Marion Zimmer Bradley

Super Pack

Falcons of Narabedla

Death Between the Stars

The Dark Intruder

The Door Through Space

Black & White

Treason of the Blood

Jackie Sees a Star

The Planet Savers

The Stars Are Waiting

Exiles of Tomorrow

The Colors of Space

The Crime Therapist

Year of the Big Thaw

The Wild One

The Wind People

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2015 by Start Publishing LLC

Cover image © Ute Kraus, Institute of Physics, Universität Hildesheim

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition July 2015

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 13: 978-1-68146-527-2

Table of Contents

Falcons of Narabedla

Voltage—from Nowhere!

Rainbow City

Flowers of Danger

Trapped!

Where the Dreamer Walks

Narayan

Battle in my Brain

Falcons of Evarin

The Return of Adric

When the Dreamers Wake

The Last Sacrifice

Death Between the Stars

The Dark Intruder

The Door Through Space

Author's Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Black & White

Treason of the Blood

Jackie Sees a Star

The Planet Savers

The Stars Are Waiting

Exiles of Tomorrow

I

II

III

The Colors of Space

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

The Crime Therapist

Year of the Big Thaw

The Wild One

The Wind People

Falcons of Narabedla

Voltage—from Nowhere!

Somewhere on the crags above us I heard a big bird scream. I turned to Andy, knee-deep in the icy stream beside me. “There’s your eagle. Probably smells that cougar I shot yesterday.” I started to reel in my line, knowing what my brother’s next move would be. “Get the camera, and we’ll try for a picture.”

We crouched together in the underbrush, watching, as the big bird of prey wheeled down in a slow spiral toward the dead cougar. Andy was trembling with excitement, the camera poised against his chest, his eyes glued in the image-finder. “Golly—” he whispered, almost prayerfully, “six foot wing spread—maybe more—”

The bird screamed again, warily, head cocked into the wind. We were to leeward; the scent of the carrion masked our enemy smell from him. The eagle failed to scent or to see us, swooping down and dropping on the cougar’s head. Andy’s camera clicked twice. The eagle thrust in its beak—

A red-hot wire flared in my brain. The bird—the bird—I leaped out of cover, running swiftly across the ten-foot clearing that separated us from the attacking eagle, my hand tugging automatically at the hunting knife in my belt. Andy’s shout of surprised anger was a faraway noise in my ears as the eagle started away with flapping, angry wings—then, in fury, swept down at me, pinions beating around my head. I heard and felt the wicked beak dart in, and thrust blindly upward with the knife, ripped, slashing, hearing the bird’s scream of pain and the flapping of wide wings. A red haze spun around me—

Then the screaming eagle was gone and Andy’s angry grip was on my shoulder, shaking me roughly. His voice, furious and frightened, was hardly recognizable. “Mike! Mike, you darned idiot, are you all right? You must be crazy!”

I blinked, rubbing my hand across my eyes. The hand came away wet. I was standing in the clearing, the knife in my hand red with blood. Bird blood. I heard myself ask, stupidly “What happened?”

My brother’s face came clear out of the thickness in my mind, scowling wrathfully. “You tell me what happened! Mike, what in the devil were you thinking about? You told me yourself that an eagle will attack a man if he’s bothered. I had him square in the camera when you jumped out of there like a bat out of a belfry and went for the eagle with your knife! You must be clean crazy!”

I let the knife drop out of my hand. “Yeah—” I said heavily, “Yeah, I guess I spoiled your picture, Andy. I’m sorry—I didn’t—” my voice trailed off, helpless. The boy’s hand was still on my shoulder; he let it drop and knelt in the grass, groping there for his camera. “That’s all right, Mike,” he said in a dead voice, “you scared the daylights out of me, that’s all.” He stood up swiftly, looking straight into my face. “Darn it, Mike, you’ve been acting crazy for a week! I don’t mind the blamed camera, but when you start going for eagles with your bare hands—” abruptly he flung the camera away, turned and began to run down the slope in the direction of the cabin.

I took a step to follow, then stopped, bending to retrieve the broken pieces of Andy’s cherished camera. The kid must have hit the eagle with it. Lucky thing for me; an eagle can be a mean bird. But why, why in the living hell had I done a thing like that? I’d warned Andy time and time again to stay clear of the big birds. Now that the urgency of action had deserted me, I felt stupid and a little lightheaded. I didn’t wonder Andy thought I was crazy. I thought so myself more than half the time. I stowed the broken camera in my tackle box, mentally promising Andy a better one; hunted up the abandoned lines and poles, carefully stowed them, cleaned our day’s catch. It was dark before I started for the cabin; I could hear the hum of the electric dynamo I’d rigged up and see the electric light across the dusk of the Sierras. A smell of bacon greeted me as I crossed into the glare of the unshielded bulb. Andy was standing at the cookstove, his back stubbornly to me. He did not turn.

“Andy—” I said.

“It’s okay, Mike. Sit down and eat your supper. I didn’t wait for the fish.”

“Andy—I’ll get you another camera—”

“I said, it’s okay. Now, damn it, eat.”

He didn’t speak again for a long time; but as I stretched back for a second mug of coffee, he got up and began to walk around the room, restlessly. “Mike—” he said entreatingly, “you came here for a rest! Why can’t you lay off your everlasting work for a while and relax?” He looked disgustedly over his shoulder at the work table where the light spilled over a confused litter of wires and magnets and coils. “You’ve turned this place into a branch office of General Electric!”

“I can’t stop now!” I said violently. “I’m on the track of something—and if I stop I’ll never find it!”

“Must be real important,” Andy said sourly, “if it makes you act like bughouse bait.”

I shrugged without answering. We’d been over that before. I’d known it when they threw me out of the government lab, just after the big blowup. I thought, an-grily. I’m heading for another one, but I don’t care.

“Sit down, Andy,” I told him. “You don’t know what happened down there. Now that the war’s over, it’s no military secret, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

I paused, swallowing down the coffee, not knowing that it scalded my mouth. “That is—I will if I can.”

Six months before they settled the war in Korea, I was working in a government radio lab, on some new communications equipment. Since I never finished it, there’s no point in going into details; it’s enough to say it would have made radar as obsolete as the stagecoach. I’d built a special supersonic condenser, and had had trouble with a set of magnetic coils that wouldn’t wind properly. When the thing blew up I hadn’t had any sleep for three nights, but that wasn’t the reason. I was normal then; just another communications man, intent on radio and this new equipment and without any of the crazy impractical notions that had lost me my job later. They called it overwork, but I knew they thought the explosion had disturbed my brain. I didn’t blame them. I would have liked to think so. It started one day in the lab with a shadow on the sun and an elusive short circuit that gave me shock after shock until I was jittery. By the time I had it fixed, the oscillator had gone out of control. I got a series of low-frequency waves that were like nothing I’d ever seen before. Then there was something like a voice speaking out of a very old, jerry-built amateur radio set. Except that there wasn’t a receiver in the lab, and no one else had heard it. I wasn’t sure myself, because right then every instrument in the place went haywire and five minutes later, part of the ceiling hit the floor and the floor went up through the roof. They found me, they say, lying half-crushed under a beam, and I woke up eighteen hours later in a hospital with four cracked ribs, and a feeling as if I’d had a lot of voltage poured into me. It went in the report that I’d been struck by lightning.

It took me a long time to get well. The ribs healed fast—faster than the doctor liked. I didn’t mind the hospital part, except that I couldn’t walk without shaking, or light a cigarette without burning myself, for months. The thing I minded was what I remembered before I woke up. Delirium; that was what they told me. But the kind and type of scars on my body didn’t ring true. Electricity—even freak lightning— doesn’t make that kind of burns. And my corner of the world doesn’t make a habit of branding people.

But before I could show the scars to anybody outside the hospital, they were gone. Not healed; just gone. I remembered the look on the medic’s face when I showed him the place where the scars had been. He didn’t think I was crazy; he thought he was. I knew the lab hadn’t been struck by lightning. The Major knew it too; I found that out the day I reported back to work. All the time we talked, his big pen moved in stubby circles across the page of his logbook, and he talked without raising his head to look at me. “I know all that, Kenscott. No electrical storms reported in the vicinity; no radio disturbance within a thousand miles. But—” his jaw grew stubborn, “the lab was wrecked and you were hurt. We’ve got to have something for the record.”

I could understand all that. What I resented was the way they treated me after I went back to work. They transferred me to another division and another line of work. They turned down my request to follow up those nontypical waves. My private notes were ripped out of my notebook while I was at lunch and I never saw them again. And as soon as they could, they shipped me to Fairbanks, Alaska, and that was the end of that.

The Major told me all I needed to know, the day before I took the plane to Alaska. His scowl said more than his words, and they said plenty. “I’d let it alone, Kenscott. No sense stirring up more trouble. We can’t bother with side alleys, anyhow. Next time you monkey with it, you might get your head blown off, not just a dose of stray voltage out of the blue. We’ve done everything but stand on our heads trying to find out where that spare energy came from—and where it went. But we’ve marked that whole line of research closed, Kenscott. If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut about it.”

“It wasn’t a message from Mars,” I suggested unsmiling, and he didn’t think that was funny either. But there was relief on his face as I left the office and went to clean out my drawer.

I got along all right in Alaska, for a while. But I wasn’t the same. The armistice had hardly been signed when they sent me back to the States with a recommendation of overwork. I tried to explain it to Andy. “They said I needed a rest. Maybe so. The shock did something funny to me ... tore me open ... like the electric shock treatments they give catatonic patients. I know a lot of things I never learned. Ordinary radio work doesn’t mean anything to me any more. It doesn’t make sense. When people out west were talking about flying saucers or whatever they were— and when they talked about weather disturbances after the atomic tests, things did make sense for a while. And when we came down here—” I paused, trying to fit confused impressions together. He wasn’t going to believe me, anyhow, but I wanted him to. A tree slapped against the cabin window; I jumped. “It started up again the day we came up in the mountains. Energy out of nowhere, following me around. It can’t knock me out. Have you noticed I let you turn the lights on and off? The day we came up, I shorted my electric razor and blew out five fuses trying to change one.”

“Yeah, I remember, you had to drive to town for them—” My brother’s eyes watched me, uneasy. “Mike, you’re kidding—”

“I wish I were,” I said. “That energy just drains into me, and nothing happens. I’m immune.” I shrugged, rose and walked across to the radio I’d put in here, so carefully, before the war. I picked up the disconnected plug; thrust it into the socket. I snapped the dial on. “I’ll show you,” I told him.

The panel flashed and darkened; confused static came cracking from the speaker, erratic. I took my hand away.

“Turn it up—” Andy said uneasily.

My hand twiddled the dial. “It’s already up.” “Try another station;” the kid insisted stubbornly. I pushed all the buttons in succession; the static crackled and buzzed, the panel light flickered on and off in little cryptic flashes. I sighed. “And reception was perfect at noon,” I told him, “You were listening to the news.” I took my hand away again. “I don’t want to blow the thing up.”

Andy came over and switched the button back on. The little panel light glowed steadily, and the mellow voice of Milton Cross filled the room ... “now conduct the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra in the Fifth or ‘Fate’ symphony of Ludwig von Beethoven ...” the noise of mixed applause, and then the majestic chords of the symphony, thundering through the rooms of the cabin.

“Ta-da-da-dumm——Ta-da-da-DUMM!”

My brother stared at me as racing woodwinds caught up with the brasses. There was nothing wrong with the radio. “Mike. What did you do to it?” “I wish I knew,” I told him. Reaching, I touched the volume button again.

Beethoven died in a muttering static like a thousand drums.

I swore and Andy sucked in his breath between his teeth, edging warily backward. He touched the dials again; once more the smoothness of the “Fate” symphony rolled out and swallowed us. I shivered.

“You’d better let it alone!” Andy said shakily. The kid turned in early, but I stayed in the main room, smoking restlessly and wishing I could get a drink without driving eighty miles over bad mountain roads. Neither of us had thought to turn off the radio; it was moaning out some interminable throbbing jazz. I turned over my notes, restlessly, not really seeing them. Once Andy’s voice came sleepily from the alcove.

“Going to read all night, Mike?” “If I feel like it,” I said tersely and began walking up and down again.

“Michael! For the luvvagod stop it and let me get some sleep!” Andy exploded, and I sank down in the chair again. “Sorry, Andy.”

Where had the intangible part of me been, those eighteen hours when I first lay crushed under a fallen beam, then under morphine in the hospital? Where had those scars come from? More important, what had made a radio lab blow up in the first place? Electricity sets fires; it shocks men into insensibility or death. It doesn’t explode. Radio waves are in themselves harmless. Most important of all, what maniac freak of lightning was I carrying in my body that made me immune to electrical current? I hadn’t told Andy about the time I’d deliberately grounded the electric dynamo in the cellar and taken the whole voltage in my body. I was still alive. It would have been a hell of a way to commit suicide—but I hadn’t.

I swore, slamming down the window. I was going to bed. Andy was right. Either I was crazy or there was something wrong; in any case, sitting here wouldn’t help. If it didn’t let up, I’d take the first train home and see a good electrician—or a psychiatrist. But right now, I was going to hit the sack.

My hand went out automatically and switched the light off.

“Damn!” I thought incredulously. I’d shorted the dynamo again. The radio stopped as if the whole orchestra had dropped dead; every light in the cabin winked swiftly out, but my hand on the switch crackled with a phosphorescent glow as the entire house current poured into my body. I tingled with weird shock; I heard my own teeth chattering.

And something snapped wide open in my brain. I heard, suddenly, an excited voice, shouting.

“Rhys! Rhys! That is the man!”

Rainbow City

“You are mad,” said the man with the tired voice.

I was drifting. I was swaying, bodiless, over a huge abyss of caverned space; chasmed, immense, limitless. Vaguely, through a sleeping distance, I heard two voices. This one was old and very tired.

“You are mad. They will know. Narayan will know. ” “Narayan is a fool,” said the second voice.

“Narayan is the Dreamer,” the tired voice said. “He is the Dreamer, and where the Dreamer walks he will know. But have it your way. I am very old and it does not matter. I give you this power, freely—to spare you. But Gamine—”

“Gamine—” the second voice stopped. After a long time “You are old, and a fool, Rhys,” it said. “What is Gamine to me?”

Bodiless, blind, I drifted and swayed and swung in the sound of the voices. The humming, like a million high-tension wires, sang around me and I felt myself cradled in the pull of a great magnet that held me suspended surely on nothingness and drew me down into the field of some force beneath. Far below me the voices faded. I swung free—fell—plunged downward in sickening motion, head over heels, into the abyss....

My feet struck hard flooring. I wrenched back to consciousness with a jolt. Winds blew coldly in my face; the cabin walls had been flung back to the high-lying stars. I was standing at a barred window at the very pinnacle of a tall tower, in the lap of a weird blueness that arched flickeringly in the night. I caught a glimpse of a startled face, a lean tired old face beneath a peaked hood, in the moment before my knees gave way and I fell, striking my head against the bars of the window.

I was lying on a narrow, high bed in a room filled with doors and bars. I could see the edge of a carved mirror set in a frame, and the top of a chest of some kind. On a bench at the edge of my field of vision there were two figures sitting. One was the old grey man, hunched wearily beneath his robe, wearing robes like a Tibetan Lama’s, somber black, and a peaked hood of grey. The other was a slimmer younger figure, swathed in silken silvery veiling, with a thin opacity where the face should have been, and a sort of opalescent shine of flesh through the silvery-sapphire silks. The figure was that of a boy or a slim immature girl; it sat erect, motionless, and for a long time I studied it, curious, between half-opened lids. But when I blinked, it rose and passed through one of the multitudinous doors; at once a soft sibilance of draperies announced return. I sat up, getting my feet to the floor, or almost there; the bed was higher than a hospital bed. The blue-robe held a handled mug, like a baby’s drinking-cup, at me. I took it in my hand hesitated—

“Neither drug nor poison,” said the blue-robe mockingly, and the voice was as noncomittal as the veiled body; a sexless voice, soft alto, a woman’s or a boy’s. “Drink and be glad it is none of Karamy’s brewing.”

I tasted the liquid in the mug; it had an indeterminate greenish look and a faint pungent taste I could not identify, although it reminded me variously of anis and garlic. It seemed to remove the last traces of shock. I handed the cup back empty and looked sharply at the old man in the Lama costume.

“You’re—Rhys?” I said. “Where in hell have I gotten to?” At least, that’s what I meant to say. Imagine my surprise when I found myself asking—in a language I’d never heard, but understood perfectly—“To which of the domains of Zandru have I been consigned now?” At the same moment I became conscious of what I was wearing. It seemed to be an old-fashioned nightshirt, chopped off at the loins, deep crimson in color. “Red flannels yet!” I thought with a gulp of dismay. I checked my impulse to get out of bed. Who could act sane in a red nightshirt?

“You might have the decency to explain where I am,” I said. “If you know.” The tiredness seemed part of Rhys’ voice. “Adric,” he said wearily. “Try to remember.” He shrugged his lean shoulders. “You are in your own Tower. And you have been under restraint again. I am sorry.” His voice sounded futile. I felt prickling shivers run down my backbone. In spite of the weird surroundings, the phrase “under restraint” had struck home. I was a lunatic in an asylum.

The blue-robed one cut in in that smooth, sexless, faint-sarcastic voice. “While Karamy holds the amnesia-ray, Rhys, you will be explaining it to him a dozen times a cycle. He will never be of use to us again. This time Karamy won. Adric; try to remember. You are at home, in Narabedla.”

I shook my head. Nightshirt or no nightshirt, I’d face this on my feet. I walked to Rhys; put my clenched hands on his shoulders. “Explain this! Who am I supposed to be? You called me Adric. I’m no more Adric than you are!”

“Adric, you are not amusing!” The blue-robe’s voice was edged with anger. “Use what intelligence you have left! You have had enough sharig antidote to cure a tharl. Now. Who are you?”

The words were meaningless. I stared, trapped. I clung to hold on to identity. “Adric—” I said, bewildered. That was my name. Was it? Wasn’t it? No. I was Mike Kenscott. Hang on to that. Two and two are four. The circumference equals the radius squared times pi. Four rulls is the chemming of twilp—stop that! Mike Kenscott. Summer 1954. Army serial number 13-48746. Karamy. I cradled my bursting head in my hands. “I’m crazy. Or you are. Or we’re both sane and this monkey-business is all real.”

“It is real,” said Rhys, compassion in his tired face. “He has been very far on the Time Ellipse, Gamine. Adric, try to understand. This was Karamy’s work. She sent you out on a time line, far, very far into the past. Into a time when the Earth was different—she hoped you would come back changed, or mad.” His eyes brooded. “I think she succeeded. Gamine, I have long outstayed my leave. I must return to my own tower—or die. Will you explain?”

“I will.” A hint of emotion flickered in the voice of Gamine. “Go, Master.” Rhys left the room, through one of the doors. Gamine turned impatiently to me again. “We waste time this way. Fool, look at yourself!”

I strode to a mirror that lined one of the doors. Above the crimson nightshirt I saw a face—not my own. The sight rocked my mind. Out of the mirror a man’s face looked anxiously; a face eagle-thin, darkly moustached, with sharp green eyes. The body belonging to the face that was not mine was lean and long and strongly muscled—and not quite human. I squeezed my eyes shut. This couldn’t be—I opened my eyes. The man in the red nightshirt I was wearing was still reflected there.

I turned my back on the mirror, walking to one of the barred windows to look down on the familiar outline of the Sierra Madre, about a hundred miles away. I couldn’t have been mistaken. I knew that ridge of mountains. But between me and the mountains lay a thickly forested expanse of land which looked like no scenery I had ever seen in my life. I was standing near the pinnacle of a high tower; I dimly saw the curve of another, just out of my line of vision. The whole landscape was bathed in a curiously pinkish light; through an overcast sky I could just make out, dimly, the shadowy disk of a watery red sun. Then—no, I wasn’t dreaming, I really did see it—beyond it, a second sun; blue-white, shining brilliantly, pallid through the clouds, but brighter than any sunlight I had ever seen.

It was proof enough for me. I turned desperately to Gamine behind me. “Where have I gotten, to? Where—when am I? Two suns—those mountains—”

The change in Gamine’s voice was swift; the veiled face lifted questioningly to mine. What I had thought a veil was not that; it seemed to be more like a shimmering screen wrapped around the features so that Gamine was faceless, an invisible person with substance but no apprehensible characteristics. Yes, it was like that; as if there was an invisible person wearing the curious silken draperies. But the invisible flesh was solid enough. Hands like cold steel gripped my shoulders. “You have been back? Back to the days before the second sun? Adric, tell me; did Earth truly have but one sun?”

“Wait—” I begged. “You mean I’ve travelled in time?”

The exultation faded from Gamine’s voice imperceptibly. “Never mind. It is improbable in any case. No, Adric; not really travelling. You were only sent out on the Time Ellipse, till you contacted some one in that other Time. Perhaps you stayed in contact with his mind so long that you think you are he?” “I’m not Adric—” I raged. “Adric sent me here—”

I saw the blurring around Gamine’s invisible features twitch in a headshake. “It’s never been proven that two minds can be interchanged like that. Adric’s body. Adric’s brain. The brain convolutions, the memory centers, the habit patterns— you’d still be Adric. The idea that you are someone else is only an illusion of your conscious mind. It will wear off.”

I shook my head, puzzled. “I still don’t believe it. Where am I?”

Gamine moved impatiently. “Oh, very well. You are Adric of Narabedla; and if you are sane again, Lord of the Crimson Tower. I am Gamine.” The swathed shoulders moved a little. “You don’t remember? I am a spell-singer.” I jerked my elbow toward the window. “Those are my own mountains out there,” I said roughly. “I’m not Adric, whoever he is. My name’s Mike Kenscott, and your hanky-panky doesn’t impress me. Take off that veil and let me see your face.”

“I wish you meant that—” a mournfulness breathed in the soft contralto. A sudden fury blazed up in me from nowhere. “And what right have you to pry for that old fool Rhys? Get back to your own place, then, spell-singer—” I broke off, appalled. What was I saying? Worse, what did I mean by it? Gamine turned. The sexless voice was coldly amused. “Adric spoke then. Whoever sits in the seat of your soul, you are the same—and past redemption!” The robes whispered sibilantly on the floor as Gamine moved to the door. “Karamy is welcome to her slave!”

The door slammed.

Left alone, I flung myself down on the high bed, stubbornly concentrating on Mike Kenscott, shutting out the vague blurred mystery in my mind that was Adric impinging on consciousness. I was not Adric. I would not be. I dared not go to the window and look out at the terrifying two suns, even to see the reassurance of the familiar Sierra Madre skyline. A homesick terror was hurting in me.

But persistently the Adric memories came, a guilty feeling of a shirked duty, and a frightened face—a real face, not a blurred nothingness—beneath Gamine’s blue veils. Memories of strange hunts and a big bird on the pommel of a high saddle. A bird hooded like a falcon, in crimson.

Consciousness of dress made me remember the—nightshirt—I still wore. Moving swiftly, without conscious thought, I went to a door and slid it open; pulled out some garments and dressed in them. Every garment in the closet was the same color; deep-hued crimson. I glanced in the mirror and a phrase Gamine had used broke the surface of my mind like a leaping fish. “Lord of the Crimson Tower.” Well, I looked it. There had been knives and swords in the closet; I took out one to look at it, and before I realized what I was doing I had belted it across my hip. I stared, decided to let it remain. It looked all right with the rest of the costume. It felt right, too. Another door folded back noiselessly and a man stood looking at me.

He was young and would have been handsome in an effeminate way if his face had not been so arrogant. Lean, somehow catlike, it was easy to determine that he was akin to Adric, or me, even before the automatic habit of memory fitted name and identity to him. “Evarin,” I said, warily.

He came forward, moving so softly that for an uneasy moment I wondered if he had pads like a cat’s on his feet. He wore deep green from head to foot, similar to the crimson garments that clothed me. His face had a flickering, as if he could at a moment’s notice raise a barrier of invisibility like Gamine’s about himself. He didn’t look as human as I.

“I have seen Gamine,” he said. “She says you are awake, and as sane as you ever were. We of Narabedla are not so strong that we can afford to waste even a broken tool like you.”

Wrath—Adric’s wrath—boiled up in me; but Evarin moved lithely backward. “I am not Gamine,” he warned, “And I will not be served like Gamine has been served. Take care.” “Take care yourself,” I muttered, knowing little else I could have said. Evarin drew back thin lips. “Why? You have been sent out on the Time Ellipse till you are only a shadow of yourself. But all this is beside the point. Karamy says you are to be freed, so the seals are off all the doors, and the Crimson Tower is no longer a prison to you. Come and go as you please. Karamy—” his lips formed a sneer, “If you call that freedom!”

I said slowly “You think I’m not crazy?”

Evarin snorted. “Except where Karamy is concerned, you never were. What is that to me? I have everything I need. The Dreamer gives me good hunting and slaves enough to do my bidding. For the rest, I am the Toymaker. I need little. But you—” his voice leaped with contempt, “you ride time at Karamy’s bidding—and your Dreamer walks—waiting the coming of his power that he may destroy us all one day!”

I stared somberly at Evarin, standing still near the door. The words seemed to wake an almost personal shame in me. The boy watched and his face lost some of his bitterness. He said more quietly “The falcon flown cannot be recalled. I came only to tell you that you are free.” He turned, shrugging his thin shoulders, and walked to the window. “As I say, if you call that freedom.”

I followed him to the window. The clouds were clearing; the two suns shone with a blinding brilliance. By looking far to the left I could see a line of rainbow-tinted towers that rose into the sky, tall and capped with slender spires. I could distinguish five clearly; one, the nearest, seemed made of a jewelled blue; one, clear emerald green; golden, flame-colored, violet. There were more beyond, but the colors were blurred and dim. They made a semicircle about a wooded park; beyond them the familiar skyline of the mountains tugged old memories in my brain. The suns swung high in a sky that held no tint of blue, that was as clear and colorless as ice. Abruptly I turned my back on it all. Evarin murmured “Narabedla. Last of the Rainbow Cities. Adric—how long now?”

I did not answer. “Karamy wants me?” Evarin’s laugh was only a soundless shaking of his thin shoulders. “Karamy can wait. Better for you if she waited forever. Come along with me, or Gamine will be back. You don’t want to see Gamine, do you?” He sounded anxious; I shook my head. Emphatically, I did not want to see that insidious spook again. “No. Why? Should I?”

Evarin looked relieved. “Come along, then. If I know Gamine, you’re pretty well muddled. Amnesiac. I’ll explain. After all—” his voice mocked, “you are my brother!”

He thrust open the door and motioned me through. Instinctively I drew back, gesturing him to lead the way; he laughed soundlessly and went, and I followed, letting it slide shut behind me.

We went down stairs and more stairs. I walked at Evarin’s side, one part of me wondering why I was not more panicky. I was a stranger in a world gone insane, yet I had that outrageous calmness with which men do fantastic things in a dream. I was simply taking one step after another; knowing what to do with that part of me that was Adric. Gamine had spoken of habit patterns, the convolutions of the brain. I had Adric’s body. Only a superficial me, an outer ego, was still a strange, muddled Mike Kenscott. The subconscious Adric was guiding me. I let him ride. I felt it would be wise to be very much Adric around Evarin. We stepped into an elevator shaft which went down, curved around corners with a speed that threw me against the wall, then began, slowly, to rise. I had long since lost all sense of direction. Abruptly the door of the shaft opened and we began to walk along a long, brilliantly illuminated passage. From somewhere we heard singing; a voice somewhere in the range of a trained boy’s voice or a woman’s mature contralto. Gamine’s voice. I could make no sense of the words; but Evarin halted to listen, swearing in a whisper. I thought the faraway voice sang my name and Evarin’s, but I could not tell. “What is it, Evarin?”

He gave a short exclamation, the sense of which was lost on me.

“Come along,” he said irritably, “It is only the spell-singer, singing old Rhys back to sleep. You waked him this time, did you not? I wonder Gamine permitted it. He is very near his last sleep—old Rhys. I think you will send him there soon.” Without giving me a chance to answer—and for that matter, I had no answer ready—he pulled me aside between recessed walls and again the shaft in which we stood began to ride. Eventually we stepped into a room at the top of another tower, a room lavishly, even garishly furnished. Evarin flung himself carelessly on a divan embroidered in silken purple and gestured me to follow his example. “Well, now tell me. Where in Time has Karamy sent you now?”

“Karamy?” I asked tentatively. Evarin’s raucous laugh rang out again. He said with seeming irrelevance, but with an odd air of confiding “My one demand of the Dreamer is—freedom from that witch’s spells. Some day I shall fashion a Toy for her. I am not the Toymaker of Narabedla for nothing. I demand little enough of the Dreamers, Zandru knows! I do not like to pay their price, but Karamy does not care what she pays. So—” he made a spreading movement of his hands, “she has power over everyone, except me. Yes; assuredly I must make her a Toy. She sent you out on the Time Ellipse. I wonder who brought you back?” I shook my head. “I’ve been out of my body too long. I can’t remember much.”

“You remember me,” Evarin said. “I wonder why she left you that? Karamy’s amnesia-rays took the rest of your memory. She never trusted me that far before.”

But I caught the crafty look in his face. I knew only this about Evarin; Karamy was right not to trust him. I said “I only remember your name. Nothing more.”

Because Evarin—I knew—was never ten minutes the same. He would profess friendship and mean friendship; ten minutes later, still in friendship, he would flay the skin from my body and count it only an exquisite joke. I did not like those perverted and subtle eyes. He seemed to read my thought. “Good, we will be strangers. Brothers are too—” he let the word trail off, unfinished. “What have you forgotten?”

Could I trust him with my terrible puzzlement? How much could I, as Adric— and I must be Adric to him—get along without knowing? What was even more to the point, how many questions could I dare ask without betraying my own helplessness? I compromised. “What are the Dreamers?”

That had been the wrong question.

“Zandru. Adric, you have been far indeed! You must have been back before the Cataclysm! Well—our forefathers, after the Cataclysm, ruled this planet and built the Rainbow Cities. That was before the Compact that killed machines. Some people say the Dreamers were born from the dead machines.”

He began to pace the floor restlessly. “They were men—once,” he said, “They are born from men and women. Mendel knows what caused them. But one in every ten million men is such a freak—a Dreamer. Some say they came out of the Cataclysm; some say they are the souls of the dead Machines. They are human—and not human. They were telepaths. They could control everything—things, minds, people. They could throw illusions around things and men—they contested our rules.”

He sat down; his voice became brooding, quiet. “One of us, here in Rainbow City, a dozen generations ago, found a way to bind the Dreamers,” he said. “We could not kill them; they were deathless, normally. But we could bind them in sleep. As they slept, under a forced stasis, we could make them give up their powers—to us. So that we controlled the things they controlled. For a price.” There was a glimpse of horror behind his eyes. “You know the price. It is high.”

I kept silent. I wanted Evarin to go on.

He shivered a little, shook his head and the horror vanished. “So each of us has a Dreamer of his own who can grant him power to do as he wills. And after years and years, as the Dreamers grow old, they grow mortal. They can be killed. And fewer are born, now; fewer to each generation. As they grow older and weaker, it is safe to let them wake; but never too strongly, or too long.” He laughed, bitterly. A fury came from nowhere into his face.

“And you loosed a Dreamer!” he cried. “A Dreamer with all his power hardly come upon him! He is harmless as yet—but he wakes, and he walks! And one day the power will come upon him—and he will destroy us all!” Evarin’s thin features were drawn with despair; not arrogant, now, but full of suffering. “A Dreamer—” he sighed, “A Dreamer, and you had been made one with him already! Can you see now why we do not trust you—brother?”

Without answering I rose and went to the window. This window did not look on the neat little park, but on a vast tract of wild country. Far away, curious trails of smoke spiralled up into the sunlight and a wispy fog lay in the bottomlands. “Down there,” said Evarin in a low voice, “Down there the Dreamer walks and waits! Down there—”

But I did not hear the rest, for my mind completed it. Down there—

Down there is my lost memory. Down there was my life.

Somewhere down there I had left my soul.

Flowers of Danger

I turned my back on the window. “Rhys is a Dreamer,” I said with slow certainty. “What is Gamine?”

Evarin nodded slowly, ignoring the question. “Rhys is a Dreamer, yes. He is old—so old he is almost mortal now; so he wakes, and he too walks. But he was one of us once—the only Dreamer ever born within the Rainbow City. His loyalty is double; but he will never harm Narabedla, because he is of our blood.” Evarin cleared his throat. “So Gamine takes what knowledge can be had from his old, old mind. And does not pay.”

“Who is Gamine?” I asked again. Evarin still hesitated.

“Karamy hates Gamine,” he said, after minutes. “So no man sees Gamine’s face. I would not ask too many questions—unless you ask them of Karamy.” A smile flickered on the mobile features, “Ask Karamy,” he said gleefully, “She will tell!”

“She will?” I said stupidly, because I could think of nothing else to say. Evarin’s grin was delicately malicious. “Oh, I am sure of that! Karamy is quick to strike. Gamine and I have little love lost, but we agree on one thing; that Karamy’s procession of slaves is monstrous. And that you are a fool to help Karamy pay for her—desires. Karamy is far too fond of power in her own hands, to pay to put it into yours.”

Karamy. Karamy who took my memory—

“She did.” Evarin murmured, and I realized I had spoken aloud. The room seemed full of a weighty silence. Evarin’s prowling footsteps made no noise as he came to my side. “I can give it back to you, though. I have made you a Toy.” His effete voice rather disgusted me, and I moved away, but he followed. “Look here, and find your memory.”

And he put something small and hard into my hand; something wrapped in silvery silks.

I raised my hand curiously, untwisting the wrappings. They were smooth and shining and colorless, with a bluish cast, like Gamine’s veils; no fabric I had ever seen. Evarin backed slowly away from me. For an instant all I could see was a blurred invisibility—like Gamine’s face behind the veils—then a sort of mirror became slowly visible, It did not seem to reflect anything; rather, it was a coldly shining surface, cloudy, glittering from within. I bent to examine the pattern of the shadows that moved on the surface. There was a curious pull from the mirror, a cold that crept sluggishly from my hand. A familiar, soothing cold. As if drawn by a magnet, my eyes bent closer—

Recognition crashed in my mind. Evarin—and his gilt deadly Toys.... I dashed the colorless thing to the floor, giving it a savage kick. The blurred invisibility wavered; I caught a glimpse of a tiny jewelled mechanism, before it sprang back to gray ice again. Evarin had backed halfway across the room; I leaped at him, collaring the dandy and wrenching him close. “I’ve a good mind to tie the thing across your throat!” I grated.

Evarin’s lip twisted up. Suddenly his whole face melted in a blurring invisibility and I felt his whole substance evaporate from between my hands. He writhed like smoke, and I leaped backward just as he materialized, whole and deadly, too close. “I am always—guarded!” he jerked out at me, “I might have known—”

He stooped, reaching for the fallen toy. I kicked the little mirror out of his reach, bent to retrieve it. “I’ll keep this,” I said, and wadding the insulated silk around it, I thrust it into a pocket. Evarin’s eyes glared at me helplessly. “You’ll stay solid for awhile now,” I jeered. “Toymaker! Damned freak—” I stormed out of the room, leaving him rubbing his bruised shoulder.

Now that Adric was back in control, I had no trouble discovering where I wanted to go. Some blind instinct led me through the maze of elevators and staircases; I stepped into servant’s quarters, kitchens, a roomful of buzzing machinery I dismissed with a glance of familiarity; and finally found myself in the open, the semicircle of rainbow towers around me.

Overhead the suns, red and white, sent a curious, double-shadowed light downward through the neatly-trimmed trees. A little day moon, smaller than any moon I had known, peeped, a curious crescent, over the edge of a mountain. The grass under my feet was just grass, but the brightly-tinted flowers in mathematically regular beds were strange to me. Paths, bordered by narrow ditches to keep the pedestrian off the flowers, wandered in and out of this strange pleasaunce; I accepted all this without conscious thought, but some unconscious scrap of memory gave me a vague practical reason for the ditches. I carefully avoided them.

Faint shrill music tugged siren-like at my ears; wordless, like Gamine’s crooning. Staring, I realized that the flowers themselves sang. The singing flowers of Karamy’s garden—I remembered their lotus song. A song of welcome? Or of danger?

I was not alone in the garden. Men, kilted and belted in the same gaudy red and gold as the flowers, passed and repassed restlessly, unquiet as chained flames. For a moment the old vanity turned uppermost in my mind. For all her slaves, all her—lovers, Karamy paid tribute to the Lord of the Crimson Tower! Paid—would continue to pay!

The men passed me, silent. They were sworded, but their swords were blunt, like children’s toys; they were a regiment of corpses, of zombies. Their salutes as I passed were jerky, mechanical.

A high note sang suddenly in the flowers; I felt, not heard, their empty parading cease. In a weird ballet they ranged themselves into blind lines that filed away nowhere; toy soldiers, all alike.

And between the backs of the toy-soldiers and the patterned, painted flowers, I saw a man running. Another me, from another world, thought briefly of the card-soldiers, flat on their faces in the Red Queen’s garden. Wonderland. I heard myself say, with half-conscious amusement “They all look so alike until you turn them over!”

The man running between the ditched flower-beds was no dummy from a pack of cards. I saw him beckon, still running. He called to me; to Adric. “Adric! Karamy walks here—just listen to the flowers! I was afraid I’d have to get all the way into the tower to find you!” His voice was urgent, breathless; he slid to a stop not three feet from me. “Narayan knew they’d freed you! He’s outside the gates. He sent me to help. Come on!”

The sight of the man touched another of those live-wires in my brain; the name of Narayan, another still. “Narayan—” I said in dull recognition. The word, on my lips, hit a chord of fear, of dread and danger—

But I had come straight from Evarin. I knew the man; I knew the response he expected, but the brief glimpse into Evarin’s mirror had set up a chain of actions I could not control. I tried to put out my hand in friendly greeting; instead I felt, with horror, my fingers at my belt and tried, without success, to halt the sword that flew without volition from its sheath. The man backed away, his eyes full of terror.

“Adric—no—the Sign—” he held up one arm, deprecatingly, then howled with agony, clutching the severed fingers. I heard my own voice, savage, inhuman, the thin laughter of Evarin snarling through it. “Sign?? There’s a sign for you!”

The man threw himself out of range; but his face, convulsed with pain, held a stunned bewilderment. “Adric—Narayan promised—you were sane—” he breathed.

I forced my sword back into the scabbard, staring without comprehension at the blood from the wound I had inflicted, and at the darting heads of the flowers. I could not kill this man who carried the name of Narayan on his tongue.

The flowers twitched—stirred—threw tendrils at the man’s bleeding hand. A quick nausea tightened my throat; I motioned urgently to him.

“Run!” I begged, “Quick, or I can’t—”

The flowers shrilled. The man threw back his head, his eyes wide with panic, and screamed.

“Karamy! Aiiieeeee—!” he staggered back wildly, teetering on the edge of the ditch. I cried another warning, incoherent—but too late. He trod on the flowers— stumbled across the little ditch. The writhing flower-heads shot up shoulder-high. They screamed a wild paean of flower-music, and he fell among them, sprawling, floundering helplessly. I heard him scream, hoarsely, horribly—I turned my eyes away. There was a wild thrashing, a flailing, a yell that died and echoed among the brilliant towers. There was a sort of purring murmur from the blossoms.

Then the flowers stilled and were quiet, waving innocently behind their ditches. Karamy, gold and fire, walked along the winding path through the trees. And in the space of a second I forgot the man who lay lifeless in the bed of the terrible flowers.

Karamy was all gold. From her glowing crown of hair to the tips of her little slippers, she was one sunny shimmer; there was amber on her brows and at her throat, and an amber rod twisted lightly between her fingers, its delicate movement outlining my face. Karamy’s smile of welcome was a dream which made me know I could be well content if this were my world.

But old habit made me turn my face away; her eyes, cat-eyes of wide yellow, watched me slyly, but her face was turned to the sprawled man in the flowers. “So? I thought I heard—something.” Without taking her eyes from my face, she spun the lucent rod. The flower-song rose again, a soft keening wail. Two of the silent guards moved noiselessly through the garden, and at an expressive movement of the rod, they lifted the corpse and bore it away. The music died. The woman’s hands went out to pull me close.

“Adric, Adric! As soon as you are free, they pursue you! That is not what you want, is it?”

“Isn’t it?” I asked shortly. I still could not look full at the cat-eyes, the caressing face. A memory scuttled, rabbit-fashion, across my mind, giving name and identity to the man I had betrayed to the flowers.

Karamy slid in front of me so I had to look at her, and the lovely lazy voice murmured the name I was beginning to know. “You are angry,” the soft voice caressed me, “I knew it was not right to let Evarin near you! Adric, we need you, Narabedla needs you! We felt betrayed when you left us, when you shut yourself up alone with your stars! Have you forgotten, or are you still—my lover?”

It rang phony! Phony, was the way I put it to myself. Part of me felt like calling her a lying she-devil and having that much, at least, on record. But I was fast acquiring a double cunning. The animal cunning of Adric’s old habit—and a desperate, trapped cunning of my own, born of a desperate fear of this unfamiliar world. There was nothing I could do except ride on the surface and let my hunches take me where they would. Karamy was very soft and sweet and something more than lovely in my arms and I held her crushingly close while I struggled with a memory. Who was Karamy? Who—and what—was I?

Karamy dropped her arms. The mantle of lazy seductiveness dropped with them. She spoke with eager annoyance. “You are still angry because I sent you on the Time Ellipse! You do not know it was for your own good—you haven’t learned your lesson yet—”

That talk meant danger for me. I could think of only one way to silence it. She seemed to like it; but even with her lips acquiescent under mine, I was wary. Was I fooling her—or was she only playing my own game, and playing it a little better?

“Now we can make plans,” she said a little later, “First, Gamine.” She looked sharply at me, but I kept my face expressionless. “Gamine is always with the old Dreamer; she lets him wake; he will grow too strong. We must send Rhys away from Narabedla. Gamine may stay or follow him to exile. But Rhys must go.”

“Rhys must go,” I conceded. “He should be slain, but Gamine will never do it,” said Karamy with a shrug that disposed of Rhys.

“Evarin—” she snapped her jewelled fingers. “His Dreamer sleeps sound! Evarin fears even his own power! My Dreamer grows strong—but he serves me!” The beautiful face looked ruthless and savage. “Your Dreamer walks—free in the forest! Only you can re-bind him. You, with my help—Adric of the Crimson Tower!”

Her eyes smoldered. “Yes, and my Dreamer shall serve you as well, till then!” She breathed. “I will pay to put power in your hands!” The very phrase Evarin had used! A shudder stung me briefly.

Her glowing face burned through my sting of fear. “I go to the Dreamer this night, Adric! Ride with me, and he shall lead you where the Dreamer walks—and lead you back to power! I have said enough—” the lambent eyes tilted at me, “Have I not?”

She had, and too much. For I knew now how the Dreamer must be paid. And the small part of me that was still Mike Kenscott cowered; the rest of me accepted the memory with a shrug. It was this Adric part that spoke. “I’ll go. And afterward, I’ll go into the forest where the Dreamer walks—and bring him back to you!”

But even as I swept Karamy into my arms and bent her head back roughly under my mouth, a warning prickle iced my spine. I said, insinuatingly “And then, Karamy——” but my eyes narrowed over her golden head.

Karamy had tricked me before this.

Trapped!

Afterward, when I had found my way back to the Crimson Tower, I searched for hours for something that might give a clue to Adric’s mystifying past. I was puzzled about this Adric who came and went as he pleased in the chambers of my memory. But I found nothing; whoever had stolen Adric’s memory, had made sure that nothing in his surroundings should clear up the puzzle in his mind. I knew only one thing. Adric was feared, disliked, distrusted by all the Narabedlans, and all except Gamine had something to gain by feigning friendship. I could not decide whether Karamy’s attitude was love that pretended contempt to mold Adric, or me, to her will, or contempt that pretended love for the same reason. And although habit found affection for Evarin, I could not trust him long. Trust a cyclone sooner than that half-mad effeminate! The name, Narayan, stuck burr-like in my mind. Friend, or enemy? I sat at the barred window of Adric’s high room, trying to force memory from the alien mind in which I was prisoner. And whether it was sheer effort of will, or the result of the fragmentary look in Evarin’s mirror, or whether, as Gamine insisted, I was really Adric and Mike Kenscott was a mere superficial illusion of my conscious mind, memory did begin to pulse back.

In the early days....

In the early days, before the vagueness came on my mind, I, Adric of the Crimson Tower, had been a power in the Rainbow City. The memories of that time were not the kind Mike Kenscott would have cared to own, but I, as Adric, found them vastly pleasing. Unlike Gamine, who loved only knowledge, or Evarin, who toyed with pleasure and trickery, I had wanted power. I had it, unlimited, from a Dreamer who stirred only vaguely in sleep. Half the known portions of this world had known the Crimson Tower as lord. And Karamy—

Some memories were triumphant. Some were humorous in Adric’s cynical mind. Some were terrible beyond guessing—for Adric had not counted cost, and even he shuddered from the price the Dreamer had exacted.

Then, to this wilful and wild man, something had happened. I had no idea what; Karamy had reached that far back and blurred, though not entirely erased, my memory. It had something to do with a blonde boy’s face, lifted in incredulous terror—or joy; and a fleeing form, veiled, that retreated down the long corridor of my mind, averting its face as I followed. Whatever had happened, it had come when Adric was sick with blood and horror, when he was surfeited, even if momentarily, with conquest, and sickened at the price the Dreamer extorted. The power, forced through the mind of the Dreamer, called for energy; kinetic energy, available from one source and one only. Adric had fed the Dreamer with that power. For a while.

One day, as a whim, I had redeemed a young woman slave—then the vagueness came and choked me. I might think; I might burst my brain, but so far and no farther my memories would carry me. I could not force memory of that chain of events. But after that, Adric’s reign had collapsed like the unstable arch it had been. His armies scattered, and he had shut himself up or been imprisoned in his Tower; his memories had been stolen and he had gone, or been sent, spinning along a time line forward, or perhaps back, until somewhere in the abyss of time he touched Mike Kenscott.

It had been then, perhaps, that Adric had escaped. He had reached, drawn Mike Kenscott back—and switched the two. It was a perfect escape from a life Adric had come to hate.

But I was Adric. There was an explanation for that, too. The physical body could not make the transit in time. I had Adric’s body; the convolutions of his brain, the synaptic links of habit. His memory banks. Only the Ego, the superimposed pattern of the conscious identity, insisted I was Mike Kenscott. In Adric’s body, the old patterns ruled, and to all intents and purposes, I was Adric. And back in my own time, I thought, Adric was living in my body—living Mike Kenscott’s life, going through the motions, with only the same queer lapses I was making here. And after a while, even these would stop. I was wholly trapped. Here, living Adric’s life, the part of me that was Adric would grow stronger and stronger till—he?— unseated the other identity wholly. And he, in my body? Andy, I thought with a wild swift fear, what will he do to Andy?

Nothing. He could not hurt Andy—not in my pattern—any more than I could hate Evarin. Or could he?

I had to get back! God, I had to get back!

When the white sun had set and the red sun glowed a darkening ember across the Sierra, a summons came, brought by one of Karamy’s toy-soldier cohorts. I dressed—in crimson again, for there was no other clothing anywhere—and followed the voiceless sentry down through a labyrinth of elevators, finally emerging into a long corridor. I strode down it, hearing my own steps echo; a second rhythm joined them imperceptibly, and Gamine stole out of the darkness, swathed in the luminous veiling, creeping noiselessly as a ghost behind me. Later I became conscious of Evarin’s padding cat-steps behind Gamine, trailing us, single-file. And other figures came from darkened recesses to stretch the silent parade; a slim girl in a winged cloak, flame color; a dwarfed man who walked beneath the amethyst huddle of purple cap and furs. Memory fitted names to them, but I did not speak to them, or they to me.

After a long time, the immense corridor began to tilt upward, climbing toward a glimmer of light at the end. Without realizing it I had swung into an arrogant, loping stride; now I brushed away the slave-soldier who headed the column and took the lead myself. Behind me the others fell into place as if I had bidden them; the flame-clothed girl in the winged cloak, the cat-footed Evarin, the dwarf bent in his jester’s cap, Gamine in the blue shroud. Without warning, we came out into a vast court; an enclosed space, yet wide as the outdoors, a yard, a plaza, a place of imposing grandeur. A place of memory.

The red sun above us glowed like a lurid coal. There were tall pillars on three sides of the courtyard, and at the far end, a vaulted archway led into a treelined drive that stretched away for miles into the twilight. Between two pillars, Karamy waited; slim, shimmering golden from head to foot. A hungry impatience sparked in her cat’s eyes. “You’re late.” “I’m ready,” I said. What I was ready for, I was not sure. Karamy waved an impatient signal to the Narabedlans who were coming up. “Adric is with us again,” she said in her curious lazy voice, “Your allegiance to Adric—children of the Rainbow!”

I stood at her side, mute, waiting; a guard of silent men behind us. “Lord Idris;” Karamy summoned. The hunchback came to bow jerkily before us. “Welcome home—Lord!”

The girl in flame-color darted to where we stood and her dipping curtsy was like the waver of a moth toward a flame. “Adric—” she murmured. The wings of her cloak lifted and fluttered across her shoulders as if they would fly of themselves. She was a shy thing, and her dark hair waved softly as if it too were winged. I touched her fingers lightly, but under the smolder of Karamy’s gaze I let her go. She watched me, shyly, with averted face.

Evarin’s face was slyly malicious, but his voice was pure silk. “It is—pleasure to follow you again, my brother,” he almost purred, and I scowled at the mockery at his face and refused his offered hand. Only Gamine said nothing, coming forward on gliding feet to bow briefly and retire; but the silver-sweet, sexless voice of the spell-singer murmured in a singing, almost wordless, croon. “Save your spells, Gamine,” said Karamy savagely, and Evarin jerked round at the shrouded form, but Gamine heeded neither of them, and the sweet contralto chanting went on.

From somewhere the silent men brought horses. Horses—here, in this nightmare world? I had never been on a horse in my life. I found myself vaulting, with a nice coordination of movement, into the saddle. The courtyard, for all the bustle of department, seemed to hold the silence of a grave. Karamy kept me close to her. When we were all mounted, she threw the amber rod upward, and the last rays of the red sun caught its rays and sent a pure shaft of light down the darkened alley-way lined with trees. At the sight of that gleam, a curiously familiar emotion stole through me. I threw up one arm over my head, mimicking Karamy’s gesture. “Ride!” I shouted.

And the flying steeds kept pace with mine.

The driveway under the arch of trees led for miles under the thick boughs. Through the easy drumming of hooves, I could still hear the sweet distant sound of Gamine’s singing, which floated on the wind, keeping pace with the rise and fall of the rolling road, in a quick cadence. The wind whipped Karamy’s golden hair like a halo about her head. I glanced over my shoulder to where the rainbow towers stood, now black, silhouetted against the greater darkness of the mountains. Over-head in the pink sky, the crescent of the tiny moon was brightening, and lower in the sky I saw another, wider disc, nearly at full. Cold air was stinging my cheeks and nipping my bones with frost, and I felt the sparks struck from hooves beating on the frozen ground.

Cold! Yet in Karamy’s garden flowers had glowed in a tropical glory—

And for a moment, it was entirely Mike Kenscott—sick, bewildered and panicky—who glanced about him with horror, feeling the swirling cold and a colder chill from the golden sorceress at my side. It was Mike Kenscott’s will that jerked at the reins of the big gelding to end this farce now— “What is it?” Karamy cried, over the noise of the hooves.

And I heard my own voice, raised above the galloping rhythm, cry back “Nothing!” and call out a command to the horse.

Good God! I was Mike Kenscott—but prisoner in a body that would not obey me—a mind that persisted in thoughts and habits I could not share, a—soul?— that would carry me to destruction! I was Mike Kenscott—trapped on a nightmare ride through hell!

Where the Dreamer Walks

I had been scared before. Now I was panicked, wild with a nerve-destroying fright. I’m not a coward. I set up a radar transmitter in Okinawa within ninety feet of a nest of Japs. That was something real. I could face it. But under two suns and a pair of little moons, with weird people I knew were not human—all right; I was a coward. I steadied myself in the saddle, trying with every scrap of my will to calm myself. If this was a nightmare, well, I’d had some beauties—

But it wasn’t. I knew that. The frost hurting my face, the sound of shod steel on stones, the vivid colors around me, told me I was wide awake. Dreams are not technicolored. And through all this I was riding hell-for-leather, my knees gripped on the saddle, guiding the horse with the grip of my thighs—and I’d never been on a horse’s back in my life. Rode—and rode—

We had ridden about seven miles, and stopped twice to breathe the horses, but we were still beneath the great archway of trees. The sky’s pink sunset light had faded; the land was flooded with a blue, fluorescent starlight, a light I’d never seen before. I strained my eyes upward through the black foliage. I suppose I had some confused idea of guessing when I was by the stars. But the view to the North was hidden by mountains, and I don’t know one constellation from another, with that single exception. A glance at Karamy, in this fright, un-nerved me; I touched the reins, dropped back till I rode between Gamine and the girl in flame-color. “Adric,” the spell-singer saluted coolly, and the girl in the winged cloak threw back her hood; I saw dark eyes watching me from a pure, sweet young face. Before the luminous innocence of those eyes I wanted to cry out in protest. I was not Adric, warlock of Narabedla. I was just a poor guy named Mike, I was just—me. I rode beside Gamine for minutes, trying to think what I would say.

Gamine’s musical voice was not raised, yet it carried perfectly to my ears. “You seem wholly yourself again.”

I didn’t answer. What was there to say? Still, there seemed to be sympathy in the sharply-edged tones. “You will remember—perhaps too much—at the Dreamer’s Keep.”

“Gamine,” I asked, “Who is Narayan?”

I saw the blue robes quiver a little; across from Gamine, I saw a curious flickering look pass across the face of the girl in the orange winged cloak. But Gamine’s answer was perfectly even and disinterested. “The name is not familiar to me. Have you heard it, Cynara?”

The girl did not answer, only moved her dark head a little.

“I should know,” I mused. But the name Cynara had touched another of those live wires within my mind. Narayan. Cynara. Cynara and Narayan! If I could only remember! Suddenly I turned. “Gamine—who are you?” Gamine sat quiet, eerily motionless on the tall horse. The robed figure seemed to blend into the starlit shadows around us. I had the sudden feeling of having re-lived this moment before, then the veiled shoulders twitched impatiently.

“Is this an inquisition?”

Rebuked, and stung by the arrogant voice, I touched my heel to my horse’s flank and rode forward to rejoin Karamy. Gamine! The hell with Gamine!

For several minutes the road had been climbing, and now we topped the summit of a little rise and abruptly the trees came to an end. By tacit consent we all drew our horses to a walk. We stood atop the lip of a broad bowl of land, perhaps thirty miles across, filled to the brim with thick dark forest. Far out in this valley lay a cleared space, and in the center of that space lay a great tower; but not a slender and fairylike spire like the Towers of Rainbow City. This was a massive donjon thrusting heavy shoulders upward into the moon-washed sky.

The Keep of the Dreamers.

Something in me murmured “This is the forest where the Dreamer walks!”—or had the murmured voice come from Gamine, motionless behind me? Karamy rode eagerly, her face drawn tautly together, her slim tanned hands clenched on the reins. All this while I was Mike Kenscott—but a Mike who watched himself without knowing what he would do next, like those puzzling nightmares where a man is both actor and audience to some mummery being played. I watched myself say and do things as if I were two men at once. In effect, I suppose I was.... Karamy turned in her saddle, facing me.

“Adric,” she murmured, “Lead me where the Dreamer walks!” I knew, with a sudden surety, that because of some bond between the freed Dreamer and myself, I could do this. But again, something outside myself told me what to say. “That bond is broken, Karamy. Did you not break it yourself? How can I guide you then?” And for my reward I saw unsureness leap in her cat’s eyes. That shot had told. Karamy had been guessing, then! The answer had shaken her. But this woman was a past mistress at subtlety. She murmured “It can be forged again. That I swear.”

Ah, but I knew how far to trust even Karamy’s oaths!

We had dipped down into the bowl of forest and we were riding through thick woods, along a road that struggled windingly, with many curves and sharp corners. Adric knew this country; his knowledge made Mike Kenscott shiver. He had hunted here, and for no fourlegged game. As if Karamy read my thoughts I hear her low laughter. “So. My wrist aches for the feel of a falcon. We’ll hunt here again—soon, you and I!” I was partly bewildered by her words, but they gave me a shivering excitement, an insidious thrill.

Behind me, I heard Gamine’s chanting take on a new note. The words were still indistinguishable, but the very tune screamed warning. A pulse began to twitch jerkily in my neck.

Without any warning, the road twisted. Karamy and I spurred our horses and rounded the curve in one swift, racing burst of speed——and were fairly in the trap before we knew it.

It was the agonized whinny of my horse, and the jolt of my body righting itself automatically from the plunging animal beneath me, that made me realize we had ridden straight on a chevaux-de-frise. I yelled, cursing, shouting to Karamy to get back, get back, but her own momentum carried her on; I saw her light body fly out of the saddle and disappear. The others, rounding the curve in a wild dash, were fairly on the barrier already, and the place was a bedlam, a scramble, with riderless horses milling in a melee of curses and the screaming of women and the threshing of feet. I was out of my saddle in an instant, thrusting Gamine’s mount back from the stabbing points fixed invisibly against the dark barrier in the road, shouting to Evarin and Idris. Evarin leaped to my side, catching at Karamy’s wild horse, while I tore madly at the barrier where the woman had been thrown. Idris bore down on me, mounted. “Go round!” he shouted. I plunged through the underbrush at the side of the road, with hasty feet twice snaked by long creepers. Past the barrier, the road lay open and deserted, and Karamy lay in a shimmer of crumpled silk, motionless. “Gamine, Evarin—” I bellowed, “No one’s here! Quick, Karamy is hurt—”

The head and shoulders of Idris’ horse thrust through the thick brushwood. “Is she dead?” the dwarf muttered. I bent, thrusting my hand to her breasts. “Her heart’s beating. Only stunned. Get down,” I ordered. Idris scrambled, monkey-fashion, from the saddle. I lifted the woman in my arms, but she did not move or open her eyes. Idris touched my arm.

“Put her on the saddle,” he suggested, and together we laid her across the pommel. Suddenly, the dwarf cried out.

“What?” I asked sharply.

“I hear—”

I never knew what Idris heard. His head vanished, as if snatched away by a giant’s hand; a rough grip collared me, choking fingers clawed at my throat, a thousand rockets went off in my head and I lay sprawling in the brushwood, eating dust, with an elephant sitting on my chest and threatening hands gouging my throat. My last coherent thought before the breath went out of me, was—

“I’m waking up!”

Narayan

But I wasn’t. When I came to—it could only have been a few seconds that I was unconscious—it was to hear Evarin snarling curses and Idris barking incoherently with rage. I heard Karamy screaming my name, and started to answer, but the steely fingers were still at my throat and with that weight on top of me, I hadn’t a chance. The fall, or something, had knocked Adric clean out of me. I was fuzzy-brained, but sane. I was an innocent bystander again.

I could see Evarin and Idris in the road, casting wary glances at the brushwood all around them. I could just make out the face of the man who was holding me pinned to the earth with his body. He had the general build of a hippopotamus and a face to match. I squirmed, but the threatening face came closer and I subsided. The man could have broken me in two like a match.

Around me in the thicket were dozens of crouching forms, fantastic snipers with weapons at their shoulders. Weapons that could have been crossbows or disintegrators, or both. “Enter Buck Rogers,” I thought wearily. I was beginning to feel faint again, and old welter-weight on my stomach didn’t help any. Abruptly he moved, delicate fingers knotting a gag in my gasping mouth; then the intolerable weight on my chest was suddenly gone and I sucked in air with relief. The fat man eased himself cautiously up, and I felt a steel point caress my lowest rib. The threat didn’t need words. I could see the Narabedlans gathered, a tight little knot in the road. The snipers around me were still holding their weapons, but the fat man commanded in a low voice “Don’t fire! They’re sure to have guards riding behind them—” the voice died to a rasping mutter, and I lay motionless, trying to dredge up some of Adric’s memories that might help; but the only thing I got was a fleeting memory of my own football days and a flying tackle by a Penn State halfback that had knocked me ten feet. Adric was gone; clean gone.

The Narabedlans were talking in low tones, Gamine the rallying-point round which they clustered. Evarin had his sword out, but even he did not step toward the mantling thicket. Cynara was holding Evarin’s arm, protesting wildly. “No, no, no, no! They’ll kill Adric—”

Suddenly, between two breaths, the road was alive with mounted men. Who they were, I never knew; I was quickly dragged to my feet and jerked away. Behind me I heard shouting, and steel, and saw thin flashes of colored flame. Spots of black danced before my eyes as I stumbled along between two captors. I felt my sword dragged from my scabbard. Oh well, I thought wryly, now that Adric’s run out on the party I don’t know how to use it anyway. Under the impetus of a knife I found myself clambering awkwardly into a saddle, felt the horse running beneath me. There wasn’t a chance of getting away, and the frying pan couldn’t be much worse than the fire, anyway.

Behind us the noises of battle died away. The horse I rode raced, sure-footed, into the darkness. I hung on with both hands to keep from falling; only Adric’s habitual reflexes kept me from tumbling ignominiously to the ground. I don’t think I had any more coherent thoughts until the jolting rhythm broke and we came out of the forest into full moonlight and a glare of open fires.

I raised my head and looked around me. We were in a grove, tree-ringed like a Druid temple, lit by watch-fires and the waver of torches. Tents sprouted in the clearing, giving it an untidy, gypsy appearance; at the back was a white frame house with a flat roof and wide doors, but no windows.

Men and women were coming out of the tents everywhere. The talk was a Pentecost of tongues, but I heard one name, repeated over and over again.

“Narayan! Narayan!” the shouts clamored.

A slim young man, blond, dressed in rough brown, came from one of the larger tents and walked deliberately toward me. The crowd drew back, widening to let him approach; before he came within twenty yards he made a signal to one of the men to untie my gag and let me down. I stood, clinging to the saddle, exhausted; the young man came forward until he could almost have touched me, and studied my face dispassionately. At last he raised his head, turning to the fat man, my captor.

“This isn’t Adric,” he said. “This man is a stranger.”

I should have been relieved; I don’t know why I wasn’t. Instead, my first reaction was bewilderment and angry annoyance. How could he tell that? I was as furiously embarrassed as if I’d been accused of wearing stolen clothing. My beefy captor was as angry as I was. “What do you mean, this isn’t Adric?” he demanded belligerently, “We took him right out of their accursed cavalcade! If it isn’t Adric, who is it?”

“I wish I knew,” Narayan muttered under his breath. His eyes, still fixed on my face, were level, disconcerting. He was tall and straightly built, with pale blond hair cut square around his shoulders like a squire from a Provencal ballad, and grey eyes that looked grave, but friendly. I liked his looks, but he had a trace of the uncanny stillness I’d noticed in old Rhys, in Gamine. For a moment I decided to tell my whole fantastic story to this man with the grave eyes. He would surely believe it. But to my surprise, he spoke and called me Adric; definitely, as if he had forgotten his doubts. “Adric,” he said, “Do you still remember me? Or did Karamy take that too?”

I sighed. I didn’t dare tell the truth, and I felt too chilled and exhausted and disoriented to lie convincingly. Yet lie I must, and do it well.

The fat man scowled and fronted Narayan. “Karamy—Zandru’s eyelashes!” he growled. “Look you, did Brennan come back this afternoon? He knows his way around Rainbow City. Ask Adric what happened to Brennan!”

The clamoring broke out around us again, but Narayan never took his eyes from my face as he answered gently “There is always danger, Raif. Blame no man unjustly. Brennan knew he faced all the dangers of Rainbow City. And even Adric is not to blame if a she-witch has him under her spells.” “Traitor!” Raif snarled at me and spat.

I loosed the saddle-horn and stepped dizzily forward. “You might try asking me,” I said with a weary anger.

“Are you Adric of the Crimson Tower?” fat Raif snapped.

“I don’t know—” I said tiredly. “I don’t know, I don’t know!”

Narayan’s eyes met mine in puzzlement. Abruptly he put out one hand and took my wrist in a firm grip. “We can’t talk here, whoever you are,” he said. “Come along.”

He led me through the thinning crowd into the frame house at the grove’s edge; Raif and one other man trailed after us, the rest clustering hive-fashion around the door. Inside, in a great timbered room, a fire burned and glowing globes chased away darkness. I went gratefully toward the fire; I was stiff with riding and I felt chilled and stupid and empty with the cold. From a wood settle near the fire, a woman rose. She was slight and dark and around her shoulders the luminescent shimmer of her winged cloak flowed like another flame. Cynara.

“Adric—” she said half-aloud, holding out her hands. I took them, partly because she seemed to expect it, partly because the girl seemed the only thing real in a world gone haywire. She flung her arms suddenly around my neck and held herself to me with a shy deliberation. “Adric, Adric, Adric—” she begged, “I slipped away in the dark—I suppose Gamine knows—but they’ll never find me here, no, never—”

Narayan’s hand pulled the girl sternly away from me; she shrank before the annoyance in his eyes. “Please—Narayan, no—”

The blond man looked at her without speaking for long moments. At last he said gravely “Sister, you must go back to Narabedla. I would not make you go if there was another way; but you must, for a time.” He beckoned to one of the men. “Kerrel—” he commanded, “Take Cynara back to Rainbow City, but don’t get caught. Cynara; tell them you were lost in the woods, or that you were caught and escaped.”

The childish mouth trembled, and she turned to me appealingly, but I gave a little shrug. What was I supposed to do? Narayan gave Cynara a gentle push. “Go with Kerrel, little sister,” he ordered in a quiet voice; Kerrel took her arm and they hurried out of the room, the winged cloak she wore fluttering on her shoulders. Narayan motioned to Raif to follow them through the door. “I’ll talk with him alone.”

Raif’s thick lips set stubbornly. He looked as if he’d be nasty in a fight. “If he’s Adric, and if he’s under Karamy’s devilments, then—”

“I have faced Adric, and Karamy too,” said Narayan with a friendly grin at the man. “Get out, Raif; you’re not my bodyguard, or even my nurse!”

The fat man accepted dismissal reluctantly, and Narayan came to my side. There was real friendliness in his grin. “Well,” he said, “Now we will talk. You cannot kill me, any more than I could kill you, so we may as well be truthful with each other. Why did you leave us, Adric? What has Karamy done to you this time?”

The room reeled around me. I put out a hand to steady myself—when the dizziness cleared, Narayan’s arm was around my shoulders and he was holding me up with a strength surprising in his slight frame. He let me settle down on the seat Cynara had left. “You have been roughly handled,” he said in apology, “Just sit still a minute. My men—” he made a deprecating little gesture, “have had orders. And if I know Karamy’s ways, you’ve been heavily drugged for a long time.” His eyes studied me intently. “Better come and have a drink. And—when did you eat last? You look half starved. That’s the way of the sharig—”

I rubbed my forehead. “I can’t remember,” I told him honestly.

“I thought so. Come along.” Narayan went into the next room, assuming that I would follow and that I knew my way around. After the insanely furnished rooms in Rainbow City, I was a little surprised when the next room proved to be a strictly functional and ordinary kitchen, equipped with the usual items. Out of a relatively un-extraordinary icebox he assembled something that looked rather like the food I was accustomed to from the 20th century, and poured some kind of liquid into an oddly shaped glass. He motioned me into a chair and set the things on the table. “Here, eat this. I know the drugs they give you; you’ll have more sense when you’ve eaten. We’ve plenty of time to talk, all night if we choose.” He saw me glance sidewise at the glass, laughed sketchily, and from the same bottle poured himself a drink and sat down opposite me, sipping it slowly. “Go ahead. I won’t poison you till I find out what Karamy’s up to.”

I laughed apologetically and started eating, with a mental shrug. It had been at least forty-eight hours since I had last tasted food, and I did justice to the plateful before me. Narayan sipped his drink—which, when I tasted mine, appeared to be excellent cognac—and watched me; and when I finally pushed the empty plate aside, he put back his glass and said “Now. Who are you, and what happened?”

I felt better and stronger; more like myself than I’d felt since Rhys had catapulted me into this world. But now that I was on the carpet, I felt I must talk fast and convincingly before those searching grey eyes.

“Karamy had me shut in the Tower,” I told him, “I was freed today, and we were on our way to the Dreamers Keep. Then your men came along. I didn’t know if I was being rescued or captured. I still don’t.” I stared with purposeful blankness at Narayan; he stared back and I could feel him debating what to do and say. Obviously, an Adric sane and glib and possibly untruthful was a different thing than an Adric too bewildered and shaken to tell anything but the truth. Finally Narayan said “I’m not sure what I ought to do or say, Adric. The bond between us isn’t as strong as it was. You know that.”

I nodded, perturbed. Adric’s thoughts seemed to be surging back, insidiously, as if Narayan held the key to unlock them. What crazy drama was going to be unfolded in my mind now?

Narayan said, low; “Karamy did it, I think.”

“Yes.” My own voice was as quiet as his own. “Karamy sent me on the Time Ellipse. She knew I’d come back changed—or mad—or not at all. I think—I think she wanted me to betray you again.”

“Adric!” Narayan reached out quickly and grabbed my arm, hard, above the elbow, till I cried out with the pain of that steely grip and twisted away, rubbing numbed flesh. “Adric—” Narayan repeated, unsteadily, “Why do you say—betray me again? Betray me? Adric—it was your hand that freed me! Zandru! Adric—” he begged, “How much have you forgotten?”

Battle in my Brain

The fire in the other room had burned down to an ember. Without a glance my way, Narayan mended the fire; sat down, his legs stretched toward the little blaze, his shin in his hands; waiting. I could not stand still. I walked, restless, around the room, speaking in little jerks and half-sentences.

“You are the Dreamer,” I said, “I—I remember a little. I remember being bound to you. I remember when I—freed you. Not knowing what it might mean, not knowing you could have slain me on the ground of sacrifice.”

“No!” Narayan was as motionless as Gamine’s veils, but his voice was harsh, strident. “No, Adric, never that! We cannot—kill each other, you and I. I could order you killed, I suppose, but I—I would never do that unless there was no other way. Adric—is there any other way for me, for you?”

A bitterness spoke in my voice; neither side trusted Adric, both wanted his allegiance. I tried to trim my words carefully between the two personalities that were battling for mastery in me.

“It was Karamy,” I said, “who took Adric from you, and sent him, half-mad, back to the Crimson Tower. Karamy’s magic stripped him of power, and sent him, gone mad, back to stargazing in Narabedla. But it was not Karamy’s—” the voice that was not quite mine shook, suddenly, with my own weariness and the blank terror I’d been keeping at bay, “It wasn’t Karamy who sent me here, I’m not Adric. You were perfectly right. I’m no more Adric than—than you are. I’m in Adric’s body, yes. He moves me like a puppet! I have his memories, his—some of his thoughts—but he—” my voice cracked suddenly on a note of panic; I knew I sounded like a hysterical kid, but I couldn’t stop my own crackup once it had broken loose. “I’m not Adric, I’m not! I don’t belong here at all! I don’t—”

Narayan jumped up from the bench and I heard his hurrying steps, then his steel hands were hard on my shoulders, swinging me around to face him. “All right,” he said, “Steady. It’s all right.”

I drew a long breath and let it out again. “Thanks,” I said briefly, shamed. “I’ll be all right now.”

Narayan shrugged wearily. “It’s all right. I guessed you weren’t Adric, of course, from the beginning. But I didn’t think Adric, when it came to the test, would really do that to me. I had his promise. I suppose, for him, it was an easy way out. A perfect way of escape.” He sank down on the bench again, dropping his head in his hands. After a little, he looked up, and his voice sounded tired. “This is difficult,” he said. “My men think you are Adric. I’d never be able to convince them you aren’t. Would you mind—pretending? You’ll have to; otherwise—” he paused, and I saw disquiet in his face. He was not a man who would enjoy threatening, but I could understand his situation. They didn’t know me from Adam; I was just an out-sider who messed things up by resembling Adric. Well, I was stuck. I hadn’t liked the Narabedlans enough to give a hang what Narayan meant to do to them. Narayan, by comparison, looked pretty decent. And there was no other way to save my skin. Adric wasn’t too popular, it seemed and in Adric’s body I hadn’t a chance. I laughed. “I’ll try,” I told him. “But what’s this all about?”

Narayan looked up again. “That’s right. You wouldn’t know. You have some of Adric’s memory, I suppose, but not all. You remember who I am?”

“Not entirely—” I told him. I remembered some things. Narayan had been born, some thirty years ago, into a respectable country family who were appalled to discover they had given birth to a mutant Dreamer, and were only too glad to deliver him to the Narabedlans for the enforced stasis. I told Narayan.

“You remember the old Dreamer who served your House?”

I nodded. He had become old, mortal, weak—and had been eliminated. I bowed my head, although I had no personal guilt.

Afterwards, Narayan and I had been bound. “I slept in the Dreamer’s Keep—” Narayan sounded reflective, almost guilty, “I was wakened, and—given sacrifice. I learned to use my power and to give it up to Adric.” A brooding horror was in the grey eyes; I realized that Narayan dwelt in his own personal private hell with the memory of what he had done under the spell of Narabedla. “Adric was—strong.”

Yes, I thought; Adric had called on Narayan’s new power without counting cost. What wonder the memory maddened Narayan? The young Dreamer seemed to win his silent fight for self-control. “Well, you—Adric, I mean—freed me. I found my sister again; Cynara. I was like a child; I had to learn to live, to be alive again. I had been trained to use my power only through the Sacrifice. I had to learn to use it without. It wasn’t easy.”

“Why?” I asked thoughtlessly. Narayan’s eyes froze me. “To use that power,” he said in a tense, controlled voice, “Took human life.”

*

Outside the door I could hear the noises of the camp; the light of their watchfires crept in through the cracks. It was too dark to see Narayan’s face now, but I heard him moving restlessly about the room. “I have harnessed the power somewhat,” he said, “I can use it, myself, a little. Not much. Adric helped me; so did my sister. She had been taken for Sacrifice, but you—Adric—redeemed her. Then—we were able to throw an illusion around Cynara. She is not of Narabedla; but we made it seem as if she had always been there, in Rainbow City. We could do that because Evarin is weak, and because Karamy did not care. It was Rhys who made the Illusion.”

“Rhys!” The old Dreamer, the only one born in Narabedla—

“Yes; Gamine is careless with Rhys and lets him wake too long. Rhys and I have been in contact for a long time.”

I was hearing scraps of conversation from a vast abyss of time and space, when I had been drawn in electric coma through Karamy’s Time Ellipse. They will know, Narayan will know. That had been old Rhys. And Adric; What have I to do with Narayan? Adric had been—still was—playing a fancy double game with Narayan; I started to open my lips to tell the young Dreamer about it, but he was still talking. “Rhys will not act, not directly, against Rainbow City. But he did that much for us, and Gamine and Cynara are friends. We forgot—we all forgot—that Adric’s allegiance belonged to Narabedla first. Until he vanished.” I heard the brooding heaviness in Narayan’s voice. These men had been friends. Narayan went on, “I sent Brennan today, to find out. He didn’t come back.” I lowered my head and miserably told him what had happened to Brennan. Narayan’s face in a flicker of firelight looked drawn and haggard. “He was a—brave man,” Narayan said at last. “But I don’t blame you. After the interchange, I think, there was a time when you went on living Adric’s life. Thinking his thoughts. But now, I think, he will grow weaker in you. I hope. You—who are you, in your own world?”

I shrugged. The words would have meant nothing to Narayan. “My name’s Mike Kenscott.”

“Mi-ek,” Narayan repeated, turning the strange word on his tongue. “The men will call you Adric. I’d better, too. Later—” he shrugged. I didn’t say anything; I was still convinced that I hadn’t seen the last of Adric. But I didn’t want to tell Narayan this. I liked the man.

Without warning, Narayan switched on lights. “It’s near dawn, and you must be worn out. We’ve taught them to stay clear of the forests at night, so we’re safe enough here. They can’t do much till they’ve been to the Dreamers Keep, in any case.” With a sudden boyish friendliness he put out his hand and I took it. “I’m glad you’re not Adric. He might be hard to handle now—if he’s changed so much.” As if the lights had been a signal, fat Raif came without knocking into the room. Narayan crossed his hostile stare at me. “He’s all right, Raif,” the Dreamer said. The fat face broke into a sudden, elephantine smile. “I’d better apologize, Adric. I had orders.”

“Find him a place to sleep,” Narayan suggested, and I followed Raif up a flight of low stairs into an inner room. There was a bed there, clean, but tumbled as if it had had another occupant not long ago. Raif said “Kerrel’s gone with Cynara. You can sleep here.”

I kicked off my boots and crawled between the blankets, suddenly too weary even to answer. I had been two days without sleep, and most of that time I had been under exhausting physical and mental strain. I saw Raif cautiously finger his weapons and sensed that whatever Narayan said, he was reserving judgment. He didn’t take chances, this outsize lieutenant of Narayan’s. Sleepily I said “You can put that up, my friend. I’m not going to move till I’ve had a good, long—”

I didn’t even finish the sentence to myself. Instead I went to sleep.

I had slept for hours. I came abruptly out of confused dreams to hear a shrill voice and to feel small hands pulling me upright. Cynara! “Wake up, Adric—” she wailed, “Karamy and Evarin are riding today—hunting you!”

I sat up, dizzy-brained, far from alert. “Cynara! How—”

“Oh, never mind that—” her voice was impatient, “What can we do?” I didn’t know. I was still stupid with sleep, but I put a reassuring arm around her shoulders. “Don’t be afraid,” I told her, then, releasing her, bent and began to pull on my boots. I heard the swift pound of steps on the stairs, and Narayan shoved open the door, dragging a brown tunic over his head as he came. He stopped short at the door, staring at his sister. “Cynara, what are you doing here?”

She repeated her news, and he sighed. He looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. “Well, never mind,” he told her, “The game was almost over, anyhow. Sooner or later they would have broken through the Illusion; Rhys is too old now for that. You were lucky to get away. We’ll have to storm the Keep tonight—unless they have too-good hunting.” He fumbled with the laces of his shirt. A dead weariness was in his grey eyes; they looked flat, almost glazed. He met my questioning stare and smiled ruefully. “The Dreamers stir,” he told me, “I am not yet free of—their need. So I must be careful.” Cynara shuddered and threw her arms around her brother’s neck, clutching him with a fiercely sheltering clasp. “Narayan, no—oh, no— don’t—”

But he was already deep in thought again. He freed her arms without impatience. “We’ll meet that when the time comes, little sister. So Karamy and Evarin ride hunting. Who else. Idris?” At her nod, his brows contracted. “All of them—but Gamine,” he mused, and turned to me. “Could you conceivably get through to Rhys? I don’t dare—not with that—that stirring.”

I understood, Narayan was still attuned to the terrible need of the sleeping Dreamers in the Keep. But I reminded him that only Gamine could control old Rhys. He looked at me with a strange curious question in his eyes, but made no comment. My own mind was working strong. I was unsure how I had gotten here in the house of the freed Dreamer. Just what had happened last night? I had thought Narayan would never trust me again; but now, when I needed it most, I seemed to be in his complete confidence. Damn Karamy anyhow, meddling with my memory! And she had the audacity to fly Evarin’s devil-birds after me—Adric, lord of the Crimson Tower! She should have a lesson she would not forget—and so should the presumptuous Gamine—and so should this walking zombie who was staring at me stupidly, as if I were his equal! I said with a slow savagery “I think I can manage Gamine!”

Narayan was watching me anxiously. Gods of the Rainbow, what preposterous things had I said and done last night? I said “We’ll take them at the Dreamer’s Keep,” and saw his face clear.

But what you do not know, Narayan, I added to myself with a secret satisfaction, is that you will join them there!

It never occurred to them to question, to wonder if Adric today were the Adric of last night. We went downstairs and snatched a quick breakfast; Cynara tore off her winged flame-color cloak and stuffed it wrathfully into the fireplace. Her coarse grey dress beneath it made her shy prettiness more striking than ever; Cynara was not Karamy, but she was a pretty thing; and Narayan could hardly fail to trust me when Cynara perched on the arm of my chair and ran her dainty fingers over the bruises on my face. “Your roughs nearly killed him!” she pouted at her brother.

“Oh, I’m not hurt,” I smiled at her, making my voice gentle for her ear alone. But I scowled darkly into my plate; pushed the food away and strode out into the camp. Narayan shouted quickly, jumping up, sending his chair crashing to the floor, and he ran after me so that we went down the steps together. “Wait,” he commanded in my ear, softly, “Don’t forget, to them you’re still a traitor!” He took my arm, and we walked through every row of tents together, Narayan’s expression almost belligerent. I saw the faces of the men as they came from their improvised shelter, saw suspicion gradually give way to tolerance and then casual acceptance. Finally Narayan called to Raif. “Stick to him, will you, Raif? He’s all right, but the men don’t know it yet.”

I glanced at Narayan. “Raif,” I said tentatively, “Can you find me twelve men who know the way to Rainbow City and aren’t afraid to come close to it?”

“I can,” Raif said, and went to do it. I had to hide a smile. Before long I would win back the place my foolishness had lost. The idiot whose body I had shared briefly had almost put it beyond recovery, but in a way he had helped, too. His weakness had won Narayan’s confidence. Well, one thing I knew, that futile idiot should not share the coming triumph. Nor should Narayan.

Narayan—fumbling in my pocket, I touched something smooth and hard. Evarin’s mirror. Narayan, looking over my shoulder as I dragged it out, asked curiously “What’s that?”

I pulled it out with a secret smile. “One of Evarin’s toys. Look at it, if you like.”

Narayan took it in his hand for a moment, without, however, untwisting the silk. “Go ahead,” I urged, “Unwrap it.” I might have sounded too eager. Abruptly Narayan handed it back. “Here. I don’t know anything about Evarin.”

I had to conceal my disappointment. With a feigned indifference I thrust it back into the pocket. It did not matter. One way or another, Narayan would lose. For Evarin and Karamy rode a-hunting today—and I knew what their game would be!

Falcons of Evarin

I pulled my cloak closer about me, prickling with excitement, as I knelt between Raif and Kerrel in the tree-platform. Just beneath me, Narayan clung to a lower branch. My ears picked up the ring of distant hooves on frozen ground, and I smiled; I knew every nuance of this hunt, and Evarin might find his deadly birds not so obedient to his call today. Not a scrap of me remembered another world where a dazed and bewildered man had flown at a living bird with his pocketknife.

Coldly I found myself considering possibilities. A snare there must be; but who: Narayan himself? No; he was my only protection until I got clear of this riffraff. Besides, if he ever unsheathed his power, unguarded like this, he could drain me as a spider sucks a trapped fly. No; it would have to be Raif. I had a grudge against the fat man, anyway. I pulled at his sleeve. “Wait here for me,” I said cunningly, and made as if to leave the platform. Raif walked smiling into the trap. “Here, Adric! Narayan gave orders you weren’t to run into any danger!”

Good, good! I didn’t even have to order the man to his death; he volunteered. “Well,” I protested, “We want a scout out, to carry word when they come.” As if we wouldn’t know!

“I’ll go,” Raif said laconically, and leaned past me, touching Narayan’s shoulder. He explained in a whisper—we were all whispering, although there was no reason for it—and Narayan nodded. “Good idea. Don’t show yourself.”

I held back laughter. As if that would matter!

The man swung down into the road. I heard his footsteps ring on the rock; heard them diminish, die in distance. Then—

A clamoring, bestial cry ripped the air; a cry that seemed to ring and echo up out of hell, a cry no human throat could compass—but I knew who had screamed. That settled the fat man. Narayan jerked around, his blonde face whiter. “Raif!” The word was a prayer.

We half-scrambled, half-leaped into the road. Side by side, we ran down the road together.

The screaming of a bird warned me. I looked up—dodged quickly—over my head a huge scarlet falcon, wide-winged, wheeled and darted in at me. Narayan’s yell cut the air and I ducked, flinging a fold of cloak over my head. I ripped a knife from my belt; slashed upward, ducking my head, keeping one arm before my eyes. The bird wavered away, hung in the air, watching me with live green eyes that shifted with my every movement. The falcon’s trappings were green, bright against the scarlet wings.

I knew who had flown this bird.

The falcon wheeled, banking like a plane, and rushed in again. No egg had hatched these birds! I knew who had shaped these slapping pinions! Over one corner of my cloak I saw Narayan pull his pistol-like electro-rod, and screamed warning. “Drop it—quick!” The birds could turn gunfire as easily as could Evarin himself, and if the falcon drew one drop of my blood, then I was lost forever, slave to whoever had flown the bird. I thrust upward with the knife, dodging between the bird’s wings. Men leaped toward us, knives out and ready. The bird screamed wildly, flew upward a little ways, and hung watching us with those curiously intelligent eyes. Another falcon and another winged across the road, and a thin, uncanny screeching echoed in the icy air. I heard the jingle of little bells. Three birds, golden-trapped and green-trapped and harnessed in royal purple, swung above us; three pairs of unwinking jewel-eyes hung motionless in a row. Beyond them the darkening red sun made a line of blackening trees and silhouetted three figures, ahorse, motionless against the background of red sky. Evarin—Idris—and Karamy, intent on the falcon-play, three traitors baiting the one who had escaped their hands.

The falcons poised—swept inward in massed attack. They darted between my knife and Narayan’s. Behind me a bestial scream rang out and I knew one of the falcons, at least, had drawn blood—that one of the men behind us was not—ours! Turning and stumbling, the stricken man ran blindly through the clearing, down the road—halfway to those silhouetted figures he reeled, tripping across the body of a man who lay beneath his feet. Narayan gave a gasping, retching sound, and I whirled in time to see him jerk out his electro-rod, spasmodically, and fire shot after wild shot at the stumbling figure that had been our man. “Fire—” he panted to me, “Don’t let him—he wouldn’t want to get to—them—”

I struck the weapon down. “Idiot!” I said savagely, “Some hunting they must have!” Narayan began protesting, and I wrenched the rod from his hand. The man was far beyond firing range now. At Narayan’s convulsed face I nearly swore aloud. This weak fool would ruin everything! I said hastily “Don’t waste your fire! We can take care of them later—” I waved a quick hand at the three on the ridge. “There is no help for those caught by Evarin’s birds.”

Narayan breathed hard, bracing himself in the road. I beckoned the others close. “Don’t fire on the birds,” I cautioned, tensely; “It only energizes them; they drain the energy from your fire! Use knives; cut their wings—look out!” The falcons, like chain-lightning, traced thin orbits down in a slapping confusion of wings and darting beaks. I backed away from the purple-harnessed birds, flicking up my cloak, beating at the flapping wings. Our men, standing in a closed circle back to back, fought them off with knives and with the ends of their cloaks thrown up, swatting them off; and three times I heard the inhuman scream, three times I heard the lurching footsteps as a man—not human any more—broke from us and ran blindly to the distant ridge. I heard Narayan shouting, whirled swiftly to face him—he ran to me, beating back the green-trapped bird that darted in and out on swift agile wings. The screeing of the falcons, the flapping of cloaks, the panting of men hard-pressed, gave the whole scene a nightmare unrealness in which the only real thing was Narayan, fighting at my side. His gasp of inhuman effort made me whirl, by instinct, flinging up my cloak to protect my back, my knife thrust out to cover his throat. He raked a long gash across the down-turned head of the falcon, was rewarded with an unbirdlike scream of agony and the spasmodic open-and-shut of the razor talons. They raked out—clawing. They furrowed a slash in the Dreamer’s arm. The razor beak darted in, ready to cut. I threw myself forward, unprotected, off balance, ready to strike.

At the last minute talons and beak turned aside—drew back—darted swiftly, straight at me. And my knife was turned aside, guarding Narayan!

But Narayan jerked aside. His knife fell in the road, and his arm shot out— grabbed the bird behind the head, twisting convulsively so the stabbing needle of a beak could not reach him. The darting head lunged, pecking at the cloak that wrapped his forearm; thrown forward, I stumbled against Narayan, carried by my own momentum, and we fell in a tangle of cloaks and knives and thrashing legs and wings, asprawl in the road. The deadly talons raked my face and his, but Narayan hung on grimly, holding the deadly beak away. I thrust with the knife again and again; thin yellow blood spurted in great gushes, splattering us both with burning venom; I snatched the wounded bird from the Dreamer’s weakening hands twisted till I heard the lithe neck snap in my fingers. The bird slumped, whatever had given it life—gone!

And high on the ridge the dwarfed figure of Idris threw up his hands—fell— collapsed across the pommel of his saddle!

Narayan’s breath went out limply in a long sigh as we untangled our twisted bodies. Our eyes met as we mopped away the blood. We grinned spontaneously. I liked this man! Almost I wished I need not send him back to tranced dream—what a waste!

He said, quietly “There is a life between us now.”

I twisted my face into a smile matching his. “That’s only one,” I said. “The rest—” I turned, watching for a moment as the falcons tore at the ring of men. “Come on,” Narayan shouted, and we flung ourselves into the breach. I flung down my knife, snatched a sword from someone and swung it in great arcs which seemed somehow right and natural to me. The men scattered before the sword like scared chickens, and I went mad with hate, sweeping the sword in vicious semicircles against the lashing birds ... the sword cut empty air, and I realized startlingly that both birds lay cut to ribbons at my feet, their blood staining the dead leaves. Narayan’s eyes swam, through a red haze, into my field of vision. They were watching me, trouble and fright in their greyness. I forced myself to sanity; dropped the sword atop the dead birds. I wiped my forehead.

“That’s that,” I said banally.

We took toll of our losses, silently. Narayan, gasping with pain, rubbed a spot of the yellow blood from his face. “That stuff burns!” he grimaced. I laughed tightly; he didn’t have to tell me. We’d both have badly festered burns to deal with tomorrow. But now, there was work—

“Look!” One of the men stared and pointed upward, his face tense with fright. Another great bird of prey hung on poised pinions above us, sapphire eyes intent; but as we watched, it wheeled and swiftly winged toward the Rainbow City. Not, however, before I had caught the azure shimmer of the bells and harness. A thin, sweet tinkling came from the flying bells, like a mocking echo of the spell-singer’s voice.

Gamine!

The Return of Adric

Back in the windowless house, we snatched a hurried meal, cared for our slashed cuts, and tried to plan further. The others had not been idle while we fought the falcons. All day Narayan’s vaunted army had been accumulating, I could hardly say assembling, in that great bowl of land between Narabedla and the Dreamer’s Keep. There were perhaps four thousand men, armed with clumsy powder weapons, with worn swords that looked as if they had been long buried, with pitchforks, scythes, even with rude clubs viciously knobbed. I had been put to it to conceal my contempt for this ragtag and bobtail of an army. And Narayan proposed to storm Rainbow City—with this! I was flabbergasted at the confidence these men had in their young leader. So much the better, I thought, take him from them and they’ll scatter to their rat-holes and crofts again! I felt my lips twisting in a bitter smile. They trusted Adric, too. When I had shown myself to them, their shouts had made the very trees echo. Well—again the ironic smile came unbidden, that was just as well, too. When Narayan was re-prisoned, I could use the power of their lost leader to tear down what he himself had built. The thought was exquisitely funny.

“What are you laughing about,” Narayan asked. We were lounging on the steps of the house, watching the men thronging around the camp. His slumbrous grey eyes held deep sparks of fire, and without waiting for my answer he went on “Think of it! The curse of the Dreamer’s magic lifted—what would it mean to this land, Adric? It means life—hope—for millions of people!”

In a way, Narayan was right. I could remember when I had shared that dream; when it had seemed somehow more worthy than a dream of personal power. Cynara came down the steps, bent and slipped her soft arms around my shoulder, and I drew her down. A volcano of hate so great I must turn my face away burned up in me. This man was my equal—no, I admitted grudgingly, my superior—and I hated him for it. I hated him because I knew that in his dream of power no one must suffer. I hated him because, once, I had been weak enough to share his feelings.

I said abruptly “Your plans are good, Narayan. There’s just one thing wrong with them; they won’t work. Storming Rainbow City won’t get you anywhere. You could kill Karamy’s slaves by the thousands, or the millions, or the billions. But you couldn’t kill Karamy, and you’d only leave her free to enslave others. You’ve got to strike at them when they’re in the Dreamer’s Keep. When the Dreamers wake is the only moment when they are vulnerable.”

“But how can we get to the Dreamer’s Keep, Adric? They go guarded a hundred times over, there.”

“What’s your army for?” I asked him roughly, “To knock down haycocks? Send your men to chase off the guards. I told you I could handle Rhys, if it came to that. He’ll get us through to the Dreamer’s Keep, if need be.”

“What about Gamine?” Cynara asked practically. Gamine was the least of my worries, but I did not tell Cynara that. I listened to their comments and suggestions a little contemptuously. Didn’t they know that when the Dreamers woke, the Narabedlans were vulnerable—to the Dreamers alone? If I were there with Narayan, there was no question about who would win.

Cynara scowled at the rip of talons across my face. “You’re hurt and you never told me!” she accused. “Come this minute and let me take care of it!” I almost laughed. Me—Adric of the Crimson Tower—being ordered around by a little country girl! I snorted, but spoke pleasantly. “I’ll live, I expect. Come and sit here with us.” I pulled her down at my side, but she leaned her head on her brother’s knee, an unquietness in her face. She was a pretty thing, although the cause of all my troubles. When I redeemed her from Karamy’s slaves, for a whim, I had not known she was Narayan’s sister—Zandru’s hells, but I had made a ghastly slip! I had told Narayan there was no help for those touched by the birds, when I myself had redeemed his own sister! Had he noticed? Would he attribute it to Karamy’s meddling with my mind? I smothered an exclamation, and Cynara and Narayan looked up anxiously. “You are hurt, Adric!”

I shook my head. I fancied Narayan looking at me with suspicion, but I controlled myself. I reached out to draw Cynara to me, but she had drawn back, rising lithely to her feet, like a dove poised for flight; only her hands, small darting hands like candle-flames, remained in mine to pull me lightly to my feet. I tried to hold her, but she protested “There is so much to be done—” and I raised the slim hands to my lips before I let her go. The gesture pleased her, I could see; so much that I watched with contempt as she tripped away. Silly, simple girl! It would please her!

In the end it was only Narayan and Cynara who rode with me to Rainbow City. Kerrel had taken the army, in sections, to set an ambush for Karamy’s guards; we rode in the opposite direction, by a twisting side road. Cynara rode beside me, her dark eyes glowing. There was dainty witchery in Cynara, and a pretty trust that made me smile and promise recklessly “We will win.” It pleased me to think that I could comfort Cynara for her brother’s downfall. Once conditioned to Rainbow City, she would forget her silly fancies and be a fair and lovely comrade. If she continued to please me, it would be amusing to see this unformed country girl wield the power that had belonged to Karamy the Golden!

It took us an hour of hard riding to reach the lip of the great cup of land, where we paused, looking down the dark, almost-straight avenue of trees that led to the walls of Rainbow City. I whistled tunelessly between my teeth. “Whatever we do, it will be wrong. We’d be taking quite a chance to ride up to the main gate; at the same time, they’ll be expecting us to sneak in the back way. They’d never expect us to come by the front avenue.”

“The deer walks safest at the hunter’s door,” Narayan quoted laughing. “But won’t they be expecting us to use that kind of logic?”

Cynara giggled, subsided at my frown. “At that rate,” I said, “We could go on all night.”

Narayan reached overhead, snatching down a crackling sheaf of frost-berries; selected one narrow pod. He held it between finger and thumb. “Chance. Two seeds, we go around. Three, we ride straight up the main gate. Agreed?” I nodded, and he crushed the dry husk. One, two—three seeds rolled into my outstretched palm. “Fate,” Narayan said with a shrug. “Ready, then?”

I jounced the seeds in my palm. “One for Evarin, and one for Idris, and one for Karamy,” I said contemptuously, and flung the little black balls into the road. “We’ll scatter them like that!”

We were lucky; the drive was deserted. If there were guards out for us at all, they had been posted somewhere on the secret paths. Straight toward the towers we rode, under the westering red sun, and just before dusk we checked our horses and tethered them within a mile of the Rainbow City, going forward cautiously on foot.

I objected to this arrangement. “I’ll get in alone,” I told them. “If anything happens to me, we mustn’t lose you as well!”

“I’ll stay,” said Narayan briefly. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll be here to help.” Silently I damned the man’s loyalty, but there was nothing I could say without spoiling the illusion I had worked so hard to create. I took his hand for a minute. “Thank you.” His voice was equally abrupt. “Good luck, Adric.” Cynara glanced at me briefly and away again. I walked away from them without looking back.

It was easy enough to find my way into the labyrinthine towers. I was not Lord of the Crimson Tower without knowing its secrets. I climbed the stairs swiftly, ransacked the place. To no avail. When she took my memories, Karamy had also been careful to take everything which could conceivably give me any power over any of the Dreamers, even old Rhys. I went up more stairs till I stood at the very pinnacle of the tower, in Adric’s star-room into which I had been catapulted—was it less than three days ago? I stood at the high window, vaguely thinking of an older Adric, an Adric who had watched the stars here, and not alone. I traced back through the years, diving down deep into the seas of sudden memory, and brought up the knowledge of—

“Mike Kenscott!” said a voice behind me, and I whirled to look into the face of a man I had never seen before.

He had the primitive look of a man out of some forgotten past. I had seen such men as I swam in the light of the Time Ellipse. He was tall and clean-shaven; he looked athletic; his eyes were a ridiculous color, dark brown. He had hair. He looked angry, if he could be said to have an expression.

But he spoke, clearly and with a deliberate calm. “Well, Mike Kenscott,” he said, in a language I had never heard, but found myself understanding perfectly, “You have taken my place very nicely. I suppose I should thank you. You’ve given me freedom, and Narayan’s trust—the rest I can do for myself!” He laughed. “In fact, you’re so much me that I’m not much of myself. But I can force you back into your own body—”

The man must be mad! At any rate, he’d insulted the Lord Adric, in his own Tower, and by Zandru’s eyelashes, he’d pay for it! I flung myself at him with a yell of rage. My fingers dug into his throat—

And I cried out in the stifling clutch of lean fingers grabbing at me, biting at my neck, my shoulders—an agonizing wrench shuddered over my body—

I faced—

Adric!

When the Dreamers Wake

Of course I understood, even while I fought, dizzy and reeling, to loose the deathgrip I had put on my own body. I was—back, I was Mike Kenscott again— Adric loosed his hands of his own will, and stepped away, breathing hard. “Thank you,” he said in the raw voice that had been mine for so long, “I myself could hardly have done better.” With a swift movement he snatched something from a little recess in the wall—pointed—and fired point-blank. A lance of grey mist stabbed out at me—

To my amazement, only a pleasant heat warmed me. I had enough split-second reasoning reflex left to fall in a slumped huddle to the ground. I knew that was what he expected. Adric fumbled in his pockets, took out the little mirror I had taken from Evarin, still wrapped in its protective silk. I watched, breathless, between narrowed eyelids. If he would only open it—but instead he gave a shudder of disgust and flung it straight at me. With a braced, agonizing effort I made myself lie perfectly still, without flinching to avoid the blow. The mirror struck my forehead. I felt blood break to the surface and trickle wetly down my face. I heard Adric moving; heard receding steps and the risp of a closing door. He was gone.

I moved. To this day I am not sure how I escaped death from Adric’s weapon; but I think it was because I was in my own body. After I had touched Adric the first time, I was immune to Earth electricity. In this world, I think, I was immune to their force. I wiped the blood from my temple. Good Lord, there was Narayan—waiting with Cynara—I forgot that I had plotted against Narayan, remembering only that I had liked the man. I couldn’t let Adric get to them—

I grabbed the mirror, crammed it into a pocket. Against the nightmare haste that drove me I ran to the closet, quickly, from the racks of weapons, chose a short ugly knife. I didn’t need swordsman’s training to use that. Thank God, I knew my way around, I could remember everything I’d done when I was Adric—but wait! I could also “remember” what he had done when he was me! That meant Adric could “remember” everything I had done and planned with Narayan! This crazy business of Identity! Even now, could I be sure which of us was who?

I dashed out of the room, ran down the endless stairs three at a time. At the entrance to Gamine’s blue tower, a dangerous whirring of wings beat around me; I staggered, almost fell backward. One of the murderous falcons—the one in blue— darted, hanging poised in the stair-well above me. I backed against the wall, hoping the bird would not attack. Gamine had not flown falcon with the others.

The strong wings flapped in the closed space; I saw the dart of the vicious little beak. Blindly I struck upward with the knife, shielding my eyes with the other hand, and was rewarded with a splatter of thin burning blood and a scream of unbirdlike agony. I ducked beneath the thrashing wings, and ran on up the stairs; behind me the dying falcon flapped, threshed and rolled down the stairs, a tangle of wings, landing far below with a flailing thump.

I was not quite sure what I meant to do. As I climbed, I thought swiftly. Gamine was no friend to Adric, I knew that. Adric had known much of Gamine and Rhys, and I drew on that knowledge, but even Adric had not known much of the spell-singer cloaked in that blurred halo of invisibility. Had he ever seen Gamine?

What was Adric doing now? I had served him well; won him Narayan’s trust, then turned him loose again in his own body, to destroy, betray them! I hated Adric as I hope I may never hate again.

And yet, I could not hate him wholly. To know all is to forgive much, and I had lived for three days and nights in Adric’s body and brain; knowing his strengths and his weaknesses, his dreams and torments, I could not condemn him utterly. A man may be forgiven much that he does for a woman’s bewitchments, and few men could be blamed for allowing Karamy to enslave them. Adric had done good, once, too; he had freed the Dreamer, he had loved—but he had trapped me here, and for that, my hate would make him pay—thoroughly!

A shadow flitted across my sight; the robed Gamine barred my way, an air of cold amusement around the poise of the hood and the blurred invisible head. The spell-singer laughed, mocking. “How like you this body, Adric? You are beaten now, for sure! The stranger works with Narayan—in your body, Adric!”

“I’m not Adric,” I shouted. “Adric’s in his own body again! He’s going after Narayan—”

“You expect me to believe that?” Contempt stung me in Gamine’s clear, sexless voice.

“Let me by to Rhys,” I begged. “He’ll know I’m telling the truth—damn it, let me by!” Infuriated by the mocking laughter, I thrust my arm to move Gamine forcibly from my path. Whatever Gamine was—man, woman, imp or boy—it was not human. Steel wires writhed between my hands. I struggled impotently in that bone-breaking grip; then with a swift impulse thrust my hand quickly at the blurred invisibility where Gamine’s face should have been.

Gamine screamed—a thin cry of horror. Suddenly I knew where I had been those two weeks I lay in the hospital—when Adric lay, in my body, gone mad, in the hospital in my place. An instinct I had grown to trust warned me to pull away sharply from Gamine’s relaxed grip. I shouldered by and ran like hell. Halfway up the stairs I heard the spell-singer’s feet running behind me, and I quickened my stride and sprinted for the heavy door that barred my way. I could feel Rhys’ presence behind the door. I threw my weight against the door, twisting the handle frantically.

The door was locked.

Behind me, I heard the padding tread of Gamine. Hopelessly, I put my back to the door, pulling my knife out again, and defied the creature.

Behind me the door suddenly opened and I was flung backward, sprawling, into the room within. “Well, Mike,” the old tired voice of Rhys said, “Gamine is a fool, but you are no better. Yes, I knew you were coming, I knew Adric is going, I know where Narayan is and I know what they plan to do. There is only one person who can stop all this, Mike Kenscott. You.”

Gaping stupidly, I picked myself up from the floor. The old Dreamer, his wrinkled face serene under the peaked hood, watched me placidly. “What—how—” I stammered.

“Gamine is a prescient. And I am not a complete fool.” Rhys smiled wearily. The dreamy look of the very old or the very young was on his face. “I cannot help you; but I will make Gamine help.”

The spell-singer came into the room, and I could almost see resentment through that strange halo of nothingness. “Gamine,” Rhys said, “it is time. You, and Narayan, must go with him to the Dreamer’s Keep.”

“No—” Gamine whispered in protest, “Narayan—cannot go! His—his— talisman was destroyed! Only outside the tower—he cannot go in!”

“There is still—mine. Give it to him.” At Gamine’s cry of dismay, Rhys’ voice was suddenly a whip-lash. “Give it to him, Gamine! I still have power to—compel that! What does it matter what happens to me? I am old; it is Narayan’s turn; your turn.” “I’ll—keep it for Narayan—” Gamine faltered.

“No!” Rhys spoke sharply. “While you keep it—and I am bound to you—there is still the bondage. Give it to him!”

Gamine sobbed harshly. From the silken veils she drew forth a small jewelled thing; wrapped in insulating silk like Evarin’s mirror. She untwisted the silk. It was a tiny sword; not a dagger, but a perfectly modelled sword, a Toy. Evarin’s too; but different. I recalled that Evarin had called himself Toy-Maker. Gamine clung to it, the robed shoulders bent.

“Mike must take it,” Rhys’ voice was gentler. “If you keep it, I am still bound to you. If Adric had it, it would bind Narayan again. If Mike keeps it—near Narayan— Narayan is free. Free to go where he will, even in the Dreamer’s Keep. Give it to him, Gamine.” Rhys sat down, wearily, as if the effort of speech had tired him past bearing. I stood and listened with a rebellious patience; I was eager to be gone. But my eyes were on the little jewelled Toy in Gamine’s hands. It winked blue. It shimmered. It pulsed with a curious heartbeat, hypnotic. Rhys watched, too, his tired face intent and almost eager. “Gamine; if Adric had seen you, had remembered—”

“I want him to remember!” Gamine’s low wail keened weirdly in the silent room. Rhys sighed.

“I am Narabedlan,” he said at last, “I could not destroy my own people. Gamine is not bound—nor you, Mike Kenscott. I suppose I am a traitor; but when I was born Narabedla was a fair city—without so many crimes on its head. Go and warn Narayan, Mike.”

Gamine hovered near me, intent, jealous, the shrouded eyes fixed on Rhys. The old man spoke on in a fading voice. “My poor city—now, Gamine. Now. Give it to him and let me rest. Stand away from me, Mike; well away; I do not want the bondage again from you.”

I did not understand and stood stupidly still. Gamine gave me an angry push. “Over there, you fool!” I reeled, recovered my balance, stood about six feet from the couch where Rhys half-sat, half-lay. The old man laid one wrinkled hand on the toy sword Gamine held. He took his hand away.

“Now,” he said quietly.

Gamine thrust the sword into my hand, and I felt a sudden stinging shock, like electric current, jolt my whole body. I saw Gamine’s robed body shiver with the same jolt. The Toy in my hand was suddenly heavy; heavy as if it were made of lead, and the tiny winking in the hilt was darkened. The peaked hood of Rhys drooped until it covered the face.

Gamine caught my arm roughly and the steel of those narrow fingers bit to the bone as they hauled me almost bodily from the room. I heard the echo of a sob in the spell-singer’s whispering croon.

Rhys—Farewell!

The next thing I knew we were racing side by side down flight after flight of stairs. Together we fled through the subterranean passages of Rainbow City. Outside, in the pillared court, a man ran toward us. His brown tunic was ripped and torn; his blond hair was rumpled. A smudge of blood reddened his forehead. I gasped “Narayan!”

The man whirled—saw us—pulled his weapon from his belt. There was no time for explanations. I threw myself at his knees in a flying tackle no football coach would approve, but it did the trick. Narayan went down under me, kicking. Gamine was not one to stand aside in a fight; the robed figure rocketed forward, flung itself on the prone Narayan, holding him motionless with that steely strength. I wrenched the electrorod from Narayan’s relaxed fingers. “Listen—” I urged, “I’m not one of Karamy’s men—Gamine, let him up!”

“He’s got Cynara—” the Dreamer muttered dizzily, “Cynara—who in Zandru’s hells are you?” He picked himself up, gazing at me with a stunned, blank look. “My name’s Kenscott,” I said briefly. Suddenly, feeling it was the best way to establish my good-faith, I pulled out the Toy Gamine had put in my hand. “I’ve seen Rhys. He sent—this.”

Narayan stared at the thing in my hand, a double grief in his young face. “Rhys—” he muttered, “I felt he was—gone!” With bent head, he reached out to take the small thing from me.

In his hand it came alive. The small jewelled Toy seemed suddenly brilliant, flaring, dazzling with a wild burst of faceted light, blue, golden, crimson, flame-color. Gamine’s low sweet voice breathed “In the Dreamer’s hands!”

“In my hands,” Narayan murmured in a choked, almost a tranced ecstasy. I broke in on their raptures rudely. “Here, Narayan! Is it Adric who’s got Cynara?”

He gulped; swallowed hard; thrust the Toy into a pocket and came back to himself, but that light was still in his eyes. He spoke with a hard restraint. “Yes. Adric surprised me—knocked me out. When I came to, they were gone.” He blinked once or twice; rubbed his eyes; then, resolutely fumbled for the little Toy and extended it to me. “Here. Keep this till we get to the Dreamer’s Keep.”

I took it without comment. Gamine slipped away; came back, leading horses. “I couldn’t find a single guard,” the cold voice murmured, “I wonder where they are?” “Adric knows,” said Narayan, tight-lipped.

We mounted.

The wind was rising. Above us the moons swung slowly in an indigo sky. Sparks flew from our hooves against the frosty stones. We were racing against time, and a nightmare panic had me while I gripped the saddle of my racing horse. It took all my concentration to stick on the animal’s back, but I was acquiring balance and a feel for riding. The ill wind was blowing some good, I thought inanely. Narayan’s blond hair was frosty pale in the moonlight, and the eerie Gamine was a nightmare ghost, a phantom from nowhere. Far away we heard the spatter of gunfire, the screams of dying men, the ring of swords and spears. Thinly Gamine chanted in the night. Narayan’s face looked haunted. “There are the guards—attacking—” he jerked out over the hoof-noises.

The scream of falcons rang swiftly above Gamine’s chant. The too-familiar beat of wings slapped around my head, and I flung up my arm to knock away one serpentine neck. My terrified horse plunged and I rocked in the saddle nearly falling. Another bird swooped down on Narayan—another—then there were swarms of them, gold and purple and green, crimson, blue, flame-color. The air was thick with their wings. Gamine screamed; I saw Narayan beat the air with his cloak. The veiled spell-singer, crouched in the saddle, was lashing at them with the whip from her saddle. The lash kept the falcons at bay, but the razor talons caught at the blue shroudings. Narayan, whip in one hand, sword in the other, beat round him in great arcs, and I heard one bird’s death-cry sending ringing echoes to the sky. I flung round me with my knife—

“The mirror—” screamed Gamine, “Evarin’s mirror! Quick, they’re coming by millions!”

They were coming in scores—hundreds, whirling and screeing. These were not the soul-falcons, belled and elaborately endowed with the intelligence and cunning of their launcher. These were—machines. Alive, yes, but not a life we knew. Only the nightmare freak of a science gone mad could produce—or control—these hateful things that were filling the clean air, groping for us with needle beaks and talons and wild wings. Only Evarin—

I fumbled blindly for the mirror, clumsily stripping the silks. A needle-talon raked at my wrist, and by sheerest instinct I struck upward, turning the face of the mirror toward the bird.

The bird reeled in mid-air—flapped—fell. A tingling shock rattled through my arm. I dropped the mirror—leaped to catch it. The thing was a perfect conductor. It—drained energy. I knew now why Evarin had been so anxious to have me—or Adric—look into its depths. It could have touched the energy waves of my brain through my eyes. The birds were brainless; all energy. I grabbed the mirror and held it upright; I caught a half-glimpse, from the tail of my eye, of the weird lightnings coiled inside it, but even that glimpse coiled my stomach in nervous knots. Shielding my face, I held it upward. The birds flew toward it like a moth to the candle. Shock after shock flowed along my arm. Three more of the horrible falcons fell limp, lifeless—drained.

A strange exhilaration began to buoy me up. The force from the birds was not electricity but a kindred force, which my nerves drank greedily. I thrust the mirror out; was rewarded again by the surge of power, and again the birds, this time by dozens, flapped and fell.

Then, as if whatever had loosed the army of falcons had realized their uselessness, the whole remaining force of the birds wheeled and fled, winging swiftly over the land to the distant donjon that rose high and far into the black midnight.

Recalled—to the Dreamer’s Keep!

The Last Sacrifice

The flow of strength had renewed me; I felt that I could face whatever came. I thrust Evarin’s mirror into my pocket; flung a word to Narayan and we were riding again, Gamine racing behind us. The blue shroudings had been torn to ribbons by the snappings of falcon-claws; I could see the pallid gleam of naked flesh through the torn veils. The noise of battle behind us grew more distinct; I could make out the explosions and the distant flashes of colored flame. I shuddered; even now that frightful army of falcons might be winging to join Adric and Evarin. The rebels could kill some of them, but for every falcon dead there would be twenty more slaves for Narabedla! What could Narayan’s men with their scythes and pitchforks and rude rusty guns do against the incredible science of a Toymaker? Narayan’s strained face was ghastly in the moonlight; I needed no telepathy to read his thoughts. Slaughter for his men—what for his sister? Our horses seemed to lag, to drag through a mire of motionless, yet they were at the full gallop of their endurance. The sound of fighting grew closer. Everything in me cried out that I was an utter fool, riding full tilt into a battle in which I had no stake. Yet something else told me, coldly and with a grim truth, that all I possessed was what I might win today, for this was the only world I would ever know; that I would never see my own world again.

Never! And Adric should rot in a hell of his own choosing for that!

