"Anderson, Poul - 1970 Flandry 09 - A Circus Of Hells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

A CIRCUS OF HELLS

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Poul Anderson

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[31 jan 2003--scanned by Wickman99]

[07 feb 2003--proofed for #bookz]

I

-

The story is of a lost treasure guarded by curious monsters, and of

captivity in a wilderness, and of a chase through reefs and shoals that

could wreck a ship. There is a beautiful girl in it, a magician, a spy

or two, and the rivalry of empires. So of course--Flandry was later

tempted to say--it begins with a coincidence.

However, the likelihood that he would meet Tachwyr the Dark was not

fantastically low. They were in the same profession, which had them

moving through a number of the same places; and they also shared the

adventurous-ness of youth. To be sure, once imperialism is practiced on

an interstellar scale, navies grow in size until the odds are huge

against any given pair of their members happening on each other.

Nevertheless, many such encounters were taking place, as was inevitable

on one of the rare occasions when a Merseian warship visited a Terran

planet. A life which included no improbable events would be the real

statistical impossibility.

The planet was Irumclaw, some 200 light-years from Sol in that march of

the human realm which faced Betelgeuse. Lieutenant (j.g.) Dominic

Flandry had been posted there not long before, with much wailing and

gnashing of teeth until he learned that even so dismal a clod had its

compensations. The Merseian vessel was the cruiser Brythioch, on a swing

through the buffer region of unclaimed, mostly unknown suns between the

spaces ruled in the names of Emperor and Roidhun. Neither government

would have allowed any craft belonging to its rival, capable of spouting

nuclear fire, any appreciable distance into its territory. But border

authorities could, at discretion, accept a "goodwill visit." It broke

the monotony and gave a slight hope of observing the kind of trivia

which, fitted together, now and then revealed a fact the opposition

would have preferred to keep secret.

In this case Merseia profited, at least initially.

Official hospitality was exchanged. Besides protocol, the humans were

motivated, whether they knew it or not, to enjoy the delicate frisson

that came from holding converse with those who--beneath every diplomatic

phrase--were the enemy. Flandry did know it; he had seen more of life

than the average twenty-one-year-old. He was sure the liberty parties

down in Old Town were being offered quite a few drinks, and other

amenities in certain cases.

Well, why not? They had been long in the deeps between the stars. If

they were straight back from here, they must travel a good 140

light-years--about ten standard days at top hyperspeed, but still an

abyss whose immensity and strangeness wore down the hardiest

spirit--before they could raise the outermost of the worlds they called

their own. They needed a few hours of small-scale living, be their hosts

never so hostile.

Which we aren't anyway, Flandry thought. We should be, but we aren't,

most of us. He grinned. Including me. Though he would have liked to join

the fun; he couldn't. The junior officers of Irumclaw Base must hold the

customary reception for their opposite numbers from the ship. (Their

seniors gave another in a separate building. The Merseians, variously

bemused or amused by the rigid Terran concept of rank, conformed. They

set more store by ceremony and tradition, even that of aliens, than

latter-day humans did.) While some of the visitors spoke Anglic, it

turned out that Flandry was the only man on this planet who knew Eriau.

The mess hall had no connection to the linguistic computer and there was

no time to jury-rig one. His translations would be needed more than his

physical presence.

Not that the latter was any disgrace, he reflected rather smugly. He was

tall and lithe and wore his dress uniform with panache and had become a

favorite among the girls downhill. Despite this, he remained well liked

by the younger men, if not always by his superiors.

He entered at the appointed evening hour. Under Commander Abdullah's

fishy eye, he saluted the Emperor's portrait not with his usual vague

wave but with a snap that well-nigh dislocated his shoulder. And a heel

click to boot, he reminded himself. Several persons being in line ahead

of him, he had a minute for taking stock. Its tables removed except for

one bearing refreshments--and its chairs, in deference to the

guests--the room stretched dreary. Pictures of former personnel,

trophies and citations for former accomplishments, seemed to make its

walls just the more depressing. An animation showed a park on Terra,

trees nodding, in the background the skyward leap of a rich family's

residential tower and airborne vehicles glittering like diamond dust;

but it reminded him too well of how far he was from those dear comforts.

He preferred the darkness in the real window. It was open and a breeze

gusted through, warm, laden with unearthly odors.

The Merseians were a more welcome sight, if only as proof that a

universe did exist beyond Irumclaw. Forty of them stood in a row,

enduring repeated introductions with the stoicism appropriate to a

warrior race.

They resembled especially large men … somewhat. A number of their

faces might have been called good-looking in a craggy fashion; their

hands each had four fingers and a thumb; the proportions and

articulations of most body parts were fairly anthropoid. But the posture

was forward-leaning, balanced by a heavy tail. The feet, revealed by

sandals, were splayed, webbed, and clawed. The skin was hairless and

looked faintly scaled; depending on sub-species, its color ranged from

the pale green which was commonest through golden brown to ebony. The

head had two convoluted bony orifices where man's has external ears. A

ridge of serrations ran from its top, down the spine to the end of the

tail.

Most of this anatomy was concealed by their uniforms: baggy tunic, snug

breeches, black with silver trim and insignia. The latter showed family

connections and status as well as rank and service. The Merseians had

politely disarmed themselves, in that none carried a pistol at his wide

belt; the Terrans, in turn, had refrained from asking them to remove

their great knuckleduster-handled war knives.

It wasn't the differences between them and men that caused trouble,

Flandry knew. It was the similarities--in planets of origin and thus in

planets desired; in the energy of warm-blooded animals, the instincts of

ancestors who hunted, the legacies of pride and war--

"Afal Ymen, may I present Lieutenant Flandry," Abdullah intoned. The

young man bowed to the huge form, whose owner corresponded approximately

to a commander, and received a nod of the ridged and shining pate. He

proceeded, exchanging names and bows with every subordinate Merseian and

wondering, as they doubtless did too, when the farce would end and the

drinking begin.

"Lieutenant Flandry."

"Mei Tachwyr."

They stopped, and stared, and both mouths fell open.

Flandry recovered first, perhaps because he became aware that he was

holding up the parade. "Uh, this is a, uh, pleasant surprise," he

stammered in Anglic. More of his wits returned. He made a formal Eriau

salutation: "Greeting and good fortune to you, Tachwyr of the Vach

Rueth."

"And … may you be in health and strength, Dominic Flandry … of

Terra," the Merseian replied.

For another moment their eyes clashed, black against gray, before the

man continued down the line.

After a while he got over his astonishment. Albeit unexpected, the

happenstance that he and Tachwyr had met again did not look especially

important. Nonetheless, he went robotlike through the motions of

sociability and of being an interpreter. His gaze and mind kept straying

toward his former acquaintance. And Tachwyr himself was too young to

mask entirely the fact that he was as anxious to get together with

Flandry.

Their chance came in a couple of hours, when they managed to dodge out

of their respective groups and seek the refreshment table. Flandry

gestured. "May I pour for you?" he asked. "I fear that except for the

telloch, we've run out of things native to your planet."

"I regret to say you have been had," Tachwyr answered. "It is a dreadful

brand. But I like your--what is it called?--skoksh?"

"That makes two of us." Flandry filled glasses for them. He had already

had several whiskies and would have preferred this one over ice.

However, he wasn't about to look sissified in front of a Merseian.

"Ah … cheers," Tachwyr said, lifting his tumbler. His throat and

palate gave the Anglic word an accent for which there were no Anglic

words.

Flandry could form Merseian speech better if not perfectly. "Tor

ychwei." With both hands he extended his glass so that the other might

take the first sip.

Tachwyr followed it with half of his own in a single gulp. "Arrach!"

Relaxed a little, he cocked his head and smiled; but under the shelf of

brow ridge, his glance held very steady on the human. "Well," he said,

"what brings you here?"

"I was assigned. For a Terran year, worse luck. And you?"

"The same, to my present ship. I see you are now in the Intelligence

Corps."

"Like yourself."

Tachwyr the Dark--his skin was a slightly deeper green than is usual

around the Wilwidh Ocean--could not altogether suppress a scowl. "I

started in that branch," he said. "You were a flyer when you came to

Merseia." He paused. "Were you not?"

"Oh, yes," Flandry said. "I transferred later."

"At Commander Abrams' instigation?"

Flandry nodded. "Mostly. He's a captain now, by the way."

"So I have heard. We … take an interest in him."

After the Starkad affair, Flandry thought, you would. Between us, Max

Abrams and I wrecked a scheme concocted by none less than Brechdan

Ironrede, Protector of the Roidhun's Grand Council.

How much do you know about that, Tachwyr? You were only put to showing

me around and trying to pump me, when Abrams and I were on your world as

part of the Hauksberg mission. And the truth about Starkad was never

made public; no one concerned could afford to let it come out.

You do remember us, though, Tachwyr. If nothing else, you must have

gathered that we were instrumental in causing Merseia quite a bit of

trouble. It bothers you to have found me here.

Better get off the subject. "You remain through tomorrow? I admit

Irumclaw has less to offer than Merseia, but I'd like to return part of

the courtesy you gave me."

Again Tachwyr was slow to speak. "Thank you, negative. I have already

arranged to tour the area with shipmates." The Eriau phrasing implied a

commitment which no honorable male would break.

Flandry reflected that a male would not ordinarily bind himself so

strongly to something so minor.

What the devil? the human thought. Maybe they aim to sample our

well-known Terran decadence and he doesn't want me to realize their

well-known Merseian virtue can slack off that much. "Stay in a party,"

he warned. "Some of those bars are almost as dangerous as the stuff they

serve."

Tachwyr uttered the throaty laugh of his species, settled down on the

tripod of feet and tail, and started yarning. Flandry matched him. They

enjoyed themselves until the man was called away to interpret a tedious

conversation between two engineer officers.

II

--

Such was the prologue. He had practically forgotten it when the

adventure began. That was on a certain night about eight months later.

Soon after the red-orange sun had set, he left the naval compound and

walked downhill. No one paid him any heed. A former commandant had tried

to discourage his young men from seeking the occasionally lethal

corruptions of Old Town. He had declared a large part of it off limits.

Meeting considerable of the expense out of his own pocket, he had

started an on-base recreation center which was to include facilities for

sports, arts, and crafts as well as honest gambling and medically

certified girls! But the bosses below knew how to use money and

influence. The commandant was transferred to a still more bleak and

insignificant outpost. His successor dismantled what had been built,

informed the men jovially that what they did off duty was their

business, and was said to be drawing a nice extra income.

