser was meant to reach into space. I can’t fix a seventy-year-old comm laser with spit and wire and good intentions.

I’m going off minute-to-minute. There’ll be no takeoff.

April 29, 2112

I’ve been stupid.

Those ten suicides. What did they do with their knives after they were through cutting? Where did they get them in the first place? Kitchen knives won’t cut bubble plastic. A laser might, but there can’t be more than a couple of portable lasers in the base. I haven’t found any.

And the airmaker’s batteries were stone dead.

Maybe the Martians kill to steal power. They wouldn’t have fire. Then they took my uranium for the same reason, slicing my primer line under the sand and running it into their own container.

But how would they get down there? Dive under the dust?

Oh.

I’m getting out of here.

I made it to the crater. God knows why they didn’t stop me. Don’t they care? They’ve got my primer fuel.

They’re under the dust. They live there, safe from meteors and violent temperature changes, and they build their cities there too. Maybe they’re heavier than the dust, so they can walk around on the bottom.

Why, there must be a whole ecology down there! Maybe one-celled plants on top, to get energy from the sun, to be driven down by currents in the dust and by dust storms, to feed intermediate stages of life. Why didn’t anybody look? Oh, I wish I could tell someone!

I haven’t time for this. The town O-tanks won’t fit my suit valves, and I can’t go back to the ship. Within the next twenty-four hours I’ve got to repair and inflate the bubble, or die of runout.

LATER:

Done. I’ve got my suit off, and I’m scratching like a madman. There were just three slits left to patch, none at all along the edge of the bubble where I found the lone mummy. I patched those three and the bubble swelled up like instant city.

When enough water flows in I’ll take a bath. But I’ll take it in the square, where I can see the whole rim.

I wonder how long it would take a Martian to get over the rim and down here to the bubble?

Wondering won’t help. I could still be seeing goblins.

April 30, 2112

The water feels wonderful. At least these early tourists took some luxuries with them.

I can see perfectly in all directions. Time has filmed the bubble a little, merely enough to be annoying. The sky is jet black, cut raggedly in half by the crater rim. I’ve turned on all the base lights. They light the interior of the crater, dimly, but well enough so I’d see anything creeping down on me. Unfortunately they also dim out the stars.

The goblins can’t get me while I’m awake.

But I’m getting sleepy.

Is that a ship? No, just a meteor. The sky’s lousy with meteors. I’ve got nothing to do but talk to myself until something happens.

LATER:

I strolled up to the rim to see if my ship was still there. The Martians might have dragged it into the dust. They hadn’t, and there’s no sign of tampering.

Am I seeing goblins? I could find out. All I’d have to do is peep into the base fusion plant. Either there’s a pile there, mostly lead by now…or the pile was stolen seventy years ago. Either way the residual radiation would punish my curiosity.

I’m watching the sun rise through the bubble wall. It has a strange beauty, unlike anything I’ve seen in space. I’ve seen Saturn from an infinity of angles when I pulled monopoles in the rings, but it can’t compare to this.

Now I know I’m crazy. It’s a hole! I’m at the bottom of the lousy hole!

The Sun writes a jagged white line along the crater rim. I can see the whole rim from here, no fear of that. No matter how fast they move, I can get into my suit before they get down to me.

It would be good to see my enemy.

Why did they come here, the fifteen men who lived and died here? I know why I’m here: for love of money. Them too? A hundred years ago the biggest diamonds men could make looked like coarse sand. They may have come after the diamond wells. But travel was fiendishly expensive then. Could they have made a profit?

Or did they think they could develop Mars the way they developed the asteroids? Ridiculous! But they didn’t have my hindsight. And holes can be useful…like the raw lead deposits along Mercury’s dawnside crescent. Pure lead, condensed from dayside vapor, free for the hauling. We’d be doing the same with Martian diamonds if it weren’t so cheap to make them.

Here’s the Sun. An anticlimax: I can’t look into it, though it’s dimmer than the rock miner’s Sun. No more postcard scenery till—

Wups.

I’d never reach my suit. One move and the bubble will be a sieve. Just now they’re as motionless as I am, staring at me without eyes. I wonder how they sense me? Their spears are poised and ready. Can they really puncture bubble fabric? But the Martians must know their own strength, and they’ve done this before.

All this time I’ve been waiting for them to swarm over the rim. They came out of the dust pool in the bottom of the crater. I should have realized the obsidian would be as badly cracked down there as elsewhere.

They do look like goblins.

For moments the silence was broken only by the twin humming of a nearby bumblebee and a distant tractor. Then Lit reached to turn off the log. He said, “We’d have saved him if he could have held out.”

“You knew he was there?”

“Yah. The Deimos scope watched him land. We sent in a routine request for permission to land on UN property. Unfortunately flatlanders can’t move as fast as a drugged snail, and we knew of no reason to hurry them up. A telescope would have tracked Muller if he’d tried to leave.”

“Was he nuts?”

“Oh, the Martians were real enough. But we didn’t know that until way too late. We saw the bubble inflate and stay that way for a while, and we saw it deflate all of a sudden. It looked like Muller’d had an accident. We broke the law and sent a ship down to get him if he was still alive. And that’s why I’m telling you all this, Garner. As First Speaker for the Belt Political Section, I hereby confess that two Belt ships have trespassed on United Nations property.”

“You had good reasons. Go on.”

“You’d have been proud of him, Garner. He didn’t run for his suit; he knew perfectly well it was too far away. Instead, he ran toward an O-tank full of water. The Martians must have slashed the moment he turned, but he reached the tank, stepped through one of the holes and turned the O-tank on the Martians. In the low pressure it was like using a fire hose. He got six before he fell.”

“They burned?”

“They did. But not completely. There are some remains. We took three bodies, along with their spears, and left the others in situ. You want the corpses?”

“Damn right.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, Lit?”

“Why do you want them? We took three mummies and three spears as souvenirs. To you they’re not souvenirs. It was a Belter who died down there.”

“I’m sorry, Lit, but those bodies are important. We can find out what a Martian’s made of before we go down. It could make all the difference.”

“Go down.” Lit made a rude noise. “Luke, why do you want to go down there? What could you possibly want from Mars? Revenge? A million tons of dust?”

“Abstract knowledge.”

“For what?”

“Lit, you amaze me. Why did Earth go to space in the first place, if not for abstract knowledge?”

Words crowded over each other to reach Lit’s mouth. They jammed in his throat, and he was speechless. He spread his hands, made frantic gestures, gulped twice, and said, “It’s obvious!”

“Tell me slow. I’m a little dense.”

“There’s everything in space. Monopoles. Metal. Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds of bracing girders. Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen. Controlled environments—”

“Was it all that obvious before we got here?”

“Of course it was!” Lit glared at his visitor. The glare took in Garner’s withered legs, his drooping, mottled, hairless skin, the decades that showed in his eyes—and Lit remembered his visitor’s age. “…Wasn’t it?”

INTENT TO DECEIVE

A waiter came to meet them as they landed. It crossed the restaurant like a chess pawn come to life, slid to a graceful stop on the carport balcony, hesitated long enough to be sure it had their attention, then moved inside at a slow walking pace.

The sound of its motion was a gentle whisper of breeze from under the lip of its ground-effect skirt. It guided them across the floor of the Red Planet, between and around occupied tables, empty tables, tables which displayed decorative meats and bowls of flowers, and other whispering robot waiters. At a table for two on the far side of the room, it deftly removed one chair to accommodate Lucas Garner’s travel chair. Somehow it had recognized Luke as a paraplegic. It held the other chair for Lloyd Masney to sit down.

The murals on the restaurant walls were dull red and bright silver: a Ray Bradbury Mars, with the silver spires of an ancient Martian city nestling among red sands. A straight canal dwindled into the distance at both sides of the big room. Its silver waters actually crossed the floor and were in turn crossed by bridges. Attenuated, fragile Martians moved through the streets of the mural. Sometimes they looked curiously out at the customers, the human intruders in their make-believe world.

“Strange place,” said Masney. He was a big, compact man with white hair and a bushy white moustache.

Luke didn’t answer. When Masney glanced up he was startled by his friend’s malevolent expression. “What’s wrong?” he asked, and turned to follow Luke’s eyes.

Luke was glaring his extreme distaste at a target which could only have been the robot waiter.

The waiter was a standard make. Below a blank spherical head was a body cylindrical for most of its length. The arms it had used to adjust Masney’s chair for him had already vanished into panels in its torso, to join other specialized arms and hands and interior shelves for carrying food. Like all the other waiters, it had been painted in an abstract pattern of dull red and bright silver to match the murals. The last foot of the robot’s cylindrical torso was a short, flaring skirt. Like Luke’s travel chair, the waiter moved on a ground-effect air cushion.

“What’s wrong?” Masney repeated.

“Nothing,” said Luke. He picked up the menu.

The robot waited for their orders. Motionless, with all its arms retracted, it had become a pop-art barber pole.

“Come on, Luke. Why were you looking at the waiter like that?”

“I don’t like robot waiters.”

“Mph? Why not?”

“You grew up with ’em. I didn’t. I’ve never got used to them.”

“What’s to get used to? They’re waiters. They bring food.”

“All right,” said Luke, studying the menu.

He was old. It was not spinal injury that had cost him the use of his legs these past ten years. Too many spinal nerves had worn out with age. A goatee had once adorned his chin, but now his chin was as bald as his brows and scalp. His face, satanic in its wrinkled age, attracted instant attention, so that his every vagrant thought seemed exaggerated in his expression. The loose skin of his arms and shoulders half hid the muscles of a wrestler: the only part of him that seemed young.

“Every time I think I know you,” said Masney, “you surprise me. You’re a hundred and seventy-four now, aren’t you?”

“You sent me a birthday card.”

“Oh, I can count. But I can’t grasp it. You’re almost twice my age. How long ago did they invent robot waiters?”

“Waiters weren’t invented. They evolved, like computers.”

“When?”

“You were just learning to spell when the first all-automated restaurant opened in New York.”

Masney smiled and shook his head gently. “All that time, and you never got used to them. Conservative, that’s you.”

Luke put the menu down. “If you must know, something happened to me once in connection with robot waiters. I had your job about then.”

“Oh?” Lloyd Masney was Superintendent of Police for Greater Los Angeles. He’d taken his desk from Luke after Luke had resigned to become an Arm of the UN, forty years back.

“I was just getting used to the job; I’d only held it a couple of years. When was it? I can’t remember; around 2025, I think. They were just introducing automated restaurants. They were just introducing a lot of things.”

“Weren’t they always?”

“Naturally, naturally. Quit interrupting. Around ten that morning I took a cigarette break. I had the habit of doing that every ten minutes. I was thinking about getting back to work when Dreamer Glass walked in. Old friend, Dreamer. I’d sent him up for a ten-year stretch for false advertising. He’d just got out and he was visiting some old friends.”

“With a firegun?”

Luke’s smile was a startling flash of new white teeth. “Oh, no. Dreamer was a nice guy. Little too much imagination, that’s all. We put him away for telling television audiences that his brand of dishwashing liquid was good for the hands. We tested it, and it wasn’t. I always thought he got too stiff a sentence, but—well, the Intent-to-Deceive laws were new then, and we had to bear down hard on the test cases so John Q would know we meant it.”

“Nowadays he’d get the organ banks.”

“We didn’t put criminals in the organ banks in those days. I wish we’d never started.

“So Dreamer went to jail on my evidence. Five years later I was Superintendent. Another two years and he was out on parole. I was no busier than usual the day he showed up, so I dug out the guests’ bottle, and we poured it in our coffee. And talked. Dreamer wanted me to fill him in on the last ten years. He’d been talking to other friends, so he knew something. But there were odd gaps that could have gotten him in trouble. He knew about the Jupiter probe, for instance, but he’d never heard of hard and soft plith.

“I wish I’d never mentioned robot restaurants.

“At first he thought I was talking about a bigger and better automat. Then when he got the idea, he was wild to see it.

“So I took him to lunch at the Herr Ober, which was a few blocks from the old Police Headquarters Building. Herr Ober was the first all-automated restaurant in Ellay. The only human beings involved were the maintenance crew, and they only showed up once a week. Everything else, from the kitchen to the hat-check girl, was machinery. I’d never eaten there—”

“Then how did you know so much about it?”

“We’d had to chase a man in there a month earlier. He’d picked up a kid for ransom, and he still had her for a hostage. At least, we thought he did. Another story. Before I could figure how to get at him, I’d had to study the Herr Ober top to bottom.” Luke snorted. “Look at that metal idiot. He’s still waiting for our order. You! Get us two Vurguuz martinis.” The pop-art barber pole rose an inch from the floor and slid off. “Where was I?

“Oh, yeah. The place wasn’t crowded, which was a break. We picked a table, and I showed Dreamer how to punch the summons button to call a waiter. We already called them waiters, but they didn’t look anything like the ones here. They were nothing but double-decker serving trays on wheels, with senses and motors and a typewriter all packed into one end.”

“Ran on wheels, too, I’ll bet.”

“Yah. Noisy. But in those days it was impressive. Dreamer was bug-eyed. When that animated tray came for our orders he just stared. I ordered for both of us.

“We downed our drinks and had another round. Dreamer told me about the Advertisers’ Club that somehow got formed in his cell block. The cigarette men could have controlled it to the eyes, there were so many of them, but they couldn’t agree on anything. What they really wanted to do was form a convict’s lobby in Washington.”

The waiter appeared with the martinis.

“Anyway, we had our drinks and ordered. Identical meals, because Dreamer still wasn’t capable of making a decision. He kept staring around, grinning.

“The waiter brought us shrimp cocktails. While we were eating, Dreamer tried to pump me on who might have the advertising concession on the robots. Not on the restaurant, but on all the automatic machinery. There he was, knowing nothing about computers, but all ready to go out and sell them. I tried to tell him he’d picked a good way to get back in Quentin, but he wouldn’t listen.

“We finished the shrimp, and the waiter brought us two more shrimp cocktails. Dreamer said, ‘What’s this?’

“‘I must have typed wrong,’ I told him. ‘I wanted two lunches, but the damn thing is bringing us two lunches each.’”

“Dreamer laughed. ‘I’ll eat them both,’ he said, and did. ‘Ten years is a long time between shrimp cocktails,’ he said.

“The waiter took our empty cups away and brought us two more shrimp cocktails.

“‘This is too much of a good thing,’ said Dreamer. ‘Where do I go to talk to the manager?’

“‘I told you, it’s all automatic. The manager’s a computer in the basement.’

“‘Does it have an audio circuit for complaints?’

“‘I think so.’

“‘Where do I find it?’

“I looked around, trying to remember. ‘Over there. Past the payment counter. But I don’t—’

“Dreamer got up. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said.

“He was, too. He came back within seconds, and he was shaking. ‘I couldn’t get out of the dining room,’ he told me. ‘The payment counter wouldn’t let me by. There was a barrier. I tried to give it some money, but nothing happened. When I tried to go over the barrier, I got an electric shock!’

“‘That’s for deadbeats. It won’t let you by until you pay for your lunch. You can’t pay until you get a bill from the waiter.’

“‘Well, let’s pay and get out. This place scares me.’

“So I pushed the summons button, and the waiter came. Before I could reach the typer it had given us two more shrimp cocktails and moved away.

“‘This is ridiculous,’ said Dreamer. ‘Look, suppose I get up and stand around at the other side of the table. That way you can reach the typer when it delivers the next round, because I’ll be blocking it from leaving.’

“We tried it. The thing wouldn’t come to our table until Dreamer sat down. Didn’t recognize him standing up, maybe. Then it served two more shrimp cocktails, and Dreamer got up quick and moved behind it. I had my hands on the typer when it backed off and knocked Dreamer flat.

“He got so mad, he stood up and kicked the first waiter that came by. The waiter shocked him good, and while he was getting up the thing tossed him a printed message to the effect that robot waiters were expensive and delicate and he shouldn’t do that.”

“That’s true,” Masney said, deadpan. “He shouldn’t.”

“I’d have been helping him do it, but I wasn’t sure what those machines would do next. So I stayed in my seat and planned what I’d do to the guy who invented robot waiters, if I ever got out of there to track him down.

“Dreamer got up shaking his head. Then he started trying to get help from the other diners. I could have told him that wouldn’t work. Nobody wanted to get involved. In the big cities they never do. Finally one of the waiters shot a slip at him that told him to stop bothering the other diners, only it was more polite than that.

“He came back to our table, but this time he didn’t sit down. He looked scared. ‘Listen, Garner,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try the kitchen. You stay here. I’ll bring help.’ And he turned and started away.

“I yelled, ‘Come back here! We’ll be all right if—’ But by that time he was out of earshot, heading for the kitchen door. I know he heard me shout. He just didn’t want to be stopped.

“The door was only four feet tall, because it was built for robots. Dreamer ducked under it and was gone. I didn’t dare go after him. If he made it, fine, I’d have help. I didn’t think he would.

“There was one more thing I wanted to try. I pushed the summons button, and when the waiter came with two more shrimp cocktails I typed ‘Phone’ before it could get away.”

“To phone Headquarters? You should have tried that earlier.”

“Sure. But it didn’t work. The waiter scooted off and brought me another shrimp cocktail.

“So I waited. By and by everyone disappeared, and I was alone in the Herr Ober. Whenever I got hungry enough I’d eat some crackers or a shrimp cocktail. The waiter kept bringing me more water and more shrimp cocktails, so that was all right.

“I left notes on some tables, so that when the dinnertime crowd showed up they’d be warned. But the waiters removed the notes as fast as I wrote them. Keeping things neat. I quit that and waited for rescue.

“Nobody came to rescue me. Dreamer never came back.

“Six o’clock, and the place filled up again. Along about nine, three couples at a nearby table started getting an endless supply of canapes Lorenzo. I watched them. Eventually they got so mad that the six of them circled the waiter and picked it up. The waiter spun its wheels madly, and then it shocked them and they dropped it. It fell on one man’s foot. Everyone in the place panicked. When the dust cleared there were only the seven of us left.

“The others were trying to decide what to do about the guy with his foot under the waiter. They were afraid to touch the waiter, of course. It wouldn’t have taken my order, because I wasn’t at one of its tables, but I got one of the others to type an order for aspirin, and off it went.

“So I got the six of them back to their table and told them not to move. One of the girls had sleeping pills. I fed three to the guy with the smashed foot.

“And so we waited.”

“I hate to ask,” said Masney, “but what were you waiting for?”

“Closing time!”

“Oh, of course. Then what?”

“At two o’clock our waiters stopped bringing us shrimp cocktails and canapes Lorenzo and brought us our bills. You wouldn’t believe what they charged me for all those shrimp cocktails…We paid our bills and left, carrying the guy with the smashed foot. We took him to a hospital, and then we got to a phone and called everybody in sight. Next day the Herr Ober was closed for repairs. It never reopened.”

“What about Dreamer?”

“He’s one reason the place never reopened. Never found him.”

“He couldn’t just disappear.”

“Couldn’t he?”

“Could he?”

“Sometimes I think he must have taken advantage of the publicity. Started life over somewhere else, with no prison record. And then I remember that he went into a fully automated kitchen, through a door that wasn’t built for humans. That kitchen machinery could handle full-sized sides of beef. Dreamer obviously wasn’t a robot. What would the kitchen machinery take him for?”

Masney thought about it.

It came to Masney as they were finishing desert.

“Mmb!” he said. “Mmmb!” And he swallowed frantically. “You fink! You were sent straight from Homicide branch to Superintendent. You never had anything to do with the Intent to Deceive Branch!”

“I thought you’d catch that.”

“But why would you lie?”

“You kept bugging me about why I hated robot waiters. I had to say something.”

“All right. You conned me. Now, why do you hate robot waiters?”

“I don’t. You just happened to look up at the wrong time. I was thinking how silly our waiter looked in his ground-effect miniskirt.”

CLOAK OF ANARCHY

Square in the middle of what used to be the San Diego Freeway, I leaned back against a huge, twisted oak. The old bark was rough and powdery against my bare back. There was dark green shade shot with tight parallel beams of white gold. Long grass tickled my legs.

Forty yards away across a wide strip of lawn was a clump of elms, and a small grandmotherly woman sitting on a green towel. She looked like she’d grown there. A stalk of grass protruded between her teeth. I felt we were kindred spirits, and once when I caught her eye I wiggled a forefinger at her, and she waved back.

In a minute now I’d have to be getting up. Jill was meeting me at the Wilshire exits in half an hour. But I’d started walking at the Sunset Boulevard ramps, and I was tired. A minute more…

It was a good place to watch the world rotate.

A good day for it, too. No clouds at all. On this hot blue summer afternoon, King’s Free Park was as crowded as it ever gets.

Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the usual number of copseyes floated overhead, waiting. Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each a television eye and a sonic stunner, each a hookup to police headquarters, they were there to enforce the law of the Park.

No violence.

No hand to be raised against another—and no other laws whatever. Life was often entertaining in a Free Park.

North toward Sunset, a man carried a white rectangular sign, blank on both sides. He was parading back and forth in front of a square-jawed youth on a plastic box, who was trying to lecture him on the subject of fusion power and the heat pollution problem. Even this far away I could hear the conviction and the dedication in his voice.

South, a handful of yelling marksmen were throwing rocks at a copseye, directed by a gesticulating man with wild black hair. The golden basketball was dodging the rocks, but barely. Some cop was baiting them. I wondered where they had got the rocks. Rocks were scarce in King’s Free Park.

The black-haired man looked familiar. I watched him and his horde chasing the copseye…then forgot them when a girl walked out of a clump of elms.

She was lovely. Long, perfect legs, deep red hair worn longer than shoulder length, the face of an arrogant angel, and a body so perfect that it seemed unreal, like an adolescent’s daydream. Her walk showed training; possibly she was a model, or dancer. Her only garment was a cloak of glowing blue velvet.

It was fifteen yards long, that cloak. It trailed back from two big gold disks that were stuck somehow to the skin of her shoulders. It trailed back and back, floating at a height of five feet all the way, twisting and turning to trace her path through the trees. She seemed like the illustration in a book of fairy tales, bearing in mind that the original fairy tales were not intended for children.

Neither was she. You could hear neck vertebrae popping all over the Park. Even the rock-throwers had stopped to watch.

She could sense the attention, or hear it in a whisper of sighs. It was what she was here for. She strolled along with a condescending angel’s smile on her face, not overdoing the walk, but letting it flow. She turned, regardless of whether there were obstacles to avoid, so that fifteen yards of flowing cloak could follow the curve.

I smiled, watching her go. She was lovely from the back, with dimples.

The man who stepped up to her a little farther on was the same one who had led the rock-throwers. Wild black hair and beard, hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes, a diffident smile and a diffident walk…Ron Cole. Of course.

I didn’t hear what he said to the girl in the cloak, but I saw the result. He flinched, then turned abruptly and walked away with his eyes on his feet.

I got up and moved to intercept him. “Don’t take it personal,” I said.

He looked up, startled. His voice, when it came, was bitter. “How should I take it?”

“She’d have turned any man off the same way. She’s to look at, not to touch.”

“You know her?”

“Never saw her before in my life.”

“Then—?”

“Her cloak. Now you must have noticed her cloak.”

The tail end of her cloak was just passing us, its folds rippling an improbably deep, rich blue. Ronald Cole smiled as if it hurt his face. “Yah.”

“All right. Now suppose you made a pass, and suppose the lady liked your looks and took you up on it. What would she do next? Bearing in mind that she can’t stop walking even for a second.”

He thought it over first, then asked, “Why not?”

“If she stops walking, she loses the whole effect. Her cloak just hangs there like some kind of tail. It’s supposed to wave. If she lies down, it’s even worse. A cloak floating at five feet, then swooping into a clump of bushes and bobbing frantically—” Ron laughed helplessly in falsetto. I said, “See? Her audience would get the giggles. That’s not what she’s after.”

He sobered. “But if she really wanted to, she wouldn’t care about…oh. Right. She must have spent a fortune to get that effect.”

“Sure. She wouldn’t ruin it for Jacques Casanova himself.” I thought unfriendly thoughts toward the girl in the cloak. There are polite ways to turn down a pass. Ronald Cole was easy to hurt.

I asked, “Where did you get the rocks?”

“Rocks? Oh, we found a place where the center divider shows through. We knocked off some chunks of concrete.” Ron looked down the length of the Park just as a kid bounced a missile off a golden ball. “They got one! Come on!”

The fastest commercial shipping that ever sailed was the clipper ship; yet the world stopped building them after just twenty-five years. Steam had come. Steam was faster, safer, more dependable, and cheaper.

The freeways served America for almost fifty years. Then modern transportation systems cleaned the air and made traffic jams archaic and left the nation with an embarrassing problem. What to do with ten thousand miles of unsightly abandoned freeways?

King’s Free Park had been part of the San Diego Freeway, the section between Sunset and the Santa Monica interchange. Decades ago the concrete had been covered with topsoil. The borders had been landscaped from the start. Now the Park was as thoroughly covered with green as the much older Griffith Free Park.

Within King’s Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy. People were searched at the entrances. There were no weapons inside. The copseyes, floating overhead and out of reach, were the next best thing to no law at all.

There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hands against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. It was usually enough.

Naturally people threw rocks at copseyes. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

“They got one! Come on!” Ron tugged at my arm. The felled copseye was hidden, surrounded by those who had destroyed it. “I hope they don’t kick it apart. I told them I need it intact, but that might not stop them.”

“It’s a Free Park. And they bagged it.”

“With my missiles!”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. They were playing baseball when I found them. I told them I needed a copseye. They said they’d get me one.”

I remember Ron quite well now. Ronald Cole was an artist and an inventor. It would have been two sources of income for another man, but Ron was different. He invented new art forms. With solder and wire and diffraction gratings and several makes of plastics kit, and an incredible collection of serendipitous junk, Ron Cole made things the like of which had never been seen on Earth.

The market for new art forms has always been low, but now and then he did make a sale. It was enough to keep him in raw materials, especially since many of his raw materials came from basements and attics. Rarely there came a big sale, and then, briefly, he would be rich.

There was this about him: he knew who I was, but he hadn’t remembered my name. Ron Cole had better things to think about than what name belonged with whom. A name was only a tag and a conversational gambit. “Russel! How are you?” A signal. Ron had developed a substitute.

Into a momentary gap in the conversation he would say, “Look at this,” and hold out—miracles.

Once it had been a clear plastic sphere, golf-ball size, balanced on a polished silver concavity. When the ball rolled around on the curved mirror, the reflections were fantastic.

Once it had been a twisting sea serpent engraved on a Michelob beer bottle, the lovely vase-shaped bottle of the early 1960s that was too big for standard refrigerators.

And once it had been two strips of dull silvery metal, unexpectedly heavy. “What’s this?”

I’d held them in the palm of my hand. They were heavier than lead. Platinum? But nobody carries that much platinum around. Joking, I’d asked. “U-235?”

“Are they warm?” he’d asked apprehensively. I’d fought off an urge to throw them as far as I could and dive behind a couch.

But they had been platinum. I never did learn why Ron was carrying them about. Something that didn’t pan out.

Within a semicircle of spectators, the felled copseye lay on the grass. It was intact, possibly because two cheerful, conspicuously large men were standing over it, waving everyone back.

“Good,” said Ron. He knelt above the golden sphere, turned it with his long artist’s fingers. To me he said, “Help me get it open.”

“What for? What are you after?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Help me get—Never mind.” The hemispherical cover came off. For the first time ever, I looked into a copseye.

It was impressively simple. I picked out the stunner by its parabolic reflector, the cameras, and a toroidal coil that had to be part of the floater device. No power source. I guessed that the shell itself was a power beam antenna. With the cover cracked there would be no way for a damn fool to electrocute himself.

Ron knelt and studied the strange guts of the copseye. From his pocket he took something made of glass and metal. He suddenly remembered my existence and held it out to me, saying, “Look at this.”

I took it, expecting a surprise, and I got it. It was an old hunting watch, a big wind-up watch on a chain, with a protective case. They were in common use a couple of hundred years ago. I looked at the face, said, “Fifteen minutes slow. You didn’t repair the whole works, did you?”

“Oh, no.” He clicked the back open for me.

The works looked modern. I guessed, “Battery and tuning fork?”

“That’s what the guard thought. Of course that’s what I made it from. But the hands don’t move; I set them just before they searched me.”

“Aah. What does it do?”

“If I work it right, I think it’ll knock down every copseye in King’s Free Park.”

For a minute or so I was laughing too hard to speak. Ron watched me with his head on one side, clearly wondering if I thought he was joking.

I managed to say, “That ought to cause all kinds of excitement.”

Ron nodded vigorously. “Of course it all depends on whether they use the kind of circuits I think they use. Look for yourself; the copseyes aren’t supposed to be foolproof. They’re supposed to be cheap. If one gets knocked down, the taxes don’t go up much. The other way is to make them expensive and foolproof, and frustrate a lot of people. People aren’t supposed to be frustrated in a Free Park.”

“So?”

“Well, there’s a cheap way to make the circuitry for the power system. If they did it that way, I can blow the whole thing. We’ll see.” Ron pulled thin copper wire from the cuffs of his shirt.

“How long will this take?”

“Oh, half an hour—maybe more.”

That decided me. “I’ve got to be going. I’m meeting Jill Hayes at the Wilshire exits. You’ve met her, a big blond girl, my height—”

But he wasn’t listening. “Okay, see you,” he muttered. He began placing the copper wire inside the copseye, with tweezers. I left.

Crowds tend to draw crowds. A few minutes after leaving Ron, I joined a semicircle of the curious to see what they were watching.

A balding, lantern-jawed individual was putting something together—an archaic machine, with blades and a small gasoline motor. The T-shaped wooden handle was brand new and unpainted. The metal parts were dull with the look of ancient rust recently removed.

The crowd speculated in half-whispers. What was it? Not part of a car; not an outboard motor, though it had blades; too small for a motor scooter, too big for a motor skateboard—

“Lawn mower,” said the white-haired lady next to me. She was one of those small, birdlike people who shrivel and grow weightless as they age, and live forever. Her words meant nothing to me. I was about to ask, when—

The lantern-jawed man finished his work, and twisted something, and the motor started with a roar. Black smoke puffed out. In triumph he gripped the handles. Outside, it was a prison offense to build a working internal combustion machine. Here—

With the fire of dedication burning in his eyes, he wheeled his infernal machine across the grass. He left a path as flat as a rug. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

The smell hit everyone at once: black dirt in the air, a stink of half-burned hydrocarbons attacking nose and eyes. I gasped and coughed. I’d never smelled anything like it.

The crowd roared and converged.

He squawked when they picked up his machine. Someone found a switch and stopped it. Two men confiscated the tool kit and went to work with screwdriver and hammer. The owner objected. He picked up a heavy pair of pliers and tried to commit murder.

A copseye zapped him and the man with the hammer, and they both hit the lawn without bouncing. The rest of them pulled the lawn mower apart and bent and broke the pieces.

“I’m half sorry they did that,” said the old woman. “Sometimes I miss the sound of lawn mowers. My dad used to mow the lawn on Sunday mornings.”

I said, “It’s a Free Park.”

“Then why can’t he build anything he pleases?”

“He can. He did. Anything he’s free to build, we’re free to kick apart.” And my mind finished, Like Ron’s rigged copseye.

Ron was good with tools. It would not surprise me a bit if he knew enough about copseyes to knock out the whole system.

Maybe someone ought to stop him.

But knocking down copseyes wasn’t illegal. It happened all the time. It was part of the freedom of the Park. If Ron could knock them all down at once, well—

Maybe someone ought to stop him.

I passed a flock of high school girls, all chittering like birds, all about sixteen. It might have been their first trip inside a Free Park. I looked back because they were so cute, and caught them staring in awe and wonder at the dragon on my back.

A few years and they’d be too blasé to notice. It had taken Jill almost half an hour to apply it this morning: a glorious red-and-gold dragon breathing flames across my shoulder, flames that seemed to glow by their own light. Lower down were a princess and a knight in golden armor, the princess tied to a stake, the knight fleeing for his life. I smiled back at the girls, and two of them waved.

Short blond hair and golden skin, the tallest girl in sight, wearing not even a nudist’s shoulder pouch: Jill Hayes stood squarely in front of the Wilshire entrance, visibly wondering where I was. It was five minutes after three.

There was this about living with a physical culture nut. Jill insisted on getting me into shape. The daily exercises were part of that, and so was this business of walking half the length of King’s Free Park…

I’d balked at doing it briskly, though. Who walks briskly in a Free Park? There’s too much to see. She’d given me an hour; I’d held out for three. It was a compromise, like the paper slacks I was wearing despite Jill’s nudist beliefs.

Sooner or later she’d find someone with muscles, or I’d relapse into laziness, and we’d split. Meanwhile…we got along. It seemed only sensible to let her finish my training.

She spotted me, yelled, “Russel! Here!” in a voice that must have reached both ends of the Park.

In answer I lifted my arm, semaphore-style, slowly over my head and back down.

And every copseye in King’s Free Park fell out of the sky, dead.

Jill looked about her at all the startled faces and all the golden bubbles resting in bushes and on the grass. She approached me somewhat uncertainly. She asked, “Did you do that?”

I said, “Yah. If I wave my arms again, they’ll all go back up.”

“I think you’d better do it,” she said primly. Jill had a fine poker face. I waved my arm grandly over my head and down, but of course, the copseyes stayed where they had fallen.

Jill said, “I wonder what happened to them?”

“It was Ron Cole. You remember him. He’s the one who engraved some old Michelob beer bottles for Steuben—”

“Oh, yes. But how?”

We went off to ask him.

A brawny college man howled and charged past us at a dead run. We saw him kick a copseye like a soccer ball. The golden cover split, but the man howled again and hopped up and down hugging his foot.

We passed dented golden shells and broken resonators and bent parabolic reflectors. One woman looked flushed and proud; she was wearing several of the copper toroids as bracelets. A kid was collecting the cameras. Maybe he thought he could sell them outside.

I never saw an intact copseye after the first minute.

They weren’t all busy kicking copseyes apart. Jill stared at the conservatively dressed group carrying POPULATION BY COPULATION signs, and wanted to know if they were serious. Their grim-faced leader handed us pamphlets that spoke of the evil and the blasphemy of Man’s attempts to alter himself through gene tampering and extra uterine growth experiments. If it was a put-on, it was a good one.

We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a UN-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide.

Ron Cole was not where I had left him.

“He must have decided that discretion is the better part of cowardice. May be right, too,” I surmised. “Nobody’s ever knocked down all the copseyes before.”

“It’s not illegal, is it?”

“Not illegal, but excessive. They can bar him from the Park, at the very least.”

Jill stretched in the sun. She was all golden, and big. She said, “I’m thirsty. Is there a fountain around?”

“Sure, unless someone’s plugged it by now. It’s a—”

“Free Park. Do you mean to tell me they don’t even protect the fountains?”

“You make one exception, it’s like a wedge. When someone ruins a fountain, they wait and fix it that night. That way…If I see someone trying to wreck a fountain, I’ll generally throw a punch at him. A lot of us do. After a guy’s lost enough of his holiday to the copseye stunners, he’ll get the idea, sooner or later.”

The fountain was a solid cube of concrete with four spigots and a hand-sized metal button. It was hard to jam, hard to hurt. Ron Cole stood near it, looking lost.

He seemed glad to see me, but still lost. I introduced him—“You remember Jill Hayes.” He said, “Certainly. Hello, Jill,” and, having put her name to its intended purpose, promptly forgot it.

Jill said, “We thought you’d made a break for it.”

“I did.”

“Oh?”

“You know how complicated the exits are. They have to be, to keep anyone from getting in through an exit with—like a shot-gun.” Ron ran both hands through his hair, without making it any more or less neat. “Well, all the exits have stopped working. They must be on the same circuits as the copseyes. I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Then we’re locked in,” I said. That was irritating. But underneath the irritation was a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. “How long do you think—”

“No telling. They’ll have to get new copseyes in somehow. And repair the beamed power system, and figure out how I bollixed it, and fix it so it doesn’t happen again. I suppose someone must have kicked my rigged copseye to pieces by now, but the police don’t know that.”

“Oh, they’ll just send in some cops,” said Jill.

“Look around you.”

There were pieces of copseyes in all directions. Not one remained whole. A cop would have to be out of his mind to enter a Free Park.

Not to mention the damage to the spirit of the Park.

“I wish I’d brought a bag lunch,” said Ron.

I saw the cloak off to my right: a ribbon of glowing blue velvet hovering at five feet, like a carpeted path in the air. I didn’t yell, or point, or anything. For Ron it might be pushing the wrong buttons.

Ron didn’t see it. “Actually I’m kind of glad this happened,” he said animatedly. “I’ve always thought that anarchy ought to be a viable form of society.”

Jill made polite sounds of encouragement.

“After all, anarchy is only the last word in free enterprise. What can a government do for people that people can’t do for themselves? Protection from other countries? If all the other countries are anarchies, too, you don’t need armies. Police, maybe; but what’s wrong with privately owned police?”

“Fire departments used to work that way,” Jill remembered. “They were hired by the insurance companies. They only protected houses that belonged to their own clients.”

“Right! So you buy theft and murder insurance, and the insurance companies hire a police force. The client carries a credit card—”

“Suppose the robber steals the card, too?”

“He can’t use it. He doesn’t have the right retina prints.”

“But if the client doesn’t have the credit card, he can’t sic the cops on the thief.”

“Oh.” A noticeable pause. “Well—”

Half-listening, for I had heard it all before, I looked for the end-points of the cloak. I found empty space at one end and a lovely red-haired girl at the other. She was talking to two men as outré as herself.

One can get the impression that a Free Park is one gigantic costume party. It isn’t. Not one person in ten wears anything but street clothes; but the costumes are what get noticed.

These guys were part bird.

Their eyebrows and eyelashes were tiny feathers, green on one, golden on the other. Larger feathers covered their heads, blue and green and gold, and ran in a crest down their spines. They were bare to the waist, showing physiques Jill would find acceptable.

Ron was lecturing. “What does a government do for anyone except the people who run the government? Once there were private post offices, and they were cheaper than what we’ve got now. Anything the government takes over gets more expensive, immediately. There’s no reason why private enterprise can’t do anything a government—”

Jill gasped. She said, “Ooh! How lovely.”

Ron turned to look.

As if on cue, the girl in the cloak slapped one of the feathered men hard across the mouth. She tried to hit the other one, but he caught her wrist. Then all three froze.

I said, “See? Nobody wins. She doesn’t even like standing still. She—” and I realized why they weren’t moving.

In a Free Park it’s easy for a girl to turn down an offer. If the guy won’t take No for an answer, he gets slapped. The stun beam gets him and the girl. When she wakes up, she walks away.

Simple.

The girl recovered first. She gasped and jerked her wrist loose and turned to run. One of the feathered men didn’t bother to chase her; he simply took a double handful of the cloak.

This was getting serious.

The cloak jerked her sharply backward. She didn’t hesitate. She reached for the big gold disks at her shoulders, ripped them loose and ran on. The feathered men chased her, laughing.

The redhead wasn’t laughing. She was running all out. Two drops of blood ran down her shoulders. I thought of trying to stop the feathered men, decided in favor of it—but they were already past.

The cloak hung like a carpeted path in the air, empty at both ends.

Jill hugged herself uneasily. “Ron, just how does one go about hiring your private police force?”

“Well, you can’t expect it to form spontaneously—”

“Let’s try the entrances. Maybe we can get out.”

It was slow to build. Everyone knew what a copseye did. Nobody thought it through. Two feathered men chasing a lovely nude? A pretty sight: and why interfere? If she didn’t want to be chased, she need only…what? And nothing else had changed. The costumes, the people with causes, the people looking for causes, the people-watchers, and pranksters—

Blank Sign had joined the POPULATION BY COPULATION faction. His grass-stained pink street tunic jarred strangely with their conservative suits, but he showed no sign of mockery; his face was as preternaturally solemn as theirs. Nonetheless they did not seem glad of his company.

It was crowded near the Wilshire exits. I saw enough bewildered and frustrated faces to guess that they were closed. The little vestibule area was so packed that we didn’t even try to find out what was wrong with the doors.

“I don’t think we ought to stay here,” Jill said uneasily.

I noticed the way she was hugging herself. “Are you cold?”

“No.” She shivered. “But I wish I were dressed.”

“How about a strip of that velvet cloak?”

“Good!”

We were too late. The cloak was gone.

It was a warm September day, near sunset. Clad only in paper slacks, I was not cold in the least. I said, “Take my slacks.”

“No, hon, I’m the nudist.” But Jill hugged herself with both arms.

“Here,” said Ron, and handed her his sweater. She flashed him a grateful look, then, clearly embarrassed, she wrapped the sweater around her waist and knotted the sleeves.

Ron didn’t get it at all. I asked him, “Do you know the difference between nude and naked?”

He shook his head.

“Nude is artistic. Naked is defenseless.”

Nudity was popular in a Free Park. That night, nakedness was not. There must have been pieces of that cloak all over King’s Free Park. I saw at least four that night: one worn as a kilt, two being used as crude sarongs, and one as a bandage.

On a normal day, the entrances to King’s Free Park close at six. Those who want to stay, stay as long as they like. Usually there are not many, because there are no lights to be broken in a Free Park; but light does seep in from the city beyond. The copseyes float about, guided by infrared, but most of them are not manned.

Tonight would be different.

It was after sunset, but still light. A small and ancient lady came stumping toward us with a look of murder on her lined face. At first I thought it was meant for us; but that wasn’t it. She was so mad she couldn’t see straight.

She saw my feet and looked up. “Oh, it’s you. The one who helped break the lawn mower,” she said—which was unjust. “A Free Park, is it? A Free Park! Two men just took away my dinner!”

I spread my hands. “I’m sorry. I really am. If you still had it, we could try to talk you into sharing it.”

She lost some of her mad; which brought her embarrassingly close to tears. “Then we’re all hungry together. I brought it in a plastic bag. Next time I’ll use something that isn’t transparent, by d-damn!” She noticed Jill and her improvised sweater-skirt, and added, “I’m sorry, dear, I gave my towel to a girl who needed it even more.”

“Thank you anyway.”

“Please, may I stay with you people until the copseyes start working again? I don’t feel safe, somehow. I’m Glenda Hawthorne.”

We introduced ourselves. Glenda Hawthorne shook our hands. By now it was quite dark. We couldn’t see the city beyond the high green hedges, but the change was startling when the lights of Westwood and Santa Monica flashed on.

The police were taking their own good time getting us some copseyes.

We reached the grassy field sometimes used by the Society for Creative Anachronism for their tournaments. They fight on foot with weighted and padded weapons designed to behave like swords, broad-axes, morning-stars, et cetera. The weapons are bugged so that they won’t fall into the wrong hands. The field is big and flat and bare of trees, sloping upward at the edges.

On one of the slopes, something moved.

I stopped. It didn’t move again, but it showed clearly in light reflected down from the white clouds. I made out something man-shaped and faintly pink, and a pale rectangle nearby.

I spoke low. “Stay here.”

Jill said, “Don’t be silly. There’s nothing for anyone to hide under. Come on.”

The blank sign was bent and marked with shoe prints. The man who had been carrying it looked up at us with pain in his eyes. Drying blood ran from his nose. With effort he whispered, “I think they dislocated my shoulder.”

“Let me look.” Jill bent over him. She probed him a bit, then set herself and pulled hard and steadily on his arm. Blank Sign yelled in pain and despair.

“That’ll do it.” Jill sounded satisfied. “How does it feel?”

“It doesn’t hurt as much.” He smiled, almost.

“What happened?”

“They started pushing me and kicking me to make me go away. I was doing it, I was walking away. I was. Then someone snatched away my sign—” He stopped for a moment, then went off at a tangent. “I wasn’t hurting anyone with my sign. I’m a Psych Major. I’m writing a thesis on what people read into a blank sign. Like the blank sheets in the Rorschach tests.”

“What kind of reactions do you get?”

“Usually hostile. But nothing like that.” Blank Sign sounded bewildered. “Wouldn’t you think a Free Park is the one place you’d find freedom of speech?”

Jill wiped at his face with a tissue from Glenda Hawthorne’s purse. She said, “Especially when you’re not saying anything. Hey, Ron, tell us more about your government by anarchy.”

Ron cleared his throat. “I hope you’re not judging it by this. King’s Free Park hasn’t been an anarchy for more than a couple of hours. It needs time to develop.”

Glenda Hawthorne and Blank Sign must have wondered what the hell he was talking about. I wished him joy in explaining it to them, and wondered if he would explain who had knocked down the copseyes.

This field would be a good place to spend the night. It was open, with no cover and no shadows, no way for anyone to sneak up on us.

And I was learning to think like a true paranoid.

We lay on wet grass, sometimes dozing, sometimes talking. Two other groups no bigger than ours occupied the jousting field. They kept their distance, we kept ours. Now and then we heard voices, and knew that they were not asleep; not all at once, anyway.

Blank Sign dozed restlessly. His ribs were giving him trouble, though Jill said none of them were broken. Every so often he whimpered and tried to move and woke himself up. Then he had to hold himself still until he fell asleep again.

“Money,” said Jill. “It takes a government to print money.”

“But you could get IOUs printed. Standard denominations, printed for a fee and notarized. Backed by your good name.”

Jill laughed softly. “Thought of everything, haven’t you? You couldn’t travel very far that way.”

“Credit cards, then.”

I had stopped believing in Ron’s anarchy. I said, “Ron, remember the girl in the long blue cloak?”

A little gap of silence. “Yah?”

“Pretty, wasn’t she? Fun to watch.”

“Granted.”

“If there weren’t any laws to stop you from raping her, she’d be muffled to the ears in a long dress and carrying a tear gas pen. What fun would that be? I like the nude look. Look how fast it disappeared after the copseyes fell.”

“Mm-m,” said Ron.

The night was turning cold. Faraway voices; occasional distant shouts, came like thin gray threads in a black tapestry of silence. Mrs. Hawthorne spoke into that silence.

“What was that boy really saying with his blank sign?”

“He wasn’t saying anything,” said Jill.

“Now, just a minute, dear. I think he was, even if he didn’t know it.” Mrs. Hawthorne talked slowly, using the words to shape her thoughts. “Once there was an organization to protest the forced contraception bill. I was one of them. We carried signs for hours at a time. We printed leaflets. We stopped people passing so that we could talk to them. We gave up our time, we went to considerable trouble and expense, because we wanted to get our ideas across.

“Now, if a man had joined us with a blank sign, he would have been saying something.

“His sign says that he has no opinion. If he joins us, he says that we have no opinion either. He’s saying our opinions aren’t worth anything.”

I said, “Tell him when he wakes up. He can put it in his notebook.”

“But his notebook is wrong. He wouldn’t push his blank sign in among people he agreed with, would he?”

“Maybe not.”

“I…suppose I don’t like people with no opinions.” Mrs. Hawthorne stood up. She had been sitting tailor-fashion for some hours. “Do you know if there’s a pop machine nearby?”

There wasn’t, of course. No private company would risk getting their machines smashed once or twice a day. But she had reminded the rest of us that we were thirsty. Eventually we all got up and trooped away in the direction of the fountain.

All but Blank Sign.

I’d liked that blank sign gag. How odd, how ominous, that so basic a right as freedom of speech could depend on so slight a thing as a floating copseye.

I was thirsty.

The Park was bright by city lights, crossed by sharpedged shadows. In such light it seems that one can see much more than he really can. I could see into every shadow; but, though there were stirrings all around us, I could see nobody until he moved. We four, sitting under an oak with our backs to the tremendous trunk, must be invisible from any distance.

We talked little. The Park was quiet except for occasional laughter from the fountain.

I couldn’t forget my thirst. I could feel others being thirsty around me. The fountain was right out there in the open, a solid block of concrete with five men around it.

They were dressed alike, in paper shorts with big pockets. They looked alike: like first-string athletes. Maybe they belonged to the same order, or frat, or ROTC class.

They had taken over the fountain.

When someone came to get a drink, the tall ash-blond one would step forward with his arm held stiffly out, palm forward. He had a wide mouth and a grin that might otherwise have been infectious, and a deep, echoing voice. He would intone, “Go back. None may pass here but the immortal Cthulhu—” or something equally silly.

Trouble was, they weren’t kidding. Or: they were kidding, but they wouldn’t let anyone have a drink.

When we arrived, a girl dressed in a towel had been trying to talk some sense into them. It hadn’t worked. It might even have boosted their egos: a lovely half-naked girl begging them for water. Eventually she’d given up and gone away.

In that light her hair might have been red. I hoped it was the girl in the cloak.

And a beefy man in a yellow business jumper had made the mistake of demanding his Rights. It was not a night for Rights. The blond kid had goaded him into screaming insults, a stream of unimaginative profanity, which ended when he tried to hit the blond kid. Then three of them had swarmed over him. The man had left crawling, moaning of police and lawsuits.

Why hadn’t somebody done something?

I had watched it all from sitting position. I could list my own reasons. One: it was hard to face the fact that a copseye would not zap them both, any second now. Two: I didn’t like the screaming fat man much. He talked dirty. Three: I’d been waiting for someone else to step in.

Mrs. Hawthorne said, “Ronald, what time is it?”

Ron may have been the only man in King’s Free Park who knew the time. People generally left their valuables in lockers at the entrances. But years ago, when Ron was flush with money from the sale of the engraved beer bottles, he’d bought an implant-watch. He told time by one red mark and two red lines glowing beneath the skin of his wrist.

We had put the women between us, but I saw the motion as he glanced at his wrist. “Quarter of twelve.”

“Don’t you think they’ll get bored and go away? It’s been twenty minutes since anyone tried to get a drink,” Mrs. Hawthorne said.

Jill shifted against me in the dark. “They can’t be any more bored than we are. I think they’ll get bored and stay anyway. Besides—” She stopped.

I said, “Besides that, we’re thirsty now.”

“Right.”

“Ron, have you seen any sign of those rock throwers you collected? Especially the one who knocked down the copseye.”

“No.”

I wasn’t surprised. In this darkness? “Do you remember his…” and I didn’t even finish.

“…Yes!” Ron said suddenly.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. His name was Bugeyes. You don’t forget a name like that.”

“I take it he had bulging eyes?”

“I didn’t notice.”

Well, it was worth a try. I stood and cupped my hands for a megaphone and shouted, “Bugeyes!”

One of the Water Monopoly shouted, “Let’s keep the noise down out there!”

“Bugeyes!”

A chorus of remarks from the Water Monopoly. “Strange habits these peasants—” “Most of them are just thirsty. This character—”

From off to the side: “What do you want?”

“We want to talk to you! Stay where you are!” To Ron I said, “Come on.” To Jill and Mrs. Hawthorne, “Stay here. Don’t get involved.”

We moved out into the open space between us and Bugeyes’s voice.

Two of the five kids came immediately to intercept us. They must have been bored, all right, and looking for action.

We ran for it. We reached the shadows of the trees before those two reached us. They stopped, laughing like maniacs, and moved back to the fountain.

Ron and I, we lay on our bellies in the shadows of low bushes. Across too much shadowless grass, four men in paper shorts stood at parade rest at the four corners of the fountain. The fifth man watched for a victim.

A boy walked out between us into the moonlight. His eyes were shining, big, expressive eyes, maybe a bit too prominent. His hands were big, too—with knobby knuckles. One hand was full of acorns.

He pitched them rapidly, one at a time, overhand. First one, then another of the Water Monopoly twitched and looked in our direction. Bugeyes kept throwing.

Quite suddenly, two of them started toward us at a run. Bugeyes kept throwing until they were almost on him; then he threw his acorns in a handful and dived into the shadows.

The two of them ran between us. We let the first go by: the wide-mouthed blond spokesman, his expression low and murderous now. The other was short and broad-shouldered, an intimidating silhouette, seemingly all muscle. A tackle. I stood up in front of him, expecting him to stop in surprise; and he did, and I hit him in the mouth as hard as I could.

He stepped back in shock. Ron wrapped an arm around his throat.

He bucked. Instantly. Ron hung on. I did something I’d seen often enough on television: linked my fingers and brought both hands down on the back of his neck.

The blond spokesman should be back by now; and I turned, and he was. He was on me before I could get my hands up. We rolled on the ground, me with my arms pinned to my sides, him unable to use his hands without letting go. It was lousy planning for both of us. He was squeezing the breath out of me. Ron hovered over us, waiting for a chance to hit him.

Suddenly there were others, a lot of others. Three of them pulled the blond kid off me, and a beefy, bloody man in a yellow business jumper stepped forward and crowned him with a rock.

The blond kid went limp.

The man squared off and threw a straight left hook with the rock in his hand. The blond kid’s head snapped back, fell forward.

I yelled, “Hey!” jumped forward, got hold of the arm that held the rock.

Someone hit me solidly in the side of the neck.

I dropped. It felt like all my strings had been cut. Someone was helping me to my feet—Ron—voices babbling in whispers, one shouting. “Get him—”

I couldn’t see the blond kid. The other one, the tackle, was up and staggering away. Shadows came from between the trees to play pileup on him. The woods were alive, and it was just a little patch of woods. Full of angry, thirsty people.

Bugeyes reappeared, grinning widely. “Now what? Go somewhere else and try it again?”

“Oh, no. It’s getting very vicious out tonight. Ron, we’ve got to stop them. They’ll kill him!”

“It’s a Free Park. Can you stand now?”

“Ron, they’ll kill him!”

The rest of the Water Trust was charging to the rescue. One of them had a tree branch with the leaves stripped off. Behind them, shadows converged on the fountain.

We fled.

I had to stop after a dozen paces. My head was trying to explode. Ron looked back anxiously, but I waved him on. Behind me the man with the branch broke through the trees and ran toward me to do murder.

Behind him, all the noise suddenly stopped.

I braced myself for the blow.

And fainted.

He was lying across my legs, with the branch still in his hand. Jill and Ron were pulling at my shoulders. A pair of golden moons floated overhead.

I wriggled loose. I felt my head. It seemed intact.

Ron said, “The copseyes zapped him before he got to you.”

“What about the others? Did they kill them?”

“I don’t know.” Ron ran his hands through his hair. “I was wrong. Anarchy isn’t stable. It comes apart too easily.”

“Well, don’t do any more experiments. Okay?”

People were beginning to stand up. They streamed toward the exits, gathering momentum, beneath the yellow gaze of the copseyes.

THE WARRIORS

The organ bank problem is basic to an understanding of this era, and of later eras on the colony worlds. It forms a background for the three tales of Gil the ARM, and for the society of Mount Lookitthat as detailed in A Gift From Earth.

Phssthpok the Pak was the second extraterrestrial to meet mankind. Though he had traveled all the way from the galactic core, he was hardly an alien; the Pak are related to humankind. Before his death he created the first of the protector-stage humans, from a Belt miner named Jack Brennan.

There followed a Golden Age—a period of peace and contentment for Earth and Belt—that lasted for two hundred and fifty years. In particular, breakthroughs in alloplasty and regeneration ended the organ bank problem. Probably all of this was due to subtle interventions by the superintelligent being who now called himself the Brennan-monster. Brennan’s story is chronicled in Protector.

Unfortunately Brennan was unable to anticipate the existence of the Kzinti…

LN

“I’m sure they saw us coming,” the Alien Technologies Officer persisted. “Do you see that ring, sir?”

The silvery image of the enemy ship almost filled the viewer. It showed as a broad, wide ring encircling a cylindrical axis, like a mechanical pencil floating inside a platinum bracelet. A finned craft projected from the pointed end of the axial section. Angular letters ran down the axis, totally unlike the dots-and-commas of Kzinti script.

“Of course I see it,” said the Captain.

“It was rotating when we first picked them up. It stopped when we got within two hundred thousand miles, and it hasn’t moved since.”

The Captain flicked his tail back and forth, gently, thoughtfully, like a pink lash. “You worry me,” he commented. “If they know we’re here, why haven’t they tried to get away? Are they so sure they can beat us?” He whirled to face the A-T Officer. “Should we be running?”

“No, sir! I don’t know why they’re still here, but they can’t have anything to be confident about. That’s one of the most primitive spacecraft I’ve ever seen.” He moved his claw about on the screen, pointing as he talked.

“The outer shell is an iron alloy. The rotating ring is a method of imitating gravity by using centripetal force. So they don’t have the gravity planer. In fact they’re probably using a reaction drive.”

The Captain’s catlike ears went up. “But we’re light-years from the nearest star!”

“They must have a better reaction drive than we ever developed. We had the gravity planer before we needed one that good.”

There was a buzzing sound from the big control board. “Enter,” said the Captain.

The Weapons Officer fell up through the entrance hatch and came to attention. “Sir, we have all weapons trained on the enemy.”

“Good.” The Captain swung around. “A-T, how sure are you that they aren’t a threat to us?”

The A-T Officer bared sharply pointed teeth. “I don’t see how they could be, sir.”

“Good. Weapons, keep all your guns ready to fire, but don’t use them unless I give the order. I’ll have the ears of the man who destroys that ship without orders. I want to take it intact.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s the Telepath?”

“He’s on his way, sir. He was asleep.”

“He’s always asleep. Tell him to get his tail up here.”

The Weapons Officer saluted, turned, and dropped through the exit hole.

“Captain?”

The A-T Officer was standing by the viewer, which now showed the ringed end of the alien ship. He pointed to the mirror-bright end of the axial cylinder. “It looks like that end was designed to project light. That would make it a photon drive, sir.”

The Captain considered. “Could it be a signal device?”

“Urrrrr…Yes, sir.”

“Then don’t jump to conclusions.”

Like a piece of toast, the Telepath popped up through the entrance hatch. He came to exaggerated attention. “Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“You omitted to buzz for entrance.”

“Sorry, sir.” The lighted viewscreen caught the Telepath’s eye and he padded over for a better look, forgetting that he was at attention. The A-T Officer winced, wishing he were somewhere else.

The Telepath’s eyes were violet around the edges. His pink tail hung limp. As usual, he looked as if he were dying for lack of sleep. His fur was flattened along the side he slept on; he hadn’t even bothered to brush it. The effect was as far from the ideal of a Conquest Warrior as one can get and still be a member of the Kzinti species. The wonder was that the Captain had not yet murdered him.

He never would, of course. Telepaths were too rare, too valuable, and—understandably—too emotionally unstable. The Captain always kept his temper with the Telepath. At times like this it was the innocent bystander who stood to lose his rank or his ears at the clank of a falling molecule.

“That’s an enemy ship we’ve tracked down,” the Captain was saying. “We’d like to get some information from them. Would you read their minds for us?”

“Yes, sir.” The Telepath’s voice showed his instant misery, but he knew better than to protest. He left the screen and sank into a chair. Slowly his ears folded into tight knots, his pupils contracted, and his ratlike tail went limp as flannel.

The world of the eleventh sense pushed in on him.

He caught the Captain’s thought: “…sloppy civilian get of a sthondat…” and frantically tuned it out. He hated the Captain’s mind. He found other minds aboard ship, isolated and blanked them out one by one. Now there were none left. There was only unconsciousness and chaos.

Chaos was not empty. Something was thinking strange and disturbing thoughts.

The Telepath forced himself to listen.

Steve Weaver floated bonelessly near a wall of the radio room. He was blond, blue-eyed, and big, and he could often be seen as he was now, relaxed but completely motionless, as if there were some very good reason why he shouldn’t even blink. A streamer of smoke drifted from his left hand and crossed the room to bury itself in the air vent.

“That’s that,” Ann Harrison said wearily. She flicked four switches in the bank of radio controls. At each click a small light went out.

“You can’t get them?”

“Right. I’ll bet they don’t even have a radio.” Ann released her chair net and stretched out into a five-pointed star. “I’ve left the receiver on, with the volume up, in case they try to get us later. Man, that feels good!” Abruptly she curled into a tight ball. She had been crouched at the communications bank for more than an hour. Ann might have been Steve’s twin; she was almost as tall as he was, had the same color hair and eyes, and the flat muscles of conscientious exercise showed beneath her blue falling jumper as she flexed.

Steve snapped his cigarette butt at the air conditioner, moving only his fingers. “Okay. What have they got?”

Ann looked startled. “I don’t know.”

“Think of it as a puzzle. They don’t have a radio. How might they talk to each other? How can we check on our guesses? We assume they’re trying to reach us, of course.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Think about it, Ann. Get Jim thinking about it, too.” Jim Davis was her husband that year, and the ship’s doctor full time. “You’re the girl most likely to succeed. Have a smog stick?”

“Please.”

Steve pushed his cigarette ration across the room. “Take a few. I’ve got to go.”

The depleted package came whizzing back. “Thanks,” said Ann.

“Let me know if anything happens, will you? Or if you think of anything.”

“I will. And fear not, Steve, something’s bound to turn up. They must be trying just as hard as we are.”

Every compartment in the personnel ring opened into the narrow doughnut-shaped hall which ran round the ring’s forward rim. Steve pushed himself into the hall, jockeyed to contact the floor, and pushed. From there it was easy going. The floor curved up to meet him, and he proceeded down the hall like a swimming frog. Of the twelve men and women on the Angel’s Pencil, Steve was best at this; for Steve was a Belter, and the others were all flatlanders, Earthborn.

Ann probably wouldn’t think of anything, he guessed. It wasn’t that she wasn’t intelligent. She didn’t have the curiosity, the sheer love of solving puzzles. Only he and Jim Davis—

He was going too fast, and not concentrating. He almost crashed into Sue Bhang as she appeared below the curve of the ceiling.

They managed to stop themselves against the walls. “Hi, jaywalker,” said Sue.

“Hi, Sue. Where you headed?”

“Radio room. You?”

“I thought I’d check the drive systems again. Not that we’re likely to need the drive, but it can’t hurt to be certain.”

“You’d go twitchy without something to do, wouldn’t you?” She cocked her head to one side, as always when she had questions. “Steve, when are you going to rotate us again? I can’t seem to get used to falling.”

But she looked like she’d been born falling, he thought. Her small, slender form was meant for flying; gravity should never have touched her. “When I’m sure we won’t need the drive. We might as well stay ready ’til then. Besides, I’m hoping you’ll change back to a skirt.”

She laughed, pleased. “Then you can turn it off. I’m not changing, and we won’t be moving. Abel says the other ship did two hundred gee when it matched courses with us. How many can the Angel’s Pencil do?”

Steve looked awed. “Just point zero five. And I was thinking of chasing them! Well, maybe we can be the ones to open communications. I just came from the radio room, by the way. Ann can’t get anything.”

“Too bad.”

“We’ll just have to wait.”

“Steve, you’re always so impatient. Do Belters always move at a run? Come here.” She took a handhold and pulled him over to one of the thick windows which lined the forward side of the corridor. “There they are,” she said, pointing out.

The star was both duller and larger than those around it. Among points which glowed arc-lamp blue-white with the Doppler shift, the alien ship showed as a dull red disk.

“I looked at it through the telescope,” said Steve. “There are lumps and ridges all over it. And there’s a circle of green dots and commas painted on one side. Looked like writing.”

“How long have we been waiting to meet them? Five hundred thousand years? Well, there they are. Relax. They won’t go away.” Sue gazed out the window, her whole attention on the dull red circle, her gleaming jet hair floating out around her head. “The first aliens. I wonder what they’ll be like.”

“It’s anyone’s guess. They must be pretty strong to take punishment like that, unless they have some kind of acceleration shield, but free fall doesn’t bother them either. That ship isn’t designed to spin.” He was staring intently out at the stars, his big form characteristically motionless, his expression somber. Abruptly he said, “Sue, I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“Suppose they’re hostile?”

“Hostile?” She tasted the unfamiliar word, decided she didn’t like it.

“After all, we know nothing about them. Suppose they want to fight? We’d—”

She gasped. Steve flinched before the horror in her face. “What—what put the idea in your head?”

“I’m sorry I shocked you, Sue.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, but why? Did—shh.”

Jim Davis had come into view. The Angel’s Pencil had left Earth when he was twenty-seven; now he was a slightly paunchy thirty-eight, the oldest man on board, an amiable man with abnormally long, delicate fingers. His grandfather, with the same hands, had been a world-famous surgeon. Nowadays surgery was normally done by autodocs, and the arachnodactyls were to Davis merely an affliction. He bounced by, walking on magnetic sandals, looking like a comedian as he bobbed about the magnetic plates. “Hi, group,” he called as he went by.

“Hello, Jim.” Sue’s voice was strained. She waited until he was out of sight before she spoke again.

Hoarsely she whispered, “Did you fight in the Belt?” She didn’t really believe it; it was merely the worst thing she could think of.

Vehemently Steve snapped, “No!” Then, reluctantly, he added, “But it did happen occasionally.” Quickly he tried to explain. “The trouble was that all the doctors, including the psychists, were at the big bases, like Ceres. It was the only way they could help the people who needed them—be where the miners could find them. But all the danger was out in the rocks.

“You noticed a habit of mine once. I never make gestures. All Belters have that trait. It’s because on a small mining ship you could hit something waving your arms around. Something like the airlock button.”

“Sometimes it’s almost eerie. You don’t move for minutes at a time.”

“There’s always tension out in the rocks. Sometimes a miner would see too much danger and boredom and frustration, too much cramping inside and too much room outside, and he wouldn’t get to a psychist in time. He’d pick a fight in a bar. I saw it happen once. The guy was using his hands like mallets.”

Steve had been looking far into the past. Now he turned back to Sue. She looked white and sick, like a novice nurse standing up to her first really bad case. His ears began to turn red. “Sorry,” he said miserably.

She felt like running; she was as embarrassed as he was. Instead she said, and tried to mean it, “It doesn’t matter. So you think the people in the other ship might want to, uh, make war?”

He nodded.

“Did you have history-of-Earth courses?”

He smiled ruefully. “No, I couldn’t qualify. Sometimes I wonder how many people do.”

“About one in twelve.”

“That’s not many.”

“People in general have trouble assimilating the facts of life about their ancestors. You probably know that there used to be wars before—hmmm—three hundred years ago, but do you know what a war is? Can you visualize one? Can you see a fusion electric point deliberately built to explode in the middle of the city? Do you know what a concentration camp is? A limited action? You probably think murder ended with war. Well, it didn’t. The last murder occurred in twenty-one something, just a hundred and sixty years ago.