The sounds of fighting seemed very close. Narayan pulled up his horse so quickly that it nearly sent Gamine plunging into his back. He said in a low, concentrated voice “Adric isn’t at the battle! This way—quick!” He whirled the horse and dashed down a side road at right angles to the way we had been riding. If we had raced before, now our horses seemed to fly. The battle raged behind us; I heard dim screams, the neighing of wounded horses, the muffled sound of earth flying upward, exploded in fire. But it had a dreamy unreal quality, like noises through a nightmare. We had left the forest and were riding across a dark and hummocky plain. Moss padded our hoof-noises; now and then some small furry thing skittered across the track we were following and twice my horse shied at swooping birds and my heart stopped until I saw they were not the falcons of Evarin.

Stark and black against a treeless horizon I could see the Dreamer’s Keep, between the small crescents of the two lesser moons. The largest one rode a golden orbit over my head. I rode hunched in the saddle, my eyes on the vast cairn only a few miles away.

Suddenly a vast arch of lightning spanned the sky above the Dreamer’s Keep. Blue lightning. I heard Narayan groan like a man in his death-agony. Twisting in my saddle, I saw brooding horror on his face—mingled with pain—and a terrified satisfaction. “The sacrifice—I still—feel it,” he breathed in labored gasps, “I still— take from it—Mike! Mike—” His voice held unbearable torture, and the veins in the fair face stood out, black and congested with effort. “If I start to work for—them— promise—promise to shoot me—”

“Oh God—” I gasped.

“Mike, promise! Gamine!”

Gamine spurred the horse to his side; I heard the low voice, sweet, almost crooning. Again the vast arch of blueness spanned the sky. Narayan dug spurs savagely into the side of his horse and raced ahead of us. On the plain, limned starkly against the sky, a horseman appeared. He rode low in the saddle, his horse carrying a double burden, but racing fleetly—to the Keep of the Dreamers. I cursed—I knew that lean crouched figure, knew it as well as my own! Adric rode to the sacrifice—and before him, limp across his saddle, he bore Cynara!

The rest of that nightmare ride is a blank in my mind. The next thing I remember clearly is reining up beneath the lee of the gaunt pile of rocks-on-rocks that was the Dreamer’s Keep. There was no sign of Adric or Cynara, no sign of any living person, nothing but the incandescent blue lightning that rayed out now every four seconds or so; Narayan’s face was a white death-mask, and Gamine’s breathing came in short sobbing pants. I alone was free from the effect. My body throbbed and tingled with the weird energy set free in the night. We flung ourselves from our horses. Gamine tugged futilely at the torn veilings to conceal her face, and for the first time the blurred invisibility wavered and I caught a glimpse of one blue eye, blue as the sky lightnings that rose and flared and died.

The lee of the tower dwarfed us with its massive bulk. Gamine clutched my arm, the cruel fingers digging bruisingly into my flesh. “Listen!”

I strained my ears. All I could hear was a low, not unpleasant humming, like the singing drone of great bees or high-tension wires; but the sound struck both aliens with horror. Narayan opened his lips—

I dug frantically in my other pocket; brought out the Toy Rhys had given me. At sight of it Narayan’s haggard face relaxed a little. He caught it from me with quick hands. “Free of Adric—” he breathed with that swift erasure of tension I had seen before. He drew a long, moaning sigh. He closed his eyes for a moment.

Somewhere above us a scream rang out; a cry bestial in its mad appeal. It broke the static immobility that held us, and Narayan, sliding the Toy inside his shirt, turned and began to run around the Tower, Gamine and I panting at his heels.

We came around the corner beneath an arching outcrop of stonework. No one needed to give orders; as one, we scrambled up on the ledge, crowding close together.

I gripped my hand on the knife in my belt. It had a comforting feel. I needed that.

A framed archway let us look down into the inside of the Keep. Below us a voice cried out despairingly—unbelievingly. “Adric—” we heard Cynara cry out, “Adric, no—oh, no—” Under our combined weight the glass shattered; we hurled inward. We found ourselves standing on a great shelf, about ten feet above the interior floor of the Keep, looking down at a scene framed in stark horror. Golden Karamy, dwarfed Idris, Evarin—stood in a close circle about a ring of coffins which gleamed crystal—glowed with scintillant radiance. In the hand of each of them was a tiny, jewelled, faceted Toy, and in the coffins—

Gamine screamed.

“The Dreamers—”

Not till then did we see Adric and what he was doing. In the center of the ring of coffins a dais rose upright, horribly altar-like, and a line of the mindless slaves, nude, vacant-eyed, defiled before the altar. As each slave stepped forward there was a shuddering moan from the others, the tiny swords rose and fell and in a brilliant flame of blue light, the slave—was not! And Adric—Cynara struggling between his hands—was thrusting her forward, into the space between the coffins, toward the nexus of the blue light—toward the Sacrifice-stone of the Dreamers!

The sight put us beyond caution. We threw ourselves from the ledge—and went down into a writhing, sprawling mass of living flesh. A barked command from Idris, and the slaves swarmed on us, drowning us in smothering bodies. I kicked and sprawled and thrashed and scratched and bit my way to the top of the heap and somehow for a second, I rolled free. That instant was enough. I was on my feet, the knife in my hand. Dragging bodies clung at my heels; I kicked out savagely, felt my boot strike naked flesh, felt and heard the pulpy sound of a skull crushing under the impact of my heel. The sound rocked my stomach, but I was not in a position to be fastidious. My eyes were swimming in trickling blood. Gamine clawed and thrust free and together we elbowed out of the press.

Evarin sprang at me. I thrust blindly with the knife in my hand, ripped into his shoulder, missing the throat by inches. I caught the Toy from his hand as it fell free. A moment of the clinging, tearing melee—then we three—Gamine and Narayan and I were standing back to back in the centre of the ring of coffins. There was a long howl of pain and terror from Evarin and the four Narabedlans flung themselves backward in a panic terror. For within the coffins the Dreamers were waking!

But Adric was no coward. He threw himself quickly forward—caught at Cynara again, and with all the force in his lean arms he flung her—straight toward the nexus of blue light! Narayan and Gamine stood frozen, bound by the Toys in their hands against the light, but I broke free—I passed straight across the cone of blue lightning—

Unharmed! The blasting energy tingled pleasantly in my body as I caught Cynara in mid-air and reeled away from the force that would have meant annihilation for her. Narayan broke away from the paralysis momentarily and caught Cynara’s staggering body from my arms. Then I felt the impact as Adric’s tall, heavy body crashed against me, felt the shock as my fist smashed against his jaw and heard him grunt as we locked into a clinch that carried us nearer—and nearer to that center of blue energy. A moment we swayed there, at the very edge of the lightning— then Evarin’s tensed cat-body hit in the centre of my back—

Again the heat thrust needles through me. Adric was flung clear, but there was an arch of blue that spanned the vault, a wild scream like the death-cry of a panther, and the Toy-maker was—

Gone!

Within the coffins the blue lights wakened, as if the last flare of energy had freed them. Quickly Idris and Karamy ran forward, quickly Adric leaped to join them, thrusting the Talisman Toys against the very lids of the coffins—but too late. The Toys in the hands of Narayan and Gamine spat glaring blue fire, and step by step the Narabedlans retreated; farther, farther, farther— The coffins were suddenly empty. As if by magic, three old men and a woman of surpassing beauty materialized about Narayan and Gamine. In their faces I could distinguish a curious likeness to Narayan and to old Rhys—and Narayan, within the circle of the Dreamers, reached out and flung the tattered veils from Gamine. A triumphant chant rushed sweetly from the lips of the spell-singer as the veils came away and in the center of the mutants stood Gamine the Dreamer, dwarfing them all by a pure majesty; the majesty of a Dreamer who had never slept! A woman she was, slender and fair and very beautiful and as like to Narayan as a twin sister, and I thought of Isis and the young Osiris as the blue eyes blazed out and the lovely body arched upward in tall freedom from the shrouding veils. Blue lightning swirled and faded and the Dreamer’s tower was bathed in trembling iridescent rainbows. Karamy and Idris retreated step by step, slinking back into the shadows. Only Adric stood his ground.

The Rainbows died. The air was void and empty of energy. The Dreamers stood looking on the crouching Karamy with her hidden face, on the bent, gnarled dwarf, on Cynara, kneeling white and radiant, on Adric, who stood with his lips parted, staring at Gamine like a man released from a spell. It was Gamine who spoke, her eyes resting on Karamy.

“She has done much evil.” The others clamored, but Gamine shook her head, long pale hair lifting electrically around her face. “No,” she disclaimed softly. “Why should they die? They are only an old dwarf—a silly fool who could not make up his own mind—” her eyes dwelt disquietingly on Adric. “And Karamy. They have no power, now we are freed. Pity them—now we are freed.”

Adric, slowly, drew himself upright. His slackly-parted lips set firmly and he looked at Narayan with a dispassionate, stubborn shrug. “Kill me, if you like.”

“No, Gamine.” Narayan stepped toward the man in crimson, “Adric,” he said in a strange, half-choked excitement, “I want to see what you saw before—to see what sent you away—to see the thing that drove you mad. Gamine’s veils—Gamine, let him see! Show him, Gamine! Show him what he saw then!”

Gamine came forward slowly to where Karamy knelt. “Stand up!” Slowly Karamy rose to her feet. There was no hope in her eyes; no mercy in Gamine’s. The two pairs of eyes, cat-yellow and blue, fought for a moment; it was Karamy’s that fell. The Dreamer woman smiled faintly. “My brothers and my sisters,” she said at last, “Karamy is beautiful, is she not?”

I suppose no woman on earth has ever been or ever will be as beautiful as Karamy the Golden. She stood proudly, turning to Adric, and I saw longing and love break forth in the man’s eyes. He gazed and gazed, and Karamy laughed and held out her arms, and Adric, bemused, went toward her—

“Hold him,” commanded Narayan tersely.

One of the Dreamers made a curious sign with his left hand and Adric was arrested; stood gripped in a vise of invisible force.

“See?” Gamine said in a ringing voice, “But now see Karamy—shorn of the Illusion her Dreamer threw! See the form of Karamy that she made me wear! This!” She reached out and touched Karamy with the little Talisman she held.

There was a gasp of horror from many throats. Karamy—Karamy the Golden—there are no words for the change that took place before our eyes. I was sick and retching with horror before the metamorphosis was half complete, and turned away my eyes; Cynara was sobbing softly into her skirt; but Adric, frozen, could not look away.

Gamine’s laugh—low and sweet and doubly deadly for its sweetness—reached my ears. “Shall I lend you my veils—sister?” She murmured, mocking, and again the horrible laugh. “NO? Go forth!” Her voice was a lashing whip, and with a broken wail, the thing that had been Karamy threw up an arm across the staring sockets and fled away into the night. And we never saw it again.

So that was the end of Karamy the Golden—the end—

A little later I found that Adric and I were staring stupidly at one another, puzzled, but without animosity. Cynara came and slipped an arm round Adric, and I turned away, embarrassed, for the man was sobbing like a child. I was amazed and sick with the enormity of all that I had seen and done. I stood and shivered and shook with deadly chill. I suppose it was reaction.

“Steady!” Narayan’s steely hand on my shoulder kept me once again from making an ass of myself. “You’ve done us a big favor,” he said after a few minutes. “I wish I had some adequate way of thanking you—not for myself—for millions of people. Perhaps one day we’ll find a way of sending you back to your own world, but—” his shoulders moved negatively, “I can’t say—”

Adric’s lean non-human face peered over Narayan’s shoulder. He looked subdued, and spoke with a curious humility. He sounded sane. “There will be a way, some day. It will take time to find it, now, but—there will be.”

Spontaneously we grinned at each other. I could not hate this man. I knew him too well. I knew, suddenly, that we would be friends. Which, indeed, is what happened.

Narayan looked from one to the other of us, troubled; then Gamine’s intent face was at his elbow.

“I’ll see to these men,” she said quietly. “Narayan, they need you, and it’s your responsibility. They have to be told why they were wakened, and how; there are slaves to be freed, armies—”

Narayan glanced guiltily over his shoulder at the other Dreamers who stood huddled together in a bewildered little knot. “That’s so,” he acknowledged gravely, and went to his people. I watched him, feeling as if my one friend here had deserted me; but it had to be that way. Narayan was not our kind. He was the sort of man who could remodel a world; but the look he sent us over his shoulder told Adric and I that we should, if we liked, have a share in that work.

“Now Mike Kenscott,” said Gamine, “I want to talk to you.”

We left Adric and Cynara in that place, and I cast a wistful glance back at them. Cynara was lovely, and very human, and I suppose I had hoped that in some way she would compensate for my enforced stay in this world. But there was Adric—

Gamine and I stood on the steps of the Dreamer’s Keep, and her voice, soft and wistful, mourned in the grey dawn. “No one ever knew I had the Dreamer powers— except old Rhys. Rhys and I were bound together—he knew, and kept me close to him, hid me and helped me. One day Adric found out. It—changed Adric. He—we freed Narayan together. Then Karamy made me what I was—what you saw. It hurt Adric—hurt something in him. I could have cured him, in time, but Karamy had him bewitched. She stripped him of power, of memory. I do not know, but perhaps some day, Adric may remember that I was—I was—”

“Gamine! Gamine!” Adric’s voice cried from within, and the next moment he rushed forth—caught the Dreamer woman in his arms, and his mouth met hers and she stood swaying in his arms, laughing and crying together. Cynara, following slowly, smiled with gentle satisfaction. I said, stunned, “What—”

Over Adric’s shoulder Gamine’s blue eyes met mine in liquid satisfaction and she finished her interrupted sentence. “I was Adric’s wife,” she said, gently. Cynara’s voice was tenderly humorous as we left them together in the glory of the rising sun. “Poor Gamine,” she said, “and poor Adric, too. I was sorry for them both. But I wish these men would make up their minds!”

I had an idea.

“Adric’s made up his mind,” I said, turning my head a little toward the couple who stood, clasped, as if they could never let go. “I suppose—” I came a little closer to Cynara, who stood looking up at me with wide, innocent eyes and lips ingenuously parted, “I suppose that gives me the right to make up my mind. Doesn’t it?” She smiled. “Does it?” But her bright eyes had given me my answer, and I never had to make up my mind again.

Death Between the Stars

They asked me about it, of course, before I boarded the starship. All through the Western sector of the Galaxy, few rules are stricter than the one dividing human from nonhuman, and the little Captain of the Vesta—he was Terran, too, and proud in the black leather of the Empire’s merchant—man forces—hemmed and hawed about it, as much as was consistent with a spaceman’s dignity.

“You see, Miss Vargas,” he explained, not once but as often as I would listen to him, “this is not, strictly speaking, a passenger ship at all. Our charter is only to carry cargo. But, under the terms of our franchise, we are required to transport an occasional passenger, from the more isolated planets where there is no regular passenger service. Our rules simply don’t permit us to discriminate, and the Theradin reserved a place on this ship for our last voyage.”

He paused, and re—emphasized, “We have only the one passenger cabin, you see. We’re a cargo ship and we are not allowed to make any discrimination between our passengers.” He looked angry about it. Unfortunately, I’d run up against that attitude before. Some Terrans won’t travel on the same ship with nonhumans even when they’re isolated in separate ends of the ship.

I understood his predicament, better than he thought. The Theradin seldom travel in space. No one could have foreseen that Haalvordhen, the Theradin from Samarra, who had lived on the forsaken planet of Deneb for eighteen of its cycles, would have chosen this particular flight to go back to its own world.

At the same time, I had no choice. I had to get back to an Empire planet—any planet—where I could take a starship for Terra. With war about to explode in the Procyon sector, I had to get home before communications were knocked out altogether. Otherwise—well, a Galactic war can last up to eight hundred years. By the time regular transport service was reestablished, I wouldn’t be worrying about getting home.

The Vesta could take me well out of the dangerous sector, and all the way to Samarra—Sirius Seven—which was, figuratively speaking, just across the street from the Solar System and Terra. Still, it was a questionable solution. The rules about segregation are strict, the anti—discriminatory laws are stricter, and the Theradin had made a prior reservation. The captain of the Vesta couldn’t have refused him transportation, even if fifty human, Terran women had been left stranded on Deneb IV. And sharing a cabin with the Theradin was ethically, morally and socially out of the question. Haalvordhen was a non—human telepath; and no human in his right senses will get any closer than necessary even to a human telepath. As for a nonhuman one -

And yet, what other way was there?

The captain said tentatively, “We might be able to squeeze you into the crewmen’s quarters—” he paused uneasily, and glanced up at me.

I bit my lip, frowning. That was worse yet. “I understand,”

I said slowly, “that this

Theradin—Haalvordhen—has offered to allow me to share its quarters.”

“That’s right. But, Miss Vargas—”

I made up my mind in a rush. “I’ll do it,” I said. “It’s the best way, all around.”

At the sight of his scandalized face, I almost regretted my decision. It was going to cause an interplanetary scandal, I thought wryly. A human woman—and a Terran citizen—spending forty days in space and sharing a cabin with a nonhuman!

The Theradin, although male in form, had no single attribute which one could remotely refer to as sex. But of course that wasn’t the problem. The nonhuman were specifically prohibited from mingling with the human races. Terran custom and taboo were binding, and I faced, resolutely, the knowledge that by the time I got to Terra, the planet might be made too hot to hold me.

Still, I told myself defiantly, it was a big Galaxy. And conditions weren’t normal just now and that made a big difference. I signed a substantial check for my transportation, and made arrangements for the shipping and stowing of what few possessions I could safely transship across space.

But I still felt uneasy when I went aboard the next day—so uneasy that I tried to bolster up my flagging spirits with all sorts of minor comforts. Fortunately the Theradin were oxygen—breathers, so I knew there would be no trouble about atmosphere—mixtures, or the air pressure to be maintained in the cabin. And the Theradin were Type Two nonhumans, which meant that the acceleration of a hyperspeed ship would knock my shipmate into complete prostration without special drugs. In fact, he would probably stay drugged in his skyhook during most of the trip.

The single cabin was far up toward the nose of the starship. It was a queer little spherical cubbyhole, a nest. The walls were foam—padded all around the sphere, for passengers never develop a spaceman’s skill at maneuvering then: bodies in free—fall, and cabins had to be designed so that an occupant, moving unguardedly, would not dash out his or her brains against an unpadded surface. Spaced at random on the inside of the sphere were three skyhooks—nested cradles on swinging pivots—into which the passenger was snugged during blastoff hi shock—absorbing foam and a complicated Garensen pressure—apparatus and was thus enabled to sleep secure without floating away.

A few screw—down doors were marked LUGGAGE. I immediately unscrewed one door and stowed my personal belongings in the bin. Then I screwed the top down securely and carefully fastened the padding over it. Finally, I climbed around the small cubbyhole, seeking to familiarize myself with it before my unusual roommate arrived.

It was about fourteen feet in diameter. A sphincter lock opened from the narrow corridor to cargo bays and crewmen’s quarters, while a second led into the cabin’s functional equivalent of a bathroom. Planet—bound men and women are always surprised and a little shocked when they see the sanitary arrangements on a spaceship. But once they’ve tried to perform normal bodily functions in free—fall, they understand the peculiar equipment very well.

I’ve made six trips across the Galaxy in as many cycles. I’m practically an old hand, and can even wash my face in freefall without drowning. The trick is to use a sponge and suction. But, by and large, I understand perfectly why spacemen, between planets, usually look a bit unkempt.

I stretched out on the padding of the main cabin, and waited with growing uneasiness for the nonhuman to show. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before the diaphragm on the outer sphincter lock expanded, and a curious, peaked face peered through.

“Vargas Miss Helten?” said the Theradin in a sibilant whisper.

“That’s my name,” I replied instantly. I pulled upward, and added, quite unnecessarily, “You are Haalvordhen, of course.”

“Such is my identification,” confirmed the alien, and the long, lean, oddly—muscled body squirmed through after the peaked head. “It is kind, Vargas Miss, to share accommodation under this necessity.”

“It’s kind of you,” I said vigorously. “We’ve all got to get home before this war breaks out!”

“That war may be prevented, I have all hope,” the nonhuman said. He spoke comprehensibly in Galactic Standard, but expressionlessly, for the vocal chords of the Theradins are located in an auxiliary pair of inner lips, and their voices seem reedy and lacking in resonance to human ears.

“Yet know you, Vargas Miss, they would have hurled me from this ship to make room for an Empire citizen, had you not been heart—kind to share.”

“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, shocked, “I didn’t know that!” I stared at him, disbelieving. The captain couldn’t have legally done such a thing—or even seriously have entertained the thought. Had he been trying to intimidate the Theradin into giving up his reserved place?

“I—I was meaning to thank you,” I said, to cover my confusion.

“Let us thank we—other, then, and be in accord,” the reedy voice mouthed. I looked the nonhuman over, unable to hide completely my curiosity. In form the Theradin was vaguely humanoid—but only vaguely—for, the squat arms terminated in mittened “hands” and the long sharp face was elfin, and perpetually grimacing.

The Theradin have no facial muscles to speak of, and no change of expression or of vocal inflection is possible to them. Of course, being telepathic, such subtleties of visible or auditory expression would be superfluous on the face of it.

I felt—as yet—none of the revulsion which the mere presence of the Theradin was supposed to inspire. It was not much different from being in the presence of a large humanoid animal. There was nothing inherently fearful about the alien. Yet he was a telepath—and of a nonhuman breed my species had feared for a thousand years. Could he read my mind?

“Yes,” said the Theradin from across the cabin. “You must forgive me. I try to put up barrier, but it is hard. You broadcast your thought so strong it is impossible to shut it out.” The alien paused. “Try not to be embarrass. It bother me too.”

Before I could think of anything to say to that a crew member in black leather thrust his head, unannounced, through the sphincter, and said with an air of authority, “In skyhooks, please.” He moved confidently into the cabin. “Miss Vargas, can I help you strap down?” he asked.

“Thanks, but I can manage,” I told him.

Hastily I clambered into the skyhook, buckling the inner straps, and fastening the suction tubes of the complicated Garensen apparatus across my chest and stomach. The nonhuman was awkwardly drawing his hands from their protective mittens and struggling with the Garensens.

Unhappily the Theradin have a double thumb, and handling the small—size Terran equipment is an almost impossibly delicate task. It is made more difficult by the fact that the flesh of their “hands” is mostly thin mucous membrane which tears easily on contact with leather and raw metal.

“Give Haalvordhen a hand,” I urged the crewman. “I’ve done—this dozens of times!” I might as well have saved my breath. The crewman came and assured himself that my straps and tubes and cushions were meticulously tightened. He took what seemed to me a long time, and used his hands somewhat excessively, I lay under the heavy Garensen equipment, too inwardly furious to even give him the satisfaction of protest.

It was far too long before he finally straightened and moved toward Haalvordhen’s skyhook. He gave the alien’s outer straps only a perfunctory tug or two, and then turned his head to grin at me with a totally uncalled—for—familiarity.

“Blastoff in ninety seconds,” he said, and wriggled himself rapidly out through the hook. Haalvordhen exploded in a flood of Samarran which I could not follow. The vehemence of his voice, however, was better than a dictionary. For some strange reason I found myself sharing his fury. The unfairness of the whole procedure was shameful. The Theradin had paid passage money, and deserved in any case the prescribed minimum of decent attention.

I said forthrightly, “Never mind the fool, Haalvordhen. Are you strapped down all right?”

“I don’t know,” he replied despairingly. “The equipment is unfamiliar—”

“Look—” I hesitated, but in common decency I had to make the gesture. “If I examine carefully my own Garensens, can you read my mind and see how they should be adjusted?”

He mouthed, “I’ll try,” and immediately I fixed my gaze steadily on the apparatus. After a moment, I felt a curious sensation. It was something like the faint, sickening feeling of being touched and pushed about, against my will, by a distasteful stranger. I tried to control the surge of almost physical revulsion. No wonder that humans kept as far as possible from the telepathic races. . .

And then I saw—did I see, I wondered, or was it a direct telepathic interference with my perceptions?—a second image superimpose itself on the Garensens into which I was strapped. And the realization was so disturbing that I forgot the discomfort of the mental rapport completely.

“You aren’t nearly fastened in,” I warned. “You haven’t begun to fasten the suction tubes—oh, damn the man. He must have seen in common humanity—” I broke off abruptly, and fumbled in grim desperation with my own straps. “I think there’s just time—”

But there wasn’t. With appalling suddenness a violent clamor—the final warning—hit my ears. I clenched my teeth and urged frantically: “Hang on! Here we go!”

And then the blast hit us! Under the sudden sickening pressure I felt my lungs collapse, and struggled to remain upright, choking for breath. I heard a queer, gagging grunt from the alien, and it was far more disturbing than a human scream would have been.

Then the second Shockwave struck with such violence that I screamed aloud in completely human terror. Screamed—and blacked out.

I wasn’t unconscious very long. I’d never collapsed during takeoff before, and my first fuzzy emotion when I felt the touch of familiar things around me again was one of embarrassment. What had happened? Then, almost simultaneously, I became reassuringly aware that we were in free fall and that the crewman who had warned us to alert ourselves was stretched out on the empty air near my skyhook. He looked worried.

“Are you all right, Miss Vargas?” he asked, solicitously. “The blastoff wasn’t any rougher than usual—”

“I’m all right,” I assured him woozily. My shoulders jerked and the Garensens shrieked as I pressed upward, undoing the apparatus with tremulous fingers. “What about the Theradin?” I asked urgently. “His Garensens weren’t fastened. You barely glanced at them.”

The crewman spoke slowly and steadily, with a deliberation I could not mistake. “Just a minute, Miss Vargas,” he said. “Have you forgotten? I spent every moment of the time I was in here fastening the Theradin’s belts and pressure equipment.” He gave me a hand to assist me up, but I shook it off so fiercely that I flung myself against the padding on the opposite side of the cabin. I caught apprehensively at a handhold, and looked down at the Theradin.

Haalvordhen lay flattened beneath the complex apparatus. His peaked pixie face was shrunken and ghastly, and his mouth looked badly bruised. I bent closer, then jerked upright with a violence that sent me cascading back across the cabin, almost into the arms of the crewman.

“You must have fixed those belts just now,” I said accusingly. “They were not fastened before blastoff! It’s malicious criminal negligence, and if Haalvordhen dies—” The crewman gave me a slow, contemptuous smile. “It’s my word against yours, sister,” he reminded me.

“In common decency, in common humanity—” I found that my voice was hoarse and shaking, and could not go on. The crewman said humorlessly, “I should think you’d be glad if the geek died in blastoff. You’re awfully concerned about the geek—and you know how that sounds?”

I caught the frame of the skyhook and anchored myself against it. I was almost too faint to speak. “What were you trying to do?” I brought out at last. “Murder the Theradin?”

The crewman’s baleful gaze did not shift from my face. “Suppose you close your mouth,” he said, without malice, but with an even inflection that was far more frightening. “If you don’t, we may have to close it for you. I don’t think much of humans who fraternize with geeks.”

I opened and shut my mouth several times before I could force myself to reply. All I finally said was, “You know, of course, that I intend to speak to the captain?”

“Suit yourself.” He turned and strode contemptuously toward the door. “We’d have been doing you a favor if the geek had died in blastoff. But, as I say, suit yourself. I think your geek’s alive, anyhow. They’re hard to kill.”

I clutched the skyhook, unable to move, while he dragged his body through the sphincter lock and it contracted behind him.

Well, I thought bleakly, I had known what I would be letting myself in for when I’d made the arrangement. And since I was already committed, I might as well see if Haalvordhen were alive or dead. Resolutely I bent over his skyhook, angling sharply to brace myself in free—fall.

He wasn’t dead. While I looked I saw the bruised and bleeding “hands” flutter spasmodically. Then, abruptly, the alien made a queer, rasping noise. I felt helpless and for some reason I was stirred to compassion.

I bent and laid a hesitant hand on the Garensen apparatus which was now neatly and expertly fastened. I was bitter about the fact that for the first time hi my life I had lost consciousness! Had I not done so the crewman could not have so adroitly covered his negligence. But it was important to remember that the circumstance would not have helped Haalvordhen much either.

“Your feelings do you nothing but credit!” The reedy flat voice was almost a whisper. “If I may trespass once more on your kindness—can you unfasten these instruments again?”

I bent to comply, asking helplessly as I did so, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Very far from all right,” the alien mouthed, slowly and without expression.

I had the feeling that he resented being compelled to speak aloud, but I didn’t think I could stand that telepath touch again. The alien’s flat, slitted eyes watched me while I carefully unfastened the suction tubes and cushioning devices.

At this distance I could see that the eyes had lost their color, and that the raw “hands” were flaccid and limp. There were also heavily discolored patches about the alien’s throat and head. He pronounced, with a terribly thick effort: “I should have—been drugged. Now it’s too late. Argha mad—” the words trailed off into blurred Samarran, but the discolored patch in his neck still throbbed sharply, and the hands twitched in an agony which, being dumb, seemed the more fearful.

I clung to the skyhook, dismayed at the intensity of my own emotion. I thought that Haalvordhen had spoken again when the sharp jolt of command sounded, clear and imperative, in my brain.

“Procalamine!” For an instant the shock was all I could feel—the shock, and the overwhelming revulsion at the telepathic touch. There was no hesitation or apology in it now, for the Theradin was fighting for his life. Again the sharp, furious command came: “Give me procalamine!”

And with a start of dismay I realized that most nonhumans needed the drug, which was kept on all spaceships to enable them to live in free—fall.

Few nonhuman races have the stubbornly persistent heart of the Terrans, which beats by muscular contraction alone. The circulation of the Theradin, and similar races, is dependent on gravity to keep the vital fluid pulsing. Procalamine gives their main blood organ just enough artificial muscular spasm to keep the blood moving and working.

Hastily I propelled myself into the “bathroom”—wiggled hastily through the diaphragm, and unscrewed the top of the bin marked FIRST AID. Neatly pigeonholed beneath transparent plastic were sterile bandages, antiseptics clearly marked HUMAN and—separately, for the three main types of nonhuman races, in one deep bin—the small plastic globules of vital stimulants.

I sorted out two purple fluorescent ones—little globes marked procalamine— and looked at the warning, in raised characters on the globule. It read: FOR ADMINISTRATION BY QUALIFIED SPACE PERSONNEL ONLY. A touch of panic made my diaphragm catch. Should I call the Vesta’s captain, or one of the crew?

Then a cold certainty grew in me. If I did, Haalvordhen wouldn’t get the stimulant he needed. I sorted out a fluorescent needle for nonhuman integument, pricked the globule and sucked the dose into the needle. Then, with its tip still enclosed in the plastic globe, I wriggled myself back to where the alien still lay loosely confined by one of the inner straps.

Panic touched me again, with the almost humorous knowledge that I didn’t know where to inject the stimulant, and that a hypodermic injection in space presents problems which only space—trained men are able to cope with. But I reached out notwithstanding and gingerly picked up one of the unmittened “hands.” I didn’t stop to think how I knew that this was the proper site for the injection. I was too overcome with strong physical loathing.

Instinct from man’s remote past on Earth told me to drop the nonhuman flesh and cower, gibbering and howling as my simian antecedents would have done. The raw membrane was feverishly hot and unpleasantly slimy to touch. I fought rising queasiness as I tried to think how to steady him for the injection.

In free—fall there is no steadiness, no direction. The hypodermic needle, of course, worked by suction, but piercing the skin would be the big problem. Also, I was myself succumbing to the dizziness of no—gravity flight, and realized coldly that if I couldn’t make the injection in the next few minutes I wouldn’t be able to accomplish it at all. For a minute I didn’t care, a primitive part of myself reminding me that if the alien died I’d be rid of a detestable cabin mate, and have a decent trip between planets.

Then, stubbornly, I threw off the temptation. I steadied the needle in my hand, trying to conquer the disorientation which convinced me that I was looking both up and down at the Theradin.

My own center of gravity seemed to be located in the pit of my stomach, and I fought the familiar space voyaging instinct to curl up in the foetal position and float. I moved slightly closer to the Theradin. I knew that if I could get close enough, our two masses would establish a common center of gravity, and I would have at least a temporary orientation while I made the injection.

The maneuver was unpleasant, for the alien seemed unconscious, flaccid and still, and mere physical closeness to the creature was repellent. The feel of the thick wettish “hand” pulsing feebly in my own was almost sickeningly ultimate. But at last I managed to maneuver myself dose enough to establish a common center of gravity between us—an axis on which I seemed to hover briefly suspended.

I pulled Haalvordhen’s “hand” into this weight—center in the bare inches of space between us, braced the needle, and resolutely stabbed with it.

The movement disturbed the brief artificial gravity, and Haalvordhen floated and bounced a little weightlessly in his skyhook. The “hand” went sailing back, the needle recoiling harmlessly. I swore out loud, now quite foolishly angry, and my own jerky movement of annoyance flung me partially across the cabin.

Inching slowly back, I tried to grit my teeth, but only succeeded with a snap that jarred my skull. In tense anger, I seized Haalvordhen’s “hand,” which had almost stopped its feverish pulsing, and with a painfully slow effort—any quick or sudden movement would have thrown me, in recoil, across the cabin again—I wedged Haalvordhen’s “hand” under the strap and anchored it there.

It twitched faintly—the Theradin was apparently still sensible to pain—and my stomach rose at that sick pulsing. But I hooked my feet under the skyhook’s frame, and flung my free arm down and across the alien, holding tight to the straps that confined him. Still holding him thus wedged down securely, I jabbed again with the needle. It touched, pricked—and then, in despair, I realized it could not penetrate the Theradin integument without weight and pressure behind it.

I was too absorbed now in what had to be done to care just how I did it. So I wrenched forward with a convulsive movement that threw me, full—length, across the alien’s body. Although I still had no weight, the momentum of the movement drove the hypodermic needle deeply into the flesh of the “hand.”

I pressed the catch, then picked myself up slowly, and looked around to see the crewman who had jeered at me with his head thrust through the lock again, regarding me with the distaste he had displayed toward the Theradin, from the first. To him I was lower than the Theradin, having degraded myself by close contact with a nonhuman.

Under that frigid, contemptuous stare, I was unable to speak. I could only silently withdraw the needle and hold it up. The rigid look of condemnation altered just a little, but not much. He remained silent, looking at me with something halfway between horror and accusation.

It seemed years, centuries, eternities that he clung there, just looking at me, his face an elongated ellipse above the tight collar of his black leathers. Then, without even speaking, he slowly withdrew his head and the lock contracted behind him, leaving me alone with my sickening feeling of contamination and an almost hysterical guilt. I hung the needle up on the air, curled myself into a ball, and, entirely unstrung, started sobbing like a fool.

It must have been a long time before I managed to pull myself together, because before I even looked to see whether Haalvordhen was still alive, I heard the slight buzzing noise which meant it was a meal—period and that food had been sent through the chute to our cabin. I pushed the padding listlessly aside, and withdrew the heat—sealed containers—one set colorless, the other set nonhuman fluorescent.

Tardily conscious of what a fool I’d been making of myself, I hauled my rations over to the skyhook, and tucked them into a special slot, so that they wouldn’t float away. Then, with a glance at the figure stretched out motionless beneath the safety—strap of the other skyhook, I shrugged, pushed myself across the cabin again, and brought the fluorescent containers to Haalvordhen.

He made a weary, courteous noise which I took for acknowledgment. By now heartily sick of the whole business, I set them before him with a bare minimum of politeness and withdrew to my own skyhook, occupying myself with the always—ticklish problem of eating m free—fell.

At last I drew myself up to return the containers to the chute, knowing we wouldn’t leave the cabin during the entire trip. Space, on a starship, is held to a rigid minimum. There is simply no room for untrained outsiders moving around in the cramped ship, perhaps getting dangerously close to critically delicate equipment, and the crew is far too busy to stop and keep an eye on rubbernecking tourists.

In an emergency, passengers can summon a crewman by pressing a call—button. Otherwise, as far as the crew was concerned, we were in another world.

I paused in midair to Haalvordhen’s skyhook. His containers were untouched and I felt moved to say, “Shouldn’t you try to eat something?”

The flat voice had become even weaker and more rasping now, and the nonhuman’s careful enunciation was slurred. Words of his native Samarran intermingled with queer turns of phrase which I expected were literally rendered from mental concepts.

“Heart—kind of you, thakkava Varga Miss, but late. Haalvordhen—I deep in grateful wishing—” A long spate of Samarran, thickly blurred followed, then as if to himself, “Theradin—we, die nowhere only on Samarra, and only a little tune ago Haalvordhen—I knowing must die, and must returning to home planet. Saata. Knowing to return and die there where Theradin—we around dying—” The jumble of words blurred again, and the limp “hands” clutched spasmodically, in and out.

Then, in a queer, careful tone, the nonhuman said, “But I am not living to return where I can stop—die. Not so long Haalvordhen—I be lasting, although Vargas—you Miss be helping most like real instead of alien. Sorry your people be most you unhelping—” he stopped again, and with a queer little grunting noise, continued, “Now Haalvordhen—I be giving Vargas—you stop—gift of heritage, be needful it is.”

The flaccid form of the nonhuman suddenly stiffened, went rigid. The drooping lids over the Theradin’s eyes seemed to unhood themselves, and in a spasm of fright I tried to fling myself backward. But I did not succeed. I remained motionless, held in a dumb fascination.

I felt a sudden, icy cold, and the sharp physical nausea crawled over me again at the harsh and sickening touch of the alien on my mind, not in words this time, but in a rapport even closer—a hateful touch so intimate that I felt my body go limp in helpless fits and spasms of convulsive shuddering under the deep, hypnotic contact.

Then a wave of darkness almost palpable surged up in my brain. I tried to scream, “Stop it, stop it!” And a panicky terror flitted in my last conscious thought through my head. This is why, this is the reason humans and telepathy don’t mix -

And then a great dark door opened under my senses and I plunged again into unconsciousness.

It was not more than a few seconds, I suppose, before the blackness swayed and lifted and I found myself floating, curled helplessly in mid—air, and seeing, with a curious detachment, the Theradin’s skyhook below me. Something in the horrid limpness of that form stirred me wide awake.

With a tight band constricting my breathing, I arrowed downward. I had never seen a dead Theradin before, but I needed no one to tell me that I saw one now. The constricting band still squeezed my throat in dry gasps, and in a frenzy of hysteria I threw myself wildly across the cabin, beating and battering on the emergency button, shrieking and sobbing and screaming. . .

They kept me drugged all the rest of the trip. Twice I remember waking and shrieking out things I did not understand myself, before the stab of needles in my arm sent me down into comforting dreams again. Near the end of the flight, while my brain was still fuzzy, they made me sign a paper, something to do with witnessing that the crew held no responsibility for the Theradin’s death.

It didn’t matter. There was something clear and cold and shrewd in my mind, behind the surface fuzziness, which told me I must do exactly what they wanted, or I would find myself in serious trouble with the Terran authorities. At the time I didn’t even care about that, and supposed it was the drugs. Now, of course, I know the truth.

When the ship made planetfall at Samarra, I had to leave the Vesta and transship for Terra. The Vesta’s little captain shook me by the hand and carefully avoided my eyes, without mentioning the dead Theradin. I had the feeling—strange, how clear it was to my perceptions—that he regarded me in the same way he would regard a loaded time bomb that might explode at any moment.

I knew he was anxious to hurry me aboard a ship for Terra. He offered me special reservations on a lino-cruiser at a nominal price, with the obvious lie that he owned a part interest in at. Detachedly I listened to his floundering lies, ignored the hand he offered again, and told a lie or two of my own. He was angry. I knew he didn’t want me to linger on Samarra.

Even so, he was glad to be rid of me.

Descending at last from the eternal formalities of the Terran landing zone, I struck out quickly across the port city and hailed a Theradin ground—car. The Theradin driving it looked at me curiously, and in a buzzing voice informed me that I could find a human conveyance at the opposite corner. Surprised at myself, I stopped to wonder what I was doing. And then -

And then I identified myself in a way the Theradin could not mistake. He was nearly as surprised as I was. I clambered into the car, and he drove me to the queer, block—shaped building which my eyes had never seen before, but which I now knew as intimately as the blue sky of Terra.

Twice, as I crossed the twisting ramp, I was challenged. Twice, with the same shock of internal surprise, I answered the challenge correctly.

At last I came before a Theradin whose challenge crossed mine like a sure, sharp lance, and the result was startling. The Theradin Haalvamphrenan leaned backward twice in acknowledgment, and said—not in words—“Haalvordhen!”

I answered in the same fashion. “Yes. Due to certain blunders, I could not return to our home planet, and was forced to use the body of this alien. Having made the transfer unwillingly, under necessity, I now see certain advantages. Once within this body, it does not seem at all repulsive, and the host is highly intelligent and sympathetic.

“I regret the feeling that I am distasteful to you, dear friend. But, consider. I can now contribute my services as messenger and courier, without discrimination by these mind—blind Terrans. The law which prevents Theradin from dying on any other planet should now be changed.”

“Yes, yes,” the other acquiesced, quickly grasping my meaning. “But now to personal matters, my dear Haalvordhen. Of course your possessions are held intact for you.”

I became aware that I possessed five fine residences upon the planet, a private lake, a grove of Theirry-trees, and four chattel boats. Inheritance among the Theradin, of course, is dependent upon continuity of the mental personality, regardless of the source of the young. When any Theradin died, transferring his mind into a new and younger host, the new host at once possessed all of those things which had belonged to the former personality. Two Theradin, unsatisfied with their individual wealth, sometimes pooled their personalities into a single host—body, thus accumulating modest fortunes.

Continuity of memory, of course, was perfect. As Helen Vargas, I had certain rights and privileges as a Terran citizen, certain possessions, certain family rights, certain Empire privileges. And as Haalvordhen, I was made free of Samarra as well.

In a sense of strict justice, I “told” Haalvamphrenan how the original host had died. I gave him the captain’s name. I didn’t envy him, when the Vesta docked again at Samarra.

“On second thought,” Haalvamphrenan said reflectively, “I shall merely commit suicide in his presence.”

Evidently Helen—Haalvordhen—I had a very long and interesting life ahead of me.

So did all the other Theradin.

The Dark Intruder

ANDREW SLAYTON snapped the dusty leather notebook shut, and tossed it into his blanket roll. He stood up, ducking to avoid the ridgepole of the tent—Andrew, who had grown up on low-gravity Mars, was just over seven feet tall—and stood up, his head a little bent, looking at the other men who shared this miniature outpost against the greatest desert ever known to man.

The flaps of the tent were tightly pegged against the fierce and unpredictable sandstorms of the Martian night. In the glow of a portable electric lamp, the four roughnecks who would do the actual digging squatted around an up-ended packing box, intent on tonight’s installment of their perpetual poker game.

A dark oblong in the corner of the tent rose and fell with regular snores. John Reade, temporary leader of this expedition, was not young, and the day’s work had been exhausting.

The men glanced up from their cards as Slayton approached them. “Want to sit in, kid?” Mike Fairbanks asked, “Kater’s losing his shirt. We could use a new dealer.”

“No, thanks. Not tonight.”

Fat Kater shook with laughter, and jeered “The kid’ud rather read about Kingslander’s men, and how they all went nuts and shot each other up!”

Spade Hansen flung down his cards, with a gesture of annoyance. “That’s nothing to joke about, Kater.” He lowered his gruff voice. “Find anything in the logs, Andy?”

Andrew squatted, elbows on thighs, beside the big foreman. “Nothing but what we know already, Spade. It beats me. As near as I can figure out, Jack Norton’s expedition—he only had ten men—was washed up inside a week. Their rations are still cached over there. And, according to Kings-lander’s notebook, his outfit went the same way. They reached here safely, made camp, did a little exploring—they found the bodies of Norton’s men and buried them—then, one by one, they all went insane and shot each other. Twenty men—and within ten days, they were just twenty-corpses.”

“Pleasant prospect,” Kater glowered, slapping down his cards on the improvised table and scowling as Rick Webber raked in the pot. “What about us?”

Rick Webber meticulously stacked his winnings and scaled his cards at Hensen. “Quit your worrying. Third time lucky— maybe we’ll get through, all right.”

“And maybe we won’t,” Fairbanks grunted, raking the cards together and shuffling them with huge fists, “You know what they call this outfit back in Mount Denver? Reade’s Folly.”

“I’d hate to tell you what they called the first men who actually tried living on Mars,” said a sleepy, pleasant voice from the corner, and John Reade thrust up his shock of white hair. “But we’re here.” The old man turned to Andrew. “Wasn’t there even a clue in the logs, some notion of what might have happened to them?”

Andrew swivelled to face him. “Not a word, sir. Kings-lander kept the log himself until he was shot, then one of his men—Ford Benton—kept it. The last couple of pages are the most awful gibberish—not even in English. Look for yourself—he was obviously but of his head for days.” Andrew unfolded his long legs, hauled up a corner of the tent flap, and stood, staring morosely across the dark wasteland of rocks and bare bushes, toward the looming mass of Xanadu.

Xanadu. Not the Xanadu of Coleridge’s poem, but—to the half-forgotten space drifter who discovered the place thirty years ago—a reasonable facsimile. It was a cloistered nun of a city, hidden behind a wide skirt of the most impassable mountains on Mars. And the city was more impassable than the mountains. No human being had ever entered it—yet.

They’d tried. Two expeditions, twelve years apart, had vanished without trace, without explanation other than the dusty notebook Andrew had unearthed, today, from the rotted shreds of a skeleton’s clothing.

Archaeological expeditions., on Mars, all start the same way. You argue, wheedle, beg, borrow and steal until you have the necessary authority and a little less than the necessary funds. Earth, torn with internecine wars and slammed down under currency restrictions, does not send much money to Mars at any time. All but the barest lifeline of supplies was choked off when it was finally verified that Mars had no heavy metals, very little worth mining. The chronically-bankrupt Geographical Society had abandoned Mars even before Xanadu was discovered. The thronging ruins of Venus, the strange surviving culture of subterranean men on Titan, the odd temples of the inner moons of Jupiter, are more rewarding than the desert barrens of Mars and its inaccessible Xanadu—the solitary remnant of a Martian society which must have vanished before mankind, on Earth, had discovered fire.

For all practical purposes, Mars is a military frontier, patrolled by the U.N. to keep any one country from using it as a base for developing secret weapons. It’s also a good place to test new atomic engines, since there isn’t much of a fallout problem and no worry about a large population getting fallout jitters. John Reade, retired Major in the Space Service, had good military contacts, and had managed to get a clearance for the third—only the third—attempt to conquer Xanadu.

Private expeditions on Mars are simple to the point of being primitive. No private citizen or foundation could possibly pay freight charges for machinery to Mars. Private citizens travel on foot, taking with them only what they can carry on their backs. Besides, no one could take a car, a plane or a rocketship over the mountains and still find a safe place to land. Pack animals are out of the question; horses and burros cannot adapt to the thin air—thicker than pre-space theorists had dared to hope, but still pretty thin—and dogs and chimpanzees, which can, aren’t—much good for pack-work. The Geographic Society is still debating about importing yaks and llamas from high-altitude Peru and Tibet; meanwhile, it’s a good thing that gravity on Mars is low enough to permit tremendous packloads of necessities.

The prime necessity is good lungs and a sackful of guts, while you scramble, scratch and curse your way over the mountains. Then a long, open valley, treacherously lined with needles of rock, and Xanadu lying—the bait in the mouth of the trap—at the top.

And then—what?

Kater and Hansen and the rest were grumbling over the cards again. “This place is jinxed,” Mike complained, turning up a deuce. “We’ll be lucky if we get a cent out of it Now if we were working on Venus—but Mars, nyaahl Even if we find something, which I doubt, and live to tell about it—who cares?”

“Yeah,” Spade muttered. “Reade, how much did you spend for dynamite to blast the walls?”

“You didn’t pay for it,” Reade said cheerfully.

Andrew stooped, shrugging on his leather jacket; thumbed the inside heating-units. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Alone?” Reade asked sharply.

“Sure, unless someone wants to come along,” Andrew said, then suddenly understood. He pulled his pistol from his pocket, and handed it, butt-first, to Reade. “Sorry, I should have remembered. This is about where the shooting started, with the others.”

Reade laughed, but he didn’t return the gun.

“Don’t go too far.”

It was one of the rare, clear nights which sometimes did penance for the usual sandstorms. Andrew drew down the tent flap behind him, walked away into the darkness. At his foot he felt a little scurrying, stooped and caught up one of the blunt-nosed sand-mice. It squirmed on his palm, kicking hard with all six puny legs; then felt the comforting heat of his hand and yeep-yeeped with pleasure; he walked on, idly scratching the scaly little beast.

The two small moons were high overhead, and there was a purplish, shimmery light over the valley, with its grotesque floor of rock spires, fuzzed between with blackish patches of prickle-bushes—spinosa martts—matted in a close tangle between each little peak.

Downwind he heard the long screaming of a banshee; then he saw it, running blindly, a huge bird with its head down between trailing, functionless wings. Andrew held his breath and stood still. The banshees had no intelligence to speak of, but by some peculiar tropism, they would rush toward anything that moved; the very heat of his body might attract them, and their huge clawed feet could disembowel a man at one stroke. And he had no pistol!

This one failed to sense him; it ran, trailing its wings and screaming eerily, like a cloaked girl, blindly into the dusk. Andrew let out his breath violently in relief. Suddenly he realized that he was not sure just which way the tent lay. He turned, crowding against “one of the rockspires. A little hollow gleamed pallidly in the moonlight. He remembered climbing a rise; he must have come this way—

He slid down roughly, a trailing pricker raking his hand. The sand-mouse leaped from his palm with a squeal and scuffled away. Andrew, sucking his bleeding palm, looked up and saw the walls of Xanadu lifting serried edges just over his head. How could he possibly have come so near in just a few minutes? Everything looked different—

He spun around, trying to scramble up the way he had come. He fell. His head struck rock, and the universe went dark.

“Take it easy.” John Reade’s voice sounded disembodied over his head, “Just lie still. You’ve got a bad bump, Andy.”

He opened his eyes to the glare of stars and a bitter wind on his face. Reade caught at his hand ~as he moved it exploringly toward his face. “Let it alone, the bleeding’s stopped. What happened? The banshee get you?”

“No, I fell. I lost my way, and I must have hit my head.” Andrew let his eyes fall shut again. “I’m sorry, sir; I know you told us not to go near the city alone. But I didn’t realize I’d come so close.”

Reade frowned and leaned closer. “Lost your way? What

are you talking about? I followed you—brought your pistol. I was afraid you’d meet a banshee. You hadn’t gone two hundred yards from the tent, Andy. When I caught up with you, you were stumbling around, and then you rolled down on the ground into that little hollow. You kept muttering No, no, no—I thought the banshee had got you.”

Andrew pushed himself upright. “I don’t think so, sir. I looked up and saw the city right over my head. That’s what made me fall. That’s when it started.”

“When what started?”

“I—don’t know.” Andrew put up his hand to rub his forehead, wincing as he touched the bruise. Suddenly he asked “John, did you ever wonder what the old Martians—the ones who built Xanadu—called the place?”

“Who hasn’t?” The old man nodded, impatiently. “I guess we’ll never know, though. That’s a fool question to ask me right now!”

“It’s something I felt,” Andrew said, groping for words. “When I got up, after I stumbled, everything looked different. It was like seeing double; one part was just rocks, and bushes, and ruins, and the other part was—well, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. I felt—” he hesitated, searching for words to define something strange, then said with an air of surprise, “Homesick. Yes, that’s it. And the most awful—desolation. The way I’d feel, I guess, if I went back to Mount Denver and found it burned down flat. And then for just a second I knew what the city was called, and why it was dead, and why we couldn’t get into it, and why tie other men went crazy. And it scared me, and I started to run—and that’s when I slipped, and hit my head.”

Reade’s worried face relaxed in a grin.

“Rubbish! The bump on your head mixed up your timesense a little, that’s all. Your hallucination, or whatever it was, came after the bump, not before.”

“No,” Andrew said quietly, but with absolute conviction. “I wasn’t hurt that bad, John.”

Reade’s face changed; held concern again, “All right,” he said gently, “Tell me what you think you know.”

Andrew dropped his face in his hands. “Whatever it was, it’s gone! The bump knocked it right out of my head. I remember that I knew—” he raised a drawn face, “but I can’t remember what!”

Reade put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Let’s get back to the tent, Andy, I’m freezing out here. Look, son, the whole thing is just your mind working overtime from that bump you got. Or—”

Andrew said bitterly, “You think I’m going crazy.”

“I didn’t say that, son. Come on. We can talk it over in the morning.” He hoisted Andrew to his feet. “I told Spade that if we weren’t back in half an hour, he’d better come looking for us.”

The men looked up from their cards, staring at the blood on Andrew’s face, but the set of Reade’s mouth silenced any comments. Andrew didn’t want to talk. He quickly shucked jacket and trousers, crawled into his sleeping bag, thumbed the heat-unit and immediately fell asleep.

When he woke, the tent was empty. Wondering why he had been allowed to sleep—Spade usually meted out rough treatment to blanket-huggers—Andrew dressed quickly, gulped a mug of the bitter coffee that stood on the hot-box, and went out to look for the others.

He had to walk some distance to find them. Armed with shovels, the four roughnecks were digging up the thorny prickle-bushes near the hollow where Andrew had fallen, while Reade, in the lee of a rock, was scowling over the fine print of an Army manual of Martio-biology.

“Sorry I overslept, John. Where do I go to work?”

“You don’t. I’ve got another job for you.” Reade turned to bark a command at Fairbanks. “Careful with the damned plant! I told you to wear gloves! Now get them on, and don’t touch those things with your bare hands.” He glanced back at Andrew. “I had an idea overnight,” he said. “What do we really know about spinosa martis? And this doesn’t quite look like the species that grows around Mount Denver. I think maybe this variety gives off some kind of gas—or poison.” He pointed at the long scratch on Andrew’s hand. “Your trouble started after you grabbed one of them. You know, there’s locoweed on Earth that drives cattle crazy-mushrooms and other plants that secrete hallucinogens. If these things give off some sort of volatile mist, it could have dispersed in that little hollow down there—there wasn’t much wind last night.”

“What shall I do?” he asked.

“I’d rather not discuss that here. Come on, 111 walk back to the tent with you.” He scrambled stiffly to his feet. “I want you to go back to Mount Denver, Andy.”

Andrew stopped; turned to Reade accusingly.

“You do think I’ve gone crazy!”

Reade shook his head. “I just think you’ll be better off in Mount Denver. —I’ve got a job for you there—one man would have to go, anyhow, and you’ve had one—well, call it a hallucination—already. If it’s a poison, the stuff might be cumulative. We may just wind up having to wear gas masks.” He put a hand on the thick leather of Andrew’s jacket sleeve. “I know how you feel about this place, Andy. But personal feelings aren’t important in this kind of work.”

“John—” half hesitant, Andrew looked back at him, “I had an idea overnight, too.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“It sounds crazy, I guess,” Andrew said diffidently, “but it just came to me. Suppose the old Martians were beings without bodies—discarnate intelligences? And they’re trying to make contact with us? Men aren’t used to that kind of contact, and it drives them insane.”

Reade scowled. “Ingenious,” he admitted,, “as a theory, but there’s a hole in it. If they’re discarnate, how did they build—” he jerked his thumb at the squat, fortress-like mass of Xanadu behind them.

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know how the drive units of a spaceship work, either. But I’m here.” He looked up. “I think one of them was trying to get in touch with me, last night. And maybe if I was trying, too—maybe if I understood, and tried to open my mind to it, too—”

Reade looked disturbed. “Andy, do you realize what you’re suggesting? Suppose this is all your imagination—”

“It isn’t, John.”

“Wait, now. Just suppose, for a minute; try to see it my way.”

“Well?” Andrew was impatient.

“By trying to ‘open your mind’, as you put it, you’d just be surrendering your sane consciousness to a brooding insanity. The human mind is pretty complex, son. About nine-tenths of your brain is dark, shadowy, all animal instinct. Only the conscious fraction can evaluate—use logic. The balance between the two is pretty tricky at best. I wouldn’t fool around with it, if I were you. Listen, Andy, I know you were born on Mars, I know how you feel. You feel at home here, don’t you?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean—”

“You resent men like Spade and Kater, coming here for the money that’s in it, don’t you?”

“Not really. Well, yes, but—”

There was a Mars-born kid with Kingslander, Andy. Remember the log? He was the first to go. In a place like this, imagination is worse than smallpox. You’re the focal point where trouble would start, if it started. That’s why I picked men like Spade and Kater—insensitive, unimaginative—for the first groundwork here. I’ve had my eye on you from the beginning, Andy, and you reacted just about the way I expected. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go.”

Andrew clenched his fists in his pocket, speaking dry-mouthed. “But if I was right—wouldn’t it be easier for them to contact someone like me? Won’t you try to see it my way?” He made a final, hopeless appeal. “Won’t you let me stay? I know I’m safe here—I know they won’t hurt me, whatever happens to the others. Take my gun if you want to—keep me in handcuffs, even—but don’t send me back!”

Reade’s voice was flat and final. “If I had any doubts, I wouldn’t have them after that. Every word you say is just making it worse. Leave while you still can, Andy.”

Andrew gave up. “All right. I’ll start back now, if you insist.”

“I do.” Reade turned away and hurried back toward the crew, and Andrew went into the tent and started packing rations in his blanket-roll for the march. The pack was clumsy, but not a tenth as heavy as the load he’d packed on the way up here. He jerked the straps angrily tight, hoisted the roll to his shoulder, and went out.

Reade was waiting for him. He had Andrew’s pistol.

“You’ll need this.” He gave it to him; hauled out his notebook and stabbed a finger at the sketchy map he had drawn on their way over the mountains. “You’ve got your compass? Okay, look; this is the place where our route crossed the mailcar track from Mount Denver to the South Encampment. If you camp there for a few hours, you can hitch a ride on the mail-car—there’s one every other day—into Mount Denver. When you get there, look up Montray. He’s getting the expedition together back there.” Reade tore the leaf from his notebook, scribbling the address on the back. Andrew lifted an eyebrow; he knew Reade had planned the expedition

in two sections, to prevent the possibility that they, trap would vanish without even a search-party sent after them.

“He won’t have things ready, of course, but tell him to hurry it up, and give him all the help you can. Tell him what we’re up against.”

“You mean what you’re up against. Are you sure you can trust me to run your errands in Mount Denver?”

“Don’t be so grim about it,” Reade said gently. “I know you want to stay, but I’m only doing my duty the way I see it. I have to think of everybody, not just you—or myself.” He gripped Andrew’s shoulder. “If things turn out all right, you can come back when they’re all under control. Good luck, Andy.”

“And if they don’t?” Andrew asked, but Reade had turned away.

It had been a rough day. Andrew sat with his back against a boulder, watching the sun drop swiftly toward the reddish range of rock he had climbed that afternoon. Around him the night wind was beginning to build up, but he had found a sheltered spot between two boulders; and in his heated sleeping-bag, could spend a comfortable night even at sixty-below temperatures.

He thought ahead while he chewed the tasteless Mar-beef—Reade had outfitted the expedition with Space Service surplus—and swallowed hot coffee made from ice painstakingly scraped from the rocks. It had taken Reade, and five men, four days to cross the ridge. Travelling light, Andrew hoped to do it in three. The distance was less than thirty miles by air, but the only practicable trail wound in and out over ninety miles, mostly perpendicular. If a bad sandstorm built up, he might not make it at all, but anyone who spent more than one season on Mars took that kind of risk for granted.

The sun dropped, and all at once the sky was ablaze with stars. Andrew swallowed the last of his coffee, looking up to pick out the Heavenly Twins on the horizon—the topaz glimmer of Venus, the blue star-sapphire that was Earth. Andrew had lived on Earth for a few years in his teens, and hated it; the thick moist air, the dragging feel of too much gravity. The close-packed cities nauseated him with their smell of smoke and grease and human sweat. Mars air was thin and cold and scentless. His parents had hated Mars the same way he had hated Earth—they were biologists in the Xenozoology division, long since transferred to Venus. He had never felt quite at home anywhere, except for the few days he had spent at Xanadu. Now he was being kicked out of that too.

Suddenly, he swore. The hell with it, sitting here, feeling sorry for himself! He’d have a long day tomorrow, and a rough climb. As he unrolled his sleeping-bag, waiting for the blankets to warm, he wondered; how old was Xanadu?

Did it matter? Surely, if men could throw a bridge between the planets, they could build a bridge across the greater gap of time that separated them from these who had once lived on Mars. And if any man could do that, Andy admitted ungrudgingly, that man was John Reade. He pulled off his boots, anchored them carefully with his pack, weighted the whole thing down with rock, and crawled into the sack.

In the comforting warmth, relaxing, a new thought crossed his mind.

Whatever it was that had happened to him at Xanadu, he wasn’t quite sure. The bump had confused him. But certainly something had happened. He did not seriously consider Reade’s warning. He knew, as Reade could not be expected to know, that he had not suffered from a hallucination; had not been touched by the fringes of insanity. But he had certainly undergone a very strange experience. Whether it

had been subjective or objective, lie did not know; but he intended to find out.

How? He tried to remember a little desultory reading he had once done about telepathy. Although he had spoken glibly to Reade about ‘opening his mind,’ he really had not the faintest idea of what he had meant by the phrase. He grinned in the dark.

“Well, whoever and whatever you are,” he said aloud, “I’m all ready and waiting. If you can figure out a way to communicate with me, come right ahead.”

And the alien came.

“I am Kamellin,” it said.

I am Kamellin..

That was all Andrew could think. It was all his tortured brain could encompass. His head hurt, and the dragging sense of some actual, tangible force seemed to pull and twist at him. I AM KAMELLIN . . . KAMELLIN . . . KAMELLIN . . . it was like a tide that sucked at him, crowding out his own thoughts, dragging him under and drowning him. Andrew panicked; he fought it, thrashing in sudden frenzy, feeling arms and legs hit the sides of the sleeping-bag, the blankets twisted around him like an enemy’s grappling hands.

Then the surge relaxed and he lay still, his breath loud in the darkness, and with fumbling fingers untangling the blankets. The sweat of fear was cold on his face, but the panic was gone.

For the force had not been hostile. It had only been— eager. Pathetically eager; eager as a friendly puppy is eager, as a friendly dog may jump up and knock a man down.

“Kamellin,” Andrew said the alien word aloud, thinking that the name was not particularly outlandish. He hoped the words would focus his thoughts sufficiently for the alien to understand.

“Kamellin, come ahead, okay, but this time take it easy,

take it slow and easy. Understand?” Guardedly, he relaxed, hoping he would be able to take it if some unusual force were thrust at him; He could understand now why men had gone insane. If this—Kamellin—had hit him like that the first time-even now, when he understood and partly expected what was happening, it was an overwhelming flood, flowing through his mind like water running into a bottle. He lay helpless, sweating. The stars were gone, blanked out, and the howling wind was quiet—or was it that he no longer saw or heard? He hung alone in a universe of emptiness, and then, to his disembodied consciousness, came the beginning of— what? Not speech. Not even a mental picture. It was simply contact, and quite indescribable. And it said, approximately;

Greetings. At last. At last it has happened and we are both sane. I am Kamellin.

The wind was howling again, the stars a million flame-bright flares in the sky. Huddled in his blankets, Andrew felt the dark intruder in his brain ebb and flow with faint pressure as, their thoughts raced in swift question and answer. He whispered his own question aloud; otherwise Kamellin’s thoughts flowed into his and intermingled with them until he found himself speaking Kamellin’s thoughts.

“What are you? Was I right, then? Are you Martians discarnate intelligences?”

Not discarnate, we have always had bodies, or rather— we lived in bodies. But our minds and bodies were wholly separate. Nothing but our will tied them together. When one body died, we simply passed into another newborn body.

A spasm of claustrophobic terror grabbed at Andrew, and his flesh crawled. “You wanted—”

Kamellin’s reassurance was immediate;

I do not want your body. You have, Kamellin fumbled for a concept to express what he meant, you are a mature individual with a personality, a reasoning intelligence of your own. I would have to destroy that before your body could join with me in symbiosis. His thoughts flared indignation; That would not be honorable!

“I hope all your people are as honorable as you are, then. What happened to the other expedition?”

He felt black anger, sorrow and desolation, breaking like tidal waves in his brain. My people were maddened—I could not hold them back. They were not stable, what you would call, not sane. The time interval had been too long. There was much killing and death which I could not prevent.

“If I could only find some way to tell Reade—”

It would be of no use. A time ago, I tried that. I attempted to make contact, easily, with a young mind that was particularly receptive to my thought. He did not go insane, and we, together, tried to tell Captain Kingslander what had happened to the others. But he believed it was more insanity, and when the young man was killed by one of the others, I had to dissipate again. I tried to reach Captain Kingslander himself, but the thought drove him insane—he was already near madness with his own fear.

Andrew shuddered. “God!” he whispered. “What can we do?”

1 do not know. I will leave you, if you wish it. Our race is finally dying. In a few mare years we will be gone, and our planet will be safe for you.

“Kamellin, no!” Andrew’s protest was immediate and genuine. “Maybe, together, we can think of some way to convince them.”

The alien seemed hesitant now;

Would you be willing, then, to—share your body for a time? It will not be easy, it is never easy for two personalities to co-inhabit one body. I could not do it without your complete consent. Kamellin seemed to be thinking thoughts which were so alien that Andrew could grasp them only vaguely; only the concept of a meticulous honor remained to color his belief in Kamellin.

“What happened to your original host-race?”

He lay shivering beneath his heated blankets as the story unfolded in his mind. Kamellin’s race, he gathered, had been humanoid—as that concept expressed itself, he sensed Kamellin’s amusement; Rather, your race is martianoid! Yes, they had built the city the Earthmen called Xanadu, it was their one technological accomplishment which had been built to withstand time. Built in the hope that one day we might return and reclaim it from the sand again, Kamellin’s soundless voice whispered, The last refuge of our dying race.

“What did you call the city?”

Kamellin tried to express the phonetic equivalent and a curious sound formed on Andrew’s lips. He said it aloud, exploringly; “Shein-la Mahari.” His tongue lingered on the liquid syllables. “What does it mean?”

The city of Mahari—Mahari, the little moon. Andrew found his eyes resting on the satellite Earthmen called Deimos. “Shein-la Mahari,” he repeated. He would never call it Xanadu again.

Kamellin continued his story.

The host-race, Andrew gathered, had been long-lived and hardy, though by no means immortal. The minds and bodies—“minds,” he impressed on Andrew, was not exactly the right concept—were actually two separate, wholly individual components. When a body died, the “mind” simply transferred, without any appreciable interval, into a newborn host; memory, although slightly impaired and blurred by such a transition, was largely retained. So that the consciousness of any one individual might extend, though dimly, over an almost incredible period of time.

The dual civilization had been a simple, highly mentalized one, systems of ethics and philosophy superseding one another in place of the rise and fall of governments. The physical life of the hosts was not highly technological. Xanadu had been almost their only such accomplishment, last desperate expedient of a dying race against the growing inhospitality of a planet gripped in recurrent, ever-worsening ice ages. They might have survived the ice alone, but a virus struck and decimated the hosts, eliminating most of the food animals as well. The birth-rate sank almost to nothing; many of the freed minds dissipated for lack of a host-body in which to incarnate.

Kamellin had a hard time explaining the next step. His kind could inhabit the body of anything which “had life, animal or plant. But they were subject to the physical limitations of the hosts. The only animals which ‘survived disease and ice were the sand-mice and the moronic banshees; both so poorly organized, with nervous systems so faulty, that even when vitalized by the intelligence of Kamellin’s race, they were incapable of any development. It was similar, Kamellin explained, to a genius who is imprisoned in the body of a helpless paralytic; his mind undamaged, but his body wholly unable to respond.

A few of Kamellin’s people tried it anyhow, in desperation. But after a few generations of the animal hosts, they had degenerated terribly, and were in a state of complete nonsanity, unable even to leave the life-form to which they had bound themselves. For all Kamellin knew, some of his people still inhabited the banshees, making transition after transition by the faint, dim flicker of an instinct still alive, but hopelessly buried in generations of non-rational life.

The few sane survivors had decided, in the end, to enter the prickle-bushes; spinosa mortis. This was possible, although it, too, had drawbacks; the sacrifice of consciousness was the main factor in life as a plant. In the darkness of the Martian night, Andrew shuddered at Kamellin’s whisper;

Immortality—without hope. An endless, dreamless sleep. We live, somnolent, in the darkness, and the wind, and wait—and forget. We had hoped that some day a new race might evolve on this world. But evolution here reached a dead end with the banshees and sand-mice. They are perfectly adapted to their environment and they have no struggle to survive: hence they need not evolve and change. When the Earthmen came, we had hope. Not that we might take their bodies. Only that we might seek help from them. But we were too eager, and my people drove out— killed—

The flow of thoughts ebbed away into silence.

Andrew spoke at last, gently.

“Stay with me for a while, at least. Maybe we can find a way.”

It won’t be easy, Kamellin warned.

“We’ll try it, anyhow. How long ago—how long have you, well, been a plant?”

I do not know. Many, many generations—there is no consciousness of time. Many seasons. There is much blurring, Let me look at the stars with your eyes.

“Sure,” Andrew consented.

The sudden blackness took him by surprise, sent a spasm of shock and terror through his mind; then sight came back and he found himself sitting upright, staring wide-eyed at the stars, and heard Kamellin’s agonized thoughts;

It has been long—again the desperate, disturbing fumbling for some concept. It has been nine hundred thousand of your years!

Then silence; such abysmal grieved silence that Andrew was almost shamed before the naked grief of this man—he could not think of Kamellin except as a man—mourning for dead world. He lay down, quietly, not wanting to intrude on the sorrow of his curious companion.

Physical exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he fell asleep.

“Was Mars like this in your day, Kamellin?” Andrew tossed the question cynically into the silence in his brain. Around him a freezing wind shifted and tossed at the crags, assailing the grip of his gauntleted hands on rock. He didn’t expect any answer. The dark intruder had been dormant all day; Andrew, when he woke, had almost dismissed the whole thing as a bizarre fantasy, born of thin air and impending madness.

But now the strange presence, like a whisper in the dark, was with him again.

Our planet was never hospitable. But why have you never discovered the roadway through the mountains?

“Give us time,” Andrew said cynically. “We’ve only been on Mars a minute or two by your standards. What roadway?” We cut a roadway through the mountains when we built Shein-la Mahari.

“What about erosion? Would it still be there?” Kamellin had trouble grasping the concept of erosion. Rain and snow were foreign to his immediate experience. Unless the roadway had been blocked by a sandstorm, it should be there, as in Kamellin’s day.

Andrew pulled himself to a ledge. He couldn’t climb with Kamellin using part of his mind; the inner voice was distracting. He edged himself backward on a flat slab of rock, unstrapping his pack. The remnant of his morning coffee was hot in his canteen; he drank it while Kamellin’s thoughts flowed through his. Finally he asked, “Where’s this roadway?” Andrew’s head reeled in vertigo. He lay flat on the ledge, dizzily grasping rock, while Kamellin tried to demonstrate his sense of direction. The whirl slowly quieted, but all he could get from the brain-shaking experience was that Kamellin’s race had oriented themselves by at least eleven major compass points in what felt like four dimensions to Andrew’s experience, oriented on fixed stars—his original host-race could see the stars even by daylight.

“But I can’t, and anyway, the stars have moved.”

I have thought of that Kamellin answered. But this part: of the mountains is familiar to me. We are not far from the place. I will lead you there.

“Lead on, MacDufl^7.”

The concept is unfamiliar. Elucidate.

Andrew chuckled. “I mean, which way do we go from here?”

The vertigo began to overcome him once more.

“No, no—not that again!”

Then I will have to take over all your senses—

Andrew’s mental recoil was as instinctive as survival. The terror of that moment last night, when Kamellin forced him into nothingness, was still too vivid. “No! I suppose you could take over forcibly, you did once, but not without half killing me! Because this time I’d fight—I’d fight you like hell!”

Kamellin’s .rage was a palpable pain in his mind. Have you no honor of your own, fool from a mad world? How could I lie to you when my mind is part of your own? Wander as you please, I do not suffer and I am not impatient. I thought that you were weary of these rocky paths, no more!

Andrew felt bitterly ashamed. “Kamellin—I’m sorry.”

Silence, a trace of alien anger remaining.

Andrew suddenly laughed aloud. Alien or human, there were correspondences; Kamellin was sulking. “For goodness sake,” he said aloud, “if we’re going to share one body, let’s not quarrel. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings; this is all new to me. But you don’t have to sit in the corner and turn up your nose, either!”

The situation suddenly struck him as too ridiculous to take seriously; he laughed aloud, and like a slow, pleasant ripple, he felt Kamellin’s slow amusement strike through his own.

Forgive me if I offended. I am accustomed to doing as I please in a body I inhabit. 1 am here at your sufferance, and I offer apologies.

Andrew laughed again, in a curious doubled amusement, somehow eager to make amends. “Okay, Kamellin, take over. You know where I want to go—if you can get us there faster, hop to it.”

But for the rest of his life he remembered the next hour with terror. His only memory was of swaying darkness and dizziness, feeling his legs take steps he had not ordered, feeling his hands slide on rock and being unable to clutch and save himself, walking blind and deaf and a prisoner in his own skull; and ready to go mad with the horror of it. Curiously enough, the saving thought had been; Kamellin’s able to stand it. He isn’t going to hurt us.

When sight and sense and hearing came back, and full orientation with it, he found himself at the mouth of a long, low canyon which stretched away for about twelve miles, perfectly straight. It was narrow, less than fifteen feet wide. On either side, high dizzy cliffs were cut sharply away; he marvelled at the technology that had built this turnpike road.

The entrances were narrow, concealed between rock, and deeply drifted with sand; the hardest part had been descending, and later ascending, the steep, worn-away steps that led down into the floor of the canyon. He had struggled and cursed his way down the two-foot steps, wishing that the old Martians had had shorter legs; but once down, he had walked the whole length in less than two hours—travelling a distance, which Reade had covered in three weary days of rock-climbing.

And beside the steps was a ramp down which vehicles could be driven; had it been less covered with sand, Andrew could have slid down!

When he finally came to the end of the canyon road, the nearly-impassible double ridge of mountains lay behind him. From there it was a simple matter to strike due west and intersect the road from Mount Denver to the spaceport. There he camped overnight, awaiting the mailcar. He was awake with the first faint light, and lost no time in gulping a quick breakfast and strapping on his pack; for the mail-cars were rocket-driven (in the thin air of Mars, this was practical) and travelled at terrific velocities along the sandy barren flats; he’d have to be alert to flag it down.

He saw it long before it reached him, a tiny cloud of dust; he hauled off his jacket and, shivering in the freezing air, flagged furiously. The speck grew immensely, roared, braked to a stop; the driver thrust out a head that was only two goggled eyes over a heavy dustkerchief.

“Need a ride?”

Protocol on Mars demanded immediate identification.

“Andrew Slayton—I’m with the Geographic Society—Reade’s outfit back in the mountains at Xanadu. Going back to Mount Denver for the rest of the expedition.”

The driver gestured. “Climb on and hang on. I’ve heard about that gang. Reade’s Folly, huh?”

“That’s what they call it.” He settled himself on the seatless floor—like all Martian vehicles, the rocket-car was a bare chassis without doors, seats or sidebars, stripped ,to lower freight costs—and gripped the rail. The driver looked down at him, curiously;

“I heard about that place Xanadu. Jinxed, they say. You must be the first man since old Torchevsky, to go there and get back safe. Reade’s men all right?”

“They were fine when I left,” Andrew said.

“Okay. Hang on,” the driver warned, and at Andrew’s nod, cut in the rockets and the sand-car leaped forward, eating up the desert.

Mount Denver was dirty and smelly after the clean coldness of the mountains. Andrew found his way through the maze of army barracks and waited in the officers’ Rec quarters while a call-system located Colonel Reese Montray.

He hadn’t been surprised to find out that the head of the other half of the expedition was a Colonel in active service; after all, within the limits imposed by regulations, the Army was genuinely anxious for Reade to find something at Xanadu. A genuine discovery might make some impression on the bureaucrats back on Earth; they might be able to revive public interest in Mars, get “some more money and supplies instead of seeing everything diverted to Venus and Europa.

Montray was a tall thin man with a heavy Lunar Colony accent, the tiny stars of the Space Service glimmering above the Army chevrons on his sleeve. He gestured Andrew into a private office and Listened, with a bored look, up to the point where he left Reade; then began to shoot questions at him.

“Has he proper chemical testing equipment for the business? Protection against gas—chemicals?”

“I don’t think so,” Andrew said. He’d forgotten Reade’s theory about hallucinogens in spinosa mortis; so much had happened since that it didn’t seem to make much difference.

“Maybe we’d better get it to him. I can wind things up here in an hour or so, if I have to, I’ve only got to tell the Commander what’s going on. He’ll put me on detached duty. You can attend to things here at the Geographic Society Headquarters, can’t you, Slayton?”

Andrew said quietly, “I’m going back with you, Colonel Montray. And you won’t need gas equipment. I did make contact with one of the old Martians.”

Montray sighed and reached for the telephone. “You can tell Dr. Cranston all about it, over at the hospital.”

“I knew you’d think I was crazy,” Andrew said in resignation, “but I can show you a pass that will take you through the Double Ridge in three hours, not three days—less, if you have a sand-car.”

The Colonel’s hand was actually on the telephone, but he didn’t pick it up. He leaned back and looked at Andrew curiously. “You discovered this pass?”

“Well, yes and no, sir.” He told his story quickly, skipping over the parts about Kamellin, concentrating on the fact of the roadway. Montray heard him out in silence, then picked up the telephone, but he didn’t call the hospital. Instead he called an employment bureau in the poorer part of Mount Denver. While he waited for the connection he looked uncertainly at Andrew and muttered, “I’d have to go out there in a few weeks anyhow. They said, if Reade got well started, he could use Army equipment—” he broke off and spoke into the clicking phone.

“Montray here for the Geographic. I want twenty roughnecks for desert work. Have them here in two hours.” He held down the contact button, dialed again, this time to call Dupont, Mars Limited, and requisition a first-class staff chemist, top priority. The third call, while Andrew waited— admiring, yet resenting the smoothness with which Montray could pull strings, was to the Martian Geographic Society headquarters; then he heaved himself up out of his chair and said, “So that’s that. I’ll buy your story, Slayton. You go down—” he scrawled on a pink form, “and commandeer an Army sand-bus that will hold twenty roughnecks and equipment. If you’ve told the truth, the Reade expedition is already a success and the Army will take over. And if you haven’t—” he made a curt gesture of dismissal, and Andrew knew that if anything went wrong, he’d be better off in the psycho ward than anywhere Montray could get at him.

When Army wheels started to go round, they ran smoothly. Within five hours they were out of Mount Denver with an ease and speed which made Andrew—accustomed to the penny-pinching of Martian Geographic—gape in amazement. He wondered if this much string-pulling could have saved Kingslander. Crammed in the front seat of the sand-bus, between Montray and the Dupont chemist, Andrew reflected gloomily on the military mind and its effect on Reade. What would Reade say when he saw Andrew back again?

The wind was rising. A sandstorm on Mars makes the worst earthly wind look like a breeze to fly kites; the Army driver swore helplessly as he tried to see through the blinding sand, and the roughnecks huddled under a tarpaulin, coarse bandanas over their eyes, swearing in seven languages. The chemist braced his kit on his knees—he’d refused to trust it to the baggage-bins slung under the chassis next to the turbines—and pulled his dustkerchief over his eyes as the hurricane wind buffeted the sand-bus. Montray shouted above the roar, “Doesn’t that road of yours come out somewhere along here?”

Shielding his eyes, Andrew peered over the low windbreak and crouched again, wiping sand from his face. “Half a mile more.”

Montray tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Here.”

The bus roared to a stop and the wind, unchallenged by the turbine noise, took over in their ears.

Montray gripped his wrist. “Crawl back under the canvas and we’ll look at the map.”

Heads low, they crawled in among the roughnecks; Montray flashed a pocket light on the “map”, which was no more than a rough aerial photo taken by a low flier over the ridge. At one edge were a group of black dots which might or might not have been Xanadu, and the ridge itself was a confusing series of blobs; Andrew rubbed a gritty finger over the photo.

“Look, this is the route we followed; Reade’s Pass, we named it. Kingslander went this way; a thousand feet lower, but too much loose rock. The canyon is about here—that dark line could be it.”

“Funny the flier who took the picture didn’t see it.” Montray raised his voice. “All out—let’s march!”

“In’a dees’ weather?” protested a gloomy voice, touching off a chorus of protest. Montray was_ inflexible. “Reade might be in bad trouble. Packs, everybody.”

Grumbling, the roughnecks tumbled out and adjusted packs and dust-bandanas. Montray waved the map-photo at Andrew; “Want this?”

“I can find my way without it.”

A straggling disorderly line, they began, Andrew leading, He felt strong and confident. In his mind Kamellin lay dormant and that pleased him too; he needed every scrap of his mind to fight the screaming torment of the wind. It sifted its way through his bandana and ate into his skin, though he had greased his face heavily with lanolin before leaving the barracks. It worked, a gritty nuisance, through his jacket and his gloves. But it was his own kind of weather; Mars weather. It suited him, even though he swore as loud as anyone else.

Montray swore too, and spat grit from his throat.

“Where is this canyon of yours?”

A little break in the hillocky terrain led northward, then the trail angled sharply, turned into the lee of a bleak canyon wall. “Around there.” Andrew fell back, letting Montray lead, while he gave a hand to the old man from DuPont.

Montray’s angry grip jerked at his elbow; Andrew’s bandana slid down and sailed away on the storm, and the chemist stumbled and fell to his knees. Andrew bent and helped the old fellow to his feet before he thrust his head around to Montray and demanded, “What the hell is the big idea?”

“That’s what I’m asking you!” Montray’s furious voice shouted the storm down. Andrew half fell around the turn, hauled by Montray’s grip; then gulped, swallowing sand, while the wind bit unheeded at his naked cheeks. For there was now no trail through the ridge. Only a steep slope of rock lay before them, blank and bare, every crevice filled to the brim with deep-drifted sand.

Andrew turned to Montray, his jaw dropping. “I don’t understand this at all, sir,” he” gulped, and went toward the edge. There was no sign of ramp or steps.

“I do.” Montray bit his words off and spat them at Andrew. “You’re coming back to Mount Denver—under arrest!”

“Sir, I came through here yesterday! There was a wide track, a ramp, about eleven feet wide, and at one side there were steps, deep steps—” he moved toward the edge, seeking signs of the vanished trailway. Montray’s grip on his arm did not loosen. “Yeah, and a big lake full of pink lemonade down at the bottom. Okay, back to the bus.”

The roughnecks crowded behind ‘them, close to the deep-deep-drifted sand near the spires of rock Andrew had sighted as landmarks on either side of the canyon. One of them stepped past Montray, glaring at the mountain of sand.

“All the way out here for a looney!” he said in disgust.

He took another step—then suddenly started sinking-stumbled, flailed and went up to his waist in the loose-piled dust.

“Careful—get back—” Andrew yelled. “You’ll go in over your heads!” The words came without volition.

The man in the sand stopped in mid-yell, and his kicking arms stopped throwing up dust. He looked thoughtfully up at the other roughnecks. “Colonel”, he said slowly, “I don’t think Slayton’s so crazy. I’m standing on a step, and there’s another one under my knee. Here, dig me out.” He began to brush sand away with his two hands. “Big steps—”

Andrew let out a yell of exultation, bending to haul the man free. “That’s IT,” he shouted. “The sandstorm last night just blew a big drift into the mouth of the canyon, that’s all! If we could get through this drift, the rest lies between rock walls and around the next angle, the sand can’t blow!”

Montray pulled binoculars from his pocket and focused them carefully. “In farther, I do see a break in the slope that looks like a canyon,” he said. “If you look at it quick, it seems to be just a flat patch; but with the glasses, you can see that it goes down between walls . . . but there’s a hundred feet of sand, at least, drifted into the entrance, and it might as well be a hundred miles. We can’t wade through that.” He frowned, looking around at the sandbus. “How wide did you say this canyon was?”

“About fifteen feet. The ramp’s about eleven feet wide.”

Montray’s brow ridged. “These busses are supposed to cross drifts up to eighty feet We’ll chance it. Though if I take an army sandbus in there, and get it stuck in a drift, we might as well pack for space.”

Andrew felt grim as they piled back into the bus. Montray displaced the driver and took the controls himself. He gave the mail} rocket high power; the bus shot forward, its quickly-extruded glider units sliding lightly, without traction, over the drifted sand. It skidded a little as Montray gunned it for the turn;, the chassis hit the drift like a ton of lead. Swearing prayerfully, Montray slammed on the auxiliary rockets, and it roared—whined—sprayed up sand like a miniature sirocco, then, mercifully, the traction lessened, the gliders began to function, and the sandbus skied lightly across the drift and down the surface of the monster ramp, into the canyon.

It seemed hours, but actually it was less than four minutes before the glider units scraped rock and Montray shut off the power and called two men to help him wind up the retractors . . . The gliders could be shot out at a moment’s notice, because on Mars when they were needed, they were needed fast, but retracting them again was a long, slow business. He craned his neck over the windbreak, looking up at the towering walls, leaning at a dizzy angle over them. He whistled sharply. “This is no natural formation!”

“I told you it wasn’t,” Andrew said.

The man from Dupont scowled. “Almost anything can be a natural formation, in rock,” he contradicted. “You say you discovered this pass, Slayton?”

Andrew caught Montray’s eye and said meekly, “Yes, sir.”

The sandbus cruised easily along the canyon floor, and up the great ramp at the other end; Montray drove stubbornly, his chin thrust out. Once he said, “Well, at least the Double Ridge—isn’t a barricade any more,” and once he muttered, “You could have discovered this by accident—delirious—and then rationalized it. . . .”

The Martian night was hanging, ready to fall, when the squat towers of the city reared up, fat and brown, against the horizon. From that distance they could see nothing of Reade’s camp except a thin trail of smoke, clear against the purplish twilight. Vague unease stirred Andrew’s mind and for the first time in hours, Kamellin’s thoughts flickered dimly alive in the corridors of his brain.

I am fearful. There is trouble.

Montray shouted, and Andrew jerked up his head in dismay, then leaped headlong from the still-moving sandbus. He ran across the sand. Reade’s tent lay in a smoking ruin on the red sand. His throat tight with dread, Andrew knelt and gently turned up the heavy form that lay, unmoving, beside the charred ruin.

Fat Kater had lost more than his shirt.

Montray finally stood up and beckoned three of the roughnecks. “Better bury him here,” he said heavily, “and see if there’s anything left unburned.”

One of the men had turned aside and was noisily getting rid of everything he’d eaten for a week. Andrew felt like doing the same, but Montray’s hand was heavy on his shoulder.

“Easy,” he said. “No, I don’t suspect you. He hasn’t been dead more than an hour. Reade sent you away before it started, evidently.” He gave commands; “No one else seems to have died in the fire. Spread out, two arid two, and look for Reade’s men.” He glanced at the sun, hovering too close to the horizon; half an hour of sunlight, and Phobos would give light for another couple of hours—he said grimly, “After that, we get back to the bus and get out of here, fast. We can come back tomorrow, but we’re not going to wander around here by Deimos-light.” He unholstered his pistol.

Don’t, said the eerie mentor in Andrew’s brain, no weapons.

Andrew said urgently, “Colonel, have the roughnecks turn in their pistols! Kingslander’s men killed each other pretty much like this!”

“And suppose someone meets a banshee? And Reade’s men all have pistols, and if they’re wandering around, raving mad—”

The next hour was nightmarish, dark phantoms moving shoulder to shoulder across the rock-needled ground; muttered words, far away the distant screams of a banshee somewhere. Once the crack of a pistol cut the night; it developed—after the roughnecks had all come running in, and half a dozen random shots had been fired, fortunately wounding no one—that one man had mistaken a rock-spire for a banshee. Montray cursed the man and sent him back to the sandbus with blistered ears. The sun dropped out of sight. Phobos, a vast purple balloon, sketched the towers of the city in faint shadows on the sand. The wind wailed and flung sand at the crags.

An abrupt shout of masculine hysteria cut the darkness; Montray jumped, stumbled and swore. “If this is another false alarm—”

It wasn’t. Somebody flashed an electric torch on the sand; Mike Fairbanks, a bullet hole cleanly through his temple, lay on the sand that was only a little redder than his blood.

That left Hansen, Webber—and John Reade.

I can find them: let me find them! Before something worse happens—

“Sir, I think I can find the others. I told you about Kamellin. This proves—”

“Proves nothing,” grunted Montray. “But go ahead.” Andrew felt coldly certain that inside the pocket of his leathers, Montray’s finger was crooked around a trigger trained on his heart. Tense and terrified, Andrew let Kamellin lead him. How did he know that this was not an elaborate trap for the Earthmen? For Kamellin led them straight beneath the walls of the city and to an open door—an open door, and three expeditions had blasted without success!

One of my people has taken over one of your men. He must have found the hidden door. If only he is still sane, we have a bare chance. ...

“Stop there,” Montray ordered curtly.

“Stop there,” echoed a harsh wild voice, and the disheveled figure of John Reade, hatless, his jacket charred, appeared in the doorway. “Andrew!” His distorted shout broke into a sobbing gasp of relief, and he pitched headlong into Andrew’s arms. “Andy, thank God you’re here! They—shot me—”

Andrew eased him gently to the ground. Montray bent over the old man, urging, “Tell us what happened, John.” “Shot in the side—Andy you were right—something got

Spade first, then Kater fired the tent—Spade rushed him, shot Mike Fairbanks—then—then, Andy, it got me, it sneaked inside me, inside my head when I wasn’t looking, inside my head—”

His” head lolled on Andrew’s shoulder.

Montray let go his wrist with a futile gesture. “He’s hurt pretty bad. Delirious.”

“His head’s as clear as mine. He’s fainted, that’s all,” Andrew protested. “If we bring him around, he can tell us—”

“He’ll be in no shape to answer questions,” said the scientist from Dupont, very definitely, “not for a long time. Montray, round up the men; we’ve got to get out of here in a hurry—”

“Look out!” shouted somebody. A pistol shot crashed and the scream of an injured man raised wild echoes. Andrew felt his heart suck and turn over; then he suddenly sank into blindness and felt himself leap to his feet and run toward the voices. Kamellin had taken over!

Spade Hansen, tottering on his feet, stumbled toward them. His shirt hung raggedly in charred fragments. Through some alien set of senses, like seeing double, Andrew sensed the presence of another, one of Kamellin’s kind.

If I can get through to him—”

Montray cocked, levelled his pistol.

“Hansen!” His voice cracked a whip, “stand where you are!”

Spade yelled something.

“Po’ki hai marrai nic Mahari—”

“You fool! They are afraid of us! Stand back!

Spade flung himself forward and threw his pistol to the ground at Andrew’s feet. “Kamellin!” .he screamed, but the voice was not his own. Andrew’s heart thudded. He stepped forward, letting the dark intruder in his mind take over all his senses again. A prisoner, he heard the alien voice shouting, felt his throat spewing forth alien syllables. There were

shouts, a despairing howl, then somewhere two pistols cracked together and Andrew flickered back to full consciousness to see Hansen reel, stumble and fall inert. Andrew sagged, swayed; Montray held him upright, and Andrew whispered incredulously, “You shot him!”

“I didn’t,” Montray insisted. “Rick Webber burst out of that doorway—fired into the crowd. Then—”

“Is Rick dead too?”

“As a doornail.” Montray gently lowered the younger man to the sand beside Reade. “You were raving yourself, for a minute, young Slayton.” He shouted angrily at the roughneck who had shot, “You didn’t have to kill Webber! A bullet in the leg would have stopped him!”

“He ran right on me with the gun—”

Montray sighed and struck his forehead with his clenched hands. “Somebody made a stretcher for Reade and one for the kid here.”

“I’m all right.” Andrew shoved Montray’s hand aside; bent to look at Reade.

“He’s in a bad way,” the man from Dupont said “We’d better get them both back to Mount Denver while there’s time.” He looked sharply at Andrew. “You had better take it easy, too. You went shouting mad yourself, for a minute.” He stood up, turning to Montray.

“I think my theory is correct. Virus strains can live almost indefinitely where the air is dry. If such a plague killed off the people who built the city, it would explain why everyone who’s come up here has caught it—homicidal and suicidal.”

“That isn’t it—”

Montray checked him forcibly. “Slayton, you’re a sick man too. You’ll have to trust our judgment,” he said. He tucked his own coat around Reade and stood up, his face gray in the fading moonlight. “I’m going to the governor,” he said, “and have this place put off limits. Forty-two men dead of an unknown Martian virus, that’s too much. Until we get the money and the men to launch a full-scale medical project and knock it out, there won’t be any more private expeditions—or public ones, either. The hell with Xanadu.” He cocked his pistol and fired the four-shot signal to summon any stragglers.

Two of the men improvised a stretcher and began to carry Reade’s inert Body toward the sandbus. Andrew walked close, steadying the old man’s limp form with his hands. He was beginning to doubt himself. Under the setting moon, the sand biting his face, he began to ask himself if Montray had been right. Had he dreamed, then rationalized? Had he dreamed Kamellin? Kamellin? he asked.

There was no answer from the darkness in his mind. Andrew smiled grimly, his arm easing Reade’s head in the rude litter. If Kamellin had ever been there, he was gone, and there was no way to prove any of it—and it didn’t matter any more.

“... therefore, with regret, I am forced to move that project Xanadu be shelved indefinitely,” Reade concluded. His face was grim and resigned, still thin from his long illness. “The Army’s attitude is inflexible, and lacking men, medics and money, it seems that the only thing to do with Xanadu is to stay away from it.”

“It goes without saying,” said the man at the head of the table, “that we all appreciate what Major Reade and Mr. Slayton have been through. Gentlemen, no one likes to quit. But in the face of this, I have no alternative but to second Major Reade’s suggestion. Gentlemen, I move that the Martian chapter of the Geographic Society be closed out, and all equipment and personnel transferred to Aphrodite Base Twelve, South Venus.”

The vote was carried without dissent, and Reade and Andrew, escaping the bombardment of questions, drifted into the cold sunlight of the streets. They walked for a long time without speaking. Reade said at last:

“Andy, we did everything we could. Montray put his own commission in jeopardy for us. But this project has cost millions already. We’ve just hit the bottom of the barrel, that’s all.”

Andrew hunched his shoulders. “I could be there in three days.”

“I’d like to try it, too.” Reade sounded grim. “ But forget it, Andy. Shein-la Mahara is madness and death. Forget it. Go home—”

“Home? Home where? To Earth?” Andrew broke off, staring. What had Reade said?

“Say that again. The name of the city.*”

“Shein-la Mahari, the city of—” Reade gulped. “What in the hell—” he looked at Andy in despair. “I thought I could forget, convince myself it never happened. It left me when Hansen shot me. We’ve got to forget it, Andy—at least until we’re on the ship going home.”

“Ship, hell! We’re not going back to Earth, Reade!”

“Here, here,” said Reade, irritably, ‘”Who’s not going?”

Andrew subsided, thinking deeply. Then, with a flash of inspiration, he turned to Reade. “John, who owns the Society’s test animals?”

Reade rubbed his forehead. “Nobody, I guess. They sure won’t bother shipping a few dogs and chimps out to Venus! I’ve got authority to release them—I guess I’ll turn them over to Medic. Why? You want a dog? A monkey? What for?” He stopped in his tracks, glaring. “What bug have you got in your brain now?”

“Never mind. You’re going back to Earth by the next ship.”

“Don’t be in such a rush,” Reade grumbled, “The Erden-luft won’t blast for a week.”

Andrew grinned. “John, those animals are pretty highly organized. I wonder—”

Reade’s eyes met his in sudden comprehension. “Good lord, I never thought of that! Come on, let’s hurry!”

At the deserted shack where the Society’s animals were kept, a solitary keeper glanced indifferently at Reade’s credentials and let them in. Reade and Andrew passed the dogs without comment, glanced at and rejected the one surviving goat, and passed on to the caged chimpanzees.

“Well, either I’m crazy or this is it,” he said, and listened for that inner answer, the secret intruder in his brain. And after a long time, dimly, it came as if Kamellin could not at once reestablish lapsed contact.

I should have left you. There is no hope now, and I would rather die with my people than survive as a prisoner in your mind.

“No!” Andrew swung to face the chimpanzee. “Could you enter that living creature without his consent?”

There was a tightness across his diaphragm, as if it were his own fate, not Kamellin’s, that was being decided.

That creature could not give consent.

“I’m sorry, I tried—”

Kamellin’s excitement almost burst into speech. No, no, he is perfectly suited, for he is highly organized, but lacking intelligence—

“A chimp’s intelligent—”

A shade of impatience, as if Kamellin were explaining to a dull child; A brain, yes, but he lacks something—will, spirit, soul, volition—

“A chimp can be taught to do almost anything a man can—”

Except talk, communicate, use real reason. Yo« cannot entirely grasp this either, I know. It was the first time Andrew had been allowed to glimpse the notion that Kamellin did not consider Andrew his complete equal. The banshees are the first stage: A physical brain, consciousness, but no intelligence. They cannot be organized. Then your creature, your primate mammal, intelligence but no soul. However, when vitalized by true reason. . . . Kamellin’s thought-stream cut off abruptly, but not before Andrew had caught the concept, What does the Earthman think he is, anyhow?

Kamellin’s thoughts were troubled; Forgive me, I had no right to give you that. . .

“Inferiority complex?” Andrew laughed.

You do not function on the level of your soul. ‘You’re aware almost exclusively in your five senses and your reasoning intelligence. But your immortal mind is somehow stunted: You humans have slid into a differed time-track somehow, and you live only in three dimensions, losing memory—

“I don’t believe in the soul, Kamellin.”

That is the point I am trying to make, Andrew.

Reade touched his shoulder. “You give me the creeps, talking to yourself. What now?”

They picked out a large male chimp and sat looking at it while it grimaced at them with idiotic mildness. Andrew felt faint distaste. “Kamellin in that thing?”

Reade chuckled. “Quit being anthropomorphic. That thing is a heck of a lot better adapted to We on Mars than you are—look at the size of the chest—and Kamellin will know it, if you don’t!” He paused. “After the switch, how can we communicate with Kamellin?”

Andrew relayed the question, puzzled. Finally he said, “I’m not sure. We’re using straight thoughts and he can’t get any notion of the -form of our language, any more than I can of his. Reade, can a chimp learn to talk?”

“No chimp ever has.”

“I mean, if a chimp did have the intelligence, the reasoning power, the drive to communicate in symbols or language, would its vocal cords and the shape of his mouth permit it!”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Reade said, “I’m no expert on monkey anatomy, though. I wouldn’t bet against it either. Why? Going to teach Kamellin English?”

“Once he leaves me, there won’t be any way to communicate except the roughest sort of sign language!”

“Andy, we’ve got to figure out some way! We can’t let that knowledge be lost to us! Here we have a chance at direct contact with a mind that was alive when the city was built—”

“That’s not the important part,” Andrew said. “Ready, Kamellin?”

Yes. And I thank you eternally. Your world and mine lie apart, but we have been brothers. I salute you, my friend. The voice went still. The room reeled, went into a sick bluer—

“Are you all right?” Reade peered anxiously down at Andrew. Past him, they both realized that the big chimpanzee—no, Kamellin!—was looking over Reade’s shoulder. Not the idiot stare of the monkey. Not human, either. Even the posture of the animal was different.

Andrew—recognized—Kamellin.

And the—difference—in his mind, was gone.

Reade was staring; “Andy, when you fell, he jumped forward and caught you! No monkey would do that!”

Kamellin made an expressive movement of his hands.

Andrew said, “A chimp’s motor reflexes are marvelous, with a human—no, a better than human intelligence, there’s practically no limit to what he can do.” He said, tentatively, “Kamellin?”

“Will the chimp recognize that?”

“Look, Reade—will you remember something, as a favor to me? He—the chimp—is not a freak monkey! He is Kamellin—my close personal friend—and a damned sight more intelligent than either of us!”

Reade dropped his eyes. “I’ll try.”

“Kamellin?”

And Kamellin spoke. Tentatively, hoarsely, mouthily, as if with unfamiliar vocal equipment, he spoke. “An—drew,” he said slowly. “Shein. La. Mahari.” They had each reached the extent of their vocabulary in the other’s language. Kamellin walked to the other cages, with the chimpanzee’s rolling scamper which somehow had, at the same time, a controlled and fluid dignity that was absolutely new. Reade dropped on a bench. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “But do you realize what you’ve done, Andrew? A talking monkey. At best, they’d call us a fraud. At. worst the scientists would end up dissecting him. Well never be able to prove anything or tell anyone!”

“I saw that all along,” Andrew said bitterly, and dropped to the bench. Kamellin came and squatted beside them, alert, with an easy stillness.

Suddenly Andrew looked up. “There are about twenty chimps. Not enough. But there’s a good balance, male to female, and they can keep up a good birth rate—”

“What in the—”

“Look,” Andrew said excitedly, “it’s more important to preserve the Martian race—the last few sane ones—than to try convincing the Society—; we probably couldn’t anyhow. We’ll take the chimps to Shein-la Mahari. Earthmen never go there, so they won’t be molested for a while, anyhow— probably not for a hundred years or so! By that time, they’ll have been able to—to reclaim their race a little, gain back their culture, and there’ll be a colony of intelligent beings, monkeylike in form but not monkeyish. We can leave records of this. In a hundred years or so—”

Reade looked at him hesitantly, his imagination gripped, against his will, by Andrew’s vision. “Could they survive?”

“Kamellin told me that the city was—time-sealed, he called it, and in perfect order.” He looked down at the listening stillness of Kamellin and was convinced that the

Martian understood; certainly Kamellin’s reception of telepathy must be excellent, even if Andrew’s was not.

“It was left that way—waiting for a race they could use, if one evolved. Chimps have terrific dexterity, once they’re guided by intelligence. They made their food chemically, by solar power, and there are heat units, records—just waiting.”

Reade stood up and started counting the chimpanzees. “We’ll probably lose our jobs and our shirts—but well try it, Andy. Go borrow a sandbus—I’ve still got good contacts.” He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket, then added grimly, “But don’t forget; we’ve still got to be on the Erdenluft when it lifts off.”

“We’ll be on it.”

Once again Andrew Slayton stood on the needled desert for a last look at the squat towers of Shein-la Mahari. He knew he would never come back.

Reade, his white shock of hair bent, stood beside him. Around them the crowd of Martians stood motionless, with a staid dignity greater than human, quietly waiting.

“No,” Reade said half to himself, “it wouldn’t work, Andy. Kamellin might take a chance on you, but you’d both regret it.”

Andrew did not move or answer, still looking hungrily up at the glareless ramparts. If I could only write a book about it, he was thinking. The day they had spent had been what every inter-planetary archaeologist dreams about in his most fantastic conjectures. The newly-incarnate Martians had been gratefully receptive to Reade’s expressive sign-language and the tour of the city was a thing past all their wildest imagination.

Beneath the sand of centuries Shein-la Mahari was more than a city; it was a world. Never would they forget the heart-stopping thrill when a re-inhabited Martian, working with skill and inhuman awareness, had uncovered the ancient machinery of the water supply, connected to the miles-deep underground lakes, and turned great jets of water into hydroponic gardens; seeds long in storage had instantly bubbled into Sprouting life. A careful engineer, her monkeylike paws working with incredible skill, had set sealed power units to humming. Rations, carefully time-sealed against emergency, were still edible. Reade and Andrew had shared the strangest meal of their lives with twenty-odd Martians—and it was not the suddenly-controlled chimpanzees whose table manners had seemed odd. Martian conventions were a cultural pattern of unbelievable stability.

Nor would he ever forget the great library of glyphs inscribed on flexible sheets of Vanadium, the power-room of throbbing machinery—

“Forget it,” Reade said roughly, “they’ll probably send us to Titan—and who knows what we’ll find there?”

“Yeah. We’ve got a spaceship to catch.” Andrew climbed into the sandcar, leaning out to grasp Kamellin’s paw—sensing that the Martian would understand the gesture, if not the words. “Goodbye, Kamellin. Good luck to all of you.” He cut the rockets in and shot away in a thunderstorm of sand. He drove fast and dangerously. He would never see Shein-la Mahari again. He would leave Mars, probably forever. And forever he would be alone. ...

“They’ll make out,” said Reade gruffly, and put an arm around his shoulders. To his intense horror, Andrew discovered that he was blinking back scalding tears.

“Sure,” he made himself say. “In a few hundred years they’ll be way ahead of Earth. Look what seventy-odd pilgrims did in North America, on our own planet! Synthetics-power—maybe even interstellar travel. They’d visited Earth once, before the plagues that killed them, Kamellin told me.” The sandcar roared around the rock-wall and Shein-la Mahari was gone. Behind them Andrew heard a rumble and a dull, groundshaking thunder. The pass behind them crashed in ruin; the Ridge was impassable again. Kamellin and his Martians would have their chance, unmolested by Earthmen, for at least a few years—

“I wonder,” Reade mused, “which race will discover the other first... ?

The Door Through Space

Author's Note

I’ve always wanted to write. But not until I discovered the old pulp science-fantasy magazines, at the age of sixteen, did this general desire become a specific urge to write science-fantasy adventures.

I took a lot of detours on the way. I discovered s-f in its golden age: the age of Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Ed Hamilton and Jack Vance. But while I was still collecting rejection slips for my early efforts, the fashion changed. Adventures on faraway worlds and strange dimensions went out of fashion, and the new look in science-fiction—emphasis on the science—came in.

So my first stories were straight science-fiction, and I’m not trying to put down that kind of story. It has its place. By and large, the kind of science-fiction which makes tomorrow’s headlines as near as this morning’s coffee, has enlarged popular awareness of the modern, miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of young people feel at ease with a rapidly changing world.

But fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science-fiction are willing to wait for tomorrow to read tomorrow’s headlines. Once again, I think, there is a place, a wish, a need and hunger for the wonder and color of the world way out. The world beyond the stars. The world we won’t live to see. That is why I wrote THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE.

—Marion Zimmer Bradley

Chapter One

Beyond the spaceport gates, the men of the Kharsa were hunting down a thief. I heard the shrill cries, the pad-padding of feet in strides just a little too long and loping to be human, raising echoes all down the dark and dusty streets leading up to the main square.

But the square itself lay empty in the crimson noon of Wolf. Overhead the dim red ember of Phi Coronis, Wolf’s old and dying sun, gave out a pale and heatless light. The pair of Spaceforce guards at the gates, wearing the black leathers of the Terran Empire, shockers holstered at their belts, were drowsing under the arched gateway where the star-and-rocket emblem proclaimed the domain of Terra. One of them, a snub-nosed youngster only a few weeks out from Earth, cocked an inquisitive ear at the cries and scuffling feet, then jerked his head at me.

“Hey, Cargill, you can talk their lingo. What’s going on out there?”

I stepped out past the gateway to listen. There was still no one to be seen in the square. It lay white and windswept, a barricade of emptiness; to one side the spaceport and the white skyscraper of the Terran Headquarters, and at the other side, the clutter of low buildings, the street-shrine, the little spaceport cafe smelling of coffee and jaco, and the dark opening mouths of streets that rambled down into the Kharsa—the old town, the native quarter. But I was alone in the square with the shrill cries—closer now, raising echoes from the enclosing walls—and the loping of many feet down one of the dirty streets.

Then I saw him running, dodging, a hail of stones flying round his head; someone or something small and cloaked and agile. Behind him the still-faceless mob howled and threw stones. I could not yet understand the cries; but they were out for blood, and I knew it.

I said briefly, “Trouble coming,” just before the mob spilled out into the square. The fleeing dwarf stared about wildly for an instant, his head jerking from side to side so rapidly that it was impossible to get even a fleeting impression of his face—human or nonhuman, familiar or bizarre. Then, like a pellet loosed from its sling, he made straight for the gateway and safety.

And behind him the loping mob yelled and howled and came pouring over half the square. Just half. Then by that sudden intuition which permeates even the most crazed mob with some semblance of reason, they came to a ragged halt, heads turning from side to side.

I stepped up on the lower step of the Headquarters building, and looked them over.

Most of them were chaks, the furred man-tall nonhumans of the Kharsa, and not the better class. Their fur was unkempt, their tails naked with filth and disease. Their leather aprons hung in tatters. One or two in the crowd were humans, the dregs of the Kharsa. But the star-and-rocket emblem blazoned across the spaceport gates sobered even the wildest blood-lust somewhat; they milled and shifted uneasily in their half of the square.

For a moment I did not see where their quarry had gone. Then I saw him crouched, not four feet from me, in a patch of shadow. Simultaneously the mob saw him, huddled just beyond the gateway, and a howl of frustration and rage went ringing round the square. Someone threw a stone. It zipped over my head, narrowly missing me, and landed at the feet of the black-leathered guard. He jerked his head up and gestured with the shocker which had suddenly come unholstered.

The gesture should have been enough. On Wolf, Terran law has been written in blood and fire and exploding atoms; and the line is drawn firm and clear. The men of Spaceforce do not interfere in the old town, or in any of the native cities. But when violence steps over the threshold, passing the blazon of the star and rocket, punishment is swift and terrible. The threat should have been enough.

Instead a howl of abuse went up from the crowd.

“Terranan!”

“Son of the Ape!”

The Spaceforce guards were shoulder to shoulder behind me now. The snub-nosed kid, looking slightly pale, called out. “Get inside the gates, Cargill! If I have to shoot—“

The older man motioned him to silence. “Wait. Cargill,” he called.

I nodded to show that I heard.

“You talk their lingo. Tell them to haul off! Damned if I want to shoot!”

I stepped down and walked into the open square, across the crumbled white stones, toward the ragged mob. Even with two armed Spaceforce men at my back, it made my skin crawl, but I flung up my empty hand in token of peace:

“Take your mob out of the square,” I shouted in the jargon of the Kharsa. “This territory is held in compact of peace! Settle your quarrels elsewhere!”

There was a little stirring in the crowd. The shock of being addressed in their own tongue, instead of the Terran Standard which the Empire has forced on Wolf, held them silent for a minute. I had learned that long ago: that speaking in any of the languages of Wolf would give me a minute’s advantage.

But only a minute. Then one of the mob yelled, “We’ll go if you give’m to us! He’s no right to Terran sanctuary!”

I walked over to the huddled dwarf, miserably trying to make himself smaller against the wall. I nudged him with my foot.

“Get up. Who are you?”

The hood fell away from his face as he twitched to his feet. He was trembling violently. In the shadow of the hood I saw a furred face, a quivering velvety muzzle, and great soft golden eyes which held intelligence and terror.

“What have you done? Can’t you talk?”

He held out the tray which he had shielded under his cloak, an ordinary peddler’s tray. “Toys. Sell toys. Children. You got’m?”

I shook my head and pushed the creature away, with only a glance at the array of delicately crafted manikins, tiny animals, prisms and crystal whirligigs. “You’d better get out of here. Scram. Down that street.” I pointed.

A voice from the crowd shouted again, and it had a very ugly sound. “He is a spy of Nebran!”

“Nebran—“ The dwarfish nonhuman gabbled something then doubled behind me. I saw him dodge, feint in the direction of the gates, then, as the crowd surged that way, run for the street-shrine across the square, slipping from recess to recess of the wall. A hail of stones went flying in that direction. The little toy-seller dodged into the street-shrine.

Then there was a hoarse “Ah, aaah!” of terror, and the crowd edged away, surged backward. The next minute it had begun to melt away, its entity dissolving into separate creatures, slipping into the side alleys and the dark streets that disgorged into the square. Within three minutes the square lay empty again in the pale-crimson noon.

The kid in black leather let his breath go and swore, slipping his shocker into its holster. He stared and demanded profanely, “Where’d the little fellow go?”

“Who knows?” the other shrugged. “Probably sneaked into one of the alleys. Did you see where he went, Cargill?”

I came slowly back to the gateway. To me, it had seemed that he ducked into the street-shrine and vanished into thin air, but I’ve lived on Wolf long enough to know you can’t trust your eyes here. I said so, and the kid swore again, gulping, more upset than he wanted to admit. “Does this kind of thing happen often?”

“All the time,” his companion assured him soberly, with a sidewise wink at me. I didn’t return the wink.

The kid wouldn’t let it drop. “Where did you learn their lingo, Mr. Cargill?”

“I’ve been on Wolf a long time,” I said, spun on my heel and walked toward Headquarters. I tried not to hear, but their voices followed me anyhow, discreetly lowered, but not lowered enough.

“Kid, don’t you know who he is? That’s Cargill of the Secret Service! Six years ago he was the best man in Intelligence, before—“ The voice lowered another decibel, and then there was the kid’s voice asking, shaken, “But what the hell happened to his face?”

I should have been used to it by now. I’d been hearing it, more or less behind my back, for six years. Well, if my luck held, I’d never hear it again. I strode up the white steps of the skyscraper, to finish the arrangements that would take me away from Wolf forever. To the other end of the Empire, to the other end of the galaxy—anywhere, so long as I need not wear my past like a medallion around my neck, or blazoned and branded on what was left of my ruined face.

Chapter Two

The Terran Empire has set its blazon on four hundred planets circling more than three hundred suns. But no matter what the color of the sun, the number of moons overhead, or the geography of the planet, once you step inside a Headquarters building, you are on Earth. And Earth would be alien to many who called themselves Earthmen, judging by the strangeness I always felt when I stepped into that marble-and-glass world inside the skyscraper. I heard the sound of my steps ringing into thin resonance along the marble corridor, and squinted my eyes, readjusting them painfully to the cold yellowness of the lights.

The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome and polished steel, mirrors and windows and looming electronic clerical machines. Most of one wall was taken up by a TV monitor which gave a view of the spaceport; a vast open space lighted with blue-white mercury vapor lamps, and a chained-down skyscraper of a starship, littered over with swarming ants. The process crew was getting the big ship ready for skylift tomorrow morning. I gave it a second and then a third look. I’d be on it when it lifted.

Turning away from the monitored spaceport, I watched myself stride forward in the mirrored surfaces that were everywhere; a tall man, a lean man, bleached out by years under a red sun, and deeply scarred on both cheeks and around the mouth. Even after six years behind a desk, my neat business clothes—suitable for an Earthman with a desk job—didn’t fit quite right, and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet, approximating the lean stooping walk of a Dry-towner from the Coronis plains.