Flandry sauntered in elegance. The comet gleaming on either shoulder was

so new that you might have looked for diffidence from him. But his

bonnet was tilted more rakishly on his seal-brown hair than a strict

interpretation of rules would have allowed; his frame was draped in a

fantastic glittergold version of dress tunic and snowy trousers tucked

into handmade beefleather half-boots; the cloak that fluttered behind

him glowed with phosphorescent patterns through the chill dusk; and

while he strolled, he sang a folk ballad concerning the improbable

adventures of a Highland tinker.

It made a good cover for the fact that he was not out for pleasure.

Beyond the compound walls, the homes of the wealthy loomed amidst

grandly downsweeping private parks. In a way, Flandry thought, they

epitomized man's trajectory. Once the settlement had been sufficiently

large and prosperous, and sufficiently within the Imperial sphere, to

attract not only merchants but aristocrats. Old Town had bustled with

culture as well as commerce--provincial, no doubt, this far from Terra;

nevertheless, live and genuine, worthy of the respectful emulation of

the autochthons.

Tonight Irumclaw lay like a piece of wreckage at the edge of the

receding tide of empire. What mansions were not standing hollow had

become the property of oafs, and showed it. (The oafs were not to be

scoffed at. Several of them directed large organizations devoted to

preying on the spacemen who visited and the Navy men who guarded what

transshipment facilities remained in use.) Outside the treaty port

boundaries, barbarism rolled forward as the natives abandoned

civilization with a perhaps justifiable contempt.

Past the residential section, workshops and warehouses hulked black in

the night, and Flandry moved alert with a hand near the needle gun under

his tunic. Robberies and murders had happened here. Lacking the police

to clean out this area, assuming he wanted to, the commandant had

settled for advising men on liberty not to go through alone.

Flandry had been shocked to learn that when he first arrived. "We could

do it ourselves--establish regular patrols--if he'd order it. Doesn't he

care? What kind of chief is he?"

His protest had been delivered in private to another scout, Lieutenant

Commander Eisenschmitt. The latter, having been around for a while,

shrugged. "The kind that any place like this gets," he answered. "We

don't rate attention at GHQ, so naturally we're sent the hacks, boobs,

and petty crooks. Good senior officers are too badly needed elsewhere.

When Irumclaw does get one it's an accident, and he doesn't stay long."

"Damn it, man, we're on the border!" Flandry pointed out the window of

the room where they sat. It had been dark then, too. Betelgeuse glowed

bloody-brilliant among the hosts of stars where no writ ran. "Beyond

there--Merseia!"

"Yeh. And the gatortails expanding in all directions except when we bar

the way. I know. But this is the far edge of nowhere … in the eyes of

an Imperial government that can't see past its perfume-sniffing nose.

You're fresh from Terra, Dom. You ought to understand better than me. I

expect we'll pull out of Irumclaw entirely inside another generation."

"No! Can't be! Why, that'd leave this whole flank exposed for six

parsecs inward. We'd have no way of protecting its commerce … of, of

staying around in any force--"

"Uh-huh." Eisenschmitt nodded. "On the other hand, the local commerce

isn't too profitable any more, less each year. And think of the saving

to the Imperial treasury if we end operations. The Emperor should be

able to build a dozen new palaces complete with harems."

Flandry had not been able to agree at the time. He was too lately out of

a fighting unit and a subsequent school where competence was demanded.

Over the months, though, he saw things for himself and drew his own sad

conclusions.

There were times when he would have welcomed a set-to with a bandit. But

it had not befallen, nor did it on this errand into Old Town.

The district grew around him, crumbling buildings left over from pioneer

days, many of them simply the original beehive-shaped adobes of the

natives slightly remodeled for other life forms. Streets and alleys

twisted about under shimmering glowsigns. Traffic was mainly pedestrian,

but noise beat on the eardrums, clatter, shuffle, clop, clangor, raucous

attempts at music, a hundred different languages, once in a while a

muffled scream or a bellow of rage. The smells were equally strong, body

odors, garbage, smoke, incense, dope. Humans predominated, but many

autochthons were present and space travelers of numerous different

breeds circulated among them.

Outside a particular joyhouse, otherwise undistinguished from the rest,

an Irumclavian used a vocalizer to chant in Anglic: "Come one, come all,

come in, no cover, no minimum. Every type of amusement, pleasure, and

thrill. No game too exotic, no stakes too high or low. Continuous

sophisticated entertainment. Delicious food and drink, stimulants,

narcotics, hallucinogens, emphasizers, to your order, to your taste, to

your purse. Every sex and every technique of seventeen, yes, seventeen

intelligent species ready to serve your desires, and this does not count

racial, mutational, and biosculp variations. Come one, come all--"

Flandry went in. He chanced to brush against two or three of the

creature's arms. The blue integument felt cold in the winter air.

The entrance hall was hot and stuffy. An outsize human in a gaudy

uniform said, "Welcome, sir. What is your wish?" while keeping eyes upon

him that were like chips of obsidian.

"Are you Lem?" Flandry responded.

"Uh, yeh. and you--?"

"I am expected."

"Urh. Take the gravshaft to the top, that's the sixth floor, go left

down the hall to a door numbered 666, stand in front of the scan and

wait. When it opens, go up the stairs."

"Six-six-six?" murmured Flandry, who had read more than was common in

his service. "Is Citizen Ammon a humorist, do you think?"

"No names!" Lem dropped a hand to the stunner at his hip. "On your way,

kid."

Flandry obeyed, even to letting himself be frisked and leaving his gun

at the checkstand. He was glad when Door 666 admitted him; that was the

sado-maso level, and he had glimpsed things.

The office which he entered, and which sealed itself behind him,

recalled Terra in its size and opulence and in the animation of a rose

garden which graced a wall. Or so it seemed; then he looked closer and

saw the shabbiness of the old furnishings, the garishness of the new. No

other human save Leon Ammon was present. A Gorzunian mercenary stood

like a shaggy statue in one corner. When Flandry turned his back, the

being's musky scent continued to remind him that if he didn't behave he

could be plucked into small pieces.

"G'evening," said the man behind the desk. He was grossly fat, hairless,

sweating, not especially clean, although his scarlet tunic was of the

finest. His voice was high and scratchy. "You know who I am, right? Sit

down. Cigar? Brandy?"

Flandry accepted everything offered. It was of prime quality too. He

said so.

"You'll do better than this if you stick by me," Ammon replied. His

smile went no deeper than his lips. "You haven't told about the

invitation my man whispered to you the other night?"

"No, sir, of course not."

"Wouldn't bother me if you did. Nothing illegal about inviting a young

chap for a drink and a gab. Right? But you could be in trouble yourself.

Mighty bad trouble, and not just with your commanding officer."

Flandry had his suspicions about the origin of many of the subjects on

the floor below. Consenting adults … after brain-channeling and

surgical disguise … He studied the tip of his cigar. "I don't imagine

you'd've asked me here, sir, if you thought I needed threatening," he

said.

"No. I like your looks, Dominic," Ammon said. "Have ever since you

started coming to Old Town for your fun. A lot of escapades, but

organized like military maneuvers, right? You're cool and tough and

close-mouthed. I had a check done on your background."

Flandry expanded his suspicions. Various incidents, when he had been

leaned on one way or another, began to look like engineered testing of

his reactions. "Wasn't much to find out, was there?' he said. "I'm only

a j.g., routinely fresh-minted after serving here for two months. Former

flyboy, reassigned to Intelligence, sent back to Terra for training in

it and then to Irumclaw for scouting duty."

"I can't really compute that," Ammon said. "If they aim to make you a

spy, why have you spend a year flitting in and out of this system?"

"I need practice in surveillance, especially of planets that are poorly

known. And the no-man's-land yonder needs watching. Our Merseian chums

could build an advanced base there, for instance, or start some other

kettle boiling, unbeknownst to us, if we didn't keep scoutboats sweeping

around." Maybe they have anyway.

"Yes, I got that answer before when I asked, and it still sounds to me

like a waste of talent. But it got you to Irumclaw, and I did notice you

and had you studied. I learned more than stands on any public record,

boy. The whole Starkad business pivoted on you."

Shocked, Flandry wondered how deeply the rot had eaten, if the agent of

a medium-scale vice boss on a tenth-rate frontier planet could obtain

such information.

"Well, your tour'll soon be up," Ammon said. "Precious little to show

for it, right? Right. How'd you like to turn a profit before you leave?

A mighty nice profit, I promise you." He rubbed his hands. "Mighty

nice."

"Depends," Flandry said. If he'd been investigated as thoroughly as it

appeared, there was no use in pretending he had private financial

resources, or that he didn't require them if he was to advance his

career as far as he hoped. "The Imperium has my oath."

"Sure, sure. I wouldn't ask you to do anything against His Majesty. I'm

a citizen myself, right? No, I'll tell you exactly what I want done, if

you'll keep it confidential."

"It'd doubtless not do me any good to blab, the way you'll tell me."

Ammon giggled. "Right! Right! You're a sharp one, Dominic. Handsome,

too," he added exploringly.

"I'll settle for the sharpness now and buy the handsomeness later,"

Flandry said. As a matter of fact, while he enjoyed being gray-eyed, he

considered his face unduly long and thin, and planned to get it

remodeled when he could afford the best.

Ammon sighed and returned to business. "All I want is for you to survey

a planet for me. You can do it on your next scouting trip. Report back,

privately, of course, and it's worth a flat million, in small bills or

whatever shape you prefer." He reached into his desk and extracted a

packet. "If you take the job, here's a hundred thousand on account." A

million! Ye gods and demons! Flandry fought to keep his mask. No

enormous fortune, really. But enough for that necessary

nest-feathering--the special equipment, the social contacts--no more

wretched budgeting of my pleasure on furlough--A distant part of him

noted with approval how cool his tone stayed. "I have to carry out my

assignment."

"I know, I know. I'm not asking you to skimp it. I told you I'm a loyal

citizen. But if you jogged off your track awhile--it shouldn't cost more

than a couple of weeks extra--"

"Cost me my scalp if anyone found out," Flandry said.

Ammon nodded. "That's how I'll know I can trust you to keep quiet. And

you'll trust me, because suborning an Imperial officer is a capital

offense--anyhow, it usually is when it involves a matter like this,

that's not going to get mentioned to the authorities or the tax

assessors."

"Why not send your personal vessel to look?"

Ammon laid aside his mannerisms. "I haven't got one. If I hired a

civilian, what hold would I have on him? Especially an Old Town type.

I'd likely end up with an extra mouth in my throat, once the word got

around what's to be had out there. Let's admit it, even on this

miserable crudball I'm not so big."