“Anyone who says human nature can’t be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he’s got to define human nature—and he can’t. Three things gave us our present peaceful civilization, and each one was a technological change.” Sue’s voice had taken on a dry, remote lecture-hall tone, like the voice on a teacher tape. “One was the development of psychistry beyond the alchemist stage. Another was the full development of land for food production. The third was the Fertility Restriction Laws and the annual contraceptive shots. They gave us room to breathe. Maybe Belt mining and the stellar colonies had something to do with it too; they gave us an inanimate enemy. Even the historians argue about that one.

“Here’s the delicate point I’m trying to nail down.” Sue rapped on the window. “Look at that spacecraft. It has enough power to move it around like a mail missile and enough fuel to move it up to our point eight light—right?”

“Right.”

“—with plenty of power left for maneuvering. It’s a better ship than ours. If they’ve had time to learn how to build a ship like that, they’ve had time to build up their own versions of psychistry, modern food production, contraception, economic theory, everything they need to abolish war. See?”

Steve had to smile at her earnestness. “Sure, Sue, it makes sense. But that guy in the bar came from our culture, and he was hostile enough. If we can’t understand how he thinks, how can we guess about the mind of something whose very chemical makeup we can’t guess at yet?”

“It’s sentient. It builds tools.”

“Right.”

“And if Jim hears you talking like this, you’ll be in psychistry treatment.”

“That’s the best argument you’ve given me,” Steve grinned, and stroked her under the ear with two fingertips. He felt her go suddenly stiff, saw the pain in her face; and at the same time his own pain struck, a real tiger of a headache, as if his brain were trying to swell beyond his skull.

“I’ve got them, sir,” the Telepath said blurrily. “Ask me anything.”

The Captain hurried, knowing that the Telepath couldn’t stand this for long. “How do they power their ship?”

“It’s a light-pressure drive powered by incomplete hydrogen fusion. They use an electromagnetic ramscoop to get their own hydrogen from space.”

“Clever…Can they get away from us?”

“No. Their drive is on idle, ready to go, but it won’t help them. It’s pitifully weak.”

“What kind of weapons do they have?”

The Telepath remained silent for a long time. The others waited patiently for his answer. There was sound in the control dome, but it was the kind of sound one learns not to hear: the whine of heavy current, the muted purr of voices from below, the strange sound like continuously ripping cloth which came from the gravity motors.

“None at all, sir.” The Kzin’s voice became clearer; his hypnotic relaxation was broken by muscle twitches. He twisted as if in a nightmare. “Nothing aboard ship, not even a knife or a club. Wait, they’ve got cooking knives. But that’s all they use them for. They don’t fight.”

“They don’t fight?”

“No, sir. They don’t expect us to fight, either. The idea has occurred to three of them, and each has dismissed it from his mind.”

“But why?” the Captain asked, knowing the question was irrelevant, unable to hold it back.

“I don’t know, sir. It’s a science they use, or a religion. I don’t understand,” the Telepath whimpered. “I don’t understand at all.”

Which must be tough on him, the Captain thought. Completely alien thoughts…“What are they doing now?”

“Waiting for us to talk to them. They tried to talk to us, and they think we must be trying just as hard.”

“But why?—never mind, it’s not important. Can they be killed by heat?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Break contact.”

The Telepath shook his head violently. He looked like he’d been in a washing machine. The Captain touched a sensitized surface and bellowed, “Weapons Officer!”

“Here.”

“Use the inductors on the enemy ship.”

“But, sir! They’re so slow! What if the alien attacks?”

“Don’t argue with me, you—” Snarling, the Captain delivered an impassioned monologue on the virtues of unquestioning obedience. When he switched off, the Alien Technologies Officer was back at the viewer and the Telepath had gone to sleep.

The Captain purred happily, wishing that they were all this easy.

When the occupants had been killed by heat he would take the ship. He could tell everything he needed to know about their planet by examining their life-support system. He could locate it by tracing the ship’s trajectory. Probably they hadn’t even taken evasive action!

If they came from a Kzin-like world it would become a Kzin world. And he, as Conquest Leader, would command one percent of its wealth for the rest of his life! Truly, the future looked rich. No longer would he be called by his profession. He would bear a name…

“Incidental information,” said the A-T Officer. “The ship was generating one and twelve sixty-fourth gee before it stopped rotating.”

“Little heavy,” the Captain mused. “Might be too much air, but it should be easy to Kzinform it. A-T, we find the strangest life forms. Remember the Chunquen?”

“Both sexes were sentient. They fought constantly.”

“And that funny religion on Altair One. They thought they could travel in time.”

“Yes, sir. When we landed the infantry they were all gone.”

“They must have all committed suicide with disintegrators. But why? They knew we only wanted slaves. And I’m still trying to figure out how they got rid of the disintegrators afterward.”

“Some beings,” said the A-T Officer, “will do anything to keep their beliefs.”

Eleven years beyond Pluto, eight years from her destination, the fourth colony ship to We Made It fell between the stars. Before her the stars were green-white and blue-white, blazing points against nascent black. Behind they were sparse, dying red embers. To the sides the constellations were strangely flattened. The universe was shorter than it had been.

For a while Jim Davis was very busy. Everyone, including himself, had a throbbing blinding headache. To each patient Dr. Davis handed a tiny pink pill from the dispenser slot of the huge autodoc which covered the back wall of the infirmary. They milled outside the door waiting for the pills to take effect, looking like a full-fledged mob in the narrow corridor; and then someone thought it would be a good idea to go to the lounge, and everyone followed him. It was an unusually silent mob. Nobody felt like talking while the pain was with them. Even the sound of magnetic sandals was lost in the plastic pile rug.

Steve saw Jim Davis behind him. “Hey, Doc,” he called softly. “How long before the pain stops?”

“Mine’s gone away. You got your pills a little after I did, right?”

“Right. Thanks, Doc.”

They didn’t take pain well, these people. They were too unused to it.

In single file they walked or floated into the lounge. Low-pitched conversations started. People took couches, using the sticky plastic strips on their falling jumpers. Others stood or floated near walls. The lounge was big enough to hold them all in comfort.

Steve wriggled near the ceiling, trying to pull on his sandals.

“I hope they don’t try that again,” he heard Sue say. “It hurt.”

“Try what?” Someone Steve didn’t recognize, half-listening as he was.

“Whatever they tried. Telepathy, perhaps.”

“No. I don’t believe in telepathy. Could they have set up ultrasonic vibrations in the walls?”

Steve had his sandals on. He left the magnets turned off.

“…a cold beer. Do you realize we’ll never taste beer again?” Jim Davis’s voice.

“I miss waterskiing.” Ann Harrison sounded wistful. “The feel of a pusher unit shoving into the small of your back, the water beating against your feet, the sun…”

Steve pushed himself toward them. “Taboo subject,” he called.

“We’re on it anyway,” Jim boomed cheerfully. “Unless you’d rather talk about the alien, which everyone else is doing. I’d rather drop it for the moment. What’s your greatest regret at leaving Earth?”

“Only that I didn’t stay long enough to really see it.”

“Oh, of course.” Jim suddenly remembered the drinking bulb in his hand. He drank from it, hospitably passed it to Steve.

“This waiting makes me restless,” said Steve. “What are they likely to try next? Shake the ship in Morse code?”

Jim smiled. “Maybe they won’t try anything next. They may give up and leave.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said Ann.

“Would that be so bad?”

Steve had a start. What was Jim thinking?

“Of course!” Ann protested. “We’ve got to find out what they’re like! And think of what they can teach us, Jim!”

When conversation got controversial it was good manners to change the subject. “Say,” said Steve, “I happened to notice the wall was warm when I pushed off. Is that good or bad?”

“That’s funny. It should be cold, if anything,” said Jim. “There’s nothing out there but starlight. Except—” A most peculiar expression flitted across his face. He drew his feet up and touched the magnetic soles with his fingertips.

“Eeeee! Jim! Jim!”

Steve tried to whirl around and got nowhere. That was Sue! He switched on his shoes, thumped to the floor, and went to help.

Sue was surrounded by bewildered people. They split to let Jim Davis through, and he tried to lead her out of the lounge. He looked frightened. Sue was moaning and thrashing, paying no attention to his efforts.

Steve pushed through to her. “All the metal is heating up,” Davis shouted. “We’ve got to get her hearing aid out.”

“Infirmary,” Sue shouted.

Four of them took Sue down the hall to the infirmary. She was still crying and struggling feebly when they got her in, but Jim was there ahead of them with a spray hypo. He used it and she went to sleep.

The four watched anxiously as Jim went to work. The autodoc would have taken precious time for diagnosis. Jim operated by hand. He was able to do a fast job, for the tiny instrument was buried just below the skin behind her ear. Still, the scalpel must have burned his fingers before he was done. Steve could feel the growing warmth against the soles of his feet.

Did the aliens know what they were doing?

Did it matter? The ship was being attacked. His ship.

Steve slipped into the corridor and ran for the control room. Running on magnetic soles, he looked like a terrified penguin, but he moved fast. He knew he might be making a terrible mistake; the aliens might be trying desperately to reach the Angel’s Pencil; he would never know. They had to be stopped before everyone was roasted.

The shoes burned his feet. He whimpered with the pain, but otherwise ignored it. The air burned in his mouth and throat. Even his teeth were hot.

He had to wrap his shirt around his hands to open the control-room door. The pain in his feet was unbearable; he tore off his sandals and swam to the control board. He kept his shirt over his hands to work the controls. A twist of a large white knob turned the drive on full, and he slipped into the pilot seat before the gentle light pressure could build up.

He turned to the rear-view telescope. It was aimed at the solar system, for the drive could be used for messages at this distance. He set it for short range and began to turn the ship.

The enemy ship glowed in the high infrared.

“It will take longer to heat the crew-carrying section,” reported the Alien Technologies Officer. “They’ll have temperature control there.”

“That’s all right. When you think they should all be dead, wake up the Telepath and have him check.” The Captain continued to brush his fur, killing time. “You know, if they hadn’t been so completely helpless I wouldn’t have tried this slow method. I’d have cut the ring free of the motor section first. Maybe I should have done that anyway. Safer.”

The A-T Officer wanted all the credit he could get. “Sir, they couldn’t have any big weapons. There isn’t room. With a reaction drive, the motor and the fuel tanks take up most of the available space.”

The other ship began to turn away from its tormentor. Its drive end glowed red.

“They’re trying to get away,” the Captain said, as the glowing end swung toward them. “Are you sure they can’t?”

“Yes sir. That light drive won’t take them anywhere.”

The Captain purred thoughtfully. “What would happen if the light hit our ship?”

“Just a bright light, I think. The lens is flat, so it must be emitting a very wide beam. They’d need a parabolic reflector to be dangerous. Unless—” His ears went straight up.

“Unless what?” The Captain spoke softly, demandingly.

“A laser. But that’s all right, sir. They don’t have any weapons.”

The Captain sprang at the control board. “Stupid!” he spat. “They don’t know weapons from sthondat blood. Weapons Officer! How could a telepath find out what they don’t know? WEAPONS OFFICER!”

“Here, sir.”

“Burn—”

An awful light shone in the control dome. The Captain burst into flame, then blew out as the air left through a glowing split in the dome.

Steve was lying on his back. The ship was spinning again, pressing him into what felt like his own bunk.

He opened his eyes.

Jim Davis crossed the room and stood over him. “You awake?”

Steve sat bolt upright, his eyes wide.

“Easy.” Jim’s gray eyes were concerned.

Steve blinked up at him. “What happened?” he asked, and discovered how hoarse he was.

Jim sat down in one of the chairs. “You tell me. We tried to get to the control room when the ship started moving. Why didn’t you ring the strap-down? You turned off the drive just as Ann came through the door. Then you fainted.”

“How about the other ship?” Steve tried to repress the urgency in his voice, and couldn’t.

“Some of the others are over there now, examining the wreckage.” Steve felt his heart stop. “I guess I was afraid from the start that alien ship was dangerous. I’m more psychist than emdee, and I qualified for history class, so maybe I know more than is good for me about human nature. Too much to think that beings with space travel will automatically be peaceful. I tried to think so, but they aren’t. They’ve got things any self-respecting human being would be ashamed to have nightmares about. Bomb missiles, fusion bombs, lasers, that induction projector they used on us. And antimissiles. You know what that means? They’ve got enemies like themselves, Steve. Maybe nearby.”

“So I killed them.” The room seemed to swoop around him, but his voice came out miraculously steady.

“You saved the ship.”

“It was an accident. I was trying to get us away.”

“No, you weren’t.” Davis’s accusation was as casual as if he were describing the chemical makeup of urea. “That ship was four hundred miles away. You would have had to sight on it with a telescope to hit it. You knew what you were doing, too, because you turned off the drive as soon as you’d burned through the ship.”

Steve’s back muscles would no longer support him. He flopped back to horizontal. “All right, you know,” he told the ceiling. “Do the others?”

“I doubt it. Killing in self-defense is too far outside their experience. I think Sue’s guessed.”

“Oooo.”

“If she has, she’s taking it well,” Davis said briskly. “Better than most of them will, when they find out the universe is full of warriors. This is the end of the world, Steve.”

“What?”

“I’m being theatrical. But it is. Three hundred years of the peaceful life for everyone. They’ll call it the Golden Age. No starvation, no war, no physical sickness other than senescence, no permanent mental sickness at all, even by our rigid standards. When someone over fourteen tries to use his fist on someone else we say he’s sick, and we cure him. And now it’s over. Peace isn’t a stable condition, not for us. Maybe not for anything that lives.”

“Can I see the ship from here?”

“Yes. It’s just behind us.”

Steve rolled out of bed, went to the window.

Someone had steered the ships much closer together. The Kzinti ship was a huge red sphere with ugly projections scattered at seeming random over the hull. The beam had sliced it into two unequal halves, sliced it like an ax through an egg. Steve watched, unable to turn aside, as the big half rotated to show its honeycombed interior.

“In a little while,” said Jim, “the men will be coming back. They’ll be frightened. Someone will probably insist that we arm ourselves against the next attacks, using weapons from the other ship. I’ll have to agree with him.

“Maybe they’ll think I’m sick myself. Maybe I am. But it’s the kind of sickness we’ll need.” Jim looked desperately unhappy. “We’re going to become an armed society. And of course we’ll have to warn the Earth…”

MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE

A world that had forgotten war did not easily accept the possibility of invading aliens.

LN

I

I A lucky few of us know the good days before they’re gone.

I remember my eighties. My job kept me in shape and gave me enough variety to keep my mind occupied. My love life was imperfect but interesting. Modern medicine makes the old fairy tales look insipid; I almost never worried about my health.

Those were the good days, and I knew them. I could remember worse.

I can remember when my memory was better, too. That’s what this file is for. I keep it updated for that reason and also to maintain my sense of purpose.

The Monobloc had been a singles bar since the 2320s.

In the 2330s I’d been a regular. I’d found Charlotte there. We held our wedding reception at the Monobloc, then dropped out for twenty-eight years. My first marriage—hers, too—both in our forties. After the children grew up and moved away, after Charlotte left me, too, I came back.

The place was much changed.

I remembered a couple of hundred bottles in the hologram bar display. Now the display was twice as large and seemed more realistic—better equipment, maybe—but only a score of bottles in the middle were liquors. The rest were flavored or carbonated water, high-energy drinks, electrolytes, a thousand kinds of tea; there was also food to match: raw vegetables and fruits kept fresh by high-tech means, arrayed with low-cholesterol dips, bran in every conceivable form short of injections.

The Monobloc had swallowed its neighbors. It was bigger, with curtained alcoves and a small gym upstairs for working out or for dating.

Herbert and Tina Schroeder still owned the place. Their marriage had been open in the 2330s. They’d aged since. So had their clientele. Some of us had married or drifted away or died of alcoholism, but word of mouth and the Velvet Net had maintained a continuous tradition. Twenty-eight years later they looked better than ever…wrinkled, of course, but lean and muscular, both ready for the Gray Olympics. Tina let me know before I could ask: she and Herb were lockstepped now.

To me it was like coming home.

For the next twelve years the Monobloc was an intermittent part of my life.

I would find a lady or she would find me, and we’d drop out. Or we’d visit the Monobloc and sometimes trade partners, and one evening we’d go together and leave separately. I was not evading marriage. Every woman I found worth knowing ultimately seemed to want to know someone else.

I was nearly bald even then. Thick white hair covered my arms and legs and torso, as if my head hairs had migrated. Twelve years of running construction robots had turned me burly. From time to time some muscular lady would look me over and claim me. I had no trouble finding company.

But company never stayed. Had I become dull? The notion struck me as funny.

I had settled myself alone at a table for two early on a Thursday evening in 2375. The Monobloc was half-empty. The earlies were all keeping one eye on the door when Anton Brillov came in.

Anton was shorter than me and much narrower, with a face like an ax. I hadn’t seen him in thirteen years. Still, I’d mentioned the Monobloc once or twice; he must have remembered.

I semaphored my arms. Anton squinted, then came over, exaggeratedly cautious until he saw who it was.

“Jack Strather!”

“Hi, Anton. So you decided to try the place.”

“Yah.” He sat. “You look good.” He looked a moment longer and said, “Relaxed. Placid. How’s Charlotte?”

“Left me after I retired. Just under a year after. There was too much of me around, and I…maybe I was too placid? Anyway. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Twitchy. Anton looked twitchy. I was amused. “Still with the Holy Office?”

“Only citizens call it that, Jack.”

“I’m a citizen now. Still gives me a kick. How’s your chemistry?”

Anton knew what I meant and didn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m okay. I’m down.”

“Kid, you’re looking over both shoulders at once.”

Anton managed a credible laugh. “I’m not the kid anymore. I’m a weekly.”

The ARM had made me a weekly at forty-eight. They couldn’t turn me loose at the end of the day anymore because my body chemistry couldn’t shift fast enough. So they kept me in the ARM building Monday through Thursday and gave me all of Thursday afternoon to shed the schitz madness. Another twenty years of that and I was even less flexible, so they retired me.

I said, “You do have to remember. When you’re in the ARM building, you’re a paranoid schizophrenic. You have to be able to file that when you’re outside.”

“Hah. How can anyone—”

“You get used to the schitz. After I quit, the difference was amazing. No fears, no tension, no ambition.”

“No Charlotte?”

“Well…I turned boring. And what are you doing here?”

Anton looked around. “Much the same thing you are, I guess. Jack, am I the youngest one here?”

“Maybe.” I looked around, double-checking. A woman was distracting me, though I could see only her back and a flash of a laughing profile. Her back was slender and strong, and a thick white braid ran down her spine, two and a half feet of clean, thick white hair. She was in an animated conversation with a blond companion of Anton’s age plus a few.

But they were at a table for two: they weren’t inviting company. I forced my attention back. “We’re gray singles, Anton. The young ones tend to get the message quick. We’re slower than we used to be. We date. You want to order?”

Alcohol wasn’t popular there. Anton must have noticed, but he ordered guava juice and vodka and drank as if he needed it. This looked worse than Thursday jitters. I let him half finish, then said, “Assuming you can tell me—”

“I don’t know anything.”

“I know the feeling. What should you know?”

The tension eased behind Anton’s eyes. “There was a message from the Angel’s Pencil.”

“Pencil…oh.” My mental reflexes had slowed down. The Angel’s Pencil had departed twenty years earlier for…was it Epsilon Eridani? “Come on, kid, it’ll be in the boob cubes before you have quite finished speaking. Anything from deep space is public property.”

“Hah! No. It’s restricted. I haven’t seen it myself. Only a reference, and it must be more than ten years old.”

That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn’t spread the news through the solar system, that was peculiar. No wonder Anton was antsy. ARMs react that way to puzzles.

Anton seemed to jerk himself back to the here and now, back to the gray singles regime. “Am I cramping your style?”

“No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone you like—” My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the table. “This gets you a map. Locate where she’s sitting, put the cursor on it. That gets you a display…hmm.”

I’d set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. “Phoebe Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight. Won a second in the Gray Jumps last year…that’s the Americas skiing matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you don’t watch your manners. It says she’s smarter than we are, too.

“Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the computer network for unlocked lifestyles.”

“So. Two males sitting together—”

“Anyone who thinks we’re bent can check if she cares enough. Bends don’t come to the Monobloc, anyway. But if we want company, we should move to a bigger table.”

We did that. I caught Phoebe Garrison’s companion’s eye. They played with their table controls, discussed, and presently wandered over.

Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we’d left the Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went home with Phoebe.

Phoebe had fine legs, as I’d anticipated, though both knees were Teflon and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation. She ate with a cross-country skier’s appetite. We spoke of our lives as we ate.

She’d come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth she’d done critical work in nanoengineering. The Board had allowed her four children. (I’d known I was out-classed.) All were married, scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.

My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I’d visited them once during an investigation trip paid for by the United Nations—

“You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story…if you can.”

“That’s the problem, all right.”

The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor and a field that would catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more interesting tales yet.

I said, “I don’t know anything current. They bounced me out when I got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports.”

“Interesting?”

“Mostly placid.” She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.

“We don’t get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on us by the Belt.” And I told her about a lunie who’d sired two clones. One he’d raised on the moon, and one he’d left in the Saturn Conserve. He’d moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen’s entire birthright. When we found him, he was arranging to culture a third clone…

I dreamed a bloody dream.

It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the dream dissolved before I could touch them, but the sensations remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.

It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor of wonderful, but I’d had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe’s arm and leg and got out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked myself up, and fell asleep on the table.

Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, “Couldn’t that wait till after breakfast?”

“I’ve got four years on you and I’m going for infinity. So I’m careful,” I told her. Let her think the tube carried vitamins. It wasn’t quite a lie…and she didn’t quite believe me, either.

On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.

In Death Valley a semicircle of twenty lasers points at an axial array of mirrors. Tracks run across the desert to a platform that looks like strands of spun caramel. Every hour or so a spacecraft trundles along the tracks, poses above the mirrors, and rises into the sky on a blinding, searing pillar of light.

That was where I and three companions and twenty-eight robots worked between emergencies. Emergencies were common enough. From time to time Glenn and Skii and ten or twenty machines had to be shipped off to Outback Field or Baikonur, while I held the fort at Death Valley Field.

All the equipment was old. The original mirrors had all been slaved to one system and had been replaced again and again. Newer mirrors were independently mounted and had their own computers, but even they were up to fifty years old and losing their flexibility. The lasers had to be replaced somewhat more often. Nothing was ready to fall apart, quite.

But the mirrors have to adjust their shapes to match distorting air currents all the way up to vacuum, because the distortions themselves must focus the drive beam. A laser at 99.3 percent efficiency is keeping too much energy, getting too hot. At 99.1 percent something would melt, lost power would blow the laser into shrapnel, and a cargo would not reach orbit.

My team had been replacing mirrors and lasers long before I came on the scene. This circuit was nearly complete. We had already reconfigured some robots to begin replacing track.

The robots worked alone while we entertained ourselves in the monitor room. If the robots ran into anything unfamiliar, they stopped and beeped. Then a story or songfest or poker game would stop just as abruptly.

Usually the beep meant that the robot had found an acute angle, an uneven surface, a surface not strong enough to bear a loaded robot, a bend in a pipe, a pipe where it shouldn’t be…a geometric problem. The robots couldn’t navigate just anywhere. Sometimes we’d have to unload it and move the load to a cart by hand. Sometimes we had to pick it up with a crane and move it or turn it. Lots of it was muscle work.

Phoebe joined me for dinner Thursday evening.

She’d whipped her grandson at laser tag. They’d gone through the museum at Edwards AFB. They’d skied…he needed to get serious about that and maybe get some surgery, too…

I listened and smiled and presently tried to tell her about my work. She nodded; her eyes glazed. I tried to tell her how good it was, how restful, after all those years in the ARM.

The ARM: that got her interest back. Stet. I told her about the Henry program.

I’d been saving that. It was an embezzling system good enough to ruin the economy. It made Zachariah Henry rich. He might have stayed rich if he’d quit in time…and if his system hadn’t been so good, so dangerous, he might have ended in prison. Instead…well, let his tongue whisper secrets to the ears in the organ banks.

I could speak of it because they’d changed the system. I didn’t say that it had happened twenty years before I’d joined the ARM. But I was still running out of declassified stories. I told her, “If a lot of people know something can be done, somebody’ll do it. We can suppress it and suppress it again—”

She pounced. “Like what?”

“Like…well, the usual example is the first cold fusion system. They did it with palladium and platinum, but half a dozen other metals work. And organic superconductors: the patents listed a wrong ingredient. Various grad students tried it wrong and still got it. If there’s a way to do it, there’s probably a lot of ways.”

“That was before there was an ARM. Would you have suppressed superconductors?”

“No. What for?”

“Or cold fusion?”

“No.”

“Cold fusion releases neutrons,” she said. “Sheathe the generator with spent uranium, what do you get?”

“Plutonium, I think. So?”

“They used to make bombs out of plutonium.”

“Bothers you?”

“Jack, the fission bomb was it in the mass murder department. Like the crossbow. Like the Ayatollah’s Asteroid.” Phoebe’s eyes held mine. Her voice had dropped; we didn’t want to broadcast this all over the restaurant. “Don’t you ever wonder just how much of human knowledge is lost in that…black limbo inside the ARM building? Things that could solve problems, warm the Earth again, ease us through the lightspeed wall.”

“We don’t suppress inventions unless they’re dangerous,” I said.

I could have backed out of the argument, but that, too, would have disappointed Phoebe. Phoebe liked a good argument. My problem was that what I gave her wasn’t good enough. Maybe I couldn’t get angry enough; maybe my most forceful arguments were classified.

Monday morning Phoebe left for Dallas and a granddaughter. There had been no war, no ultimatum, but it felt final.

Thursday evening I was back in the Monobloc.

So was Anton. “I’ve played it,” he said. “Can’t talk about it, of course.”

He looked mildly bored. His hands looked like they were trying to break chunks off the edge of the table.

I nodded placidly.

Anton shouldn’t have told me about the broadcast from the Angel’s Pencil. But he had, and if the ARM had noticed, they’d better hear him mention it again.

Company joined us, sampled, and departed. Anton and I spoke to a pair of ladies who turned out to have other tastes. (Some bends like to bug the straights.) A younger woman joined us for a time. She couldn’t have been over thirty and was lovely in the modern style, but hard, sharply defined muscle isn’t my sole standard of beauty.

I remarked to Anton, “Sometimes the vibes just aren’t right.”

“Yeah. Look, Jack, I have carefully concealed a prehistoric Calvados in my apt at Maya. There isn’t really enough for four—”

“Sounds nice. Eat first?”

“Stet. There’s sixteen restaurants in Maya.”

A score of blazing rectangles meandered across the night, washing out the stars. The eye could still find a handful of other space artifacts, particularly around the moon.

Anton flashed the beeper that would summon a taxi. I said, “So you viewed the call. So why so tense?”

Security devices no bigger than a basketball rode the glowing sky, but the casual eye would not find them. One had to assume they were there. Patterns in their monitor chips would match the vision and sound patterns of a mugging, a rape, an injury, a cry for help. Those chips had gigabytes to spare for words and word patterns the ARM might find of interest.

So: no key words.

Anton said, “Jack, they tell a hell of a story. A…foreign vehicle pulled alongside Angela at four-fifths of legal max. It tried to cook them.”

I stared. A spacecraft matched course with the Angel’s Pencil at eighty percent of lightspeed? Nothing man-built could do that. And warlike? Maybe I’d misinterpreted everything. That can happen when you make up your code as you go along.

But how could the Pencil have escaped? “How did Angela manage to phone home?”

A taxi dropped. Anton said, “She sliced the bread with the, you know, motor. I said it’s a hell of a story.”

Anton’s apartment was most of the way up the slope of Maya, the pyramidal arcology north of Santa Maria. Old wealth.

Anton led me through great doors, into an elevator, down corridors. He played tour guide: “The Fertility Board was just getting some real power about the time this place went up. It was built to house a million people. It’s never been fully occupied.”

“So?”

“So we’re en route to the east face. Four restaurants, a dozen little bars. And here we stop.”

“This your apt?”

“No. It’s empty; it’s always been empty. I sweep it for bugs, but the authorities…I think they’ve never noticed.”

“Is that your mattress?”

“No. Kids. They’ve got a club that’s two generations old. My son tipped me off to this.”

“Could we be interrupted?”

“No. I’m monitoring them. I’ve got the security system set to let them in, but only when I’m not here. Now I’ll set it to recognize you. Don’t forget the number: Apt 23309.”

“What is the ARM going to think we’re doing?”

“Eating. We went to one of the restaurants, then came back and drank Calvados…which we will do later. I can fix the records at Buffalo Bill. Just don’t argue about the credit charge, stet?”

“But—Yah, stet.” Hope you won’t be noticed; that’s the real defense. I was thinking of bailing out, but curiosity is part of what gets you into the ARM. “Tell your story. You said she sliced the bread with the, you know, motor?”

“Maybe you don’t remember. Angel’s Pencil isn’t your ordinary Bussard ramjet. The field scoops up interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion-pumped laser. The idea was to use it for communications, too. Blast a message halfway across the galaxy with that. A Belter crewman used it to cut the alien ship in half.”

“There’s a communication you can live without. Anton…what they taught us in school. A sapient species doesn’t reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They’ll wreck the environment one way or another—war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding…remember?”

“Sure.”

“So do you believe all this?”

“I think so.” He smiled painfully. “Director Bernhardt didn’t. He classified the message and attached a memo, too. Six years of flight aboard a ship of limited size, terminal boredom coupled with high intelligence and too much time, elaborate practical jokes, yadda yadda. Director Harms left it classified…with the cooperation of the Belt. Interesting?”

“But he had to have that.”

“But they had to agree. There’s been more since. Angel’s Pencil sent us hundreds of detailed photos of the alien ship. It’s unlikely they could be faked. There are corpses. Big sort of cats, orange, up to three meters tall, big feet and elaborate hands with thumbs. We’re in mucking great trouble if we have to face those.”

“Anton, we’ve had 350 years of peace. We must be doing something right. The odds say we can negotiate.”

“You haven’t seen them.”

It was almost funny. Jack was trying to make me nervous. Twenty years earlier the terror would have been fizzing in my blood. Better living through chemistry! This was all frightening enough, but my fear was a cerebral thing, and I was its master.

I wasn’t nervous enough for Anton. “Jack, this isn’t just vaporware. A lot of those photos show what’s maybe a graviton generator, maybe not. Director Harms set up a lab on the moon to build one for us.”

“Funded?”

“Heavy funding. Somebody believes in this. But they’re getting results! It works!”

I mulled it over. “Alien contact. As a species we don’t seem to handle that too well.”

“Maybe this one can’t be handled at all.”

“What else is being done?”

“Nothing, or damn close. Silly suggestions, career-oriented crap designed to make a bureau bigger…Nobody wants to use the magic word. War.”

“War. Three hundred fifty years out of practice, we are. Maybe C. Cretemaster will save us.” I smiled at Anton’s bewilderment. “Look it up in the ARM records. There’s supposed to be an alien of sorts living in the cometary halo. He’s the force that’s been keeping us at peace this past three and a half centuries.”

“Very funny.”

“Mmm. Well, Anton, this is a lot more real for you than for me. I haven’t yet seen anything upsetting.”

I hadn’t called him a liar. I’d only made him aware that I knew nothing to the contrary. For Anton there might be elaborate proof, but I’d seen nothing and had heard only a scary tale.

Anton reacted gracefully. “Of course. Well, there’s still that bottle.”

Anton’s Calvados was as special as he’d claimed, decades old and unique. He produced cheese and bread. Good thing: I was ready to eat his arm off. We managed to stick to harmless topics and parted friends.

The big catlike aliens had taken up residence in my soul.

Aliens aren’t implausible. Once upon a time, maybe. But an ancient ETI in a stasis field had been in the Smithsonian since the opening of the twenty-second century, and a quite different creature—C. Cretemaster’s real-life analog—had crashed on Mars before the century had ended.

Two spacecraft matching course at near lightspeed; that was just short of ridiculous. Kinetic energy considerations…why, two such ships colliding might as well be made of antimatter! Nothing short of a gravity generator could make it work. But Anton was claiming a gravity generator.

His story was plausible in another sense. Faced with warrior aliens, the ARM would do only what it could not avoid. They would build a gravity generator because the ARM had to control such a thing. Any further move was a step toward the unthinkable. The ARM took sole credit (and other branches of the United Nations also took sole credit) for the fact that man had left war behind. I shuddered to think what force it would take to turn the ARM toward war.

I would continue to demand proof of Anton’s story. Looking for proof was one way to learn more, and I resist seeing myself as stupid. But I believed him already.

On Thursday we returned to Apt 23309.

“I had to dig deep to find out, but they’re not just sitting on their thumbs,” he said. “There’s a game going in Aristarchus Crater, Belt against flatlander. They’re playing peace games.”

“Huh?”

“They’re making formats for contact and negotiation with hypothetical aliens. The models all have the look of those alien corpses, cats with bald tails, but they all think differently.”

“Good.” Here was my proof. I could check this claim.

“Good. Sure. Peace games.” Anton was brooding. Twitchy. “What about war games?”

“How would you run one? Half your soldiers would be dead at the end…unless you’re thinking of rifles with paint bullets. War gets more violent than that.”

Anton laughed. “Picture every building in Chicago covered with scarlet paint on one side. A nuclear war game.”

“Now what? I mean, for us.”

“Yah. Jack, the ARM isn’t doing anything to put the human race back on a war footing.”

“Maybe they’ve done something they haven’t told you about.”

“Jack, I don’t think so.”

“They haven’t let you read all their files, Anton. Two weeks ago you didn’t know about peace games in Aristarchus. But okay. What should they be doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’s your chemistry?”

Anton grimaced. “How’s yours? Forget I said that. Maybe I’m back to normal and maybe I’m not.”

“Yah, but you haven’t thought of anything. How about weapons? Can’t have a war without weapons, and the ARM’s been suppressing weapons. We should dip into their files and make up a list. It would save some time when and if. I know of an experiment that might have been turned into an inertialess drive if it hadn’t been suppressed.”

“Date?”

“Early twenty-second. And there was a field projector that would make things burn, late twenty-third.”

“I’ll find ’em.” Anton’s eyes took on a faraway look. “There’s the archives. I don’t mean just the stuff that was built and then destroyed. The archives reach all the way back to the early twentieth. Stuff that was proposed: tanks, orbital beam weapons, kinetic energy weapons, biologicals—”

“We don’t want biologicals.”

I thought he hadn’t heard. “Picture crowbars six feet long. A short burn takes them out of orbit, and they steer themselves down to anything with the silhouette you want…a tank or a submarine or a limousine, say. Primitive stuff now, but at least it would do something.” He was really getting into this. The technical terms he was tossing off were masks for horror. He stopped suddenly, then said, “Why not biologicals?”

“Nasty bacteria tailored for us might not work on warcats. We want their biological weapons, and we don’t want them to have ours.”

“Stet. Now, here’s one for you. How would you adjust a ’doc to make a normal person into a soldier?”

My head snapped up. I saw the guilt spread across his face. He said, “I had to look up your dossier. Had to, Jack.”

“Sure. All right, I’ll see what I can find.” I stood up. “The easiest way is to pick schitzies and train them as soldiers. We’d start with the same citizens the ARM has been training since…date classified, three hundred years or so. People who need the ’doc to keep their metabolism straight or they’ll ram a car into a crowd or strangle—”

“We wouldn’t find enough. When you need soldiers, you need thousands. Maybe millions.”

“True. It’s a rare condition. Well, good night, Anton.”

I fell asleep on the ’doc table again.

Dawn poked under my eyelids, and I got up and moved toward the holophone. Caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Rethought. If David saw me looking like this, he’d be booking tickets to attend the funeral. So I took a shower and a cup of coffee first.

My eldest son looked like I had: decidedly rumpled. “Dad, can’t you read a clock?”

“I’m sorry. Really.” These calls are so expensive that there’s no point hanging up. “How are things in Aristarchus?”

“Clavius. We’ve been moved out. We’ve got half the space we used to, and we’d need twice the space to hold everything we own. Ah, the time change isn’t your fault, Dad; we’re all in Clavius now, all but Jennifer. She—” David vanished. A mechanically soothing voice said, “You have impinged on ARM police business. The cost of your call will be refunded.”

I looked at the empty space where David’s face had been. I was ARM…but maybe I’d already heard enough.

My granddaughter Jennifer is a medic. The censor program had reacted to her name in connection with David. David said she wasn’t with him. The whole family had been moved out except for Jennifer.

If she’d stayed on in Aristarchus or been kept on…

Human medics are needed when something unusual has happened to a human body or brain. Then they study what’s going on, with an eye to writing more programs for the ’docs. The bulk of those problems are psychological.

Anton’s “peace games” must be stressful as hell.

II

II Anton wasn’t at the Monobloc Thursday. That gave me another week to rethink and recheck the programs I’d put on a dime disk, but I didn’t need it.

I came back the next Thursday. Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison were holding a table for four.

I paused—backlit in the doorway, knowing my expression was hidden—then moved in. “When did you get back?”

“Saturday before last,” Phoebe said gravely.

It felt awkward. Anton felt it, too, but then, he would. I began to wish I didn’t ever have to see him on a Thursday night.

I tried tact. “Shall we see if we can conscript a fourth?”

“It’s not like that,” Phoebe said. “Anton and I, we’re together. We had to tell you.”

But I’d never thought…I’d never claimed Phoebe. Dreams are private. This was coming from some wild direction. “Together as in?”

Anton said, “Well, not married, not yet, but thinking about it. And we wanted to talk privately.”

“Like over dinner?”

“A good suggestion.”

“I like Buffalo Bill. Let’s go there.”

Twenty-odd habitués of the Monobloc must have heard the exchange and watched us leave. Those three long-timers seem friendly enough but too serious…and three’s an odd number…

We didn’t talk until we’d reached Apt 23309.

Anton closed the door before he spoke. “She’s in, Jack. Everything.”

I said, “It’s really love, then.”

Phoebe smiled. “Jack, don’t be offended. Choosing is what humans do.”

Trite, I thought, and then: Skip it. “That bit there in the Monobloc seemed overdone. I felt excessively foolish.”

“That was for them. My idea,” Phoebe said. “After tonight one of us may have to go away. This way we’ve got an all-purpose excuse. You leave because your best friend and favored lady closed you out. Or Phoebe leaves because she can’t bear to ruin a friendship. Or big, burly Jack drives Anton away. See?”

She wasn’t just in; she was taking over. Ah, well. “Phoebe, love, do you believe in murderous cats eight feet tall?”

“Do you have doubts, Jack?”

“Not anymore. I called my son. Something secretive is happening in Aristarchus, something that requires a medic.”

She only nodded. “What have you got for us?”

I showed them my dime disk. “Took me less than a week. Run it in an autodoc. Ten personality choices. The chemical differences aren’t big, but…infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn’t have anything to do with children…where was I? Yah. Infantry isn’t at all like logistics, and neither is like espionage, and navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We’ll have to reinvent them. This is just a first cut. I wish we had a way to try it out.”

Anton set a dime disk next to mine, along with a small projector. “Mine’s nearly full. The ARM’s stored an incredible range of dangerous devices. We need to think hard about where to store this. I even wondered if one of us should be emigrating, which is why—”

“To the Belt? Farther?”

“Jack, if this all adds up, we won’t have time to reach another star.”

We watched stills and flat motion pictures of weapons and tools in action. Much of it was quite primitive, copied out of deep archives. We watched rock and landscape being torn, aircraft exploding, machines destroying other machines…and imagined flesh shredding.

“I could get more, but I thought I’d better show you this first,” Anton said.

I said, “Don’t bother.”

“What? Jack?”

“It only took us a week! Why risk our necks to do work that can be duplicated that fast?”

Anton looked lost. “We need to do something!”

“Well, maybe we don’t. Maybe the ARM is doing it all for us.”

Phoebe gripped Anton’s wrist hard, and he swallowed some bitter retort. She said, “Maybe we’re missing something. Maybe we’re not looking at it right.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Let’s find a way to look at it differently.” She was looking straight at me.

I said, “Stoned? Drunk? Fizzed? Wired?”

Phoebe shook her head. “We need the schitz view.”

“Dangerous, love. Also, the chemicals you’re talking about are massively illegal. I can’t get them, and Anton would be caught for sure.” I saw the way she was smiling at me. “Anton, I’ll break your scrawny neck.”

“Huh? Jack?”

“No, no, he didn’t tell me,” Phoebe said hastily, “though frankly, I’d think either of you might have trusted me that much, Jack! I remembered you in the ’doc that morning, and Anton coming down from that twitchy state on a Thursday night, and it all clicked.”

“Okay.”

“You’re a schitz, Jack. But it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“Thirteen years of peace,” I said. “They pick us for it, you know. Paranoid schizophrenics, born with our chemistry screwed up, a hair-trigger temper, and a skewed view of the universe. Most schitzies never have to feel that. We use the ’docs more regularly than you do, and that’s that. But some of us go into the ARM. Phoebe, your suggestion is still silly. Anton’s crazy four days out of the week, just like I used to be. Anton’s all you need.”

“Phoebe, he’s right.”

“No. The ARM used to be all schitzies, right? The genes have thinned out over three hundred years.”

Anton nodded. “They’ll tell us in training. The ones who could be Hitler or Napoleon or Castro—they’re the ones the ARM wants. They’re the ones you can send on a mother hunt, the ones with no social sense. But the Fertility Board doesn’t let them breed, either, unless they’ve got something special. Jack, you were special, high intelligence or something—”

“Perfect teeth, and I don’t get sick in free fall, and Charlotte’s people never develop back problems. That helped. Yah…but every century there are less of us. So they hire some Antons, too, and make you crazy.”

“But carefully,” Phoebe said. “Anton’s not evolved for paranoia, Jack. You are. When they juice Anton up, they don’t make him too crazy, just enough to get the viewpoint they want. I bet they leave the top management boringly sane. But you, Jack—”

“I see it.” Centuries of ARM tradition were squarely on her side.

“You can go as crazy as you like. It’s all natural, and medics have known how to handle it since Only One Earth. We need the schitz viewpoint, and we don’t have to steal the chemicals.”

“Stet. When do we start?”

Anton looked at Phoebe. Phoebe said, “Now?”

We played Anton’s tape all the way through, to a running theme of graveyard humor.

“I took only what I thought we could use,” Anton said. “You should have seen some of the rest: Agent Orange, napalm, murder stuff.”

Phoebe said, “Isn’t this murder?”

That remark might have been unfair. We were watching this bizarre chunky rotary-blade flier. Fire leapt from underneath it once and again…weapons of some kind.

Anton said, “Aircraft design isn’t the same when you use it for murder. It changes when you expect to be shot at. Here.” The picture had changed. “That’s another weapons platform. It’s not just fast; it’s supposed to hide in the sky. Jack, are you all right?”

“I’m scared green. I haven’t felt any effects yet.”

Phoebe said, “You need to relax. Anton delivers a terrific massage. I never learned.”

She wasn’t kidding. Anton didn’t have my muscle, but he had big strangler’s hands. I relaxed into it, talking as he worked, liking the way my voice wavered as his hands pounded my back.

“It hasn’t been that long since a guy like me let his ’doc run out of beta-damma-something. An indicator light ran out, and he didn’t notice. He tried to kill his business partner by bombing his partner’s house and got some family members instead.”

“We’re on watch,” Phoebe said. “If you go berserk, we can handle it. Do you want to see more of this?”

“We’ve missed something. Children, I’m a registered schitz. If I don’t use my ’doc for three days, they’ll be trying to find me before I remember I’m the Marsport Strangler.”

Anton said, “He’s right, love. Jack, give me your door codes. If I can get into your apt, I can fix the records.”

“Keep talking. Finish the massage, at least. We might have other problems. Do we want fruit juice? Munchies? Foodlike substances?”

When Anton came back with groceries, Phoebe and I barely noticed.

Were the warcats real? Could we fight them with current tech? How long did Sol system have? And the other systems, the more sparsely settled colony worlds? Was it enough to make tapes and blueprints of the old murder machines, or did we have to set to building clandestine factories? Phoebe and I were spilling ideas past each other as fast as they came, and I had quite forgotten that I was doing something dangerous.

I noticed myself noticing that I was thinking much faster than thoughts could spill from my lips. I remembered knowing that Phoebe was brighter than I was, and that didn’t matter, either. But Anton was losing his Thursday edge.

We slept. The old airbed was a big one. We woke to fruit and bread and dived back in.

We reinvented the navy, using only what Anton had recorded of seagoing navies. We had to. There had never been space navies; the long peace had fallen first.

I’m not sure when I slid into schitz mode. I’d spent four days out of seven without the ’doc every week for forty-one years, excluding vacations. You’d think I’d remember the feel of my brain chemistry changing. Sometimes I do, but it’s the central me that changes, and there’s no way to control that.

Anton’s machines were long out of date, and none had been developed even for interplanetary war. Mankind had found peace too soon. Pity. But if the warcats’ gravity generators could be copied before the warcats arrived, that alone could save us!

Then again, whatever the cats had for weapons, kinetic energy was likely to be the ultimate weapon however the mass was moved. Energy considerations don’t he…I stopped trying to anticipate individual war machines; what I needed was an overview.

Anton was saying very little.

I realized that I had been wasting my time making medical programs. Chemical enhancement was the most trivial of what we’d need to remake an army. Extensive testing would be needed, and then we might not get soldiers at all unless they retained some civil rights or unless officers killed enough of them to impress the rest. Our limited pool of schitzies had better be trained as our officers. For that matter, we’d better start by taking over the ARM. They had all the brightest schitzies.

As for Anton’s work in the ARM archives, the most powerful weapons had been entirely ignored. They were too obvious.

I saw how Phoebe was staring at me, and Anton, too, both gape-jawed.

I tried to explain that our task was nothing less than the reorganization of humanity. Large numbers might have to die before the rest saw the wisdom in following our lead. The warcats would teach that lesson, but if we waited for them, we’d be too late. Time was breathing hot on our necks.

Anton didn’t understand. Phoebe was following me, though not well, but Anton’s body language was pulling him back and closing him up while his face stayed blank. He feared me worse than he feared warcats.

I began to understand that I might have to kill Anton. I hated him for that.

We did not sleep at all on Friday. By Saturday noon we should have been exhausted. I’d caught catnaps from time to time—we all had—but I was still blazing with ideas. In my mind the pattern of an interstellar invasion was shaping itself like a vast three-dimensional map.

Earlier I might have killed Anton because he knew too much or too little, because he would steal Phoebe from me. Now I saw that that was foolish. Phoebe wouldn’t follow him. He simply didn’t have the…the internal power. As for knowledge, he was our only access to the ARM!

Saturday evening we ran out of food…and Anton and Phoebe saw the final flaw in their plan.

I found it hugely amusing. My ’doc was halfway across Santa Maria. They had to get me there. Me, a schitz.

We talked it around. Anton and Phoebe wanted to check my conclusions. Fine: we’d give them the schitz treatment. But for that we needed my disk (in my pocket) and my ’doc (at the apt). So we had to go to my apt.

With that in mind, we shaped plans for a farewell bacchanal.

Anton ordered supplies. Phoebe got me into a taxi. When I thought of other destinations, she was persuasive. And the party was waiting…

We were a long time reaching the ’doc. There was beer to be dealt with, and a pizza the size of Arthur’s round table. We sang, though Phoebe couldn’t hold a tune. We took ourselves to bed. It had been years since my urge to rut had run so high, so deep, backed by a sadness that ran deeper yet and wouldn’t go away.

When I was too relaxed to lift a finger, we staggered singing to the ’doc with me hanging limply between them. I produced my dime disk, but Anton took it away. What was this? They moved me onto the table and set it working. I tried to explain: they had to lie down, put the disk here…But the circuitry found my blood loaded with fatigue poisons and put me to sleep.

Sunday noon:

Anton and Phoebe seemed embarrassed in my presence. My own memories were bizarre, embarrassing. I’d been guilty of egotism, arrogance, self-centered lack of consideration. Three dark blue dots on Phoebe’s shoulder told me that I’d brushed the edge of violence. But the worst memory was of thinking like some red-handed conqueror, and out loud.

They’d never love me again.

But they could have brought me into the apt and straight to the ’doc. Why didn’t they?

While Anton was out of the room, I caught Phoebe’s smile in the corner of my eye and saw it fade as I turned. An old suspicion surfaced and has never faded since.

Suppose that the women I love are all attracted to Mad Jack. Somehow they recognize my schitz potential, though they find my sane state dull. There must have been a place for madness throughout most of human history. So men and women seek in each other the capacity for madness…

And so what? Schitzies kill. The real Jack Strather is too dangerous to be let loose.

And yet…it had been worth doing. From that strange fifty-hour session I remembered one real insight. We spent the rest of Sunday discussing it, making plans, while my central nervous system returned to its accustomed unnatural state. Sane Jack.

Anton Brillov and Phoebe Garrison held their wedding reception in the Monobloc. I stood as best man, bravely cheerful, running over with congratulations, staying carefully sober.

A week later I was among the asteroids. At the Monobloc they said that Jack Strather had fled Earth after his favored lady had deserted him for his best friend.

III

III Things ran smoother for me because John Junior had made a place for himself in Ceres.

Even so, they had to train me. Twenty years earlier I’d spent a week in the Belt. It wasn’t enough. Training and a Belt citizen’s equipment used up most of my savings and two months of my time.

Time had brought me to Mercury, and the lasers, eight years before.

Lightsails are rare in the inner solar system. Between Venus and Mercury there are still lightsail races, an expensive, uncomfortable, and dangerous sport. Cargo craft once sailed throughout the Asteroid Belt, until fusion motors became cheaper and more dependable.

The last refuge of the lightsail is a huge, empty region: the cometary halo, Pluto and beyond. The lightsails are all cargo craft. That far from Sol their thrust must be augmented by lasers, the same Mercury lasers that sometimes hurl an unmanned probe into interstellar space.

These were different from the launch lasers I was familiar with. They were enormously larger. In Mercury’s lower gravity, in Mercury’s windless environment, they looked like crystals caught in spiderwebs. When the lasers fired, the fragile support structures wavered like a spiderweb in the wind.

Each stood in a wide black pool of solar collector, as if tar paper had been scattered at random. A collector sheet that lost fifty percent of its power was not removed. We would add another sheet but continue to use all the available power.

Their power output is dangerous to the point of fantasy. For safety’s sake the Mercury lasers have to be continuously linked to the rest of the solar system across a lightspeed delay of several hours. The newer solar collectors also pick up broadcasts from space or from the control center in Challenger Crater. Mercury’s lasers must never lose contact. A beam that strayed where it wasn’t supposed to could do untold damage.

They were spaced all along the planet’s equator. They were hundreds of years apart in design, size, technology. They fired while the sun was up and feeding their square miles of collectors, with a few fusion generators for backup. They flicked from target to target as the horizon moved. When the sun set, it set for thirty-odd Earth days, and that was plenty of time to make repairs—

“In general, that is.” Kathry Perritt watched my eyes to be sure I was paying attention. I felt like a schoolboy again. “In general we can repair and update each laser station in turn and still keep ahead of the dawn. But come a quake, we work in broad daylight and like it.”

“Scary,” I said too cheerfully.

She looked at me. “You feel nice and cool? That’s a million tons of soil, old man, and a layer cake of mirror sheeting on top of that, and these old heat exchangers are still the most powerful ever built. Daylight doesn’t scare you? You’ll get over that.”

Kathry was a sixth-generation Belter from Mercury, taller than me by seven inches, not very strong, but extremely dexterous. She was my boss. I’d be sharing a room with her…and yes, she rapidly let me know that she expected us to be bedmates.

I was all for that. Two months in Ceres had shown me that Belters respond to social signals I don’t know. I had no idea how to seduce anyone.

Sylvia and Myron had been born on Mars in an enclave of arcologists digging out the cities beneath the deserts. Companions from birth, they’d married at puberty. They were addicted to news broadcasts. News could get them arguing. Otherwise they behaved as if they could read each other’s minds; they hardly talked to each other or to anyone else.

We’d sit around the duty room and wait and polish our skills as storytellers. Then one of the lasers would go quiet, and a tractor the size of some old Chicago skyscraper would roll.

Rarely was there much of a hurry. One laser would fill in for another until the Monster Bug arrived. Then the robots, riding the Monster Bug like one of Anton’s aircraft carriers, would scatter ahead of us and set to work.

Two years after my arrival my first quake shook down six lasers in four different locations and ripped a few more loose from the sunlight collectors. Landscape had been shaken into new shapes. The robots had some trouble. Sometimes Kathry could reprogram them. Otherwise her team had to muscle them through, with Kathry to shout orders and me to supply most of the muscle.

Of the six lasers, five survived. They seemed built to survive almost anything. The robots were equipped to spin new support structure and to lift the things into place, with a separate program for each design.

Maybe John Junior hadn’t used influence in my behalf. Flatlander muscles were useful when the robots couldn’t get over the dust pools or through the broken rock. For that matter, maybe it wasn’t some Belt tradition that had made Kathry claim me on sight. Sylvia and Myron were lockstepped, and I might have been female or bend. Maybe she thought she was lucky.

After we’d remounted the lasers that had survived, Kathry said, “They’re all obsolete, anyway. They’re not being replaced.”

“That’s not good,” I said.

“Well, good and bad. Lightsail cargo is slow. If the light wasn’t almost free, why bother? The interstellar probes haven’t sent much back yet, and we might as well wait. At least the Belt Speakers think so.”

“Do I gather I’ve fallen into a kind of a blind alley?”

She glared at me. “You’re an immigrant flatlander. Were you expecting to be First Speaker for the Belt? You thinking of moving on?”

“Not really. But if the job’s about to fold—”

“Another twenty years, maybe. Jack, I’d miss you. Those two—”

“It’s all right, Kathry. I’m not going.” I waved both arms at the blazing dead landscape, said “I like it here,” and smiled into her bellow of laughter.

I beamed a tape to Anton when I got the chance.

“If I was ever angry, I got over it, as I hope you’ve forgotten anything I said or did while I was, let’s say, running on automatic. I’ve found another life in deep space, not much different from what I was doing on Earth…though that may not last. These lightsail pusher lasers are a blast from the past. Time gets them, the quakes get them, and they’re not being replaced. Kathry says twenty years.

“You said Phoebe left Earth, too. Working with an asteroid mining setup? If you’re still trading tapes, tell her I’m all right and I hope she is, too. Her career choice was better than mine, I expect…”

I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Three years after I expected it Kathry asked, “Why did you come out here? It’s none of my business, of course—”

Customs differ: I’d been three years in her bed before she had worked up to this. I said, “Time for a change” and “I’ve got children and grandchildren on the moon and Ceres and Floating Jupiter.”

“Do you miss them?”

I had to say yes. The result was that I took half a year off to bounce around the solar system.

After I visited my kids and grandkids, I stayed three weeks with Phoebe. She’s second in command of a mining setup on a two-kilometer asteroid orbiting beyond Jupiter. They’ve been refining the metal ores and shaping them into scores of kilometers of electromagnetic mass driver, then running the slag down the mass driver: a rocket with real rocks in it and an arbitrarily high exhaust velocity, limited only by the length of the mass driver, which they keep extending. The asteroid will reach Ceres as mostly refined metal.

I think Phoebe was bored; she was seriously glad to see me. Still, I came back early. My being away from Mercury made us both antsy.

Another year passed, and once again Kathry wanted to know, “Why Mercury?”

I said, “What I did on Earth was a lot like this. The difference is, on Earth I’m dull. Here—am I dull?”

“You’re fascinating. You won’t talk about the ARM, so you’re fascinating and mysterious. I can’t believe you’d be dull just because of where you are. Why did you leave, really?”

So I said, “There was a woman.”

“What was she like?”

“She was smarter than me. I was a little dull for her. So she left, and that would have been okay. But she came back to my best friend.” I shifted uncomfortably and said, “Not that they drove me off Earth.”

“No?”

“No. I’ve got everything I once had herding construction robots on Earth, plus one thing I wasn’t bright enough to miss. I lost my sense of purpose when I left the ARM.”

I noticed that Myron was listening. Sylvia was watching the holo walls, the three that showed the face of Mercury: rocks blazing like coals in the fading twilight, with only the robots and the lasers to give the illusion of life. The fourth wall generally carried newscasts. Just then it showed a view up the trunk into the waving branches of the tremendous redwoods they’ve been growing for three hundred years in Hovestraydt City on the moon.

“These are the good times,” I said. “You have to notice or they’ll go right past. We’re holding the stars together and having a fine time doing it. Notice how much dancing we do? On Earth I’d be too old and creaky for that—” Sylvia was shaking my shoulder. “Sylvia, what?”

I heard it as soon as I stopped talking: “Tombaugh Station relayed this picture, the last broadcast from the Fantasy Prince. Once again, the Fantasy Prince has apparently been—”

Starscape glowed within the fourth holo wall. Something came out of nowhere, moving hellishly fast, and stopped so quickly that it might have been a toy. It was egg-shaped, studded with what my memory said were weapons.

Phoebe won’t have made her move yet. The warcats will have to be deep in the solar system before her asteroid mine can be a deterrent. Then one or another warcat ship will find streams of slag sprayed across its path, impacting at comet speeds and higher.

By now Anton must know whether the ARM actually has plans of its own to repel an interstellar invasion.

Me, I’ve already done my part. I worked on the computer shortly after I first arrived. Nobody’s tampered with it since. The dime disk is in place.

We kept the program relatively simple.

Until and unless the warcats destroy something that’s being pushed by a laser from Mercury, nothing will happen. The warcats must condemn themselves. Then the affected laser will lock on to the warcat ship…and so will every Mercury laser that’s getting sunlight. Twenty seconds, then the system goes back to normal until another target disappears.

If the warcats can be persuaded that Sol system is defended, maybe they’ll give us time to build defenses.

Asteroid miners dig deep for fear of solar storms and meteors. Phoebe might survive the warcat weapons. We might survive here, too, with shielding built to block the hellish sun and laser cannon to battle incoming ships. But that’s not the way to bet.

We might get one ship.

It might be worth doing.

A GIFT FROM EARTH

To Hank
A good critic, a good Friend

IThe Ramrobot

IA ramrobot had been the first to see Mount Lookitthat.

Ramrobots had been first visitors to all the settled worlds. The interstellar ramscoop robots, with an unrestricted fuel supply culled from interstellar hydrogen, could travel between stars at speeds approaching that of light. Long ago the UN had sent ramrobots to nearby stars to search out habitable planets.

It was a peculiarity of the first ramrobots that they were not choosy. The Procyon ramrobot, for instance, had landed on We Made It in spring. Had the landing occurred in summer or winter, when the planet’s axis points through its sun, the ramrobot would have sensed the fifteen-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. The Sirius ramrobot had searched out the two narrow habitable bands on Jinx, but had not been programmed to report the planet’s other peculiarities. And the Tau Ceti ramrobot, Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #4, had landed on Mount Lookitthat.

Only the Plateau on Mount Lookitthat was habitable. The rest of the planet was an eternal searing black calm, useless for any purpose. The Plateau was smaller than any region a colony project would settle by choice. But Inter stellar Ramscoop Robot #4 had found an habitable point, and that was all it knew.

The colony slowboats, which followed the ramrobots, had not been built to make round trips. Their passengers had to stay, always. And so Mount Lookitthat was settled, more than three hundred years ago.

A flock of police cars fanned out behind the fleeing man. He could hear them buzzing like summer bumble-bees. Now, too late, they were using all their power. In the air this pushed them to one hundred miles per hour: fast enough for transportation in as small a region as Mount Lookitthat, but, just this once, not fast enough to win a race. The running man was only yards from the edge.

Spurts of dust erupted ahead of the fugitive. At last the Implementation police had decided to risk damaging the body. The man bit the dust like a puppet thrown in anger, turned over hugging one knee. Then he was scrambling for the cliff’s sharp edge on the other knee and two hands. He jerked once more, but kept moving. At the very edge he looked up to see a circling car coming right at him from the blue void beyond.

With the tip of his tongue held firmly between his teeth, Jesus Pietro Castro aimed his car at the enraged, agonized, bearded face. An inch too low and he’d hit the cliff; an inch too high and he’d miss the man, miss his chance to knock him back onto the Plateau. He pushed two fan throttles forward…

Too late. The man was gone.

Later, they stood at the edge and looked down.

Often Jesus Pietro had watched groups of children standing fearful and excited at the void edge, looking down toward the hidden roots of Mount Lookitthat, daring each other to go closer—and closer. As a child he had done the same. The wonder of that view had never left him.

Forty miles below, beneath a swirling sea of white mist, was the true surface of Mount Lookitthat the planet. The great plateau on Mount Lookitthat the mountain had a surface less than half the size of California. All the rest of the world’s surface was a black oven, hot enough to melt lead, at the bottom of an atmosphere sixty times as thick as Earth’s.

Matthew Keller had committed, deliberately, one of the worst of possible crimes. He had crawled off the edge of the Plateau, taking with him his eyes, his liver and kidneys, his miles of blood tubing, and all twelve of his glands—taking everything that could have gone into the Hospital’s organ banks to save the lives of those whose bodies were failing. Even his worth as fertilizer, not inconsiderable on a three-hundred-year-old colony world, was now nil. Only the water in him would someday return to the upper world to fall as rain on the lakes and rivers and as snow on the great northern glacier. Already, perhaps, he was dry and flaming, in the awful heat forty miles below.

Or had he stopped falling, even yet?

Jesus Pietro, Head of Implementation, stepped back with an effort. The formless mist sometimes brought strange hallucinations and stranger thoughts—like that odd member of the Rorschach inkblot set, the one sheet of cardboard which is blank. Jesus Pietro had caught himself thinking that when his time came, if it ever came, this was the way he would like to go. And that was treason.

The major met his eye with a curious reluctance.

“Major,” said Jesus Pietro, “why did that man escape you?”

The major spread his hands. “He lost himself in the trees for several minutes. When he broke for the edge, it took my men a few minutes to spot him.”

“How did he reach the trees? No, don’t tell me how he broke loose. Tell me why your cars didn’t catch him before he reached the grove.”

The major hesitated a split second too long. Jesus Pietro said, “You were playing with him. He couldn’t reach his friends and he couldn’t remain hidden anywhere, so you decided to have a little harmless fun.”

The major dropped his eyes.

“You will take his place,” said Jesus Pietro.

The playground was grass and trees, swings and teeter-totters, and a slow, skeletal merry-go-round. The school surrounded it on three sides, a one-story building of architectural coral, painted white. The fourth side, protected by a high fence of tame vine growing on wooden stakes, was the edge of Gamma Plateau, a steep cliff overlooking Lake Davidson on Delta Plateau.

Matthew Leigh Keller sat beneath a watershed tree and brooded. Other children played all around him, but they ignored Matt. So did two teachers on monitor duty. People usually ignored Matt when he wanted to be alone.

Uncle Matt was gone. Gone to a fate so horrible that the adults wouldn’t even talk about it.

Implementation police had come to the house at sunset yesterday. They had left with Matt’s big comfortable uncle. Knowing that they were taking him to the Hospital, Matt had tried to stop those towering, uniformed men; but they’d been gentle and superior and firm, and an eight-year-old boy had not slowed them down at all. A honey-bee buzzing around four tanks.

One day soon his uncle’s trial and conviction would be announced on the colonist teedee programs, along with the charges and the record of his execution. But that didn’t matter. That was just cleaning up. Uncle Matt would not be back.

A sting in his eyes warned Matt that he was going to cry.

Harold Lillard stopped his aimless running around when he realized that he was alone. He didn’t like to be alone. Harold was ten, big for his age, and he needed others around him. Preferably smaller others, children who could be dominated. Looking rather helplessly around him, he spotted a small form under a tree near the playground’s edge. Small enough. Far enough from the playground monitors.

He started over.

The boy under the tree looked up.

Harold lost interest. He wandered away with a vacant expression, moving more or less toward the teeter-totters.

Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #143 left Juno at the end of a linear accelerator. Coasting toward interstellar space, she looked like a huge metal insect, makeshift and hastily built. Yet, except for the contents of her cargo pod, she was identical to the last forty of her predecessors. Her nose was the ramscoop generator, a massive, heavily armored cylinder with a large orifice in the center. Along the sides were two big fusion motors, aimed ten degrees outward, mounted on oddly jointed metal structures like the folded legs of a praying mantis. The hull was small, containing only a computer and an insystem fuel tank.

Juno was invisible behind her when the fusion motors fired. Immediately the cable at her tail began to unroll. The cable was thirty miles long and was made of braided Sinclair molecule chain. Trailing at the end was a lead capsule as heavy as the ramrobot itself.

Identical cargo pods had been going to the stars for centuries. But this one was special.

Like Ramrobots #141 and #142, already moving toward Jinx and Wunderland—like Ramrobot #144, not yet built—Ramrobot #143 carried the seeds of revolution. That revolution was already in process on Earth. On Earth it was quiet, orderly. It would not be so on Mount Lookitthat.

The medical revolution that began with the beginning of the twentieth century had warped all human society for five hundred years. America had adjusted to Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in less than half that time. As with the gin, the effects would never quite die out. But already society was swinging back to what had once been normal. Slowly; but there was motion. In Brazil a small but growing, alliance agitated for the removal of the death penalty for habitual traffic offenders. They would be opposed, but they would win.

On twin spears of actinic light the ramrobot approached Pluto’s orbit. Pluto and Neptune were both on the far side of the sun, and there were no ships nearby to be harmed by magnetic effects.

The ramscoop generator came on.

The conical field formed rather slowly, but when it had stopped oscillating, it was two hundred miles across. The ship began to drag a little, a very little, as the cone scooped up interstellar dust and hydrogen. She was still accelerating. Her insystem tank was idle now, and would be for the next twelve years. Her food would be the thin stuff she scooped out between the stars.

In nearby space the magnetic effects would have been deadly. Nothing with a notochord could live within three hundred miles of the storm of electromagnetic effects that was a working ramscoop generator. For hundreds of years men had been trying to build a magnetic shield efficient enough to let men ride the ramrobots. They said it couldn’t be done, and they were right. A ramrobot could carry seeds and frozen fertile animal eggs, provided they were heavily shielded and were carried a good distance behind the ramscoop generator. Men must ride the slowboats, carrying their own fuel, traveling at less than half the speed of light.