The clerk behind the sign marked TRANSPORTATION was a little rabbit of a man with a sunlamp tan, barricaded by a small-sized spaceport of desk, and looking as if he liked being shut up there. He looked up in civil inquiry.

“Can I do something for you?”

“My name’s Cargill. Have you a pass for me?”

He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional spacemen, which I obviously wasn’t. “Let me check my records,” he hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the glassy surface. Shadows came and went, and I saw myself half-reflected, a tipsy shadow in a flurry of racing colors. The pattern finally stabilized and the clerk read off names.

“Brill, Cameron ... ah, yes. Cargill, Race Andrew, Department 38, transfer transportation. Is that you?”

I admitted it and he started punching more buttons when the sound of the name made connection in whatever desk-clerks use for a brain. He stopped with his hand halfway to the button.

“Are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? The Race Cargill?”

“It’s right there,” I said, gesturing wearily at the projected pattern under the glassy surface.

“Why, I thought—I mean, everybody took it for granted—that is, I heard—“

”You thought Cargill had been killed a long time ago because his name never turned up in news dispatches any more?” I grinned sourly, seeing my image dissolve in blurring shadows, and feeling the long-healed scar on my mouth draw up to make the grin hideous. “I’m Cargill, all right. I’ve been up on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any clerk could handle. You for instance.”

He gaped. He was a rabbit of a man who had never stepped out of the safe familiar boundaries of the Terran Trade City. “You mean you’re the man who went to Charin in disguise, and routed out The Lisse? The man who scouted the Black Ridge and Shainsa? And you’ve been working at a desk upstairs all these years? It’s—hard to believe, sir.”

My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing it. “The pass?”

“Right away, sir.” He punched buttons and a printed chip of plastic extruded from a slot on the desk top. “Your fingerprint, please?” He pressed my finger into the still-soft surface of the plastic, indelibly recording the print; waited a moment for it to harden, then laid the chip in the slot of a pneumatic tube. I heard it whoosh away.

“They’ll check your fingerprint against that when you board the ship. Skylift isn’t till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process crew finishes with her.” He glanced at the monitor screen, where the swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile spacecraft. “It will be another hour or two. Where are you going, Mr. Cargill?”

“Some planet in the Hyades Cluster. Vainwal, I think, something like that.”

“What’s it like there?”

“How should I know?” I’d never been there either. I only knew that Vainwal had a red sun, and that the Terran Legate could use a trained Intelligence officer. And not pin him down to a desk.

There was respect, and even envy in the little man’s voice. “Could I—buy you a drink before you go aboard, Mr. Cargill?”

“Thanks, but I have a few loose ends to tie up.” I didn’t, but I was damned if I’d spend my last hour on Wolf under the eyes of a deskbound rabbit who preferred his adventure safely secondhand.

But after I’d left the office and the building, I almost wished I’d taken him up on it. It would be at least an hour before I could board the starship, with nothing to do but hash over old memories, better forgotten.

The sun was lower now. Phi Coronis is a dim star, a dying star, and once past the crimson zenith of noon, its light slants into a long pale-reddish twilight. Four of Wolf’s five moons were clustered in a pale bouquet overhead, mingling thin violet moonlight into the crimson dusk.

The shadows were blue and purple in the empty square as I walked across the stones and stood looking down one of the side streets.

A few steps, and I was in an untidy slum which might have been on another world from the neat bright Trade City which lay west of the spaceport. The Kharsa was alive and reeking with the sounds and smells of human and half-human life. A naked child, diminutive and golden-furred, darted between two of the chinked pebble-houses, and disappeared, spilling fragile laughter like breaking glass.

A little beast, half snake and half cat, crawled across a roof, spread leathery wings, and flapped to the ground. The sour pungent reek of incense from the open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a hulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glare as I passed.

I turned, retracing my steps. There was no danger, of course, so close to the Trade City. Even on such planets as Wolf, Terra’s laws are respected within earshot of their gates. But there had been rioting here and in Charin during the last month. After the display of mob violence this afternoon, a lone Terran, unarmed, might turn up as a solitary corpse flung on the steps of the HQ building.

There had been a time when I had walked alone from Shainsa to the Polar Colony. I had known how to melt into this kind of night, shabby and inconspicuous, a worn shirtcloak hunched round my shoulders, weaponless except for the razor-sharp skean in the clasp of the cloak; walking on the balls of my feet like a Dry-towner, not looking or sounding or smelling like an Earthman.

That rabbit in the Traffic office had stirred up things I’d be wiser to forget. It had been six years; six years of slow death behind a desk, since the day when Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man; death-warrant written on my scarred face anywhere outside the narrow confines of the Terran law on Wolf.

Rakhal Sensar—my fists clenched with the old impotent hate. If I could get my hands on him!

It had been Rakhal who first led me through the byways of the Kharsa, teaching me the jargon of a dozen tribes, the chirping call of the Ya-men, the way of the catmen of the rain-forests, the argot of thieves markets, the walk and step of the Dry-towners from Shainsa and Daillon and Ardcarran—the parched cities of dusty, salt stone which spread out in the bottoms of Wolf’s vanished oceans. Rakhal was from Shainsa, human, tall as an Earthman, weathered by salt and sun, and he had worked for Terran Intelligence since we were boys. We had traveled all over our world together, and found it good.

And then, for some reason I had never known, it had come to an end. Even now I was not wholly sure why he had erupted, that day, into violence and a final explosion. Then he had disappeared, leaving me a marked man. And a lonely one: Juli had gone with him.

I strode the streets of the slum unseeing, my thoughts running a familiar channel. Juli, my kid sister, clinging around Rakhal’s neck, her gray eyes hating me. I had never seen her again.

That had been six years ago. One more adventure had shown me that my usefulness to the Secret Service was over. Rakhal had vanished, but he had left me a legacy: my name, written on the sure scrolls of death anywhere outside the safe boundaries of Terran law. A marked man, I had gone back to slow stagnation behind a desk. I’d stood it as long as I could.

When it finally got too bad, Magnusson had been sympathetic. He was the Chief of Terran Intelligence on Wolf, and I was next in line for his job, but he understood when I quit. He’d arranged the transfer and the pass, and I was leaving tonight.

I was nearly back to the spaceport by now, across from the street-shrine at the edge of the square. It was here that the little toy-seller had vanished. But it was exactly like a thousand, a hundred thousand other such street-shrines on Wolf, a smudge of incense reeking and stinking before the squatting image of Nebran, the Toad God whose face and symbol are everywhere on Wolf. I stared for a moment at the ugly idol, then slowly moved away.

The lighted curtains of the spaceport cafe attracted my attention and I went inside. A few spaceport personnel in storm gear were drinking coffee at the counter, a pair of furred chaks, lounging beneath the mirrors at the far end, and a trio of Dry-towners, rangy, weathered men in crimson and blue shirt cloaks, were standing at a wall shelf, eating Terran food with aloof dignity.

In my business clothes I felt more conspicuous than the chaks. What place had a civilian here, between the uniforms of the spacemen and the colorful brilliance of the Dry-towners?

A snub-nosed girl with alabaster hair came to take my order. I asked for jaco and bunlets, and carried the food to a wall shelf near the Dry-towners. Their dialect fell soft and familiar on my ears. One of them, without altering the expression on his face or the easy tone of his voice, began to make elaborate comments on my entrance, my appearance, my ancestry and probably personal habits, all defined in the colorfully obscene dialect of Shainsa.

That had happened before. The Wolfan sense of humor is only half-human. The finest joke is to criticize and insult a stranger, preferably an Earthman, to his very face, in an unknown language, perfectly deadpan. In my civilian clothes I was obviously fair game.

A look or gesture of resentment would have lost face and dignity—what the Dry-towners call their kihar—permanently. I leaned over and remarked in their own dialect that I would, at some future and unspecified time, appreciate the opportunity to return their compliments.

By rights they should have laughed, made some barbed remark about my command of language and crossed their hands in symbol of a jest decently reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each other a drink, and that would be that.

But it didn’t happen that way. Not this time. The tallest of the three whirled, upsetting his drink in the process. I heard its thin shatter through the squeal of the alabaster-haired girl, as a chair crashed over. They faced me three abreast, and one of them fumbled in the clasp of his shirtcloak.

I edged backward, my own hand racing up for a skean I hadn’t carried in six years, and fronted them squarely, hoping I could face down the prospect of a roughhouse. They wouldn’t kill me, this close to the HQ, but at least I was in for an unpleasant mauling. I couldn’t handle three men; and if nerves were this taut in the Kharsa, I might get knifed. Quite by accident, of course.

The chaks moaned and gibbered. The Dry-towners glared at me and I tensed for the moment when their steady stare would explode into violence.

Then I became aware that they were gazing, not at me, but at something or someone behind me. The skeans snicked back into the clasps of their cloaks.

Then they broke rank, turned and ran. They ran, blundering into stools, leaving havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their wake. One man barged into the counter, swore and ran on, limping. I let my breath go. Something had put the fear of God into those brutes, and it wasn’t my own ugly mug. I turned and saw the girl.

She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery across the breasts, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized Toad God, Nebran. Her features were delicate, chiseled, pale; a Dry-town face, all human, all woman, but set in an alien and unearthly repose. The great eyes gleamed red. They were fixed, almost unseeing, but the crimson lips were curved with inhuman malice.

She stood motionless, looking at me as if wondering why I had not run with the others. In half a second, the smile flickered off and was replaced by a startled look of—recognition?

Whoever and whatever she was, she had saved me a mauling. I started to phrase formal thanks, then broke off in astonishment. The cafe had emptied and we were entirely alone. Even the chaks had leaped through an open window—I saw the whisk of a disappearing tail.

We stood frozen, looking at one another while the Toad God sprawled across her breasts rose and fell for half a dozen breaths.

Then I took one step forward, and she took one step backward, at the same instant. In one swift movement she was outside in the dark street. It took me only an instant to get into the street after her, but as I stepped across the door there was a little stirring in the air, like the rising of heat waves across the salt flats at noon. Then the street-shrine was empty, and nowhere was there any sign of the girl. She had vanished. She simply was not there.

I gaped at the empty shrine. She had stepped inside and vanished, like a wraith of smoke, like—

—Like the little toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa.

There were eyes in the street again and, becoming aware of where I was, I moved away. The shrines of Nebran are on every corner of Wolf, but this is one instance when familiarity does not breed contempt. The street was dark and seemed empty, but it was packed with all the little noises of living. I was not unobserved. And meddling with a street-shrine would be just as dangerous as the skeans of my three loud-mouthed Dry-town roughnecks.

I turned and crossed the square for the last time, turning toward the loom of the spaceship, filing the girl away as just another riddle of Wolf I’d never solve.

How wrong I was!

Chapter Three

From the spaceport gates, exchanging brief greetings with the guards, I took a last look at the Kharsa. For a minute I toyed with the notion of just disappearing down one of those streets. It’s not hard to disappear on Wolf, if you know how. And I knew, or had known once. Loyalty to Terra? What had Terra given me except a taste of color and adventure, out there in the Dry-towns, and then taken it away again?

If an Earthman is very lucky and very careful, he lasts about ten years in Intelligence. I had had two years more than my share. I still knew enough to leave my Terran identity behind like a worn-out jacket. I could seek out Rakhal, settle our blood-feud, see Juli again....

How could I see Juli again? As her husband’s murderer? No other way. Blood-feud on Wolf is a terrible and elaborate ritual of the code duello. And once I stepped outside the borders of Terran law, sooner or later Rakhal and I would meet. And one of us would die.

I looked back, just once, at the dark rambling streets away from the square. Then I turned toward the blue-white lights that hurt my eyes, and the starship that loomed, huge and hateful, before me.

A steward in white took my fingerprint and led me to a coffin-sized chamber. He brought me coffee and sandwiches—I hadn’t, after all, eaten in the spaceport cafe—then got me into the skyhook and strapped me, deftly and firmly, into the acceleration cushions, tugging at the Garensen belts until I ached all over. A long needle went into my arm—the narcotic that would keep me safely drowsy all through the terrible tug of interstellar acceleration.

Doors clanged, buzzers vibrated lower down in the ship, men tramped the corridors calling to one another in the language of the spaceports. I understood one word in four. I shut my eyes, not caring. At the end of the trip there would be another star, another world, another language. Another life.

I had spent all my adult life on Wolf. Juli had been a child under the red star. But it was a pair of wide crimson eyes and black hair combed into ringlets like spun black glass that went down with me into the bottomless pit of sleep....

Someone was shaking me.

“Ah, come on, Cargill. Wake up, man. Shake your boots!”

My mouth, foul-tasting and stiff, fumbled at the shapes of words. “Wha’ happened? Wha’ y’ want?” My eyes throbbed. When I got them open I saw two men in black leathers bending over me. We were still inside gravity.

“Get out of the skyhook. You’re coming with us.”

“Wha’—“ Even through the layers of the sedative, that got to me. Only a criminal, under interstellar law, can be removed from a passage-paid starship once he has formally checked in on board. I was legally, at this moment, on my “planet of destination.”

“I haven’t been charged—“

”Did I say you had?” snapped one man.

“Shut up, he’s doped,” the other said hurriedly. “Look,” he continued, pronouncing every word loudly and distinctly, “get up now, and come with us. The co-ordinator will hold up blastoff if we don’t get off in three minutes, and Operations will scream. Come on, please.”

Then I was stumbling along the lighted, empty corridor, swaying between the two men, foggily realizing the crew must think me a fugitive caught trying to leave the planet.

The locks dilated. A uniformed spaceman watched us, fussily regarding a chronometer. He fretted. “The dispatcher’s office—“

”We’re doing the best we can,” the Spaceforce man said. “Can you walk, Cargill?”

I could, though my feet were a little shaky on the ladders. The violet moonlight had deepened to mauve, and gusty winds spun tendrils of grit across my face. The Spaceforce men shepherded me, one on either side, to the gateway.

“What the hell is all this? Is something wrong with my pass?”

The guard shook his head. “How would I know? Magnusson put out the order, take it up with him.”

“Believe me,” I muttered, “I will.”

They looked at each other. “Hell,” said one, “he’s not under arrest, we don’t have to haul him around like a convict. Can you walk all right now, Cargill? You know where the Secret Service office is, don’t you? Floor 38. The Chief wants you, and make it fast.”

I knew it made no sense to ask questions, they obviously knew no more than I did. I asked anyhow.

“Are they holding the ship for me? I’m supposed to be leaving on it.”

“Not that one,” the guard answered, jerking his head toward the spaceport. I looked back just in time to see the dust-dimmed ship leap upward, briefly whitened in the field searchlights, and vanish into the surging clouds above.

My head was clearing fast, and anger speeded up the process. The HQ building was empty in the chill silence of just before dawn. I had to rout out a dozing elevator operator, and as the lift swooped upward my anger rose with it. I wasn’t working for Magnusson any more. What right had he, or anybody, to grab me off an outbound starship like a criminal? By the time I barged into his office, I was spoiling for a fight.

The Secret Service office was full of grayish-pink morning and yellow lights left on from the night before. Magnusson, at his desk, looked as if he’d slept in his rumpled uniform. He was a big bull of a man, and his littered desk looked, as always, like the track of a typhoon in the salt flats.

The clutter was weighted down, here and there, with solidopic cubes of the five Magnusson youngsters, and as usual, Magnusson was fiddling with one of the cubes. He said, not looking up, “Sorry to pull this at the last minute, Race. There was just time to put out a pull order and get you off the ship, but no time to explain.”

I glared at him. “Seems I can’t even get off the planet without trouble! You raised hell all the time I was here, but when I try to leave—what is this, anyhow? I’m sick of being shoved around!”

Magnusson made a conciliating gesture. “Wait until you hear—“ he began, and broke off, looking at someone who was sitting in the chair in front of his desk, somebody whose back was turned to me. Then the person twisted and I stopped cold, blinking and wondering if this were a hallucination and I’d wake up in the starship’s skyhook, far out in space.

Then the woman cried, “Race, Race! Don’t you know me?”

I took one dazed step and another. Then she flew across the space between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up, still disbelieving.

“Juli!”

“Oh, Race, I thought I’d die when Mack told me you were leaving tonight. It’s been the only thing that’s kept me alive, knowing—knowing I’d see you.” She sobbed and laughed, her face buried in my shoulder.

I let her cry for a minute, then held my sister at arm’s length. For a moment I had forgotten the six years that lay between us. Now I saw them, all of them, printed plain on her face. Juli had been a pretty girl. Six years had fined her face into beauty, but there was tension in the set of her shoulders, and her gray eyes had looked on horrors.

She looked tiny and thin and unbearably frail under the scanty folds of her fur robe, a Dry-town woman’s robe. Her wrists were manacled, the jeweled tight bracelets fastened together by the links of a long fine chain of silvered gilt that clashed a little, thinly, as her hands fell to her sides.

“What’s wrong, Juli? Where’s Rakhal?”

She shivered and now I could see that she was in a state of shock.

“Gone. He’s gone, that’s all I know. And—oh, Race, Race, he took Rindy with him!”

From the tone of her voice I had thought she was sobbing. Now I realized that her eyes were dry; she was long past tears. Gently I unclasped her clenched fingers and put her back in the chair. She sat like a doll, her hands falling to her sides with a thin clash of chains. When I picked them up and laid them in her lap she let them lie there motionless. I stood over her and demanded, “Who’s Rindy?” She didn’t move.

“My daughter, Race. Our little girl.”

Magnusson broke in, his voice harsh. “Well, Cargill, should I have let you leave?”

“Don’t be a damn fool!”

“I was afraid you’d tell the poor kid she had to live with her own mistakes,” growled Magnusson. “You’re capable of it.”

For the first time Juli showed a sign of animation. “I was afraid to come to you, Mack. You never wanted me to marry Rakhal, either.”

“Water under the bridge,” Magnusson grunted. “And I’ve got lads of my own, Miss Cargill—Mrs.—“ he stopped in distress, vaguely remembering that in the Dry-towns an improper form of address can be a deadly insult.

But she guessed his predicament.

“You used to call me Juli, Mack. It will do now.”

“You’ve changed,” he said quietly. “Juli, then. Tell Race what you told me. All of it.”

She turned to me. “I shouldn’t have come for myself—“

I knew that. Juli was proud, and she had always had the courage to live with her own mistakes. When I first saw her, I knew this wouldn’t be anything so simple as the complaint of an abused wife or even an abandoned or deserted mother. I took a chair, watching her and listening.

She began. “You made a mistake when you turned Rakhal out of the Service, Mack. In his way he was the most loyal man you had on Wolf.”

Magnusson had evidently not expected her to take this tack. He scowled and looked disconcerted, shifting uneasily in his big chair, but when Juli did not continue, obviously awaiting his answer, he said, “Juli, he left me no choice. I never knew how his mind worked. That final deal he engineered—have you any idea how much that cost the Service? And have you taken a good look at your brother’s face, Juli girl?”

Juli raised her eyes slowly, and I saw her flinch. I knew how she felt. For three years I had kept my mirror covered, growing an untidy straggle of beard because it hid the scars and saved me the ordeal of facing myself to shave.

Juli whispered, “Rakhal’s is just as bad. Worse.”

“That’s some satisfaction,” I said, and Mack stared at us, baffled. “Even now I don’t know what it was all about.”

“And you never will,” I said for the hundredth time. “We’ve been over this before. Nobody could understand it unless he’d lived in the Dry-towns. Let’s not talk about it. You talk, Juli. What brought you here like this? What about the kid?”

“There’s no way I can tell you the end without telling you the beginning,” she said reasonably. “At first Rakhal worked as a trader in Shainsa.”

I wasn’t surprised. The Dry-towns were the core of Terran trade on Wolf, and it was through their cooperation that Terra existed here peaceably, on a world only half human, or less.

The men of the Dry-towns existed strangely poised between two worlds. They had made dealings with the first Terran ships, and thus gave entrance to the wedge of the Terran Empire. And yet they stood proud and apart. They alone had never yielded to the Terranizing which overtakes all Empire planets sooner or later.

There were no Trade Cities in the Dry-towns; an Earthman who went there unprotected faced a thousand deaths, each one worse than the last. There were those who said that the men of Shainsa and Daillon and Ardcarran had sold the rest of Wolf to the Terrans, to keep the Terrans from their own door.

Even Rakhal, who had worked with Terra since boyhood, had finally come to a point of decision and gone his own way. And it was not Terra’s way.

That was what Juli was saying now.

“He didn’t like what Terra was doing on Wolf. I’m not so sure I like it myself—“

Magnusson interrupted her again. “Do you know what Wolf was like when we came here? Have you seen the Slave Colony, the Idiot’s Village? Your own brother went to Shainsa and routed out The Lisse.”

“And Rakhal helped him!” Juli reminded him. “Even after he left you, he tried to keep out of things. He could have told them a good deal that would hurt you, after ten years in Intelligence, you know.”

I knew. It was, although I wasn’t going to tell Juli this, one reason why, at the end—during that terrible explosion of violence which no normal Terran mind could comprehend—I had done my best to kill him. We had both known that after this, the planet would not hold the two of us. We could both go on living only by dividing it unevenly. I had been given the slow death of the Terran Zone. And he had all the rest.

“But he never told them anything! I tell you, he was one of the most loyal—“

Mack grunted, “Yeah, he’s an angel. Go ahead.”

She didn’t, not immediately. Instead she asked what sounded like an irrelevant question. “Is it true what he told me? That the Empire has a standing offer of a reward for a working model of a matter transmitter?”

“That offer’s been standing for three hundred years, Terran reckoning. One million credits cash. Don’t tell me he was figuring to invent one?”

“I don’t think so. But I think he heard rumors about one. He said with that kind of money he could bargain the Terrans right out of Shainsa. That was where it started. He began coming and going at odd times, but he never said any more about it. He wouldn’t talk to me at all.”

“When was all this?”

“About four months ago.”

“In other words, just about the time of the riots in Charin.”

She nodded. “Yes. He was away in Charin when the Ghost Wind blew, and he came back with knife cuts in his thigh. I asked if he had been mixed-up in the anti-Terran rioting, but he wouldn’t tell me. Race, I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t really care. But just about that time, the Great House in Shainsa changed hands. I’m sure Rakhal had something to do with that.

“And then—“ Juli twisted her chained hands together in her lap—“he tried to mix Rindy up in it. It was crazy, awful! He’d brought her some sort of nonhuman toy from one of the lowland towns, Charin I think. It was a weird thing, scared me. But he’d sit Rindy down in the sunlight and have her look into it, and Rindy would gabble all sorts of nonsense about little men and birds and a toymaker.”

The chains about Juli’s wrists clashed as she twisted her hands together. I stared somberly at the fetters. The chain, which was long, did not really hamper her movements much. Such chains were symbolic ornaments, and most Dry-town women went all their lives with fettered hands. But even after the years I’d spent in the Dry-towns, the sight still brought an uneasiness to my throat, a vague discomfort.

“We had a terrible fight over that,” Juli went on. “I was afraid, afraid of what it was doing to Rindy. I threw it out, and Rindy woke up and screamed—“ Juli checked herself and caught at vanishing self-control.

“But you don’t want to hear about that. It was then I threatened to leave him and take Rindy. The next day—“ Suddenly the hysteria Juli had been forcing back broke free, and she rocked back and forth in her chair, shaken and strangled with sobs. “He took Rindy! Oh, Race, he’s crazy, crazy. I think he hates Rindy, he—he, Race, he smashed her toys. He took every toy the child had and broke them one by one, smashed them into powder, every toy the child had—“

”Juli, please, please,” Magnusson pleaded, shaken. “If we’re dealing with a maniac—“

”I don’t dare think he’d harm her! He warned me not to come here, or I’d never see her again, but if it meant war against Terra I had to come. But Mack, please, don’t do anything against him, please, please. He’s got my baby, he’s got my little girl....” Her voice failed and she buried her face in her hands.

Mack picked up the solidopic cube of his five-year-old son, and turned it between his pudgy fingers, saying unhappily, “Juli, we’ll take every precaution. But can’t you see, we’ve got to get him? If there’s a question of a matter transmitter, or anything like that, in the hands of Terra’s enemies—“

I could see that, too, but Juli’s agonized face came between me and the picture of disaster. I clenched my fist around the chair arm, not surprised to see the fragile plastic buckle, crack and split under my grip. If it had been Rakhal’s neck....

“Mack, let me handle this. Juli, shall I find Rindy for you?”

A hope was born in her ravaged face, and died, while I looked. “Race, he’d kill you. Or have you killed.”

“He’d try,” I admitted. The moment Rakhal knew I was outside the Terran zone, I’d walk with death. I had accepted the code during my years in Shainsa. But now I was an Earthman and felt only contempt.

“Can’t you see? Once he knows I’m at large, that very code of his will force him to abandon any intrigue, whatever you call it, conspiracy, and come after me first. That way we do two things: we get him out of hiding, and we get him out of the conspiracy, if there is one.”

I looked at the shaking Juli and something snapped. I stooped and lifted her, not gently, my hands biting her shoulders. “And I won’t kill him, do you hear? He may wish I had; by the time I get through with him—I’ll beat the living hell out of him; I’ll cram my fists down his throat. But I’ll settle it with him like an Earthman. I won’t kill him. Hear me, Juli? Because that’s the worst thing I could do to him—catch him and let him live afterward!”

Magnusson stepped toward me and pried my crushing hands off her arms. Juli rubbed the bruises mechanically, not knowing she was doing it. Mack said, “You can’t do it, Cargill. You wouldn’t get as far as Daillon. You haven’t been out of the zone in six years. Besides—“

His eyes rested full on my face. “I hate to say this, Race, but damn it, man, go and take a good look at yourself in a mirror. Do you think I’d ever have pulled you off the Secret Service otherwise? How in hell can you disguise yourself now?”

“There are plenty of scarred men in the Dry-towns,” I said. “Rakhal will remember my scars, but I don’t think anyone else would look twice.”

Magnusson walked to the window. His huge form bulked against the light, perceptibly darkening the office. He looked over the faraway panorama, the neat bright Trade City below and the vast wilderness lying outside. I could almost hear the wheels grinding in his head. Finally he swung around.

“Race, I’ve heard these rumors before. But you’re the only man I could have sent to track them down, and I wouldn’t send you out in cold blood to be killed. I won’t now. Spaceforce will pick him up.”

I heard the harsh inward gasp of Juli’s breath and said, “Damn it, no. The first move you make—“ I couldn’t finish. Rindy was in his hands, and when I knew Rakhal, he hadn’t been given to making idle threats. We all three knew what Rakhal might do at the first hint of the long arm of Terran law reaching out for him.

I said, “For God’s sake let’s keep Spaceforce out of it. Let it look like a personal matter between Rakhal and me, and let us settle it on those terms. Remember he’s got the kid.”

Magnusson sighed. Again he picked up one of the cubes and stared into the clear plastic, where the three-dimensional image of a nine-year-old girl looked out at him, smiling and innocent. His face was transparent as the plastic cube. Mack acts tough, but he has five kids and he is as soft as a dish of pudding where a kid is concerned.

“I know. Another thing, too. If we send out Spaceforce, after all the riots—how many Terrans are on this planet? A few thousand, no more. What chance would we have, if it turned into a full-scale rebellion? None at all, unless we wanted to order a massacre. Sure, we have bombs and dis-guns and all that.

“But would we dare to use them? And where would we be after that? We’re here to keep the pot from boiling over, to keep out of planetary incidents, not push them along to a point where bluff won’t work. That’s why we’ve got to pick up Rakhal before this gets out of hand.”

I said, “Give me a month. Then you can move in, if you have to. Rakhal can’t do much against Terra in that time. And I might be able to keep Rindy out of it.”

Magnusson stared at me, hard-eyed. “If you do this against my advice, I won’t be able to step in and pull you out of a jam later on, you know. And God help you if you start up the machines and can’t stop them.”

I knew that. A month wasn’t much. Wolf is forty thousand miles of diameter, at least half unexplored; mountain and forest swarming with nonhuman and semi-human cities where Terrans had never been.

Finding Rakhal, or any one man, would be like picking out one star in the Andromeda nebula. Not impossible. Not quite impossible.

Mack’s eyes wandered again to his child’s face, deep in the transparent cube. He turned it in his hands. “Okay, Cargill,” he said slowly, “so we’re all crazy. I’ll be crazy too. Try it your way.”

Chapter Four

By sunset I was ready to leave. I hadn’t had any loose ends to tie up in the Trade City, since I’d already disposed of most of my gear before boarding the starship. I’d never been in better circumstances to take off for parts unknown.

Mack, still disapproving, had opened the files to me, and I’d spent most of the day in the back rooms of Floor 38, searching Intelligence files to refresh my memory, scanning the pages of my own old reports sent years ago from Shainsa and Daillon. He had sent out one of the nonhumans who worked for us, to buy or acquire somewhere in the Old Town a Dry-towner’s outfit and the other things I would wear and carry.

I would have liked to go myself. I felt that I needed the practice. I was only now beginning to realize how much I might have forgotten in the years behind a desk. But until I was ready to make my presence known, no one must know that Race Cargill had not left Wolf on the starship.

Above all, I must not be seen in the Kharsa until I went there in the Dry-town disguise which had become, years ago, a deep second nature, almost an alternate personality.

About sunset I walked through the clean little streets of the Terran Trade City toward the Magnusson home where Juli was waiting for me.

Most of the men who go into Civil Service of the Empire come from Earth, or from the close-in planets of Proxima and Alpha Centaurus. They go out unmarried, and they stay that way, or marry women native to the planets where they are sent.

But Joanna Magnusson was one of the rare Earth women who had come out with her husband, twenty years ago. There are two kinds of Earthwomen like that. They make their quarterings a little bit of home, or a little bit of hell. Joanna had made their house look like a transported corner of Earth.

I never knew quite what to think of the Magnusson household. It seemed to me almost madness to live under a red sun, yet come inside to yellow light, to live on a world with the wild beauty of Wolf and yet live as they might have lived on their home planet. Or maybe I was the one who was out of step. I had done the reprehensible thing they called “going native.” Possibly I had done just that, and in absorbing myself into the new world, had lost the ability to fit into the old.

Joanna, a chubby comfortable woman in her forties, opened the door and gave me her hand. “Come in, Race. Juli’s expecting you.”

“It’s good of you.” I broke off, unable to express my gratitude. Juli and I had come from Earth—our father had been an officer on the old starship Landfall when Juli was only a child. He had died in a wreck off Procyon, and Mack Magnusson had found me a place in Intelligence because I spoke four of the Wolf languages and haunted the Kharsa with Rakhal whenever I could get away.

They had also taken Juli into their own home, like a younger sister. They hadn’t said much—because they had liked Rakhal—when the breakup came. But that terrible night when Rakhal and I nearly killed each other, and Rakhal came with his face bleeding and took Juli away with him, had hurt them hard. Yet it had made them all the kinder to me.

Joanna said forthrightly, “Nonsense, Race! What else could we do?” She drew me along the hall. “You can talk in here.”

I delayed a minute before going through the door she indicated. “How is Juli?”

“Better, I think. I put her to bed in Meta’s room, and she slept most of the day. She’ll be all right. I’ll leave you to talk.” Joanna opened the door, and went away.

Juli was awake and dressed, and already some of the terrible frozen horror was gone from her face. She was still tense and devil-ridden, but not hysterical now.

The room, one of the children’s bedrooms, wasn’t a big one. Even at the top of the Secret Service, a cop doesn’t live too well. Not on Terra’s Civil Service pay scale. Not, with five youngsters. It looked as if all five of the kids had taken it to pieces, one at a time.

I sat down on a too-low chair and said, “Juli, we haven’t much time, I’ve got to be out of the city before dark. I want to know about Rakhal, what he does, what he’s like now. Remember, I haven’t seen him for years. Tell me everything—his friends, his amusements, everything you know.”

“I always thought you knew him better than I did.” Juli had a fidgety little way of coiling the links of the chain around her wrists and it made me nervous.

“It’s routine, Juli. Police work. Mostly I play by ear, but I try to start out by being methodical.”

She answered everything I asked her, but the sum total wasn’t much and it wouldn’t help much. As I said, it’s easy to disappear on Wolf. Juli knew he had been friendly with the new holders of the Great House on Shainsa, but she didn’t even know their name.

I heard one of the Magnusson children fly to the street door and return, shouting for her mother. Joanna knocked at the door of the room and came in.

“There’s a chak outside who wants to see you, Race.”

I nodded. “Probably my fancy dress. Can I change in the back room, Joanna? Will you keep my clothes here till I get back?”

I went to the door and spoke to the furred nonhuman in the sibilant jargon of the Kharsa and he handed me what looked like a bundle of rags. There were hard lumps inside. The chak said softly, “I hear a rumor in the Kharsa, Raiss. Perhaps it will help you. Three men from Shainsa are in the city. They came here to seek a woman who has vanished, and a toymaker. They are returning at sunrise. Perhaps you can arrange to travel in their caravan.”

I thanked him and carried the bundle inside. In the empty back room I stripped to the skin and unrolled the bundle. There was a pair of baggy striped breeches, a worn and shabby shirtcloak with capacious pockets, a looped belt with half the gilt rubbed away and the base metal showing through, and a scuffed pair of ankle-boots tied with frayed thongs of different colors. There was a little cluster of amulets and seals. I chose two or three of the commonest kind, and strung them around my neck.

One of the lumps in the bundle was a small jar, holding nothing but the ordinary spices sold in the market, with which the average Dry-towner flavors food. I rubbed some of the powder on my body, put a pinch in the pocket of my shirtcloak, and chewed a few of the buds, wrinkling my nose at the long-unfamiliar pungency.

The second lump was a skean, and unlike the worn and shabby garments, this was brand-new and sharp and bright, and its edge held a razor glint. I tucked it into the clasp of my shirtcloak, a reassuring weight. It was the only weapon I could dare to carry.

The last of the solid objects in the bundle was a flat wooden case, about nine by ten inches. I slid it open. It was divided carefully into sections cushioned with sponge-absorbent plastic, and in them lay tiny slips of glass, on Wolf as precious as jewels. They were lenses—camera lenses, microscope lenses, even eyeglass lenses. Packed close, there were nearly a hundred of them nested by the shock-absorbent stuff.

They were my excuse for travel to Shainsa. Over and above the necessities of trade, a few items of Terran manufacture—vacuum tubes, transistors, lenses for cameras and binoculars, liquors and finely forged small tools—are literally worth their weight in platinum.

Even in cities where Terrans have never gone, these things bring exorbitant prices, and trading in them is a Dry-town privilege. Rakhal had been a trader, so Juli told me, in fine wire and surgical instruments. Wolf is not a mechanized planet, and has never developed any indigenous industrial system; the psychology of the nonhuman seldom runs to technological advances.

I went down the hallway again to the room where Juli was waiting. Catching a glimpse in a full-length mirror, I was startled. All traces of the Terran civil servant, clumsy and uncomfortable in his ill-fitting clothes, had dropped away. A Dry-towner, rangy and scarred, looked out at me, and it seemed that the expression on his face was one of amazement.

Joanna whirled as I came into the room and visibly paled before, recovering her self-control, she gave a nervous little giggle. “Goodness, Race, I didn’t know you!”

Juli whispered, “Yes, I—I remember you better like that. You’re—you look so much like—“

The door flew open and Mickey Magnusson scampered into the room, a chubby little boy browned by a Terra-type sunlamp and glowing with health. In his hand he held some sparkling thing that gave off tiny flashes and glints of color.

I gave the kid a grin before I realized that I was disguised anyhow and probably a hideous sight. The little boy backed off, but Joanna put her plump hand on his shoulder, murmuring soothing things.

Mickey toddled toward Juli, holding up the shining thing in his hands as if to display something very precious and beloved. Juli bent and held out her arms, then her face contracted and she snatched at the plaything.

“Mickey, what’s that?”

He thrust it protectively behind his back. “Mine!”

“Mickey, don’t be naughty,” Joanna chided.

“Please let me see,” Juli coaxed, and he brought it out, slowly, still suspicious. It was an angled prism of crystal, star-shaped, set in a frame which could get the star spinning like a solidopic. But it displayed a new and comical face every time it was turned.

Mickey turned it round and round, charmed at being the center of attention. There seemed to be dozens of faces, shifting with each spin of the prism, human and nonhuman, all dim and slightly distorted. My own face, Juli’s, Joanna’s came out of the crystal surface, not a reflection but a caricature.

A choked sound from Juli made me turn in dismay. She had let herself drop to the floor and was sitting there, white as death, supporting herself with her two hands.

“Race! Find out where he got that—that thing!”

I bent and shook her. “What’s the matter with you?” I demanded. She had lapsed into the dazed, sleepwalking horror of this morning. She whispered, “It’s not a toy. Rindy had one. Joanna, where did he get it?” She pointed at the shining thing with an expression of horror which would have been laughable had it been less real, less filled with terror.

Joanna cocked her head to one side and wrinkled her forehead, reflectively. “Why, I don’t know, now you come to ask me. I thought maybe one of the chaks had given it to Mickey. Bought it in the bazaar, maybe. He loves it. Do get up off the floor, Juli!”

Juli scrambled to her feet. She said, “Rindy had one. It—it terrified me. She would sit and look at it by the hour, and—I told you about it, Race. I threw it out once, and she woke up and screamed. She shrieked for hours and hours and she ran out in the dark and dug for it in the trash pile, where I’d buried it. She went out in the dark, broke all her fingernails, but she dug it out again.” She checked herself, staring at Joanna, her eyes wide in appeal.

“Well, dear,” said Joanna with mild, rebuking kindness, “you needn’t be so upset. I don’t think Mickey’s so attached to it as all that, and anyhow I’m not going to throw it away.” She patted Juli reassuringly on the shoulder, then gave Mickey a little shove toward the door and turned to follow him. “You’ll want to talk alone before Race leaves. Good luck, wherever you’re going, Race.” She held out her hand forthrightly.

“And don’t worry about Juli,” she added in an undertone. “We’ll take good care of her.”

When I came back to Juli she was standing by the window, looking through the oddly filtered glass that dimmed the red sun to orange. “Joanna thinks I’m crazy, Race.”

“She thinks you’re upset.”

“Rindy’s an odd child, a real Dry-towner. But it’s not my imagination, Race, it’s not. There’s something—“ Suddenly she sobbed aloud again.

“Homesick, Juli?”

“I was, a little, the first years. But I was happy, believe me.” She turned her face to me, shining with tears. “You’ve got to believe I never regretted it for a minute.”

“I’m glad,” I said dully. That made it just fine.

“Only that toy—“

”Who knows? It might be a clue to something.” The toy had reminded me of something, too, and I tried to remember what it was. I’d seen nonhuman toys in the Kharsa, even bought them for Mack’s kids. When a single man is invited frequently to a home with five youngsters, it’s about the only way he can repay that hospitality, by bringing the children odd trifles and knicknacks. But I had never seen anything quite like this one, until—

—Until yesterday. The toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa, the one who had fled into the shrine of Nebran and vanished. He had had half a dozen of those prism-and-star sparklers.

I tried to call up a mental picture of the little toy-seller. I didn’t have much luck. I’d seen him only in that one swift glance from beneath his hood. “Juli, have you ever seen a little man, like a chak only smaller, twisted, hunchbacked? He sells toys—“

She looked blank. “I don’t think so, although there are dwarf chaks in the Polar Cities. But I’m sure I’ve never seen one.”

“It was just an idea.” But it was something to think about. A toy-seller had vanished. Rakhal, before disappearing, had smashed all Rindy’s toys. And the sight of a plaything of cunningly-cut crystal had sent Juli into hysterics.

“I’d better go before it’s too dark,” I said. I buckled the final clasp of my shirtcloak, fitted my skean another notch into it, and counted the money Mack had advanced me for expenses. “I want to get into the Kharsa and hunt up the caravan to Shainsa.”

“You’re going there first?”

“Where else?”

Juli turned, leaning one hand against the wall. She looked frail and ill, years older than she was. Suddenly she flung her thin arms around me, and a link of the chain on her fettered hands struck me hard, as she cried out, “Race, Race, he’ll kill you! How can I live with that on my conscience too?”

“You can live with a hell of a lot on your conscience.” I disengaged her arms firmly from my neck. A link of the chain caught on the clasp of my shirtcloak, and again something snapped inside me. I grasped the chain in my two hands and gave a mighty heave, bracing my foot against the wall. The links snapped asunder. A flying end struck Juli under the eye. I ripped at the seals of the jeweled cuffs, tore them from her arms, find threw the whole assembly into a corner, where it fell with a clash.

“Damn it,” I roared, “that’s over! You’re never going to wear those things again!” Maybe after six years in the Dry-towns, Juli was beginning to guess what those six years behind a desk had meant to me.

“Juli, I’ll find your Rindy for you, and I’ll bring Rakhal in alive. But don’t ask more than that. Just alive. And don’t ask me how.”

He’d be alive when I got through with him. Sure, he’d be alive.

Just.

Chapter Five

It was getting dark when I slipped through a side gate, shabby and inconspicuous, into the spaceport square. Beyond the yellow lamps, I knew that the old city was beginning to take on life with the falling night. Out of the chinked pebble-houses, men and woman, human and nonhuman, came forth into the moonlit streets.

If anyone noticed me cross the square, which I doubted, they took me for just another Dry-town vagabond, curious about the world of the strangers from beyond the stars, and who, curiosity satisfied, was drifting back where he belonged. I turned down one of the dark alleys that led away, and soon was walking in the dark.

The Kharsa was not unfamiliar to me as a Terran, but for the last six years I had seen only its daytime face. I doubted if there were a dozen Earthmen in the Old Town tonight, though I saw one in the bazaar, dirty and lurching drunk; one of those who run renegade and homeless between worlds, belonging to neither. This was what I had nearly become.

I went further up the hill with the rising streets. Once I turned, and saw below me the bright-lighted spaceport, the black many-windowed loom of the skyscraper like a patch of alien shadow in the red-violet moonlight. I turned my back on them and walked on.

At the fringe of the thieves market I paused outside a wineshop where Dry-towners were made welcome. A golden nonhuman child murmured something as she pattered by me in the street, and I stopped, gripped by a spasm of stagefright. Had the dialect of Shainsa grown rusty on my tongue? Spies were given short shrift on Wolf, and a mile from the spaceport, I might as well have been on one of those moons. There were no spaceport shockers at my back now. And someone might remember the tale of an Earthman with a scarred face who had gone to Shainsa in disguise....

I shrugged the shirtcloak around my shoulders, pushed the door and went in. I had remembered that Rakhal was waiting for me. Not beyond this door, but at the end of the trail, behind some other door, somewhere. And we have a byword in Shainsa: A trail without beginning has no end.

Right there I stopped thinking about Juli, Rindy, the Terran Empire, or what Rakhal, who knew too many of Terra’s secrets, might do if he had turned renegade. My fingers went up and stroked, musingly, the ridge of scar tissue along my mouth. At that moment I was thinking only of Rakhal, of an unsettled blood-feud, and of my revenge.

Red lamps were burning inside the wineshop, where men reclined on frowsy couches. I stumbled over one of them, found an empty place and let myself sink down on it, arranging myself automatically in the sprawl of Dry-towners indoors. In public they stood, rigid and formal, even to eat and drink. Among themselves, anything less than a loose-limbed sprawl betrayed insulting watchfulness; only a man who fears secret murder keeps himself on guard.

A girl with a tangled rope of hair down her back came toward me. Her hands were unchained, meaning she was a woman of the lowest class, not worth safeguarding. Her fur smock was shabby and matted with filth. I sent her for wine. When it came it was surprisingly good, the sweet and treacherous wine of Ardcarran. I sipped it slowly, looking round.

If a caravan for Shainsa were leaving tomorrow, it would be known here. A word dropped that I was returning there would bring me, by ironbound custom, an invitation to travel in their company.

When I sent the woman for wine a second time, a man on a nearby couch got up, and walked over to me.

He was tall even for a Dry-towner, and there was something vaguely familiar about him. He was no riffraff of the Kharsa, either, for his shirtcloak was of rich silk interwoven with metallic threads, and crusted with heavy embroideries. The hilt of his skean was carved from a single green gem. He stood looking down at me for some time before he spoke.

“I never forget a voice, although I cannot bring your face to mind. Have I a duty toward you?”

I had spoken a jargon to the girl, but he addressed me in the lilting, sing-song speech of Shainsa. I made no answer, gesturing him to be seated. On Wolf, formal courtesy requires a series of polite non sequiturs, and while a direct question merely borders on rudeness, a direct answer is the mark of a simpleton.

“A drink?”

“I joined you unasked,” he retorted, and summoned the tangle-headed girl. “Bring us better wine than this swill!”

With that word and gesture I recognized him and my teeth clamped hard on my lip. This was the loudmouth who had shown fight in the spaceport cafe, and run away before the dark girl with the sign of Nebran sprawled on her breast.

But in this poor light he had not recognized me. I moved deliberately into the full red glow. If he did not know me for the Terran he had challenged last night in the spaceport cafe, it was unlikely that anyone else would. He stared at me for some minutes, but in the end he only shrugged and poured wine from the bottle he had ordered.

Three drinks later I knew that his name was Kyral and that he was a trader in wire and fine steel tools through the nonhuman towns. And I had given him the name I had chosen, Rascar.

He asked, “Are you thinking of returning to Shainsa?”

Wary of a trap, I hesitated, but the question seemed harmless, so I only countered, “Have you been long in the Kharsa?”

“Several weeks.”

“Trading?”

“No.” He applied himself to the wine again. “I was searching for a member of my family.”

“Did you find him?”

“Her,” said Kyral, and ceremoniously spat. “No, I didn’t find her. What is your business in Shainsa?”

I chuckled briefly. “As a matter of fact, I am searching for a member of my family.”

He narrowed his eyelids as if he suspected me of mocking him, but personal privacy is the most rigid convention of the Dry-towns and such mockery showed a sensible disregard for prying questions if I did not choose to answer them. He questioned no further.

“I can use an extra man to handle the loads. Are you good with pack animals? If so, you are welcome to travel under the protection of my caravan.”

I agreed. Then, reflecting that Juli and Rakhal must, after all, be known in Shainsa, I asked, “Do you know a trader who calls himself Sensar?”

He started slightly; I saw his eyes move along my scars. Then reserve, like a lowered curtain, shut itself over his face, concealing a brief satisfied glimmer. “No,” he lied, and stood up.

“We leave at first daylight. Have your gear ready.” He flipped something at me, and I caught it in midair. It was a stone incised with Kyral’s name in the ideographs of Shainsa. “You can sleep with the caravan if you care to. Show that token to Cuinn.”

Kyral’s caravan was encamped in a barred field past the furthest gates of the Kharsa. About a dozen men were busy loading the pack animals—horses shipped in from Darkover, mostly. I asked the first man I met for Cuinn. He pointed out a burly fellow in a shiny red shirtcloak, who was busy at chewing out one of the young men for the way he’d put a packsaddle on his beast.

Shainsa is a good language for cursing, but Cuinn had a special talent at it. I blinked in admiration while I waited for him to get his breath so I could hand him Kyral’s token.

In the light of the fire I saw what I’d half expected: he was the second of the Dry-towners who’d tried to rough me up in the spaceport cafe. Cuinn barely glanced at the cut stone and tossed it back, pointing out one of the packhorses. “Load your personal gear on that one, then get busy and show this mush-headed wearer of sandals”—an insult carrying particularly filthy implications in Shainsa—“how to fasten a packstrap.”

He drew breath and began to swear at the luckless youngster again, and I relaxed. He evidently hadn’t recognized me, either. I took the strap in my hand, guiding it through the saddle loop. “Like that,” I told the kid, and Cuinn stopped swearing long enough to give me a curt nod of acknowledgment and point out a heap of boxed and crated objects.

“Help him load up. We want to get clear of the city by daybreak,” he ordered, and went off to swear at someone else.

Kyral turned up at dawn, and a few minutes later the camp had vanished into a small scattering of litter and we were on our way.

Kyral’s caravan, in spite of Cuinn’s cursing, was well-managed and well-handled. The men were Dry-towners, eleven of them, silent and capable and most of them very young. They were cheerful on the trail, handled the pack animals competently, during the day, and spent most of the nights grouped around the fire, gambling silently on the fall of the cut-crystal prisms they used for dice.

Three days out of the Kharsa I began to worry about Cuinn.

It was of course a spectacular piece of bad luck to find all three of the men from the spaceport cafe in Kyral’s caravan. Kyral had obviously not known me, and even by daylight he paid no attention to me except to give an occasional order. The second of the three was a gangling kid who probably never gave me a second look, let alone a third.

But Cuinn was another matter. He was a man my own age, and his fierce eyes had a shrewdness in them that I did not trust. More than once I caught him watching me, and on the two or three occasions when he drew me into conversation, I found his questions more direct than Dry-town good manners allowed. I weighed the possibility that I might have to kill him before we reached Shainsa.

We crossed the foothills and began to climb upward toward the mountains. The first few days I found myself short of breath as we worked upward into thinner air, then my acclimatization returned and I began to fall into the pattern of the days and nights on the trail. The Trade City was still a beacon in the night, but its glow on the horizon grew dimmer with each day’s march.

Higher we climbed, along dangerous trails where men had to dismount and let the pack animals pick their way, foot by foot. Here in these altitudes the sun at noonday blazed redder and brighter, and the Dry-towners, who come from the parched lands in the sea-bottoms, were burned and blistered by the fierce light. I had grown up under the blazing sun of Terra, and a red sun like Wolf, even at its hottest, caused me no discomfort. This alone would have made me suspect. Once again I found Cuinn’s fierce eyes watching me.

As we crossed the passes and began to descend the long trail through the thick forests, we got into nonhuman country. Racing against the Ghost Wind, we skirted the country around Charin, and the woods inhabited by the terrible Ya-men, birdlike creatures who turn cannibal when the Ghost Wind blows.

Later the trail wound through thicker forests of indigo trees and grayish-purple brushwood, and at night we heard the howls of the catmen of these latitudes. At night we set guards about the caravan, and the dark spaces and shadows were filled with noises and queer smells and rustlings.

Nevertheless, the day’s marches and the night watches passed without event until the night I shared guard with Cuinn. I had posted myself at the edge of the camp, the fire behind me. The men were sleeping rolls of snores, huddled close around the fire. The animals, hobbled with double ropes, front feet to hind feet, shifted uneasily and let out long uncanny whines.

I heard Cuinn pacing behind me. I heard a rustle at the edge of the forest, a stir and whisper beyond the trees, and turned to speak to him, then saw him slipping away toward the outskirts of the clearing.

For a moment I thought nothing of it, thinking that he was taking a few steps toward the gap in the trees where he had disappeared. I suppose I had the idea that he had slipped away to investigate some noise or shadow, and that I should be at hand.

Then I saw the flicker of lights beyond the trees—light from the lantern Cuinn had been carrying in his hand! He was signaling!

I slipped the safety clasp from the hilt of my skean and went after him. In the dimming glow of the fire I fancied I saw luminous eyes watching me, and the skin on my back crawled. I crept up behind him and leaped. We went down in a tangle of flailing legs and arms, and in less than a second he had his skean out and I was gripping his wrist, trying desperately to force the blade away from my throat.

I gasped, “Don’t be a fool! One yell and the whole camp will be awake! Who were you signaling?”

In the light of the fallen lantern, lips drawn back in a snarl, he looked almost inhuman. He strained at the knife for a moment, then dropped it. “Let me up,” he said.

I got up and kicked the fallen skean toward him. “Put that away. What in hell were you doing, trying to bring the catmen down on us?”

For a moment he looked taken aback, then his fierce face closed down again and he said wrathfully, “Can’t a man walk away from the camp without being half strangled?”

I glared at him, but realized I really had nothing to go by. He might have been answering a call of nature, and the movement of the lantern accidental. And if someone had jumped me from behind, I might have pulled a knife on him myself. So I only said, “Don’t do it again. We’re all too jumpy.”

There were no other incidents that night, or the next. The night after, while I lay huddled in my shirtcloak and blanket by the fire, I saw Cuinn slip out of his bedroll and steal away. A moment later there was a gleam in the darkness, but before I could summon the resolve to get up and face it out with him, he returned, looked cautiously at the snoring men, and crawled back into his blankets.

While we were unpacking at the next camp, Kyral halted beside me. “Heard anything queer lately? I’ve got the notion we’re being trailed. We’ll be out of these forests tomorrow, and after that it’s clear road all the way to Shainsa. If anything’s going to happen, it will happen tonight.”

I debated speaking to him about Cuinn’s signals. No, I had my own business waiting for me in Shainsa. Why mix myself up in some other, private intrigue?

He said, “I’m putting you and Cuinn on watch again. The old men doze off, and the young fellows get to daydreaming or fooling around. That’s all right most of the time, but I want someone who’ll keep his eyes open tonight. Did you ever know Cuinn before this?”

“Never set eyes on him.”

“Funny, I had the notion—“ He shrugged, turned away, then stopped.

“Don’t think twice about rousing the camp if there’s any disturbance. Better a false alarm than an ambush that catches us all in our blankets. If it came to a fight, we might be in a bad way. We all carry skeans, but I don’t think there’s a shocker in the whole camp, let alone a gun. You don’t have one by any chance?”

After the men had turned in, Cuinn patrolling the camp, halted a minute beside me and cocked his head toward the rustling forest.

“What’s going on in there?”

“Who knows? Catmen on the prowl, probably, thinking the horses would make a good meal, or maybe that we would.”

“Think it will come to a fight?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

He surveyed me for a moment without speaking. “And if it did?”

“We’d fight.” Then I sucked in my breath, for Cuinn had spoken Terran Standard, and I, without thinking had answered in the same language. He grinned, showing white teeth filed to a point.

“I thought so!”

I seized his shoulder and demanded roughly, “And what are you going to do about it?”

“That depends on you,” he answered, “and what you want in Shainsa. Tell me the truth. What were you doing in the Terran Zone?” He gave me no chance to answer. “You know who Kyral is, don’t you?”

“A trader,” I said, “who pays my wages and minds his own affairs.” I moved backward, hand on my skean, braced for a sudden rush. He made no aggressive motion, however.

“Kyral told me you’d been asking questions about Rakhal Sensar,” he said. “Clever. Now I, for one, could have told you he’d never set eyes on Rakhal. I—“

He broke off, hearing a noise in the forest, a long eerie howl. I muttered, “If you’ve brought them down on us—“

He shook his head urgently. “I had to take that chance, to get word to the others. It won’t work. Where’s the girl?”

I hardly heard him. I was hearing twigs snap, and silent sneaking feet. I turned for a yell that would rouse the camp and Cuinn grabbed me hard, saying insistently, “Quick! Where’s the girl! Go back and tell her it won’t work! If Kyral suspected—“

He never finished the sentence. Just behind us came another of the long eerie howls. I knocked Cuinn away, and suddenly the night was filled with crouching forms that came down on us like a whirlwind.

I shouted madly as the camp came alive with men struggling out of blankets, fighting for life itself. I ran hard, still shouting, for the enclosure where we had tied the horses. A catman, slim and black-furred, was crouched and cutting the hobble-strings of the nearest animal. I hurled myself on him. He exploded, clawing, raking my shoulder with talons that ripped the rough cloth like paper. I whipped out my skean and slashed upward. The talons contracted in my shoulder and I gasped with pain. Then the thing howled and fell away, clawing at the air. It twitched and lay still.

Four shots in rapid succession cracked in the clearing. Kyral to the contrary, someone must have had a pistol. I heard one of the cat-things wail, a hoarse dying rattle. Something dark clawed my arm and I slashed with the knife, going down as another set of talons fastened in my back, rolling and clutching.

I managed to get the thing’s forelimbs wedged under my elbow, my knee in its spine. I heaved, bent it backward, backward till it screamed, a high wail.

Then I felt the spine snap and the dead thing mewled once, just air escaping from collapsing lungs, and slid limp from my thigh. Erect it had not been over four feet tall and in the light of the dying fire it might have been a dead lynx.

“Rascar....” I heard a gasp, a groan. I whirled and saw Kyral go down, struggling, drowning in half a dozen or more of the fierce half-humans. I leaped at the smother of bodies, ripped one away with a stranglehold, slashed at its throat.

They were easy to kill.

I heard a high, urgent scream in their mewing tongue. Then the furred black things seemed to melt into the forest as silently as they had come. Kyral, dazed, his forehead running blood, his arm slashed to the bone, was sitting on the ground, still stunned.

Somebody had to take charge. I bellowed, “Lights! Get lights. They won’t come back if we have enough light, they can only see well in the dark.”

Someone stirred the fire. It blazed up as they piled on dead branches, and I roughly commanded one of the kids to fill every lantern he could find, and get them burning. Four of the dead things were lying in the clearing. The youngster I’d helped loading horses, the first day, gazed down at one of the catmen, half-disemboweled by somebody’s skean, and suddenly bolted for the bushes, where I heard him retching.

I set the others with stronger stomachs to dragging the bodies away from the clearing, and went back to see how badly Kyral was hurt. He had the rip in his arm and his face was covered with blood from a shallow scalp wound, but he insisted on getting up to inspect the hurts of the others.

There was no one without a claw-wound in leg or back or shoulder, but none were serious, and we were all feeling fairly cheerful when someone demanded, “Where’s Cuinn?”

He didn’t seem to be anywhere. Kyral, staggering slightly, insisted on searching, but I felt we wouldn’t find him. “He probably went off with his friends,” I snorted, and told about the signaling. Kyral looked grave.

“You should have told me,” he began, but shouts from the far end of the clearing sent us racing there. We nearly stumbled over a single, solitary, motionless form, outstretched and lifeless, blind eyes staring upward at the moons.

It was Cuinn. And his throat had been torn completely out.

Chapter Six

Once we were free of the forest, the road to the Dry-towns lay straight before us, with no hidden dangers. Some of us limped for a day or two, or favored an arm or leg clawed by the catmen, but I knew that what Kyral said was true; it was a lucky caravan which had to fight off only one attack.

Cuinn haunted me. A night or two of turning over his cryptic words in my mind had convinced me that whoever, or whatever he’d been signaling, it wasn’t the catmen. And his urgent question “Where’s the girl?” swam endlessly in my brain, making no more sense than when I had first heard it. Who had he mistaken me for? What did he think I was mixed up in? And who, above all, were the “others” who had to be signaled, at the risk of an attack by catmen which had meant his own death?

With Cuinn dead, and Kyral thinking I’d saved his life, a large part of the responsibility for the caravan now fell on me. And strangely I enjoyed it, making the most of this interval when I was separated from the thought of blood-feud or revenge, the need of spying or the threat of exposure. During those days and nights on the trail I grew back slowly into the Dry-towner I once had been. I knew I would be sorry when the walls of Shainsa rose on the horizon, bringing me back inescapably to my own quest.

We swung wide, leaving the straight trail to Shainsa, and Kyral announced his intention of stopping for half a day at Canarsa, one of the walled nonhuman cities which lay well off the traveled road. To my inadvertent show of surprise, he returned that he had trading connections there.

“We all need a day’s rest, and the Silent Ones will buy from me, though they have few dealings with men. Look here, I owe you something. You have lenses? You can get a better price in Canarsa than you’d get in Ardcarran or Shainsa. Come along with me, and I’ll vouch for you.”

Kyral had been most friendly since the night I had dug him out from under the catmen, and I knew no way to refuse without exposing myself for the sham trader I was. But I was deathly apprehensive. Even with Rakhal I had never entered any of the nonhuman towns.

On Wolf, human and nonhuman have lived side by side for centuries. And the human is not always the superior being. I might pass, among the Dry-towners and the relatively stupid humanoid chaks, for another Dry-towner. But Rakhal had cautioned me I could not pass among nonhumans for native Wolfan, and warned me against trying.

Nevertheless, I accompanied Kyral, carrying the box which had cost about a week’s pay in the Terran Zone and was worth a small fortune in the Dry-towns.

Canarsa seemed, inside the gates, like any other town. The houses were round, beehive fashion, and the streets totally empty. Just inside the gates a hooded figure greeted us, and gestured us by signs to follow him. He was covered from head to foot with some coarse and shiny fiber woven into stuff that looked like sacking.

But under the thick hooding was horror. It slithered and it had nothing like a recognizable human shape or walk, and I felt the primeval ape in me cowering and gibbering in a corner of my brain. Kyral muttered, close to my ear, “No outsider is ever allowed to look on the Silent Ones in their real form. I think they’re deaf and dumb, but be damn careful.”

“You bet,” I whispered, and was glad the streets were empty. I walked along, trying not to look at the gliding motion of that shrouded thing up ahead.

The trading was done in an open hut of reeds which looked as if it had been built in a hurry, and was not square, round, hexagonal or any other recognizable geometrical shape. It formed a pattern of its own, presumably, but my human eyes couldn’t see it. Kyral said in a breath of a whisper, “They’ll tear it down and burn it after we leave. We’re supposed to have contaminated it too greatly for any of the Silent Ones ever to enter again. My family has traded with them for centuries, and we’re almost the only ones who have ever entered the city.”

Then two of the Silent Ones of Canarsa, also covered with that coarse shiny stuff, slithered into the hut, and Kyral choked off his words as if he had swallowed them.

It was the strangest trading I had ever done. Kyral laid out the small forged-steel tools and the coils of thin fine wire, and I unpacked my lenses and laid them out in neat rows. The Silent Ones neither spoke nor moved, but through a thin place in the gray veiling I saw a speck which might have been a phosphorescent eye, moving back and forth as if scanning the things laid out for their inspection.

Then I smothered a gasp, for suddenly blank spaces appeared in the rows of merchandise. Certain small tools—wirecutters, calipers, surgical scissors—had vanished, and all the coils of wire had disappeared. Blanks equally had appeared in the rows of lenses; all of my tiny, powerful microscope lenses had vanished. I cast a quick glance at Kyral, but he seemed unsurprised. I recalled vague rumors of the Silent Ones, and concluded that, eerie though it seemed, this was merely their way of doing business.

Kyral pointed at one of the tools, at an exceptionally fine pair of binocular lenses, at the last of the coils of wire. The shrouded ones did not move, but the lenses and the wire vanished. The small tool remained, and after a moment Kyral dropped his hand.

I took my cue from Kyral and remained motionless, awaiting whatever surprise was coming. I had halfway expected what happened next. In the blank spaces, little points of light began to glimmer, and after a moment, blue and red and green gem-stones appeared there. To me the substitution appeared roughly equitable and fair, though I am no judge of the fine points of gems.

Kyral scowled slightly and pointed to one of the green gems, and after a moment it whisked away and a blue one took its place. In another spot where a fine set of surgical instruments had lain, Kyral pointed at the blue gem which now lay there, shook his head and held out three fingers. After a moment, a second blue stone lay winking beside the first.

Kyral did not move, but inexorably held out the three fingers. There was a little swirling in the air, and then both gems vanished, and the case of surgical instruments lay in their place.

Still Kyral did not move, but held the three fingers out for a full minute. Finally he dropped them and bent to pick up the case instruments. Again the little swirl in the air, and the instruments vanished. In their place lay three of the blue gems. My mouth twitched in the first amusement I had felt since we entered this uncanny place. Evidently bargaining with the Silent Ones was not a great deal different than bargaining with anyone anywhere. Nevertheless, under the eyes of those shrouded but horrible forms—if they had eyes, which I doubted—I had no impulse to protest their offered prices.

I gathered up the rejected lenses, repacked them neatly, and helped Kyral recrate the tools and instruments the Silent Ones had not wanted. I noticed that in addition to the microscope lenses and surgical instruments, they had taken all the fine wire. I couldn’t imagine, and didn’t particularly want to imagine, what they intended to do with it.

On our way back through the streets, unshepherded this time, Kyral’s tongue was loosened as if with a great release from tension. “They’re psychokinetics,” he told me. “Quite a few of the nonhuman races are. I guess they have to be, having no eyes and no hands. But sometimes I wonder if we of the Dry-towns ought to deal with them at all.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, not really listening. I was thinking mostly about the way the small objects had melted away and reappeared. The sight had stirred some uncomfortable memory, a vague sense of danger. It was not tangible enough for me to know why I feared it, but just a subliminal uneasiness that kept prodding at me, like a tooth that isn’t quite aching yet.

Kyral said, “We of Shainsa live between fire and flood. Terra on the one hand, and on the other maybe something worse, who knows? We know so little about the Silent Ones, and those like them. Who knows, maybe we’re giving them the weapons to destroy us—“ He broke off, with a gasp, and stood staring down one of the streets.

It lay open and bare between two rows of round houses, and Kyral was staring fixedly at a doorway which had opened there. I followed his paralyzed gaze, and saw the girl.

Hair like spun black glass fell in hard waves around her shoulders, and the red eyes smiled with alien malice, alien mischief, beneath the dark crown of little stars. And the Toad God sprawled in hideous embroideries across the white folds of her breast.

Kyral gulped hoarsely. His hand flew up as he clutched the charms strung about his neck. I imitated the gesture mechanically, watching Kyral, wondering if he would turn and run again. But he stood frozen for a minute. Then the spell broke and he took one step toward the girl, arms outstretched.

“Miellyn!” he cried, and there was heartbreak in his voice. And again, the cry making ringing echoes in the strange street:

“Miellyn! Miellyn!”

This time it was the girl who whirled and fled. Her white robes fluttered and I saw the twinkle of her flying feet as she vanished into a space between the houses and was gone.

Kyral took one blind step down the street, then another. But before he could burst into a run I had him by the arm, dragging him back to sanity.

“Man, you’ve gone mad! Chase, in a nonhuman town?”

He struggled for a minute, then, with a harsh sigh, he said, “It’s all right, I won’t—“ and shook loose from my arm.

He did not speak again until we reached the gates of Canarsa and they closed, silently and untouched, behind us. I had forgotten the place already. I had space only to think of the girl, whose face I had not forgotten since the moment when she saved me and disappeared. Now she had appeared again to Kyral. What did it all mean?

I asked, as we walked toward the camp, “Do you know that girl?” But I knew the question was futile. Kyral’s face was closed, conceding nothing, and his friendliness had vanished completely.

He said, “Now I know you. You saved me from the catmen, and again in Canarsa, so my hands are bound from harming you. But it is evil to have dealings with those who have been touched by the Toad God.” He spat noisily on the ground, looked at me with loathing, and said, “We will reach Shainsa in three days. Stay away from me.”

Chapter Seven

Shainsa, first in the chain of Dry-towns that lie in the bed of a long-dried ocean, is set at the center of a great alkali plain; a dusty, parched city bleached by a million years of sun. The houses are high, spreading buildings with many rooms and wide windows. The poorer sort were made of sun-dried brick, the more imposing being cut from the bleached salt stone of the cliffs that rise behind the city.

News travels fast in the Dry-towns. If Rakhal were in the city, he’d soon know that I was here, and guess who I was or why I’d come. I might disguise myself so that my own sister, or the mother who bore me, would not know me. But I had no illusions about my ability to disguise myself from Rakhal. He had created the disguise that was me.

When the second sun set, red and burning, behind the salt cliffs, I knew he was not in Shainsa, but I stayed on, waiting for something to happen. At night I slept in a cubbyhole behind a wineshop, paying an inordinate price for that very dubious privilege. And every day in the sleepy silence of the blood-red noon I paced the public square of Shainsa.

This went on for four days. No one took the slightest notice of another nameless man in a shabby shirtcloak, without name or identity or known business. No one appeared to see me except the dusty children, with pale fleecy hair, who played their patient games on the windswept curbing of the square. They surveyed my scarred face with neither curiosity or fear, and it occurred to me that Rindy might be such another as these.

If I had still been thinking like an Earthman, I might have tried to question one of the children, or win their confidence. But I had a deeper game in hand.

On the fifth day I was so much a fixture that my pacing went unnoticed even by the children. On the gray moss of the square, a few dried-looking old men, their faces as faded as their shirtcloaks and bearing the knife scars of a hundred forgotten flights, drowsed on the stone benches. And along the flagged walk at the edge of the square, as suddenly as an autumn storm in the salt flats, a woman came walking.

She was tall, with a proud swinging walk, and a metallic clashing kept rhythm to her swift steps. Her arms were fettered, each wrist bound with a jeweled bracelet and the bracelets linked together by a long, silver-gilt chain passed through a silken loop at her waist. From the loop swung a tiny golden padlock, but in the lock stood an even tinier key, signifying that she was a higher caste than her husband or consort, that her fettering was by choice and not command.

She stopped directly before me and raised her arm in formal greeting like a man. The chain made a tinkling sound in the hushed square as her other hand was pulled up tight against the silken loop at her waist. She stood surveying me for some moments, and finally I raised my head and returned her gaze. I don’t know why I had expected her to have hair like spun black glass and eyes that burned with a red reflection of the burning star.

This woman’s eyes were darker than the poison-berries of the salt cliffs, and her mouth was a cut berry that looked just as dangerous. She was young, the slimness of her shoulders and the narrow steel-chained wrists told me how very young she was, but her face had seen weather and storms, and her dark eyes had weathered worse psychic storms than that. She did not flinch at the sight of my scars, and met my gaze without dropping her eyes.

“You are a stranger. What is your business in Shainsa?”

I met the direct question with the insolence it demanded, hardly moving my lips. “I have come to buy women for the brothels of Ardcarran. Perhaps when washed you might be suitable. Who could arrange for your sale?”

She took the rebuke impassively, though the bitter crimson of her mouth twitched a little in mischief or rage. But she made no sign. The battle was joined between us, and I knew already that it would be fought to the end.

From somewhere in her draperies, something fell to the ground with a little tinkle. But I knew that trick too and I did not move. Finally she went away without bending to retrieve it and when I looked around I saw that all the fleece-haired children had stolen away, leaving their playthings lying on the curbing. But one or two of the gaffers on the stone benches, who were old enough to show curiosity without losing face, were watching me with impassive eyes.

I could have asked the woman’s name then, but I held back, knowing it could only lessen the prestige I had gained from the encounter. I glanced down, without seeming to do so, at the tiny mirror which had fallen from the recesses of the fur robe. Her name might have been inscribed on the reverse.

But I left it lying there to be picked up by the children when they returned, and went back to the wineshop. I had accomplished my first objective; if you can’t be inconspicuous, be so damned conspicuous that nobody can miss you. And that in itself is a fair concealment. How many people can accurately describe a street riot?

I was finishing off a bad meal with a stone bottle of worse wine when the chak came in, disregarding the proprietor, and made straight for me. He was furred immaculately white. His velvet muzzle was contracted as if the very smells might soil it, and he kept a dainty paw outstretched to ward off accidental contact with greasy counters or tables or tapestries. His fur was scented, and his throat circled with a collar of embroidered silk. This pampered minion surveyed me with the innocent malice of an uninvolved nonhuman for merely human intrigues.

“You are wanted in the Great House of Shanitha, thcarred man.” He spoke the Shainsa dialect with an affected lisp. “Will it pleathe you, come wis’ me?”

I came, with no more than polite protest, but was startled. I had not expected the encounter to reach the Great House so soon. Shainsa’s Great House had changed hands four times since I had last been in Shainsa. I wasn’t overly anxious to appear there.

The white chak, as out of place in the rough Dry-town as a jewel in the streets or a raindrop in the desert, led me along a winding boulevard to an outlying district. He made no attempt to engage me in conversation, and indeed I got the distinct impression that this cockscomb of a nonhuman considered me well beneath his notice. He seemed much more aware of the blowing dust in the street, which ruffled and smudged his carefully combed fur.

The Great House was carved from blocks of rough pink basalt, the entry guarded by two great caryatids enwrapped in chains of carved metal, set somehow into the surface of the basalt. The gilt had long ago worn away from the chains so that it alternately gleamed gold or smudged base metal. The caryatids were patient and blind, their jewel-eyes long vanished under a hotter sun than today’s.

The entrance hall was enormous. A Terran starship could have stood upright inside it, was my first impression, but I dismissed that thought quickly; any Terran thought was apt to betray me. But the main hall was built on a scale even more huge, and it was even colder than the legendary hell of the chaks. It was far too big for the people in it.

There was a little solar heater in the ceiling, but it didn’t help much. A dim glow came from a metal brazier but that didn’t help much either. The chak melted into the shadows, and I went down the steps into the hall by myself, feeling carefully for each step with my feet and trying not to seem to be doing so. My comparative night-blindness is the only significant way in which I really differ from a native Wolfan.

There were three men, two women and a child in the room. They were all Dry-towners and had an obscure family likeness, and they all wore rich garments of fur dyed in many colors. One of the men, old and stooped and withered, was doing something to the brazier. A slim boy of fourteen was sitting cross-legged on a pile of cushions in the corner. There was something wrong with his legs.

A girl of ten in a too-short smock that showed long spider-thin legs above her low leather boots was playing with some sort of shimmery crystals, spilling them out into patterns and scooping them up again from the uneven stones of the floor. One of the women was a fat, creased slattern, whose jewels and dyed furs did not disguise her greasy slovenliness.

Her hands were unchained, and she was biting into a fruit which dripped red juice down the rich blue fur of her robe. The old man gave her a look like murder as I came in, and she straightened slightly but did not discard the fruit. The whole room had a curious look of austere, dignified poverty, to which the fat woman was the only discordant note.

But it was the remaining man and woman who drew my attention, so that I noticed the others only peripherally, in their outermost orbit. One was Kyral, standing at the foot of the dais and glowering at me.

The other was the dark-eyed woman I had rebuked today in the public square.

Kyral said, “So it’s you.” And his voice held nothing. Not rebuke, not friendliness or a lack of it, not even hatred.

Nothing.

There was only one way to meet it. I faced the girl—she was sitting on a thronelike chair next to the fat woman, and looked like a doe next to a pig—and said boldly, “I assume this summons to mean that you informed your kinsmen of my offer.”

She flushed, and that was triumph enough. I held back the triumph, however, wary of overconfidence. The gaffer laughed the high cackle of age, and Kyral broke in with a sharp, angry monosyllable by which I knew that my remark had indeed been repeated, and had lost nothing in the telling. But only the line of his jaw betrayed the anger as he said calmly, “Be quiet, Dallisa. Where did you pick this up?”

I said boldly, “The Great House has changed rulers since last I smelled the salt cliffs. Newcomers do not know my name and theirs is unknown to me.”

The old gaffer said thinly to Kyral, “Our name has lost kihar. One daughter is lured away by the Toymaker and another babbles with strangers in the square, and a homeless no-good of the streets does not know our name.”

My eyes, growing accustomed to the dark blaze of the brazier, saw that Kyral was biting his lip and scowling. Then he gestured to a table where an array of glassware was set, and at the gesture, the white chak came on noiseless feet and poured wine.

“If you have no blood-feud with my family, will you drink with me?”

“I will,” I said, relaxing. Even if he had associated the trader with the scarred Earthman of the spaceport, he seemed to have decided to drop the matter. He seemed startled, but he waited until I had lifted the glass and taken a sip. Then, with a movement like lightning, he leaped from the dais and struck the glass from my lips.

I staggered back, wiping my cut mouth, in a split-second juggling possibilities. The insult was terrible and deadly. I could do nothing now but fight. Men had been murdered in Shainsa for far less. I had come to settle one feud, not involve myself in another, but even while these lightning thoughts flickered in my mind, I had whipped out my skean and I was surprised at the shrillness of my own voice.

“You contrive offense beneath your own roof—“

”Spy and renegade!” Kyral thundered. He did not touch his skean. From the table he caught a long four-thonged whip, making it whistle through the air. The long-legged child scuttled backward. I stepped back one pace, trying to conceal my desperate puzzlement. I could not guess what had prompted Kyral’s attack, but whatever it was, I must have made some bad mistake and could count myself lucky to get out of there alive.

Kyral’s voice perceptibly trembled with rage. “You dare to come into my own home after I have tracked you to the Kharsa and back, blind fool that I was! But now you shall pay.”

The whip sang through the air, hissing past my shoulders. I dodged to one side, retreating step by step as Kyral swung the powerful thongs. It cracked again, and a pain like the burning of red-hot irons seared my upper arm. My skean rattled down from numb fingers.

The whip whacked the floor.

“Pick up your skean,” said Kyral. “Pick it up if you dare.” He poised the lash again.

The fat woman screamed.

I stood rigid, gauging my chances of disarming him with a sudden leap. Suddenly the girl Dallisa leaped from her seat with a harsh musical chiming of chains.

“Kyral, no! No, Kyral!”

He moved slightly, but did not take his eyes from me. “Get back, Dallisa.”

“No! Wait!” She ran to him and caught his whip-arm, dragging it down, and spoke to him hurriedly and urgently. Kyral’s face changed as she spoke; he drew a long breath and threw the whip down beside my skean on the floor.

“Answer straight, on your life. What are you doing in Shainsa?”

I could hardly take it in that for the moment I was reprieved from sudden death, from being beaten into bloody death there at Kyral’s feet. The girl went back to her thronelike chair. Now I must either tell the truth or a convincing lie, and I was lost in a game where I didn’t know the rules. The explanation I thought might get me out alive might be the very one which would bring down instant and painful death. Suddenly, with a poignancy that was almost pain, I wished Rakhal were standing here at my side.

But I had to bluff it out alone.

If they had recognized me for Race Cargill, the Terran spy who had often been in Shainsa, they might release me—it was possible, I supposed, that they were Terran sympathizers. On the other hand, Kyral’s shouts of “Spy, renegade!” seemed to suggest the opposite.

I stood trying to ignore the searing pain in my lashed arm, but I knew that blood was running hot down my shoulder. Finally I said, “I came to settle blood-feud.”

Kyral’s lips thinned in what might have been meant for a smile. “You shall, assuredly. But with whom, remains to be seen.”

Knowing I had nothing more to lose, I said, “With a renegade called Rakhal Sensar.”

Only the old man echoed my words dully, “Rakhal Sensar?”

I felt heartened, seeing I wasn’t dead yet.

“I have sworn to kill him.”

Kyral suddenly clapped his hands and shouted to the white chak to clean up the broken glass on the floor. He said huskily, “You are not yourself Rakhal Sensar?”

“I told you he wasn’t,” said Dallisa, high and hysterically. “I told you he wasn’t.”

“A scarred man, tall—what was I to think?” Kyral sounded and looked badly shaken. He filled a glass himself and handed it to me, saying hoarsely, “I did not believe even the renegade Rakhal would break the code so far as to drink with me.”

“He would not.” I could be positive about this. The codes of Terra had made some superficial impress on Rakhal, but down deep his own world held sway. If these men were at blood-feud with Rakhal and he stood here where I stood, he would have let himself be beaten into bloody rags before tasting their wine.

I took the glass, raised it and drained it. Then, holding it out before me, I said, “Rakhal’s life is mine. But I swear by the red star and by the unmoving mountains, by the black snow and by the Ghost Wind, I have no quarrel with any beneath this roof.” I cast the glass to the floor, where it shattered on the stones.

Kyral hesitated, but under the blazing eyes of the girl he quickly poured himself a glass of the wine and drank a few sips, then flung down the glass. He stepped forward and laid his hands on my shoulders. I winced as he touched the welt of the lash and could not raise my own arm to complete the ceremonial toast.

Kyral stepped away and shrugged. “Shall I have one of the women see to your hurt?” He looked at Dallisa, but she twisted her mouth. “Do it yourself!”

“It is nothing,” I said, not truthfully. “But I demand in requital that since we are bound by spilled blood under your roof, that you give me what news you have of Rakhal, the spy and renegade.”

Kyral said fiercely, “If I knew, would I be under my own roof?”

The old gaffer on the dais broke into shrill whining laughter. “You have drunk wi’ him, Kyral, now he’s bound you not to do him harm! I know the story of Rakhal! He was spy for Terra twelve years. Twelve years, and then he fought and flung their filthy money in their faces and left ‘em. But his partner was some Dry-town halfbreed or Terran spy and they fought wi’ clawed gloves, and near killed one another except the Terrans, who have no honor, stopped ‘em. See the marks of the kifirgh on his face!”

“By Sharra the golden-chained,” said Kyral, gazing at me with something like a grin. “You are, if nothing else, a very clever man. What are you, spy, or half-caste of some Ardcarran slut?”

“What I am doesn’t matter to you,” I said. “You have blood-feud with Rakhal, but mine is older than yours and his life is mine. As you are bound in honor to kill”—the formal phrases came easily now to my tongue; the Earthman had slipped away—“so you are bound in honor to help me kill. If anyone beneath your roof knows anything of Rakhal—“

Kyral’s smile bared his teeth.

“Rakhal works against the Son of the Ape,” he said, using the insulting Wolf term for the Terrans. “If we help you to kill him, we remove a goad from their flanks. I prefer to let the filthy Terranan spend their strength trying to remove it themselves. Moreover, I believe you are yourself an Earthman.

“You have no right to the courtesy I extend to we, the People of the Sky. Yet you have drunk wine with me and I have no quarrel with you.” He raised his hand in dismissal, outfencing me. “Leave my roof in safety and my city with honor.”

I could not protest or plead. A man’s kihar, his personal dignity, is a precious thing in Shainsa, and he had placed me so I could not compromise mine further in words. Yet I lost kihar equally if I left at his bidding, like an inferior dismissed.

One desperate gamble remained.

“A word,” I said, raising my hand, and while he half turned, startled, believing I was indeed about to compromise my dignity by a further plea, I flung it at him:

“I will bet shegri with you.”

His iron composure looked shaken. I had delivered a blow to his belief that I was an Earthman, for it is doubtful if there are six Earthmen on Wolf who know about shegri, the dangerous game of the Dry-towns.

It is no ordinary gamble, for what the better stakes is his life, possibly his reason. Rarely indeed will a man beg shegri unless he has nothing further to lose.

It is a cruel, possibly decadent game, which has no parallel anywhere in the known universe.

But I had no choice. I had struck a cold trail in Shainsa. Rakhal might be anywhere on the planet and half of Magnusson’s month was already up. Unless I could force Kyral to tell what he knew, I might as well quit.

So I repeated: “I will bet shegri with you.”

And Kyral stood unmoving.

For what the shegrin wagers is his courage and endurance in the face of torture and an unknown fate. On his side, the stakes are clearly determined beforehand. But if he loses, his punishment or penalty is at the whim of the one who has accepted him, and he may be put to whatever doom the winner determines.

And this is the contest:

The shegrin permits himself to be tortured from sunrise to sunset. If he endures he wins. It is as simple as that. He can stop the torture at any moment by a word, but to do so is a concession of defeat.

This is not as dangerous as it might, at first, seem. The other party to the bet is bound by the ironclad codes of Wolf to inflict no permanent physical damage (no injury that will not heal with three suncourses). But from sunrise to sunset, any torment or painful ingenuity which the half-human mentality of Wolf can devise must be endured.

The man who can outthink the torture of the moment, the man who can hold in his mind the single thought of his goal—that man can claim the stakes he has set, as well as other concessions made traditional.

The silence grew in the hall. Dallisa had straightened and was watching me intently, her lips parted and the tip of a little red tongue visible between her teeth. The only sound was the tiny crunching as the fat woman nibbled at nuts and cast their shells into the brazier. Even the child on the steps had abandoned her game with the crystal dice, and sat looking up at me with her mouth open. Finally Kyral demanded, “Your stakes?”

“Tell me all you know of Rakhal Sensar and keep silence about me in Shainsa.”

“By the red shadow,” Kyral burst out, “you have courage, Rascar!”

“Say only yes or no!” I retorted.

Rebuked, he fell silent. Dallisa leaned forward and again, for some unknown reason, I thought of a girl with hair like spun black glass.

Kyral raised his hand. “I say no. I have blood-feud with Rakhal and I will not sell his death to another. Further, I believe you are Terran and I will not deal with you. And finally, you have twice saved my life and I would find small pleasure in torturing you. I say no. Drink again with me and we part without a quarrel.”

Beaten, I turned to go.

“Wait,” said Dallisa.

She stood up and came down from the dais, slowly this time, walking with dignity to the rhythm of her musically clashing chains. “I have a quarrel with this man.”

I started to say that I did not quarrel with women, and stopped myself. The Terran concept of chivalry has no equivalent on Wolf.

She looked at me with her dark poison-berry eyes, icy and level and amused, and said, “I will bet shegri with you, unless you fear me, Rascar.”

And I knew suddenly that if I lost, I might better have trusted myself to Kyral and his whip, or to the wild beast-things of the mountains.

Chapter Eight

I slept little that night.

There is a tale told in Daillon of a shegri where the challenger was left in a room alone, where he was blindfolded and told to await the beginning of the torment.

Somewhere in those dark hours of waiting, between the unknown and the unexpected, the hours of telling over to himself the horrors of past shegri, the torture of anticipation alone became the unbearable. A little past noon he collapsed in screams of horror and died raving, unmarred, untouched.

Daybreak came slowly, and with the first streamers of light came Dallisa and the white chak, maliciously uninvolved, sniffing his way through the shabby poverty of the great hall. They took me to a lower dungeon where the slant of the sunlight was less visible. Dallisa said, “The sun has risen.”

I said nothing. Any word may be interpreted as a confession of defeat. I resolved to give them no excuse. But my skin crawled and I had that peculiar prickling sensation where the hair on my forearms was bristling erect with tension and fear.

Dallisa said to the chak, “His gear was not searched. See that he has swallowed no anesthetic drugs.”

Briefly I gave her credit for thoroughness, even while I wondered in a split second why I had not thought of this. Drugs could blur consciousness, at least, or suspend reality. The white nonhuman sprang forward and pinioned my arms with one strong, spring-steel forearm. With his other hand he forced my jaws open. I felt the furred fingers at the back of my throat, gagged, struggled briefly and doubled up in uncontrollable retching.

Dallisa’s poison-berry-eyes regarded me levelly as I struggled upright, fighting off the dizzy sickness of disgust. Something about her impassive face stopped me cold. I had been, momentarily, raging with fury and humiliation. Now I realized that this had been a calculated, careful gesture to make me lose my temper and thus sap my resistance.

If she could set me to fighting, if she could make me spend my strength in rage, my own imagination would fight on her side to make me lose control before the end. Swimming in the glare of her eyes, I realized she had never thought for a moment that I had taken any drug. Acting on Kyral’s hint that I was a Terran, she was taking advantage of the well-known Terran revulsion for the nonhuman.

“Blindfold him,” Dallisa commanded, then instantly countermanded that: “No, strip him first.”

The chak ripped off shirtcloak, shirt, shoes, breeches, and I had my first triumph when the wealed clawmarks on my shoulders—worse, if possible, than those which disfigured my face—were laid bare. The chak screwed up his muzzle in fastidious horror, and Dallisa looked shaken. I could almost read her thoughts:

If he endured this, what hope have I to make him cry mercy?

Briefly I remembered the months I lay feverish and half dead, waiting for the wounds Rakhal had inflicted to heal, those months when I had believed that nothing would ever hurt me again, that I had known the worst of all suffering. But I had been younger then.

Dallisa had picked up two small sharp knives. She weighed them, briefly, gesturing to the chak. Without resisting, I let myself be manhandled backward, spreadeagled against the wall.

Dallisa commanded, “Drive the knives through his palms to the wall!”

My hands twitched convulsively, anticipating the slash of steel, and my throat closed in spasmodic dread. This was breaking the compact, bound as they were not to inflict physical damage. I opened my lips to protest this breaking of the bond of honor and met her dark blazing stare, and suddenly the sweat broke out on my forehead. I had placed myself wholly in their hands, and as Kyral had said, they were in no way bound by honor to respect a pledge to a Terran!

Then, as my hands clenched into fists, I forced myself to relax. This was a bluff, a mental trick to needle me into breaking the pact and pleading for mercy. I set my lips, spread my palms wide against the wall and waited impassively.

She said in her lilting voice, “Take care not to sever the tendons, or his hands would be paralyzed and he may claim we have broken our compact.”

The points of the steel, razor-sharp, touched my palms, and I felt blood run down my hand before the pain. With an effort that turned my face white, I did not pull away from the point. The knives drove deeper.

Dallisa gestured to the chak. The knives dropped. Two pinpricks, a quarter of an inch deep, stung in my palm. I had outbluffed her. Had I?

If I had expected her to betray disappointment—and I had—I was disappointed. Abruptly, as if the game had wearied her already, she gestured, and I could not hold back a gasp as my arms were hauled up over my head, twisted violently around one another and trussed with thin cords that bit deep into the flesh. Then the rough upward pull almost jerked my shoulders from their sockets and I heard the giant chak grunt with effort as I was hauled upward until my feet barely, on tiptoe, touched the floor.

“Blindfold him,” said Dallisa languidly, “so that he cannot watch the ascent of the sun or its descent or know what is to come.”

A dark softness muffled my eyes. After a little I heard her steps retreating. My arms, wrenched overhead and numbed with the bite of the cords, were beginning to hurt badly now. But it wasn’t too bad. Surely she did not mean that this should be all....

Sternly I controlled my imagination, taking a tight rein on my thoughts. There was only one way to meet this—hanging blind and racked in space, my toes barely scrabbling at the floor—and that was to take each thing as it came and not look ahead for an instant. First of all I tried to get my feet under me, and discovered that by arching upwards to my fullest height I could bear my weight on tiptoe and ease, a little, the dislocating ache in my armpits by slackening the overhead rope.

But after a little, a cramping pain began to flare through the arches of my feet, and it became impossible to support my weight on tiptoe. I jarred down with violent strain on my wrists and wrenched shoulders again, and for a moment the shooting agony was so intense that I nearly screamed. I thought I heard a soft breath near me.

After a little it subsided to a sharp ache, then to a dull ache, and then to the violent cramping pain again, and once more I struggled to get my toes under me. I realized that by allowing my toes barely to touch the floor they had doubled and tripled the pain by the tantalizing hope of, if not momentary relief, at least the alteration of one pain for another.

I haven’t the faintest idea, even now, how long I repeated that agonizing cycle: struggle for a toehold on rough stone, scraping my bare feet raw; arch upward with all my strength to release for a few moments the strain on my wrenched shoulders; the momentary illusion of relief as I found my balance and the pressure lightened on my wrists.

Then the slow creeping, first of an ache, then of a pain, then of a violent agony in the arches of feet and calves. And, delayed to the last endurable moment, that final terrible anguish when the drop of my full weight pulled shoulder and wrist and elbow joints with that bone-shattering jerk.

I started once to estimate how much time had passed, how many hours had crawled by, then checked myself, for that was imminent madness. But once the process had begun my brain would not abandon and I found myself, with compulsive precision, counting off the seconds and the minutes in each cycle: stretch upward, release the pressure on the arms; the beginning of pain in calves and arches and toes; the creeping of pain up ribs and loins and shoulders; the sudden jarring drop on the arms again.

My throat was intolerably dry. Under other circumstances I might have estimated the time by the growth of hunger and thirst, but the rough treatment I had received made this impossible. There were other, unmentionable, humiliating pains.

After a time, to bolster my flagging courage, I found myself thinking of all the ways it might have been worse. I had heard of a shegrin exposed to the bite of poisonous—not fatal, but painfully poisonous—insects, and to the worrying of the small gnawing rodents which can be trained to bite and tear. Or I might have been branded....

I banished the memory with the powerful exorcism; the man in Daillon whose anticipation, alone, of a torture which never came, had broken his mind. There was only one way to conquer this, and that was to act as if the present moment was the only one, and never for a moment to forget that the strongest of compacts bound them not to harm me, that the end of this was fixed by sunset.

Gradually, however, all such rational thoughts blurred in a semidelirium of thirst and pain, narrowing to a red blaze of agony across my shoulder blades. I eased up on my toes again.

White-hot pain blazed through my feet. The rough stone on which my toes sank had been covered with metal and I smelled scorching flesh, jerking up my feet with a wordless snarl of rage and fury, hanging in agony by my shoulders alone.

And then I lost consciousness, at least for several moments, for when I became aware again, through the nightmare of pain, my toes were resting lightly and securely on cold stone. The smell of burned flesh remained, and the painful stinging in my toes. Mingled with that smell was a drift of perfume close by.

Dallisa murmured, “I do not wish to break our bargain by damaging your feet. It’s only a little touch of fire to keep you from too much security in resting them.”

I felt the taste of blood mingle in my mouth with the sour taste of vomit. I felt delirious, lightheaded. After another eternity I wondered if I had really heard Dallisa’s lilting croon or whether it was a nightmare born of feverish pain:

Plead with me. A word, only a word and I will release you, strong man, scarred man. Perhaps I shall demand only a little space in your arms. Would not such doom be light upon you? Perhaps I shall set you free to seek Rakhal if only to plague Kyral. A word, only a word from you. A word, only a word from you....

It died into an endlessly echoing whisper. Swaying, blinded, I wondered why I endured. I drew a dry tongue over lips, salty and bloody, and nightmarishly considered yielding, winning my way somehow around Dallisa. Or knocking her suddenly senseless and escaping—I, who need not be bound by Wolf’s codes either. I fumbled with a stiff shape of words.

And a breath saved me, a soft, released breath of anticipation. It was another trick. I swayed, limp and racked. I was not Race Cargill now. I was a dead man hanging in chains, swinging, filthy vultures pecking at my dangling feet. I was....

The sound of boots rang on the stone and Kyral’s voice, low and bitter, demanded somewhere behind me, “What have you done with him?”

She did not answer, but I heard her chains clash lightly and imagined her gesture. Kyral muttered, “Women have no genius at any torture except....” His voice faded out into great distances. Their words came to me over a sort of windy ringing, like the howling of lost men, dying in the snowfast passes of the mountains.

“Speak up, you fool, he can’t hear you now.”

“If you have let him faint, you are clumsy!”

“You talk of clumsiness!” Dallisa’s voice, even thinned by the nightmare ringing in my head, held concentrated scorn. “Perhaps I shall release him, to find Rakhal when you failed! The Terrans have a price on Rakhal’s head, too. And at least this man will not confuse himself with his prey!”

“If you think I would let you bargain with a Terranan—“

Dallisa cried passionately, “You trade with the Terrans! How would you stop me, then?”

“I trade with them because I must. But for a matter involving the honor of the Great House—“

”The Great House whose steps you would never have climbed, except for Rakhal!” Dallisa sounded as if she were chewing her words in little pieces and spitting them at Kyral. “Oh, you were clever to take us both as your consorts! You did not know it was Rakhal’s doing, did you? Hate the Terrans, then!” She spat an obscenity at him. “Enjoy your hate, wallow in hating, and in the end all Shainsa will fall prey to the Toymaker, like Miellyn.”

“If you speak that name again,” said Kyral very low, “I will kill you.”

“Like Miellyn, Miellyn, Miellyn,” Dallisa repeated deliberately. “You fool, Rakhal knew nothing of Miellyn!”

“He was seen—“

”With me, you fool! With me! You cannot yet tell twin from twin? Rakhal came to me to ask news of her!”

Kyral cried out hoarsely, like a man in anguish, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You don’t really have to ask, do you, Kyral?”

“You bitch!” said Kyral. “You filthy bitch!” I heard the sound of a blow. The next moment Kyral ripped the blindfold from my eyes and I blinked in the blaze of light. My arms were wholly numb now, twisted above my head, but the jar of his touch sent fresh pain racing through me. Kyral’s face swam out of the blaze of hell. “If that is true, then this is a damnable farce, Dallisa. You have lost our chance of learning what he knows of Miellyn.”

“What he knows?” Dallisa lowered her hand from her face, where a bruise was already darkening.

“Miellyn has twice appeared when I was with him. Loose him, Dallisa, and bargain with him. What we know of Rakhal for what he knows of Miellyn.”

“If you think I would let you bargain with Terranan,” she mocked. “Weakling, this quarrel is mine! You fool, the others in the caravan will give me news, if you will not! Where is Cuinn?”

From a million miles away Kyral laughed. “You’ve slipped the wrong hawk, Dallisa. The catmen killed him.” His skean flicked loose. He climbed to a perch near the rope at my wrists. “Bargain with me, Rascar!”

I coughed, unable to speak, and Kyral insisted, “Will you bargain? End this damned woman’s farce which makes a mock of shegri?”

The slant of sun told me there was light left. I found a shred of voice, not knowing what I was going to say until I had said it, irrevocably. “This is between Dallisa and me.”

Kyral glared at me in mounting rage. With four strides he was out of the room, flinging back a harsh, furious “I hope you kill each other!” and the door slammed.

Dallisa’s face swam red, and again as before, I knew the battle which was joined between us would be fought to a dreadful end. She touched my chest lightly, but the touch jolted excruciating pain through my shoulders.

“Did you kill Cuinn?”

I wondered, wearily, what this presaged.

“Did you?” In a passion, she cried, “Answer! Did you kill him?” She struck me hard, and where the touch had been pain, the blow was a blaze of white agony. I fainted.

“Answer!” She struck me again and the white blaze jolted me back to consciousness. “Answer me! Answer!” Each cry bought a blow until I gasped finally, “He signaled ... set catmen on us....”

“No!” She stood staring at me and her white face was a death mask in which the eyes lived. She screamed wildly and the huge chak came running.

“Cut him down! Cut him down! Cut him down!”

A knife slashed the rope and I slumped, falling in a bone-breaking huddle to the floor. My arms were still twisted over my head. The chak cut the ropes apart, pulled my arms roughly back into place, and I gagged with the pain as the blood began flowing painfully through the chafed and swollen hands.

And then I lost consciousness. More or less permanently, this time.

Chapter Nine

When I came to again I was lying with my head in Dallisa’s lap, and the reddish color of sunset was in the room. Her thighs were soft under my head, and for an instant I wondered if, in delirium, I had conceded to her. I muttered, “Sun ... not down....”

She bent her face to mine, whispering, “Hush. Hush.”

It was heaven, and I drifted off again. After a moment I felt a cup against my lips.

“Can you swallow this?”

I could and did. I couldn’t taste it yet, but it was cold and wet and felt heavenly trickling down my throat. She bent and looked into my eyes, and I felt as if I were falling into those reddish and stormy depths. She touched my scarred mouth with a light finger. Suddenly my head cleared and I sat upright.

“Is this a trick to force me into calling my bet?”

She recoiled as if I had struck her, then the trace of a smile flitted around her red mouth. Yes, between us it was battle. “You are right to be suspicious, I suppose. But if I tell you what I know of Rakhal, will you trust me then?”

I looked straight at her and said, “No.”

Surprisingly, she threw back her head and laughed. I flexed my freed wrists cautiously. The skin was torn away and chafed, and my arms ached to the bone. When I moved harsh lances of pain drove through my chest.

“Well, until sunset I have no right to ask you to trust me,” said Dallisa when she had done laughing. “And since you are bound by my command until the last ray has fallen, I command that you lay your head upon my knees.”

I blazed, “You are making a game of me!”

“Is that my privilege? Do you refuse?”

“Refuse?” It was not yet sunset. This might be a torture more complex than any which had yet greeted me. From the scarlet glint in her eyes I felt she was playing with me, as the cat-things of the forest play with their helpless victims. My mouth twitched in a grimace of humiliation as I lowered myself obediently until my head rested on her fur-clad knees.

She murmured, smiling, “Is this so unbearable, then?”

I said nothing. Never, never for an instant could I forget that—all human, all woman as she seemed—Dallisa’s race was worn and old when the Terran Empire had not left their home star. The mind of Wolf, which has mingled with the nonhuman since before the beginnings of recorded time, is unfathomable to an outsider. I was better equipped than most Earthmen to keep pace with its surface acts, but I could never pretend to understand its deeper motivations.

It works on complex and irrational logic. Mischief is an integral part of it. Even the deadly blood-feud with Rakhal had begun with an overelaborate practical joke—which had lost the Service, incidentally, several thousand credits worth of spaceship.

And so I could not trust Dallisa for an instant. Yet it was wonderful to lie here with my head resting against the perfumed softness of her body.

Then suddenly her arms were gripping me, frantic and hungry; the subdued thing in her voice, her eyes, flamed out hot and wild. She was pressing the whole length of her body to mine, breasts and thighs and long legs, and her voice was hoarse.

“Is this torture too?”

Beneath the fur robe she was soft and white, and the subtle scent of her hair seemed a deeper entrapment than any. Frail as she seemed, her arms had the strength of steel, and pain blazed down my wrenched shoulders, seared through the twisted wrists. Then I forgot the pain.

Over her shoulder the last dropping redness of the sun vanished and plunged the room into orchid twilight.

I caught her wrists in my hands, prizing them backward, twisting them upward over her head. I said thickly, “The sun’s down.” And then I stopped her wild mouth with mine.

And I knew that the battle between us had reached climax and victory simultaneously, and any question about who had won it was purely academic.

During the night sometime, while her dark head lay motionless on my shoulder, I found myself staring into the darkness, wakeful. The throbbing of my bruises had little to do with my sleeplessness; I was remembering other chained girls from the old days in the Dry-towns, and the honey and poison of them distilled into Dallisa’s kisses. Her head was very light on my shoulders, and she felt curiously insubstantial, like a woman of feathers.

One of the tiny moons was visible through the slitted windows. I thought of my rooms in the Terran Trade City, clean and bright and warm, and all the nights when I had paced the floor, hating, filled to the teeth with bitterness, longing for the windswept stars of the Dry-towns, the salt smell of the winds and the musical clashing of the walk of the chained women.

With a sting of guilt, I realized that I had half forgotten Juli and my pledge to her and her misfortune which had freed me again, for this.

Yet I had won, and what they knew had narrowed my planet-wide search to a pinpoint. Rakhal was in Charin.

I wasn’t altogether surprised. Charin is the only city on Wolf, except the Kharsa, where the Terran Empire has put down deep roots into the planet, built a Trade City, a smaller spaceport. Like the Kharsa, it lies within the circle of Terran law—and a million miles outside it.

A nonhuman town, inhabited largely by chaks, it is the core and center of the resistance movement, a noisy town in a perpetual ferment. It was the logical place for a renegade. I settled myself so that the ache in my racked shoulders was less violent, and muttered, “Why Charin?”

Slight as the movement was, it roused Dallisa. She rolled over and propped herself on her elbows, quoting drowsily, “The prey walks safest at the hunter’s door.”

I stared at the square of violet moonlight, trying to fit together all the pieces of the puzzle, and asked half aloud, “What prey and what hunters?”

Dallisa didn’t answer. I hadn’t expected her to answer. I asked the real question in my mind: “Why does Kyral hate Rakhal Sensar, when he doesn’t even know him by sight?”

“There are reasons,” she said somberly. “One of them is Miellyn, my twin sister. Kyral climbed the steps of the Great House by claiming us both as his consorts. He is our father’s son by another wife.”

That explained much. Brother-and-sister marriages, not uncommon in the Dry-towns, are based on expediency and suspicion, and are frequently, though not always loveless. It explained Dallisa’s taunts, and it partly explained, only partly, why I found her in my arms. It did not explain Rakhal’s part in this mysterious intrigue, nor why Kyral had taken me for Rakhal, (but only after he remembered seeing me in Terran clothing).

I wondered why it had never occurred to me before that I might be mistaken for Rakhal. There was no close resemblance between us, but a casual description would apply equally well to me or to Rakhal. My height is unusual for a Terran—within an inch of Rakhal’s own—and we had roughly the same build, the same coloring. I had copied his walk, imitated his mannerisms, since we were boys together.

And, blurring minor facial characteristics, there were the scars of the kifirgh on my mouth, cheeks, and shoulders. Anyone who did not know us by sight, anyone who had known us by reputation from the days when we had worked together in the Dry-towns, might easily take one of us for the other. Even Juli had blurted, “You’re so much like—“ before thinking better of it.

Other odd bits of the puzzle floated in my mind, stubbornly refusing to take on recognizable patterns, the disappearance of a toy-seller; Juli’s hysterical babbling; the way the girl—Miellyn?—had vanished into a shrine of Nebran; and the taunts of Dallisa and the old man about a mysterious “Toymaker.” And something, some random joggling of a memory, in that eerie trading in the city of the Silent Ones. I knew all these things fitted together somehow, but I had no real hope that Dallisa could complete their pattern for me.

She said, with a vehemence that startled me, “Miellyn is only the excuse! Kyral hates Rakhal because Rakhal will compromise and because he’ll fight!”

She rolled over and pressed herself against me in the darkness. Her voice trembled. “Race, our world is dying. We can’t stand against Terra. And there are other things, worse things.”

I sat up, surprised to find myself defending Terra to this girl. After all these years I was back in my own world. And yet I heard myself say quietly, “The Terrans aren’t exploiting Wolf. We haven’t abolished the rule of Shainsa. We’ve changed nothing.”

It was true. Terra held Wolf by compact, not conquest. They paid, and paid generously, for the lease of the lands where their Trade Cities would rise, and stepped beyond them only when invited to do so.

“We let any city or state that wants to keep its independence govern itself until it collapses, Dallisa. And they do collapse after a generation or so. Very few primitive planets can hold out against us. The people themselves get tired of living under feudal or theocratic systems, and they beg to be taken into the Empire. That’s all.”

“But that’s just it,” Dallisa argued. “You give the people all those things we used to give them, and you do it better. Just by being here, you are killing the Dry-towns. They’re turning to you and leaving us, and you let them do it.”

I shook my head. “We’ve kept the Terran Peace for centuries. What do you expect? Should we give you arms, planes, bombs, weapons to hold your slaves down?”

“Yes!” she flared at me. “The Dry-towns have ruled Wolf since—since—you, you can’t even imagine how long! And we made compact with you to trade here—“

”And we have rewarded you by leaving you untouched,” I said quietly. “But we have not forbidden the Dry-towns to come into the Empire and work with Terra.”

She said bitterly, “Men like Kyral will die first,” and pressed her face helplessly against me. “And I will die with them. Miellyn broke away, but I cannot! Courage is what I lack. Our world is rotten, Race, rotten all through, and I’m as rotten as the core of it. I could have killed you today, and I’m here in your arms. Our world is rotten, but I’ve no confidence that the new world will be better!”

I put my hand under her chin, and looked down gravely into her face, only a pale oval in the darkness. There was nothing I could say; she had said it all, and truthfully. I had hated and yearned and starved for this, and when I found it, it turned salty and bloody on my lips, like Dallisa’s despairing kisses. She ran her fingers over the scars on my face, then gripped her small thin hands around my wrists so fiercely that I grunted protest.

“You will not forget me,” she said in her strangely lilting voice. “You will not forget me, although you were victorious.” She twisted and lay looking up at me, her eyes glowing faintly luminous in darkness. I knew that she could see me as clearly as if it were day. “I think it was my victory, not yours, Race Cargill.”

Gently, on an impulse I could not explain, I picked up one delicate wrist, then the other, unclasping the heavy jeweled bracelets. She let out a stifled cry of dismay. And then I tossed the chains into a corner before I drew her savagely into my arms again and forced her head back under my mouth.

I said good-bye to her alone, in the reddish, windswept space before the Great House. She pressed her head against my shoulder and whispered, “Race, take me with you!”

For answer I only picked up her narrow wrists and turned them over on my palm. The jeweled bracelets were clasped again around the thinly boned joints, and on some self-punishing impulse she had shortened the chains so that she could not even put her arms around me. I lifted the punished wrists to my mouth and kissed them gently.

“You don’t want to leave, Dallisa.”

I was desperately sorry for her. She would go down with her dying world, proud and cold and with no place in the new one. She kissed me and I tasted blood, her thin fettered body straining wildly against me, shaken with tearing, convulsive sobs. Then she turned and fled back into the shadow of the great dark house.

I never saw her again.

Chapter Ten

A few days later I found myself nearing the end of the trail.

It was twilight in Charin, hot and reeking with the gypsy glare of fires which burned, smoking, at the far end of the Street of the Six Shepherds. I crouched in the shadow of a wall, waiting.

My skin itched from the dirty shirtcloak I hadn’t changed in days. Shabbiness is wise in nonhuman parts, and Dry-towners think too much of water to waste much of it in superfluous washing anyhow. I scratched unobtrusively and glanced cautiously down the street.

It seemed empty, except for a few sodden derelicts sprawled in doorways—the Street of the Six Shepherds is a filthy slum—but I made sure my skean was loose. Charin is not a particularly safe town, even for Dry-towners, and especially not for Earthmen, at any time.

Even with what Dallisa had told me, the search had been difficult. Charin is not Shainsa. In Charin, where human and nonhuman live closer together than anywhere else on the planet, information about such men as Rakhal can be bought, but the policy is to let the buyer beware. That’s fair enough, because the life of the seller has a way of not being worth much afterward, either.

A dirty, dust-laden wind was blowing up along the street, heavy with strange smells. The pungent reek of incense from a street-shrine was in the smells. The heavy, acrid odor that made my skin crawl. In the hills behind Charin, the Ghost Wind was rising.

Borne on this wind, the Ya-men would sweep down from the mountains, and everything human or nearly human would scatter in their path. They would range through the quarter all night, and in the morning they would melt away, until the Ghost Wind blew again. At any other time, I would already have taken cover. I fancied that I could hear, borne on the wind, the faraway yelping, and envision the plumed, taloned figures which would come leaping down the street.

In that moment, the quiet of the street split asunder.

From somewhere a girl’s voice screamed in shrill pain or panic. Then I saw her, dodging between two of the chinked pebble-houses. She was a child, thin and barefoot, a long tangle of black hair flying loose as she darted and twisted to elude the lumbering fellow at her heels. His outstretched paw jerked cruelly at her slim wrist.

The little girl screamed and wrenched herself free and threw herself straight on me, wrapping herself around my neck with the violence of a storm wind. Her hair got in my mouth and her small hands gripped at my back like a cat’s flexed claws.

“Oh, help me,” she gasped between sobs. “Don’t let him get me, don’t.” And even in that broken plea I took it in that the little ragamuffin did not speak the jargon of that slum, but the pure speech of Shainsa.

What I did then was as automatic as if it had been Juli. I pulled the kid loose, shoved her behind me, and scowled at the brute who lurched toward us.

“Make yourself scarce,” I advised. “We don’t chase little girls where I come from. Haul off, now.”

The man reeled. I smelled the rankness of his rags as he thrust one grimy paw at the girl. I never was the hero type, but I’d started something which I had to carry through. I thrust myself between them and put my hand on the skean again.

“You—you Dry-towner.” The man set up a tipsy howl, and I sucked in my breath. Now I was in for it. Unless I got out of there damned fast, I’d lose what I’d come all the way to Charin to find.

I felt like handing the girl over. For all I knew, the bully could be her father and she was properly in line for a spanking. This wasn’t any of my business. My business lay at the end of the street, where Rakhal was waiting at the fires. He wouldn’t be there long. Already the smell of the Ghost Wind was heavy and harsh, and little flurries of sand went racing along the street, lifting the flaps of the doorways.

But I did nothing so sensible. The big lunk made a grab at the girl, and I whipped out my skean and pantomimed.

“Get going!”

“Dry-towner!” He spat out the word like filth, his pig-eyes narrowing to slits. “Son of the Ape! Earthman!”

“Terranan!” Someone took up the howl. There was a stir, a rustle, all along the street that had seemed empty, and from nowhere, it seemed, the space in front of me was crowded with shadowy forms, human and otherwise.

“Earthman!”

I felt the muscles across my belly knotting into a band of ice. I didn’t believe I’d given myself away as an Earthman. The bully was using the time-dishonored tactic of stirring up a riot in a hurry, but just the same I looked quickly round, hunting a path of escape.

“Put your skean in his guts, Spilkar! Grab him!”

“Hai-ai! Earthman! Hai-ai!”

It was the last cry that made me panic. Through the sultry glare at the end of the street, I could see the plumed, taloned figures of the Ya-men, gliding through the banners of smoke. The crowd melted open.

I didn’t stop to reflect on the fact—suddenly very obvious—that Rakhal couldn’t have been at the fires at all, and that my informant had led me into an open trap, a nest of Ya-men already inside Charin. The crowd edged back and muttered, and suddenly I made my choice. I whirled, snatched up the girl in my arms and ran straight toward the advancing figures of the Ya-men.

Nobody followed me. I even heard a choked shout that sounded like a warning. I heard the yelping shrieks of the Ya-men grow to a wild howl, and at the last minute, when their stiff rustling plumes loomed only a few yards away, I dived sidewise into an alley, stumbled on some rubbish and spilled the girl down.

“Run, kid!”

She shook herself like a puppy climbing out of water. Her small fingers closed like a steel trap on my wrist. “This way,” she urged in a hasty whisper, and I found myself plunging out the far end of the alley and into the shelter of a street-shrine. The sour stink of incense smarted in my nostrils, and I could hear the yelping of the Ya-men as they leaped and rustled down the alley, their cold and poisonous eyes searching out the recess where I crouched with the girl.

“Here,” she panted, “stand close to me on the stone—“ I drew back, startled.

“Oh, don’t stop to argue,” she whimpered. “Come here!”

“Hai-ai! Earthman! There he is!”

The girl’s arms flung round me again. I felt her slight, hard body pressing on mine and she literally hauled me toward the pattern of stones at the center of the shrine. I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t caught her closer yet.

The world reeled. The street disappeared in a cone of spinning lights, stars danced crazily, and I plunged down through a widening gulf of empty space, locked in the girl’s arms. I fell, spun, plunged head over heels through tilting lights and shadows that flung us through eternities of freefall. The yelping of the Ya-men whirled away in unimaginable distances, and for a second I felt the unmerciful blackout of a power dive, with blood breaking from my nostrils and filling my mouth.

Chapter Eleven

Lights flared in my eyes.

I was standing solidly on my feet in the street-shrine, but the street was gone. Coils of incense still smudged the air. The God squatted toadlike in his recess. The girl was hanging limp, locked in my clenched arms. As the floor straightened under my feet I staggered, thrown off balance by the sudden return of the girl’s weight, and grabbed blindly for support.

“Give her to me,” said a voice, and the girl’s sagging body was lifted from my arms. A strong hand grasped my elbow. I found a chair beneath my knees and sank gratefully into it.

“The transmission isn’t smooth yet between such distant terminals,” the voice remarked. “I see Miellyn has fainted again. A weakling, the girl, but useful.”