He leaned forward. "I want to become big," he said. It smoldered in eyes

and voice; he shook with the intensity of it. "Once I know, from you,

that the thing's worthwhile, I'll sink everything I own and can borrow

into building up a reliable outfit. We'll work secretly for the first

several years, sell through complicated channels, sock away the profits.

Then maybe I'll surface, doctor the story, start paying taxes, move to

Terra--maybe buy my way to a patent of nobility, maybe go into politics,

I don't know, but I'll be big. Do you understand?"

Far too well, Flandry thought.

Ammon dabbed at his glistening forehead. "It wouldn't hurt you, having a

big friend," he said. "Right?"

Associate, please, Flandry thought. Perhaps that, if I must. Never

friend.

Aloud: "I suppose I could cook my log, record how trouble with the boat

caused delay. She's fast but superannuated, and inspections are

lackadaisical. But you haven't yet told me, sir, what the bloody

dripping hell this is all about."

"I will, I will." Ammon mastered his emotions. "It's a lost treasure,

that's what it is. Listen. Five hundred years ago, the Polesotechnic

League had a base here. You've heard?"

Flandry, who had similarly tamed his excitement into alertness, nodded

wistfully. He would much rather have lived in the high and spacious days

of the trader princes, when no distance and no deed looked too vast for

man, than in this twilight of empire. "It got clobbered during the

Troubles, didn't it?" he said.

"Right. However, a few underground installations survived. Not in good

shape. Not safe to go into. Tunnels apt to collapse, full of

nightskulks--you know. Now I thought those vaults might be useful

for--Never mind. I had them explored. A microfile turned up. It gave the

coordinates and galactic orbit of a planetary system out in what's now

no-man's-land. Martian Minerals, Inc., was mining one of the worlds.

They weren't publicizing the fact; you remember what rivalries got to be

like toward the end of the League era. That's the main reason why

knowledge of this system was completely lost. But it was quite a place

for a while."

"Rich in heavy metals," Flandry pounced.

Ammon blinked. "How did you guess?"

"Nothing else would be worth exploiting by a minerals outfit, at such a

distance from the centers of civilization. Yes." A renewed eagerness

surged in Flandry. "A young, metal-rich star, corresponding planets, on

one of them a robotic base … It was robotic, wasn't it? High-grade

central computer--consciousness grade, I'll bet--directing machines that

prospected, mined, refined, stored, and loaded the ships when they

called. Probably manufactured spare parts for them too, and did needful

work on them, besides expanding its own facilities. You see, I don't

suppose a world with that concentration of violently poisonous elements

in its ground would attract people to a manned base. Easier and cheaper

in the long run to automate everything."

"Right. Right." Ammon's chins quivered with his nodding. "A moon,

actually, of a planet bigger than Jupiter. More massive, that is--a

thousand Terras--though the file does say its gravity condensed it to a

smaller size. The moon itself, Wayland they named it, Wayland has about

three percent the mass of Terra but half the surface pull. It's that

dense."

Mean specific gravity circa eleven, Flandry calculated. Uranium,

thorium--probably still some neptunium and plutonium--and osmium,

platinum, rare metals simply waiting to be scooped out--my God! My

greed!

From behind his hard-held coolness he drawled: "A million doesn't seem

extravagant pay for opening that kind of opportunity to you."

"It's plenty for a look-see," Ammon said. "That's all I want of you, a

report on Wayland. I'm taking the risks, not you.

"First off, I'm risking you'll go report our talk, trying for a reward

and a quick transfer elsewhere before my people can get to you. Well, I

don't think that's a very big risk. You're too ambitious and too used to

twisting regulations around to suit yourself. And too smart, I hope. If

you think for a minute, you'll see how I could fix it to get any

possible charges against me dropped. But maybe I've misjudged you.

"Then, supposing you play true, the place could turn out to be no good.

I'll be short a million, for nothing. More than a million, actually.

There's the hire of a partner; reliable ones don't come cheap. And

supplies for him; and transporting them to a spot where you can pick

them and him up after you've taken off; and--oh, no, boy, you consider

yourself lucky I'm this generous."

"Wait a minute," Flandry said. "A partner?"

Ammon leered. "You don't think I'd let you travel alone, do you? Really,

dear boy! What'd prevent your telling me Wayland's worthless when it

isn't, coming back later as a civilian, and 'happening' on it?"

"I presume if I give you a negative report, you'll … request … I

submit to a narcoquiz. And if I didn't report to you at all, you'd know

I had found a prize."

"Well, what if you told them you'd gotten off course somehow and found

the system by accident? You could hope for a reward. I can tell you

you'd be disappointed. Why should the bureaucrats care, when there'd be

nothing in it for them but extra work? I'd lay long odds they'd classify

your 'discovery' an Imperial secret and forbid you under criminal

penalties ever to mention it anywhere. You might guess differently,

though. No insult to you, Dominic. I believe in insurance, that's all.

Right?

"So my agent will ride along, and give you the navigational data after

you're safely away in space, and never leave your side till you've

returned and told me personally what you found. Afterward, as a witness

to your behavior on active duty, a witness who'll testify under

hypnoprobe if need be, why, he'll keep on being my insurance against any

change of heart you might suffer."

Flandry blew a smoke ring. "As you wish," he conceded. "It'll be pretty

cozy, two in a Comet, but I can rig an extra bunk and--Let's discuss

this further, shall we? I think I will take the job, if certain

conditions can be met."

Ammon would have bristled were he able. The Gorzunian sensed his

irritation and growled. "Conditions? From you?"

Flandry waved his cigar. "Nothing unreasonable, sir," he said airily.

"For the most part, precautions that I'm sure you will agree are

sensible and may already have thought of for yourself. And that agent

you mentioned. Not 'he', please. It could get fatally irritating, living

cheek by unwashed jowl with some goon for weeks. I know you can find a

capable and at the same time amiable human female. Right? Right."

He had everything he could do to maintain that surface calm. Beneath it,

his pulse racketed--and not simply because of the money, the risk, the

enjoyment. He had come here on a hunch, doubtless generated by equal

parts of curiosity and boredom. He had stayed with the idea that, if the

project seemed too hazardous, he could indeed betray Ammon and apply for

duty that would keep him beyond range of assassins. Now abruptly a

vision was coming to him, hazy, uncertain, and gigantic.

III

---

Djana was hard to shock. But when the apartment door had closed behind

her and she saw what waited, her "No!" broke free as a near scream.

"Do not be alarmed," said the squatting shape. A vocalizer converted the

buzzes and whistles from its lower beak into recognizable Anglic

syllables. "You have nothing to fear and much to gain."

"You--a man called me--"

"A dummy. It is not desirable that Ammon know you have met me in

private, and surely he has put a monitor onto you."

Djana felt surreptitiously behind her. As expected, the door did not

respond; it had been set to lock itself. She clutched her large

ornamental purse. A stun pistol lay inside. Her past had seen

contingencies.

Bracing herself and wetting her lips, she said, "I don't. Not with

xenos--" and in haste, fearing offense might be taken, "I mean nonhuman

sophonts. It isn't right."

"I suspect a large enough sum would change your mind," the other said.

"You have a reputation for avarice. However, I plan a different kind of

proposition." It moved slowly closer, a lumpy gray body on four thin

legs which brought the head at its middle about level with her waist.

One tentacle sent the single loose garment swirling about in a sinuous

gesture. Another clutched the vocalizer in boneless fingers. The

instrument was being used with considerable skill; it actually achieved

an ingratiating note. "You must know about me in your turn. I am only

Rax, harmless old Rax, the solitary representative of my species on this

world. I assure you my reproductive pattern is sufficiently unlike yours

that I find your assumption comical."

Djana eased a bit. She had in fact noticed the creature during the three

years she herself had been on Irumclaw. A casual inquiry and answer

crossed her recollection, yes, Rax was a dealer in drugs, legal or

illegal, from … where was it? Nobody knew or cared. The planet had

some or other unpronounceable name and orbited in distant parts.

Probably Rax had had to make a hurried departure for reasons of health,

and had drifted about until it stranded at last on this tolerant shore.

Such cases were tiresomely common.

And who could remember all the races in the Terran Empire? Nobody: not

when its bounds, unclear though they were, defined a rough globe 400

light-years across. That volume contained an estimated four million

suns, most with attendants. Maybe half had been visited once or more, by

ships which might have picked up incidental native recruits. And the

hundred thousand or so worlds which enjoyed a degree of repeated contact

with men--often sporadic--and owed a degree of allegiance to the

Imperium--often purely nominal--were too many for a brain to keep track

of.

Djana's eyes flickered. The apartment was furnished for a human, in

abominable taste. He must be the one who had called her. Now he was

gone. Though an inner door stood closed, she never doubted she was alone

with Rax. Silence pressed on her, no more relieved by dull traffic

sounds from outside than the gloom in the windows was by a few street

lights. She grew conscious of her own perfume. Too damn sweet, she

thought.

"Do be seated." Rax edged closer yet, with an awkwardness that suggested

weight on its original planet was significantly lower than Irumclaw's

0.96 g. Did it keep a field generator at home … if it had any concept

akin to "home"?

She drew a long breath, tossed her head so the tresses flew back over

her shoulders, and donned a cocky grin. "I've a living to make," she

said.

"Yes, yes." Rax's lower left tentacle groped ropily in a pouch and

stretched forth holding a bill. "Here. Twice your regular hourly

recompense, I am told. You need but listen, and what you hear should

point the way to earning very much more."

"We-e-ell … " She slipped the money into her purse, found a chair,

drew forth a cigarette and inhaled it into lighting. Her visceral

sensations she identified as part fear--this must be a scheme against

Ammon, who played rough--and part excitement--a chance to make some real

credit? Maybe enough to quit this wretched hustle for good?

Rax placed itself before her. She had no way of reading expressions on

that face.

"I will tell you what information is possessed by those whom I

represent," the vocalizer said. The spoken language, constructed with

pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar in a one-one relationship to

Anglic, rose and fell eerily behind the little transponder. "A junior

lieutenant, Dominic Flandry, was observed speaking several times in

private with Leon Ammon."

Now why should that interest them especially? she wondered, then lost

her thought in her concentration on the words.

"Investigation revealed Ammon's people had come upon something in the

course of excavating in this vicinity. Its nature is known just to him

and a few trusted confidants. We suspect that others who saw were paid

to undergo memory erasure anent the matter, except for one presumably

stubborn person whose corpse was found in Mother Chickenfoot's Lane.

Subsequently you too have been closeted with Ammon and, later, with

Flandry."

"Well," Djana said, "he--"

"Pure coincidence is implausible," Rax declared, "especially when he

could ill afford you on a junior lieutenant's pay. It is also known that

Ammon has quietly purchased certain spacecraft supplies and engaged a

disreputable interplanetary ferrier to take them to the outermost member

of this system and leave them there at a specific place, in a cave

marked by a small radio beacon that will self-activate when a vessel

passes near."