For Ramrobot #143, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star, then a dim orange spark. The drag on the ramscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than compensated for by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes in Neptune’s Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot’s steady fusion light: a tiny, fierce blue-white point against Tau Ceti’s yellow.

The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot the stars crept together, until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember red, and Tau Ceti showed brilliant white. The pair of red dwarfs known as L726-8, almost in the ramrobot’s path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if somebody heavy had sat down on the universe.

Ramrobot #143 reached the halfway point, 5.95 light-years from Sol as measured relative to Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship throughout the voyage.

But a relay clicked in the ramrobot’s computer. It was message time. The ramscoop flickered out, and the light died in the motors as Ramrobot #143 poured all her stored power into a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the beam drawing steadily ahead.

A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking nurse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders.

Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and as the nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter, Matt examined his bottle critically. “Doesn’t look so good,” he said.

The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat wasting her time!

“I better run it through again,” Matt decided aloud. And he drank it.

“It was apple juice,” he said later that night. “I almost got caught sneaking it into the medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damndest color.”

“But why?” his father asked in honest bewilderment. “Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know she’s part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital”

“I think it was funny,” Jeanne announced. She was Matt’s sister, a year younger than Matt, and she always sided with him.

Matt’s grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his years. “One for Uncle Matt.”

Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. “You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and you’ll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”

His father’s evident concern penetrated Matt’s mood. “Don’t worry, Ghengis,” he said easily. “Miss Prynn’s probably forgotten all about it. I’m lucky that way.”

“Nonsense. If she doesn’t report you, it’d be through sheer kindness.”

“Fat chance of that.”

In a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple though major: he now had a new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew. He was to give up smoking immediately.

He could feel the pull of internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen, and went to work.

Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaint—a practical joke—and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, “Matthew Leigh Keller?”

“Convicted of treason,” Major Jensen said instantly. “Six years ago. He escaped over the edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks.”

But he hadn’t, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen’s predecessor had gone instead. Yet Keller had died…“What’s he doing playing practical jokes in colonist medcheck station?”

After a moment of cogitation Major Jensen said, “He had a nephew.”

“Be about fifteen now?”

“Perhaps. I’ll check.”

Keller’s nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself. I could follow standard practice and send him a reprimand.

No. Let him think he’d got away with it. Give him room to move around in, and one day he’d replace the body his uncle stole.

Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to desist.

The snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its surface was a montage of big and little pits, craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on the hull, even on the cargo pod thirty miles behind. The ship looked pebble-finished.

The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop design had suffered its last major change.

Now, eight and a half years beyond Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the cargo spool rewound until the cargo pod was locked in its socket.

The machine seemed to hesitate…and then its two cylindrical motors rose from the hull on their praying-mantis legs. For seconds they remained at right angles to the hull. Then, slowly, the legs contracted. But now the motors pointed forward.

A U-shaped bar swung the cargo pod around until it also pointed forward. Slowly the spool unwound to its full length.

The ramscoop went on again. The motors roared their full strength, and now they fired their long streams of fusing hydrogen and fused helium through the ramscoop itself.

Eight point three light-years from Sol, almost directly between Sol and Tau Ceti, lie the twin red dwarf stars L726-8. Their main distinction is that they are the stars of smallest mass known to man. Yet they are heavy enough to have collected a faint envelope of gas. The ramrobot braked heavily as her ramscoop plowed through the fringes of that envelope.

She continued braking. The universe stretched on again; the stars resumed their normal shapes and colors. Eleven point nine light-years from Sol, one hundred million miles above the star Tau Ceti, the machine came to an effective stop. Her ramscoop went permanently off. A variety of senses began searching the sky. They stopped. Locked.

Again she moved. She must reach her destination on the remaining fuel in her insystem tank.

Tau Ceti is a G8 star, about four hundred degrees cooler than Sol and only forty-five percent as strong as its output of light. The world of Mount Lookitthat orbits sixty-seven million miles away, a moonless world in a nearly circular path.

The ramrobot moved in on Mount Lookitthat the world. She moved cautiously, for there were fail-safe factors in her computer program. Her senses probed.

Surface temperature: 600 degrees Fahrenheit, with little variation. Atmosphere: opaque, dense, poisonous near the surface. Diameter: 7650 miles.

Something came over the horizon. In visible light it seemed an island in a sea of fog. A topography like a flight of broad, very shallow steps, flat plateaus separated by sheer cliffs. But Ramrobot #143 sensed more than visible light. There was Earth-like temperature, breathable air at an Earth-like pressure.

And there were two radio homing signals.

The signals settled it. Ramrobot #143 didn’t even have to decide which to answer, for they were coming from only a quarter of a mile apart. They came, in fact, from Mount Lookitthat’s two slowboats, and the distance between them was bridged by the sprawling structure of the Hospital, so that the spacecraft were no longer spacecraft but odd-looking towers in a sort of bungalow-castle. But the ramrobot didn’t know that and didn’t need to.

There were signals. Ramrobot #143 started down.

The floor vibrated gently against the soles of his feet, and from all around came muted, steady thunder. Jesus Pietro Castro strode down the twisting, intermeshing, labyrinthine passages of the Hospital.

Though he was in a tearing hurry, it never occurred to him to run. He was not in the gymnasium, after all. Instead he moved like an elephant, which cannot run but can walk fast enough to trample a running man. His head was down; his stride was as long as his legs could reach. His eyes looked ominously out from under prominent brow ridges and bushy white eyebrows. His bandit’s moustache and his full head of hair were also white and bushy, forming a startling contrast to his swarthy skin. Implementation police sprang to attention as he passed, snapping out of his way with the speed of pedestrians dodging a bus. Was it his rank they feared or his massive, unstoppable bulk? Perhaps even they didn’t know.

At the great stone arch which was the main entrance to the Hospital, Jesus Pietro looked up to see a sparkling blue-white star overhead. Even as he found it, it winked out. Moments later the all-pervading thunder died away.

A jeep was waiting for him. If he’d had to call for one, someone would have been very sorry. He got in, and the Implementation chauffeur took off at once, without waiting for orders. The Hospital fell behind, with its walls and its surrounding wasteland of defenses.

The ramrobot package was floating down on its parachutes.

Other cars were in flight, erratically shifting course as their drivers tried to guess where the white dot would come down. It would be near the Hospital of course. The ramrobot would have aimed for one or another of the ships; and the Hospital had grown like something living, like a growth of architectural coral, between the two former spacecraft.

But the wind was strong today.

Jesus Pietro frowned. The parachute would be blown over the edge of the cliff. It would end not on Alpha plateau, where the crew built their homes and where no colonist could be tolerated, but in the colonist regions beyond.

It did. The cars swooped after it like a flock of geese, following it over the four-hundred-foot cliff that separated Alpha Plateau from Beta Plateau, where forests of fruit trees alternated with fields of grain and vegetables and meadows where cattle gazed. There were no homes on Beta, for the crew did not like colonists so close. But colonists worked there, and often they played there.

Jesus Pietro picked up his phone. “Orders,” he said. “Ramrobot package one-forty-three is landing in Beta, sector…twenty-two or thereabouts. Send four squads in after us. Do not under any circumstances interfere with cars or crew, but arrest any colonist you find within half a mile of the package. Hold them for questioning only. And get out here fast.”

The package skimmed over half an acre of citrus trees and came down at the far edge.

It was a grove of lemon and orange trees. One of the later ramrobot packages had carried the grove’s genetically altered ancestors, along with other miracles of terrestrial biological engineering. These trees would not harbor any parasites at all. They would grow anywhere. They would not compete for growth with other similarly altered citrus trees. Their fruit remained precisely ripe for ten months out of the year; and when they dropped the fruit to release the seeds, it was at staggered intervals, so that at any time five trees out of six held ripe fruit.

In their grim need for sunlight the trees had spread their leaves and branches into an opaque chain, so that being in the grove was like being in a virgin forest. Mushrooms grew here, imported unchanged from Earth.

Polly had already picked a couple of dozen. If anyone had asked, she had gone into the citrus woods to pick mushrooms. By the time her hypothetical questioner arrived, she would have hidden her camera.

Considering that the tending season was a month away, a remarkable number of colonists were abroad on Beta Plateau. In woods, on the plains, climbing cliffs for exercise, hundreds of men and women were on excursions and picnics. An alert Implementation officer would have found their distribution improbably even. Too many would have been recognized as Sons of Earth.

But the ramrobot package chose to land in Polly’s area. She was near the edge of the woods when she heard the thump. She moved swiftly but quietly in that direction. With her black hair and darkly tanned skin she was nearly invisible in the forest dusk. She crawled between two tree trunks, moved behind another, and peered out.

A large cylindrical object lay on the grass beyond. A string of five parachutes writhed away before the wind.

So that’s what they look like, she thought. It seemed so small to have come so far…but it must be only a tiny portion of the total ramrobot. The major portion would be on its way home.

But it was the package that counted. The contents of a ramrobot package were never trivial. For six months, ever since the maser message arrived, the Sons of Earth had been planning to capture ramrobot capsule #143. At worst, they could ransom it to the crew. At best, it might be something to fight with.

She almost stepped out of the woods before she saw the cars. At least thirty of them, landing all around the ramrobot package.

She stayed hidden.

His soldiers would not have recognized Jesus Pietro, but they would have understood. All but two or three of the men and women around him were purebred crew. Their chauffeurs, including his own, had prudently stayed in their cars. Jesus Pietro Castro was obsequious, deferential, and very careful not to joggle an elbow or to step on a toe or even to find himself in somebody’s path.

As a result, his vision was blocked when Millard Parlette, a real descendant of the first Captain of the Planck, opened the capsule and reached in. He did see what the ancient held up to the sunlight, the better to examine it.

It was a rectangular solid with rounded edges, and it had been packed in a resilient material which was now disintegrating. The bottom half was metal. The top was a remote descendant of glass, hard as the cheaper steel alloys, more transparent than a windowpane. And in the top half floated something shapeless.

Jesus Pietro felt his mouth fall open. He looked harder. His eyelids squinted, his pupils dilated. Yes, he knew what this was. It was what the maser message had promised six months ago.

A great gift, and a great danger.

“This must be our most carefully guarded secret,” Millard Parlette was saying in a voice like a squeaky door. “No word must ever leak out. If the colonists saw this, they’d blow it out of all proportion. We’ll have to tell Castro to—Castro! Where the Mist Demons is Castro?”

“Here I am, sir.”

Polly fitted the camera back in its case and began to work her way deeper into the woods. She’d taken several pictures, and two were telescopic shots of the thing in the glass case. Her eyes hadn’t seen it clearly, but the film would show it in detail.

She went up a tree with the camera about her neck. The leaves and branches tried to push her back, but she fought through, deeper and deeper into the protecting leaves. When she stopped, there was hardly a square inch of her that didn’t feel the gentle pressure. It was dark as the caves of Pluto.

In a few minutes the police would be all through here. They would wait only until the crew was gone before converging on this area. It was not enough that Polly be invisible. There must be enough leaves to block any infrared fight leaving her body.

She could hardly blame herself for losing the capsule. The Sons of Earth had been unable to translate the maser message, but the crew had. They knew the capsule’s worth. But so did Polly—now. When the eighteen thousand colonists of Mount Lookitthat knew what was in that capsule…

Night came. The Implementation police had collected all the colonists they could find. None had seen the capsule after it came down, and all would be released after questioning. Now the police spread out with infrared detectors. There were several spots of random heat in Polly’s grove, and all were sprayed with sonic stunners. Polly never knew she’d been hit. When she woke next morning, she was relieved to find herself still in her perch. She waited until high noon, then moved toward the Beta-Gamma Bridge with her camera hidden under the mushrooms.

IIThe Sons of Earth

IIFrom the bell tower of Campbelltown came four thunderous ringing notes. The sonic wave-fronts marched out of town in order, crossing fields and roads, diminishing as they came. They overran the mine with hardly a pause. But men looked up, lowering their tools.

Matt smiled for the first time that day. Already he could taste cold beer.

The bicycle ride from the mine was all downhill. He reached Cziller’s as the place was beginning to fill up. He ordered a pitcher, as usual, and downed the first glassful without drawing breath. A kind of bliss settled on him, and he poured his second glass carefully down the side to avoid a head. He sat sipping it while more and more freed workmen poured into the taproom.

Tomorrow was Saturday. For two days and three nights he could forget the undependable little beasties who earned him his living.

Presently an elbow hit him in the neck. He ignored it: a habit his ancestors had brought from crowded Earth and retained. But the second time the elbow poked him, he had the glass to his lips. With beer dripping wetly down his neck, be turned to deliver a mild reproof.

“Sorry,” said a short dark man with straight black hair. He had a thin, expressionless face and the air of a tired clerk. Matt looked more closely.

“Hood,” he said.

“Yes, my name is Hood. But I don’t recognize you.” The man put a question in his voice.

Matt grinned, for he liked flamboyant gestures. He wrapped his fingers in his collar and pulled his shirt open to the waist. “Try again,” he invited.

The clerkish type shied back, and then his eyes caught the tiny scar on Matt’s chest. “Keller.”

“Right,” said Matt, and zipped his shirt up.

“Keller. I’ll be d—damned,” said Hood. You could tell somehow that he saved such words for emergencies. “It’s been at least seven years. What have you been doing lately?”

“Grab that seat.” Hood saw his opportunity and was into the stool next to Matt before the occupant was fully out of it. “I’ve been playing nursemaid to mining worms. And you?”

Hood’s smile suddenly died. “Er—you don’t still hold that scar against me, do you?”

“No!” Matt said with explosive sincerity. “That whole thing was my fault. Anyway it was a long time ago.”

It was. Matt had been in the eighth grade that fall day when Hood came into Matt’s classroom to borrow the pencil sharpener. It was the first time he’d ever seen Hood: a boy about Matt’s size, though obviously a year older, an undersized, very nervous upperclassman. Unfortunately the teacher was out of the room. Hood had marched the full length of the room, not looking at anyone, sharpened his pencil, and turned to find his escape blocked by a mob of yelling, bounding eighth graders. To Hood, a new arrival at the school, they must have looked like a horde of cannibals. And in the forefront was Matt, using a chair in the style of an animal trainer.

Exit Hood, running, wild with terror. He had left the sharpened point of his pencil in Matt’s chest.

It was one of the few times Matt had acted the bully. To him, the scar was a badge of shame.

“Good,” said Hood, his relief showing. “So you’re a miner now?”

“Right, and regretting it every waking hour. I rue the day Earth sent us those little snakes.”

“It must be better than digging the holes yourself.”

“Think so? Are you ready for a lecture?”

“Just a second.” Hood drained his glass in a heroic gesture. “Ready.”

“A mining worm is five inches long and a quarter inch in diameter, mutated from an earthworm. Its grinding orifice is rimmed with little diamond teeth. It ingests metal ores for pleasure, but for food it has to be supplied with blocks of synthetic stuff which is different for each breed of worm—and there’s a breed for every metal. This makes things complicated. We’ve got six breeds out at the mine site, and I’ve got to see that each breed always has a food block within reach.”

“It doesn’t sound too complicated. Can’t they find their own food?”

“In theory, sure. In practice, not always. But that’s not all. What breaks down the ores is a bacterium in the worm’s stomach. Then the worm drops metal gains around its food block, and we sweep them up. Now, that bacterium dies very easily. If the bacterium dies, so does the worm, because there’s metal ore blocking his intestines. Then the other worms eat his body to recover the ore. Only, five times out of sit it’s the wrong ore.”

“The worms can’t tell each other apart?”

“Flaming right they can’t. They eat the wrong metals, they eat the wrong worms, they eat the wrong food blocks; and when they do everything right, they still die in ten days. They were built that way because their teeth wear out so fast. They’re supposed to breed like mad to compensate, but the plain truth is they don’t have time when they’re on the job. We have to keep going back to the crew for more.”

“So they’ve got you by the gonads.”

“Sure. They charge what they like.”

“Could they be putting the wrong chemical cues in some of the food blocks?”

Matt looked up, startled. “I’ll bet that’s just what they’re doing. Or too little of the right cues; that’d save them money at the same time. They won’t let us grow our own, of course. The—” Matt swallowed the word. After all, he hadn’t seen Hood in years. The crew didn’t like being called names.

“Time for dinner,” said Hood.

They finished the beer and went to the town’s one restaurant. Hood wanted to know what had happened to his old school friends, or schoolmates; Hood had not made friends easily. Matt, who knew in many cases, obliged. They talked shop, both professions. Hood was teaching school on Delta. To Matt’s surprise, the introverted boy had become an entertaining storyteller. He had kept his dry, precise tone, and it only made his jokes funnier. They were both fairly good at their jobs, and both making enough money to live on. There was no real poverty anywhere on the Plateau. It was not the colonists’ money the crew wanted, as Hood pointed out over the meat course.

“I know where there’s a party,” Hood said over coffee.

“Are we invited?”

“Yes.”

Matt had nothing planned for the night, but be wanted reassurance. “Party crashers welcome?”

“In your case, party crashers solicited. You’ll like Harry Kane. He’s the host.”

“I’m sold.”

The sun dipped below the edge of Gamma Plateau as they rode up. They left their bicycles in back of the house. As they walked around to the front, the sun showed again, a glowing red half-disk above the eternal sea of cloud beyond the void edge. Harry Kane’s house was just forty yards from the edge. They stopped a moment to watch the sunset fade, then turned toward the house.

It was a great sprawling bungalow, laid out in a rough cross, with the bulging walls typical of architectural coral. No attempt had been made to disguise its origin. Matt had never before seen a house which was not painted, but he had to admire the effect. The remnants of the shaping balloon, which gave all architectural coral buildings their telltale bulge, had been carefully scraped away. The exposed walls had been polished to a shining pink sheen. Even after sunset the house glowed softly.

As if it were proud of its thoroughly colonist origin.

Architectural coral was another gift of the ramrobots. A genetic manipulation of ordinary sea coral, it was the cheapest building material known. The only real cost was in the plastic balloon that guided the growth of the coral and enclosed the coral’s special airborne food. All colonists lived in buildings of coral. Not many would have built in stone or wood or brick even were it allowed. But most attempted to make their dwellings look somewhat like those on Alpha plateau. With paint, with wood and metal and false stone-sidings, with powered sandpaper disks to flatten the inevitable bulges, they tried to imitate the crew.

In daylight or darkness Harry Kane’s house was flagrantly atypical.

The noise hit them as they opened the door. Matt stood still while his ears adjusted to the noise level—a survival trait his ancestors had developed when Earth’s population numbered nineteen billion, even as it did that night, eleven point nine light-years away. During the last four centuries a man of Earth might as well have been stone deaf if he could not carry on a conversation with a thousand drunks bellowing in his ears. Matt’s people had kept some of their habits too. The great living room was jammed, and the few chairs were largely being ignored.

The room was big, and the bar across from the entrance was enormous. Matt shouted, “Harry Kane must do a lot of entertaining.”

“He does! Come with me; we’ll meet him!”

Matt caught snatches of conversation as they pushed their way across the room. The party hadn’t been going long, he gathered, and several people knew practically nobody; but they all had drinks. They were of all ages, all professions. Hood had spoken true. If a party crasher wasn’t welcome, he’d never know it, because no one would recognize him as one.

The walls were like the outside, a glowing coral-pink. The floor, covered with a hairy-looking wall-to-wall rug of mutated grass, was flat except at the walls; no doubt it had been sanded flat after the house was finished and the forming balloon removed. But Matt knew that beneath the rug was not tile or hardwood, but the ever-present pink coral.

They reached the bar, no more jostled than-need be. Hood leaned across the bar as far as he could, which because of his height was not far, and called, “Harry! Two vodka sodas, and I’d like you to meet—Dammit, Keller, what’s your first name?”

“Matt.”

“Matt Keller. We’ve known each other since grade school.”

“Pleasure, Matt,” said Harry Kane, and reached over to shake hands. “Glad to see you here, Jay.” Harry was almost Matt’s height, and considerably broader, and his wide face was dominated by a shapeless nose and an even wider grin. He looked exactly like a bartender. He poured the vodka sodas into glasses in which water had been prefrozen. He handed them across. “Enjoy yourselves,” he said, and moved down the bar to serve two newcomers.

Hood said, “Harry believes the best way to meet everyone right away is to play bartender for the first couple of hours. Afterward he turns the job over to a volunteer.”

“Good thinking,” said Matt. “Is your name Jay?”

“Short for Jayhawk. Jayhawk Hood. One of my ancestors was from Kansas. The jayhawk was a symbolic Kansas bird.”

“Crazy, isn’t it, that we needed eight years to learn each other’s first names?”

At that moment a fragment of the crowd noticed Hood and swept down upon them. Hood barely had time to grin in answer before they were in the midst of introductions. Matt was relieved. He was sure he had seen Harry Kane pass something to Jay Hood along with his drink, Manners kept him from asking questions, but it stuck in his curiosity, and he wanted to forget it.

The newcomers were four men and a woman. As an individual, Matt remembered only the woman.

Her name was Laney Mattson. She was around twenty-six years old, five years older than Matt. In bare feet he would have topped her by a scant half-inch. But she was wearing double-spikes, and her piled confection of auburn hair made her even taller. Not merely tall, she was big, with wide pronounced hips and deep breasts behind an “M” neckline. She looked prettier than she was, Matt thought; she used cosmetics well. And there was a booming exuberance in her every act, an enjoyment as big as herself.

The men were her age and over, in their late twenties. Any of the four would have looked normal dancing with Laney. They were huge. Matt retained of them only a composite impression of a resonant voice and an enveloping handclasp and a great handsome face smiling down from the pink ceiling. Yet he liked them all. He just couldn’t tell them apart.

Hood surprised him again. Talking along in his dry voice, keeping it raised to an audible bellow, not straining his neck to look anyone in the face, Hood somehow kept control of the conversation. It was he who guided the talk to school days. One of the tall men was moved to speak of a simple trick he’d used to rewire his school’s teaching teedee, so that for one day he and his classmates, had watched their lessons both upside down and inside out. Matt found himself telling of the specimen bottle of apple juice he’d sneaked into the Gamma medcheck station, and what he did with it. Someone who’d been listening politely from the edge of the circle mentioned that once he’d stolen a car from a picnicking crew family on Beta Plateau. He’d set the autopilot to circle a constant thousand feet beyond the void edge. It had stayed up for five days before dropping into the mist, with scores of Implementation police watching.

Matt watched Jay Hood and Laney as they talked. Laney had a long arm draped over Hood’s shoulders, and the top of his head reached just to her chin. They were both talking at once, trampling the tail ends of each other’s sentences, racing pell-mell through memories and anecdotes and jokes they’d been saving, sharing them with the group but talking for each other.

It wasn’t love, Matt decided, though it was like love. It was an immense satisfaction Hood and Laney felt at knowing each other. Satisfaction and pride. It made Matt feel lonely.

Gradually Matt became aware that Laney was wearing a hearing aid. It was so small and so cunningly colored as to be nearly invisible within her ear. Truthfully, Matt couldn’t swear that it was there.

If Laney needed a hearing aid, it was too bad she couldn’t hide it better. For centuries more civilized peoples had been wearing specks of laminated plastic buried in the skin above the mastoid bone. Such things did not exist on Mount Lookitthat. A crew, now, would have had his ears replaced from the organ banks…

Glasses went empty, and one of Laney’s big escorts came back with replacements. The little group grew and shrank and split into other groups with the eternal capriciousness of the cocktail party. For a moment Matt and Jay Hood were left standing alone in a forest of backs and elbows. Hood said, “Want to meet a beautiful girl?”

“Always.”

Hood turned to lead the way, and Matt caught a flash of the same odd coloring in his ear that he had noticed in Laney’s. Since when had Hood become hard of hearing? It might have been imagination, aided by vodka sodas. For one thing, the tiny instruments seemed too deeply embedded to be removed.

But an item that size could have been just what Harry Kane passed to Jay Hood along with his drink.

“It’s the easiest way to conduct a raid, sir.” Jesus Pietro sat deferentially forward in his chair, hands folded on his desk, the very image of the highly intelligent man dedicated solely to his work. “We know that members always leave the Kane house by twos and fours. We’ll pick them up outside the house. If they stop coming out, we’ll know they’ve caught on. Then we’ll go into the house itself.”

Behind his mask of deference, Jesus Pietro was annoyed. For the first time in four years he had planned a major raid on the Sons of Earth, and Millard Parlette had picked that night to visit the Hospital. Why tonight? He came only once in two months, thank the Mist Demons. A visit from a crew always upset Jesus Pietro’s men.

At least Parlette had come to him. Once Parlette had summoned him to his own house, and that had been bad. Here, Jesus Pietro was in his element. His office was practically an extension of his personality. The desk had the shape of a boomerang, enclosing him in an obtuse angle for more available working space. He had three guests’ chairs of varying degrees of comfort, for crew and Hospital personnel and colonist. The office was big and square, but there was a slight curve to the back wall. Where the other walls were cream colored, easy on the eye, the back wall was smoothly polished dark metal.

It was part of the outer hull of the Planck. Jesus Pietro’s office was right up against the source of half the spiritual strength of Mount Lookitthat, and half the electrical power too: the ship that had brought men to this world. Sitting at his desk, Jesus Pietro felt the power at his back.

“Our only problem,” he continued smoothly, “is that not all of Kane’s guests are involved in the conspiracy. At least half will be deadheads invited for camouflage. Telling them apart will take time.”

“I see that,” said the old man. His voice squeaked. He wore the tall, skeletal look of a Don Quixote, but his eyes held no madness. They were sane and alert. For nearly two hundred years the Hospital had kept his body, brain, and mind functioning. Probably even he did not know how much of him had been borrowed from colonists convicted of major crimes. “Why tonight?” he asked.

“Why not, sir?” Jesus Pietro saw what he was driving at, and his mind raced. Millard Parlette was nobody’s fool. The ancient was one of the few crew willing to accept any kind of responsibility. Most of the thirty thousand crew on Mount Lookitthat preferred to devise ever more complex forms of playing: sports; styles of dress that changed according to half-a-dozen complex, fluctuating sets of rules; rigid and ridiculous social forms. Parlette preferred to work—sometimes. He had chosen to rule the Hospital. He was competent and quick; though he appeared rarely, be always seemed to know what was happening; and he was difficult to lie to.

Now he said, “Yesterday the ramrobot capsule. Last night your men were scouring the area for spies. Tonight you plan a major raid for the first time in four years. Do you think someone slipped through your fingers?”

“No, sir!” But that would not satisfy Parlette. “But in this instance I can afford to cover my bet even when it’s a sure thing. If a colonist had news of the ramrobot package, he’d be at Kane’s place tonight though demons bar the way.”

“I don’t approve of gambling,” said Parlette. Jesus Pietro uneasily searched his mind for a suitable answer. “And you have chosen not to gamble. Very good, Castro. Now. What has been done with the ramrobot capsule?”

“I think the organ-bank people have it unpacked, sir. And the…contents stored. Would you like to see?”

“Yes.”

Jesus Pietro Castro, Head of implementation, the only armed authority on in entire world, rose hastily to his feet to act as guide. If they hurried, he might get away in time to supervise the raid. But there was no polite way to make a crew hurry.

Hood had spoken true. Polly Tournquist was beautiful. She was also small and dark and quiet, and Matt definitely wanted to know her better. Polly had long, soft hair the color of a starless night, direct brown eyes, and a smile that came through even when she was trying to look serious. She looked like someone with a secret, Matt thought. She didn’t talk; she listened.

“Parapsychological abilities are not a myth,” Hood was insisting. “When the Planck left Earth, there were all kinds of psionics devices for amplifying them. Telepathy had gotten almost dependable. They—”

“What’s ‘almost dependable’?”

“Dependable enough so there were specially trained people to read dolphin minds. Enough so telepaths were called as expert witnesses in murder trials. Enough—”

“All right, all right,” said Matt. It was the first time tonight that he had seen Hood worked up. Matt gathered from the attitudes of the others that Hood rode this hobbyhorse often. He asked, “Where are they now, these witches of yours?”

“They aren’t witches! Look, Kell—Look, Matt. Every one of those psi powers was tied up a little bit with telepathy. They proved that. Now, do you know how they tested our ancestors before they sent them into space for a thirty-year one-way trip?”

Someone played straight man. “They had to orbit Earth for a while.”

“Yes. Four candidates in a ferryboat, orbiting for one month. No telepath could take that.”

Polly Tournquist was following the debate like a spectator at a tennis match, swinging her shoulders to face whoever was speaking. Her grin widened; her hair swung gently, hypnotically; she was altogether a pleasure to watch. She knew Matt was watching. Occasionally her eyes would flick toward him as if inviting him to share the joke.

“Why not, if he’s got company?”

“The wrong company. Anywhere on Earth a latent telepath is surrounded by tens of thousands of minds. In space he has three. And he can’t get away from any of them for a single hour, for a full month.”

“How do you know all this, Jay? Books? You damn sure don’t have anyone to experiment on.”

Polly’s eyes sparkled as she followed the debate. The lobes of Hood’s ears were turning red. Polly’s raven hair swung wide, and when it uncovered her right ear for an instant, she was almost certainly wearing a tiny, almost invisible hearing aid.

So she did have a secret. And, finally, Matt thought he knew what it was.

Three hundred years ago the Planck had come to Mount Lookitthat with six crew members to guard fifty passengers in suspended animation. The story was in an the history tapes, of how the circular flying wing had dipped into the atmosphere and flown for hours above impenetrable mists which the instruments showed to be poisonous and deadly hot. And then a great mass had come over the horizon, a vertical flat-topped mountain forty miles high and hundreds of miles long. It was like a new continent rearing over the impalpable white sea. The crew had gaped, wordless, until Captain Parlette had said, “Lookitthat!”

Unwritten, but thoroughly known, was the story of the landing. The passengers had been wakened one at a time to find themselves living in an instant dictatorship. Those who fought the idea, and they were few, died. When the Arthur Clarke came down forty years later, the pattern was repeated. The situation had not changed but for population growth, not in the last three hundred years.

From the beginning there had been a revolutionary group. Its name had changed several times, and Matt had no idea what it was now. He had never known a revolutionary. He had no particular desire to be one. They accomplished nothing, except to fill the Hospital’s organ banks. How could they, when the crew controlled every weapon and every watt of power on Mount Lookitthat?

If this was a nest of rebels, then they had worked out a good cover. Many of the merrymakers had no hearing aids, and these seemed to be the ones who didn’t know anyone here. Like Matt himself. In the midst of a reasonably genuine open-house brawl, certain people listened to voices only they could hear.

Matt let his imagination play. They’d have an escape hatch somewhere—those of the inner circle—and if the police showed, they would use it during a perfectly genuine panic. Matt and his brethren of the outer circle would be expendable.

“But why should all of these occult powers be connected to mind-reading? Does that make sense to you, Jay?”

“Certainly. Don’t you see that telepathy is a survival trait? When human beings evolved psi powers, they must have evolved telepathy first. All the others came later, because they’re less likely to get you out of a bad situation…”

Matt dismissed the idea of leaving. Safer? Sure. But here he had, for a time, escaped from his persnickety mining worms and their venal crewish growers and the multiple, other problems that made his life what it was. And his curiosity bump itched madly. He wanted to know how they thought, how they worked, how they protected themselves, what they had in mind. He wanted to know—

He wanted to know Polly Tournquist. Now more than ever. She was small and lovely and delicate looking, an every man who had ever looked at her must have wanted to protect her. What was such a girl doing throwing her life away? Really, that was all she was doing. Sooner or later the organ banks would run short of healthy livers or live skin or lengths of large intestine at a time when there was a dearth of crime on the Plateau. Then Implementation would throw a raid, and Polly would be stripped down to her component parts.

Matt had a sudden urge to talk her out of it, get her to leave here with him and move to another part of the Plateau. Would they be able to hide out in a region so limited?

Possibly not, but—

But she didn’t even know he’d guessed. If she found out, he could die for his knowledge. He’d have to put a fail-safe on his mouth.

It spoiled things. If Matt could have played the observer, the man who watched and said nothing…But he wasn’t an observer. He was involved now. He knew Jay and liked him, he’d liked Laney Mattson and Harry Kane at sight, and he could have fallen in love with Polly Tournquist. These people were putting their lives on the line. And his too! And he could do nothing about it.

The middle-aged man with the brush cut was still at it. “Jay,” he said with a poor imitation of patience, “you’re trying to tell us that Earth had psi powers under good control when the founding fathers left. Well, what have they done since? They’ve made all kinds of progress m biological engineering. Their ships improve constantly. Now the ramrobots go home all by themselves. But what have they done about psi powers? Nothing. Just nothing. And why?”

“Because—”

“Because it’s all superstition. Witchcraft. Myths.”

Oh, shut up, Matt thought. It was all cover for what was really going on, and he wasn’t a part of that. He dropped back out of the circle, hoping nobody would notice him—except Polly. Nobody did. He eased toward the bar for a refill.

Harry Kane was gone, replaced by a kid somewhat younger than Matt, one who wouldn’t last another half hour if he kept sampling his own wares. When Matt tasted his drink, it was mostly vodka. And when he turned around, there was Polly, laughing at his puckered face.

The half-dozen suspects were deeply asleep along one wall of the patrol wagon. A white-garbed Implementation medic looked up as Jesus Pietro entered. “Oh, there you are, sir. I think these three must be deadheads. The others had mechanisms in their ears.”

The night outside was as black as always on moonless Mount Lookitthat. Jesus Pietro had left Millard Parlette standing before the glass wall of the organ banks, contemplating…whatever he might be contemplating. Eternal life? Not likely. Even Millard Parlette, one hundred and ninety years old, would die when his central nervous system wore out. You couldn’t transplant brains without transplanting memories. What had Parlette been thinking? His expression had been very odd.

Jesus Pietro took a suspect’s head in his hands and rolled it to look in the ears. The body rolled too, limply, passively. “I don’t see anything.”

“When we tried to remove the mechanism, it evaporated. So did the old woman’s. This girl still has hers.”

“Good.” He bent to look. Far down in the left ear, too deep for fingers to reach it, was something colored dead black with a rim of fleshy pink. He said, “Get a microphone.”

The man made a call. Jesus Pietro waited impatiently for someone to bring a mike. Someone eventually did. Jesus Pietro held it against the girl’s head and turned the sound up high.

Rustling noises came in an amplified crackle.

“Tape it on,” said Jesus Pietro. The medic stretched the girl on her side and taped the mike against her head. The thunder of rustling stopped, and the interior of the wagon was full of the deep drumbeat sound of her arteries.

“How long since anybody left the meeting?”

“That was these two, sir. About twenty minutes.”

The door in back opened to admit two men and two women, unconscious, on stretchers. One man had a hearing aid.

“Obviously they don’t have a signal to show they’re clear,” said Jesus Pietro. “Foolish.” Now, if he’d been running the Sons of Earth…

Come to think of it, he might send out decoys, expendable members. If the first few didn’t come back, he’d send out more, at random intervals, while the leaders escaped.

Escaped where? His men had found no exit routes; the sonics reported no tunnels underground.

It was seconds before Jesus Pietro noticed that the mike was speaking. The sounds were that low. Quickly he put his ear to the loudspeaker.

“Stay until you feel like leaving, then leave. Remember, this is an ordinary party, open-house style. However, those of you who have nothing important to say should’ve gone by midnight. Those who wish to speak to me should use the usual channels. Remember not to try to remove the earpieces; they will disintegrate of themselves at six o’clock. Now enjoy yourselves!”

“What’s he say?” asked the medic.

“Nothing important. I wish I could be sure that was Kane.” Jesus Pietro nodded briefly at the medic and the two cops. “Keep it up,” he said, and stepped out into the night.

“Why’d you leave? It was just getting interesting.”

“No it wasn’t, and my glass was empty, and anyway I was hoping you’d follow.”

Polly laughed. “You must believe in miracles.”

“True. Why’d you leave?”

Embedded in wall-to-wall humanity, drowned in a waterfall of human voices, Polly and Matt nevertheless had a sort of privacy. Manners and lack of interest would prevent anyone from actually listening to them. Hence nobody could hear them; for how could anyone concentrate on two conversations at once? They might have been in a room by themselves, a room with yielding walls and unyielding elbows, a room as small and private as a phone booth.

“I think Jay’s bugs on psi powers,” said Polly. She had not answered his question, which was fine by Matt. He’d expected to escape unnoticed from Hood’s debate. He was lucky that way. But Polly coming to join him was new and different, and he enjoyed guessing at her motives.

“He talks like that all the time?”

“Yes. He thinks if we could only—” She stopped. Girl with a secret. “Forget Jay. Tell me about yourself.”

So he talked of mining worms and home life and the school in sector nine, Gamma Plateau; and he mentioned Uncle Matt, who had died for being a rebel, but she ignored the bait. And Polly talked about growing up a hundred miles away, near the Colony University; and she described her job at the Delta Retransmitting Power Station, but she never mentioned her hearing aid.

“You look like a girl with a secret,” Matt said. “I think it must be the smile.”

She moved closer to him, which was very close, and lowered her voice. “Can you keep a secret?”

Matt smiled with one side of his mouth to show that he knew what was coming. She said it anyway. “So can I.”

And that was that. But she didn’t move away. They smiled at each other from a distance of a couple of inches, nose to nose, momentarily content with a silence which, to an earlier man, would have sounded like the center of an air raid. She was lovely, Polly. Her face was a lure and a danger; her figure, small and lithe and woman shaped, rippled with a dancer’s grace beneath her loose green jumper. For the moment Matt looked silently into her eyes and felt very good. The moment passed, and they talked small talk.

The flow of the crowd carried them half across the room. Once they pushed back to the bar for refills, then let the crowd carry them again. In the continuous roar there was something hypnotic, something that might have explained why the crowded-room drinking bout was more than half a thousand years old; for monotonous background noise has long been used in hypnosis. Time ceased to exist. But there came a moment when Matt knew that he would ask Polly to go home with him, and she would accept.

He didn’t get the chance.

Something changed in Polly’s face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. The hearing aid? He was ready to pretend he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t get that chance either. For suddenly Polly was moving away, disappearing into the crowd, not as if she were in any hurry, but as if she remembered something she ought to do, some niggling detail she might as well take care of now. Matt tried to follow her, but the sea of humanity closed behind her.

The hearing aid, he told himself. It called her. But he stayed by the bar, resisting the pressure that would have borne him away. He was getting very drunk now, and glad of it. He didn’t believe it had been the hearing aid. The whole thing was too familiar. Too many girls had lost interest in him just as suddenly as Polly had. He was more than disappointed. It hurt. The vodka helped to kill the pain.

About ten-thirty he went around to the other side of the bar. The kid playing bartender was happily drunk and glad to give up his place. Matt was gravely drunk. He dispensed drinks with dignity, being polite but not obsequious. The crowd was thinning now. This was bedtime for most of Mount Lookitthat. By now the sidewalks in most towns would have been rolled up and put away till dawn. These revolutionists must be a late-rising group. Matt served drinks automatically, but he wasn’t having any more himself.

The vodka began to run low. And there wasn’t anything but vodka, vodka converted from sugar and water and air by one of Earth’s educated bacteria. Let it run out, Matt thought viciously. He could watch the riot.

He served somebody a vodka grapefruit, as requested. But the hand with the drink did not vanish to make room for someone else. Slowly Matt realized that the hand belonged to Laney Mattson. “Hi,” he said.

“Hi. Want a stand-in?”

“Guess so.”

Somebody changed places with him—one of Laney’s tall escorts—and Laney led him through the thinning ranks to a miraculously unoccupied sofa. Matt sank deep into it. The room would start to whirl if he closed his eyes.

“Do you always get this looped?”

“No. Something bugging me.”

“Tell me?”

He turned to look at her. Somehow his vodka-blurred eyes saw past Laney’s makeup, saw that her mouth was too wide and her green eyes were strangely large. But she wore a smile of sympathetic curiosity.

“Ever see a twenty-one-year-old virgin male?” He squinted to, try to read her reaction.

The corners of Laney’s mouth twisted strangely. “No.” She was trying not to laugh, be realized. He turned away.

She asked, “Lack of interest?”

“No! Hell, no.”

“Then what?”

“She forgets me.” Matt felt himself sobering with time and the effort of answering. “All of a sudden the girl I’m chasing just”—he gestured a little wildly—“forgets I’m around. I don’t know why.”

“Stand up.”

“Hmph?”

He felt her hand on his arm, pulling. He stood up. The room spun and he realized that he wasn’t sobering; he’d just felt steadier sitting down. He followed the pull of her arm, relieved that he didn’t fall down. The next thing he knew, everything was pitch black.

“Where are we?”

No answer. He felt hands pull his shirt apart, hands with small sharp nails which caught in his chest hair. Then his pants dropped. “So this is it,” he said, in a tone of vast surprise. It sounded so damn silly that he wanted to cringe.

“Don’t panic,” said Laney. “Mist Demons, you’re nervous! Come here. Don’t trip over anything.”

He managed to walk out of his pants without falling. His knees bumped something. “Fall face down,” Laney commanded, and he did. He was face down on an airfoam mattress, rigidly tense. Hands that were stronger than they ought to be dug into the muscles of his neck and shoulders, kneading them like dough. It felt wonderful. He lay there with his arms out like a swandiver, going utterly limp as knuckles ran down the sides of his vertebrae, as slender fingers pulled each separate tendon into a new shape.

When he was good and ready, he turned over and reached out.

To his left was a stack of photos a foot high. Before him three photos, obviously candid shots. Jesus Pietro spread them out and looked them over. He wrote a name under one of them. The others rang no bell, so he shuffled them and put them on the big stack. Then he stood up and stretched.

“Match these with the suspects we’ve already collected,” he told an aide. The man saluted, picked up the stack and left the flying office, moving toward the patrol wagons. Jesus Pietro followed him out.

Almost half of Harry Kane’s guests were now in patrol wagons. The photographs had been taken as they entered the front door earlier tonight. Jesus Pietro, with his phenomenal memory, had identified a good number of them.

The night was cool and dark. A stiff breeze blew across the Plateau, carrying a smell of rain.

Rain.

Jesus Pietro looked up to see that half the sky was raggedly blotted out. He could imagine trying to conduct a raid in a pouring rainstorm. He didn’t like the idea.

Back in his office, he turned the intercom to all-channel. “Now hear this,” he said conversationally. “Phase two is on. Now.”

“Is everyone that nervous?”

Laney chuckled softly. Now she could laugh all she wanted, if she wanted. “Not that nervous. I think everyone must be a little afraid the first time.”

“You?”

“Sure. But Ben handled it right. Good man, Ben.”

“Where is he now?” Matt felt a mild gratitude toward Ben.

“He’s—he’s gone.” Her tone told him to drop it. Matt, guessed he’d been caught wearing a hearing aid or something.

“Mind if I turn on a light?”

“If you can find a switch,” said Laney, “you can turn it on.”

She didn’t expect him to, not in pitch blackness in a strange room, but he did. He felt incredibly sober, and incredibly peaceful. He ran his eyes over her lying next to him, seeing the tangled ruin of her sculptured hairdo, remembering the touch of smooth warm skin, knowing he could touch her again at will. It was a power he’d never felt before. He said, “Very nice.”

“Makeup smeared over forgettable face.”

“Unforgettable face.” It was true, now. “No makeup over unforgettable body.” A body with an infinite capacity for love, a body he’d thought almost too big to be sexy.

“I should wear a mask, no clothes.”

“You’d get more attention than you’d like.”

She laughed hugely, and he rested his ear over her navel to enjoy the earthquake ripple of abdominal muscles.

The rain came suddenly, beating against the thick coral walls. They stopped talking to listen. Suddenly Laney dug her fingers into his arm and whispered, “Raid.”

She means Rain, Matt thought, turning to look at her. She was terrified, her eyes and nostrils and mouth all distended. She meant Raid!

“You’ve got a way out, don’t you?”

Laney shook her head. She was listening to unheard voices through the hearing aid.

“But you must have a way out. Don’t worry, I don’t want to know about it. I’m in no danger.” Laney looked startled, and he said, “Sure, I noticed the hearing aids. But it’s none of my business.”

“Yes it is, Matt. You were invited here so we could get a look at you. All of us bring outsiders occasionally. Some get invited to join.”

“Oh.”

“I told the truth. There’s no way out. Implementation has ways of finding tunnels. But there is a hiding place.”

“Good.”

“We can’t reach it. Implementation is already in the house. They’ve filled it with sleepy gas. It should be seeping around the doors any minute.”

“The windows?”

“They’ll be waiting for us.”

“We can try.”

“Okay.” She was on her feet and getting into her dress. Nothing else. Matt wasted not even that much time. He swung a great marble ashtray against a window and followed it through, thanking the Mist Demons that Mount Lookitthat couldn’t make unbreakable glass.

Two pairs of hands closed on his arms before his feet cleared the window. Matt kicked out and heard somebody say Whuff! In the corner of his eye Laney cleared the window and was running. Good, he’d hold their attention for her. He jerked at the grip on his arms. A meaty hand weighing a full ton smashed across his jaw. His knees buckled. A light shone in his eyes, and he shrank back.

The light passed. Matt made one last frantic attempt to jerk loose, and felt one arm come free. He swung it full around. The elbow smacked solidly into yielding meat and bone: an unmistakable, unforgettable sensation. And he was free, running.

Just once in his life he had hit someone like that. From the feel of it he must have smashed the man’s nose all over his face. If Implementation caught him now…!

Wet, slippery, treacherous grass underfoot. Once he stepped on a smooth wet rock and went skidding across the grass on cheek and shoulder. Twice a spotlight found him, and each time he hit the grass and lay where he was, looking back to see where the light went. When it pointed elsewhere, he ran again. The rain must have bluffed the lights and the eyes behind him; the rain and the luck of Matt Keller. Lightning flickered about him, but whether it helped or hurt him he couldn’t say.

Even when he was sure he was free, he continued to run.

IIIThe Car

III—Finished.

Millard Parlette pushed his chair back and viewed the typewriter with satisfaction. His speech lay on his desk, last page on top, back-to-front. He picked up the stack of paper with long, knobby fingers and quickly shuffled it into correct order.

—Record it now?

—No. Tomorrow morning. Sleep on it tonight, see if I’ve left anything out. I don’t have to deliver it until day after tomorrow. Plenty of time to record the speech in his own voice, then play it over and over until he’d learned it by heart.

But it had to go over. The crew had to be made to understand the issues. For too long they had lived the lives of a divinely ordained ruling class. If they couldn’t adapt—

Even his own, descendants…they didn’t talk politics often, and when they did, Millard Parlette noticed that they talked in terms not of power but of rights. And the Parlettes were not typical. By now Millard Parlette could claim a veritable army of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth; yet he made every effort to see them all as often as possible. Those who had succumbed to the prevalent crewish tastes—eldritch styles of dress, elegantly worded slander, and all the other games the crew used to cloak their humdrum reality—had done so in spite of Millard Parlette. The average crew was utterly dependent on the fact that he was a crew.

And if the power balance should shift?

They’d be lost. For a time they’d be living in a false universe, under wrong assumptions; and in that time they would be destroyed.

What chance…What chance that they would listen to an old man from a dead generation?

No. He was just tired. Millard Parlette dropped the speech on his desk, stood up, and left the study; At least he would force them to listen. By order of the Council, at two o’clock Sunday every pure-blooded crew on the planet would be in front of his teedee set. If he could put it across…he must.

They had to understand the mixed blessing of Ramrobot #143.

Rain filled the coral house with an incessant drumming. Only Implementation police moved within and without. The last unconscious colonist was on his way out the door on a stretcher as Major Jansen entered.

He found Jesus Pietro lounging in an easy chair in the living room. He put the handful of photos beside him.

“What’s this supposed to be?”

“These are the ones we haven’t caught yet, sir.”

Jesus Pietro pulled himself erect, conscious once again of his soaked uniform. “How did they get past you?”

“I can’t imagine, sir. Nobody escaped after he was spotted.”

“No secret tunnels. The echo sounders would have found them. Mpf.” Jesus Pietro shuffled rapidly through the photos. Most had names beneath the faces, names Jesus Pietro had remembered and jotted down earlier that night. “This is the core,” he said. “We’ll wipe out this branch of the Sons of Earth if we can find these. Where are they?”

The aide was silent. He knew the question was rhetorical. The Head was leaning back with his eyes on the ceiling.

—Where were they?

—There were no tunnels out. They had not left underground.

—They hadn’t run away. They would have been stopped, or if not stopped, seen. Unless there were traitors in Implementation. But there weren’t. Period.

—Could they have reached the void edge? No, that was better guarded than the rest of the grounds. Rebels had a deplorable tendency to go off the edge when cornered.

—An aircar? Colonists wouldn’t have an aircar, not legally, and none had been reported stolen recently. But Jesus Pietro had always been convinced that at least one crew was involved in the Sons of Earth. He had no proof, no suspect; but his studies of history showed that a revolution always moves down from the top of a society’s structure.

A crew might have supplied them with an escape car. They’d have been seen but not stopped. No Implementation officer would halt a car—“Jansen, find out if any cars were sighted during the raid. If there were, let me know when, how many, and descriptions.”

Major Jansen left without showing his surprise at the peculiar order.

An officer had found the housecleaner nest, a niche in the south wall, near the floor. The man reached in and carefully removed two unconscious adult housecleaners and four pups, put them on the floor, reached in to remove the nest and the food dish. The niche would have to be searched.

Jesus Pietro’s clothes dried slowly, in wrinkles. He sat with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his belly. Presently he opened his eyes, sighed, and frowned slightly.

—Jesus Pietro, this is a very strange house.

—Yes. Almost garishly colonist. (Overtones of disgust.)

Jesus Pietro looked at the pink coral walls, the flat-sanded floor which curved up at the edge of the rug to join the walls. Not a bad effect if a woman were living here. But Harry Kane was a bachelor.

—How much would you say a house like this cost?

—Oh, about a thousand stars, not including furnishings. Furnishings would cost twice that. Rugs, ninety stars if you bought one and let it spread. Two housecleaners, mated, fifty stars.

—And how much to put a basement under such a house?

—Mist Demons, what an idea! Basements have to be dug by hand, by human beings! It’d cost twenty thousand stars easily. You could build a school for that. Who would ever think of digging a basement under an architectural coral house?

—Who indeed?

Jesus Pietro stepped briskly to the door. “Major Jansen!”

The sequel was likely to be messy. Jesus Pietro retired to the flying office while a team went in with an echo sounder. Yes, there was a large open space under the house. Major Chin wanted to find the entrance, but that might take all night, and the sounds might warn the colonists. Jesus Pietro sat firmly on his curiosity and ordered explosives.

It was messy. The rebels had put together some ingenious devices from materials anyone would have considered harmless. Two men died before sleepy-gas grenades could be used.

When all was quiet, Jesus Pietro followed the demolition teams into the basement. They found one of the unconscious rebels leaning on a dead-man switch. They traced the leads to a homemade bomb big enough to blow house and basement to bits. While they disconnected the bomb, Jesus Pietro studied the man, making a mental note to ask him if he’d chickened out. He’d found that they often did.

Behind one wall was a car, a three-year-old four-seater model with a bad scrape on the ground-effect skirt. Jesus Pietro could see no way to get it out of the basement, and neither could anyone else. The house must have been formed over it. Of course, thought Jesus Pietro; they dug the basement then grew the house over it. He had his men cut away the wall so that the car could be removed later if it was thought worthwhile. They’d practically have to remove the house.

There was a flight of steps with a trapdoor at the top. Jesus Pietro, examining the small bomb under the trapdoor, congratulated himself (pointedly, in Major Chin’s hearing) on not allowing Major Chin to search for the entrance. He might have found it. Someone removed the bomb and opened the trapdoor. Above was the living room. An asymmetrical section of mutated grass rug had reluctantly tom away and come up with the door. When the door was lowered, it would grow back within twenty minutes.

After the dead and unconscious had been filed away in patrol wagons, Jesus Pietro walked among them, comparing the faces with his final stack of photos. He was elated. With the exception of one man, he had collected Harry Kane and his entire guest list. The organ banks would be supplied for years. Not only would the crew have a full supply, which they always did anyway, but there would be spare parts for exceptional servants of the regime; i.e., for civil servants such as Jesus Pietro and his men. Even the colonists would benefit. It was not at all unusual for the Hospital to treat a sick but deserving colonist if the medical supplies were sufficient. The Hospital treated everyone they could. It reminded the colonists that the crew ruled in their name and had their interests at heart.

And the Sons of Earth was dead. All but one man, and from his picture he wasn’t old enough to be dangerous.

Nonetheless Jesus Pietro had his picture tacked to the Hospital bulletin boards and sent a copy to the newscast station with the warning that he was wanted for questioning.

It was not until dawn, when he was settling down to sleep, that he remembered who belonged to that face. Matthew Keller’s nephew, six years older than when he’d pulled that cider trick.

He looked just like his uncle.

The rain stopped shortly before dawn, but Matt didn’t know it. Sheltered from the rain by a cliff and by a thick clump of watershed trees, he slept on.

The cliff was the Beta-Gamma cliff. He’d fetched up against it sometime last night, dizzy and bruised and wet and winded. He could have collapsed there or tried running parallel to the cliff. He had chosen to collapse. If Implementation found him, he’d never awaken, and he had known it as he went to sleep. He had been too exhausted to care.

He woke about ten with a ferocious headache. Every separate muscle hurt from running and from sleeping on bare ground. His tongue felt like the entire Implementation police force had marched over it in sweat socks. He stayed on his back, looking up into the dark trees his ancestors had called pines, and tried to remember.

So much to begin and end in one night.

The people seemed to crowd around him. Hood, Laney, the four tall men, the kid who drank behind the bar, the laughing man who stole crew cars, Polly, Harry Kane, and a forest of anonymous elbows and shouting voices.

All gone. The man whose scar he wore. The woman who’d left him flat. The genial mastermind-bartender. And Laney! How could he have lost Laney?

They were gone. Over the next few years they might reappear in the form of eyes, lengths of artery and vein, grafts of hair-bearing scalp…

By now the police would be looking for Matt himself.

He sat up, and every muscle screamed. He was naked. Implementation must have found his clothes in Laney’s room. Could they match the clothes to him? And if they couldn’t, they’d still wonder how a man came to be wandering stark naked in open countryside. On the pedwalks of Earth there were licensed nudists, and on Wunderland you didn’t need a license; but on the Plateau there was no substitute for clothing.

He couldn’t turn himself in. By now he’d never prove he wasn’t a rebel. He’d have to get clothes, somehow, and hope they weren’t looking for him already.

He surged to his feet, and it hit him again. Laney. Laney in the dark, Laney looking at him in the lamplit bed. Polly, the girl with the secret. Hood, first name Jayhawk. A wave of sickness caught him, and he doubled over, retching. He stopped the spasms by sheer willpower. His skull was a throbbing drum. He straightened and walked to the edge of the watershed forest.

To right and left the watershed trees stretched along the base of the Beta-Gamma cliff. Beta Plateau above him, unreachable except by the bridge, which must be miles to the left. Before him, a wide meadow with a few grazing goats. Beyond that, houses. Houses in all directions, thickly clustered. His own was perhaps four miles away. He’d never reach it without being stopped.

How about Harry’s house? Laney had said there was a hiding place. And the ones who left before the raid…some of them might have returned. They could help him.

But would they?

He’d have to try it. He might reach Harry’s house, crawling through the grass. The luck of Matt Keller might hold that far. He’d never reach his own.

His luck held: the strange luck that seemed to hide Matt Keller when he didn’t want to be noticed. He reached the house two hours later. His knees and belly were green and itchy from the grass.

The grounds about the house were solidly spread with wheel tracks. All of Implementation must have been in on the raid. Matt saw no guards, but he went carefully in case they were inside. Implementation guards or rebel guards, he could still be shot. Though a guard might hesitate to shoot him, he’d want to ask questions first. Like: “Where’s your pants, buddy?”

Nobody was inside. A dead or sleeping family of housecleaners lay against one wall, beneath their looted nest. Dead, probably, or drugged. Housecleaners hated, light; they did their work at night. The rug showed a gaping hole that reached down through indoor grass and architectural coral to a well-furnished hole in the ground. The living-room walls were spotted with explosion marks and mercy-bullet streaks. So was the basement, when Matt climbed down to look.

The basement was empty of men and nearly empty of equipment. Scars showed where heavy machinery had stood, more scars where it had been torn loose or burned loose. There were doors, four of them, all crude looking and all burned open. One led to a kitchen; two opened on empty storerooms. One whole wall lay on its side, but the piece of equipment beyond was intact. The hole left by the fallen wall might have been big enough to remove it, but certainly the hole in the living-room floor was not.

It was a car, a flying car of the type used by all crew families. Matt had never before seen one close up. There it was beyond the broken wall, with no possible way to get it out. What in blazes had Harry Kane wanted with a car that couldn’t be flown?

Perhaps this was what had brought on the raid. Cars were strictly denied to colonists. The military uses of a flying car are obvious. But why wasn’t its theft noticed earlier? The car must have been here when the house was built.

Dimly Matt remembered a story he’d heard last night. Something about a stolen car set to circle the Plateau until the fuel ran out. No doubt the car had fallen in the mist, watched by furious, impotent crew. But—suppose he’d heard only the official version? Suppose the fuel had not ran out; suppose the car had dipped into the mist, circled below the Plateau, and come up where Harry Kane could bury it in a hidden basement?

Probably he’d never know.

The showers were still running. Matt was shivering badly when he stepped in. The hot water thawed him instantly. He let the water pour heavily down on the back of his neck, washing the grass stains and dirt and old sweat from him as it ran in streams to his feet. Life was bearable. With all its horrors and all its failures, life was bearable where there were hot showers.

He thought of something then, and metaphorically his ears pricked up.

The raid had been so big. Implementation had grabbed everyone at the party. From the number of tracks, it was likely they had taken even those who had left early, putting them to sleep one-by-one and two-by-two as they turned toward home. They must have returned to the Hospital with close to two hundred prisoners.

Some were innocent. Matt knew that. And Implementation was usually fair about convictions. Trials were always closed, and only the results were ever published, but Implementation usually preferred not to convict the innocent. Suspects had returned from the Hospital.

—But that wouldn’t take long. The police could simply release everyone without a hearing aid, with notations to keep an eye on them in future. He who wore a hearing aid was guilty.

—But it would take time to reduce around a hundred convicted rebels to their component parts. The odds were that Laney, Hood, and Polly were still alive. Certainly they could not all be dead by this time.

Matt stepped out of the shower and began looking for clothes. He found a closet which must have belonged to Harry Kane, for the shorts were too wide and the shirts were too short. He dressed anyway, pulling shirt and shorts into a million wrinkles with the belt. At a distance he’d pass.

The clothes problem was as nothing, now. The problem he faced was much worse.

He had no idea how long it took to take a man apart and store him away, though he could guess that it would take a long time to do it right. He didn’t know whether Implementation, in the person of the dread Castro, would want to question the rebels first. But he did know that every minute he waited reduced the odds that each of the partygoers was still alive. Right now the odds were good.

Matt Keller would go through life knowing that he had passed up his chance to save them.

But, he reminded himself, it wasn’t really a chance. He had no way to reach Alpha Plateau without being shot. He’d have to cross two guarded bridges.

The noonday sun shone through clean air on a clean, ordered world—in contrast to the gutted coral shell behind him. Matt hesitated on the doorstep, then resolutely turned back to the jagged hole in Harry Kane’s living room. He must know that it was impossible. The basement was the heart of the rebel stronghold—a heart which had failed. If Implementation had overlooked a single weapon…

There were no weapons in the car, but he found an interesting assortment of scars. Ripped upholstery showed bolts attached to the exposed metal walls, but the bolts had been cut or torn out. Matt found six places which must have been gun mounts. A bin in back might have held makeshift hand grenades. Or sandwiches; Matt couldn’t tell. Implementation had taken anything that might have been a weapon, but they didn’t seem to have harmed the car. Presumably they would come back and dig it out someday if they thought it worth the effort.

He got in and looked at the dashboard, but it didn’t tell him anything. He’d never seen a car dashboard. There had been a cover over it, padlocked, but the padlock lay broken on the floor and the cover was loose. Harry’s padlock? Or the original owner’s?

He sat in the unfamiliar vehicle, unwilling to leave because leaving would mean giving up. When he noticed a button labeled Start, he pushed it. He never heard the purr of the motor starting.

The blast made him spasm like a galvanized frog. It came all in one burst, like the sound of a gunshot as heard by a fly sitting in the barrel. Harry must have set something to blow up the house! But no, he was still alive. And there was daylight pouring in on him.

Daylight.

Four feet of earth had disappeared from above him. A wall of the house was in his field of vision. It leaned. Harry Kane must have been a genius with shaped charge explosives. Or known one. Come to that, Matt could have done the job for him. The mining worms didn’t do all his work.

Daylight. And the motor was running. He could hear an almost soundless hum now that his ears had recovered from the blast. If he flew the car straight up…

He’d have had to cross two guarded bridges to reach Alpha Plateau. Now he could fly there—if he could learn to fly before the car killed him.

Or, he could go home. He wouldn’t be noticed, despite his ill-fitting clothes. Colonists tended to mind their own business, leaving it to the crew and Implementation to maintain order. He’d change clothes, burn these, and who would know or ask where he’d been over the weekend?

Matt sighed and examined the dashboard again. He couldn’t quit now. Later, maybe, when he crashed the car, or when they stopped him in the air. Not now. The blast that had freed his path was an omen one he couldn’t ignore.

Let’s see. Four levers set at zero. Fans: 1-2, 1-3, 2-4, 3-4. Why would those little levers be set to control the fans in pairs? He pulled one toward him. Nothing.

A small bar with three notches: Neutral. Ground. Air. Set on Neutral. He moved it to Ground. Nothing. If he’d had the Ground Altitude set for the number of inches he wanted, the fans would have started. But he didn’t know that. He tried Air.

The car tried to flop over on its back.

He was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he pulled all the fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma were tiny squares. Finally the car began to settle down.

Not that he could relax for a moment.

Fans numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 were left front, right front, left rear, right rear. Dropping lever 1-2 dropped the front of the car; 3-4, the back; 1-3, the left side; 2-4, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he had the knack of it.

But how to go forward?

There were Altitude and Rotation dials, but they didn’t do anything. He didn’t dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it. But…suppose he tilted the car forward? Depressed the 1-2 throttle.

He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could strike him in the face, he got the car righted, waited until his nerves stopped jumping, then…tried it again.

This time he pushed the 1-2 lever in a little, waited three seconds, pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move forward with its nose dipped.

Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to fly backwards, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn’t know how to turn around.

He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob labeled Slats. The car also started to drop. Matt remembered the venetian-blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were, leveled the car’s altitude. It must have been right because the car kept moving forward.

It was hardly wobbling at all.

And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.

The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and river terminated at the void edge to the left, and the murmur of the river’s fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance.

Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn’t know just what it looked like, but he was sure he’d recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn’t bother him. He hadn’t decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew.

It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.

But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the Gyroscope switch.

As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions.

“Did you get the prisoners put away all right?”

“Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn’t have room for them all.”

“And they’re in the organ banks?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. “Let’s hope they didn’t know anything important. What about the deadheads?”

“We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o’clock. That’s when the ear mikes evaporated.”

“Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?”

“Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues.”

“It’s not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources,” said Jesus Pietro.

After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know, “What about Keller?”

“Who, Sir?”

“The one that got away.”

And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, “No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody’s volunteered to turn him in. He hasn’t tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him.”

More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee. Then, “See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out if anyone saw the landing yesterday.”

“One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens.”

“Oh?” For a moment Jesus Pietro’s thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out—“I don’t know why you couldn’t tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute,” he called as Jansen turned to the door. “One more thing. There may be basements that we don’t know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus.”

“Yes, sir. Priority?”

“No, no, no. The vivarium’s two deep already. Tell them to-take their time.”

The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then demanded, “Well, why call here? Hold on.” With a touch of derision he reported, “A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless manner. Naturally they had to call you personally.”

“Now why the—mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane’s basement?”

“I’ll ask.” He did. “It is, sir.”

“I should have known there’d be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down.”

Geologists (don’t give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet’s skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.

It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat’s atmosphere.

And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls, the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.

Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia.

The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one’s peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation.

So Alpha Plateau was crowded.

What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist’s home. Two or three were as large as Matt’s old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.

None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead.

Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size.

Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis. Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.

They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships’ hulls. Some would be power stations, others—he couldn’t guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.

All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees?

A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun-beam! For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake.

It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of Alpha Plateau.

The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn’t move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.

The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the desperate.

Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they’d lost him, but they wanted to see him fall.

How far down was the mist? He’d never known. Miles, certainly. Tens of miles? They’d hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn’t go back to the Plateau; they’d stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now.

Matt flipped the car over on its back.

The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.

“Hell of a way to go,” someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement.

The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.

Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air!

But that wouldn’t occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth’s strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn’t meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it.

He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the farther he’d leave them behind.

At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn’t know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose.

It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening, and the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles down to the Idle notches.

The blood rushing to his head threatened to choke him. He turned the car right side up. Pressure jammed him deep in his seat with a force no man had felt since the brute-force chemical rockets, but he could stand it now. What he couldn’t endure was the heat. And the pain in his ears. And the taste of the air.

He pulled the throttles out again. He wanted to stop fast.

Come to that, would he know when he stopped? This around him was not a wispy kind of mist, but a dark blur giving no indication of his velocity. From above, the mist was white; from below, black. Being lost down here would be horrible. At least he knew which way was up. It was fractionally lighter in that direction.

The air tasted like flaming molasses.

He had the throttles all the way out. Still the gas crept in. Matt pulled his shirt over his mouth and tried to breathe through that. No good. Something like a black wall emerged from the mist-blur, and he tilted the car in time to avoid crashing against the side of Mount Lookitthat. He stayed near the black wall, watching it rush past him. He’d be harder to see in the shadow of the void edge.

The mist disappeared. He shot upward through sparkling sunlight. When he thought he was good and clear of the foul mist, and when he couldn’t stand to breathe hot poison for another second, he put the window down. The car whipped to the side and tried to turn over. A hurricane roared through the cabin. It was hot and thick and soupy, that hurricane, but it could be breathed.