I spat blood, trying to get the room in focus. For I was inside a room, a room of some translucent substance, windowless, a skylight high above me, through which pink daylight streamed. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I’d come halfway around the planet in a few seconds!

From somewhere I heard the sound of hammering, tiny, bell-like hammering, the chiming of a fairy anvil. I looked up and saw a man—a man?—watching me.

On Wolf you see all kinds of human, half-human and nonhuman life, and I consider myself something of an expert on all three. But I had never seen anyone, or anything, who so closely resembled the human and so obviously wasn’t. He, or it, was tall and lean, man-shaped but oddly muscled, a vague suggestion of something less than human in the lean hunch of his posture.

Manlike, he wore green tight-fitting trunks and a shirt of green fur that revealed bulging biceps where they shouldn’t be, and angular planes where there should have been swelling muscles. The shoulders were high, the neck unpleasantly sinuous, and the face, a little narrower than human, was handsomely arrogant, with a kind of wary alert mischief that was the least human thing about him.

He bent, tilted the girl’s inert body on to a divan of some sort, and turned his back on her, lifting his hand in an impatient, and unpleasantly reminiscent, gesture.

The tinkling of the little hammers stopped as if a switch had been disconnected.

“Now,” said the nonhuman, “we can talk.”

Like the waif, he spoke Shainsan, and spoke it with a better accent than any nonhuman I had ever known—so well that I looked again to be certain. I wasn’t too dazed to answer in the same tongue, but I couldn’t keep back a spate of questions:

“What happened? Who are you? What is this place?”

The nonhuman waited, crossing his hands—quite passable hands, if you didn’t look too closely at what should have been nails—and bent forward in a sketchy gesture.

“Do not blame Miellyn. She acted under orders. It was imperative you be brought here tonight, and we had reason to believe you might ignore an ordinary summons. You were clever at evading our surveillance, for a time. But there would not be two Dry-towners in Charin tonight who would dare the Ghost Wind. Your reputation does you justice, Rakhal Sensar.”

Rakhal Sensar! Once again Rakhal!

Shaken, I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped blood from my mouth. I’d figured out, in Shainsa, why the mistake was logical. And here in Charin I’d been hanging around in Rakhal’s old haunts, covering his old trails. Once again, mistaken identity was natural.

Natural or not, I wasn’t going to deny it. If these were Rakhal’s enemies, my real identity should be kept as an ace in reserve which might—just might—get me out alive again. If they were his friends ... well, I could only hope that no one who knew him well by sight would walk in on me.

“We knew,” the nonhuman continued, “that if you remained where you were, the Terranan Cargill would have made his arrest. We know about your quarrel with Cargill, among other things, but we did not consider it necessary that you should fall into his hands at present.”

I was puzzled. “I still don’t understand. Exactly where am I?”

“This is the mastershrine of Nebran.”

Nebran!

The stray pieces of the puzzle suddenly jolted into place. Kyral had warned me, not knowing he was doing it. I hastily imitated the gesture Kyral had made, gabbling a few words of an archaic charm.

Like every Earthman who’s lived on Wolf more than a tourist season, I’d seen faces go blank and impassive at mention of the Toad God. Rumor made his spies omnipresent, his priests omniscient, his anger all-powerful. I had believed about a tenth of what I had heard, or less.

The Terran Empire has little to say to planetary religions, and Nebran’s cult is a remarkably obscure one, despite the street-shrines on every corner. Now I was in his mastershrine, and the device which had brought me here was beyond doubt a working model of a matter transmitter.

A matter transmitter, a working model—the words triggered memory. Rakhal was after it.

“And who,” I asked slowly, “are you, Lord?”

The green-clad creature hunched thin shoulders again in a ceremonious gesture. “I am called Evarin. Humble servant of Nebran and yourself,” he added, but there was no humility in his manner. “I am called the Toymaker.”

Evarin. That was another name given weight by rumor. A breath of gossip in a thieves market. A scrawled word on smudged paper. A blank folder in Terran Intelligence. Another puzzle-piece snapped into place—Toymaker!

The girl on the divan sat up suddenly passing slim hands over her disheveled hair. “Did I faint, Evarin? I had to fight to get him into the stone, and the patterns were not set straight in that terminal. You must send one of the Little Ones to set them to rights. Toymaker, you are not listening to me.”

“Stop chattering, Miellyn,” said Evarin indifferently. “You brought him here, and that is all that matters. You aren’t hurt?”

Miellyn pouted and looked ruefully at her bare bruised feet, patted the wrinkles in her ragged frock with fastidious fingers. “My poor feet,” she mourned, “they are black and blue with the cobbles and my hair is filled with sand and tangles! Toymaker, what way was this to send me to entice a man? Any man would have come quickly, quickly, if he had seen me looking lovely, but you—you send me in rags!”

She stamped a small bare foot. She was not merely as young as she had looked in the street. Though immature and underdeveloped by Terran standards, she had a fair figure for a Dry-town woman. Her rags fell now in graceful folds. Her hair was spun black glass, and I—I saw what the rags and the confusion in the filthy street had kept me from seeing before.

It was the girl of the spaceport cafe, the girl who had appeared and vanished in the eerie streets of Canarsa.

Evarin was regarding her with what, in a human, might have been rueful impatience. He said, “You know you enjoyed yourself, as always, Miellyn. Run along and make yourself beautiful again, little nuisance.”

The girl danced out of the room, and I was just as glad to see her go. The Toymaker motioned to me.

“This way,” he directed, and led me through a different door. The offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra. For the workers were tiny, gnarled trolls!

They were chaks. Chaks from the polar mountains, dwarfed and furred and half-human, with witchlike faces and great golden eyes, and I had the curious feeling that if I looked hard enough I would see the little toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa. I didn’t look. I figured I was in enough trouble already.

Tiny hammers pattered on miniature anvils in a tinkling, jingling chorus of musical clinks and taps. Golden eyes focused like lenses over winking jewels and gimcracks. Busy elves. Makers of toys!

Evarin jerked his shoulders with an imperative gesture. I followed him through a fairy workroom, but could not refrain from casting a lingering look at the worktables. A withered leprechaun set eyes into the head of a minikin hound. Furred fingers worked precious metals into invisible filigree for the collarpiece of a dancing doll. Metallic feathers were thrust with clockwork precision into the wings of a skeleton bird no longer than my fingernail. The nose of the hound wabbled and sniffed, the bird’s wings quivered, the eyes of the little dancer followed my footsteps.

Toys?

“This way,” Evarin rapped, and a door slid shut behind us. The clinks and taps grew faint, fainter, but never ceased.

My face must have betrayed more than conventional impassivity, for Evarin smiled. “Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the masterpriest of Nebran, a maker of Toys, and the shrine of the Toad God a workshop for children’s playthings?”

Evarin paused suggestively. They were obviously not children’s playthings and this was my cue to say so, but I avoided the trap. Evarin opened a sliding panel and took out a doll.

She was perhaps the length of my longest finger, molded to the precise proportions of a woman, and costumed after the bizarre fashion of the Ardcarran dancing girls. Evarin touched no button or key that I could see, but when he set the figure on its feet, it executed a whirling, armtossing dance in a fast, tricky tempo.

“I am, in a sense, benevolent,” Evarin murmured. He snapped his fingers and the doll sank to her knees and poised there, silent. “Moreover, I have the means and, let us say, the ability to indulge my small fantasies.

“The little daughter of the President of the Federation of Trade Cities on Samarra was sent such a doll recently. What a pity that Paolo Arimengo was so suddenly impeached and banished!” The Toymaker clucked his teeth commiseratingly. “Perhaps this small companion will compensate the little Carmela for her adjustment to her new ... position.”

He replaced the dancer and pulled down something like a whirligig. “This might interest you,” he mused, and set it spinning. I stared at the pattern of lights that flowed and disappeared, melting in and out of visible shadows. Suddenly I realized what the thing was doing. I wrested my eyes away with an effort. Had there been a lapse of seconds or minutes? Had Evarin spoken?

Evarin arrested the compelling motion with one finger. “Several of these pretty playthings are available to the children of important men,” he said absently. “An import of value for our exploited and impoverished world. Unfortunately they are, perhaps, a little ... ah, obvious. The incidence of nervous breakdowns is, ah, interfering with their sale. The children, of course, are unaffected, and love them.” Evarin set the hypnotic wheel moving again, glanced sidewise at me, then set it carefully back.

“Now”—Evarin’s voice, hard with the silkiness of a cat’s snarl, clawed the silence—“we’ll talk business.”

I turned, composing my face. Evarin had something concealed in one hand, but I didn’t think it was a weapon. And if I’d known, I’d have had to ignore it anyway.

“Perhaps you wonder how we recognized and found you?” A panel cleared in the wall and became translucent. Confused flickers moved, dropped into focus and I realized that the panel was an ordinary television screen and I was looking into the well-known interior of the Cafe of Three Rainbows in the Trade City of Charin.

By this time I was running low on curiosity and didn’t wonder till much, much later how televised pictures were transmitted around the curve of a planet. Evarin sharpened the focus down on the long Earth-type bar where a tall man in Terran clothes was talking to a pale-haired girl. Evarin said, “By now, Race Cargill has decided, no doubt, that you fell into his trap and into the hands of the Ya-men. He is off-guard now.”

And suddenly the whole thing seemed so unbearably, illogically funny that my shoulders shook with the effort to keep back dangerous laughter. Since I’d landed in Charin, I’d taken great pains to avoid the Trade City, or anyone who might have associated me with it. And Rakhal, somehow aware of this, had conveniently filled up the gap. By posing as me.

It wasn’t nearly as difficult as it sounded. I had found that out in Shainsa. Charin is a long, long way from the major Trade City near the Kharsa. I hadn’t a single intimate friend there, or within hundreds of miles, to see through the imposture. At most, there were half a dozen of the staff that I’d once met, or had a drink with, eight or ten years ago.

Rakhal could speak perfect Standard when he chose; if he lapsed into Dry-town idiom, that too was in my known character. I had no doubt he was making a great success of it all, probably doing much better with my identity than I could ever have done with his.

Evarin rasped, “Cargill meant to leave the planet. What stopped him? You could be of use to us, Rakhal. But not with this blood-feud unsettled.”

That needed no elucidation. No Wolfan in his right mind will bargain with a Dry-towner carrying an unresolved blood-feud. By law and custom, declared blood-feud takes precedence over any other business, public or private, and is sufficient excuse for broken promises, neglected duties, theft, even murder.

“We want it settled once and for all.” Evarin’s voice was low and unhurried. “And we aren’t above weighting the scales. This Cargill can, and has, posed as a Dry-towner, undetected. We don’t like Earthmen who can do that. In settling your feud, you will be aiding us, and removing a danger. We would be ... grateful.”

He opened his closed hand, displaying something small, curled, inert.

“Every living thing emits a characteristic pattern of electrical nerve impulses. We have ways of recording those impulses, and we have had you and Cargill under observation for a long time. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to key this Toy to Cargill’s pattern.”

On his palm the curled thing stirred, spread wings. A fledgling bird lay there, small soft body throbbing slightly. Half-hidden in a ruff of metallic feathers I glimpsed a grimly elongated beak. The pinions were feathered with delicate down less than a quarter of an inch long. They beat with delicate insistence against the Toymaker’s prisoning fingers.

“This is not dangerous to you. Press here”—he showed me—“and if Race Cargill is within a certain distance—and it is up to you to be within that distance—it will find him, and kill him. Unerringly, inescapably, untraceably. We will not tell you the critical distance. And we will give you three days.”

He checked my startled exclamation with a gesture. “Of course this is a test. Within the hour Cargill will receive a warning. We want no incompetents who must be helped too much! Nor do we want cowards! If you fail, or release the bird at a distance too great, or evade the test”—the green inhuman malice in his eyes made me sweat—“we have made another bird.”

By now my brain was swimming, but I thought I understood the complex inhuman logic involved. “The other bird is keyed to me?”

With slow contempt Evarin shook his head. “You? You are used to danger and fond of a gamble. Nothing so simple! We have given you three days. If, within that time, the bird you carry has not killed, the other bird will fly. And it will kill. Rakhal, you have a wife.”

Yes, Rakhal had a wife. They could threaten Rakhal’s wife. And his wife was my sister Juli.

Everything after that was anticlimax. Of course I had to drink with Evarin, the elaborate formal ritual without which no bargain on Wolf is concluded. He entertained me with gory and technical descriptions of the way in which the birds, and other of his hellish Toys, did their killing, and worse tasks.

Miellyn danced into the room and upset the exquisite solemnity of the wine-ritual by perching on my knee, stealing a sip from my cup, and pouting prettily when I paid her less attention than she thought she merited. I didn’t dare pay much attention, even when she whispered, with the deliberate and thorough wantonness of a Dry-town woman of high-caste who has flung aside her fetters, something about a rendezvous at the Three Rainbows.

But eventually it was over and I stepped through a door that twisted with a giddy blankness, and found myself outside a bare windowless wall in Charin again, the night sky starred and cold. The acrid smell of the Ghost Wind was thinning in the streets, but I had to crouch in a cranny of the wall when a final rustling horde of Ya-men, the last of their receding tide, rustled down the street. I found my way to my lodging in a filthy chak hostel, and threw myself down on the verminous bed.

Believe it or not, I slept.

Chapter Twelve

An hour before dawn there was a noise in my room. I roused, my hand on my skean. Someone or something was fumbling under the mattress where I had thrust Evarin’s bird. I struck out, encountered something warm and breathing, and grappled with it in the darkness. A foul-smelling something gripped over my mouth. I tore it away and struck hard with the skean. There was a high shrilling. The gripping filth loosened and fell away and something died on the floor.

I struck a light, retching in revulsion. It hadn’t been human. There wouldn’t have been that much blood from a human. Not that color, either.

The chak who ran the place came and gibbered at me. Chaks have a horror of blood and this one gave me to understand that my lease was up then and there, no arguments, no refunds. He wouldn’t even let me go into his stone outbuilding to wash the foul stuff from my shirtcloak. I gave up and fished under the mattress for Evarin’s Toy.

The chak got a glimpse of the embroideries on the silk in which it was wrapped, and stood back, his loose furry lips hanging open, while I gathered my few belongings together and strode out of the room. He would not touch the coins I offered; I laid them on a chest and he let them lie there, and as I went into the reddening morning they came flying after me into the street.

I pulled the silk from the Toy and tried to make some sense from my predicament. The little thing lay innocent and silent in my palm. It wouldn’t tell me whether it had been keyed to me, the real Cargill, some time in the past, or to Rakhal, using my name and reputation in the Terran Colony here at Charin.

If I pressed the stud it might play out this comedy of errors by hunting down Rakhal, and all my troubles would be over. For a while, at least, until Evarin found out what had happened. I didn’t deceive myself that I could carry the impersonation through another meeting.

On the other hand, if I pressed the stud, the bird might turn on me. And then all my troubles would be over for good.

If I delayed past Evarin’s deadline, and did nothing, the other bird in his keeping would hunt down Juli and give her a swift and not too painless death.

I spent most of the day in a chak dive, juggling plans. Toys, innocent and sinister. Spies, messengers. Toys which killed horribly. Toys which could be controlled, perhaps, by the pliant mind of a child, and every child hates its parents now and again!

Even in the Terran colony, who was safe? In Mack’s very home, one of the Magnusson youngsters had a shiny thing which might, or might not, be one of Evarin’s hellish Toys. Or was I beginning to think like a superstitious Dry-towner?

Damn it, Evarin couldn’t be infallible; he hadn’t even recognized me as Race Cargill! Or—suddenly the sweat broke out, again, on my forehead—or had he? Had the whole thing been one of those sinister, deadly and incomprehensible nonhuman jokes?

I kept coming to the same conclusion. Juli was in danger, but she was half a world away. Rakhal was here in Charin. There was a child involved—Juli’s child. The first step was to get inside the Terran colony and see how the land lay.

Charin is a city shaped like a crescent moon, encircling the small Trade City: a miniature spaceport, a miniature skyscraper HQ, the clustered dwellings of the Terrans who worked there, and those who lived with them and supplied them with necessities, services and luxuries.

Entry from one to the other is through a guarded gateway, since this is hostile territory, and Charin lies far beyond the impress of ordinary Terran law. But the gate stood wide-open, and the guards looked lax and bored. They had shockers, but they didn’t look as if they’d used them lately.

One raised an eyebrow at his companion as I shambled up. I could pretty well guess the impression I made, dirty, unkempt and stained with nonhuman blood. I asked permission to go into the Terran Zone.

They asked my name and business, and I toyed with the notion of giving the name of the man I was inadvertently impersonating. Then I decided that if Rakhal had passed himself off as Race Cargill, he’d expect exactly that. And he was also capable of the masterstroke of impudence—putting out a pickup order, through Spaceforce, for his own name!

So I gave the name we’d used from Shainsa to Charin, and tacked one of the Secret Service passwords on the end of it. They looked at each other again and one said, “Rascar, eh? This is the guy, all right.” He took me into the little booth by the gate while the other used an intercom device. Presently they took me along into the HQ building, and into an office that said “Legate.”

I tried not to panic, but it wasn’t easy! Evidently I’d walked square into another trap. One guard asked me, “All right, now, what exactly is your business in the Trade City?”

I’d hoped to locate Rakhal first. Now I knew I’d have no chance and at all costs I must straighten out this matter of identity before it went any further.

“Put me straight through to Magnusson’s office, Level 38 at Central HQ, by visi,” I demanded. I was trying to remember if Mack had ever even heard the name we used in Shainsa. I decided I couldn’t risk it. “Name of Race Cargill.”

The guard grinned without moving. He said to his partner, “That’s the one, all right.” He put a hand on my shoulder, spinning me around.

“Haul off, man. Shake your boots.”

There were two of them, and Spaceforce guards aren’t picked for their good looks. Just the same, I gave a pretty good account of myself until the inner door opened and a man came storming out.

“What the devil is all this racket?”

One guard got a hammerlock on me. “This Dry-towner bum tried to talk us into making a priority call to Magnusson, the Chief at Central. He knew a couple of the S.S. passwords. That’s what got him through the gate. Remember, Cargill passed the word that somebody would turn up trying to impersonate him.”

“I remember.” The strange man’s eyes were wary and cold.

“You damned fools,” I snarled. “Magnusson will identify me! Can’t you realize you’re dealing with an impostor?”

One of the guards said to the legate in an undertone, “Maybe we ought to hold him as a suspicious character.” But the legate shook his head. “Not worth the trouble. Cargill said it was a private affair. You might search him, make sure he’s not concealing contraband weapons,” he added, and talked softly to the wide-eyed clerk in the background while the guards went through my shirtcloak and pockets.

When they started to unwrap the silk-shrouded Toy I yelled—if the thing got set off accidentally, there’d be trouble. The legate turned and rebuked, “Can’t you see it’s embroidered with the Toad God? It’s a religious amulet of some sort, let it alone.”

They grumbled, but gave it back to me, and the legate commanded, “Don’t mess him up any more. Give him back his knife and take him to the gates. But make sure he doesn’t come back.”

I found myself seized and frog-marched to the gate. One guard pushed my skean back into its clasp. The other shoved me hard, and I stumbled, fell sprawling in the dust of the cobbled street, to the accompaniment of a profane statement about what I could expect if I came back. A chorus of jeers from a cluster of chak children and veiled women broke across me.

I picked myself up, glowered so fiercely at the giggling spectators that the laughter drained away into silence, and clenched my fists, half inclined to turn back and bull my way through. Then I subsided. First round to Rakhal. He had sprung the trap on me, very neatly.

The street was narrow and crooked, winding between doubled rows of pebble-houses, and full of dark shadows even in the crimson noon. I walked aimlessly, favoring the arm the guard had crushed. I was no closer to settling things with Rakhal, and I had slammed at least one gate behind me.

Why hadn’t I had sense enough to walk up and demand to see Race Cargill? Why hadn’t I insisted on a fingerprint check? I could prove my identity, and Rakhal, using my name in my absence, to those who didn’t know me by sight, couldn’t. I could at least have made him try. But he had maneuvered it very cleverly, so I never had a chance to insist on proofs.

I turned into a wineshop and ordered a dram of greenish mountainberry liquor, sipping it slowly and fingering the few bills and coins in my pockets. I’d better forget about warning Juli. I couldn’t ‘vise her from Charin, except in the Terran zone. I had neither the money nor the time to make the trip in person, even if I could get passage on a Terran-dominated airline after today.

Miellyn. She had flirted with me, and like Dallisa, she might prove vulnerable. It might be another trap, but I’d take the chance. At least I could get hints about Evarin. And I needed information. I wasn’t used to this kind of intrigue any more. The smell of danger was foreign to me now, and I found it unpleasant.

The small lump of the bird in my pocket tantalized me. I took it out again. It was a temptation to press the stud and let it settle things, or at least start them going, then and there.

After a while I noticed the proprietors of the shop staring at the silk of the wrappings. They backed off, apprehensive. I held out a coin and they shook their heads. “You are welcome to the drink,” one of them said. “All we have is at your service. Only please go. Go quickly.”

They would not touch the coins I offered. I thrust the bird in my pocket, swore and went. It was my second experience with being somehow tabu, and I didn’t like it.

It was dusk when I realized I was being followed.

At first it was a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, a head seen too frequently for coincidence. It developed into a too-persistent footstep in uneven rhythm.

Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

I had my skean handy, but I had a hunch this wasn’t anything I could settle with a skean. I ducked into a side street and waited.

Nothing.

I went on, laughing at my imagined fears.

Then, after a time, the soft, persistent footfall thudded behind me again.

I cut across a thieves market, dodging from stall to stall, cursed by old women selling hot fried goldfish, women in striped veils railing at me in their chiming talk when I brushed their rolled rugs with hasty feet. Far behind I heard the familiar uneven hurry: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.

I fled down a street where women sat on flower-decked balconies, their open lanterns flowing with fountains and rivulets of gold and orange fire. I raced through quiet streets where furred children crept to doors and watched me pass with great golden eyes that shone in the dark.

I dodged into an alley and lay there, breathing hard. Someone not two inches away said, “Are you one of us, brother?”

I muttered something surly, in his dialect, and a hand, reassuringly human, closed on my elbow. “This way.”

Out of breath with long running, I let him lead me, meaning to break away after a few steps, apologize for mistaken identity and vanish, when a sound at the end of the street made me jerk stiff and listen.

Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.

I let my arm relax in the hand that guided me, flung a fold of my shirtcloak over my face, and went along with my unknown guide.

Chapter Thirteen

I stumbled over steps, took a jolting stride downward, and found myself in a dim room jammed with dark figures, human and nonhuman.

The figures swayed in the darkness, chanting in a dialect not altogether familiar to me, a monotonous wailing chant, with a single recurrent phrase: “Kamaina! Kama-aina!” It began on a high note, descending in weird chromatics to the lowest tone the human ear could resolve.

The sound made me draw back. Even the Dry-towners shunned the orgiastic rituals of Kamaina. Earthmen have a reputation for getting rid of the more objectionable customs—by human standards—on any planet where they live. But they don’t touch religions, and Kamaina, on the surface anyhow, was a religion.

I started to turn round and leave, as if I had inadvertently walked through the wrong door, but my conductor hauled on my arm, and I was wedged in too tight by now to risk a roughhouse. Trying to force my way out would only have called attention to me, and the first of the Secret Service maxims is; when in doubt, go along, keep quiet, and watch the other guy.

As my eyes adapted to the dim light, I saw that most of the crowd were Charin plainsmen or chaks. One or two wore Dry-town shirtcloaks, and I even thought I saw an Earthman in the crowd, though I was never sure and I fervently hope not. They were squatting around small crescent-shaped tables, and all intently gazing at a flickery spot of light at the front of the cellar. I saw an empty place at one table and dropped there, finding the floor soft, as if cushioned.

On each table, small smudging pastilles were burning, and from these cones of ash-tipped fire came the steamy, swimmy smoke that filled the darkness with strange colors. Beside me an immature chak girl was kneeling, her fettered hands strained tightly back at her sides, her naked breasts pierced for jeweled rings.

Beneath the pallid fur around her pointed ears, the exquisite animal face was quite mad. She whispered to me, but her dialect was so thick that I could follow only a few words, and would just as soon not have heard those few. An older chak grunted for silence and she subsided, swaying and crooning.

There were cups and decanters on all the tables, and a woman tilted pale, phosphorescent fluid into a cup and offered it to me. I took one sip, then another. It was cold and pleasantly tart, and not until the second swallow turned sweet on my tongue did I know what I tasted. I pretended to swallow while the woman’s eyes were fixed on me, then somehow contrived to spill the filthy stuff down my shirt.

I was wary even of the fumes, but there was nothing else I could do. The stuff was shallavan, outlawed on every planet in the Terran Empire and every halfway decent planet outside it.

More and more figures, men and creatures, kept crowding into the cellar, which was not very large. The place looked like the worst nightmare of a drug-dreamer, ablaze with the colors of the smoking incense, the swaying crowd, and their monotonous cries. Quite suddenly there was a blaze of purple light and someone screamed in raving ecstasy: “Na ki na Nebran n’hai Kamaina!”

“Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!” shrilled the tranced mob.

An old man jumped up and started haranguing the crowd. I could just follow his dialect. He was talking about Terra. He was talking about riots. He was jabbering mystical gibberish which I couldn’t understand and didn’t want to understand, and rabble-rousing anti-Terran propaganda which I understood much too well.

Another blaze of lights and another long scream in chorus: “Kamayeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!”

Evarin stood in the blaze of the many-colored light.

The Toymaker, as I had seen him last, cat-smooth, gracefully alien, shrouded in a ripple of giddy crimsons. Behind him was a blackness. I waited till the painful blaze of lights abated, then, straining my eyes to see past him, I got my worst shock.

A woman stood there, naked to the waist, her hands ritually fettered with little chains that stirred and clashed musically as she moved stiff-legged in a frozen dream. Hair like black grass banded her brow and naked shoulders, and her eyes were crimson.

And the eyes lived in the dead dreaming face. They lived, and they were mad with terror although the lips curved in a gently tranced smile.

Miellyn.

Evarin was speaking in that dialect I barely understood. His arms were flung high and his cloak went spilling away from them, rippling like something alive. The jammed humans and nonhumans swayed and chanted and he swayed above them like an iridescent bug, weaving arms rippling back and forth, back and forth. I strained to catch his words.

“Our world ... an old world.”

“Kamayeeeeena,” whimpered the shrill chorus.

“... humans, humans, all humans would make slaves of us all, all save the Children of the Ape....”

I lost the thread for a moment. True. The Terran Empire has one small blind spot in otherwise sane policy, ignoring that nonhuman and human have lived placidly here for millennia: they placidly assumed that humans were everywhere the dominant race, as on Earth itself.

The Toymaker’s weaving arms went on spinning, spinning. I rubbed my eyes to clear them of shallavan and incense. I hoped that what I saw was an illusion of the drug—something, something huge and dark, was hovering over the girl. She stood placidly, hands clasped on her chains, but her eyes writhed in the frozen calm of her face.

Then something—I can only call it a sixth sense—bore it on me that there was someone outside the door. I was perhaps the only creature there, except for Evarin, not drugged with shallavan, and perhaps that’s all it was. But during the days in the Secret Service I’d had to develop some extra senses. Five just weren’t enough for survival.

I knew somebody was fixing to break down that door, and I had a good idea why. I’d been followed, by the legate’s orders, and, tracking me here, they’d gone away and brought back reinforcements.

Someone struck a blow on the door and a stentorian voice bawled, “Open up there, in the name of the Empire!”

The chanting broke in ragged quavers. Evarin stopped. Somewhere a woman screamed. The lights abruptly went out and a stampede started in the room. Women struck me with chains, men kicked, there were shrieks and howls. I thrust my way forward, butting with elbows and knees and shoulders.

A dusky emptiness yawned and I got a glimpse of sunlight and open sky and knew that Evarin had stepped through into somewhere and was gone. The banging on the door sounded like a whole regiment of Spaceforce out there. I dived toward the shimmer of little stars which marked Miellyn’s tiara in the darkness, braving the black horror hovering over her, and touched rigid girl-flesh, cold as death.

I grabbed her and ducked sideways. This time it wasn’t intuition—nine times out of ten, anyway, intuition is just a mental shortcut which adds up all the things which your subconscious has noticed while you were busy thinking about something else. Every native building on Wolf had concealed entrances and exits and I know where to look for them. This one was exactly where I expected. I pushed at it and found myself in a long, dim corridor.

The head of a woman peered from an opening door. She saw Miellyn’s limp body hanging on my arm and her mouth widened in a silent scream. Then the head popped back out of sight and a door slammed. I heard the bolt slide. I ran for the end of the hall, the girl in my arms, thinking that this was where I came in, as far as Miellyn was concerned, and wondering why I bothered.

The door opened on a dark, peaceful street. One lonely moon was setting beyond the rooftops. I set Miellyn on her feet, but she moaned and crumpled against me. I put my shirtcloak around her bare shoulders. Judging by the noises and yells, we’d gotten out just in time. No one came out the exit behind us. Either the Spaceforce had plugged it or, more likely, everyone else in the cellar had been too muddled by drugs to know what was going on.

But it was only a few minutes, I knew, before Spaceforce would check the whole building for concealed escape holes. Suddenly, and irrelevantly, I found myself thinking of a day not too long ago, when I’d stood up in front of a unit-in-training of Spaceforce, introduced to them as an Intelligence expert on native towns, and solemnly warned them about concealed exits and entrances. I wondered, for half a minute, if it might not be simpler just to wait here and let them pick me up.

Then I hoisted Miellyn across my shoulders. She was heavier than she looked, and after a minute, half conscious, she began to struggle and moan. There was a chak-run cookshop down the street, a place I’d once known well, with an evil reputation and worse food, but it was quiet and stayed open all night. I turned in at the door, bending at the low lintel.

The place was smoke-filled and foul-smelling. I dumped Miellyn on a couch and sent the frowsy waiter for two bowls of noodles and coffee, handed him a few extra coins, and told him to leave us alone. He probably drew the worst possible inference—I saw his muzzle twitch at the smell of shallavan—but it was that kind of place anyhow. He drew down the shutters and went.

I stared at the unconscious girl, then shrugged and started on the noodles. My own head was still swimmy with the fumes, incense and drug, and I wanted it clear. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do, but I had Evarin’s right-hand girl, and I was going to use her.

The noodles were greasy and had a curious taste, but they were hot, and I ate all of one bowl before Miellyn stirred and whimpered and put up one hand, with a little clinking of chains, to her hair. The gesture was indefinably reminiscent of Dallisa, and for the first time I saw the likeness between them. It made me wary and yet curiously softened.

Finding she could not move freely, she rolled over, sat up and stared around in growing bewilderment and dismay.

“There was a sort of riot,” I said. “I got you out. Evarin ditched you. And you can quit thinking what you’re thinking, I put my shirtcloak on you because you were bare to the waist and it didn’t look so good.” I stopped to think that over, and amended: “I mean I couldn’t haul you around the streets that way. It looked good enough.”

To my surprise, she gave a shaky little giggle, and held out her fettered hands. “Will you?”

I broke her links and freed her. She rubbed her wrists as if they hurt her, then drew up her draperies, pinned them so that she was decently covered, and tossed back my shirtcloak. Her eyes were wide and soft in the light of the flickering stub of candle.

“O, Rakhal,” she sighed. “When I saw you there—“ She sat up, clasping her hands hard together, and when she continued her voice was curiously cold and controlled for anyone so childish. It was almost as cold as Dallisa’s.

“If you’ve come from Kyral, I’m not going back. I’ll never go back, and you may as well know it.”

“I don’t come from Kyral, and I don’t care where you go. I don’t care what you do.” I suddenly realized that the last statement was wholly untrue, and to cover my confusion I shoved the remaining bowl of noodles at her.

“Eat.”

She wrinkled her nose in fastidious disgust. “I’m not hungry.”

“Eat it anyway. You’re still half doped, and the food will clear your head.” I picked up one mug of the coffee and drained it at a single swallow. “What were you doing in that disgusting den?”

Without warning she flung herself across the table at me, throwing her arms round my neck. Startled, I let her cling a moment, then reached up and firmly unfastened her hands.

“None of that now. I fell for it once, and it landed me in the middle of the mudpie.”

But her fingers bit my shoulder.

“Rakhal, Rakhal, I tried to get away and find you. Have you still got the bird? You haven’t set it off yet? Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t, Rakhal, you don’t know what Evarin is, you don’t know what he’s doing.” The words spilled out of her like floodwaters. “He’s won so many of you, don’t let him have you too, Rakhal. They call you an honest man, you worked once for Terra, the Terrans would believe you if you went to them and told them what he—Rakhal, take me to the Terran Zone, take me there, take me there where they’ll protect me from Evarin.”

At first I tried to stop her, question her, then waited and let the torrent of entreaty run on and on. At last, exhausted and breathless, she lay quietly against my shoulder, her head fallen forward. The musty reek of shallavan mingled with the flower scent of her hair.

“Kid,” I said heavily at last, “you and your Toymaker have both got me wrong. I’m not Rakhal Sensar.”

“You’re not?” She drew back, regarding me in dismay. Her eyes searched every inch of me, from the gray streak across my forehead to the scar running down into my collar. “Then who—“

”Race Cargill. Terran Intelligence.”

She stared, her mouth wide like a child’s.

Then she laughed. She laughed! At first I thought she was hysterical. I stared at her in consternation. Then, as her wide eyes met mine, with all the mischief of the nonhuman which has mingled into the human here, all the circular complexities of Wolf illogic behind the woman in them, I started to laugh too.

I threw back my head and roared, until we were clinging together and gasping with mirth like a pair of raving fools. The chak waiter came to the door and stared at us, and I roared “Get the hell out,” between spasms of crazy laughter.

Then she was wiping her face, tears of mirth still dripping down her cheeks, and I was frowning bleakly into the empty bowls.

“Cargill,” she said hesitantly, “you can take me to the Terrans where Rakhal—“

”Hell’s bells,” I exploded. “I can’t take you anywhere, girl. I’ve got to find Rakhal—“ I stopped in midsentence and looked at her clearly for the first time.

“Child, I’ll see that you’re protected, if I can. But I’m afraid you’ve walked from the trap to the cookpot. There isn’t a house in Charin that will hold me. I’ve been thrown out twice today.”

She nodded. “I don’t know how the word spreads, but it happens, in nonhuman parts. I think they can see trouble written in a human face, or smell it on the wind.” She fell silent, her face propped sleepily between her hands, her hair falling in tangles. I took one of her hands in mine and turned it over.

It was a fine hand, with birdlike bones and soft rose-tinted nails; but the lines and hardened places around the knuckles reminded me that she, too, came from the cold austerity of the salt Dry-towns. After a moment she flushed and drew her hand from mine.

“What are you thinking, Cargill?” she asked, and for the first time I heard her voice sobered, without the coquetry, which must after all have been a very thin veneer.

I answered her simply and literally. “I am thinking of Dallisa. I thought you were very different, and yet, I see that you are very like her.”

I thought she would question what I knew of her sister, but she let it pass in silence. After a time she said, “Yes, we were twins.” Then, after a long silence, she added, “But she was always much the older.”

And that was all I ever knew of whatever obscure pressures had shaped Dallisa into an austere and tragic Clytemnestra, and Miellyn into a pixie runaway.

Outside the drawn shutters, dawn was brightening. Miellyn shivered, drawing her thin draperies around her bare throat. I glanced at the little rim of jewels that starred her hair and said, “You’d better take those off and hide them. They alone would be enough to have you hauled into an alley and strangled, in this part of Charin.” I hauled the bird Toy from my pocket and slapped it on the greasy table, still wrapped in its silk. “I don’t suppose you know which of us this thing is set to kill?”

“I know nothing about the Toys.”

“You seem to know plenty about the Toymaker.”

“I thought so. Until last night.” I looked at the rigid, clamped mouth and thought that if she were really as soft and delicate as she looked, she would have wept. Then she struck her small hand on the tabletop and burst out, “It’s not a religion. It isn’t even an honest movement for freedom! Its a—a front for smuggling, and drugs, and—and every other filthy thing!

“Believe it or not, when I left Shainsa, I thought Nebran was the answer to the way the Terrans were strangling us! Now I know there are worse things on Wolf than the Terran Empire! I’ve heard of Rakhal Sensar, and whatever you may think of Rakhal, he’s too decent to be mixed up in anything like this!”

“Suppose you tell me what’s really going on,” I suggested. She couldn’t add much to what I knew already, but the last fragments of the pattern were beginning to settle into place. Rakhal, seeking the matter transmitter and some key to the nonhuman sciences of Wolf—I knew now what the city of Silent Ones had reminded me of!—had somehow crossed the path of the Toymaker.

Evarin’s words now made sense: “You were clever at evading our surveillance—for a while.” Possibly, though I’d never know, Cuinn had been keeping one foot in each camp, working for Kyral and for Evarin. The Toymaker, knowing of Rakhal’s anti-Terran activities, had believed he would make a valuable ally and had taken steps to secure his help.

Juli herself had given me the clue: “He smashed Rindy’s Toys.” Out of the context it sounded like the work of a madman. Now, having encountered Evarin’s workshop, it made plain good sense.

And I think I had known all along that Rakhal could not have been playing Evarin’s game. He might have turned against Terra—though now I was beginning even to doubt that—and certainly he’d have killed me if he found me. But he would have done it himself, and without malice. Killed without malice—that doesn’t make sense in any of the languages of Terra. But it made sense to me.

Miellyn had finished her brief recitation and was drowsing, her head pillowed on the table. The reddish light was growing, and I realized that I was waiting for dawn as, days ago, I had waited for sunset in Shainsa, with every nerve stretched to the breaking point. It was dawn of the third morning, and this bird lying on the table before me must fly or, far away in the Kharsa, another would fly at Juli.

I said, “There’s some distance limitation on this one, I understand, since I have to be fairly near its object. If I lock it in a steel box and drop it in the desert, I’ll guarantee it won’t bother anybody. I don’t suppose you’d have a shot at stealing the other one for me?”

She raised her head, eyes flashing. “Why should you worry about Rakhal’s wife?” she flared, and for no good reason it occurred to me that she was jealous. “I might have known Evarin wouldn’t shoot in the dark! Rakhal’s wife, that Earthwoman, what do you care for her?”

It seemed important to set her straight. I explained that Juli was my sister, and saw a little of the tension fade from her face, but not all. Remembering the custom of the Dry-towns, I was not wholly surprised when she added, jealously, “When I heard of your feud, I guessed it was over that woman!”

“But not in the way you think,” I said. Juli had been part of it, certainly. Even then I had not wanted her to turn her back on her world, but if Rakhal had remained with Terra, I would have accepted his marriage to Juli. Accepted it. I’d have rejoiced. God knows we had been closer than brothers, those years in the Dry-towns. And then, before Miellyn’s flashing eyes, I suddenly faced my secret hate, my secret fear. No, the quarrel had not been all Rakhal’s doing.

He had not turned his back, unexplained on Terra. In some unrecognized fashion, I had done my best to drive him away. And when he had gone, I had banished a part of myself as well, and thought I could end the struggle by saying it didn’t exist. And now, facing what I had done to all of us, I knew that my revenge—so long sought, so dearly cherished—must be abandoned.

“We still have to deal with the bird,” I said. “It’s a gamble, with all the cards wild.” I could dismantle it, and trust to luck that Wolf illogic didn’t include a tamper mechanism. But that didn’t seem worth the risk.

“First I’ve got to find Rakhal. If I set the bird free and it killed him, it wouldn’t settle anything.” For I could not kill Rakhal. Not, now, because I knew life would be a worse punishment than death. But because—I knew it, now—if Rakhal died, Juli would die, too. And if I killed him I’d be killing the best part of myself. Somehow Rakhal and I must strike a balance between our two worlds, and try to build a new one from them.

“And I can’t sit here and talk any longer. I haven’t time to take you—“ I stopped, remembering the spaceport cafe at the edge of the Kharsa. There was a street-shrine, or matter transmitter, right there, across the street from the Terran HQ. All these years....

“You know your way in the transmitters. You can go there in a second or two.” She could warn Juli, tell Magnusson. But when I suggested this, giving her a password that would take her straight to the top, she turned white. “All jumps have to be made through the Mastershrine.”

I stopped and thought about that.

“Where is Evarin likely to be, right now?”

She gave a nervous shudder. “He’s everywhere!”

“Rubbish! He’s not omniscient! Why, you little fool, he didn’t even recognize me. He thought I was Rakhal!” I wasn’t too sure, myself, but Miellyn needed reassurance. “Or take me to the Mastershrine. I can find Rakhal in that scanning device of Evarin’s.” I saw refusal in her face and pushed on, “If Evarin’s there, I’ll prove he’s fallible enough with a skean in his throat! And here”—I thrust the Toy into her hand—“hang on to this, will you?”

She put it matter-of-factly into her draperies. “I don’t mind that. But to the shrine—“ Her voice quivered, and I stood up and pushed at the table.

“Let’s get going. Where’s the nearest street-shrine?”

“No, no! Oh, I don’t dare!”

“You’ve got to.” I saw the chak who owned the place edging round the door again and said, “There’s no use arguing, Miellyn.” When she had readjusted her robes a little while ago, she had pinned them so that the flat sprawl of the Nebran embroideries was over her breasts. I put a finger against them, not in a sensuous gesture, and said, “The minute they see these, they’ll throw us out of here, too.”

“If you knew what I know of Nebran, you wouldn’t want me to go near the Mastershrine again!” There was that faint coquettishness in her sidewise smile.

And suddenly I realized that I didn’t want her to. But she was not Dallisa and she could not sit in cold dignity while her world fell into ruin. Miellyn must fight for the one she wanted.

And then some of that primitive male hostility which lives in every man came to the surface, and I gripped her arm until she whimpered. Then I said, in the Shainsan which still comes to my tongue when moved or angry, “Damn it, you’re going. Have you forgotten that if it weren’t for me you’d have been torn to pieces by that raving mob, or something worse?”

That did it. She pulled away and I saw again, beneath the veneer of petulant coquetry, that fierce and untamable insolence of the Dry-towner. The more fierce and arrogant, in this girl, because she had burst her fettered hands free and shaken off the ruin of the past.

I was seized with a wildly inappropriate desire to seize her, crush her in my arms, taste the red honey of that teasing mouth. The effort of mastering the impulse made me rough.

I shoved at her and said, “Come on. Let’s get there before Evarin does.”

Chapter Fourteen

Outside in the streets it was full day, and the color and life of Charin had subsided into listlessness again, a dim morning dullness and silence. Only a few men lounged wearily in the streets, as if the sun had sapped their energy. And always the pale fleecy-haired children, human and furred nonhuman, played their mysterious games on the curbs and gutters and staring at us with neither curiosity nor malice.

Miellyn was shaking when she set her feet into the patterned stones of the street-shrine.

“Scared, Miellyn?”

“I know Evarin. You don’t. But”—her mouth twitched in a pitiful attempt at the old mischief—“when I am with a great and valorous Earthman....”

“Cut it out,” I growled, and she giggled. “You’ll have to stand closer to me. The transmitters are meant only for one person.”

I stooped and put my arms round her. “Like this?”

“Like this,” she whispered, pressing herself against me. A staggering whirl of dizzy darkness swung round my head. The street vanished. After an instant the floor steadied and we stepped into the terminal room in the Mastershrine, under a skylight dim with the last red slant of sunset. Distant hammering noises rang in my ears.

Miellyn whispered, “Evarin’s not here, but he might jump through at any second.” I wasn’t listening.

“Where is this place, Miellyn? Where on the planet?”

“No one knows but Evarin, I think. There are no doors. Anyone who goes in or out, jumps through the transmitter.” She pointed. “The scanning device is in there, we’ll have to go through the workroom.”

She was patting her crushed robes into place, smoothing her hair with fastidious fingers. “I don’t suppose you have a comb? I’ve no time to go to my own—“

I’d known she was a vain and pampered brat, but this passed all reason, and I said so, exploding at her. She looked at me as if I wasn’t quite intelligent. “The Little Ones, my friend, notice things. You are quite enough of a roughneck, but if I, Nebran’s priestess, walk through their workroom all blown about and looking like the tag end of an orgy in Ardcarran....”

Abashed, I fished in a pocket and offered her a somewhat battered pocket comb. She looked at it distastefully but used it to good purpose, smoothing her hair swiftly, rearranging her loose-pinned robe so that the worst of the tears and stains were covered, and giving me, meanwhile, an artless and rather tempting view of some delicious curvature. She replaced the starred tiara on her ringlets and finally opened the door of the workroom and we walked through.

Not for years had I known that particular sensation—thousands of eyes, boring holes in the center of my back somewhere. There were eyes; the round inhuman orbs of the dwarf chaks, the faceted stare of the prism eyes of the Toys. The workroom wasn’t a hundred feet long, but it felt longer than a good many miles I’ve walked. Here and there the dwarfs murmured an obsequious greeting to Miellyn, and she made some lighthearted answer.

She had warned me to walk as if I had every right to be there, and I strode after her as if we were simply going to an agreed-on meeting in the next room. But I was drenched with cold sweat before the farther door finally closed, safe and blessedly opaque, behind us. Miellyn, too, was shaking with fright, and I put a hand on her arm.

“Steady, kid. Where’s the scanner?”

She touched the panel I’d seen. “I’m not sure I can focus it accurately. Evarin never let me touch it.”

This was a fine time to tell me that. “How does it work?”

“It’s an adaptation of the transmitter principle. It lets you see anywhere, but without jumping. It uses a tracer mechanism like the one in the Toys. If Rakhal’s electrical-impulse pattern were on file—just a minute.” She fished out the bird Toy and unwrapped it. “Here’s how we find out which of you this is keyed to.”

I looked at the fledgling bird, lying innocently in her palm, as she pushed aside the feathers, exposing a tiny crystal. “If it’s keyed to you, you’ll see yourself in this, as if the screen were a mirror. If it’s keyed to Rakhal....”

She touched the crystal to the surface of the screen. Little flickers of snow wavered and danced. Then, abruptly, we were looking down from a height at the lean back of a man in a leather jacket. Slowly he turned. I saw the familiar set of his shoulders, saw the back of his head come into an aquiline profile, and the profile turn slowly into a scarred, seared mask more hideously claw-marked and disfigured than my own.

“Rakhal,” I muttered. “Shift the focus if you can, Miellyn, get a look out the window or something. Charin’s a big city. If we could get a look at a landmark—“

Rakhal was talking soundlessly, his lips moving as he spoke to someone out of sight range of the scanning device. Abruptly Miellyn said, “There.” She had caught a window in the sight field of the pane. I could see a high pylon and two of three uprights that looked like a bridge, just outside. I said, “It’s the Bridge of Summer Snows. I know where he is now. Turn it off, Miellyn, we can find him—“ I was turning away when Miellyn screamed.

“Look!”

Rakhal had turned his back on the scanner and for the first time I could see who he was talking to. A hunched, catlike shoulder twisted; a sinuous neck, a high-held head that was not quite human.

“Evarin!” I swore. “That does it. He knows now that I’m not Rakhal, if he didn’t know it all along! Come on, girl, we’re getting out of here!”

This time there was no pretense of normality as we dashed through the workroom. Fingers dropped from half-completed Toys as they stared after us. Toys! I wanted to stop and smash them all. But if we hurried, we might find Rakhal. And, with luck, we would find Evarin with him.

And then I was going to bang their heads together. I’d reached a saturation point on adventure. I’d had all I wanted. I realized that I’d been up all night, that I was exhausted. I wanted to murder and smash, and wanted to fall down somewhere and go to sleep, all at once. We banged the workroom door shut and I took time to shove a heavy divan against it, blockading it.

Miellyn stared. “The Little Ones would not harm me,” she began. “I am sacrosanct.”

I wasn’t sure. I had a notion her status had changed plenty, beginning when I saw her chained and drugged, and standing under the hovering horror. But I didn’t say so.

“Maybe. But there’s nothing sacred about me!”

She was already inside the recess where the Toad God squatted. “There is a street-shrine just beyond the Bridge of Summer Snows. We can jump directly there.” Abruptly she froze in my arms, with a convulsive shudder.

“Evarin! Hold me, tight—he’s jumping in! Quick!”

Space reeled round us, and then....

Can you split instantaneousness into fragments? It didn’t make sense, but so help me, that’s what happened. And everything that happened, occurred within less than a second. We landed in the street-shrine. I could see the pylon and the bridge and the rising sun of Charin. Then there was the giddy internal wrenching, a blast of icy air whistled round us, and we were gazing out at the Polar mountains, ringed in their eternal snow.

Miellyn clutched at me. “Pray! Pray to the Gods of Terra, if there are any!”

She clung so violently that it felt as if her small body was trying to push through me and come out the other side. I hung on tight. Miellyn knew what she was doing in the transmitter; I was just along for the ride and I didn’t relish the thought of being dropped off somewhere in that black limbo we traversed.

We jumped again, the sickness of disorientation forcing a moan from the girl, and darkness shivered round us. I looked on an unfamiliar street of black night and dust-bleared stars. She whimpered, “Evarin knows what I’m doing. He’s jumping us all over the planet. He can work the controls with his mind. Psychokinetics—I can do it a little, but I never dared—oh, hang on tight!”

Then began one of the most amazing duels ever fought. Miellyn would make some tiny movement, and we would be falling, blind and dizzy, through blackness. Halfway through the giddiness, a new direction would wrench us and we would be thrust elsewhere, and look out into a new street.

One instant I smelled hot coffee from the spaceport cafe near the Kharsa. An instant later it was blinding noon, with crimson fronds waving above us and a dazzle of water. We flicked in and out of the salty air of Shainsa, glimpsed flowers on a Daillon street, moonlight, noon, red twilight flickered and went, shot through with the terrible giddiness of hyperspace.

Then suddenly I caught a second glimpse of the bridge and the pylon; a moment’s oversight had landed us for an instant in Charin. The blackness started to reel down, but my reflexes are fast and I made one swift, scrabbling step forward. We lurched, sprawled, locked together, on the stones of the Bridge of Summer Snows. Battered, and bruised, and bloody, we were still alive, and where we wanted to be.

I lifted Miellyn to her feet. Her eyes were dazed with pain. The ground swayed and rocked under our feet as we fled along the bridge. At the far end, I looked up at the pylon. Judging from its angle, we couldn’t be more than a hundred feet from the window through which I’d seen that landmark in the scanner. In this street there was a wineshop, a silk market, and a small private house. I walked up and banged on the door.

Silence. I knocked again and had time to wonder if we’d find ourselves explaining things to some uninvolved stranger. Then I heard a child’s high voice, and a deep familiar voice hushing it. The door opened, just a crack, to reveal part of a scarred face.

It drew into a hideous grin, then relaxed.

“I thought it might be you, Cargill. You’ve taken at least three days longer than I figured, getting here. Come on in,” said Rakhal Sensar.

Chapter Fifteen

He hadn’t changed much in six years. His face was worse than mine; he hadn’t had the plastic surgeons of Terran Intelligence doing their best for him. His mouth, I thought fleetingly, must hurt like hell when he drew it up into the kind of grin he was grinning now. His eyebrows, thick and fierce with gray in them, went up as he saw Miellyn; but he backed away to let us enter, and shut the door behind us.

The room was bare and didn’t look as if it had been lived in much. The floor was stone, rough-laid, a single fur rug laid before a brazier. A little girl was sitting on the rug, drinking from a big double-handled mug, but she scrambled to her feet as we came in, and backed against the wall, looking at us with wide eyes.

She had pale-red hair like Juli’s, cut straight in a fringe across her forehead, and she was dressed in a smock of dyed red fur that almost matched her hair. A little smear of milk like a white moustache clung to her upper lip where she had forgotten to wipe her mouth. She was about five years old, with deep-set dark eyes like Juli’s, that watched me gravely without surprise or fear; she evidently knew who I was.

“Rindy,” Rakhal said quietly, not taking his eyes from me. “Go into the other room.”

Rindy didn’t move, still staring at me. Then she moved toward Miellyn, looking up intently not at the woman, but at the pattern of embroideries across her dress. It was very quiet, until Rakhal added, in a gentle and curiously moderate voice, “Do you still carry a skean, Race?”

I shook my head. “There’s an ancient proverb on Terra, about blood being thicker than water, Rakhal. That’s Juli’s daughter. I’m not going to kill her father right before her eyes.” My rage spilled over then, and I bellowed, “To hell with your damned Dry-town feuds and your filthy Toad God and all the rest of it!”

Rakhal said harshly, “Rindy. I told you to get out.”

“She needn’t go.” I took a step toward the little girl, a wary eye on Rakhal. “I don’t know quite what you’re up to, but it’s nothing for a child to be mixed up in. Do what you damn please. I can settle with you any time.

“The first thing is to get Rindy out of here. She belongs with Juli and, damn it, that’s where she’s going.” I held out my arms to the little girl and said, “It’s over, Rindy, whatever he’s done to you. Your mother sent me to find you. Don’t you want to go to your mother?”

Rakhal made a menacing gesture and warned, “I wouldn’t—“

Miellyn darted swiftly between us and caught up the child in her arms. Rindy began to struggle noiselessly, kicking and whimpering, but Miellyn took two quick steps, and flung an inner door open. Rakhal took a stride toward her. She whirled on him, fighting to control the furious little girl, and gasped, “Settle it between you, without the baby watching!”

Through the open door I briefly saw a bed, a child’s small dresses hanging on a hook, before Miellyn kicked the door shut and I heard a latch being fastened. Behind the closed door Rindy broke into angry screams, but I put my back against the door.

“She’s right. We’ll settle it between the two of us. What have you done to that child?”

“If you thought—“ Rakhal stopped himself in midsentence and stood watching me without moving for a minute. Then he laughed.

“You’re as stupid as ever, Race. Why, you fool, I knew Juli would run straight to you, if she was scared enough. I knew it would bring you out of hiding. Why, you damned fool!” He stood mocking me, but there was a strained fury, almost a frenzy of contempt behind the laughter.

“You filthy coward, Race! Six years hiding in the Terran zone. Six years, and I gave you six months! If you’d had the guts to walk out after me, after I rigged that final deal to give you the chance, we could have gone after the biggest thing on Wolf. And we could have brought it off together, instead of spending years spying and dodging and hunting! And now, when I finally get you out of hiding, all you want to do is run back where you’ll be safe! I thought you had more guts!”

“Not for Evarin’s dirty work!”

Rakhal swore hideously. “Evarin! Do you really believe—I might have known he’d get to you too! That girl—and you’ve managed to wreck all I did there, too!” Suddenly, so swiftly my eyes could hardly follow, he whipped out his skean and came at me. “Get away from that door!”

I stood my ground. “You’ll have to kill me first. And I won’t fight you, Rakhal. We’ll settle this, but we’ll do it my way for once, like Earthmen.”

“Son of the Ape! Get your skean out, you stinking coward!”

“I won’t do it, Rakhal.” I stood and defied him. I had outmaneuvered Dry-towners in a shegri bet. I knew Rakhal, and I knew he would not knife an unarmed man. “We fought once with the kifirgh and it didn’t settle anything. This time we’ll do it my way. I threw my skean away before I came here. I won’t fight.”

He thrust at me. Even I could see that the blow was a feint, and I had a flashing, instantaneous memory of Dallisa’s threat to drive the knife through my palms. But even while I commanded myself to stand steady, sheer reflex threw me forward, grabbing at his wrist and the knife.

Between my grappling hand he twisted and I felt the skean drive home, rip through my jacket with a tearing sound; felt the thin fine line of touch, not pain yet, as it sliced flesh. Then pain burned through my ribs and I felt hot blood, and I wanted to kill Rakhal, wanted to get my hands around his throat and kill him with them. And at the same time I was raging because I didn’t want to fight the crazy fool, I wasn’t even mad at him.

Miellyn flung the door open, shrieking, and suddenly the Toy, released, was darting a small whirring droning horror, straight at Rakhal’s eyes. I yelled. But there was no time even to warn him. I bent and butted him in the stomach. He grunted, doubled up in agony and fell out of the path of the diving Toy. It whirred in frustration, hovered.

He writhed in agony, drawing up his knees, clawing at his shirt, while I turned on Miellyn in immense fury—and stopped. Hers had been a move of desperation, an instinctive act to restore the balance between a weaponless man and one who had a knife. Rakhal gasped, in a hoarse voice with all the breath gone from it:

“Didn’t want to use. Rather fight clean—“ Then he opened his closed fist and suddenly there were two of the little whirring droning horrors in the room and this one was diving at me, and as I threw myself headlong to the floor the last puzzle-piece fell into place: Evarin had made the same bargain with Rakhal as with me!

I rolled over, dodging. Behind me in the room there was a child’s shrill scream: “Daddy! Daddy!” And abruptly the birds collapsed in midair and went limp. They fell to the floor like dropping stones and lay there quivering. Rindy dashed across the room, her small skirts flying, and grabbed up one of the terrible vicious things in either hand.

“Rindy!” I bellowed. “No!”

She stood shaking, tears pouring down her round cheeks, a Toy squeezed tight in either hand. Dark veins stood out almost black on her fair temples. “Break them, Daddy,” she implored in a little thread of a voice. “Break them, quick. I can’t hang on....”

Rakhal staggered to his feet like a drunken man and snatched one of the Toys, grinding it under his heel. He made a grab at the second, reeled and drew an anguished breath. He crumpled up, clutching at his belly where I’d butted him. The bird screamed like a living thing.

Breaking my paralysis of horror I leaped up, ran across the room, heedless of the searing pain along my side. I snatched the bird from Rindy and it screamed and shrilled and died as my foot crunched the tiny feathers. I stamped the still-moving thing into an amorphous mess and kept on stamping and smashing until it was only a heap of powder.

Rakhal finally managed to haul himself upright again. His face was so pale that the scars stood out like fresh burns.

“That was a foul blow, Race, but I—I know why you did it.” He stopped and breathed for a minute. Then he muttered, “You ... saved my life, you know. Did you know you were doing it, when you did it?”

Still breathing hard, I nodded. Done knowingly, it meant an end of blood-feud. However we had wronged each other, whatever the pledges. I spoke the words that confirmed it and ended it, finally and forever:

“There is a life between us. Let it stand for a death.”

Miellyn was standing in the doorway, her hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide. She said shakily, “You’re walking around with a knife in your ribs, you fool!”

Rakhal whirled and with a quick jerk he pulled the skean loose. It had simply been caught in my shirtcloak, in a fold of the rough cloth. He pulled it away, glanced at the red tip, then relaxed. “Not more than an inch deep,” he said. Then, angrily, defending himself: “You did it yourself, you ape. I was trying to get rid of the knife when you jumped me.”

But I knew that and he knew I knew it. He turned and scooped up Rindy, who was sobbing noisily. She dug her head into his shoulder and I made out her strangled words. “The other Toys hurt you when I was mad at you....” she sobbed, rubbing her fists against smeared cheeks. “I—I wasn’t that mad at you. I wasn’t that mad at anybody, not even ... him.”

Rakhal pressed his hand against his daughter’s fleecy hair and said, looking at me over her head, “The Toys activate a child’s subconscious resentments against his parents—I found out that much. That also means a child can control them for a few seconds. No adult can.” A stranger would have seen no change in his expression, but I knew him, and saw.

“Juli said you threatened Rindy.”

He chuckled and set the child on her feet. “What else could I say that would have scared Juli enough to send her running to you? Juli’s proud, almost as proud as you are, you stiff-necked Son of the Ape.” The insult did not sting me now.

“Come on, sit down and let’s decide what to do, now we’ve finished up the old business.” He looked remotely at Miellyn and said, “You must be Dallisa’s sister? I don’t suppose your talents include knowing how to make coffee?”

They didn’t, but with Rindy’s help Miellyn managed, and while they were out of the room Rakhal explained briefly. “Rindy has rudimentary ESP. I’ve never had it myself, but I could teach her something—not much—about how to use it. I’ve been on Evarin’s track ever since that business of The Lisse.

“I’d have got it sooner, if you were still working with me, but I couldn’t do anything as a Terran agent, and I had to be kicked out so thoroughly that the others wouldn’t be afraid I was still working secretly for Terra. For a long time I was just chasing rumors, but when Rindy got big enough to look in the crystals of Nebran, I started making some progress.

“I was afraid to tell Juli; her best safety was the fact that she didn’t know anything. She’s always been a stranger in the Dry-towns.” He paused, then said with honest self-evaluation, “Since I left the Secret Service I’ve been a stranger there myself.”

I asked, “What about Dallisa?”

“Twins have some ESP to each other. I knew Miellyn had gone to the Toymaker. I tried to get Dallisa to find out where Miellyn had gone, learn more about it. Dallisa wouldn’t risk it, but Kyral saw me with Dallisa and thought it was Miellyn. That put him on my tail, too, and I had to leave Shainsa. I was afraid of Kyral,” he added soberly. “Afraid of what he’d do. I couldn’t do anything without Rindy and I knew if I told Juli what I was doing, she’d take Rindy away into the Terran Zone, and I’d be as good as dead.”

As he talked, I began to realize how vast a web Evarin and the underground organization of Nebran had spread for us. “Evarin was here today. What for?”

Rakhal laughed mirthlessly. “He’s been trying to get us to kill each other off. That would get rid of us both. He wants to turn over Wolf to the nonhumans entirely, I think he’s sincere enough, but”—he spread his hands helplessly—“I can’t sit by and see it.”

I asked point-blank, “Are you working for Terra? Or for the Dry-towns? Or any of the anti-Terran movements?”

“I’m working for me”, he said with a shrug. “I don’t think much of the Terran Empire, but one planet can’t fight a galaxy. Race, I want just one thing. I want the Dry-towns and the rest of Wolf, to have a voice in their own government. Any planet which makes a substantial contribution to galactic science, by the laws of the Terran Empire, is automatically given the status of an independent commonwealth.

“If a man from the Dry-towns discovers something like a matter transmitter, Wolf gets dominion status. But Evarin and his gang want to keep it secret, keep it away from Terra, keep it locked up in places like Canarsa! Somebody has to get it away from them. And if I do it, I get a nice fat bonus, and an official position.”

I believed that, where I would have suspected too much protestation of altruism. Rakhal tossed it aside.

“You’ve got Miellyn to take you through the transmitters. Go back to the Mastershrine, and tell Evarin that Race Cargill is dead. In the Trade City they think I’m Cargill, and I can get in and out as I choose—sorry if it caused you trouble, but it was the safest thing I could think of—and I’ll ‘vise Magnusson and have him send soldiers to guard the street-shrines. Evarin might try to escape through one of them.”

I shook my head. “Terra hasn’t enough men on all Wolf to cover the street-shrines in Charin alone. And I can’t go back with Miellyn.” I explained. Rakhal pursed his lips and whistled when I described the fight in the transmitter.

“You have all the luck, Cargill! I’ve never been near enough even to be sure how they work—and I’ll bet you didn’t begin to understand! We’ll have to do it the hard way, then. It won’t be the first time we’ve bulled our way through a tight place! We’ll face Evarin in his own hideout! If Rindy’s with us, we needn’t worry.”

I was willing to let him assume command, but I protested, “You’d take a child into that—that—“

”What else can we do? Rindy can control the Toys, and neither you nor I can do that, if Evarin should decide to throw his whole arsenal at us.” He called Rindy and spoke softly to her. She looked from her father to me, and back again to her father, then smiled and stretched out her hand to me.

Before we ventured into the street, Rakhal scowled at the sprawled embroideries of Miellyn’s robe. He said, “In those things you show up like a snowfall in Shainsa. If you go out in them, you could be mobbed. Hadn’t you better get rid of them now?”

“I can’t,” she protested. “They’re the keys to the transmitter!”

Rakhal looked at the conventionalized idols with curiosity, but said only, “Cover them up in the street, then. Rindy, find her something to put over her dress.”

When we reached the street-shrine, Miellyn admonished: “Stand close together on the stones. I’m not sure we can all make the jump at once, but we’ll have to try.”

Rakhal picked up Rindy and hoisted her to his shoulder. Miellyn dropped the cloak she had draped over the pattern of the Nebran embroideries, and we crowded close together. The street swayed and vanished and I felt the now-familiar dip and swirl of blackness before the world straightened out again. Rindy was whimpering, dabbing smeary fists at her face. “Daddy, my nose is bleeding....”

Miellyn hastily bent and wiped the blood from the snubby nose. Rakhal gestured impatiently.

“The workroom. Wreck everything you see. Rindy, if anything starts to come at us, you stop it. Stop it quick. And”—he bent and took the little face between his hands—“chiya, remember they’re not toys, no matter how pretty they are.”

Her grave gray eyes blinked, and she nodded.

Rakhal flung open the door of the elves’ workshop with a shout. The ringing of the anvils shattered into a thousand dissonances as I kicked over a workbench and half-finished Toys crashed in confusion to the floor.

The dwarfs scattered like rabbits before our assault of destruction. I smashed tools, filigree, jewels, stamping everything with my heavy boots. I shattered glass, caught up a hammer and smashed crystals. There was a wild exhilaration to it.

A tiny doll, proportioned like a woman, dashed toward me, shrilling in a supersonic shriek. I put my foot on her and ground the life out of her, and she screamed like a living woman as she came apart. Her blue eyes rolled from her head and lay on the floor watching me. I crushed the blue jewels under my heel.

Rakhal swung a tiny hound by the tail. Its head shattered into debris of almost-invisible gears and wheels. I caught up a chair and wrecked a glass cabinet of parts with it, swinging furiously. A berserk madness of smashing and breaking had laid hold on me.

I was drunk with crushing and shattering and ruining, when I heard Miellyn scream a warning and turned to see Evarin standing in the doorway. His green cat-eyes blazed with rage. Then he raised both hands in a sudden, sardonic gesture, and with a loping, inhuman glide, raced for the transmitter.

“Rindy,” Rakhal panted, “can you block the transmitter?”

Instead Rindy shrieked. “We’ve got to get out! The roof is falling down! The house is going to fall down on us! The roof, look at the roof!”

I looked up, transfixed by horror. I saw a wide rift open, saw the skylight shatter and break, and daylight pouring through the cracking walls, Rakhal snatched Rindy up, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders. I grabbed Miellyn round the waist and we ran for the rift in the buckling wall.

We shoved through just before the roof caved in and the walls collapsed, and we found ourselves standing on a bare grassy hillside, looking down in shock and horror as below us, section after section of what had been apparently bare hill and rock caved in and collapsed into dusty rubble.

Miellyn screamed hoarsely. “Run. Run, hurry!”

I didn’t understand, but I ran. I ran, my sides aching, blood streaming from the forgotten flesh-wound in my side. Miellyn raced beside me and Rakhal stumbled along, carrying Rindy.

Then the shock of a great explosion rocked the ground, hurling me down full length, Miellyn falling on top of me. Rakhal went down on his knees. Rindy was crying loudly. When I could see straight again, I looked down at the hillside.

There was nothing left of Evarin’s hideaway or the Mastershrine of Nebran except a great, gaping hole, still oozing smoke and thick black dust. Miellyn said aloud, dazed, “So that’s what he was going to do!”

It fitted the peculiar nonhuman logic of the Toymaker. He’d covered the traces.

“Destroyed!” Rakhal raged. “All destroyed! The workrooms, the science of the Toys, the matter transmitter—the minute we find it, it’s destroyed!” He beat his fists furiously. “Our one chance to learn—“

”We were lucky to get out alive,” said Miellyn quietly. “Where on the planet are we, I wonder?”

I looked down the hillside, and stared in amazement. Spread out on the hillside below us lay the Kharsa, topped by the white skyscraper of the HQ.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, “right here. We’re home. Rakhal, you can go down and make your peace with the Terrans, and Juli. And you, Miellyn—“ Before the others, I could not say what I was thinking, but I put my hand on her shoulder and kept it there. She smiled, shakily, with a hint of her old mischief. “I can’t go into the Terran Zone looking like this, can I? Give me that comb again. Rakhal, give me your shirtcloak, my robes are torn.”

“You vain, stupid female, worrying about a thing like that at a time like this!” Rakhal’s look was like murder. I put my comb in her hand, then suddenly saw something in the symbols across her breasts. Before this I had seen only the conventionalized and intricate glyph of the Toad God. But now—

I reached out and ripped the cloth away.

“Cargill!” she protested angrily, crimsoning, covering her bare breasts with both hands. “Is this the place? And before a child, too!”

I hardly heard. “Look!” I exclaimed. “Rakhal, look at the symbols embroidered into the glyph of the God! You can read the old nonhuman glyphs. You did it in the city of The Lisse. Miellyn said they were the key to the transmitters! I’ll bet the formula is written out there for anyone to read!

“Anyone, that is, who can read it! I can’t, but I’ll bet the formula equations for the transmitters are carved on every Toad God glyph on Wolf. Rakhal, it makes sense. There are two ways of hiding something. Either keep it locked away, or hide it right out in plain sight. Whoever bothers even to look at a conventionalized Toad God? There are so many billions of them....”

He bent his head over the embroideries, and when he looked up his face was flushed. “I believe—by the chains of Sharra, I believe you have it, Race! It may take years to work out the glyphs, but I’ll do it, or die trying!” His scarred and hideous face looked almost handsome in exultation, and I grinned at him.

“If Juli leaves enough of you, once she finds out how you maneuvered her. Look, Rindy’s fallen asleep on the grass there. Poor kid, we’d better get her down to her mother.”

“Right.” Rakhal thrust the precious embroidery into his shirtcloak, then cradled his sleeping daughter in his arms. I watched him with a curious emotion I could not identify. It seemed to pinpoint some great change, either in Rakhal or myself. It’s not difficult to visualize one’s sister with children, but there was something, some strange incongruity in the sight of Rakhal carrying the little girl, carefully tucking her up in a fold of his cloak to keep the sharp breeze off her face.

Miellyn was limping in her thin sandals, and she shivered. I asked, “Cold?”

“No, but—I don’t believe Evarin is dead, I’m afraid he got away.”

For a minute the thought dimmed the luster of the morning. Then I shrugged. “He’s probably buried in that big hole up there.” But I knew I would never be sure.

We walked abreast, my arm around the weary, stumbling woman, and Rakhal said softly at last, “Like old times.”

It wasn’t old times, I knew. He would know it too, once his exultation sobered. I had outgrown my love for intrigue, and I had the feeling this was Rakhal’s last adventure. It was going to take him, as he said, years to work out the equations for the transmitter. And I had a feeling my own solid, ordinary desk was going to look good to me in the morning.

But I knew now that I’d never run away from Wolf again. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting for me down below, and I was bringing back her child. My best friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?

If the memory of dark, poison-berry eyes was to haunt me in nightmares, they did not come into the waking world. I looked at Miellyn, took her slender unmanacled hand in mine, and smiled as we walked through the gates of the city. Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein the perfect steel chains that should bind my love’s wrists to my key forever.

Black & White

THIS HAS BEEN an old story since Cain killed Abel,” the man said quietly. “Brother against brother, city against city, nation against nation. But at least it will never be old-again.”

“Never again,” the woman repeated, “at least, not on Earth.”

“Not on Earth.”

In the ruin of what had been—when cities still were dignified by names—lower Harlem, a man and a woman were sitting in the only building left intact on The Day. It had once been a beer-hall. The walls were still gaudy with lascivious poses of women that no longer had meaning, and the glass over the bar had been so thoroughly shattered that even now neither the man nor the woman dared cross the floor barefoot; the splintered glass from long-gone bottles was still working in fragments out of the wood floor.

They-had been living there for three months—since they had found each other and realized they were the last man and woman in New York—probably, on the North American continent—almost certainly, in the world.

“All the Adam-and-Eve stories I ever read—” the woman said, with a hard little” laugh. “Never thought I’d end up as the protagonist of one, It’s ludicrous.”

“Easy now!” The man’s voice was soothing. He caught the edge of hysteria, easier to abort than to stop after it got going. “You’re not.”

“No,” her voice brooded now; “I’m not.”

“Kathy,” he said gently, “have you heard the old saying, I wouldn’t marry her if she was the last woman in the world?”

“Oh, Jeff—”

“For the love of God!” the man exploded, and stood up, the muscles running in ridges under the dark skin of his jaw. “Kathy, don’t say it! For the love of God! Hand me a mirror, if you can find one in this empty rathole! But don’t say it!”

Then he spoke with a bitterness so deep that he himself did not recognize it as bitter. “Kathy, I’d leave here ten morrow—except I’d be so lonely I’d shoot myself.”

“So would I.”

“But you’ve got to use your head, Kathy. I thought this was permanently settled. I thought our ancestors settled it for us about three hundred years ago. And—we’re both reasonably civilized. It’s a good thing, or I’d—” he broke off unclenched his fists and made himself lounge in a chair again.

“Is it really such a good thing?” Kathy asked softly. The garish red lights over the bar—somehow unbroken, the power plant out here hadn’t run down yet—gave a lustre to her fair hair as she leaned forward and looked at him. The man saw the play of the red light on her blonde hair—cut short like his—and briefly shut his eyes.

“AH I know is—we’re both the products of our respective civilizations, Kathy. Good or bad—I don’t know. Who cares? Girl, go to bed! It’s after midnight, and I thought we promised each other we weren’t going to hash this over any more!”

The girl nodded. “I’m sorry.” She rose, shading her eyes. “Jeff, tomorrow let’s see if we can’t find some other light bulbs somewhere. These red things are going to drive me nuts!”

He laughed. “Talk about needles and haystacks! New York of the bright lights and I have to look for a light-bulb. Okay, Kathy, I’ll find one if I have to shinny up a light pole.”

“Good night, Jeff.”

“Night, Kathy.”

The man sat quite still until he heard the Yale lock snap shut on the inside of the door; an old sign—this had once been a wellknown night club-said NO STAGS, PLEASE. Jeff slid something out of his pocket and sat looking at it. It was a key, the key that belonged to the Yale lock.

He opened the street door and went out. The hunks of jammed cars, partially smashed, still blocked the sidewalks, and many of the light-poles were down, but here and there a solitary street lamp would burn until some day the power went off at the central station. One, near the corner, spilled a puddle of brilliance into the shadows of broken concrete and brickwork. Slinking figures a foot long made eerie shadows around the old bones that lay in the street. The man barely glanced their way. Once they had made him so sick that he could not walk in a street where they lay. Now he kicked them carelessly aside. Deconditioning, he thought. Too many of the dead to worry about them.

Could other taboos go the same way?

Grass would come back some day and cover the bones. He wouldn’t live to see it. Grass, in Harlem!

He still held the key in his hand. Did Kathy know he had it? Two weeks ago, she had told him that she had lost it, but since she could lock the door on the inside with a turn of her wrist, he hadn’t worried—until he found the key, the next day, lying almost in plain sight by the bar. Had she lost it—on purpose?

Jeff scowled. What if she had? They’d have it to live with for the rest of their lives.

Their children would never know or care. . . .

“Oh, Jesus,” the man .muttered, and put his face in his hands, almost a childhood reflex. “Oh sweet Jesus . . .”

The new awareness of Kathy was almost that; a crucifixion. Kathy’s face swam before his eyes. He did not think it was a pretty face. He never had. A fair-haired, blue-eyed woman, an object forbidden, forever taboo, beyond desire. Doubly taboo, doubly beyond desire.

He scrambled to the summit of a pile of smashed concrete and looked down at the river. The water was clean, now, freed of the dead fish that Had clogged it for a month. The river, like the city, had its own scavengers that ate the corruption away.

A question of sin? But is there a clean-cut question of sin in these days? Morality used to be a matter of black or white, right or wrong, not all shades of—of brown, he said with his teeth clenched. He fished in his pocket for the key and sent it flying in. a high arch far out over the waters. He didn’t even hear the tiny splash.

“Well, that’s that,” he said aloud. “Clear cut. Black or white.”

That was that, even before Kathy and I talked it over that one time. You know that, Father.

Father, lead us not into temptation . . . Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee . . . and I detest all my sins ...

He put his hands to his temples, feeling the black crisped

hair there. Who are you trying to kid—Father? He turned and walked back to their home. He spread his blankets, shucked shirt and pants. Under his pillow lay a curious white object Kathy had never seen. It was the one thing he concealed from her since they had come to share joint loneliness. He held it musingly a minute.

Did it mean anything now? You’ve lost everything else that goes with it.

Be honest now. Did it ever mean anything? It couldn’t prevent this from happening—this, the end of the world!

He glanced up at the fragment of unbroken mirror over the bar and in a sudden rage raised his hand to shatter it. It only accentuated the difference between himself and Kathy. Then he stayed his hand. Mirrors meant a lot to a woman.

His own face looked grimly back at him. Neither handsome nor ugly to his eyes. Just an ordinary, brown-skinned face, the face of a Negro man about thirty years old. He swallowed, then did a curious thing. He raised the white thing in his hand and started to put it around his neck—then crumpled it furiously in his fist. He started to throw it away, then thrust the Roman collar back beneath the pillow. Father Thomas Jefferson Brown, a priest without a parish, glared at his own image, turned suddenly away from the mirror, laughed softly, crawled into his blankets and went to sleep.

Jeff said, “Maybe it would have been easier on you if you’d been brought up in the south, Kathy. You wouldn’t even have been thinking this way.”

Kathy smiled and shook her head. “It wouldn’t have changed much. Be honest, Jeff. What you’re really thinking is—the human race isn’t worth much, if it can end this way.”

He laughed out loud. “At least it’s not worth starting the whole bloody mess all over again,” he said.

She spoke with a seriousness rare for her. “Did it ever occur to you, Jeff, that it might have been meant—our finding each other, from such a distance apart?”

He chuckled grimly. “Like Lot and his daughters, you mean? Frankly, no.”

She rarely spoke of the thing which was so much in the forefront of their minds that it was almost never on their tongues. But now she said “It’s rather terrible, in a way. It took a cataclysm to make me realize that the problem even existed. If you’d ever asked me, I’d have said that civilization was just a veneer—take a man, and a woman, right out of society, and they’ll revert to primitive man, and primitive woman.”

Against thy last temptations, O Father ...

Should I tell her I was a priest? No. She wasn’t a Catholic, she made that clear. And, with all my apologies, dear Lord, I’m not going to fight for one last soul. You made your clean sweep of the fields, and left no gleanings in the corners, and I’m not going to try to convert her. But I’m not going to tell her and let her try to make me override my vows either. A priest forever. If you wanted Adam and Eve, Lord, you should have picked a couple of other people. I don’t mind letting her think it’s because I’m colored and she’s white, but I’m not going to have her call me a fool because with the world ending I count on the next one more than this. Amen.

After a stretched silence he said “Aren’t you getting tired of canned foods? I am. Let’s take the boat and go across the river. There are plenty of wild rabbits—well shoot a few for supper. It will be a welcome change.”

The breeze over the lower Hudson blew, with a clean freshness, down from the hills. They were both hardened now to the sight of the ruined city, but Jeff found himself toying, again, with the notion of striking upriver again. The few things they had—lights, a few caches of food and clothing-could be weighed against the immense good of not having to look at the ruins every time they moved.

Then he laughed, shortly. Only the memory of what the last civilization had done to itself, kept his resolve firm. . . .

Above the city, grass was beginning to grow down to the water’s edge, and rabbits hopped on the overgrown fields without shyness. “Look how tame they are!” Kathy said in wonder. She had been loading her pistol; now she dropped it back into her windbreaker.

“Oh, Jeff, let’s not shoot .them! They’re such cute little fellows, and now there’s nobody to scare them!”

“I could sure go for some rabbit stew,” the man said doubtfully, then chuckled. “But have it your way, Kathy. Why should the last humans make themselves obnoxious to the new dominant species?”

“You—really don’t mind?” She looked at him with the look he had seen so often these last days, half imploring, half concealed.

He shook his head. “Not a bit. Maybe we’ll’ find a pig-some of them must have gotten loose and run wild. Anyway, we’re sure to find something—”

“Jeff!” The woman froze. “What was that noise?”

“A shot,” the man said huskily, “A shot—a rifle! Kathy, there’s someone else here!”

“Were they—shooting at us?” the woman faltered.

“I doubt it. Rabbits, probably, but—”

“I’ll fire a signal!”

Jeff was already heading the boat to shore. He said quietly “No. Kathy, it’s rotten to sound suspicious, but there could be trouble. Men, running wild—well, you’re a woman.”

And all men aren’t like me . . . instinct tamed so long ago it doesn’t matter. ...

She frowned at him “Oh, surely—there wouldn’t be

trouble? After all this time? Remember how—bow glad we were just to find out we weren’t alone in the world—”

”Just the same, keep the gun out of sight,” Jeff urged gently. “They’ll probably take to us better if we’re not armed. Put it away until we’re sure we’re safe with friends—or until we know we’ll have to fight.”

Obediently, the woman put the pistol back into the pocket of her windbreaker. Jeff stood up and shouted in his ringing basso, “Hello! Hello! Anybody there?”

Silence. After a long time, a thin echo rang back, “Hello!”

“That was no echo,” Jeff muttered, “took too long. Hello! Hey there! Can you hear us?”

Three rifle shots in rapid succession answered them; after a little, a man topped the brow of the hill, stood looking down for a minute, then yelled and broke into a run toward them.

“Hello!” he gasped breathlessly when we got to them. “Well, I’ll be damned, a few others made it too! You fellers been here long? I been—well, hell! It’s a girl!” His eyes rested on Kathy. “Seeing you so far off, in them slacks— and with you—” his eyes, now strangely altered, rested on Jeff. The newcomer was a thickset man, bearded, his clothes in tatters, and Jeff held himself by force from distaste. A man alone in the wilds would not feel the same obligation as a man living with a fellow human being—to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

He said quietly, “I’m Jeff Brown, and this is Kathy Morgan.”

“I’m Hank Nichols,” the man said. “Glad to see ya’ll, Miss Morgan. Jeff.”

Jeff held out his hand, but the man ignored it and after a moment Jeff let it fall to his side. Social gestures were a little incongruous now, anyway. Nichols’ eyes were still fixed on Kathy, but Jeff, remembering how, after his own long isolation, he bad wept for joy, just to see another human thought tolerantly; half mad with loneliness. Poor devil!

Nichols asked, “Any more of you in the city? I hoped—”

It was Jeff who answered, though he had spoken to Kathy; “No. I travelled all over the Midwest, looking, and finally gave it up. Katherine travelled all over New England. There was an old man—he died just before she found me.”

“Katherine, eh? I ain’t seen ary soul either. Guess we’re all that’s left.” His gaze at Katherine was open now and his side glances at Jeff more frequent. “I just caught me a mess of rabbits. Ya’ll might as well come eat with me, they’s plenty more.”

Kathy was looking at the man with dismay; bearded, slouching, not exactly filthy but certainly not clean. His eyes, which followed her, made her feel strange. She caught Jeff’s arm and murmured.

He smiled and said reassuringly, “Steady, girl. He may not be a very prepossessing specimen, but he’s one of God’s creatures, after all. We’re not in a position to be—” he smiled at her, winningly, “segregationists.”

She nodded, hesitantly, but clung to Jeff’s arm. Nichols, turning, saw the gesture, and his eyes narrowed, an odd light behind them.

In a small clearing not far away, he had pitched a tent, and the embers of a cookfire smoldered, smoke hanging over the untidy campsite. He squatted on his heels, skinning the rabbits deftly.

“Sure is nice here. I never got to see the country before I worked in a garage down in Kentucky. Only thing, I miss the movies. Some day I’m going to find me a movie projector someplace, must be one around. Sure lonesome, too.”

“It is,” Jeff agreed. “But there may be others somewhere—in Europe, Africa—we just don’t know. We’ve no way of knowing.”

Nichols tossed away a rabbit skin. Kathy took up the skinned animal. “Can’t I help you?”

“Sure, baby.” He handed her his knife, holding her small hand for a moment in his great paw. “Sure been missing someone to cut up my rabbits.” He laughed and leered, picked up a second rabbit from the pile and began expertly trimming off the paws and stripping away the pelt. “Jeff, why don’t you hunt up some more brushwood?”

The tone, casual and commanding, made Jeff seethe; but he stood up, said mildly, “Right you are,” and walked away. His thoughts were confused. Oh Lord, thy practical jokes are beyond human understanding. A man and a woman, and even a priest to marry them. Kathy had been afraid of the man—yet she was laughing with him, offering to help him. Instinct. Each after his own .kind, male and female . . . rough and dirty and unsavory as Nichols looked, he was a man; and he could, and would recognize the instincts in himself, and in Kathy.

The thought made sickness rise in Jeff’s throat; he swallowed, trying not to gag. Kathy—and that creature!

Be sensible. He’ll give her what she wants and you can’t—or won’t. Damned fool . . . clinging to a remnant of superstition, a vow made for a world that’s ended . . .

You protected Kathy from a dozen dangers. A pack of starving dogs. Falling walls. Rats. Savage, homeless cats, turned predatory-wild. . . .

But are you going to turn her over to a man who’s worse than any of these?

He clenched his fists and his teeth, shaking, sick, fighting the need to run back to the clearing, to fight Nichols, if need be, savagely, hand to hand, for his woman. But she’s not yours . . . oh God, oh my dear God . . . blessed Mother of Mercy, Mary have pity on me . . .

Kathy screamed. And screamed again, horribly. “No! No!

Jeff—help! Help! Jeff! Oh, no-o-o—!” and the cry was choked off as if a rough hand had stifled the screamer’s throat.

Jeff cast thought, prayer and compunction aside; the last remnant of civilization dropped from him and he ran. “Kathy! Kathy!” he shouted. “Easy, darling, I’m coming—”

Nichols bullet struck him broadside in the lung and he toppled headlong into the little gully.

Kathy, her hands to her mouth, stared in crazy horror at the bearded man. “You—shot him! You—shot him!”

“Yeah, I shot the dam—,” he said, but Kathy understood nothing of the rest of the sentence except that it was unbelievably foul. “Anyway, that’s all over. Figured you’d be damn glad to get rid of him. What’d he do—catch you when you were alone? Anyhow, now we got rid of him. Come on, babe, c’mere—hey! What you doing?”

Kathy fumbled in her windbreaker pocket. She had become expert at shooting the swift-moving, starving rats. Just another rat, she told herself, and her hand was steady on the trigger; the slug tore away his smile, wiped the sickening memory of his leer from her mind forever. Not until she found herself kicking his limp body again and again did she realize that she was crying. She ran to Jeff, kneeling at his side, babbling.

His eyes opened painfully. “Kathy—”

“I shot him,” she wept, “I killed him, I—”

“You shouldn’t have,” he whispered. His mind strayed. “Say—an act of contrition—”

She stared down in horror and sudden wild surmise as the man clawed slowly at the deep agony in his chest. Then he muttered, his eyes and his brain quite clear, “I was—right all along. As long as we—feel this way—we might as well end it here. Good thing he came along, or I would have given in . . .” he choked on bloody spit.

“Don’t talk! Oh, Jeff, darling, darling—don’t talk—” Sobbing, she cradled his head on her knees. His eyes, already unseeing, sought vainly to find her in the closing darkness. He muttered incoherently in Latin for a moment, then suddenly, softly, “Kathy—darling—bend down and tell me— did you lose that key on purpose?”

Sobbing, the woman bent to whisper her answer, but he was already beyond hearing. Father Thomas Jefferson Brown said clearly, loudly, “Sorry, Lord, you’ll have to start from a fresh batch of clay,” and died. After a minute, Kathy straightened, letting his limp body fall.

“He was right all along,” she said to nobody, put the pistol in her pocket, picked up the two skinned rabbits with a grim smile, and went back to the boat alone.

Treason of the Blood

Every night, as darkness folded over the Castello di Speranza, the little Contessa, Teresa, descended to gloat over her prisoner. There were formalities to this visit, each stylized as the motions of some pagan priest celebrating some high and ancient ritual before the altar. First she dismissed all of her servants, even the deaf—mute Rondo who obeyed her as a trained dog. Then, each night bruising her frail hands anew on the steel, she drew the bolts of her chamber and fastened the locks of earn casement. If some mythical observer could have hidden behind the arras he would have seen a strange thing; into each metal bolt, roughly and painfully scratched by hands unused to such labor, the sign of the cross had been inscribed.

Then she knelt for a moment before the oaken prie-dieu, clasping her fingers about her beads; mere habit now, for she had long ceased to pray. The mirror at the far end of the chamber gave back her reflection dimly, a shadow pattern in black and white; the black coils of her hair netted with thin lace, the close black of a mourning gown crossed by the clasped fingers of white hands on ivory beads, her face—drawn to the whiteness of bone, of alabaster-brushed with black silken brows.

A face made for softness and for love, but hard now and cruel, the eyes level with hate, the soft mouth drawn to a thin white line. A saint, transformed by the double lashes of grief and sworn revenge into a fiend from the pit.

Rising and laying aside her beads, the Contessa lifted the lid of a carven chest, and took a three—thonged whip of braided leather. At the end of each thong, bits of razor—steel had been fixed; the leather was blackened and the bits of steel dulled with a dull brownish - red stain. She touched her fingertips to the steel and drew them back quickly; the sharp steel had drawn her blood.

She shrugged, disregarding the pain. In the leather grip of the quirt, crudely cut by an inexpert knife, was again the sign of the cross.

There was no answering creak as she drew back the bolt of the secret panel. This door was kept oiled and in perfect repair. A taper held high in one hand, she descended the stairs as noiselessly as her own shadow, her trailing skirts sweeping aside fresh cobwebs and sending small spiders scurrying into the cracks of the stone.

The brackish smell of stagnant underground pools came up to meet her. There had been a time when her delicate nostrils had shuddered at this smell, but that time was long past. She herself hardly realized how much she had changed from the young girl, afraid of every shadow, her frail fingers bleeding from the struggle with the then—rusted bolt, who had first come down these steps in despair and terror.

She paused and sighed. “Why do I come?” she asked almost aloud, and tike an echo cast back from the dank depths there was a whisper and a sigh, “Come.”

Two turns of the winding stair and she came into an arched corridor, lighted with dim moonlight filtering down long shafts built centuries ago. The passageway was lined with remnants of a grimmer day; the rusted bars of a pulley still suggesting the strappado, a crisscross of bars like a hard couch, the grim green—bronze stare of an Iron Maiden. The Contessa barely gazed at these things which once had made her shudder; now they seemed familiar friends. She toyed, indeed, with a moment’s thought they could be put in order before she turned the final twist in the passage, where a steel grating reared from stone floor to arched ceiling. Taking the great key from the chatelaine at her belt, the Contessa unlocked the grating and passed through.

“Good evening, Contessa,” said the man chained to the wall.

The Contessa bowed her head. “And to you a good evening, messire, she said in her melodious voice, whose modulation was so deep a habit that even the transformation of maiden to fiend could not alter it.

She surveyed the man before her; his arms encased in cuffs of iron secured to the wall by long chains that passed through a ringbolt there. His legs too were locked in anklets of steel joined by a chain. A tattered white shirt and dark—stained leather riding breeches were all his clothing, yet, as he bowed, his fair hair caught the gleam of the taper and the dancing shadow, on the stone wall seemed to reflect wide wings.

The woman, standing carefully beyond the furthest reach of the chain, let her eyes linger on the features, thin, sharp and subtly sensual. As he raised his head again, his eyes, blazing with some strange spark, crossed hers. He shuddered as if with some terrible pain. The long look was almost like a lover’s glance. Again the Contessa was shaken by the curious beauty of the chained man. Beauty? A strange word, yet beauty it was, the beauty of some restless caged eagle, beating its wings with the fierce despair and agony of its inhuman hunger. But his glance fell first, though when he spoke his voice held a lilting mockery.

“You are beautiful this evening, madonna,” he said, “I regret that I may not kiss your hand.”

A spasm of indefinable emotion seemed to convulse her face. “So,” she said abruptly, “kiss if you will,” and extended her slender fingers, bruised and bleeding, to him. It was a mocking gesture, but he seized her hand in his and bent low over it, touching his lips to the hand. Then, abruptly, he struggled as if sudden madness possessed him, his chained hands crushing over her wrist, bringing them up avidly to his lips.

With a single swift gesture she brought up the whip and, wrenching her other hand free, lashed out with a single brutal blow. He flinched momentarily and in that instant she was beyond his reach again, her eyes flaming.

“I had forgotten,” she taunted, “it is full moon and you—hunger!”

He stood slumped in his chains, not deigning to answer her mockery. At last he said, quietly, “Aye, full moon again. Are not your dreams evil, madonna?”

She shuddered as if to ward off the memory, but said, “I count myself lucky if you can do no more harm than this—to send me evil dreams!” A spasm of disgust twisted her mouth. Suddenly she stepped back and caught up the whip again.

“Angelo, Count Fioresi,” she cried in a ringing voice, “You have fed on your last victim - vampire!” She laughed aloud.

“Three months have I kept you in chains and watched your strength diminish and your evil hunger grow!”

Suddenly he strained wildly against the chains, but the spasm was feeble and soon he fell back exhausted, leaning against the wall and sagging.

“Once you could have burst those chains,” she said, smiling in cruel triumph, “had I not carved the cross into each bracelet! Now even ordinary chains would hold you, I think!” He propped himself up on his hands.

“Madonna,” he said in a low voice, “my life is at your mercy; you might end it at your pleasure. None could blame you, if you sought my death. But why do you find pleasure in tormenting me?”

“Need you ask?” she cried in a high anguished voice—the last remnant of the young girl she had been three scant months ago. “You, who came to this castle as my suitor, beguiling my father by posing as the grandson of his oldest friend? How often he spoke of you, saying he felt, when he was in your company, that the friend of his youth had returned from the dead? He did not know how true he spoke!”

The Count shook his head.

“No,” he said wearily. “If you must tell again that old sad tale, tell it truly. That is but old wives telling, that such as I return from death. We do not die, but live many times the span of mortal men, unless accident cuts off our life—or, or, we are barred too long from our other source of life.”

Her convulsed face seemed to waver in the dim light.

“Be it so then. Your old friend, my father, sickened and died, then Rico my brother, of a wasting sickness. Last of all Cassilda, the sister who had mothered me when I was left motherless, was laid in unhallowed Earth—still you sought to wed me.”

“Madonna, you call me a fiend—”

“Can you deny it?” she cried. “Can you claim to be man, you who have touched neither food nor drink in these months since I brought you here?”

“I have admitted I am not a man of your sort,” he said, his head bowed. “My race is far older than yours, Madonna, perhaps made before your own God gave dominion to your kind. Like some beasts, we live—when we have passed youth—only by the blood of living things. Till my thirtieth year, I thought myself as other men. Yet I did not kill your kin, Contessa. And if I had; if I had? Your eldest brother Stefano was slain in a duel with the lord of Monteno, yet Monteno’s kin are honored guests here in Castello di Speranzo. I did not know.” He seemed suddenly to writhe in pain—“I did not know, death was already in your kinfolk when I came here.”

“You lie!” she cried out, and the lash whistled in the air as it caught the man across face and chest. He cried out hoarsely and the fiend smile crossed the girl’s face.

“It gives me joy to know that you can suffer!” she cried. “Suffer as I suffered!”

The whiplash had drawn blood; she looked at the crimson drops with a strange gloating smile.

“Have a care, Lady,” said Angelo, Count Fioresi, softly. “I sought the blood of men so that I might not die; you have come to seek it for pleasure.”

She raised the whip again, then lowered it.

“Why can I not seek your death?” she cried. “Why did I not kill you then? What can I not rid God’s sweet earth of such a thing as you?”

“And why are your dreams so evil?” he asked softly, “and why was it that once you loved me, Madonna? Your God has forbidden revenge to his faithful. Why could you not slay me, and leave me to his vengeance and hell—or to his mercy?”

She turned suddenly and fled down the passage and up the winding stairs. Her footsteps made crisp echoes in the night. And Angelo, Count Fioresi, man, monster, vampire, whatever he was, dropped his face into his hands and wept.

The Contessa flung her windows wide, shivering as the night wind blew the dungeon stench from her gown; she would have knelt, but the words of the vampire burned in her heart; God has forbidden revenge.

What have I become? she asked herself, almost in wonder. She lay down in her great bed, but she feared to sleep, so great was the encompassing horror of the dreams that visited her. It was some evil spell of the vampire she held chained, she told herself; yet so great was the terror at the nights of full moon that she dared not close her eyes. She lay there recalling how she had first trapped the evil thing in man’s form which lay now in her dungeon.

When first he came to them he had been ever at hand. She thought it was Cassilda’s hand he sought, for her sister was both older and more beautiful; yet he showed to Cassilda only a curious courteous kindliness.

It was the kindliness which she could not now reconcile with the horrors. When her father, then her brother had died, she had wept, “I am ill—fated; you cannot want me now.” He had smiled and said, “Perhaps, when you are my wife, evil fortune will weary of following you.”

But it seemed as if some evil spell lay on them all in those days, for there were deaths all through the village, as if some mysterious sickness plagued them. At last even Cassilda died, though the castle’s priest, Father Milo, hid away her body from Teresa.

Angelo had come to her that day where she wept near the chapel—aye, she now, recalled, he had never stopped within the chapel doors here—his fair and beautiful face wrung with what had seemed to be honest compassion. Was it truly hell—black hypocrisy?

“Teresa, Teresa, I cannot bear to see you so alone!”

Now she wondered; what, indeed, would have happened, had she succumbed to his pleas? Could he indeed have come within the chapel? Her cross—signs had held him fast; could he have wedded her indeed?

Would, she not, indeed, have accomplished her purpose by binding him fast in Sacrament. . . ?

Father Milo, drawn and quivering with his own terror, had drawn her into the chapel that night, and signed her with the cross, then bidden her sit on his bench while he stood before her, his face taut with pain and horror. At first she had hardly listened to his rambling tale of strange deaths in the village, the marks found on the throat of her father and brother, the hint of some more dreadful horror surrounding Cassilda’s death. Only slowly and incredulously did she realize what he was telling her—that these deaths were the work of a vampire!

“But this is only wicked superstition,” she cried in protest, and he shook his head.

“No, it is the devil’s work, done by one in league with that same devil!” Father Milo replied, his face drawn and white. Slowly, word by word, he had convinced her. Even then she had never more than half believed the dreadful tales he had told—that the Count had been seen to fly in the form of a bat from the windows of the old tower, that a holy woman of the village had smelled grave clothes and the musk of the coffin when he passed by; but when at last she believed, she had knelt before the priest, a passion of rage and terror surging up in her heart.

“What can be done?” and Father Milo answered slowly:

“The creature must die.”

“Death alone would not serve!” she cried out in anguish, her face as white as her mourning veil. “I remember—I remember the night before she died, Cassilda came to my bedside and wept; and I—I did not know, why!”

Father Milo laid his hand on her head. “Bear what I must tell you now, with courage, my daughter. Cassilda died by her own hand, for fear of that same fate.”

Teresa cried out in pain. “Then death alone cannot serve this monster! He must suffer - suffer as I and mine have suffered!”

“Revenge belongs to God alone,” the priest rebuked.

“I know not for certain, but I have heard that these monstrous creatures of the devil—cannot truly die, but live on in their coffins, rising to seek the blood of living things. Daughter, I must travel to Rome, and seek dispensation to deal with this—this thing, so that we may be rid of him forever.” “You must go tonight.”

“But first we must make all secure,” replied the priest, “So that he cannot harm you nor destroy you as he has done to your kin. Be watchful, but show no change in your manner, so that he will not suspect we know him for what he is. Then, when I return, we can destroy him and send him into true death back to his coffin for God in his infinite mercy to punish or pardon.”

Teresa covered her face with her hands. “A thing from the grave and I had loved him!” she whispered. “God’s mercy? I would see him burn forever in hell!”

The priest crossed himself, shaking his head sadly. “It grieves me that you speak such evil words,” he said in rebuke. “Can you set limits on the mercy of God?”

“For that devil, yes!”

“Yet a great saint said once to Satan’s self, daughter: ‘to thee also I may promise God’s mercy, when thou prayest for it.’ Think you, Teresa; the Count Fioresi is a valiant soldier and a gallant courtier. He has borne this devil’s curse many years, and for him this must be true hell, cast out of God’s sight. Can you deny that the merciful God might one day pardon him?”

“If I thought this,” she cried out passionately, “then would I find a way to keep him ever from that pardon—to make him live and suffer as me and mine!”

The priest had answered simply, “You are overwrought, and small wonder. Pray God to forgive your thoughtless words.” He gave her his hand to rise. “I must go tonight; come now to your room, where we must make all safe.”

His hands then had cut the sign of the cross into each door and window, and he had sprinkled them with holy water. He had left the main door for last, but as he turned to it Teresa felt a sudden, stifling terror. Even to save herself from death she could not endure to be shut in by spells, even holy spells.

“This I will seal myself with my crucifix when I am within,” she said, and as she spoke, her plan leaped full—formed into her heart.

“Perhaps it is better so,” he said thoughtfully. He drew from his robes a small vial. “Give him this in his wine,” he said, “and God forgive us, daughter, but at least it will send him to the first death. When I return from Rome we will deal with the vampire, with stake and fire.” Reverently he gave her a rosary. “This was blessed by a great Saint and is an heirloom of my family. It will keep him from rising from the dead until I come again.” He laid his hand on her head in blessing. “And mark,” he added severely, “forget these wicked thoughts of revenge! I command you, on peril of your soul’s health, pray for the soul of this lost sheep of God; pray for the soul of Angelo Fioresi.” But the words had fallen on a hard heart. She bowed her head, but cried out inside,

“Never!”

With her own hands she prepared food and drink for the first stage of the priest’s journey; but as she bade him farewell and his palfrey ambled away, she had turned away with the first cruel smile, crushing the little vial in her hand. “But you will not return,” she murmured, “and vengeance will be mine!”

Then, turning from the door, she met the smiling eyes of Count Angelo, and forced herself to smile and give him her hand to kiss.

“Why has the priest left us?”

“To secure permission for our marriage,” she replied steadily.

“Then we are alone here?” he drew her close, smiling.

“May his journey be swift!”

But a curious frown had touched his forehead, and Teresa quailed and shrank from his kiss. “Not now!”

She lay awake that night, feeling like the chained goat staked out to draw the prowling mountain lion, the pale light from the open door lying across her face, waiting for the step and shadow, as of black wings across her door. She clasped the cross in terror, thinking; it is true, then, that the vampire moves like cat or ghost on noiseless feet.

Slowly the shadow bent till the full lips touched her throat, then, as if she feigned waking, she murmured, “Angelo?”

“Love—”

“Wait,” she whispered, clutching the cross in her hand, “the door is ajar.”

“Surely not,” he whispered, turning, but with a scurry of step she reached it, slammed it to, and jammed the bolt together with the crucifix. “Now,” she cried, white as her nightgown, “let me see if you can leave as you came, Angelo, Count Fioresi—fiend, monster, murderer—vampire!” She rushed at him, holding the light aloft. He whirled like a beast at the death, making a dash at the sealed windows, the other door, in vain. She said hi a voice that shook, “I never more than half believed, till now. It seemed a monstrous lie, but true, then!”

The Count stretched his hands toward her and she raised the cross to ward him away, but although she had expected him to rush at her, bent on murder, he did not stir. “Teresa,” he implored, “it is not what you think. I beg—I implore you, hear me before it is too late.” But in her wrath and fury she would not listen. She caught up the whip and rushed at him, raining blows on his face and shoulders. He cried out and with one swift movement wrenched the lash from her hands and cast it on the carpet.

“Have a care, lady,” he said in a low, voice, “I know many things you know not. And I tell you, Teresa, at this moment you stand in peril more deadly than mine. Will you hear me - hear me but a moment, for the sake of the father who ties dead?”

Hear you, monster, murderer, grave—ghoul?” she cried, and a bleak smile crossed his face.

“The old tale that I rise from a coffin of death? No, Lady, I have never known death, yet. Nor do I want to die, yet. But if you kill me now, you pass into peril, so hear me first.” He strode toward her again, as if he would seize her and compel her to listen, but she snatched up the crucifix from the prie—dieu and held it before her. He flinched away and she gloated, “So that much superstition is true?” He cowered, his lifted arm covering his face.

“True in part, Teresa; I cannot harm you while you bear that symbol of your faith, that sign that you are under God’s protection. Yet for the last time I beg you—”

“Would you beguile me with words?” she cried. Crucifix in hand, she raised the whip and brought it down across his cowering form. He retreated a step and she followed, the lash rising and falling. “So you can bleed and suffer?” she cried in triumph.

“Even as yourself,” he muttered, and slumped to his knees: Warding herself with the cross, Teresa wielded the lash, savoring each dull crack and the thin lines of blood that gradually crisscrossed his body. At last she stood gasping above him; he lay senseless and bloody at her feet. With wary glances, fearing his faint was feigned, Teresa ran to the chest and dragged the heavy chains thence. Her own frail fingers had scratched the cross in each bracelet with her diamond ring. Then she summoned Rondo, the deaf—mute, and with his help she dragged the Count down the long stairs and, shivering, locked the chains to the dungeon wall. Then, sick with horror and replete with the satisfaction of her first plan of revenge, she fell almost senseless on her bed.

“Throw the windows wide,” die motioned to Rondo, “I am fainting!”

When he had left she slept, but her dreams were evil. She seemed to rise and pass like a silent wraith from the castle, and confused horrors of blood and dying faces wandered in her mind. She woke to discover that she had walked in her sleep and lay half—in, half - out of the leaded casements.

Has he bewitched me? she wondered, as she fell across her bed in the growing daylight and slept.

She woke at dusk and descended, shuddering, into the crypt; but her fear was somehow soothed by seeing her enemy in chains. There she began the custom of descending each evening into the crypt . . .

As the days passed this began to absorb her more and more, so that she lived only for the moments when she came before the chained man, looked into his fierce eyes like a caged falcon, and when his pleas grew too disturbing, silenced them with the cruel lash into which she had now cut the cross so that he could not wrench it away.

The evil dreams still tormented her. The spell seemed to seize all the castle, for some of her servants fled, and others came to her with a tale of deaths in the village, but she brushed them aside like buzzing flies.

The maker of deaths is safely chained below, she thought; they cannot now ascribe them to supernatural visits, nor lay all deaths to such a cause! She was impatient and cruel with them, longing only for the moment when she would descend to gloat over her prisoner, then return to sleep the sleep of dead exhaustion.

The people of the village murmured because Father Milo did not return, and sent old women to her to beg that she should find another priest. “Would you command me?” she shouted, pacing the floor, and when the delegation had fled, she stared at herself in horror in the glass; they will think I am mad!

So three moons waxed and waned, bringing little change. Then came a night when Angelo barely stirred when she spoke to him, but lay seemingly senseless in the straw and chains.

At last he opened his eyes and murmured, “Gloat your fill at my despair, madonna. The end comes. But I see you passing further and further into peril. For your own sake I beg you; end this.”

“Why,” she mocked, “the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be! Shall I set you as priest in Father Milo’s chapel?”

“I am no monster of cruelty,” he said, “though I cannot blame you for thinking me so. Yet, Teresa, I am safely chained here. Why, then, the deaths of your people?” She shrugged callously. “Such folk are always dying. Am I responsible for them, bodies or souls?”

The chained creature gave her a curious calculating look. “Once you would not have spoken so. Once you were gentle and pious.”

“And if I am a fiend from hell, who but yourself made me so?”

Almost he laughed. “No, no, you have guarded yourself from me, but have you not made yourself a fiend?”

“Silence,” she shrieked. “Silence!” She brought down the whip full across his face, and, with a terrible cry he fell, blood breaking from his broken lips.

She let the whip fall, and knelt beside him. “He spoke truly; the end is near,” she thought.

“Here let him lie forever.”

The crucifix she still wore swayed back and forth, casting a strange shadow on her prisoner, and a random thought touched her: I have had my revenge. It is not too late to put aside my hate and do as Father Milo bid me; put an end to his sufferings and convey him to God’s mercy. I need but strike him through the heart. He has said that he cannot rise from the dead. Even so I can pray for him the prayers for the dead, doing penance. Then will I, too, return to God’s mercy. And Angelo—Angelo will pass to the dust he should long have been, and his soul settle for his crimes before God.

She had the strange sense that the dungeon was crowded with watching, waiting spirits; it was as if she stood at some crossroads waiting for a victim to be hanged or pardoned, and the victim was herself. She could cast aside hate, and seek mercy, or - Her lips curled in a smile of terrible cruelty. Never, never could she forego the pleasure she had found hi this! No, let him surfer, let him suffer forever! Who had need of God’s forgiveness? There were many outside God’s domain!

“So it is too late,” he said. She shrank back, but moving inexorably he sat up, gripped her roughly and burst the chains from his hands, then from his ankles.

Teresa shrieked aloud, cowering back and starting to her feet. She tripped over the fallen lash and fell to the stones and Angelo, rising, strode to her and stood over her.

“I would have saved you,” he said at last. “Think, Teresa, of your evil dreams. Had they not begun before ever I came to Castello Speranza? Long years ago, one of the women of the Fioresi married into the Speranza clan; and I knew that one at least of your kin would be—of the full blood of my folk. Had it been Rico, I would have taken him as esquire in my service, to guard and protect him. I—I would have saved you,” he said almost inaudibly, “guarded you as a thing more precious than my life. I watched over you, kept you safe, guarded you in innocence of what you were, though I came too late to save your father—”

She shrieked in horror as the words filtered through her brain, but he went on remorselessly.

“When Rico met his death, I could bear it no longer, and in desperation, seeking only to guard you, I made it known to Cassilda. I—I did not know she would slay herself with the horror. I thought only that together we might guard you, till I could bring you safely to knowledge of what you were. You could have come to accept it—not as a thing of terror, but simply another kind of life; a different nature living harmlessly by its own laws. No, I did not slay your kin,” he said. “I have lived so for two hundred years. Since the first year when I first learned what I was, no man has—died from my touch; I know how to—take life—and harm them no more than a leech’s blood—letting. I am neither evil nor cruel, madonna, because I live as I must.”

He bent over her. She recoiled, mad with fear, and thrust the crucifix at him.

“No,” he said gently, taking her shoulders hi his hands, “it will not protect you now.” He went on, almost sadly: “I was reared to fear it; it was instilled into my inmost heart and brain, that I might never touch one who called sincerely on God’s mercy. While you were still ignorant of what you were, Teresa, while you were sincerely pious in your faith, I could not pass through the symbol of your sincere belief. And the cross which you carved on my chains, thinking when you did so that you would protect others from my evil was a barrier to me. But now you have grown evil. You have rejected the teachings of your faith. You cannot call now upon your God for protection. The cross is now, to you, only an empty symbol, and it will not hold me.”

He ripped the crucifix from her throat, gazed on it sadly and laid it aside.

“Perhaps I never had a soul,” he said wearily, “but you, Teresa, cast yours away. You are too much monster even to live among my people.”

The last thing the Contessa ever saw was his face, torn with pain, descending into a crimson blur into which she fell like death.

Hours later villagers gathered to watch the Castello di Speranza crash down in flames, and none marked the quiet, scarred man who rode silently into the forest, bowed as if in long agony, crouched in his saddle with grief and pain. He never looked back at the rising flame, but rode with head bowed over the neck of his horse and muttered again and again, “Teresa! Teresa! Teresa!”

Jackie Sees a Star

So YOU WANT to hear about the Edwards child? Oh, no, you don’t get by with that one! You can just put on your hat again, and walk right back down those stairs, Mister, We’ve had too many psychologists and debunkers around here, and we don’t want any more.

Oh—you’re from the University? Excuse me, professor. I’m sorry. But if you knew what we’ve put up with, from reporters, and all kinds of crackpots . . . and it isn’t good for Jackie, either. He’s getting awfully spoiled. If you knew how many paddlings I’ve had to give that kid in just this past week.

His mother? Me? Oh, no! No, I’m just Jackie’s aunt. His mother, my sister Beth, works at the Tax Bureau. Jackie’s father died when he was only a week old. You know . . . he’d been in the Big Bombings in ‘64, and he never really got over it. It was pretty awful.

Anyhow, I look after Jackie while my sister works. He’s a good little kid—spoiled, but what kid isn’t, these days?

It was I who heard it first, as a matter of fact. You see I’m around Jackie a lot more than his mother is.

I was making Jackie’s bed one morning when he came up behind me, and grabbed me round the waist, and asked, real serious, “Aunt Dorothy, are the stars really other suns like this one, and do they have planets too?”

I said, “Why, sure, Jackie. I thought you knew that.”

He gave me a hug. “Thanks, Aunt Dorothy. I thought Mig was kidding me.”

“Who’s Mig?” I asked. I knew most of the kids on the block, you see, but there was a new little girl on the corner. I asked, “Is she the little Jackson girl?”

Jackie said, “Mig isn’t a. girl!” And did he sound disgusted! “Besides,” he said, “Mig doesn’t live ‘round here at all. His name is really Migardolon Domier, but I call him Mig. He doesn’t really talk to me. I mean, just inside my head.”

I said, “Oh.” I laughed a little bit, too, because Jackie isn’t really an imaginative kid. But I guess most kids go through the imaginary-playmate stage. I had one when I was a kid. I called her Bitsy—but anyway, Jackie just ran out to play, and I didn’t think about it again until one day he asked me what a spaceship looked like.

So I took him to see that movie—you know the one Paul Douglas played in about the trip to Mars—but would you believe it, the kid just stuck up his nose.

“I mean a real spaceship!” he said. “Mig showed me a lot better one than that!”

“So I spoke kind of sharp. You know, I didn’t like him to be rude. And he said, “Well, Mig’s father is building a spaceship. It goes all the way across the Gal—the gallazzy, I guess, and goes through—Aunt Dorothy, what’s hyperspace?”

“Oh, ask Mig what it is,” I said, real cross with him. You know how it is when kids act smart.

The next day was Saturday, so Beth was at home with Jackie, and I stayed with Mother. But when I came over Monday morning, she asked me, “Dorrie, where on earth did Jack pick up all this rocketship lingo? And what kind of a phase is this Mig business?”

I told her I’d taken him to see SOCKET MARS, and she was quite provoked. Beth still thinks rockets are kind of comicbook stuff, and she gave me a long talk about trashy movies, and getting him too excited, and overstimulating his imagination, and so forth.