Suddenly Djana realized why Skipper Orsini had sought her out and been

lavish shortly after his return. Rax's outfit had bribed him.

"I can't imagine what you're getting at," she said. A draft of smoke

swirled and bit in her lungs.

"You can," Rax retorted. "Dominic Flandry is a scout-boat pilot. He will

soon depart on his next scheduled mission. Ammon must have engaged him

to do something extra in the course of it. Since the cargo delivered to

Planet Eight included impellers and similar gear, the job evidently

involves study of a world somewhere in the wilderness. Ammon's discovery

was therefore, in all probability, an old record of its existence and

possible high value. You are to be his observer. Knowing Flandry's

predilections, one is not surprised that he should insist on a companion

like you. It follows that you two have been getting acquainted, to make

certain you can endure being cooped together for weeks in a small boat.

"Orsini will flit you to Eight. Flandry will surreptitiously land there,

pick up you and the supplies, and proceed into interstellar space.

Returning, you two will reverse the whole process, and meet in Ammon's

office to report."

Djana sat still.

"You give away nothing by affirming this," Rax stated. "My organization

knows. Where is the lost planet? What is its nature?"

"Who are you working for?" Djana asked mutedly.

"That does not concern you." Rax's tone was mild and Djana took no

umbrage. The gang lords of Irumclaw were a murderous lot. "You owe Ammon

no allegiance," Rax urged. "Rather, you owe him a disfavor. Since you

prefer to operate independently, and thus compete with the houses, you

must pay him for his 'protection.' "

Djana sighed. "If it weren't him, it'd be somebody else."

Rax drew forth a sheaf of bills and riffled them with a fine crisp

sound. She estimated--holy saints!--ten thousand credits. "This for

answering my questions," it said. "Most likely a mere beginning for

you."

She thought, while she inhaled raggedly, If the business looks too

dangerous, I can go tell Leon right away and explain I was playing

along--of course, this bunch might learn I'd talked and I'd have to

skip--A flick of white fury: I shouldn't have to skip! Not ever again!

She built her sentences with care. "Nobody's told me much. You

understand they wouldn't, till the last minute. Your ideas are right,

but they're about as far along as my own information goes."

"Has Flandry said nothing to you?"

She plunged. "All right. Yes. Give me that packet." Having taken the

money, she described what the pilot had been able to reveal to her after

she had lowered his guard for him. (An oddly sweet pair of nights; but

best not think about that.) "He doesn't know the coordinates yet, you

realize," she finished. "Not even what kind of sun it is, except for the

metals. It must be somewhere not too far off his assigned route. But he

says that leaves thousands of possibilities."

"Or more." Rax forgot to control intonation. Was the sawing rhythm that

came out of the speaker an equivalent of its equivalent of an awed

whisper? "So many, many stars … a hundred billion in this one lost

lonely dustmote of a galaxy … and we on the edge, remote in a spiral

arm where they thin toward emptiness … what do we know, what can we

master?"

The voice became flat and businesslike again. "This could be a prize

worth contending for. We would pay well for a report from you. Under

certain circumstances, a million."

What Nicky said he was getting! And Leon's paying me a bare hundred

thousand--Djana shook her head. "I'll be watched for quite a while, Rax,

if Wayland turns out to be any use. What good is a fortune after you've

been blasted?" She shivered. "Or they might be angry enough to

brain-channel me and--" The cigarette scorched her fingers. She ground

it into a disposer and reached for a new one. A million credits, she

thought wildly. A million packs of smokes. But no, that's not it. What

you do is bank it and live off the interest. No huge income, but you'd

be comfortable on it, and safe, and free, free--

"You would require disappearance, certainly," Rax said. "That is part of

the plan."

"Do you mean we … our boat … would never come back?"

"Correct. The Navy will mount a search, with no result. Ammon will not

soon be able to obtain another scout, and in the interim he can be

diverted from his purpose or done away with. You can be taken to a

suitably distant point, to Terra itself if you wish."

Djana started her cigarette. The taste was wrong. "What about, well,

him?"

"Junior Lieutenant Flandry? No great harm need come if the matter is

handled efficiently. For the sums involved, one can afford to hire

technicians and equipment able to remove recent memories from him

without damage to the rest of his personality. He can be left where he

will soon be found. The natural assumption will be that he was captured

by Merseians and hypnoprobed in a random-pattern search for

information."

Rax hunched forward. "Let me make the proposition quite specific," it

continued. "If Wayland turns out to be worthless, you simply report to

Ammon as ordered. When it is safe, you seek me and tell me the details.

I want especially to know as much about Flandry as you can extract from

him. For example, has he anything more in mind concerning this mission

than earning his bribe? You see, my organization may well have uses of

its own for a buyable Navy officer. Since this puts you to no special

effort or hazard, your compensation will be one hundred thousand

credits."

Plus what I've already got in my purse, she exulted, plus Leon's

payment!

"And if the moon is valuable?" she murmured.

"Then you must capture the boat. That should not be difficult. Flandry

will be unsuspicious. Furthermore, our agents will have seen to it that

the crates supposed to contain impellers do not. That presents no

problem; the storage cave is unguarded."

Djana frowned. "Huh? What for? How can he check out the place if he

can't flit around in his spacesuit?"

"It will not be considered your fault if his judgment proves erroneous,

for this or any other cause. But he should be able to do well enough; it

is not as if this were a xenological expedition or the like. The reason

for thus restricting his mobility is that he--young and reckless--will

thereby be less likely to undertake things which could expose you, our

contact, to danger."

"Well!" Djana chuckled. "Nice of you."

"After Flandry is your prisoner, you will steer the boat through a

volume whose coordinates will be given you," Rax finished. "This will

bring you within detection range of a ship belonging to us, which will

make rendezvous and take you aboard. Your reward will go to a million

credits."

"Um-m-m … " Check every angle, girl. The one you don't check is sure

to be the one with a steel trap in it. Djana flinched, recalling when

certain jaws had punished her for disobedience to an influential person.

Rallying, she asked: "Why not just trail the scout?"

"The space vibrations created by an operating hyper-drive are

detectable, instantaneously, to a distance of about one light-year," Rax

said, patient with her ignorance of technology. "That is what limits

communications over any greater reach to physical objects such as

letters or couriers. If our vessel can detect where Flandry's is, his

can do likewise and he may be expected to take countermeasures."

"I see." Djana sat a while longer, thinking her way forward. At last she

looked up and said: "By Jesus, you do tempt me. But I'll be honest, I'm

scared. I know damn well I'm being watched, ever since I agreed to do

this job, and Leon might take it into his head to give me a narcoquiz.

You know?"

"This has also been provided for," Rax pointed. "Behind yonder door is a

hypnoprobe with amnesiagenic attachments. I am expert in its use. If you

agree to help us for the compensation mentioned, you will be shown the

rendezvous coordinates and memorize them. Thereafter your recollection

of this night will be driven from your consciousness."

"What?" It was as if a hand closed around Djana's heart. She sagged back

into her chair. The cigarette dropped from cold fingers.

"Have no fears," the goblin said. "Do not confuse this with

zombie-making. There will be no implanted compulsions, unless you count

a posthypnotic suggestion making you want to explore Flandry's mind and

persuade him to show you how to operate the boat. You will simply awaken

tomorrow in a somewhat disorganized state, which will soon pass except

that you cannot remember what happened after you arrived here. The

suggestion will indicate a night involving drugs, and the money in your

purse will indicate the night was not wasted. I doubt you will worry

long about the matter, especially since you are soon heading into

space."

"I--well--I don't touch the heavy drugs, Rax--"

"Perhaps your client spiked a drink. To continue: Your latent memories

will be buried past the reach of any mere narcoquiz. Two alternative

situations will restimulate them. One will be an interview where Flandry

has told Ammon Wayland is worthless. The other will be his telling you,

on the scene, that it is valuable. In either case, full knowledge will

return to your awareness and you can take appropriate action."

Djana shook her head. "I've been … brain-channeled …

brain-burned--no," she choked. Every detail in the room, a checkerboard

pattern on a lounger, a moving wrinkle on Rax's face, the panels of the

inner door, stood before her with nightmare sharpness. "No, I won't."

"I do not speak of slave conditioning," the other said. "That would make

you too inflexible. Besides, it takes longer than the hour or so we dare

spend. I speak of a voluntary bargain with us which includes your

submitting to a harmless cue-recall amnesia."

Djana rose. The knees shook beneath her. "You, you, you could make a

mistake. No. I'm going. Let me out." She reached into her purse.

She was too late. The slugthrower had appeared. She stared down its

muzzle, "If you do not cooperate tonight," Rax told her, "you are dead.

Therefore, why not give yourself a chance to win a million credits? They

can buy you liberation from what you are."

IV

--

The next stage of the adventure came a month afterward. That was when

the mortal danger began.

The sun that men had once named Mimir burned with four times the

brightness of Sol; but at a distance of five astronomical units it

showed tiny, a bluish-white firespot too intense for the unshielded eye.

Covering its disc with a finger, you became able to see the haze around

it--gas, dust, meteoroids, a nebula miniature in extent but thick as any

to be found anywhere in the known universe--and the spearpoints of light

created by reflection within that nebula. Elsewhere, darkness swarmed

with remoter stars and the Milky Way foamed around heaven.

Somewhat more than four million kilometers from the scoutboat, Regin

spread over two and a half times the sky diameter of Luna seen from

Terra. The day side of the giant planet cast sunlight blindingly off

clouds in its intensely compressed atmosphere. The night side had an

ashen-hued glow of its own, partly from aurora, partly from luminosity

rebounding off a score of moons.

They included Wayland. Though no bigger than Luna, the satellite

dominated the forward viewscreen: for the boat was heading straight down

out of orbit. The vision of stark peaks, glacier fields, barren plains,

craters old and eroded or new and raw, was hardly softened by a thin

blanket of air.

Flandry sent his hands dancing over the pilot board. Technically Comet

class, his vessel was antiquated and minimally equipped. Without a

proper conning computer, he must make his approach manually. It didn't

bother him. Having gotten the needful data during free fall around the

globe, he had only to keep observant of his instruments and direct the

grav drive accordingly. For him it was a dance with the boat for

partner, to the lilt of cosmic forces; and indeed he whistled a waltz

tune through his teeth.

Nonetheless he was taut. The faint vibrations of power, rustle and

chemical-sharp odor of ventilation, pull of the interior weightmaking

field, stood uncommonly strong in his awareness. He heard the blood beat

in his ears.