He saw the edge of the Plateau above him, and he pushed the throttles in a little to slow down. His stomach turned a flip-flop. For the first time since he’d gotten into the car, he had time to be sick. His stomach tried to turn over, his head was splitting from the sudden changes in pressure, and the Implementation sonics were having their revenge in twitching, jerking muscles. He kept the car more or less upright until the edge of the Plateau came level with him. There was a stone wall along the edge here. He eased the car sideways, eased it back when he was over the wall, tilted it by guess and hope until he was motionless in the air, then let it drop.

The car fell about four feet. Matt opened the door but stopped himself from getting out. What he really wanted to do was faint, but he’d left the fans idling. He found the Neutral…Ground…Air toggle and shoved it forward without much care. He was tired and sick, and he wanted to lie down.

The toggle fell in the Ground slot.

Matt stumbled out the door—stumbled because the car was rising. It rose four inches off the ground and began to slide. During his experimenting Matt must have set the ground altitude, so that the car was now a ground-effect vehicle. It slid away from him as he tried to reach for it. He watched on hands and knees as it glided away across the uneven ground, bounced against the wall and away, against the wall and away. It circled the end of the wall and went over the edge.

Matt flopped on his back and closed his eyes. He didn’t care if he never saw a car again.

The motion sickness, the sonic aftereffects, the poisoned air he’d breathed, the pressure changes—they gripped him hard, and he wanted to die. Then, by stages, they began to let go. Nobody found him there. A house was nearby, but it had a vacant look. After some time Matt sat up and took stock of himself.

His throat hurt. There was a strange, unpleasant taste in his mouth.

He was still on Alpha Plateau. Only crew would go to the trouble of building walls along a void edge. So he was committed. Without a car he could no more leave Alpha Plateau than he could have arrived there in the first place.

But the house was architectural coral. Bigger than anything he was used to, it was still coral. Which meant that it should have been deserted about forty years.

He’d have to risk it. He needed cover. There were no trees nearby, and trees were dangerous to hide in; they would probably be fruit trees, and someone might come apple-picking. Matt got up and moved toward the house.

IVThe Question Man

IVThe hospital was the control nexus of a world. It was not a large world, and the settled region totaled a mere 20,000 square miles; but that region needed a lot of control. It also required considerable electricity, enormous quantities of water to be moved up from the Long Fall River, and a deal of medical attention. The Hospital was big and complex and diversified. Two fifty-six-man spacecraft were its east and west corners. Since the spacecraft were hollow cylinders with the airlocks opening to the inside (to the Attic, as that inner space had been called when the rotating ships were between stars and the ship’s axis was Up), the corridors in that region were twisted and mazelike and hard to navigate.

So the young man in Jesus Pietro’s office had no idea where he was. Even if he’d managed to leave the office unguarded, he’d have been hopelessly lost. And he knew it. That was all to the good.

“You were on the dead-man switch,” said Jesus Pietro.

The man nodded. His sandy hair was cut in the old Belter style, copied from the even older Mohawk. There were shadows under his eyes as if from lack of sleep, and the lie was borne out by a slump of utter depression, though he had been sleeping since his capture in Harry Kane’s basement.

“You funked it,” Jesus Pietro accused. “You arranged to fall across the switch so that it wouldn’t go off.”

The man looked up. Naked rage was in his face. He made no move, for there was nothing he could do.

“Don’t be ashamed. The dead-man switch is an old trick. It almost never gets used in practice. The man in charge is too likely to change his mind at the last second. It’s a—”

“I fully expected to wake up dead!” the man shouted.

“—natural reaction. It takes a psychotic to commit suicide. No, don’t tell me all about it. I’m not interested. I want to hear about the car in your basement.”

“You think I’m a coward, do you?”

“That’s an ugly word.”

“I stole that car.”

“Did you?” The skeptical tone was genuine. Jesus Pietro did not believe him. “Then perhaps you can tell me why the theft went unnoticed.”

The man told him. He talked eagerly, demanding that Jesus Pietro recognize his courage. Why not? There was nobody left to betray. He would live as long as Jesus Pietro Castro was interested in him, and for three minutes longer. The organ bank operating room was three minutes’ walk away. Jesus Pietro listened politely. Yes, he remembered the car that had tauntingly circled the Plateau for five days. The young crew owner had given him hell for letting it happen. The man had even suggested—demanded—that one of Castro’s men drop on the car from above, climb into the cockpit, and bring it back. Jesus Pietro’s patience had given out, and he had risked his life by politely offering to help the young man perform the feat.

“So we buried it at the same time we built the basement,” the prisoner finished. “Then we let the house grow over it. We had great plans.” He sagged into his former position of despair but went on talking, mumbling. “There were gun mounts. Bins for bombs. We stole a sonic stunner and mounted it in the rear window. Now nobody’ll ever use them.”

“The car was used.”

“What?”

“This afternoon. Keller escaped us last night. He returned to Kane’s home this morning, took the car and flew it nearly to the Hospital before we stopped him. The Mist Demons know what he thought he was doing.”

“Great! ‘The last flight of—’ We never got around to naming it. Our air force. Our glorious air force. Who did you say?”

“Keller. Matthew Leigh Keller.”

“I don’t know him. What would he be doing with my car?”

“Don’t play games. You are not protecting anyone. We drove him off the edge. Five ten, age twenty-one, hair brown, eyes blue—”

“I tell you I never met him.”

“Good-by.” Jesus Pietro pushed a button under his desk. The door opened.

“Wait a minute. Now, wait—”

Lying, Jesus Pietro thought, after the man was gone. Probably lied about the car too. Somewhere in the vivarium the man who really took the car waited to be questioned. If it was stolen. It could equally well have been supplied by a crew member, by Jesus Pietro’s hypothetical traitor.

He had often wondered why the crew would not supply him with truth drugs. They would have been easy to manufacture from instructions in the ship’s libraries. Millard Parlette, in a mellow mood, had once tried to explain. “We own their bodies,” he had said. “We take them apart on the slightest pretext; and if they manage to die a natural death, we get them anyway, what we can save. Aren’t the poor bastards at least entitled to the privacy of their own minds?”

It seemed a peculiar bleeding-heart attitude, coming from a man whose very life depended on the organ banks. But others apparently felt the same. If Jesus Pietro wanted his questions answered, he must depend on his own empirical brand of psychology.

Polly Tournquist. Age: twenty. Height: five one. Weight: ninety-five. She wore a crumpled party dress in the colonist style. In Jesus Pietro’s eyes it did nothing for her. She was small and brown, and compared to most of the women Jesus Pietro met socially, muscular. They were work muscles, not tennis muscles. Traces of callus marred her hands. Her hair, worn straight back, had a slight natural curl to it but no trace of style.

Had she been raised as crew girls were raised, had she access to cosmetics available on Alpha Plateau, she would have known how to be beautiful. Then she wouldn’t have been bad at all, once the callus left her hands and cosmetic treatment smoothed her skin. But, like most colonists, she had aged faster than a crew.

She was only a young colonist girl, like a thousand other young colonist girls Jesus Pietro had seen.

She bore his silent stare for a full minute before she snapped, “Well?”

“Well? You’re Polly Tournquist, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You had a handful of films on you when you were picked up last night. How did you get them?”

“I prefer not to say.”

“Eventually I think you will. Meanwhile, what would you like to talk about?”

Polly looked bewildered. “Are you serious?”

“I am serious. I’ve interviewed six people today. The organ banks are full and the day is ending. I’m in no hurry. Do you know what those films of yours imply?”

She nodded warily. “I think so. Especially after the raid.”

“Oh, you saw the point, did you?”

“It’s clear you have no more use for the Sons of Earth. We’ve always been some danger to you—”

“You flatter yourselves.”

“But you’ve never had a real try at wiping us out. Not till now. Because we serve as a recruiting center for your damned organ banks!”

“You amaze me. Did you know this when you joined?”

“I was fairly sure of it.”

“Then why join?”

She spread her hands. “Why does anybody join? I couldn’t stand the way things are now. Castro, what happens to your body when you die?”

“Cremated. I’m an old man.”

“You’re crew. They’d cremate you anyway. Only colonists go into the banks.”

“I’m half crew,” said Jesus Pietro. His desire to talk was genuine, and there was no need for reticence with a girl who was, to all intents and purposes, dead. “When my—you might say—pseudo-father reached the age of seventy, he was old enough to need injections of testosterone. Except that he chose a different way to get them.”

The girl looked bewildered, then horrified.

“I see you understand. Shortly afterward his wife, my mother, became pregnant. I must admit they raised me almost as a crew. I love them both. I don’t know who my father was. He may have been a rebel, or a thief.”

“To you there’s no difference, I suppose.” The girl’s tone was savage.

“No. Back to the Sons of Earth,” Jesus Pietro said briskly. “You’re quite right. We don’t need them anymore, not as a recruiting center nor for any other purpose. Yours was the biggest rebel group on Mount Lookitthat. We’ll take the others as they come.”

“I don’t understand. The organ banks are obsolete now, aren’t they? Why not publish the news? There’d be a worldwide celebration!”

“That’s just why we don’t broadcast the news. Your kind of sloppy thinking! No, the organ banks are not obsolete. It’s just that we’ll need a smaller supply of raw material. And as a means of punishment for crimes the banks are as important as ever!”

“You son of a bitch,” said Polly. Her color was high, and her voice held an icy, half-controlled fury. “So we might get uppity if we thought we were being killed to no purpose!”

“You will not be dying to no purpose,” Jesus Pietro explained patiently. “That has not been necessary since the first kidney transplant between identical twins. It has not been necessary since Landsteiner classified the primary blood types in 1900. What do you know about the car in Kane’s basement?”

“I prefer not to say.”

“You’re being very difficult.”

The girl smiled for the first time. “I’ve heard that.”

His reaction took Jesus Pietro by surprise. A flash of admiration, followed by a hot flood of lust. Suddenly the bedraggled colonist girl was the only girl in the universe. Jesus Pietro held his face like frozen stone while the flood receded. It took several seconds.

“What about Matthew Leigh Keller?”

“Who? I mean—”

“You prefer not to say. Miss, Tournquist, you probably know that there are no truth drugs on this world. In the ships’ libraries are instructions for making scopolamine, but no crew will authorize me to use them. Hence I have developed different methods.” He saw her stiffen. “No, no. There will be no pain. They’d put me in the organ banks if I used torture. I’m only going to give you a nice rest.”

“I think I know what you mean. Castro, what are you made of? You’re half colonist yourself. What makes you side with the crew?”

“There must be law and order, Miss Tournquist. On all of Mount Lookitthat there is only one force for law and order, and that force is the crew.” Jesus Pietro pushed the call button.

He did not relax until she was gone, and then he found himself shaken. Had she noticed that flash of desire? What an embarrassing thing to happen! But she must have assumed he was only angry. Of course she had.

Polly was in the maze of corridors when she suddenly remembered Matt Keller. Her regal dignity, assumed for the benefit of the pair of Implementation police who were her escorts, softened in thought. Why would Jesus Pietro be interested in Matt? He wasn’t even a member. Did it mean that he had escaped?

Odd, about that night. She’d liked Matt. He’d interested her. And then, suddenly…It must have looked to him as if she’d brushed him off. Well, it didn’t matter now. But Implementation should have turned him loose. He was nothing but a deadhead.

Castro. Why had he told her all that? Was it part of the coffin cure? Well, she’d hold out as long as possible. Let Castro worry about who might know the truth of Ramrobot #143. She had told nobody. But let him worry.

The girl looked about her in pleased wonder at the curving walls and ceiling with their peeled, discolored paint, at the spiral stairs, at the matted, withered brown rug which had been indoor grass. She watched the dust puff out from her falling feet, and she ran her hands over the coral walls where the paint had fallen away. Her new, brightly dyed falling-jumper seemed to glow in the gloom of the deserted house.

“It’s very odd,” she said. Her crewish accent was strange and lilting.

The man lifted an arm from around her waist to wave it about him. “They live just like this,” he said in the same accent. “Just like this. You can see their houses from your car on the way to the lake.”

Matt smiled as he watched them walk up the stairs. He had never seen a two-story coral house; the balloons were too hard to blow, and the second floor tended to sag unless you maintained two distinct pressures. Why didn’t they come to Delta Plateau if they wanted to see how colonists lived?

But why should they? Surely their own lives were more interesting.

What strange people they were. It was hard to understand them, not only because of the lilt but because certain words meant the wrong things. Their faces were alien, with flared nostrils and high, prominent cheekbones. Against the people Matt had known, they seemed fragile, undermuscled, but graceful and beautiful to the point where Matt wondered about the man’s manhood. They walked as though they owned the world.

The deserted house had proved a disappointment. He’d thought all was lost when the crew couple came strolling in, pointing and staring as if they were in a museum. But with luck they would be up there for some time.

Matt moved very quietly from the darkness of a now doorless closet, picked up their picnic basket, and ran on tiptoe for the door. There was a place where he could hide, a place he should have thought of before.

He climbed over the low stone wall with the picnic basket in one hand. There was a three-foot granite lip on the void side. Matt settled himself cross-legged against the stone wall, with his head an inch below the top and his toes a foot from the forty-mile drop to hell. He opened the picnic basket.

There was more than enough for two. He ate it all, eggs and sandwiches and squeezebags of custard and a thermos of soup and a handful of olives. Afterward he kicked the basket and the scraps of plastic wrap into the void. His eyes followed them down.

Consider:

Anyone can see infinity by looking up on a clear night. But only on the small world of Mount Lookitthat can you see infinity by looking down.

No, it’s not really infinity. Neither is the night sky, really. You can see a few nearby galaxies; but even if the universe turns out to be finite, you see a very little distance into it. Matt could see apparent infinity by looking straight down.

He could see the picnic basket falling. Smaller. Gone.

The plastic wrap. Fluttering down. Gone.

Then, nothing but the white mist.

On a far-distant day they would call the phenomenon Plateau trance. It was a form of autohypnosis well known to Plateau citizens of both social classes, differing from other forms only in that nearly anyone could fall into such a state by accident. In this respect Plateau trance compares to ancient, badly authenticated cases of “highway hypnosis” or to more recent studies of “the far look,” a form of religious trance endemic to the Belt of Sol. The far look comes to a miner who spends too many minutes staring at a single star in the background of naked space. Plateau trance starts with a long, dreamy look down into the void mist.

For a good eight hours Matt had not had a chance to relax. He would not get a chance tonight, and he didn’t want to dwell on that now. Here was his chance. He relaxed.

He came out of it with a niggling suspicion that time had passed. He was lying on his side, his face over the edge staring down into unfathomable darkness. It was night. And he felt wonderful.

Until he remembered.

He got up and climbed carefully over the wall. It would not do to slip, three feet from the edge, and he was often clumsy when he felt this nervous. Now his stomach seemed to have been replaced by a plastic demonstration model from a biology class. There was a jerkiness in his limbs.

He walked a little way from the wall and stopped. Which way was the Hospital?

Come now, he thought. This is ridiculous.

Well, there was a swelling hill to his left. Light glowed faintly along its rim. He’ll try that.

The grass and the earth beneath it ended as he reached the top. Now there was stone beneath his bare feet, stone and rock dust untouched by three hundred years of the colony planting program. He stood at the crest of the hill looking down on the Hospital. It was half a mile away and blazed with light. Behind and to either side were other lights, the lights of houses, none within half a mile of the Hospital. Against their general glow he saw the black tongue of forest he’d noticed that morning.

In a direction not quite opposite to the dark, sprawling line of trees, a straighter line of light ran from the Hospital to a cluster of buildings at the perimeter of the bare region. A supply road.

He could reach the trees by moving along the edge of town. The trees would give him cover until he reached the wall—but it seemed a poor risk. Why would Implementation leave that one line of cover across a bare, flat protective field? That strip of forest must be loaded with detection equipment.

He started across the rock on his belly.

He stopped frequently. It was tiring, moving like this. Worse than that, what was he going to do when he got inside? The Hospital was big, and he knew nothing about the interior. The lighted windows bothered him. Didn’t the Hospital ever sleep? The stars shone bright and cold. Each time he stopped to rest, the Hospital was a little closer.

So was the wall that surrounded it. It leaned outwards and on this side there was no break at all.

He was a hundred yards from the wall when he found the wire. There were big metal pegs to hold it off the ground, pegs a foot high and thirty yards apart, driven into the rock. The wire itself was bare coppery metal strung taut a few inches off the ground. Matt had not touched it. He crossed it very carefully, staying low but not touching the wire at any time.

Faintly there came the sound of alarm bells ringing inside the wall. Matt stopped where he was. Then he turned and was over the wire in one leap. When he hit the ground he didn’t move. His eyes were closed tight. He felt the faint touch of numbness which meant a sonic beam. Evidently he was out of range. He risked a look behind him. Four searchlights hunted him across the bare rock. The wall was lousy with police.

He turned away, afraid they’d see his face shining. There were whirring sounds. Mercy-bullets falling all around him, slivers of glassy chemical which dissolved in blood. They weren’t as accurate as lead pellets, but one must find him soon.

A light pinned him. And another, and a third.

From the wall came a voice. “Cease fire.” The whirr of anesthetic slivers ended. The voice spoke again, bored, authoritative, tremendously amplified. “Stand up, you. You may as well walk, but we’ll carry you if we have to.”

Matt wanted to burrow like a rabbit. But even a rabbit wouldn’t have made headway in the pitted, dusty stone. He stood up with his hands in the air.

There was no sound, no motion.

One of the lights swung away from him. Then the others. They moved in random arcs for a while, crossing the protective-rock field with swooping blobs of light. Then, one by one, they went out.

The amplified voice spoke again. It sounded faintly puzzled. “What set off the alarms?”

Another voice, barely audible in the quiet night. “Don’t know, sir.”

“Maybe a rabbit. All right, break it up.”

The figures on the wall disappeared. Matt was standing all alone with his hands in the air. After a while he put them down and walked away.

The man was tall and thin, with a long face and a short mouth and no expression. His Implementation-police uniform could not have been cleaner nor better pressed if he’d donned it a moment ago for the first time. He sat beside the door, bored and used to it, a man who had spent half his life sitting and waiting.

Every fifteen minutes or so he would get up to look at the coffin.

Seemingly the coffin had been built for Gilgamesh or Paul Bunyan. It was oak, at least on the outside. The eight gauge dials along one edge appeared to have been pirated from somewhere else and attached to the coffin by a carpenter of only moderate skill. The, long-headed man would stand up, go to the coffin, stand over the dials for a minute. Something could go wrong, after all. Then he would have to act in a hurry. But nothing ever did, and he would return to his chair and wait some more.

Problem:

Polly Tournquist’s mind holds information you need. How to get at it?

The mind is the body. The body is the mind.

Drugs would interfere with her metabolism. They might harm her. You’d risk it, but you’re not allowed drugs anyway.

Torture? You could damage a few fingernails, bend a few bones. But it wouldn’t stop there. Pain affects the adrenal glands, and the adrenal glands affect everything. Sustained pain can have a savage, even permanent, effect on a body needed for medical supplies. Besides, torture is unethical.

Friendly persuasion? You could offer her a deal. Her life, and resettlement in some other region of the Plateau, for anything you want to know. You’d like that, and the organ banks are full…But she won’t deal. You’ve seen them before. You can tell.

So you give her a nice rest.

Polly Tournquist was a soul alone in space. Less than that, for there was nothing around her that could have been identified as “space.” No heat, no cold, no pressure, no light, no darkness, no hunger, no thirst, no sound.

She had tried to concentrate on the sound of her heartbeat, but even that had disappeared. It was too regular. Her mind had edited it out. Similarly with the darkness behind her closed, bandaged eyelids: the darkness was uniform, and she no longer sensed it. She could strain her muscles against the soft, swaddling bandages that bound her, but she sensed no result, for the slack was small fractions of an inch. Her mouth was partly open; she could neither open it further nor close it on the foam-rubber mouthpiece. She could not bite her tongue, nor find it. In no way could she produce the sensation of pain. The ineffable peace of the coffin cure wrapped her in its tender folds and carried her, screaming silently, into nothingness.

What happened?

He sat at the edge of the grass on the hill above the Hospital. His eyes were fixed on its blazing windows. His heart beat softly against his knee.

What happened? They had me. They had me!

He had walked away. Bewildered, helpless, beaten, he had waited for the magnified voice to shout its orders. And nothing had happened. It was as if they had forgotten him. He had walked away with the feel of death at his back, waiting for the numbness of a sonic stun-beam or the prick of a mercy-bullet or the roar of the officer’s voice.

Gradually, against all reason, he had sensed that they were not going to come for him.

And then he ran.

His lungs had stopped their tortured laboring many minutes ago, but his brain still spun. Perhaps it would never stop. He had run until he collapsed, here at the top of the hill, but the fear that drove him was not the fear of the organ banks. He had fled from an impossible thing, from a universe without reason. How could he have walked away from that plain of death with no eye to watch him? It smacked of magic, and he was afraid.

Something had suspended the ordinary laws of the universe to save his life. He had never heard of anything that could do that…except the Mist Demons. And the Mist Demons were a myth. They had told him so when he was old enough. The Mist Demons were a tale to frighten children, like the reverse of a Santa Claus. The old wives who found powerful beings in the mist beyond the edge of the world had followed a tradition older than history, perhaps as old as man. But nobody believed in the Mist Demons. They were like the Belt miners’ Church of Finagle, whose prophet was Murphy. A half-bitter joke. Something to swear by.

They had me and they let me go. Why?

Could they have had a purpose? Was there some reason the Hospital should let a colonist sneak to its very walls, then let him go free?

Could the organ banks be full? But there must be someplace they could keep a prisoner until there was room.

But if they thought he was a crew! Yes, that was it! A human figure on Alpha plateau—of course they’d assume he was crew. But so what? Surely someone would have come to question him.

Matt began pacing a tight circle at the top of the low hill. His head whirled. He’d walked to certain death and been turned loose. By whom? Why? And what did he do next? Go back and give them another chance? Walk to the Alpha-Beta Bridge and hope nobody would see him sneaking across? Fly down the cliff, vigorously flapping his arms?

The awful thing was that he didn’t know it wouldn’t work. Magic, magic. Hood had talked about magic.

No, he hadn’t. He’d practically turned purple denying that magic was involved. He’d been talking about…psychic powers. And Matt had been so involved in watching, Polly that he couldn’t remember anything Hood had said.

It was very bad luck. Because this was his only out. He had to assume that he had a psychic power, though he had not the remotest idea what that implied. At least it put a name to what had happened.

“I’ve got a psychic power,” Matt announced. His voice rang with queer precision in the quiet night.

Fine. So? If Hood had gone into detail on the nature of psychic powers, Matt couldn’t remember. But he could fairly well drop the idea of flying down the Alpha-Beta cliff. Whatever else was true of man’s unexplored mental powers, they must be consistent. Matt could remember the feeling that he wouldn’t be noticed if he didn’t want to be, he had never flown, nor even dreamed of flying.

He ought to talk to Hood.

But Hood was in the Hospital. He might be dead already.

Well…

Matt had been eleven years old when Ghengis, or Dad, brought two charms home for gifts. They were model cars, just the right size for charm bracelets, and they glowed in the dark. Matt and Jeanne had loved them at sight and forever.

One night they had left the charms in a closet for several hours, thinking they would grow brighter when they “got used to the dark.” When Jeanne opened the closet, they had lost all their glow.

Jeanne was near tears. Matt’s reaction was different. If darkness robbed the charms of their powers…

He hung them next to a light bulb for an hour. When he turned off the light, they glowed like little blue lamps.

A tide of small, loosely packed clouds was spreading across the stars. In all directions the town lights had gone out, all but the lights of the Hospital. The Plateau slept in a profound silence.

Well…he’d tried to sneak into the Hospital. He’d been caught. But when he stood up in the glare of spotlights, they couldn’t see him. The why of it was just as magical as before, but he thought he was beginning to see the how of it.

He’d have to risk it. Matt began to walk.

He’d never planned for it to go this far. If only he’d been stopped before it was too late. But it was too late, and he had the sense to know it.

Strictly speaking, he should have been wearing something bright. A blue shirt with a tangerine sweater, iridescent green pants, a scarlet cape with an S enclosed in a yellow triangle. And…rimmed glasses? It had been a long time since grade school. Never mind; he’d have to go as he was.

A good thing he liked flamboyant gestures.

He skirted the edge of the bare region until he reached the houses. Presently he was walking through dark streets. The houses were fascinating and strange. He would have enjoyed seeing them by daylight. What manner of people lived in them? Colorful, idle, happy, eternally young and healthy. He would have liked to be one of them.

But he noticed a peculiar thing about the houses. Heterogeneous as they were in form, color, style, building material, they had one thing in common. Always they faced away from the Hospital.

As if the Hospital inspired them with fear. Or guilt.

There were lights ahead. Matt walked faster. He had been walking for half an hour now. Yes, there was the supply road, lit bright as day by two close-spaced lines of street lamps. A broken white line ran down the curving middle.

Matt stepped out to the white line and began following it toward the Hospital.

Again his shoulders were unnaturally rigid, as with the fear of death from behind. But the danger was all before him. The organ banks were the most humiliating imaginable form of death. Yet Matt feared something worse.

Men had been released from the Hospital to tell of their trials. Not many, but they could talk. Matt could guess a little of what waited for him.

They would see him, they would fire mercy-bullets into him, they would carry him on a stretcher into the Hospital. When he woke, he would be taken to his first and last interview with the dread Castro. The Head’s burning eyes would look into his, and he would rumble, “Keller, eh? Yes, we had to take your uncle apart. Well, Keller? You walked up here like you thought you were a crew with an appointment. What did you think you were doing, Keller?”

And what was he going to say to that?

VThe Hospital

VAsleep, Jesus Pietro looked ten years older. His defenses—his straight back, tight muscles, and controlled features—were relaxed. His startling pale eyes were closed. His carefully combed white hair was messy, showing the bare scalp over which it had been carefully combed. He slept alone, separated from his wife by a door which was never locked. Sometimes he thrashed in his sleep, and sometimes, ridden by insomnia, he stared at the ceiling with his arms folded and muttered to himself, which was why Nadia slept next door. But tonight he lay quiet.

He could have looked thirty again, with help. Inside his aging skin he was in good physical shape. He had good wind, thanks partly to his borrowed lung; his muscles were hard beneath loose wrinkles and deposits of fat; and his digestion was good. His teeth, all transplants, were perfect. Give him new skin, new scalp, a new liver; replace a number of sphincter and other autonomic muscles…

But that would take a special order from the crew congress. It would be a kind of testimonial and he would accept it if it were offered, but he wasn’t going to fight for it. Transplants and the giving of transplants were the right of the crew and their most powerful reward. And Jesus Pietro was…not squeamish, but somehow reluctant to exchange parts of himself for parts of some stranger. It would be like losing part of his ego. Only the fear of death had made him accept a new lung years ago.

He slept quietly.

And things began to add up.

Polly Tournquist’s films: Someone had slipped through his net night before last. Keller’s getaway last night. A gnawing suspicion, only an intuition as yet, that ramrobot package #143 was even more important than anyone had guessed. Wrinkled, uncomfortable sheets. His blankets, which were a trifle too heavy. The fact that he had forgotten to brush his teeth. A mental picture of Keller diving head-down for the mist—it kept coming back to haunt him. Faint noises from outside, from the wall, noises already an hour old, noises which hadn’t awakened him but which were still unexplained. His twinges of lust for the girl in the coffin cure, and the guilt that followed. His temptation to use that ancient brainwashing technique for his own private purposes, to make the rebel girl love him for a time. Adultery! More guilt.

Temptations. Escaped prisoners. Hot, wrinkled bedclothes.

No use. He was awake.

He lay rigidly on his back, arms folded, glaring into the dark. No use fighting it. Last night had fouled up his internal clock; he’d eaten breakfast at twelve-thirty. Why did he keep thinking of Keller?

(Head down over the mist, with the fans pushing hard on the seat of his pants. Hell above and Heaven below, going up into the unknown; lost forever, destroyed utterly. The dream of the Hindu, realized in physical form. The peace of total dissolution.)

Jesus Pietro rolled over and turned on the phone.

A strange voice said, “Hospital—sir.”

“Who is this?”

“Master Sergeant Leonard V. Watts, sir. Night duty.”

“What’s happening at the Hospital, Master Sergeant?” It was not an unusual question. Jesus Pietro had asked it scores of times at early morning hours during the last ten years.

Watts’ voice was crisp. “Let me see. You left at seven, sir. At seven-thirty Major Jansen ordered the release of the deadheads we picked up last night, the ones without ear mikes. Major Jansen left at nine. At ten-thirty Sergeant Helios reported that all the deadheads had been returned to their homes. Mmmm…” Shuffling of papers in background. “All but two of the prisoners questioned today have been executed and stored away. The medical supplies section informs us that the banks will be unable to handle new material until further notice. Do you want a list of executions, sir?”

“No.”

“Coffin cure proceeding satisfactorily. No adverse medical reactions from suspect. Grounds reports a false alarm at twelve-oh-eight, caused by a rabbit blundering into the electric-eye barrier. No evidence of anything moving on the grounds.”

“Then how do they know it was a rabbit?”

“Shall I ask, sir?”

“No. They guessed, of course. Good night.” Jesus Pietro turned on his back and waited for sleep.

His thoughts drifted…

…He and Nadia hadn’t been getting together much lately. Shouldn’t he start taking testosterone shots? A transplant wouldn’t be necessary; many glands were not put in suspended animation, but were kept running, as it were, with a complex and exact food/blood supply and a system for extracting the hormones. He could put up with the inconvenience of shots.

…Though his father hadn’t.

A younger Jesus Pietro had spent much time wondering about his own conception. Why had the old man insisted that the doctors connect the vas deferens during his gonad transplant? An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew. Even sixty years ago, despite the centuries-old tradition of large families, the Plateau had been mostly uninhabited. Breeding must have seemed a duty to Haneth Castro, as it had to all his ancestors. Besides, how must the old man have felt, knowing that at last he could no longer sire children?

An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew.

His thoughts were wandering far, blurred with impending sleep. Jesus Pietro turned on his side, drowsily comfortable.

…Rabbit?

Why not? From the woods.

Jesus Pietro turned on his other side.

…What was a rabbit doing in the trapped woods?

What was anything bigger than a field mouse doing in the woods?

What was a rabbit doing on Alpha Plateau? What would it eat?

Jesus Pietro cursed and reached for the phone. To Master Sergeant Watts he said, “Take an order. Tomorrow I want the woods searched thoroughly and then deloused. If they find anything as big as a rat, I want to know about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That alarm tonight. What sector?”

“Let me see. Where the—ah. Sector six, sir.”

“Six? That’s nowhere near the woods.”

“No, sir.”

And that was that. “Good night, Master Sergeant,” said Jesus Pietro, and hung up. Tomorrow they’d search the woods. Implementation was becoming decidedly slack, Jesus Pietro decided. He’d have to do something about it.

The wall slanted outward, twelve feet of concrete crosslaced with barbed wire. The gate slanted too, at the same angle, perhaps twelve degrees from vertical. Solid cast-iron it was, built to slide into the concrete wall, which was twelve feet thick. The gate was closed. Lights from inside lit the upper edges of wall and gate, and tinged the sky above.

Matt stood under the wall, looking up. He couldn’t climb over. If they saw him, they’d open the gate for him…but they mustn’t see him.

They hadn’t yet. The train of logic had worked. If something that glows in the dark stops glowing when it’s been in the dark too long, hang it near a light. If a car goes up when it’s rightside up, it’ll go down fast when it’s upside down. If the cops see you when you’re hiding, but don’t when you’re not, they’ll ignore you completely when you walk up the middle of a lighted road.

But logic ended here.

Whatever had helped him wasn’t helping him now.

Matt turned his back on the wall. He stood beneath the overhanging iron gate, his eyes following the straight line of the road to where its lights ended. Most of the houses were dark now. The land was black all the way to the starry horizon. On his right the stars were blurred along that line, and Matt knew he was seeing the top of the void mist.

The impulse that came then was one he never managed to explain, even to himself.

He cleared his throat. “Something is helping me,” he said in an almost normal voice. “I know that. I need help to get through this gate. I have to get into the Hospital.”

Noises came from inside the wall, the faintest of sounds: regular footsteps, distant voices. They were the business of the Hospital and had nothing to do with Matt.

Outside the wall nothing changed.

“Get me in there,” he pleaded, to himself or to something outside himself. He didn’t know which. He knew nothing.

On the Plateau there was no religion.

But suddenly Matt knew that there was just one way to get inside. He stepped off the access road and began hunting. Presently he found a discarded chunk of concrete, dirty and uneven. He carried it back and began pounding it against the iron gate.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

A head appeared on the wall. “Stop that, you half-witted excuse for a colonist bastard!”

“Let me in.”

The head remained. “You are a colonist.”

“Right.”

“Don’t move! Don’t you move a muscle!” The man fumbled with something on the other side of the wall. Both hands appeared, one holding a gun, the other a telephone receiver. “Hello? Hello? Answer the phone, dammit!…Watts? Hobart. A fool of a colonist just came walking up to the gate and started pounding on it. Yes, a real colonist! What do I do with him?…All right, I’ll ask.”

The head looked down. “You want to walk or be carried?”

“I’ll walk,” said Matt.

“He says he’ll walk. Why should he get his choice?…Oh. I guess it’s easier at that. Sorry, Watts, I’m a little shook. This never happened to me before.”

The gateman hung up. His head and gun continued to peer down at Matt. After a moment the gate slid back into the wall.

“Come on through,” said the gateman. “Fold your hands behind your neck.”

Matt did. A gatehouse had been built against the wall on the inside. The gateman came down a short flight of steps. “Stay ahead of me,” he ordered. “Start walking. That’s the front entrance, where all the lights are. See? Walk toward that.”

It would have been hard to miss the front entrance. The great square bronze door topped a flight of broad, shallow steps flanked by Doric pillars. The steps and the pillars were either marble or some plastic substitute.

“Stop looking back at me,” snapped the gateman. His voice shook.

When they reached the door, the gateman produced a whistle and blew into it. There was no sound, but the door opened. Matt went through.

Once inside, the gateman seemed to relax. “What were you doing out there?” he asked.

Matt’s fear was returning. He was here. These corridors were the Hospital. He hadn’t thought past this moment. Deliberately so; for if he had, he would have ran. The walls around him were concrete, with a few metal grilles at floor level and four rows of fluorescent tubing in the ceiling. There were doors, all closed. An unfamiliar odor tinged the air, or a combination of odors.

I said, “What were—”

“Find out at the trial!”

“Don’t bite my head off. What trial? I found you on Alpha Plateau. That makes you guilty. They’ll put you in the vivarium till they need you, and then they’ll pour antifreeze in you and cart you away. You’ll never wake up.” It sounded as if the gateman was smacking his lips.

Matt’s head jerked around, with the terror showing in his eyes. The gateman jumped back at the sudden move. His gun steadied. It was a mercy-bullet pistol, with a tiny aperture in the nose and a CO_2 cartridge doubling as a handle. For a frozen moment Matt knew he was about to shoot.

They’d carry his unconscious body to the vivarium, whatever that was. He wouldn’t wake up there. They’d take him apart while he was sleeping. His last living moment dragged out and out…

The gun lowered. Matt shrank back from the gateman’s expression. The gateman had gone mad. His wild eyes looked about him in horror, at the walls, at the doors, at the mercy-bullet gun in his hand, at everything but Matt Abruptly he turned and ran.

Matt heard his wail drifting back. “Mist Demons! I’m supposed to be on the gate!”

At one-thirty another officer came to relieve Polly’s guard.

The newcomer’s uniform was not as well pressed, but he himself seemed in better condition. His muscles were gymnasium muscles, and he was casually alert at one-thirty in the morning. He waited until the long-headed man had gone, then moved to inspect the dials along the edge of Polly’s coffin.

He was more thorough than the other. He moved methodically down the line, in no hurry, jotting the settings in a notebook. Then he opened two big clamps at two corners of the coffin and swung the lid back, careful not to jar it.

The figure within did not move. She was wrapped like a mummy, a mummy with a snout, in soft swaddling cloth. The snout was a bulge over her mouth and nose, the mouth pads and the arrangements for breathing. There were similar protrusions over her ears. Her arms were crossed at her waist, straitjacket fashion.

The Implementation officer looked down at her for long moments. When he turned, he showed his first signs of furtiveness. But he was alone, and no footsteps sounded in the hall.

From the head end of the coffin protruded a padded tube with a cap even more heavily padded in sponge rubber. The officer opened the cap and spoke softly.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend. I’m going to put you to sleep.”

He peeled the soft bandage from Polly’s arm, drew his gun, and fired at the skin. Half a dozen red beads formed there, but the girl did not move. He could not have been sure that she heard him or that she felt the needles.

He closed the lid and the cap of the speaking tube.

He was perspiring freely as he watched the dials change. Presently he produced a screwdriver and went to work at the backs of the dials. When he finished, all eight dials read as they had read when he came in.

They lied. They said that Polly Tournquist was awake but motionless, conscious but deprived of any sensory stimulus. They said she was going mad by increments. Whereas Polly Tournquist was asleep. She would be asleep for the eight hours of Loren’s tour of duty.

Loren wiped his face and sat down. He did not enjoy taking such risks, but it was necessary. The girl must know something, else she wouldn’t be here. Now she could hold out for eight hours longer.

The man they wheeled into the organ bank operating room was unconscious. He was the same man Jesus Pietro’s squad had found resting on the dead-man switch, one of those he had questioned that afternoon. Jesus Pietro was through with him-he had been tried and condemned, but in law he was still alive. It was a legal point, nothing more.

The operating room was big and busy. Against one long wall were twenty small suspended-animation tanks mounted on wheels, for moving medical supplies to and from the room next door. Doctors and interns worked quietly and skillfully at a multitude of operating tables. There were cold baths: open tanks of fluid kept at a constant 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Beside the door was a twenty-gallon tank half full of a straw-colored fluid.

Two interns wheeled the convict into the operating room, and one immediately injected a full pint of the straw-colored fluid into his arm. They moved the table next to one of the cold baths. A woman moved over to help, carefully fastening a breathing mask over the man’s face. The interns tilted the table. The convict slid into the bath without a splash.

“That’s the last,” said one. “Oh, boy, I’m beat.”

The woman looked at him with concern, a concern that might have showed in her mouth behind the mask but that could not show in her eyes. Eyes have no expression. The intern’s voice had shown almost total exhaustion. “Take off, the both of you,” she said. “Sleep late tomorrow. We won’t need you.”

When they finished with this convict, the organ banks would be full. In law he was still alive. But his body temperature fell fast, and his heartbeat was slowing. Eventually it stopped. The patient’s temperature continued to fall. In two hours it was well below freezing, yet the straw-colored fluid in his veins kept any part of him from freezing.

In law he was still alive. Prisoners had been reprieved at this point and revived without medical ill effects, though they walked in terror for the rest of their days.

Now they lifted the convict onto an operating table. His skull was opened; an incision was made in his neck, cutting the spinal cord just below the brain stem. The brain was lifted out, carefully, for the membranes surrounding it must not be damaged. Though the doctors might deny it, there was a kind of reverence attached to the human brain, and to this moment. At this moment the convict became legally dead.

In a New York hospital a cardiectomy would have been performed first, and the prisoner would have been dead when it was over. On We Made It he would have been dead the moment his body temperature reached 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a legal point. You had to draw the line somewhere.

They flash-burned his brain and saved the ashes for urn burial. His skin came next, removed in one piece, still living. Machines did most of the work, but the machines of the Plateau were not advanced enough to work without human control. The doctors proceeded as if they were disassembling a delicate, very valuable, vastly complex jigsaw puzzle. Each unit went into a suspended-animation tank. Someone then took a tiny sample with a hypodermic, and tested it for a wide variety of rejection reactions. A transplant operation was never cut-and-dried. A patient’s body would reject foreign parts unless each rejection reaction was balanced by complex biochemicals. When the tests were over, each unit was labeled in full detail and wheeled next door, into the organ banks.

Matt was lost. He wandered through the halls looking for a door labeled Vivarium. Some of the doors he passed had labels; some did not. The Hospital was huge. Chances were, he could wander for days without finding the vivarium the gateman had mentioned.

Solitary individuals passed him in the corridors, in police uniforms or in white gowns and white masks pulled down around their necks. If he saw someone coming, Matt shrank against the wall and remained perfectly still until the intruder passed. Nobody noticed him. His strange invisibility protected him well.

But he wasn’t getting anywhere.

A map, that’s what he needed.

Some of these doors must lead to offices. Some or all offices must have maps in them, perhaps built into wall or desk. After all, the place was so complicated. Matt nodded to himself. Here was a door, now, with a strange symbol and some lettering: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Maybe…

He opened the door. And froze halfway through it, shocked to the core.

Glass tanks filled the room like floor-to-ceiling aquarium tanks, each subdivided into compartments. They were arranged like a labyrinth, or like the bookcases in a public library. In the first moments Matt couldn’t recognize anything he saw in those tanks, but in their asymmetrical shapes and in their infinite dark shades of red, their nature was unmistakable.

He stepped all the way inside. He had abandoned control of his legs, and they moved of themselves. These flattish dark-red objects, those translucent membranes, the soft-looking blobs of alien shapes, the great transparent cylindrical tanks filled with bright-red fluid…Yes, these had been human beings. And there were epitaphs:

Type AB, RH+. Glucose content…Rd Corp count…

Thyroid gland, male. Rejection classes C, 2, pn, 31. Overactive for body weight less than…

Left humerus, live. Marrow type 0, Rh-, N, 02. Length…IMPORTANT: Test for fit in sockets before using.

Matt closed his eyes and rested his head against one of the tanks. The glass surface was cold. It felt good against his perspiring forehead. He had always had too much empathy. Now there was a grief in him, and he needed time to mourn these strangers. Mist Demons grant they were strangers.

Pancreas. Rejection classes F, 4, pr, 21. DIABIETIC TENDENCIES: Use for pancreatic fluid secretion only. DO NOT TRANSPLANT.

A door opened.

Matt slid behind the tank and watched from around the corner. The woman wore gown and mask, and she pushed something on wheels. Matt watched her transfer things from the cart into various of the larger tanks.

Somebody had just died.

And the woman in the mask was a monster. If she’d taken off her mask to reveal foot-long poison-dripping fangs, Matt couldn’t have feared her more.

Voices came through the open door.

“We can’t use any more muscle tissue.” A woman’s voice, high and querulous, with a crew lilt. The lilt didn’t quite ring true, though Matt couldn’t have said where it failed.

A sarcastic male voice answered. “What shall we do, throw it away?”

“Why not?”

Seconds of silence. The woman with the cart finished her work and moved toward the door. Then: “I’ve never liked the idea. A man died to give us healthy, living tissue, and you want to throw it away like—” The closing door cut him off.

Like the remnants of a ghoul’s feast, Matt finished for him.

He was turning toward the hall door when his eye caught something else. Four of the tanks were different from the others. They sat near the hall door, on flooring whose scars and shaded color showed where suspended-animation tanks had stood. Unlike the suspended-animation tanks, these did not have heavy machinery-filled bases. Instead, machinery rested in the tanks themselves, behind the transparent walls. It might have been aerating machinery. The nearest tank contained six small human hearts.

Unmistakably they were hearts. They beat. But they were tiny, no bigger than a child’s fist. Matt touched the surface of the tank, and it was blood warm. The tank next to it held five-lobed objects which had to be livers; but they were small, small.

That did it. In what seemed one leap, Matt was out in the hall. He leaned against the wall, gasping, his shoulders heaving, his eyes unable to see anything but those clusters of small hearts and livers.

Someone rounded the corner and came to an abrupt stop.

Matt turned and saw him: a big, soft man in an Implementation-police uniform. Matt tried his voice. It came out blurred but comprehensible: “Where’s the vivarium?”

The man stared, then pointed. “Take a right and you’ll find a flight of stairs. Up one flight, take a right, then a left, and watch for the sign. It’s a big door with an alarm light; you can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.” Matt turned toward the stairs. His stomach hurt, and there was a shivering in his hands. He wished he could drop where he was, but he had to keep going.

Something stung his arm.

Matt turned and raised his arm in the same instant. Already the sting was gone; his arm was as numb as a haunch of meat. Half a dozen tiny red drops bedewed his wrist.

The big, soft man regarded Matt with a puzzled frown. His gun was in his hand.

The galaxy spun madly, receding.

Corporal Halley Fox watched the colonist fall, then bolstered his gun. What was the world coming to? First the ridiculous secrecy about the ramrobot. Then, two hundred prisoners swept up in one night, and the whole Hospital going crazy trying to cope. And now! A colonist wandering the Hospital corridors, actually asking for the vivarium!

Well, he’d get it. Halley Fox lifted the man and slung him over his shoulder, grunting with the effort. Only his face was soft. Report it and forget it. He shifted his burden and staggered toward the stairs.

VIThe Vivarium

VIAt dawn the graded peak of Mount Lookitthat swam beneath a sea of fog. For those few who were already abroad, the sky merely turned from black to gray. This was not the poison mist below the void edge but a continuous cloud of water vapor, thick enough to let a blind man win a shooting match. Crew and colonists, one and all, as they stepped outside their homes, their homes vanished behind them. They walked and worked in a universe ten yards in diameter.

At seven o’clock Implementation police moved into the trapped forest, a squad at each end. Yellow fog lights swept the tongue of forest from the nearest sections of wall. The light barely reached the trees. Since the men who had been on watch that night had gone home, the searchers had no idea what animal they were searching for. Some thought it must be colonists.

At nine they met in the middle, shrugged it each other and left. Nothing human or animal lived in the trapped woods, nothing bigger than a big insect. Four aircars nevertheless rose into the fog and sprayed the wood from end to end.

At nine-thirty…

Jesus Pietro cut the grapefruit in half and held one half upside down. The grapefruit meat dropped in sections into his bowl. He asked, “Did they ever find that rabbit?”

Major Jansen stopped with his first sip of coffee halfway to his lips. “No, sir, but they did find a prisoner.”

“In the woods?”

“No, sir. He was pounding on the gate with a rock. The gate man took him inside the Hospital, but from there it becomes a little unclear—”

“Jansen, it’s already unclear. What was this man doing pounding on the gate?” A horrible thought struck him. “Was he a crew?”

“No, sir. He was Matthew Keller. Positive identification.”

Grapefruit juice spilled on the breakfast rack. “Keller?”

“The same.”

“Then who was in the car?”

“I doubt we’ll ever know, sir. Shall I ask for volunteers to examine the body?”

Jesus Pietro laughed long and loud. Jansen was pure colonist, though he and his ancestors had been in service so long that their accents and manners were almost pure crew. It would never do for him to joke with his superiors in public. But in private he could be amusing—and he had the sense to know the difference.

“I’ve been trying to think of a way to shake up Implementation,” said Jesus Pietro. “That might do it. Well. Keller came up to the gate and began pounding on it with a rock?”

“Yes, sir. The gateman took him in charge after calling Watts. Watts waited half an hour before he called the gatehouse again. The gateman couldn’t remember what happened after he and the prisoner reached the Hospital. He was back on duty, and he couldn’t explain that either. He should have reported to Watts, of course. Watts put him under arrest.”

“Watts shouldn’t have waited half an hour. Where was Keller all this time?”

“A Corporal Fox found him outside the door to the organ banks, shot him, and carted him off to the vivarium.”

“Then he and the gateman are both waiting for us. Good. I’ll never sleep again until I get this straightened out.” Jesus Pietro finished his breakfast in a remarkable hurry.

Then it occurred to him that the mystery was deeper than that. How had Keller reached Alpha Plateau at all? The guards wouldn’t have let him past the bridge.

By car? But the only car involved…

Hobart was scared. He was as frightened as any suspect Jesus Pietro had seen, and he took no interest in hiding it. “I don’t know! I took him through the door, the big door. I made him walk ahead so he couldn’t jump me—”

“And did he?”

“I can’t remember anything like that.”

“A bump on the head might have given you amnesia. Sit still.” Jesus Pietro walked around the chair to examine Hobart’s scalp. His impersonal gentleness was frightening in itself. “No bumps, no bruises. Does your head hurt?”

“I feel fine.”

“Now, you walked in the door. Were you talking to him?”

The man bobbed his graying head. “Uh huh. I wanted to know what he was doing banging on the gate. He wouldn’t say.”

“And then?”

“All of a sudden I—” Hobart stopped, swallowed convulsively.

Jesus Pietro put an edge in his voice. “Go on.”

Hobart started to cry.

“Stop that. You started to say something. What was it?”

“All of a sudden I—gulp—remembered I was s’posed t’be at the gate—”

“But what about Keller?”

“Who?”

“What about your prisoner?”

“I can’t remember!”

“Oh, get out of here.” Jesus Pietro thumbed a button. “Take him back to the vivarium. Get me Keller.”

Up a flight of stairs, take a right then a left…

VIVARIUM. Behind the big door were rows of contour couches, skimpily padded. All but two couches had occupants. There were ninety-eight prisoners here, of all ages from fifteen to fifty-eight, and all were asleep. Each was wearing, a headset. They slept quietly, more quietly than the usual sleeper, breathing shallowly, their peaceful expressions untroubled by bad dreams. It was a strangely restful place. They slept in rows of ten, some snoring gently, the rest silent.

Even the guard looked sleepy. He sat in a more conventional chair to one side of the door, with his double chin drooping on his chest, his arms folded in his lap.

More than four centuries ago, at some time near the middle of the nineteen hundreds, a group of Russian scientists came up with a gadget that might have made sleep obsolete. In some places it did. By the twenty-fourth century it was a rare corner of the known universe that did not know of the sleepmaker.

Take three electrodes, light electrodes. Now pick a guinea pig, human, and get him to lie down with his eyes closed. Put two electrodes on his eyelids, and tape the third to the nape of his neck. Run a gentle, rhythmic electric current from eyelids to nape, through the brain. Your guinea pig will drop off immediately. Turn the current off in a couple of hours, and he will have had the equivalent of eight hours’ sleep.

You’d rather not turn off the current? Fine. It won’t hurt him. He’ll just go on sleeping. He’ll sleep through a hurricane. You’ll have to wake him occasionally to eat, drink, evacuate, exercise. If you don’t plan to keep him long, you can skip the exercise.

Suspects weren’t kept long in the vivarium.

Heavy footsteps sounded outside the door. The vivarium guard jerked alert. When the door opened, he was at attention.

“Sit down there,” said one of Hobart’s escorts. Hobart sat. Tears had streaked his sunken cheeks. He donned his own headset, dropped his head back, and was asleep. Peace spread across his face. The bigger guard asked, “Which one is Keller?”

The vivarium guard consulted a chart. “Ninety-eight.”

“Okay.” Instead of taking off Keller’s headset, the man moved to a panel of one hundred buttons. He pushed number ninety-eight. As Keller began to stir, they both moved in to attach handcuffs. Then they lifted the headset.

Matt Keller’s eyes opened.

His new escorts lifted him to his feet with a practiced motion. “On our way,” one said cheerfully. Bewildered, Matt followed the pull on his arms. In a moment they were in the hall. Matt snatched one look behind him before the door closed.

“Wait a minute,” he protested, predictably jerking back against the handcuffs.

“Man wants to ask you a few questions. Look, I’d rather carry you than do this. You want to walk?”

The threat usually quieted them down—as it did now. Matt stopped pulling. He’d expected to wake up dead; these moments of consciousness were a free bonus. Someone must have gotten curious.

“Who wants to see me?”

“A gentleman named Castro,” the bigger guard tossed off. The dialogue was following its usual pattern. If Keller was an average suspect, the Head’s dread name would paralyze his brain. If he kept his wits, he’d still choose to use this time in preparation for his interview, rather than risk a sonic now. Both guards had been doing this for so long that they’d come to see prisoners as faceless, interchangeable.

Castro. The name echoed between Matt’s ears.

What did you think you were doing, Keller? You came in here like you had an engraved invitation. Thought you had a secret weapon, did you, Keller? What did you think you were doing, Keller? WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU—

One instant the suspect was walking between them, lost in his own fears. The next, he had jerked back like a fish hooked on two lines. The guards instantly pulled apart to string him between them, then regarded him in sheer disgust. One said, “Stupid!” The other pulled out his gun.

They stood there, one with a sonic loose in his hand, looking about them in apparent bewilderment. Matt jerked again, and the smaller guard looked in shocked surprise at his own wrist. He fumbled in his belt, got out a key, and unlocked the handcuff.

Matt threw all his weight on the other steel chain. The bigger guard yelled in anger and pulled back. Matt flew into him, inadvertently butting him in the stomach. The guard hit him across the jaw with a backhand swing of his arm. Momentarily unable to move, Matt watched the guard take a key from his pocket and unlock the remaining handcuff from his own wrist. The guard’s eyes were strange.

Matt backed away with two sets of handcuffs dangling from his arms. The guards looked after him, not at him but in his general direction. Something was very wrong with their eyes. Fruitlessly, Matt tried to remember where he’d seen that look before. The gateman last night?

The guards turned and sauntered away.

Matt shook his head, more baffled than relieved, and turned back the way he had come. There was the vivarium door. He’d had only one backward glimpse, but he was sure he’d seen Harry Kane in there.

The door was locked.

Mist Demons, here we go again. Matt raised his hand, changed his mind, changed it again, and slapped the palm three times against the door. It opened at once. A round, expressionless face looked through and suddenly acquired an expression. The door started to close. Matt pulled it open and went in.

The round guard with the round face genuinely didn’t know what to do. At least he hadn’t forgotten that Matt was here. Matt was grateful. He swung joyfully at the guard’s double chin. When the guard didn’t fold, Matt hit him again. The man finally reached for his gun, and Matt took a firm grip on the appropriate wrist, holding the gun in its holster, and swung once more. The guard slid to the floor.

Matt took the guard’s sonic and put it in his pants pocket. His hand hurt. He rubbed it against his cheek, which also hurt, and ran his eyes down the row of sleepers. There was Laney! Laney, her face pale, with one thin scratch from temple to chin, her auburn hair concealing the three-pronged headset, her deep breasts hardly moving as she slept. And there was Hood, looking like a sleeping child. Something began to unwind inside Matt Keller, a warmth uncoiling to spread through his limbs. For hours he had been all alone with death. There was the tall man who’d spelled him for bartender that night. Night before last! There was Harry Kane, a cube of a man, strong even in sleep.

Polly wasn’t there.

He looked again, carefully, and she still wasn’t there.

Where was she? Instantly the aquarium tanks of the organ bank flashed into his mind’s eye. One tank had held skins, whole human skins with barely room between them for the clear conducting nutrient fluid. The scalps had some hair, short and long, blond and black and red, hair that waved in a cold fluid breeze. Rejection classes C, 2, nr, 34. He couldn’t remember seeing the space-blackness of Polly’s hair. It might or might not have been waving in the aquarium tank. He hadn’t been looking for it.

Convulsively he made himself look about him. That bank of buttons? He pushed one. It popped out at the touch of a finger. Nothing else happened.

Oh, well, what the hell…He started pushing them all, letting his forefinger run down a row of ten, down the next row, and the next. He had released sixty when he heard motion.

The sleepers were waking.

He released the rest of the buttons. The murmur of awakening grew louder: yawning, confused voices, clatterings, gasps of dismayed shock when prisoners suddenly realized where they were. A clear voice calling, “Matt? Matt!”

“Here, Laney!”

She wove her way toward him through people climbing groggily out of their contour couches. Then she was in his arms, and they clung to each other as if a tornado were trying to pluck them apart and whirl them away. Matt felt suddenly weak, as if he could afford weakness now. “So you didn’t make it,” he said.

“Matt, where are we? I tried to get to the void edge—”

Somebody bellowed, “We are in the Hospital vivarium!” The voice cut like an ax through the rising pandemonium. Harry Kane, Leader, assumed his proper role.

“That’s right,” Matt said gently.

Her eyes were two inches from his, dead level. “Oh. Then you didn’t make it either.”

“Yes I did. I had to get here on my own.”

“What—how?”

“Good question. I don’t know exactly—”

Laney began to chuckle.

Shouting from the back of the room. Somebody had noticed an Implementation uniform on one of the newly awakened. A scream of pure terror changed to a yell of agony and died abruptly. Matt saw jerking heads, heard sounds he tried to ignore. Laney wasn’t laughing anymore. The disturbance subsided.

Harry Kane had mounted a chair, He cupped his hands and bellowed, “Shut up, all of you! Everyone who knows the map of the Hospital, get over here! Gather round me!” There was a shifting in the mass. Laney and Matt still clung to each other, but not desperately now. Their heads turned to watch Harry, acknowledging his leadership. “Take a look, the rest of you!” Harry shouted. “These are the people who can lead you out of here. In a minute we’re going to have to make our break. Keep your eyes on…” He named eight names. Hood’s was one. “Some of us are going to get shot. As long as one of these eight is still moving, follow him! Or her. If all eight are down, and I am too”—he paused for emphasis—“scatter! Make as much trouble as you can! Sometimes the only sensible thing to do is panic!

“Now, who got us out of this? Who woke us up? Anyone?”

“Me,” said Matt.

A last buzz of noise died. Suddenly everyone was looking at him. Harry said, “How?”

“I’m not sure how I got in here. I’d like to talk to Hood about it.”

“Okay, stick with Jay. Keller, isn’t it? We’re grateful, Keller. What do those buttons do? I saw you fooling with them.”

“They turn off whatever it is that makes you go to sleep.”

“Is anyone still in his couch? If so, get out of it now. Now, somebody push those buttons back in so it’ll look like there was a power failure. Was that it, Keller? Did you just accidentally wake up?”

“No.”

Harry Kane looked puzzled, but when Matt didn’t elaborate, he shrugged. “Watson, Chek, start pushing those buttons in. Jay, make sure you stick with Keller. The rest of you, are you ready to move?”

There was a shout of assent. As it died, a lone voice asked, “Where to?”

“Good point. If you get free, make for the coral houses around the south void and Alpha-Beta cliffs. Anything else?”

Nobody spoke, including Matt. Why ask questions to which nobody knew the answers? Matt was unutterably relieved to let someone else make the decisions for a while. They might be just as wrong, but ninety-eight rebels could be a mighty force, even moving in the wrong direction. And Harry Kane was a born leader.

Laney moved out of his arms but kept a grip on one hand. Matt became conscious of the handcuffs dangling from his wrists. They might hamper him. Jay Hood moved up beside him, looking rumpled. He shook hands, grinning, but the grin didn’t match the fear in his eyes, and he seemed reluctant to let go. Was there one person in this room who wasn’t terrified? If there was, it wasn’t Matt. He pulled the sonic loose from his pants pocket.

“All out,” said Harry Kane, and butted the door open with a wide shoulder. They streamed into the hall.

“I’ll take only a minute of your time, Watts.” Jesus Pietro relaxed indolently in his chair. He loved mysteries and proposed to enjoy this one. “I want you to describe in detail what happened last night, starting with the call from Hobart.”

“But there aren’t any details, sir.” Master Sergeant Watts was tired of repeating himself. His voice was turning querulous. “Five minutes after your call, Hobart called and said he had a prisoner. I told him to bring him to my office. He never came. Finally I called the gate. He was there, all right, without his prisoner, and he couldn’t explain what had happened. I had to put him under arrest.”

“His behavior has been puzzling in other ways. That is why I ask, Why didn’t you call the gate earlier?”

“Sir?”

“Your behavior is as puzzling as Hobart’s, Watts. Why did you assume it would take Hobart half an hour to reach your office?”

“Oh.” Watts fidgeted. “Well, Hobart said this bird came right up to the gate and started banging on it with a rock. When Hobart didn’t show right away, I thought he must have stopped off to question the prisoner, find out why he did it. After all,” he explained hastily, “if he brought the bird straight to me, he’d likely never find out what he was doing banging on the gate.”

“Very logical. Did it occur to you at any point that the ‘bird’ might have overpowered Hobart?”

“But Hobart had a sonic!”

“Watts, have you ever been on a raid?”

“No, sir. How could I?”

“A man came back from the raid of night-before-last with the bones of his nose spread all over his face. He, too, had a sonic.”

“Yessir, but that was a raid, sir.”

Jesus Pietro sighed. “Thank you, Master Sergeant. Will you step outside, please? Your bird should be arriving any minute.”

Watts left, his relief showing.

He’d made a good point, thought Jesus Pietro, though not the one he’d intended. Probably all the Hospital guards had the same idea: that a gun was ipso facto invincible. Why not? The Hospital guards had never been on a raid in the colonist regions. Few had ever seen a colonist who wasn’t unconscious. Occasionally Jesus Pietro staged mock raids with guards playing the part of colonists. They didn’t mind, particularly; mercy-weapons were not unpleasant. But the men with the guns always won. All the guards’ experience told them that the gun was king, that a man who had a gun need fear nothing but a gun.

What to do? Interchange guards and raiders long enough to give the guards some experience? No, the elite raiders would never stand for that.

Why was he worrying about Implementation?

Had the Hospital ever been attacked? Never, on Alpha Plateau. A colonist force had no way to get there.

But Keller had.

He used the phone. “Jansen, find out who was on guard at the Alpha-Beta Bridge last night. Wake them up and send them here.”

“It will be at least fifteen minutes, sir.”

“Fine.”

How had Keller gotten past them? There had been one aircar on Gamma Plateau, but it had been destroyed. With the pilot still in it? Had Keller had a chauffeur? Or…would a colonist know how to use the autopilot?

Where the Mist Demons was Keller!

Jesus Pietro began to pace the room. He had no cause for worry, yet he worried. Instinct? He didn’t believe he had instincts. The phone spoke in his secretary’s voice. “Sir, did you order two guards?”

“Bridge guards?”

“No, sir. Intrahospital guards.”

“No.”

“Thank you.” Click.

Something had set off the grounds alarms last night. Not a rabbit. Keller might have tried the wall first. If the grounds guards had let a prisoner escape, then faked a report—he’d have their hides!

“Sir, these guards insist you sent for them.”

“Well, I damn well didn’t. Tell them—just a minute. Send them in.”

They came, two burly men whose submissive countenances unsuccessfully hid their ire at being made to wait.

“When did I send for you?” asked Jesus Pietro.

The big one said, “Twenty minutes ago,” daring Jesus Pietro to call him a liar.

“Were you supposed to pick up a prisoner first?”

“No, sir. We took Hobart to the vivarium, put him to beddybye and came straight back.”

“You don’t remember being—”

The smaller guard went white. “D—Dave! We were supposed to p—pick up someone. Keeler. Something Keeler.”

Jesus Pietro regarded them for a full twenty seconds. His face was curiously immobile. Then he opened the intercom. “Major Jansen. Sound ‘Prisoners Loose.’”

“Wait a minute,” said Matt.

The tail end of the colonist swarm was leaving them behind. Hood brought himself up short. “What are you doing?”

Matt dodged back into the vivarium. One man lay on his face with his headset on. Probably he’d thought he was safe once he was out of the couch. Matt snatched the headset off and slapped him twice, hard; and when his eyelids fluttered, Matt pulled him to his feet and pushed him at the door.

Watson and Chek finished pushing buttons and left, running, shoving around Hood.

“Come on!” Hood yelled from the doorway. Panic was in his voice. But Matt stood rooted by the thing on the floor.

The guard. They’d tom him to pieces!

Matt was back in the organ banks, frozen rigid by horror.

“Keller!”

Matt stooped, picked up something soft and wet. His expression was very strange. He stepped to the door, hesitated a moment, then drew two sweeping arcs and three small closed curves on its gleaming metal surface. He hurled the warm thing backhand, turned, and ran. The two men and Laney charged down the hall, trying to catch the swarm.

The swarm poured down the stairs like a waterfall: a close-packed mass, running and stumbling against each other and brushing against walls and banisters and generally making a hell of a lot of noise. Harry Kane led. A cold certainty was in his heart, the knowledge that he would be first to fall when they met the first armed guard. But by then the swarm should have unstoppable momentum.

The first armed guard was several yards beyond the first corner. He turned and stared as if his eyes beheld a miracle. He hadn’t moved when the mob reached him. Someone actually had the sense to take his gun. A tall blond man got it and immediately forced his way to the front, waving it and yelling for room. The swarm flowed around and over the limp Implementation policeman.

This hallway was long, lined with doors on both sides. Every door seemed to be swinging open at once. The man with the gun closed his fist on the trigger and waved it slowly up and down the hall. Heads peered out the doors, paused, and were followed by falling bodies. The colonist swarm slowed to pick their way around the crewish and half-crewish fallen. Nonetheless, the fallen were all badly or mortally injured when the swarm passed. Implementation used mercy-weapons because they needed their prisoners intact. The swarm had no such motive for mercy.

The swarm was stretching now, dividing the fast from the slow, as Kane reached the end of the hall. He rounded the turn in a clump of six.

Two police were parked indolently against opposite walls, steaming cups in their hands, their heads turned to see where the noise was coming from. For a magic moment they stayed that way…and then their cups flew wide, trailing spiral nebulae of brown fluid, and their guns came up like flowing light. Harry Kane fell with a buzzing in his ears. But his last glimpse of the corridor showed him that the police were falling too.

He lay like a broken doll, with his head swimming and his eyes blurring and his body, as numb as a frozen plucked chicken. Feet pounded past and over him. Through the blanketing numbness he dimly sensed himself being kicked.

Abruptly four hands gripped his wrists and ankles, and he was off again, swaying and jouncing between his rescuers. Harry Kane was pleased. His opinion of mobs was low. This mob was behaving better than he had expected. Through the buzzing in his ears he heard a siren.

At the bottom of the stairs they reached the tail of the swarm—Laney in the lead, Matt and Jay Hood following. Matt panted, “Stay! Got…gun.”

Laney saw the point and slowed. Matt could guard the rear. If they tried to reach the front of the swarm, they’d be stuck in the middle, and the sonic would be useless.

But nobody came at them from the rear. There were noises ahead, and they passed sprawled bodies: one policeman, then a string of men and women in lab smocks. Matt found his stomach trying to turn inside out. The rebels’ viciousness was appalling. So was Hood’s grin: a tight killer’s grin, making a lie of his scholar’s face.

Ahead, more commotion. Two men stopped to lift a heavy sprawled figure and continued running. Harry Kane was out of the action. “Hope somebody’s leading them!” Hood shouted.