Then she gave me the latest developments on this Mig affair. It seemed that Jackie had given with the details. Mig was a little fellow who lived on a planet halfway across the “gallazzy,” and his father was a rocketship engineer.

Well, you know how kids are about spaceships. Jackie wasn’t quite six, but he’s always been kind of old for his age. That afternoon he started teasing me to take him to the Planetarium. He kept on about it until I finally took him, that evening, after Beth got home.

It was quite late when we left. The stars had all come out, and while we were walking home, I asked him which one of the stars Mig lived on. And, professor, do you know what that child said? He said, “You can’t live on a star, dummy! You’d burn up! He lives on a planet around the star!”

He pointed off toward the north, fidgeted around for a few minutes, and finally said, “Well, the sky kind of looks different where Mig lives. But I think it’s up there somewhere,” and he pointed into the Big Dipper.

I didn’t encourage the Mig business, but, good gosh, it didn’t need encouraging, I guess it was two or three days later when Jackie told me that Mig’s sun was going to blow up, so his father was building a spaceship, and they were coming here to live.

I kept a straight face. But I couldn’t help wondering what would happen when Jackie got his Mig, so to speak, down to earth. Probably it would just ease the fantasy off into a more normal phase, and it would gradually disappear.

One night in August, Beth wanted to go to a movie with some girls from her office, so I stayed with Jackie. I was reading downstairs when I suddenly heard him bawling upstairs—not very loud, but real unhappy and pitiful.

I ran upstairs and took him up, thinking he’d had a bad dream, and held him, just shaking and trembling, until he finally quieted down to a hiccup now and then.

And then he said, in the unhappiest little voice, “Mig has to leave his—his erling on the planet, to get blowed up with the sun! It’s a little bitty thing like a puppy, but his Daddy says there isn’t any room on the spaceship for it! But he got it for his—well, I guess it was kind of like a birthday—and he wanted to show it to me when he got here!”

Well!

I guess the lecture I gave him about imagination had something to do with it, because I didn’t hear any more about Mig for quite some time. He kept Beth posted, though. He even told her when the spaceship was going to take off and when Mig’s sun was going to blow up, or else where we’d see it. I don’t know which. But anyway, he made her mark it down on the Calendar. The fifth of November, it was.

Well, in September I went back to college, and—well, I don’t just talk about—things outside of the family, but my boy friend, Dave, he was almost like one of the family, and this year he’d got a job working with Professor Milliken at the Observatory.

You know Professor Milliken, don’t you? I thought so. I told Dave about this Mig phase of Jackie’s, and one night when Dave was over at Beth’s with me, he got the kid talking about it. He humored the kid a lot. He even took him over to the Observatory and let Jackie look through the big telescope there. And of course Jackie gave Dave all the latest details on Mig.

It seems that this spaceship had already taken off—that was why he hadn’t heard much from Mig lately, because—“Mig’s Daddy sealed him up in a little capsule, so he won’t wake up till they are ‘way out in hyperspace. Because the spaceship will go faster and faster and awful fast, and unless he is sealed up, and asleep, it will hurt him something awful!” And Dave humored Jackie, and talked about acceleration and hyperspace and shortcuts across the Galaxy, and I don’t know what all, and Jackie just sat there and drank it all in as if he understood every word. Dave even wrote down the day when Mig’s sun was supposed to blow up, and promised to keep an eye on it.

Jackie started to kindergarten, of course, about then, and I thought he’d forgotten all about Mig. I didn’t hear anything more for at least six weeks. But one night—I was babysitting for Beth again—the telephone rang, and it was Dave.

“Dorothy! Remember Jackie’s little Galactic citizen whose world was supposed to go up in smoke tonight?”

I glanced at the calendar. It was November fifth. “Now, look here, Dave,” I said firmly. “You are not going to disillusion the kid like that. He’s forgotten all about the silly business. Besides, he’s in bed.”

“Well, get him up!” said Dave. “Dorrie, get a load of this. The biggest supernova I ever saw just exploded in the North. Get Jackie over here! I want to ask him some questions!”

He meant it. I could tell that he meant it. I ran upstairs and bundled Jackie up in a blanket—I didn’t even bother to put his clothes on, just a blanket over his pajamas—and took him down to the Observatory in a taxi.

I wish you could have seen the place. Jackie sitting on atable, in his pajamas, telling Professor Milliken all about Migand the spaceship and the little sealed capsule and the erlingand all the rest of it.

*

I guess you can imagine what a week we went through. Scientists, and reporters, and psychologists and parapsychologists and just plain debunkers. And the crackpots. Oh yes, the crackpots. And then they dug up the records about Jackie’s father.

They couldn’t even let the poor man rest quiet in his grave, and when they found out about the Bombing, they talked about hard radiations and mutations until I darn’ near went crazy, and Beth had to quit her job.

They even talked about telepathy. Just as if Jackie was some kind of a freak. We had to take the poor kid out of kindergarten. He hated that—he was getting so much good out of it. And he enjoyed it so much, having the other children to play with, and painting, and making those cute little baskets, and he’d learned to tell time, and everything.

And then the spaceship landed, and I tell you, we haven’t had a minute’s peace since.

Oh, that’s all right! I was going to call them in for lunch in a few minutes, anyway. “Jackie! Jackie—will you and Mig come in here for a few minutes? A friend of your uncle Dave’s wants to talk to you two boys.”

The Planet Savers

By the time I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows, alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the glass-brick.

Habit and memory fitted names to all these; the bare office, the orange flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man before.

He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the Terran Trade City.

I didn’t stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man. But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here.

“Could I trouble you to tell me your name?”

That was reasonable enough. If I found somebody making himself at home in my office—if I had an office—I’d ask him his name, too. I started to swing my legs to the floor, and had to stop and steady myself with one hand while the room drifted in giddy circles around me.

“I wouldn’t try to sit up just yet,” he remarked, while the floor calmed down again. Then he repeated, politely but insistently, “Your name?”

“Oh, yes. My name.” It was—I fumbled through layers of what felt like gray fuzz, trying to lay my tongue on the most familiar of all sounds, my own name. It was—why, it was—I said, on a high rising note, “This is damn silly,” and swallowed. And swallowed again. Hard.

“Calm down,” the chubby man said soothingly. That was easier said than done. I stared at him in growing panic and demanded, “But, but, have I had amnesia or something?”

“Or something.”

“What’s my name?”

“Now, now, take it easy! I’m sure you’ll remember it soon enough. You can answer other questions, I’m sure. How old are you?”

I answered eagerly and quickly, “Twenty-two.”

*

The chubby man scribbled something on a card. “Interesting. In-ter-est-ing. Do you know where we are?”

I looked around the office. “In the Terran Headquarters. From your uniform, I’d say we were on Floor 8—Medical.”

He nodded and scribbled again, pursing his lips. “Can you—uh—tell me what planet we are on?”

I had to laugh. “Darkover,” I chuckled, “I hope! And if you want the names of the moons, or the date of the founding of the Trade City, or something—”

He gave in, laughing with me. “Remember where you were born?”

“On Samarra. I came here when I was three years old—my father was in Mapping and Exploring—” I stopped short, in shock. “He’s dead!”

“Can you tell me your father’s name?”

“Same as mine. Jay—Jason—” the flash of memory closed down in the middle of a word. It had been a good try, but it hadn’t quite worked. The doctor said soothingly, “We’re doing very well.”

“You haven’t told me anything,” I accused. “Who are you? Why are you asking me all these questions?”

He pointed to a sign on his desk. I scowled and spelled out the letters. “Randall ... Forth ... Director ... Department ...” and Dr. Forth made a note. I said aloud, “It is—Doctor Forth, isn’t it?”

“Don’t you know?”

I looked down at myself, and shook my head. “Maybe I’m Doctor Forth,” I said, noticing for the first time that I was also wearing a white coat with the caduceus emblem of Medical. But it had the wrong feel, as if I were dressed in somebody else’s clothes. Iwas no doctor, was I? I pushed back one sleeve slightly, exposing a long, triangular scar under the cuff. Dr. Forth—by now I was sure he was Dr. Forth—followed the direction of my eyes.

“Where did you get the scar?”

“Knife fight. One of the bands of those-who-may-not-enter-cities caught us on the slopes, and we—” the memory thinned out again, and I said despairingly, “It’s all confused! What’s the matter? Why am I up on Medical? Have I had an accident? Amnesia?”

“Not exactly. I’ll explain.”

I got up and walked to the window, unsteadily because my feet wanted to walk slowly while I felt like bursting through some invisible net and striding there at one bound. Once I got to the window the room stayed put while I gulped down great breaths of warm sweetish air. I said, “I could use a drink.”

“Good idea. Though I don’t usually recommend it.” Forth reached into a drawer for a flat bottle; poured tea-colored liquid into a throwaway cup. After a minute he poured more for himself. “Here. And sit down, man. You make me nervous, hovering like that.”

I didn’t sit down. I strode to the door and flung it open. Forth’s voice was low and unhurried.

“What’s the matter? You can go out, if you want to, but won’t you sit down and talk to me for a minute? Anyway, where do you want to go?”

The question made me uncomfortable. I took a couple of long breaths and came back into the room. Forth said, “Drink this,” and I poured it down. He refilled the cup unasked, and I swallowed that too and felt the hard lump in my middle begin to loosen up and dissolve.

*

Forth said, “Claustrophobia too. Typical,” and scribbled on the card some more. I was getting tired of that performance. I turned on him to tell him so, then suddenly felt amused—or maybe it was the liquor working in me. He seemed such a funny little man, shutting himself up inside an office like this and talking about claustrophobia and watching me as if I were a big bug. I tossed the cup into a disposal.

“Isn’t it about time for a few of those explanations?”

“If you think you can take it. How do you feel now?”

“Fine.” I sat down on the couch again, leaning back and stretching out my long legs comfortably. “What did you put in that drink?”

He chuckled. “Trade secret. Now; the easiest way to explain would be to let you watch a film we made yesterday.”

“To watch—” I stopped. “It’s your time we’re wasting.”

He punched a button on the desk, spoke into a mouthpiece. “Surveillance? Give us a monitor on—” he spoke a string of incomprehensible numbers, while I lounged at ease on the couch. Forth waited for an answer, then touched another button and steel louvers closed noiselessly over the windows, blacking them out. I rose in sudden panic, then relaxed as the room went dark. The darkness felt oddly more normal than the light, and I leaned back and watched the flickers clear as one wall of the office became a large visionscreen. Forth came and sat beside me on the leather couch, but in the picture Forth was there, sitting at his desk, watching another man, a stranger, walk into the office.

Like Forth, the newcomer wore a white coat with the caduceus emblems. I disliked the man on sight. He was tall and lean and composed, with a dour face set in thin lines. I guessed that he was somewhere in his thirties. Dr.-Forth-in-the-film said, “Sit down, Doctor,” and I drew a long breath, overwhelmed by a curious, certain sensation.

I have been here before. I have seen this happen before.

(And curiously formless I felt. I sat and watched, and I knew I was watching, and sitting. But it was in that dreamlike fashion, where the dreamer at once watches his visions and participates in them....)

*

“Sit down, Doctor,” Forth said, “did you bring in the reports?”

Jay Allison carefully took the indicated seat, poised nervously on the edge of the chair. He sat very straight, leaning forward only a little to hand a thick folder of papers across the desk. Forth took it, but didn’t open it. “What do you think, Dr. Allison?”

“There is no possible room for doubt.” Jay Allison spoke precisely, in a rather high-pitched and emphatic tone. “It follows the statistical pattern for all recorded attacks of 48-year fever ... by the way, sir, haven’t we any better name than that for this particular disease? The term ‘48-year fever’ connotes a fever of 48 years duration, rather than a pandemic recurring every 48 years.”

“A fever that lasted 48 years would be quite a fever,” Dr. Forth said with the shadow of a grim smile. “Nevertheless that’s the only name we have so far. Name it and you can have it. Allison’s disease?”

Jay Allison greeted this pleasantry with a repressive frown. “As I understand it, the disease cycle seems to be connected somehow with the once-every-48-years conjunction of the four moons, which explains why the Darkovans are so superstitious about it. The moons have remarkably eccentric orbits—I don’t know anything about that part, I’m quoting Dr. Moore. If there’s an animal vector to the disease, we’ve never discovered it. The pattern runs like this; a few cases in the mountain districts, the next month a hundred-odd cases all over this part of the planet. Then it skips exactly three months without increase. The next upswing puts the number of reported cases in the thousands, and three months after that, it reaches real pandemic proportions and decimates the entire human population of Darkover.”

“That’s about it,” Forth admitted. They bent together over the folder, Jay Allison drawing back slightly to avoid touching the other man.

Forth said, “We Terrans have had a Trade compact on Darkover for a hundred and fifty-two years. The first outbreak of this 48-year fever killed all but a dozen men out of three hundred. The Darkovans were worse off than we were. The last outbreak wasn’t quite so bad, but it was bad enough, I’ve heard. It has an 87 per cent mortality—for humans, that is. I understand the trailmen don’t die of it.”

“The Darkovans call it the trailmen’s fever, Dr. Forth, because the trailmen are virtually immune to it. It remains in their midst as a mild ailment taken by children. When it breaks out into the virulent form every 48 years, most of the trailmen are already immune. I took the disease myself as a child—maybe you heard?”

Forth nodded. “You may be the only Terran ever to contract the disease and survive.”

“The trailmen incubate the disease,” Jay Allison said. “I should think the logical thing would be to drop a couple of hydrogen bombs on the trail cities—and wipe it out for good and all.”

(Sitting on the Sofa in Forth’s dark office, I stiffened with such fury that he shook my shoulder and muttered, “Easy, there, man!”)

*

Dr. Forth, on the screen, looked annoyed, and Jay Allison said, with a grimace of distaste, “I didn’t mean that literally. But the trailmen are not human. It wouldn’t be genocide, just an exterminator’s job. A public health measure.”

Forth looked shocked as he realized that the younger man meant what he was saying. He said, “Galactic center would have to rule on whether they’re dumb animals or intelligent non-humans, and whether they’re entitled to the status of a civilization. All precedent on Darkover is toward recognizing them as men—and good God, Jay, you’d probably be called as a witness for the defense! How can you say they’re not human after your experience with them? Anyway, by the time their status was finally decided, half of the recognizable humans on Darkover would be dead. We need a better solution than that.”

He pushed his chair back and looked out the window.

“I won’t go into the political situation,” he said, “you aren’t interested in Terran Empire politics, and I’m no expert either. But you’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that Darkover’s been playing the immovable object to the irresistible force. The Darkovans are more advanced in some of the non-causative sciences than we are, and until now, they wouldn’t admit that Terra had a thing to contribute. However—and this is the big however—they do know, and they’re willing to admit, that our medical sciences are better than theirs.”

“Theirs being practically non-existent.”

“Exactly—and this could be the first crack in the barrier. You may not realize the significance of this, but the Legate received an offer from the Hasturs themselves.”

Jay Allison murmured, “I’m to be impressed?”

“On Darkover you’d damn well better be impressed when the Hasturs sit up and take notice.”

“I understand they’re telepaths or something—”

“Telepaths, psychokinetics, parapsychs, just about anything else. For all practical purposes they’re the Gods of Darkover. And one of the Hasturs—a rather young and unimportant one, I’ll admit, the old man’s grandson—came to the Legate’s office, in person, mind you. He offered, if the Terran Medical would help Darkover lick the trailmen’s fever, to coach selected Terran men in matrix mechanics.”

“Good Lord,” Jay said. It was a concession beyond Terra’s wildest dreams; for a hundred years they had tried to beg, buy or steal some knowledge of the mysterious science of matrix mechanics—that curious discipline which could turn matter into raw energy, and vice versa, without any intermediate stages and without fission by-products. Matrix mechanics had made the Darkovans virtually immune to the lure of Terra’s advanced technologies.

Jay said, “Personally I think Darkovan science is over-rated. But I can see the propaganda angle—”

“Not to mention the humanitarian angle of healing—”

*

Jay Allison gave one of his cold shrugs. “The real angle seems to be this; can we cure the 48-year fever?”

“Not yet. But we have a lead. During the last epidemic, a Terran scientist discovered a blood fraction containing antibodies against the fever—in the trailmen. Isolated to a serum, it might reduce the virulent 48-year epidemic form to the mild form again. Unfortunately, he died himself in the epidemic, without finishing his work, and his notebooks were overlooked until this year. We have 18,000 men, and their families, on Darkover now, Jay. Frankly, if we lose too many of them, we’re going to have to pull out of Darkover—the big brass on Terra will write off the loss of a garrison of professional traders, but not of a whole Trade City colony. That’s not even mentioning the prestige we’ll lose if our much-vaunted Terran medical sciences can’t save Darkover from an epidemic. We’ve got exactly five months. We can’t synthesize a serum in that time. We’ve got to appeal to the trailmen. And that’s why I called you up here. You know more about the trailmen than any living Terran. You ought to. You spent eight years in a Nest.”

*

(In Forth’s darkened office I sat up straighter, with a flash of returning memory. Jay Allison, I judged, was several years older than I, but we had one thing in common; this cold fish of a man shared with myself that experience of marvelous years spent in an alien world!)

Jay Allison scowled, displeased. “That was years ago. I was hardly more than a baby. My father crashed on a Mapping expedition over the Hellers—God only knows what possessed him to try and take a light plane over those crosswinds. I survived the crash by the merest chance, and lived with the trailmen—so I’m told—until I was thirteen or fourteen. I don’t remember much about it. Children aren’t particularly observant.”

Forth leaned over the desk, staring. “You speak their language, don’t you?”

“I used to. I might remember it under hypnosis, I suppose. Why? Do you want me to translate something?”

“Not exactly. We were thinking of sending you on an expedition to the trailmen themselves.”

(In the darkened office, watching Jay’s startled face, I thought; God, what an adventure! I wonder—I wonder if they want me to go with him?)

Forth was explaining: “It would be a difficult trek. You know what the Hellers are like. Still, you used to climb mountains, as a hobby, before you went into Medical—”

“I outgrew the childishness of hobbies many years ago, sir,” Jay said stiffly.

“We’d get you the best guides we could, Terran and Darkovan. But they couldn’t do the one thing you can do. You know the trailmen, Jay. You might be able to persuade them to do the one thing they’ve never done before.”

“What’s that?” Jay Allison sounded suspicious.

“Come out of the mountains. Send us volunteers—blood donors—we might, if we had enough blood to work on, be able to isolate the right fraction, and synthesize it, in time to prevent the epidemic from really taking hold. Jay, it’s a tough mission and it’s dangerous as all hell, but somebody’s got to do it, and I’m afraid you’re the only qualified man.”

“I like my first suggestion better. Bomb the trailmen—and the Hellers—right off the planet.” Jay’s face was set in lines of loathing, which he controlled after a minute, and said, “I—I didn’t mean that. Theoretically I can see the necessity, only—” he stopped and swallowed.

“Please say what you were going to say.”

“I wonder if I am as well qualified as you think? No—don’t interrupt—I find the natives of Darkover distasteful, even the humans. As for the trailmen—”

(I was getting mad and impatient. I whispered to Forth in the darkness, “Shut the damn film off! You couldn’t send that guy on an errand like that! I’d rather—”

(Forth snapped, “Shut up and listen!”

(I shut up and the film continued to repeat.)

*

Jay Allison was not acting. He was pained and disgusted. Forth wouldn’t let him finish his explanation of why he had refused even to teach in the Medical college established for Darkovans by the Terran empire. He interrupted, and he sounded irritated.

“We know all that. It evidently never occurred to you, Jay, that it’s an inconvenience to us—that all this vital knowledge should lie, purely by accident, in the hands of the one man who’s too damned stubborn to use it?”

Jay didn’t move an eyelash, where I would have squirmed, “I have always been aware of that, Doctor.”

Forth drew a long breath. “I’ll concede you’re not suitable at the moment, Jay. But what do you know of applied psychodynamics?”

“Very little, I’m sorry to say.” Allison didn’t sound sorry, though. He sounded bored to death with the whole conversation.

“May I be blunt—and personal?”

“Please do. I’m not at all sensitive.”

“Basically, then, Doctor Allison, a person as contained and repressed as yourself usually has a clearly defined subsidiary personality. In neurotic individuals this complex of personality traits sometimes splits off, and we get a syndrome known as multiple, or alternate personality.”

“I’ve scanned a few of the classic cases. Wasn’t there a woman with four separate personalities?”

“Exactly. However, you aren’t neurotic, and ordinarily there would not be the slightest chance of your repressed alternate taking over your personality.”

“Thank you,” Jay murmured ironically, “I’d be losing sleep over that.”

“Nevertheless I presume you do have such a subsidiary personality, although he would normally never manifest. This subsidiary—let’s call him Jay_{2}—would embody all the characteristics which you repress. He would be gregarious, where you are retiring and studious; adventurous where you are cautious; talkative while you are taciturn; he would perhaps enjoy action for its own sake, while you exercise faithfully in the gymnasium only for your health’s sake; and he might even remember the trailmen with pleasure rather than dislike.”

“In short—a blend of all the undesirable characteristics?”

“One could put it that way. Certainly he would be a blend of all the characteristics which you, Jay_{1}, consider undesirable. But—if released by hypnotism and suggestion, he might be suitable for the job in hand.”

“But how do you know I actually have such an—alternate?”

“I don’t. But it’s a good guess. Most repressed—” Forth coughed and amended, “most disciplined personalities possess such a suppressed secondary personality. Don’t you occasionally—rather rarely—find yourself doing things which are entirely out of character for you?”

I could almost feel Allison taking it in, as he confessed, “Well—yes. For instance—the other day—although I dress conservatively at all times—” he glanced at his uniform coat, “I found myself buying—” he stopped again and his face went an unlovely terra-cotta color as he finally mumbled, “a flowered red sports shirt.”

Sitting in the dark I felt vaguely sorry for the poor gawk, disturbed by, ashamed of the only human impulses he ever had. On the screen Allison frowned fiercely, “A crazy impulse.”

“You could say that, or say it was an action of the suppressed Jay_{2}. How about it, Allison? You may be the only Terran on Darkover, maybe the only human, who could get into a trailman’s Nest without being murdered.”

“Sir—as a citizen of the Empire, I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“Jay, look,” Forth said, and I felt him trying to reach through the barricade and touch, really touch that cold contained young man, “we couldn’t order any man to do anything like this. Aside from the ordinary dangers, it could destroy your personal balance, maybe permanently. I’m asking you to volunteer something above and beyond the call of duty. Man to man—what do you say?”

I would have been moved by his words. Even at secondhand I was moved by them. Jay Allison looked at the floor, and I saw him twist his long well-kept surgeon’s hands and crack the knuckles with an odd gesture. Finally he said, “I haven’t any choice either way, Doctor. I’ll take the chance. I’ll go to the trailmen.”

*

The screen went dark again and Forth flicked the light on. He said, “Well?”

I gave it back, in his own intonation, “Well?” and was exasperated to find that I was twisting my own knuckles in the nervous gesture of Allison’s painful decision. I jerked them apart and got up.

“I suppose it didn’t work, with that cold fish, and you decided to come to me instead? Sure, I’ll go to the trailmen for you. Not with that Allison—I wouldn’t go anywhere with that guy—but I speak the trailmen’s language, and without hypnosis either.”

Forth was staring at me. “So you’ve remembered that?”

“Hell, yes,” I said, “my dad crashed in the Hellers, and a band of trailmen found me, half dead. I lived there until I was about fifteen, then their Old-One decided I was too human for them, and they took me out through Dammerung Pass and arranged to have me brought here. Sure, it’s all coming back now. I spent five years in the Spacemen’s Orphanage, then I went to work taking Terran tourists on hunting parties and so on, because I liked being around the mountains. I—” I stopped. Forth was staring at me.

“You think you’d like this job?”

“It would be tough,” I said, considering. “The People of the Sky—” (using the trailmen’s name for themselves) “—don’t like outsiders, but they might be persuaded. The worst part would be getting there. The plane, or the ‘copter, isn’t built that can get through the crosswinds around the Hellers and land inside them. We’d have to go on foot, all the way from Carthon. I’d need professional climbers—mountaineers.”

“Then you don’t share Allison’s attitude?”

“Dammit, don’t insult me!” I discovered that I was on my feet again, pacing the office restlessly. Forth stared and mused aloud, “What’s personality anyway? A mask of emotions, superimposed on the body and the intellect. Change the point of view, change the emotions and desires, and even with the same body and the same past experiences, you have a new man.”

I swung round in mid-step. A new and terrible suspicion, too monstrous to name, was creeping up on me. Forth touched a button and the face of Jay Allison, immobile, appeared on the visionscreen. Forth put a mirror in my hand. He said, “Jason Allison, look at yourself.”

I looked.

“No,” I said. And again, “No. No. No.”

*

Forth didn’t argue. He pointed, with a stubby finger. “Look—” he moved the finger as he spoke, “height of forehead. Set of cheekbones. Your eyebrows look different, and your mouth, because the expression is different. But bony structure—the nose, the chin—”

I heard myself make a queer sound; dashed the mirror to the floor. He grabbed my forearm. “Steady, man!”

I found a scrap of my voice. It didn’t sound like Allison’s. “Then I’m—Jay_{2}? Jay Allison with amnesia?”

“Not exactly.” Forth mopped his forehead with an immaculate sleeve and it came away damp with sweat, “No—not Jay Allison as I know him!” He drew a long breath. “And sit down. Whoever you are, sit down!”

I sat. Gingerly. Not sure.

“But the man Jay might have been, given a different temperamental bias. I’d say—the man Jay Allison started out to be. The man he refused to be. Within his subconscious, he built up barriers against a whole series of memories, and the subliminal threshold—”

“Doc, I don’t understand the psycho talk.”

Forth stared. “And you do remember the trailmen’s language. I thought so. Allison’s personality is suppressed in you, as yours was in him.”

“One thing, Doc. I don’t know a thing about blood fractions or epidemics. My half of the personality didn’t study medicine.” I took up the mirror again and broodingly studied the face there. The high thin cheeks, high forehead shaded by coarse dark hair which Jay Allison had slicked down now heavily rumpled. I still didn’t think I looked anything like the doctor. Our voices were nothing alike either; his had been pitched rather high, falsetto. My own, as nearly as I could judge, was a full octave deeper, and more resonant. Yet they issued from the same vocal chords, unless Forth was having a reasonless, macabre joke.

“Did I honest-to-God study medicine? It’s the last thing I’d think about. It’s an honest trade, I guess, but I’ve never been that intellectual.”

“You—or rather, Jay Allison is a specialist in Darkovan parasitology, as well as a very competent surgeon.” Forth was sitting with his chin in his hands, watching me intently. He scowled and said, “If anything, the physical change is more startling than the other. I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

“That tallies with me. I don’t recognize myself.” I added, “—and the queer thing is, I didn’t even like Jay Allison, to put it mildly. If he—I can’t say he, can I?”

“I don’t know why not. You’re no more Jay Allison than I am. For one thing, you’re younger. Ten years younger. I doubt if any of his friends—if he had any—would recognize you. You—it’s ridiculous to go on calling you Jay_{2}. What should I call you?”

“Why should I care? Call me Jason.”

“Suits you,” Forth said enigmatically. “Look, then, Jason. I’d like to give you a few days to readjust to your new personality, but we are really pressed for time. Can you fly to Carthon tonight? I’ve hand-picked a good crew for you, and sent them on ahead. You’ll meet them there. You’ll find them competent.”

*

I stared at him. Suddenly the room oppressed me and I found it hard to breathe. I said in wonder, “You were pretty sure of yourself, weren’t you?”

Forth just looked at me, for what seemed a long time. Then he said, in a very quiet voice, “No. I wasn’t sure at all. But if you didn’t turn up, and I couldn’t talk Jay into it, I’d have had to try it myself.”

*

Jason Allison, Junior, was listed on the directory of the Terran HQ as “Suite 1214, Medical Residence Corridor.” I found the rooms without any trouble, though an elderly doctor stared at me rather curiously as I barged along the quiet hallway. The suite—bedroom, minuscule sitting-room, compact bath—depressed me; clean, closed-in and neutral as the man who owned them, I rummaged them restlessly, trying to find some scrap of familiarity to indicate that I had lived here for the past eleven years.

Jay Allison was thirty-four years old. I had given my age, without hesitation, as 22. There were no obvious blanks in my memory; from the moment Jay Allison had spoken of the trailmen, my past had rushed back and stood, complete to yesterday’s supper (only had I eaten that supper twelve years ago)? I remembered my father, a lined silent man who had liked to fly solitary, taking photograph after photograph from his plane for the meticulous work of Mapping and Exploration. He’d liked to have me fly with him and I’d flown over virtually every inch of the planet. No one else had ever dared fly over the Hellers, except the big commercial spacecraft that kept to a safe altitude. I vaguely remembered the crash and the strange hands pulling me out of the wreckage and the weeks I’d spent, broken-bodied and delirious, gently tended by one of the red-eyed, twittering women of the trailmen. In all I had spent eight years in the Nest, which was not a nest at all but a vast sprawling city built in the branches of enormous trees. With the small and delicate humanoids who had been my playfellows, I had gathered the nuts and buds and trapped the small arboreal animals they used for food, taken my share at weaving clothing from the fibres of parasite plants cultivated on the stems, and in all those eight years I had set foot on the ground less than a dozen times, even though I had travelled for miles through the tree-roads high above the forest floor.

Then the Old-One’s painful decision that I was too alien for them, and the difficult and dangerous journey my trailmen foster-parents and foster-brothers had undertaken, to help me out of the Hellers and arrange for me to be taken to the Trade City. After two years of physically painful and mentally rebellious readjustment to daytime living, the owl-eyed trailmen saw best, and lived largely, by moonlight, I had found a niche for myself, and settled down. But all of the later years (after Jay Allison had taken over, I supposed, from a basic pattern of memory common to both of us) had vanished into the limbo of the subconscious.

A bookrack was crammed with large microcards; I slipped one into the viewer, with a queer sense of spying, and found myself listening apprehensively to hear that measured step and Jay Allison’s falsetto voice demanding what the hell I was doing, meddling with his possessions. Eye to the viewer, I read briefly at random, something about the management of compound fracture, then realized I had understood exactly three words in a paragraph. I put my fist against my forehead and heard the words echoing there emptily; “laceration ... primary efflusion ... serum and lymph ... granulation tissue....” I presumed that the words meant something and that I once had known what. But if I had a medical education, I didn’t recall a syllable of it. I didn’t know a fracture from a fraction.

In a sudden frenzy of impatience I stripped off the white coat and put on the first shirt I came to, a crimson thing that hung in the line of white coats like an exotic bird in snow country. I went back to rummaging the drawers and bureaus. Carelessly shoved in a pigeonhole I found another microcard that looked familiar; and when I slipped it mechanically into the viewer it turned out to be a book on mountaineering which, oddly enough, I remembered buying as a youngster. It dispelled my last, lingering doubts. Evidently I had bought it before the personalities had forked so sharply apart and separated, Jason from Jay. I was beginning to believe. Not to accept. Just to believe it had happened. The book looked well-thumbed, and had been handled so much I had to baby it into the slot of the viewer.

Under a folded pile of clean underwear I found a flat half-empty bottle of whiskey. I remembered Forth’s words that he’d never seen Jay Allison drink, and suddenly I thought, “The fool!” I fixed myself a drink and sat down, idly scanning over the mountaineering book.

*

Not till I’d entered medical school, I suspected, did the two halves of me fork so strongly apart ... so strongly that there had been days and weeks and, I suspected, years where Jay Allison had kept me prisoner. I tried to juggle dates in my mind, looked at a calendar, and got such a mental jolt that I put it face-down to think about when I was a little drunker.

I wondered if my detailed memories of my teens and early twenties were the same memories Jay Allison looked back on. I didn’t think so. People forget and remember selectively. Week by week, then, and year by year, the dominant personality of Jay had crowded me out; so that the young rowdy, more than half Darkovan, loving the mountains, half-homesick for a non-human world, had been drowned in the chilly, austere young medical student who lost himself in his work. But I, Jason—I had always been the watcher behind, the person Jay Allison dared not be? Why was he past thirty—and I just 22?

A ringing shattered the silence; I had to hunt for the intercom on the bedroom wall. I said, “Who is it?” and an unfamiliar voice demanded, “Dr. Allison?”

I said automatically, “Nobody here by that name,” and started to put back the mouthpiece. Then I stopped and gulped and asked, “Is that you, Dr. Forth?”

It was, and I breathed again. I didn’t even want to think about what I’d say if somebody else had demanded to know why in the devil I was answering Dr. Allison’s private telephone. When Forth had finished, I went to the mirror, and stared, trying to see behind my face the sharp features of that stranger, Doctor Jason Allison. I delayed, even while I was wondering what few things I should pack for a trip into the mountains and the habit of hunting parties was making mental lists about heat-socks and windbreakers. The face that looked at me was a young face, unlined and faintly freckled, the same face as always except that I’d lost my suntan; Jay Allison had kept me indoors too long. Suddenly I struck the mirror lightly with my fist.

“The hell with you, Dr. Allison,” I said, and went to see if he had kept any clothes fit to pack.

*

Dr. Forth was waiting for me in the small skyport on the roof, and so was a small ‘copter, one of the fairly old ones assigned to Medical Service when they were too beat-up for services with higher priority. Forth took one startled stare at my crimson shirt, but all he said was, “Hello, Jason. Here’s something we’ve got to decide right away; do we tell the crew who you really are?”

I shook my head emphatically. “I’m not Jay Allison; I don’t want his name or his reputation. Unless there are men on the crew who know Allison by sight—”

“Some of them do, but I don’t think they’d recognize you.”

“Tell them I’m his twin brother,” I said humorlessly.

“That wouldn’t be necessary. There’s not enough resemblance.” Forth raised his head and beckoned to a man who was doing something near the ‘copter. He said under his breath, “You’ll see what I mean,” as the man approached.

He wore the uniform of Spaceforce—black leather with a little rainbow of stars on his sleeve meaning he’d seen service on a dozen different planets, a different colored star for each one. He wasn’t a young man, but on the wrong side of fifty, seamed and burly and huge, with a split lip and weathered face. I liked his looks. We shook hands and Forth said, “This is our man, Kendricks. He’s called Jason, and he’s an expert on the trailmen. Jason, this is Buck Kendricks.”

“Glad to know you, Jason.” I thought Kendricks looked at me half a second more than necessary. “The ‘copter’s ready. Climb in, Doc—you’re going as far as Carthon, aren’t you?”

We put on zippered windbreaks and the ‘copter soared noiselessly into the pale crimson sky. I sat beside Forth, looking down through pale lilac clouds at the pattern of Darkover spread below me.

“Kendricks was giving me a funny eye, Doc. What’s biting him?”

“He has known Jay Allison for eight years,” Forth said quietly, “and he hasn’t recognized you yet.”

But we let it ride at that, to my great relief, and didn’t talk any more about me at all. As we flew under silent whirring blades, turning our backs on the settled country which lay near the Trade City, we talked about Darkover itself. Forth told me about the trailmen’s fever and managed to give me some idea about what the blood fraction was, and why it was necessary to persuade fifty or sixty of the humanoids to return with me, to donate blood from which the antibody could be, first isolated, then synthesised.

It would be a totally unheard-of thing, if I could accomplish it. Most of the trailmen never touched ground in their entire lives, except when crossing the passes above the snow line. Not a dozen of them, including my foster-parents who had so painfully brought me out across Dammerung, had ever crossed the ring of encircling mountains that walled them away from the rest of the planet. Humans sometimes penetrated the lower forests in search of the trailmen. It was one-way traffic. The trailmen never came in search of them.

*

We talked, too, about some of those humans who had crossed the mountains into trailmen country—those mountains profanely dubbed the Hellers by the first Terrans who had tried to fly over them in anything lower or slower than a spaceship. (The Darkovan name for the Hellers was even more explicit, and even in translation, unrepeatable.)

“What about this crew you picked? They’re not Terrans?”

Forth shook his head. “It would be murder to send anyone recognizably Terran into the Hellers. You know how the trailmen feel about outsiders getting into their country.” I knew. Forth continued, “Just the same, there will be two Terrans with you.”

“They don’t know Jay Allison?” I didn’t want to be burdened with anyone—not anyone—who would know me, or expect me to behave like my forgotten other self.

“Kendricks knows you,” Forth said, “but I’m going to be perfectly truthful. I never knew Jay Allison well, except in line of work. I know a lot of things—from the past couple of days—which came out during the hypnotic sessions, which he’d never have dreamed of telling me, or anyone else, consciously. And that comes under the heading of a professional confidence—even from you. And for that reason, I’m sending Kendricks along—and you’re going to have to take the chance he’ll recognize you. Isn’t that Carthon down there?”

*

Carthon lay nestled under the outlying foothills of the Hellers, ancient and sprawling and squatty, and burned brown with the dust of five thousand years. Children ran out to stare at the ‘copter as we landed near the city; few planes ever flew low enough to be seen, this near the Hellers.

Forth had sent his crew ahead and parked them in an abandoned huge place at the edge of the city which might once have been a warehouse or a ruined palace. Inside there were a couple of trucks, stripped down to framework and flatbed like all machinery shipped through space from Terra. There were pack animals, dark shapes in the gloom. Crates were stacked up in an orderly untidiness, and at the far end a fire was burning and five or six men in Darkovan clothing—loose sleeved shirts, tight wrapped breeches, low boots—were squatting around it, talking. They got up as Forth and Kendricks and I walked toward them, and Forth greeted them clumsily, in bad accented Darkovan, then switched to Terran Standard, letting one of the men translate for him.

Forth introduced me simply as “Jason,” after the Darkovan custom, and I looked the men over, one by one. Back when I’d climbed for fun, I’d liked to pick my own men; but whoever had picked this crew must have known his business.

Three were mountain Darkovans, lean swart men enough alike to be brothers; I learned after a while that they actually were brothers, Hjalmar, Garin and Vardo. All three were well over six feet, and Hjalmar stood head and shoulders over his brothers, whom I never learned to tell apart. The fourth man, a redhead, was dressed rather better than the others and introduced as Lerrys Ridenow—the double name indicating high Darkovan aristocracy. He looked muscular and agile enough, but his hands were suspiciously well-kept for a mountain man, and I wondered how much experience he’d had.

The fifth man shook hands with me, speaking to Kendricks and Forth as if they were old friends. “Don’t I know you from someplace, Jason?”

He looked Darkovan, and wore Darkovan clothes, but Forth had forewarned me, and attack seemed the best defense. “Aren’t you Terran?”

“My father was,” he said, and I understood; a situation not exactly uncommon, but ticklish on a planet like Darkover. I said carelessly, “I may have seen you around the HQ. I can’t place you, though.”

“My name’s Rafe Scott. I thought I knew most of the professional guides on Darkover, but I admit I don’t get into the Hellers much,” he confessed. “Which route are we going to take?”

I found myself drawn into the middle of the group of men, accepting one of the small sweetish Darkovan cigarettes, looking over the plan somebody had scribbled down on the top of a packing case. I borrowed a pencil from Rafe and bent over the case, sketching out a rough map of the terrain I remembered so well from boyhood. I might be bewildered about blood fractions, but when it came to climbing I knew what I was doing. Rafe and Lerrys and the Darkovan brothers crowded behind me to look over the sketch, and Lerrys put a long fingernail on the route I’d indicated.

“Your elevation’s pretty bad here,” he said diffidently, “and on the ‘Narr campaign the trailmen attacked us here, and it was bad fighting along those ledges.”

I looked at him with new respect; dainty hands or not, he evidently knew the country. Kendricks patted the blaster on his hip and said grimly, “But this isn’t the ‘Narr campaign. I’d like to see any trailmen attack us while I have this.”

“But you’re not going to have it,” said a voice behind us, a crisp authoritative voice. “Take off that gun, man!”

Kendricks and I whirled together, to see the speaker; a tall young Darkovan, still standing in the shadows. The newcomer spoke to me directly:

“I’m told you are Terran, but that you understand the trailmen. Surely you don’t intend to carry fission or fusion weapons against them?”

And I suddenly realized that we were in Darkovan territory now, and that we must reckon with the Darkovan horror of guns or of any weapon which reaches beyond the arm’s-length of the man who wields it. A simple heat-gun, to the Darkovan ethical code, is as reprehensible as a super-cobalt planetbuster.

Kendricks protested, “We can’t travel unarmed through trailmen country! We’re apt to meet hostile bands of the creatures—and they’re nasty with those long knives they carry!”

The stranger said calmly, “I’ve no objection to you, or anyone else, carrying a knife for self-defense.”

“A knife?” Kendricks drew breath to roar. “Listen, you bug-eyed son-of-a—who do you think you are, anyway?”

The Darkovans muttered. The man in the shadows said, “Regis Hastur.”

*

Kendricks stared pop-eyed. My own eyes could have popped, but I decided it was time for me to take charge, if I were ever going to. I rapped, “All right, this is my show. Buck, give me the gun.”

He looked wrathfully at me for a space of seconds, while I wondered what I’d do if he didn’t. Then, slowly, he unbuckled the straps and handed it to me, butt first.

I’d never realized quite how undressed a Spaceforce man looked without his blaster. I balanced it on my palm for a minute while Regis Hastur came out of the shadows. He was tall, and had the reddish hair and fair skin of Darkovan aristocracy, and on his face was some indefinable stamp—arrogance, perhaps, or the consciousness that the Hasturs had ruled this world for centuries long before the Terrans brought ships and trade and the universe to their doors. He was looking at me as if he approved of me, and that was one step worse than the former situation.

So, using the respectful Darkovan idiom of speaking to a superior (which he was) but keeping my voice hard, I said, “There’s just one leader on any trek, Lord Hastur. On this one, I’m it. If you want to discuss whether or not we carry guns, I suggest you discuss it with me in private—and let me give the orders.”

One of the Darkovans gasped. I knew I could have been mobbed. But with a mixed bag of men, I had to grab leadership quick or be relegated to nowhere. I didn’t give Regis Hastur a chance to answer that, either; I said, “Come back here. I want to talk to you anyway.”

He came, and I remembered to breathe. I led the way to a fairly deserted corner of the immense place, faced him and demanded, “As for you—what are you doing here? You’re not intending to cross the mountains with us?”

He met my scowl levelly. “I certainly am.”

I groaned. “Why? You’re the Regent’s grandson. Important people don’t take on this kind of dangerous work. If anything happens to you, it will be my responsibility!” I was going to have enough trouble, I was thinking, without shepherding along one of the most revered Personages on the whole damned planet! I didn’t want anyone around who had to be fawned on, or deferred to, or even listened to.

*

He frowned slightly, and I had the unpleasant impression that he knew what I was thinking. “In the first place—it will mean something to the trailmen, won’t it—to have a Hastur with you, suing for this favor?”

It certainly would. The trailmen paid little enough heed to the ordinary humans, except for considering them fair game for plundering when they came uninvited into trailman country. But they, with all Darkover, revered the Hasturs, and it was a fine point of diplomacy—if the Darkovans sent their most important leader, they might listen to him.

“In the second place,” Regis Hastur continued, “the Darkovans are my people, and it’s my business to negotiate for them. In the third place, I know the trailmen’s dialect—not well, but I can speak it a little. And in the fourth, I’ve climbed mountains all my life. Purely as an amateur, but I can assure you I won’t be in the way.”

There was little enough I could say to that. He seemed to have covered every point—or every point but one, and he added, shrewdly, after a minute, “Don’t worry; I’m perfectly willing to have you take charge. I won’t claim—privilege.”

I had to be satisfied with that.

*

Darkover is a civilized planet with a fairly high standard of living, but it is not a mechanized or a technological culture. The people don’t do much mining, or build factories, and the few which were founded by Terran enterprise never were very successful; outside the Terran Trade City, machinery or modern transportation is almost unknown.

While the other men checked and loaded supplies and Rafe Scott went out to contact some friends of his and arrange for last-minute details, I sat down with Forth to memorize the medical details I must put so clearly to the trailmen.

“If we could only have kept your medical knowledge!”

“Trouble is, being a doctor doesn’t suit my personality,” I said. I felt absurdly light-hearted. Where I sat, I could raise my head and study the panorama of blackish-green foothills which lay beyond Carthon, and search out the stone roadways, like a tiny white ribbon, which we could follow for the first stage of the trip. Forth evidently did not share my enthusiasm.

“You know, Jason, there is one real danger—”

“Do you think I care about danger? Or are you afraid I’ll turn—foolhardy?”

“Not exactly. It’s not a physical danger, Jason. It’s an emotional—or rather an intellectual danger.”

“Hell, don’t you know any language but that psycho double-talk?”

“Let me finish, Jason. Jay Allison may have been repressed, overcontrolled, but you are seriously impulsive. You lack a balance-wheel, if I could put it that way. And if you run too many risks, your buried alter-ego may come to the surface and take over in sheer self-preservation.”

“In other words,” I said, laughing loudly, “if I scare that Allison stuffed-shirt he may start stirring in his grave?”

Forth coughed and smothered a laugh and said that was one way of putting it. I clapped him reassuringly on the shoulder and said, “Forget it, sir. I promise to be godly, sober and industrious—but is there any law against enjoying what I’m doing?”

Somebody burst out of the warehouse-palace place, and shouted at me. “Jason? The guide is here,” and I stood up, giving Forth a final grin. “Don’t you worry. Jay Allison’s good riddance,” I said, and went back to meet the other guide they had chosen.

And I almost backed out when I saw the guide. For the guide was a woman.

She was small for a Darkovan girl, and narrowly built, the sort of body that could have been called boyish or coltish but certainly not, at first glance, feminine. Close-cut curls, blue-black and wispy, cast the faintest of shadows over a squarish sunburnt face, and her eyes were so thickly rimmed with heavy dark lashes that I could not guess their color. Her nose was snubbed and might have looked whimsical and was instead oddly arrogant. Her mouth was wide, and her chin round, and altogether I dismissed her as not at all a pretty woman.

She held up her palm and said rather sullenly, “Kyla-Raineach, free Amazon, licensed guide.”

I acknowledged the gesture with a nod, scowling. The guild of free Amazons entered virtually every masculine field, but that of mountain guide seemed somewhat bizarre even for an Amazon. She seemed wiry and agile enough, her body, under the heavy blanket-like clothing, almost as lean of hip and flat of breast as my own; only the slender long legs were unequivocally feminine.

The other men were checking and loading supplies; I noted from the corner of my eye that Regis Hastur was taking his turn heaving bundles with the rest. I sat down on some still-undisturbed sacks, and motioned her to sit.

“You’ve had trail experience? We’re going into the Hellers through Dammerung, and that’s rough going even for professionals.”

*

She said in a flat expressionless voice, “I was with the Terran Mapping expedition to the South Polar ridge last year.”

“Ever been in the Hellers? If anything happened to me, could you lead the expedition safely back to Carthon?”

She looked down at her stubby fingers. “I’m sure I could,” she said finally, and started to rise. “Is that all?”

“One thing more—” I gestured to her to stay put. “Kyla, you’ll be one woman among eight men—”

The snubbed nose wrinkled up; “I don’t expect you to crawl into my blankets, if that’s what you mean. It’s not in my contract—I hope!”

I felt my face burning. Damn the girl! “It’s not in mine, anyway,” I snapped, “but I can’t answer for seven other men, most of them mountain roughnecks!” Even as I said it I wondered why I bothered; certainly a free Amazon could defend her own virtue, or not, if she wanted to, without any help from me. I had to excuse myself by adding, “In either case you’ll be a disturbing element—I don’t want fights, either!”

She made a little low-pitched sound of amusement. “There’s safety in numbers, and—are you familiar with the physiological effect of high altitudes on men acclimated to low ones?” Suddenly she threw back her head and the hidden sound became free and merry laughter. “Jason, I’m a free Amazon, and that means—no, I’m not neutered, though some of us are. But you have my word, I won’t create any trouble of any recognizably female variety.” She stood up. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to check the mountain equipment.”

Her eyes were still laughing at me, but curiously I didn’t mind at all. There was a refreshing element in her manner.

*

We started that night, a curiously lopsided little caravan. The pack animals were loaded into one truck and didn’t like it. We had another stripped-down truck which carried supplies. The ancient stone roads, rutted and gullied here and there with the flood-waters and silt of decades, had not been planned for any travel other than the feet of men or beasts. We passed tiny villages and isolated country estates, and a few of the solitary towers where the matrix mechanics worked alone with the secret sciences of Darkover, towers of glareless stone which sometimes shone like blue beacons in the dark.

Kendricks drove the truck which carried the animals, and was amused by it. Rafe and I took turns driving the other truck, sharing the wide front seat with Regis Hastur and the girl Kyla, while the other men found seats between crates and sacks in the back. Once while Rafe was at the wheel and the girl dozing with her coat over her face to shut out the fierce sun, Regis asked me, “What are the trailcities like?”

I tried to tell him, but I’ve never been good at boiling things down into descriptions, and when he found I was not disposed to talk, he fell silent and I was free to drowse over what I knew of the trailmen and their world.

Nature seems to have a sameness on all inhabited worlds, tending toward the economy and simplicity of the human form. The upright carriage, freeing the hands, the opposable thumb, the color-sensitivity of retinal rods and cones, the development of language and of lengthy parental nurture—these things seem to be indispensable to the growth of civilization, and in the end they spell human. Except for minor variations depending on climate or foodstuff, the inhabitant of Megaera or Darkover is indistinguishable from the Terran or Sirian; differences are mainly cultural, and sometimes an isolated culture will mutate in a strange direction or remain, atavists, somewhere halfway to the summit of the ladder of evolution—which, at least on the known planets, still reckons homo sapiens as the most complex of nature’s forms.

The trailmen were a pausing-place which had proved tenacious. When the mainstream of evolution on Darkover left the trees to struggle for existence on the ground, a few remained behind. Evolution did not cease for them, but evolved homo arborens; nocturnal, nystalopic humanoids who lived out their lives in the extensive forests.

The truck bumped over the bad, rutted roads. The wind was chilly—the truck, a mere conveyance for hauling, had no such refinements of luxury as windows. I jolted awake—what nonsense had I been thinking? Vague ideas about evolution swirled in my brain like burst bubbles—the trailmen? They were just the trailmen, who could explain them? Jay Allison, maybe? Rafe turned his head and asked, “Where do we pull up for the night? It’s getting dark, and we have all this gear to sort!” I roused myself, and took over the business of the expedition again.

But when the trucks had been parked and a tent pitched and the pack animals unloaded and hobbled, and a start made at getting the gear together—when all this had been done I lay awake, listening to Kendricks’ heavy snoring, but myself afraid to sleep. Dozing in the truck, an odd lapse of consciousness had come over me ... myself yet not myself, drowsing over thoughts I did not recognize as my own. If I slept, who would I be when I woke?

*

We had made our camp in the bend of an enormous river, wide and shallow and unbridged; the river Kadarin, traditionally a point of no return for humans on Darkover. The river is fed by ocean tides and we would have to wait for low water to cross. Beyond the river lay thick forests, and beyond the forests the slopes of the Hellers, rising upward and upward; and their every fold and every valley was filled to the brim with forest, and in the forests lived the trailmen.

But though all this country was thickly populated with outlying colonies and nests, it would be no use to bargain with any of them; we must deal with the Old One of the North Nest, where I had spent so many of my boyhood years.

From time immemorial, the trailmen—usually inoffensive—had kept strict boundaries marked between their lands and the lands of ground-dwelling men. They never came beyond the Kadarin. On the other hand, almost any human who ventured into their territory became, by that act, fair game for attack.

A few of the Darkovan mountain people had trade treaties with the trailmen; they traded clothing, forged metals, small implements, in return for nuts, bark for dyestuffs and certain leaves and mosses for drugs. In return, the trailmen permitted them to hunt in the forest lands without being molested. But other humans, venturing into trailman territory, ran the risk of merciless raiding; the trailmen were not bloodthirsty, and did not kill for the sake of killing, but they attacked in packs of two or three dozen, and their prey would be stripped and plundered of everything portable.

Travelling through their country would be dangerous....

*

The sun was high before we struck the camp. While the others were packing up the last oddments, ready for the saddle, I gave the girl Kyla the task of readying the rucksacks we’d carry after the trails got too bad even for the pack animals, and went to stand at the water’s edge, checking the depth of the ford and glancing up at the smoke-hazed rifts between peak and peak.

The men were packing up the small tent we’d use in the forests, moving around with a good deal of horseplay and a certain brisk bustle. They were a good crew, I’d already discovered. Rafe and Lerrys and the three Darkovan brothers were tireless, cheerful and mountain-hardened. Kendricks, obviously out of his element, could be implicitly relied on to follow orders, and I felt that I could fall back on him. Strange as it seemed, the very fact that he was a Terran was vaguely comforting, where I’d anticipated it would be a nuisance.

The girl Kyla was still something of an unknown quantity. She was too taut and quiet, working her share but seldom contributing a word—we were not yet in mountain country. So far she was quiet and touchy with me, although she seemed natural enough with the Darkovans, and I let her alone.

“Hi, Jason, get a move on,” someone shouted, and I walked back toward the clearing squinting in the sun. It hurt, and I touched my face gingerly, suddenly realizing what had happened. Yesterday, riding in the uncovered truck, and this morning, un-used to the fierce sun of these latitudes, I had neglected to take the proper precautions against exposure and my face was reddening with sunburn. I walked toward Kyla, who was cinching a final load on one of the pack-animals, which she did efficiently enough.

She didn’t wait for me to ask, but sized up the situation with one amused glance at my face. “Sunburn? Put some of this on it.” She produced a tube of white stuff; I twisted at the top inexpertly, and she took it from me, squeezed the stuff out in her palm and said, “Stand still and bend down your head.”

She smeared the mixture efficiently across my forehead and cheeks. It felt cold and good. I started to thank her, then broke off as she burst out laughing. “What’s the matter?”

“You should see yourself!” she gurgled.

I wasn’t amused. No doubt I presented a grotesque appearance, and no doubt she had the right to laugh at it, but I scowled. It hurt. Intending to put things back on the proper footing, I demanded, “Did you make up the climbing loads?”

“All except bedding. I wasn’t sure how much to allow,” she said. “Jason, have you eyeshades for when you get on snow?” I nodded, and she instructed me severely, “Don’t forget them. Snowblindness—I give you my word—is even more unpleasant than sunburn—and very painful!”

“Damn it, girl, I’m not stupid!” I exploded.

She said, in her expressionless monotone again, “Then you ought to have known better than to get sunburnt. Here, put this in your pocket,” she handed me the tube of sunburn cream, “maybe I’d better check up on some of the others and make sure they haven’t forgotten.” She went off without another word, leaving me with an unpleasant feeling that she’d come off best, that she considered me an irresponsible scamp.

Forth had said almost the same thing....

I told off the Darkovan brothers to urge the pack animals across the narrowest part of the ford, and gestured to Corus and Kyla to ride one on either side of Kendricks, who might not be aware of the swirling, treacherous currents of a mountain river. Rafe could not urge his edgy horse into the water; he finally dismounted, took off his boots, and led the creature across the slippery rocks. I crossed last, riding close to Regis Hastur, alert for dangers and thinking resentfully that anyone so important to Darkover’s policies should not be risked on such a mission. Why, if the Terran Legate had (unthinkably!) come with us, he would be surrounded by bodyguards, secret service men and dozens of precautions against accident, assassination or misadventure.

All that day we rode upward, encamping at the furthest point we could travel with pack animals or mounted. The next day’s climb would enter the dangerous trails we must travel afoot. We pitched a comfortable camp, but I admit I slept badly. Kendricks and Lerrys and Rafe had blinding headaches from the sun and the thinness of the air; I was more used to these conditions, but I felt a sense of unpleasant pressure, and my ears rang. Regis arrogantly denied any discomfort, but he moaned and cried out continuously in his sleep until Lerrys kicked him, after which he was silent and, I feared, sleepless. Kyla seemed the least affected of any; probably she had been at higher altitudes more continuously than any of us. But there were dark circles beneath her eyes.

However, no one complained as we readied ourselves for the final last long climb upward. If we were fortunate, we could cross Dammerung before nightfall; at the very least, we should bivouac tonight very near the pass. Our camp had been made at the last level spot; we partially hobbled the pack animals so they would not stray too far, and left ample food for them, and cached all but the most necessary of light trail gear. As we prepared to start upward on the steep, narrow track—hardly more than a rabbit-run—I glanced at Kyla and stated, “We’ll work on rope from the first stretch. Starting now.”

One of the Darkovan brothers stared at me with contempt. “Call yourself a mountain man, Jason? Why, my little daughter could scramble up that track without so much as a push on her behind!”

I set my chin and glared at him. “The rocks aren’t easy, and some of these men aren’t used to working on rope at all. We might as well get used to it, because when we start working along the ledges, I don’t want anybody who doesn’t know how.”

They still didn’t like it, but nobody protested further until I directed the huge Kendricks to the center of the second rope. He glared viciously at the light nylon line and demanded in some apprehension, “Hadn’t I better go last until I know what I’m doing? Hemmed in between the two of you, I’m apt to do something damned dumb!”

Hjalmar roared with laughter and informed him that the center place on a 3-man rope was always reserved for weaklings, novices and amateurs. I expected Kendricks’ temper to flare up: the burly Spaceforce man and the Darkovan giant glared at one another, then Kendricks only shrugged and knotted the line through his belt. Kyla warned Kendricks and Lerrys about looking down from ledges, and we started.

The first stretch was almost too simple, a clear track winding higher and higher for a couple of miles. Pausing to rest for a moment, we could turn and see the entire valley outspread below us. Gradually the trail grew steeper, in spots pitched almost at a 50-degree angle, and was scattered with gravel, loose rock and shale, so that we placed our feet carefully, leaning forward to catch at handholds and steady ourselves against rocks. I tested each boulder carefully, since any weight placed against an unsteady rock might dislodge it on somebody below. One of the Darkovan brothers—Vardo, I thought—was behind me, separated by ten or twelve feet of slack rope, and twice when his feet slipped on gravel he stumbled and gave me an unpleasant jerk. What he muttered was perfectly true; on slopes like this, where a fall wasn’t dangerous anyhow, it was better to work unroped; then a slip bothered no one but the slipper. But I was finding out what I wanted to know—what kind of climbers I had to lead through the Hellers.

Along a cliff face the trail narrowed horizontally, leading across a foot-wide ledge overhanging a sheer drop of fifty feet and covered with loose shale and scrub plants. Nothing, of course, to an experienced climber—a foot-wide ledge might as well be a four-lane superhighway. Kendricks made a nervous joke about a tightrope walker, but when his turn came he picked his way securely, without losing balance. The amateurs—Lerrys Ridenow, Regis, Rafe—came across without hesitation, but I wondered how well they would have done at a less secure altitude; to a real mountaineer, a footpath is a footpath, whether in a meadow, above a two-foot drop, a thirty-foot ledge, or a sheer mountain face three miles above the first level spot.

After crossing the ledge the going was harder. A steeper trail, in places nearly imperceptible, led between thick scrub and overhanging trees, thickly forested. In spots their twisted roots obscured the trail; in others the persistent growth had thrust aside rocks and dirt. We had to make our way through tangles of underbrush which would have been nothing to a trailman, but which made our ground-accustomed bodies ache with the effort of getting over or through them; and once the track was totally blocked by a barricade of tangled dead brushwood, borne down on floodwater after a sudden thaw or cloud-burst. We had to work painfully around it over a three-hundred-foot rockslide, which we could cross only one at a time, crab-fashion, leaning double to balance ourselves; and no one complained now about the rope.

Toward noon I had the first intimation that we were not alone on the slope.

At first it was no more than a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my eyes, the shadow of a shadow. The fourth time I saw it, I called softly to Kyla: “See anything?”

“I was beginning to think it was my eyes, or the altitude. I saw, Jason.”

“Look for a spot where we can take a break,” I directed. We climbed along a shallow ledge, the faint imperceptible flutters in the brushwood climbing with us on either side. I muttered to the girl, “I’ll be glad when we get clear of this. At least we’ll be able to see what’s coming after us!”

“If it comes to a fight,” she said surprisingly, “I’d rather fight on gravel than ice.”

*

Over a rise, there was a roaring sound; Kyla swung up and balanced on a rock-wedged tree root, cupped her mouth to her hands and called, “Rapids!”

I pulled myself up to the edge of the drop and stood looking down into the narrow gully. Here the narrow track we had been following was crossed and obscured by the deep, roaring rapids of a mountain stream.

Less than twenty feet across, it tumbled in an icy flood, almost a waterfall, pitching over the lip of a crag above us. It had sliced a ravine five feet deep in the mountainside, and came roaring down with a rushing noise that made my head vibrate. It looked formidable; anyone stepping into it would be knocked off his feet in seconds, and swept a thousand feet down the mountainside by the force of the current.

Rafe scrambled gingerly over the gullied lip of the channel it had cut, and bent carefully to scoop up water in his palm and drink. “Phew, it’s colder than Zandru’s ninth hell. Must come straight down from a glacier!”

It did. I remembered the trail and remembered the spot. Kendricks joined me at the water’s edge, and asked, “How do we get across?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, studying the racing white torrent. Overhead, about twenty feet from where we clustered on the slope, the thick branches of enormous trees overhung the rapids, their long roots partially bared, gnarled and twisted by recurrent floods; and between these trees swayed one of the queer swing-bridges of the trailmen, hanging only about ten feet above the water.

Even I had never learned to navigate one of these swing-bridges without assistance; human arms are no longer suited to brachiation. I might have managed it once; but at present, except as a desperate final expedient, it was out of the question. Rafe or Lerrys, who were lightly built and acrobatic, could probably do it as a simple stunt on the level, in a field; on a steep and rocky mountainside, where a fall might mean being dashed a thousand feet down the torrent, I doubted it. The trailmen’s bridge was out ... but what other choice was there?

I beckoned to Kendricks, he being the man I was the most inclined to trust with my life at the moment, and said, “It looks uncrossable, but I think two men could get across, if they were steady on their feet. The others can hold us on ropes, in case we do get knocked down. If we can get to the opposite bank, we can stretch a fixed rope from that snub of rock—” I pointed, “and the others can cross with that. The first men over will be the only ones to run any risk. Want to try?”

I liked it better that he didn’t answer right away, but went to the edge of the gully and peered down the rocky chasm. Doubtless, if we were knocked down, all seven of the others could haul us up again; but not before we’d been badly smashed on the rocks. And once again I caught that elusive shadow of movement in the brushwood; if the trailmen chose a moment when we were half-in, half-out of the rapids, we’d be ridiculously vulnerable to attack.

“We ought to be able to get a fixed rope easier than that,” Hjalmar said, and took one of the spares from his rucksack. He coiled it, making a running loop on one end, and standing precariously on the lip of the rapids, sent it spinning toward the outcrop of rock we had chosen as a fixed point. “If I can get it over....”

The rope fell short, and Hjalmar reeled it in and cast the loop again. He made three more unsuccessful tries before finally, with held breath, we watched the noose settle over the rocky snub. Gently, pulling the line taut, we watched it stretch above the rapids. The knot tightened, fastened. Hjalmar grinned and let out his breath.

“There,” he said, and jerked hard on the rope, testing it with a long hard pull. The rocky outcrop broke, with a sharp crack, split, and toppled entirely into the rapids, the sudden jerk almost pulling Hjalmar off his feet. The boulder rolled, with a great bouncing splash, faster and faster down the mountain, taking the rope with it.

We just stood and stared for a minute. Hjalmar swore horribly, in the unprintable filth of the mountain tongue, and his brothers joined in. “How the devil was I to know the rock would split off?”

“Better for it to split now than when we were depending on it,” Kyla said stolidly. “I have a better idea.” She was untying herself from the rope as she spoke, and knotting one of the spares through her belt. She handed the other end of the rope to Lerrys. “Hold on to this,” she said, and slipped out of her blankety windbreak, standing shivering in a thin sweater. She unstrapped her boots and tossed them to me. “Now boost me on your shoulders, Hjalmar.”

Too late, I guessed her intention and shouted, “No, don’t try—!” But she had already clambered to an unsteady perch on the big Darkovan’s shoulders and made a flying grab for the lowest loop of the trailmen’s bridge. She hung there, swaying slightly and sickeningly, as the loose lianas gave to her weight.

“Hjalmar—Lerrys—haul her down!”

“I’m lighter than any of you,” Kyla called shrilly, “and not hefty enough to be any use on the ropes!” Her voice quavered somewhat as she added, “—and hang on to that rope, Lerrys! If you lose it, I’ll have done this for nothing!”

She gripped the loop of vine and reached, with her free hand, for the next loop. Now she was swinging out over the edge of the boiling rapids. Tight-mouthed, I gestured to the others to spread out slightly below—not that anything would help her if she fell.

Hjalmar, watching as the woman gained the third loop—which joggled horribly to her slight weight—shouted suddenly, “Kyla, quick! The loop beyond—don’t touch the next one! It’s frayed—rotted through!”

Kyla brought her left hand up to her right on the third loop. She made a long reach, missed her grab, swung again, and clung, breathing hard, to the safe fifth loop. I watched, sick with dread. The damned girl should have told me what she intended.

Kyla glanced down and we got a glimpse of her face, glistening with the mixture of sunburn cream and sweat, drawn with effort. Her tiny swaying figure hung twelve feet above the white tumbling water, and if she lost her grip, only a miracle could bring her out alive. She hung there for a minute, jiggling slightly, then started a long back-and-forward swing. On the third forward swing she made a long leap and grabbed at the final loop.

It slipped through her fingers; she made a wild grab with the other hand, and the liana dipped sharply under her weight, raced through her fingers, and with a sharp snap, broke in two. She gave a wild shriek as it parted, and twisted her body frantically in mid-air, landing asprawl half-in, half-out of the rapids, but on the further bank. She hauled her legs up on dry land and crouched there, drenched to the waist but safe.

*

The Darkovans were yelling in delight. I motioned to Lerrys to make his end of the rope fast around a hefty tree-root, and shouted, “Are you hurt?” She indicated in pantomime that the thundering of the water drowned words, and bent to belay her end of the rope. In sign-language I gestured to her to make very sure of the knots; if anyone slipped, she hadn’t the weight to hold us.

I hauled on the rope myself to test it, and it held fast. I slung her boots around my neck by their cords, then, gripping the fixed rope, Kendricks and I stepped into the water.

It was even icier than I expected, and my first step was nearly the last; the rush of the white water knocked me to my knees, and I floundered and would have measured my length except for my hands on the fixed rope. Buck Kendricks grabbed at me, letting go the rope to do it, and I swore at him, raging, while we got on our feet again and braced ourselves against the onrushing current. While we struggled in the pounding waters, I admitted to myself; we could never have crossed without the rope Kyla had risked her life to fix.

Shivering, we got across and hauled ourselves out. I signalled to the others to cross two at a time, and Kyla seized my elbow. “Jason—”

“Later, dammit!” I had to shout to make myself heard over the roaring water, as I held out a hand to help Rafe get his footing on the ledge.

“This—can’t—wait,” she yelled, cupping her hands and shouting into my ear. I turned on her. “What!”

“There are—trailmen—on the top level—of that bridge! I saw them! They cut the loop!”

Regis and Hjalmar came struggling across last; Regis, lightly-built, was swept off his feet and Hjalmar turned to grab him, but I shouted to him to keep clear—they were still roped together and if the ropes fouled we might drown someone. Lerrys and I leaped down and hauled Regis clear; he coughed, spitting icy water, drenched to the skin.

I motioned to Lerrys to leave the fixed rope, though I had little hope that it would be there when we returned, and looked quickly around, debating what to do. Regis and Rafe and I were wet clear through; the others to well above the knee. At this altitude, this was dangerous, although we were not yet high enough to worry about frostbite. Trailmen or no trailmen, we must run the lesser risk of finding a place where we could kindle a fire and dry out.

“Up there—there’s a clearing,” I said briefly, and hurried them along.

*

It was hard climbing now, on rock, and there were places where we had to scrabble for handholds, and flatten ourselves out against an almost sheer wall. The keen wind rose as we climbed higher, whining through the thick forest, soughing in the rocky outcrops, and biting through our soaked clothing with icy teeth. Kendricks was having hard going now, and I helped him as much as I could, but I was aching with cold. We gained the clearing, a small bare spot on a lesser peak, and I directed the two Darkovan brothers who were the driest to gather dry brushwood and get a fire going. It was hardly near enough sunset to camp; but by the time we were dry enough to go on safely, it would be, so I gave orders to get the tent up, then rounded angrily on Kyla.

“See here, another time don’t try any dangerous tricks unless you’re ordered to!”

“Go easy on her,” Regis Hastur interceded, “we’d never have crossed without the fixed rope. Good work, girl.”

“You keep out of this!” I snapped. It was true, yet resentment boiled in me as Kyla’s plain sullen face glowed under the praise from the Hastur.

The fact was—I admitted it grudgingly—a lightweight like Kyla ran less risk on an acrobat’s bridge than in that kind of roaring current. That did not lessen my annoyance; and Regis Hastur’s interference, and the foolish grin on the girl’s face, made me boil over.

I wanted to question her further about the sight of trailmen on the bridge, but decided against it. We had been spared attack on the rapids, so it wasn’t impossible that a group, not hostile, was simply watching our progress—maybe even aware that we were on a peaceful mission.

But I didn’t believe it for a minute. If I knew anything about the trailmen, it was this—one could not judge them by human standards at all. I tried to decide what I would have done, as a trailman, but my brain wouldn’t run that way at the moment.

The Darkovan brothers had built up the fire with a thoroughly reckless disregard of watching eyes. It seemed to me that the morale and fitness of the shivering crew was of more value at the moment than caution; and around the roaring fire, feeling my soaked clothes warming to the blaze and drinking boiling hot tea from a mug, it seemed that we were right. Optimism reappeared; Kyla, letting Hjalmar dress her hands which had been rubbed raw by the slipping lianas, made jokes with the men about her feat of acrobatics.

We had made camp on the summit of an outlying arm of the main ridge of the Hellers, and the whole massive range lay before our eyes, turned to a million colors in the declining sun. Green and turquoise and rose, the mountains were even more beautiful than I remembered. The shoulder of the high slope we had just climbed had obscured the real mountain massif from our sight, and I saw Kendricks’ eyes widen as he realized that this high summit we had just mastered was only the first step of the task which lay before us. The real ridge rose ahead, thickly forested on the lower slopes, then strewn with rock and granite like the landscape of an airless, deserted moon. And above the rock, there were straight walls capped with blinding snow and ice. Down one peak a glacier flowed, a waterfall, a cascade shockingly arrested in motion. I murmured the trailman’s name for the mountain, aloud, and translated it for the others:

“The Wall Around the World.”

“Good name for it,” Lerrys murmured, coming with his mug in his hand to look at the mountain. “Jason, the big peak there has never been climbed, has it?”

“I can’t remember.” My teeth were chattering and I went back toward the fire. Regis surveyed the distant glacier and murmured, “It doesn’t look too bad. There could be a route along that western arête—Hjalmar, weren’t you with the expedition that climbed and mapped High Kimbi?”

The giant nodded, rather proudly. “We got within a hundred feet of the top, then a snowstorm came up and we had to turn back. Some day we’ll tackle the Wall Around the World—it’s been tried, but no one ever climbed the peak.”

“No one ever will,” Lerrys stated positively, “There’s two hundred feet of sheer rock cliff, Prince Regis, you’d need wings to get up. And there’s the avalanche ledge they call Hell’s Alley—”

Kendricks broke in irritably, “I don’t care whether it’s ever been climbed or ever will be climbed, we’re not going to climb it now!” He stared at me and added, “I hope!”

“We’re not.” I was glad of the interruption. If the youngsters and amateurs wanted to amuse themselves plotting hypothetical attacks on unclimbable sierras, that was all very well, but it was, if nothing worse, a great waste of time. I showed Kendricks a notch in the ridge, thousands of feet lower than the peaks, and well-sheltered from the icefalls on either side.

“That’s Dammerung; we’re going through there. We won’t be on the mountain at all, and it’s less than 22,000 feet high in the pass—although there are some bad ledges and washes. We’ll keep clear of the main tree-roads if we can, and all the mapped trailmen’s villages, but we may run into wandering bands—” abruptly I made my decision and gestured them around me.

“From this point,” I broke the news, “we’re liable to be attacked. Kyla, tell them what you saw.”

*

She put down her mug. Her face was serious again, as she related what she had seen on the bridge. “We’re on a peaceful mission, but they don’t know that yet. The thing to remember is that they do not wish to kill, only to wound and rob. If we show fight—” she displayed a short ugly knife, which she tucked matter-of-factly into her shirt-front, “they will run away again.”

Lerrys loosened a narrow dagger which until this moment I had thought purely ornamental. He said, “Mind if I say something more, Jason? I remember from the ‘Narr campaign—the trailmen fight at close quarters, and by human standards they fight dirty.” He looked around fiercely, his unshaven face glinting as he grinned. “One more thing. I like elbow room. Do we have to stay roped together when we start out again?”

I thought it over. His enthusiasm for a fight made me feel both annoyed and curiously delighted. “I won’t make anyone stay roped who thinks he’d be safer without it,” I said, “we’ll decide that when the time comes, anyway. But personally—the trailmen are used to running along narrow ledges, and we’re not. Their first tactic would probably be to push us off, one by one. If we’re roped, we can fend them off better.” I dismissed the subject, adding, “Just now, the important thing is to dry out.”

Kendricks remained at my side after the others had gathered around the fire, looking into the thick forest which sloped up to our campsite. He said, “This place looks as if it had been used for a camp before. Aren’t we just as vulnerable to attack here as we would be anywhere else?”

He had hit on the one thing I hadn’t wanted to talk about. This clearing was altogether too convenient. I only said, “At least there aren’t so many ledges to push us off.”

Kendricks muttered, “You’ve got the only blaster!”

“I left it at Carthon,” I said truthfully. Then I laid down the law:

“Listen, Buck. If we kill a single trailman, except in hand-to-hand fight in self-defense, we might as well pack up and go home. We’re on a peaceful mission, and we’re begging a favor. Even if we’re attacked—we kill only as a last resort, and in hand-to-hand combat!”

“Damned primitive frontier planet—”

“Would you rather die of the trailmen’s disease?”

He said savagely, “We’re apt to catch it anyway—here. You’re immune, you don’t care, you’re safe! The rest of us are on a suicide mission—and damn it, when I die I want to take a few of those monkeys with me!”

*

I bent my head, bit my lip and said nothing. Buck couldn’t be blamed for the way he felt. After a moment I pointed to the notch in the ridge again. “It’s not so far. Once we get through Dammerung, it’s easy going into the trailmen’s city. Beyond there, it’s all civilized.”

“Maybe you call it civilization,” Kendricks said, and turned away.

“Come on, let’s finish drying our feet.”

And at that moment they hit us.

*

Kendricks’ yell was the only warning I had before I was fighting away something scrabbling up my back. I whirled and ripped the creature away, and saw dimly that the clearing was filled to the rim with an explosion of furry white bodies. I cupped my hands and yelled, in the only trailman dialect I knew, “Hold off! We come in peace!”

One of them yelled something unintelligible and plunged at me—another tribe! I saw a white-furred, chinless face, contorted in rage, a small ugly knife—a female! I ripped out my own knife, fending away a savage slash. Something tore white-hot across the knuckles of my hand; the fingers went limp and my knife fell, and the trailman woman snatched it up and made off with her prize, swinging lithely upward into the treetops.

I searched quickly, gripped with my good hand at the bleeding knuckles, and found Regis Hastur struggling at the edge of a ledge with a pair of the creatures. The crazy thought ran through my mind that if they killed him all Darkover would rise and exterminate the trailmen and it would all be my fault. Then Regis tore one hand free, and made a curious motion with his fingers.

It looked like an immense green spark a foot long, or like a fireball. It exploded in one creature’s white face and she gave a wild howl of terror and anguish, scrabbled blindly at her eyes, and with a despairing shriek, ran for the shelter of the trees. The pack of trailmen gave a long formless wail, and then they were gathering, flying, retreating into the shadows. Rafe yelled something obscene and then a bolt of bluish flame lanced toward the retreating pack. One of the humanoids fell without a cry, pitching senseless over the ledge.

I ran toward Rafe, struggling with him for the shocker he had drawn from its hiding-place inside his shirt. “You blind damned fool!” I cursed him, “you may have ruined everything—”

“They’d have killed him without it,” he retorted wrathfully. He had evidently failed to see how efficiently Regis defended himself. Rafe motioned toward the fleeing pack and sneered, “Why don’t you go with your friends?”

With a grip I thought I had forgotten, I got my hand around Rafe’s knuckles and squeezed. His hand went limp and I snatched the shocker and pitched it over the ledge.

“One word and I’ll pitch you after it,” I warned. “Who’s hurt?”

Garin was blinking senselessly, half-dazed by a blow; Regis’ forehead had been gashed and dripped blood, and Hjalmar’s thigh sliced in a clean cut. My own knuckles were laid bare and the hand was getting numb. It was a little while before anybody noticed Kyla, crouched over speechless with pain. She reeled and turned deathly white when we touched her; we stretched her out where she was, and got her shirt off, and Kendricks crowded up beside us to examine the wound.

“A clean cut,” he said, but I didn’t hear. Something had turned over inside me, like a hand stirring up my brain, and....

*

Jay Allison looked around with a gasp of sudden vertigo. He was not in Forth’s office, but standing precariously near the edge of a cliff. He shut his eyes briefly, wondering if he were having one of his worst nightmares, and opened them on a familiar face.

Buck Kendricks was bone-white, his mouth widening as he said hoarsely, “Jay! Doctor Allison—for God’s sake—”

A doctor’s training creates reactions that are almost reflexes; Jay Allison recovered some degree of sanity as he became aware that someone was stretched out in front of him, half-naked, and bleeding profusely. He motioned away the crowding strangers and said in his bad Darkovan, “Let her alone, this is my work.” He didn’t know enough words to curse them away, so he switched to Terran, speaking to Kendricks:

“Buck, get these people away, give the patient some air. Where’s my surgical case?” He bent and probed briefly, realizing only now that the injured was a woman, and young.

The wound was only a superficial laceration; whatever sharp instrument had inflicted it, had turned on the costal bone without penetrating lung tissue. It could have been sutured, but Kendricks handed him only a badly-filled first-aid kit; so Dr. Allison covered it tightly with a plastic clip-shield which would seal it from further bleeding, and let it alone. By the time he had finished, the strange girl had begun to stir. She said haltingly, “Jason—?”

“Dr. Allison,” he corrected tersely, surprised in a minor way—the major surprise had blurred lesser ones—that she knew his name. Kendricks spoke swiftly to the girl, in one of the Darkovan languages Jay didn’t understand, and then drew Jay aside, out of earshot. He said in a shaken voice, “Jay, I didn’t know—I wouldn’t have believed—you’re Doctor Allison? Good Lord—Jason!”

And then he moved fast. “What’s the matter? Oh, hell, Jay, don’t faint on me!”

*

Jay was aware that he didn’t come out of it too bravely, but anyone who blamed him (he thought resentfully) should try it on for size; going to sleep in a comfortably closed-in office and waking up on a cliff at the outer edges of nowhere. His hand hurt; he saw that it was bleeding and flexed it experimentally, trying to determine that no tendons had been injured. He rapped, “How did this happen?”

“Sir, keep your voice down—or speak Darkovan!”

Jay blinked again. Kendricks was still the only familiar thing in a strangely vertiginous universe. The Spaceforce man said huskily. “Before heaven, Jay, I hadn’t any idea—and I’ve known you how long? Eight, nine years?”

Jay said, “That idiot Forth!” and swore, the colorless profanity of an indoor man.

Somebody shouted, “Jason!” in an imperative voice, and Kendricks said shakily, “Jay, if they see you—you literally are not the same man!”

“Obviously not.” Jay looked at the tent, one pole still unpitched. “Anyone in there?”

“Not yet.” Kendricks almost shoved him inside. “I’ll tell them—I’ll tell them something.” He took a radiant from his pocket, set it down and stared at Allison in the flickering light, and said something profane. “You’ll—you’ll be all right here?”

Jay nodded. It was all he could manage. He was keeping a tight hold on his nerve; if it went, he’d start to rave like a madman. A little time passed, there were strange noises outside, and then there was a polite cough and a man walked into the tent.

He was obviously a Darkovan aristocrat and looked vaguely familiar, though Jay had no conscious memory of seeing him before. Tall and slender, he possessed that perfect and exquisite masculine beauty sometimes seen among Darkovans, and he spoke to Jay familiarly but with surprising courtesy:

“I have told them you are not to be disturbed for a moment, that your hand is worse than we believed. A surgeon’s hands are delicate things, Doctor Allison, and I hope that yours are not badly injured. Will you let me look?”

Jay Allison drew back his hand automatically, then, conscious of the churlishness of the gesture, let the stranger take it in his and look at the fingers. The man said, “It does not seem serious. I was sure it was something more than that.” He raised grave eyes. “You don’t even remember my name, do you, Dr. Allison?”

“You know who I am?”

“Dr. Forth didn’t tell me. But we Hasturs are partly telepathic, Jason—forgive me—Doctor Allison. I have known from the first that you were possessed by a god or daemon.”

“Superstitious rubbish,” Jay snapped. “Typical of a Darkovan!”

“It is a convenient manner of speaking, no more,” said the young Hastur, overlooking the rudeness. “I suppose I could learn your terminology, if I considered it worth the effort. I have had psi training, and I can tell the difference when half of a man’s soul has driven out the other half. Perhaps I can restore you to yourself—”

“If you think I’d have some Darkovan freak meddling with my mind—” Jay began hotly, then stopped. Under Regis’ grave eyes, he felt a surge of unfamiliar humility. This crew of men needed their leader, and obviously he, Jay Allison, wasn’t the leader they needed. He covered his eyes with one hand.

Regis bent and put a hand on his shoulder, compassionately, but Jay twitched it off, and his voice, when he found it, was bitter and defensive and cold.

“All right. The work’s the thing. I can’t do it, Jason can. You’re a parapsych. If you can switch me off—go right ahead!”

*

I stared at Regis, passing a hand across my forehead. “What happened?” I demanded, and in even swifter apprehension, “Where’s Kyla? She was hurt—”

“Kyla’s all right,” Regis said, but I got up quickly to make sure. Kyla was outside, lying quite comfortably on a roll of blankets. She was propped on her elbow drinking something hot, and there was a good smell of hot food in the air. I stared at Regis and demanded, “I didn’t conk out, did I, from a little scratch like this?” I looked carelessly at my gashed hand.

“Wait—” Regis held me back, “don’t go out just yet. Do you remember what happened, Doctor Allison?”

I stared in growing horror, my worst fear confirmed. Regis said quietly, “You—changed. Probably from the shock of seeing—” he stopped in mid-sentence, and I said, “The last thing I remember is seeing that Kyla was bleeding, when we got her clothes off. But—good Gods, a little blood wouldn’t scare me, and Jay Allison’s a surgeon, would it bring him roaring up like that?”

“I couldn’t say.” Regis looked as if he knew more than he was telling. “I don’t believe that Dr. Allison—he’s not much like you—was very concerned with Kyla. Are you?”

“Damn right I am. I want to make sure she’s all right—” I stopped abruptly. “Regis—did they all see it?”

“Only Kendricks and I,” Regis said, “and we will not speak of it.”

I said, “Thanks,” and felt his reassuring hand-clasp. Damn it, demigod or prince, I liked Regis.

I went out and accepted some food from the kettle and sat down between Kyla and Kendricks to eat. I was shaken, weak with reaction. Furthermore, I realized that we couldn’t stay here. It was too vulnerable to attack. So, in our present condition, were we. If we could push on hard enough to get near Dammerung pass tonight, then tomorrow we could cross it early, before the sun warmed the snow and we had snowslides and slush to deal with. Beyond Dammerung, I knew the tribesmen and could speak their language.

I mentioned this, and Kendricks looked doubtfully at Kyla. “Can she climb?”

“Can she stay here?” I countered. But I went and sat beside her anyhow.

“How badly are you hurt? Do you think you can travel?”

She said fiercely, “Of course I can climb! I tell you, I’m no weak girl, I’m a free Amazon!” She flung off the blanket somebody had tucked around her legs. Her lips looked a little pinched, but the long stride was steady as she walked to the fire and demanded more soup.

We struck the camp in minutes. The trailmen band of raiding females had snatched up almost everything portable, and there was no sense in striking and caching the tent; they’d return and hunt it out. If we came back with a trailmen escort, we wouldn’t need it anyway. I ordered them to leave everything but the lightest gear, and examined each remaining rucksack. Rations for the night we would spend in the pass, our few remaining blankets, ropes, sunglasses. Everything else I ruthlessly ordered left behind.

It was harder going now. For one thing, the sun was lowering, and the evening wind was icy. Nearly everyone of us had some hurt, slight in itself, which hindered us in climbing. Kyla was white and rigid, but did not spare herself; Kendricks was suffering severely from mountain sickness at this altitude, and I gave him all the help I could, but with my stiffening slashed hand I wasn’t having too easy a time myself.

There was one expanse that was sheer rock-climbing, flattened like bugs against a wall, scrabbling for hand-holds and footholds. I felt it a point of pride to lead, and I led; but by the time we had climbed the thirty-foot wall, and scrambled along a ledge to where we could pick up the trail again, I was ready to give over. Crowding together on the ledge, I changed places with the veteran Lerrys, who was better than most professional climbers.

He muttered, “I thought you said this was a trail!”

I stretched my mouth in what was supposed to be a grin and didn’t quite make it. “For the trailmen, this is a superhighway. And no one else ever comes this way.”

Now we climbed slowly over snow; once or twice we had to flounder through drifts, and once a brief bitter snowstorm blotted out sight for twenty minutes, while we hugged each other on the ledge, clinging wildly against wind and icy sleet.

*

We bivouacked that night in a crevasse blown almost clean of snow, well above the tree-line, where only scrubby unkillable thornbushes clustered. We tore down some of them and piled them up as a windbreak, and bedded beneath it; but we all thought with aching regret of the comfort of the camp gear we’d abandoned. The going had gotten good and rough.

That night remains in my mind as one of the most miserable in memory. Except for the slight ringing in my ears, the height alone did not bother me, but the others did not fare so well. Most of the men had blinding headaches, Kyla’s slashed side must have given her considerable pain, and Kendricks had succumbed to mountain-sickness in its most agonizing form: severe cramps and vomiting. I was desperately uneasy about all of them, but there was nothing I could do; the only cure for mountain-sickness is oxygen or a lower altitude, neither of which was practical.

In the windbreak we doubled up, sharing blankets and body warmth: I took a last look around the close space before crawling in beside Kendricks, and saw the girl bedding down slightly apart from the others. I started to say something, but Kendricks spoke, first. Voicing my thoughts.

“Better crawl in with us, girl.” He added, coldly but not unkindly, “you needn’t worry about any funny stuff.”

Kyla gave me just the flicker of a grin, and I realized she was including me on the Darkovan side of a joke against this big man who was so unaware of Darkovan etiquette. But her voice was cool and curt as she said, “I’m not worrying,” and loosened her heavy coat slightly before creeping into the nest of blankets between us.

It was painfully cramped, and chilly in spite of the self-heating blankets; we crowded close together and Kyla’s head rested on my shoulder. I felt her snuggle closely to me, half asleep, hunting for a warm place; and I found myself very much aware of her closeness, curiously grateful to her. An ordinary woman would have protested, if only as a matter of form, sharing blankets with two strange men. I realized that if Kyla had refused to crawl in with us, she would have called attention to her sex much more than she did by matter-of-factly behaving as if she were, in fact, male.

She shivered convulsively, and I whispered, “Side hurting? Are you cold?”

“A little. It’s been a long time since I’ve been at these altitudes, too. What it really is—I can’t get those women out of my head.”

Kendricks coughed, moving uncomfortably. “I don’t understand—those creatures who attacked us—all women—?”

I explained briefly. “Among the people of the Sky, as everywhere, more females are born than males. But the trailmen’s lives are so balanced that they have no room for extra females within the Nests—the cities. So when a girl child of the Sky People reaches womanhood, the other women drive her out of the city with kicks and blows, and she has to wander in the forest until some male comes after her and claims her and brings her back as his own. Then she can never be driven forth again, although if she bears no children she can be forced to be a servant to his other wives.”

Kendricks made a little sound of disgust.

“You think it cruel,” Kyla said with sudden passion, “but in the forest they can live and find their own food; they will not starve or die. Many of them prefer the forest life to living in the Nests, and they will fight away any male who comes near them. We who call ourselves human often make less provision for our spare women.”

She was silent, sighing as if with pain. Kendricks made no reply except a non-committal grunt. I held myself back by main force from touching Kyla, remembering what she was, and finally said, “We’d better quit talking. The others want to sleep, if we don’t.”

*

After a time I heard Kendricks snoring, and Kyla’s quiet even breaths. I wondered drowsily how Jay would have felt about this situation—he who hated Darkover and avoided contact with every other human being, crowded between a Darkovan free-Amazon and half a dozen assorted roughnecks. I turned the thought off, fearing it might somehow re-arouse him in his brain.

But I had to think of something, anything to turn aside this consciousness of the woman’s head against my chest, her warm breath coming and going against my bare neck. Only by the severest possible act of will did I keep myself from slipping my hand over her breasts, warm and palpable through the thin sweater, I wondered why Forth had called me undisciplined. I couldn’t risk my leadership by making advances to our contracted guide—woman, Amazon or whatever!

Somehow the girl seemed to be the pivot point of all my thoughts. She was not part of the Terran HQ, she was not part of any world Jay Allison might have known. She belonged wholly to Jason, to my world. Between sleep and waking, I lost myself in a dream of skimming flight-wise along the tree roads, chasing the distant form of a girl driven from the Nest that day with blows and curses. Somewhere in the leaves I would find her ... and we would return to the city, her head garlanded with the red leaves of a chosen-one, and the same women who had stoned her forth would crowd about and welcome her when she returned. The fleeing woman looked over her shoulder with Kyla’s eyes; and then the woman’s form muted and Dr. Forth was standing between us in the tree-road, with the caduceus emblem on his coat stretched like a red staff between us. Kendricks in his Spaceforce uniform was threatening us with a blaster, and Regis Hastur was suddenly wearing Space Service uniform too and saying, “Jay Allison, Jay Allison,” as the tree-road splintered and cracked beneath our feet and we were tumbling down the waterfall and down and down and down....

“Wake up!” Kyla whispered, and dug an elbow into my side. I opened my eyes on crowded blackness, grasping at the vanishing nightmare. “What’s the matter?”

“You were moaning. Touch of altitude sickness?”

I grunted, realized my arm was around her shoulder, and pulled it quickly away. After awhile I slept again, fitfully.

*

Before light we crawled wearily out of the bivouac, cramped and stiff and not rested, but ready to get out of this and go on. The snow was hard, in the dim light, and the trail not difficult here. After all the trouble on the lower slopes, I think even the amateurs had lost their desire for adventurous climbing; we were all just as well pleased that the actual crossing of Dammerung should be an anticlimax and uneventful.

The sun was just rising when we reached the pass, and we stood for a moment, gathered close together, in the narrow defile between the great summits to either side.

Hjalmar gave the peaks a wistful look.

“Wish we could climb them.”

Regis grinned at him companionably. “Sometime—and you have the word of a Hastur, you’ll be along on that expedition.” The big fellows’ eyes glowed. Regis turned to me, and said warmly, “What about it, Jason? A bargain? Shall we all climb it together, next year?”

I started to grin back and then some bleak black devil surged up in me, raging. When this was over, I’d suddenly realized, I wouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t be anywhere. I was a surrogate, a substitute, a splinter of Jay Allison, and when it was over, Forth and his tactics would put me back into what they considered my rightful place—which was nowhere. I’d never climb a mountain except now, when we were racing against time and necessity. I set my mouth in an unaccustomed narrow line and said, “We’ll talk about that when we get back—if we ever do. Now I suggest we get going. Some of us would like to get down to lower altitudes.”

The trail down from Dammerung inside the ridge, unlike the outside trail, was clear and well-marked, and we wound down the slope, walking in easy single file. As the mist thinned and we left the snow-line behind, we saw what looked like a great green carpet, interspersed with shining colors which were mere flickers below us. I pointed them out.

“The treetops of the North Forest—and the colors you see are in the streets of the Trailcity.”

An hour’s walking brought us to the edge of the forest. We travelled swiftly now, forgetting our weariness, eager to reach the city before nightfall. It was quiet in the forest, almost ominously still. Over our head somewhere, in the thick branches which in places shut out the sunlight completely, I knew that the tree-roads ran crisscross, and now and again I heard some rustle, a fragment of sound, a voice, a snatch of song.

“It’s so dark down here,” Rafe muttered, “anyone living in this forest would have to live in the treetops, or go totally blind!”

Kendricks whispered to me, “Are we being followed? Are they going to jump us?”

“I don’t think so. What you hear are just the inhabitants of the city—going about their daily business up there.”

“Queer business it must be,” Regis said curiously, and as we walked along the mossy, needly forest floor, I told him something of the trailmen’s lives. I had lost my fear. If anyone came at us now, I could speak their language, I could identify myself, tell my business, name my foster-parents. Some of my confidence evidently spread to the others.

But as we came into more and more familiar territory, I stopped abruptly and struck my hand against my forehead.

“I knew we had forgotten something!” I said roughly, “I’ve been away from here too long, that’s all. Kyla.”

“What about Kyla?”

The girl explained it herself, in her expressionless monotone. “I am an unattached female. Such women are not permitted in the Nests.”

“That’s easy, then,” Lerrys said. “She must belong to one of us.” He didn’t add a syllable. No one could have expected it; Darkovan aristocrats don’t bring their women on trips like this, and their women are not like Kyla.

The three brothers broke into a spate of volunteering, and Rafe made an obscene suggestion. Kyla scowled obstinately, her mouth tight with what could have been embarrassment or rage. “If you believe I need your protection—!”

“Kyla,” I said tersely, “is under my protection. She will be introduced as my woman—and treated as such.”

Rafe twisted his mouth in an un-funny smile. “I see the leader keeps all the best for himself?”

My face must have done something I didn’t know about, for Rafe backed slowly away. I forced myself to speak slowly: “Kyla is a guide, and indispensable. If anything happens to me, she is the only one who can lead you back. Therefore her safety is my personal affair. Understand?”

*

As we went along the trail, the vague green light disappeared. “We’re right below the Trailcity,” I whispered, and pointed upward. All around us the Hundred Trees rose, branchless pillars so immense that four men, hands joined, could not have encircled one with their arms. They stretched upward for some three hundred feet, before stretching out their interweaving branches; above that, nothing was visible but blackness.

Yet the grove was not dark, but lighted with the startlingly brilliant phosphorescence of the fungi growing on the trunks, and trimmed into bizarre ornamental shapes. In cages of transparent fibre, glowing insects as large as a hand hummed softly and continuously.

As I watched, a trailman—quite naked except for an ornate hat and a narrow binding around the loins—descended the trunk. He went from cage to cage, feeding the glow-worms with bits of shining fungus from a basket on his arm.

I called to him in his own language, and he dropped the basket, with an exclamation, his spidery thin body braced to flee or to raise an alarm.

“But I belong to the Nest,” I called to him, and gave him the names of my foster-parents. He came toward me, gripping my forearm with warm long fingers in a gesture of greeting.

“Jason? Yes, I hear them speak of you,” he said in his gentle twittering voice, “you are at home. But those others—?” He gestured nervously at the strange faces.

“My friends,” I assured him, “and we come to beg the Old One for an audience. For tonight I seek shelter with my parents, if they will receive us.”

He raised his head and called softly, and a slim child bounded down the trunk and took the basket. The trailman said, “I am Carrho. Perhaps it would be better if I guided you to your foster-parents, so you will not be challenged.”

I breathed more freely. I did not personally recognize Carrho, but he looked pleasantly familiar. Guided by him, we climbed one by one up the dark stairway inside the trunk, and emerged into the bright square, shaded by the topmost leaves into a delicate green twilight. I felt weary and successful.

Kendricks stepped gingerly on the swaying, jiggling floor of the square. It gave slightly at every step, and Kendricks swore morosely in a language that fortunately only Rafe and I understood. Curious trailmen flocked to the street and twittered welcome and surprise.

*

Rafe and Kendricks betrayed considerable contempt when I greeted my foster-parents affectionately. They were already old, and I was saddened to see it; their fur graying, their prehensile toes and fingers crooked with a rheumatic complaint of some sort, their reddish eyes bleared and rheumy. They welcomed me, and made arrangements for the others in my party to be housed in an abandoned house nearby ... they had insisted that I, of course, must return to their roof, and Kyla, of course, had to stay with me.

“Couldn’t we camp on the ground instead?” Kendricks asked, eying the flimsy shelter with distaste.

“It would offend our hosts,” I said firmly. I saw nothing wrong with it. Roofed with woven bark, carpeted with moss which was planted on the floor, the place was abandoned, somewhat a bit musty, but weathertight and seemed comfortable to me.

The first thing to be done was to despatch a messenger to the Old One, begging the favor of an audience with him. That done, (by one of my foster-brothers), we settled down to a meal of buds, honey, insects and birds eggs! It tasted good to me, with the familiarity of food eaten in childhood, but among the others, only Kyla ate with appetite and Regis Hastur with interested curiosity.

*

After the demands of hospitality had been satisfied, my foster-parents asked the names of my party, and I introduced them one by one. When I named Regis Hastur, it reduced them to brief silence, and then to an outcry; gently but firmly, they insisted that their home was unworthy to shelter the son of a Hastur, and that he must be fittingly entertained at the Royal Nest of the Old One.

There was no gracious way for Regis to protest, and when the messenger returned, he prepared to accompany him. But before leaving, he drew me aside:

“I don’t much like leaving the rest of you—”

“You’ll be safe enough.”

“It’s not that I’m worried about, Dr. Allison.”

“Call me Jason,” I corrected angrily. Regis said, with a little tightening of his mouth, “That’s it. You’ll have to be Dr. Allison tomorrow when you tell the Old One about your mission. But you have to be the Jason he knows, too.”

“So—?”

“I wish I needn’t leave here. I wish you were—going to stay with the men who know you only as Jason, instead of being alone—or only with Kyla.”

There was something odd in his face, and I wondered at it. Could he—a Hastur—be jealous of Kyla? Jealous of me? It had never occurred to me that he might be somehow attracted to Kyla. I tried to pass it off lightly:

“Kyla might divert me.”

Regis said without emphasis, “Yet she brought Dr. Allison back once before.” Then, surprisingly, he laughed. “Or maybe you’re right. Maybe Kyla will—scare away Dr. Allison if he shows up.”

*

The coals of the dying fire laid strange tints of color on Kyla’s face and shoulders and the wispy waves of her dark hair. Now that we were alone, I felt constrained.

“Can’t you sleep, Jason?”

I shook my head. “Better sleep while you can.” I felt that this night of all nights I dared not close my eyes or when I woke I would have vanished into the Jay Allison I hated. For a moment I saw the room with his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but—habituated to white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors—dirty and unsanitary as any beast’s den.

Kyla said broodingly, “You’re a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are you—in Terra’s world?”

I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the whole truth:

“Kyla, the man you know as me doesn’t exist. I was created for this one specific task. Once it’s finished, so am I.”

She started, her eyes widening. “I’ve heard tales of—of the Terrans and their sciences—that they make men who aren’t real, men of metal—not bone and flesh—”

Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. “Is this metal? No, no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason—I won’t be him, I’ll be someone different—” How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when I didn’t understand it myself?

She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, “I saw—someone else—looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost.”

I shook my head savagely. “To the Terrans, I’m the ghost!”

“Poor ghost,” she whispered.

Her pity stung. I didn’t want it.

“What I don’t remember I can’t regret. Probably I won’t even remember you.” But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else, unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl, that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light—only a few coals in the brazier. She had removed her sexless outer clothing, and wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child’s smock and curiously appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar. Visible to whom?

She reached out an appealing hand. “Jason! Jason—?”

*

My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling, under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison’s mind, and that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla’s image flickered in and out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then—as if seen at the wrong end of a telescope—far away and sharply incised and as remote and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.

Her hands closed on my shoulders. I put out a groping hand to push her away.

“Jason,” she implored, “don’t—go away from me like that! Talk to me, tell me!”

But her words reached me through emptiness.... I knew important things might hang on tomorrow’s meeting, Jason alone could come through that meeting, where the Terrans for some reason put him through this hell and damnation and torture ... oh, yes ... the trailmen’s fever.

Jay Allison pushed the girl’s hand away and scowled savagely, trying to collect his thoughts and concentrate them on what he must say and do, to convince the trailmen of their duty toward the rest of the planet. As if they—not even human—could have a sense of duty!

With an unaccustomed surge of emotion, he wished he were with the others. Kendricks, now. Jay knew, precisely, why Forth had sent the big, reliable spaceman at his back. And that handsome, arrogant Darkovan—where was he? Jay looked at the girl in puzzlement; he didn’t want to reveal that he wasn’t quite sure of what he was saying or doing, or that he had little memory of what Jason had been up to.

He started to ask, “Where did the Hastur kid go?” before a vagrant logical thought told him that such an important guest would have been lodged with the Old One. Then a wave of despair hit him; Jay realized he did not even speak the trailmen’s language, that it had slipped from his thoughts completely.

“You—” he fished desperately for the girl’s name, “Kyla. You don’t speak the trailmen’s language, do you?”

“A few words. No more. Why?” She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room—still not far from him—and he wondered remotely what his damned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile.

“Sit down, child. You needn’t be frightened.”

“I’m—I’m trying to understand—” the girl touched him again, evidently trying to conquer her terror. “It isn’t easy—when you turn into someone else under my eyes—” Jay saw that she was shaking in real fright.

He said wearily, “I’m not going to—to turn into a bat and fly away. I’m just a poor devil of a doctor who’s gotten himself into one unholy mess.” There was no reason, he was thinking, to take out his own misery and despair by shouting at this poor kid. God knew what she’d been through with his irresponsible other self—Forth had admitted that that damned “Jason” personality was a blend of all the undesirable traits he’d fought to smother all his life. By an effort of will he kept himself from pulling away from her hand on his shoulder.

“Jason, don’t—slip away like that! Think! Try to keep hold on yourself!”

Jay propped his head in his hands, trying to make sense of that. Certainly in the dim light she could not be too conscious of subtle changes of expression. She evidently thought she was talking to Jason. She didn’t seem to be overly intelligent.

“Think about tomorrow, Jason. What are you going to say to him? Think about your parents—”

Jay Allison wondered what they would think when they found a stranger here. He felt like a stranger. Yet he must have come, tonight, into this house and spoken—he rummaged desperately in his mind for some fragments of the trailmen’s language. He had spoken it as a child. He must recall enough to speak to the woman who had been a kind foster-mother to her alien son. He tried to form his lips to the unfamiliar shapes of words...

Jay covered his face with his hands again. Jason was the part of himself that remembered the trailmen. That was what he had to remember—Jason was not a hostile stranger, not an alien intruder in his body. Jason was a lost part of himself and at the moment a damn necessary part. If there were only some way to get back the Jason memories, skills, without losing himself ... he said to the girl, “Let me think. Let me—” to his surprise and horror his voice broke into an alien tongue, “Let me alone, will you?”

Maybe, Jay thought, I could stay myself if I could remember the rest. Dr. Forth said: Jason would remember the trailmen with kindness, not dislike.

Jay searched his memory and found nothing but familiar frustration; years spent in an alien land, apart from a human heritage, stranded and abandoned. My father left me. He crashed the plane and I never saw him again and I hate him for leaving me ...

But his father had not abandoned him. He had crashed the plane trying to save them both. It was no one’s fault—

Except my father’s. For trying to fly over the Hellers into a country where no man belongs ...

He hadn’t belonged. And yet the trailmen, whom he considered little better than roaming beasts, had taken the alien child into their city, their homes, their hearts. They had loved him. And he ...

*

“And I loved them,” I found myself saying half aloud, then realized that Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook my head rather groggily. “What’s the matter?”

“You frightened me,” she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison. He couldn’t even give me the splinter of life I’d won for myself, but had to come sneaking out of my mind, how he must hate me! Not half as much as I hated him, damn him! Along with everything else, he’d scared Kyla half to death!

She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking down into hell again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold world he’d made his life. Kyla’s face was lifted, soft and intent and pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed her, hard.

“Could a ghost do this?” I demanded, “or this?”

She whispered, “No—oh, no,” and her arms went up to lock around my neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and disappear.

Regis had been right. It had been the only way ...

*

The Old One was not old at all; the title was purely ceremonial. This one was young—not much older than I—but he had poise and dignity and the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur. It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in spreading from star to star. A feeling of knowing one’s own place, a dignity that didn’t demand recognition because it had never lacked for it.

Like all trailmen he had the chinless face and lobeless ears, the heavy-haired body which looked slightly less than human. He spoke very low—the trailmen have very acute hearing—and I had to strain my ears to listen, and remember to keep my own voice down.

He stretched his hand to me, and I lowered my head over it and murmured, “I take submission, Old One.”

“Never mind that,” he said in his gentle twittering voice, “sit down, my son. You are welcome here, but I feel you have abused our trust in you. We dismissed you to your own kind because we felt you would be happier so. Did we show you anything but kindness, that after so many years you return with armed men?”

The reproof in his red eyes was hardly an auspicious beginning. I said helplessly, “Old One, the men with me are not armed. A band of those-who-may-not-enter-cities attacked us, and we defended ourselves. I travelled with so many men only because I feared to travel the passes alone.”

“But does that explain why you have returned at all?” The reason and reproach in his voice made sense.

Finally I said, “Old One, we come as suppliants. My people appeal to your people in the hope that you will be—” I started to say, as human, stopped and amended “—that you will deal as kindly with them as with me.”

His face betrayed nothing. “What do you ask?”

I explained. I told it badly, stumbling, not knowing the technical terms, knowing they had no equivalents anyway in the trailmen’s language. He listened, asking a penetrating question now and again. When I mentioned the Terran Legate’s offer to recognize the trailmen as a separate and independent government, he frowned and rebuked me:

“We of the Sky People have no dealings with the Terrans, and care nothing for their recognition—or its lack.”

For that I had no answer, and the Old One continued, kindly but indifferently, “We do not like to think that the fever which is a children’s little sickness with us shall kill so many of your kind. But you cannot in all honesty blame us. You cannot say that we spread the disease; we never go beyond the mountains. Are we to blame that the winds change or the moons come together in the sky? When the time has come for men to die, they die.” He stretched his hand in dismissal. “I will give your men safe-conduct to the river, Jason. Do not return.”

Regis Hastur rose suddenly and faced him. “Will you hear me, Father?” He used the ceremonial title without hesitation, and the Old One said in distress, “The son of Hastur need never speak as a suppliant to the Sky People!”

“Nevertheless, hear me as a suppliant, Father,” Regis said quietly. “It is not the strangers and aliens of Terra who are pleading. We have learned one thing from the strangers of Terra, which you have not yet learned. I am young and it is not fitting that I should teach you, but you have said; are we to blame that the moons come together in the sky? No. But we have learned from the Terrans not to blame the moons in the sky for our own ignorance of the ways of the Gods—by which I mean the ways of sickness or poverty or misery.”

“These are strange words for a Hastur,” said the Old One, displeased.

“These are strange times for a Hastur,” said Regis loudly. The Old One winced, and Regis moderated his tone, but continued vehemently, “You blame the moons in the sky. I say the moons are not to blame—nor the winds—nor the Gods. The Gods send these things to men to test their wits and to find if they have the will to master them!”

*

The Old One’s forehead ridged vertically and he said with stinging contempt, “Is this the breed of king which men call Hastur now?”

“Man or God or Hastur, I am not too proud to plead for my people,” retorted Regis, flushing with anger. “Never in all the history of Darkover has a Hastur stood before one of you and begged—”

“—for the men from another world.”

“—for all men on our world! Old One, I could sit and keep state in the House of the Hasturs, and even death could not touch me until I grew weary of living! But I preferred to learn new lives from new men. The Terrans have something to teach even the Hasturs, and they can learn a remedy against the trailmen’s fever.” He looked round at me, turning the discussion over to me again, and I said:

“I am no alien from another world, Old One. I have been a son in your house. Perhaps I was sent to teach you to fight destiny. I cannot believe you are indifferent to death.”

Suddenly, hardly knowing what I was going to do until I found myself on my knees, I knelt and looked up into the quiet stern remote face of the nonhuman:

“My father,” I said, “you took a dying man and a dying child from a burning plane. Even those of their own kind might have stripped their corpses and left them to die. You saved the child, fostered him and treated him as a son. When he reached an age to be unhappy with you, you let a dozen of your people risk their lives to take him to his own. You cannot ask me to believe that you are indifferent to the death of a million of my people, when the fate of one could stir your pity!”

*

There was a moment’s silence. Finally the Old One said, “Indifferent—no. But helpless. My people die when they leave the mountains. The air is too rich for them. The food is wrong. The light blinds and tortures them. Can I send them to suffer and die, those people who call me father?”

And a memory, buried all my life, suddenly surfaced. I said urgently, “Father, listen. In the world I live in now, I am called a wise man. You need not believe me, but listen; I know your people, they are my people. I remember when I left you, more than a dozen of my foster-parents’ friends offered, knowing they risked death, to go with me. I was a child; I did not realize the sacrifice they made. But I watched them suffer, as we went lower in the mountains, and I resolved ... I resolved ...” I spoke with difficulty, forcing the words through a reluctant barricade, “... that since others had suffered so for me ... I would spend my life in curing the sufferings of others. Father, the Terrans call me a wise doctor, a man of healing. Among the Terrans I can see that my people, if they will come to us and help us, have air they can breathe and food which will suit them and that they are guarded from the light. I don’t ask you to send anyone, father. I ask only—tell your sons what I have told you. If I know your people—who are my people forever—hundreds of them will offer to return with me. And you may witness what your foster-son has sworn here; if one of your sons dies, your alien son will answer for it with his own life.”

The words had poured from me in a flood. They were not all mine; some unconscious thing had recalled in me that Jay Allison had power to make these promises. For the first time I began to see what force, what guilt, what dedication working in Jay Allison had turned him aside from me. I remained at the Old One’s feet, kneeling, overcome, ashamed of the thing I had become. Jay Allison was worth ten of me. Irresponsible, Forth had said. Lacking purpose, lacking balance. What right had I to despise my soberer self?

At last I felt the Old One touch my head lightly.

“Get up, my son,” he said, “I will answer for my people. And forgive me for my doubts and my delays.”

*

Neither Regis nor I spoke for a minute after we left the audience room; then, almost as one, we turned to each other. Regis spoke first, soberly.

“It was a fine thing you did, Jason. I didn’t believe he’d agree to it.”

“It was your speech that did it,” I denied. The sober mood, the unaccustomed surge of emotion, was still on me, but it was giving way to a sudden upswing of exaltation. Damn it, I’d done it! Let Jay Allison try to match that ...

Regis still looked grave. “He’d have refused, but you appealed to him as one of themselves. And yet it wasn’t quite that ... it was something more ...” Regis put a quick embarrassed arm around my shoulders and suddenly blurted out, “I think the Terran Medical played hell with your life, Jason! And even if it saves a million lives—it’s hard to forgive them for that!”

*

Late the next day the Old One called us in again, and told us that a hundred men had volunteered to return with us and act as blood donors and experimental subjects for research into the trailmen’s disease.

The trip over the mountains, so painfully accomplished was easier in return. Our escort of a hundred trailmen guaranteed us against attack, and they could choose the easiest paths.

Only as we undertook the long climb downward through the foothills did the trailmen, un-used to ground travel at any time, and suffering from the unaccustomed low altitude, begin to weaken. As we grew stronger, more and more of them faltered, and we travelled more and more slowly. Not even Kendricks could be callous about “inhuman animals” by the time we reached the point where we had left the pack animals. And it was Rafe Scott who came to me and said desperately, “Jason, these poor fellows will never make it to Carthon. Lerrys and I know this country. Let us go ahead, as fast as we can travel alone, and arrange at Carthon for transit—maybe we can get pressurized aircraft to fly them from here. We can send a message from Carthon, too, about accommodations for them at the Terran HQ.”

I was surprised and a little guilty that I had not thought of this myself. I covered it with a mocking, “I thought you didn’t give a damn about ‘any of my friends.’”

Rafe said doggedly, “I guess I was wrong about that. They’re going through this out of a sense of duty, so they must be pretty different than I thought they were.”

Regis, who had overheard Rafe’s plan, now broke in quietly, “There’s no need for you to travel ahead, Rafe. I can send a quicker message.”

I had forgotten that Regis was a trained telepath. He added, “There are some space and distance limitations to such messages, but there is a regular relay net all over Darkover, and one of the relays is a girl who lives at the very edge of the Terran Zone. Ifyou’ll tell me what will give her access to the Terran HQ—” he flushed slightly and explained, “from what I know of the Terrans, she would not be very fortunate relaying the message if she merely walked to the gate and said she had a relayed telepathic message for someone, would she?”

I had to smile at the picture that conjured up in my mind. “I’m afraid not,” I admitted. “Tell her to go to Dr. Forth, and give the message from Dr. Jason Allison.”

Regis looked at me curiously—it was the first time I had spoken my own name in the hearing of the others. But he nodded, without comment. For the next hour or two he seemed somewhat more pre-occupied than usual, but after a time he came to me and told me that the message had gone through. Sometime later he relayed an answer; that airlift would be waiting for us, not at Carthon, but a small village near the ford of the Kadarin where we had left our trucks.

When we camped that night there were a dozen practical problems needing attention; the time and exact place of crossing the ford, the reassurance to be given to terrified trailmen who could face leaving their forests but not crossing the final barricade of the river, the small help in our power to be given the sick ones. But after everything had been done that I could do, and after the whole camp had quieted down, I sat before the low-burning fire and stared into it, deep in painful lassitude. Tomorrow we would cross the river and a few hours later we would be back in the Terran HQ. And then....