Harnessed beside him, Djana exclaimed: "You're not aiming for the

centrum. You're way off."

He spared her a look. Even now he enjoyed the sight. "Of course," he

said.

"What? Why?"

"Isn't it obvious? Something mighty damn strange is going on there. I'm

not about to bull in. Far better we weasel in." He laughed. "Though I'd

rather continue tomcatting."

Her features hardened. "If you try to pull any--"

"Ah-ah. No bitching." Flandry gave his attention back to the board and

screens. His voice went on, abstractedly: "I'm surprised at you. I am

for a fact. A hooker so tough albeit delectable, not taking for granted

we'd reconnoiter first. I'm going to land us in that crater--see it?

Ought to be firm ground, though we'll give it a beam test before we cut

the engine. With luck, any of those flying weirdies we saw that happens

to pass overhead should register us as another piece of meteorite. Not

that I expect any will chance by. This may be a miniworld, but it wears

a lot of real estate. I'll leave you inboard and take a verree cautious

lookabout. If all goes well, we'll do some encores, working our way

closer. And don't think I don't wish a particularly sticky hell be

constructed for whatever coprolite brain it was that succeeded in

packing the impeller cases with oxygen bottles."

He had not made that discovery until he was nearing Regin and had broken

out the planetside gear Ammon had assembled to his order. You didn't

need personal flying units on routine surveillance. The last thing you

were supposed to do was land anywhere. They weren't even included in

your emergency equipment. If you ran into trouble, they couldn't help

you.

I should have checked the whole lot when we loaded it aboard on Planet

Eight, he thought. I'm guilty of taking something for granted. How Max

Abrams would ream me out! … Well, I guess Intelligence agents learn

their trade through sad experience like everybody else.

After a string of remarks that made Djana herself blush, he had

seriously considered aborting the Wayland mission. But no. Too many

hazards were involved in a second try, starting with the difficulty of

convincing his fellows that breakdowns had delayed him twice in a row.

And what harm could an utterly lifeless ball of rock do him?

Strangely, the enigmatic things he had seen from orbit increased his

determination to go down. Or perhaps that wasn't so strange. He was

starved for action. Besides, at his age he dared not admit to any girl

that he could be scared.

His whetted senses perceived that she shivered. It was for the first

time in their voyage. But then, she was a creature of cities and

machinery, not of the Big Deep.

And it was a mystery toward which they descended: where a complex of

robots ought to have been at work, or at least passively waiting out the

centuries, an inexplicable crisscross of lines drawn over a hundred

square kilometers in front of the old buildings, and a traffic of

objects like nothing ever seen before except in bad dreams. Daunting,

yes. On a legitimate errand, Flandry would have gone back for

reinforcements. But that was impractical under present circumstances.

Briefly, he felt a touch of pity for Djana. He knew she was as gentle,

loving, and compassionate as a cryogenic drill. But she was beautiful

(small, fine-boned, exquisite features, great blue eyes, honey-gold

hair), which he considered a moral virtue. Apart from insisting that he

prepare meals--and he was undoubtedly far the superior cook--she had

accepted the cramped austerity of the boat with wry good humor. During

their three weeks of travel she had given him freely of her talents,

which commanded top price at home. While her formal education in other

fields was scanty, between bouts she had proved an entertaining

talkmate. Half enemy she might be, but Flandry had allowed himself the

imprudent luxury of falling slightly in love with her, and felt he was a

little in her debt. No other scouting sweep had been as pleasant!

Now she faced the spacefarer's truth, that the one thing we know for

certain about this universe is that it is implacable. He wanted to reach

across and console her.

But the vessel was entering atmosphere. A howl began to penetrate the

hull, which bucked.

"Come on, Jake," Flandry said. "Be a good girl."

"Why do you always call the boat Jake?" the companion asked, obviously

trying to get her mind off the crags lancing toward her.

"Giacobini-Zinner is ridiculous," he answered, "and the code letters

can't be fitted into anything bawdy." I refrain from inquiring what you

were called as a child, he thought. I prefer not to believe in, say, an

Errriintrude Bugglethwaite who invested in a, ah, house name and a

total-body biosculp job … "Quiet, please. This is tricky work. Thin

air means high-velocity winds."

The engine growled. Interior counter-acceleration force did not

altogether compensate for lurching; the deck seemed to stagger.

Flandry's hands flew, his feet shoved pedals, occasionally he spoke an

order to the idiot-grade central computer that the boat did possess. But

he'd done this sort of thing before, often under more difficult

conditions. He'd make planetfall without real trouble--

The flyers came.

He had scarcely a minute's warning of them. Djana screamed as they

whipped from a veil of driving gray cloud. They were metal, bright in

the light of Mimir and of Regin's horizon-scraping dayside crescent.

Wide, ribbed wings upbore sticklike torsos, grotesque empennage, beaks

and claws. They were much smaller than the spacecraft, but they numbered

a score or worse.

They attacked. They could do no real harm directly. Their hammering and

scraping resounded wild in the hull. But however frail by the standards

of a real ship, a Comet was built to resist heavier bufferings.

They did, though, rock it. Wheeling and soaring, they darkened vision.

More terribly, they interfered with radar, sonic beams, every probing of

every instrument. Suddenly, except for glimpses when they flashed aside,

Flandry was piloting blind. The wind sent his craft reeling.

He stabbed forth flame out of the single spitgun in the nose. A flyer

exploded in smoke and fragments. Another, wing sheared across, spun

downward to destruction. The rest were too many, too quickly reacting.

"We've got to get out of here!" he heard himself yell, and crammed on

power. Shock smashed through him. Metal shrieked. The world whirled in

the screens. For an instant, he saw what had happened. Without sight or

sensors, in the turbulence of the air, he had descended further than he

knew. His spurt of acceleration was not vertical. It had side-swiped a

mountaintop.

No time for fear. He became the boat. Two thrust cones remained, not

enough to escape with but maybe enough to set down on and not spatter.

He ignored the flock and fought for control of the drunkenly unbalanced

grav drive. If he made a straight tail-first backdown, the force would

fend off the opposition; he'd have an uncluttered scan aft, which he

could project onto one of the pilot board screens and use for an

eyeballed landing. That was if he could hold her upright. If not, well,

it had been fun living. The noise lessened to wind-whistle, engine

stutter, drumbeat of beaks. Through it he was faintly astonished to hear

Djana. He shot her a glance. Her eyes were closed, her hands laid palm

to palm, and from her lips poured ancient words, over and over. "Hail

Mary, full of grace--"

Her? And he'd thought he'd gotten to know her!

V

-

They landed skull-rattlingly hard. Weakened members in the boat gave way

with screeches and thumps. But they landed.

At once Flandry bent himself entirely to the spitgun. Locked onto target

after target, the beam flashed blue among the attackers that wheeled

overhead. A winged thing slanted downward and struck behind the rim of

the crater where he had settled. A couple of others took severe damage

and limped off. The remainder escorted them. In a few minutes the last

was gone from sight.

No--wait--high above, out of range, a hovering spark in murky heaven?

Flandry focused a viewscreen and turned up the magnification. "Uh-huh."

He nodded. "One of our playmates has stayed behind to keep a beady eye

on us."

"O-o-o-oh-h-h," Djana whimpered.

"Pull yourself together," he snapped. "You know how. Insert Part A in

Slot B, bolt to Section C, et cetera. In case nobody's told you, we have

a problem."

Mainly he was concerned with studying the indicators on the board while

he unharnessed. Some air had been lost, and replenished from the reserve

tanks, but there was no further leakage. Evidently the hull had cracked,

not too badly for self-sealing but enough to make him doubt the

feasibility of returning to space without repairs. Inboard damage must

be worse, for the grav field was off--he moved under Wayland's half a

terrestrial g with a bounding ease that roused no enthusiasm in

him--and, oh-oh indeed, the nuclear generator was dead. Light, heat, air

and water cycles, everything was running off the accumulators.

"Keep watch," he told Djana. "If you see anything peculiar, feel free to

holler."

He went aft, past the chaos of galley and head, the more solidly

battened-down instrument and life-support centers, to the engine room.

An hour's inspection confirmed neither his rosiest hopes nor his

sharpest fears. It was possible to fix Jake, and probably wouldn't take

long: if and only if shipyard facilities were brought to bear.

"So what else is new?" he said and returned forward.

Djana had been busy. She stood in the conn with all the small arms

aboard on a seat behind her--the issue blaster and needier, his private

Merseian war knife--except for the stun pistol she had brought herself.

That was bolstered on her flank. She rested a hand on its iridivory

butt.

"What the deuce?" Flandry exclaimed. "I might even ask. What the trey?"

He started toward her. She drew the gun. "Halt," she said. Her soprano

had gone flat.

He obeyed. She could drop him as he attacked, in this space where there

was no room to dodge, and secure him before he regained consciousness.

Of course, he could perhaps work free of any knots she was able to tie,

but--He swallowed his dismay and studied her. The panic was gone, unless

it dwelt behind that whitened skin and drew those lips into disfiguring

straight lines.

"What's wrong?" he asked slowly. "My intentions are no more shocking

than usual."

"Maybe nothing's wrong, Nicky." She attempted a smile. "I've got to be

careful. You understand that, don't you? You're an Imperial officer and

I'm riding Leon Ammon's rocket. Maybe we can keep on working together.

And maybe not. What's happened here?"

He collected his wits. "Int'resting question," he said. "If you think

this is a trap for you--well, really, my sweet, you know quite well no

functional trap is that elaborate. I'm every bit as baffled as you …

and worried, if that's any consolation. I want nothing at the moment but

to get back with hide entire to vintage wine, gourmet food, good

conversation, good music, good books, good tobacco, a variety of

charming ladies, and everything else that civilization is about."

He was ninety-nine percent honest. The remaining one percent involved

pocketing the rest of his million. Though not exclusively …

The girl didn't relax. "Well, can we?"

He told her what the condition of the boat was.

She nodded. Wings of amber-colored hair moved softly past delicate high

cheekbones. "I thought that was more or less it," she said. "What do you

figure to do?"

Flandry shifted stance and scratched the back of his neck. "Another

interesting question. We can't survive indefinitely, you realize.

Considering the outside temperature and other factors, I'd say that if

we throttle all systems down to a minimum--and if we don't have to fire

the spitgun again--we have accumulator energy for three months. Food for

longer, yes. But when the thermometer drops to minus a hundred, even

steak sandwiches can only alleviate; they cannot cure."

She stamped a foot. "Will you stop trying to be funny!"

Why, I thought I was succeeding, Flandry wanted to say, and

incidentally, that motion of yours had fascinating effects in these

snug-fitting pullovers we're wearing. Do it again?