A siren blared in the corridors. It was loud enough-to wake the Mist Demons, to send them screaming into the sky for a little peace. It jarred the concrete; it shook the very bones of a man. There was a rattling clang, barely heard above the siren. An iron door bad dropped into the swarm, cutting it in two. One man was emphatically dead beneath it. The tail of the swarm, including perhaps a dozen men and women, washed against the steel door and rebounded.

Trapped. The other end of the corridor was also blocked. But doors lined both sides. One man took off, running down the hallway toward the far end, swiveling his head back and forth to look briefly through the open doors, ignoring the closed ones. “Here!” he shouted, waving an arm. Wordlessly the others followed.

It was a lounge, a relaxation room, furnished with four wide couches, scattered chairs, two card tables, and a huge coffee dispenser. And a picture window. As Matt reached the door, the window already gaped wide, showing sharp glass teeth. The man who’d found the room was using a chair to clean the glass away.

An almost soundless hum—and Matt felt the numbness of a sonic beamer. From the doorway! He slammed the door and it stopped.

Automatics?

“Benny!” Laney shouted, picking up one end of a couch. The man at the window dropped his chair and ran to take the other end. He’d been one of Laney’s escorts the night of the party. Together they dropped the couch across the windowsill, over the broken glass. Colonists began to climb over it.

Hood had found a closet and opened it. It was like opening Pandora’s box. Matt saw half-a-dozen men in white smocks swarm over Hood. In seconds they would have torn him to ribbons. Matt used his sonic. They all went down in a lump, including Hood. Matt pulled him out, draped him over a shoulder, and followed the others over the couch. Hood was heavier than he looked.

Matt had to drop him on the grass and follow him down. Far across the lawn was the Hospital wall, leaning outward, the top laced with wires that leaned inward. Very thin wire, just barely visible through the thin fog. Matt picked Hood up, glanced around, saw the others running alongside the building with the tall man named Benny in the lead. He staggered after them.

They reached a corner—the Hospital seemed to have a million corners—stopped sharply, and backed up, milling. Guards coming? Matt put Hood down, hefted his sonic—

A gun and hand emerged questing from the broken picture window. Matt fired and the man slumped. But he knew there must be others in there. Matt ducked beneath the window, rose suddenly, and fired in. Half-a-dozen police fired back. Matt’s right side and arm went numb; he dropped the gun, then himself dropped below the sill. In a moment they’d be peering over. The man named Benny was running toward him. Matt threw the first policeman’s sonic to him and picked up his own with his left hand.

The men inside hadn’t expected Benny. They were trying to fire over the sill at Matt, and to do that they had to lean out. In half a minute it was over.

Benny said, “There’s a carport just beyond that corner. Guarded.”

“Do they know we’re here?”

“I don’t think so. The Mist Demons have given us a mist.” Benny smiled at his own pun.

“Good. We can use these guns. You’ll have to carry Jay; my arm’s out.”

“Jay’s the only one who can fly.”

“I can,” said Matt.

“Major Jansen. Sound ‘Prisoners Loose.’”

The sound of the siren came instantly, even before Jesus Pietro could change his mind. For a moment he was sure, preternaturally sure, that he’d made a fool of himself. This could cost him much face…

But no. Keller must be freeing the prisoners. Keller wasn’t here; therefore Keller was free. His first move would be to free the other Sons of Earth. If the vivarium guard had stopped him, he would then have called here; he hadn’t called; hence Keller had succeeded.

But if Keller were harmlessly asleep in the vivarium? Nonsense. Why had the guards forgotten about him? They were behaving too much like Hobart had behaved last night. A miracle had been worked, a miracle of the kind Jesus Pietro was beginning to associate with Keller. There must be some purpose to it.

It must have been used to free Keller.

And the halls must be full of angry rebels.

That was very bad. Implementation had motives for using mercy-weapons. Rebels had none—neither mercy-weapons nor mercy-motives. They’d kill whoever got in their way.

The steel doors would be in place now, vibrating in sleep-producing frequencies. By now the danger would be over—almost certainly. Unless the rebels had first gotten out of the halls.

But what damage had they done already?

“Come with me,” Jesus Pietro told the two guards. He marched toward the door. “Keep your guns drawn,” he added over his shoulder.

The guards snapped out of their stupor and ran to catch up. They had not the faintest idea what was going on, but Jesus Pietro was sure they’d recognize a colonist in time to down him. They’d be adequate protection.

One dozen colonists, two stunned. Seven captured guns.

Matt stayed hidden behind the corner, reluctantly obeying Benny’s orders. With him were the two women: Laney and a deep-voiced middle-aged tigress named Lydia Hancock, and the two fallen: Jay Hood and Harry Kane.

Matt would have fought the carport guards, but he couldn’t fight the logic. Because he was the only one who could fly a car, he had to stay behind while the others charged out onto the field with their sonics going.

The carport was a big, flat expanse of lawn, a variant of mutant grass, which could take an infinite amount of trampling. Lines of near-white crossed the green, outlining landing targets. The white too was grass. Cars rested near the centers of two of the targets. Men moved about the cars, servicing them and removing metal canisters from the underbellies. The mist hung four feet above the grass under diffuse sunlight, curling about the rebels as they ran.

They were halfway to the cars when someone on the Hospital wall swung a spotlight-sized sonic toward them. The rebels dropped immediately, like hay before a scythe. So did the mechanics around the cars. Unconscious men lay scattered across the carport field with the mist curling around them.

Matt pulled his head back as the big sonic-swung toward the corner. Even so, he felt the numbness, faint and far-off, matching the deadwood feeling in his right arm. “Shall we wait till they turn it off, then run for it?”

“I think they’ve got us,” said Laney.

“Stop that!” Mrs. Hancock rapped savagely. Matt had first met her fifteen minutes ago and had never seen her without her present enraged expression. She was a fierce one, bulky and homely, a natural for any cause. “They haven’t got us until they take us!”

“Something keeps people from seeing me sometimes,” said Matt. “If you want to risk it, and if you all stay close to me, it may protect us all.”

“Crack’ unner strain.” Hood’s voice was slurred, barely comprehensible. Only his eyes moved to watch Matt. Harry, too, was awake, alert, and immobile.

“It’s true, Hood. I don’t know why, but it’s true. I think it must be a psi power.”

“Wreebody who blieves in psi things hees psygic.”

“The sonic’s off us,” said Laney.

“My arm’s dead. Laney, you and Mrs.—”

“Call me Lydia.”

“You and Lydia put Hood over my left shoulder, the pick up Harry. Stay right by me. We’ll be walking, remember. Don’t try to hide. If we get shot, I’ll apologize when I get the chance.”

“’Pologise now.”

“Okay, Hood. I’m sorry I got us all killed.”

“’Sawrigh’.”

“Let’s go.”

VIIThe Bleeding Heart

VIIWhen they see this…Jesus Pietro shuddered. He watched his own guards shrink back, unwilling to enter, unable to look away. They’ll think a little less of their guns when they see this!

The vivarium guard had certainly had a gun. Probably he hadn’t thought to draw it in time.

He’d get no second chance.

He was like something spilled from an organ-bank conveyor tank.

Hobart, dead near the back of the vivarium, was no prettier. Jesus Pietro felt a stab of guilt. He hadn’t meant Hobart for such a fate.

Aside from the bodies, the vivarium was empty. Naturally.

Jesus Pietro looked once more around him—and his eyes found the door and the dark scrawl on its bright steel surface.

It was a symbol of some kind; he was sure of that. But of what? The symbol of the Sons of Earth was a circle containing a streamlined outline of the American super-continent. This was nothing like it, nor was it like anything he knew of. But it had unmistakably been drawn in human blood.

Two wide arcs, bilaterally symmetrical. Three small closed curves underneath, like circles with tails. Tadpoles? Some microorganism?

Jesus Pietro rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Later he’d ask the prisoners. Best forget it for now.

“Assume they took the fastest route to the main entrance,” he said aloud. If the guards were surprised to hear him thus lecture himself, they reacted as Major Jansen had long since learned to react. They said nothing “Come,” said Jesus Pietro.

Left, right, down the stairs…a dead policeman sprawled in the hall, his Implementation uniform as torn and ruined as himself. Jesus Pietro passed him without breaking his juggernaut stride. He reached steel emergency doors and used his ultrasonic whistle. As the doors went up, his guards tensed.

Two pitiful rows of maimed and dead, and another steel door at the other end. The dead were like an explosion in the organ banks. That was definitely the way to think of them. It would not do to consider that these having been human beings under Jesus Pietro’s protection. Most had not even been police, but civilians: doctors and electricians.

What a valuable lesson the Hospital guards would learn from this! Jesus Pietro felt sick. It showed only in his unusual pallor; but that he could not control. He marched down the corridor with his expression held remotely aloof. The steel doors went up as he approached.

Colonists were piled against the steel doors at both ends, as if trying to escape the trap even while unconscious. One of the policemen spoke into a handphone, asking for stretchers.

Jesus Pietro stood over the piled rebels. “I never really hated them before,” he said.

“K’llr, use gyrsco’.”

“What?” Matt couldn’t spare the attention. He was trying to fly with one hand, the wrong hand; his car bucked and weaved like a frightened stallion.

“Gy—rro—skko’!” Hood enunciated painfully.

“I see it. What do I do with it?”

“Turr’ on.”

Matt flipped the Gyroscope switch to On. Something hummed below him. The car trembled, then righted itself, going straight up.

“Shlatsh.”

Matt used the knob. The car began to accelerate.

“Hel’ me see ow’, Laney.” Hood was propped upright beside the left front window, with Harry Kane in the middle and Matt on the right. Laney reached from the back seat to hold Hood’s head out the window.

“Turr’ ri’.”

“How?”

“Shtee—ring nog.”

“Knob? Like this thing?”

“Ye—ss i’iot.”

“For the record,” Matt said icily, “I flew a car all the way from Harry’s basement to Alpha Plateau. It was the first time I’d ever been in a car. Naturally I don’t know what all these gadgets do.”

“Thass ri’. Now go strray’ till I tell you.”

Matt released the knob. The car flew on by itself. “We aren’t going toward the coral houses,” he said.

“No.” Harry Kane spoke slowly but understandably. “The coral houses are the first place Implementation will look. I couldn’t drag a hundred men where we’re going.”

“Where’s that?”

“A large unoccupied mansion owned by Geoffrey Eustace Parlette and his family.”

“And where will Geoffrey Eustace Parlette be all this time?”

“He and his family are swimming and gambling in a small public resort on Iota. I’ve got contacts on Alpha Plateau, Keller.”

“Parlette. Any—”

“His grandson. Millard Parlette was staying with them, but he’s making a speech. He should be starting about now. The sending station on Nob Hill is far enough away, and his hosts here are gone, so he’ll probably be staying with a relative.”

“It still sounds dangerous.”

“You should talk.”

The left-handed compliment hit Matt like six dry martinis. He’d done it! He’d walked into the Hospital, freed prisoners, raised merry hell, left his mark, and walked out free and untouched! “We can hide the car till the furor dies down,” he said. “Then, back to Gamma—”

“And leave my men in the vivarium? I can’t do that. And there’s Polly Tournquist.”

Polly. The girl who’d—Yes. “I’m not a rebel, Harry. The grand rescue’s over. Frankly, I only came here to get Laney if I could. I can drop this crusade any time.”

“You think Castro will just let you go, Keller? He must know you were one of the prisoners. He’ll hunt you down wherever you hide. Besides, I can’t let you have the car. I’ll need it for my grand rescue.”

Matt grimaced. It was his car, wasn’t it? He’d stolen it himself. But they could fight that out later. “Why did you mention Polly?”

“She saw the ramrobot come down. Castro probably found the films on her. He may be questioning her to find out who else knows.”

“Knows what?”

“I don’t know either. Polly’s the only one. But it must be pretty damn important. Polly thought so, and apparently so did Castro. You didn’t know there was a ramrobot coming, did you?”

“No.”

“They kept it secret. They’ve never done that before.”

Laney said, “Polly acted like she’d found something vastly important. She insisted on telling us all at once, night before last. But Castro didn’t give her the chance. Now I’m wondering whether it wasn’t the ramrobot that brought on the raid.”

“She could be in the organ banks” said Matt.

“Not yet,” said Harry. “Not if Castro found the films. She wouldn’t have talked yet. He’ll be using the coffin cure, and that takes time.”

“Coffin cure?”

“It’s not important.”

Important or not, Matt didn’t like the sound of it. “How are you planning to mount your rescue?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Angle lef’,” said Hood.

Houses and greenery rolled beneath them. Flying a car was infinitely easier with the gyroscopes going. Matt could see no cars around, police or otherwise. Had something grounded them?

“So,” said Laney. “You came all the way to the Hospital to get me.”

“In a stolen car,” said Matt. “With a small detour into the void mist.”

Laney’s wide mouth formed half a smile and half a grin, half joy and half amusement. “Naturally I’m flattered.”

“Naturally.”

Mrs. Hancock spoke from the back seat. “I’d like to know why they didn’t beam us down, back there at the carport.”

“And you knew they wouldn’t,” said Laney. “How did you know, Matt?”

“Second the motion,” said Harry Kane.

“I don’t know,” said Matt.

“But you knew it might work.”

“Yah.”

“Why?”

“Okay. Hood, you listening?”

“Ye—ss.”

“It’s a long story. I’ll start with the morning after the party—”

“Start with the party,” said Laney.

“Everything?”

“Everything.” Laney gave the word undue emphasis. “I think it might be important, Matt.”

Matt shrugged an uncomfortable surrender. “It might at that. Okay. I met Hood in a bar for the first time in eight years…”

Jesus Pietro and Major Jansen stood well out of the way as a stream of stretchers moved into the vivarium to deposit their charges in contour couches. In another part of the Hospital other stretchers carried dead and wounded into the operating rooms, some to be restored to life and health and usefulness, others to be pirated for undamaged parts.

“What is it?” Jesus Pietro asked.

“I don’t know,” said Major Jansen. He stepped back from the door to get a better look. “It seems almost familiar.”

“That’s no help.”

“I assume a colonist drew it?”

“You might as well. Nobody else was left alive.”

Major Jansen drew even farther back, stood bouncing lightly on his toes, hands on hips. Finally he said, “It’s a valentine, sir.”

“A valentine.” Jesus Pietro glared intense irritation at his aide. He looked back at the door. “I’ll be damned. It is a valentine.”

“With teardrops.”

“A valentine with teardrops. Whoever drew that wasn’t sane. Valentine, valentine…Why would the Sons of Earth leave us a valentine drawn in human blood?”

“Blood. A bleeding—oh, I see. That’s what it is, sir. It’s a bleeding heart. They’re telling us they’re against the practice of executing felons for the organ banks.”

“A reasonable attitude for them to take.” Jesus Pietro looked once more into the vivarium. The bodies of Hobart and the vivarium guard had been removed, but the stains of carnage remained. He said, “They don’t act like the usual sort of bleeding heart.”

Thirty thousand pairs of eyes waited behind the teedee lenses.

Four teedee cameras circled him. They were blank now, and untended, as cameramen moved casually about the room, doing things and saying things Millard Parlette made no effort to understand. In fifteen minutes those blank teedee lenses would be peepholes for sixty thousand yes.

Millard Parlette began leafing through his notes. If here were any changes to be made, the time was Now.

1. Lead-in.

1. Stress genuine emergency.

2. Mention ramrobot package.

3. “What follows is background.”

How real would an emergency seem to these people? The last emergency session Millard Parlette could recall was the Great Plague of 2290, more than a century ago. Most of his audience would not have been born then.

Hence the lead-in, to grab their attention.

2. The organ-bank problem—exposition.

1. Earth calls it a problem; we do not. Therefore Earth knows considerably more about it.

2. Any citizen, with the help of the organ banks, can live as long as it takes his central nervous system to wear out. This can be a very long time if his circulatory system is kept functioning.

3. But the citizen, cannot take more out of the organ banks than goes into them. He must do his utmost to see that they are supplied.

4. The only feasible method of supplying the organ banks is through execution of criminals. (Demonstrate this; show why other methods are inadequate.)

5. A criminal’s pirated body can save a dozen lives. There is now no valid argument against capital punishment for any given crime; for all such argument seeks to prove that killing a man does society no good. Hence the citizen, who wants to live as long and as healthily as possible, will vote any crime into a capital crime if the organ banks are short of material.

1. Cite Earth’s capital punishment for false advertising, income tax evasion, air pollution, having children without a license.

The wonder was that it had taken so long to pass these laws.

The organ-bank problem could have started in the year 1900, when Karl Landsteiner separated human blood into four types: A, B, AB, and O. Or in 1914, when Albert Hustin found that sodium citrate would prevent blood from clotting. Or in 1940, when Landsteiner and Wiener found the Rh factor. Blood banks could so easily have been supplied by condemned criminals, but apparently nobody had realized it.

And there was Hamburger’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, in a Parisian hospital where kidney transplants were made from donors who were not identical twins. There were the antirejection serums discovered by Mostel and Granovich in the 2010s…

Nobody seemed to have noticed the implications—until the middle of the twenty-first century.

There were organ banks all over the world, inadequately supplied by people kind enough to will their bodies to medical science.

How useful is the body of a man who dies of old age? How fast can you reach a car accident? And in 2043, Arkansas, which had never rescinded the death penalty, made the organ banks the official state method of execution.

The idea had spread like wildfire…like a moral plague, as one critic of the time had put it. Millard Parlette had researched it very thoroughly, then cut all of the historical matter out of his speech, afraid it would lose him his audience. People, especially crew, did not like to be lectured.

6. Thus the government which controls the organ banks is more powerful than any dictator in history. Many dictators have had the power of death, but organ banks give a government power of life and death.

1. Life. The organ banks can cure nearly anything, and the government can regulate which citizens shall benefit, on grounds that materials are running short. Priorities become vital.

2. Death. No citizen will protest when the government condemns a man to die, not when his death gives the citizen his chance to live.

Untrue and unfair. There were always altruists. But let it stand.

3. The organ-bank problem—colonies.

1. Alloplasty: the science of putting foreign materials in the human body for medical purposes.

2. Examples:

1. Implanted hearing aids

2. Heart pacemakers and artificial hearts

3. Plastic tubing for veins, arteries

3. Alloplasty in use on Earth for half a thousand years.

4. No alloplasty for a colony world. Alloplasty needs a high technology.

5. Every colony world has organ-bank facilities. The stasis room of a slowboat is designed to freeze organs. The ships themselves thus become the center of an organ bank.

6. Thus the organ-bank “problem” is unrelieved even by the alternative of alloplasty, on any colony world.

4. The organ-bank problem—as it relates to the power politics of Mount Lookitthat.

1. The Covenant of Planetfall.

Millard Parlette frowned. How would the average crew react to the truth about the Covenant of Planetfall?

What they were taught in school was true, in the main. The Covenant of Planetfall, the agreement which gave the crew authority over the colonists, had existed since the Planck landing. The colonists had agreed to it, all of them.

The rationale held, too. The crew had taken all the risks, done all the work of decades, suffered and slaved through years of training, to reach a target which might be habitable. The colonists had slept peacefully through all those weary years in space. It was right that the crew should rule.

But—how many crew knew that those first colonists had signed the Covenant at gunpoint? That eight had died rather than sign away their freedom?

Was it Millard Parlette’s place to tell them?

Yes, it was. They had to understand the nature of power politics. He left the notation unchanged.

2. The Hospital:

1. Control of electric power

2. Control of news media

3. Control of justice: of the police, of trials, of executions

4. Control of medicine and the organ banks: the positive side of justice

3. Organ replacement for colonists? Yes!

1. Colonists in good standing are obviously entitled to medical care. Obviously even to themselves.

2. Justice must have a positive side.

3. The organ-bank “problem” implies that the colonists who can hope for medical treatment will support the government.

5. The ramrobot capsule.
(Show pictures. Give ’em the full tour. Use #1 for visual impact, but concentrate on implications of rotifer.)

There was something he could add to that! Millard Parlette looked down at his right hand. It was coming along nicely. Already the contrast with his untreated left hand was dramatic.

That’d make ’em sit up!

6. The danger of the ramrobot capsule.

1. It does not make the organ banks obsolete. The capsule held only four items. To replace the organ banks would require hundreds, or thousands, each a separate project.

2. But any colonist report would blow it out of all proportion. Colonists would assume that capital punishment would stop now.

Millard Parlette glanced behind him—and shuddered. You couldn’t be rational about Ramrobot Capsule #143. The visual impact was too great.

If his speech got dull at any point, he could get their attention back by simply cutting to a shot of the ramrobot packages.

3. Capital punishment cannot stop in any case.

1. Decrease the severity of punishment, and crime increases drastically. (Cite examples from Earth history. Unfortunate that Mount Lookitthat has none.)

2. What punishment to substitute for capital punishment? No prisons on Mount Lookitthat. Warning notes and jottings on one’s record hold power only through threat of the organ banks.

7. Conclusion.
Violently or peaceably, the rule of the crew ends when the colonists learn of Ramrobot Capsule #143.

Three minutes to go. No question of changing the speech now.

The question was, and had always been, the speech itself. Should thirty thousand crew be told what had arrived in Ramrobot Capsule #143? Could they be made to understand its importance? And—could such a secret be kept by that many?

Members of the Council had fought bitterly to prevent this event. Only Millard Parlette’s sure control, his knowledge of the ways of power and the weaknesses of his fellow Council members, even his own striking authority-figure appearance, which he used ruthlessly—only Millard Parlette’s determination had brought the Council to issue their declaration of emergency.

And now every crew on Alpha Plateau, and elsewhere, was before his teedee set. No cars flew above Alpha Plateau; no skiers glided down the snows of the northern glacier; the lake and the hot springs and the gambling halls of Iota were empty.

One minute to go. Too late to call off the speech.

Could thirty thousand people keep such a secret?

Why, no, of course they couldn’t.

“That big house with the flat roof,” said Harry Kane.

Matt tilted the car to the right. He continued, “I waited till the guards were out of sight, then went back to the vivarium. The man inside opened the door for me. I knocked him down and took his gun, found that bank of buttons and started pushing them.”

“Land in the garden, not on the roof. Did you ever figure out what was wrong with their eyes?”

“No.” Matt worked the slats and the steering knob, trying to get above the garden. It was big, and it ran to the void edge: a formal garden in a style a thousand years old, a symmetrical maze of right-angle hedges enclosing rectangles of brilliant color. The house too was all rectangles, an oversized version of the small identical-development-houses of the nineteens. Flat-roofed, flat-sided, nearly undecorated, the size of a motel but so wide it seemed low, the house seemed to have been built from prefabricated parts and then added to over the years. Geoffrey Eustace Parlette had evidently imitated ancient bad taste in hopes of getting something new and different.

Matt didn’t see it that way, naturally. To him all the houses of Alpha were equally strange.

He brought the car down on the strip of grass at the void edge. The car landed, bounced, landed again. At what he judged was the proper moment, Matt pushed in all four fan levers. The car dropped jarringly. The levers tried to come out again, and Matt held them in with his hand, looking despairingly at Hood for help.

“Gyroscope,” said Hood.

Matt forced his numb right arm to cross his torso and flick the Gyroscope switch.

“You need a little training in how to fly,” Harry Kane said with admirable restraint. “You finished your story?” He had insisted that Matt talk without interruption.

“I may have forgotten some things.”

“We can save the question-and-answer period until we get established. Matt, Laney, Lydia, get me out of here and move Jay in front of the dashboard. Jay, can you move your arms?”

“Yah. The stunner’s pretty well worn off.”

They piled out, Matt and the two women. Harry came out on his feet, moving in jerks and twitches but managing to stay upright. He brushed away offers of help and stood watching Hood. Hood had opened a panel in the dash and was doing things inside.

“Matt!” Laney called over her shoulder. She was standing inches from the void.

“Get back from there!”

“No! Come here!”

Matt went. So did Mrs. Hancock. The three of them stood at the edge of the grass, looking down into their shadows.

The sun was at their backs, shining down at forty-five degrees. The water-vapor mist which had covered the southern end of the Plateau that morning now lay just beyond the void edge, almost at their feet. And they looked into their shadows—three shadows reaching down into infinity, three contoured black tunnels growing smaller and narrower as they bored through the lighted mist, until they reached their blurred vanishing points. But for each of the three it seemed that only his own shadow was surrounded by a small, vivid, perfectly circular rainbow.

A fourth shadow joined them, moving slowly and painfully. “Oh, for a camera,” mourned Harry Kane.

“I never saw it like that before,” said Matt.

“I did, once, a long time ago. It was like I’d had a vision. Myself, the representative of Man, standing at the edge of the world with a rainbow about his head. I joined the Sons of Earth that night.”

A muted whirr sounded behind them. Matt turned to see the car slide toward him across the lawn, pause at the edge, go over. It hovered over the mist and then settled into it, fading like a porpoise submerging.

Harry turned and called, “All set?”

Hood knelt on the grass where the car had rested. “Right. It’ll come back at midnight, wait fifteen minutes, then go back down. It’ll do that for the next three nights. Would someone help me into the house?”

Matt half carried him through the formal garden. Hood was heavy; his legs would move, but they would not carry him. As they walked, he lowered his voice to ask, “Matt, what was that thing you drew on the door?”

“A bleeding heart.”

“Oh. Why?”

“I’m not really sure. When I saw what they’d done to the guard, it was like being back in the organ banks. I remembered my Uncle Matt.” His grip tightened in reflex on Hood’s arm. “They took him away when I was eight. I never found out why. I had to leave something to show I was there—me, Matt Keller, walking in alone and out with an army. One for Uncle Matt! I was a little crazy, Hood; I saw something in the organ banks that would shake anyone’s mind. I didn’t know your symbol, so I had to make up my own.”

“Not a bad one. I’ll show you ours later. Was it bad, the organ banks?”

“Horrible. But the worst was those, tiny hearts and livers. Children, Jay! I never knew they took children.”

Hood looked up questioningly. Then Lydia Hancock pushed the big front door open for them, and they had to concentrate on getting up the steps.

Jesus Pietro was furious.

He’d spent some time in his office, knowing he would be most useful there, but he’d felt cramped. Now he was at the edge of the carport watching the last of the sonic victims being carried away. He wore a beltphone; his secretary could reach him through that.

He’d never hated colonists before.

To Jesus Pietro, human beings came in two varieties: crew and colonist. On other worlds other conditions might apply, but other worlds did not intrude on Mount Lookitthat. The crew were masters, wise and benevolent, at least in the aggregate. The colonists were ordained to serve.

Both groups had exceptions. There were crew who were in no way wise and who did not work at being benevolent, who accepted the benefits of their world and ignored the responsibilities. There were colonists who would overthrow the established order of things and others who preferred to turn criminal rather than serve. When brought into contact with crew he did not admire, Jesus Pietro treated them with the respect due their station. The renegade colonists he hunted down and punished.

But he didn’t hate them, any more than Matt Keller really hated mining worms. The renegades were part of his job, part of his working day. They behaved as they did because they were colonists, and Jesus Pietro studied them as biology students studied bacteria. When his working day ended, so did his interest in colonists, unless something unusual was going on.

Now that was over. In running amok through the Hospital, the rebels had spilled over from his working day into his very home. He couldn’t have been angrier if they’d been in his house, smashing furniture and killing servants and setting poison for the housecleaners and pouring salt on the rugs.

The intercom buzzed. Jesus Pietro unhooked it from his belt and said, “Castro.”

“Jansen, sir. I’m call’ from the vivarium.”

“Well?”

“There are six rebels missing. Do you want their names?”

Jesus Pietro glanced around him. They’d carried the last unconscious colonist away ten minutes ago. These last stretcher passengers were carport personnel.

“You should have them all. Have you checked with the operating room? I saw at least one dead under a door.”

“I’ll check, sir.”

The carport was back to normal. The rebels hadn’t had time to mess it up as they’d messed up the halls’ and the electricians’ rec room. Jesus Pietro debated whether to return to his office or to trace the rebels’ charge back through the rec room. Then he happened to notice two men arguing by the garages. He strolled over.

“You had no right to send Bessie out!” one was shouting. He wore a raider’s uniform, and he was tall, very dark, enlistment-poster handsome.

“You bloody raiders think you own these cars,” the mechanic said contemptuously.

Jesus Pietro smiled, for the mechanics felt exactly the same. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

“This idiot can’t find my car! Sorry, sir.”

“And which car is yours, Captain?”

“Bessie. I’ve been using Bessie for three years, and this morning some idiot took it out to spray the woods. Now look! They’ve lost her, sir!” The man’s voice turned plaintive.

Jesus Pietro turned cold blue eyes on the mechanic. “You’ve lost a car?”

“No sir. I just don’t happen to know where they’ve put it.”

“Where are the cars that came back from spraying the woods?”

“That’s one of them.” The mechanic pointed across the carport. “We were half finished unloading her when those fiends came at us. Matter of fact we were unloading both of them.” The mechanic scratched his head. He met Jesus Pietro’s eyes with the utmost reluctance. “I haven’t seen the other one since.”

“There are prisoners missing. You know that?” He didn’t wait for the mechanic’s answer. “Find Bessie’s serial number and description and give them to my secretary. If you find Bessie, call my office. For the moment I’m going to assume the car is stolen.”

The mechanic turned and ran toward an office. Jesus Pietro used his handphone to issue instructions regarding a possible stolen car.

Jansen came back on the line. “One rebel dead, sir. That leaves five missing.” He listed them.

“All right. It’s beginning to look like they took a car. See if the wall guards saw one leaving.”

“They’d have reported it, sir.”

“I’m not so certain. Find out.”

“Sir, the carport was attacked. The guards had to report five prisoners stealing an aircar during a mob attack!”

“Jansen, I think they might have forgotten to. You understand me?” There was steel in his voice. Jansen signed off without further protest.

Jesus Pietro looked up at the sky, rubbing his moustache with two fingers. A stolen car would be easy to find. There were no crew pleasure-cars abroad now, not in the middle of Millard Parlette’s speech. But they might have landed it. And if a car had been stolen in full view of the wall guards, it had been stolen by ghosts.

That would fit admirably with the other things that had been happening at the Hospital.

VIIIPolly’s Eyes

VIIIGeoffrey Eustace Parlette’s house was different inside. The rooms were big and comfortable, furnished in soft good taste. They were innumerable. Toward the back were a pool table, a small bowling alley, an auditorium and stage with pull-down movie screen. The kitchen was the size of Harry Kane’s living-room. Matt and Laney and Lydia Hancock had moved through the entire house with stun guns at the ready. They had found no living thing, barring the rugs and the no-less-than-six house-cleaner nests.

Lydia had threatened force to get Matt to return to the living room. He wanted to explore. He’d seen incredible bedrooms. Hobbyists’ bedrooms…

In a living room two stories tall, before a vast false fireplace whose stone logs showed red electrical heat where they touched, the five survivors dropped into couches. Harry Kane still moved carefully, but he seemed almost recovered from the stunner that had caught him in the Hospital. Hood had his voice back, but not his strength.

Matt slumped in the couch. He wriggled, adjusting his position, and finally put his feet up. It was good to feel safe.

“Tiny hearts and livers,” said Hood.

“Yah,” said Matt.

“That’s impossible.”

Harry Kane made a questioning noise.

“I saw them,” said Matt. “The rest of it was pretty horrible, but that was the worst.”

Harry Kane was sitting upright. “In the organ banks?”

“Yes, dammit, in the organ banks. Don’t you believe me? They were in special tanks of their own, makeshift-looking, with the motors sitting in the water next to the organs. The glass was warm.”

“Stasis tanks aren’t warm,” said Hood.

“And Implementation doesn’t take children,” said Harry Kane. “If they did, I’d know it.”

Matt merely glared.

“Hearts and livers,” said Harry. “Just those? Nothing else?”

“Nothing I noticed,” said Matt. “No, wait. There were a couple of tanks just like them. One was empty. One looked…polluted, I think.”

“How long were you in there?”

“Just long enough to get sick to my stomach. Mist Demons, I wasn’t investigating anything! I was looking for a map!”

“In the organ banks?”

“Lay off,” said Laney. “Relax, Matt. It doesn’t matter.”

Mrs. Hancock had gone to find the kitchen. She returned now, with a pitcher and five glasses. “Found this. No reason we shouldn’t mess up the place, is there?”

They assured her there wasn’t, and she poured for them.

Hood said, “I’m more interested in your alleged psychic powers. I’ve never read of anything like you’ve got. It must be something new.”

Matt grunted.

“I should tell you that anyone who believes in the so-called psi powers at all usually thinks he’s psychic himself.” Hood’s tone was dry, professional. “We may find nothing at all.”

“Then how did we get here?”

“We may never know. Some new Implementation policy? Or maybe the Mist Demons love you, Matt.”

“I thought of that, too.”

Mrs. Hancock returned to the kitchen.

“When you tried to sneak up to the Hospital,” Hood continued, “you were spotted right away. You must have run through the electric-eye net. You didn’t attempt to run?”

“They had four spotlights on me. I just stood up,”

“Then they ignored you? They let you walk away?”

“That’s right. I kept looking back, waiting for that loudspeaker to say something. It never did. Then I ran.”

“And the man who took you into the Hospital. Did anything happen just before he went insane and ran back to the gatehouse?”

“Like what?”

“Anything involving light.”

“No.”

Hood looked disappointed. Laney said, “People seem to forget about you.”

“Yah. It’s been like that all my life. In school the teacher wouldn’t call on me unless I knew the answer. Bullies never bothered me.”

“I should have been so lucky,” said Hood.

Laney wore the abstracted look of one tracing an idea.

“The eyes,” said Harry Kane, and paused for thought. He had been listening without comment, in the attitude of The Thinker, jaw on fist, elbow on knee. “You said there was something strange about the guards’ eyes.”

“Yah, I don’t know what. I’ve seen that look before, I think, but I can’t remember—”

“What about the one who finally shot you? Anything odd about his eyes?”

“No.”

Laney came out of her abstraction with a startled look. “Matt. Do you think Polly would have gone home with you?”

“What the Mist Demons does that have to do with anything?”

“Don’t get mad, Matt. I’ve got a reason for asking.”

“I can’t imagine—”

“That’s why you called in the experts.”

“All right, yes. I thought she was going home with me.”

“Then she suddenly turned and walked away.”

“Yah. The bitch just—” Matt swallowed the rest of it. Not until now, when he could feel his pain and rage and humiliation in bearable retrospect, did he realize how badly she’d stung him. “She walked away like she’d remembered something. Something more important than me, but not particularly important for all that. Laney, could it have been her hearing aid?”

“The radio?…No, not that early. Harry, did you tell Polly anything by radio that you didn’t tell the rest of us?”

“I told her I’d call for her speech at midnight, after everyone had gone home. They could hear it through the radios. Otherwise, nothing.”

“So she had no reason to drop me,” said Matt. “I still don’t see why we have to dig into this.”

“It’s strange,” said Hood. “It can’t hurt to look at anything strange in your young life.”

Laney said, “Did you resent it?”

“Damn right I did. I hate being left flat like that, toyed with and then dropped.”

“You didn’t offend her?”

“I don’t see how I could have. I didn’t get drunk till afterward.”

“You told me it’s happened before like that.”

“Every time. Every damn time, until you. I was virgin until Friday night.” Matt looked belligerently around him. Nobody said anything. “That’s why I can’t see how it helps to talk about it. Dammit, it isn’t unusual in my young life.”

Hood said, “It’s unusual in Polly’s young life. Polly’s not a tease. Am I wrong, Laney?”

“No. She takes her sex seriously. She wouldn’t make a play for someone she didn’t want. I wonder…”

“I don’t think I was kidding myself, Laney.”

“Neither do I. You keep saying something was strange about the guards’ eyes. Was there anything strange about Polly’s eyes?”

“What are you getting at?”

“You claim every time you’re getting ready to lose your virginity to a girl, she drops you. Why? You aren’t ugly. You probably don’t have the habit of being grossly impolite. You weren’t with me. You bathe often enough. Was there something about Polly’s eyes?”

“Dammit, Laney…Eyes.” Something changed in Polly’s face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. She certainly wasn’t looking at anything; her eyes went past him and through, him, and they looked blind…

“She looked abstracted. What do you want me to say? She looked like she was thinking of something else, and then she walked away.”

“Was it sudden, this loss of interest? Did she—”

“Laney, what do you think? I drove her away deliberately?” Matt jumped to his feet. He couldn’t take any more; he was wires stretched on a bone frame, every wire about to break. Nobody had ever so assaulted his privacy! He had never imagined that a woman could share his bed, listen in sympathy to all the agony of the secrets that had shaped his soul, and then spill everything she knew into a detailed, clinical roundtable discussion! He felt like one who has been disassembled for the organ banks, who, still aware, watches a host of doctors probing and prodding his separated innards with none-too-clean hands, hears them making ribald comments about his probable medical and social history.

And he was about to say so, in no mild terms, when he saw that nobody was looking at him.

Nobody was looking at him.

Laney was staring into the artificial fire; Hood was looking at Laney; Harry Kane was in his Thinker position. None of them were really seeing anything, at least not anything there in the room. Each wore an abstracted look.

“One problem,” Harry Kane said dreamily. “How the blazes are we going to free the rest of us, when only four of us escaped?” He glanced around at his inattentive audience, then went back to contemplating his navel from the inside.

Matt felt the hair stir on his head. Harry Kane had looked right at him, but he certainly hadn’t seen Matt Keller. And there was something very peculiar about his eyes.

Like a man in a wax museum, Matt bent to look into Harry Kane’s eyes.

Harry jumped as if he’d been shot. “Where the blazes did you come from?” He stared as if Matt had dropped from the ceiling. Then he said, “Umm…oh! You did it.”

There wasn’t a doubt of it. Matt nodded. “You all suddenly lost interest in me.”

“What about our eyes?” Hood seemed about to spring at him, he was so intense.

“Something. I don’t know. I was bending down to see, when”—Matt shrugged—“it wore off.”

Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.

Hood said, “Suddenly? I don’t remember its being sudden.”

“What do you remember?” Matt asked.

“Well, nothing, really. We were talking about eyes—or was it about Polly? Sure, Polly. Matt, did it bother you to talk about it?”

Matt growled in his throat.

“Then that’s why you did whatever you did. You didn’t want to be noticed.”

Probably.

Hood rubbed his hands briskly together. “So. We know you’ve got something, anyway, and it’s under your control. Your subconscious control. Well!” Hood became a professor looking around at his not-too-bright class. “What questions are still unanswered?

“For one, what do the eyes have to do with anything? For another, why was a guard eventually able to shoot you and store you away? For a third, why would you use your ability to drive girls away?”

“Mist Demons, Hood! There’s no conceivable reason—”

“Keller.”

The voice was a quiet command. Harry Kane was back in Thinker position on the couch, staring off into space. “You said Polly looked abstracted. Did we look abstracted a moment ago?”

“When you forgot about me? Yah.”

“Do I look abstracted now?”

“Yah. Wait a minute.” Matt stood up and walked around Harry, examining him from different sides. He should have looked like a man deep in thought. Thinker position: chin on fist, elbow on knee; face lowered, almost scowling; motionless; eyes hooded…Hooded? But clearly visible.

“No, you don’t. There’s something wrong.”

“What?”

“Your eyes.”

“Round and round we go,” Harry said disgustedly. “Well, get down and look at my eyes, for the Mist Demons’ sake!”

Matt knelt on the indoor grass and looked up into Harry’s eyes. No inspiration came. A wrongness there, but where?…He thought of Polly on Friday night, when they stood immersed in noise and elbows, and talked nose-to-nose. They’d touched from time to time, half accidentally, hands and shoulders brushing…He’d felt the warm blood beating in his neck…and suddenly—

“Too big,” said Matt. “Your pupils are too big. When somebody really isn’t interested in what’s going on around him, the pupils are smaller.”

“What about Polly’s eyes?” Hood probed. “Dilated or contracted?”

“Contracted. Very small. And so were the guards’ eyes, the ones who came for me this morning.” He remembered how surprised they’d been when he yanked on the handcuffs, the handcuffs that still dangled from his wrists. They hadn’t been interested in him; they’d merely unlocked the chains from their own wrists. And when they’d looked at him—“That’s it. That’s why their eyes looked so funny. The pupils were pinpoints.”

Hood sighed in relief. “Then that’s all of it,” he said, and got up. “Well, I think I’ll see how Lydia’s doing with dinner.”

“Come back here.” Harry Kane’s voice was low and murderous. Hood burst out laughing.

“Stop that cackling,” said Harry Kane. “Whatever Keller’s got, we need it. Talk!”

Whatever Keller’s got, we need it. Matt felt he ought to protest. He didn’t intend to be used by the Sons of Earth. But he couldn’t interrupt now.

“It’s a very limited form of telepathy,” said Jay Hood. “And because it is so very limited, it’s probably more dependable than more general forms. Its target is so much less ambiguous.” He smiled. “We really ought to have a new name for it. Telepathy doesn’t apply, not quite.”

Three people waited patiently but implacably.

“Matt’s mind,” said Hood, “is capable of controlling the nerves and muscles which dilate and contract the iris of another man’s eye.” And he smiled, waiting for their response.

“So what?” asked Harry Kane. “What good is that?”

“You don’t understand? No, I suppose you don’t. It’s more in my field. Do you know anything about motivational research?”

Three heads waggled No.

“The science was banned on Earth long, long ago because its results were being used for immoral advertising purposes. But they found out some interesting things first. One of them involved dilation and contraction of the pupil of the eye.

“It turns out that if you show a man something and measure his pupil with a camera, you can tell whether it interests him. You can show him pictures of his country’s political leaders, in places where there are two or more factions, and his eyes will dilate for the leader of his own. Take him aside for an hour and talk to him, persuade him to change his political views, and his pupils will dilate for the other guy. Show him pictures of pretty girls, and the girl he calls prettiest will have dilated pupils. He doesn’t know it. He only knows she looks interested. In him.

“I wonder,” said Hood, smiling dreamily at himself. Some people love to lecture. Hood was one. “Could that be the reason the most expensive restaurants are always dark? A couple comes in, they look at each other across a dinner table, and they both look interested. What do you think?”

Harry Kane said, “I think you’d better finish telling us about Keller.”

“He has,” said Laney. “Don’t you see? Matt’s afraid of being seen by someone. So he reaches out with his mind and contracts the man’s pupils whenever he looks at Matt. Naturally the man can’t get interested in Matt.”

“Exactly.” Hood beamed at Laney. “Matt takes a reflex and works it in reverse to make it a conditioned reflex. I knew light had something to do with it. You see, Matt? It can’t work unless your victim sees you. If he hears you, or if he gets a blip when you cross an electric-eye beam—”

“Or if I’m not concentrating on being scared. That’s why the guard shot me.”

“I still don’t see how it’s possible,” said Laney. “I helped you do your research on this, Jay. Telepathy is reading minds. It operates on the brain, doesn’t it?”

“We don’t know. But the optic nerve is brain tissue, not ordinary nerve tissue.”

Harry Kane stood up and stretched. “That doesn’t matter. It’s better than anything the Sons of Earth have put together. It’s like a cloak of invisibility. Now we have to figure out how to use it.”

The missing car was still missing. It was nowhere in the Implementation garages; it had not been found by the search squad, neither in the air nor on the ground. If policeman had taken it out for legitimate purposes, would have been visible; if it had not been visible, it would have been in trouble of some kind, and the pilot would have phoned a Mayday. Apparently it really had be stolen.

To Jesus Pietro, it was disturbing. A stolen car was one thing; an impossible stolen car was another.

He had associated Keller with miracles: with the miracle that had left him unhurt when his car fell into the void mist, with the miracle that had affected Hobart’s memory last night. On that assumption he had sounded the “Prisoners Loose.” And, lo! there were prisoners running amok in the corridors.

He had associated missing prisoners with a missing car with the miracles of Keller. Thus he had assumed a stolen car where no car could have been stolen. And, lo! a car had indeed been stolen.

Then Major Jansen had called from the vivarium. Nobody had noticed, until that moment, that the sleep helmets were still running. How, then, had ninety-eight prisoners walked away?

Miracles! What the blazes was he fighting? One man, many? Had Keller been passenger or driver of that car? Had there been other passengers? Had the Sons of Earth discovered something new, or was it Keller alone?

That was an evil thought. Matthew Keller, come back from the void in the person of his nephew to haunt his murderer…Jesus Pietro snorted.

He’d doubled the guard at the Alpha-Beta Bridge. Knowing that the bridge was the only way off the cliff and across the Long Fall River at the bottom, he had nonetheless set guards along the cliff edge. No normal colonist could leave Alpha Plateau without a car. (But could something abnormal walk unseen past the guards?)

And no fugitive would leave in a police car. Jesus Pietro had ordered all police cars to fly in pairs for the duration. The fugitives would be flying alone.

As part colonist, Jesus Pietro had not been allowed to hear Millard Parlette’s speech, but he knew it was over. Crew cars were flying again. If the fugitives stole a crew car, they might have a chance. But the Hospital would be informed immediately if a crew car was stolen. (Really? A police car had been stolen, and he’d had to find out for himself.)

Nobody and nothing had been found in the abandoned coral houses. (But would anything important have been seen?)

Most of the escaped prisoners were safe in the vivarium. (From which they had escaped before, without bothering to turn off their sleeper helmets.)

Jesus Pietro wasn’t used to dealing with ghosts.

It would require brand new techniques.

Grimly he set out to evolve them.

The arguments began during dinner.

Dinner took place at the unconventional hour of three o’clock. It was good, very good. Lydia Hancock still looked like a sour old harridan, but to Matt, anyone who could cook like her deserved the benefit of the doubt. They had finished the mutton chops when Harry Kane turned to business.

“There are five of us left,” he said. “What can we do to get the rest of us loose?”

“We could blow the pumping station,” Hood suggested. It developed that the pumping station, which supplied Alpha Plateau with water from the Long Fall was the crew’s only source of water. It was located at the base of the Alpha-Beta cliff. The Sons of Earth had long ago planted mines to blow it apart. “It would give us a diversion.”

“And cut off the power, too,” said Matt, remembering that hydrogen for fusion can be taken from water.

“Oh, no. The power plants only use a few buckets of water in a year, Keller. A diversion for what, Jay? Any suggestions?”

“Matt. He got us out once. He can do it again, now that he knows—”

“Oh no you don’t. I am not a revolutionary. I told you why I went to the Hospital, and I won’t go there again.”

Thus, the arguments.

On Matt’s side there was little said. He wasn’t going back to the Hospital. If he could, he would return to Gamma and live out his life there, trusting his psi power to protect him. If he had to live elsewhere—even if he had to spend the rest of his life in hiding on Alpha Plateau—so be it. His life might be disrupted now, but it was not worthless enough to throw away.

He got no sympathy from anyone, not even from Laney. On their part the arguments ranged from appeals to his patriotism or to his love of admiration, to attacks on his personality, to threats of bodily harm to himself and his family. Jay Hood was the most vituperative. You would have thought he had invented “the luck of Matt Keller,” that Matt had stolen it. He seemed genuinely convinced that he held a patent on psi power on the Plateau.

In a way it was ludicrous. They begged him, they browbeat him, they threatened him—and with never a chance of succeeding. Once they actually succeeded in frightening him, and once their personal comments annoyed him beyond the limits of patience. Both times the arguments ended abruptly, and Matt was left alone in his irritation while the Sons of Earth discussed whatever came to mind, their pupils contracting to pinpoints whenever they looked at him.

After the second such episode Harry Kane realized what was happening and ordered the others to lay off. It was interfering with their ability to make plans, he said.

“Go somewhere else,” he told Matt. “If you’re not going to help us, at least don’t listen to our plans. Feeble though they’ll probably be, there’s no reason we should risk your hearing them. You might use the information to buy your way back into Castro’s good graces.”

“You’re an ungrateful son of a bitch,” said Matt, “and I demand an apology.”

“Okay, I apologize. Now go somewhere else.”

Matt went out into the garden.

The mist was back, but it was an overhanging mist now, turning the sky steel gray, bleaching colors out of the garden, turning the void from a fuzzy flat plain into a dome around the universe. Matt found a stone bench and sat down and put his head in his hands.

He was shaking. A mass verbal attack can do that to a man, can smash his self-respect and set up doubts which remain for hours or days or forever. There are well-developed verbal techniques for many to use against one. You never let the victim speak without interruption; never let him finish a sentence. You interrupt each other so that he can’t quite catch the drift of your arguments, and then he can’t find the flaws. He forgets his rebuttal points because he’s not allowed to put them into words. His only defense is to walk out. If, instead, you throw him out…

Gradually his confusion gave way to a kind of sick, curdled anger. The ungrateful…! He’d saved their worthless lives twice, and where was their thanks? Well, he didn’t need them. He’d never needed them for a moment.

He knew what he was now. Hood had given him that much. He knew, and he could take advantage of it.

He could become the world’s first invulnerable thief. If Implementation would not let him resume his mining career, he would do just that. Weaponless, he could rob storehouses in broad daylight. He could pass guarded bridges unnoticed, be at work on Gamma while they were searching him out in every corner of Eta. Eta, now…a nice place to rob if he couldn’t return to his old life. The crew gambling-resort must see half the wealth of the Plateau at one time or another.

He’d have a long walk to the Alpha-Beta Bridge, and a longer walk afterward. A car would be useful. Serve the Sons of Earth right if he took their car—but he’d have to wait till midnight. Did he want to do that?

His daydreams had calmed him still further. His shaking had stopped, and he wasn’t as angry now. He could begin to see what had moved the four inside to attack him so, though he saw no justice in it for there was none. Laney, Hood, Harry Kane, Lydia—they must be fanatics, or why would they sell their lives for a hopeless revolution? Being fanatics, they would have only one ethic: to do anything in their power to advance their cause, no matter whom it might hurt.

He still didn’t know where he went from here. One thing he knew: It would not involve the Sons of Earth. Otherwise he had plenty of time for decisions.

A chill thin breeze blew from the north. Gradually the fog was thickening.

The electric fire inside would be welcome.

But the thick hostility would not. He stayed where he was, hunching his back to the wind.

…Why in blazes would Hood assume he drove away women? Did Hood think he was crazy? Or deficient? No; he’d have used that during the arguments. Why, then?

He hadn’t driven away Laney.

That memory warmed him. She was lost for good now; their paths would diverge, and someday she’d end in the organ banks. But Friday night had happened; Friday night was permanent…

…Polly’s eyes. Her pupils had contracted, sure enough. Like the gatekeeper’s eyes, like Harry’s and Hood’s and Laney’s eyes when Matt had tired of their verbal onslaughts. Why?

Matt nibbled gently at his lower lip.

And if he’d driven Polly away (never mind why; there was no answer), then it was not her fault that she had gone.

But Laney had stayed.

Matt jumped to his feet. They’d have to tell him. He had a lever on them; they couldn’t know how sure he was that he’d have nothing to do with their cause. And he had to know.

He turned toward the house and saw the cars—three of them, way up there in the gray sky, disappearing and reappearing around the mist. Dropping.

He stood perfectly still. He wasn’t really convinced that they were landing here, though they grew bigger and closer every second. Finally they were just overhead and settling. And still he stood. For by then there was no place to run to, and he knew that only “the luck of Matt Keller” could protect him. It should work. He was certainly scared enough.

One of the cars almost landed on him. He was invisible, all right.

A tall, spare man got out of the car, moved his hands briefly inside the dashboard, and stepped back to avoid the wind as the car rose again and settled on the roof. The other cars had landed, and they were Implementation. A man disembarked and moved toward the tall civilian. They spoke briefly. The tall man’s voice was high, almost squeaky, and it had the crew lilt. He was thanking the policeman for his escort. The policeman got back into the car, and both Implementation cars rose into the fog.

The tall man sighed and let himself slump. Matt’s fear ebbed. This crew was no danger; he was a tired old man, worn out with years and with some recent toil. But what a fool Harry Kane had been to think nobody would come!

The man moved toward the house. Tired he might have been, but he walked straight, like a policeman on parade. Matt cursed softly and moved in behind him.

When the oldster saw the living room, he’d know someone had been there. He’d call for help unless Matt stopped him.

The old man opened the big wooden door and walked in. Matt was right behind him.

He saw the old man go rigid.

The ancient didn’t try to scream. If he had a handphone, he didn’t reach for it. His head turned from side to side, studying the living room from where he stood, taking in the abandoned glasses and pitcher and the glowing false fire. When his profile turned to Matt, he looked thoughtful. Not frightened, not angry. Thoughtful.

And when the old man smiled, it was a slow, tense smile, the smile of a chess player who sees victory almost within his grasp—or defeat, for his opponent might have set an unsuspected trap. The old man smiled, but the muscles of his face stood out iron-hard under the loose, wrinkled skin, and his fists tightened at his sides. He cocked his head to one side, listening.

He turned abruptly toward the dining room, and was face to face with Matt.

Matt said, “What are you grinning at?”

The crew batted an eyelash; he was discomposed for just that long. Speaking low, he asked, “Are you one of the Sons of Earth?”

Matt shook his head.

Consternation! And why that reaction? Matt held up a hand. “Don’t do anything rash,” he said. He’d wrapped a handcuff chain around that hand to make it a better weapon. The old man settled back on his heels. Three of him would have been no physical match for Matt.

“I’m going to search you,” said Matt. “Raise your hands.” He moved behind the old man and ran his hands over various pockets. He found some bulky objects, but no handphone.

He stood back, considering. He had never searched anyone; there might be tricks a man could use to fool him.

“What do you want with the Sons of Earth?”

“I’ll tell them when I see them.” The baritone lilt was not hard to understand, though Matt could never have imitated it.

“That won’t do.”

“Something very important has happened.” The old man seemed to make a difficult decision. “I want to tell them about the ramrobot package.”

“All right. Go ahead of me. That way.”

They moved toward the dining room with Matt trailing.

Matt was about to yell when the door suddenly opened. Lydia Hancock had her nose and a sonic showing around the edge. It took her a second to realize that the man in the lead was not Matt, and then she fired.

Matt caught the old man as he fell. “Stupid,” he said. “He wanted to talk to you.”

“He can talk to us when he wakes up,” said Lydia.

Harry Kane emerged warily, holding the other stolen sonic ready in his hand. “Any others?”

“Just him. He had a police escort but they left. Better search him; there might be a radio on him somewhere.”

“Mist Demons! It’s Millard Parlette!”

“Oh!” Matt knew the name, but he hadn’t recognized the man. “I think he really wanted to see you. When he realized someone was here, he acted sneaky. He didn’t panic until I told him I wasn’t one of you. He said he wanted to talk about the ramrobot.”

Harry Kane grunted. “He won’t wake up for hours. Lydia, you’re on guard duty. I’m going for a shower; I’ll relieve you when I come down.”

He went upstairs. Lydia and Hood picked up Millard Parlette, moved him into the front entrance; and sat him up against a wall. The old man had gone loose, like, a puppet without strings.

“A shower sounds wonderful,” said Laney.

Matt said, “May I talk to you first? Hood too.”

They got Jay Hood and went into the living room. Hood and Laney flopped in front of the fire, but Matt was, too restless to sit. “Hood, I’ve got to know. What makes you think I’ve been using my psi power to drive away women?”

“You’ll recall it was Laney’s idea first. But the evidence seems good. Do you doubt that Polly left because you contracted her irises?”

Of course he doubted it. But he couldn’t back it up. He looked at Laney, waiting.

“It’s important, isn’t it, Matt?”

“Yah.”

“You remember, just before the raid, when you asked me if everyone was as nervous as you were?”

“Mmm…Yah, I remember. You said, ‘Not that nervous, but still nervous.’”

“What are you two talking about?”

“Jay, do you remember your first—mmm. Do you remember when you stopped being a virgin?”

Hood threw back his head and laughed. “What a question, Laney! Nobody ever forgets the first time! It was—”

“Right. Were you nervous?”

Hood sobered. “At one point, I was. There was so much I didn’t know. I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself.”

Laney nodded. “I’ll bet everyone’s nervous the first time. Including you, Matt. You suddenly realize, This Is It, and you get all tensed up. Then your girl’s eyes go funny.”

Matt said a bad word. This was exactly what he hadn’t wanted to hear. “But what about us? Laney, why didn’t I defend myself against you?”

“I don’t know.”

Hood snapped, “What difference does it make? Whatever you’ve got, you’re not going to use it.”

“I have to know!”

Hood shrugged and went to stand before the fire.

“You were pretty sloshed,” said Laney. “Could that have had anything to do with it?”

“Maybe.”

She couldn’t have known why it was important, but she was trying to help. “Maybe it’s because I’m older than you. Maybe you decided I knew what I was doing.”

“I didn’t decide anything. I was too drunk. And too bitter.”

She turned restlessly, her wrinkled party dress swirling out around her. She stopped. “Matt! I remember! It was pitch dark in there!”

Matt closed his eyes. Why, so it was. He’d stumbled unseeing across the bed; he’d had to turn on a light to see Laney at all. “That’s it. I didn’t even realize what was going on until the door was closed. Oookay,” he sighed, letting all his breath rush out with the word, leaving him an empty man.

Hood said, “That’s great. Are you finished with us?”

“Yah.”

Hood left without looking back. Laney, on the verge of leaving, hesitated. Matt looked half dead, as if every erg of energy had been drained out of him.

She touched his arm. “What’s wrong, Matt?”

“I drove her away! It wasn’t her fault!”

“Polly?” She grinned into his eyes. “Why let it bother you? You got me the same night!”

“Oh, Laney, Laney. She could be in the organ banks! She could be in the—coffin cure, whateverthehell that is.”

“It’s not your fault. If you’d found her in the vivarium—”

“Is it my fault that I was glad? She dropped me like a sick house-cleaner, and an hour later Implementation took her away! And when I found out, I was glad! I had revenge!” His hands were on her upper arms, squeezing, almost hard enough to hurt.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated. “You’d have saved her if you could.”

“Sure.” But he wasn’t hearing her. He let go of her arms. “I’ve got to go after her,” he muttered, saying the words aloud, trying the taste of them. “Yah. I’ve got to go after her.”

He turned and made for the entrance.

IXThe Way Back

IX“Come back here, you idiot!”

Matt stopped halfway to the door. “Huh? Isn’t this what you all want?”

“Come back here! How are you going to get over the wall? You can’t pound on the gate again!”

Matt turned back. He felt feverish, unable to think. “Castro’d be ready for that, wouldn’t he? He may not know what happened last night, but he must know something’s wrong.”

“We tried hard enough to tell him! Come here, sit down…Don’t underestimate that man, Matt. We’ve got to think this through.”

“That wall. How am I going to get over? Oh, damn, damn.”

“You’re tired. Why not wait till Harry comes down? Then we can get things organized.”

“Oh, no. I’m not taking help from the Sons of Earth. This has nothing to do with them.”

“How about me? Will you take my help?”

“Sure, Laney.”

She decided not to question the illogic of this. “All right, let’s start at the beginning. How are you going to reach the Hospital?”

“Yah. Too far to walk. Mmm…Parlette’s car. It’s on the roof.”

“But if Castro gets it, it’ll lead him straight here.”

“I’d have to wait till midnight to get the other car.”

“That may be the only way.” Laney wasn’t tired; she’d had twice as much sleep as she needed in the vivarium. But she felt used, ready for the laundry. A hot bath would help. She put it out of her mind. “Maybe we can raid a crew house for another car. Then we set the autopilot to take Parlette’s car back here.”

“That’ll take time.”

“We’ll have to take it. We’ll also have to wait till after sunset before we start.”

“Will we need darkness that early?”

“It would help. And suppose the fog cleared while we were over the void?”

“Oh.” Colonist and crew alike, the people of the Plateau loved to watch the sun setting over the void mist. The colors were never the same twice. Land along the void edge always cost three times as much as land anywhere else.

“Suddenly we’d have a thousand crew looking down at us. It might be a mistake to use the void at all. Castro may have thought of that. We’ll be safe if the fog holds. But whatever we do, we’ll have to wait till dark.”

Matt stood up and stretched muscles that felt knotted. “Okay. So we get to the Hospital. How do we get in?—Laney, what’s an electric eye?”

She told him.

“Oh. I didn’t see any light…Ultraviolet, of course, or infrared. I should be able to get over that.”

“We.”

“You’re not invisible, Laney.”

“I am if I stick close to you.”

“Phut.”

“I’ll have to come that far with you anyway. You can’t program an autopilot.”

Matt got up to pace. “Leave that a moment. How do we get over the wall?”

“I don’t,” said Laney, and stopped. “There may be a way,” she said. “Leave it to me.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t.”

The cold breeze outside had become a wind, audible through the walls. Laney shivered, though the electric fire was hot enough. The fog beyond the south windows was growing dark.

“We’ll need guns,” she said.

“I don’t want to take one of yours. You’ve only got the two we picked up on the way to the car.”

“Matt, I know more than you do about crew. They all go in for sports of one kind or another.”

“So?”

“Some of them hunt. A long time ago Earth sent us some frozen fertilized deer and caribou ova in a cargo ramrobot. The Hospital hatched them out, grew ’em to adulthood and scattered them around the bottom edge of the glacier, north of here. There’s enough grass there to keep them happy.”

“Then we might find guns here.”

“It’s a good bet. The richer a crew is, the more sports equipment he buys. Even if he never uses it.”

The gun rack was in a room in the upper story, a room lined with paintings of more-or-less wild animals and with heads and hooves of deer and caribou. The rack held half-a-dozen air-powered rifles. They searched the room, and eventually Laney found a drawer containing several boxes of crystal slivers, each sliver two inches long.

“They look like they’d stop a bandersnatch,” said Matt. He’d never seen a bandersnatch, except in filmed maser messages from Jinx, but he knew they were big.

“They’ll stop an elk cold. But the guns only fire one at a time. You have to be accurate.”

“Makes it more sporting?”

“I guess so.”

Implementation mercy-guns fired a steady stream of tiny slivers. One would make the victim woozy; it took half a dozen to drop him in his tracks.

Matt closed and pocketed the box of oversized mercy-slivers. “Getting hit with one of these would be like being stabbed with an ice pick, even without the knockout effect. Will they kill a man?”

“I don’t know,” said Laney. She chose two guns from the rack. “We’ll take these.”

“Jay!”

Hood stopped halfway to the living room, turned, and made for the entrance hall.

Lydia Hancock was bending over Millard Parlette. She had folded his flaccid hands neatly in his lap. “Come here and have a look at this.”

Hood looked down at the stunned crew. Millard Parlette was coming around. His eyes didn’t track and wouldn’t focus, but they were open. Hood saw something else, and he bent for a closer look.

The crew’s hands didn’t match. The skin of one was mottled with age. It couldn’t be as old as Parlette must be, but he hadn’t replaced the skin in a good long time. From fingertips to elbow the arm showed a curious lack of personality, of what Hood decided was artistic continuity. Part of that might have been imagination. Hood knew in advance that Parlette must have used the organ banks continuously during his lifetime. But no imagination was needed to see that the left hand was dry and mottled and faintly callused, with cracked fingernails and receding quick.

Whereas the skin of the right hand was like a baby’s, smooth and pink, untanned, almost translucent. The quick of the fingernails ran all the way to the tips of the fingers. Many high school students could not have said the same.

“The old love-child just got a transplant job,” said Hood.

“No. Look here.” Lydia pointed to the wrist. There was a ragged band of color, something less than an inch wide, running round Parlette’s wrist. It was a dead milky-white such as Hood had never seen in human skin.

“Here too.” A similar ring circled the first joint of Parlette’s thumb. The thumbnail was cracked and dry, with a badly receding quick.

“Right, Lydia. But what is it? An artificial hand?”

“With a gun inside, maybe. Or a radio.”

“Not a radio. They’d be all over us by now.” Hood took Parlette’s right hand and rolled the joints in his fingers. He felt old bone and muscle under the baby skin, and joints that would be arthritic someday soon. “This is a real human hand. But why didn’t he get the whole thing replaced?”

“We’ll have to let him tell us.”

Hood stood up. He felt clean and rested and well fed. If they had to wait for Parlette to talk, they’d picked a nice place to wait.

Lydia asked, “How’s Laney doing with Keller?”

“I don’t know. I’m not going to try to find out.”

“That must be tough, Jay.” Lydia laughed a barking laugh. “You’ve spent half your life trying to find psychic powers on Plateau. Now one finally shows up, and he doesn’t want to play with us.”

“I’ll tell you what really bothers me about Matt Keller. I grew up with him. In school I never noticed him, except one time when he got me mad at him.” Absently he rubbed a point on his chest with two fingertips. “He was right under my nose all the time. But I was right, wasn’t I? Psi powers exist, and we can use them against the Hospital.”

“Can we?”

“Laney’s persuasive. If she can’t talk him around, I sure, can’t.”

“You’re not pretty enough.”

“I’m prettier than you.”

The barking laugh rang again. “Touché!”

“I knew it,” said Laney. “It had to be the basement.”

Two walls were covered with various kinds of small tools. Tables held an electric drill and a bandsaw. There were drawers of nails, screws, nuts…

Matt said, “Parlette the Younger must have done a lot of building.”

“Not necessarily. It may be just a hobby. Come on, Matt, get your wrists down here. I think I see the saw we want.”

Twenty minutes later he was rubbing bare wrists, scratching furiously where he’d been unable to scratch before. His arms felt ten pounds lighter without the handcuffs.

The time of waiting sat heavily on Jesus Pietro.

It was long past quitting time. From the windows of his office he could see the trapped forest as a darker blur in a darkening gray mist. He’d called Nadia and told her not to expect him home that night. The night shift was in charge of the Hospital, reinforced at Jesus Pietro’s orders with scores of extra guards.

Soon he’d have to alert them for what he expected. Right now he was trying to decide what to say.

He wasn’t about to impress them with the startling news that all of five prisoners were loose somewhere on Alpha Plateau. They would already have heard about the escape. They’d leave the mop-up job to the hunting squads.

Jesus Pietro activated the intercom. “Miss Lauessen, please connect me with all of the Hospital intercoms.”

“Will do.” She didn’t always call him Sir. Miss Lauessen had more crew blood than Jesus Pietro—she was nearly pure—and she had powerful protectors. Fortunately she was a pleasant person and a good worker. If she ever became a disciplinary problem…

“You’re on, sir.”