And then ... and then nothing. I would vanish, I would utterly cease to exist anywhere, except as a vagrant ghost troubling Jay Allison’s unquiet dreams. As he moved through the cold round of his days I would be no more than a spent wind, a burst bubble, a thinned cloud.

The rose and saffron of the dying fire-colors gave shape to my dreams. Once more, as in the trailcity that night, Kyla slipped through firelight to my side, and I looked up at her and suddenly I knew I could not bear it. I pulled her to me and muttered, “Oh, Kyla—Kyla, I won’t even remember you!”

She pushed my hands away, kneeling upright, and said urgently, “Jason, listen. We are close to Carthon, the others can lead them the rest of the way. Why go back to them at all? Slip away now and never go back! We can—” she stopped, coloring fiercely, that sudden and terrifying shyness overcoming her again, and at last she said in a whisper, “Darkover is a wide world, Jason. Big enough for us to hide in. I don’t believe they would search very far.”

They wouldn’t. I could leave word with Kendricks—not with Regis, the telepath would see through me immediately—that I had ridden ahead to Carthon, with Kyla. By the time they realized that I had fled, they would be too concerned with getting the trailmen safely to the Terran Zone to spend much time looking for a runaway. As Kyla said, the world was wide. And it was my world. And I would not be alone in it.

“Kyla, Kyla,” I said helplessly, and crushed her against me, kissing her. She closed her eyes and I took a long, long look at her face. Not beautiful, no. But womanly and brave and all the other beautiful things. It was a farewell look, and I knew it, if she didn’t.

After the briefest time, she pulled a little away, and her flat voice was gentler and more breathless than usual. “We’d better leave before the others waken.” She saw that I did not move. “Jason—?”

I could not look at her. Muffled behind my hands, I said, “No, Kyla. I—I promised the Old One to look after my people in the Terran world. I must go back—”

“You won’t be there to look after them! You won’t be you!”

I said bleakly, “I’ll write a letter to remind myself. Jay Allison has a very strong sense of duty. He’ll look after them for me. He won’t like it, but he’ll do it, with his last breath. He’s a better man than I am, Kyla. You’d better forget about me.” I said, wearily, “I never existed.”

That wasn’t the end. Not nearly. She—begged, and I don’t know why I put myself through the hell of stubbornness. But in the end she ran away, crying, and I threw myself down by the fire, cursing Forth, cursing my own folly, but most of all cursing Jay Allison, hating my other self with a blistering, sickening rage.

*

Coming through the outskirts of the small village the next afternoon, the village where the airlift would meet us, we noted that the poorer quarter was almost abandoned. Regis said bleakly, “It’s begun,” and dropped out of line to stand in the doorway of a silent dwelling. After a minute he beckoned to me, and I looked inside.

I wished I hadn’t. The sight would haunt me while I lived. An old man, two young women and half a dozen children between four and fifteen years old lay inside. The old man, one of the children, and one of the young women were laid out neatly in clean death, shrouded, their faces covered with green branches after the Darkovan custom for the dead. The other young woman lay huddled near the fireplace, her coarse dress splattered with the filthy stuff she had vomited, dying. The children—but even now I can’t think of the children without retching. One, very small, had been in the woman’s arms when she collapsed; it had squirmed free—for a little while. The others were in an indescribable condition and the worst of it was that one of them was still moving, feebly, long past help. Regis turned blindly from the door and leaned against the wall, his shoulders heaving. Not, as I first thought, in disgust, but in grief. Tears ran over his hands and spilled down, and when I took him by the arm to lead him away, he reeled and fell against me.

He said in a broken, blurred, choking voice, “Oh, Lord, Jason, those children, those children—if you ever had any doubts about what you’re doing, any doubts about what you’ve done, think about that, think that you’ve saved a whole world from that, think that you’ve done something even the Hasturs couldn’t do!”

My own throat tightened with something more than embarrassment. “Better wait till we know for sure whether the Terrans can carry through with it, and you’d better get to hell away from this doorway. I’m immune, but damn it, you’re not.” But I had to take him and lead him away, like a child, from that house. He looked up into my face and said with burning sincerity, “I wonder if you believe I’d give my life, a dozen times over, to have done that?”

It was a curious, austere reward. But vaguely it comforted me. And then, as we rode into the village itself, I lost myself, or tried to lose myself, in reassuring the frightened trailmen who had never seen a city on the ground, never seen or heard of an airplane. I avoided Kyla. I didn’t want a final word, a farewell. We had had our farewells already.

*

Forth had done a marvelous job of having quarters ready for the trailmen, and after they were comfortably installed and reassured, I went down wearily and dressed in Jay Allison’s clothing. I looked out the window at the distant mountains and a line from the book on mountaineering, which I had bought as a youngster in an alien world, and Jay had kept as a stray fragment of personality, ran in violent conflict through my mind:

Something hidden—go and find it ...

Something lost beyond the ranges ...

*

I had just begun to live. Surely I deserved better than this, to vanish when I had just discovered life. Did the man who did not know how to live, deserve to live at all? Jay Allison—that cold man who had never looked beyond any ranges—why should I be lost in him?

Something lost beyond the ranges ... nothing would be lost but myself. I was beginning to loathe the overflown sense of duty which had brought me back here. Now, when it was too late, I was bitterly regretting ... Kyla had offered me life. Surely I would never see Kyla again.

Could I regret what I would never remember? I walked into Forth’s office as if I were going to my doom. I was ...

Forth greeted me warmly.

“Sit down and tell me all about it ...” he insisted. I would rather not speak. Instead, compulsively, I made it a full report ... and curious flickers came in and out of my consciousness as I spoke. By the time I realized I was reacting to a post-hypnotic suggestion, that in fact I was going under hypnosis again, it was too late and I could only think that this was worse than death because in a way I would be alive ...

*

Jay Allison sat up and meticulously straightened his cuff before tightening his mouth in what was meant for a smile. “I assume, then, that the experiment was a success?”

“A complete success.” Forth’s voice was somewhat harsh and annoyed, but Jay was untroubled; he had known for years that most of his subordinates and superiors disliked him, and had long ago stopped worrying about it.

“The trailmen agreed?”

“They agreed,” Forth said, surprised. “You don’t remember anything at all?”

“Scraps. Like a nightmare.” Jay Allison looked down at the back of his hand, flexing the fingers cautiously against pain, touching the partially healed red slash. Forth followed the direction of his eyes and said, not unsympathetically, “Don’t worry about your hand. I looked at it pretty carefully. You’ll have the total use of it.”

Jay said rigidly, “It seems to have been a pretty severe risk to take. Did you ever stop to think what it would have meant to me, to lose the use of my hand?”

“It seemed a justifiable risk, even if you had,” Forth said dryly. “Jay, I’ve got the whole story on tape, just as you told it to me. You might not like having a blank spot in your memory. Want to hear what your alter ego did?”

Jay hesitated. Then he unfolded his long legs and stood up. “No, I don’t think I care to know.” He waited, arrested by a twinge of a sore muscle, and frowned.

What had happened, what would he never know, why did the random ache bring a pain deeper than the pain of a torn nerve? Forth was watching him, and Jay asked irritably, “What is it?”

“You’re one hell of a cold fish, Jay.”

“I don’t understand you, sir.”

“You wouldn’t,” Forth muttered. “Funny. I liked your subsidiary personality.”

Jay’s mouth contracted in a mirthless grin.

“You would,” he said, and swung quickly round.

“Come on. If I’m going to work on that serum project I’d better inspect the volunteers and line up the blood donors and look over old whatshisname’s papers.”

But beyond the window the snowy ridges of the mountain, inscrutable, caught and held his eye; a riddle and a puzzle—

“Ridiculous,” he said, and went to his work.

*

Four months later, Jay Allison and Randall Forth stood together, watching the last of the disappearing planes, carrying the volunteers back toward Carthon and their mountains.

“I should have flown back to Carthon with them,” Jay said moodily. Forth watched the tall man stare at the mountain; wondered what lay behind the contained gestures and the brooding.

He said, “You’ve done enough, Jay. You’ve worked like the devil. Thurmond—the Legate—sent down to say you’d get an official commendation and a promotion for your part. That’s not even mentioning what you did in the trailmen’s city.” He put a hand on his colleague’s shoulder, but Jay shook it off impatiently.

All through the work of isolating and testing the blood fraction, Jay had worked tirelessly and unsparingly; scarcely sleeping, but brooding; silent, prone to fly into sudden savage rages, but painstaking. He had overseen the trailmen with an almost fatherly solicitude—but from a distance. He had left no stone unturned for their comfort—but refused to see them in person except when it was unavoidable.

Forth thought, we played a dangerous game. Jay Allison had made his own adjustment to life, and we disturbed that balance. Have we wrecked the man? He’s expendable, but damn it, what a loss! He asked, “Well, why didn’t you fly back to Carthon with them? Kendricks went along, you know. He expected you to go until the last minute.”

Jay did not answer. He had avoided Kendricks, the only witness to his duality. In all his nightmare brooding, the avoidance of anyone who had known him as Jason became a mania. Once, meeting Rafe Scott on the lower floor of the HQ, he had turned frantically and plunged like a madman through halls and corridors, to avoid coming face to face with the man, finally running up four flights of stairs and taking shelter in his rooms, with the pounding heart and bursting veins of a hunted criminal. At last he said, “If you’ve called me down here to read me the riot act about not wanting to make another trip into the Hellers—!”

“No, no,” Forth said equably, “there’s a visitor coming. Regis Hastur sent word he wants to see you. In case you don’t remember him, he was on Project Jason—”

“I remember,” Jay said grimly. It was nearly his one clear memory—the nightmare of the ledge, his slashed hand, the shameful naked body of the Darkovan woman, and—blurring these things, the too-handsome Darkovan aristocrat who had banished him for Jason again. “He’s a better psychiatrist than you are, Forth. He changed me into Jason in the flicker of an eyelash, and it took you half a dozen hypnotic sessions.”

“I’ve heard about the psi powers of the Hasturs,” Forth said, “but I’ve never been lucky enough to meet one in person. Tell me about it. What did he do?”

*

Jay made a tight movement of exasperation, too controlled for a shrug. “Ask him, why don’t you. Look, Forth, I don’t much care to see him. I didn’t do it for Darkover; I did it because it was my job. I’d prefer to forget the whole thing. Why don’t you talk to him?”

“I rather had the idea that he wanted to see you personally. Jay, you did a tremendous thing, man! Damn it, why don’t you strut a little? Be—be normal for once! Why, I’d be damned near bursting with pride if one of the Hasturs insisted on congratulating me personally!”

Jay’s lip twitched, and his voice shook with controlled exasperation. “Maybe you would. I don’t see it that way.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to. On Darkover nobody refuses when the Hasturs make a request—and certainly not a request as reasonable as this one.” Forth sat down beside the desk. Jay struck the woodwork with a violent clenched fist and when he lowered his hand there was a tiny smear of blood along his knuckles. After a minute he walked to the couch and sat down, very straight and stiff, saying nothing. Neither of the men spoke again until Forth started at the sound of a buzzer, drew the mouthpiece toward him, and said, “Tell him we are honored—you know the routine for dignitaries, and send him up here.”

Jay twisted his fingers together and ran his thumb, in a new gesture, over the ridge of scar tissue along the knuckles. Forth was aware of an entirely new quality in the silence, and started to speak to break it, but before he could do so, the office door slid open on its silent beam, and Regis Hastur stood there.

Forth rose courteously and Jay got to his feet like a mechanical doll jerked on strings. The young Darkovan ruler smiled engagingly at him:

“Don’t bother, this visit is informal; that’s the reason I came here rather than inviting you both to the Tower. Dr. Forth? It is a pleasure to meet you again, sir. I hope that our gratitude to you will soon take a more tangible form. There has not been a single death from the trailmen’s fever since you made the serum available.”

Jay, motionless, saw bitterly that the old man had succumbed to the youngster’s deliberate charm. The chubby, wrinkled old face seamed up in a pleased smile as Forth said, “The gifts sent to the trailmen in your name, Lord Hastur, were greatly welcomed.”

“Do you think that any of us will ever forget what they have done?” Regis replied. He turned toward the window and smiled rather tentatively at the man who stood there; motionless since his first conventional gesture of politeness:

“Dr. Allison, do you remember me at all?”

“I remember you,” Jay Allison said sullenly.

His voice hung heavy in the room, its sound a miasma in his ears. All his sleepless, nightmare-charged brooding, all his bottled hate for Darkover and the memories he had tried to bury, erupted into overwrought bitterness against this too-ingratiating youngster who was a demigod on this world and who had humiliated him, repudiated him for the hated Jason ... for Jay, Regis had suddenly become the symbol of a world that hated him, forced him into a false mold.

A black and rushing wind seemed to blur the room. He said hoarsely, “I remember you all right,” and took one savage, hurtling step.

The weight of the unexpected blow spun Regis around, and the next moment Jay Allison, who had never touched another human being except with the remote hands of healing, closed steely, murderous hands around Regis’ throat. The world thinned out into a crimson rage. There were shouting and sudden noises, and a red-hot explosion in his brain ...

*

“You’d better drink this,” Forth remarked, and I realized I was turning a paper cup in my hands. Forth sat down, a little weakly, as I raised it to my lips and sipped. Regis took his hand away from his throat and said huskily, “I could use some of that, Doctor.”

I put the whiskey down. “You’ll do better with water until your throat muscles are healed,” I said swiftly, and went to fill a throwaway cup for him, without thinking. Handing it to him. I stopped in sudden dismay and my hand shook, spilling a few drops. I said hoarsely, swallowing, “—but drink it, anyway—”

Regis got a few drops down, painfully, and said, “My own fault. The moment I saw—Jay Allison—I knew he was a madman. I’d have stopped him sooner only he took me by surprise.”

“But—you say him—I’m Jay Allison,” I said, and then my knees went weak and I sat down. “What in hell is this? I’m not Jay—but I’m not Jason, either—”

I could remember my entire life, but the focus had shifted. I still felt the old love, the old nostalgia for the trailmen; but I also knew, with a sure sense of identity, that I was Doctor Jason Allison, Jr., who had abandoned mountain climbing and become a specialist in Darkovan parasitology. Not Jay who had rejected his world; not Jason who had been rejected by it. But then who?

Regis said quietly, “I’ve seen you before—once. When you knelt to the Old One of the trailmen.” With a whimsical smile he said, “As an ignorant superstitious Darkovan, I’d say that you were a man who’d balanced his god and daemon for once.”

I looked helplessly at the young Hastur. A few seconds ago my hands had been at his throat. Jay or Jason, maddened by self-hate and jealousy, could disclaim responsibility for the other’s acts.

I couldn’t.

Regis said, “We could take the easy way out, and arrange it so we’d never have to see each other again. Or we could do it the hard way.” He extended his hand, and after a minute, I understood, and we shook hands briefly, like strangers who have just met. He added, “Your work with the trailmen is finished, but We Hasturs committed ourselves to teach some of the Terrans our science—matrix mechanics. Dr. Allison—Jason—you know Darkover, and I think we could work with you. Further, you know something about slipping mental gears. I meant to ask; would you care to be one of them? You’d be ideal.”

I looked out the window at the distant mountains. This work—this would be something which would satisfy both halves of myself. The irresistible force, the immovable object—and no ghosts wandering in my brain. “I’ll do it,” I told Regis. And then, deliberately, I turned my back on him and went up to the quarters, now deserted, which we had readied for the trailmen. With my new doubled—or complete—memories, another ghost had roused up in my brain, and I remembered a woman who had appeared vaguely in Jay Allison’s orbit, unnoticed, working with the trailmen, tolerated because she could speak their language. I opened the door, searched briefly through the rooms, and shouted, “Kyla!” and she came. Running. Disheveled. Mine.

At the last moment, she drew back a little from my arms and whispered, “You’re Jason—but you’re something more. Different ...”

“I don’t know who I am,” I said quietly, “but I’m me. Maybe for the first time. Want to help me find out just who that is?”

I put my arm around her, trying to find a path between memory and tomorrow. All my life, I had walked a strange road toward an unknown horizon. Now, reaching my horizon, I found it marked only the rim of an unknown country.

Kyla and I would explore it together.

The Stars Are Waiting

ON A CERTAIN street in Washington, there is a certain building which makes the Pentagon, by comparison, look like Open House. I’m not going to tell you even what street the building is on. If I did, a certain very secret division of the FBI would be breathing down my neck before you could say “Security.” So; on this certain street, in this certain building, is a certain room, and I sleep in that room.

My name is David Rohrer, and I am an M.D. with certain other qualifications. If you’re getting bored with these equivocations, read on; I’ll be specific enough in a minute or two.

It was on a Tuesday night in 1964; that’s close enough to the actual date. If you’re curious, it was six months to the day after India closed all her frontiers. Of course, you didn’t read about that in the newspapers, but if you were a tourist or a missionary going to India, you found out about it the hard way.

As I say, on a Tuesday night in 1964, about eleven-thirty, the phone in my room suddenly rang. I swore, sat up, grabbed the thing and put it to my ear. I knew it would be important; there are no outside lines in the building, except a specially sealed off and scrambled wire which goes to the White House, and another one to a room on the top floor of the Pentagon. The room telephones are all inside communication, easier, and more private, than a public address system.

“Rohrer,” I said curtly.

I recognized the voice that answered. You would too; you’ve heard it often enough, telecast from the floor of the Senate. “Get down here, Doc,” right away. Flanders is back!”

I didn’t even waste time answering. I dropped the phone cradle, shoved feet into my shoes, hauled on trousers over my pajamas, grabbed my bag and ran downstairs.

The Senator’s room was on the second floor. I could see lights around the crack beneath his door and heard muted voices coming from inside. I shoved the door open.

“It’s the Doc!” someone said as I pushed my way through the crowd.

The Senator, in striped pajamas that would have looked better on a film star, was sitting on the edge of the bed, and a group of men whom even the president wouldn’t recognize were gathered around. In the bed which had obviously been occupied, not long ago, by the Senator, a man was lying.

He was fully clad—socks, overcoat, but someone had pulled off his shoes, which were filthy with mud. His head lolled back on the pillow. I could see at that distance that he wasn’t dead; his chest rose and fell heavily, and his breathing was a stertorous noise in the room. I pushed some of the police aside and took up his lax hand.

“What happened here? What’s the matter?” I asked to nobody in particular. I didn’t actually expect an answer, but curiously enough I got it from the Senator, of all people.

“Nothing. He just walked tip the front steps and in. Bagley, in the hall, recognized him and sent him up to my room. He knocked—the regular code knock—so I got up and let him in, and he collapsed.”

I glanced at his overcoat while I felt the thumping pulse. “He’s bone-dry. It’s pouring rain outdoors. Even if he came in a cab, how did he get here without so much as his hair getting wet?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” one of the men growled.

“There’s something funny going on . . .” someone murmured.

“Damned funny.” I let the man’s hand drop and opened my bag.

After a brief examination, I straightened up. “There isn’t a wound anywhere on him. Not even a bump or concussion on his head. Either he’s fainted from shock—which, judging from his pulse and heartbeat, seems unlikely, or at least a typical—or he’d doped. And I don’t know of any drug that would do that.” I pushed up his eyelid. The eye seemed normal, the pupils neither dilated nor contracted.

As I frowned in puzzlement, the man’s eyes suddenly opened. He stared around rationally for a moment, and his eyes came to rest on me. I asked quietly, “How do you feel now?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Certainly.” He seemed to make an attempt to sit up; gave it up.

“What is your name?” I asked him quietly.

“Julian Flanders.” He smiled, and added, “Of course.”

The Senator interceded with a question, “How did you get here without getting wet?”

A faint look of distress came over his face.

“I don’t know.”

Another man, who was in at least temporary authority, put in, “When did you leave India, Flanders?”

“I don’t know.”

“Amnesia,” I said low-toned, “partial aphasia.”

The man in authority grabbed my arm. “Rohrer, listen! Can you bring him out of it? You’ve got to bring him out of it!”

I answered, “I don’t know. Certainly not now. The man’s in no condition—”

“He’s got to be in condition.”

I said with some sternness, “His heartbeat is so far above normal that it’s dangerous even to try to make him talk. I’m going to give him a sedative,” bending over my bag, I began to load a hypodermic, “and he must rest in quiet for, some hours. After that, perhaps we can question him. He may, of course, come out of it with memory completely restored, if his heart doesn’t fail.”

I gave the injection. Flanders’ heavy breathing gradually stilled a little; the heartbeat diminished infinitesimally, but went on thud-thudding at a dangerous rate.

A doctor has privileges. I managed to clear everybody out of the room except the top man of the secret police, and told the Senator to go upstairs and climb into my bed; I’d stay with Flanders. Eventually, the building quieted down. To make a long story short, I sat by Flanders, smoking and thinking, until dawn. He slept, breathing heavily, without moving even a finger or foot, until morning. I knew how odd that in itself was; a normal sleeper, even the one who vows that he sleeps like a log, turns over some eighteen times in a normal night. Flanders did not stir. It would have been like watching a corpse, except for the rasping breaths, and the steady thump-thump of his heart when I bent and put a stethoscope to his chest.

It would be both foolish and futile to write down the events of the next few days. Important faces came and went, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. I had to report; No Change. Flanders woke now and then. He knew his name, answered ordinary questions, about his early life, recognized his wife when a plainclothesman brought her secretly into the building, asked about his children. But whenever anyone asked a question about anything which had happened since the day he had left this house with a secret pass which would smuggle him into India, the answer was always the same; the look of acute distress, the quickened breathing, and the muttered, disturbed “I—don’t know—”

On Saturday morning, the Senator called me out of the room. “The Chief wants to see you downstairs, Rohrer,” he told me, and I scowled. “I can’t leave my patient—”

The Senator looked disgusted. “You know as well as I do, there won’t be any reason you’d have to stay. I’ll baby-sit with him myself.” He gave me a little shove, “Go on, Doc. I think this is important.”

The conference room downstairs was so elaborately soundproofed that it might have been on the moon. There were good reasons for that, of course. But it always made me nervous.

Secrets have been told in that room for which twenty governments would give anything short of their plutonium stockpiles. After I came in, a guard at the door went through a careful ritual of locking it again, and I turned to look around the table.

Some of the men I knew by name. Others I knew by reputation or because their faces were familiar to the newspapers. The man at the head of the table, who seemed tobe in charge, was one of the top men in the FBI, and itwas he who spoke first.

“Sit down, Dr. Rohrer,” he said courteously, “Can you tell us anything about Mr. Flanders?”

I took a seat and told them briefly what I knew of the case. I was perfectly candid about admitting that the circumstances baffled me. When I had finished, the Chief cleared his throat and looked around the table. “I just wanted to add,” he put in unobtrusively, “that there is no use in suggesting that we summon other medical advice.” He coughed, “Dr. Rohrer is probably better qualified than any man presently in the United States, and everyone at this table will realize the impossibility of calling in anyone from outside.”

He looked back at me, “Is there any chance of restoring Mr. Flanders’ memory and his ability to speak within a few days?” he asked me bluntly. “I may as well add now, Doctor, that for these purposes we must consider Flanders as expendable. Provided that you can restore his memory and powers of speech in time to avert what we believe will be a major military catastrophe, you need not worry about the eventual consequences in the terms of Flanders’ health.”

I didn’t like that. No medical man would. At the same time, I realized that the Chief meant exactly what he said. The cold war which America has been fighting, on and off, for the past twenty-two years, was in a stage of minor retrenchment. Our soldiers were not wearing uniforms and carrying bazookas and badger-jets; they were dodging, like Flanders, in and out of the nets of intrigue. Flanders was not a private in this hierarchy of strategy; in (fact, he probably ranked as a brigadier general had there been any way to evaluate worth. I knew, then, how desperate the situation must be.

I told them slowly, “We can try narcosynthsis, hypnosis, electric shock if that fails. I must warn you, however, that Flanders’ heart may fail at any moment.”

“It mustn’t!” one man barked, “Not until we know what happened!” He stood up and pounded on the table with something which could have been mere irritation or actual hysteria, “Chief, can’t you tell Rohrer why we have to wring out what’s inside Flanders’ head before he conks out?”

The man at the head of the table turned toward him and spoke placatingly, “Of course. I have already said that Dr. Rohrer is to be trusted implicitly.”

There were a few minutes of silence; then the Chief began to talk.

I had known, of course, when India closed her frontiers. In this certain house in Washington that kind of news comes in as a matter of course, although not a whisper of it gets into the papers or even reaches the Pentagon. I had not known that India’s first move had been to, cancel all her munitions orders.

I learned it now for the first time. Nearly eight months ago, India had quite suddenly cancelled all orders outstanding, in England and in the United States, for munitions, armaments and the flood of war supplies which the United States has poured out in the name of a prepared Free World united against a sudden move from the other side of the Steel Curtain. With the exception of a sudden recession in the Wall Street tickers, this had had little effect on the world. One of the Indian representatives in the United Nations had made one of the perennial Disarmament Speeches which come from India. This resolution had been shouted down without a vote. Then India had just quietly closed her frontiers.

Americans, Englishmen, all foreign citizens, were asked politely to leave the country. At first, we had been fearful that this heralded a sudden shifting of the Indian influence to the Russo-Chinese coalition; however, angry radio messages filtering out, announced that Russian, Chinese and Korean nationals had been expelled even less politely from India.

Then the news blackout had begun.

India did not withdraw from the U. N., although all outstanding Indian troops were withdrawn from the world’s various fronts. To angry questions, Hindu and Moslem diplomats returned equivocal answers; they had decided that disarmament was the only way to world peace. Naturally, for the sake of morale, this had been kept out of the newspapers; fake speeches and photographs were concocted to keep any hint of the true situation from filtering down to the restless public. Planes which crossed the frontier into India were challenged and turned back, without violence but with unquestionable menace. The sea harbors were closed, and from the north came word that the northern entrances to India had all been closed by dynamiting the rocky and treacherous passes of the Himalayas.

To all intents and purposes, India had simply seceded from the planet Earth.

It was apparent to any politician, the Chief continued, what really had happened. India had simply discovered some great secret weapon and was working for world domination in one great master stroke. If the brainless fools in the U. N. had any sense, he continued, they would have made terms with Russia, to unite and wipe out this menace to Free World and Russo-Chinese coalition both. India, he ranted on, was obviously a traitor to the Free World, and must suffer a traitor’s punishment. He glowered around the table and went on in a little more muted mutter; public opinion still had a few fools who kept contending, in loud-mouthed idiocy, that India had simply been seized by some sort of Hindu revival of non-violence and Neo-Gandhiism, and was actually disarming behind its curtain of silence. And while we were stalling, he shouted, Norway had suddenly cut off all munitions orders. Her frontiers would be closed any day, and already the slump in the armament industries was threatening a serious world depression!

After a ferocious scowl, he continued, directly at me, not orating now but talking like a badly scared man, “So you can understand, perhaps, Doctor, why we have to know what has happened to Flanders. We sent him secretly to India to find out what’s really been happening. He managed to radio back a code message that he was on the trail, only a week ago Monday. This is Sunday. They tell me that he turned up on the steps here Tuesday night. Flanders knows about what’s been happening in India!”

He rose in dismissal. I sat still, staring in dismay, I hadn’t believed that anything like this was possible!

I said hoarsely, “I’ll do my best, Chief.”

I tried everything I dared. There wouldn’t be much point in detailing the things we tried, because the details wouldn’t mean much to a layman, and besides, most of them are still marked Classified. Things like that may not mean much now, but I want to stay on the outside of the Federal prison until the day comes.

Anyhow, eventually, on a Tuesday night—another rainy Tuesday, almost exactly a month after the night when Flanders appeared in dry clothing and muddy shoes in the Senator’s bedroom, I knew that he was going to talk, I signalled to the Chief and the Senator, who had been present at all tests, to switch on a dictaphone. There might not be time for much questioning, and there certainly was no margin for recovering ground which Flanders might go over sketchily. We’d have to get it down, word for word,™ just as he said it, while his strength lasted.

The dictaphone began to .hum. I gave Flanders the shot, and asked him a few preliminary test questions. Almost abruptly, his stertorous breathing stopped; he began to breathe normally and quietly, although the pounding heartbeat continued, on and on, a thunder in my stethoscope. He wouldn’t last long under this dosage. But he’d remember, and we might be able to get his story down. He began to talk. ...

The room was silent. There was only the heavy pounding in the stethoscopes and the occasional rasp as one of the listeners shifted his weight. Flanders was a tall, lean man, normally, and he had lost so much weight that he resembled a skeleton. His face was a death-mask molded in yellow wax, and his lips barely moved while his voice was a racking whisper in the stillness.

“Chief—Senator—Doc. I’ve got something to say—don’t interrupt me—important I say it. I won’t last long. I’m a— kind of booby-trap. A puzzle. They sent me back—a locked puzzle—if you could unlock me, then you’re fit to have the answer. Sort of a final test.”

The whisper receded for a moment, and he took up the story as if there had been no interval, “. . . . went to India, like I was sent, and found out where they kept the government now. Chief, there isn’t any government any more. Just a lot of happy people. No government. No famine. Bright colors . . . food you never tasted, and the ships that come and go every day . . . ships—”

I thought he was delirious, and felt for his pulse. He jerked his hand away in irritation, and I said gently, “What ships, Flanders? All the sea harbors are closed.”

And the man smiled, a curiously sweet smile, and murmured, “Not those harbors. I mean the ships from the stars.”

The Senator muttered, “He’s mad as a Hatter!”

“No, Doc, Chief—listen,” Flanders’ broken whisper went on, “I seen them. Big ships, whooshing down in the plains. Big spaceport—north of Delhi. I saw one of the men from the stairs. I’m a—” he paused and sighed wearily, “God, I’m tired—I’m a volunteer. He asked me if I felt like dying to bring the message back. He said I couldn’t go out and live, because if they didn’t believe me—I mean if you folks didn’t believe me—then they couldn’t have anybody spreading stories. Can I give you the message? Will you make a record of it? Then I can—quit—and I’m so tired—”

The Chief started to rise. Imperatively, with the authority of a medical man, I gestured him sharply back. “Sit still!” I said humoringly to Flanders, “Tell us. We’ve got a dictaphone.”

He muttered in that terrible racked whisper, “Show me— got to see it—hooked up—my own words—”

Over the Chief’s angry gesture, I showed Flanders the dictaphone.

He leaned back on his pillows, smiling. I have never seen a happier smile on the face of a child. He stirred a little and put out his hand, and incredibly I felt the terrible racked heartbeats slowing and easing. And abruptly the emaciated body heaved itself .upright, and Flanders suddenly spoke in a new, a strong and sharp voice.

“Men of America, of the planet which you call Earth,” he said strongly, “This man Flanders is a volunteer whom we are using to bring you our message. And this is what we have to say. The stars are waiting for you. The stars are waiting.”

A moment’s pause; then that sharp, strong inflexible voice continued, “A hundred thousand years ago, men’s ancestors lived on this world and were a part of the great empire which stretches from sun to sun and has so stretched since before your planet was born out of the womb of your little yellow star. Great catacylsms of nature wrecked your planet. Many were evacuated, but many chose to stay with their home world, with the floods, the sunken continents, the deluges and tidal waves. For this they paid a price. They reverted to savagery. And savages know no space.”

Another, long, quiet pause, while the Senator said in the sharp stillness, “Impossible! This is—”

“Shut up!” the chief snapped, for Flanders, or rather, the curiously alien voice through Flanders, was speaking again.

“. . . assume that you have reclimbed most of the distance from savagery, and the stars are waiting for you. We have been watching. We are ready to reclaim your world. We make only one condition; there is no war in space. We insist upon trust and sufferance. We insist. We do not show ourselves until we know that you are ready.

“Whatever country will totally remove and destroy all weapons of disaster, whatever country will close off their frontiers and withdraw completely from a world torn by war, that nation and that people will be received into the Commonwealth of the Stars. It is so with the state you call India. It is so with the state you call Norway, which today has closed its frontiers.

“The invitation is extended equally to all. Lay down your arms. You will be protected in ways you cannot even imagine. You need not fear that your enemies on this Earth will Be permitted to harm you, for they, _and not you, are the truly isolated.

“Display your trust and your will to nonagression. Disarm yourselves. Lay down your arms. The stars are waiting.”

The voice trailed off, was silent. The thunder in the stethoscopes began again. Flanders slumped; the rattling breath, tortured, tore through the room, stopped.

I let my hand drop from his wrist.

“He’s dead, sir,” I said.

Before the words were out of my mouth, the Senator was clawing at the telephone.

“Get me the President!”

Exiles of Tomorrow

I

“A VERY STRANGE thing happened when I was born,” Carey Kennaird told me.

He paused and refilled his wine glass, looking at me with a curious appraisal in his young and very blue eyes. I returned his glance as casually as I could, wondering why he had suddenly decided to confide in me.

I had known Carey Kennaird for only a few weeks. We were the most casual of acquaintances; a word in the lobby of our hotel, a cup of coffee in a lunchroom he liked, mugs of beer in the quiet back room of the corner bar. He was intelligent and I had enjoyed his conversation. But until now it had consisted entirely of surface commonplaces. Today, he seemed to be opening up a trifle.

He had volunteered the information, unasked, that he was the son of a well-known research physicist, and that he was in Chicago to look for his father who had disappeared mysteriously a week or so before. Young Kennaird seemed oddly unworried about his father’s plight. But I was pleased at the way his reserve appeared to be dropping.

As I say, Carey Kennaird had a casual way with him, and he puzzled me. He did not, somehow, seem emotionally in sympathy with the hectic tempo of the rushed age in which he had grown up.

“Well,” I told him noncommitally, “childhood memories often make quite normal events seem strange. What was it?”

The appraisal in his eyes was franker now. “Mr. Grayne, do you ever read science-fiction?”

“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “At least, only very occasionally.”

He looked a little crestfallen. “Oh—well, do you know anything about the familiar science-fiction concept of traveling in time?”

“A little,” I finished my drink, wishing the waiter would bring us another bottle of wine. “It’s supposed to involve some quite staggering paradoxes, I believe. I’m thinking of the man who goes back in time and kills his own grandfather?”

He looked disgusted. “That’s at best a trite layman’s idea!”

“Well, I’m a layman,” I said genially. The arrogance of young people always strikes me as being pathetic rather than insulting. I did not think young Kennaird could have been more than nineteen. Twenty, perhaps. “Now then, young fellow, don’t tell me you’ve actually invented a time machine!”

“Good Lord, no!” The denial was so laughingly spontaneous that I had to laugh with him, “No, just an idea that interests me. I don’t really believe there’s much paradox involved in time-travel at all.”

He paused, his eyes still on my face. “See here, Mr. Grayne, I’d like to—well, do you mind listening to something rather fantastic? I’m not drunk, but I’ve got a good reason for wanting to confide in you. You see, I know a great deal about you, really.”

I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been prepared for just such a statement. I grinned a strained grin at the boy. “No, go ahead,” I told him. “I’m interested.” I leaned back in my chair, preparing to listen.

You see, I knew what he was going to say.

II

Ryn Kenner sat in his cell, his head buried in his hands.

“Oh, God—” he muttered to himself, over and over.

There were so many unpredictable risks involved. Even though he had spent three years coaching Cara, teaching her to guard against every possible contingency, he still might fail. If only he could have eliminated the psychic block. But that, of course, was the most necessary risk of all.

Sometimes, in spite of his humanitarian training, Ryn Kenner thought the old, primitive safeguards had been better. Executing murderers, locking maniacs up in cells was certainly better than exiling men in this horrible new way. Ryn Kenner knew that he would have preferred to die. Two or three times he had even thought of slashing his wrists with a razor before the Exile. Once he had actually set a razor against his right wrist, but his early training had been too strong for him. Even the word suicide could set off a mental complex of quivering nerve reactions impossible to control.

The tragedy, Kenner thought despondently, resided in the paradox that civilization had become too enlightened. There had been a time when men had thought that traveling backward in time would upset the framework of events and change the future. But it had been a manifestly mistaken

idea, for in this year, 2543 A.D., the whole past had already occurred, and the present moment contained within itself the entire past, including whatever rectifying attempts time-travelers had made in that past.

Kenner shivered as he realized that his own acts had all occurred in the past. He, Ryn Kenner, had already died— six centuries before.

Time-travel—the perfect, ‘the most humane way of banishing criminals! He had heard all the arguments which sophistry could muster. The strong individualists were clearly misfits in the enlightened twenty-sixth century. For their own good, they should be exiled to eras psychologically congenial to them. A good many of them had been sent to California in the year 1849. They thus took a one-way trip to an era where murder was not a crime, but a social necessity, the respectable business of a gentleman. Religious fanatics were exiled to the First Dark Ages, where they could not disturb the tranquil materialism of the present century; too aggressive atheists, to the twenty-third century.

Kenner rose and began to pace his cell, which was a prison in fact, if not in appearance. Outside the wide window spread a spacious view of Nyor Harbor, and the room was luxuriously furnished. He knew, however, that if he stepped a foot past the lines which had been drawn around the door, he would be instantly overpowered by a powerful sleeping gas. He had tried it once, with almost disastrous results.

This hour of high decision was his last in the twenty-sixth century. In fifty minutes, in his own personal, subjective time from now, he would be somewhere in the twentieth century, the era to which his rashness had condemned him when he had been apprehended by the psycho police while attempting to re-discover the fabulous atomic isotopes. And he wouldn’t remember enough to get back. He would be permitted to keep all his training—all his knowledge, and memory—but there would be a fatal reservation.

Never, for the rest of his life, would Kenner be able to remember that he had come from the past. For the three weeks during which he had been confined to the cell the radiant suggestor had been steadily beaming at his brain. No defense his mind could devise had sufficed to stay its slow inroads into his thought.

Already his brain was beginning to grow fuzzy and he knew that the time was short. He drew a long breath, hearing steps in the corridor, and the whistle which meant the hypnotic gas was being momentarily turned off.

He stopped pacing.

Abruptly the door opened, and a psycho-supervisor entered the cell. Framed in the radiance behind him—

“Cara!” Kenner almost sobbed, and ran forward to catch his wife in his arms, and hold her with hungry violence. She cried softly against him. “Rhy, Ryn, it won’t be long—”

The supervisor’s face was compassionate. “Kenner,” he said, “you may have twenty minutes alone with your wife. You will be unsupervised.” The door closed softly behind him.

Kenner led Cara to a seat. She tried to hold back her tears, looking at him with wide, frightened eyes. “Ryh, darling, I thought you might have—”

“Hush, Cara,” he whispered. “They may be listening. Just remember everything I’ve told you. You mustn’t risk being sent to a different year. You already know what to do.”

“I’ll—find you,” she promised.

“Let’s not talk about it,” Kenner urged gently. “We haven’t long. Grayne promised he’d look after you until—”

“I know. He’s been good to me while you were here.”

The twenty minutes didn’t seem long. The supervisor pretended not to notice while Cara clung to Kenner in a last agony of farewell. Ryn brushed the tears away from her eyes, softly.

“See you in nineteen forty-five, Cara,” he whispered, and let her go.

“It’s a date darling,” were her last words before she followed the supervisor out of the prison. Kenner, in the last few moments remaining to him, before he sank into sleep again, desperately tried to marshal what little knowledge he possessed about the twentieth century.

His brain felt dark now, and oppressed, as if someone had wrapped his mind in smothering folds of wool. Dimly he knew that when he woke, his prison would be yet unbuilt. And yet, all the rest of his life he would be in prison— the prison of a mind that would never let him speak the truth.

III

“—and of course, this hypothetical psychic block would also contain provision prohibiting marriage with anyone from the past,” Carey Kennaird finished. “It would naturally be inconvenient for children to be born of the time exiles. But if my hypothetical man from the future should actually find the wife he’d arranged to have exiled with him, there’d be no psychic block against marrying her.” He paused, staring at me steadily. “Now, what would happen to the kid?”

My own glass stood empty. I signalled to the waiter, but Kennaird shook his head. “Thanks, I’ve had enough.”

I paid for the wine. “Suppose we walk to the hotel together, Kennaird?” I said. “You’ve got a fascinating theory there, my boy. It would make a fine plot for a science-fiction novel. Are you a writer? Of course, what happened to the

boy—” we passed together into the blinding sunlight of the Chicago Loop, “—would be the climax of your story.”

“It would,” Kennaird agreed.

We crossed the street beneath the thundering El trains, and stood in front of Marshall Fields while Carey lit a cigarette.

“Smoke?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No thanks. You said you had a reason for confiding in me, young man. What is it?”

He looked at me curiously. “I think you know, Mr. Grayne. You weren’t born in the Twentieth Century. I was, of course. But you’re like Dad and Cara. You’re a time exile, too, aren’t you?

“I know you can’t say anything, because of the psychic block. But you don’t have to deny it. That’s how Dad told me. He made me read science-fiction. Then he made me ask him leading questions—and just answered yes or no.” Young Kennaird paused. “I don’t have the psychic block. Dad was trying to help me discover the time-travel device. He came up to Chicago, and disappeared. But I’m on the right track now. I’m sure of it. I think Dad got back somehow.”

Even though I’d known what he was going to say, I swallowed hard.

“Something very strange did happen when you were born,” I said. “You put a peculiar strain on the whole framework of time. It was something that never should have happened, because of—” my voice faltered, “the psychic block against marrying anyone from the past.”

Carey Kennaird looked at me intently. “Hard to talk about the psychic block, isn’t it? Dad never could.”

I nodded without speaking. We climbed the hotel steps together. “Come up to my room,” I urged. “We’ll talk it over. You see, Carey—I’m going to call you that—Kenner used to be my friend.”

“I wonder,” Carey said, “If Dad got home to the twenty-sixth century.”

“He did.”

Carey stared. “Mr. Grayne! Is he all right?”

Regretfully, I shook my head. The elevator boy let us off on the fourth floor. I wondered if he, too, were an exile. I wondered how many people in Chicago were exiles, sullen behind the mask of a mental block which clamped a gag on their lips when they tried to speak the truth.

I wondered how many men, and how many women, were living such a lie, day in, and day out, lonely, miserable exiles from their own tomorrow, victims of a fate literally worse than death. Small wonder they would do anything to avoid such a fate.

My door closed behind us. While Carey stared, wide-eyed, at the device which loomed darkly in one corner of the room, I went to my desk, and removed the shining disk. I walked straight up to him. “This is from your father,” I told him. “Look at it carefully.”

He accepted it eagerly, his eyes blazing with excitement, sensing at once that it had come from the twenty-sixth century.

He died instantly.

Hating my work, hating time-travel, hating the whole chain of events, which had made me an instrument of justice, I stepped into the device that would return me to the twenty-sixth century.

Carey Kennaird had told the truth. A very strange thing had happened at his birth. Like an extra electron bombarding an unstable isotope, he had broken the link that held the framework of time together. His birth had started a chain reaction that had ended, for me, a week before in 2556, when Kenner and Cara had reappeared in the twenty-sixth century and been murdered in a panic by the psycho-supervisors. I, already condemned to time exile, had won a free pardon for my work, a commutation of my sentence to a light reprimand and the loss of my position. It was ugly work and I hated it, for Kenner and Cara had been my friends. But I had no freedom of choice. Anything was better than exile into time.

Anything, anything.

Besides, it had been necessary.

It isn’t lawful for children to be born before their parents.

The Colors of Space

Chapter One

The Lhari spaceport didn’t belong on Earth.

Bart Steele had thought that, a long time ago, when he first saw it. He had been just a kid then; twelve years old, and all excited about seeing Earth for the first time—Earth, the legendary home of mankind before the Age of Space, the planet of Bart’s far-back ancestors. And the first thing he’d seen on Earth, when he got off the starship, was the Lhari spaceport.

And he’d thought, right then, It doesn’t belong on Earth.

He’d said so to his father, and his father’s face had gone strange, bitter and remote.

"A lot of people would agree with you, Son," Captain Rupert Steele had said softly. "The trouble is, if the Lhari spaceport wasn’t on Earth, we wouldn’t be on Earth either. Remember that."

Bart remembered it, five years later, as he got off the strip of moving sidewalk. He turned to wait for Tommy Kendron, who was getting his baggage off the center strip of the moving roadway. Bart Steele and Tommy Kendron had graduated together, the day before, from the Space Academy of Earth. Now Tommy, who had been born on the ninth planet of the star Capella, was taking the Lhari starship to his faraway home, and Bart’s father was coming back to Earth, on the same starship, to meet his son.

Five years, Bart thought. That’s a long time. I wonder if Dad will know me?

"Let me give you a hand with that stuff, Tommy."

“I can manage,” Tommy chuckled, hefting the plastic cases. “They don’t allow you much baggage weight on the Lhari ships. Certainly not more than I can handle.”

The two lads stood in front of the spaceport gate for a minute. Over the gate, which was high and pointed and made of some clear colorless material like glass, was a jagged symbol resembling a flash of lightning; the sign, in Lhari language, for the home world of the Lhari.

They walked through the pointed glass gate, and stood for a moment, by mutual consent, looking down over the vast expanse of the Lhari spaceport.

This had once been a great desert. Now it was all floored in with some strange substance that was neither glass, metal nor concrete; it looked like gleaming crystal—though it felt soft underfoot—and in the glare of the noonday sun, it gave back the glare in a million rainbow flashes. Tommy put his hands up to his eyes to shield them. “The Lhari must have funny eyes, if they can stand all this glare!”

Inside the glass gate, a man in a guard’s uniform gave them each a pair of dark glasses. “Put them on now, boys. And don’t look directly at the ship when it lands.”

Tommy hooked the earpieces of the dark glasses over his ears, and sighed with relief. Bart frowned, but finally put them on. Bart’s mother had been a Mentorian—from the planet Mentor, of the star Deneb, a hundred times brighter than the sun. Bart had her eyes. But Mentorians weren’t popular on Earth, and Bart had learned to be quiet about his mother.

Through the dark lenses, the glare was only a pale gleam. Far out in the very center of the spaceport, a high, clear-glass skyscraper rose, catching the sunlight in a million colors. Around the building, small copters and robotcabs veered, discharging passengers; and the moving sidewalks were crowded with people coming and going. Here and there in the crowd, standing out because of their height and the silvery metallic cloaks they wore, were the strange tall figures of the Lhari.

“Well, how about going down?” Tommy glanced impatiently at his timepiece. “Less than half an hour before the starship touches down.”

“All right. We can get a sidewalk over here.” Reluctantly, Bart tore his eyes from the fascinating spectacle, and followed Tommy, stepping onto one of the sidewalks. It bore them down a long, sloping ramp toward the floor of the spaceport, then sped toward the glass skyscraper; came to rest at the wide pointed doors, depositing them in the midst of the crowd. The jagged lightning flash was there over the doors of the building, and the words:

here, by grace of the Lhari, is the doorway to all the stars.

Bart remembered, as if it were yesterday, how he and his father had first passed through this doorway. And his father, looking up, had said under his breath “Not for always, Son. Someday men will have a doorway to the stars, and the Lhari won’t be standing in the door.”

Inside the building, it was searingly bright. The high open rotunda was filled with immense mirrors, and glass ramps running up and down, moving staircases, confusing signs and flashing lights on tall oddly shaped pillars. The place was crowded with men from all over the planet, but the dark glasses they all wore gave them a strange sort of family resemblance.

Tommy said, “I’d better check my reservations.”

Bart nodded. “Meet you on the upper level later,” he said, and got on a moving staircase that soared slowly upward, past level after level, toward the information desk located on the topmost mezzanine.

The staircase moved slowly, and Bart had plenty of time to see everything. On the step immediately in front of him, two Lhari were standing; with their backs turned, they might almost have been men. Unusually tall, unusually thin, but men. Then Bart amended that mentally. The Lhari had two arms, two legs and a head apiece—they were that much like men. Their faces had two eyes, two ears, and a nose and mouth, all in the right places. But the similarity ended there.

They had skin of a curious pale silvery gray, and pale, pure-white hair rising in what looked like a feathery crest. The eyes were long and slanting, the forehead high and narrow, the nose delicately thin and chiseled with long vertically slit nostrils, the ears long, pointed and lobeless. The mouth looked almost human, though the chin was abnormally pointed. The hands would almost have passed inspection as human hands—except for the long, triangular nails curved over the fingertips like the claws of a cat. They wore skin-tight clothes of some metallic silky stuff, and long flowing gleaming silvery capes. They looked unearthly, elfin and strange, and in their own way they were beautiful.

The two Lhari in front of Bart had been talking softly, in their fast twittering speech; but as the hum of the crowds on the upper levels grew louder, they raised their voices, and Bart could hear what they were saying. He was a little surprised to find that he could still understand the Lhari language. He hadn’t heard a word of it in years—not since his Mentorian mother died. The Lhari would never guess that he could understand their speech. Not one human in a million could speak or understand a dozen words of Lhari, except the Mentorians.

“Do you really think that human—” the first Lhari spoke the word as if it were a filthy insult—“will have the temerity to come in by this ship?”

“No reasonable being can tell what humans will do,” said the second Lhari. “But then, no reasonable being can tell what our own Port Authorities will do either! If the message had only reached us sooner, it would have been easier. Now I suppose it will have to clear through a dozen officials and a dozen different kinds of formalities.”

The younger Lhari sounded angry. “And we have only a description—no name, nothing! How do they expect us to do anything under those conditions? What I can’t understand is how it ever happened, or how the man managed to get away. What worries me is the possibility that he may have communicated with others we don’t know about. Those bungling fools who let the first man get away can’t even be sure—”

“Do not speak of it here,” said the old Lhari sharply. “There are Mentorians in the crowd who might understand us.” He turned and looked straight at Bart, and Bart felt as if the slanted strange eyes were looking right through to his bones. The Lhari said, in Universal, “Who are you, boy? What iss your businesssses here?”

Bart replied in the same language, politely, “My father’s coming in on this ship. I’m looking for the information desk.”

“Up there,” said the old Lhari, pointing with a clawed hand, and lost interest in Bart. He said to his companion, in their own language, “Always, I regret these episodes. I have no malice against humans. I suppose even this Vegan that we are seeking has young, and a mate, who will regret his loss.”

“Then he should not have pried into Lhari matters,” said the younger Lhari fiercely. “If they’d killed him right away—”

The soaring staircase swooped up to the top level; the two Lhari stepped off and mingled swiftly with the crowd, being lost to sight. Bart whistled in dismay as he got off and turned toward the information desk. A Vegan! Some poor guy from his own planet was in trouble with the Lhari. He felt a cold, crawling chill down his insides. The Lhari had spoken regretfully, but the way they’d speak of a fly they couldn’t manage to swat fast enough. Sooner or later you had to get down to it, they just weren’t human!

Here on Earth, nothing much could happen, of course. They wouldn’t let the Lhari hurt anyone—then Bart remembered his course in Universal Law. The Lhari spaceport in every system, by treaty, was Lhari territory. Once you walked beneath the lightning-flash sign, the authority of the planet ceased to function; you might as well be on that unbelievably remote world in another galaxy that was the Lhari home planet—that world no human had ever seen. On a Lhari spaceport, or on a Lhari ship, you were under the jurisdiction of Lhari law.

Tommy stepped off a moving stair and joined him. “The ship’s on time—it reported past Luna City a few minutes ago. I’m thirsty—how about a drink?”

There was a refreshment stand on this level; they debated briefly between orange juice and a drink with a Lhari name that meant simply cold sweet, and finally decided to try it. The name proved descriptive; it was very cold, very sweet and indescribably delicious.

“Does this come from the Lhari world, I wonder?”

“I imagine it’s synthetic,” Bart said.

“I suppose it won’t hurt us?”

Bart laughed. “They wouldn’t serve it to us if it would. No, men and Lhari are alike in a lot of ways. They breathe the same air. Eat about the same food.” Their bodies were adjusted to about the same gravity. They had the same body chemistry—in fact, you couldn’t tell Lhari blood from human, even under a microscope. And in the terrible Orion Spaceport wreck sixty years ago, doctors had found that blood plasma from humans could be used for wounded Lhari, and vice versa, though it wasn’t safe to transfuse whole blood. But then, even among humans there were five blood types.

And yet, for all their likeness, they were different.

Bart sipped the cold Lhari drink, seeing himself in the mirror behind the refreshment stand; a tall teen-ager, looking older than his seventeen years. He was lithe and well muscled from five years of sports and acrobatics at the Space Academy, he had curling red hair and gray eyes, and he was almost as tall as a Lhari.

Will Dad know me? I was just a little kid when he left me here, and now I’m grown-up.

Tommy grinned at him in the mirror. “What are you going to do, now we’ve finished our so-called education?”

“What do you think? Go back to Vega with Dad, by Lhari ship, and help him run Vega Interplanet. Why else would I bother with all that astrogation and math?”

“You’re the lucky one, with your father owning a dozen ships! He must be almost as rich as the Lhari.”

Bart shook his head. “It’s not that easy. Space travel inside a system these days is small stuff; all the real travel and shipping goes to the Lhari ships.”

It was a sore point with everyone. Thousands of years ago, men had spread out from Earth—first to the planets, then to the nearer stars, crawling in ships that could travel no faster than the speed of light. They had even believed that was an absolute limit—that nothing in the universe could exceed the speed of light. It took years to go from Earth to the nearest star.

But they’d done it. From the nearer stars, they had sent out colonizing ships all through the galaxy. Some vanished and were never heard from again, but some made it, and in a few centuries man had spread all over hundreds of star-systems.

And then man met the people of the Lhari.

It was a big universe, with measureless millions of stars, and plenty of room for more than two intelligent civilizations. It wasn’t surprising that the Lhari, who had only been traveling space for a couple of thousand years themselves, had never come across humans before. But they had been delighted to meet another intelligent race—and it was extremely profitable.

Because men were still held, mostly, to the planets of their own star-systems. Ships traveling between the stars by light-drive were rare and ruinously expensive. But the Lhari had the warp-drive, and almost overnight the whole picture changed. By warp-drive, hundreds of times faster than light at peak, the years-long trip between Vega and Earth, for instance, was reduced to about three months, at a price anyone could pay. Mankind could trade and travel all over their galaxy, but they did it on Lhari ships. The Lhari had an absolute, unbreakable monopoly on star travel.

“That’s what hurts,” Tommy said. “It wouldn’t do us any good to have the star-drive. Humans can’t stand faster-than-light travel, except in cold-sleep.”

Bart nodded. The Lhari ships traveled at normal speeds, like the regular planetary ships, inside each star-system. Then, at the borders of the vast gulf of emptiness between stars, they went into warp-drive; but first, every human on board was given the cold-sleep treatment that placed them in suspended animation, allowing their bodies to endure the warp-drive.

He finished his drink. The increasing bustle in the crowds below them told him that time must be getting short. A tall, impressive-looking Lhari strode through the crowd, followed at a respectful distance by two Mentorians, tall, redheaded humans wearing metallic cloaks like those of the Lhari. Tommy nudged Bart, his face bitter.

“Look at those lousy Mentorians! How can they do it? Fawning upon the Lhari that way, yet they’re as human as we are! Slaves of the Lhari!”

Bart felt the involuntary surge of anger, instantly controlled. “It’s not that way at all. My mother was a Mentorian, remember. She made five cruises on a Lhari ship before she married my father.”

Tommy sighed. “I guess I’m just jealous—to think the Mentorians can sign on the Lhari ship as crew, while you and I will never pilot a ship between the stars. What did she do?”

“She was a mathematician. Before the Lhari met up with men, they used a system of mathematics as clumsy as the old Roman numerals. You have to admire them, when you realize that they learned stellar navigation with their old system, though most ships use human math now. And of course, you know their eyes aren’t like ours. Among other things, they’re color-blind. They see everything in shades of black or white or gray.

“So they found out that humans aboard their ships were useful. You remember how humans, in the early days in space, used certain birds, who were more sensitive to impure air than they were. When the birds keeled over, they could tell it was time for humans to start looking over the air systems! The Lhari use Mentorians to identify colors for them. And, since Mentor was the first planet of humans that the Lhari had contact with, they’ve always been closer to them.”

Tommy looked after the two Mentorians enviously. “The fact is, I’d ship out with the Lhari myself if I could. Wouldn’t you?”

Bart’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. “No,” he said. “I could—I’m half Mentorian, I can even speak Lhari.”

“Why don’t you? I would.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” Bart said softly. “Not even very many Mentorians will. You see, the Lhari don’t trust humans too much. In the early days, men were always planting spies on Lhari ships, to try and steal the secret of warp-drive. They never managed it, but nowadays the Lhari give all the Mentorians what amounts to a brainwashing—deep hypnosis, before and after every voyage, so that they can neither look for anything that might threaten the Lhari monopoly of space, nor reveal it—even under a truth drug—if they find it out.

“You have to be pretty fanatical about space travel to go through that. Oh, my mother could tell us a lot of things about her cruises with the Lhari. The Lhari can’t tell a diamond from a ruby, except by spectrographic analysis, for instance. And she—”

A high gong note sounded somewhere, touching off an explosion of warning bells and buzzers all over the enormous building. Bart looked up.

“The ship must be coming in to land.”

“I’d better check into the passenger side,” Tommy said. He stuck out his hand. “Well, Bart, I guess this is where we say good-bye.”

They shook hands, their eyes meeting for a moment in honest grief. In some indefinable way, this parting marked the end of their boyhood.

“Good luck, Tom. I’m going to miss you.”

They wrung each other’s hands again, hard. Then Tommy picked up his luggage and started down a sloping ramp toward an enclosure marked TO PASSENGER ENTRANCE.

Warning bells rang again. The glare intensified until the glow in the sky was unendurable, but Bart looked anyhow, making out the strange shape of the Lhari ship from the stars.

It was huge and strange, glowing with colors Bart had never seen before. It settled down slowly, softly: enormous, silent, vibrating, glowing; then swiftly faded to white-hot, gleaming blue, dulling down through the visible spectrum to red. At last it was just gleaming glassy Lhari-metal color again. High up in the ship’s side a yawning gap slid open, extruding stairsteps, and men and Lhari began to descend.

Bart ran down a ramp and surged out on the field with the crowd. His eyes, alert for his father’s tall figure, noted with surprise that the ship’s stairs were guarded by four cloaked Lhari, each with a Mentorian interpreter. They were stopping each person who got off the starship, asking for identity papers. Bart realized he was seeing another segment of the same drama he had overheard discussed, and wished he knew what it was all about.

The crowd was thinning now. Robotcabs were swerving in, hovering above the ground to pick up passengers, then veering away. The gap in the starship’s side was closing, and still Bart had not seen the tall, slim, flame-haired figure of his father. The port on the other side of the ship, he knew, was for loading passengers. Bart moved carefully through the thinning crowd, almost to the foot of the stairs. One of the Lhari checking papers stopped and fixed him with an inscrutable gray stare, but finally turned away again.

Bart began really to worry. Captain Steele would never miss his ship! But he saw only one disembarking passenger who had not yet been surrounded by a group of welcoming relatives, or summoned a robotcab and gone. The man was wearing Vegan clothes, but he wasn’t Bart’s father. He was a fat little man, with ruddy cheeks and a fringe of curling gray hair all around his bald dome. Maybe he’d know if there was another Vegan on the ship.

Then Bart realized that the little fat man was staring straight at him. He returned the man’s smile, rather hesitantly; then blinked, for the fat man was coming straight toward him.

“Hello, Son,” the fat man said loudly. Then, as two of the Lhari started toward him, the strange man did an incredible thing. He reached out his two hands and grabbed Bart.

“Well, boy, you’ve sure grown,” he said, in a loud, cheerful voice, “but you’re not too grown-up to give your old Dad a good hug, are you?” He pulled Bart roughly into his arms. Bart started to pull away and stammer that the fat man had made a mistake, but the pudgy hand gripped his wrist with unexpected strength.

“Bart, listen to me,” the stranger whispered, in a harsh fast voice. “Go along with this or we’re both dead. See those two Lhari watching us? Call me Dad, good and loud, if you want to live. Because, believe me, your life’s in danger—right now!”

Chapter Two

For a moment, pulled off balance in the fat stranger’s hug, Bart remained perfectly still, while the man repeated in that loud, jovial voice, “How you’ve grown!” He let him go, stepping away a pace or two, and whispered urgently, “Say something. And take that stupid look off your face.”

As he stepped back, Bart saw his eyes. In the chubby, good-natured red face, the stranger’s eyes were half-mad with fear.

In a split second, Bart remembered the two Lhari and their talk of a fugitive. In that moment, Bart Steele grew up.

He stepped toward the man and took him quickly by the shoulders.

“Dad, you sure surprised me,” he said, trying to keep his voice from shaking. “Been such a long time, I’d—half forgotten what you looked like. Have a good trip?”

“About like always.” The fat man was breathing hard, but his voice sounded firm and cheerful. “Can’t compare with a trip on the old Asterion though.” The Asterion was the flagship of Vega Interplanet, Rupert Steele’s own ship. “How’s everything?”

Beads of sweat were standing out on the man’s ruddy forehead, and his grip on Bart’s wrist was so hard it hurt. Bart, grasping at random for something to say, gabbled, “Too bad you couldn’t get to my graduation. I made th-third in a class of four hundred—”

The Lhari had surrounded them and were closing in.

The fat man took a deep breath or two, said, “Just a minute, Son,” and turned around. “You want something?”

The tallest of the Lhari—the old one, whom Bart had seen on the escalator—looked long and hard at him. When they spoke Universal, their voices were sibilant, but not nearly so inhuman.

“Could we trrrouble you to sssshow us your paperrrssss?”

“Certainly.” Nonchalantly, the fat man dug them out and handed them over. Bart saw his father’s name printed across the top.

The Lhari gestured to a Mentorian interpreter: “What colorrr isss thisss man’s hairrr?”

The Mentorian said in the Lhari language, “His hair is gray.” He used the Universal word; there were, of course, no words for colors in the Lhari speech.

“The man we sssseek has hair of red,” said the Lhari. “And he isss tall, not fat.”

“The boy is tall and with red hair,” the Mentorian volunteered, and the old Lhari made a gesture of disdain.

“This boy is twenty years younger than the man whose description came to us. Why did they not give us a picture or at least a name?” He turned to the other Lhari and said in their own shrill speech, “I suspected this man because he was alone. And I had seen this boy on the upper mezzanine and spoken with him. We watched him, knowing sooner or later the father would seek him. Ask him.” He gestured and the Mentorian said, “Who is this man, you?”

Bart gulped. For the first time he noted the energon-ray shockers at the belts of the four Lhari. He’d heard about those. They could stun—or they could kill, and quite horribly. He said, “This is my father. You want my cards, too?” He hauled out his identity papers. “My name’s Bart Steele.”

The Lhari, with a gesture of disgust, handed them back. “Go, then, father and son,” he said, not unkindly.

“Let’s get going, Son,” said the little bald man. His hand shook on Bart’s, and Bart thought, If we’re lucky, we can get out of the port before he faints dead away. He said “I’ll get a copter,” and then, feeling sorry for the stranger, gave him his arm to lean on. He didn’t know whether he was worried or scared. Where was his father? Why did this man have his dad’s papers? Was his father hiding inside the Lhari ship? He wanted to run, to burst away from the imposter, but the guy was shaking so hard Bart couldn’t just leave him standing there. If the Lhari got him, he was a dead duck.

A copter swooped down, the pilot signaling. The little man said hoarsely, “No. Robotcab.”

Bart waved the copter away, getting a dirty look from the pilot, and punched a button at the stand for one of the unmanned robotcabs. It swung down, hovered motionless. Bart boosted the fat man in. Inside, the man collapsed on the seat, leaning back, puffing, his hand pressed hard to his chest.

“Punch a combo for Denver,” he said hoarsely.

Bart obeyed, automatically. Then he turned on the man.

“It’s your game, mister! Now tell me what’s going on? Where’s my father?”

The man’s eyes were half-shut. He said, gasping, “Don’t ask me any questions for a minute.” He thumbed a tablet into his mouth, and presently his breathing quieted.

“We’re safe—for the minute. Those Lhari would have cut us down.”

“You, maybe. I haven’t done anything. Look, you,” Bart said in sudden rage, “you owe me some explanations. For all I know, you’re a criminal and the Lhari have every right to chase you! Why have you got my father’s papers? Did you steal them to get away from the Lhari? Where’s my father?”

“It’s your father they were looking for, you young fool,” said the man, gasping hard. “Lucky they had only a description and not a name—but they’ve probably got that by now, uncoded. We’ve only confused them for a little while. But if you hadn’t played along, they’d have had you watched, and when they get hold of the name Steele—they will, sooner or later, the people in the Procyon system—”

“Where is my father?”

“I hope I don’t know,” the fat man said. “If he’s still where I left him, he’s dead. My name is Briscoe. Edmund Briscoe. Your father saved my life years ago, never mind how. The less you know, the safer you’ll be for a while. His major worry just now is about you. He was afraid, if he didn’t turn up here, you’d take the first ship back to Vega. So he gave me his papers and sent me to warn you—”

Bart shook his head. “It all sounds phony as can be. How do I know whether to believe you or not?” His hand hovered over the robotcab controls. “We’re going straight to the police. If you’re okay, they won’t turn you over to the Lhari. If you’re not—”

”You young fool,” said the fat man, with feeble violence, “there’s no time for all that! Ask me questions—I can prove I know your father!”

“What was my mother’s name?”

“Oh, God,” Briscoe said, “I never saw her. I knew your father long before you were born. Until he told me, I never knew he’d married or had a son. I’d never have known you, except that you’re the living image—” He shook his head helplessly, and his breathing sounded hoarse.

“Bart, I’m a sick man, I’m going to die. I want to do what I came here to do, because your father saved my life once when I was young and healthy, and gave me twenty good years before I got old and fat and sick. Win or lose, I won’t live to see you hunted down like a dog, like my own son—”

”Don’t talk like that,” Bart said, a creepy feeling coming over him. “If you’re sick, let me take you to a doctor.”

Briscoe did not even hear. “Wait, there is something else. Your father said, ‘Tell Bart I’ve gone looking for the Eighth Color. Bart will know what I mean.’”

“That’s crazy. I don’t know—”

He broke off, for the memory had come, full-blown:

He was very young: five, six, seven. His mother, tall and slender and very fair, was bending over a blueprint, pointing with a delicate finger at something, straightening, saying in her light musical voice:

“The fuel catalyst—it’s a strange color, a color you never saw anywhere. Can you think of a color that isn’t red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, indigo or some combination of them? It isn’t any of the colors of the spectrum at all. The fuel is a real eighth color.”

And his father had used the phrase, almost adopted it. “When we know what the eighth color is, we’ll have the secret of the star-drive, too!”

Briscoe saw his face change, nodded weakly. “I see it means something to you. Now will you do as I tell you? Within a couple of hours, they’ll be combing the planet for you, but by that time the ship I came in on will have taken off again. They only stop a short time here, for mail, passengers—no cargo. They may get under way again before all messages are cleared and decoded.” He stopped and breathed hard. “The Earth authorities might protect you, but you would never be able to board a Lhari ship again—and that would mean staying on Earth for the rest of your life. You’ve got to get away before they start comparing notes. Here.” His hand went into his pockets. “For your hair. It’s a dye—a spray.”

He pressed a button on the bulb in his hand; Bart gasped, feeling cold wetness on his head. His own hand came away stained black.

“Keep still.” Briscoe said irritably. “You’ll need it at the Procyon end of the run. Here.” He stuck some papers into Bart’s hand, then punched some buttons on the robotcab’s control. It wheeled and swerved so rapidly that Bart fell against the fat man’s shoulder.

“Are you crazy? What are you going to do?”

Briscoe looked straight into Bart’s eyes. In his hoarse, sick voice, he said, “Bart, don’t worry about me. It’s all over for me, whatever happens. Just remember this. What your father is doing is worth doing, and if you start stalling, arguing, demanding explanations, you can foul up a hundred people—and kill about half of them.”

He closed Bart’s fingers roughly over the papers. The robotcab hovered over the spaceport. “Now listen to me, very carefully. When I stop the cab, down below, jump out. Don’t stop to say good-bye, or ask questions, or anything else. Just get out, walk straight through the passenger door and straight up the ramp of the ship. Show them that ticket, and get on. Whatever happens, don’t let anything stop you. Bart!” Briscoe shook his shoulder. “Promise! Whatever happens, you’ll get on that ship!”

Bart swallowed, feeling as if he’d been shoved into a silly cops-and-robbers game. But Briscoe’s urgency had convinced him. “Where am I going?”

“All I have is a name—Raynor Three,” Briscoe said, “and the message about the Eighth Color. That’s all I know.” His mouth twisted again in that painful gasp.

The cab swooped down. Bart found his voice. “But what then? Is Dad there? Will I know—”

”I don’t know any more than I’ve told you,” Briscoe said. Abruptly the robotcab came to a halt, swaying a little. Briscoe jerked the door open, gave Bart a push, and Bart found himself stumbling out on the ramp beside the spaceport building. He caught his balance, looked around, and realized that the robotcab was already climbing the sky again.

Immediately before him, neon letters spelled TO PASSENGER ENTRANCE ONLY. Bart stumbled forward. The Lhari by the gate thrust out a disinterested claw. Bart held up what Briscoe had shoved into his hand, only now seeing that it was a thin wallet, a set of identity papers and a strip of pink tickets.

“Procyon Alpha. Corridor B, straight through.” The Lhari gestured, and Bart went through the narrow passageway, came out at the other end, and found himself at the very base of a curving stair that led up and up toward a door in the side of the huge Lhari ship. Bart hesitated. In another minute he’d be on his way to a strange sun and a strange world, on what might well be the wild-goose chase of all time.

Passengers were crowding the steps behind him. Someone shouted suddenly, “Look at that!” and someone else yelled, “Is that guy crazy?”

Bart looked up. A robotcab was swooping over the spaceport in wild, crazy circles, dipping down, suddenly making a dart like an enraged wasp at a little nest of Lhari. They ducked and scattered; the robotcab swerved away, hovered, swooped back. This time it struck one of the Lhari grazingly with landing gear and knocked him sprawling. Bart stood with his mouth open, as if paralyzed.

Briscoe! What was he doing?

The fallen Lhari lay without moving. The robotcab moved in again, as if for the kill, buzzing viciously overhead.

Then a beam of light arced from one of the drawn energon-ray tubes. The robotcab glowed briefly red, then seemed to sag, sink together; then puddled, a slag heap of molten metal, on the glassy floor of the port. A little moan of horror came from the crowd, and Bart felt a sudden, wrenching sickness. It had been like a game, a silly game of cops and robbers, and suddenly it was as serious as melted death lying there on the spaceport. Briscoe!

Someone shoved him and said, “Come on, quit gawking, kid. They won’t hold the ship all day just because some nut finds a new way to commit suicide.”

Bart, his legs numb, walked up the ramp. Briscoe had died to give him this chance. Now it was up to him to make it worth having.

Chapter Three

At the top of the ramp, a Lhari glanced briefly at his papers, motioned him through. Bart passed through the airlock, and into a brightly lit corridor half full of passengers. The line was moving slowly, and for the first time Bart had a chance to think.

He had never seen violent death before. In this civilized world, you didn’t. He knew if he thought about Briscoe, he’d start bawling like a baby, so he swallowed hard a couple of times, set his chin, and concentrated on the trip to Procyon Alpha. That meant this ship was outbound on the Aldebaran run—Proxima Centauri, Sirius, Pollux, Procyon, Capella and Aldebaran.

The line of passengers was disappearing through a doorway. A woman ahead of Bart turned and said nervously, “We won’t be put into cold-sleep right away, will we?”

He reassured her, remembering his inbound trip five years ago. “No, no. The ship won’t go into warp-drive until we’re well past Pluto. It will be several days, at least.”

Beyond the doorway the lights dwindled, and a Mentorian interpreter took his dark glasses, saying, “Kindly remove your belt, shoes and other accessories of leather or metal before stepping into the decontamination chamber. They will be separately decontaminated and returned to you. Papers, please.”

With a small twinge of fright, Bart surrendered them. Would the Mentorian ask why he was carrying two wallets? Inside the other one, he still had his Academy ID card which identified him as Bart Steele, and if the Mentorian looked through them to check, and found out he was carrying two sets of identity papers....

But the Mentorian merely dumped all his pocket paraphernalia, without looking at it, into a sack. “Just step through here.”

Holding up his trousers with both hands, Bart stepped inside the indicated cubicle. It was filled with faint bluish light. Bart felt a strong tingling and a faint electrical smell, and along his forearms there was a slight prickling where the small hairs were all standing on end. He knew that the invisible R-rays were killing all the microorganisms in his body, so that no disease germ or stray fungus would be carried from planet to planet.

The bluish light died. Outside, the Mentorian gave him back his shoes and belt, handed him the paper sack of his belongings, and a paper cup full of greenish fluid.

“Drink this.”

“What is it?”

The medic said patiently, “Remember, the R-rays killed all the microorganisms in your body, including the good ones—the antibodies that protect you against disease, and the small yeasts and bacteria that live in your intestines and help in the digestion of your food. So we have to replace those you need to stay healthy. See?”

The green stuff tasted a little brackish, but Bart got it down all right. He didn’t much like the idea of drinking a solution of “germs,” but he knew that was silly. There was a big difference between disease germs and helpful bacteria.

Another Mentorian official, this one a young woman, gave him a key with a numbered tag, and a small booklet with WELCOME ABOARD printed on the cover.

The tag was numbered 246-B, which made Bart raise his eyebrows. B class was normally too expensive for Bart’s father’s modest purse. It wasn’t quite the luxury class A, reserved for planetary governors and ambassadors, but it was plenty luxurious. Briscoe had certainly sent him traveling in style!

B Deck was a long corridor with oval doors; Bart found one numbered 246, and, not surprisingly, the key opened it. It was a pleasant little cabin, measuring at least six feet by eight, and he would evidently have it to himself. There was a comfortably big bunk, a light that could be turned on and off instead of the permanent glow-walls of the cheaper class, a private shower and toilet, and a placard on the walls informing him that passengers in B class had the freedom of the Observation Dome and the Recreation Lounge. There was even a row of buttons dispensing synthetic foods, in case a passenger preferred privacy or didn’t want to wait for meals in the dining hall.

A buzzer sounded and a Mentorian voice announced, “Five minutes to Room Check. Passengers will please remove all metal in their clothing, and deposit in the lead drawers. Passengers will please recline in their bunks and fasten the retaining straps before the steward arrives. Repeat, passengers will please....”

Bart took off his belt, stuck it and his cuff links in the drawer and lay down. Then, in a sudden panic, he got up again. His papers as Bart Steele were still in the sack. He got them out, and with a feeling as if he were crossing a bridge and burning it after him, tore up every scrap of paper that identified him as Bart Steele of Vega Four, graduate of the Space Academy of Earth. Now, for better or worse, he was—who was he? He hadn’t even looked at the new papers Briscoe had given him!

He glanced through them quickly. They were made out to David Warren Briscoe, of Aldebaran Four. According to them, David Briscoe was twenty years old, hair black, eyes hazel, height six foot one inch. Bart wondered, painfully, if Briscoe had a son and if David Briscoe knew where his father was. There was also a license, validated with four runs on the Aldebaran Intrasatellite Cargo Company—planetary ships—with the rank of Apprentice Astrogator; and a considerable sum of money.

Bart put the papers in his pants pocket and the torn-up scraps of his old ones into the trashbin before he realized that they looked exactly like what they were—torn-up legal identity papers and a broken plastic card. Nobody destroyed identity papers for any good reason. What could he do?

Then he remembered something from the Academy. Starships were closed-system cycles, no waste was discarded, but everything was collected in big chemical tanks, broken down to separate elements, purified and built up again into new materials. He threw the paper into the toilet, worked the plastic card back and forth, back and forth until he had wrenched it into inch-wide bits, and threw it after them.

The cabin door opened and a Mentorian said irritably, “Please lie down and fasten your straps. I haven’t all day.”

Hastily Bart flushed the toilet and went to the bunk. Now everything that could identify him as Bart Steele was on its way to the breakdown tanks. Before long, the complex hydrocarbons and cellulose would all be innocent little molecules of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen; they might turn up in new combinations as sugar on the table!

The Mentorian grumbled, “You young people think the rules mean everybody but you,” and strapped him far too tightly into the bunk. Bart felt resentful; just because Mentorians could work on Lhari ships, did they have to act as if they owned everybody?

When the man had gone, Bart drew a deep breath. Was he really doing the right thing?

If he’d refused to get out of the robotcab—

If he’d driven Briscoe straight to the police—

Then maybe Briscoe would still be alive. And now it was too late.

A warning siren went off in the ship, rising to hysterical intensity. Bart thought, incredulously, this is really happening. It felt like a nightmare. His father a fugitive from the Lhari. Briscoe dead. He himself traveling, with forged papers, to a star he’d never seen.

He braced himself, knowing the siren was the last warning before takeoff. First there would be the hum of great turbines deep in the ship, then the crushing surge of acceleration. He had made a dozen trips inside the solar system, but no matter how often he did it, there was the strange excitement, the little pinpoint of fear, like an exotic taste, that was almost pleasant.

The door opened and Bart grabbed a fistful of bed-ticking as two Lhari came into the room.

One of them said, in their strange shrill speech, “This boy is the right age.”

Bart froze.

“You’re seeing spies in every corner, Ransell,” said the other, then in Universal, “Could we trrouble you for your paperesses, sirr?”

Bart, strapped down and helpless, moved his head toward the drawer, hoping his face did not betray his fear. He watched the two Lhari riffle through his papers with their odd pointed claws.

“What isss your planet?”

Bart bit his lip, hard—he had almost said, “Vega Four.”

“Aldebaran Four.”

The Lhari said in his own language, “We should have Margil in here. He actually saw them.”

The other replied, “But I saw the machine that disintegrated. I still say there was enough protoplasm residue for two bodies.”

Bart fought to keep his face perfectly straight.

“Did anyone come into your cabin?” The Lhari asked in Universal.

“Only the steward. Why? Is something wrong?”

“There iss some thought that a stowaway might be on boarrd. Of courrrse we could not allow that, anyone not prrroperly prrotected would die in the first shift into warp-drive.”

“Just the steward,” Bart said again. “A Mentorian.”

The Lhari said, eying him keenly, “You are ill? Or discommoded?”

Bart grasped at random for an excuse. “That—that stuff the medic made me drink made me feel—sort of sick.”

“You may send for a medical officer after acceleration,” said the Lhari expressionlessly. “The summoning bell is at your left.”

They turned and went out and Bart gulped. Lhari, in person, checking the passenger decks! Normally you never saw one on board; just Mentorians. The Lhari treated humans as if they were too dumb to bother about. Well, at least for once someone was acting as if humans were worthy antagonists. We’ll show them—someday!

But he felt very alone, and scared....

A low hum rose, somewhere in the ship, and Bart grabbed ticking as he felt the slow surge. Then a violent sense of pressure popped his ear drums, weight crowded down on him like an elephant sitting on his chest, and there was a horrible squashed sensation dragging his limbs out of shape. It grew and grew. Bart lay still and sweated, trying to ease his uncomfortable position, unable to move so much as a finger. The Lhari ships hit 12 gravities in the first surge of acceleration. Bart felt as if he were spreading out, under the weight, into a puddle of flesh—melted flesh like Briscoe’s—

Bart writhed and bit his lip till he could taste blood, wishing he were young enough to bawl out loud.

Abruptly, it eased, and the blood started to flow again in his numbed limbs. Bart loosened his straps, took a few deep breaths, wiped his face—wringing wet, whether with sweat or tears he wasn’t sure—and sat up in his bunk. The loudspeaker announced, “Acceleration One is completed. Passengers on A and B Decks are invited to witness the passing of the Satellites from the Observation Lounge in half an hour.”

Bart got up and washed his face, remembering that he had no luggage with him, not so much as a toothbrush.

At the back of his mind, packed up in a corner, was the continuing worry about his father, the horror at Briscoe’s ghastly death, the fear of the Lhari; but he slammed the lid firmly on them all. For the moment he was safe. They might be looking for Bart Steele by now, but they weren’t looking for David Briscoe of Aldebaran. He might just as well relax and enjoy the trip. He went down to the Observation Lounge.

It had been darkened, and one whole wall of the room was made of clear quartzite. Bart drew a deep breath as the vast panorama of space opened out before him.

They were receding from the sun at some thousands of miles a minute. Swirling past the ship, gleaming in the reflected sunlight like iron filings moving to the motion of a magnet, were the waves upon waves of cosmic dust—tiny free electrons, ions, particles of gas; free of the heavier atmosphere, themselves invisible, they formed in their billions into bright clouds around the ship; pale, swirling veils of mist. And through their dim shine, the brilliant flares of the fixed stars burned clear and steady, so far away that even the hurling motion of the ship could not change their positions.

One by one he picked out the constellations. Aldebaran swung on the pendant chain of Taurus like a giant ruby. Orion strode across the sky, a swirling nebula at his belt. Vega burned, cobalt blue, in the heart of the Lyre.

Colors, colors! Inside the atmosphere of Earth’s night, the stars had been pale white sparks against black. Here, against the misty-pale swirls of cosmic dust, they burned with color heaped on color; the bloody burning crimson of Antares, the metallic gold of Capella, the sullen pulsing of Betelgeuse. They burned, each with its own inward flame and light, like handfuls of burning jewels flung by some giant hand upon the swirling darkness. It was a sight Bart felt he could watch forever and still be hungry to see; the never-changing, ever-changing colors of space.

Behind him in the darkness, after a long time, someone said softly, “Imagine being a Lhari and not being able to see anything out there but bright or brighter light.”

A bell rang melodiously in the ship and the passengers in the lounge began to stir and move toward the door, to stretch limbs cramped like Bart’s by tranced watching, to talk quickly of ordinary things.

“I suppose that bell means dinner,” said a vaguely familiar voice at Bart’s elbow. “Synthetics, I suppose, but at least we can all get acquainted.”

The light from the undarkened hall fell on their faces as they moved toward the door. “Bart! Why, it can’t be!”

In utter dismay, Bart looked down into the face of Tommy Kendron.

In the rush of danger, he had absolutely forgotten that Tommy Kendron was on this ship—to make his alias useless; Tommy was looking at him in surprise and delight.

“Why didn’t you tell me, or did you and your father decide at the last minute? Hey, it’s great that we can go part way together, at least!”

Bart knew he must cut this short very quickly. He stepped out into the full corridor light so that Tommy could see his black hair.

“I’m sorry, you’re confusing me with someone else.”

“Bart, come off it—” Tommy’s voice died out. “Sorry, I’d have sworn you were a friend of mine.”

Bart wondered suddenly, had he done the wrong thing? He had a feeling he might need a friend. Badly.

Well, it was too late now. He stared Tommy in the eye and said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

Tommy looked deflated. He stepped back slightly, shaking his head. “Never saw such a resemblance. Are you a Vegan?”

“No,” Bart lied flatly. “Aldebaran. David Briscoe.”

“Glad to know you, Dave.” With undiscourageable friendliness, Tommy stuck out a hand. “Say, that bell means dinner, why don’t we go down together? I don’t know a soul on the ship, and it looks like luck—running into a fellow who could be my best friend’s twin brother.”

Bart felt warmed and drawn, but sensibly he knew he could not keep up the pretense. Sooner or later, he’d give himself away, use some habitual phrase or gesture Tommy would recognize.

Should he take a chance—reveal himself to Tommy and ask him to keep quiet? No. This wasn’t a game. One man was already dead. He didn’t want Tommy to be next.

There was only one way out. He said coldly, “thank you, but I have other things to attend to. I intend to be very busy all through the voyage.” He spun on his heel and walked away before he could see Tommy’s eager, friendly smile turn hurt and defensive.

Back in his cabin, he gloomily dialed some synthetic jellies, thinking with annoyance of the anticipated good food of the dining room. He knew he couldn’t risk meeting Tommy again, and drearily resigned himself to staying in his cabin. It looked like an awfully boring trip ahead.

It was. It was a week before the Lhari ship went into warp-drive, and all that time Bart stayed in his cabin, not daring to go to the observation Lounge or dining hall. He got tired of eating synthetics (oh, they were nourishing enough, but they were altogether uninteresting) and tired of listening to the tapes the room steward got him from the ship’s library. By the time they had been in space a week, he was so bored with his own company that even the Mentorian medic was a welcome sight when he came in to prepare him for cold-sleep.

Bart had had the best education on Earth, but he didn’t know precisely how the Lhari warp-drive worked. He’d been told that only a few of the Lhari understood it, just as the man who flew a copter didn’t need to understand Newton’s Three Laws of Motion in order to get himself back and forth to work.

But he knew this much; when the ship generated the frequencies which accelerated it beyond the speed of light, in effect the ship went into a sort of fourth dimension, and came out of it a good many light-years away. As far as Bart knew, no human being had ever survived warp-drive except in the suspended animation which they called cold-sleep. While the medic was professionally reassuring him and strapping him in his bunk, Bart wondered what humans would do with the Lhari star-drive if they had it. Well, he supposed they could use automation in their ships.

The Mentorian paused, needle in hand. “Do you wish to be wakened for the week we shall spend in each of the Proxima, Sirius and Pollux systems, sir? You can, of course, be given enough drug to keep you in cold-sleep until we reach the Procyon system.”

Bart wondered if the room steward had mentioned the passenger so bored with the trip that he didn’t even visit the Observation Lounge. He felt tempted—he was getting awfully tired of staring at the walls. On the other hand, he wanted very much to see the other star-systems. When he passed through them on the trip to Earth, he’d been too young to pay much attention.

Firmly he put the temptation aside. Better not to risk meeting other passengers, Tommy especially, if he decided he couldn’t take the boredom.

The needle went into his arm. He felt himself sinking into sleep, and, in sudden panic, realized that he was helpless. The ship would touch down on three worlds, and on any of them the Lhari might have his description, or his alias! He could be taken off, drugged and unconscious, and might never wake up! He tried to move, to protest, to tell them he was changing his mind, but already he was unable to speak. There was a freezing moment of intense, painful cold. Then he was floating in what felt like waves of cosmic dust, swirling many-colored before his eyes. And then there was nothing, no color, nothing at all except the nowhere night of sleep.

Chapter Four

Bart felt cold. He stirred, moved his head in drowsy protest; then memory came flooding back, and in sudden panic he sat up, flinging out his arms as if to ward away anyone who would lay hands on him.

“Easy!” said a soothing voice. A Mentorian—not the same Mentorian—bent over him. “We have just entered the gravitational field of Procyon planet Alpha, Mr. Briscoe. Touchdown in four hours.”

Bart mumbled an apology.

“Think nothing of it. Quite a number of people who aren’t used to the cold-sleep drug suffer from minor lapses of memory. How do you feel now?”

Bart’s legs were numb and his hands tingled when he sat up; but his body processes had been slowed so much by the cold-sleep that he didn’t even feel hungry; the synthetic jelly he’d eaten just before going to sleep wasn’t even digested yet.

When the Mentorian left for another cabin, Bart looked around, and suddenly felt he would stifle if he stayed here another minute. He wasn’t likely to run into Tommy twice in a row, and if he did, well, Tommy would probably remember the snub he’d had and stay away from Dave Briscoe. And he wanted another sight of the stars—before he went into worry and danger.

He went down to the Observation Lounge.

The cosmic dust was brighter out here, and the constellations looked a little flattened. Textbook tables came back to him. He had traveled 47 light-years—he couldn’t remember how many billions of miles that was. Even so, it was only the tiniest hop-skip-and-jump in the measureless vastness of space.

The ship was streaking toward Procyon, a sol-type star, bright yellow; the three planets, Alpha, Beta and Gamma, ringed like Saturn and veiled in shimmering layers of cloud, swung against the night. Past them other stars, brighter stars, faraway stars he would never see, glimmered through the pale dust....

“Hello, Dave. Been space-sick all this time? Remember me? I met you about six weeks ago in the lounge down here—just out from Earth.”

Oh, no! Bart turned, with a mental groan, to face Tommy. “I’ve been in cold-sleep,” he said. He couldn’t be rude again.

“What a dull way to face a long trip!” Tommy said cheerily. “I’ve enjoyed every minute of it myself.”

It was hard for Bart to realize that, for Tommy, their meeting had been six weeks ago. It all seemed dreamlike. The closer he came to it, the less he could realize that in a few hours he’d be getting off on a strange world, with only the strange name Raynor Three as a guide. He felt terribly alone, and having Tommy close at hand helped, even though Tommy didn’t know he was helping.

“Maybe I should have stayed awake.”

“You should,” Tommy said. “I only slept for a couple of hours at each warp-drive shift. We had a day-long stopover at Sirius Eighteen, and I took a tour of the planet. And I’ve spent a lot of time down here, just star-gazing—not that it did me much good. Which one is Antares? How do you tell it from Aldebaran? I’m always getting them mixed up.”

Bart pointed. “Aldebaran—that’s the big red one there,” he said. “Think of the constellation Taurus as a necklace, with Aldebaran hanging from it like a locket. Antares is much further down in the sky, in relation to the arbitrary sidereal axis, and it’s a deeper red. Like a burning coal, while Aldebaran is like a ruby—”

He broke off in mid-word, realizing that Tommy was gazing at him in a mixture of triumph and consternation. Too late, Bart realized he had been tricked. Studying for an exam, the year before, he had explained the difference between the two red stars in almost the same words.

“Bart,” Tommy said in a whisper, “I knew it had to be you. Why didn’t you tell me, fella?”

Bart felt himself start to smile, but it only stretched his mouth. He said, very low, “Don’t say my name out loud Tom. I’m in terrible trouble.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? What’s a friend for?”

“We can’t talk here. And all the cabins are wired for sound in case somebody stops breathing, or has a heart attack in space,” Bart said, glancing around.

They went and stood at the very foot of the quartz window, seeming to tread the brink of a dizzying gulf of cosmic space, and talked in low tones while Alpha and Beta and Gamma swelled like blown-up balloons in the port.

Tommy listened, almost incredulous. “And you’re hoping to find your father, with no more information than that? It’s a big universe,” he said, waving at the gulf of stars. “The Lhari ships, according to the little tourist pamphlet they gave me, touch down at nine hundred and twenty-two different stars in this galaxy!”

Bart visibly winced, and Tommy urged, “Come to Capella with me. You can stay with my family as long as you want to, and appeal to the Interplanet authority to find your father. They’d protect him against the Lhari, surely. You can’t chase all over the galaxy playing interplanetary spy all by yourself, Bart!”

But Briscoe had deliberately gone to his death, to give Bart the chance to get away. He wouldn’t have died to send Bart into a trap he could easily have sprung on Earth.

“Thanks, Tommy. But I’ve got to play it my way.”

Tommy said firmly, “Count me in then. My ticket has stopover privileges. I’ll get off at Procyon with you.”

It was a temptation—to have a friend at his back. He put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, grateful beyond words. But fresh horror seized him as he remembered the horrible puddle of melted robotcab with Briscoe somewhere in the residue. Protoplasm residue enough for two bodies. He couldn’t let Tommy face that.

“Tommy, I appreciate that, believe me. But if I did find my father and his friends, I don’t want anyone tracing me. You’d only make the danger worse. The best thing you can do is stay out of it.”

Tommy faced him squarely. “One thing’s for sure. I’m not going to let you go off and never know whether you’re alive or dead.”

“I’ll try to get a message to you,” Bart said, “if I can. But whatever happens, Tommy, stay with the ship and go on to Capella. It’s the one thing you can do to help me.”

A warning bell rang in the ship. He broke sharply away from Tommy, saying over his shoulder, “It’s all you can do to help, Tom. Do it—please? Just stay clear?”

Tommy reached out and caught his arm. “Okay,” he said reluctantly, “I will. But you be careful,” he added fiercely. “You hear me? And if I don’t hear from you in some reasonable time, I’ll raise a stink from here to Vega!”

Bart broke away and ran. He was afraid, if he didn’t, he’d break up again. He closed the cabin door behind him, trying to calm down so that the Mentorian steward, coming to strap him in for deceleration, wouldn’t see how upset he was. He was going to need all his nerve.

He went through another decontamination chamber, and finally moved, with a line of passengers, out of the yawning airlock, under the strange sun, into the strange world.

At first sight it was a disappointment. It was a Lhari spaceport that lay before him, to all appearances identical with the one on Earth: sloping glass ramps, tall colorless pylons, a skyscraper terminus crowded with men of all planets. But the sun overhead was brilliant and clear gold, the shadows sharp and violet on the spaceport floor. Behind the confines of the spaceport he could see the ridges of tall hills and unfamiliarly colored trees. He longed to explore them, but he got a grip on his imagination, surrendering his ticket stub and false papers to the Lhari and Mentorian interpreter who guarded the ramp.

The Lhari said to the Mentorian, in the Lhari language, “Keep him for questioning but don’t tell him why.” Bart felt a cold chill icing his spine. This was it.

The Mentorian said briefly, “We wish to check on the proper antibody component for Aldebaran natives. There will be a delay of about thirty minutes. Will you kindly wait in this room here?”

The room was comfortable, furnished with chairs and a vision-screen with some colorful story moving on it, small bright figures in capes, curious beasts racing across an unusual veldt; but Bart paced the floor restlessly. There were two doors in the room. Through one of them, he had been admitted; he could see, through the glass door, the silhouette of the Mentorian outside. The other door was opaque, and marked in large letters:

DANGER HUMANS MUST NOT PASS WITHOUT SPECIAL LENSES TYPE X. ORDINARY SPACE LENSES WILL NOT SUFFICE DANGER! LHARI OPENING! ADJUST X LENSES BEFORE OPENING!

Bart read the sign again. Well, that was no way out, for sure! He had heard that the Lhari sun was almost 500 times as bright as Earth’s. The Mentorians alone, among humans, could endure Lhari lights—he supposed the warning was for ordinary spaceport workers.

A sudden, rather desperate plan occurred to Bart. He didn’t know how much light he could tolerate—he’d never been on Mentor—but he had inherited some of his mother’s tolerance for light. And blindness would be better than being burned down with an energon-gun! He went hesitantly toward the door, and pushed it open.

His eyes exploded into pain; automatically his hands went up to shield them. Light, light—he had never known such cruelly glowing light. Even through the lids there was pain and red afterimages; but after a moment, opening them a slit, he found that he could see, and made out other doors, glass ramps, pale Lhari figures coming and going. But for the moment he was alone in the long corridor beyond which he could see the glass ramps.

Nearby, a door opened into a small office with glass walls; on a peg, one of the silky metallic cloaks worn by Mentorians doing spaceport work was hanging. On an impulse, Bart caught it up and flung it around his shoulders.

It felt cool and soft, and the hood shielded his eyes a little. The ramp leading down to what he hoped was street level was terribly steep and there were no steps. Bart eased himself over the top of the ramp and let go. He whooshed down the slick surface on the flat of his back, feeling the metal of the cloak heat with the friction, and came to a breathless jarring stop at the bottom. Whew, what a slide! Three stories, at least! But there was a door, and outside the door, maybe, safety.

A voice hailed him, in Lhari. “You, there!”

Bart could see well now. He made out the form of a Lhari, only a colorless blob in the intense light.

“You people know better than to come back here without glasses. Do you want to be blinded, my friend?” He actually sounded kind and concerned. Bart tensed, his heart pounding. Now that he was caught, could he bluff his way out? He hadn’t actually spoken the Lhari language in years, though his mother had taught it to him when he was young enough to learn it without a trace of accent.

Well, he must try. “Margil sent me to check,” he improvised quickly. “They were holding someone for questioning, and he seems to have gotten away somehow, so I wanted to make sure he didn’t come through here.”

“What is the matter that one man can give us all the slip this way?” the Lhari said curiously. “Well, one thing is sure, he’s Vegan or Solarian or Capellan, one of the dim-star people. If he comes through here, we’ll catch him easily enough while he’s stumbling around half blind. You know that you shouldn’t stay long.” He gestured. “Out this way—and don’t come back without special lenses.”

Bart nodded, jerking the cloak around his shoulders, forcing himself not to break into a run as he stepped through the door the Lhari indicated. It closed behind him. Bart blinked, feeling as if he had stepped into pitch darkness. Only slowly did his eyes adapt and he became aware that he was standing in a city street, in the full glow of Procyon sunlight, and apparently outside the Lhari spaceport entirely.

He’d better get to cover! He took off the Mentorian cloak, thrust it under his arm. He raised his eyes, which were adjusting to ordinary light again, and stopped dead.

Just across the street was a long, low, rainbow colored building. And the letters—Bart blinked, thinking his eyes deceived him—spelled out:

EIGHT COLORS TRANSSHIPPING CORPORATION

CARGO, PASSENGERS, MESSAGES, EXPRESS

A. RAYNOR ONE, MANAGER

Chapter Five

For a moment the words swirled before Bart’s still-watering eyes. He wiped them, trying to steady himself. Had he so soon reached the end of his dangerous quest? Somehow he had expected it to lie in deep, dark concealment.

Raynor One. The existence of Raynor One presupposed a Raynor Two and probably a Raynor Three—for all he knew, Raynors Four, Five, Six, and Sixty-six! The building looked solid and real. It had evidently been there a long time.

With his hand on the door, he hesitated. Was it, after all, the right Eight Colors? But it was a family saying; hardly the sort of thing you’d be apt to hear outside. He pushed the door and went in.

The room was filled with brighter light than the Procyon sun outdoors, the edges of the furniture rimmed with neon in the Mentorian fashion. A prim-looking girl sat behind a desk—or what should have been a desk, except that it looked more like a mirror, with little sparkles of lights, different colors, in regular rows along one edge. The mirror-top itself was blue-violet and gave her skin and her violet eyes a bluish tinge. She was smooth and lacquered and glittering and she raised her eyebrows at Bart as if he were some strange form of life she hadn’t seen very often.

“I’d—er—like to see Raynor One,” he said.

Her dainty pointed fingernail, varnished blue, stabbed at points of light. “On what business?” she asked, not caring.

“It’s a personal matter.”

“Then I suggest you see him at his home.”

“It can’t wait that long.”

The girl studied the glassy surface and punched at some more of the little lights. “Name, please?”

“David Briscoe.”

He had thought her perfect-painted face could not show any emotion except disdain, but it did. She looked at him in open, blank consternation. She said into the vision-screen, “He calls himself David Briscoe. Yes, I know. Yes, sir, yes.” She raised her face, and it was controlled again, but not bored. “Raynor One will see you. Through that door, and down to the end of the hall.”

At the end of the hallway was another door. He stepped through into a small cubicle, and the door slid shut like a closing trap. He whirled in panic, then subsided in foolish relief as the cubicle began to rise—it was just an automatic elevator.

It rose higher and higher, stopping with an abrupt jerk, and slid open into a lighted room and office. A man sat behind a desk, watching Bart step from the elevator. The man was very tall and very thin, and the gray eyes, and the intensity of the lights, told Bart that he was a Mentorian. Raynor One?

Under the steady, stern gray stare, Bart felt the slow, clutching suck of fear again. Was this man a slave of the Lhari, who would turn him over to them? Or someone he could trust? His own mother had been a Mentorian.

“Who are you?” Raynor One’s voice was harsh, and gave the impression of being loud, though it was not.

“David Briscoe.”

It was the wrong thing. The Mentorian’s mouth was taut, forbidding. “Try again. I happen to know that David Briscoe is dead.”

“I have a message for Raynor Three.”

The cold gray stare never altered. “On what business?”

On a sudden inspiration, Bart said, “I’ll tell you that if you can tell me what the Eighth Color is.”

There was a glint in the grim eyes now, though the even, stern voice did not soften. “I never knew myself. I didn’t name it Eight Colors. Maybe it’s the original owner you want.”

On a sudden hope, Bart asked, “Was he, by any chance, named Rupert Steele?”

Raynor One made a suspicious movement. “I can’t imagine why you think so,” he said guardedly. “Especially if you’ve just come in from Earth. It was never very widely known. He only changed the name to Eight Colors a few weeks ago. And it’s for sure that your ship didn’t get any messages while the Lhari were in warp-drive. You mention entirely too many names, but I notice you aren’t giving out any further information.”

“I’m looking for a man called Rupert Steele.”

“I thought you were looking for Raynor Three,” said Raynor One, staring at the Mentorian cloak. “I can think of a lot of people who might want to know how I react to certain names, and find out if I know the wrong people, if they are the wrong people. What makes you think I’d admit it if I did?”

Now, Bart thought, they had reached a deadlock. Somebody had to trust somebody. This could go on all night—parry and riposte, question and evasive answer, each of them throwing back the other’s questions in a verbal fencing-match. Raynor One wasn’t giving away any information. And, considering what was probably at stake, Bart didn’t blame him much.

He flung the Mentorian cloak down on the table.

“This got me out of trouble—the hard way,” he said. “I never wore one before and I never intend to again. I want to find Rupert Steele because he’s my father!”

“Your father. And just how are you going to prove that exceptionally interesting statement?”

Without warning, Bart lost his temper.

“I don’t care whether I prove it or not! You try proving something for a change, why don’t you? If you know Rupert Steele, I don’t have to prove who I am—just take a good look at me! Or so Briscoe told me—a man who called himself Briscoe, anyway. He gave me papers to travel under that name! I didn’t ask for them, he shoved them into my hand. That Briscoe is dead.” Bart struck his fist hard on the desk, bending over Raynor One angrily.

“He sent me to find a man named Raynor Three. But the only one I really care about finding is my father. Now you know as much as I do, how about giving me some information for a change?”

He ran out of breath and stood glaring down at Raynor One, fists clenched. Raynor One got up and said, quick, savage and quiet, “Did anyone see you come here?”

“Only the girl downstairs.”

“How did you get through the Lhari? In that?” He moved his head at the Mentorian cloak.

Bart explained briefly, and Raynor One shook his head.

“You were lucky,” he said, “you could have been blinded. You must have inherited flash-accommodation from the Mentorian side—Rupert Steele didn’t have it. I’ll tell you this much,” he added, sitting down again. “In a manner of speaking, you’re my boss. Eight Colors—it used to be Alpha Transshipping—is what they call a middleman outfit. The interplanet cargo lines transport from planet to planet within a system—that’s free competition—and the Lhari ships transport from star to star—that’s a monopoly all over the galaxy. The middleman outfits arrange for orderly and businesslike liaison between the two. Rupert Steele bought into this company, a long time ago, but he left it for me to manage, until recently.”

Raynor punched a button, said to the image of the glossy girl at the desk, “Violet, get Three for me. You may have to send a message to the Multiphase.”

He swung round to Bart again. “You want a lot of explanations? Well, you’ll have to get ‘em from somebody else. I don’t know what this is all about. I don’t want to know: I have to do business with the Lhari. The less I know, the less I’m apt to say to the wrong people. But I promised Three that if you turned up, or if anyone came and asked for the Eighth Color, I’d send you to him. That’s all.”

He motioned Bart ungraciously to a seat, and shut his mouth firmly, as if he had already said too much. Bart sat. After a while he heard the elevator again; the panel slid open and Raynor Three came into the room.

It had to be Raynor Three; there was no one else he could have been. He was as like Raynor One as Tweedledum to Tweedledee: tall, stern, ascetic and grim. He wore the full uniform of a Mentorian on Lhari ships: the white smock of a medic, the metallic blue cloak, the low silvery sandals.

He said, “What’s doing, One? Violet—” and then he caught sight of Bart. His eyes narrowed and he drew a quick breath, his face twisting up into apprehension and shock.

“It must be Steele’s boy,” he said, and immediately Bart saw the difference between the—were they brothers? For Raynor One’s face, controlled and stern, had not altered all during their interview, but Raynor Three’s smile was wry and kindly at once, and his voice was low and gentle. “He’s the image of Rupert. Did he come in on his own name? How’d he manage it?”

“No. He had David Briscoe’s papers.”

“So the old man got through,” said Raynor Three, with a low whistle. “But that’s not safe. Quick, give them to me, Bart.”

“The Lhari have them.”

Raynor One walked to the window and said in his deadpan voice, “It’s useless. But get the kid out of here before they come looking for me. Look.”

He pointed. Below them, the streets were alive with uniformed Lhari and Mentorians. Bart felt sick.

“If they had the same efficiency with red tape that we humans have, he’d never have made it this far.”

Raynor Three actually smiled. “But you can count on them for that much inefficiency,” he said, and his eyes twinkled for a moment at Bart. “That’s how it was so easy to work the old double-shuffle trick on them. They had Steele’s description but not his name, so Briscoe took Steele’s papers and managed to slip through. Once they landed on Earth, they had the Steele names, but by the time that cleared, you were outbound with another set of papers. It may have confused them, because they knew David Briscoe was dead—and there was just a chance you were an innocent bystander who could raise a real row if they pulled you in. Did old Briscoe get away?”

“No,” Bart said, harshly, “he’s dead.”

Raynor Three’s mobile face held shocked sadness. “Two brave men,” he said softly, “Edmund Briscoe the father, David Briscoe the son. Remember the name, Bart, because I won’t remember it.”

“Why not?”

Raynor Three gave him a gold-glinting, enigmatic glance. “I’m a Mentorian, remember? I’m good at not remembering things. Just be glad I remember Rupert Steele. If you’d been a few days later, I wouldn’t have remembered him, though I promised to wait for you.”

Raynor One demanded, “Get him out of here, Three!”

Raynor Three swung to Bart. “Put that on again.” He indicated the Mentorian cloak. “Pull the hood right up over your head. Now, if we meet anyone, say a polite good afternoon in Lhari—you can speak Lhari?—and leave the rest of the talking to me.”

Bart felt like cringing as they came out into the street full of Lhari; but Raynor Three whispered, “Attack is the best defense,” and went up to one of the Lhari. “What’s going on, rieko mori?”

“A passenger on the ship got away without going through Decontam. He may spread disease, so of course we have alerted all authorities,” the Lhari said.

As the Lhari strode past, Raynor Three grimaced. “Clever, that. Now the whole planet will be hunting for any stranger, worrying themselves into fits about some unauthorized germ. We’d better get you to a safe place. My country house is a good way off, but I have a copter.”

Bart demanded, as they climbed in, “Are you taking me to my father?”

“Wait till we get to my place,” Raynor Three said, taking the controls and putting the machine in the air. “Just lean back and enjoy the trip, huh?”

Bart relaxed against the cushions, but he still felt apprehensive. Where was his father? If he was a fugitive from the Lhari, he might by now be at the other end of the galaxy. But if his father couldn’t travel on Lhari ships, and if he had been here, the chances were that he was still somewhere in the Procyon system.

They flew for a long time; across low hills, patchwork agricultural districts, towns, and then for a long time over water. The copter had automatic controls, but Raynor Three kept it on manual, and Bart wondered if the Mentorian just didn’t want to talk.

It began to descend, at last, toward a small green hill, bright in the last gold rays on sunset. A small domelike pink bubble rose out of the hill. Raynor Three set the copter neatly down on a platform that slid shut after them, unfastened their seat belts and gave Bart a hand to climb out.

He ushered him into a living room of glass and chrome, softly lighted, but deserted and faintly dusty. Raynor pushed a switch; soft music came on, and the carpets caressed his feet. He motioned Bart to a chair.

“You’re safe here, for a while,” Raynor Three said, “though how long, nobody knows. But so far, I’ve been above suspicion.”’

Bart leaned back; the chair was very comfortable, but the comfort could not help him to relax.

“Where is my father?” he demanded.

Raynor Three stood looking down at him, his mobile face drawn and strange. “I guess I can’t put it off any longer,” he said softly. Then he covered his face with his hands. From behind them hoarse words came, choked with emotion.

“Your father is dead, Bart. I—I killed him.”

Chapter Six

For a moment Bart stared, frozen, unable to move, his very ears refusing the words he heard. Had this all been another cruel trick, then, a trap, a betrayal? He rose and looked wildly around the room, as if the glass walls were a cage closing in on him.

“Murderer!” he flung at Raynor, and took a step toward him, his clenched fists coming up. He’d been shoved around too long, but here he had one of them right in front of him, and for once he’d hit back! He’d start by taking Raynor Three apart—in small pieces! “You—you rotten murderer!”

Raynor Three made no move to defend himself. “Bart,” he said compassionately, “sit down and listen to me. No, I’m no murderer. I—I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

Bart’s hands dropped to his sides, but he heard his voice crack with pain and grief: “I suppose you’ll tell me he was a spy or a traitor and you had to kill him!”

“Not even that. I tried to save your father, I did everything I could. I’m no murderer, Bart. I killed him, yes—God forgive me, because I’ll never forgive myself!”

Bart’s fists unclenched and he stared down at Raynor Three, shaking his head in bewilderment and pain. “I knew he was dead! I knew it all along! I was trying not to believe it, but I knew!”

“I liked your father. I admired him. He took a long chance, and it killed him. I could have stopped him, I should have stopped him, but how could I? Where did I have the right to stop him, after what I did to—” he stopped, almost in mid-word, as if a switch had been turned.

But Bart was not listening. He swung away, striding to the wall as if he would kick it in, striking it with his two clenched fists, his whole being in revolt. Dad, oh, Dad! I kept going, I thought at the end of it you’d be here and it would all be over. But here I am at the end of it all, and you’re not here, you won’t ever be here again.

Dimly, he knew when Raynor Three rose and left him alone. He leaned his head on his clenched fists, and cried.

After a long time he raised his head and blew his nose, his face setting itself in new, hard, unaccustomed lines, slowly coming to terms with the hard, painful reality. His father was dead. His dangerous, dead-in-earnest game of escape had no happy ending of reunion with his father. They couldn’t sit together and laugh about how scared he had been. His father was dead, and he, Bart, was alone and in danger. His face looked very grim indeed, and years older than he was.

After a long time Raynor Three opened the door quietly. “Come and have something to eat, Bart.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I am,” Raynor Three said, “and you ought to be. You’ll need it.” He pulled knobs and the appropriate tables and chairs extruded themselves from the walls. Raynor unsealed hot cartons and spread them on the table, saying lightly, “Looks good—not that I can claim any credit, I subscribe to a food service that delivers them hot by pneumatic tube.”

Bart felt sickened by the thought of eating, but when he put a polite fork in the food, he discovered that he was famished and ate up everything in sight. When they had finished, Raynor dumped the cartons into a disposal chute, went to a small portable bar and put a glass into his hand.

“Drink this.”

Bart touched his lips to the glass, made a face and put it away. “Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

“Call it medicine, you’ll need something,” Raynor Three said crossly. “I’ve got a lot to tell you, and I don’t want you going off half-primed in the middle of a sentence. If you’d rather have a shot of tranquilizer, all right; otherwise, I prescribe that you drink what I gave you.” He gave Bart a quick, wry grin. “I really am a medic, you know.”

Feeling like a scolded child, Bart drank. It burned his mouth, but after it was down, he felt a sort of warm burning in his insides that gradually spread a sense of well-being all through him. It wasn’t alcohol, but whatever it was, it had quite a kick.

“Thanks,” he muttered. “Why are you taking this trouble, Raynor? There must be danger—”

”Don’t you know—” Raynor broke off. “Obviously, you don’t. Your mother never said much about your Mentorian family tree, I suppose? She was a Raynor.” He smiled at Bart, a little ruefully. “I won’t claim a kinsman’s privileges until you decide how much to trust me.”

Raynor Three settled back.

“It’s a long story and I only know part of it,” he began. “Our family, the Raynors, have traded with the Lhari for more generations than I can count. When I was a young man, I qualified as a medic on the Lhari ships, and I’ve been star-hopping ever since. People call us the slaves of the Lhari—maybe we are,” he added wryly. “But I began it just because space is where I belong, and there’s nowhere else that I’ve ever wanted to be. And I’ll take it at any price.

“I never questioned what I was doing until a few years ago. It was your father who made me wonder if we Mentorians were blind and selfish—this privilege ought to belong to everyone, not just the Lhari. More and more, the Lhari monopoly seemed wrong to me. But I was just a medic. And if I involved myself in any conspiracy against the Lhari, they’d find it out in the routine psych-checking.

“And then we worked out how it could be done. Before every trip, with self-hypnosis and self-suggestion, I erase my own memories—a sort of artificial amnesia—so that the Lhari can’t find out any more than I want them to find out. Of course, it also means that I have no memory, while I’m on the Lhari ships, of what I’ve agreed to while I’m—” His face suddenly worked, and his mouth moved without words, as if he had run into some powerful barrier against speech.

It was a full minute, while Bart stared in dismay, before he found his voice again, saying, “So far, it was just a sort of loose network, trying to put together stray bits of information that the Lhari didn’t think important enough to censor.

“And then came the big breakthrough. There was a young Apprentice astrogator named David Briscoe. He’d taken some runs in special test ships, and read some extremely obscure research data from the early days of the contact between men and Lhari, and he had a wild idea. He did the bravest thing anyone has ever done. He stripped himself of all identifying data—so that if he died, no one would be in trouble with the Lhari—and stowed away on a Lhari ship.”

“But—” Bart’s lips were dry—” didn’t he die in the warp-drive?”

Slowly, Raynor Three shook his head.

“No, he didn’t. No drugs, no cold-sleep—but he didn’t die. Don’t you see, Bart?” He leaned forward, urgently.

“It’s all a fake! The Lhari have just been saying that to justify their refusal to give us the secret of the catalyst that generates the warp-drive frequencies! Such a simple lie, and it’s worked for all these years!”

“A Mentorian found him and didn’t have the heart to turn him over to the Lhari. So he was smuggled clear again. But when that Mentorian underwent the routine brain-checks at the end of the voyage, the Lhari found out what had happened. They didn’t know Briscoe’s name, but they wrung that Mentorian out like a wet dishcloth and got a description that was as good as fingerprints. They tracked down young Briscoe and killed him. They killed the first man he’d talked to. They killed the second. The third was your father.”

“The murdering devils!”

Raynor sighed. “Your father and Briscoe’s father were old friends. Briscoe’s father was dying with incurable heart disease; his son was dead, and old Briscoe had only one thought in his mind—to make sure he didn’t die for nothing. So he took your father’s papers, knowing they were as good as a death warrant, slipped away and boarded a Lhari ship that led roundabout to stars where the message hadn’t reached yet. He led them a good chase. Did he die or did they track him down and kill him?” Bart bowed his head and told the story.