Djana overcame her anger. "We need help," she said.

"No point in trying to radio for it," Flandry said. "Air this thin

supports too little ionosphere to send waves far past the horizon.

Especially when the sun, however bright, is so distant. We might be able

to bounce signals off Regin or another moon, except that that'd require

aiming and monitoring gear Jake doesn't carry."

She stared at him in frank surprise. "Radio?"

"To the main computer at the mining centrum. It was originally a

top-level machine, you know, complete with awareness--whatever it may

have suffered since. And it commanded repair and maintenance equipment

as well. If we could raise it and get a positive response, we should

have the appropriate robots here in a few hours, and be off on the rest

of my circuit in a few days."

Flandry smiled lopsidedly. "I wish now I had given it a call from

orbit," he went on. "But with the skewball things we saw--we've lost

that option. We shall simply have to march there in person and see what

can be done."

Djana tensed anew. "I thought that's what you'd figure on," she said,

winter bleak. "Nothing doing, lover. Too chancy."

"What else--"

She had hardly begun to reply when he knew. The heart stumbled in him.

"I didn't join you blind," she said. "I studied the situation first,

whatever I could learn, including the standard apparatus on these boats.

They carry several couriers each. One of those can make it back to

Irumclaw in a couple of weeks, with a message telling where we are and

what we're sitting on."

"But," he protested. "But. Listen, the assault on us wasn't likely the

last attempt. I wouldn't guarantee we can hold out. We'd better leave

here, duck into the hills--"

"Maybe. We'll play that as it falls. However, I am not passing up the

main chance for survival, which is to bring in a Navy ship." Djana's

laugh was a yelp. "I can tell what you're thinking," she continued.

"There I'll be, along on your job. How many laws does that break? The

authorities will check further. When they learn about your taking a

bribe to do Ammon's work for him in an official vessel--I suppose at a

minimum the sentence'll be life enslavement."

"What about you?" he countered.

Her lids drooped. Her lips closed and curved. She moved her hips from

side to side. "Me? I'm a victim of circumstances. I was afraid to

object, with you wicked men coercing me … till I got this chance to do

the right thing. I'm sure I can make your commandant see it that way and

give me an executive pardon. Maybe even a reward. We're good friends,

really, Admiral Julius and me."

"You won't get through the wait here without my help," Flandry said.

"Certainly not if we're attacked."

"I might or might not," she replied. Her expression thawed. "Nicky,

darling, why must we fight? We'll have time to work out a plan for you.

A story or--or maybe you can hide somewhere with supplies, and I can

come back later and get you, I swear I will--" She swayed in his

direction. "I swear I want to. You've been wonderful. I won't let you

go."

"Regardless," he said, "you insist on sending a message."

"Yes."

"Can you launch a courier? What if I refuse?"

"Then I'll stun you, and tie you, and torture you till you agree," she

said, turned altogether impersonal. "I know a lot about that."

Abruptly it blazed from her: "You'll never imagine how much I know!

You'd die before I finished. Remember your boasting to me about the

hardships you've met, a poor boy tiying to get ahead in the service on

nothing but ability? If you could've heard me laughing inside while I

kissed you! I came up from slavery--in the Black Hole of Jihannath--what

I've been through makes the worst they've thought of in Irumclaw Old

Town look like a crèche game--I'm not going back to hell again--as God

is my witness, I'm not!" She drew a shaking breath and damped the vizor

once more into place. From a pocket she fetched a slip of paper. "This

is the message," she said.

Flandry balanced on the balls of his feet. He might be able to take her,

if he acted fast and luck fell his way … he just might … And swiftly

as a stab, he knew the risk was needless.

He gasped.

"What's the matter?" Djana's question wavered near hysteria.

He shook himself. "Nothing," he said. "All right, you win, let's ship

your dispatch off."

The couriers were near the main airlock. He walked in advance, before

her steady gun muzzle, though she knew the location. For that matter,

the odds were she could figure out how to activate them herself. She had

been quick to learn the method of putting the boat on a homeward

course--feed the destination coordinates to the autopilot, lock the

manual controls, et cetera--when he met her request for precautionary

instruction. These gadgets, four in number, were simpler yet.

Inside each torpedo shape--120 centimeters long, but light enough for a

man to lift under Terran gravity--were packed the absolute minimum of

hyperdrive and grav-drive machinery; sensors and navigational computer

to guide it toward a preset goal; radio to beep when it neared;

accumulators for power; and a tiny space for the payload, which could be

a document, a tape, or whatever else would fit.

Ostentatiously obedient, Flandry opened one compartment and stepped

aside while Djana laid in her letter and closed the shell. Irumclaw's

coordinates were stenciled on it for easy reference and she watched him

turn the control knobs. He slid the courier forward on the launch rack.

Pausing, he said: "I'd like to program this for a sixty-second delay, if

you don't mind."

"Why?"

"So we can get back to the conn and watch it take off. To be sure it

does, you know."

"M-m-m--that makes sense." Djana hefted the gun. "I'm keeping you

covered till it's outbound, understand."

"Logical. Afterward, can we both be uncovered?"

"Be still!"

Flandry started the mechanism and returned forward with her. They stared

out.

The view was of desolation. Jake lay close by the crater wall, which

sloped steeply aloft until its rim stood fanged in heaven, three

kilometers above. Its palisades reached so far that they vanished under

the near horizon before their opposite side became visible. The darkling

rock was streaked with white, that also covered the floor: carbon

dioxide and ammonia snow. This was beginning to vaporize in Wayland's

sixteen-day time of sunlight; fogs boiled and mists steamed, exposing

the bluish gleam of eternal water ice.

Overhead the sky was deep violet, almost black. Stars glittered wanly

across most of it, for at this early hour Mimir's fierce disc barely

cleared the ringwall in that area where the latter went behind the curve

of the world. Regin was half a dimness mottled with intricate cloud

patterns, half a shining like burnished steel.

A whitter of wind came in through the hull.

Behind Flandry, Djana said with unexpected wistfulness: "When the

courier's gone, Nicky, will you hold me? Will you be good to me?"

He made no immediate reply. His shoulder and stomach muscles ached from

tension.

The torpedo left its tube. For a moment it hovered, while the idiot

pseudo-brain within recognized it was on a solid body and which way was

up. It rose. Once above atmosphere, it would take sights on beacons such

as Betelgeuse and lay a course to Irumclaw.

Except--yes! Djana wailed. Flandry whooped. The spark high above had

struck. As one point of glitter, the joined machines staggered across

the sky.

Flandry went to the viewscreen and set the magnification. The torpedo

had nothing but a parchment-thin aluminum skin, soon ripped by the

flyer's beak while the flyer's talons held tight. The courier had ample

power to shake off its assailant, but not the acumen to do so. Besides,

the stresses would have wrecked it anyway. It continued to rise, but

didn't get far before some critical circuit was broken. That killed it.

The claws let go and it plummeted to destruction.

"I thought that'd happen," Flandry murmured.

The flyer resumed its station. Presently three others joined it. "They

must've sensed our messenger, or been called," Flandry said. "No use

trying to loft more, eh? We need their energy packs worse for other

things."

Djana, who had stood numbed, cast her gun aside and crumpled weeping

into his arms. He stroked her hair and made soothing noises.

At last she pulled herself together, looked at him, and said, still

gulping and hiccoughing: "You're glad, aren't you?"

"Well, I can't say I'm sorry," he admitted.

"Y-y-you'd rather be dead than--"

"Than a slave? Yes, cliché or not, 'fraid so."

She considered him for a while that grew. "All right," she said most

quietly. "That makes two of us."

VI

--

He had topped the ringwall when the bugs found him.

His aim was to inspect the flyer which had crashed on the outer slope,

while Djana packed supplies for the march. Perhaps he could get some

clue as to what had gone wrong here. The possibility that those

patrolling would spot him and attack seemed among the least of the

hazards ahead. He could probably find a cave or crag or crevasse in

time, a shelter where they couldn't get at him, on the rugged

craterside. Judiciously applied at short range, the blaster in his hip

sheath ought to rid him of them, in view of what the spitgun had

accomplished--unless, of course, they summoned so many reinforcements

that he ran out of charge.

Nothing happened. Tuning his spacesuit radio through its entire range of

reception, he came upon a band where there was modulation: clicks and

silences, a code reeling off with such speed that in his ears it sounded

almost like an endless ululation, high-pitched and unhuman. He was

tempted to transmit a few remarks on those frequencies, but decided not

to draw unnecessary attention to himself. At their altitude, he might

well be invisible to the flyers.

The rest of the available radio spectrum was silent, except for the

seethe and crackle of cosmic static. And the world was silent, except

for the moan of wind around him, the crunching of snow and rattling of

stones as his boots struck, the noise of his own breath and heartbeat.

The crater floor was rock, ice, drift of snow and mists, wan

illumination that would nonetheless have burned him with ultraviolet

rays had his faceplate let them past. Clouds drove ragged across alien

constellations and the turbulent face of Regin. The crater wall lifted

brutal before him.

Climbing it was not too difficult. Erosion had provided ample footing

and handholds; and in this gravity, even burdened with space armor he

was lighter than when nude under Terran pull. He adapted to the changed

ratio of weight and inertia with an ease that would have been

unconscious had he not remembered it was going to cause Djana some

trouble and thereby slow the two of them down. Other than keeping a

nervous eye swiveling skyward, the chief nuisance he suffered was due to

imperfections of the air renewal and thermostatic units. He was soon

hot, sweating, and engulfed in stench.

I'll be sure to fix that before we start! he thought. And give the

service crew billy hell when (if) I return. Momentarily, the spirit

sagged in him: What's the use? They're sloppy because the higher

echelons are incompetent because the Empire no longer really cares about

holding this part of the marches … In my grandfather's day we were

still keeping what was ours, mostly.

In my father's day, the slogan became "conciliation and consolidation,"

which means retreat. Is my day--my very own personal bit of daylight

between the two infinite darknesses--is it going to turn into the Long

Night?

He clamped his teeth together and climbed more vigorously. Not if I can

help it!

The bugs appeared.

They hopped from behind boulders and ice banks, twenty or more, soaring

toward him. Some thirty centimeters long, they had ten claw-footed legs

each, a tail ending in twin spikes, a head on which half a dozen

antennae moved. Mimir's light shimmered purple off their intricately

armored bodies.