“This is the Head,” said Jesus Pietro. “You all know of the man captured last night infiltrating the Hospital. He and several others escaped this morning. I have information that he was scouting the Hospital defenses in preparation for an attack to take place tonight.

“Sometime between now and dawn the Sons of Earth will almost certainly attack the Hospital. You have all been issued maps of the Hospital showing the locations of automatic protective-devices installed today. Memorize them, and don’t stumble into any of the traps. I have issued orders for maximum dosage of anesthetic in these traps, and they can kill. Repeat, they can kill.

“I think it unlikely that the rebels will make any kind of frontal attack.” Unlikely, indeed! Jesus Pietro smiled at the understatement. “You should be alert for attempts to infiltrate the Hospital possibly by using our own uniforms. Keep your identification handy. If you see someone you do not recognize, ask for his ident. Compare him with the photo. The rebels have not had time to forge idents.

“One last word. Don’t be reluctant to shoot each other.”

He signed off, waited for Miss Lauessen to clear the lines, then had her contact the Power Sections. “Cut off all power to the colonist regions of the Plateau until dawn,” he told them.

The men of Power took pride in their work, and their work was to keep the power running. There were loud protests. “Do it,” said Jesus Pietro, and cut them off.

Once again he thought longingly of issuing death darts to his men. But then they would be afraid to shoot each other. Worse, they’d fear their own weapons. Never since the Covenant of Planetfall had Implementation used deadly weapons. In any case the poison slivers had been stored so long that they’d probably lost their effectiveness.

He’d raised hell with tradition tonight; there’d be hell to pay if nothing happened. But he knew something would. It wasn’t just the fact that this was the last chance for the rebels to get their prisoners out of the vivarium, it was the cold certainty in Jesus Pietro’s viscera. Something would happen.

A vague red line divided black sky from black land. It faded gradually, and suddenly the Hospital lights came on outside, making the night white. Somebody brought Jesus Pietro dinner, and he ate hurriedly, and kept the coffeepot when the tray was gone.

“Down there,” said Laney.

Matt nodded and pushed in the fan levers. They dropped toward a medium-sized dwelling that at first glance looked like a large, flat haystack. There were windows in the haystack, and on one side was a porchlike platform. Under the porch was an oddly curved swimming pool. Lights showed at the windows, and the swimming pool area blazed with light. The water itself was lit from underneath. There was no rooftop landing-zone, but on the other side of the house were two cars.

“I’d have picked an empty house, myself.” Matt was commenting, not criticizing. He’d decided hours ago that Laney was the expert in rebellion.

“Then what? Even if you found a car, where would you get the keys? I picked this one because most of them will be out in plain sight by the pool. There, see them? Hover the car and I’ll see how many I can pick off.”

They’d flown east along the void, flying blind in the fog, staying far from the edge, so that even the sound of their fans would not carry. Finally, miles east of the Parlette mansion, they’d turned inland. Matt flew with the gun balanced beside him on the seat. He’d never owned anything with such power in it. It gave him a warm feeling of security and invulnerability.

Laney was in the back seat, where she could fire from either window. Matt couldn’t tell how many people were down around the swimming pool. But the guns had telescopic sights.

There were pops like balloons exploding. “One,” said Laney. “Two. Oop, here comes another…Three, and out. Okay, Matt, drop her fast. Yeee! Not that fast, Matt.”

“Listen, did I get us down or didn’t I?”

But she was out and running for the house. Matt followed more slowly. The swimming pool steamed like a huge bathtub. He saw two fallen crew near the pool, and a third near the glass doors to the house, and he blushed, for they were naked. Nobody had ever told him that crew threw nude swimming-parties. Then he noticed blood pooling under a woman’s neck, and he stopped blushing. Clothing was trivia here.

From the pool area the house still looked like a haystack, but with more normal solid structures showing through the grassy yellow sides. Inside it was vastly different from Geoffrey Eustace Parlette’s house; the walls were all curved, and a conical false fireplace occupied the center of the living room. But there, was the same air of luxury.

Matt heard a pop like a balloon exploding, and he ran.

He rounded a door jamb as he heard the second pop. A man stood behind a polished table dialing a handphone. He was beginning to fall as Matt saw him: a brawny middle-aged crew wearing nothing but a few drops of water and an expression of ultimate terror. He was looking straight at Laney. One hand pawed at a blood spot on his ribs. His terror seemed to fade as he fell, but Matt remembered it. Being hunted was bad in itself, but being hunted naked must be far worse. Naked had always been synonymous with “unprotected.”

“Try the upstairs,” said Laney. She was reloading the gun. “We’ll have to find where they changed. If you find a pair of pants, search the pockets for keys. Hurry; we can’t stay here long.”

He came down a few minutes later with a bunch of keys dangling from his finger. “They were in the bedroom,” he said.

“Good. Throw ’em away.”

“Was that a funny?”

“I found these.” She too had a key ring. “Think it through. Those clothes upstairs must belong to the owner of the house. If we take his car, Implementation can trace it back here. It may not matter; I can’t think of any way they could trace us from here back to Parlette’s. But if we take a visitor’s car, they can’t trace us anywhere. So these are the ones we want. You can ditch yours.”

They went back to the pool area for Parlette’s car. Laney opened the dash and fiddled inside. “I don’t dare send it back,” she muttered. “Harry’ll have to use the other one. Ah…So I’ll just send it ten miles up and tell it to head south forever. Okay, Matt, let’s go.”

They found a key to fit one of the cars on the roof. Matt flew, east and north, directly toward the Hospital.

The fog had not been abnormally thick on the ground, but at this height it was the edge of Creation. Matt flew for an hour before he saw a faint yellow blur to the left.

“The Hospital.” Laney agreed. They turned.

A faint yellow blur on the left…and white lights forming and clarifying all around them.

Matt dropped the car instantly.

They came down hard on water. As the car bobbed to the surface, they dived out opposite doors. Matt came up gasping with the cold. The fans washed spray over him, and he turned his face to avoid it. Ducks quacked in panic.

The white lights were dropping toward them. Matt called, “Where are we?”

“Parlette Park, I think.”

Matt stood up in the water, waist deep, holding his gun high. The car skidded across the duck pond, hesitated at the edge, and then continued on until it nudged into a hedge. The fog was turning yellowish gray as car lights dropped toward the pond.

A thought struck him. “Laney. Got your gun?”

“Yah.”

“Test it.”

He heard it puff. “Good,” he said, and pitched his own gun away. He heard it splash.

Car lights were settling all around them. Matt swam toward the sound of Laney’s shot until he bumped into her. He took her arm and whispered, “Stay close.” They waded toward shore. He could feel her shivering. The water was cold, but when they stood up, the wind was colder.

“What happened to your gun?”

“I threw it away. My whole purpose in life is being scared, isn’t it? Well, I can’t get scared with a gun in my hand.”

They stumbled onto the grass. White lights surrounded them at ground level, faintly blurred by the lifting mist. Others hovered overhead, spotlights casting a universal glow over the park. In that light men showed as running black silhouettes. A car settled on the water behind them, gently as a leaf.

“Put me through to the Head,” said Major Chin. He rested at ease in the back seat of his car. The car sat a foot above the water on a small duck pond in Parlette Park, supported on its ground-effect air cushion. In such a position it was nearly invulnerable to attack.

“Sir?…We’ve caught a stolen car…Yes, sir, it must have been stolen; it landed the moment we flew over to investigate. Went down like a falling elevator…It was flying straight toward the Hospital. I imagine we’re about two miles southwest of you. They must have abandoned the car immediately after landing it on a duck pond…Yes, sir, very professional. The car ran into a hedge and just stayed there, trying to butt its way through on autopilot…License number B—R—G—Y…No, sir, nobody in it, but we’ve surrounded the area. They won’t get through…No, sir, nobody’s seen them yet. They may be in the trees. But we’ll smoke them out.”

A puzzled expression chased itself across his smooth round face. “Yes, sir,” he said, and signed off. He thought about directing the search by beltphone, but he had no further orders to give. All around him were the lights of police cars. The search pattern was fixed. When someone found something, he’d call.

But what had the Head meant by that last remark? “Don’t be surprised if you don’t find anyone.”

His eyes narrowed. The car a decoy, on autopilot? But what would that accomplish?

Another car flying in above him. This empty car to hold his attention while the other got through.

He used the beltphone. “Carson, you there? Lift your car out of there. Up to a thousand feet. Turn on your lights and hover and see what you can pick up on infrared. Stay there until we call off the search.”

It was some time before he found out how badly he’d missed the mark.

“Calling Major Chin,” said Doheny, hovering one hundred feet above Parlette Park. Controlled excitement tinged his voice with the thrill of the chase.

“Sir? I’ve got an infrared spot just leaving the pond…Could be two people; this fog is messing up my image…Western shore. They’re out now, moving toward where all the men are milling around…You don’t? They’re there; I swear it…Okay, okay, but if they aren’t there, then something’s wrong with my infrascope—sir…Yes, sir.”

Annoyed but obedient, Doheny settled back and watched the dim red spot merge with the bigger spot that was a car motor. That tears it, he thought; that makes them police, whether they’re real or not.

He saw the larger infrared source move away, leaving behind a second source smaller than a car but comfortably bigger than one man. That jerked him alert, and he moved to the window to check. It was there, all right, and…

He lost interest and returned to the infrascope. The cloverleaf-shaped source was still there, not moving, the right color to be four unconscious men. A man-sized source separated itself from the milling mass around the abandoned car, moving toward the cloverleaf source. Seconds later there was pandemonium.

Gasping, wheezing, running for their lives, they pelted out of Parlette Park and into a wide, well-lighted village walk. Matt gripped Laney’s wrist as they ran, so that she couldn’t “forget about him” and wander off on her own. As they reached the walk, Laney pulled back on his arm.

“Okay…We can…relax now.”

“How far…to the Hospital?”

“’Bout…two miles.”

Ahead of them the white lights of Implementation cars faded behind a lighted dome of fog as they chased an empty car on autopilot. A yellow glow touched the fading far end of the walk: the lights of the Hospital.

The walk was a rectangular pattern of red brick, luxuriously wide, with great spreading chestnut trees planted down the middle in a pleasantly uneven row. Street lights along the sides illuminated old and individualistic houses. The chestnuts swayed and sang shrilly in the wind. The wind blew the still-thinning fog into curls and streamers; it cut steel-cold through wet clothes and wet skin to reach meat and marrow.

“We’ve got to get some clothes,” said Matt.

“We’ll meet someone. We’re bound to. It’s only nine.”

“How could those crew stand it? Swimming!”

“The water was hot. Probably they had a sauna bath waiting somewhere. I wish we did.”

“We should have taken that car.”

“Your power wouldn’t have hidden us. At night they couldn’t see your face in a car window. They’d have seen a stolen car, and they’d have bathed it in sonics, which is just what they must be doing now.”

“And why did you insist on stripping that policeman? And having got the damn suit, why did you throw it away?”

“For the Mist Demons’ sake, Matt! Will you trust me?”

“Sorry. We could either of us use that coat.”

“It’s worth it. Now they’ll be looking for one man in an Implementation uniform. Hey! In front of me, quick!”

A square of light had appeared several houses down. Matt stepped in front of her and stooped, hands on knees, so she could use his shoulder as a gun rest.

It had worked on four police in Parlette Park. It worked now. A crew couple appeared in the light. They turned and waved to their hosts, turned again and moved down the steps, hunching slightly against the wind. The closing door cut the light from them and left them as dim moving shadows. As they touched the brick, they crossed the flat trajectories of two hunting slivers.

Matt and Laney stripped them and left them propped against a garden hedge for the sun to find.

“Thank the Mist Demons,” said Matt. He was still shivering inside the dry clothes.

Laney was already thinking ahead. “We’ll stick with the houses as far as we can. These houses give off a lot of infrared. They’ll screen us. Even if a car does spot us, he’ll have to drop and question us to be sure we’re not crew.”

“Good. What happens when we run out of houses?”

Laney didn’t answer for a long time. Matt didn’t press her. Finally she said, “Matt, there’s something I’d better tell you.”

Again he didn’t press her.

“As soon as we get through the Wall—if we get through the wall—I’m going to the vivarium. You don’t have to come along, but I’ve got to go.”

“Won’t that be the first thing they expect?”

“Probably.”

“Then we’d better not. Let’s hunt down Polly first. We ought to keep the noise down as long as possible. Once your Sons of Earth come charging out, assuming we get that far, those doors will drop right away. In fact, if we—” At this point he glanced over at her and stopped.

Laney was looking straight ahead. Her face was hard and mask-like. So was her voice, deliberately hard.

“That’s why I’m telling you now. I’m going to the vivarium. That’s why I’m here.” She seemed about to break off; then she went on in a rush. “That’s why I’m here, because the Sons of Earth are in there and I’m one of them. Not because you need me, but because they need me. I need you to get me in. Otherwise I’d be trying it alone.”

“I see,” said Matt. He was about to go on, but—no, he couldn’t say that. He’d leave himself wide open to be slapped down, and in this, mood Laney would do it. Instead he said, “What about Polly’s big secret?”

“Millard Parlette knows it too. He seemed eager to talk. If he isn’t, Lydia will get it out of him anyway.”

“So you don’t need Polly anymore.”

“That’s right. And if you’ve got the idea I’m here for love of you, you can forget that too. I’m not trying to be boorish, Matt, or cruel either. I just want you to know where you stand. Otherwise you’ll be counting on me to make intelligent decisions.

“You’re transportation, Matt. We need each other to get in. Once we’re inside I’ll go straight to the vivarium, and you can do, whatever you have to to stay alive.”

For some time they walked in silence, arm in arm, a crew couple strolling home along a distance too short to use a car. Other crew appeared from time to time. Mostly they walked quickly, bent against the wind, and they ignored Matt and Laney and each other in their hurry to get out of the cold. Once a good dozen men and women, varying from merely high to falling-down drunk, poured into the street ahead of them, marched four houses down, and began banging on the door. Matt and Laney watched as the door opened and the partygoers poured in. And suddenly Matt felt intensely lonely. He gripped Laney’s arm a little tighter, and they went on.

The brick walk swung away to the left, and they followed it around. Now there were no houses on the right. Just trees, high and thick, screening the Hospital from view. The barren defense perimeter must be just the other side.

“Now what?”

“We follow it,” said Laney. “I think we ought to go in along the trapped forest.”

She waited for him to ask why, but he didn’t. She told him anyway. “The Sons of Earth have been planning an attack on the Hospital for decades. We’ve been waiting for the right time, and it never came. One of the things we planned was to go in along the edge of the trapped woods. The woods themselves are so full of clever widgets that the guards on that side probably never notice it.”

“You hope.”

“You bet.”

“What do you know about the Hospital defenses?”

“Well, you ran into most of them last night. A good thing you had the sense to stay out of the trapped woods. There are two electric-eye rings. You saw the wall; guns and spotlights all over it. Castro probably put extra men on it tonight, and we can bet he closed off the access road. Usually they leave it open, but it’s easy enough to close the electric-eye ring and shut off power to the gate.”

“And inside the wall?”

“Guards. Matt, we’ve been assuming that all these men will be badly trained. The Hospital’s never been under direct attack. We’re outnumbered—”

“Yes, we are, aren’t we?”

“But we’ll be dealing with guards who don’t really believe there’s anything to guard against.”

“What about traps? We can’t fight machinery.”

“Practically none in the Hospital—at least, not usually. There are things Castro could set up in an emergency. In the slowboats there could be anything; we just don’t know. But we won’t be going near the slowboats. Then there are those damn vibrating doors.”

Matt nodded, a swift vicious jerk of his chin.

“Those doors surprised us all. We should have been warned.”

“By who?”

“Never you mind. Stop a second…Right. This is the place. We go through here.”

“Laney.”

“Yah? There are pressure wires in the dirt. Step on the roots only as we go through.”

“What happened Friday night?”

She turned back to look at his face, trying to read what he meant. She said, “I happened to think you needed me.”

Matt nodded slowly. “You happened to think right.”

“Okay. That’s what I’m there for. The Sons of Earth are mostly men. Sometimes they get horribly depressed. Always planning, never actually fighting, never winning when they do, and always wondering if they aren’t doing just what Implementation wants. They can’t even brag except to each other, because not all the colonists are on our side. Then, sometimes, I can make them feel like men again.”

“I think I need my ego boosted about now.”

“What you need right now, brother, is a good scare. Just keep thinking scared, and you’ll be all right. We go through here—”

“I just thought of something.”

“What’s that?”

“If we’d stayed here this afternoon, we’d have saved all this trouble.”

“Will you come on? And don’t forget to step on the roots!”

XParlette’s Hand

XDarkness covered most of Mount Lookitthat.

The crew never knew it. The lights of Alpha Plateau burned undimmed. Even in the houses along the Alpha-Beta cliff, with a view across Beta Plateau toward the distant, clustered town lights of Gamma and Iota, tonight that view was blanked by fog; and who was to know that the clustered lights were dark?

In the colonist regions there was fear and fury, but it couldn’t touch Alpha Plateau.

No real danger threatened. On Gamma and Iota there were no hospitals where patients might die in dark operating theaters. No cars would crash without street lights. Spoiling meat in butcher shop freezers would cause no famine; there were the fruit and nut forests, the crops, the herds.

But there was fear and fury. Was something wrong, up there where all power originated? Or was it a prank, a punishment, an experiment—some deliberate act of Implementation?

You couldn’t travel without lights. Most people stayed where they were, wherever they were. They bedded down where they could; for colonists it was near bedtime anyway. And they waited for the lights to come back.

They would give no trouble, Jesus Pietro thought. If danger came tonight, it would not come from down there.

Equally certain, the Sons of Earth would attack, though they only numbered five. Harry Kane would not leave most of his men to die. Whatever he could do, he would do it, regardless of risk.

And Major Chin’s fugitive had escaped, was loose two miles from the Hospital, wearing a police uniform. And because he had escaped, because he was alone, because no man had seen him clearly—it had to be Matt Keller.

Five dossiers to match five fugitives. Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood: These were old friends, the most dangerous of the Sons of Earth. Elaine Mattson and Lydia Hancock and Matthew Keller: These he had come to know by heart during the long hours following the break this afternoon. He could have recognized any of them a mile away or told them their life stories.

The slimmest dossier was Matt Keller’s: two and a half skimpy pages. Mining engineer…not much of a family man…few love affairs…no evidence he had ever joined the Sons of Earth.

Jesus Pietro was worried. The Sons of Earth, if they got this far, would go straight to the vivarium to free their compatriots. But if Matthew Keller was his own agent…

If the ghost of Alpha Plateau was not a rebel, but a thing with its own unpredictable purpose…

Jesus Pietro worried. His last sip of coffee suddenly tasted horrible, and he pushed the cup away. He noted with relief that the mist seemed to be clearing. On his desk were a stack of five dossiers and a sixth all alone and a mercy-bullet gun.

In the lights of the Hospital the sky glowed pearl gray. The wall was a monstrous mass above them, a sharp black shadow cutting across the lighted sky. They heard regular footsteps overhead.

They’d crawled here side by side, close enough to get in each other’s way. They’d broad-jumped the electric-eye barriers, Matt first, then Laney making her move while Matt stared up at the wall and willed nobody to see her. So far nobody had.

“We could get around to the gate,” said Matt.

“But if Castro’s cut off the power, we can’t get it open. No, there’s a better way.”

“Show me.”

“We may have to risk a little excitement…Here it is.”

“What?”

“The fuse. I wasn’t sure it’d be here.”

“Fuse?”

“See, a lot of Implementation is pure colonist. We have to be careful who we approach, and we’ve lost good men who talked to the wrong person, but it paid off. I hope.”

“Someone planted a bomb for you?”

“I hope so. There are only two Sons of Earth in Implementation, and either or both of them could be ringers.” She fumbled in the big, loose pockets of her mud-spattered crewish finery. “Bitch didn’t carry a lighter. Matt?”

“Lessee. Here.”

She took the lighter, then spoke deliberately. “If they see the light, we’re done for.” She crouched over the wire.

Matt crouched over her, to shield the light with his body. As he did so, he looked up. Two bumps showed on the straight black shadow of the wall. They moved. Matt started to whisper, Stop! Yellow light flared under him, and it was too late.

The heads withdrew.

Laney shook his arm. “Run! Along the wall!” He followed the pull.

“Now flat!” He landed beside her on his belly. There was a tremendous blast. Metal bits sang around them, raising tiny pings against the wall. Something bit a piece from Matt’s ear, and he slapped at it like a wasp sting.

He didn’t have time to curse. Laney jerked him to his feet, and they ran back the way they had come. There was confused shouting on the wall, and Matt looked up to meet a hundred eyes looking down. Then suddenly the area was bright as hell.

“Here!” Laney dropped to her knees, slapped his hand onto her ankle, and crawled. Matt heard mercy-bullets spattering around his ankles as he went in after her.

On the outside the hole was just big enough to crawl through on hands and knees. The bomb must have been a shaped charge. But the wall was thick, and the hole was smaller on the inside. They emerged on their bellies, with scratches. Here too was light, too bright, making Matt’s eyes water. Startlingly, there were pits all in a row in the dirt along this side of the wall, and over the cordite stink was the smell of rich, moist new earth.

“Bombs,” he said wonderingly. Pressure bombs, set off by the explosion, originally intended to explode under an invader dropping from the top of the wall. Bombs, meant to kill. “I’m flattered,” he whispered to himself, and lied.

“Shut up!” Laney turned to glare, and in the lurid artificial light he saw her eyes change. Then she turned and ran. She was beyond reach before Matt had time to react.

Feet pounded all around them, all running at top speed toward the hole in the wall. They were surrounded! Amazingly, nobody tried to stop Laney. But he saw someone jerk to a stop, then go pelting after her.

And nobody tried to stop Matt. He was invisible enough, but he’d lost Laney. Without him, she had nothing but the gun…and he didn’t know how to reach Polly. He stood there, lost.

Frowning, Harry Kane inspected hands which didn’t match. He’d seen transplantees before, but never such a patchwork man as Millard Parlette.

Lydia said, “It isn’t artificial, is it?”

“No. But it’s not a normal transplant job either.”

“He should be coming around.”

“I am,” said Millard Parlette.

Harry started. “You can talk?”

“Yes.” Parlette had a voice like a squeaky door, altered by a would-be musical crew lilt, slurred by the effects of a sonic stunner. He spoke slowly, consciously enunciating. “May I have a glass of water?”

“Lydia, get him some water.”

“Here.” The stocky virago supported the old man’s head with her arm and fed him the water in small sips.

Harry studied the man. They’d propped him against a wall in the vestibule. He hadn’t moved since then and probably couldn’t, but the muscles of his face, which had been slack and rubbery, now reflected a personality.

“Thank you,” he said, in a stronger voice. “You shouldn’t have shot me, you know.”

“You have things to tell us, Mr. Parlette.”

“You’re Harry Kane. Yes, I have things to tell you. And then I’ll want to make a deal of sorts with you.”

“I’m open to deals. What kind?”

“You’ll understand when I finish. May I start with the recent ramrobot package? This will be somewhat technical—”

“Lydia, get Jay.” Lydia Hancock quietly withdrew.

“I’ll want him to hear anything technical. Jay is our genius.”

“Jayhawk Hood? Is he here too?”

“You seem to know a good deal about us.”

“I do. I’ve been studying the Sons of Earth for longer than you’ve been alive. Jayhawk Hood has a fine mind. By all means, let us wait for him.”

“You’ve been studying us, have you? Why?”

“I’ll try to make that clear to you, Kane. It will take time. Has the situation on Mount Lookitthat ever struck you as artificial, fragile?”

“Phut. If you’d been trying to change it as long as I have, you wouldn’t think so.”

“Seriously, Kane. Our society depends entirely on its technology. Change the technology, and you change the society. Most especially you change the ethics.”

“That’s ridiculous. Ethics are ethics.”

The old man’s hand twitched. “Let me speak, Kane.”

Harry Kane was silent.

“Consider the cotton gin,” said Millard Parlette. “That invention made it economically feasible to grow cotton in quantity in the southern United States, but not in the northern states. It brought slaves in great numbers to one section of that nation while slavery died out in another. The result was a problem in racial tolerance which lasted for centuries.

“Consider feudal armor. The ethics of chivalry were based on the fact that armor was a total defense against anything which wasn’t similarly armored. The clothyard arrow, and later gunpowder, ended chivalry and made a new ethic necessary.

“Consider war as a tool of diplomacy.” Millard Parlette stopped to gasp for breath. After a moment he went on. “It was, you know. Then came poison gas, and fission bombs, and fission-fusion bombs, and a possible fission-fusion-radiocobalt bomb. Each invention made war less and less useful for imposing one’s will, more and more randomly destructive, until nationalism itself became too dangerous to be tolerated, and the United Nations on Earth became more powerful than any possible minority alliance of nations.

“Consider the settling of the Belt. A solely technological development, yet it created the wealthiest population in the system in a region which absolutely required new ethics, where stupidity automatically carries its own death penalty.” The old man stopped again, exhausted.

“I’m no historian,” said Harry. “But morals are morals. What’s unethical here and now is unethical anywhere, anytime.”

“Kane, you’re wrong. It is ethical to execute a man for theft?”

“Of course.”

“Did you know that there was once a vastly detailed science of rehabilitation for criminals? It was a branch of psychology, naturally, but it was by far the largest such branch. By the middle of century twenty-one, nearly two-thirds of all criminals could eventually be released as cured.”

“That’s silly. Why go to all that trouble when the organ banks must have been crying for—Oh. I see. No organ banks.”

The old man was finally smiling, showing perfect new white teeth. Sparkling teeth and keen gray eyes: The real Millard Parlette showed behind the cracked, wrinkled, loose rubber mask of his face.

Except that the teeth couldn’t be his, thought Harry. Nuts to that. “Go on.” he said.

“One day a long time ago I realized that the ethical situation on Mount Lookitthat was fragile. It was bound to change someday, and suddenly, what with Earth constantly bombarding us with new discoveries. I decided to be ready.”

There were footsteps on the stairs, running. Lydia and Hood burst in.

Harry Kane introduced Hood to Millard Parlette as if they were already allies. Hood took his cue and shook hands formally, wincing inside himself because Parlette’s hand still felt like something dead.

“Keep that hand,” said Millard Parlette. “Examine it.”

“We already did.”

“Your conclusions?”

“Ask you about it.”

“Apparently Earth is using biological engineering for medical purposes. There were four gifts in the ramrobot package, along with complete instructions for their care and use. One was a kind of fungus-virus symbiot. I dipped my little finger in it. Now the muck is replacing my skin.”

“Replacing—? Sorry,” said Hood. It was difficult not to interrupt Parlette, his speech was so irritatingly slow.

“That’s right. First it dissolves the epidermis, leaving only the living cells beneath. Then it somehow stimulates the DNA memory in the derma. Probably the virus component does that. You may know that a virus does not reproduce; it compels its host to produce more virus, by inserting its own reproductive chains into the host cells.”

“You may have a permanent guest,” said Hood.

“No. The virus dies after a short time. Any virus does that. Then the fungus starves.”

“Wonderful! The muck moves in a ring, leaving new skin behind!” Hood considered. “Earth really came through this time. But what happens when it reaches your eyes?”

“I don’t know. But there were no special instructions. I offered myself as a test subject because I could use a new pelt. It’s even supposed to get rid of scar tissue. It does.”

“That’s quite an advance,” said Harry.

“But you don’t see why it’s important. Kane, I showed you this first because I happened to bring it along. The others will jolt you.” Parlette let his head droop to relieve the strain on his neck. “I don’t know what animal gave birth to the second gift, but it now resembles a human liver. In the proper environment it will behave like a human liver.”

Harry’s eyes went wide and blank. Lydia made a startled hissing sound. And Millard Parlette added, “The proper environment is, of course, the environment of a human liver. They have not been tested because they are not fully grown. We can expect disadvantages due to the lack of nervous connections—”

“Keller told the truth. Little hearts and livers!” Harry exclaimed. “Parlette, was the third gift an animal to replace the human heart?”

“Yes. Nearly all muscle. It reacts to Adrenalin by speeding up, but once again the lack of nervous—”

“Yee HAH!” Harry Kane began to dance. He grabbed Lydia Hancock, spun her around and around. Hood watched, grinning foolishly. Kane abruptly released her and dropped to his knees in front of Parlette. “What’s the fourth?”

“A rotifer.”

“A…rotifer?”

“It lives as a symbiot in the human bloodstream. It does things the human body will not do for itself. Kane, it has often struck me that evolution as a process leaves something to be desired. Evolution is finished with a man once he is too old to reproduce. Thus there is no genetic program to keep him alive longer than that. Only inertia. It takes enormous medical knowledge to compen—”

“What does it do, this rotifer?”

“It fights disease. It cleans fatty deposits from the veins and arteries. It dissolves blood clots. It is too big to move into the small capillaries, and it dies on contact with air. Thus it will not impede necessary clotting. It secretes a kind of gum to patch weak points in the walls of the arteries and larger capillaries, which is reassuring to a man of my age.

“But it does more than that. It acts as a kind of catch-all gland, a supplementary pituitary. It tends to maintain the same glandular balance a man is supposed to have at around age thirty. It will not produce male and female hormones, and it takes its own good time disposing of excess adrenaline, but otherwise it maintains the balance. Or so say the instructions.”

Harry Kane sank back on his heels. “Then the organ banks are done. Obsolete. No wonder you tried to keep it secret.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“What?” Parlette opened his mouth, but Harry rode him down. “I tell you the organ banks are done for! Listen, Parlette. The skin mold replaces skin grafting, and does it better. The heart animal and the liver animal replace heart and liver transplants. And the rotifer keeps everything else from getting sick in the first place! What more do you want?”

“Several things. A kidney beast, for example. Or—”

“Quibbling.”

“How would you replace a lung? A lung destroyed by nicotine addiction?”

Hood said, “He’s right. Those four ramrobot gifts are nothing but a signpost. How do you repair a smashed foot, a bad eye, a baseball finger?” He was pacing now, in short jerky steps. “You’d need several hundred different artifacts of genetic engineering to make the organ banks really obsolete. All the same—”

“All right, cut,” said Harry Kane, and Hood was silent. “Parlette, I jumped the gun. You’re right. But I’ll give you something to think about. Suppose every colonist on Mount Lookitthat knew only the facts about the ramrobot package. Not Hood’s analysis, and not yours—just the truth. What then?”

Parlette was smiling. He shouldn’t have been, but his white teeth gleamed evenly in the light, and the smile was not forced. “They would assume the organ banks were obsolete. They would confidently expect Implementation to disband.”

“And when Implementation showed no sign of disbanding, they’d revolt! Every colonist on Mount Lookitthat! Could the Hospital stand against that?”

“You see the point, Kane. I am inclined to think the Hospital could stand against any such attack, though I would not like to gamble on it. But I am sure we could lose half the population of this planet in the bloodbath, win or lose.”

“Then—you’ve already thought of this.”

Parlette’s face twisted. His hands fluttered aimlessly and his feet jumped against the floor as the effects of the sonic gave up their hold on him. “Do you think me a fool, Harry Kane? I never made that mistake about you. I first heard of the ramrobot package six months ago, when the ramrobot sent out its maser message. I knew immediately that the present crew rule over the Plateau was doomed.”

Laney had vanished around to the left, around the great gentle curve of the Planck, while Matt stood gaping. He started after her, then checked himself. She must know of another entrance; he’d never catch her before she reached it. And if he followed her through, he’d be lost in the maze of the Hospital.

But he had to find her. She’d kept him in the dark as much as she could. Probably because she expected Castro to get him, and didn’t want him to spill anything important. She hadn’t mentioned the bomb until the fuse was in her hand, nor the detailed plans for invading the Hospital until she was already following them.

Eventually she’d have told him how to find Polly. Now he’d lost both.

Or…?

He ran toward the main entrance, dodging police who tried to run through his solid bulk. He would meet Laney at the vivarium—if she got there. But he knew only one route to reach it.

The great bronze doors swung open as he approached. Matt hesitated at the bottom of the wide stairs. Electric eyes? Then three uniformed men trotted through the entrance and down, and Matt trotted up between them. If there were electric eyes here, and men watching them, they could never keep track of the last minute’s traffic.

The doors swung shut as he went through. They almost caught him between them. He cursed in a whisper and stepped aside for a running policeman with a whistle in his mouth. Like the ultrasonic whistle the gateman had used to get in last night. He’d need one to get out. But later. He needn’t think about leaving yet.

His legs ached savagely. He slowed to a brisk walk and tried not to pant.

Right, up a flight, take a right, then a left…

VIVARIUM. He saw the door down the corridor, and he stopped where he was and sagged gratefully against a wall. He’d beaten her here. And he was horribly tired. His legs were numb, there was a singing in his head, he wanted to do nothing but breathe. A taste in his mouth and throat reminded him of the hot metal taste of the void mist when he’d bored for the bottom less than thirty-six plateau hours ago. It seemed he’d been running forever, terrified forever. His blood had carried adrenaline for too long. The wall felt soft against his back.

It was good to rest. It was good to breathe. It was good to be warm, and the Hospital walls were warm, almost too warm for a cold-weather crewish overjacket. He’d ditch it when it got too hot. Probing idly in his pockets, he found a double handful of unshelled roasted peanuts.

Corporal Halley Fox rounded the corner and stopped. He saw a crew resting against a wall, wearing his overjacket indoors. There was a ragged tear in the crew’s ear and a pool of blood below it, soaked into the neck of his overjacket. He was cracking and eating peanuts, dropping the shells on the floor.

It was strange, but not strange enough.

Halley Fox was in the third generation of a family which traditionally produced Implementation police. Naturally he had joined Implementation. His reflexes were not quick enough to make him a raider, and he made a better follower than a leader. For eight years now he had been a competent man in a good position that did not require much responsibility.

Then…last night he’d caught a colonist invading the Hospital.

This morning there’d been a break from the vivarium, the first since the vivarium was built. Corporal Fox had seen blood for the first time. Man’s blood, not drained into an organ-bank tank but spilled recklessly along a hallway in conscious murderous violence.

This evening the Head had warned of an impending attack on the Hospital. He’d practically warned Corporal Fox to shoot his own fellow guards! And everyone was taking him seriously!

Minutes ago there’d been a hell of a big blast outside the windows…and half the guards had deserted their posts to see what had happened.

Corporal Fox was slightly punch-drunk.

He had not deserted his post. Things were confused enough. He stuck to his training as something he knew to be solid. And when he saw a crew resting against a wall eating peanuts, he saluted and said, “Sir.”

Matt looked up to see a police officer standing stiff as a board, holding the short barrel of a mercy-bullet pistol slantwise across his forehead.

Effectively he disappeared. Corporal Fox continued down the hall, stepping wide around the vivarium door. At the end of the corridor he stopped, half turned, and fell.

Matt got unsteadily to his feet. The sight of the guard had damn near stopped his heart.

Laney came around fast. She saw Matt, dodged back, poked the gun around—

“Stop! It’s me!”

“Oh, Matt. I thought I’d lost you.”

He moved toward her. “I saw someone come after you. Did you get him?”

“Yah.” She looked down at Corporal Fox. “They’re badly trained. That’s something.”

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”

“Never you mind. Come on.” She moved back toward the vivarium.

“Hold it. Where do I find Polly?”

“I really don’t know. We’ve never known where they administer the coffin cure.” She reached for the door handle. Matt caught her wrist. “Come now, Matt,” she said. “You had fair warning.”

“The door’s Booby-trapped.”

“Oh?”

“I saw the way that guy walked around it.”

She frowned at the handle. Then, with effort, she tore a strip from the bottom of Matt’s jacket. She tied it to the handle, moved back as far as it would reach.

Matt backed away. He said, “Before you do something irrevocable, won’t you please tell me where to find Polly?”

“Honestly, Matt, I don’t know.” She wasn’t trying to hide the fact that he was an unneeded distraction.

“Okay, where’s Castro’s office?”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“I’m a fanatic. Like you.”

That got a grin. “You’re crazy, but okay. You go back the way I came, turn the only way you can, and go up another flight. Follow the hall until you see signs. The signs will take you the rest of the way. The office is up against the hull of the Planck. But if you stick with me, we may find an easier way.”

“Pull then.”

Laney pulled.

The handle came down and clicked. Immediately something fired from the ceiling: a conical burst of mercy-bullets spattering the area where anyone would have stood to pull the handle. And a siren blared in the corridor, loud and raucous and familiar.

Laney jumped straight back in surprise, fetched up against the wall. The door swung open a couple of inches. “In,” she cried, and dove through, followed by Matt.

The puffs of mercy-bullets were lost in the sound of the siren. But Matt saw four men in the room, crouched in target-shooting position in a line opposite the door. They were still firing as Laney fell.

“Doomed? Really?” Even to himself Harry sounded inane. But he’d expected no such easy capitulation.

“How many Sons of Earth are there?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I can tell you,” said Millard Parlette. “Less than four hundred. On all of Mount Lookitthat there are less than seven hundred active rebels. For three hundred years you and your kind have been trying to build a rebellion. You’ve made no progress at all.”

“Precious little.”

“You enlist your rebels from the colonists, naturally. Your trouble is that most colonists don’t really want the crew to lose control of the Plateau. They’re happy the way they are. Yours is an unpopular cause. I tried to explain why before; let me try again.” With obvious effort he moved his arms enough to fold his hands in his lap. Random muscles in his shoulders twitched from time to time.

“It’s not that they don’t think they could do better than the crew if it came to the point. Everybody always thinks that. They’re afraid of Implementation, yes, and they won’t risk their good blood and bone to make the change, not when Implementation has all the weapons on the Plateau and controls all the electrical power too.

“But that isn’t the point. The point is that they don’t really think that the crew rule is wrong.

“It all depends on the organ banks. On the one hand, the organ banks are a terrible threat, not only a death penalty, but an ignominious way to die. On the other hand, the banks are a promise. A man who deserves it and can pay for it, even a colonist, can get medical treatment at the Hospital. But without the organ banks there’d be no treatment. He’d die.

“Do you know what your rebels would do if they could beat the crew to their knees? Some would insist that the organ banks be abolished. They’d be killed or ostracized by their own members. The majority would keep the banks just as they are, but use the crew to feed them!”

His neck was stronger now, and he looked up to see patient stares. A good audience. And he had them hooked, finally.

“Up to now,” he went on, “you couldn’t start a rebellion because you couldn’t convince enough fighting men that your cause was just. Now you can. Now you can convince the colonists of Mount Lookitthat that the organ banks are and should be obsolete. Then wait a little. When Implementation doesn’t disband, you move.”

Harry Kane said, “That’s exactly what I was thinking, only you seem to be way ahead of me. Why did you call me silly?”

“You made a silly assumption. You thought I was trying to keep the ramrobot package a secret. Quite the contrary. Just this afternoon I—”

“I’ve finally got it,” said Hood. “You’ve decided to join the winning side, have you Parlette?”

“You fool. You bad-mouthed colonist fool.”

Jay Hood flushed. He stood perfectly straight with his arms at his sides and his fists clenched. He was no angrier than Parlette. The old man was trying to shift his weight, and every muscle in his body was jumping as a result. He said, “Do you think so little of me, to think I’d follow such motives?”

“Relax, Jay. Parlette, if you have something to say, say it. If we jump to the wrong conclusions, please assume that you’re expressing yourself badly, and don’t try to shift the blame.”

“Why don’t you all count to infinity?” Lydia Hancock suggested.

Parlette spoke slowly and evenly. “I am trying to prevent a bloodbath. Is that clear enough for you? I’m trying to prevent a civil war that could kill half the people in this world.”

“You can’t do it,” said Harry Kane. “It’s coming.”

“Kane, cannot you and I and your associates work out a new…constitution for Mount Lookitthat? Obviously the Covenant of Planetfall will no longer work.”

“Obviously.”

“I made a speech today. In fact, I seem to be spending the whole damn day and night making speeches. This afternoon I called an emergency session—rammed it through the Council. You know what that means?”

“Yah. You were talking to every crew on the Plateau, then.”

“I told them what was in ramrobot package one-forty-three. I showed them. I told them about the organ-bank problem and about the relationship between ethics and technology. I told them that if the secret of the ramrobot ever reached the colonists, the colonists would revolt en masse. I did my damndest, Kane, to scare the pants off them.

“I’ve known from the beginning that we couldn’t keep the secret forever. Now that thirty thousand people know it, it’ll be out even faster, even if we were all killed this instant. I did all this, Kane, in order to warn them. To scare them. When they realize that the secret is out, they may be scared enough to dicker. The smart ones will.

“I’ve been planning this a long time, Kane. I didn’t even know what it was that Earth would ship us. It might have been a regeneration serum, or designs for cheap alloplasty components, or even a new religion. Anything. But something was coming, and here it is, and, Kane, we’ve got to try to stop the bloodbath.” Gone were Parlette’s shortness of breath and his clumsy attempts to make his lips and tongue work against a sonic blast. His voice was smooth and lilting, rising and falling, a little hoarse but terribly earnest. “We’ve got to try. Maybe we can find something both the crew and the colonists can agree on.”

He stopped, and three heads nodded, almost in reflex.

XIInterview With the Head

XIHe saw the four men, and be saw Laney stagger. He tried to turn and run, and in that instant there was a godawful clang, a sound like being inside a church bell. He jumped to the side instead, knowing the hall must be full of sonics.

“Shut the damn door!” a voice yelled. One of the guards jumped to obey. Matt felt the, numbness of the sonics, and his knees went watery. He kept his eyes on his four enemies.

One bent over Laney. “All alone,” he said. “Crazy. Wonder where she got the clothes?”

“Off a crew, maybe.”

Another guard laughed brayingly.

“Shut up, Rick. Come on, lend a hand. Let’s get her to a chair.”

“A hunting gun. Wouldn’t you hate to get shot with this?”

“She came a long way to get to the vivarium. Most of ’em we have to bring.”

The braying laugh again.

“Gas bomb didn’t go off.” One of the guards kicked a metal canister. Immediately the canister began hissing. “Nose plugs, quick!”

They fumbled in their pockets, produced things that looked like large rubber false noses.

“Good. We should have done this before. If we keep the room filled with gas, anyone who comes charging in will drop right away.”

Matt had gotten the message. He’d held his breath from the moment he heard the hiss. Now he walked up to the nearest guard and wrenched his false nose away. The man gasped in surprise, looked directly at Matt, and crumpled.

The false nose had a band to fit around the neck, and some kind of adhesive to form a skin-tight lock around the nose. Matt got it on and found himself breathing through it, with difficulty. It was not comfortable.

“Rick? Oh, that idiot. Where the Mist Demons is his nose plug?”

“I’ll bet the jerk forgot to bring it.”

“Get me Major Jansen, please.” One of the guards was using his handphone. “Sir? A girl just tried to crash the vivarium. Yes, a girl, in crew clothing…That’s right, just one…She’s sleeping in one of the seats, sir. We figured as long as she’d gone to all that trouble getting here…”

Matt still felt dizzy, though the door must be blocking the vibrations of the big sonics. Had he been hit by an unnoticed mercy-bullet?

He bent over Laney. She was out of it, for sure. Punctured by far too many anesthetic slivers, her lungs filled with gas, a rhythmic sleep-inducing current playing through her brain…?

He found three wires leading to her headset. He pulled them. Now she was a time bomb. When everything else wore off, she’d wake up. More of a firecracker, actually, with four armed guards in the room.

“One more thing, sir. The place is full of gas. It’s just as well, we think.

“No, sir, we haven’t. If you’ll turn off the sonics, I’ll look.” He turned from the phone. “Watts, check in the hall and see if anybody dropped dead out there.”

“But the sonics are still going!”

“They should be off. Try it.”

A ballpoint pen peeped from the shirt pocket of the unconscious guard. Matt saw it, snatched it, and drew rapidly: a heart on the guard’s forehead, three drops running down the straight bridge of the nose.

The one called Watts opened the door a crack. No sonic numbness touched him. He opened it farther. “Hey!” He snaked out and ran down the hall toward Fox’s body. Matt was on his heels.

“It’s a guard,” he called back.

“Check the ident.”

Watts began going through Fox’s pockets. He looked up once as Matt sidled past him, then continued with his work.

“It’s Elaine Mattson,” said Jesus Pietro. “Has to be. You’re sure she was alone?”

“If there’d been anyone with her, he would have been in the same condition. I think she was alone, sir.”

That made sense. Which was hardly a guarantee, Jesus Pietro thought. “Thank you, Major Jansen. How are the hunting squads doing?”

“They’ve found nothing, sir. They’re still quartering Alpha Plateau. Shall I see how far they’ve gotten?”

“Yes. Call me back.” He hung up and tilted back his desk chair, with a frown wrinkling his forehead.

They had to be somewhere on Alpha. And they couldn’t all be attacking the Hospital.

Elaine Mattson, captured. Well and good. She must have set off that mysterious explosion to cover her entrance. Had she also worn that Implementation uniform? It might be. She’d pass at a distance, long enough to knock out a crew woman and get a better disguise.

Maybe. Maybe.

He picked up the sixth dossier, the one lying alone next to the stunner. Polly Tournquist’s life:

Born twenty-two years ago, firstborn in a family with no known connection to the Sons of Earth. Her father’s left eye had come from the organ banks, after he’d lost his own to a fishing fly. A good, loyal colonist. A disciplinarian in his own family.

Raised on Delta, sector four. Studied at Colony University, with good grades. She’d met Jayhawk Hood there. Her first love affair. Why? Hood would have made a bad gigolo—small, puny, not good-looking—but some girls like a man with a mind.

Finished high school and college, went to work at Delta Retransmitting Station. Affair with Hood had cooled to friendship, apparently. But she’d joined the Sons of Earth. Revolting against authority? Her father would have turned her in, had he known. Look at the lines of disapproval in that ferret face…hmm? Without those lines, he’d look something like Jayhawk Hood!

It all helped. By now she’d been in the coffin cure for thirty hours. If a voice came to her now, the only sensory stimulus in her cosmos, she’d listen. And believe. As others had. Especially if the voice appealed to the right incidents in her past.

But for now she’d have to wait. The Sons of Earth came first. One down, four to go…Jesus Pietro reached for his cup and found the coffee stone cold.

A question touched, his mind. He grimaced, pushed it back to wherever it had come from. He opened his deskphone and said, “Miss Lauessen, will you order me more coffee.”

“Are you sure? You’ll be awash with the stuff.”

“Just get it. And”—the same thought crawled out into the light, and before he could stop himself—“get me Matthew Keller’s file. Not the one on my desk, the one in the dead file.”

She came in a minute later, slender and blonde and looking coolly remote, carrying a folder and a pot of coffee. He opened the folder at once. She frowned at him, started to ask something, saw that he wasn’t listening, and left.

Matthew Keller. Born…Educated…Joined Sons of Earth tenth month, 2384, in middle age. Why so late? Why at all? Became a professional killer and thief, stealing for the Sons of Earth, killing Implementation officers foolish enough to venture into the colonist regions in insufficient numbers. Thief? Damn! Could Keller senior have stolen that car? The car Keller junior rode straight down into the void! Trapped in Sector 28, Beta, fourth month, 2397; captured, convicted of treason, disassembled for the organ banks. Oh, Jesus Pietro, you clever liar, you. Half the Hospital must know he really went off the edge, forty miles down to Mist Demons and hellfire.

So? Jesus Pietro dumped his cold coffee, into a wastebasket, poured a fresh cup, and sipped.

A flicking shadow somewhere at the corner of his eye. A noise. Someone was in the room. The cup jumped in his hand, searing his lip. He put it down fast and looked around.

He went back to the dossier.

Matthew Keller. What idiot whim had made him ask for this? Keller senior was dead. Crippled, crawling, he’d gone off the void edge split seconds before—

“Castro.”

Jesus Pietro looked up with a start.

He looked down. Treatment reports…Not good, but no disaster. Too many people had been injured in the mass escape, but some could be saved. Luckily the organ banks were full. And could be filled again, from the vivarium, once the Surgery Section found time. Why did everything have to happen at once?

“Castro!”

Jesus Pietro’s chin jerked up—and he caught himself before his eyes followed. He’d done this once before, hadn’t he? There’d been a noise…and someone had called his name…and what the Mist Demons was someone doing unannounced in Jesus Pietro’s private office? He let his eyes travel to the edge of the desk—

Crew clothing.

But it was rumpled and dirty, and it didn’t fit, and the hands that rested flat on his desk had dirty short fingernails. A colonist in crew clothing, for sure. In Jesus Pietro’s office. Unannounced. He’d gone past Miss Lauessen, unannounced.

“You.”

“That’s right. Where is she?”

“You’re Matthew Keller.”

“Yes.”

“How did you get in here?” Somehow he kept the tremor out of his voice, and was proud of it.

“None of your business. Where is she?”

“Who?”

“Don’t give me that. Where’s Polly?”

“I can’t tell you that. Or anything else,” said Jesus Pietro. He kept his eyes fixed on the man’s stolen gold belt buckle.

At the periphery of his vision he saw two big, none-too-clean hands reach down to his own right hand. His visitor leaned heavily on that hand, and when Jesus Pietro belatedly tried to withdraw it, he couldn’t. He saw his visitor take hold of his middle finger and bend it back.

The pain was shocking. Jesus Pietro’s mouth came wide open, and he looked up to plead…

He was reaching for Polly Tournquist’s folder when agony struck his hand. He snatched it back as if trying to get it off a hot stove. Reflex. The middle finger stuck out at right angles to the knuckles.

Mist Demons, it hurt! How the blazes had he—

“Well, Castro?”

He remembered enough, barely enough, not to look up. Someone or something was in this room, something or someone with the power to make people forget. He made a logical connection and said, “You.”

“Right. Where’s Polly Tournquist?”

“You. Matthew Keller. So you came for me.”

“Let’s not play games. Where’s Polly?”

“Were you in the car that attacked the Hospital? The one that dove straight down—”

“Yes.”

“Then how—”

“Shut up, Castro. Tell me where Polly is. Now. Is she alive?”

“You’ll get no information from me. How did you get back from the void?”

“I flew back.”

“I mean the first time.”

“Castro, I could break every finger in both your hands. Now where’s Polly? Is she dead?”

“Would I talk if you did?”

There was hesitation. Then two arms converged on his right hand. Jesus Pietro yelped with the pain and reached with clawed fingers for a pair of eyes…

He was halfway through a stack of reports when agony bit into his hand. He found two fingers of his right hand bent back at right angles to the palm. With his teeth clenched hard on a scream, Jesus Pietro turned on the intercom. “Get me the doctor.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Just get me the—” His eyes caught a flash of movement. Someone in the office with him!

“You’re right,” said a voice. “I can’t torture anything out of you.”

Faint, fading memories told him not to look up. He said, “You.”

“Go fly a bicycle.”

“Matthew Keller?”

Silence.

“Answer me, damn you! How did you get back?”

Two hands slapped together on Jesus Pietro’s right hand. His whole face clamped down on the scream, and Jesus Pietro snatched up his stunner and looked wildly for a target.

He looked up again when the doctor entered.

“No point in replacing them,” said the doctor. “They’re only dislocated.” And he deadened Jesus Pietro’s arm, set the fingers, and sprinted them. “How the Mist Demons did you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You dislocated two fingers, and you can’t quite recall—”

“Get off my back. I said I can’t remember what happened to my hand. But I think that infernal ghost, Matthew Keller, must have had something to do with it.”

The doctor gave him a very peculiar look. And left.

Jesus Pietro looked ruefully at his right arm, sprinted and dangling from a sling. Oh, fine. And he genuinely couldn’t remember anything about it.

Which was why he kept thinking about Matthew Keller.

But why did he keep thinking about Polly Tournquist?

It was time and past time for the next phase of her treatment. But surely she could wait? Of course she could.

He tried his coffee. Too cool. He poured it back into the pot and started fresh.

His arm felt like dead meat.

Why did he keep thinking about Polly Tournquist?

“Phut!” He stood up clumsily, because of his bound arm. “Miss Lauessen,” he told the intercom, “get me two guards. I’m going over to the Planck.”

“Will do.”

He was reaching for the stunner on his desk when something caught his eye. It was the dossier for Matthew Keller, senior. A crude drawing defaced its yellow cover.

Two open arcs, joined, in black ink. Three small closed loops beneath.

The bleeding heart. It certainly hadn’t been there before.

Jesus Pietro opened the folder. He could smell his own fear, and feel it, in the cool perspiration that soaked his shirt. As if he’d been afraid for hours.

Front and side views. Blue eyes, yellow hair, skin beginning to puff out with age…

Something stirred somewhere in Jesus Pietro’s mind. For just a moment the face in the folder became younger. Its expression changed slightly, so that it seemed both frightened and angry. There was blood soaking into its collar, and a piece freshly bitten from its ear.

“Your guards are here, sir.”

“Thank you,” said Jesus Pietro. He took one last look at the dead man and closed the folder. He put the stunner in his pocket before he left.

“I wish we could warn Laney,” said Harry Kane. “This changes everything.”

“You wouldn’t even know what to tell her yet. Here, take this out.” Mrs. Hancock put a steaming pitcher of hot cider on a tray, added four mugs.

They were in the kitchen. Hood was in the living room with Millard Parlette. Parlette, leaning on Jay Hood, had managed to stagger into the living room and into an armchair.

It had seemed a good time to call a break.

The wind screamed against black windows. To four conspirators in front of a convincing fire, drinking hot spiced cider against the cold, the living room seemed a haven.

A temporary haven.

“You’ve been thinking about this longer than we have,” said Harry. “We never dreamed the crew might compromise. Just what are you prepared to offer?”

“To start with, amnesty for the Sons of Earth, for you and whoever remains in the vivarium. That comes free. We’ll need you. Once the colonists lose faith in the crew, you’ll be the only force for law and order in the colony regions.”

“That’ll be a switch.”

“We need to discuss three types of medical care,” said Millard Parlette. “Organic transplants, the ramrobot gifts, and minor medical treatment. You already have some access to standard drugs at the medcheck stations. We can expand those. I’m sure we can offer free access to the heartbeasts and liverbeasts and so forth. For a while your colonists will have to come up to the Hospital to get treatment with the ramrobot symbiots, but eventually we can build culture tanks in Gamma and Delta and Eta.”

“Very good. What about the organ banks?”

“Right.” Millard Parlette wrapped his arms around his narrow rib cage and stared into the fire. “I couldn’t plan for that part, because I didn’t know just what technological change was coming. What are your ideas?”

“Abolish the organ banks,” Mrs. Hancock said firmly.

“Throw away tons of organic transplant material? Dump it on the grass?”

“Yes!”

“Would you also abolish crime? The organ banks are our only way to punish thieves and murderers. There are no prisons on Mount Lookitthat.”

“Then build prisons. You’ve been killing us long enough!”

Parlette shook his head.

Harry Kane intervened. “It wouldn’t work. Look, Lydia, I know how you feel, but we couldn’t do it. If we dumped all that transplant material out, we’d have the whole Plateau against us. We can’t even abolish execution by the organ banks, partly because crime would run rampant without capital punishment, and partly because there are too many crew like Parlette, who need the banks to live. If we did that, we might as well declare war here and now.”

Lydia turned appealingly to Hood.

“I pass,” said Hood. “I think you’re all ignoring something.”

Harry said, “Oh?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to wait and see. Keep talking.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lydia. “I don’t understand any of you. What have we been fighting for? What have we been dying for? To smash the organ banks!”

“You’re overlooking something, Mrs. Hancock,” Parlette said gently. “It isn’t that the crew wouldn’t agree to that, and it isn’t that the colonists wouldn’t agree to that. They wouldn’t, of course. But I won’t let you kick in the organ banks.”

“No.” Lydia’s words dripped scorn. “You’d have to die then, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would. And you need me.”

“Why? What have you got for us besides your influence and your good advice?”

“A small army. I have more than one hundred lineal descendants. They’ve been prepared for this day for a very long time. Not all of them will follow me, but most will obey my orders without question. They all have hunting weapons.”

Lydia sighed, raggedly.

“We’ll do our best, Mrs. Hancock. We can’t eliminate the organ banks, but we can eliminate the injustice.”

“What we’ll have to do,” said Harry, “is establish a first-come, first-serve basis for what’s already in the banks. Whoever gets sick first—you see what I mean. Meanwhile we set up a new code of law, so that a crew stands just as much chance of getting into the banks as a colonist.”

“Don’t push too hard there, Kane. Remember, we have to satisfy both groups.”

“Phut!” said Lydia Hancock. It was hard to tell whether she was ready to cry or to start a fistfight.

They were a circle of three, leaning toward each other across the coffeetable, holding forgotten mugs. Hood sat a little back from the coffeetable, ignored, waiting for something.

“The thing is,” said Parlette, “We can make everyone equal before the law. We can do that, and get away with it, provided that there is no redistribution of property. Do you agree to that?”

“Not completely.”

“Look at the logic. Everyone is equal in the courts. A crime is a crime. But the more property a man has, the less likely he is to want to commit a crime. It gives the crew something to protect, and it gives the colonist something to gain.”

“It makes sense, yes. But there are a few things we’ll want.”

“Go ahead.”

“Our own electrical power sources.”

“Fine. We’ll supply it free until we can build plants on Gamma and Delta. We can put hydraulic plants along the Muddy and Long Fall rivers.”

“Good. We want free access to the organ banks guaranteed.”

“That’s a problem. An organ bank is like any other bank. You can’t take out more than you put in. We’ll have less condemned criminals and a lot more sick colonists to take care of.”

Hood had his chair tilted back on two legs, with his feet on the edge of the table. His eyes were half closed, as if he was dreaming pleasant daydreams.

“Lotteries, then; fair lotteries. And heavy research into alloplasty, financed by the crew.”

“Why the crew?”

“You’ve got all the money.”

“We can work out a graduated tax. Anything else?”

“There are a lot of unjust laws. We’ll want to build houses as we see fit. No restrictions on the clothes we wear. Free travel. The right to buy machinery, any machinery, at the same price a crew pays. We’ll want to put some solid restrictions on Implementation. For—”

“Why? They’ll be police. They’ll be enforcing your laws.”

“Parlette, have you ever had a squad of police come crashing through the wall of your house, throwing mercy-bullets and sleepy gas around, dragging housecleaners into the light, tearing up the indoor lawn—”

“I’ve never been a rebel.”

“The hell you say.”

Parlette smiled. It made him look too much like a death’s head. “I’ve never been caught.”

“Point is, Implementation can do that to anyone. And does, constantly. The householder doesn’t even get an apology when they don’t find evidence of crime.”

“I hate to restrict the police. It’s a sure route to chaos.” Parlette took a long swallow of cider. “All right, how does this sound? There used to be a thing called a search warrant. If kept the UN police from entering any home unless they had a good and sufficient reason, one they could show to a judge.”

“Sounds good.”

“I can look up the details in the library.”

“Another thing. As things stand now, Implementation has an exclusive monopoly on prisoners. They catch ’em, decide whether they’re guilty, and take ’em apart. We ought to split those functions up somehow.”

“I’ve thought about that, Kane. We can establish laws such that no man can be executed until he has been declared guilty by a clear majority of ten men. Five crew, five colonists, in cases where crew and colonists are both involved. Otherwise, trial by five of the prisoner’s own social group. All trials to be public, on some special teedee channel.”

“That sounds—”

“I knew it.” Jay Hood dropped back into the discussion with a thump of chair legs on flooring. “Do you realize that every suggestion either of you has made tonight would take power away from the Hospital?”

Parlette frowned. “Perhaps. What does it matter?”

“You’ve been talking as if there were two power groups on Mount Lookitthat. There are three! You, us, and the Hospital, and the Hospital is the most powerful. Parlette, you’ve been studying the Sons of Earth for Mist Demons know how long. Have you spent any time studying Jesus Pietro Castro?”

“I’ve known him a long time.” Millard Parlette considered. “At least, I know he’s competent. I don’t suppose I really know how he thinks.”

“Harry does. Harry, what would Castro do if we tried to put all these restrictions on his police?”

“I don’t understand you,” said Millard Parlette. “Castro is a good, loyal man. He has never done anything that wasn’t in the best interests of the crew. Perhaps I don’t know him socially, but I do know that he regards himself as a servant of the crew. Anything the crew accepts, he will accept.”

“Dammit, Hood’s right,” said Harry Kane. “I know Castro better than I knew my father. I just hadn’t thought of this.”

“Jesus Pietro Castro is a good, loyal—”

“Servant of the crew. Right. Now hold on just a minute, Parlette. Let me speak.

“First of all, what crew? What crew is he loyal to?”

Parlette snorted. He picked up his mug and found it empty.

“He’s not loyal to any specific crew,” said Harry Kane. “In fact he doesn’t respect most crew. He respects you, and there are others who fit his ideals, but what he’s loyal to is a sort of ideal crew: a man who does not overspend, is polite to his inferiors and knows exactly how to treat them, and has the best interests of the colonists in his mind at all times. This image is the man he serves.

“Now, let’s look for a moment at what we propose to do. Search warrants for the Implementation police. We remove Implementation’s power to choose what colonists get the leftover materials from the organ banks. We tell them who they may and may not execute. Anything else, Jay?”

“Power. We’re taking the electrical monopoly away from the Hospital. Oh, and with less restrictions on the colonists, the police would have less work to do. Castro would have to fire some of ’em.”

“Right. Now, you don’t suppose every crew on the Plateau is going to agree with all of that, do you?”

“No, not all. Of course not. We may be able to swing a majority. At least a majority of political power.”

“Damn your majority. What crew is Castro going to be loyal to? You can name him.”

Parlette was rubbing the back of his neck. “I see your point, of course. Given that you’ve analyzed Castro correctly, he’ll follow the conservative faction.”

“He will, believe me. The crew who would rather die than accept our compromise is the man he’ll follow. And all of Implementation will follow him. He’s their leader.”

“And they’ve got all the weapons,” said Hood.

XIIThe Slowboat

XIIBleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

Why Polly Tournquist?

She could have nothing to do with the present trouble. Since Saturday evening she had been suffering sensory deprivation in the coffin cure. Why must he be haunted by the colonist girl? What was her hold on him that she could pull him away from his office at a time like this? He hadn’t felt a fascination like this since…

He couldn’t remember.

The guard in front of him stopped suddenly, pushed a button in the wall, and stepped aside. Jesus Pietro jerked back to reality. They had reached the elevator.

The doors slid back, and Jesus Pietro stepped in, followed by the two guards.

(Where’s Polly? Deep in his mind something whispered, Where is she? Subliminally, he remembered. Tell me where Polly is!)

Bleeding heart. Matthew Keller. Polly Tournquist.

Either he’d finally lost his mind—and over a colonist girl!—or there was some connection between Matthew Keller and Polly Tournquist. But he had no evidence of that at all.

Perhaps the girl could tell him.

And if she could, certainly she would.

Matt had trailed them to the end of a blind corridor. When they stopped, Matt stopped too, confused. Was Castro going to Polly, or wasn’t he?

Doors slid back in the wall, and Matt’s three guides entered. Matt followed, but stopped at the doors. The room was too small. He’d bump an elbow and get shot—

The doors closed in his face. Matt heard muted mechanical noises, diminishing.

What in blazes was it, an airlock? And why here?

He was at the end of a dead-end corridor, lost in the Hospital. The Head and two guards were on the other side of those doors. Two guards, armed and alert—but they were the only guides he had. Matt pushed the big black button which had opened the doors.

This time they stayed closed.

He pushed it again. Nothing happened.

Was he doing exactly what the guard had done? Had the guard used a whistle, or a key?

Matt looked down the hall to where it bent, wondering if he could make his way back to Castro’s office. Probably not. He pushed the button again…

A muted mechanical noise, nearly inaudible, but rising.

Presently the doors opened to show a tiny, boxlike room, empty.

He stepped in, crouched slightly, ready for anything. There were no doors in the back. How had the others left? Nothing. Nothing but four buttons labeled One, Two, Door Open, Emergency Stop.

He pushed them in order. One did nothing. He pushed Two, and everything happened at once.

The doors closed.

The room started to move. He felt it, vibration and uncanny pressure against the soles of his feet. He dropped to his hands and knees, choking off a yell.

The pressure was gone, but still the room quivered with motion, and still there was the frightening, unfamiliar sound of machinery. Matt waited, crouching on all fours.

There was a sudden foreign feeling in his belly and gonads, a feel of falling. Matt said, “Wump!” and clutched at himself. The box jarred to a stop.

The doors opened. He came out slowly.

He was on a high narrow bridge. The moving box was at one end, supported in four vertical girders that dropped straight down into a square hole in the roof of the Hospital. At the other end of the bridge was a similar set of girders, empty.

Matt had never been this high outside a car. All of the Hospital was below him, lit by glare lights: the sprawling amorphous structure of rooms and corridors, the inner grounds, the slanting wall, the defense perimeter, the trapped forest, and the access road. And rising up before him was the vast black hull of the Planck.

Matt’s end of the bridge was just outside what was obviously the outer hull of the ancient slowboat. The bridge crossed the chisel-sharp ring of the leading edge, so that its other end was over the attic.

The Planck. Matt looked down along the smooth black metal flank of the outer hull. For most of its length the ship was cylindrical; but the tail, the trailing edge, flared outward for a little distance, and the leading edge was beveled like a chisel, curving in at a thirty-degree angle to close the twenty-foot gap between outer and inner hulls, the gap that held the guts of the ship. More than halfway down, just below a ring of narrow windows, the roof of the Hospital moved in to grip the hull.

Something hummed behind him. The moving box was on its way down.

Matt watched it go, and then he started across the bridge, sliding his hands along the hip-high handrails. The dropping of the box might mean that someone would be coming up.

At the other end he looked for a black button in one of the four supporting girders. It was there, and he pushed it. Then he looked down.

The attic, the space enclosed by the inner hull, was as perfectly cylindrical as a soup can with both ends removed. Four airfoils formed a cross at the stem, a few yards above the ground, and where they crossed was a bulky, pointed casing. There was a ring of four windows halfway down the inner hull. The airlock was at the same level. Matt could see it by looking between the hull and the moving box, which was rising toward him.

Matt felt a chill as he looked down at that pointed casing between the fins. The ship’s center of mass was directly over it. Therefore it had to be the fusion drive.