“Meanwhile,” Raynor Three continued, “your father came to me, knowing I was sympathetic, knowing I was a Lhari-trained surgeon. He had just one thought in his mind: to do, again, what David Briscoe had done, and make sure the news got out this time. He cooked up a plan that was even braver and more desperate. He decided to sign on a Lhari ship as a member of the crew.”

“As a Mentorian?” Bart asked, but something cold, like ice water trickling down his back, told him this was not what Raynor meant. “The brainwashing—”

”No,” said Raynor, “not as a Mentorian; he couldn’t have escaped the psych-checking. As a Lhari.”

Bart gasped. “How—”

”Men and Lhari are very much alike,” Raynor Three said. “A few small things—skin color, the shape of the ears, the hands and claws—keep humans from seeing that the Lhari are men.”

“Don’t say that,” Bart almost yelled. “Those filthy, murdering devils! You call those monsters men?”

“I’ve lived among the Lhari all my life. They’re not devils, Bart, they have their reasons. Physiologically, the Lhari are—well, humanoid, if you like that better. They’re a lot more like a man than a man is like, for instance, a gorilla. Your father convinced me that with minor plastic and facial surgery, he could pass as a Lhari. And finally I gave in, and did the surgery—”

”And it killed him!”

“Not really. It was a completely unforeseeable thing—a blood clot broke loose in a vein, and lodged in his brain. He was dead in seconds. It could have happened at any time,” he said, “yet I feel responsible, even though I keep telling myself I’m not. And I’ll help you as much as I can—for his sake, and for your mother’s. The Lhari don’t watch me too closely—they figure that anything I do they’ll catch in the brainwashing. But I’m still one step ahead of them, as long as I can erase my own memories.”

Bart was sifting it all, slowly, in his mind.

“Why was Dad doing this? What could he gain?”

“You know we can build ships as good as the Lhari ships, but we don’t know anything about the rare catalyst they use for warp-drive fuel. Captain Steele had hopes of being able to discover where they got it.”

“But couldn’t they find out where the Lhari ships go for fueling?”

“No. There’s no way to trail a Lhari ship,” he reminded Bart. “We can follow them inside a star-system, but then they pop into warp-drive, and we don’t know where they go when they aren’t running between our stars.

“We’ve gathered together what information we do have, and we know that after a certain number of runs in our part of the galaxy, ships take off in the direction of Antares. There’s a ship, due to come in here in about ten days, called the Swiftwing, which is just about due to make the Antares run. Captain Steele had managed to arrange—I don’t know how, and I don’t want to know how—for a vacancy on that ship, and somehow he got credentials. You see, it’s a very good spy system, a network between the stars, but the weak link is this: everything, every message, every man, has to travel back and forth by the Lhari ships themselves.”

He rose, shaking it all off impatiently. “Well, it’s finished now. Your father is dead. What are you going to do? If you want to go back to Vega, you can probably convince the Lhari you’re just an innocent bystander. They don’t hurt bystanders or children, Bart. They aren’t bad people. They’re just protecting their business monopoly.

“The safest way to handle it would be this: let me erase your memories of what I’ve told you tonight. Then just let the Lhari capture you. They won’t kill you. They’ll just give you a light psych-check. When they find out you don’t know anything, they’ll send you back to Vega, and you can spend the rest of your life in peace, running Vega Interplanet and Eight Colors.”

Bart turned on him furiously. “You mean, go home like a good little boy, and pretend none of this ever happened? What do you think I am, anyhow?” Bart’s chin set in the new, hard line. “What I want is a chance to go on where Dad left off!”

“It won’t be easy, and it could be dangerous,” Raynor Three said, “but there’s nothing else to be done. We had the arrangements all made; and now somebody’s got to take the dangerous risk of calling them off. Are you game for a little plastic surgery—just enough to change your looks again, with new forged papers? You can’t go by the Swiftwing—it doesn’t carry passengers—but there’s another route you can take.”

Bart sprang up. “No,” he said, “I know a better way. Let me go on the Swiftwing—in Dad’s place—as a Lhari!”

“Bart, no,” Raynor Three said. “You’d never get away with it. It’s too dangerous.” But his gold eyes glinted.

“Why not? I speak Lhari better than Dad ever did. And my eyes can stand Lhari lights. You said yourself, it’s going to be a dangerous job just calling off all the arrangements. So let’s not call them off. Just let me take Dad’s place!”

“Bart, you’re only a boy—”

”What was Dave Briscoe? No, Raynor. Dad left me a lot more than Vega Interplanet, and you know it. I’ll finish what he started, and then maybe I’ll begin to deserve what he left me.”

Raynor Three gripped Bart’s hand. He said, in a voice that shook, “All right, Bart. You’re your father’s son. I can’t say more than that. I haven’t any right to stop you.”

Chapter Seven

“All right, Bart, today we’ll let you look at yourself,” Raynor Three said.

Bart smiled under the muffling layers of bandage around his face. His hands were bandaged, too, and he had not been permitted to look in a mirror. But the transition had been surprisingly painless—or perhaps his sense of well-being had been due to Raynor Three slipping him some drug.

He’d been given injections of a chemical that would change the color of his skin; there had been minor operations on his face, his hands, his feet.

“Let’s see you get up and walk around.”

Bart obeyed awkwardly, and Raynor frowned. “Hurt?”

“Not exactly, but I feel as if I were limping.”

“That’s to be expected. I changed the angle of the heel tendon and the muscle of the arch. You’re using a different set of muscles when you walk; until they harden up, you’ll have some assorted Charley horses. Have any trouble hearing me?”

“No, though I’d hear better without all these bandages,” Bart said impatiently.

“All in good time. Any trouble breathing?”

“No, except for the bandages.”

“Fine. I changed the shape of your ears and nostrils, and it might have affected your hearing or your breathing. Now, listen, Bart: I’m going to take the bandages off your hands first. Sit down.”

Bart sat across the table from him, obediently sticking out his hands. Raynor Three said, “Shut your eyes.”

Bart did as he was told and felt Raynor Three’s long fingers working at the bandages.

“Move each finger as I touch it.” Bart obeyed, and Raynor said neutrally, “Good. Now, take a deep breath and then open your eyes.”

Impatiently Bart flicked his lids open. In spite of the warning, his breath went out in a harsh, jolting gasp. His hands lay on the table before him—but they were not his hands.

The narrow, long fingers were pearl-gray, tipped with whitish-pink claws that curved out over the tips. Nervously Bart moved one finger, and the long claw flicked out like a cat’s, retracted. He swallowed.

“Golly!” He felt strangely wobbly.

“A beautiful job, if I do say so. Be careful not to scratch yourself, and practice picking up small things.”

Bart saw that the long grayish claws were trembling. “How did you make—the claws?”

“Quite simple, really,” Raynor beamed. “I injected protein compounds into the nail matrix, which speeded up nail growth terrifically, and then, as they grew, shaped them. Joining on those tiny muscles for the retracting mechanism was the tricky part though.”

Bart was moving his hands experimentally. Once over the shock, they felt quite normal. The claws didn’t get in his way half so much as he’d expected when he picked up a pen that lay beside him and, with the blunt tip, made a few of the strange-looking dots and wedges that were the Lhari alphabet.

“Practice writing this,” said Raynor Three, and laid a plastic-encased folder down beside him. It was a set of ship’s papers printed in Lhari. Bart read it through, seeing that it was made out to the equivalent of Astrogator, First Class, Bartol.

“That’s your name now, the name your father would have used. Memorize it, get used to the sound of it, practice writing it. Don’t worry too much about the rating; it’s an elementary one, what we’d call Apprentice rating, and I have a training tape for you anyhow. My brother got hold of it, don’t ask me how—and don’t ask him!”

“When am I going to see my face?”

“When I think you’re ready for the shock,” Raynor said bluntly. “It almost threw you when I showed you your hands.”

He made Bart walk around some more briefly, slowly, he unwound the bandages; then turned and picked up a mirror at the bottom of his medic’s case, turning it right side up. “Here. But take it easy.”

But when Bart looked in the mirror he felt no unexpected shock, only an unnerving revulsion.

His hair was bleached-white and fluffy, almost feathery to the touch. His skin was grayish-rose, and his eyelids had been altered just enough to make his eyes look long, narrow and slanted. His nostrils were mere slits, and he moved his tongue over lips that felt oddly thin.

“I did as little to your teeth as I thought I could get away with-capped the front ones,” Raynor Three told him. “So if you get a toothache you’re out of luck—you won’t dare go to a Lhari dentist. I could have done more, but it would have made you look too freakish when we changed you back to human again—if you live that long,” he added grimly.

I hadn’t thought about that. And if Raynor is going to forget me, who will do it? The cold knot of fear, never wholly absent, moved in him again.

Watching his face, Raynor Three said gently, “It’s a big network, Bart. I’m not telling you much, for your own safety. But when you get to Antares, they’ll tell you all you need to know.”

He lifted Bart’s oddly clawed hands. “I warned you, remember—the change isn’t completely reversible. Your hands will always look—strange. The fingers had to be lengthened, for instance. I wanted to make you as safe as possible among the Lhari. I think you’ll pass anything but an X-ray. Just be careful not to break any bones.”

He gave Bart a package. “This is the Lhari training tape. Listen to it as often as you can, then destroy it—completely—before you leave here. The Swiftwing is due in port three days from now, and they stay here a week. I don’t know how we’ll manage it, but I’ll guarantee there’ll be a vacancy of one Astrogator, First Class, on that ship.” He rose. “And now I’m going back to town and erase the memory.” He stopped, looking intently at Bart.

“So if you see me, stay away from me and don’t speak, because I won’t know you from any other Lhari. Understand? From here on, you’re on your own, Bart.”

He held out his hand. “This is the rough part, Son.” His face moved strangely. “I’m part of this network between the stars, but I don’t know what I’ve done before, and I’ll never know how it comes out. It’s funny to stand here and look at you and realize that I won’t even remember you.” The gold-glinted eyes blinked rapidly. “Goodbye, Bart. And—good luck, Son.”

Bart took his hand, deeply moved, with the strange sense that this was another death—a worse one than Briscoe’s. He tried to speak and couldn’t.

“Well—” Raynor’s mouth twisted into a wry grin. “Ouch! Careful with those claws. The Lhari don’t shake hands.”

He turned abruptly and went out of the door and out of Bart’s life, while Bart stood at the dome-window, feeling alone as he had never felt alone before.

He had to wait six days, and they felt like six eternities. He played the training tape over and over. With his Academy background, it wasn’t nearly so difficult as he’d feared. He read and reread the set of papers identifying him as Astrogator, First Class, Bartol. Forged, he supposed. Or was there, somewhere, a real Bartol?

The last morning he slept uneasily late. He finished his last meal as a human, spent part of the day removing all traces of his presence from Raynor’s home, burned the training tape, and finally got into the silky, silvery tights and cloak that Raynor had provided. He could use his hands now as if they belonged to him; he even found the claws handy and useful. He could write his signature, and copy out instructions from the training tape, without a moment’s hesitation.

Toward dusk, a young Lhari slipped unobserved out of Raynor’s house and hiked unnoticed to the edges of a small city nearby, where he mingled with the crowd and hired a skycab from an unobservant human driver to take him to the spaceport city. The skycab driver was startled, but not, Bart judged, unusually so, to pick up a Lhari passenger.

“Been doing a little sight-seeing on our planet, hey?”

“That’s right,” Bart said in Universal, not trying to fake his idea of the Lhari accent. Raynor had told him that only a few of the Lhari had that characteristic sibilant “r” and “s” and warned him against trying to imitate it. Just speak naturally; there are dialects of Lhari, just as there are dialects of the different human languages, and they all sound different in Universal anyhow. “Just looking around some.”

The skycab driver frowned and looked down at his controls, and Bart felt curiously snubbed. Then he remembered. He himself had little to say to the Lhari when they spoke to him.

He was an alien, a monster. He couldn’t expect to be treated like a human being any more.

When the skycab let him off before the spaceport, it felt strange to see how the crowds edged away from him as he made a way through them. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the mirror-ramps, a tall thin strange form in a metallic cloak, head crested with feathery white, and felt overwhelmingly homesick for his own familiar face.

He was beginning to feel hungry, and realized that he could not go into an ordinary restaurant without attracting attention. There were refreshment stands all over the spaceport, and he briefly considered getting a snack at one of these.

No, that was just putting it off. The time had to come when he must face his fear and test his disguise among the Lhari themselves. Reviewing his knowledge of the construction of spaceports, he remembered that one side was the terminal, where humans and visitors and passengers were freely admitted; the other side, for Lhari and their Mentorian employees only, contained—along with business offices of many sorts—a sort of arcade with amusement centers, shops and restaurants catering to the personnel of the Lhari ships. With nine or ten ships docking every day, Raynor had assured him that a strange Lhari face would be lost in the crowds very easily.

He went to one of the doors marked danger, Lhari lights beyond, and passed through the glaring corridor of offices and storage-warehouses, finally coming out into a sort of wide mall. The lights were fierce, but he could endure them without trouble now, though his head ached faintly. Raynor, testing his light tolerance, had assured him that he could endure anything the Lhari could, without permanent damage to his optic nerves, though he would have headaches until he got used to them.

There were small shops and what looked like bars, and a glass-fronted place with a sign lettered largely, in black letters, a Lhari phrase meaning roughly home away from home: meals served, spacemen welcome, reasonable.

Behind him a voice said in Lhari, “Tell me, does that sign mean what it says? Or is this one of those traps for separating the unwary spaceman from his hard-earned credits? How’s the food?”

Bart carefully took hold of himself.

“I was just wondering that myself.” He turned as he spoke, finding himself face to face with a young Lhari in the unadorned cloak of a spaceman without official rank. He knew the Lhari was young because his crest was still white.

The young Lhari extended his claws in the closed-fist, hidden-claw gesture of Lhari greeting. “Shall we take a chance? Ringg son of Rahan greets you.”

“Bartol son of Berihun.”

“I don’t remember seeing you in the port, Bartol.”

“I’ve mostly worked on the Polaris run.”

“Way off there?” Ringg son of Rahan sounded startled and impressed. “You really get around, don’t you? Shall we sit here?”

They sat on triangular chairs at a three-cornered table. Bart waited for Ringg to order, and ordered what he did. When it came, it was a sort of egg-and-fish casserole which Bart found extremely tasty, and he dug into it with pleasure. Allowing for the claws, Lhari table manners were not so much different from human—and remember, their customs differ as much as ours do. If you do something differently, they’ll just think you’re from another planet with a different culture.

“Have you been here long?”

“A day or so. I’m off the Swiftwing.”

Bart decided to hazard his luck. “I was told there’s a vacancy on the Swiftwing.”

Ringg looked at him curiously. “There is,” he said, “but I’d like to know how you found it out. Captain Vorongil said that anyone who talked about it would be sent to Kleeto for three cycles. But what happened to you? Miss your ship?”

“No, I’ve just been laying off—traveling, sight-seeing, bumming around,” Bart said. “But I’m tired of it, and now I’d like to sign out again.”

“Well, we could use another man. This is the long run we’re making, out to Antares and then home, and if everybody has to work extra shifts, it’s no fun. But if old Vorongil knows that there’s been talk in the port about Klanerol jumping ship, or whatever happened to him, we’ll all have to walk wide of his temper.”

Bart was beginning to relax a little; Ringg apparently accepted him without scrutiny. At this close range Ringg did not seem a monster, but just a young fellow like himself, hearty, good-natured—in fact, not unlike Tommy.

Bart chased the thought away as soon as it sneaked into his brain—one of those things, like Tommy? Then, rather grimly, he reminded himself, I’m one of those things. He said irritably, “So how do I account for asking your captain for the place?”

Ringg cocked his fluffy crest to one side. “I know,” he said, “I told you. I’ll say you’re an old friend of mine. You don’t know what Vorongil’s like when he gets mad. But what he doesn’t know, he won’t shout about.” He shoved back the triangular chair. “Who did tell you, anyway?”

This was the first real hurdle, and Bart’s brain raced desperately, but Ringg was not listening for an answer. “I suppose somebody gossiped, or one of those fool Mentorians picked it up. Got your papers? What rating?”

“Astrogator first class.”

“Klanerol was second, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.” Ringg led the way through the arcades, out across a guarded sector, passing half a dozen of the huge ships lying in their pits. Finally Ringg stopped and pointed. “This is the old hulk.”

Bart had traveled only in Lhari passenger ships, which were new and fresh and sleek. This ship was enormous, ovoid like the egg of some space-monster, the sides dented and discolored, thin films of chemical discoloration lying over the glassy metallic hull.

Bart followed Ringg. This was real, it was happening. He was signing out for his first interstellar cruise on one of the Lhari ships. Not a Mentorian assistant, half-trusted, half-tolerated, but one of the crew themselves. If I’m lucky, he reminded himself grimly.

There was Lhari, in the black-banded officer’s cloak, at the doorway. He glanced at Ringg’s papers.

“Friend of mine,” Ringg said, and Bart proffered his folder. The Lhari gave it a casual glance, handed it back.

“Old Baldy on board?” Ringg asked.

“Where else?” The officer laughed. “You don’t think he’d relax with cargo not loaded, do you?”

They seemed casual and normal, and Bart’s confidence was growing. They had accepted him as one of themselves. But the great ordeal still lay before him—an interview with the Lhari captain. And the idea had Bart sweating scared.

The corridors and decks seemed larger, wider, more spacious, but shabbier than on the clean, bright, commercial passenger decks Bart had seen. Dark-lensed men were rolling bales of cargo along on wheeled dollies. The corridors seemed endless. More to hear the sound of his own voice, and reassure himself of his ability to speak and be understood, than because he cared, he asked Ringg, “What’s your rating?”

“Well, according to the logbooks, I’m an Expert Class Two, Metals-Fatigue,” said Ringg. “That sounds very technical and interesting. But what it means is just that I go all over the ship inch by inch, and when I finish, start all over again at the other end. Most of what I do is just boss around the maintenance crews and snarl at them about spots of rust on the paint.”

They got into a small round elevator and Ringg punched buttons; it began to rise, slowly and creakily, toward the top. “This, for instance,” Ringg said. “I’ve been yelling for a new cable for six months.” He turned. “Take it easy, Bartol; don’t let Vorongil scare you. He likes to hear the sound of his own voice, but we’d all walk out the lock without spacesuits for him.”

The elevator slid to a stop. The sign in Lhari letters said Level of Administration—Officers’ Deck. Ringg pushed at a door and said, “Captain Vorongil?”

“I thought you were on leave,” said a Lhari voice, deeper and slower than most. “What are you doing, back here more than ten milliseconds before strap-in checks?”

Ringg stepped back for Bart to go inside. The small cabin, with an elliptical bunk slung from the ceiling and a triangular table, was dwarfed by a tall, thin Lhari, in a cloak with four of the black bands that seemed to denote rank among them. He had a deeply lined face with a lacework of tiny wrinkles around the slanted eyes. His crest was not the high, fluffy white of a young Lhari, but broken short near the scalp, grayish pink showing through, the little feathery ends yellowed with age. He growled, “Come in then, don’t stand there. I suppose Ringg’s told you what a tyrant I am? What do you want, feathertop?”

Bart remembered being told that this was the Lhari equivalent of “Kid” or “Youngster.” He fumbled in the capacious folds of his cloak for his papers. His voice sounded shrill, even to himself.

“Bartol son of Berihun in respectful greeting, rieko mori.” (“Honorable old-bald-one,” the Lhari equivalent of “sir.”) “Ringg told me there is a vacancy among the Astrogators, and I want to sign out.”

Unmistakably, Vorongil’s snort was laughter.

“So you’ve been talking, Ringg?”

Ringg retorted, “Better that I tell one man than that you have to hunt the planet over—or run the long haul with the drive-room watches short by one man.”

“Well, well, you’re right,” Vorongil growled. He glared at Bart. “On the last planet, one of our men disappeared. Jumped ship!” The creases around his eyes deepened, troubled. “Probably just gone on the drift, sight-seeing, but I wish he’d told me. As it is, I wonder if he’s been hurt, killed, kidnaped.”

Ringg said, “Who’d dare? It would be reported.”

Bart knew, with a cold chill, that the missing Klanerol had not simply gone “on the drift.” No Lhari port would ever see Klanerol, Second Class Astrogator, again.

“Bartol,” mused the captain, riffling the forged papers. “Served on the Polaris run. Hm—you are a good long way off your orbit, aren’t you? Never been out that way myself. All right, I’ll take you on. You can do system programming? Good. Rating in Second Galaxy mathematics?”

He nodded, hauled out a sheet of thin, wax-coated fabric and his claws made rapid imprints in the surface. He passed it to Bart, pointed. Bart hesitated, and Vorongil said impatiently, “Standard agreement, no hidden clauses. Put your mark on it, feathertop.”

Bart realized it was something like a fingerprint they wanted. You’ll pass anything but X-rays. He pressed the top of one claw into the wax. Vorongil nodded, shoved it on a shelf without looking at it.

“So much for that,” said Ringg, laughing, as they came out. “The Bald One was in a good temper. I’m going to the port and celebrate, not that this dim place is very festive. You?”

“I—I think I’ll stay aboard.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be down there somewhere,” Ringg said. “See you later, shipmate.” He raised his closed fist in farewell, and went.

Bart stood in the corridor, feeling astounded and strange. He belonged here! He had a right to be on board the ship! He wasn’t quite sure what to do next.

A Lhari, as short and fat as a Lhari could possibly be and still be a Lhari, came or rather waddled out of the captain’s office. He saw Bartol and called, “Are you the new First Class? I’m Rugel, coordinator.”

Rugel had a huge cleft darkish scar across his lip, and there were two bands on his cloak. He was completely bald, and he puffed when he walked. “Vorongil asked me to show you around. You’ll share quarters with Ringg—no sense shifting another man. Come down and see the chart rooms—or do you want to leave your kit in your cabin first?”

“I don’t have much,” Bart said.

Rugel’s seamed lip widened. “That’s the way—travel light when you’re on the drift,” he confirmed.

Rugel took him down to the drive rooms, and here for a moment, in wonder and awe, Bart almost forgot his disguise. The old Lhari led him to the huge computer which filled one wall of the room, and Bart was smitten with the universality of mathematics. Here was something he knew he could handle.

He could do this programming, easily enough. But as he stood before the banks of complex, yet beautifully familiar levers, the sheer exquisite complexity of it overcame him. To compute the movements of thousands of stars, all moving at different speeds in different directions in the vast swirling directionless chaos of the Universe—and yet to be sure that every separate movement would come out to within a quarter of a mile! It was something that no finite brain—man or Lhari—could ever accomplish, yet their limited brains had built these computers that could do it.

Rugel watched him, laughing softly. “Well, you’ll have enough time down here. I like to have youngsters who are still in the middle of a love affair with their work. Come along, and I’ll show you your cabin.”

Rugel left him in a cabin amidships; small and cramped, but tidy, two of the oval bunks slung at opposite ends, a small table between them, and drawers filled with pamphlets and manuals and maps. Furtively, ashamed of himself, yet driven by necessity, Bart searched Ringg’s belongings, wanting to get some idea of what possessions he ought to own. He looked around the shower and toilet facilities with extra care—this was something he couldn’t slip up on and be considered even halfway normal. He was afraid Ringg would come in, and see him staring curiously at something as ordinary, to a Lhari, as a cake of soap.

He decided to go down to the port again and look around the shops. He was not afraid of being unable to handle his work. What he feared was something subtler—that the small items of everyday living, something as simple as a nail file, would betray him.

On his way he looked into the Recreation Lounge, filled with comfortable seats, vision-screens, and what looked like simple pinball machines and mechanical games of skill. There were also stacks of tapereels and headsets for listening, not unlike those humans used. Bart felt fascinated, and wanted to explore, but decided he could do that later.

Somehow he took the wrong turn coming out of the Recreation Lounge, and went through a door where the sudden dimming of lights told him he was in Mentorian quarters. The sudden darkness made him stumble, thrust out his hands to keep from falling, and an unmistakably human voice said, “Ouch!”

“I’m sorry,” Bart said in Universal, without thinking.

“I admit the lights are dim,” said the voice tartly, and Bart found himself looking down, as his eyes adjusted to the new light level, at a girl.

She was small and slight, in a metallic blue cloak that swept out, like wings, around her thin shoulders; the hood framed a small, kittenlike face. She was a Mentorian, and she was human, and Bart’s eyes rested with comfort on her face; she, on the other hand, was looking up with anxiety and uneasy distrust. That’s right—I’m a Lhari, a nonhuman freak!

“I seem to have missed my way.”

“What are you looking for, sir? The medical quarters are through here.”

“I’m looking for the elevator down to the crew exits.”

“Through here,” she said, reopening the door through which he had come, and shading her large, lovely, long-lashed eyes with a slender hand. “You took the wrong turn. Are you new on board? I thought all ships were laid out exactly alike.”

“I’ve only worked on passenger ships.”

“I believe they are somewhat different,” said the girl in good Lhari. “Well, that is your way, sir.”

He felt as if he had been snubbed and dismissed.

“What is your name?”

She stiffened as if about to salute. “Meta of the house of Marnay Three, sir.”

Bart realized he was doing something wholly out of character for a Lhari—chatting casually with a Mentorian. With a wistful glance at the pretty girl, he said a stiff “Thank you” and went down the ramp she had indicated. He felt horribly lonely. Being a freak wasn’t going to be much fun.

Chapter Eight

He saw the girl again next day, when they checked in for blastoff. She was seated at a small desk, triangular like so much of the Lhari furniture, checking a register as they came out of the Decontam room, making sure they downed their greenish solution of microorganisms.

“Papers, please?” She marked, and Bart noticed that she was using a red pencil.

“Bartol,” she said aloud. “Is that how you pronounce it?” She made small scribbles in a sort of shorthand with the red pencil, then made other marks with the black one in Lhari; he supposed the red marks were her own private memoranda, unreadable by the Lhari.

“Next, please.” She handed a cup of the greenish stuff to Ringg, behind him. Bart went down toward the drive room, and to his own surprise, found himself wishing the girl were a mathematician rather than a medic. It would have been pleasant to watch her down there.

Old Rugel, on duty in the drive room, watched Bart strap himself in before the computer. “Make sure you check all dials at null,” he reminded him, and Bart felt a last surge of panic.

This was his first cruise, except for practice runs at the Academy! Yet his rating called him an experienced man on the Polaris run. He’d had the Lhari training tape, which was supposed to condition his responses, but would it? He tried to clench his fists, drove a claw into his palm, winced, and commanded himself to stay calm and keep his mind on what he was doing.

It calmed him to make the routine check of his dials.

“Strapdown check,” said a Lhari with a yellowed crest and a rasping voice. “New man, eh?” He gave Bart’s straps perfunctory tugs at shoulders and waist, tightened a buckle. “Karol son of Garin.”

Bells rang in the ship, and Bart felt the odd, tonic touch of fear. This was it.

Vorongil strode through the door, his banded cloak sweeping behind him, and took the control couch.

“Ready from fueling room, sir.”

“Position,” Vorongil snapped.

Bart heard himself reading off a string of figures in Lhari. His voice sounded perfectly calm.

“Communication.”

“Clear channels from Pylon Dispatch, sir.” It was old Rugel’s voice.

“Well,” Vorongil said, slowly and almost reflectively, “let’s take her up then.”

He touched some controls. The humming grew. Then, swift, hard and crushing, weight mashed Bart against his couch.

“Position!” Vorongil’s voice sounded harsh, and Bart fought the crushing weight of it. Even his eyeballs ached as he struggled to turn the tiny eye muscles from dial to dial, and his voice was a dim croak: “Fourteen seven sidereal twelve point one one four nine....”

“Hold it to point one one four six,” Vorongil said calmly.

“Point one one four six,” Bart said, and his claws stabbed at dials. Suddenly, in spite of the cold weight on his chest, the pain, the struggle, he felt as if he were floating. He managed a long, luxurious breath. He could handle it. He knew what he was doing.

He was an Astrogator....

Later, when Acceleration One had reached its apex and the artificial gravity made the ship a place of comfort again, he went down to the dining hall with Ringg and met the crew of the Swiftwing. There were twelve officers and twelve crewmen of various ratings like himself and Ringg, but there seemed to be little social division between them, as there would have been on a human ship; officers and crew joked and argued without formality of any kind.

None of them gave him a second look. Later, in the Recreation Lounge, Ringg challenged him to a game with one of the pinball machines. It seemed fairly simple to Bart; he tried it, and to his own surprise, won.

Old Rugel touched a lever at the side of the room. With a tiny whishing sound, shutters opened, the light of Procyon Alpha flooded them and he looked out through a great viewport into bottomless space.

Procyon Alpha, Beta and Gamma hung at full, rings gently tilted. Beyond them the stars burned, flaming through the shimmers of cosmic dust. The colors, the never-ending colors of space!

And he stood here, in a room full of monsters—he was one of the monsters—

“Which one of the planets was it we stopped on?” Rugel asked. “I can’t tell ‘em apart from this distance.”

Bartol swallowed; he had almost said the blue one. He pointed. “The—the big one there, with the rings almost edge-on. I think they call it Alpha.”

“It’s their planet,” said Rugel. “I guess they can call it what they want to. How about another game?”

Resolutely, Bart turned his back on the bewitching colors, and bent over the pinball machine.

The first week in space was a nightmare of strain. He welcomed the hours on watch in the drive room; there alone he was sure of what he was doing. Everywhere else in the ship he was perpetually scared, perpetually on tiptoe, perpetually afraid of making some small and stupid mistake. Once he actually called Aldebaran a red star, but Rugel either did not hear the slip or thought he was repeating what one of the Mentorians—there were two aboard besides the girl—had said.

The absence of color from speech and life was the hardest thing to get used to. Every star in the manual was listed by light-frequency waves, to be checked against a photometer for a specific reading, and it almost drove Bart mad to go through the ritual when the Mentorians were off duty and could not call off the color and the equivalent frequency type for him. Yet he did not dare skip a single step, or someone might have guessed that he could see the difference between a yellow and a green star before checking them.

The Academy ships had had the traditional human signal system of flashing red lights. Bart was stretched taut all the time, listening for the small codelike buzzers and ticks that warned him of filled tanks, leads in need of servicing, answers ready. Ringg’s metal-fatigues testing kit was a bewildering muddle of boxes, meters, rods and earphones, each buzzing and clicking its characteristic warning.

At first he felt stretched to capacity every waking moment, his memory aching with a million details, and lay awake nights thinking his mind would crack under the strain. Then Alpha faded to a dim bluish shimmer, Beta was eclipsed, Gamma was gone, Procyon dimmed to a failing spark; and suddenly Bart’s memory accustomed itself to the load, the new habits were firmly in place, and he found himself eating, sleeping and working in a settled routine.

He belonged to the Swiftwing now.

Procyon was almost lost in the viewports when a sort of upswept tempo began to run through the ship, an undercurrent of increased activity. Cargo was checked, inventoried and strapped in. Ringg was given four extra men to help him, made an extra tour of the ship, and came back buzzing like a frantic cricket. Bart’s computers told him they were forging toward the sidereal location assigned for the first of the warp-drive shifts, which would take them some fifteen light-years toward Aldebaran.

On the final watch before the warp-drive shift, the medical officer came around and relieved the Mentorians from duty. Bart watched them go, with a curious, cold, crawling apprehension. Even the Mentorians, trusted by the Lhari—even these were put into cold-sleep! Fear grabbed his insides.

No human had ever survived the shift into warp-drive, the Lhari said. Briscoe, his father, Raynor Three—they thought they had proved that the Lhari lied. If they were right, if it was a Lhari trick to reinforce their stranglehold on the human worlds and keep the warp-drive for themselves, then Bart had nothing to fear. But he was afraid.

Why did the Mentorians endure this, never quite trusted, isolated among aliens?

Raynor Three had said, Because I belong in space, because I’m never happy anywhere else. Bart looked out the viewport at the swirl and burn of the colors there. Now that he could never speak of the colors, it seemed he had never been so wholly and wistfully aware of them. They symbolized the thing he could never put into words.

So that everyone can have this. Not just the Lhari.

Rugel watched the Mentorians go, scowling. “I wish medic would find a way to keep them alive through warp,” he said. “My Mentorian assistant could watch that frequency-shift as we got near the bottom of the arc, and I’ll bet she could see it. They can see the changes in intensity faster than I can plot them on the photometer!”

Bart felt goosebumps break out on his skin. Rugel spoke as if the certain death of humans, Mentorians, was a fact. Didn’t the Lhari themselves know it was a farce? Or was it?

Vorongil himself took the controls for the surge of Acceleration Two, which would take them past the Light Barrier. Bart, watching his instruments to exact position and time, saw the colors of each star shift strangely, moment by moment. The red stars seemed hard to see. The orange-yellow ones burned suddenly like flame; the green ones seemed golden, the blue ones almost green. Dimly, he remembered the old story of a “red shift” in the lights of approaching stars, but here he saw it pure, a sight no human eyes had ever seen. A sight that no eyes had seen, human or otherwise, for the Lhari could not see it....

“Time,” he said briefly to Vorongil, “Fifteen seconds....”

Rugel looked across from his couch. Bart felt that the old, scarred Lhari could read his fear. Rugel said through a wheeze, “No matter how old you get, Bartol, you’re still scared when you make a warp-shift. But relax, computers don’t make mistakes.”

“Catalyst,” Vorongil snapped, “Ready—shift!”

At first there was no change; then Bart realized that the stars, through the viewport, had altered abruptly in size and shade and color. They were not sparks but strange streaks, like comets, crossing and recrossing long tails that grew, longer and longer, moment by moment. The dark night of space was filled with a crisscrossing blaze. They were moving faster than light, they saw the light left by the moving Universe as each star hurled in its own invisible orbit, while they tore incredibly through it, faster than light itself....

Bart felt a curious, tingling discomfort, deep in his flesh; almost an itching, a stinging in his very bones.

Lhari flesh is no different from ours....

Space, through the viewport, was no longer space as he had come to know it, but a strange eerie limbo, the star-tracks lengthening, shifting color until they filled the whole viewport with shimmering, gray, recrossing light. The unbelievable reaction of warp-drive thrust them through space faster than the lights of the surrounding stars, faster than imagination could follow.

The lights in the drive chamber began to dim—or was he blacking out? The stinging in his flesh was a clawed pain.

Briscoe lived through it....

They say.

The whirling star-tracks fogged, coiled, turned colorless worms of light, went into a single vast blur. Dimly Bart saw old Rugel slump forward, moaning softly; saw the old Lhari pillow his bald head on his veined arms. Then darkness took him; and thinking it was death, Bart felt only numb, regretful failure. I’ve failed, we’ll always fail. The Lhari were right all long.

But we tried! By God, we tried!

“Bartol?” A gentle hand, cat claws retracted, came down on his shoulder. Ringg bent over him. Good-natured rebuke was in his voice. “Why didn’t you tell us you got a bad reaction, and ask to sign out for this shift?” he demanded. “Look, poor old Rugel’s passed out again. He just won’t admit he can’t take it—but one idiot on a watch is enough! Some people just feel as if the bottom’s dropped out of the ship, and that’s all there is to it.”

Bart hauled his head upright, fighting a surge of stinging nausea. His bones itched inside and he was damnably uncomfortable, but he was alive.

“I’m—fine.”

“You look it,” Ringg said in derision. “Think you can help me get Rugel to his cabin?”

Bart struggled to his feet, and found that when he was upright he felt better. “Wow!” he muttered, then clamped his mouth shut. He was supposed to be an experienced man, a Lhari hardened to space. He said woozily, “How long was I out?”

“The usual time,” Ringg said briskly, “about three seconds—just while we hit peak warp-drive. Feels longer, so they tell me, sometimes—time’s funny, beyond light-speeds. The medic says it’s purely psychological. I’m not so sure. I itch, blast it!”

He moved his shoulders in a squirming way, then bent over Rugel, who was moaning, half insensible. “Catch hold of his feet, Bartol. Here—ease him out of his chair. No sense bothering the medics this time. Think you can manage to help me carry him down to the deck?”

“Sure,” Bart said, finding his feet and his voice. He felt better as they moved along the hallway, the limp, muttering form of the old Lhari insensible in their arms. They reached the officer’s deck, got Rugel into his cabin and into his bunk, hauled off his cloak and boots. Ringg stood shaking his head.

“And they say Captain Vorongil’s so tough!”

Bart made a questioning noise.

“Why, just look,” said Ringg. “He knows it would make poor old Rugel feel as if he wasn’t good for much—to order him into his bunk and make him take dope like a Mentorian for every warp-shift. So we have this to go through at every jump!” He sounded cross and disgusted, but there was a rough, boyish gentleness as he hauled the blanket over the bald old Lhari. He looked up, almost shyly.

“Thanks for helping me with Old Baldy. We usually try to get him out before Vorongil officially takes notice. Of course, he sort of keeps his back turned,” Ringg said, and they laughed together as they turned back to the drive room. Bart found himself thinking, Ringg’s a good kid, before he pulled himself up, in sudden shock.

He had lived through warp-drive! Then, indeed, the Lhari had been lying all along, the vicious lie that maintained their stranglehold monopoly of star-travel. He was their enemy again, the spy within their gates, like Briscoe, to be hunted down and killed, but to bring the message, loud and clear, to everyone: The Lhari lied! The stars can belong to us all!

When he got back to the drive room, he saw through the viewport that the blur had vanished, the star-trails were clear, distinct again, their comet-tails shortening by the moment, their colors more distinct.

The Lhari were waiting, a few poised over their instruments, a few more standing at the quartz window watching the star-trails, some squirming and scratching and grousing about “space fleas”—the characteristic itching reaction that seemed to be deep down inside the bones.

Bart checked his panels, noted the time when they were due to snap back into normal space, and went to stand by the viewport. The stars were reappearing, seeming to steady and blaze out in cloudy splendor through the bright dust. They burned in great streamers of flame, and for the moment he forgot his mission again, lost in the beauty of the fiery lights. He drew a deep, shaking gasp. It was worth it all, to see this! He turned and saw Ringg, silent, at his shoulder.

“Me, too,” Ringg said, almost in a whisper. “I think every man on board feels that way, a little, only he won’t admit it.” His slanted gray eyes looked quickly at Bart and away.

“I guess we’re almost down to L-point. Better check the panel and report nulls, so medic can wake up the Mentorians.”

The Swiftwing moved on between the stars. Aldebaran loomed, then faded in the viewports; another shift jumped them to a star whose human name Bart did not know. Shift followed shift, spaceport followed spaceport, sun followed sun; men lived on most of these worlds, and on each of them a Lhari spaceport rose, alien and arrogant. And on each world men looked at Lhari with resentful eyes, cursing the race who kept the stars for their own.

Cargo amassed in the holds of the Swiftwing, from worlds beyond all dreams of strangeness. Bart grew, not bored, but hardened to the incredible. For days at a time, no word of human speech crossed his mind.

The blackout at peak of each warp-shift persisted. Vorongil had given him permission to report off duty, but since the blackouts did not impair his efficiency, Bart had refused. Rugel told him that this was the moment of equilibrium, the peak of the faster-than-light motion.

“Perhaps a true limiting speed beyond which nothing will ever go,” Vorongil said, touching the charts with a varnished claw. Rugel’s scarred old mouth spread in a thin smile.

“Maybe there’s no such thing as a limiting speed. Someday we’ll reach true simultaneity—enter warp, and come out just where we want to be, at the same time. Just a split-second interval. That will be real transmission.”

Ringg scoffed, “And suppose you get even better—and come out of warp before you go into it? What then, Honorable Bald One?”

Rugel chuckled, and did not answer. Bart turned away. It was not easy to keep on hating the Lhari.

There came a day when he came on watch to see drawn, worried faces; and when Ringg came into the drive room they threw their levers on automatic and crowded around him, their crests bobbing in question and dismay. Vorongil seemed to emit sparks as he barked at Ringg, “You found it?”

“I found it. Inside the hull lining.”

Vorongil swore, and Ringg held up a hand in protest. “I only locate metals fatigue, sir—I don’t make it!”

“No help for it then,” Vorongil said. “We’ll have to put down for repairs. How much time do we have, Ringg?”

“I give it thirty hours,” Ringg said briefly, and Vorongil gave a long shrill whistle. “Bartol, what’s the closest listed spaceport?”

Bart dived for handbooks, manuals, comparative tables of position, and started programming information. The crew drifted toward him, and by the time he finished feeding in the coded information, a row three-deep of Lhari surrounded him, including all the officers. Vorongil was right at his shoulder when Bart slipped on his earphones and started decoding the punched strips that fed out the answers from the computer.

“Nearest port is Cottman Four. It’s almost exactly thirty hours away.”

“I don’t like to run it that close.” Vorongil’s face was bitten deep with lines. He turned to Ramillis, head of Maintenance. “Do we need spare parts? Or just general repairs?”

“Just repairs, sir. We have plenty of shielding metal. It’s a long job to get through the hulls, but there’s nothing we can’t fix.”

Vorongil flexed his clawed hands nervously, stretching and retracting them. “Ringg, you’re the fatigue expert. I’ll take your word for it. Can we make thirty hours?”

Ringg looked pale and there was none of his usual boyish nonsense when he said, “Captain, I swear I wouldn’t risk Cottman. You know what crystallization’s like, sir. We can’t get through that hull lining to repair it in space, if it does go before we land. We wouldn’t have the chance of a hydrogen atom in a tank of halogens.”

Vorongil’s slanted eyebrows made a single unbroken line. “That’s the word then. Bartol, find us the closest star with a planet—spaceport or not.”

Bart’s hands were shaking with sudden fear. He checked each digit of their present position, fed it into the computer, waited, finally wet his lips and plunged, taking the strip from a computer.

“This small star, called Meristem. It’s a—” he bit his lip, hard; he had almost said green—“type Q, two planets with atmosphere within tolerable limits, not classified as inhabited.”

“Who owns it?”

“I don’t have that information on the banks, sir.”

Vorongil beckoned the Mentorian assistant. So apart were Lhari and Mentorian on these ships that Bart did not even know his name. He said, “Look up a star called Meristem for us.” The Mentorian hurried away, came back after a moment with the information that it belonged to the Second Galaxy Federation, but was listed as unexplored.

Vorongil scowled. “Well, we can claim necessity,” he said. “It’s only eight hours away, and Cottman’s thirty. Bartol, plot us a warp-drive shift that will land us in that system, and on the inner of the two planets, within nine hours. If it’s a type Q star, that means dim illumination, and no spaceport mercury-vapor installations. We’ll need as much sunlight as we can get.”

It was the first time that Bart, unaided, had had the responsibility of plotting a warp-drive shift. He checked the coordinates of the small green star three times before passing them along to Vorongil. Even so, when they went into Acceleration Two, he felt stinging fear. If I plotted wrong, we could shift into that crazy space and come out billions of miles away....

But when the stars steadied and took on their own colors, the blaze of a small green sun was steady in the viewport.

“Meristem,” Vorongil said, taking the controls himself. “Let’s hope the place is really uninhabited and that catalogue’s up to date, lads. It wouldn’t be any fun to burn up some harmless village, or get shot at by barbarians—and we’re setting down with no control-tower signals and no spaceport repair crews. So let’s hope our luck holds out for a while yet.”

Bart, feeling the minute, unsteady trembling somewhere in the ship—Imagination, he told himself, you can’t feel metal-fatigue somewhere in the hull lining—echoed the wish. He did not know that he had already had the best luck of his unique voyage, or realize the fantastic luck that had brought him to the small green star Meristem.

Chapter Nine

The crews of repairmen were working down in the hull, and the Swiftwing was a hell of clanging noise and shuddering heat. Maintenance was working overtime, but the rest of the crew, with nothing to do, stood around in the recreation rooms, tried to play games, cursed the heat and the dreary dimness through the viewports, and twitched at the boiler-factory racket from the holds.

Toward the end of the third day, the biologist reported air, water and gravity well within tolerable limits, and Captain Vorongil issued permission for anyone who liked, to go outside and have a look around.

Bart had a sort of ship-induced claustrophobia. It was good to feel solid ground under his feet and the rays of a sun, even a green sun, on his back. Even more, it was good to get away from the constant presence of his shipmates. During this enforced idleness, their presence oppressed him unendurably—so many tall forms, gray skins, feathery crests. He was always alone; for a change, he felt that he’d like to be alone without Lhari all around him.

But as he moved away from the ship, Ringg dropped out of the hatchway and hailed him. “Where are you going?”

“Just for a walk.”

Ringg drew a deep breath of weariness. “That sounds good. Mind if I come along?”

Bart did, but all he could say was, “If you like.”

“How about let’s get some food from the rations clerk, and do some exploring?”

The sun overhead was a clear greenish-gold, the sky strewn with soft pale clouds that cast racing shadows on the soft grass underfoot, fragrant pinkish-yellow stuff strewn with bright vermilion puff-balls. Bart wished he were alone to enjoy it.

“How are the repairs coming?”

“Pretty well. But Karol got his hand half scorched off, poor fellow. Just luck the same thing didn’t happen to me.” Ringg added. “You know that Mentorian—the young one, the medic’s assistant?”

“I’ve seen her. Her name’s Meta, I think.” Suddenly, Bart wished the Mentorian girl were with him here. It would be nice to hear a human voice.

“Oh, is it a female? Mentorians all look alike to me,” Ringg said, while Bart controlled his face with an effort. “Be that as it may, she saved me from having the same thing happen. I was just going to lean against a strip of sheet metal when she screamed at me. Do you think they can really see heat vibrations? She called it red-hot.”

They had reached a line of tall cliffs, where a steep rock-fall divided off the plain from the edge of the mountains. A few slender, drooping, gold-leaved trees bent graceful branches over a pool. Bart stood fascinated by the play of green sunlight on the emerald ripples, but Ringg flung himself down full length on the soft grass and sighed comfortably. “Feels good.”

“Too comfortable to eat?”

They munched in companionable silence. “Look,” said Ringg at last, pointing toward the cliffs, “Holes in the rocks. Caves. I’d like to explore them, wouldn’t you?”

“They look pretty gloomy to me. Probably full of monsters.”

Ringg patted the hilt of his energon-ray. “This will handle anything short of an armor-plated saurian.”

Bart shuddered. As part of uniform, he, too, had been issued one of the energon-rays; but he had never used it and didn’t intend to. “Just the same, I’d rather stay out here in the sun.”

“It’s better than vitamin lamps,” Ringg admitted, “even if it’s not very bright.”

Bart wondered, suddenly and worriedly, about the effects of green sunburn on his chemically altered skin tone.

“Well, let’s enjoy it while we can,” Ringg said, “because it seems to be clouding over. I wouldn’t be surprised if it rained.” He yawned. “I’m getting bored with this voyage. And yet I don’t want it to end, because then I’ll have to fight it out all over again with my family. My father owns a hotel, and he wants me in the family business, not five hundred light-years away. None of our family have ever been spacemen before,” he explained, “and they don’t understand that living on one planet would drive me out of my mind.” He sighed. “How did you explain it to your people—that you couldn’t be happy in the mud? Or are you a career man?”

“I guess so. I never thought about doing anything else,” Bart said slowly, Ringg’s story had touched him; he had never realized quite so fully how much alike the two races were, how human the Lhari problems and dreams could seem. Why, of course, the Lhari aren’t all spacemen. They have hotel keepers and garbage men and dentists just as we do. Funny, you never think of them except in space.

“My mother died when I was very young,” Bart said, choosing his words very carefully. “My father owned a fleet of interplanetary ships.”

“But you wanted the real thing, deep space, the stars,” Ringg said. “How did he feel about that?”

“He would have understood,” Bart said, unable to keep emotion out of his voice, “but he’s dead now. He died, not long ago.”

Ringg’s eyes were bright with sympathy. “While you were off on the drift? Bad luck,” he said gently. He was silent, and when he spoke again it was in a very different tone.

“But some of the older generation—I had a professor in training school, funny old chap, bald as the hull of the Swiftwing. Taught us cosmic-ray analysis, and what he didn’t know about spiral nebulae could be engraved on my fifth toe-claw, and he’d never been off the face of the planet. Not even to one of the moons! He was the supervisor of my student lodge, and oh, was he a—” The phrase Ringg used meant, literally, a soft piece of cake.

“His feet may have been buried in mud, but his head was off in the Great Nebula. We had some wild times,” Ringg reminisced. “We’d slip away to the city—strictly against rules, it was an old-style school—and draw lots for one of us to stay home and sign in for all twelve. You see, he’d sit there reading, and when one of us came in, just shove the wax at us, with his nose in a text on cosmic dust, never looking up. So the one who stayed home would scrawl a name on it, walk out the back door, come around and sign in again. When there were twelve signed in, of course, the old chap would go up to bed, and late that night the one who stayed in would sneak down and let us in.”

Ringg sat up suddenly, touching his cheek. “Was that a drop of rain? And the sun’s gone. I suppose we ought to start back, though I hate to leave those caves unexplored.”

Bart bent to gather up the debris of their meal. He flinched as something hard struck his arm. “Ouch! What was that?”

Ringg cried out in pain. “It’s hail!”

Sharp pieces of ice were suddenly pelting, raining down all around them, splattering the ground with a harsh, bouncing clatter. Ringg yelled, “Come on—it’s big enough to flatten you!”

It looked to Bart as if it were at least golf-ball size, and seemed to be getting bigger by the moment. Lightning flashed around them in sudden glare. They ducked their heads and ran.

“Get in under the lee of the cliffs. We couldn’t possibly make it back to the Swift—” Ringg’s voice broke off in a cry of pain; he slumped forward, pitched to his knees, then slid down and lay still.

“What’s the matter?” Bart, arm curved to protect his skull, bent over the fallen Lhari, but Ringg, his forehead bleeding, lay insensible. Bart felt sharp pain in his arm, felt the hail hard as thrown stones raining on his head. Ringg was out cold. If they stayed in this, Bart thought despairingly, they’d both be dead!

Crouching, trying to duck his head between his shoulders, Bart got his arms under Ringg’s armpits and half-carried, half-dragged him under the lee of the cliffs. He slipped and slid on the thickening layer of ice underfoot, lost his footing, and came down, hard, one arm twisted between himself and the cliff. He cried out in pain, uncontrollably, and let Ringg slip from his grasp. The Lhari boy lay like the dead.

Bart bent over him, breathing hard, trying to get his breath back. The hail was still pelting down, showing no signs of lessening. About five feet away, one of the dark gaps in the cliff showed wide and menacing, but at least, Bart thought, the hail couldn’t come in there. He stooped and got hold of Ringg again. A pain like fire went through the wrist he had smashed against the rock. He set his teeth, wondering if it had broken. The effort made him see stars, but he managed somehow to hoist Ringg up again and haul him through the pelting hail toward the yawning gap. It darkened around them, and, blessedly, the battering, bruising hail could not reach them. Only an occasional light splinter of ice blew with the bitter wind into the mouth of the cave.

Bart laid Ringg down on the floor, under the shelter of the rock ceiling. He knelt beside him, and spoke his name, but Ringg just moaned. His forehead was covered with blood.

Bart took one of the paper napkins from the lunch sack and carefully wiped some of it away. His stomach turned at the deep, ugly cut, which immediately started oozing fresh blood. He pressed the edges of the cut together with the napkin, wondering helplessly how much blood Ringg could lose without danger, and if he had concussion. If he tried to go back to the ship and fetch the medic for Ringg, he’d be struck by hail himself. From where he stood, it seemed that the hailstones were getting bigger by the minute.

Ringg moaned, but when Bart knelt beside him again he did not answer. Bart could hear only the rushing of wind, the noise of the splattering hail and a sound of water somewhere—or was that a rustle of scales, a dragging of strange feet? He looked through the darkness into the depths of the cave, his hand on his shock-beam. He was afraid to turn his back on it.

This is nonsense, he told himself firmly, I’ll just walk back there and see what there is.

At his belt he had the small flashlamp, excessively bright, that was, like the energon-beam shocker, a part of regulation equipment. He took it out, shining it on the back wall of the cave; then drew a long breath of startlement and for a moment forgot Ringg and his own pain.

For the back wall of the cave was an exquisite fall of crystal! Minerals glowed there, giant crystals, like jewels, crusted with strange lichen-like growths and colors. There were pale blues and greens and, shimmering among them, a strangely colored crystalline mineral that he had never seen before. It was blue—No, Bart thought, that’s just the light, it’s more like red—no, it can’t be like both of them at once, and it isn’t really like either. In this light—

Ringg moaned, and Bart, glancing round, saw that he was struggling to sit up. He ran back to him, dropping to his knees at Ringg’s side. “It’s all right, Ringg, lie still. We’re under cover now.”

“Wha’ happened?” Ringg said blurrily. “Head hurts—all sparks—all the pretty lights—can’t see you!” He fumbled with loose, uncoordinated fingers at his head and Bart grabbed at him before he poked a claw in his eye. “Don’t do that,” Ringg complained, “can’t see—”

He must have a bad concussion then. That’s a nasty cut. Gently, he restrained the Lhari boy’s hands.

“Bartol, what happened?”

Bart explained. Ringg tried to move, but fell limply back.

“Weren’t you hurt? I thought I heard you cry out.”

“A cut or two, but nothing serious,” Bart said. “I think the hail’s stopped. Lie still, I’d better go back to the ship and get help.”

“Give me a hand and I can walk,” Ringg said, but when he tried to sit up, he flinched, and Bart said, “You’d better lie still.” He knew that head injuries should be kept very quiet; he was almost afraid to leave Ringg for fear the Lhari boy would have another delirious fit and hurt himself, but there was no help for it.

The hail had stopped, and the piled heaps were already melting, but it was bitterly cold. Bart wrapped himself in the silvery cloak, glad of its warmth, and struggled back across the slushy, ice-strewn meadow that had been so pink and flowery in the sunshine. The Swiftwing, a monstrous dark egg looming in the twilight, seemed like home. Bart felt the heavenly warmth close around him with a sigh of pure relief, but the Second Officer, coming up the hatchway, stopped in consternation:

“You’re covered with blood! The hailstorm—”

”I’m all right,” Bart said, “but Ringg’s been hurt. You’ll need a stretcher.” Quickly, he explained. “I’ll come with you and show you—”

”You’ll do no such thing,” the officer said. “You look as if you’d been caught out in a meteor shower, feathertop! We can find the place. You go and have those cuts attended to, and—what’s wrong with your wrist? Broken?”

Bart heard, like an echo, the frightening words: Don’t break any bones. You won’t pass an X-ray.

“It’s all right, sir. When I get washed up—”

”That’s an order,” snapped the officer, “do you think, on this pestilential unlucky planet, we can afford any more bad luck? Metals fatigue, Karol burned so badly the medic thinks he may never use his hand again, and now you and Ringg getting yourselves laid up and out of action? The medic will help me with Ringg; that Mentorian girl can look after you. Get moving!”

He hurried away, and Bart, his head beginning to hurt, walked slowly up the ramp. His whole arm felt numb, and he supported it with his good hand.

In the small infirmary, Karol lay groaning in a bunk, his arm bound in bandages, his head moving from side to side. The Mentorian girl Meta turned, charging a hypo. She looked pale and drawn. She went to Karol, uncovering his other arm, and made the injection; almost immediately the moaning stopped and Karol lay still. Meta sighed and drew a hand over her brow, brushing away feathery wisps that escaped from the cap tied over her hair.

“Bartol? You’re hurt? Not more burns, I hope?”

She looks just like a fluffy little kitten, Bart thought incongruously. Fatigue was beginning to blur his reactions.

“Only a few cuts,” he said, in Universal, though Meta had spoken Lhari. In his weariness and pain he was homesick for the sound of a familiar word. “Ringg and I were both caught in the hailstorm. He’s badly hurt.”

“Sit down here.”

Bart sat. Meta’s hands were skillful and cool as she sponged the blood away from his forehead and sprayed it with some pleasantly cold, mint-smelling antiseptic. Bart leaned back, tireder than he knew, half-closing his eyes.

“That hail must have been enormous; we heard it through the hull. Whatever possessed you to go out into it?”

“It wasn’t hailing when we left,” Bart said wearily. “The sun was as nice and green as it could be.” He bit the words off, realizing he had made a slip, but the girl seemed not to hear, fastening a strip of plastic over a cut. She picked up his wrist. Bart flinched in spite of himself, and Meta nodded. “I was afraid of that; it may be broken. Better let me X-ray it.”

“No!” Bart said harshly. “It’s all right, I just twisted it. Nothing’s broken. Just strap it up.”

“It’s pretty badly swollen,” the girl said, moving it gently. “Does that hurt? I thought so.”

Bart set his teeth against a cry. “It’s all right, I tell you. Just because it’s black and blue—”

He heard her breath jolt out, her fingers clenched painfully on his wounded wrist. She did not hear his cry this time. “And the sun was nice and green,” she whispered. “What are you?”

Bart felt himself slip sidewise; he thought for a moment that he would faint where he sat. Terrified, he looked up at Meta. Their eyes met, and she said, hardly moving her pale lips, “Your eyes—they’re like mine. Your eyelashes—dark, not white. You’re not a Lhari!”

The pain in his wrist suddenly blurred everything else, but Meta suddenly realized she was gripping it; she gave a little, gentle cry, and cradled the abused wrist in her palm.

“No wonder you didn’t want it X-rayed,” she whispered. Biting her lip, she glanced, terrified, at Karol, unconscious in the bunk. “No, he can’t hear us; I gave him a heavy shot of hypnin, poor fellow.”

“Go ahead,” Bart said bitterly, “yell for your keepers.”

Her gray eyes blazed at him for a moment; then, gently, she laid his wrist on the table, went to the infirmary door and locked it on the inside. She turned around, her face white; even her lips had lost their color. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“Does it matter now?”

Shocked comprehension swept over her face. “You don’t think I’d tell them,” she whispered. “I heard talk, in the Procyon port, of a spy that had managed to get through on a Lhari ship.” Her face twisted. “You—you must know about the man on the Multiphase, you know they’ll—make sure I can’t—hide anything dangerous to the Lhari at the end of the voyage.”

“Meta—” concern for her swept over him—“what will they do to you when they find out that you know and—didn’t tell?”

Her gray eyes were wide as a kitten’s. “Why, nothing. The Lhari would never hurt anyone, would they?”

Brainwashed? He set his mouth grimly. “I hope you never find out different.”

“Why would they need to?” she asked, reasonably. “They could just erase the memory. I never heard of a Lhari actually hurting anyone. But something like this—” She wavered, looking at him. “You look so much like a Lhari! How was it done? How could they do it? Poor fellow, you must be the—the loneliest man in the Universe!”

Her voice was compassionate. Bart felt his throat tighten, and had the awful feeling that he was going to cry. He reached with his good hand for hers, seeking the comfort of a human touch, but she flinched instinctively away.

He was a monster to this pretty girl....

“It looks so real,” she said helplessly. “Yes, now I can see, you have tiny moons at the base of the nail, and the Lhari don’t.” Her face worked. “It’s—it’s horrifying! How could you—”

There was a noise in the corridor. Meta gasped and ran to unlock the door, stood back as the medic and the Second Officer came in, staggering under Ringg’s weight. Carefully, they put him into a bunk. The medic straightened, shaking his crest.

“Did you get that wrist taken care of, Bartol?”

Meta stepped between Bart and the officer, reaching for a roll of bandage. “I’m working on it now, rieko mori,” she said. “It only wants strapping up.” But her fingers trembled as she wound the gauze, pulling each fold tight.

“How’s—Ringg?”

“Needs quiet,” grunted the medic, “and a few sutures. Lucky you got him under cover when you did.”

Ringg said weakly from his bunk, “Bartol saved my life. I can think of plenty who’d have run for cover, instead of staying out in that stuff long enough to drag me inside. Thanks, shipmate.”

Meta’s hand, with a swift hard pressure, lingered on Bart’s shoulder as she cut the bandage and fastened the end. “I don’t think that will bother you much now,” she whispered, fleetingly. “I didn’t dare say it was broken or they’d insist on X-rays. If it hurts I’ll get you something later for the pain. If you keep it strapped up tight—”

”It will do,” Bart said aloud. The tight bandage made it feel a little better, but he felt sick and dizzy, and when the medic turned and saw him, the officer said brusquely “Watch off for you, Bartol. I’ll fix the sign-out sheet, but you go to your cabin and get yourself at least four hours of sleep. That’s an order.”

Bart stumbled out of the cabin with relief. Safe in his own quarters, he flung himself down on his bunk, shaking all over. He’d come safely through one more nightmare, one more terror—for the moment! Had he put Meta in danger, too? Was there no end to this ceaseless fear? Not only for himself, but for others, the innocent bystanders who stumbled into plots they did not understand?

You’re doing this for the stars. It’s bigger than your fear. It’s bigger than you are, or any of the others....

He was beginning to think it was a lot too big for him.

Chapter Ten

The green-sun Meristem lay far behind them. Karol’s burns had healed; only a faint pattern on Ringg’s forehead showed where six stitches had closed the ugly wound in his skull. Bart’s wrist, after a few days of nightmarish pain when he tried to pick up anything heavy, had healed. Two more warp-drive shifts through space had taken the Swiftwing far, far out to the rim of the known galaxy, and now the great crimson coal of Antares burned in their viewports.

Antares had twelve planets, the outermost of which—far away now, at the furthest point in its orbit from the point of the Swiftwing’s entry into the system—was a small captive sun. No larger than the planet Earth, it revolved every ninety years around its huge primary.

Small as it was, it was blazingly blue-white brilliant, and had a tiny planet of its own. After their stop on Antares Seven—the largest of the inhabited planets in this system, where the Lhari spaceport was located—they would make a careful orbit around the great red primary, and land on the tiny worldlet of the blue-white secondary before leaving the Antares system.

As Bart watched Antares growing in the viewports, he felt a variety of emotions. On the one hand, he was relieved that as his voyage in secrecy neared its official destination, he had as yet not incurred unmasking.

But he felt uncertain about his father’s co-conspirators. Would they return him to human form and send him back to Vega, his part ended? Or would they, unthinkably, demand that he go on into the Lhari Galaxy? What would he do, if they did?

At one moment he entertained fantasies of going on into the Lhari worlds, returning victorious with the secret of their fueling location, or of the star-drive itself. At another, he could not wait to be free of it all. He longed for the society of his own people, yet ached to think that this voyage between the stars must end so soon.

They made planetfall at the largest Lhari spaceport Bart had seen; as always, the Second Officer was the first to go through Decontam and ashore, returning with exchanged mail and messages for the Swiftwing’s crew. He laughed when he gave Bartol a sealed packet. “So you’re not quite the orphan we’ve always thought!”

Bart took it, his heart suddenly pounding, and walked away through the groups of officers and crew eagerly debating how they would spend their port leave. He knew what it would be.

It was on the letterhead of Eight Colors, and it contained no message. Only an address—and a time.

He slipped away unobserved to the Mentorian part of the ship to borrow a cloak from Meta. She did not ask why he wanted it, and stopped him when he would have told her. “I’d—rather not know.”

She looked very small and very scared, and Bart wished he could comfort her, but he knew she would shrink from him, repelled and horrified by his Lhari skin, hair, claws.

Yet she reached for his hand, gripping it hard in her own dainty one. “Bartol, be careful,” she whispered, then stopped. “Bartol—that’s a Lhari name. What’s your real one?”

“Bart. Bart Steele.”

“Good luck, Bart.” There were tears in her gray eyes.

With the blue cloak folded around his face, hands tucked in the slits at the side, he felt almost like himself. And as the strange crimson twilight folded down across the streets, laden with spicy smells and little, fragrant gusts of wind, he almost savored the sense of being a conspirator, of playing for high stakes in a network of intrigue between the stars. He was off on an adventure, and meant to enjoy it.

The address he had been given was a lavish estate, not far from the spaceport, across a little gleaming lake that shimmered red, indigo, violet in the crimson sunset, surrounded by a low wall of what looked like purple glass. Bart, moving slowly through the gate, felt that eyes were watching him, and forced himself to walk with slow dignity.

Up the path. Up a low flight of black-marble stairs. A door swung open and shut again, closing out the red sunset, letting him into a room that seemed dim after the months of Lhari lights. There were three men in the room, but his eyes were drawn instantly to one, standing against an old-fashioned fireplace.

He was very tall and quite thin, and his hair was snow-white, though he did not look old. Bart’s first incongruous thought was, He’d make a better Lhari than I would. His firm, commanding voice told Bart at once that this was the man in charge. “You are Bartol?” He extended his hand.

Bart took it—and found himself gripped in a judo hold. The other two men, leaping to place behind him, felt all over his body, not gently.

“No weapons, Montano.”

“Look here—”

”Save it,” Montano said. “If you’re the right person, you’ll understand. If not, you won’t have much time to resent it. A very simple test. What color is that divan?”

“Green.”

“And those curtains?”

“Darker green, with gold and red figures.”

The men released him, and the white-haired man smiled.

“So you actually did it, Steele! I thought for sure the code message was a fake.” He stepped back and looked Bart over from head to foot, whistling. “Raynor Three is a genius! Claws and everything! What a deuce of a risk to take though!”

“You know my name,” Bart said, “but who are you?”

Suspicion came back into the dark eyes. “Does that Mentorian cloak mean—you’ve lost your memories, too?”

“No,” said Bart, “it’s simpler than that. I’m not Rupert Steele. I’m—” his voice caught—“I’m his son.”

The man looked startled and shocked. “I suppose that means Rupert is dead. Dead! It came a little before he expected it, then. So you’re Bart.” He sighed. “My name’s Montano. This is Hedrick, and I suppose you recognize Raynor Two.”

Bart blinked. It was the same face, but it was not grim like Raynor One’s, nor expressive and kindly like that of Raynor Three. This one just looked dangerous.

“But sit down,” Montano said with a wave of his hand, “make yourself comfortable.”

Hedrick relieved Bart of his cloak; Raynor Two put a cup of some steaming drink in his hand, passed him a tray of small hot fried things that tasted crisp and delicious. Bart relaxed, answering questions. How old? Only seventeen? And you came all alone on a Lhari ship, working your way as Astrogator? I must say you’ve got guts, kid! It was dangerously like the fantasy he had invented. But Montano interrupted at last.

“All right, this isn’t a party and we haven’t all night. I don’t suppose Bart has either. Enough time wasted. Since you walked into this, young Steele, I take it you know what our plans are, after this?”

Bart shook his head. “No. Raynor Three sent me to call off your plans, because of my father—”

”That sounds like Three,” interrupted Raynor Two. “Entirely too squeamish!”

Montano said irritably, “We couldn’t have done anything without a man on the Swiftwing, and you know it. We still can’t. Bart, I suppose you know about Lharillis.”

“Not by that name.”

“Your next stop. The planetoid of the captive sun. That little hunk of bare rock out there is the first spot the Lhari visited in this galaxy—even before Mentor. It’s an inferno of light from that little blue-white sun, so of course they love it—it’s just like home to them. When they found that the inner planets of Antares were inhabited, they built their spaceport here, so they’d have a better chance at trade.” Montano scowled fiercely.

“But they wanted that little worldlet. So we went all over it to be sure there were no rare minerals there, and finally leased it to them, a century at a time. They mine the place for some kind of powdered lubricant that’s better than graphite—it’s all done by robot machinery, no one’s stationed there. Every time a Lhari ship comes through this system they stop there, even though there’s nothing on Lharillis except a landing field and some concrete bunkers filled with robot mining machinery. They’ll stop there on the way out of this system—and that’s where you come in. We need you on board, to put the radiation counter out of commission.”

He took a chart from a drawer, spread it out on a table top. “The simplest way would be to cut these two wires. When the Lhari land, we’ll be there, waiting for them. On board the Lhari ship, there must be full records—coordinates of their home world, of where they go for their catalyst fuel—all that.”

Bart whistled. “But won’t the crew defend the ship? You can’t fight energon-ray guns!”

Montano’s face was perfectly calm. “No. We won’t even try.” He handed Bart a small strip of pale-yellow plastic.

“Keep this out of sight of the Mentorians,” he said. “The Lhari won’t be able to see the color, of course. But when it turns orange, take cover.”

“What is it?”

“Radiation-exposure film. It’s exactly as sensitive to radiation as you are. When it starts to turn orange, it’s picking up radiation. If you’re aboard the ship, get into the drive chambers—they’re lead-lined—and you’ll be safe. If you’re out on the surface, you’ll be all right inside one of the concrete bunkers. But get under cover before it turns red, because by that time every Lhari of them will be stone-cold dead.”

Bart let the strip of plastic drop, staring in disbelief at Montano’s cold, cruel face. “Kill them? Kill a whole shipload of them? That’s murder!”

“Not murder. War.”

“We’re not at war with the Lhari! We have a treaty with them!”

“The Federation has, because they don’t dare do anything else,” Montano said, his face taking on the fanatic’s light, “but some of us dare do something, some of us aren’t going to sit forever and let them strangle all humanity, hold us down, let us die! It’s war, Bart, war for economic survival. Do you suppose the Lhari would hesitate to kill anyone if we did anything to hurt their monopoly of the stars? Or didn’t they tell you about David Briscoe, how they hunted him down like an animal—”

”But how do we know that was Lhari policy, and not just—some fanatic?” Bart asked suddenly. He thought of the death of the elder Briscoe, and as always he shivered with the horror of it, but for the first time it came to him: Briscoe had provoked his own death. He had physically attacked the Lhari—threatened them, goaded them to shoot him down in self-defense! “I’ve been on shipboard with them for months. They’re not wanton murderers.”

Raynor Two made a derisive sound. “Sounds like it might be Three talking!”

Hedrick growled, “Why waste time talking? Listen, young Steele, you’ll do as you’re told, or else! Who gave you the right to argue?”

“Quiet, both of you.” Montano came and laid his arm around Bart’s shoulders, persuasively. “Bart, I know how you feel. But can’t you trust me? You’re Rupert Steele’s son, and you’re here to carry on what your father left undone, aren’t you? If you fail now, there may not be another chance for years—maybe not in our lifetimes.”

Bart dropped his head in his hands. Kill a whole shipload of Lhari—innocent traders? Bald, funny old Rugel, stern Vorongil, Ringg—

“I don’t know what to do!” It was a cry of despair. Bart looked helplessly around at the men.

Montano said, almost tenderly, “You couldn’t side with the Lhari against men, could you? Could a son of Rupert Steele do that?”

Bart shut his eyes, and something seemed to snap within him. His father had died for this. He might not understand Montano’s reasons, but he had to believe that Montano had them.

“All right,” he said, thickly, “you can count on me.”

When he left Montano’s house, he had the details of the plan, had memorized the location of the device he was to sabotage, and accepted, from Montano, a pair of dark contact lenses. “The light’s hellish out there,” Montano warned. “I know you’re half Mentorian, but they don’t even take their Mentorians out there. They’re proud of saying no human foot has ever touched Lharillis.”

When he got back to the Lhari spaceport, Ringg hailed him. “Where have you been? I hunted the whole port for you! I wouldn’t join the party till you came. What’s a pal for?”

Bart brushed by him without speaking, disregarding Ringg’s surprised stare, and went up the ramp. He reached his own cabin and threw himself down in his bunk, torn in two.

Ringg was his friend! Ringg liked him! And if he did what Montano wanted, Ringg would die.

Ringg had followed him, and was standing in the cabin door, watching him in surprise. “Bartol, is something the matter? Is there anything I can do? Have you had more bad news?”

Bart’s torn nerves snapped. He raised his head and yelled at Ringg, “Yes, there is something! You can quit following me around and just let me alone for a change!”

Ringg took a step backward. Then he said, very softly, “Suit yourself, Bartol. Sorry.” And noiselessly, his white crest held high, he glided away.

Bart’s resolve hardened. Loneliness had done odd things to him—thinking of Ringg, a Lhari, one of the freaks who had killed his father, as a friend! If they knew who he was, they would turn on him, hunt him down as they’d hunted Briscoe, as they’d hunted his father, as they’d hounded him from Earth to Procyon. He put his scruples aside. He’d made up his mind.

They could all die. What did he care? He was human and he was going to be loyal to his own kind.

Chapter Eleven

But although he thought he had settled all the conflict, he found that it returned when he was lying in his bunk, or when he stood in the dome and watched the stars, while they moved through the Antares system toward the captive sun and the tiny planet Lharillis.

It’s in my power to give this to all men....

Should a few Lhari stand in his way?

He lay in his bunk brooding, thinking of death, staring at the yellow radiation badge. If you fail, it won’t be in our lifetime. He’d have to go back to little things, to the little ships that hauled piddling cargo between little planets, while all the grandeur of the stars belonged to the Lhari. And if he succeeded, Vega Interplanet could spread from star to star, a mighty memorial to Rupert Steele.

One day Vorongil sent for him. “Bartol,” he said, and his voice was not unkind, “you and Ringg have always been good friends, so don’t be angry about this. He’s worried about you—says you spend all your spare time in your bunk growling at him. Is there anything the matter, feathertop?”

He sounded so concerned, so—the word struck Bart with hysterical humor—so fatherly, that Bart wanted insanely to laugh and to cry. Instead he muttered, “Ringg should mind his own business.”

“But it’s not like that,” Vorongil said. “Look, the Swiftwing’s a world, young fellow, and a small one. If one being in that world is unhappy, it affects everyone.”

Bart had an absurd, painful impulse—to blurt out the incredible truth to Vorongil, and try to get the old Lhari to understand what he was doing.

But fear held him silent. He was alone, one small human in a ship of Lhari. Vorongil was frowning at him, and Bart mumbled, “It’s nothing, rieko mori.”

“I suppose you’re pining for home,” Vorongil said kindly. “Well, it won’t be long now.”

The glare of the captive sun grew and grew in the ports, and Bart’s dread mounted. He had, as yet, had no opportunity to put the radiation counter out of order. It was behind a panel in the drive room, and try as he might, he could think of no way to get to it unobserved. Sometimes, in sleepless nights, it seemed that would be the best way. Just let it go. But then the Lhari would detect Montano’s ship, and kill Montano and his men.

Did he believe that? He had to believe it. It was the only way he could possibly justify what he was doing.

And then his chance came, as so many chances do when one no longer wants them. The Second Officer met him at the beginning of one watch, saying worriedly, “Bartol, old Rugel’s sick—not fit to be on his feet. Do you think you can hold down this shift alone, if I drop in and give you a hand from time to time?”

“I think so,” Bart said, carefully not overemphasizing it. The Second Officer, by routine, spent half of his time in the drive room, and half his time down below in Maintenance. When he left, Bart knew he would have at least half an hour, uninterrupted, in the drive room. He ripped open the panel, located the wires and hesitated; he didn’t quite dare to cut them outright.

He jerked one wire loose, frayed the other with a sharp claw until it was almost in shreds and would break with the first surge of current, pulled two more connections loose so that they were not making full contact. He closed the panel and brushed dust over it, and when the Second Officer came back, Bart was at his own station.

As Antares fell toward them in the viewport, he found himself worrying about Mentorians. They would be in cold sleep, presumably in a safe part of the ship, behind shielding, or Montano would have made provisions for them. Still, he wished there were a way to warn Meta.

He was not on watch when they came into the planetary field of Lharillis, but when he came on shift, he knew at once that the trouble had been located. The panel was pulled open, the exposed wires hanging, and Ringg was facing old Rugel, shouting, “Listen, Baldy, I won’t have you accusing me of going light on my work! I checked those panels eight days ago! Tell me who’s going to be opening the panels in here anyhow?”

“No, no,” Rugel said patiently, “I’m not accusing you of anything, only being careless, young Ringg. You poke with those buzzing instruments and things, maybe once you tear loose some wires.”

Bart remembered he wasn’t supposed to know what was going on. “What’s this all about?”

It was Rugel who answered. “The radiation counter—the planetary one, not the one we use in space—is out of order. We don’t even need it this landing—there’s no radiation on Lharillis. If it were the landing gear, now, that would be serious. I’m just trying to tell Ringg—”

”He’s trying to say I didn’t check it.” Ringg was not to be calmed. “It’s my professional competence—”

”Forget it,” Bart said. “If Rugel isn’t sore about it, and if we don’t need it for landing, why worry?” He felt like Judas.

“Just take a look at my daybook,” Ringg insisted, “I checked and marked it service fit! I tell you, somebody was blundering around, opening panels where they had no business, tore it out by accident, then was too much of a filthy sneak to report it and get it fixed!”

“Bartol was on watch alone one night,” said the Second Officer, “but you wouldn’t meddle with panels, would you, Bartol?”

Bart set his teeth, steadying his breathing, as Ringg turned hopefully to him. “Bartol, did you—by mistake, maybe? Because if you did, it won’t count against your rating, but it means a black mark against mine!”

Bart hid his self-contempt in sudden, tense fury. “No, I didn’t! You’re going to accuse everybody on the Swiftwing, all the way from me to Vorongil, before you can admit a mistake, aren’t you? If you want somebody to blame, look in a mirror!”

“Listen, you!” Ringg’s pent-up rage exploded. He seized Bart by the shoulder and Bart moved to throw him off, so that Ringg’s outthrust claws raked only his forearm. In pure reflex he felt his own claws flick out; they clinched, closed, scuffled, and he felt his claws rake flesh; half incredulous, saw the thin red line of blood welling from Ringg’s cheek.

Then Rugel’s arms were flung restrainingly around him, and the Second Officer was wrestling with a furious, struggling Ringg. Bart looked at his red-tipped claws in ill-concealed horror, but it was lost in a general gasp of consternation, for Vorongil had flung the drive room door open, taking in the scene in one blistering glance.

“What’s going on down here?”

For the first time, Bart understood Vorongil’s reputation as a tyrant. One glance at Ringg’s bleeding face and Bart’s ripped forearm, and he did not pause for breath for a good fifteen minutes. By the time he finished, Bart felt he would rather Ringg’s claws had laid him bleeding to the bone than stand there in the naked contempt of the old Lhari’s freezing eyes.

“Half-fledged nestlings trying to do a man’s work! So someone forgot the panel, or damaged the panel by mistake—no, not another word,” he commanded, as Ringg’s crest came proudly up. “I don’t care who did what! Any more of this, and the one who does it can try his claws on the captain of the Swiftwing!” He looked ugly and dangerous. “I thought better of you both. Get below, you squalling kittens! Let me not see your faces again before we land!”

As they went along the corridor, Ringg turned to Bart, apology and chagrin in his eyes. “Look—I never meant to get the Bald One down on us,” he said, but Bart kept his face resolutely averted. It was easier this way, without pretense of friendship.

The light from the small captive sun grew more intense. Bart had never known anything like it, and was glad to slip away and put the dark contact lenses into his eyes. They made his eyes appear all enormous, dilated pupil; fearfully, he hoped no one would notice. His arm smarted, and he did not speak to Ringg all through the long, slow deceleration.

When the intercom ordered all crew members to the hatchway, Bart lingered a minute, pinning the yellow radiation badge in a fold of his cloak. A spasm of fear threatened to overwhelm him again, and nightmarish loneliness. He felt agonizingly homesick for his own familiar face. It seemed almost more than he could manage, to step out into the corridor full of Lhari.

It won’t be long now.

The hatch opened. Even accustomed, as he was, to Lhari lights, Bart squeezed his eyes shut at the blue-white brilliance that assaulted him now. Then, opening slitted lids cautiously, he found that he could see.

A weirdly desolate scene stretched away before them. Bare, burning sand, strewn with curiously colored rocks, lay piled in strange chaos; then he realized there was an odd, but perceptible geometry to their arrangement. They showed alternate crystal and opaque faces. Old Rugel noted his look of surprise.

“Never been here before? That’s right, you’ve always worked on the Polaris run. Well, those aren’t true rocks, but living creatures of a sort. The crystals are alive; the opaque faces are lichens that have something like chlorophyll and can make their food from air and sunlight. The rocks and lichens live in symbiosis. They have intelligence of a sort, but fortunately they don’t mind us, or our automatic mining machinery. Every time, though, we find some new lichen that’s trying to set up a symbiote cycle with the concrete of our bunkers.”

“And every time,” Ringg said cheerfully, “somebody—usually me—has to see about having them scraped down and repainted. Maybe someday I’ll find a paint the lichens don’t like the taste of.”

“Going to explore with Ringg?” Rugel asked, and Ringg, always ready to let bygones be bygones, grinned and said, “Sure!” Bart could not face him.

Vorongil stopped and said, “This your first time here, young Bartol? How would you like to visit the monument with me? You can see the machinery on the way back.”

Relieved at not having to go with Ringg, he followed the captain, falling into step beside him. They moved in silence, along the smooth stone path.

“The crystal creatures made this road,” Vorongil said at last. “I think they read minds a little. There used to be a very messy, rocky desert here, and we used to have to scrabble and scratch our way to the monument. Then one day a ship—not mine—touched down and discovered that there was a beautiful smooth road leading up to the monument. And the lichens never touch that stone—but you probably had all this in school. Excited, Bartol?”

“No—no, sir. Why?”

“Eyes look a bit odd. But who could blame you for being excited? I never come here without remembering Rhazon and his crew on that long jump. The longest any Lhari captain ever made. A blind leap in the dark, remember, Bartol. Through the dark, through the void, with his own crew cursing him for taking the chance! No one had ever crossed between galaxies—and remember, they were using the Ancient Math!”

He paused, and Bart said through a catch of breath. “Quite an achievement.” His badge still looked reassuringly yellow.

“You young people have no sense of wonder,” Vorongil said. “Not that I blame you. You can’t realize what it was like in those days. Oh, we’d had star-travel for centuries, we were beginning to stagnate. And now look at us! Oh, they derided Rhazon—said that even if he did find anyone, any other race, they’d be monsters with whom we could never communicate. But here we have a whole new galaxy for peaceful trade, a new mathematics that takes all the hazard out of space travel, our Mentorian friends and allies.” He smiled. “Don’t tell the High Council on me, but I think they deserve a lot more credit than most Lhari care to give them. Between ourselves, I think the next Panarch may see it that way.”

Vorongil paused. “Here’s the monument.”

It lay between the crystal columns, tall, of pale blue sandstone, with letters in deep shadow of such contrast that the Lhari could read them: a high, sheer, imposing stele. Vorongil read the words slowly aloud in the musical Lhari language:

“‘Here, with thanks to Those who Watch the Great Night, I, Rhazon of Nedrun, raise a stone of memory. Here we first do touch the new worlds. Let us never again fear to face the unknown, trusting that the Mind of All Knowledge still has many surprises in store for all the living.’

“I think I admire courage more than anything there is, Bartol. Who else could have dared it? Doesn’t it make you proud to be a Lhari?”

Bart had felt profoundly moved; now he snapped back to awareness of who he was and what he was doing. So only the Lhari had courage? Life has surprises, all right, Captain, he thought grimly.

He glanced down at the badge strip of plastic on his arm. It began to tinge faint orange as he looked, and a chill of fear went over him. He had to get away somehow—get to cover!

He looked round and his fear was almost driven from his mind. “Captain, the rocks! They’re moving!”

Vorongil said, unruffled, “Why, so they are. They do, you know; they have intelligence of a sort. Though I’ve never actually seen them move before, I know they shift places overnight. I wonder what’s going on?” They were edging back, the path widening and changing. “Oh, well, maybe they’re going to do some more landscaping for us. I once knew a captain who swore they could read his mind.”

Bart saw the slow, inexorable deepening of his badge—he had to get away. He tensed, impatient; gripped by fists of panic. Somewhere on this world, Montano and his men were setting up their lethal radiations....

Think of this: a Lhari ship of our own to study, to know how it works, to see the catalyst and find out where it comes from, to read their records and star routes. Now we know we can use it without dying in the warp-drive....

Think of this: to be human again, yet to travel the stars with men of my own race!

It’s worth a few deaths!

Even Vorongil? Standing here, talking to him, he might—say it! You talked to him as if he’d been your father! Oh, Dad, Dad, what would you do?

His voice was steady, as he said, “It’s very good of you to show me all this, sir, but the other men will call me a slacker. Hadn’t I better get to a work detail?”

“Hm, maybe so, feathertop,” Vorongil said. “Let me see—well, down this way is the last row of bunkers. See the humps? You can check inside to see if they’re full or empty and save us the trouble of exploring if they’re all empty. Have a look round inside if you care to—the robot machinery’s interesting.”

Bart tensed; he had wondered how he’d get hidden inside, but he asked, “Not locked?”

“Locked?” The old Lhari’s short, yellowed crest bobbed in surprise. “Why? Who ever comes here but our ships? And what could we do with the stuff but take it back with us? Why locked? You’ve been on the drift too long—among those thieving humans! It’s time you got back to live among decent folk again. Well, go along.”

The sting of the words stiffened Bart as he took his leave. The color of the badge seemed deeper orange....

When it’s red, you’re dead.

It’s true. The Lhari don’t steal. They don’t even seem to understand dishonesty.

But they lied—lied to us all....

Knowing what we were like, maybe! That we’d steal their ships, their secrets, their lives!

The deepening color of the badge seemed the one visible thing in a strange glaring world. He walked along the row of bunkers, realizing he need not check if they were full or empty—the Lhari wouldn’t live long enough to harvest their better-than-graphite lubricant. They’d be dead.

The last bunker was empty. He looked at his orange badge and stepped inside, heart pounding so loudly he thought it was an external sound—it was an external sound, a step.

“Don’t move one inch,” said a voice in Universal, and Bart froze, trembling. He looked cautiously round.

Montano stood there, spacesuited, his head bare, dark contact lenses blurring his eyes. And in his hand a drawn blaster was held level—trained straight at Bart’s heart.

Chapter Twelve

After the first moment of panic, Bart realized Montano could not tell him from a Lhari. He remained motionless. “It’s me, Montano—Bart Steele.”

The man lowered the weapon and put it away. “You nearly got yourself cut down,” he said. “Did you make it all right?” He crossed behind Bart, inspecting the fastenings of the bunker.

“It’s just luck I didn’t shoot you first and ask questions afterward.” Montano drew a deep breath and sat down on the concrete floor. “Anyway, we’re safe in here. We’ve got about half an hour before the radiation will reach lethal intensity. It has a very short half-life, though; only about twelve minutes. If we spend an hour in here, we’ll be safe enough. Did you have any trouble putting the radiation counter out of commission?”

So in half an hour they would all be dead. Ringg, Rugel, Captain Vorongil. Two dozen Lhari, all dead so that Montano could have a Lhari ship to play with.

And what then? More killing, more murder? Would Montano start killing everyone who tried to get the secret of the drive from him? The Lhari had the star-drive; maybe it belonged to them, maybe not. Maybe humans had a right to have it, too. But this wasn’t the right way. Maybe they didn’t deserve it.

He turned to look at Montano. The man was leaning back, whistling softly through his teeth. He felt like telling Montano that he couldn’t go through with it. He started to speak, then stopped, his blood icing over.

If I try to argue with him, I’ll never get out of here alive. It means too much to him.

Do I just salve my conscience with that then? Sit here and let them die?

With a shock of remembrance, it came to Bart that he had a weapon. He was armed, this time, with the energon-beam that was part of his uniform. Montano had evidently forgotten it. Could he kill Montano? Even to save two dozen Lhari?

He reached hesitantly toward the beam-gun, quickly thumbed the catch down to the lowest point, which was simple shock. He froze as Montano looked in his direction, hand out of sight under his cloak.

“How many Lhari on board?”

“Twenty-three, and three Mentorians.”

“Anyone apt to be behind shielding—say, in the drive chamber?”

“No, I think they’re all outside.”

Montano nodded, idly. “Then we won’t have to worry.”

Bart slipped his hand toward his weapon. Montano saw the movement, cocked his head in question; then, as understanding flashed over his face, his hand darted to his own gun. But Bart had pressed the charge of his, and Montano slumped over without a cry. He looked so limp that Bart gasped. Was he dead? Hastily he fumbled the lax hand for a pulse. After a long, endless moment he saw Montano’s chest twitch and knew the man was breathing.

Well, Montano would be safe here in the bunker. Hastily, Bart looked at his timepiece. Half an hour before the radiation was lethal—for the Lhari. Was it already, for him? Shakily, he unfastened the door. He ran out into the glare, seeing as he ran that his badge was tinged with an ever-darkening, gold, orange....

Montano had said there was a safety margin, but maybe he was wrong, maybe all Bart would accomplish would be his own death! He ran back along the line of bunkers, his heart pounding with his racing feet. Two crewmen came along the line, young white-crested Lhari from the other watch. He gasped, “Where is the captain?”

“Down that way—what’s wrong, Bartol?” But Bart was gone, his muscles aching with the unaccustomed effort inside gravity. Putting on speed, he saw the tall, austere shape of Vorongil, his banded cloak dark against the glaring light. Vorongil turned, startled, at the sound of his running feet.

Suddenly, Bart realized that he was still holding his energon-ray. In shock and revulsion, he dropped it at Vorongil’s feet.

“Captain, go warn the men! They’ll all be dead in half an hour! There are lethal radiations—”

”What? Are you sunstruck?”

Bart stopped cold. Never once had it crossed his mind what he would say to Vorongil or how he would make the captain believe his story, without revealing Montano. He started to hold up his badge, realized the Lhari captain could not see color, and dropped it again, while Vorongil bent over to pick up the fallen gun. “Are you sunstruck or mad, Bartol? What’s this babble?”

“Captain, everybody on the Swiftwing—”

”And speak Lhari!” Vorongil demanded, and Bart realized that in his excitement he had been shouting in Universal. He drew a long, deep breath.

“Captain, there are lethal radiations being released here,” he said. “You have just barely half an hour to gather all the men and get them behind shielding.”

“The radiation counter is out of order,” Vorongil remarked, unruffled. “How can you possibly know—”

Bart stood in despair. Could he say, A ship has landed here? Could he say, Check that bunker? Even if Montano was a would-be murderer, he was human, and Bart could not betray him to the Lhari. There had been too much betrayal. His voice rose in sudden hysteria.

“Captain, there’s no time! I tell you, you’ll all be dead if you don’t believe me! Get the men into the ship! Get them behind shielding and then check my story! I’m not—” he had gone this far, he might as well go the whole way—“I’m not a Lhari!”

“What?”

One of the crewmen came dashing up, his crest sweat-streaked. “Captain! Rugel has collapsed! We don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

“Radiation sickness,” said Bart, and Vorongil reached out, catching his shoulder in a cruel taloned grip. Bart said desperately “I’m not a Lhari! I signed on in disguise—I knew they meant to take the ship, but I can’t let you all die.

“How can I make you believe me? Here—” In desperation, Bart reached up. Pain stabbed his eyeballs, fierce, blinding, as he pulled out one of the contact lenses. He could not see the captain’s face through the light, but suddenly two Lhari were holding his arms. The fear of death was on Bart, but it no longer mattered. He saw through watering eyes the ever-deepening orange of the badge disappearing.

“Here,” he said, tearing at it, “radiation. You must be able to see how dark it is. Even if it’s just darkness....”

Suddenly Vorongil was shouting, but Bart could not hear. Two men were dragging him along. They hustled him up the ramp of the ship. He could see again, but his eyes were blurred, and he felt sick, colors spinning before his eyes, a nauseated ringing in his head.

At first he thought it was his ears ringing; then he made out the rising, shrieking wail and fall of the emergency siren, steps running, shouting voices, the slow clang of the doors. Someone was pushing at him, babbling words in Lhari, but he heard them through an ever-increasing distance: Vorongil’s face bent over his, only a blurred crimson blob that flashed away like a vanishing star in the viewport. It flamed out into green darkness, vanished, and Bart fell through what seemed to be a bottomless chasm of starless night.

When he woke, acceleration had its crushing hand on his chest. He tried to move, discovered that he was strapped hard into a bunk, and fainted again.

Suddenly the pressure was gone and he was lying at ease on the smooth sheets of a hospital bunk. His eyes were covered with a light bandage, and there was a sharp pain in his left arm. He tried to move it and found it was tied down.

“I think he’s coming round,” said Vorongil’s voice.

“Yes, and a lot too soon for me,” said a bitter voice which Bart recognized as that of the ship’s medic. “Freak!”

“Listen, Baldy,” said Vorongil, “whoever he is, he could have been blinded or killed. You wouldn’t be alive now if it wasn’t for that freak, as you call him. Bartol, can you hear me? How much light can your eyes stand?”

“As much as any Mentorian.” Bart found he could move his right arm, and twitched the bandage away. Vorongil and the medic stood over him; in the other infirmary bunk a form was lying, covered with a white sheet. Sickly, Bart wondered if they had found Montano. Vorongil followed the direction of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice held deep bitterness, “poor old Rugel is dead. He didn’t get much of the radiation, but his heart wouldn’t stand it, and gave out.” He bowed his head. “He was bald in the service of the ships when my crest was new-sprouted,” he said in deep grief.

Bart felt the shock of that, even through his own fear. He looked down at his left arm. It was strapped to a splint, and fluid was dripping slowly into the vein there.

Vorongil nodded. “I expect you feel pretty sick. You got a good dose of radiation yourself, but we’ve given you a couple of transfusions—one of the Mentorians matched your blood type, fortunately. It was a close call.”

The medic was looking down in ill-disguised curiosity. “Fantastic,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d tell me who changed your looks. I admit I wouldn’t believe it until I had a look at your foot bones under the fluoroscope.”

Vorongil said quietly, “Bartol—I don’t suppose that’s your real name—why did you do it?”

“I couldn’t see you all die, sir,” Bart said, not expecting them to believe him. “No more than that.”

The medic said roughly in Lhari, “It’s a trick, sir, no more. A trick to make us trust him!”

“Why would he risk his own life then?” Vorongil asked. “No, it’s more than that.” He hesitated. “We checked the bunkers—in radiation suits—before we took off. We found a man in one of them.”

“Was he dead?” Bart whispered.

“No,” Vorongil said quietly.

“Thank God!” It was a heartfelt explosion. Then, apprehensively, “Or did you kill him?”

“What do you think we are?” Vorongil said incredulously. “Indeed no. His own men have probably found him by now. I don’t imagine he got half as much radiation as you did.”

Bart surveyed the needle in his arm. “Why are you taking all this trouble if I’m going to be put out of the way?”

“You must have some funny ideas about us,” Vorongil said shaking his head. “That would be a fine way to reward you for saving all of our lives. No, you’re not going to be killed.”

“If I had my way—” the old medic began, and suddenly Vorongil flew into a rage. “Get out!”

The medic went stiffly through the door, and Vorongil stood gazing down at Bart, shaking his yellowed crest. “I don’t know what to say to you. It was a brave thing you did, but perhaps no braver than you’ve done all along. Are you a Mentorian?”

“Only half.”

“Strange,” Vorongil said, looking into space, “that I could talk to you as I did by the monument, and you knew what I meant. But, yes, you would understand.” Abruptly, he recalled himself, and his voice was thin and cold.

“I haven’t quite decided what to do. I haven’t spoken of this to the crew yet; the fewer who know about this, the better. I told them you got a heavy dose of radiation, and you’re too sick to see visitors.” He sounded kinder when he said, “It’s true, you know. It won’t hurt you to get your strength back.”

He went out, and Bart wondered, Get my strength back for what? He lay back, feeling weaker than he realized. It was a relief to know he wasn’t going to be killed out of hand. And somehow he didn’t believe he was going to be killed at all.

It wasn’t like being a prisoner. The medic brought him plenty of food, urging him to eat—“You need plenty of protein after radiation burns”—and if he stayed in the bunk, it was only because he felt too weak to get up. Actually he was suffering from delayed emotional shock, as well as from radiation. He was content to let things drift.

Inevitably, the time came when he had to think about what he had done. He had betrayed Montano, he had been false to the men who sent him.

“But they don’t know the Lhari,” his conscience replied, justifying what he had done.

You sided with the Lhari against your own people. You spoilt our chances of learning about the Lhari fuel catalyst.

“I’ve done something better than stealing a secret by stealth. I’ve proved that humans and Lhari can communicate, that they can trust each other. It’s only their looks that are strange. A kind, generous man is a kind generous man, whether his name is Raynor Three or Vorongil.”

But who’s going to know it?

“I know it. And truth comes out, sooner or later. Somehow, a better understanding between man and Lhari will come from this.”

Secure in the knowledge, he turned over and went peacefully to sleep.

When he woke again, he felt better. The Mentorian girl, Meta, was sitting quietly between the bunks, watching him. He started to turn over, flinched at the pain in his arm.

“Yes,” she said, “we’re giving you one last transfusion. Plasma, this time. It’s Lhari, but if you know that much, you know it won’t hurt you.” She came and inspected the needle in his wrist, and Bart caught her hand with his free one. “Meta, does anyone else know?”

She looked down with a troubled smile. “I don’t think so. I was off watch, waiting for cold-sleep—we’re just about to make the long jump—when Vorongil came to my quarters. I was startled almost out of my wits. He asked if I could keep a secret; then he told me about you. Oh, Bart!” Her small soft hand closed convulsively on his, “I was so afraid! I knew they wouldn’t kill you, but I was afraid!”

Yet they had killed David Briscoe, Bart thought, and hunted down two of his friends. It was the only thing he couldn’t square with his perception of the Lhari. It didn’t fit. He could understand that they had shot down the robotcab with Edmund Briscoe in it, in pure self-defense; and that knowledge had taken off the edge of the horror. But the death of young Briscoe and everyone he had talked to could not be explained away.

“You seem very sure they wouldn’t have killed me, Meta,” he said, carefully clasping his hand around hers.

“They wouldn’t,” she affirmed. “But they could—make you forget—”

A small chill went over Bart. He let go of her hand and lay staring bleakly at the wall. He supposed that was his probable fate: remembering the tragic tone of Raynor Three when he said I won’t remember you, he gritted his teeth, feeling his face twist convulsively. Meta, watching, misunderstood.

“Arm hurting? I’ll have that needle out of your vein in a few minutes now.”

When she had freed his arm and put away the apparatus, she came to his side. “Bart, how did it happen? How did they find you out?”

Suddenly, the longing for human contact was too much for Bart, and the knowledge of his secret intolerable. The Lhari could find out what he knew, if they wanted to know, very simply; he was in their power. It didn’t matter any more.

The telling of the story took a long time, and when he finished, Meta’s soft small kitten-face was compassionate.

“I’m glad you—decided what you did,” she whispered. “It’s what a Mentorian would have done. I know that other races call us slaves of the Lhari. We aren’t. We’re working in our own way to show the Lhari that human beings can be trusted. The other peoples—they hold away from the Lhari, fighting them with words even though they’re afraid to fight them with weapons, carrying on the war that they’re afraid to fight!

“Did it ever occur to you—all the peoples of all the planets keep saying, We’re as good as the Lhari, but only the Mentorians are willing to prove it? Bart, a Lhari ship can’t get along in our galaxy without Mentorians any more! It may be slower than trying to take the warp-drive by force, or stealing it by spying, but when we learn to endure it, I have faith that we’ll get it!”

Bart, although moved by Meta’s philosophy, couldn’t quite share it. It still seemed to him that the Mentorians were lacking in something—independence, maybe, or drive.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything like that,” he said honestly. “It was simply that I couldn’t let them die. After all—” he was speaking more to himself than to the girl—“it’s their star-drive. They found it. And they’ve given us star-trade, and star-travel, cheaply and with profit to both sides. I hope we’ll get the star-drive someday. But if we got it by mass murder, it would sow the seeds of a hatred between men and Lhari that would never end. It wouldn’t be worth it, Meta. Nothing would be worth that. We’ve got enough hate already.”

Bart was still in his bunk, but beginning to fret at staying there, when the familiar trembling of Acceleration Two started to run through the ship. It was, by now, so familiar to him that he hardly gave it a second thought, but Meta panicked.

“What’s happening? Bart, what is it? Why are we under acceleration again?”

“Shift to warp,” he said without thinking, and her face went deathly white. “So that’s it,” she whispered. “Vorongil—no wonder he wasn’t worried about what I would find out from you or what you knew.” She drew herself together in her chair, a miserable, shrunken, terrified little figure, bravely trying to control her terror.

Then she held out her hands to Bart. “I’m—I’m ashamed,” she whispered. “When you’ve been so brave, I shouldn’t be afraid to die.”

“Meta, what’s the matter? What are you afraid of?” It suddenly swept over Bart what she meant and what she feared. “But don’t you understand, Meta?” he exclaimed, “Humans can live through the warp-drive! No drugs, no cold-sleep—Meta, I’ve done it dozens of times!”

“But you’re a Lhari!” It burst from her, uncontrollable. She stopped, looked at him in consternation. He smiled, bitterly.

“No, Meta, they didn’t do a thing to my internal organs, to my brain, to the tissues of my body. Just a little plastic surgery on my hands, my feet and my face. Meta, there’s nothing to be afraid of—nothing,” he repeated.

She twisted her small hands together. “I’m—trying to—to believe that,” she whispered, “but all my life I’ve known—”

The screaming whine in the ship gripped them with the strange, clawing lassitude and discomfort. Bart, gasping under it, heard the girl moan, saw her slump lax in her chair, half fainting. Her face was so deathly white that he began seriously to be afraid she would die of her fear. Fighting his own agonizing weakness, he pulled himself upright. He reached the girl, dug his claws cruelly into her.

“Girl, get hold of yourself! Fight it! Fight it! The more scared you are, the worse it’s going to be!”

She was rigid, trembling, in a trance of terror.

“You rotten little coward,” he yelled at her, “snap out of it! Or are all you Mentorians so gutless that you believe any half-baked folk tale the Lhari pass off on you? You and your fine talk about earning the star-drive! What would you do with it after you got it—if you die of fear when you try?”

“Oh! You—!” She flung her head back, her eyes blazing with rage. “Anything you can do, I can do, too!” He saw life flowing back into her face, and the trembling now was with fury, not fear; she was fighting the pain, the crawling itch in her nerve ends, the terrible sense of draining disorganization.

Bart felt his hold on himself breaking. He whispered hoarsely, “That’s the girl—don’t be scared if I—black out for a minute.” He held on to consciousness with his last courage, afraid if he fainted, the girl would collapse again.

She reached for him, and Bart, starved for some human touch, drew her into his arms. They clung together, and he felt her wet face against his own, the softness of her trembling hands. She was still crying a little. Then the blackness closed on him, as if endless, and the gray blur of warp-drive peak blotted his brain into nothingness.

He came out of it to feel her cheek soft against his, her head trustfully on his shoulder. He said huskily, “All right, Meta?”

“I’m fine,” she murmured, shakily. He tightened his hands a little, realizing that for the first time in months he had physically forgotten his Lhari disguise, that Meta had given him this priceless reassurance that he was human. But, as if suddenly aware of it again, she looked up at him and drew hesitantly away.

“Don’t—Meta, am I so horrible to you then? So—repulsive?”

“No, it’s only—” she bit her lip—“it’s just that the Lhari are—I can’t quite explain it.”

“Different,” Bart finished for her. “At first I was repelled—physically repelled by myself, and by them. It was like living among weird animals, and being one of the animals. And then, one day, Ringg was just another kid. He had gray skin and long claws and white hair, just the way I once had pinkish skin and short fingernails and reddish hair, but the difference wasn’t that I was human inside and he wasn’t. If you skinned Ringg, and skinned me, we’d be almost identical. And all of a sudden then, Ringg and Vorongil and all the rest were men to me. Just people. I thought you Mentorians, after living with the Lhari all these years, would feel that.”

She said in slow wonder, “We’ve lived and worked side by side with them all these years, yet kept so apart! I’ve defended the Lhari to you, yet it took you to explain them to me!”

His arm was still round her, her head still lying on his shoulder. Bart was just beginning to wonder if he might kiss her when the infirmary door opened and Ringg stood in the doorway, staring at them with surprise, shock and revulsion. Bart realized, suddenly, how it must look to Ringg—who certainly shared Meta’s prejudice—but even as he comprehended it, Ringg’s face altered. Meta slipped from Bart’s arms and rose, but Ringg came slowly a step into the room.

“I—remembered you had a bad reaction, to warp-drive,” he said. “I came to see if you were all right. I would never have believed—but I’m beginning to guess. There was always something about you, Bartol.” He shut the door behind him and stood against it. His voice lowered almost to a whisper, he said, “You’re not Lhari, are you?”

“Vorongil knows,” Bart said.

Ringg nodded. “That day on Lharillis. The crew was talking, but only one or two of them really know what happened. There are a dozen rumors. I wanted to see you. They said you were sick with radiation burns—”

“I was.”

Ringg raised his hand, absently, to the still-puckered mark on his cheek, saw Bart watching him and smiled.

“You’re not worrying about that fight? Forget it, friend. If anything, I admire someone who can use his claws—especially if, as I begin to suspect, they’re not his.” He leaned over, his hand lightly on Bart’s shoulder. “I don’t forget so easily. You saved my life, remember? And you’re a hero on the ship for warning us all. Are you really human? Why not get rid of the disguise?”

Bart laughed wryly. “It won’t come off,” he said, and explained.

Ringg raised his hands to his own face curiously. “I wonder what sort of human I’d make?” He looked at Meta’s small fingers. “Not that I’d ever have the nerve. But then, it’s no surprise to anyone that you have courage, Bartol.”

“You seem to accept it—”

“It’s a shock,” said Ringg honestly, “it scares me a little. But I’m remembering the friendship. That was real. As far as I’m concerned, it still is real.”

Chapter Thirteen

Ringg was still bending over Meta’s hand when Vorongil came into the cabin. He started to speak, then noticed Ringg. “I might have known,” he growled, “if there was anything to find out, you’d find it.”

“Shall I go, rieko mori?”

“No, stay. You’ll find it out some way or other, you might as well get it right the first time. But first of all—are you all right, Meta?”

Her chin went up, defiantly. “Yes. And why have you lied to us all these years—all of you?”

Vorongil looked mildly startled. “It wasn’t exactly a lie. Nine out of ten Lhari captains believe it with all their heart—that humans die in warp-drive. I wasn’t sure myself until I heard the debates in Council City, last year.”

“But why?”

Vorongil sighed. His eyes rested disconcertingly on Bart. “I presume you know human history,” he said, “better than I do. The Lhari have never had a war, in all written history. Quite frankly, you terrified us. It was decided, on the highest summit levels, that we wouldn’t give humans too many chances to find out things we preferred to keep to ourselves. The first few ships to carry Mentorians had carried them without cold-sleep, but people forget easily. The truth is buried in the records of those early voyages.

“As the Mentorians grew more important to us, we began to regret the policy, but by that time the Mentorians themselves believed it so firmly that when we tried the experiment of carrying them through the shift into warp-drive, they died of fear—pure suggestion. I tried it with you, Meta, because I knew Bart’s presence would reassure you. The others were given an inert sedative they believed to be the cold-sleep drug. How are you feeling, Bart?”

“Fine—but wondering what’s going to happen.”

“You won’t be hurt,” Vorongil said, quickly. Then: “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“I don’t, sir. David Briscoe did what I did, and he’s dead. So are three other men.”

“Men do strange things from fear—men and Lhari. Your people, as I said before, have a strange history. It scares us. Can you guarantee that some, at least, of your people wouldn’t try to come and take the star-drive by force? We left a man on Lharillis who thought nothing of killing twenty-four of us. I suppose the captain of the Multiphase, knowing he had gravely violated Lhari laws, knowing that Briscoe’s report might touch off an intergalactic war between men and Lhari—well, I suppose he felt that half a dozen deaths were better than half a million. I’m not defending him. Just explaining, maybe, why he did what he did.”

Bart lowered his eyes. He had no answer to that.

“No, you won’t be killed. But that’s all I can guarantee. My personal feelings have nothing to do with it. You’ll have to go to Council Planet with us, and you’ll have to be psych-checked there. That is Lhari law—and by treaty with your Federation, it is human law, too. If you know anything dangerous to us, we have a legal right to eliminate those memories before you can be released.”

Meta smiled at him, encouragingly, but Bart shivered. That was almost worse than the thought of death.

And the fear grew more oppressive as the ship forged onward toward the home world of the Lhari. And it did not lessen when, after they touched down, he was taken from the ship under guard.

He had only a glimpse, through dark glasses, of the terrible brilliance of the Lhari sun dazzling on crystal towers, before he was hustled into a closed surface car. It whisked him away to a building he did not see from the outside; he was taken up by private elevator to a suite of rooms which might—for all he could tell—have been a suite in a luxury hotel or a lunatic asylum. The walls were translucent, the furniture oddly colored, and so carefully padded that even a homicidal or suicidal person could not have hurt himself or anyone else on it or with it.

Food reached him often enough so that he never got hungry, but not often enough to keep him from being bored between meals, or from brooding. Two enormous Lhari came in to look at him every hour or so, but either they were deaf and dumb, did not understand his dialect of Lhari, or were under orders not to speak to him. It was the most frustrating time of his entire voyage.

One day it ended. A Lhari and a Mentorian came for him and took him down elevators and up stairs, and into a quiet, neutral room where four Lhari were gathered. They sat him in a comfortable chair, and the Mentorian interpreter said gently, with apology:

“Bart Steele, I have been asked to say to you that you will not be physically harmed in any way. This will be much simpler, and will have much less injurious effect on your mind if you cooperate with us. At the same time, I have been asked to remind you that resistance is absolutely useless, and if you attempt it, you will only be treated with force rather than with courtesy.”

Bart sat facing them, shaking with humiliation. The thought of resistance flashed through his mind. Maybe he should make them fight for what they got! At least they’d see that all humans weren’t like the Mentorians, to sit quietly and let themselves be brainwashed without a word of protest.

He started to spring up, and the hands of his guards tightened, swift and strong, even before his muscles had fully tightened. Bart’s head dropped. Cold common sense doused over his brave thoughts. He was uncountable millions of light-years from his own people. He was absolutely alone. Bravery would mean nothing; submission would mean nothing. Would he be more of a man, somehow, if he let his mind be wrecked?

“All right,” he muttered, “I won’t fight.”

“You show your good sense,” the Mentorian said quietly. “Give me your left arm, please—or, if you are left-handed, your right. As you prefer.”

Deftly, almost painlessly, a needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. Ringg, Vorongil, Meta, his father....

Consciousness slid away.

Years later—he never knew whether it was memory or imagination—it seemed to him that he could reach into that patch of gray and dreamless time and fish out questions and answers whole, the faces of Lhari swelling up suddenly in his eyes and shrinking back into interstellar distance, the sting-smell of drugs, the sound of unexpected voices, odd reflex pains, cobwebs of patchy memories that fitted nowhere else into his life so that he supposed they must go here.

He only knew that there was a time he did not remember and then a time when he began to think there was such a thing as memory, and then a time when he floated without a body, and then another time when the path of every separate nerve in his body seemed to be outlined, a shimmering web in the gray murk. There was a mirror and a face. There were blotchy worms of light like the star-trails of peaking warp-drive through the viewport, colors shifting and receding, a green star, the red eye of Antares.

Then the peak-point faded, his mind began to decelerate and angle slowly down and down into the field of awareness, and he became fuzzily aware that he was lying full length on a sort of couch. He shook his head groggily. It hurt. He sat up. That hurt, too. A hand closed gently around his elbow and he felt the cold edge of a cup against his sore mouth.

“Take a sip of this.”

The liquid felt cool on his tongue, evaporating almost before he could swallow; the fumes seemed to mount inside the root of his nose, expanding tremendously inside his head and brain. Abruptly his head was clear, the last traces of gray fuzz gone.

“When you feel able,” the Mentorian said courteously, “the High Council will see you.”

Bart blinked. As if exploring a sore tooth with his tongue, his mind sought for memories, but they all seemed clear, marshaled in line. The details, clear and unblurred, of his voyage here. His humiliation and resentment against the Lhari. They could have changed my thinking, my attitudes. They could have made me admire or be loyal to the Lhari. They didn’t. I’m still me.

“I’m ready now.” He got up, reeled and had to lean on the Mentorian; his feet did not seem to touch the ground in quite the right way. After a minute he could walk steadily, and followed the Mentorian along a corridor. The Mentorian said into a small grille, “The Vegan Bartol, alias Bart Steele,” and after a moment a doorway opened.

Inside a room rose, high, domed, vaulted above his head, whitish opalescent, washed with green. For a moment, while his eyes adjusted to the light, he wondered how the Lhari saw it.

Beyond an expanse of black, glassy floor, he saw a low semicircular table, behind which sat eight Lhari. All wore pale robes with high collars that rose stiffly behind their domed heads; all were old, their faces lined with many wrinkles, and seven of the eight were as bald as the hull of the Swiftwing. Under their eyes he hesitated; then, unexpectedly, pride stiffened his back.

They should have done a better job of brainwashing, if they expected him to skulk in like a scared rabbit! He held his head high and moved across the floor step by steady step, trying not to limp or display that he felt tired or sore.

You’re human! Act proud of it!

No one moved until he stood before the semicircle of ancients. Then the youngest, the only one of the eight with some trace of feathery crest on his high gray head, said “Captain Vorongil, you identify this person?”

“I do,” Vorongil said, and Bart saw him seated before the high Council. To Bart, the Lhari captain seemed a familiar, almost a friendly face.

“Well, Bart Steele, alias Bartol son of Berihun,” said one old Lhari, “what have you to say for yourself?”

Bart stood silent, not moving. What could he say that would not reveal how desperately alone, how young and foolish and frightened he felt? All his brave resolutions seemed to drain away before their old, gnomish faces. Here he’d been thinking of himself as a brave spy, a gallant fighter in humanity’s cause and what not. Now he saw himself for what he was; a reckless boy, meddling in affairs too big for him. He lowered his eyes.

“We have read the transcript of your knowledge,” said the old Lhari. “There is little in it that we do not know. We are not, of course, concerned with human conspiracies unless they endanger Lhari lives. The Antares authorities will deal with the man Montano for an unauthorized landing on Lharillis, in violation of Federation treaty.”

He smiled, his gnome’s face breaking into a million tiny cracks like a piece of gray-glazed pottery. “Bartol, or whatever you call yourself, you are a brave young man. I suppose you are afraid we will block your memories, or your ability to speak of them?”

Bart nodded, gulping. Did the old Lhari read his mind?