For a second Flandry seriously wondered if he had lost his mind. The old

records said Wayland was barren, always had been, always would be. He

had expected nothing else. Life simply did not evolve where cold was

this deep and permanent, air this tenuous, metal this dominant,

background radiation this high. And supposing a strange version of it

could, Mimir was a young star, that had coalesced with its planets only

a few hundred megayears ago from a nebula enriched in heavy atoms by

earlier stellar generations; the system hadn't yet finished condensing,

as witness the haze around the sun and the rate of giant meteorite

impacts; there had not been time for life to start.

Thus Flandry's thought flashed. It ended when the shapes were

murderously upon him.

Two landed on his helmet. He heard the clicks, felt the astonishing

impact. Looking down, he saw others at his waist, clinging to his legs,

swarming around his boots. Jaws champed, claws dug. They found the

joints in his armor and went to work.

No living thing smaller than a Llynathawrian elephant wolf should have

been able to make an impression on the alloys and plastics that encased

Flandry. He saw shavings peel off and fall like sparks of glitter.

He saw water vapor puff white from the first pinhole by his left ankle.

The creature that made it gnawed industriously on.

Flandry yelled an obscenity. He shook one loose and managed to kick it.

The shock of striking that mass hurt his toes. The bug didn't arc far,

nor was it injured. It sprang back to the fray. Flandry was trying to

pluck another off. It clung too strongly for him.

He drew his blaster, set it to needle beam and low intensity, laid the

muzzle against the carapace, and pulled the trigger.

The creature did not smoke or explode or do whatever else a normal

organism would. But after two or three seconds it let go, dropped to the

ground and lay inert.

The rest continued their senseless, furious attack. Flandry cooked them

off him and slew those that hadn't reached him with a series of energy

bolts. No organism that size, that powerful, that heavily shelled, ought

to have been that vulnerable to his brief, frugal beams.

The last two were on his back where he couldn't see them. He widened the

blaster muzzle and fanned across the air renewal unit. They dropped off

him. The heat skyrocketed the temperature in his suit and drove gas

faster out of the several leaks. Flandry's eardrums popped painfully.

His head roared and whirled.

Training paid off. Scarcely aware of what he did, he slapped sealpatches

on the holes and bled the reserve tank for a fresh atmosphere. Only then

did he sit down, gasp, shudder, and finally wet his mummy-dry mouth from

the water tube.

Afterward he was able to examine the dead bugs. Throwing a couple of

them into his pack, he resumed climbing. From the top of the ringwall he

discerned the wrecked flyer and slanted across talus and ice patches to

reach it. The crash had pretty well fractured it to bits, which

facilitated study. He collected a few specimen parts and returned to

Jake.

The trip was made in a growingly grim silence, which he scarcely broke

when he re-entered the boat. Aloneness and not knowing had ground Djana

down. She sped to welcome him. He gave her a perfunctory kiss, demanded

food and a large pot of coffee, and brushed past her on his way to the

workshop.

VII

---

They had about 200 kilometers to go. That was the distance, according to

the maps Flandry had made in orbit, from the scoutboat's resting place

to a peak so high that a transmission from it would be line-of-sight

with some of the towering radio transceiver masts he had observed at

varying separations from the old computer centrum.

"We don't want to get closer than we must," he explained to the girl.

"We want plenty of room for running, if we find out that operations have

been taken over by something that eats people."

She swallowed. "Where could we run to?"

"That's a good question. But I won't lie down and die gracefully. I'm

far too cowardly for that."

She didn't respond to his smile. He hoped she hadn't taken his remark

literally, even though it contained a fair amount of truth.

The trip could be shortened by crossing two intervening maria. Flandry

refused. "I prefer to skulk," he said, laving out a circuitous path

through foothills and a mountain range that offered hiding places. While

it would often make the going tough, and Djana was inexperienced and not

in training, and they would be burdened with Ammon's supplies and

planetside gear, he hoped they could average thirty or forty kilometers

per twenty-four hours. A pitiful few factors worked in their favor.

There was the mild gravity and the absence of rivers to ford and brush

to struggle through. There was the probably steady weather. Since

Wayland always turned the same face to Regin, there was continuous

daylight for the span of their journey, except at high noon when the

planet would eclipse Mimir. There was an ample supply of stimulants.

And, Flandry reflected, it helps to travel scared.

He decreed a final decent meal before departure, and music and

lovemaking and a good sleep while the boat's sensors kept watch. The

party fell rather flat; Djana was too conscious that this might be the

last time. Flandry made no reproaches. He did dismiss any vague ideas he

might have entertained about trying for a long-term liaison with her.

They loaded up and marched. More accurately, they scrambled, across the

crater wall and into a stretch of sharp hills and wind-polished slippery

glaciers. Flandry allowed ten minutes' rest per hour. He spent most of

those periods with map, gyrocompass, and sextant, making sure they were

still headed right. When Djana declared she could do no more, he said

calculatedly, "Yes, I understand; you're no use off your back." She spat

her rage and jumped to her feet.

I mustn't drive her too hard, Flandry realized. Gradual strengthening

will get us where we're going faster. In fact, without that she might

not make it at all.

Does that matter?

Yes, it does, I can't abandon her.

Why not? She'd do the same for me.

Um-m-m … I don't know exactly why … let's say that in spite of

everything, she's a woman. Waste not, want not.

When she did begin reeling as she walked, he agreed to pitch camp and

did most of the chores alone.

First he selected a spot beneath an overhanging cliff. "So our winged

chums won't see us," he explained chattily, "or drop on us their

equivalent of what winged chums usually drop. You will note, however,

that an easy route will take us onto the top of the cliff, if we should

have groundborne callers. From there we can shoot, throw rocks, and

otherwise hint to them that they're not especially welcome." Slumped in

exhaustion against a boulder, she paid him no heed.

He inflated the insulating floor of the sealtent and erected its

framework. The wind gave him trouble, flapping the fabric he stretched

across until he got it secured. Because the temperature had risen to

about minus fifty, he didn't bother with extra layers, but merely filled

the cells of the one skin with air.

To save accumulator charge, he worked the pump by hand, and likewise

when it evacuated the tent's interior. Extreme decompression wasn't

needed, since the Waylander atmosphere was mostly noble gases and

nitrogen. The portable air renewer he had placed inside, together with a

glower for heat, took care of remaining poisonous vapors and excess

carbon dioxide, once he had refilled the tent with oxygen at 200

millibars. (The equipment for all this was heavy. But it was

indispensable, at least until Djana got into such condition that she

didn't frequently need the relief of shirtsleeve environment. And she'd

better! Given the limitations of what they could carry, they could make

possibly fifteen stops that utilized it.) While renewer and glower did

their work, Flandry chipped water ice to melt for drinking and cooking.

They entered through the plastic airlock. He showed Djana how to bleed

her spacesuit down to ambient pressure. When they had taken off their

armor, she lay on the floor and watched him with eyes glazed by fatigue.

He fitted together his still, put it on the glower, and filled it with

ice. "Why are you doing that?' she whispered.

"Might have unpleasant ingredients," he answered. "Gases like ammonia

come off first and are taken up by the activated colloids in this

bottle. We can't let them contaminate our air; our one renewer's busy

handling the stuff we breathe out; and besides, when we strike camp I

must pump as big a fraction as I can manage back into its tank. When the

water starts boiling, I shut the valve to the gas-impurity flask and

open the one to the water can. We can't risk heavy metal salts,

especially on a world where they must be plentiful. Doesn't take but a

micro quantity of plutonium, say, this far from medical help, to kill

you in quite a nasty fashion. A propos, I suppose you know we daren't

smoke in a pure oxy atmosphere."

She shuddered and turned her glance from the desolation in the ports.

Dinner revived her somewhat. Afterward she sat hugging her legs, chin on

knees, and watched him clean the utensils. In the cramped space, his

movements were economical. "You were right," she said gravely. "I

wouldn't have a prayer without you."

"A hot meal, albeit freeze-dried, does beat pushing a concentrate bar

through your chowlock and calling it lunch, eh?"

"You know what I mean, Nicky. What can I do?"

"You can take your turn watching for monsters," he said immediately.

She winced. "Do you really think--"

"No. I don't think. Too few data thus far to make it worth the trouble.

Unhappily, though, one datum is the presence of two or more kinds of

critter whose manners are as deplorable as they are inexplicable."

"But they're machines!"

"Are they?"

She stared at him from under tangled tawny bangs. He said while he

labored: "Where does 'robot' leave off and 'organism' begin? For

hundreds of years there've been sensor-computer-effector systems more

intricate and versatile than some kinds of organic life. They function,

perceive, ingest, have means to repair damage and to be reproduced; they

homeostatize, if that horrible word is the one I want; certain of them

think. None of it works identically with the systems evolved by organic

animals and sophonts--but it works, and toward very similar ends.

"Those bugs that attacked me have metal exoskeletons underneath that

purple enamel, and electronic insides. That's why they succumbed so

easily to my blaster: high heat conductivity, raising the temperature of

components designed for Wayland's natural conditions. But they're

machinery as elaborate as any I've ever ruined. As I told you, I hadn't

the time or means to do a proper job of dissection. As near as I could

tell, though, they run off accumulators. Their feelers are magnificently

precise sensors--magnetic, electric, radionic, thermal, et cetera. They

have optical and audio systems as well. In fact, with one exception,

they're such gorgeous engineering that it's a semantic quibble whether

to call them robots or artificial animals.

"Same thing, essentially, for the flyers--which, by the way, I'm tempted

to call snapdragonflies. They get their lift from the wings and a VTOL

turbojet; they use beak and claws to rip rather than grind metal; but

they have sensors and computers akin to the bugs'. And they seem able to

act more independently, as you'd expect with a larger 'brain.' "

He put away the last dish, settled back, and longed for a cigarette.

"What do you mean by 'one exception'?" Djana asked.

"I can imagine a robotic ecology, based on self-reproducing solar-cell

units that'd perform the equivalent of photosynthesis," Flandry said. "I

seem to recall it was actually experimented with once. But these things

we've met don't have anything I can identify as being for nourishment,

repair, or reproduction. No doubt they have someplace to go for

replacement parts and energy recharges--someplace where new ones are

also manufactured--most likely the centrum area. But what about the

wrecked ones? There doesn't seem to be any interest in reclaiming those

marvelous parts, or even the metal. It's not an ecology, then; it's

open-ended. Those machines have no purpose except destruction."

He drew breath. "In spite of which," he said, "I don't believe they're

meant for guarding this world or any such job. Because who save a

lunatic would build a fighting robot and omit guns?

"Somehow, Djana, Wayland's come down with a plague of monsters. Until we

know how many of what kinds, I suggest we proceed on the assumption that

everything we meet will want to do us in."