The Planck was rumored to be a dangerous place, and not without reason. A ship that had carried men between the stars, a ship three hundred years old, was bound to inspire awe. But there was real power here. The Planck’s landing motors should still be strong enough to hurl her into the sky. Her fusion drive supplied electrical power to all the colonist regions: to teedee stations, homes, smokeless factories—and if that fusion plant ever blew, it would blow Alpha Plateau into the void.

Somewhere in the lifesystem, sandwiched between inner and outer hull, were the controls that could blow the bomb in that casing. The Head was in there too—somewhere.

If Matt could bring them together…

The moving box reached the top, and Matt entered.

It dropped a long way. The Planck was tall. Even the beveled ring of the leading edge, which had held stored equipment for the founding of a colony, was forty feet high. The ship was one hundred and eighty feet high, including a landing skirt, for the inner hull did not quite reach the ground. The stem and the mouths of the landing motors were supported ten feet above the ground by that long skirtlike extension of the outer hull.

This moving box was an open grid. Matt could watch his progress all the way down. Had he been acrophobic, he’d have been insane before the box stopped opposite the airlock.

The airlock was not much bigger than the moving box. Inside, it was all dark metal, with a dial-and-control panel in chipped blue plastic. Already Matt was heartily sick of blinking dials and metal walls. It was strange and discomforting to be surrounded by so much metal, and unnerving to wonder what all those dials were trying to tell him.

Set in the ceiling was something Matt had trouble recognizing. Something simple, almost familiar…ah. A ladder. A ladder running uselessly from door to wall across the ceiling of the airlock.

Sure. With the ship spinning in space, the outer door would be a trapdoor down from the attic. Of course you’d need a ladder. Matt grinned and strode through the airlock and nearly ran face on into a policeman.

“The luck of Matt Keller” had no time to work. Matt dodged back into the airlock. He heard a patter of mercy-bullets, like gravel on metal. In a moment the man would be around the corner, firing.

Matt yelled the only thing he could think of. “Stop! It’s me!”

The guard was around in the same instant. But he didn’t fire yet…and he didn’t fire yet…and presently he turned and went, muttering a surly apology. Matt wondered whom he’d been taken for. It wouldn’t matter; the man had already forgotten him.

Matt chose to follow him instead of turning the other way. It seemed to him that if a guard saw two men approach, and ignored one and recognized the other, he wouldn’t shoot—no matter how trigger-happy he was.

The corridor was narrow, and it curved to the left. Floor and ceiling were green. The left-hand wall was white, set with uncomfortably bright lights; the wall on the right was black, with a roughened rubbery surface, obviously designed as a floor. Worse yet, the doors were all trapdoors leading down into the floor and up into the ceiling. Most of the doors in the floor were closed and covered with walkways. Most of the ceiling doors were open, and ladders led up into these. All the ladders and walkways looked old and crude, colony-built, and all were riveted into place.

It was eerie. Everything was on its side. Walking through this place was like defying gravity.

Matt heard sounds and voices from some of the rooms above. They told him nothing. He couldn’t see what was happening above him, and he didn’t try. He was listening for Castro’s voice.

If he could get the Head to the fusion-drive controls—wherever they were—then he could threaten to blow up the Planck. Castro had held out under threat of physical pain, but how would he react to a threat to Alpha Plateau?

And all Matt wanted was to free one prisoner.

…That was Castro’s voice. Coming not from the ceiling but from underfoot, from a closed door. Matt bent over the walkway across it and tried the handle. Locked.

Knock? But all of Implementation was on edge tonight, ready to shoot at anything. Under such circumstances Matt could be unconscious and falling long seconds before a gunman could lose interest in him.

No way to steal a key, to identify the right key. And he couldn’t stay here forever.

If only Laney were here now.

A voice. Polly jerked to attention—except that she felt no jerk; she did not know if she had moved or not.

A voice. For some timeless interval she had existed with no sensation at all. There were pictures in her memory and games she could play in her mind, and for a time there had been sleep. Some friend had shot her full of mercy-bullets. She remembered the sting, vividly. But she’d wakened. Mental games had failed; she couldn’t concentrate. She had begun to doubt the reality of her memories. Friends’ faces were blurred. She had clung to the memory of Jay Hood, his sharp-edged, scholarly face, easy to remember. Jay. For two years they had been little more than close friends. But in recent hours she had loved him hopelessly; his was the only visual image that would come clear to her, except for a hated face, wide and expressionless, decorated with a bright snowy moustache: the face of the enemy. But she was trying to make Jay come too clear, to give him texture, expression, meaning. He had blurred, she had reached to bring him back, he had blurred more…

A voice. It had her complete attention.

“Polly,” it said, “you must trust me.”

She wanted to answer, to express her gratitude, to tell the voice to keep talking, to beg it to let her out. She was voiceless.

“I would like to free you, to bring you back to the world of sense and touch and smell,” said the voice. Gently, sympathetically, regretfully, it added, “I cannot do that just yet. There are people making me keep you here.”

A voice had become the voice, familiar, wholly reassuring. Suddenly she placed it.

“Harry Kane and Jayhawk Hood. They won’t let me free you”—Castro’s voice. She wanted to scream—“because you failed in your mission. You were to find out about ramrobot number one-forty-three. You failed.”

Liar! Liar! I didn’t fail! She wanted to scream out the truth, all of the truth. At the same time she knew that that was Castro’s aim. But she hadn’t talked in so long!

“Are you trying to tell me something? Perhaps I can persuade Harry and Jayhawk to let me free your mouth. Would you like that?”

I’d love that, Polly thought. I’d tell all the secrets of your ancestry. Something within her was still rational. The sleep, that was what had done it. How long had she been here? Not years, not even days; she would have been thirsty. Unless they’d given her water intravenously. But however long it had been, she’d slept for some part of the time. Castro didn’t know about the mercy-bullets. He’d come hours early.

Where was the voice?

All was silent. Faintly she could hear her pulse beating in her carotid arteries; but as she grasped for the sound, it too was gone.

Where was Castro? Leaving her to rot?

Speak!

Speak to me!

The Planck was big, but its lifesystem occupied less than a third of its volume: three rings of pressurized compartments between the cargo holds above and the water fuel tanks and fission-driven landing motors below. Much cargo had been needed to set up a self-sufficient colony. Much fuel had been needed to land the Planck: trying to land on the controlled hydrogen bomb of the fusion drive would have been like landing a blowtorch on a featherbed.

So the lifesystem was not large. But neither was it cramped, since the compartments aft of the corridor had been designed for the comfort of just three growing families.

That which was now Jesus Pietro’s interrogation room had once been a living room, with sofas, a cardtable, a coffeetable, a reader screen connected to the ship’s library, a small refrigerator. The tables and other things were gone now, cut from the outer wall with torches long ago. It had been a big room, luxuriously so for a spacecraft, where room is always at a premium. It had had to be big. Any normal apartment-dweller can step outside for a breath of air.

Now, upended, the room was merely tall. Halfway up the walls were the doors which had led to other parts of the apartment. The door to the corridor had become a trapdoor, and the door just under it, a closet to hold spacesuits in case of emergency, could now be reached only from the ladder. In the crescent of floor space at the bottom of the room were a long, heavy box, two guards in chairs, an empty chair, and Jesus Pietro Castro, closing the padded lip of the speaking tube at one corner of the box.

“Give her ten minutes to think it over,” he said. He glanced at his watch, noted the time.

His handphone buzzed.

“I’m in the vivarium,” Major Jansen reported. “The girl’s a colonist, all right, in stolen crew clothing. We don’t’ know where she got it yet. I doubt we’ll like the answer. We had to pump antidotes into her; she was dying from an overdose of mercy-weapons.”

“No sign that anyone came with her?”

“I didn’t say that, sir. There are two things. One, the wires were pulled on the chair she was sitting in. Her helmet was stone dead. She couldn’t have done that herself. Maybe that’s why one of the prisoners woke up this afternoon.”

“And then he freed the others? I don’t believe it. We would have noticed the pulled wires afterward.”

“I agree, sir. So somebody pulled those wires after she was in the chair.”

“Maybe. What’s your second point?”

“When the gas went off in the vivarium, one of the four police wasn’t wearing his nose plug. We haven’t been able to find it anywhere; his locker’s empty, and when I called his wife, she said he took it with him. He’s awake now, but he has no idea—”

“Is it worth bothering with? The guards aren’t used to gas filters. Or gas.”

“There was a mark on the man’s forehead, sir. Like the one we found this afternoon, only this one is in ballpoint ink.”

“Oh.”

“Which means that there must be a traitor in Implementation itself, sir.”

“What makes you think so, Major?”

“The bleeding-heart symbol does not represent any known revolutionary organization. Further, only a guard could have made that mark. Nobody else has entered the vivarium tonight.”

Jesus Pietro swallowed his impatience. “You may be right, Major. Tomorrow we’ll devise ways to smoke them out.”

Major Jansen made several suggestions. Jesus Pietro listened, made appropriate comments, and cut him off as soon as he could.

A traitor in Implementation? Jesus Pietro hated to think so. It was possible, and not a thing to be ignored; but the knowledge that the Head suspected such a thing could damage Implementation morale more than any possible traitor.

In any case, Jesus Pietro was not interested. No traitorous guard could have moved invisibly in Jesus Pietro’s office. The bleeding heart was something else entirely.

Jesus Pietro called the power room. “You aren’t doing anything right now, are you? Good. Would one of you bring us some coffee.”

Three minutes more and he could resume interrogation.

Jesus Pietro paced. He walked off balance, with one arm bound immobile against his body: one more annoyance. The numbness was wearing off in his mangled hand.

Yes, the bleeding heart was something else again. A gruesome symbol on a vivarium floor. Fingers that broke without their owner noticing. An ink drawing appearing from nowhere on a dossier cover, like a signature. A signature.

Intuition was tricky. Intuition had told Jesus Pietro that something would happen tonight. And something had; but what? Intuition, or something like it, had brought him here. Surely he’d had no logical reason to keep thinking about Polly Tournquist. Did she really know something? Or did his subconscious mind have other motives for bringing him here?

Jesus Pietro paced, following the arc of the inner wall.

Presently someone knocked on the door overhead. The guards loosened their guns and looked up. Fumbling sounds, and then the door dropped open and a man backed slowly down the ladder. He balanced a tray in one hand. He did not try to close the door after him.

The slowboat had never been a convenient place to work. Ladders everywhere. The man with the tray had to back a long way down—the full length of what had been a large, comfortable living room—before he touched bottom.

Matt poked his head through the doorway, upside down.

There was the lab man, backing down the ladder with his coffee tray balanced on one hand. On the floor were three more men, and one was Castro. As Matt’s head appeared in the doorway each pair of eyes glanced up, held Matt’s stare for a moment, then dropped.

Matt started down, looking over his shoulder, trying to hold eight eyes at once.

“Dammit, Hood, help me up.”

“Parlette, you can’t possibly expect—”

“Help me over to the phone.”

“We’d be committing suicide,” said Harry Kane. “What would your army of relatives do when they learned we were holding you prisoner in your own house?”

“I’m here of my own free will. You know that.”

“But will they know that?”

“My family will stand behind me.” Parlette set the palms of his hands on the chair arms, and with tremendous effort, stood up. But once up, he was unable to move.

“They won’t know what’s going on,” said Harry Kane. “All they’ll know for certain is that you’re alone in the house with three escaped vivarium prisoners.”

“Kane, they wouldn’t understand what’s happening if I talked for two hours. But they’ll stand behind me.”

Harry Kane opened his mouth, closed it again, and began to tremble. He had to fold his hands on the table to keep them from shaking. “Call them,” he said.

“No,” said Jay Hood.

“Help him, Jay.”

“No! If he uses that phone to turn us in, he’ll go down as the greatest con man in history. And we’ll be finished!”

“Oh, phut.” Lydia Hancock stood up and wrapped one of Parlette’s arms around her neck. “Be sensible, Jay. Parlette is the best chance we ever had. We’ve got to trust him.” And she walked him over to the phone.

Almost time to resume the interrogation. Jesus Pietro waited while the lab man deposited his tray on the “coffin” and started back up.

And he realized that his pulse was racing. There was cold perspiration dribbling wetly down his ribs. His hand throbbed like a heart. His eyes flicked here, there, all about the room, looking for something that wasn’t there.

Within seconds, and for no reason at all, the interrogation room had become a trap.

There was a thump, and every muscle in his body jumped. Nothing there, nothing his eyes could find. But he, the nerveless, elephantine Castro, was jumping at shadows. The room was a trap, a trap.

“Back in a moment,” said Jesus Pietro. He strode to the ladder, looking every inch the Man in Charge, and went up.

A guard said, “But, sir! What about the prisoner?”

“I’ll be right back,” said the Head, without slowing.

He pulled himself through the doorway, reached down, and closed the door. And there he stuck.

He’d had no planned destination. Something had screamed at him to get out, some intuition so powerful that he had followed it without question—right in the middle of an interrogation.

What was he afraid of? Was he about to learn some unpleasant truth from Polly Tournquist? Or was it guilt? Surely he no longer lusted after the colonist girl. Surely he could control it if he did.

No Implementation man had ever seen him thus: shoulders slumped, face set in wrinkles of fatigue, standing in a hallway because he had no place to go.

In any case, he had to go back. Polly Tournquist was waiting for the sound of his voice. She might or might not know things he needed to know.

He pulled himself together, visibly, and turned to face the door, his eyes sliding automatically around the bright frosted pane in the wall. Men who worked in the slowboats developed such habits. As ceiling lights, the panel would have been just bright enough. As wall lights, they hurt the eyes.

Castro’s eyes slid around the pane, caught something, and came back. There was a blue scrawl on the frosted pane.

Matt was almost down the ladder when the man in the lab coat started up.

Matt addressed a subvocal comment to the Mist Demons, who made no obvious response. Then, because the lab man was about to bump into him, he swung around to the underside of the ladder and dropped. He landed with a thump. Every head in the room jerked around. Matt backed into a corner, stepping softly, waiting.

He’d known it from the beginning: He couldn’t count on this power of his. At some point he would have enough of being afraid; the glandular caps over his kidneys would stop producing adrenaline…

The guard turned their eyes back to the ceiling. The lab man disappeared through the doorway and closed the door after him. Only Castro himself continued to behave peculiarly; his eyes kept darting around the room as if searching for something that wasn’t there. Matt began to breathe more easily.

The man with the coffee had appeared at just the right time. Matt had been about to leave, to see if he could find a fusion control room before he got back to Castro. He had, in fact, discovered that the frosted glass in the hall light would take ink; and he was marking it to show which door led to Castro, when someone had rounded the corner, carrying coffee.

Castro was still behaving oddly. During the interview in Castro’s office, Matt had never ceased to be afraid of him. Yet now he seemed only a nervous man with a bandaged arm.

Dangerous thinking, thought Matt. Be scared!

Suddenly Castro started up the ladder.

Matt nibbled his lower lip. Some comic chase this was becoming! Where was the Head going now? And how could Matt hold six eyes, two above and four below, while climbing a ladder?

He started for the ladder anyway.

“But, sir! What about the prisoner?”

“I’ll be right back.”

Matt backed into the corner again. Prisoner?

Coffin. The word was nearly obsolete on Mount Lookitthat, where crew and colonist alike cremated their dead. But that box against the wall was easily big enough to hold a prisoner.

He’d have to look inside.

But first, the guards…

“It’s the Head calling, Major.”

“Thank you, Miss Lauessen.”

“Jansen, is that you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve found another bleeding heart.”

“In the Planck?”

“Yes. Right above the coffin room, on a light. Now here’s what I want done. I want you to close the Planck’s airlocks, flood the ship with gas, then come in with a squad. Anyone you can’t identify immediately, play a sonic over him to keep him quiet. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. Suppose the traitor is someone we know?”

“Use your own judgment there. I have good reason to assume he’s not a policeman, though he may be in uniform. How long will you need?”

“About twenty minutes. I could use cars instead of elevators, but it would take just as long.”

“Good. Use the cars. Seal off the elevators first. I want as much surprise effect as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Execute.”

The guards were no trouble at all. Matt stepped up behind one of the men, pulled the gun from his holster, and shot them both.

He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to drive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stunner was a surer bet than a hypothetical, undependable psi power. It was real, cold and hard in his hand.

The “coffin” was bigger than it had seemed from the doorway. He found clamps, big and easy to operate. The lid was heavy. Foam plastic covered the inside, with a sound-deadening surface of small interlocking conical indentations.

Inside was something packed very carefully in soft, thick white cloth. Its shape was only vaguely human, and its head was not human at all. Matt felt the back hairs stir on his neck. Coffin. And the thing inside didn’t move. If he had found Polly, then Polly was dead.

He began unwrapping it anyway, starting with what passed for the figure’s head. He found ear cups, and underneath, human ears. They were blood-warm to the touch. Matt began to hope.

He unwrapped cloth from a pair of brown eyes. They looked up at him, and then they blinked.

Hoping was over. He had found Polly, and she was alive.

She was more cocoon than girl. Toward the end she was helping to get the wrappings and paddings and sensory wires off her legs. She wasn’t much help. Her fingers wouldn’t work. Muscles jerked rhythmically in her jaw, her arms, her legs. When she tried to step out of the coffin, Matt had to catch the full weight of her falling body, and they went down in a heap.

“Thanks,” she said unsteadily. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I remember you.” She got up, clinging to his arm for support. She had not yet smiled. When Matt had uncovered her mouth and removed the clamps and padding, she had looked like a child expecting to be slapped. She still did. “You’re Matt something. Aren’t you?”

“Matt Keller. Can you stand by yourself now?”

“Where are we?” She did not let go of his arm.

“In the middle of the Hospital. But we have a fair chance to get out, if you do just as I say.”

“How did you get in?”

“Jay Hood tells me I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That’s what we have to count on. Hey, are you all right?”

“Since you ask, no.” She smiled for the first time, a ghost grin, a rictus that vanished in a split second. She was better off without it.

“You don’t look it. Come here, sit down.” She was clinging to his upper arm with both hands, as if afraid of falling. He led her to one of the chairs. She’s still in shock, he thought. “Better yet, lie down. On the other floor. Easy…Now put your feet up on the chair. What the Mist Demons were they doing to you?”

“It’s a long story.” Her brows puckered, leaving a sudden deep V between her eyes. “I can tell it fast, though. They were doing nothing to me. Nothing and nothing and nothing.” She lay on her back with her feet in the air, the way Matt had placed her, and her eyes looked up past the ceiling, looked up at Nothing.

Matt wanted to look away. Polly was no longer pretty. Her hair was a housecleaners’ nest, and her makeup had gone every which way; but that wasn’t it. Something had gone out of her, and something else had replaced it. Her pale face mirrored the ultimate horror of what she saw, looking up at Nothing.

Presently she said, “How did you get here, Matt?”

“Came to rescue you.”

“You’re not a Son of Earth.”

“No.”

“You could be a ringer. Harry’s house was raided the night you came.”

“That’s highly ungrateful for a maiden in distress.”

“I’m sorry.” But her eyes were watchful and suspicious. She took her feet off the chair and rolled to sitting position on the floor. She was wearing an unfamiliar garment, like a playsuit, but made of soft, flimsy fabric. Her fingers had found a corner of the cloth and were playing with it, kneading it, pulling at it, rolling it, crumpling it. “I can’t trust anything. I’m not even sure I’m not dreaming. Maybe I’m still in the box.”

“Easy,” he said, and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “You’ll get over—”

She snatched at his hand to hold it there, so quickly that he almost jerked away. Every move she made was exaggerated. “You don’t know what it was like! They wrapped me up and put me away, and from then on, it was like being dead!” She was squeezing his hand, feeling the fingers and the nails and the knuckles, as if she’d never touched a human hand before. “I kept trying to remember things, and they were always just out of reach. It was—” She stuck, her larynx bobbing and her lips twitching without sound. Then she jumped at him.

She knocked him flat on his back and wrapped herself around him. It was nothing like affectionate. She clung to him as if she were drowning and he a floating log. “Hey,” said Matt. “The gun. You knocked the gun away.”

She didn’t hear. Matt looked up at the door. It didn’t move, and there were no ominous noises.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s okay now. You’re out.” She had her face buried in the hollow of his shoulder, and she was moving against him. Her arms were tight around his chest with a grip of desperation. “You’re out now.” He massaged her neck and shoulder muscles, trying to do what Laney had done night before last.

The way she kept touching things, kneading them—he understood now. She was making sure they were real. The time in the coffin must have been worse than he could imagine. She must have lost all touch with reality, all her faith in the solidness of things outside that artificial womb. And so she ran her hands along his back, traced the lines of his shoulder blades and vertebrae with her fingertips; and so she moved against him with a sliding motion, with her toes, her thighs, her arms, her body—as if sensing, sensing with every square inch of skin…

He felt himself coming alive in response. Trapdoors and curved metal walls, guns and Implementation police, ceased to matter at all. There was only Polly.

“Help me,” she said, her voice muffled.

Matt rolled over onto her. The soft, flimsy-looking fabric of her jumper tore like tissue. Fleetingly, Matt wondered why it was there at all. And that didn’t matter either.

Presently Polly said, “Well. I’m real after all.”

And Matt, drifting peacefully down from some far peak of Nirvana, asked, “Was that what you meant by help?”

“I didn’t know what I meant. I needed help.” She smiled slowly, with her eyes as well as her mouth. “Suppose it wasn’t what I meant. Then what?”

“Then I’ve callously seduced you.” He moved his head back a little to look her in the face. The change was incredible. “I was afraid you’d gone off the beam for good.”

“So was I.”

Matt glanced up at the trapdoor, then stretched to reach, for the sonic. Nirvana was over.

“You really came to rescue me?”

“Yah.” He didn’t mention Laney, not yet. No point in spoiling this moment.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. We’ve still got to get out of here.”

“You don’t have any questions to ask me?”

What was she doing, testing him? Didn’t she trust him now? Well, why should she? “No,” he said, “no questions. But there are things I’ve got to tell you—”

She stiffened under him. “Matt. Where are we?”

“In the Hospital. Deep in the Hospital. But we can get out.”

She rolled away and came to her feet in one smooth motion. “We’re in one of the slowboats! Which one?”

“The Planck. Does it matter?”

She scooped the other guard’s sonic stunner from his holster in what looked like a racing dive. “We can set off the fusion plant! Blow the Hospital and the crew into the void mist! Come on, Matt, let’s get moving. Are there guards in the corridor? How many?”

“Set off—Are you out of your mind?”

“We’d wipe out the Hospital and most of Alpha Plateau.” She picked up her ripped mock-playsuit and threw it down again. “I’ll have to depants one of these police. And that’ll be it! We’d win, Matt! All in one stroke!”

“What win? We’ll be dead!”

She stood up with her hands on her hips and regarded him with disgust. Now she wore a pair of Implementation uniform pants too big for her. Matt had never seen anyone more thoroughly alive. “I’d forgotten. You aren’t a Son of Earth. All right, Matt, see how far you can get. You may be able to get out of range of the blast. Personally, I doubt it.”

“I’ve got a personal interest in you. I didn’t come all this way to have you commit suicide. You’re coming with me.”

Polly donned a guard’s shirt, then hurriedly rolled up the pants, which were much too long. “You’ve done your duty. I’m not ungrateful, Matt, but we just aren’t going in the same direction. Our motives aren’t the same.” She kissed him hard, pushed him back, and whispered, “I can’t pass up this chance.” She started for the ladder.

Matt blocked her way. “You haven’t a prayer of getting anywhere without me. You’re coming with me, and we’re leaving the Hospital—if we get that far.”

Polly hit him.

She hit him with stiffened fingertips just under the sternum, where the ribs make an inverted V. He doubled up, trying to curl around the pain, not yet trying to breathe, but gaping like a fish. He felt fingers at his throat and realized that she’d seen the gas filter and was taking it.

He saw her as a blur at the corner of his eye, climbing the ladder. He heard the door open, and a moment later, close. Slow fire was spreading through his lungs. He tried to draw air, and it hurt.

He’d never learned to fight. “The luck of Matt Keller” had made it unnecessary. Once he’d struck a guard on the point of the jaw. Where else would you hit somebody? And who’d guess that a slightly built girl could hit so hard?

Inch by inch he uncurled, straightened up. He drew his breath in shallow, painful sips. When the pain over his heart would let him move again, he started up the ladder.

XIIIIt All Happened At Once

XIIIPolly moved at a gliding run. The gas filter was in place over her nose. She held the sonic straight out ahead of her, pointed around the curve of the inner hull. If an enemy appeared, that was where he would be, right in the gunsight. Nobody would come at her from behind. She was moving too fast.

As one of the inner core of the Sons of Earth, Polly knew the Planck as well as she knew her own home. The flight control room was a diameter’s distance from airlock. She ticked off the doors as she passed under them. Hydroponics…Library…

Flight Control. The door was closed. No ladder.

Polly crouched and sprang. She caught the handle at the top of her leap. The door was not locked; it was closed, because nobody ever used the flight control room. Unfortunately the door opened inward, upward. She dropped back, frustrated, landing silently on her toes.

If she’d chosen the fusion room…but the fusion room was for fine control. There, the Hospital electricians kept power running to the colonist regions. She’d have run into people, and they might have stopped her.

The guard had carried a wallet.

She leapt again, caught the knob and turned it, pushed the wallet between the door and the jamb, where the catch of the lock ought to be. Again she dropped, and again she leapt. This time she slapped the flat of her hand hard against the door. It flipped upward…and over.

Far down the curve of the corridor someone yelled, “What’s going on down there?”

Polly’s chest heaved, pulling deep lungfuls of air through her nose, under perfect control. She jumped a last time, caught the jamb, and pulled herself up. Heavy footsteps…Before someone could come into sight, she had closed the door.

There was a ladder here, built into what had been the ceiling. Doubtless the Planck’s original crew had used it to climb down from those six control chairs after the First Landing. Polly used it now.

She squirmed into the second seat on the left and found the control panel and the bypass. Part of the wall had been pried up, and a simple iron bar had been welded into place between two plates, removing control from the flight control room and giving it directly to the fusion room. In flight both control points had been necessary: the fusion room to keep the drive working and stable, and the flight control room to keep it pointed. Now the fusion drive was used only for making electricity. And Polly’s control panel was dead.

She went down the ladder fast. There was a tool closet by the door. If it held a welding arc—

It did.

And if there was no anesthetic gas around—or if it wasn’t inflammable…

Nothing exploded as she turned on the welder. She began welding the door shut.

Almost immediately she attracted attention. She could hear excited voices, muffled by the door. Then there was the faint numbness of a sonic beamer. The door didn’t conduct subsonics well, but she couldn’t take this long. Nonetheless she finished the welding job before she went back up the ladder.

She used the welding arc to cut away the bypass. It was slow work. Implementation would surely have barged in on her before she finished. Now they could whistle for entrance. She had all the time in the world. In their world.

Matt reached the corridor and began to walk, leaving the interrogation room open behind him. He walked bent, with his chest half collapsed and his arms folded over the pain. He’d forgotten to take the remaining sonic.

“I’m not the domineering type,” he muttered, perversely enjoying the sound of his own voice. And, “Either that, or I’m trying to dominate the wrong woman.”

A heavy figure came pounding around the curve. Jesus Pietro Castro, wearing a gas filter and carrying a heavy mercy-sliver gun, looked up in time to avoid a collision. He jerked to a stop, and then his mouth dropped open as he took in blue eyes, brown hair, a bitter and angry colonist’s face, an ear with a small piece bitten out of it, and blood soaked into the collar of a crewish overjacket.

“You agree?” Matt said brightly.

Castro raised his gun. The “luck” was off.

And all the rage and humiliation in Matt broke loose. “All right,” he yelled, “look at me! Damn you, look at me! I’m Matthew Keller.”

The Head stared. He did not fire. He stared.

“I crashed my way into your crummy Hospital single-handed, twice! I came through walls and void mist and sleepy gas and mercy bullets to rescue that damn woman, and when I got her loose, she punched me in the gut and folded me up like a flower! So go ahead and look!”

Castro looked and looked.

And finally Matt realized that he should have fired.

Castro swiveled his head from side to side in a negative motion. But his eyes never left Matt. And slowly, slowly, as if he were knee deep in hardening cement, he moved one slow step forward.

Abruptly Matt realized what was happening. “Don’t look away,” he said hastily. “Look at me.” The Head was close enough now, and Matt reached out and pushed the barrel of the mercy-gun aside, still striving to hold Castro’s eyes. “Keep looking.”

They stared eye to eye. Above his bulky false nose, Castro’s eyes were remarkable: all white and black, all whites and huge, expanded pupils, with practically no iris showing. His jaw hung loose under the snowy handlebar moustache. He was melting; the perspiration ran in slow streams into his collar. Like a man in an ecstasy of fear, or awe, or worship…he stared.

Contract the pupils of eyes not your own, and you got psychic invisibility. Expand them, and you got…what? Fascination?

For damn sure, he had the Head’s complete attention. Matt drew back his fist, cocked it—and couldn’t follow through. It would have been like attacking a cripple. Castro was a cripple: one of his arms was in a sling.

There was shouting from down the corridor, from the direction Polly had taken.

The Head moved another gluey step forward.

Too many enemies, before and behind. Matt slapped the gun out of Castro’s hand, then turned and ran.

As he dropped through the door to the coffin room, he saw the Head still looking after him, still held in the strange spell. Then he pushed the door closed above him.

Polly cut the last of the bar away, and the control board came alight. She ran her eyes quickly over the lighted dials, then once more, slowly.

According to the control board, the fusion drive was as cold as Pluto’s caves.

Polly whistled between her teeth. It was no malfunction of the board. The several dials checked each other too well. Someone had decided to black out the colony regions.

She couldn’t start the drive from here. And she’d never reach the fusion room; she’d locked herself in with a vengeance.

If only this had been the Arthur Clarke! Castro would never dare cut power to the crew. The Clarke’s fusion plant must be going full blast.

Well, now, she thought in growing excitement. She slid out onto the ladder. There might be a way to reach the Clarke.

Jesus Pietro felt a hand shaking his shoulder. He turned and found Major Jansen. “What is it?”

“We’ve flooded the Planck with gas, sir. Everyone who wasn’t warned should be unconscious, unless he’s behind doors. I wish there weren’t so many filters floating around, though. Whoever we’re after has had too good a chance to pick one up.”

“Good,” said Jesus Pietro. He couldn’t concentrate. He wanted to be alone, to think…no, he didn’t want to be alone…“Carry on,” he said. “Try the coffin room. He may be in there.”

“He isn’t. Or if he is, there’s more than one traitor. Somebody’s in the flight control room, welded in. It’s a good thing the fusion plant is off.”

“Get him out. But try the coffin room, too.”

Major Jansen moved off in the direction of all the commotion. Jesus Pietro wondered what he’d find when he finally looked in the coffin room. Had Keller’s ghost really gone in there, or had he faded out while running up the corridor? Jesus Pietro wasn’t sure.

But he was sure of the ghost.

He would never in his life forget those eyes. Those binding, blinding, paralyzing eyes. They would haunt him the rest of his life—however many minutes that might be. For surely the ghost didn’t intend to let him go now.

His handphone rang. Jesus Pietro picked it off his belt and said, “The Head.”

“Sir, we’re getting some very strange reports,” said the voice of Miss Lauessen. “A large number of cars are converging on the Hospital. Someone claiming to represent the Council is accusing you of treason.”

“Me? Of treason?”

“Yes, sir.” Miss Lauessen sounded strange. And she kept calling him Sir.

“What grounds?”

“Shall I find out, sir?”

“Yes. And order them to land outside the defense perimeter. If they don’t, set patrol cars on them. It’s obviously the Sons of Earth.” He clicked off and immediately thought, But where did they all come from? And where did they get the cars?

And he thought, Keller?

His handphone buzzed.

Miss Lauessen’s voice had turned plaintive—almost querulous. “Sir, the fleet of cars is led by Millard Parlette. He accuses you of malfeasance and treason, and he orders you to give yourself up for trial.”

“He’s gone insane.” Jesus Pietro tried to think. It was all coming at once. Was this why Keller had appeared to him, shown himself at last? No mysterious symbols, this time; no invisible breaking of fingers. Keller’s eyes…“Try to land the old man without hurting him. The other cars too. Order them to set their cars on autopilot. Tell them they won’t be hurt. Give them one minute; then knock them out with sonics.”

“I hesitate to remind you, sir, but Millard Parlette is your superior officer. Will you give yourself up?”

Then Jesus Pietro remembered that Miss Lauessen was almost pure crew. Did her veins carry Parlette blood? It was reputedly easy to come by. He said the only thing he could.

“No.”

The phone cut off, cut him off from the Hospital switchboard and from the world outside.

He’d gone off half-cocked, and be knew it. Somehow Polly’s blow in the belly had made him want to die. He’d stumbled out into the corridor to be captured.

Not this time. He scooped up the remaining sonic and started for the ladder. This time he’d know just what he was doing when he went through that door.

But why go through it at all? The thought stopped him at the foot of the ladder. If Polly was going to blow the drive—

No, she’d never get that far. And she’d had all the rescuing she was entitled to. It was time to think about escape. He looked up at the exit—and shivered.

Some escape hatch. The moment he poked his head out there, somebody would shoot at it. He had to see his enemy to use the “luck,” and he couldn’t see in all directions at once.

Yet, this room was no place to stand off a siege. All anyone would have to do would be to fire mercy-needles down toward the floor. If he looked before he fired, the “luck” would get him; but that statement applied to an ordinary sonic stunner. And so he wouldn’t look.

He had to get out.

But—Castro’s nose piece. It meant Implementation was using gas. The corridor must be already full of it.

Too many things to think about! Matt cursed and began going through a guard’s pockets. The guard stirred and tried to strangle Matt with limp fingers. Matt played the sonic over them both, then finished his search. Neither guard had a gas filter.

Matt looked up at the door. He could chance it, of course, but if there was gas in the corridor, only that airtight door was protecting him now. It had to be airtight, of course.

Get to another room? There were the doors leading to what must be bedrooms. But they were halfway up the walls and too far from the ladder.

And there, just under the exit, was a small door placed where any good apartment would have a coat closet. He might be able to reach it.

It wasn’t a coat closet, of course. It held two spacesuits.

And it wasn’t easy to reach. Matt had to lean far out from the ladder to turn the knob, let the door fall open, and then jump for the opening. Leaving the cubbyhole would be just as bad when the time came.

Spacesuits. They had hung on hooks; now they sprawled on the floor like empty men. Thick rubbery fabric, with a heavy metal neck-ring set with clamps to hold the separate helmet. Metal struts in the fabric braced the rocket backpack and the control unit under the chin.

Would the air converter still work? Ridiculous, after three hundred years. But there might still be air in the tank. Matt found a knob in the control panel of one suit, twisted it, and got a hiss.

So there was still stored air. The suit would protect him against gas. And the big fishbowl of a helmet would not interfere with his vision, nor his “luck.”

He snatched up the gun when the door to the corridor dropped open. A long moment later two legs came into sight of the ladder. Matt played the sonic over them. A man grunted in surprise and toppled into view, and down.

A voice of infinite authority spoke. “You! Come out of there!”

Matt grinned to himself. Quietly he put the gun aside and reached for the suit. A wave of dizziness made the world go dreamy. He’d been right about the gas.

He turned the air knob on full and put his head through the neck ring. He took several deep breaths, then held his breath while he slid feet first into the suit.

“You haven’t got a chance! Come on out or we’ll come in after you!”

Do that. Matt pulled the helmet over, his head and resumed breathing. The dizziness was passing, but he had to move carefully. Especially since the suit was a size too, small for him.

The door dropped open suddenly, and there was a spattering of mercy-slivers. A snarling face and a hand came into view, the hand firing a mercy-gun. Matt shot at the face. The man slumped, head down, but he didn’t fall; someone pulled him up out of sight by his ankles.

The air in the suit had a metallic smell thick enough to cut. Matt wrinkled his nose. Anyone else would have been satisfied with one escape from the Hospital. Who but Lucky Matt Keller would have—

There was a roar like a distant, continuous explosion. What, Matt wondered, are they trying now? He raised the gun.

The ship shook, and shook again. Matt found himself bouncing about like a toy in a box. Somehow he managed to brace his feet and shoulders against walls. I thought the son of a bitch was bluffing! He snatched at the stunner as it threatened to slide out into space.

The ship jumped, slapping hard against his cheekbone, as one whole wall of the ship ripped away. The roar was suddenly louder, much louder.

“We’re too close,” said Parlette.

Hood, in the driver’s seat, said, “We have to be close enough to give orders.”

“Nonsense. You’re afraid someone will call you a coward. Hang back, I tell you. Let my men do the fighting; they know what they’re doing. We’ve practiced enough.”

Hood shrugged and eased back on the 3-4 throttle. Already theirs was the last car in a swarm of more than forty, an armada of floating red taillights against the starry night. Each car carried two of Parlette’s line, a driver and a gunman.

Parlette, hovering like a vulture over the car’s phone, suddenly crowed, “I’ve got Deirdre Lauessen! All of you, be quiet. Listen, Deirdre, this is an emergency…”

And the others, Harry Kane and Lydia Hancock and Jay Hood, listened while Parlette talked.

It took him several minutes, but at last he leaned back, smiling with carnivorous white teeth. “I’ve done it. She’ll put our accusation on the intercom. Now we’ll have Implementation fighting each other.”

“You’ll have a tough time justifying that accusation,” Harry Kane warned him.

“Not at all. By the time I finished, I could convince Castro himself that he was guilty of treason, malfeasance of duty, and augmented incest. Provided—” He paused for effect. “Provided we can take the Hospital. If I control the Hospital, they’ll believe me. Because I’ll be the only one talking.

“The main point is this. In law I am the man in charge of the Hospital, and have been since Castro was the size of Hood. If it weren’t me, it would be some other crew of course. In practice, it’s Castro’s Hospital, and I have to take it away from him. We have to have control before we can begin changing the government of Mount Lookitthat. But once I’ve got control, I can keep it.”

“Look ahead.”

“Police cars. Not many.”

“Tight formation. I wonder if that’s good? None of us ever had any training in dogfights.”

“Why didn’t you fight each other?”

“We expected to fight,” said Parlette. “We never expected to fight the Hospital. So we—”

“What the Mist Demons is that?”

Parlette was leaning far forward in his seat, his mismatched hands bracing him against the dashboard. He didn’t answer.

Harry shook his shoulder. “What is it? It looks like fire all around one end of the Hospital.” Parlette seemed rigid with shock.

And then one whole end of the Hospital detached itself from the main structure and moved sedately away. Orange flame bloomed all around its base.

“That,” said Millard Parlette, “is the Planck taking off on its landing motors.”

Polly was in the upper-left-hand seat. She manipulated the controls in front of her with extreme delicacy, but still the knobs turned in short jumps. Minute flakes of rust must be coming loose somewhere in the chain of command that led from this control chair to the fission piles.

Finally the piles were hot.

And Polly tried the water valves.

It seemed to her that long ago someone had decided to keep the slowboats ready for a fast takeoff. It must have been during the first years of the colony, when nobody—crew or colonist—had been sure that an interstellar colony was possible. Then, others had forgotten, and the only changes made since then had been the necessary ones.

Until the slowboats themselves were part of the structure of the Hospital, and the interiors of the lifesystems were a maze of ladders and jury-rigs. Until the organ banks were moved entirely out of the ships, and the suspended animation rooms were closed off for good. Until the ships were nothing more than electrical generating plants—if one turned a blind eye to the interrogation room and perhaps to other secrets.

And still the tool closets were undisturbed. And still there were spacesuits in the upended rooms, behind doors which hadn’t been opened for centuries.

And still there was water in the landing fuel tanks and uranium in the landing motors. Nobody had bothered to remove them. The water had not evaporated, not from tanks made to hold water for thirty years against interstellar vacuum. The uranium…

Polly valved water into the hot motors, and the ship roared. She yipped in triumph. The ship shuddered and shook along her whole length. From beneath the welded door there were muffled screams.

There was more than one way to tell a joke! The Planck’s fusion drive was dead, but the Arthur Clarke’s drive must be running hot. And when Polly dived the Planck on it from the edge of atmosphere, the explosion would tear the top from Alpha Plateau!

“Come loose,” she whispered.

The Planck pulled loose from the rock around it, rose several feet, and settled, mushily. The huge ship seemed to be bouncing, ponderously, on something soft. Polly twisted the water fuel valve to no effect. Water and pile were running at peak.

Polly snarled low in her throat. The pile must be nearly dead; it couldn’t even manage to lift the ship against Mount Lookitthat’s point eight gee. If it weren’t for the landing skirt guiding the blast for a ground effect, they wouldn’t be moving at all!

Polly reached far across to the seat on her right. A bar moved under her hand, and at the aft end of the Planck, two fins moved in response. The ship listed to the side and drifted back to nudge the Hospital, almost gently—once, twice.

Live flame roared through the Hospital. It was water vapor heated beyond incandescence, to the point where oxygen dissociated itself from hydrogen, and it cut where it hit. Like death’s hurricane it roared through the corridors, cutting its way through walls where there were no corridors. It killed men before they knew what was killing them, for the first touch of the superheated steam made them blind.

The drive flame spread its fiery death through a third of the ground floor.

To men inside and outside the Hospital, to men who had never met and never would, this was the night everything happened at once. Sane men locked their doors and found something to hide under while they waited for things to stop happening.

“Laney. It must be Laney,” said Jay Hood. “She got through.”

“Elaine Mattson?”

“Right. And she got to the Planck. Can you imagine?”

“She must have a wonderful sense of timing. Do you know what will happen when she blows the drive?”

“Oh, my God. What’ll we do?”

“Keep flying,” said Parlette. “We’d never get out of range now. We might just as well bull through with this and hope Miss Mattson realizes the colonists are winning.”

“More police cars,” said Harry Kane. “Left and right, both.”

Polly touched the bar again. The ship tilted to the other side and began to drift ponderously away from the Hospital.

She dared tilt the ship no farther. How much clearance did she have under the landing skirt? A foot? A yard? Ten? If the skirt touched the ground, the ship would go over on its side.

That was not part of Polly’s plan.

Behind her the door had turned red hot. Polly glanced back with bared teeth. She moved her hands over the board, but in the end left the settings just the way they were. She’d have to circle all the way around the Hospital, but then she’d have a gliding run at the Arthur Clarke.

And she’d hit it again and again until one ship failed.

She never noticed when the red spot on the door turned white and burned through.

The ship jumped three feet upward, and Matt’s head snapped down against the closet floor. When he looked up, the outer hull side of the room was tearing away like tissue paper, except for the agonized scream of old metal dying. And Matt was looking straight into Castro’s office.

He couldn’t think; he couldn’t move. The scene had a quality of nightmare; it was beyond the rational. Magic! he thought, and, Not again!

The Hospital was drifting away, dreamlike. His ears had gone dead, so that it all took place in an eerie silence. The ship was taking off…

And there was no air in his helmet. The tank had held only one last wheeze. He was suffocating. He pulled the clamps up with fingers gone limp and tingly, tossed the helmet away, and gulped air. Then he remembered the gas.

But it was clean hot air, air from outside, howling through the gaping hole in the outer hull. He sucked at it, pulling it to him. There were spots before his eyes.

The ship was going up and down in a seasick manner. Wavering in the drive, Matt thought, and tried to ignore it. But one thing he couldn’t ignore:

Polly had reached the controls. Apparently she was taking the ship up. No telling how high they were already; the lights of the Hospital had dwindled to the point where everything outside was uniformly black against the lighted room. They were going up, and the room was wide open to naked space, and Matt had no helmet.

The room seemed steadier. He jumped for the ladder. The suit was awkward, but he caught the ladder and made his way down, fighting the imbalance caused by his backpack. It wasn’t until he touched bottom that the backpack caught his conscious attention.

After all, if the Planck’s landing motors still worked, why not a spacesuit’s backpack?

He peered down at a control panel meant to be read by fingertips. With the helmet on, he couldn’t have done it. The backpack was studded with small rocket motors; he wanted the ones on the bottom, of course.

How high was he now?

He tried the two buttons on the bottom, and something exploded on his back. It felt about right, as if it were trying to lift him. There was only one throttle knob. Doubtless it controlled all the jets at once, or all that were turned on at a given time.

Well, what else did he need to know? How high was he?

He took one last deep breath and went out the hole in the wall. He saw blackness around him, and he twisted the throttle hard over. It didn’t move. It was already on full. Matt had something like one second to realize that the backpack was for use in space, that it probably wouldn’t have lifted its own weight against gravity.

He hit.

Moving carefully, so as not to interfere with the men using welding torches, Major Jansen peered up into the hole in the flight-control-room door.

They had pushed a platform into position under the door, so that two men could work at once. The platform rose and settled, rose and settled, so that the major had to brace himself with his hands flat on the ceiling. He could see raven hair over the top of a control chair, and one slender brown arm hanging down.

Jesus Pietro, standing below, called, “How long?”

“A few seconds,” said one of the men with cutting torches. “Unless she welded the hinge side too.”

“Do you know where we’re going?” called the Head. “I do.”

Major Jansen looked down, surprised. The Head sounded so odd! And he looked like an old man in poor health. He seemed unable to concentrate on what was going on. He’s ready for retirement, Major Jansen thought with compassion. If we live through this…

“I do,” Jesus Pietro repeated, and nodded to himself.

Major Jansen turned away. He had no time to feel sympathy for the Head, not while this was going on.

“She welded the hinge side,” said one of the cutters.

“How long?”

“Three minutes if we work from both ends.”

The ship continued to move, drifting along on its cushion of fire.

Fire swept along the edge of the trapped forest, leaving a line of licking red and orange flame, ignored by the embattled aircars above. Presently there were explosions among the trees, and then the whole tongue of forest was aflame.

Now the Planck had left the defense perimeter and moved into a place of shops and houses. The crew who lived in those houses were awake, of course; nobody could have slept through that continuous roar. Some stayed where they were; some made for the street and tried to run for it. The ones who reached their basements were the ones who lived. A block-wide path of exploded, burning houses was the wake of the Planck.

But now the houses were empty, and they didn’t burn. They were of architectural coral, and they had been deserted, most of them, for upwards of thirty years.

“We’re through, sir.” The words were hardly necessary. The cutters were pushing the door aside, their hands protected by thick gloves. Major Jansen shoved through and went up the ladder with panic at his back.

Polly’s control board bewildered him. Knowing that he knew as much about flying spacecraft as anyone behind him, he continued to search for the dial or wheel or lever that would change the Planck’s direction. Finally, puzzled, he looked up; and that was his undoing.

The flight control room was long. It projected through the cargo section to where the outer and inner hulls met, and most of it was transparent. Major Jansen looked out through the outer hull, and he saw what was happening outside.

He saw the glow of the drive flames near the bottom of his view. To the right, a coral house exploding: the last house. Not far ahead, the black line of the void edge, coming closer.

And he froze.

“We’re going over,” said Jesus Pietro, standing under him on the ladder. He showed neither surprise nor fear.

Major Jansen screamed and buried his face in his arms.

Jesus Pietro squeezed past him and into the left-hand seat. His decision was based on logic alone. If Major Jansen had not found the right control, then he was looking at the wrong panel; and this was the only other control panel the colonist girl could reach from where she was sitting. He found the fin controls and tried them.

The ship tilted back and began to slow.

Still slowing, it drifted over the edge.

Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The Planck was no longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a black shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars.

Presently the stars went out.

The ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the ancient walls of the Planck creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus Pietro watched, waiting.

Waiting for Matthew Keller.

XIVBalance of Power

XIVHe struggled half awake, desperate to escape the terror of sleep. What a wild nightmare that was!

Then he felt fingers probing him.

Agony! He braced and tried to draw away, putting his whole body into it. His whole body barely twitched, but he heard himself whimper. A cool hand touched his forehead, and a voice—Laney’s?—said, “Lie back, Matt.”

He remembered it later, the next time he woke. He woke slowly this time, with the images of his memory forming around him. Again he thought, What a nightmare. But the images came clearer, too clear for a dream, and:

His right leg and most of his right side were as numb as frozen pork. Parts of him were not numb; they ached and stung and throbbed. Again he tried to withdraw from the pain, but this time he was tied down. He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded.

Harry Kane, Mrs. Hancock, Laney, and several others he didn’t recognize all crowded around his strange bed. One was a big woman with red hands and somewhat crewish features, wearing a white smock. Matt disliked her at once. He’d seen such smocks in the organ banks.

“He’s awake.” The woman in white spoke with a throaty lilt. “Don’t try to move, Keller. You’re all splinted up. These people want to talk to you. If you get tired, tell me right away and I’ll get them out of here.”

“Who are you?”

Harry Kane stepped forward. “She’s your doctor, Keller. How do you feel?”

How did he feel? A moment ago he’d realized, too late, that his backpack wouldn’t lift him. But he couldn’t remember the mile-long fall. “Am I going to die?”

“No, you’ll live,” said the woman doctor. “You won’t even be crippled. The suit must have braced you against the fall. You broke a leg and some ribs, but they’ll heal if you follow orders.”

“All right,” said Matt. Nothing seemed to matter much. Was he doped? He saw that he was on his back, with one leg in the air and something bulky around his rib cage, interfering with his breathing. “Did they put transplants in me?”

“Never mind that now, Keller. You just rest and get well.”

“How’s Polly?”

“We couldn’t find her.”

“She was on the Planck. She must have reached the drive controls.”

“Oh!” Laney exclaimed. She started to say something, then changed her mind.

Harry said, “The Planck went over the edge.”

“I see.”

“You got her loose?”

“I got her loose once,” Matt said. The faces were growing hazy. “She was a fanatic. All of you, fanatics. She had all the rescuing I could give her.”

The room drifted away, dreamlike, and he knew the Planck was taking off. From a distance a woman’s authoritarian crew lilt ordered “Out, now, all of you.”

The doctor escorted them to the door, and Harry Kane put a hand on her elbow and took her with them into the corridor. There he asked, “How long before he’s well?”

“Let go, of me, Mr. Kane.”

Harry did. “How long?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be no invalid. In a week we’ll put him in a walking cast. In a month we’ll see.”

“How long before he’s back at work?”

“Two months, with luck. Why so eager, Mr. Kane?”

“Top secret.”

The woman scowled. “Whatever you’re planning for him, you can bear in mind that he’s my patient. He won’t be ready for anything else until I tell you so.”

“All right. I suggest you don’t tell him about the transplants. He wouldn’t like that.”

“They’re in his records. I can’t do anything about that. I won’t tell him anything.”

When she had left them, Laney asked, “Why so eager?”

“I have an idea about Matt. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Don’t you think we’ve used him enough?”

“No,” said Harry Kane. “I’d like to, but no.”

Millard Parlette was near exhaustion. He’d moved into Jesus Pietro Castro’s office on Sunday, night, even before the outer wall was replaced, and he’d lived there ever since. His meals were sent in, and he used Castro’s cot when he slept, which was rarely. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was at the end of his life, that he’d waited just long enough to meet this—the crisis he’d foreseen a hundred years ago.

The Planck had done terrible damage to the Hospital, but the work of rebuilding was well in progress. Parlette had hired a construction firm himself, paying them out of his personal fortune. Eventually he would push a bill through the Council to reimburse him. Now workmen were painting the outer wall of his office, which on Sunday night had been yawning space.

His immediate problem was that half of Implementation wanted to quit.

The events of the previous week had had a disastrous effect on Implementation morale. Having the Head accused of treason and deposed by force was only part of it. Elaine Mattson and Matthew Keller had done their part, castrating the Hospital with bombs and stealth. The vivarium prisoners had been freed to make slaughter in the Hospital corridors. The destruction of the Planck had affected not just Hospital personnel but all of Alpha Plateau, for the Planck was half of history.

Now Implementation was faced with a dreadful confusion. All raids on the colony plateaus had been canceled. Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and no one could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn’t help that the rumors were true.

Parlette did what he could. He spoke to every man who wanted to resign. Some he persuaded to stay. As the ranks dwindled, he found new ways to use the men he had left.

At the same time he was dealing with the Plateau’s four power blocs.

The Council of the Crew had followed Parlette in the past. With luck and skill and work he would make them follow him again.

The crew as a whole would normally follow the Council. But a colonist revolt, in these days of a weakened, disheartened Implementation, might send them into a full panic; and then the Council would mean nothing.

The Sons of Earth would follow Harry Kane. But Kane was beyond Parlette’s control, and he didn’t trust Millard Parlette at all.

The nonrebellious majority of colonists would remain nonrebellious if Kane left them alone. But the Sons of Earth, with their privileged knowledge of the ramrobot gifts, could stir them to killing wrath at any time. Would Harry Kane wait for the New Law?

Four power blocs, and Implementation too. Being Head meant an endless maze of details, minor complaints, delivery of reprimands, paperwork, petty internal politics—he could get lost in such a maze and never know it until a screaming colonist army came to storm the Hospital.

It was a wonder he ever got around to Matt Keller.

Matt lived on his back, with his right side encased in concrete and his right leg dangling in space. He was given pills that reduced the pains to permanent, aggravating aches.

The woman in the organ-bank smock examined him from time to time. Matt suspected she saw him as potential organ-bank material, of dubious value. On Wednesday he overheard someone calling her Dr. Bennet. He had never thought of asking her name, as she had never thought of giving it.

In the early morning hours, when the sleeping pills were wearing off, or during afternoon naps, he was plagued by nightmares. Again his elbow smashed a nose across a man’s face, and again there was the awful shock of terror and triumph. Again he asked the way to the vivarium, turned, and raised his arm to see the skin beaded with bright blood. Again he stood in the organ banks, unable to run, and he woke drenched in perspiration. Or, with a stolen sonic he dropped uniformed men until the remembered sonic backlash turned his arm to wood. He woke, and his right arm had gone to sleep under him.

He thought of his family with nostalgia. He saw Jeannie and her husband every few months; they lived not twenty miles from Gamma’s major mining area. But he hadn’t seen his mother and father in years. How good it would be to see them again!

Even the memory of mining worms filled him with nostalgia. They were unpredictable, yes, but compared to Hood or Polly or Laney…at least he could understand mining worms.

His curiosity had been as dead as his right leg. On Wednesday evening it returned with a rush.

Why was the Hospital treating him? If he had been captured, why hadn’t he been taken apart already? How had Laney and Kane been allowed to visit him?

He was frantic with impatience. Dr. Bennet didn’t appear until noon Thursday. Somewhat to his surprise, she was not at all reluctant to talk.

“I don’t understand it myself,” she told Matt. “I do know that all the live rebels have been turned loose, and we aren’t getting any more organ-bank material. Old Parlette’s the Head now, and a lot of his relatives are working here too. Pure crew, working in the Hospital.”

“It must be strange to you.”

“It’s weird. Old Parlette is the only one who knows what’s really going on—if he does. Does he?”

Does he? Matt groped at the question. “What makes you think I know?”

“He’s given orders that you’re to be treated with an excess of tender loving care. He must have some reason, Keller.”

“I suppose he must.”

When it was obvious that that was all he had to say, she said, “If you’ve got any more questions, you can ask your friends. They’ll be here Saturday. There’s another weird thing—all the colonists wandering through the Hospital, and we’ve got orders not to touch them. I hear some of them are proven rebels.”

“I’m one myself.”

“I thought you might be.”

“After my leg heals, will I be turned loose?”

“I suppose so, from the way you’re being treated. It’s up to Parlette.” Her treatment of him had become curiously ambivalent. By turns he was her inferior, confidant, and patient. “Why don’t you ask your friends on Saturday?”

That night they hooked up a sleepmaker at the head of his bed. “Why didn’t they do that before?” he asked one of the workmen. “It must be safer than pills.”

“You’re looking at it wrong,” the man told him. “Most of the patients here are crew. You don’t think a crew would use a vivarium sleepmaker, do you?”

“Too proud, huh?”

“I told you. They’re crew.”

There was a listening bug in, the headset.

To Parlette, Matt was part of the paperwork. His was one of the dossiers lying on Jesus Pietro’s desk. Its cover was scorched, like the others; but the Head’s office, on the second floor, had escaped most of the damage from the Planck’s wildfire drive.

Parlette went through all those dossiers and many more. By now he knew that the worst threat to his “New Law” was defection by the Sons of Earth. Only they, with their presumed control over the colonists, could make it work; and only they were beyond his control.

Matthew Keller’s dossier was unusual in its skimpiness. There wasn’t even a record of his joining the rebel organization. Yet he must belong. Castro’s notes implied that Keller had freed the vivarium prisoners. He had been badly hurt invading the Hospital a second time. He must be partly responsible for the Planck disaster. He seemed to be connected with the mystery of the bleeding-heart symbol. A very active rebel, Matthew Keller.

Then there was Harry Kane’s disproportionate interest in him.

Parlette’s first evanescent impulse was to have him die of his injuries. He’d caused too much destruction already. Probably the Planck’s library could never be replaced. But getting Harry Kane’s trust was far more important.

On Thursday Dr. Bennet sent him word that Keller would be receiving visitors. Installing a listening bug was an obvious precaution. Millard Parlette made a note of the coming interview—at Saturday noon—then forgot it until then.

When Hood had finished talking, Matt smiled and said, “I told you they were little hearts and livers.”

It didn’t go over. The four of them looked solemnly back at him, like a jury circling his hospital bed.

When they’d first come in, he’d wondered if they were all slated for the organ banks. They’d been so deadly serious, and they moved with coordination, as if they’d rehearsed this.

Hood had talked for almost half an hour, with occasional interruptions from Harry Kane and no comments at all from Laney and Mrs. Hancock. It still seemed rehearsed. You do all the talking, Jay, someone must have said. Break it to him gently. Then…But what they’d told him was all good.

“You’ve still got that bad-news look,” he said. “Why so solemn? All is roses. We’re all going to live forever. No more Implementation raids. No more being hauled off to the organ banks without a trial. We can even build wooden houses if we’re crazy enough to want them. The millenium has come at last.”

Harry Kane spoke. “And what’s to keep Parlette from breaking all his rash promises?”

Matt still couldn’t see why it should involve him. “You think he might?”

“Look at it logically, Keller. Parlette has Castro’s job now. He’s the Head. He runs Implementation.”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Kane. “I want him to have all the power he can grab, because he’s the only man who can put the New Law across—if he chooses. But let’s just back off a little and look at how much power he does have.

“He runs Implementation.” Kane ticked it off on a finger. “He’s trained his own clan to use hunting guns. That gives him most of the weapons on Mount Lookitthat. He can twist the Council around his little finger. Parlette is well on his way to being the world’s first emperor!”

“But you could stop him. You said yourself that you can raise the colony against him any time you like.”

Kane waved it off. “We can’t do that. Sure, it’s a good threat, especially after what we’ve already done to Implementation. But we don’t want a bloodbath any more than Parlette does, or says he does. No, we need something else to hold over him.”

Four solemn faces waited for his reply. What the Mist Demons was this all about? Matt said, “All right, you thought up the problem; now think up an answer.”

“We need an invisible assassin.”

Matt raised himself on one shoulder and peered at Harry Kane around the white pillar of his traction-bound leg. No, Kane wasn’t joking. The effort was exhausting, and he dropped back.

Laney put a hand on his arm. “It’s the only answer, Matt. And it’s perfect. No matter how powerful Millard Parlette becomes politically, he’ll never have a defense against you.”

“It’s you or civil war,” Kane put in.

Matt found his voice. “I don’t doubt you’re serious,” he said wonderingly. “What I doubt is your sanity. Do I look like an assassin? I’ve never killed anyone. I never intend to.”

“You did pretty well last weekend.”

“What—I used a stun gun! I hit some people with my fist! Why does that make me a pro killer?”

“You realize,” said Hood, “that we never intend to use you as such. You’re a threat, Matt, nothing more. You’ll be one leg in the balance of power between the Sons of Earth and Millard Parlette.”

“I’m a miner.” Matt gestured with his left hand the one that didn’t pull cracked ribs. “A miner. I use trained worms to dig for metal. My boss sells the metal, and buys worms and worm food, and with luck he makes enough to pay my salary. Wait a minute. Have you told Parlette about this idea?”

“No, of course not. He’ll never know about it unless you agree, and then we’ll wait until you’re out of the Hospital.”

“Mist Demons, I should hope so. If Parlette gets the idea I’m dangerous to him—and me on my back like this—I want to be on Delta before you tell Parlette. Hell I want to be on Earth before—”

“Then you agree?”

“No, Kane! No, I do not agree to anything! Don’t you realize I’ve got a family? What if Parlette takes hostages?”

“Two parents and a sister,” Hood amplified. “Parents on Iota.”

“Don’t worry,” Laney said soothingly. “We’ll protect them, Matt. They’ll be safe.”

Kane nodded. “If anyone so much as harms a hair on your head, or threatens any member of your family. I’ll declare total war. I’ll have to tell Parlette that; and to make him believe it, I’ll have to mean it. And I do.”

Matt thought very seriously about shouting for Dr. Bennet. It wouldn’t work. Even if she threw them out, they’d only come back later.

And Matt Keller was a man on his back. He could move three inches to the side if he was willing to endure the pain. Four inches, no. A captive audience.

“You’ve really thought it out, haven’t you? Why did you wait so long to tell me?”

Jay Hood answered. “I wanted to be here. This is my day off.”

“You’re back teaching school, Jay?”

“It seems appropriate to teach history while we’re making it.” In the dry voice there was a barely concealed jubilation. Hood was in his element. Strange that he’d never suspected the size of Hood’s ego.

“You got me into this,” said Matt.

“Sorry. My apologies. Believe me, Matt, I only picked you as a probable recruit.” When Matt didn’t answer, Hood continued, “But we do need you. Let me show you how much. You were dying, Matt—”

“Stop, Jay.”

“He has a right to know, Laney. Matt, those ribs you broke tore up your lung and your diaphragm. Harry had to talk Parlette into—”

“Jay, shut up.”

“All right, Laney.” He sounded hurt.

“Matt, we weren’t going to tell you. Really we weren’t.”

Dead man’s flesh was a part of him, forever. Living under his rib cage: a strange, partial resurrection.

Matt said, “All right, Laney. How do you stand on this?”

Laney looked down, then up to meet his eyes. “It’s your choice, Matt. But if we don’t have you, we don’t have anyone.” She seemed to stop, then hurried on. “Listen, Matt, you’re making a big thing out of this. We’re not asking you to rush right out and murder someone. We’d be perfectly happy to see you go back to your mining worms. For all we care, you can stay there the rest of your life, with a small extra income”—“Thanks”—“For being on standby alert. Maybe Parlette’s honest. Maybe he really does want to make the Plateau a paradise. Maybe all is roses. But just in case—” She leaned forward in the uncomfortable hospital chair, gripping his wrist with one hand, looking deep into his eyes. Her nails cut the skin—“just in case Parlette is ambitious, then we’ll need you to stop him. Nobody else will be able to do it.

“We must let him have his power now. Somebody has to take power, or there’ll be civil war. But if he needs to be stopped, and you don’t stop him, you’ll be a coward.”

Matt tried to pull his arm away. Torn muscles reacted; it was as if he’d been kicked in the side with a lead boot. “You’re fanatics! All four of you!” And he was trapped, trapped…

Laney let go. Slowly she sat back, her eyes soft and dreamy, with pinpoint pupils.

Matt relaxed. The others were looking at nothing. Jay Hood was humming under his breath. Mrs. Hancock scowled at some unpleasant thought.

“The luck of Matt Keller” had given him a breathing space.

“The luck of Matt Keller.” A joke, a shaggy-dog story. If he hadn’t used the power to “rescue” Polly, she might be alive now. If he hadn’t come running to Jay Hood for explanations, he’d be back tending his mining worms. No wonder this form of “luck” had never appeared before. Perhaps it never would again.

It was a detrimental mutation. It had kept him virgin until he was twenty-one. It had killed Polly and caused Laney to see him as a tool instead of a man. It had sent him into the Planck; he’d never have tried that without his psychological invisibility. Into the Planck to die; out, by blind luck, with a dead man’s lung.

A man should have the sense to hide his differences.

Too late. They would forget him, again and again, as often as he desired. But always they would come back. Matt Keller, tool, captive assassin.

Not likely!

“You,” he said. “Mrs. Hancock.”

The others stirred, turned to face him, returned to the world in which Matt Keller was a factor to be considered.

“Mrs. Hancock. Do you have anything to say to me?”

“I don’t think so,” said the middle-aged rebel who should have been a shrewish housewife.

“You didn’t say a word while the others were brow-beating me. Why did you come?”

She shrugged. “Just to see what would happen. Keller, did you ever lose someone you loved?”

“Sure.”

“To the organ banks?”

“My Uncle Matt.”

“I did my damndest to stop you from getting a transplant, Keller. Dr. Bennet says you’d have lived without it, but of course you’d have been a cripple.”

“I’d have been just as glad,” said Matt, though he wasn’t sure it was true.

“I wanted to smash the organ banks the first chance we got. Nobody else seems to feel that way. Maybe nobody else had a husband cut up for the organ banks.”

“Make your point.”

She shrugged again. “I don’t know if you’re as important as Harry says. It seems to me nobody could be that important. You got us out of the Hospital, right. Parlette would never have found us otherwise, right. We’re grateful, right. But did we have to cut a man up to show how grateful we are? You didn’t do him any good.

“Well, he’s dead, and we can’t break up the organ banks yet. But we’re trying to change the laws so less people go into them, and then only the ones that deserve it most. If you were any kind of man, you’d be wild to help us. I say it’s all you can do for that dead man.”

“For sweet charity.”

Mrs. Hancock’s mouth closed like a trap.

“I’m going to join you,” said Matt. “But not for sweet charity. And now I’ll give you my reasons.”

“Go on,” said Harry Kane. He was the only one who didn’t show surprise.

“I can’t go back to my mining worms. That’s absolute. But I’m no hired killer, and that’s for sure too. I’ve never committed murder. I haven’t wanted to, not often. If I ever kill a man, I’ll want to know just why I’m doing it.

“There’s only one way I can be sure I will.

“From now on, the five of us are going to be the leaders of the Sons of Earth.” That he saw, jolted even Harry Kane. “I’ll want a hand in all decisions. I’ll want all the information available to any of you. What do you say, Harry?”

“Keep talking.”