“A year ago we might have done so. Captain Vorongil, you will be interested to know that we have discussed this in Council, and your recommendations have been taken. The secret that humans can endure star-drive has outlived its usefulness. For good or ill, it is secret no longer. We cannot possibly eliminate all the old records, or the enterprising people who hunt them out.

“The captain who had David Briscoe killed, under the mistaken notion that this would excuse his own negligence in letting Briscoe stow away on his ship, is undergoing psychotherapy and may eventually recover.

“As for the rest—Bart Steele, you know nothing that is a danger to us. You do not know the coordinates of our world, or even in which galaxy it is located. You do not know where we secure the catalyst your people seek. In fact, you know nothing that is not soon to become common knowledge. In view of that, we have decided not to interfere with your memories.”

“Talk as much as you like,” added another of the ancients, “and may your memories of this voyage help in understanding between the Lhari and other human races. Good fortune to you.” And he was smiling.

“There is another side to this,” said a third, more sternly and gravely. “You have broken a treaty between Lhari and man. We have dealt with you as the laws required; now your own people must do so. You must return with the Swiftwing to the planet where the violation originated—” he consulted a memorandum—“Procyon Alpha. There you and the man Raynor Three will face charges of unlawful conspiracy to board a Lhari ship, in violation of Intergalactic Trade treaties. Captain Vorongil, will you be responsible for him?”

So I’ve lost, Bart thought drearily. I didn’t even learn anything important enough for them to suppress. There was a strange wounded pride in this; after all his trouble, he was being treated like a little boy who has used a great deal of enterprise and intelligence to rob a cookie cupboard, and for his pains is sent home with the stolen cookie in his hand.

Vorongil touched his arm. “Come, Bartol,” he said gently, “I’m taking you back to the Swiftwing. I don’t have to treat you like a prisoner, do I?”

Numbly, Bart gave what the old Lhari asked, his word of honor not to attempt escape (Escape? Where to?) or to attempt to enter the drive chamber of the Swiftwing while they were still among the Lhari worlds.

As they left the council hall, Bart, in a gesture of despair, covered his face with his hands. As he brought them down, he found himself staring at them, transfixed.

The fingers looked longer and thinner than he remembered them, but they were his own hands again. The nails seemed faintly thick and ridged, and there was still a faint grayish tinge through the pale flesh color, but they were human hands. Unmistakably. He felt of his nose and ears, with fumbling fingers; raised his hand and touched the very short, crisp hair growing on his newly shaven skull.

“You fool,” said Vorongil to the Mentorian, in disgust, “why didn’t you tell him what the medics had done for him? Easy, Bartol!” The old Lhari’s arm tightened around his shoulder. “I thought they’d told you. Somebody come here and give the youngster a hand.”

Later, in the small cabin (it had been Rugel’s) which was to be his prison during the return voyage of the Swiftwing, he had a chance to study his familiar-strange face. He had thought that only a short time—an hour or so—had elapsed between the time he was drugged and the time they took him before the Council. Later, from what he learned about the dispatch schedules of the Swiftwing, he realized that he had been kept under sedation for nearly three weeks, while his face and hands healed.

As Raynor Three had warned, the change was not altogether reversible. Studying his face in the mirror, he could still see a hint of something thin, strange, alien in the set of his features; the nose and chin somewhat too pointed, elfin, to be human. His hands would always be too long, too narrow, too supple. For the rest, he looked grim, older. He could never go back to what he had been before he became a Lhari; it had left its mark on him forever.

Before the Swiftwing lifted, outbound, Vorongil came to his cabin. “You’ve seen very little of our world,” he said diffidently. “I have permission for you to visit the city before we leave Council Spaceport.”

“You think you can trust me?” Bart asked bitterly.

Vorongil said gravely, without humor, “The question does not arise. You do not know the coordinates of this world, and have no way of finding them. Within those limitations, you are an honored guest here, and if it would give you any pleasure, you are welcome to see as much of Council Planet as time permits.”

It seemed, through Vorongil’s kindness, that the old Lhari sensed his bitter defeat. Nothing was to be gained by sulking in his cabin, a prisoner. He had an opportunity which no human, except the Mentorians, had ever had; which perhaps no human would ever have again. He might as well take advantage of it.

Ringg and Meta both seemed startled at his new appearance, but Meta instantly held out her hands, clasping his quickly and warmly. “Bart! I wondered what your real face looked like. But I think I’d have known you anyhow.”

Ringg surveyed him wonderingly, shaking his head. “Say something,” he implored, “so I’ll know you’re Bartol.”

Bart held out his arm, less gray by the day as the drug wore out of his system. The thin line of the scar was still on it. He raised his forefinger lightly to the fine line on Ringg’s cheek. “I couldn’t return that now. So let’s not get into any more fights.”

Ringg laughed and gave him a rough, affectionate shove. “You’re Bartol, all right!”

Even his sense of defeat vanished in wonder as they came out into the great spaceport. He saw, now, that the Lhari spaceports in human worlds were built to create, for the spacemen so far from their native worlds, some feeling of home. But everything here was so vast as to stagger the imagination. There were miles and miles of the great ships, lying strewn like pebbles on this monster beachhead into space, bearing the strangeness of a million far-flung stars. He gaped like a child.

Above them, the burning brilliance of a star gave strange glow and color to the crystal pylons. What color was the star? He turned to Meta, irritated at his inability to be sure.

“Meta, what color is this sun? I’ve been all around the spectrum, and it’s not red, blue, green, orange, violet—” He broke off, realizing what he had said and what he had seen. “An eighth color,” he finished, anticlimatically.

“You and your talk of colors,” Ringg grumbled, “I wish I knew what you Mentorians see! It’s like trying to imagine seeing a smell or hearing light!”

Meta laughed. “As far as I know, no one’s named it. Sometimes we Mentorians call it catalyst color. I think only Mentorians can see it as separate color.”

“So what?” Ringg said impatiently, “What are we going to do, chatter about light waves or see the city?”

Bart acquiesced, trying to sound eager, but a wild excitement was gusting up in him. He dutifully pretended fascination with the towers, the many-leveled roads, the giant dams and pylons, but his thoughts were racing.

The eighth color! There can’t be too many suns of this color, or they’d have named it and known it! And telescopes can find it.

Could success be salvaged, then, at the very edge of failure? Maybe he need not go empty-handed, empty-eyed, from the Lhari worlds! They had dismissed him, scornfully, stolen cookie in hand—but maybe it would be a bigger cookie than they dreamed!

The exhilaration lasted through the tour of the port, through the heavy surge of acceleration which brought them up, out and way from Council Planet. Bart, confined in Rugel’s cabin, hardly felt like a prisoner, his mind busy with schemes.

I’ll study star-maps, and spectroscope reports....

It lasted almost two days of shiptime, and they were readying for Acceleration Two, before he came, figuratively, down to earth. To pick one star out of trillions—and not even in his own galaxy? It would take a lifetime and he didn’t even know which of the four or five spiral nebulae in the skies of the human worlds was the Lhari Galaxy. A lifetime? A hundred lifetimes wouldn’t do it!

He might have known. If there had been one chance in the odd billion of his making any such discovery, the Lhari would never have given Vorongil permission for the intruder to visit the planet at all. He would have been returned to the Swiftwing as he had been taken from it, by closed car, and imprisoned, maybe even drugged, until he was safely back in the human worlds again.

He was under parole not to enter the drive chamber (and sure he would be stopped if he attempted it anyhow), but when Acceleration One was completed, he went to the viewport in the Recreation Lounge, and nobody threw him out. He stood long, looking at the unfamiliar galaxy of the Lhari stars; the unknown, forever unknowable constellations with their strange shapes. Stars green, gold, topaz, burning blue, sullen red, and the great strangely colored receding sun of the Lhari people, known to them by the melodious name of the Ke Lhiro—which meant, simply, The Sun: it was their first home.

Where had he seen that color? In that stolen glimpse of the Lhari ship landing, long ago? Of all the colors of space, this one he would never know.

He turned away from the unsolvable riddle of the strange constellations; and went to his cabin, to dream of the green star Meristem where he had first plotted known coordinates for a previously unknown world, and to wander in baffling nightmares where he fed jagged, star-colored pieces of hail into the ship’s computer and watched them come out as tiny paperdoll spaceships with the letterhead of Eight Colors printed neatly across their sides.

After the warp-drive shift, Vorongil came to his cabin, this time crisp and businesslike.

“We’re back in your galaxy,” he said, “among the stars you know. We have no passenger space on the Swiftwing; we had to ship out without replacing Rugel, which means we’re short two men. I’ve no authority to ask this of you, but—would you like your old job back for the rest of the voyage?”

Bart glanced at his human hands.

Vorongil shrugged. “We’ve carried Mentorians as full-ranking Astrogators. There don’t happen to be any on the Swiftwing. But there’s no law about it.”

Bart looked the old Lhari in the eye. “I won’t accept Mentorian terms, Vorongil.”

“I wouldn’t ask it. You worked your way outward on this run, and the High Council didn’t see fit to erase those memories or inhibit them. Why should I? Do you want it or not?”

Did he want it? Until this moment Bart had not identified the worst of his pain and defeat—to travel as a passenger, a supercargo, when he had once been part of the Swiftwing. Literally he ached to be back with it again. “I do, rieko mori.”

“Very well,” Vorongil rapped, “see that you turn out next watch!” He spun round and walked out. His tone was no longer gently indulgent, but sharp and distant. Bart, at first surprised, suddenly understood.

Not now a prisoner, a passenger, a guest on the Swiftwing. He was part of the crew again—and Vorongil was his captain.

The Lhari crew were oddly constrained at first. But Ringg was the same as always, and before long they were almost on the old terms. With every watch, it seemed, he was building a bridge between man and Lhari. They accepted him.

But for what? Something might come, in the far future, of his acceptance, but he wouldn’t get the benefit of it. This would be his only voyage; after this he’d be chained again, crawling from planet to planet of a single sun. And as warp-shift followed warp-shift, the Swiftwing retracing the path of her outward cruise star by star, Bart said farewell to them.

One day, at last, he stood at the viewport, watching Procyon Alpha nearing. A year ago, frightened, terribly alone, still unsteady on his new Lhari muscles and terrified by the monsters that were his shipmates, he had watched these planets spinning away. Poor old Rugel, poor old Baldy!

Behind him, Meta came into the lounge.

“Bart—”

He turned to face her. “It won’t be much longer, Meta. Tomorrow I’ll find out what the Federation is going to do to me. Conspiracy unlawfully to board—and all the rest of it. Even if I don’t go to a prison planet, I’ll spend the rest of my life chained down to Vega.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.”

“What other choice is there?” he demanded.

“You’re half Mentorian,” she said, raising her eager face. “Oh, Bart, you love it so, you know you can’t bear to give it up. Stay with us—please stay!”

Before answering, he looked out the viewport a last time. The clouds of cosmic dust swirled and foamed around the familiar jewels of his own sky. Blue, beloved Vega, burning in the heart of the Lyre—home—when would he go home? He had no home now. Yet his father had left him Vega Interplanet, as well as Eight Colors and a quest to the stars.

He searched for the topaz of Sol, where he had learned astrogation; Procyon, where he had become a Lhari; the ruby of Aldebaran (hail and farewell, David Briscoe!); the bloodstone of Antares, where he had learned fear and the shape of integrity. The colors, the unknowable colors of space. And others. Nameless stars where he and his Lhari shipmates had worked and played. And stars he had never seen and would never see, all the endless worlds beyond worlds and stars beyond stars....

He took a last, longing look at the colors of space, then turned his back on them, deliberately giving them up. He could not pay the price the Mentorians paid.

“No, Meta,” he said huskily. “The Mentorian way is one way, but—I’ve had a taste of being one of the masters of space. It’s more than most men ever have, maybe it’s more than I deserve. But I can’t settle for anything less. Not even if it means losing you.”

He shut his eyes and stood, head bowed. When he looked up again, he was alone with the stars beyond the viewport, and the lounge was empty.

Chapter Fourteen

The low rainbow building of Eight Colors, near the spaceport of Procyon Alpha, had not changed; and when Bart went in, as he had done a year ago, it seemed that the same varnished girl was sitting before the same glass desk, neon-edged and brittle, with the same chrome-tinged hair and blue fingernails. She looked at Bart in his Lhari clothing, at Meta in her Mentorian robe and cloak, at Ringg, and her unruffled dignity did not turn a hair.

“May I help you?” she inquired, still not caring.

“I want to see Raynor One.”

“On what business, please?”

“Tell him,” said Bart, with immense satisfaction, “that his boss is here—Bart Steele—and wants to see him right away.”

It had a sort of disrupting effect. She seemed to go blurred at the edges. After a minute, blinking carefully, she spoke into the vision-screen, and reported, numbly, “Go on up, Mr. Steele.”

He wasn’t expecting a welcome. He said so as the elevator rose. “After all, if I’d never come back, he’d doubtless have inherited the whole Eight Colors line, unencumbered. I don’t expect he’ll be happy to see me. But he’s the only one I can turn to.”

The elevator stopped, opened. They stepped out, and a man stepped nervously toward them. For a moment, expecting Raynor One, Bart was deceived; then as the man’s face spread in a smile of welcome, he stopped in incredulous delight.

“Raynor Three!”

In overflowing gladness, Bart hugged him. It was like a meeting with the dead. He felt as if he had really come home. “But—but you remember me!” he exclaimed, backing away, in amazement.

Slowly, the man nodded. His eyes were grave. “Yes. I decided it wasn’t worth it, Bart, to go on losing everything that meant anything to me. Even if it meant I had to give up the stars, never travel again except as a passenger, I couldn’t go on being afraid to remember, never knowing the consequences or responsibilities of what I’d done.” His sad smile was strangely beautiful. “The Multiphase sailed without me. I’ve been here, hoping against hope that someday I’d know the rest.”

Associations clicked into place in Bart’s mind. The Multiphase. So Raynor Three was the Mentorian who had smuggled David Briscoe off the ship, and whose memories, wrung out by the Lhari captain of that ship, had touched off so many deaths. But he had paid for that—paid many times over. And now must he pay for this, too?

Raynor One strode toward them. “So it’s really you. I thought it might be a trap, but Three wouldn’t listen. Word came from Antares that Montano had been arrested and his ship confiscated for illegal landing on Lharillis. I thought you were probably dead.”

“We sent a boy to do a man’s job,” Raynor Three said, “and he came back a man. But tell me—” He looked curiously at Ringg and Meta.

Bart introduced them, adding, “I came for help, really. I’m facing charges, and I’m afraid you are, too.”

Raynor One said harshly, “A trap, after all, Three! He trapped you, and he’s led the Lhari to you!”

“No,” Raynor Three said, “or he wouldn’t be walking around free and unguarded and with all his memories intact. Tell me about it, Bart.” And when Bart had given a quick narration of the Lhari judgment, he nodded, slowly.

“That’s all we ever wanted. Don’t think you failed, Bart. The horrible part was only the way they were trying to keep it secret.”

Ringg interrupted, “Do not judge the Lhari by them, Raynor Three,” and Raynor Three said in good Lhari, “I don’t, feathertop. Raynors have been working with Lhari since the days of Rhazon of Nedrus. But I wanted an open, official statement of Lhari policy—not secret murders by fanatics. I had confidence in the Lhari as a people, but not in individuals. What good did it do to know that the Lhari council in another galaxy would have condemned the murders and manhunts, when they were going on in this one, day after day?

“Don’t you see, Bart?” he continued, “you didn’t fail—not if we’re going to have the publicity of a test case, publicly heard. That means the Lhari are prepared to admit, before our whole galaxy, that humans can survive warp-drive without cold-sleep. That’s all David Briscoe was trying to prove, or your father either—may they rest in peace. So, whatever happens, we’ve won.”

“If you two idealists will give me a minute for cold realities,” Raynor One said, “there’s this. Among other things. Bart’s not yet of legal age. You may not know this, Bart, but your father appointed me your legal guardian. When I turned you over to Three, I’m afraid, I assumed legal responsibility for all the consequences. I ought to have kept you under my own supervision.”

Bart smiled at Raynor One’s stern face. “I crossed two galaxies, and faced the Lhari High Council, without you to hold my hand. I can face the Trade Federation.”

“Naturally I will be responsible for your defense,” Raynor One said stiffly.

“But I don’t need a defense,” Bart said, turning to Raynor Three and meeting his eyes. “I’m going to tell the truth, and let it stand. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they don’t hold you responsible for my actions.”

“Another thing. Some lunatic from Capella arrived here and all but accused me of having you murdered. Do you know a Tommy Kendron?”

“Do I know him!” Bart interrupted with a joyful yell. “Tommy’s here? Quick—where do I get in touch with him?”

An hour later they were all gathered at Raynor Three’s country house. The talk went on far into the night. Tommy wanted to know everything, and both Raynors wanted to know every detail of Bart’s year among the Lhari, while Meta and Ringg were both curious about how it had begun.

Bart tried to forget that the next day might bring trouble, even imprisonment. The Lhari Council had told him to talk as much as he liked about his voyage, and this might be his only chance. When he had finished, Tommy leaned forward and gripped Bart’s hand tightly.

“You make them sound like pretty decent people,” he said, looking at Ringg. “A year ago, if you’d told me I’d be here with a Lhari spaceman and a bunch of Mentorians, I’d never have believed it.”

“Nor I, that I would be as friend under a human roof,” Ringg replied. “But a friend to Bart is my friend also.” He touched the faint discolored scars on his brow, saying softly, “But for Bart, I would not be here to greet anyone, man or Lhari, as friend.”

“So,” said Tommy triumphantly, “you haven’t failed, even if you didn’t discover the secret of the Eighth Color—”

But a sudden, blinding light burst over Bart as Ringg moved his hand to the scars. Once again he searched a cave beneath a green star, where Ringg lay unconscious and bleeding, and played his Lhari light fearfully over a waterfall of colored minerals. And there was one whose color he could not identify—red, blue, violet, green, none of these—the color of an unknown star in an unknown galaxy, the shimmer of a landing Lhari ship, the color of an unknown element in an unknown fuel—

“The secret of the Eighth Color,” he said, and stood up, his hands literally shaking in excitement. “I’m an idiot! No, don’t ask me any questions! I could still be wrong. But even if I go to a prison planet, the Eighth Color isn’t a secret any more!”

When the others had gone back to the city, he sat with Raynor Three in the room where the latter had told him of his father’s death, where he had first seen his terrifying Lhari face. They spoke little, but Raynor Three finally asked, “Were you serious about not wanting a defense, Bart?”

“I was. All I want is a chance to tell my own story in my own way. Where everyone will hear me.”

Raynor Three looked at him curiously. “There’s something you’re not telling, Bart. Want to tell me?”

Bart hesitated, then held out his hand and clasped his kinsman’s. “Thanks—but no.”

Raynor Three saw his hesitation and chuckled. “All right, son. Forget I asked. You’ve grown up.”

It was good to sleep in a soft human-type bed again, to eat breakfast and shave and dress in ordinary human clothing again. But Bart folded his Lhari tights and the cloak tenderly, with regret. They were the memory of an experience no one else would ever have.

Raynor Three let him take the controls as they flew back to the spaceport city; and a little before noon they entered the great crystal pylon that was the headquarters of the Federation Trade Bureau on Procyon Alpha. Men and Lhari were moving in the lobby; among them Bart saw Vorongil, Meta at his side. He smiled at her, received a wan smile in return.

Would Vorongil feel that Bart had deceived him, betrayed him, when he heard Bart today?

In the hearing room, four white-crested Lhari sat across from four dignified, well-dressed men, representatives of the Federation of Intergalactic Trade. The space beyond was wholly filled with people, crowded together, and carrying stereo cameras, intercom equipment, the creepie-peepie of the on-the-spot space commentator.

“Mr. Steele, we had hoped to make this a quiet hearing, without undue publicity. But we cannot deny the news media the privilege of covering it, unless you wish to claim the right to privacy.”

“No, indeed,” Bart said clearly. “I want them all to hear what I’m going to say.”

Raynor One came up to the bench. “Bart, as your guardian, I advise against it. Some people will call this a publicity stunt. It won’t do Eight Colors any good to admit that men have been spying on the Lhari—”

“I want press coverage,” Bart repeated stubbornly, “and as many star-systems on the relay as possible.”

“All right. But I wash my hands of it,” Raynor One said angrily.

Bart told his story simply: his meeting with the elder Briscoe, his meeting with Raynor One—carefully not implicating Raynor One in the plot—Raynor Three’s work in altering his appearance to that of a Lhari, and the major events of his cruise on the Swiftwing. When he came to the account of the shift into warp-drive, he saw the faces of the press reporters, and realized that for them this was the story of the year—or century: humans can endure star-drive! But he went on, not soft-pedaling Montano’s attempted murder, his own choice, the trip to the Lhari world—

One of the board representatives interrupted testily, “What is the point of this lengthy narrative? You can give the story to the newsmen without our official sanction, if you want to make it a heroic epic, young Steele. We have heard sufficient to prove your guilt, and that of Raynor, in the violation of treaty—”

“Nevertheless, I want this official,” Bart said. “I don’t want to be mobbed when they hear that I have the secret of the star-drive.”

The effect was electric. The four Lhari sat up; their white crests twitched. Vorongil stared, his gray eyes darkening with fear. One of the Lhari leaned forward, shooting the question at him harshly.

“You did not discover the coordinates of the Council Planet of Ke Lhiro! You did not discover—”

“I did not,” Bart said quietly. “I don’t know them and I have no intention of trying to find them. We don’t need to go to the Lhari Galaxy to find the mineral that generates the warp-frequencies, that they call ‘Catalyst A’ and that the Mentorians call the ‘Eighth Color.’ There is a green star called Meristem, and a spectroscopic analysis of that star, I’m sure, will reveal what unknown elements it contains, and perhaps locate other stars with that element. There must be others in our galaxy, but the coordinates of the star Meristem are known to me.”

Vorongil was staring at him, his mouth open. He leaped up and cried out, shaking, “But they assured us that among your memories—there was nothing of danger to us—”

Compassionately, gently, Bart said, “There wasn’t—not that they knew about, Vorongil. I didn’t realize it myself. I might never have remembered seeing a mineral that was of a color not found in the spectrum. Certainly, a memory like that meant nothing to the Lhari medics who emptied out my mind and turned over all my thoughts. You Lhari can’t see color at all.

“So no one but I saw the color of the mineral in the cave; you Lhari yourselves don’t know that your fuel looks unlike anything else in the universe. You never cared to find out how your world looked to your Mentorians. So your medics never questioned my memories of an eighth color. To you, it’s just another shade of gray, but under a light strong enough to blind any but Mentorian eyes, it takes on a special color—”

The conference broke up in disorder, the four Lhari clustering together in a furious babble, then hastily leaving the room. Bart stood waiting, feeling empty and cold. Vorongil’s stare baffled him with unreadable emotion.

“You fool, you unspeakable young idiot!” Raynor One groaned. “Why did you blurt it out like that before every news media in the galaxy? Why, we could have had a monopoly on the star-drive—Eight Colors and Vega Interplanet!” As he saw the men of the press approaching with their microphones, lights, cameras and TV equipment, he gripped Bart urgently by the arm.

“We can still salvage something! Don’t talk any more! Refer them to me—say I’m your guardian and your business manager—you can still make something of this—”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do,” Bart replied, and broke away from him to approach the newsmen.

“Yes, certainly, I’ll answer all your questions, gentlemen.”

Raynor One flung up his hands in despair, but over their shoulder he saw the glowing face of Meta, and smiled. She, at least, would understand. So would Raynor Three.

A page boy touched Bart on the arm. “Mr. Steele,” he said, “you are to appear immediately before the World Council!”

He was to be asked one question again and again in the days that followed, but his real answer was to Meta and Raynor Three, looking quietly past Raynor One and speaking to the news cameras that would carry his words all over the galaxy to men and Lhari:

“Why didn’t I keep it for myself? Because there are always men like Montano, who in their mistaken pride will murder and steal for such things. I want this knowledge to be open to all men, to be used for their benefit. There has been too much secrecy already. I want all men to have the stars.”

He had to tell his story again and again to the hastily summoned representatives of the Galactic Federation. At one point the delegate from his home star of Vega actually rose and shouted to him, “This is treason! You betrayed your home world—and the whole human race! Don’t you know the Lhari may fight a war over this?”

Bart remembered Vorongil’s silent, sad confession of the Lhari fears.

“No,” he said gently. “No. There won’t be any war unless we start one. The Lhari won’t start any war. Believe me.”

But inwardly, he sweated. What would the Lhari do?

They had to wait for representatives of the Lhari Council to make the journey from their home galaxy; meanwhile they kept Bart in protective custody. There was, of course, no question of sending him to a “prison planet”; public opinion would have crucified any government that suggested punishment for the man who had discovered a human world with deposits of Catalyst A. Bart could claim an “explorer’s share,” and Raynor One had lost no time in filing that claim on his behalf.

But he was lonely and anxious. They had confined him to a set of rooms high in the building overlooking the spaceport; from the balcony he could see the ships landing and departing. Life went on, ships came and went, and out there in the vast night of space, the suns and colors flamed and rolled, heedless of the little atoms that traveled and intrigued between them.

A night came when the buzzer sounded and he opened the door to Raynor One and Raynor Three.

“Better turn on your vision-screen, Bart. The Elder of the Lhari Council has arrived with their official decision, and he’s going to announce it.”

Bart waited, anxiously, pacing the room, while on the TV screen various dignitaries presented the Elder.

“We are the first race to travel the stars.” A bald head, an ancient Lhari face seamed like glazed pottery, looked at Bart from the screen, and Bart remembered when he had stood before that face, sick with defeat. But now he need not pretend to hold his head erect.

“We have had a long and triumphant time as masters of the stars,” the Lhari said. “But triumph and power will sicken and stagnate the race which holds them too long unchallenged. We reached this point once before. Then a Lhari captain, Rhazon of Nedrun, abandoned the safe ways of caution, and out of his blind leap in the blind dark came many good things. Trade with the human race. Our Mentorian allies. A system of mathematics to take the hazards from our star-travel.

“Yet once again the Lhari had grown cautious and fearful. And a young man named Bartol took a blind leap into unknown darkness, all alone—”

“Not alone,” Bart said as if to himself, “it took two men called Briscoe. And my father. And a couple of Raynors. And even a man called Montano, because without that, I’d never have decided—”

“Like Rhazon of Nedrun, like all pioneers, this young man has been cursed by his own people, the very ones who will one day benefit from his daring. He has found his people a firm footing among the stars. It is too late for the Lhari to regret that we did not sooner extend you the hand of welcome there. You have climbed, unaided, to join us. For good or ill, we must make room for you.

“But there is room for all. Competition is the lifeblood of trade, and we face the future without fear, knowing that life still holds many surprises for the living. I say to you: welcome to the stars.”

Even while Bart stood speechless with the knowledge of success, the door opened again, and Bart, turning, cried out in amazement.

“Tommy! Ringg! Meta!”

“Sure,” Tommy exclaimed, “we’ve got to celebrate,” but Bart stopped, looking past them.

“Captain Vorongil!” he said, and went to greet the old Lhari. “I thought you’d hate me, rieko mori.” The term of respect fell naturally from his lips.

“I did, for a time,” Vorongil said quietly. “But I remembered the day we stood on Lharillis, by the monument. And that you risked—perhaps your life, certainly your eyesight—to save us from death. So when the Elder asked for my estimate of your people, I gave it.”

“I thought it sounded like you.” Bart felt that his happiness was complete.

“And now,” Ringg cried, “let’s celebrate! Meta, you haven’t even told him that he’s free!”

But while the party got rolling, Bart wondered—free for what? And after a little while he went out on the balcony and stood looking down at the spaceport, where the Swiftwing lay in shadow, huge, beloved—renounced.

“What now, Bartol?” Vorongil’s quiet voice asked from his elbow. “You’re famous—notorious. You’re going to be rich, and a celebrity.”

“I was wishing I could get away until the excitement dies down.”

“Well,” said Vorongil, “why don’t you? The Swiftwing ships out tonight, Bartol—for Antares and beyond. It will be a couple of years before your Eight Colors can be made over into an Interstellar line—and as Raynor One has said to me several times, he’ll have to handle all those details, for you’re not of age yet.

“I’ve been thinking. Now that we Lhari must share space with your people, you’ll need experienced men for your ships. Unless we all want the disasters born of trial and error, we Lhari had better help you train your men quickly and well. I want you to go back on the Swiftwing with me. Not an apprentice, but representative of Eight Colors, to act as liaison between men and Lhari—at least until your own affairs claim your attention.”

Behind them on the balcony, Tommy appeared, making signals to Bart: “Say yes! Say yes, Bart! I did!”

Bart’s eyes suddenly filled. Out of defeat he had won success beyond his greatest hopes. But he did not feel all glad; he felt only a heavy responsibility. Whether good or bad came of the gift he had snatched from the stars, would rest in large measure on his own shoulders. He was going back to space—to learn the responsibility that went with it.

“I accept,” he said gravely.

“Oh, boy!” Tommy dragged Ringg into a sort of war dance of exuberant celebration, pointing at the flaring glow of the spaceport gates. “Here, by grace of the Lhari, stands the doorway to all the stars,” he quoted. “Well, maybe you were here first. But look out—we’re coming!”

A doorway to the stars. Bart had crossed that doorway once, frightened and alone. Dad, if you could only know! The first interstellar ship of Eight Colors was to bear the name Rupert Steele, but that was years in the future.

Now, looking at the Swiftwing, at Ringg and Tommy, at Raynor Three and Vorongil, who would all be his shipmates in the new world they were building, he felt suddenly very lonely again.

“Come in, Bart. It’s your party,” Meta said softly, and he felt her hand lying in his. He looked down at the pretty Mentorian girl. She would be with him, too. And suddenly he knew he would never be lonely again.

His arm around Meta, his friends—man and Lhari—at his shoulder, he went back to the celebration, to plan for the first intergalactic voyage to the stars.

The Crime Therapist

THE RIGELLIAN named Rhoum murmured sibilantly, “You realize, Mr. Colby, that this operation is illegal?”

Colby furtively mopped his brow. “Yes. I thought we’d been all over that before.”

It seemed incredible that this place actually existed, here on a modern Earth, where you could have shrimp in California and twenty minutes later, for a fifty-cent traffic-token, have coffee in Boston; where two weeks passage on a dionite-drive spaceship would take you to Theta Centaurus, and two months to the fourth planet of Antares. Here, where children were carefully conditioned for social adjustment, and crime simply was not.

Yet, that this office was here. The sign on the door said simply:

Dr. Rhoum (Ex—T.), M.D. Licensed Crime Therapist.

“I just wanted it to be understood, completely,” the little Extra-terrestrial breathed hissily, and looked at the puny man in the relaxit. “Unfortunately, your psychotherapeutic authorities do not yet recognize the criminal impulses to be a form of insanity as normal, if I may make a minor paradox, as any other. They treat criminals as socially maladjusted individuals, not as psychoneurotics. And they fail to realize that, in the one type of individual, these impulses cannot be discharged by ordinary rehabilitation methods. Nor can they be sublimated; they need satisfaction.”

Rhoum paused. Colby leaned forward, sweating a little with anticipation.

Rhoum continued smoothly, “I had a patient, several weeks ago, who was an arsonist. Or rather, he should have been an arsonist. Most unfortunately, your compulsory childhood social conditioning had sent him into a state of continual sublimation and frustration. Conditioning told him, and he believed it consciously, that arson was an antisocial impulse, besides, most houses today are flameproof. He was on the verge of total breakdown; fortunately, he was referred to us for treatment—in time.”

“I thought you said you weren’t legal,” growled Colby.

“We are not inside Terran law,” Rhoum smiled. “The Terran Empire provisions permit us to carry on our business. It is illegal for citizens of Earth to patronize our therapies. But,” he smiled, again, “it is to our client’s best advantage not to talk. And—the word gets around. Oh, yes; it gets around.”

A brief pause, then Rhoum continued, “But I was telling you about my client. At our therapy center, we erected a large building of highly-inflammable material. At his leisure,

he burned it down. It made a beautiful blaze—beautiful. Very successful therapy.”

“. . . Where is he now?” Colby asked, his small, close-set eyes gleaming with excitement.

Rhoum drew his smooth brows together in a little frown. “Well, the case was a peculiar one, Mr. Colby. As a direct result, he contracted severe burns and died. But he died sane—and happy, Mr. Colby.”

Colby rubbed his scrawny hands. “I see,” he murmured, chuckling. “The operation was a success, but the patient died.”

Rhoum concealed a look of violent dislike. “You might put it that way, sir.”

Colby suddenly sat bolt upright in the relaxit, pushing his feet to the pneumatic carpet. His tongue slid over thin lips. “That—there wouldn’t be any—any danger of anything like that, happening to me, would there?” he whispered, looking around furtively.

“Oh, dear me, no, sir! The nature of your ailment is altogether different, if you will allow me to say so. I understand quite well. Arsonists are fanatics; murderers are really a relatively mild form of psychotic, you might say. The arsonist— or pyromaniac, you might say—committed suicide, in an elaborate way. He really wanted to die, you see; his antisocial neurosis built itself up to a self-destruction complex. In immolating the building, he really immolated himself.”

“I see.” Colby was bored now; he tapped his foot impatiently. “Er—do you handle murderers very often?”

“Oh, yes. Homicidal mania is very common—especially since it has been possible to construct such lifelike android robots within a period of three to four weeks. Until the previous decade, you know, it often took several months to make a single model, and the results were often uncertain. The new Centaurian process is most effective. Before, when we had to wait so long for the delivery of androids, the— well, the delay in therapy—was often disastrous to the patient. In a case of murder, you see, immediate therapy is often imperative. Why, just last week—but I am boring you now, Mr. Colby.”

Colby leaned forward, the small eyes glowing expectantly. “Oh, no, really I’m not bored, Doctor Rhoum. Really. Please go on,” he murmured emphatically. Rhoum’s cool, nonhuman eyes surveyed him quizzically.

“Very well. You—we had a patient, last week, a confirmed sadist, and psychiatric examination showed that beneath his conditioning he was a seriously-frustrated potential murderer. Fortunately, another client had just cancelled his appointment for mayhem therapy—oh, yes, we sometimes have spontaneous cures where therapy becomes unnecessary—and we had six young-girl androids on hand, quite perfect models—a few of them had been made for assault therapy. Only one was a standard murder model. They were quite expensive, too—not these assembly-line robot affairs which are just one notch better than the old steeloid frame jobs. They were genuine female androids, with all the details complete—you follow me?”

Colby smirked. “Nice work!”

Rhoum’s professionally lifted eyebrow cut him off. “Within a week of therapy, Mr. Colby, he had murdered them all. His methods—but I fear I must spare you the details.” The Rigellian ignored Colby’s disappointed frown. “Professional ethics, you will understand.”

“What—what happened to him?”

“He was discharged yesterday morning, completely sane, my dear sir. Completely sane.”

Colby could not keep back a sigh of relieved satisfaction. “Of course,” he said, smirking again, “I’m not really insane, Dr. Rhoum, you understand. But I feel it would be better to get it out of my system. These minor frustrations, you know; they take it out of my nerves.”

“Ah, yes,” Rhoum was professional and serene. “Now, in your case, sir. A serious hate complex—”

“Oh, hardly serious—” protested Colby deprecatingly.

Rhoum only smiled. “I understand, Mr. Colby, that you want to kill your wife.”

“Well, er, yes. She—you see, she’s such a sloppy dresser. And she wears those old fashioned neonylon housecoats. Then, she will wear an earring-alarm to bed, and five times in the past month, it’s gone off and waked me before ten o’clock. Then when I slapped her—just a little knock—she threatened to leave me. We have only a five-year marriage, you see. But it isn’t fair. And, er, well, I understand that after—after this, you make arrangements so I don’t have to meet her again. And, er, there’s this girl at the Sky Harbor Hotel—”

“I quite understand,” Rhoum murmured in his hissing voice. “But why murder, Mr. Colby? Surely that is drastic treatment. A little mayhem therapy—slapping around one of our substitutes for a few hours every day for a week or so—or you could simply apply for a divorce—”

“Well, er, you see,” Colby smirked again, “well, I’m not really insane, but I feel frustrated over it. Besides, I’ve tried to choke her once or twice, and—well, she made me promise to come here. So I decided, if I was going to do the thing at all, I’d do it up right, and kill her properly!” He glared at Rhoum, then suddenly shouted, “Blast it, what do you care? I’ve got the money! If I want to kill my wife, what business is it of yours? You don’t have to try to reform me, do you?”

Rhoum said calmly, “Of course not. But we dislike employing drastic therapy, if a cure can be carried out with milder treatment. It is my professional duty to try to persuade you to employ the simplest therapy. But if you feel you must kill your wife, well—”

“It’s the only thing that will make me a sane man again!” Colby said dramatically.

Rhoum’s sharp eyes glanced at him, blinking back. “I fear you are right,” he murmured. “I can see you are in a serious condition. Of course. We can arrange it at once.” He paused to consult a calendar, and asked, “Will the third of Einstein suit you? This is only the fifth of Freud, but Einstein third is only five weeks from now. You can wait five weeks, can’t you?”

“Oh, I think so,” Colby murmured.

“Well, we might be able to squeeze you in toward the end of this month, but these hurry-up jobs never effect a complete cure. Of course, if you decide to change your mind, and take it out in a simple mayhem therapy, it would only be three or four days—”

Modestly, Colby waved the suggestion away.

Rhoum nodded gravely. “Do you have a recent three-dim photograph of your wife?”

Colby tugged it out of his pocket. “As a matter of fact—”

“Hmmm, yes, she’s very pretty. Well, Mr. Colby, you understand that until your appointment you must be a guest at our therapy center. That is to prevent a—well, a normal and a pleasant anticipation from getting uncontrollable.”

He paused, “I trust you won’t find it unpleasant. I think our facilities for the entertainment of patients are fairly complete. And now—to get down to business—”

The talk became definite. A very large check changed hands.

“Sign here, Mr. Colby.”

Colby signed the form which said that he was committing himself voluntarily for treatment. Rhoum pushed a buzzit; an exquisite Centaurian girl in a wisp of neonylon appeared.

“Nurse, take Mr. Colby to his apartments. I hope you will be quite content here, Mr. Colby, just ask Demella for anything you want.”

When the smirking little man had gone, quite willingly, Dr. Rhoum selected a stylus and made a careful entry in his casebook.

Then he reached for the telephone.

The therapist said, “Hello. Mrs. Helen Colby? Dr. Rhoum speaking.”

The light feminine voice at the end of the telephone sounded disturbed. “Oh! Frank told me he was going there.” A pause. “Tell me, doctor. Is it serious?”

Dr. Rhoum made his voice professionally serene, but grave. “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Colby, quite serious. You must try to be brave. You see, he decided on the murder therapy. I suppose you have no objection to being murdered?”

“None whatever, but—oh, that’s so drastic!”

“Drastic diseases, you know, Mrs. Colby. Let me see, when can you come down for an appointment? Are you free tomorrow afternoon? We will need samples of blood, hair, and so forth, to make the android—as soon as possible. It’s serious.”

The appointment was made.

The fifth of Einstein dawned bright and clear. Colby woke up, switching off the all-night hypnotic learner, and ate with a hearty appetite the breakfast that the blue-haired girl from Aldebaran VI brought him. Last week, at his request, Dr. Rhoum had removed him from Demella’s charge; she had been insufferably insubordinate. Besides, he had never cared for those Centaurians—too skinny. Hamilda, now, she was something.

Dr. Rhoum came for him punctually at nine. His face looked stern and terribly grave. “You are certain that you want to go through with this?” he asked quietly. “There is still time to change your mind, you know. We can convert you to a simpler therapy—mayhem, or simply abusive treatment—or you can go home this morning, get a divorce and forget the whole matter. We’re quite prepared to give you a refund on the murder fee.”

Colby stared at him between tight-squeezed small eyes. “I’m going through with it,” he snarled furiously. “Didn’t you say you weren’t going to try to rehabilitate or reform me?”

Dr. Rhoum shrugged. “Very well,” he remarked quietly. “First, remember this: When you murder your wife, you will murder her; we are very thorough. When you leave here—this morning,” he smiled faintly, “she will, to you, be dead. You will never see her again, or she you. We are very thorough about that—since it would, of course, invalidate the entire therapy, and perhaps drive you into severe psychosis for you to meet the woman you had murdered. That is, one reason why the murder therapy is so expensive.”

Colby smiled quietly. “It’s worth it,” he remarked.

Rhoum only shrugged again. “Go down the hall, and into that room,” he told him. “And—I’ll see you in the office afterward.”

Colby stood still for a moment, and Rhoum, watching closely, saw his hands tremble a little, saw his lips thin and set tightly. Then Colby turned and walked down the hall. The door closed behind him, and Rhoum walked into his own office.

The television cameras had been carefully placed, so that Rhoum and the woman could see, on the wide screen, every corner of the room which Colby had just entered, even the young and lovely woman who sat, dressed in a loose neo-nylon robe, on the divan. Mrs. Colby shuddered as she looked at the woman-image.

“It’s—it’s terrible—” she breathed in low horror, “she’s— why, she’s me, Doctor—”

“You don’t have to watch if it’s too painful, Mrs. Colby, but there is a catharsis-therapy in this for you, too. After all, you will never see him again. If you watch him murder you in cold blood, you won’t grieve for him,” said Rhoum gently. “Remember, he is insane. A man who could murder in cold blood—even when he knows it is a robot—a man who could come here, knowing it to be illusory, and who, after five weeks of waiting, clings to the need to release by killing—he is a very sick man, Mrs. Colby.”

“I—I know—oh!” Mrs. Colby gave a low scream as the two images on the screen coalesced in terrible Conflict. “Oh! Oh!” and covered her eyes with her hands.

Rhoum’s voice was low and soothing. “Please try and watch this, Mrs. Colby—”

“Will it—will it cure him?” she faltered. “Perfectly, madam. He will be discharged, completely cured, sane, this evening.”

Helen Colby squeezed her eyes tight shut. “Oh no—” she moaned, “Frank—Frank—don’t—did I drive you to this—” Rhoum’s smooth cold eyes watched the screen in professional detachment. “A bad case, Mrs. Colby, a bad case. Sadistic and wild—you were very wise to send him to me when you did. He might have broken down, and—” his voice grew suddenly hard. “It would be you lying there now!” He touched a button on his desk. To the two heavy male nurses who came in, he said curtly, gesturing toward the screen, “Take the patient out of there—the murder cubicle— and clean up the android. And send Demella with a sedative for Mrs. Colby,” he added, glancing at the sobbing girl.

He rose from his desk and walked around the divan to Helen Colby, placing a light hand on her shoulder. “Try to be brave,” he said. “I’m ordering you a sedative. The .nurse will take you upstairs. Lie down there until you feel better,

and then any of the staff will call you a cab and take you home.”

He nodded at the Centaurian girl who came in carrying a drinking-glass and a couple of capsules; then left the office and walked down the hall toward the murder cubicle.

Colby hung, limp and loose, between the male nurses. There was blood on his hands; he was sweating, slack-limbed and slack-mouthed, breathing in little panting sobs. But his eyes were shrewd and alight.

He understood the technique. Complete catharsis of the impulses. He felt cool and clean and released, ready for anything . . . sane again. He glanced up at Rhoum, who stood, tall in his white garments, before him. And he marvelled that his voice was so steady. “Well, Doctor?”

Rhoum’s voice was hard. “Excellent, Mr. Colby. You will very soon be discharged as cured.”

Colby glanced down at his stained garments. “Can I—get cleaned up a little?”

“After a bit, Mr. Colby,” Rhoum’s voice was smooth and soothing. “Just come with me, now. Just come with me.”

Colby hung back; was dragged, suddenly resisting, between the male nurses. “What’s this—where are you taking me? The treatment’s over, isn’t it? I’m a sane man again—”

Rhoum shoved open a door; the male nurses hauled Colby bodily through it. Colby knew at once where he had been brought. Hard, real and anachronistic in the streamlined, crime-less world—an electric chair is unmistakable anywhere.

“Not quite,” said Rhoum softly, to the slumped and helpless Colby. “Murder, sir, carries the death penalty.” He paused. “You see, your therapy isn’t quite finished yet. You can’t commit a crime without punishment; and the punishment fits the crime.”

Colby suddenly began to struggle wildly. “But I didn’t—I didn’t—it was only an android robot, a duplicate—”

Rhoum came and knelt beside the chair, fastening the final electrodes in place. “A test, sir; a test of your aberration. You might say, a final test. The intention, the means and the method of committing a fatal murder. Were we to leave you without—” he smiled, “without this final therapy, you could not be cured. Either your temperament would demand that you commit more murders, or else you would develop an intense guilt complex, and would, in the end, be more seriously insane than you are now.” He stood up, moving to the great switch. “There is only one cure for a murderer, Mr. Colby.”

“But you can’t do this . . .” Colby yelled, his voice hoarse, harsh, unrecognizable. “It was a robot—I signed—it’s murder—murder—murder—”

Rhoum threw the switch.

He glanced only briefly at the body as they carried it past his office door.

“Yes,” he said to Mrs. Colby, as he finished signing his name, “he died sane.” He handed her the check with a ceremonious little bow. “Here you are, madam, minus the cost of the robot, and a few other expenses.”

Her voice almost failed, and she left the office with a choked, quiet farewell. Rhoum gazed after her for a moment, smiling faintly; then chose a stylus, and wrote in his logbook, “Colby, Frank. ‘Discharged cured—” he glanced at his watch, “11:52, 5th of Einstein, 2467"

Then he picked up the telephone to make his report to the police psychologists.

Year of the Big Thaw

You say that Matthew is your own son, Mr. Emmett?

Yes, Rev’rend Doane, and a better boy never stepped, if I do say it as shouldn’t. I’ve trusted him to drive team for me since he was eleven, and you can’t say more than that for a farm boy. Way back when he was a little shaver so high, when the war came on, he was bounden he was going to sail with this Admiral Farragut. You know boys that age—like runaway colts. I couldn’t see no good in his being cabin boy on some tarnation Navy ship and I told him so. If he’d wanted to sail out on a whaling ship, I ‘low I’d have let him go. But Marthy—that’s the boy’s Ma—took on so that Matt stayed home. Yes, he’s a good boy and a good son.

We’ll miss him a powerful lot if he gets this scholarship thing. But I ‘low it’ll be good for the boy to get some learnin’ besides what he gets in the school here. It’s right kind of you, Rev’rend, to look over this application thing for me.

Well, if he is your own son, Mr. Emmett, why did you write ‘birthplace unknown’ on the line here?

Rev’rend Doane, I’m glad you asked me that question. I’ve been turnin’ it over in my mind and I’ve jest about come to the conclusion it wouldn’t be nohow fair to hold it back. I didn’t lie when I said Matt was my son, because he’s been a good son to me and Marthy. But I’m not his Pa and Marthy ain’t his Ma, so could be I stretched the truth jest a mite. Rev’rend Doane, it’s a tarnal funny yarn but I’ll walk into the meetin’ house and swear to it on a stack o’Bibles as thick as a cord of wood.

You know I’ve been farming the old Corning place these past seven year? It’s good flat Connecticut bottom-land, but it isn’t like our land up in Hampshire where I was born and raised. My Pa called it the Hampshire Grants and all that was King’s land whenhis Pa came in there and started farming at the foot of Scuttock Mountain. That’s Injun for fires, folks say, because the Injuns used to build fires up there in the spring for some of their heathen doodads. Anyhow, up there in the mountains we see a tarnal power of quare things.

You call to mind the year we had the big thaw, about twelve years before the war? You mind the blizzard that year? I heard tell it spread down most to York. And at Fort Orange, the place they call Albany now, the Hudson froze right over, so they say. But those York folks do a sight of exaggerating, I’m told.

Anyhow, when the ice went out there was an almighty good thaw all over, and when the snow run off Scuttock mountain there was a good-sized hunk of farmland in our valley went under water. The crick on my farm flowed over the bank and there was a foot of water in the cowshed, and down in the swimmin’ hole in the back pasture wasn’t nothing but a big gully fifty foot and more across, rushing through the pasture, deep as a lake and brown as the old cow. You know freshet-floods? Full up with sticks and stones and old dead trees and somebody’s old shed floatin’ down the middle. And I swear to goodness, Parson, that stream was running along so fast I saw four-inch cobblestones floating and bumping along.

I tied the cow and the calf and Kate—she was our white mare; you mind she went lame last year and I had to shoot her, but she was just a young mare then and skittish as all get-out—but she was a good little mare.

Anyhow, I tied the whole kit and caboodle of them in the woodshed up behind the house, where they’d be dry, then I started to get the milkpail. Right then I heard the gosh-awfullest screech I ever heard in my life. Sounded like thunder and a freshet and a forest-fire all at once. I dropped the milkpail as I heard Marthy scream inside the house, and I run outside. Marthy was already there in the yard and she points up in the sky and yelled, “Look up yander!”

We stood looking up at the sky over Shattuck mountain where there was a great big—shoot now, I d’no as I can call its name but it was like a trail of fire in the sky, and it was makin’ the dangdest racket you ever heard, Rev’rend. Looked kind of like one of them Fourth-of-July skyrockets, but it was big as a house. Marthy was screaming and she grabbed me and hollered, “Hez! Hez, what in tunket is it?” And when Marthy cusses like that, Rev’rend, she don’t know what she’s saying, she’s so scared.

I was plumb scared myself. I heard Liza—that’s our young-un, Liza Grace, that got married to the Taylor boy. I heard her crying on the stoop, and she came flying out with her pinny all black and hollered to Marthy that the pea soup was burning. Marthy let out another screech and ran for the house. That’s a woman for you. So I quietened Liza down some and I went in and told Marthy it weren’t no more than one of them shooting stars. Then I went and did the milking.

But you know, while we were sitting down to supper there came the most awful grinding, screeching, pounding crash I ever heard. Sounded if it were in the back pasture but the house shook as if somethin’ had hit it.

Marthy jumped a mile and I never saw such a look on her face.

“Hez, what was that?” she asked.

“Shoot, now, nothing but the freshet,” I told her.

But she kept on about it. “You reckon that shooting star fell in our back pasture, Hez?”

“Well, now, I don’t ‘low it did nothing like that,” I told her. But she was jittery as an old hen and it weren’t like her nohow. She said it sounded like trouble and I finally quietened her down by saying I’d saddle Kate up and go have a look. I kind of thought, though I didn’t tell Marthy, that somebody’s house had floated away in the freshet and run aground in our back pasture.

So I saddled up Kate and told Marthy to get some hot rum ready in case there was some poor soul run aground back there. And I rode Kate back to the back pasture.

It was mostly uphill because the top of the pasture is on high ground, and it sloped down to the crick on the other side of the rise.

Well, I reached the top of the hill and looked down. The crick were a regular river now, rushing along like Niagary. On the other side of it was a stand of timber, then the slope of Shattuck mountain. And I saw right away the long streak where all the timber had been cut out in a big scoop with roots standing up in the air and a big slide of rocks down to the water.

It was still raining a mite and the ground was sloshy and squanchy under foot. Kate scrunched her hooves and got real balky, not likin’ it a bit. When we got to the top of the pasture she started to whine and whicker and stamp, and no matter how loud I whoa-ed she kept on a-stamping and I was plumb scared she’d pitch me off in the mud. Then I started to smell a funny smell, like somethin’ burning. Now, don’t ask me how anything could burn in all that water, because I don’t know.

When we came up on the rise I saw the contraption.

Rev’rend, it was the most tarnal crazy contraption I ever saw in my life. It was bigger nor my cowshed and it was long and thin and as shiny as Marthy’s old pewter pitcher her Ma brought from England. It had a pair of red rods sticking out behind and a crazy globe fitted up where the top ought to be. It was stuck in the mud, turned halfway over on the little slide of roots and rocks, and I could see what had happened, all right.

The thing must have been—now, Rev’rend, you can say what you like but that thing must have flew across Shattuck and landed on the slope in the trees, then turned over and slid down the hill. That must have been the crash we heard. The rods weren’t just red, they were red-hot. I could hear them sizzle as the rain hit ‘em.

In the middle of the infernal contraption there was a door, and it hung all to-other as if every hinge on it had been wrenched halfway off. As I pushed old Kate alongside it I heared somebody hollering alongside the contraption. I didn’t nohow get the words but it must have been for help, because I looked down and there was a man a-flopping along in the water.

He was a big fellow and he wasn’t swimming, just thrashin’ and hollering. So I pulled off my coat and boots and hove in after him. The stream was running fast but he was near the edge and I managed to catch on to an old tree-root and hang on, keeping his head out of the water till I got my feet aground. Then I hauled him onto the bank. Up above me Kate was still whinnying and raising Ned and I shouted at her as I bent over the man.

Wal, Rev’rend, he sure did give me a surprise—weren’t no proper man I’d ever seed before. He was wearing some kind of red clothes, real shiny and sort of stretchy and not wet from the water, like you’d expect, but dry and it felt like that silk and India-rubber stuff mixed together. And it was such a bright red that at first I didn’t see the blood on it. When I did I knew he were a goner. His chest were all stove in, smashed to pieces. One of the old tree-roots must have jabbed him as the current flung him down. I thought he were dead already, but then he opened up his eyes.

A funny color they were, greeny yellow. And I swear, Rev’rend, when he opened them eyes I felt he was readin’ my mind. I thought maybe he might be one of them circus fellers in their flying contraptions that hang at the bottom of a balloon.

He spoke to me in English, kind of choky and stiff, not like Joe the Portygee sailor or like those tarnal dumb Frenchies up Canady way, but—well, funny. He said, “My baby—in ship. Get—baby . . . ” He tried to say more but his eyes went shut and he moaned hard.

I yelped, “Godamighty!” ‘Scuse me, Rev’rend, but I was so blame upset that’s just what I did say, “Godamighty, man, you mean there’s a baby in that there dingfol contraption?” He just moaned so after spreadin’ my coat around the man a little bit I just plunged in that there river again.

Rev’rend, I heard tell once about some tomfool idiot going over Niagary in a barrel, and I tell you it was like that when I tried crossin’ that freshet to reach the contraption.

I went under and down, and was whacked by floating sticks and whirled around in the freshet. But somehow, I d’no how except by the pure grace of God, I got across that raging torrent and clumb up to where the crazy dingfol machine was sitting.

Ship, he’d called it. But that were no ship, Rev’rend, it was some flying dragon kind of thing. It was a real scarey lookin’ thing but I clumb up to the little door and hauled myself inside it. And, sure enough, there was other people in the cabin, only they was all dead.

There was a lady and a man and some kind of an animal looked like a bobcat only smaller, with a funny-shaped rooster-comb thing on its head. They all—even the cat-thing—was wearing those shiny, stretchy clo’es. And they all was so battered and smashed I didn’t even bother to hunt for their heartbeats. I could see by a look they was dead as a doornail.

Then I heard a funny little whimper, like a kitten, and in a funny, rubber-cushioned thing there’s a little boy baby, looked about six months old. He was howling lusty enough, and when I lifted him out of the cradle kind of thing, I saw why. That boy baby, he was wet, and his little arm was twisted under him. That there flying contraption must have smashed down awful hard, but that rubber hammock was so soft and cushiony all it did to him was jolt him good.

I looked around but I couldn’t find anything to wrap him in. And the baby didn’t have a stitch on him except a sort of spongy paper diaper, wet as sin. So I finally lifted up the lady, who had a long cape thing around her, and I took the cape off her real gentle. I knew she was dead and she wouldn’t be needin’ it, and that boy baby would catch his death if I took him out bare-naked like that. She was probably the baby’s Ma; a right pretty woman she was but smashed up something shameful.

So anyhow, to make a long story short, I got that baby boy back across that Niagary falls somehow, and laid him down by his Pa. The man opened his eyes kind, and said in a choky voice, “Take care—baby.”

I told him I would, and said I’d try to get him up to the house where Marthy could doctor him. The man told me not to bother. “I dying,” he says. “We come from planet—star up there—crash here—” His voice trailed off into a language I couldn’t understand, and he looked like he was praying.

I bent over him and held his head on my knees real easy, and I said, “Don’t worry, mister, I’ll take care of your little fellow until your folks come after him. Before God I will.”

So the man closed his eyes and I said, Our Father which art in Heaven, and when I got through he was dead.

I got him up on Kate, but he was cruel heavy for all he was such a tall skinny fellow. Then I wrapped that there baby up in the cape thing and took him home and give him to Marthy. And the next day I buried the fellow in the south medder and next meetin’ day we had the baby baptized Matthew Daniel Emmett, and brung him up just like our own kids. That’s all.

All? Mr. Emmett, didn’t you ever find out where that ship really came from?

Why, Rev’rend, he said it come from a star. Dying men don’t lie, you know that. I asked the Teacher about them planets he mentioned and she says that on one of the planets—can’t rightly remember the name, March or Mark or something like that—she says some big scientist feller with a telescope saw canals on that planet, and they’d hev to be pretty near as big as this-here Erie canal to see them so far off. And if they could build canals on that planet I d’no why they couldn’t build a flying machine.

I went back the next day when the water was down a little, to see if I couldn’t get the rest of them folks and bury them, but the flying machine had broke up and washed down the crick.

Marthy’s still got the cape thing. She’s a powerful saving woman. We never did tell Matt, though. Might make him feel funny to think he didn’t really b’long to us.

But—but—Mr. Emmett, didn’t anybody ask questions about the baby—where you got it?

Well, now, I’ll ‘low they was curious, because Marthy hadn’t been in the family way and they knew it. But up here folks minds their own business pretty well, and I jest let them wonder. I told Liza Grace I’d found her new little brother in the back pasture, and o’course it was the truth. When Liza Grace growed up she thought it was jest one of those yarns old folks tell the little shavers.

And has Matthew ever shown any differences from the other children that you could see?

Well, Rev’rend, not so’s you could notice it. He’s powerful smart, but his real Pa and Ma must have been right smart too to build a flying contraption that could come so far.

O’course, when he were about twelve years old he started reading folks’ minds, which didn’t seem exactly right. He’d tell Marthy what I was thinkin’ and things like that. He was just at the pesky age. Liza Grace and Minnie were both a-courtin’ then, and he’d drive their boy friends crazy telling them what Liza Grace and Minnie were a-thinking and tease the gals by telling them what the boys were thinking about.

There weren’t no harm in the boy, though, it was all teasing. But it just weren’t decent, somehow. So I tuk him out behind the woodshed and give his britches a good dusting just to remind him that that kind of thing weren’t polite nohow. And Rev’rend Doane, he ain’t never done it sence.

The Wild One

This is a story that they tell on the solitary farms on the borders of the Catskill mountains, where I grew up. It is a mistake to think that country is settled and modern, just because the big highways stretch from city to city, and the factories hold out clean jobs that pay better than the scratch-the-soil farming on shale rock. For between every farm is a stretch of woodland, and every farm has its own woods, and by night there are deer and rabbits and even wolves and the big lynxes that prowl south of Canada in a hungry season. And every now and again, to some lonely farm-girl who roams the edges and center of the deep woods by night, a child will be born like Helma Lassiter . . .

Roger Lassiter lifted his hands abruptly from the keys of die piano, and stared across the room at his sobbing young wife.

“Helma, dear!” he said contritely, “If I’d known—I didn’t hear you come in, dear. Please forgive me?”

“Of course!” Helma wiped away her tears, and her strange, hesitant smile flickered for an instant on the wet face, “If I’d known you wanted to play, I wouldn’t have come back so early.” She crossed the room, and Roger held out his arms to stop her as she passed and hold her, for a moment, close to him. “Did you and Nell Connor have a good time?”

She dropped her eyes. “I didn’t go to see Nell, Roger, it was too lovely hi the woods. And—and there’ll be a full moon tonight. ...”

He slid his arm around the girl’s waist. “You’re the wildest child of nature I ever knew,” he murmured, halfway between exasperation and indulgence, and from the piano bench he twisted to look out the window at the deep stretch of dark woodland, oaks and maple and birch, that surrounded their house; then he turned back to rest his eyes on Helma.

She was good to look at; a tawny blonde girl, slight, delicately but strongly made, with creamy skin and dark-gray eyes that lightened to amber or an odd gold-flecked green when she was angry or excited, and so incredibly supple that he often wondered if she had been a ballet dancer. He did not know what she had been; she never talked about her childhood, and he knew only that she had run away from a farm in the Adirondacks when she was only fourteen years old. She had been twenty-three when they met, a chance acquaintance, almost a pick-up, at the swimming pool in Albany. Roger, escorting a pair of frisky nephews, had been attracted, then charmed, by her unbelievable grace in the water, her swift clean beauty; a seal-woman of the legends could have shown herself no more at home in the sea. He had been shocked at the change which had come over her when she had run back to the dressing-rooms and reappeared in a cheap skirt and blouse, her hair brushed down and her legs encased in lumpy socks and shoes. It was as if rust had suddenly covered a bright coin. But he had not been able to forget the laughing, glowing nymph of the pool. And he had never forgotten. It had not taken him long to discover how she revived in the woods, in the country. After their marriage, they had built this small house at the edge of the forest; a necessity, not a luxury, for Helma drooped and wilted in an apartment. They had built the house with their own hands, camping in the woods while it rose from the foundations, sleeping at night in a tent; and day by day a visible radiance had crept over Helma until she seemed alive with an inner, glowing beauty. Still, on the first night they had slept in their new home, she had murmured “I think I liked the tent better!” Even now, for choice, she slept on the open porch when she could.

He smiled now into her half-closed eyes and murmured what he had said many times, “I think you’re half wood-cat, Helma!”

“Oh, I am,” she returned, as always, “I am. Didn’t you know?”

“And say, I used to have a dog who howled just like that when I played the piano. It’s not what you’d call a compliment to my playing!”

She colored . . . even after four years of marriage, she was very sensitive about this. “I can’t help it,” she whispered for the hundredth time, “It hurts my ears so much—”

He patted her shoulder gently. “Well, never mind, honey, I try not to play when you’re around,” he told her, “but seriously, I’m beginning to wonder if you ought to go so far into the woods alone. Bob Connor told me he’s heard wolves, and the other day he shot a lynx. Perhaps it’s all right in broad daylight, but I wish you’d stay out of the woods at night, Helma.”

He was not a countryman by habit; born and reared in cities, it had thrown him into a panic, the first time that he had waked in the night and found himself alone in bed. He had hunted the house through and found it empty; in a growing apprehension, mounting to absolute terror, he had searched the woods with a lantern, shouting, panicked, until he had finally found Henna, snuggled into a hollow of summer grass, sleeping, a rabbit bolting from her side as he came near.

After a few months he had come to take it for granted; Helma was almost physically incapable of staying out of the woods when they were so near, night or day. Sometimes Roger wondered if he had been wise to bring her so far from the cities and the plowed farms on the highways; she might have been unhappy, but she might have been less wild.

He murmured, “Perhaps if we had a child—”

He had spoken almost under his breath, but her body stiffened in the curve of his arm and she pulled away from him. “Roger,” she murmured, “You know I can’t—”

He said, low-voiced, “We haven’t talked much about this, because it always makes you so unhappy. Now I think we must. How do you know you can’t have children? Perhaps we could see Doctor demons when we go into town this Saturday. Perhaps—”

Helma jerked away from him furiously, taut, her head flung back, even the short sleek tawny hair seeming electric and alive, and her eyes flared green. The small blunt hands were flexed into claws. “I won’t!” she spat at him, “I won’t be mauled about and stared at by some doctor. ...”

“Helma! Roger’s sharp voice cut through her hysteria; she relaxed a little, but went on in a low angry voice, “I’ve never told you much about me, have I? I know that. I can’t have your child, such a child as I could have, you wouldn’t want, I—” She slumped down on a corner of the divan and buried her face in her arms despondently. After a long time she raised her face. “Would it make you so happy if I had a baby, Roger?” she asked pitifully.

The man could not bear it. He stood up and went to her, seating himself on the divan at her side and pulling the blonde head down on his shoulder. “Not if you don’t want to, Helma,” he said, in a gentle voice, “Maybe you’re right, maybe—”

Her wide eyes burned tearlessly in the twilight. “You think I’m wild, you think I’m a crazy woman who might be normal if I had a baby to tie me down a little bit. You want me to be like your friends’ wives, like Nell Connor, sleep in my bed nights and never step out further than the chicken house!” Her voice fell steadily, accusing. She pushed him away from her, stood up and backed away toward the door, a low menace, not quite a word, in her throat. Before her green glare his own eyes fell.

“Well, damn it, Helma,” he muttered, “I’d appreciate it if you’d try, at least, to act like a normal adult human being! There are times when you’re like a wild animal!”

“I am,” she said huskily, and swiftly turned and went out of the room. Half rising, the man saw through the window the quick bound with which she crossed the porch and lawn, watched her bend, with that amazing suppleness, and unfasten first one sandal, then the other. She kicked her feet free and ran toward the back gate; with a single lissome movement she was up and over it, and Roger saw the pale gold of her hair and the green-and-brown plaid of her house dress melt into the forest like a shadow, and there was a tight breathlessness in his throat as he watched her slide away and vanish in the leaves. But she was back before morning, slipping silently, barefoot, through the doors, and sliding into bed beside him, as noiselessly as a cat. Roger, who had not closed his eyes all night, felt her presence and moved toward her, but she shoved him away. Roger shrugged and sighed; he was used to this, too. Helma could be as violent and passionate as a young lioness when aroused, but she was curiously cold at other times, and would push or cuff him away if he touched her when she was not in the mood. Roger had reflected that civilized man alone, of all animals, is not cyclic in desire, and that Hernia’s odd wildness was probably nothing more than a reversion to an earlier, possibly a cleaner day. Since in spite of occasional exasperations, Roger loved his wife devotedly, he respected her moods; it was as well that he did, for once, in the first year of their marriage—before he had learned how deep this was ingrained into Helma’s whole nature—he had been less tolerant, and had once—only once—attempted to take her by force. There was still a tiny white line across his cheek where her wild hands had raked bone-deep. She had sobbed frenzied apologies afterward, but Roger had never risked it again. All women, he knew, were periodic to some extent; and it was true that she was altogether satisfying when her nature allowed her to be compliant.

In the days and weeks that followed, Helma was unusually quiet, subdued and docile. Summer lazed to a close; the crisp leaves of September drifted from helpless branches and the twanging winds of autumn played mournful threnodies in the deserted woods. Helma haunted the leaf-deep paths by day, but not once did she run off by night, and Roger Lassiter began to wonder if she was actually settling down. Surely it was time, after four years of marriage, that Helma should take on a look of sleekness and content, and for her body to soften a little from its hard angularity. She worked around the house happily—it was always neat and clean, but now it positively shone with soap and wax and polished floors, and Helma herself seemed as smooth and clean as a well-kept cat. Even her quick dancing walk seemed, although just as graceful, a trifle firmer and more subdued. And sometimes in the evenings when Roger returned home ... he worked days, in a chemical factory ... he would hear Helma singing, a curious contralto croon, almost toneless, but rising and falling in smooth, well-defined rhythmic cadences that were sweetly resonant. She never told him, in so many words, that she was pregnant. Roger, although he guessed it as early as September, kept aloof from asking, thinking that perhaps she wanted to tell him herself, when she chose; but she never did, and finally he asked her only “When?” “Early in the spring,” she said, and her greeny eyes glanced, half-sorrowful, at his glad face. He told her gently, “You see, you were wrong, Helma. Aren’t you happy about this?”

She did not answer, but put down her book and came to curl up on the rug at his feet, putting her head of thick short straight hair into his lap. He stroked it without speaking, and she shut her eyes, leaning against his knee. After a time she began the odd rough contralto crooning, and he smiled. “What kind of witch-chant is that, Helma? I never heard you sing before. I didn’t know you knew one note from another.”

“I don’t,” her smile was a gamin, enigmatic thing. “I don’t know, I remember hearing my mother sing like this when I was very small.”

“What was your mother like?” he asked, and Helma laughed softly.

“Like me.”

“I’d like to have seen that! What was your father like?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps—someone like you. Perhaps he was—different. Perhaps I never had a father, I can’t remember.”

Roger persisted “Did your mother never tell you?”

Helma suddenly drew her head away from her husband’s stroking hands, looking up at him slantwise through her hair. “You would have called my mother mad,” she said evenly, “She said my father was a lynx—a wildcat she called it.”

Roger abruptly shivered as if a freezing wind had blown out the cozy fire. “Don’t talk rubbish, Helma.” She shrugged. “You asked me. It’s what my mother used to say. She was mad, madder than I am. She lived on a farm away up in the mountains, with only her grandfather and a little sister. She used to listen to hunters’ stories about men and women who turned into wolves and wildcats when the moon was full, and ran in the woods at night. I’ve heard old men howl like the gray timber-wolf, when the moon lit up the snow like daylight, and seen them slink through the shadows with red eyes. ...”

“Hell! You’re morbid tonight!”

“No. Why? When I was a little girl I used to run around the hunters’ huts. I could walk along a path and a wildcat would walk along the limb of a tree right over me and never even snarl, and I could pick up rabbits with my bare hands. I still can.” Her smile was frankly malicious now. “You don’t believe those old stories, do you? Till she died, my mother used to run out in the woods every full moon. She said my father was a lynx, I didn’t. Do you believe I’ll turn into a wildcat some night and rip out your throat? A silver bullet isn’t any good, you know. That’s just an old wife’s tale. Just an iron knife, a knife of cold iron will kill a turn skin animal. That’s what they say. Iron, or lead. Are you afraid of me?” She laughed, and Roger felt his goose fleshed arms stiffen and crawl. “For Godsake, cut it out!” he almost shouted.

She had stiffened and pulled away.

“I’m sorry. You asked me.”

Roger Lassiter dreamed that night of wandering in black leafless woods, while green cat-eyes, disturbingly like Helma’s, watched him from low branches; she came in before dawn, her dress torn, a bloodstain on one foot, shivering with cold, and lay huddled in warmed blankets, sobbing, while a dismayed and horrified Roger washed her thorn-lacerated legs, forced brandy between her blue lips, and for the first time in their married life laid down the law.

“This damned monkey business has got to stop, Helma. I thought that now, with the baby coming, you’d show some sense. Now, listen. You’re going to a doctor, today, if you have to be carried. You’re going to stay in the house, nights, if I have to lock you in. I know women act funny when they’re pregnant, but you act clean crazy, and it’s got to stop.” For the first time her tears and pleas had no effect on him; he spooned hot milk between her chattering teeth, and continued, thin-lipped, “One more trick like this—just one, Helma—and we move back to Albany, at least till after the baby comes. Helma, if I have to have you examined by a psychiatrist, maybe—” he could not, although he wanted to, form the threat he had intended. Helma suffered enough in a house. Her acute claustrophobia would certainly kill her in a hospital.

But the threats he had already made had been effective enough to terrify Helma into submission. She saw the doctor, as he stipulated, and reacted quite normally when he assured her that he believed she would have twins. As the winter settled in earnest, the house took on the air of tranquil peace which only the happily pregnant woman knows how to create around the home she has made. As in everything else, Helma was almost animal in this; Roger had never known a woman to seem so healthy, so casual. The wives of his friends fretted and were ungainly and unlovely and given to whims and complaints, and for the first time Roger could favorably compare his wife’s docility with theirs. The winter sneaked by on quiet-running feet. Snow came heavy that year, but the roads were kept plowed, and Roger managed to get back and forth every day. If Helma sometimes walked in the woods during the daytime, Roger did not know it, and she never left the house by night. The season was cruelly cold; now and then they could stand at the window and see a deer, made bold by the severity of the season, step out of the forest to the garden gate; and at night wolves howled in the darkness and now and then they heard the fierce snarl of a lynx, far away across the branch. Roger frowned and talked of getting a rifle, but Helma protested, “Wolves are cowards. They never attack anything bigger than a rabbit. And a lynx never bothered anybody who wasn’t pokin’ around him.”

In February Bob Connor shot a lynx, less than a mile from the Lassiter house, and brought it over his shoulder to the door, thumping gaily till they came to look.

“I shot this big fellow down by the rocks on your creek, Roger. Listen, I’ve been making my kids stay right in the back yard, and if I were you, I wouldn’t go in the woods at night, or let your wife. There are a lot of these cats around,” he continued, dumping the stiff corpse on the step to ease his shoulder, “And they can be nasty customers—God, Helma, what’s the matter! Roger, lookout, “ he warned, just in time for Roger to catch Helma as she slumped in a dead faint.

When she had been carried into the bedroom and revived, and had apologized shakily for being such a fool, Bob, out of earshot, had blamed himself severely.

“I’m sorry, Roger. I guess maybe the blood made her fainty-like. Nell hates seeing dead things. I knowed she was in the family way, too, and I ought to had more sense than barge in like that with an old dead wildcat!”

“I don’t think that was it,” Roger said, baffled, “Helma’s never been squeamish about blood.”

“She’s a bit odd about wild things, though, ain’t she?” Bob asked in a tone discreetly lowered, and Roger, distracted, confessed that she was. He watched Bob go down the road, feeling something like despair, realizing that Bob Connor would certainly add his bit to the stories—already far too prevalent—of Helma Lassiter’s “Queerness.” But he had not the heart to reprimand or question Helma, nor to repeat Bob Connor’s final words, said in that tactfully-dropped voice, “I wouldn’t let her run off into the woods thataway, Roger. I go out a lot, shooting these cats, and wolves—bounty on wolves, you know. I try to be careful, and God! I’d hate to shoot somebody!”

After that day Helma grew even quieter, more subdued, losing even the spasmodic impulse to wander in the woods even in broad daylight. Somewhat alarmed, Roger found himself circuitously urging Helma into the garden, at least out of doors, out of the house which she now haunted, sleeping a great deal by day, but rising at night to prowl sleeplessly with her soft pacing movements through all the rooms. When Roger anxiously questioned her, she answered evasively: she was too tired to go far from the house, and the baby’s movements in her body were most troublesome at night, and made her restless. She was heavy now, and her face was fuller, giving the wide-set cheekbones under her thick, tawny level brows a curiously unfathomable, animal, enigmatic look. She spoke little, but she seemed happy and tranquil, apart from her restlessness. Roger believed that Helma was trying consciously to wean herself from her wild ways and that she was silently suffering the torture of claustrophobia, for there seemed a curious disturbed look behind the green eyes, when she thought no one was watching her. Roger knew his young wife to be a strong-willed girl, and believed that she could discipline herself unsparingly.

In March came raging winds and a blizzard that swept down from the Adirondacks in a sort of apocalyptic violence, locking both Lassiters in the house for days. Then, overnight, the snow began to melt; the back of the winter was broken, the creeks overflowed with cool melting rains, and a strange moist green appeared through the soaked dead brownness of the grass. Crows and bluejays racketed in new-plowed fields, and a sweet chirping came from the trees at the edge of the woods. Sometimes now on the damp evenings, when light lingered at sundown, Helma would drag her distorted body to the forest gate and lean there, her face poignant with such longing that Roger, watching, felt a hurting pain and pity seeing his wild thing straining so hard at the leash of love he had finally girded about her heart. The gate was never locked, but Helma never touched her fingers to the light latch. Roger was just as well pleased, for now in the warm nights they often heard the snarl and spit of the big wildcats, and in these spring days he knew, the females would be defending their young. Nor did Roger fail to wonder if Helma would likewise be violent hi defence of her child.

He had assumed that when the time came for her confinement he would drive her to the hospital in Albany. She did not say that she approved this arrangement, but on the other hand, she made no protest, and Roger took it for granted.

One evening in late March, while they sat at supper, Helma said quietly “You better drive to Albany and get some coffee, Roger. I used the last for breakfast this morning, and there’s none for tomorrow’s breakfast.”

Like many pliant and easygoing men, Roger was crotchety in small and unimportant trifles, and he scolded Helma with as much severity as he ever used to her; why hadn’t she told him at breakfast? She just looked back at him with her closed and heavy face.

“You better go now, or the stores are all going to be closed before you get there.”

She was walking around the room restlessly, now and again stopping to pick up some small object and examine it meticulously, handle it with a curious, fidgety stroking movement of her small, rather stubby fingers, then put it impatiently down and resume her feline prowling, “But do you mind if I don’t ride along? I’ll stay here and go-go to bed. I’m awful tired.”

Roger protested. “I don’t like to leave you alone, specially at night. Suppose the baby started to come?”

“Well, you’ll be back in an hour,” Helma said reasonably.

“For heaven’s sake, sit down, you’ll drive me crazy, pacing like that—” Roger snapped at her, “Are you going to start your fool tricks again?”

“Oh, Roger, please,” she started to sob, “I don’t think I could stand being bounced around, until I have to!”

The man felt like a brute. Why, he wondered, should he get in a dither, because a girl in the last month of pregnancy didn’t want to take a twenty-mile ride in an old car, over the worst roads in New York State? He shrugged and went to the closet for his coat.

“AH right, honey,” he said tenderly. “Would you like me to get Mrs. Connor to come and sit with you while I’m gone?”

Helma said in a tone of intense disgust, “Look. I’m twenty-seven years old.”

Roger hugged her. “Oh, all right, all right. I’ll be back in an hour.” He went to the garage to back out the car, but on another thought, ran back up the steps.

“Helma?”

“Yes? I thought you’d gone!”

“You sure you don’t want to ride along, or come and stay to Nell Connor’s place while I’m gone? I can pick you up on the way back.”

Hernia’s clear laugh raised staccato echoes in the unlighted porch. “Who’s pregnant, you or me? Go along with you, or you’ll have to drive all over town to find a store open!”

The muddy roads were now nearly clean of snow, and Roger made good time on the way to Albany. On the edge of town he found a small all-night grocery and decided to go in there, and turn back at once, instead of driving to the uptown chain-store where they usually traded. He bought the coffee and hurried out to the car again, forgetting his change, and only realizing when half-way home again that it had been a five-dollar bill.

It was already dark. Roger, his headlights sweeping a beam across the dark edges of the woods, pictured Helma, curled up kitten-fashion under quilts, but somehow the mental picture held no conviction nor comfort, and he pressed down the accelerator to the floorboard. If a state trooper caught up with him, he’d tell the truth. His wife was pregnant and he didn’t like to leave her alone after dark. If it came to that, he’d rather pay a fine than leave her alone any longer.

The house was dark. Only the reflection of his headlights made ghosts on the unlighted window, and then Roger Lassiter saw that the garden gate swung open on its hinges, and that Helma’s brown oxfords and crumpled duty socks lay in the mud beside the open gate. At that sight Roger Lassiter’s terror jumped up from behind the wall of consciousness, and caught him by the throat. One last wild hope still beat with the thudding of his pulse; Helma might have felt her labor imminent and run to Connor’s—the path through the woods was shorter than the road. Like a crazy man he jumped into the auto and sent it careening wildly down the mud road. Before it had fully come to a stop before the Connor farmhouse, he flung the door open and pelted toward the kitchen door entrance. Through the lighted window a Connor child saw him coming, and flung the door open.

“Mommy, here’s Mister Lassiter!”

Nell Connor’s horsy kind face peered over her child’s head. “Roger, come in! What’s wrong?”

The man stood blinking numbly in the light. “Is Helma here?”

“Helma? Why, no, Roger! I saw you drive by, earlier, and thought perhaps her time had come and you was takin’ her to the hospital!”

“She’s gone,” Roger said numbly, “She’s gone. I drove to Albany to get a pound of coffee, and she said she was too tired to come along. And when I come back she’s just gone!

Where’s Bob?”

“He went out to hunt lynxes, he said it was full moon and the big cats would prowl all night—oh, my God, Roger!” Nell Connor’s pleasant florid face was drained of color, “S’pose Helma’s in the woods!” She lowered her voice, glancing at the children, “Bob told me last year that she run off in the woods sometimes, and he said he was scared to hunt. But this winter he’s figured that with the baby coming, she’d stay right close to the house.”

She was reaching for a man’s mackinaw that hung behind the stove, as she spoke.

“Molly,” she said to the oldest girl, “You put Kenneth and Edna to bed, now. Miz. Lassiter’s lost in the woods, and I’m going to help Mister Lassiter look for her. Donny, you get a lantern and come along. An’ Molly, after you get the kids to bed, you make up tots of hot coffee, mind, and you put a couple of hot-water bottles in my bed and put on both teakettles to boil.” She explained in an undertone, “If the baby started to come, Helma’s kind of nervous, she might get scared to death and just run off and get lost trying to come down here, poor thing. If she did, and the baby started to come, we’ll bring her back here. I’ve had five, I reckon I could kind of look after her.”

“You’re so good—” Roger faltered.

“Oh, shucks, what’s neighbors for? I s’pect Helma’d worry ‘bout me, if I got lost.” She beckoned to her oldest boy, and took the lantern from his hand.

“We’ll go down the path, Donnie. You take the flashlight, and go down the back pasture, ‘hind the barn. Keep yelling for your Dad, now. And if you find Miz. Lassiter, you yell like crazy and keep on hollering till we hear you, and then come back and tell Molly to come an’ help you get her in the house. Hurry up, now.”

Never afterward in his life could Roger remember anything of the next few hours except plodding through moonlit darkness, with the lantern bobbing dully in his hand and Nell Connor’s staunch and confident voice growing gradually tired and afraid. They shouted “Hel-ma! Hel-ma! Hel-ma!” until their lips were cracked with cold and their throats hoarse, stopping to listen for answering shouts, and Mrs. Connor faltered, “I dunno how Helma could come so far, being big like she was!” They trembled when they heard an animal snarl in the woods; and once Nell Connor—steady, nerveless Nell, a farm woman all her life, fifty years old—screamed aloud as she saw green eyes and ears laid flat, peering down from a low branch. But worse than this were the times when they heard the distant crack! of a rifle and knew that Bob Connor had shot. Behind Roger’s burning eyes was the picture of Helma lying still and stiff beside the path somewhere, shot by accident, or, overcome by travail, lying somewhere in agony, unable to come to them, too far away to hear their shouts and calls, or-—worse—hearing, and too weak to answer.

Roger wandered into a dark nightmare, which suddenly dissolved around him as a shout sounded in his ears; his heart stopped and began painfully to beat again, for it seemed that he had heard Helma cry out—Helma, screaming, not far away—He caught at Nell’s arm.

“Did you hear that?”

“I heard a catbird or something—” she said doubtfully. “It’s Helma! Oh, come on!”

“Roger!” She gripped and held him fast, “I didn’t hear anything. Go easy, now. Hark, I heard something—steps—I think it’s Bob.” She raised her voice, shouting “Bob! Helma! Helma—!”

Out of the night came the harsh snapping CRACK! of rifle fire, close at hand; two shots in rapid succession, then a crashing in the thickets, and Bob Connor lumbered out of the brushwood.

“Nell! Roger! For God’s sake, what’s the matter! You look like—has something happened to Helma?”

“She’s gone—”

“Christ!” said Bob Connor simply. “How long you been hunting her?”

“All night. Bob, I just heard her scream! She’s back in there—” Roger gabbled like a madman, “I heard her, and something else—like a baby crying—”

“Easy, easy, Roger!” Bob Connor, his big face compassionate, caught his arm, “I shot a ’cat. A big female, just had cubs. I couldn’t leave the little things to die without their mom, so I shot ‘em, too.”

“It’s Helma! Helma’s back in there, dying! Let me go, damn it, let me go—” He twisted away from Bob’s restraining hands and ran toward the thicket. The Connors followed, breaking into a run after him, catching up as he stopped over the body of the dead lynx.

It was a large female, not yet stiff, tawny gold in color, with strange eyes, and the limp newborn cubs were still wet with slime, unlicked. Roger stood a moment, numbly, over the big graceful still body; then slumped. Bob Connor stepped to put an arm about his shoulders and held him up.

“Come on, Roger. Come on, come on back to the house, you’re worn out. Come on. Don’t worry. We’ll find Hernia. When we get back to the house, you have some coffee, and you look like you could use a shot of whisky. Come on. You’re beat right out, man.” While he talked, he was urging Roger’s limp steps toward the path, “The minute we get to the house,” he said soothingly, “I’ll get right in the car and go get the state troopers. They’ll look all over. Maybe she wandered across to one of the other farms. They’ll find her, Roger. Come on.”

Roger jerked up his head and looked into Bob Connor’s eyes with the blank stare of a man who has been hit and does not know it yet.

“It’s no use, Bob. Helma’s dead. I know she’s dead.”

He dropped his head then and began to cry harshly. Over his head, Bob and Nell Connor exchanged grave, sympathetic glances. “He’s worn right out. Come on, Roger, Lean on me. Come on, now, fellow. . . .”

And where I grew up, they end the story there, because Helma Lassiter never came back. All the farm folks wonder, sometimes, whatever happened to the poor crazy girl.

I used to ride my bike past the Lassiter house that summer and see Mister Lassiter just sitting on his back porch, day after day, just looking off into the woods. The lawn went to rack and ruin, and the rabbits used to hop right up into the garden where he was sitting. And my Daddy never would let me go into the woods looking for nuts again, unless he could go with me with a gun.

The Wind People

It had been a long layover for the Starholm’s crew, hunting heavy elements for fuel—eight months, on an idyllic green paradise of a planet; a soft, windy, whispering world, inhabited only by trees and winds. But in the end it presented its own unique problem. Specifically, it presented Captain Merrihew with the problem of Robin, male, father unknown, who had been born the day before, and a month prematurely, to Dr. Helen Murray.

Merrihew found her lying abed in the laboratory shelter, pale and calm, with the child beside her.

The little shelter, constructed roughly of green planks, looked out on the clearing which the Starholm had used as a base of operations during the layover; a beautiful place at the bottom of a wide valley, in the curve of a broad, deep-flowing river. The crew, tired of being shipbound, had built half a dozen such huts and shacks in these eight months.

Merrihew glared down at Helen. He snorted, “This is a fine situation. You, of all the people in the whole damned crew—the ship’s doctor! It’s—it’s—” Inarticulate with rage, he fell back on a ridiculously inadequate phrase. “It’s—criminal carelessness!”

“I know.” Helen Murray, too young and far too lovely for a ship’s officer on a ten-year cruise, still looked weak and white, and her voice was a gentle shadow of its crisp self.

“I’m afraid four years in space made me careless.”

Merrihew, brooded, looking down at her. Something about ship—gravity conditions, while not affecting potency, made conception impossible; no child had ever been conceived in space and none ever would. On planet layovers, the effect wore off very slowly; only after three months aground had Dr. Murray started routine administration of anticeptin to the twenty-two women of the crew, herself included. At that time she had been still unaware that she herself was already carrying a child.

Outside, the leafy forest whispered and rustled, and Merrihew knew Helen had forgotten his existence again. The day-old child was tucked up in one of her rolled coveralls at her side. To Merrihew, he looked like a skinned monkey, but Helen’s eyes smoldered as her hands moved gently over the tiny round head.

He stood and listened to the winds and said at random, “These shacks will fall to pieces in another month. It doesn’t matter, we’ll have taken off by then.”

Dr. Chao Lin came into the shack, an angular woman of thirty-five. She said, “Company, Helen? Well, it’s about time. Here, let me take Robin.”

Helen said in weak protest, “You’re spoiling me, Lin.”

“It will do you good,” Chao Lin returned. Merrihew, in a sudden surge of fury and frustration, exploded. “Damn it, Lin, you’re making it all worse. He’ll die when we go into overdrive, you know, as well as I do!”

Helen sat up, clutching Robin protectively. “Are you proposing to drown him like a kitten?”

“Helen, I’m not proposing anything. I’m stating a fact.”

“But it’s not a fact. He won’t die in overdrive because he won’t be aboard when we go into overdrive!”

Merrihew looked at Lin helplessly, but his face softened. “Shall we—put him to sleep and bury him here?”

The woman’s face turned white. “No!” she cried in passionate protest, and Lin bent to disengage her frantic grip.

“Helen, you’ll hurt him. Put him down. There.” Merrihew looked down at her, troubled, and said, “We can’t just abandon him to die slowly, Helen—”

“Who says I’m going to abandon him?” Merrihew asked slowly, “Are you planning to desert?” He added, after a minute, “There’s a chance he’ll survive. After all, his very birth was against all medical precedent. Maybe—”

“Captain”—Helen’s voice sounded desperate—“even drugged, no child under ten has ever endured the shift into hyperspace drive. A newborn would die in seconds.” She clasped Robin to her again and said, “It’s the only way—you have Lin for a doctor, Reynolds can handle my collateral duties. This planet is uninhabited, the climate is mild, and we couldn’t possibly starve.” Her face, so gentle, was suddenly like rock. “Enter my death in the log, if you want to.”

Merrihew looked from Helen to Lin, and said, “Helen, you’re insane!”

She said, “Even if I’m sane now, I wouldn’t be long if I had to abandon Robin.” The wild note had died out of her voice, and she spoke rationally, but inflexibly. “Captain Merrihew, to get me aboard the Starholm, you will have to have me drugged or taken by force; I promise you I won’t go any other way. And if you do that—and if Robin is left behind, or dies in overdrive, just so you will have my services as a doctor—then I solemnly swear that I will kill myself at the first opportunity.”

“My God,” said Merrihew, “you are insane!”

Helen gave a very tiny shrug. “Do you want a madwoman aboard?” Chao Lin said quietly, “Captain, I don’t see any other way. We would have had to arrange it that way if Helen had actually died in childbirth. Of two unsatisfactory solutions, we must choose the less harmful.” And Merrihew knew that he had no real choice. “I still think you’re both crazy,” he blustered, but it was surrender, and Helen knew it. Ten days after the Starholm took off, young Colin Reynolds, technician, committed suicide by the messy procedure of slicing his jugular vein, which—in zero gravity—distributed several quarts of blood in big round globules all over his cabin. He left an incoherent note.

Merrihew put the note in the disposal and Chao Lin put the blood in the ship’s blood bank for surgery, and they hushed it up as an accident; but Merrihew had the unpleasant feeling that the layover on the green and windy planet was going to become a legend, spread in whispers by the crew. And it did, but that is another story.

Robin was two years old when he first heard the voices in the wind. He pulled at his mother’s arms and crooned softly, in imitation.

“What is it, lovey?”

“Pretty.” He crooned again to the distant murmuring sound. Helen smiled vaguely and patted the round cheek. Robin, his infant imagination suddenly distracted, said, “Hungry. Robin hungry. Berries.”

“Berries after you eat,” Helen promised absently, and picked him up. Robin tugged at her arm.

“Mommy pretty, too!”

She laughed, a rosy and smiling young Diana. She was happy on the solitary planet; they lived quite comfortably in one of the larger shacks, and only a little frown line between her eyes bore witness to the terror which had closed down on her in the first months, when every new day had been some new struggle—against weakness, against unfamiliar sounds, against loneliness and dread. Nights when she lay wakeful, sweating with terror while the winds rose and fell again and her imagination gave them voices, bleak days when she wandered dazedly around the shack or stared moodily at Robin. There had been moments—only fleeting, and penanced with hours of shame and regret—when she thought that even the horror of losing Robin in those first days would have been less than the horror of spending the rest of her life alone here, when she had wondered why Merrihew had not realized that she was unbalanced, and forced her to go with them; by now, Robin would have been only a moment’s painful memory.

Still not strong, knowing she had to be strong for Robin or he would die as surely as if she had abandoned him, she had spent the first months in a somnambulistic dream.

Sometimes she had walked for days at a time in that dream; she would wake to find food that she could not remember gathering. Somehow, pervasive, the dream voices had taken over; the whispering winds had been full of voices and even hands.

She had fallen ill and lain for days sick and delirious, and had heard a voice which hardly seemed to be her own, saying that if she died the wind voices would care for Robin . . . and then the shock and irrationality of that had startled her out of delirium, agonized and trembling, and she pulled herself upright and cried out, “No!”

And the shimmer of eyes and voices had faded again into vague echoes, until there was only the stir of sunlight on the leaves, and Robin, chubby and naked, kicking in the sunlight, cooing with his hands outstretched to the rustle of leaves and shadows.

She had known, then, that she had to get well. She had never heard the wind voices again, and her crisp, scientific mind rejected the fanciful theory that if she only believed in the wind voices she would see their forms and hear their words clearly. And she rejected them so thoroughly that when she heard them speak, she shut them away from her mind, and after a time heard them no longer, except in restless dreams.

By now she had accepted the isolation and the beauty of their world, and begun to make a happy life for Robin.

For lack of other occupation last summer—though the winter was mild and there was no lack of fruits and roots even then—Helen had patiently snared male and female of small animals like rabbits, and now she had a pen of them. They provided a change of diet, and after a few smelly unsuccessful experiments she had devised a way to supply their fur pelts. She made no effort at gardening, though when Robin was older she might try that. For the moment, it was enough that they were healthy and safe and protected.

Robin was listening again. Helen bent her ear, sharpened by the silence, but heard only the rustle of wind and leaves; saw only falling brightness along a silvered tree-trunk. Wind? When there were no branches stirring?

“Ridiculous,” she said sharply, then snatched up the baby boy and squeezed him before hoisting him astride her hip. “Mommy doesn’t mean you, Robin. Let’s look for berries.”

But soon she realized that his head was tipped back and that he was listening, again, to some sound she could not hear.

On what she said was Robin’s fifth birthday, Helen had made a special bed for him in another room of the building. He missed the warmth of Helen’s body, and the comforting sound of her breathing; for Robin, since birth, had been a wakeful child.

Yet, on the first night alone, Robin felt curiously freed. He did something he had never dared do before, for fear of waking Helen; he slipped from his bed and stood in the doorway, looking into the forest.

The forest was closer to the doorway now; Robin could fuzzily remember when the clearing had been wider. Now, slowly, beyond the garden patch which Helen kept cleared, the underbrush and saplings were growing back, and even what Robin called “the burned place” was covered with new sparse grass.

Robin was accustomed to being alone during the day—even in his first year, Helen had had to leave him alone, securely fastened in the house, or inside a little tight-fenced yard. But he was not used to being alone at night.

Far off in the forest, he could hear the whispers of the other people. Helen said there were no other people, but Robin knew better, because he could hear their voices on the wind, like fragments of the songs Helen sang at bedtime. And sometimes he could almost see them in the shadowy spots.

Once when Helen had been sick, a long time ago, and Robin had run helplessly from the fenced yard to the inside room and back again, hungry and dirty and furious because Helen only slept on the bed with her eyes closed, rousing up now and then to whimper like he did when he fell down and skinned his knee, the winds and voices had come into the very house; Robin had hazy memories of soothing voices, of hands that touched him more softly than Helen’s hands. But he could not quite remember.

Now that he could hear them so clearly, he would go and find the other people. And then if Helen was sick again, there would be someone else to play with him and look after him. He thought gleefully, Won’t Helen be surprised? and darted off across the clearing.

Helen woke, roused not by a sound but by a silence. She no longer heard Robin’s soft breaths from the alcove, and after a moment she realized something else: The winds were silent.

Perhaps, she thought, a storm was coming. Some change in air pressure could cause this stillness—but Robin? She tiptoed to the alcove; as she had suspected, his bed was empty.

Where could he be? In the clearing? With a storm coming? She slid her feet into handmade sandals and ran outside, her quivering call ringing out through the silent forest: “Robin—oh, Robin!”

Silence. And far away a little ominous whisper. And for the first time since that first frightening year of loneliness, she felt lost, deserted in an alien world. She ran across the clearing, looking around wildly, trying to decide which way he could have wandered. Into the forest? What if he had strayed toward the riverbank? There was a place where the bank crumbled away, down toward the rapids—her throat closed convulsively, and her call was almost a shriek: “Oh, Robin! Robin, darling! Robin!”

She ran through the paths worn by then—feet, hearing snatches of rustle, winds and leaves suddenly vocal in the cold moonlight around her. It was the first time since the spaceship left them that Helen had ventured out into the night of their world. She called again, her voice cracking in panic.

“Robin!”

A sudden stray gleam revealed a glint of white, and a child stood in the middle of the path. Helen gasped with relief and ran to snatch up her son—then fell back in dismay. It was not Robin who stood there. The child was naked, about a head shorter than Robin, and female.

There was something curious about the bare and gleaming flesh, as if she could see the child only hi the full flush of the moonlight. A round, almost expressionless face was surrounded by a mass of colorless streaming hair, the exact color of the moonlight. Helen’s audible gasp startled her to a stop: she shut her eyes convulsively, and when she opened them the path was black and empty and Robin was running down the track toward her.

Helen caught him up, with a strangled cry, and ran, clasping him to her breast, back down the path to their shack. Inside, she barred the door and laid Robin down in her own bed, and threw herself down shivering, too shaken to speak, too shaken to scold him, curiously afraid to question. I had a hallucination, she told herself, a hallucination, another dream, a dream. . .

A dream, like the other Dream. She signified it to herself as The Dream because it was not like any other dream she had ever had. She had dreamed it first before Robin’s birth, and been ashamed to speak of it to Chao Lin, fearing the common-sense skepticism of the older woman.

On their tenth night on the green planet (the Starholm was a dim recollection now), when Mernhew’s scientists had been convinced that the little world was safe, without wild beasts or diseases or savage natives, the crew had requested permission to camp in the valley clearing beside the river. Permission granted, they had gone apart in couples almost as usual, and even those who had no enduring liaison at the moment had found a partner for the night.

It must have been that night...

Colin Reynolds was two years younger than Helen, and their attachment, enduring over a few months of ship time, was based less on mutual passion than on a sort of boyish need in him, a sort of impersonal feminine solicitude in Helen. All her affairs had been like that, companionable, comfortable, but never passionate. Curiously enough, Helen was a woman capable of passion, of great depths of devotion; but no man had ever roused it and now no man ever would. Only Robin’s birth had touched her deeply pent emotions.

But that night, when Colin Reynolds was sleeping, Helen stayed restlessly awake, hearing the unquiet stirring of wind on the leaves. After a time she wandered down to the water’s edge, staying a cautious distance from the shore—for the cliff crumbled dangerously—and stretched herself out to listen to the wind—voices. And after a time she fell asleep, and had The Dream, which was to return to her again and again.

Helen thought of herself as a scientist, without room for fantasies, and that was why she called it, fiercely, a dream; a dream born of some undiagnosed conflict in her. Even to herself Helen would not recall it in full.

There had been a man, and to her it seemed that he was part of the green and windy world, and he had found her sleeping by the river. Even in her drowsy state, Helen had suspected that perhaps one of the other crew members, like herself sleepless and drawn to the shining water, had happened upon her there, such things were not impossible, manners and mores being what they were among starship crew’s.

But to her, half dreaming, there had been some strangeness about him, which prevented her from seeing him too clearly even in the brilliant green moonlight. No dream and no man had ever seemed so living to her; and it was her fierce rationalization of the dream which kept her silent, months later, when she discovered (to her horror and secret despair) that she was with child. She had felt that she would lose the haze and secret delight of the dream if she openly acknowledged that Colin had fathered her child. But at first—in the cool green morning that followed—she had not been at all sure it was a dream. Seeing only sunlight and leaves, she had held back from speaking, not wanting ridicule; could she have asked each man of the Starholm, “Was it you who came to me last night? Because if it was not, there are other men on this world, men who cannot be clearly seen even by moonlight.”

Severely she reminded herself, Merrihew’s men had pronounced the world uninhabited, and uninhabited it must be. Five years later, hugging her sleeping son close, Helen remembered the dream, examined the content of her fantasy, and once again, shivering, repeated, “I had a hallucination. It was only a dream. A dream, because I was alone ...” When Robin was fourteen years old, Helen told him the story of his birth, and of the ship. He was a tall, silent boy, strong and hardy but not talkative; he heard the story almost in silence, and looked at Helen for a long time in silence afterward. He finally said in a whisper, “You could have died—you gave up a lot for me, Helen, didn’t you?” He knelt and took her face in his hands.

She smiled and drew a little away from him. “Why are you looking at me like that, Robin?”

The boy could not put instant words to his thoughts; emotions were not in his vocabulary. Helen had taught him everything she knew, but she had always concealed her feelings from her son. He asked at last, “Why didn’t my father stay with you?”

“I don’t suppose it entered his head,” Helen said. “He was needed on the ship. Losing me was bad enough.”

Robin said passionately, “I’d have stayed!”

The woman found herself laughing. “Well—you did stay, Robin.”

He asked, “Am I like my father?”

Helen looked gravely at her son, trying to see the half-forgotten features of young Reynolds in the boy’s face. No, Robin did not look like Colin Reynolds, nor like Helen herself. She picked up his hand in hers; despite his robust health, Robin never tanned; his skin was pearly pale, so that in the green sunlight it blended into the forest almost invisibly. His hand lay in Helen’s palm like a shadow. She said at last, “No, nothing like him. But under this sun, that’s to be expected.”

Robin said confidently, “I’m like the other people.”

“The ones on the ship? They—”

“No,” Robin interrupted, “you always said when I was older you’d tell me about the other people. I mean the other people here. The ones in the woods. The ones you can’t see.”

Helen stared at the boy in blank disbelief. “What do you mean? There are no other people, just us.” Then she recalled that every imaginative child invents playmates. Alone, she thought, Robin’s always alone, no other children, no wonder he’s a little—strange. She said quietly, “You dreamed it, Robin.”

The boy only stared at her in bleak, blank alienation. “You mean,” he said, “you can’t hear them, either?” He got up and walked out of the hut. Helen called, but he didn’t turn back. She ran after him, catching at his arm, stopping him almost by force. She whispered, “Robin, Robin, tell me what you mean! There isn’t anyone here. Once or twice I thought I had seen—something, by moonlight, only it was a dream. Please, Robin—please—”

“If it’s only a dream, why are you frightened?” Robin asked, through a curious constriction in his throat. “If they’ve never hurt you ...”

No, they had never hurt her. Even if, in her long-ago dream, one of them had come to her. And the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair—a scrap of memory from a vanished life on another world sang in Helen’s thoughts. She looked up at the pale, impatient face of her son, and swallowed hard.

Her voice was husky when she spoke. “Did I ever tell you about rationalization—when you want something to be true so much that you can make it sound right to yourself?”4

“Couldn’t that also happen to something you wanted not to be true?” Robin retorted with a mutinous curl of his mouth.

Helen would not let go his arm. She begged, “Robin, no, you’ll only waste your life and break your heart looking for something that doesn’t exist.”

The boy looked down into her shaken face, and suddenly a new emotion welled up in him and he dropped to his knees beside her and buried his face against her breast. He whispered, “Helen, I’ll never leave you, I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to do, I don’t want anyone but you.”

And for the first time in many years, Helen broke into wild and uncontrollable crying, without knowing why she wept.

Robin did not speak again of his quest in the forest. For many months he was quiet and subdued, staying near the clearing, hovering near Helen for days at a time, then disappearing into the forest at dusk. He heard the winds numbly, deaf to their promise and their call.

Helen too was quiet and withdrawn, feeling Robin’s alienation through his submissive mood. She found herself speaking to him sharply for being always underfoot; yet, on the rare days when he vanished into the forest and did not return until after sunset, she felt a restless unease that set her wandering the paths herself, not following him, but simply uneasy unless she knew he was within call.

Once, in the shadows just before sunset, she thought she saw a man moving through the trees, and for an instant, as he turned toward her, she saw that he was naked. She had seen him only for a second or two, and after he had slipped between the shadows again common sense told her it was Robin. She was vaguely shocked and annoyed; she firmly intended to speak to him, perhaps to scold him for running about naked and slipping away like that; then, in a sort of remote embarrassment, she forbore to mention it. But after that, she kept out of the forest.

Robin had been vaguely aware of her surveillance and knew when it ceased. But he did not give up his own pointless rambles, although even to himself he no longer spoke of searching, or of any dreamlike inhabitants of the woods. At tunes it still seemed that some shadow concealed a half-seen form, and the distant murmur grew into a voice that mocked him; a white arm, the shadow of a face, until he lifted his head and stared straight at it.

One evening toward twilight he saw a sudden shimmer in the trees, and he stood, fixedly, as the stray glint resolved itself first into a white face with shadowy eyes, then into a translucent flicker of bare arms, and then into the form of a woman, arrested for an instant with her hand on the bole of a tree. In the shadowy spot, filled only with the last ray of a cloudy sunset, she was very clear; not cloudy or unreal, but so distinct that he could see even a small smudge, or bramble scratch on her shoulder, and a fallen leaf tangled in her colorless hair. Robin, paralyzed, watched her pause, and turn, and smile, and then she melted into the shadows.

He stood with his heart pounding for a second after she had gone; then whirled, bursting with the excitement of his discovery, and ran down the path toward home. Suddenly he stopped short, the world tilting and reeling, and fell on his face in a bed of dry leaves.

He was still ignorant of the nature of the emotion in him. He felt only intolerable misery and the conviction that he must never, never speak to Helen of what he had seen or felt. He lay there, his burning face pressed into the leaves, unaware of the rising wind, the little flurry of blown leaves, the growing darkness and distant thunder. At last an icy spatter of rain aroused him, and cold, numbed, he made his way slowly homeward. Over his head the boughs creaked woodenly, and Robin, under the driving whips of the rain, felt their tumult only echoed his own voiceless agony.

He was drenched by the time he pushed the door of the shack open and stumbled blindly toward the fire, only hoping that Helen would be sleeping. But she started up from beside the hearth they had built together last summer.

“Robin?” Deathly weary, the boy snapped, “Who else would it be?”

Helen didn’t answer. She came to him, a small swift-moving figure in the firelight, and drew him into the warmth. She said, almost humbly, “I was afraid—the storm—Robin, you’re all wet, come to the fire and dry out.”

Robin yielded, his twitching nerves partly soothed by her voice. How tiny Helen is, he thought, and I can remember that she used to carry me around on one arm; now she hardly comes to my shoulder. She brought him food and he ate wolfishly, listening to the steady pouring rain, uncomfortable under Helen’s watching eyes. Before his own eyes there was the clear memory of the woman in the wood, and so vivid was Robin’s imagination, heightened by loneliness and undiluted by any random impressions, that it seemed to him Helen must see her too. And when she came to stand beside him, the picture grew so keen in his thoughts that he actually pulled himself free of her.

The next day dawned gray and still, beaten with long needles of rain. They stayed indoors by the smoldering fire; Robin, half sick and feverish from his drenching, sprawled by the hearth too indolent to move, watching Helen’s comings and goings about the room; not realizing why the sight of her slight, quick form against the gray fight filled him with such pain and melancholy.

The storm lasted four days. Helen exhausted her household tasks and sat restlessly thumbing through the few books she knew by heart—they had allowed her to remove all her personal possessions, all the things she had chosen on a forgotten and faraway Earth for a ten-year star cruise. For the first time in years, Helen was thinking again of the life, the civilization she had thrown away, for Robin who had been a pink scrap in the circle of her arm and now lay sullen on the hearth, not speaking, aimlessly whittling a stick with a knife (found discarded in a heap of rubbish from the Starholm) which was his dearest possession. Helen felt slow horror closing in on her. What world, what heritage did I give him, in my madness? This world has driven us both insane. Robin and I are both a little mad, by Earth’s standard’s. And when I die, and I will die first, what then? At that moment Helen would have given her life to believe in his old dream of strange people in the wood.

She flung her book restlessly away, and Robin, as if waiting for that signal, sat upright and said almost eagerly, “Helen—”

Grateful that he had broken the silence of days, she gave him an encouraging smile.

“I’ve been reading your books,” he began diffidently, “and I read about the sun you came from. It’s different from this one. Suppose—suppose there were actually a kind of people here, and something in this light, or in your eyes, made them invisible to you.”

Helen said, “Have you been seeing them again?”

He flinched at her ironical tone, and she asked, somewhat more gently, “It’s a theory, Robin, but it wouldn’t explain, then, why you see them.”

“Maybe I’m—more used to this light,” he said gropingly. “And anyway, you said you thought you’d seen them and thought it was only a dream.”

Halfway between exasperation and a deep pity, Helen found herself arguing, “If these other people of yours really exist, why haven’t they made themselves known in sixteen years?

The eagerness with which he answered was almost frightening. “I think they only come out at night, they’re what your book calls a primitive civilization.” He spoke the words he had read, but never heard, with an odd hesitation. “They’re not really a civilization at all, I think, they’re like—part of the woods.”

“A forest people,” Helen mused, impressed in spite of herself, “and nocturnal. It’s always moonlight or dusky when you see them—”

“Then you do believe me—oh, Helen,” Robin cried, and suddenly found himself pouring out the story of what he had seen, in incoherent words, concluding, “and by daylight I can hear them, but I can’t see them. Helen, Helen, you have to believe it now, you’ll have to let me try to find them and learn to talk to them ...”

Helen listened with a sinking heart. She knew they should not discuss it now, when five days of enforced housebound proximity had set their nerves and tempers on edge, but some unknown tension hurled her words at Robin. “You saw a woman, and I—a man. These things are only dreams. Do I have to explain more to you?”

Robin flung his knife sullenly aside. “You’re so blind, so stubborn.”

“I think you are feverish again.” Helen rose to go.

He said wrathfully, “You treat me like a child!”

“Because you act like one, with your fairy tales of women in the wind.”

Suddenly Robin’s agony overflowed and he caught at her, holding her around the knees, clinging to her as he had not done since he was a small child, his words stumbling and rushing over one another.

“Helen, Helen darling, don’t be angry with me,” he begged, and caught her in a blind embrace that pulled her off her feet. She had never guessed how strong he was; but he seemed very like a little boy, and she hugged him quickly as he began to cover her face with childish kisses.

“Don’t cry, Robin, my baby, it’s all right,” she murmured, kneeling close to him.

Gradually the wildness of his passionate crying abated; she touched his forehead with her cheek to see if it was heated with fever, and he reached up and held her there. Helen let him lie against her shoulder, feeling that perhaps after the violence of his outburst he would fall asleep, and she was half-asleep herself when a sudden shock of realization darted through her; quickly she tried to free herself from Robin’s entangling arms.

“Robin, let me go.”

He clung to her, not understanding. “Don’t let go of me, Helen. Darling, stay here beside me,” he begged, and pressed a kiss into her throat.

Helen, her blood icing over, realized that unless she freed herself very quickly now, she would be fighting against a strong, aroused young man not clearly aware of what he was doing. She took refuge in the sharp maternal note of ten years ago, almost vanished in the closer, more equal companionship of the time between: “No, Robin. Stop it at once, do you hear?”

Automatically he let her go, and she rolled quickly away, out of his reach, and got to her feet. Robin, too intelligent to be unaware of her anger and too naive to know its cause, suddenly dropped his head and wept, wholly unstrung. “Why are you angry?” he blurted out. “I was only loving you.”

And at the phrase of the five-year-old child, Helen felt her throat would burst with its ache. She managed to choke out, “I’m not angry, Robin—we’ll talk about this later, I promise,” and then, her own control vanishing, turned and fled precipitately into the pouring rain.

She plunged through the familiar woods for a long time, in a daze of unthinking misery. She did not even fully realize that she was sobbing and muttering aloud, “No, no, no, no!”

She must have wandered for several hours. The rain had stopped and the darkness was lifting before she began to grow calmer and to think more clearly.

She had been blind not to foresee this day when Robin was a child; only if her child had been a daughter could it have been avoided. Or—she was shocked at the hysterical sound of her own laughter—if Colin had stayed and they had raised a family like Adam and Eve!

But what now? Robin was sixteen; she was not yet forty. Helen caught at vanishing memories of society; taboos so deeply rooted that for Helen they were instinctual and impregnable. Yet for Robin nothing existed except this little patch of forest and Helen herself—the only person in his world, more specifically at the moment the only woman in his world. So much, she thought bitterly, for instinct. But have I the right to begin this all over again? Worse; have I the right to deny its existence and, when I die, leave Robin alone?

She had stumbled and paused for breath, realizing that she had wandered in circles and that she was at a familiar point on the riverbank which she had avoided for sixteen years. On the heels of this realization she became aware that for only the second time in memory, the winds were wholly stilled.

Her eyes, swollen with crying, ached as she tried to pierce the gloom of the mist, lilac-tinted with the approaching sunrise, which hung around the water. Through the dispersing mist she made out, dimly, the form of a man.

He was tall, and his pale skin shone with misty white colors. Helen sat frozen, her mouth open, and for the space of several seconds he looked down at her without moving. His eyes, dark splashes in the pale face, had an air of infinite sadness and compassion, and she thought his lips moved in speech, but she heard only a win familiar rustle of wind.

Behind him, mere flickers, she seemed to make out the ghosts of other faces, tips of fingers of invisible hands, eyes, the outline of a woman’s breast, the curve of a child’s foot. For a minute, in Helen’s weary numbed state, all her defenses went down and she thought: Then I’m not mad and it wasn’t a dream and Robin isn’t Reynolds’ son at all. His father was Ms—one of these—and they’ve been watching me and Robin, Robin has seen them, he doesn’t know he’s one of them, but they know. They know and I’ve kept Robin from them all these sixteen years.

The man took two steps toward her, the translucent body shifting to a dozen colors before her blurred eyes. His face had a curious familiarity—familiarity—and in a sudden spasm of terror Helen thought, “I’m going mad, it’s Robin, its Robin!”

His hand was actually outstretched to touch her when her scream cut icy lashes through the forest, stirring wild echoes in the wind-voices, and she whirled and ran blindly toward the treacherous, crumbling bank. Behind her came steps, a voice, a cry—Robin, the strange dryad-man, she could not guess. The horror of incest, the son the father the lover suddenly melting into one, overwhelmed her reeling brain and she fled insanely to the brink. She felt a masculine hand actually gripping her shoulder, she might have been pulled back even then, but she twisted free blindly, shrieking, “No, Robin, no, no—” and flung herself down the steep bank, to slip and hurl downward and whirl around in—the raging current to spinning oblivion and death . . .

Many years later, Merrihew, grown old in the Space Service, falsified a log entry to send his ship for a little while into the orbit of the tiny green planet he had named Robin’s World. The old buildings had fallen into rotted timbers, and Merrihew quartered the little world for two months from pole to pole but found nothing. Nothing but shadows and whispers and the unending voices of the wind. Finally, he lifted his ship and went away.