Matt’s mouth was dry. Harry Kane didn’t like this, and Harry Kane was a bad enemy. “The Sons of Earth can’t commit murder without my consent, and I won’t give it unless I decide murder is necessary. To make that decision, I’d have to know everything, always. One more thing. If I ever decide one of you is trying to cheat me, I’ll kill you because cheating me of information will be murder.”

“What makes you think you can handle that much power, Keller?” Harry’s voice was dispassionate, merely interested.

“I have to try,” Matt pointed out. “It’s my power.”

“Fair enough.” Harry stood up. “One of us will be here tomorrow, with copies of Parlette’s New Law, in full. If we decide to make changes later, we’ll let you know.”

“Let me know before you make the changes.”

Kane hesitated, then nodded. They went.

Millard Parlette sighed and turned off the receiver.

Invisible assassin? An odd phrase to come from a practical man like Harry Kane. What could he have meant?

Kane would tell him eventually, of course.

Even then it wouldn’t matter. Kane could be trusted now, and that did matter. Now Kane had a hold on Millard Parlette. Be it real or imaginary, he would use that hold before he started a civil war.

And Millard Parlette could concentrate on the man waiting outside. Implementation had selected one of their number to present a set of grievances. The man must be getting angrier and angrier as he waited for the Head’s attention.

Parlette used the intercom. “Send him in, Miss Lauessen.”

“Good.”

“Wait. What’s his name again?”

“Halley Fox. Corporal.”

“Thank you. Would you please send to Gamma and Delta and Iota plateaus for records on Matthew Keller.”

“Done, mine ancestor.”

Mist Demons! How had Castro put up with the woman? Parlette smiled. Why not? Let him take care of Implementation and the Council, and Harry Kane would take care of the rest. An invisible assassin had just lifted half the load from his back.

“It’ll be one strange balance of power,” said Harry Kane. “Parlette’s got every weapon on the planet except for what we’ve built in our basements. He’s got all the electrical and medical facilities, and most of the wealth. And what have we got? Matt Keller.”

“And lucky to get him,” said Laney.

A red-haired girl in an iridescent dress passed them, walking quickly down the corridor. A crew girl, probably visiting a relative. They stopped talking until she had passed. Harry Kane grinned after her, grinned at her startled expression and at the way she’d quickened her step to leave them behind. They’d all have to get used to this someday: to the sight of colonists in the hallowed corridors of the Hospital.

Jay Hood said, “Well, we’ve got him. Or has he got us?” He slapped the wall, making gunshot echoes. “Can you imagine what the historians will say? They may never figure it out.”

Matt lay on his back and contemplated the ceiling.

He’d made the right decision. He was sure of it. If he had a power, then someone had to have a use for it.

He himself had none.

A detrimental mutation is one that prevents the organism from surviving long enough to breed. Matt’s only hope of becoming a father lay in suppressing the “luck” entirely, at least in his private life. An invisible man goes nowhere in a civilized society.

Someone entered. Matt’s eyes jerked hard over, caught by the iridescent blue of her dress.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, and turned to leave. She was tall and slender, and young, with dark red hair curved into impossible contours. Her dress was of a type never seen on Delta Plateau, loose and clinging, and it glowed. A face lovely in its strangeness, with flared nostrils and pronounced cheekbones, marked her as pure crew.

“Just a minute,” Matt called.

She turned in surprise, not at what he’d said, but at his colonist accent. Then her back straightened and her chin lifted and her mouth became a hard, angry line. Matt flushed.

And before her eyes could coldly leave him, he thought, Look at me.

Her eyes didn’t turn. Her chin came down and her face went soft and dreamy.

Keep your eyes on mine, he thought at her. I fascinate you, right? Right. Keep looking.

She took a slow step toward him.

Matt dropped the control. She took another step forward, and then she looked horrified. She turned and ran from the room, followed by Matt’s pealing laughter.

Detrimental mutation?

Maybe not.

The Outsider ship was a Christmas decoration, a hall of tinsel ribbons looping over and under and around one another, never touching. It was the diameter of New York with about the same population, in beings like black cat-o’-nine-tails with thickened handles.

Miles ahead at the end of its tethering cables, the fusion drive spread dim light over the ship. The basking ramps cast vacuum-sharp shadows across each other, and in the borderlands between light and shade lay the crew. They lay with their heads in sunlight and their branched tails in shadow, soaking up energy through thermoelectric currents. Fusion radiation sleeted through their bodies, unnoticed. It was a peaceful, lazy time.

Between stars there was little to do.

Until actinic blue flame flashed across their course, throwing high-energy particles and electromagnetic fields about with carefree abandon.

In moments the object was out of sight, even to an Outsider’s sensitive eye. But not to the ship’s instruments. In an hour the Outsiders had it nailed: position, velocity, mass, design, thrust. It was metal, mechanical, pushed by fusion, and fueled by interstellar hydrogen. Not a primitive device, but…

Built by potential customers.

In every, arm of the galaxy were Outsiders, using everything from photon sails to reactionless, inertialess drives to push their ships; but always they traveled through Einsteinian space. Hyperdrive was vulgar. The Outsiders never used hyperdrive.

Other species were different. They preferred not to dawdle in space, enjoying the trip, sightseeing, taking their time. Usually they preferred the speedy convenience of the hyperdrive Blind Spot. Hundreds of times over, alien races had bought the secret of the hyperdrive from passing Outsiders.

The trade ship, swung easily toward Procyon and the human colony on We Made It, following Interstellar Ramscoop Robot #144. No chance of catching up, not at the customary .01 gee. No hurry. Plenty of time…

In two sparks of fusion light, an industrial revolution moved on We Made It.

THERE IS A TIDE

I

I Then, the planet had no name. It circles a star which in 2830 lay beyond the fringe of known space, a distance of nearly forty light-years from Sol. The star is a G3, somewhat redder than Sol, somewhat smaller. The planet, swinging eighty million miles from its primary in a reasonably circular orbit, is a trifle cold for human tastes.

In the year 2830 one Louis Gridley Wu happened to be passing. The emphasis on accident is intended. In a universe the size of ours almost anything that can happen, will. Take the coincidence of his meeting—

But we’ll get to that.

Louis Wu was one hundred and eighty years old. As a regular user of boosterspice, he didn’t show his years. If he didn’t get bored first, or broke, he might reach a thousand.

“But,” he sometimes told himself, “not if I have to put up with any more cocktail parties, or Bandersnatch hunts, or painted flatlanders swarming through an anarchy park too small for them by a factor of ten. Not if I have to live through another one-night love affair or another twenty-year marriage or another twenty-minute wait for a transfer booth that blows its zap just as it’s my turn. And people. Not if I have to live with people, day and night, all those endless centuries.”

When he started to feel like that, he left. It had happened three times in his life, and now a fourth. Presumably, it would keep happening. In such a state of anomie, of acute anti-everything, he was no good to anyone, especially his friends, most especially himself. So he left. In a small but adequate spacecraft, his own, he left everything and everyone, heading outward for the fringe of known space. He would not return until he was desperate for the sight of a human face, the sound of a human voice.

On the second trip he had gritted his teeth and waited until he was desperate for the sight of a Kzinti face.

That was a long trip, he remembered. And, because he had only been three and a half months in space on this fourth trip, and because his teeth still snapped together at the mere memory of a certain human voice…because of these things, he added, “I think this time I’ll wait till I’m desperate to see a Kdatlyno. Female, of course.”

Few of his friends guessed the wear and tear these trips saved him. And them. He spent the months reading, while his library played orchestrated music. By now he was well clear of known space. Now he turned the ship ninety degrees, beginning a wide circular arc with Sol at its center.

He approached a certain G3 star. He dropped out of hyperdrive well clear of the singularity in hyperspace which surrounds any large mass. He accelerated into the system on his main thruster, sweeping the space ahead of him with the deep-radar. He was not looking for habitable planets. He was looking for Slaver stasis boxes.

If the pulse returned no echo, he would accelerate until he could shift to hyperdrive. The velocity would stay with him, and he could use it to coast through the next system he tried, and the next, and the next. It saved fuel.

He had never found a Slaver stasis box. It did not stop him from looking.

As he passed through the system, the deep-radar showed him planets like pale ghosts, light gray circles on the white screen. The G3 sun was a wide gray disk, darkening almost to black at the center. The near-black was degenerate matter, compressed past the point where electron orbits collapse entirely.

He was well past the sun, and still accelerating when the screen showed a tiny black fleck.

“No system is perfect, of course,” he muttered as he turned off the drive. He talked to himself a good deal, out here where nobody could interrupt him.

“It usually saves fuel,” he told himself a week later. By then he was out of the singularity, in clear space. He took the ship into hyperdrive, circled halfway round the system, and began decelerating. The velocity he’d built up during those first two weeks gradually left him. Somewhere near where he’d found a black speck in the deep-radar projection, he slowed to a stop.

Though he had never realized it until now, his system for saving fuel was based on the assumption that he would never find a Slaver box. But the fleck was there again, a black dot on the gray ghost of a planet. Louis Wu moved in.

The world looked something like Earth. It was nearly the same size, very much the same shape, somewhat the same color. There was no moon.

Louis used his telescope on the planet and whistled appreciatively. Shredded white cloud over misty blue…faint continental outlines…a hurricane whorl near the equator. The ice caps looked big, but there would be warm climate near the equator. The air looked sweet and noncarcinogenic on the spectrograph. And nobody on it. Not a soul!

No next-door neighbors. No voices. No faces.

“What the hell,” he chortled. “I’ve got my box. I’ll just spend the rest of my vacation here. No men. No women. No children.” He frowned and rubbed the fringe of hair along his jaw. “Am I being hasty? Maybe I should knock.”

But he scanned the radio bands and got nothing. Any civilized planet radiates like a small star in the radio range. Moreover, there was no sign of civilization, even from a hundred miles up.

“Great! Okay, first I’ll get that old stasis box.” He was sure it was that. Nothing but stars and stasis boxes were dense enough to show black in the reflection of a hyperwave pulse.

He followed the image around the bulge of the planet. It seemed the planet had a moon after all. The moon was twelve hundred miles up, and it was ten feet across.

“Now why,” he wondered aloud, “would the Slavers have put it in orbit? It’s too easy to find. They were in a war, for Finagle’s sake! And why would it stay here?”

The little moon was still a couple of thousand miles away, invisible to the naked eye. The scope showed it clearly enough. A silver sphere ten feet through, with no marks on it.

“A billion and a half years it’s been there,” said Louis to himself, said he. “And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. Something would have knocked it down. Dust, a meteor, the solar wind. Tnuctip soldiers. A magnetic storm. Nah.” He ran his fingers through straight black hair grown too long. “It must have drifted in from somewhere else. Recently. Wha—”

Another ship, small and conical, had appeared behind the silvery sphere. Its hull was green, with darker green markings.

II

II “Damn,” said Louis. He didn’t recognize the make. It was no human ship. “Well, it could be worse. They could have been people.” He used the comm laser.

The other ship braked to a stop. In courtesy, so did Louis.

“Would you believe it?” he demanded of himself. “Three years total time I’ve spent looking for stasis boxes. I finally find one, and now something else wants it too!”

The bright blue spark of another laser glowed in the tip of the alien cone. Louis listened to the autopilot computer chuckling to itself as it tried to untangle the signals in an unknown laser beam. At least they did use lasers, not telepathy or tentacle-waving or rapid changes in skin color.

A face appeared on Louis’s screen.

It was not the first alien he had seen. This, like some others, had a recognizable head: a cluster of sense organs grouped around a mouth, with room for a brain. Trinocular vision, he noted; the eyes set deep in sockets, well protected, but restricted in range of vision. Triangular mouth, too, with yellow, serrated bone knives showing their edges behind three gristle lips.

Definitely, this was an unknown species.

“Boy, are you ugly,” Louis refrained from saying. The alien’s translator might be working by now.

His own autopilot finished translating the alien’s first message. It said. “Go away. This object belongs to me.”

“Remarkable,” Louis sent back. “Are you a Slaver?” The being did not in the least resemble a Slaver, and the Slavers had been extinct for eons.

“That word was not translated,” said the alien. “I reached the artifact before you did. I will fight to keep it.”

Louis scratched at his chin, at two weeks’ growth of bristly beard. His ship had very little to fight with. Even the fusion plant which powered the thruster was designed with safety in mind. A laser battle, fought with comm lasers turned to maximum, would be a mere endurance test; and he’d lose, for the alien ship had more mass to absorb more heat. He had no weapons per se. Presumably the alien did.

But the stasis box was a big one.

The Tnuctipun-Slaver war had wiped out most of the intelligent species of the galaxy, a billion and a half years ago. Countless minor battles must have occurred before a Slaver-developed final weapon was used. Often the Slavers, losing a battle, had stored valuables in a stasis box, and hidden it against the day they would again be of use.

No time passed inside a closed stasis box. Alien meat a billion and a half years old had emerged still fresh from its hiding place. Weapons and tools showed no trace of rust. Once a stasis box had disgorged a small, tarsierlike sentient being, still alive. That former slave had lived a strange life before the aging process claimed her, the last of her species.

Slaver stasis boxes were beyond value. It was known that the Tnuctipun, at least, had known the secret of direct conversion of matter. Perhaps their enemies had too. Someday, in a stasis box somewhere outside known space, such a device would be found. Then fusion power would be as obsolete as internal combustion.

And this, a sphere ten feet in diameter, must be the largest stasis box ever found.

“I too will fight to keep the artifact,” said Louis. “But consider this. Our species has met once, and will meet again regardless of who takes the artifact now. We can be friends or enemies. Why should we risk this relationship by killing?”

The alien sense-cluster gave away nothing. “What do you propose?”

“A game of chance, with the risks even on both sides. Do you play games of chance?”

“Emphatically yes. The process of living is a game of chance. To avoid chance is insanity.”

“That it is. Hmmm.” Louis regarded the alien head that seemed to be all triangles. He saw it abruptly whip around, flick, to face straight backward, and snap back in the same instant. The sight did something to the pit of his stomach.

“Did you speak?” the alien asked.

“No. Won’t you break your neck that way?”

“Your question is interesting. Later we must discuss anatomy. I have a proposal.”

“Fine.”

“We shall land on the world below us. We will meet between our ships. I will do you the courtesy of emerging first. Can you bring your translator?”

He could connect the computer with his suit radio. “Yes.”

“We will meet between our ships and play some simple game, familiar to neither of us, depending solely on chance. Agreed?”

“Provisionally. What game?”

The image on the screen rippled with diagonal lines. Something interfering with the signal? It cleared quickly. “There is a mathematics game,” said the alien. “Our mathematics will certainly be similar.”

“True.” Though Louis had heard of some decidedly peculiar twists in alien mathematics.

“The game involves a screee—” Some word that the autopilot couldn’t translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien’s mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. “This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even.”

The image rippled, then cleared.

“Agreed,” said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.

“We shall both accelerate away from the artifact. Will you follow me down?”

“I will,” said Louis.

The image disappeared.

III

III Louis Wu scratched at a week’s growth of beard. What a way to greet an alien ambassador! In the worlds of men Louis Wu dressed impeccably; but out here he felt free to look like death warmed over, all the time.

But how was a—Trinoc supposed to know that he should have shaved? No, that wasn’t the problem.

Was he fool or genius?

He had friends, many of them, with habits like his own. Two had disappeared decades ago; he no longer remembered their names. He remembered only that each had gone hunting stasis boxes in this direction and that each had neglected to come back.

Had they met alien ships?

There were any number of other explanations. Half a year or more spent alone in a single ship was a good way to find out whether you liked yourself. If you decided you didn’t, there was no point in returning to the worlds of men.

But there were aliens out here. Armed. One rested in orbit five hundred miles ahead of his ship, with a valuable artifact halfway between.

Still, gambling was safer than fighting. Louis Wu waited for the alien’s next move.

That move was to drop like a rock. The alien ship must have used at least twenty gees of push. After a moment of shock, Louis followed under the same acceleration, protected by his cabin gravity. Was the alien testing his maneuverability?

Possibly not. He seemed contemptuous of tricks. Louis, trailing the alien at a goodly distance, was now much closer to the silver sphere. Suppose he just turned ship, ran for the artifact, strapped it to his hull and kept running?

Actually, that wouldn’t work. He’d have to slow to reach the sphere; the alien wouldn’t have to slow to attack. Twenty gees was close to his ship’s limit.

Running might not be a bad idea, though. What guarantee had he of the alien’s good faith? What if the alien “cheated”?

That risk could be minimized. His pressure suit had sensors to monitor his body functions. Louis set the autopilot to blow the fusion plant if his heart stopped. He rigged a signal button on his suit to blow the plant manually.

The alien ship burned bright orange as it hit air. It fell free and then slowed suddenly, a mile over the ocean. “Showoff,” Louis muttered and prepared to imitate the maneuver.

The conical ship showed no exhaust. Its drive must be either a reactionless drive, like his own, or a kzin-style induced-gravity drive. Both were neat and clean, silent, safe to bystanders and highly advanced.

Islands were scattered across the ocean. The alien circled, chose one at seeming random, and landed like a feather along a bare shoreline.

Louis followed him down. There was a bad moment while he waited for some unimaginable weapon to fire from the grounded ship, to tear him flaming from the sky while his attention was distracted by landing procedures. But he landed without a jar, several hundred yards from the alien cone.

“An explosion will destroy both our ships if I am harmed,” he told the alien via signal beam.

“Our species seem to think alike. I will now descend.”

Louis watched him appear near the nose of the ship, in a wide circular airlock. He watched the alien drift gently to the sand. Then he clamped his helmet down and entered the airlock.

Had he made the right decision?

Gambling was safer than war. More fun, too. Best of all, it gave him better odds.

“But I’d hate to go home without that box,” he thought. In nearly two hundred years of life, he had never done anything as important as finding a stasis box. He had made no discoveries, won no elective offices, overthrown no governments. This was his big chance.

“Even odds,” he said, and turned on the intercom as he descended.

His muscles and semicircular canals registered about a gee. A hundred feet away waves slid hissing up onto pure white sand. The waves were green and huge, perfect for riding; the beach a definite beer party beach.

Later, perhaps he would ride those waves to shore on his belly, if the air checked out and the water was free of predators. He hadn’t had time to give the planet a thorough checkup.

Sand tugged at his boots as he went to meet the alien.

The alien was five feet tall. He had looked much taller descending from his ship, but that was because he was mostly leg. More than three feet of skinny leg, a torso like a beer barrel, and no neck. Impossible that his neckless neck should be so supple. But the chrome yellow skin fell in thick rolls around the bottom of his head, hiding anatomical details.

His suit was transparent, a roughly alien-shaped balloon, constricted at the shoulder, above and below the complicated elbow joint, at the wrist, at hip and knee. Air jets showed at wrist and ankle. Tools hung in loops at the chest. A back pack hung from the neck, under the suit. Louis noted all these tools with trepidation; any one of them could be a weapon.

“I expected that you would be taller,” said the alien.

“A laser screen doesn’t tell much, does it? I think my translator may have mixed up right and left, too. Do you have the coin?”

“The screee?” The alien produced it. “Shall there be no preliminary talk? My name is screee.”

“My machine can’t translate that. Or pronounce it. My name is Louis. Has your species met others besides mine?”

“Yes, two. But I am not an expert in that field of knowledge.”

“Nor am I. Let’s leave the politenesses to the experts. We’re here to gamble.”

“Choose your symbol,” said the alien, and handed him the coin.

Louis looked it over. It was a lens of platinum or something similar, sharp-edged, with the three-clawed hand of his new gambling partner stamped on one side and a planet, with heavy ice caps outlined, decorating the other. Maybe they weren’t ice caps, but continents.

He held the coin as if trying to choose. Stalling. Those gas jets seemed to be attitude jets, but maybe not. Suppose he won? Would he win only the chance to be murdered?

But they’d both die if his heart stopped. No alien could have guessed what kind of weapon would render him helpless without killing him.

“I choose the planet. You flip first.”

The alien tossed the coin in the direction of Louis’s ship. Louis’s eyes followed it down, and he took two steps to retrieve it. The alien stood beside him when he rose.

“Hand,” he said. “My turn.” He was one down. He tossed the coin. As it spun gleaming, he saw for the first time that the alien ship was gone.

“What gives?” he demanded.

“There’s no need for us to die,” said the alien. It held something that had hung in a loop from its chest. “This is a weapon, but both will die if I use it. Please do not try to reach your ship.”

Louis touched the button that would blow his power plant.

“My ship lifted when you turned your head to follow the screee. By now my ship is beyond range of any possible explosion you can bring to bear. There is no need for us to die, provided you do not try to reach your ship.”

“Wrong. I can leave your ship without a pilot.” He left his hand where it was. Rather than be cheated by an alien in a gambling game—

“The pilot is still on board, with the astrogator and the screee. I am only the communications officer. Why did you assume I was alone?”

Louis sighed and let his arm fall. “Because I’m stupid,” he said bitterly. “Because you used the singular pronoun, or my computer did. Because I thought you were a gambler.”

“I gambled that you would not see my ship take off, that you would be distracted by the coin, that you could see only from the front of your head. The risks seemed better than one-half.”

Louis nodded. It all seemed clear.

“There was also the chance that you had lured me down to destroy me.” The computer was still translating into the first person singular. “I have lost at least one exploring ship that flew in this direction.”

“Not guilty. So have we.” A thought struck him, and he said, “Prove that you hold a weapon.”

The alien obliged. No beam showed, but sand exploded to Louis’s left, with a vicious crack! and a flash the color of lightning. The alien held something that made holes.

So much for that. Louis bent and picked up the coin. “As long as we’re here, shall we finish the game?”

“To what purpose?”

“To see who would have won. Doesn’t your species gamble for pleasure?”

“To what purpose? We gamble for survival.”

“Then Finagle take your whole breed!” he snarled and flung himself to the sand. His chance for glory was gone, tricked away from him. There is a tide that governs men’s affairs…and there went the ebb, carrying statues to Louis Wu, history books naming Louis Wu, jetsam on the tide.

“Your attitude is puzzling. One gambles only when gambling is necessary.”

“Nuts.”

“My translator will not translate that comment.”

“Do you know what that artifact is?”

“I know of the species who built that artifact. They traveled far.”

“We’ve never found a stasis box that big. It must be a vault of some kind.”

“It is thought that that species used a single weapon to end their war and all its participants.”

The two looked at each other. Possibly each was thinking the same thing. What a disaster, if any but my own species should take this ultimate weapon!

But that was anthropomorphic thinking. Louis knew that a Kzin would have been saying: Now I can conquer the universe, as is my right.

“Finagle take my luck!” said Louis Wu between his teeth. “Why did you have to show at the same time I did?”

“That was not entirely chance. My instruments found your craft as you backed into the system. To reach the vicinity of the artifact in time, it was necessary to use thrust that damaged my ship and killed one of my crew. I earned possession of the artifact.”

“By cheating, damn you!” Louis stood up…

And something meshed between his brain and his semicircular canals.

IV

IV One gravity.

The density of a planet’s atmosphere depended on its gravity, and on its moon. A big moon would skim away most of the atmosphere, over the billions of years of a world’s evolution. A moonless world the size and mass of Earth should have unbreathable air, impossibly dense, worse than Venus.

But this planet had no moon. Except—

The alien said something, a startled ejaculation that the computer refused to translate. “Secree! Where did the water go?”

Louis looked. What he saw puzzled him only a moment. The ocean had receded, slipped imperceptibly away, until what showed now was half a mile of level, slickly shining sea bottom.

“Where did the water go? I do not understand.”

“I do.”

“Where did it go? Without a moon, there can be no tides. Tides are not this quick in any case. Explain, please.”

“It’ll be easier if we use the telescope in my ship.”

“In your ship there may be weapons.”

“Now pay attention,” said Louis. “Your ship is very close to total destruction. Nothing can save your crew but the comm laser in my ship.”

The alien dithered, then capitulated. “If you have weapons, you would have used them earlier. You cannot stop my ship now. Let us enter your ship. Remember that I hold my weapon.”

The alien stood beside him in the small cabin, his mouth working disturbingly around the serrated edges of his teeth as Louis activated the scope and screen. Shortly a starfield appeared. So did a conical spacecraft, painted green with darker green markings. Along the bottom of the screen was the blur of thick atmosphere.

“You see? The artifact must be nearly to the horizon. It moves fast.”

“That fact is obvious even to low intelligence.”

“Yah. Is it obvious to you that this world must have a massive satellite?”

“But it does not, unless the satellite is invisible.”

“Not invisible. Just too small to notice. But then, it must be very dense.”

The alien didn’t answer.

“Why did we assume the sphere was a Slaver stasis box? Its shape was wrong; its size was wrong. But it was shiny, like the surface of a stasis field, and spherical, like an artifact. Planets are spheres too, but gravity wouldn’t ordinarily pull something ten feet wide into a sphere. Either it would have to be very fluid, or it would have to be very dense. Do you understand me?”

“No.”

“I don’t know how your equipment works. My deep-radar uses a hyperwave pulse to find stasis boxes. When something stops a hyperwave pulse, it’s either a stasis box, or it’s something denser than degenerate matter, the matter inside a normal star. And this object is dense enough to cause tides.”

A tiny silver bead had drifted into view ahead of the cone. Telescopic foreshortening seemed to bring it right alongside the ship. Louis reached to scratch at his beard and was stopped by his faceplate.

“I believe I understand you. But how could it happen?”

“That’s guesswork. Well?”

“Call my ship. They would be killed. We must save them!”

“I had to be sure you wouldn’t stop me.” Louis Wu went to work. Presently a light glowed; the computer had found the alien ship with its comm laser.

He spoke without preliminaries. “You must leave the spherical object immediately. It is not an artifact. It is ten feet of nearly solid neutronium, probably torn loose from a neutron star.”

There was no answer, of course. The alien stood behind him but did not speak. Probably his own ship’s computer could not have handled the double translation. But the alien was making one two-armed gesture, over and over.

The green cone swung sharply around, broadside to the telescope.

“Good, they’re firing lateral,” said Louis to himself. “Maybe they can do a hyperbolic past it.” He raised his voice. “Use all the power available. You must pull away.”

The two objects seemed to be pulling apart. Louis suspected that that was illusion, for the two objects were almost in line-of-sight. “Don’t let the small mass fool you,” he said, unnecessarily now. “Computer, what’s the mass of a ten-foot neutronium sphere?—Around two times ten to the minus six times the mass of this world, which is pretty tiny, but if you get too close…Computer, what’s the surface gravity?—I don’t believe it.”

The two objects seemed to be pulling together again. Damn, thought Louis. If they hadn’t come along, that’d be me.

He kept talking. It wouldn’t matter now, except to relieve his own tension. “My computer says ten million gravities at the surface. That may be off. Newton’s formula for gravity. Can you hear me?”

“They are too close,” said the alien. “By now it is too late to save their lives.” It was happening as he spoke. The ship began to crumble a fraction of a second before impact. Impact looked no more dangerous than a cannonball striking the wall of a fort. The tiny silver bead simply swept through the side of the ship. But the ship closed instantly, all in a moment, like tinsel paper in a strong man’s fist. Closed into a bead glowing yellow with heat. A tiny sphere ten feet through or a bit more.

“I mourn,” said the alien.

“Now I get it,” said Louis. “I wondered what was fouling our laser messages. That chunk of neutronium was right between our ships, bending the light beams.”

“Why was this trap set for us?” cried the alien. “Have we enemies so powerful that they can play with such masses?”

A touch of paranoia? Louis wondered. Maybe the whole species had it. “Just a touch of coincidence. A smashed neutron star.”

For a time the alien did not speak. The telescope, for want of a better target, remained focused on the bead. Its glow had died.

The alien said, “My pressure suit will not keep me alive long.”

“We’ll make a run for it. I can reach Margrave in a couple of weeks. If you can hold out that long, we’ll set up a tailored environment box to hold you until we think of something better. It only takes a couple of hours to set one up. I’ll call ahead.”

The alien’s triple gaze converged on him. “Can you send messages faster than light?”

“Sure.”

“You have knowledge worth trading for. I’ll come with you.”

“Thanks a whole lot.” Louis Wu started punching buttons. “Margrave. Civilization. People. Faces. Voices. Bah.” The ship leapt upward, ripping atmosphere apart. Cabin gravity wavered a little, then settled down.

“Well,” he told himself. “I can always come back.”

“You will return here?”

“I think so,” he decided.

“I hope you will be armed.”

“What? More paranoia?”

“Your species is insufficiently suspicious,” said the alien. “I wonder that you have survived. Consider this neutronium object as a defense. Its mass pulls anything that touches it into smooth and reflective spherical surface. Should any vehicle approach this world, its crew would find this object quickly. They would assume it is an artifact. What other assumption could they make? They would draw alongside for a closer examination.”

“True enough, but that planet’s empty. Nobody to defend.”

“Perhaps.”

The planet was dwindling below. Louis Wu swung his ship toward deep space.

SAFE AT ANY SPEED

In the two hundred years between Beowulf Shaeffer and Louis Wu, little had changed on the surface. Known Space was somewhat larger. Most ships used a reactionless drive, the “thruster.” The birthright lotteries had been in use on Earth almost since Shaeffer’s time.

It was the birthright lotteries, which made being born a matter of sheer luck, that eventually created the Teela Brown gene. Teela Brown’s story is chronicled in Ringworld. There were other teelas on Earth, and their effect was catastrophic, at least for a writer. Stories about infinitely lucky people tend to be dull.

One tale survives from the golden age that followed.

LN

But how, you ask, could a car have managed to fail me?

Already I can see the terror in your eyes at the thought that your car, too, might fail. Here you are with an indefinite lifespan, a potentially immortal being, taking every possible precaution against the abrupt termination of your godhead; and all for nothing. The disruptor field in your kitchen dispose-all could suddenly expand to engulf you. Your transfer booth could make you disappear at the transmitter and forget to deliver you at the receiver. A slidewalk could accelerate to one hundred miles per hour, then slew sideways to throw you against a building. Every boosterspice plant in the Thousand Worlds could die overnight, leaving you to grow old and gray and wrinkled and arthritic. No, it’s never happened in human history; but if a man can’t trust his car, fa’ Pete’s sake, what can he trust?

Rest assured, reader, it wasn’t that bad.

For one thing, it all happened on Margrave, a world in the first stages of colonization. I was twenty minutes out of Triangle Lake on my way to the Wiggly River logging region, flying at an altitude of a thousand feet. For several days the logging machines had been cutting trees which were too young, and a mechanic was needed to alter a few settings in the boss brain. I was cruising along on autopilot, playing double-deck complex solitaire in the back seat, with the camera going so that just in case I won one I’d have a film to back up my bragging.

Then a roc swooped down on me, wrapped ten huge talons around my car, and swallowed it.

Right away you’ll see that it couldn’t happen anywhere but Margrave. In the first place, I wouldn’t have been using a car for a two-hour trip on any civilized world. I’d have taken a transfer booth. In the second place, where else can you find rocs?

Anyway, this big damn bird caught me and ate me, and everything went dark. The car flew blithely on, ignoring the roc, but the ride became turbulent as the roc tried to fly away and couldn’t. I heard grinding sounds from outside. I tried my radio and got nothing. Either it couldn’t reach through all that meat around me, or the trip through the bird’s gullet had brushed away my antennas.

There didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. I turned on the cabin lights and went on with the game. The grinding noises continued, and now I could see what was causing them. At some time the roc had swallowed several boulders, for the same reason a chicken swallows grit: to help digestion. The rocks were rubbing against the car under peristalsis, trying to break it down into smaller pieces for the murky digestive juices to work on.

I wondered how smart the boss brain was. When it saw a roc glide in for a landing at the logging camp, and when it realized that the bird was incapable of leaving no matter how it shrieked and flapped its wings, would the master computer draw the correct conclusion? Would it realize the bird had swallowed a car? I was afraid not. If the boss brain were that smart it would have been in business for itself.

I never found out. All of a sudden my seat cocoon wrapped itself around me like an overprotective mother, and there was a meaty three-hundred-mile-per-hour Smack!

The cocoon unwrapped itself. My cabin lights still showed red-lit fluid around me, but it was getting redder. The boulders had stopped rolling around. My cards were all over the cabin, like a snowstorm.

Obviously I’d forgotten one teensy little mountain when I programmed the autopilot. The roc had been blocking the radar and sonar, with predictable results. A little experimenting showed that my drive had failed under the impact, my, radio still wouldn’t work, and my emergency flares refused to try to fire through a roc’s belly.

There was no way to get out, not without opening my door to a flood of digestive juices. I could have done that if I’d had a vac suit, but how was I to know I’d need one on a two-hour car trip?

There was only one thing to do.

I collected my cards, shuffled, and started a new game.

It was half a year before the roc’s corpus decomposed enough to let me out. In that time I won five games of double complex solitaire. I’ve only got films for four; the camera ran out. I’m happy to say that the emergency food-maker worked beautifully if a little monotonously, the airmaker never failed, and the clock TV kept perfect time as a clock. As a TV it showed only technicolor ripples of static. The washroom went out along about August, but I got it fixed without much trouble. At 2:00 P.M. on October 24 I forced the door open, hacked my way through the mummified skin and flesh between a couple of roc ribs, and took a deep breath of real air. It smelled of roc. I’d left the cabin door open, and I could hear the airmaker whine crazily as it tried to absorb the smell.

I fired off a few flares, and fifteen minutes later a car dropped to take me home. They say I was the hairiest human being they’d ever seen. I’ve since asked Mr. Dickson, the president of General Transportation, why he didn’t include a depil tube in the emergency stores.

“A castaway is supposed to look like a castaway,” he tells me. “If you’re wearing a year’s growth of hair, your rescuer will know immediately that you’ve been lost for some time and will take the appropriate steps.”

General Transportation has paid me a more than adequate sum in a compensation for the fact that my car was unable to handle a roc. (I’ve heard that they’re changing the guarantees for next year’s model.) They’ve promised me an equal sum for writing this article. It seems there are strange and possibly damaging rumors going around concerning my delayed arrival at Wiggly River.

Rest assured, reader. I not only lived through the accident without harm, but came out of it with a substantial profit. Your car is perfectly safe, provided it was built later than 3100 A.D.

AFTERTHOUGHTS

Near thirty years ago I was just getting into the swing of constructive daydreaming: letting my imagination flow until I had something, then guiding it.

A violent picture ran through my mind, with no story around it at first. I saw men building a campfire out of what they did not know to be stage tree logs…

The stage tree came from World of Ptavvs. I had developed an elaborate background for the race that ruled the galaxy over a billion years ago. The stage tree was the cheapest part of their spacecraft launch industry, an organically grown solid fuel rocket: tree on the outside, chemicals in the core around a star-shaped hollow.

It bothered me, losing all those fascinating life-forms…

…The fire catches slowly, then burns briskly. Suddenly the logs are going off like so much dynamite!

Well, why shouldn’t some of those life-forms have survived in evolved form?

A Relic of the Empire was set in Beowulf Shaeffer’s time, but it linked Lucas Garner’s era to the cosmos of the Man-Kzin Wars and after. From that point on I was elaborating a future history. The kzinti were already involved via “The Warriors.” I set A Gift from Earth in an intermediate era. In Ringworld even the sunflowers of Slaver times were found to have survived. Early tales of planetary exploration became part of the fabric.

It was fun fitting pieces together.

In 1968 or so Norman Spinrad persuaded me that restricting my stories to Known Space was stunting my growth as a writer. So I gave it up. Well, I did! A few days later I started writing Ringworld.

Writing Ringworld made me realize how tangled and complex my basic assumptions had become. There were too many unlikely miracles left over from individual stories: stasis fields, teleportation booths, an invulnerable spacecraft hull, Teela Brown, made lucky by generations of a puppeteer breeding program. Every story set later in time must be examined for reasons why a transfer booth or stasis field or General Products hull, or sheer luck, will not solve the problem.

The Ringworld was settled, as was Earth, by Pak breeders and had been built by Pak protectors. But the story was too complex already; I couldn’t open that topic, too! In Ringworld I let Louis Wu deduce the wrong answer.

Protectors didn’t surface on the Ringworld until The Ringworld Engineers.

It took me twenty-five years to really find the handle on the Teela Brown gene. It’s there, in The Ringworld Throne.

I like to leave the playground open when I leave. It delights me when readers go further than the story and begin to rebuild the playground equipment. I pass on a few interesting suggestions from readers:

Mathematically, the Ringworld can be treated very simply, as a suspension bridge with no endpoints. The Ringworld floor (now called scrith) needs a tensile strength equivalent to the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. MIT students noticed the Ringworld’s instability right away, and a high school class in Florida noticed that most of the topsoil would end up in the sea bottoms in a few thousand years. For them I designed the Ringworld’s attitude jets and flup circulation system.

A metal base with a stasis field around it can be used as the floor of a settlement on an antimatter planet.

Hank Stine suggested Matt Keller’s interestingly limited psychic power, later known as “Plateau eyes.”

Dan Alderson published two thousand words on the Grog problem as raised in Handicap. His conclusion: the Grogs can be controlled, if need be, by Bandersnatchi (as first seen in World of Ptavvs.) The dinosaur-sized sapient creatures are demonstrably immune to hypnotic telepathy. However, they must be spacelifted to Jinx.

“There Is a Tide” was suggested in a conversation with Tom Digby and Dan Alderson. Dan also gave me details for the meteor defense used in The Ringworld Engineers. I miss him a lot.

Many readers have done mathematical treatments of the problem raised in the short story “Neutron Star.” Maximum stress: a million gees at perihelion, at Shaeffer’s head and feet, experienced for a very short time. But Shaeffer’s ship leaves the neutron star spinning outrageously and keeps the spin! Shaeffer won’t survive unless the ship’s been programmed to shed that spin. See Crashlander to see why General Products would have done that.

For quick access to details of Known Space, see Chaosium’s old Ringworld game or The Guide to Larry Niven’s Ringworld by Kevin Stein and The Man-Kzin Wars, eight volumes and counting, all from Baen Books. But these books include ideas that were not mine. For my ideas alone, use the Timeline and Bibliography in this book, absolutely current as of October 1995.

In an early version of Tales of Known Space I told you that the series was complete and invited you to dream up your own stories.

I should have phrased that better! The invitation is to daydream, to criticize or elaborate, to use the playground equipment to your heart’s content…not to violate my copyrights, for Kdapt’s sake! The Man-Kzin Wars are the only legitimate source of Known Space stories not written by Larry Niven, and I’m the editor; the writers enter by invitation only.

As for Known Space, it doesn’t seem to be through with me.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Worlds of Larry Niven

Series

KNOWN SPACE (stories in chronological order of appearance; right-hand column is latest publication)

1964

The Coldest Place

Tales of Known Space

1965

World of Ptavvs

World of Ptavvs

One Face

The Shape of Space

Becalmed in Hell

Tales of Known Space

1966

Eye of an Octopus

Tales of Known Space

The Warriors

Tales of Known Space

Bordered in Black

The Shape of Space

Neutron Star

Crashlander

How the Heroes Die

Tales of Known Space

At the Core

Crashlander

A Relic of the Empire

Neutron Star

At the Bottom of a Hole

Tales of Known Space

1967

The Soft Weapons

Neutron Star

Flatlander

Crashlander

The Ethics of Madness

Neutron Star

Safe at Any Speed

Tales of Known Space

The Adults

Protector

The Handicapped

Neutron Star

The Jigsaw Man

Tales of Known Space

1968

Slowboat Cargo *

A Gift from Earth

The Deceivers *

Tales of Known Space

Grendel

Neutron Star

Neutron Star

Crashlander

There is a Tide

Tales of Known Space

World of Ptavvs

World of Ptavvs

A Gift from Earth

A Gift from Earth

Wait It Out

Tales of Known Space

1969

The Organleggers *

The Shape of Space

1970

Ringworld

Ringworld

1972

Cloak of Anarchy

Tales of Known Space

1973

Protector

Protector

The Defenseless Dead

Flatlander

1975

The Borderland of Sol

Crashlander

Tales of Known Space

Tales of Known Space

ARM

Flatlander

1976

The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton

The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton

1978

The Patchwork Girl

Flatlander

1980

The Ringworld Engineers

The Ringworld Engineers

1990

Madness Has Its Place

N-Space

1994

Procrustes

Crashlander

1995

The Woman in Del Rey Crater

Flatlander

1996

The Ringworld Throne

The Ringworld Throne

* Title changed for novelization or appearance in a collection

LESHY CIRCUIT

Passerby (1969

All the Myriad Ways

Rammer (1971

A Hole in Space

The Fourth Profession (1972)

Quark 4

Night on Mispek Moor (1974

Vertex, August 1974

SVETZ

Get a Horse/ (1969) *

The Flight of the Horse

Bird in the Hand (1970

The Flight of the Horse

Leviathan (1970)

The Flight of the Horse

There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine (1970)

The Flight of the Horse

Death in a Cage (1973)

The Flight of the Horse

* Title changed for novelization or appearance in a collection.

TELEPORTATION

By Mind Alone (1966)

If, June

Flash Crowd (1973)

Three Trips in Time and Space

The Alibi Machine (1973)

A Hole in Space

All the Bridges Rusting (1973)

A Hole in Space

A Kind of Murder (1974)

A Hole in Space

The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club (1974)

A Hole in Space

TIME TRAVEL-PARALLEL UNIVERSE

Wrong Way Street (1965)

Galaxy, April

All the Myriad Ways (1968)

All the Myriad Ways

For a Foggy Night (1971)

All the Myriad Ways

The Return of William Proxmire (1990)

N-Space

WARLOCK’S ERA

Not Long before the End (1969)

All the Myriad Ways

Unfinished Story #1 (1970)

All the Myriad Ways

What Good Is a Glass Dagger? (1972)

The Flight of the Horse

The Magic Goes Away (1978)

The Magic Goes Away

Talisman (with Dian Girard, 1985)

Limits

The Lion in His Attic (1985)

Limits

The Portrait of Daryanree the King (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

The Wishing Game (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

THE DRACO TAVERN

Cruel and Unusual (1979)

Convergent Series

The Subject Is Closed (1979)

Convergent Series

Grammar Lesson (1979)

Convergent Series

Assimilating Our Culture, That’s What They’re Doing! (1979)

Convergent Series

The Schumann Computer (1979)

Convergent Series

One Night at the Draco Tavern (1984, 1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

The Green Marauder (1985)

Limits

The Real Thing (1985)

Limits

War Movie (1985)

Limits

Limits (1985)

Limits

DREAM PARK (with Steven Barnes)

Retrospective (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

Dream Park (1980)

Dream Park

The Barsoom Project (1989)

Dream Park 2: The Barsoom Project

The California Voodoo Game (1992)

Dream Park 3: The California Voodoo Game

Works Not Part of Any Niven Series

The Long Night (1967)

Dry Run (1968)

Like Banquo’s Ghost (1968)

The Meddler (1968)

The Deadlier Weapon (1969)

The Misspelled Magishun (1970)

No Exit (1971)

Unfinished Story #2 (1971)

Inconstant Moon (1971)

What Can You Say about Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers? (1971)

The Hole Man (1974)

$16,940.00 (1974)

Plaything (1974)

The Mote in God’s Eye (1974)

The Nonesuch (1974)

Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation (1979)

The Last Necronomicon

Cautionary Tales (1979)

Transfer of Power (1979)

In the Cellar (1979)

Flare Time (1985)

Spirals (with Jerry Pournelle, 1985)

The Locusts (with Steven Barnes, 1985)

A Teardrop Falls (1985)

The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters (1990)

Brenda (1990)

The Dreadful White Page (1991)

The Murder of Halley’s Comet (with David Drake)

NONFICTION

Exercise in Speculation: The Theory and Practice of Teleportation (1969)

All the Myriad Ways

Down in Flames (1969)

Trumpet, No. 9

The Theory and Practice of Time Travel (1971)

All the Myriad Ways

Man of Steel—Woman of Kleenex (1971)

All the Myriad Ways

Bigger Than Worlds (1974)

A Hole in Space

The Words in Science Fiction Future Histories

SFWA Bulletin

From Macrostructures Engineering: Progress Report (1980)

Lunacon program book

On the Marching Morons (with Isaac Asimov, 1981)

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1981

Niven’s Laws (1984)

Niven’s Laws, N-Space

Convention Stories (1984)

Niven’s Laws

Staying Rich (1984)

Niven’s Laws

The Theory and Practice of Instant Learning (1984)

Niven’s Laws

If Idi Amin Had Had the Bomb (1984)

Niven’s Laws

In Memoriam: Howard Grote Littlemead

Niven’s Laws

Why Men Light Wars and What You Can Do About it (1984)

Niven’s Laws, Playgrounds of the Mind

Collaborations (1984)

Niven’s Laws

Equipment, Method, and the Rest

The Science Fiction Source Book

Tell Me a Story (1986)

Writers of the Future #2

Review of “The Prisoner” (1987)

Reason

Review of “Against the Fall of Night” and “Great Sky River” (1987)

Reason

The Alien in our Minds (1990)

N-Space

The Kiteman (1990)

N-Space

Space (1990)

N-Space

Criticism (1989)

New Destinies, Playgrounds of the Mind

The Lost Ideas (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

Ghetto? But I Thought…(1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

Adrienne and Irish Coffee (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

Trantorcon Report (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

Comics (1991)

Playgrounds of the Mind

The Green Lantern Bible Update (1991—for DC Comics)

Playgrounds of the Mind

WORKS WHICH HAVE NOT APPEARED IN A NIVEN COLLECTIVE TO DATE

By Mind Alone (1966)

No Exit (1971)

In the Cellar (1979)

The Wristwatch Plantation (with Sharman Di Vono and Ron Harris)

STORY COLLECTIONS

A1. Neutron Star, Ballantine, April 1968

A2. The Shape of Space, Ballantine, September 1969

A3. All the Myriad Ways, Ballantine, June 1971

A4. The Flight of the Horse, Ballantine, September 1973

A5. A Hole in Space, Ballantine, June 1974

A6. Tales of Known Space, Ballantine, August 1975

A7. The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, Ballantine, February 1976

A8. Niven’s Laws, Owlswick Press, 1984

A9. Limits, Del Rey Books, 1985

A10. The Magic May Return, Ace Books

A11. More Magic, Ace Books

A12. The Time of the Warlock, Steeldragon Press, limited edition

A13. N-Space, Tor Books, 1990

A14. Playgrounds of the Mind, Tor Books, 1991

A15. Bridging the Galaxies, San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions, Inc.

A16. Crashlander (the Beowulf Shaeffer stories), Del Rey Books, 1994

A17. Flatlander (the Gil “the Arm” Hamilton stories), Del Rey Books, 1995

NOVELS

N1. World of Ptavvs, Ballantine, August 1968; a shorter version, “World of Ptavvs,” appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow, March 1965; Known Space.

N2. A Gift from Earth, Ballantine, September 1968, originally appeared as Slowboat Cargo in Galaxy, February, March, and April 1968; Known Space.

N3. Ringworld, Ballantine, October 1970; original book publication, no serialization; Known Space.

N4. The Flying Sorcerers (w. David Gerrold). Ballantine, August 1971; originally appeared as “The Misspelled Magishun” in Worlds of If, May-July 1970; not part of a series.

N5. Protector, Ballantine, September 1973; the first half of the novel, “Phssthpok,” appeared as “The Adults” in Galaxy, June 1967, Known Space.

N6. The Mote in God’s Eye (w. Jerry Pournelle), Simon and Schuster, October 1974; original book publication, no serialization, not part of a series.

N7. Lucifer’s Hammer, Playboy Press (hardcover), Fawcett Books (paperback)

N8. The Ringworld Engineers, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston (hardcover), Del Rey Books (paperback)

N9. The Patchwork Girl, Ace Books (illustrated trade paperback), 1978

N10. Dream Park (with Steven Barnes), Ace Books

N11. Oath of Fealty (with Jerry Pournelle), Timescape Books (hardcover), Pocket Books (paperback)

N12. The Descent of Anansi (with Steven Barnes), Tor Books, 1982

N13. The Integral Trees, Del Rey Books, 1984

N14. Footfall, Del Rey Books, 1985

N15. The Smoke Ring, Del Rey Books, 1987

N16. The Legacy of Heorot (with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), Simon & Schuster (hardcover), Pocket Books (paperback)

N17. Dream Park 2: The Barsoom Project (with Steven Barnes), Ace Books, 1989

N18. Achilles’ Choice (with Steven Barnes), Tor Books, 1991

N19. Fallen Angels (with Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn), Baen Books, 1991

N20. The California Voodoo Game (with Steven Barnes), Del Rey Books, 1992

N21. Ganthet’s Tale (graphic novel with John Byrne), DC Comics

N22. The Gripping Hand (with Jerry Pournelle), Pocket Books, 1992

N23. Beowulf’s Children (with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), Tor Books, 1995 (British title: The Dragons of Heorot)

N24. The Ringworld Throne, Del Rey Books, 1996

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“The Coldest Place,” copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Worlds of If, December 1964.

“Becalmed in Hell,” copyright © 1965 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1965.

“Wait It Out,” copyright © 1968 for Futures Unbounded

“Eye of an Octopus,” copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Magazine, February 1966.

“How the Heroes Die,” copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Magazine, October 1966.

“The Jigsaw Man,” copyright © 1967 by Harlan Ellison for Dangerous Visions.

“At the Bottom of a Hole,” copyright © 1966 by the Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Magazine, December 1966.

“Intent to Deceive,” copyright © 1968 as “The Deceivers” by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Magazine, April 1968.

“Cloak of Anarchy,” copyright © 1972 by The Condé Nast Publications, Inc., for Analog, March 1972.

“The Warriors,” copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Worlds of If, February 1966.

“There Is a Tide,” copyright © 1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation for Galaxy Magazine, July 1968.

“Safe at Any Speed,” copyright © 1967 by Mercury Press, Inc., for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1967.

“Madness Has Its Place,” copyright © Larry Niven, August 1990.

about the Author

About the Author

LARRY NIVEN was born in 1938 in Los Angeles, California. In 1956, he entered the California Institute of Technology, only to flunk out a year and a half later after discovering a bookstore jammed with used science-fiction magazines. He graduated with a B.A. in mathematics (minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Kansas, in 1962, and completed one year of graduate work before he dropped out to write. His first published story, “The Coldest Place,” appeared in the December 1964 issue of Worlds of If. He won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1966 for “Neutron Star,” and in 1974 for “The Hole Man.” The 1975 Hugo Award for Best Novelette was given to The Borderland of Sol. His novel Ringworld won the 1970 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1970 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the 1972 Ditmar, an Australian award for Best International Science Fiction.

BONUS: THE COLOR OF SUNFIRE

My contract with the Pleione ended on Silvereyes.

Silvereyes was Earthlike, blue-on-blue under shredded white cloud. Earthlike, except for the sunflower fields. Every world, even every habitable world, has its own strange signature. The atmospheric bands and prolate shape of Jinx, the freeway lines girding Earth, the cue-ball white of Mount Lookitthat, and now, finally, the silver sunflower fields of Silvereyes, Beta Hydri I.

There were five such fields spaced around the planet. Five oval fields of sunflowers, each the approximate size of, say, Mongolia or Iran. If you caught the planet just right, with two of the fields showing in daylight, they looked like gleaming silver eyes peering into space. Clouds couldn’t block that glare, could barely dim it. The eyes peered blindly up to watch us land.

Earth, Jinx, Wunderland, We Made It—for three years I had lived with the Pleione, hauling goods among the home worlds. Each time we went up we were richer. My contract was up, my money was banked, and I was down for good. I would be a landowner on Silvereyes, at least long enough to know whether I liked it.

The spaceport was at the edge of one of the huge sun-flower fields. From the fence to the horizon the sunflowers grew, thick, knotted grey stalks two feet high, topped each by a rippling blossom with a silver mirror surface. Each towel-sized mirror blossom was turned toward the late afternoon sun, and each was curved into a paraboloid of rotation, its focus on a black photosynthetic knot protruding from the blossom.

Nothing lived in that field besides sunflowers. Any trespassing plant or animal would have been blasted for fertilizer, blasted to ash in the blinding focus of rippling solar mirrors.

I gawked at the sunflowers for awhile, thinking philosophical thoughts. Then, carrying my luck-gift, I walked to a transfer booth. I dropped a coin in the slot and dialed at random.

Tomorrow I would look for property to buy. Tonight I would celebrate.

Luck brought me out in a private residence somewhere in the world. A stick-thin householder unfolded himself from his masseur chair to stare inquiringly at me. I called, “What town is this?”

“Bradbury’s Landing,” said the worthy. “Do I know you?”

“Doubtful.” I opened the door to place my luck-gift in a shelf outside the booth. It was a copy of a Hrodenu touch-sculpture, lacking something of the original no doubt, but a good piece, and expensive. “A luck-gift for the first silverman I was to meet. If you’ll name me the best bar in town, I’ll not disturb you further.”

“Try Grushenko’s,” he said immediately. “But let me offer you a drink first. My name is Mann.”

I would have refused. To take something in return might spoil the luck. But now I had a better look at him, and I knew he wasn’t a silverman after all.

He was a Wunderlander. The asymmetric beard made it certain, though his attenuated seven foot frame showed his low gravity origin. He had the dignity to go with the beard, the straight posture, the unconscious air of nobility. A wonder it had lasted, for he must be desperately poor.

And poor men don’t leave their own worlds. They can’t afford to. Curious…

“Taken,” I said. “And I’ll trade you tales.”

“A good custom,” said Mann. “I followed it at one time.” He dipped into a cupboard and brought out a bottle. “I’d offer you your choice, but there is only vodka. It’s good in droobleberry juice, or chilled and tossed back over the palate.”

“Chilled then. I plan to be drunk before the night ends. Is it night here?”

“Barely.” He seemed startled. “What did you do, dial at random?”

“Yes.”

He laughed. He pulled out a worn low-temp container, opened it and dipped the bottle. The liquid inside boiled and smoked. Liquid nitrogen. He held the bottle until water started to freeze out of the vodka, then poured. He bowed as he handed me the drink.

I bowed and handed him the touch-sculpture copy, though the luck had gone out of the gesture. A pity I hadn’t met a silverman.

“Call me Richard,” he said. “Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann. And who shall tell his tale first?”

“Yourself,” I said. I’d chosen my own tale, of a bandersnatch hunt near the Jinxian shoreline, and of the telepathic woman who needed a bandersnatch skeleton to complete her collection. But she kept fainting, with no apparent medical cause. She was an experienced huntress. Though she knew about bandersnatchi, her habit was to read the mind of her prey. Sensory deprivation kept putting her to sleep…

But what of his tale? He must be churchrat poor. I was not judging only by his small apartment nor by his aged clothing. He himself was aged. Half his beard and most of his hair were white. His withered skin look like he’d slept in it. A man who doesn’t buy boosterspice is a man on the edge of starvation.

Richard Harvey Schultz-Mann tossed a jigger of vodka back over his palate. “Would you believe that I once had it in my power to blackmail the entire puppeteer species?”

“Certainly,” I said. “You’re my host.”

“Meaning I could tell you anything at all.” He laughed. “But this is true. Once I knew the location of the puppeteer home world. You may remember that that was the species’ most closely guarded secret, before their exodus.”

“I remember. They pulled up stakes about forty years ago.” My family had gone broke in the crash. Half the interworld businesses in known space had folded for lack of the puppeteers. One day their commercial empire had offices on every known habitable world. The next, they were gone, their commitments paid off in cash.

Rumors were rife. The most consistent was that the galactic core had exploded in a chain reaction of novae, and the puppeteers had found out about it. The radiation wave wouldn’t be reaching known space for another twenty thousand years, which you’d say is a good long time. But the puppeteers were cowards. They had left, in the fastest species migration on record.

Luckily I’d already earned my spaceman’s papers. With no money left, I’d have had to drop out of grad school.

A thought hit me. “Is that how you lost your money? In the puppeteer crash?”

He looked at me from under shaggy white brows. His eyes were black and deep. “Yes and no. I wasn’t in the stock market. I was tracing relics of tnuctipun biological engineering, flying my ship on a government grant. I set my ship down on a world orbiting Mira Ceti, and there I met a Jinxian.”

“You were tracing what?”

“Old plants, genetically tailored by the tnuctipun, left behind when the tnuctipun were wiped out. They’ve been mutating for more than a billion years. I was tracing stage trees, but those sunflowers outside are more of the same.”

“Oh, really?”

“The Slavers used them for defense, surrounding their plantations with sunflower borders. The tnuctipun used them to attack the plantations. Afterward, the sunflowers throve. A built-in heat beam is more effective against predators than mere thorns.

“Then there are the air plants. Another tailored plant, once used to replace air on Slaver ships. Later they learned to hold their air in bubbles. Now they cover dozens of known asteroid belts. But I digress,” said Mann.

I assured him I’d been fascinated. He smiled and refilled our glasses. I was sipping at my own vodka, for it was stinging cold. I’d have choked myself if I’d tried to drink it like he did.

“The Jinxian,” he said, “had found the puppeteer system. He was making pirate raids on them. Idiot. He’d have been rich beyond dreams if he’d simply blackmailed them. They’re cowards, the puppeteers. They were afraid that if men knew where their world was, someday they might try to rob them. Like the Jinxian, raiding their ships, or worse. An armed invasion, a hundred years from now, or a thousand, or ten thousand. You see?”

“Yah. He told you where their world was?”

“As he was dying,” said Rich Mann. “Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. That was what he said.”

“Just one world, I assume.”

“Of course. Not one puppeteer in a million would be brave enough or insane enough to trust itself in a fragile spacecraft. Each of their representatives to other worlds was more or less insane. How could they colonize other worlds? By sending maniacs?”

“I used to wonder why nobody ever found that world. It must be somewhere in known space, or not far outside. People must have looked. Newsmen, fortune hunters, hobbyists. Spacemen aren’t known for a repressed curiosity.”

“They didn’t know what they were looking for.” Mann lay back in a fading masseur chair whose machinery had long ceased working. Once I would have commented on the odd contours of his beard, covering his right cheek entirely, sprouting in a single waxed spike at the left point of his chin, shaved off entirely below the part in his hair. But I’d seen too many odd customs on too many odd worlds. I’d even found people to comment on my own customs, and to laugh at them.

“I found out,” he said. “That was my mistake. I should have gone straight back to civilization, looked up the puppeteer embassy and made a deal. Memory erasure of those coordinates, for a fee of a hundred million stars. Right then, no hesitation. They’d have jumped at the chance.

“But I had to see for myself. What was it you said about spacemen and curiosity?

“I took my ship, my borrowed ship that was owned by the Institute of Knowledge on Jinx, and I went to twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. And what I found was a big, fat, fuzzy red giant. Talk about the purloined letter! Men must have been watching that star with telescopes before ever they flew.”

“Naturally I believe you,” I said. “Every word, immediately. But I seem to remember that the puppeteers walked in Earth’s gravity, breathed terrestrial air, and never wore protective clothing against the ultraviolet waves in sunlight.” Mann was grinning like he had my wallet. “All right, I know I’m off the track, but how? The puppeteers must have come from a nearly Earthlike world under a nearly GO sun.”

“That’s where everyone else went off the track, too. They were all searching around G- and F-class sun. Funny thing is, that fat red giant probably was a yellow dwarf a million or two years ago.”

“But—”

“How about Procyon? We Made It has a population near a billion, yet everyone knows it’ll start expanding in half a million years. We’ll be gone long before then, of course. The Core explosion.

“I see why you’re confused, of course. I saw that red giant, and I decided the Jinxian had lied to me after all. I searched what should have been the habitable temperature bands. I found rocks up to the size of Ceres, no bigger. I’d been assuming a transparent, Earthlike atmosphere. Now I searched further and further out, assuming denser atmosphere, more greenhouse effect. I searched out to two billion miles from the primary. Nothing. The Jinxian had lied.”

Mann got up to refill our glasses. I said. “If that’s your story, I’m going to brain you with a Hrodenu.”

“It almost was the end. I was a week toward Silvereyes before I turned back.

“I’d been thinking. The puppeteers were used to G-type sunlight. If their world was actually circling a red giant sun, they must be using supplementary ultraviolet. That would release more heat on their world. Plants would need it too. More heat, higher temperatures. They’d be further out.”

“You could carry that on forever,” I speculated. “Assume more and more power per individual, more and more individuals. Any flatlander uses more power in a day than a citizen of Russia, at its peak of power, used in a lifetime. Seawater distilleries alone…”

“Now you’ve got it,” said Mann.

“Excuse me?”

“Think it out the way I did. The puppeteers are cowards. They couldn’t relieve their population pressure by migration. So the population of the home world went up and up. So did the power expenditure per capita.

“It’s the same on Earth. It never snows on the big cities, because the people are putting out too much power. Street lights, house lights—why, if a reading lamp put out only visible light, the only light that didn’t get absorbed by the walls would be the fraction that escaped to space through windows. Then there are refrigerators, air conditioning, transfer booths, crematoriums, neon signs, the frequencies of tridee transmission, messages lasered in from the Moon and asteroids. How about underwater street lights in the continental shelf cities? And dolphin industries? It all has to go somewhere. And Earth’s population is only eighteen billion.”

“How many puppeteers are there?”

Mann shrugged, “I didn’t get that close. A trillion, I’d guess, and all fanatics for comfort. They must use total conversion for power. Would you believe—”

“Instantly.”

“You’re kind. I found the puppeteer planet two light-weeks out from its primary. The sun was no more than a blurred pink dot.”

I closed my mouth.

“I’ll be damned,” Mann said wonderingly. “You meant it. You haven’t called me a liar yet. But it makes sense to put a planet out there. With all the heat they were putting out, they needed a sun like they needed an armed kzinti invasion. A long, long time ago they must have moved their world out to where they could radiate enough heat away to keep the planet habitable. When the sun blew up like a big red balloon, the chances are they hardly noticed.”

“No wonder they were never found. Why do you suppose they kept a sun at all?”

“They probably wanted an anchor, to keep them from drifting all over space.”

“Um.”

“You should have seen it, the way it blazed against the stars. Not like a planet. The continents flamed like yellow-star sunlight. I could have read a book in the light that came through my windows.”

“They let you get that close?”

“Who’d have dared attack me?” He was taking to himself now, and his thoughts were nowhere in this room. “The continents flamed like sunfire, but the oceans were black as space, with light scattered across them to mark islands, maybe. Points of light like bright stars. It was as if black, starry space pushed its edges through black, starry seas to the borders of the burning continents. I’m the only man alive who’s ever seen it. The Jinxian saw it, he and his pirate crew, but they’re dead. All dead.”

“How do you know?”

“I killed them.”

“Did you have reason?”

“Ample reason. Points of honor,” said Mann. He knocked his vodka back with a flip of the wrist. “The Jinxian gave me the coordinates as he was dying. Revenge, he thought. He was right. I should have gone straight to We Made It, but I had to see the planet for myself. And then I came to Silvereyes, which was closer, and I went to the puppeteer embassy, and it was gone.”

“Oh,” I said, for I had the whole picture.

“That’s right. While I was looking for their planet, the puppeteers found out about the Core explosion. So they fled the worlds of men, and where did that leave me? The Institute decided I’d misused my ship. Presently they confiscated it.”

“Surely you could have gotten something out of it. You knew where the puppeteer world was.”

“Did I?” He grinned mockingly.

“Sure. A news agency would have paid you plenty for the biggest scoop of the generation. Even if the puppeteers had left their world empty behind them.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“They didn’t have to travel in hyperspace, because they weren’t coming back. The relativistic time lag wouldn’t inconvenience them. They felt safer in normal space. That meant there was no limit to the mass they could move.”

“Eventually, my host, you will strain even my credulity.”

“Why boggle at this? They’d already moved their world once. They hated spacecraft. This is no random guess. When I couldn’t find an embassy I decided to go straight to the puppeteers themselves. I left a message behind in a safe deposit box, to protect myself, like any blackmailer. The puppeteer world was gone when I got there. Gone like a dream. I turned back to Silvereyes, and there the Institute confiscated my ship. Ship and score and riches beyond dreams, all gone.

“Now I have only the memory of a world that shone by its own light, that blazed in the colors of sunfire and darkness.” He hefted the Hrodenu. “And this. I thank you. Every man should own one good thing.”

A pretty compliment. “It was well traded,” I told him. “And the vodka is almost gone. Shall we go drinking and dining? You can play guide for me, since you’ve been here for forty years.”

And so Mann donned clothing and we went to Grushenko’s, I and the finest liar in known space. There, hours later, we traded tales with a pair of sloe-eyed computer programmers. One girl, by luck, turned out to have a father-fixation; and so we were well paired.

It was a fine night to be down. The only uncomfortable moment came when Mann retold his tale of the puppeteer world, and produced a pocket holograph. Somehow the luck of the gift held, and Mann didn’t see my jaw drop.

There in the holograph, a light the color of the sun blazed against starry space. The blazing figure had the shape of a fiery amoeba, but two reaching pseudopods had been lopped at their tips by arcs of a circle.

“I wonder where it is now,” said Mann. The beauty he saw in the holograph, the beauty I could not see, was all the beauty there is.

Table of Contents

- also by Larry Niven
- Copyright
- Contents
- Timeline for Known Space
- Introduction
- THE COLDEST PLACE
- BECALMED IN HELL
- WAIT IT OUT
- EYE OF AN OCTOPUS
- HOW THE HEROES DIE
- THE JIGSAW MAN

- WORLD OF PTAVVS

- 1

- 2

- AT THE BOTTOM OF A HOLE
- INTENT TO DECEIVE
- CLOAK OF ANARCHY
- THE WARRIORS

- MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE

- I
- II
- III

- A GIFT FROM EARTH

- I-The Ramrobot
- II-The Sons of Earth
- III-The Car
- IV-The Question Man
- V-The Hospital
- VI-The Vivarium
- VII-The Bleeding Heart
- VIII-Polly’s Eyes
- IX-The Way Back
- X-Parlette’s Hand
- XI-Interview With the Head
- XII-The Slowboat
- XIII-It All Happened At Once
- XIV-Balance of Power

- THERE IS A TIDE

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- SAFE AT ANY SPEED

- Afterthoughts

- Bibliography

- Series

- Works Not Part of Any Niven Series

- Acknowledgments
- about the Author
- Bonus: THE COLOR OF SUNFIRE