A few times in the course of the next several Terran days, the humans

concealed themselves when shapes passed by. These might be flyers

cruising far overhead, in one case stooping on some prey hidden by a

ridge. Or a pair of dog-sized, huge-jawed, sensor-bristling hunters

loped six-legged on a quest; or a bigger object,vhorned and

spike-tailed, rumbled on caterpillar treads along the bottom of a

ravine. Twice Flandry lay prone and watched combats: bugs swarming over

a walking red globe with lobsterish claws; a constrictor shape entangled

with a mobile battering ram. Both end results appeared to confirm his

deductions. The vanquished were left where they fell while the victors

resumed prowling. Remnants from earlier battles indicated the same

aftermath. Otherwise the journey was nothing but a struggle to make

distance. There was little opportunity while afoot, little wakefulness

while at rest, to think about the significance of what had been seen.

Nor did Flandry worry about encountering a killer. If it happened, it

happened. On the whole, he didn't expect that kind of trouble … yet.

This was too vast and rugged a land for any likelihood of ft. Given due

caution, he and Djana ought to make their first objective. What occurred

after that might be a different story.

He did notice that the radio traffic got steadily thicker on the

nonstandard band the robots used. No surprise. He was nearing what had

been the center of operations, which must still be the center of

whatever the hell was going on nowadays.

Hell indeed, he thought through the dullness of the exhaustion. Did

somebody sabotage Wayland, maybe long ago, by installing a predator

factory? Or was it perhaps an accident? People may have fought

hereabouts, and I suppose a nearby explosion could derange the main

computer.

None of the guesses seemed reasonable. The beast machines couldn't offer

effective opposition to modern weapons. They threatened the lives of two

marooned humans; but a single spacecraft, well-armed, well-equipped with

detectors, crew alerted to the situation, could probably annihilate them

with small difficulty. That fact ruled out sabotage--didn't it? As for

damage to the ultimate control engine: Imprimis, it must have had heavy

shielding, plus extensive self-repair capability, the more so in view of

the meteorite hazard. Secundus, assuming it did sustain permanent harm,

that implied a loss of components; it would then scarcely be able to

design and produce these superbly crafted gargoyles.

Flandry gave up wondering.

The time came when he and Djana halted within an hour of the mountaintop

that was their goal. They found a cave, screened by tall pinnacles,

wherein they erected the sealtent. "It's not going any further," the man

said. "Among other reasons, you know how long it takes to raise and to

knock down again; and we can't stand many more losses of unrecovered

oxygen each time we break camp. So if we don't succeed in getting help,

and in particular if we provoke a hunt for us, the burden won't be worth

carrying. This is a nice, hard-to-find, defensible spot to sit in."

"When do we call?" the girl asked.

"When we've corked off for about twelve hours," Flandry said. "I want to

be well rested."

She herself was tired enough that she dropped straight into sleep.

In the "morning" his spirits were somewhat restored. He whistled as he

led the way upward, and when he stood on the peak he declaimed. "I name

thee Mt. Maidens." All the while, though, his attention ranged ahead.

Behind and on either side was the familiar jumble of rock, ice, and inky

shadows. Above gloomed the sky, its scattered stars and clouds, Mimir's

searing brilliance now very near the dim, bright-edged shield of Regin.

The wind whimpered around. He was glad to be inside his warm if smelly

armor.

Ahead, as his topographical maps had revealed, the mountain dropped with

a steepness that would have been impossible under higher gravity. The

horizon was flat, betokening the edge of the plain where the centrum

lay, and the squares he had seen, and he knew not what else. Through

binoculars he made out the cruciform tops of four radio transceiver

masts. Those had risen since man abandoned Wayland; others were

scattered about in the wilds; from orbit, he had identified a few as

being under construction by robots of recognizable worker form. He had

considered making for one of those sites instead of here, but decided

against it. That kind of robot was too specialized, also in its "brain,"

to understand his problem. Besides, the nearest was dangerously far from

Jake's resting place.

He unfolded a light tripod-based directional transmitter. He plugged in

the ancillary apparatus, including a jack to his own helmet radio.

Squatting, he directed the assembly in its rotation until it had locked

onto one of the masts. Djana waited. Her face showed still more gaunt

and grimy than his, her eyes hollow and fever-bright.

"Here goes," Flandry said.

"O God, have mercy, help us," breathed in his earplugs. He wondered

briefly, pityingly, if religion was what had kept her going, ever since

her nightmare childhood. But he had to tell her to keep silence.

He called on the standard band. "Two humans, shipwrecked, in need of

assistance. Respond." And again. And again. Nothing answered but the

fire-crackle of cosmic energies.

He tried on the robots' band. The digital code chattered with no

alteration that he could detect.

He tried other frequencies.

After an hour or more, he unplugged and rose. His muscles ached, his

mouth was parched, his voice came hoarse out of a roughened throat. "No

go, I'm afraid."

Djana had been seated on the sanitary unit from her pack, which doubled

as a stool protecting against the elemental cold beneath. He had watched

her shrink further and further into herself. "So we're finished," she

mumbled.

He sighed. "The circumstances could be more promising. The big computer

should've replied instantly to a distress call." He paused. The wind

blew, the stars jeered. He straightened. "I'm going for a first-hand

look."

"Out in the open?" She scrambled erect. Her gauntlets closed spastically

around his. "You'll be swarmed and killed!"

"Not necessarily. We saw from the boat, things do appear to be different

yonder from elsewhere. For instance, none of the accumulated wreckage

you'd expect if fighting went on. Anyhow, it's our last resort." Flandry

patted her in a fatherly way, which he might as well under present

conditions. "You'll stay in the tent, of course, and wait for me."

She moistened her lips. "No, I'll come along," she said.

"Whoa! You could get scragged."

"Rather that than starve to death, which I will if you don't make it. I

won't handicap you, Nicky. Not any more. If we aren't loaded down the

way we were, I can keep up with you. And I'll be extra hands and eyes."

He pondered. "Well, if you insist." She's more likely to be an asset

than not--a survivor type like her.

Sardonically: Yes, just like her, I suspect she's got more than one

motive for this. Exemplia gratia, to make damn sure I don't gain

anything she doesn't get in on.

Not that a profit seems plausible.

VIII

----

As they neared the plain, Mimir went into eclipse.

The last arc of brilliance edging Regin vanished with the sun. Instead,

the planet showed as a flattened black disc overlaid with faint,

flickering auroral glow and ringed with sullen red where light was

refracted through atmosphere.

Flandry had anticipated it. The stars, suddenly treading forth many and

resplendent, and the small crescents of two companion moons, ought to

give sufficient illumination for cautious travel. At need, he and Djana

could use their flashbeams, though he would rather not risk drawing

attention.

He had forgotten how temperature would tumble. Fog started forming

within minutes, until the world was swirling shapeless murk. It gave way

after a while to snow borne on a lashing, squealing wind. Carbon dioxide

mostly, he guessed; maybe some ammonia. He leaned into the thrust,

squinted at his gyrocompass, and slogged on.

Djana caught his arm. "Shouldn't we wait?" he barely heard through the

noise.

He shook his head before he remembered that to her he had become a

shadow. "No. A chance to make progress without being spotted."

"First luck we've had. Thanks, Jesus!"

Flandry refrained from observing that when the storm ended they might be

irrevocably far into a hostile unknown. What had they to lose?

For a time, as they groped, he thought the audio pickups in his helmet

registered a machine rumble. Did he actually feel the ground quiver

beneath some great moving mass? He changed direction a trifle, without

saying anything to the girl.

In this region, eclipse lasted close to two hours. The station would

have been located on farside, escaping the darknesses altogether, except

for the offsetting advantage of having Regin high in the night sky. When

full, the planet must flood this hemisphere with soft radiance, an

impossibly beautiful sight.

Though I doubt the robots ever gave a damn about scenery, Flandry

thought, peering down to guide his boots past boulders and drifts.

Unless maybe the central computer … yes, I suppose. Imperial

technology doesn't use many fully conscious machines--little need for

them when we're no longer adventuring into new parts of the galaxy--so

I, at any rate, know less about them than my ancestors did. Still, I can

guess that a "brain" that powerful would necessarily develop interests

outside its regular work. Its junction--its desire, to get

anthropomorphic--was to serve the human masters. But in between

pros-pectings, constructions, visiting ships, when routine could only

have occupied a minor part of its capacity, did it turn sensors onto the

night sky and admire?

Daylight began to filter through the snowfall. The wind died to a

soughing. The ground flattened rapidly. Before precipitation had quite

ended, fog was back, the newly frozen gases subliming under Mimir's rays

and recondensing in air.

Flandry said, low and by sonic transmission: "Radio silence. Move quiet

as you can." It was hardly a needful order. Earplugs were loud with

digital code and there came a metallic rattle from ahead.

Once more Wayland took Flandry by surprise. He had expected the mists to

lift slowly, as they'd done near dawn, giving him and Djana time to make

out something of what was around them before they were likely to be

noticed. His observations in orbit had indicated as much. For minutes

the whiteness did veil them. Two meters away, wet ice and rock, tumbling

rivulets, steaming puddles, faded into smoky nothing.

It broke apart. Through the rifts he saw the plain and the machines. The

holes widened with tearing rapidity. The fog turned into cloudlets which

puffed aloft and vanished.

Djana screamed.

Knowledge struck through Flandry: Damn me for a witling! Why didn't I

think? It takes a long while to heat things up again after half a month

of night. But not after two hours. And evaporation goes fast at low

pressures. What I saw from space, and assumed were lingering ground

hazes, were clouds higher up, like those I see steaming away above us--

That was at the back of his brain. Most of him saw what surrounded him.

The blaster sprang into his hand.

Though the mountain was not far behind, soaring from a knife-edge

boundary, he and Djana had passed by the nearest radio mast and were

down on the plain. Like other Waylander maria, it was not perfectly

level; it rolled, reared in scattered needles and minor craters, seamed

itself with narrow cracks, was bestrewn with rocks and overlaid in

places by ice banks. The travelers had entered the section that was

marked into squares. More than a kilometer apart, the lines ran arrow

straight, east and west, north and south, further than he cpuld see

before curvature shut off vision. He happened to be near one and could

identify it as a wide streak of Black granules driven permanently into

the stone.

What he truly saw in that moment was the robots.

A hundred meters to his right went three of the six-legged lopers.

Somewhat further off on his left rolled a horned and treaded giant.

Still further ahead, but not too far to catch him, straggled half a

dozen different monstrosities. Bugs by the score leaped and crawled

across the ground. Flyers were slanting down the sky. He threw a look to

rear and saw retreat cut off by a set of legs upbearing a circular saw.

Djana cast herself on her knees. Flandry crouched above, teeth skinned,

and waited in the racket of his heart for the first assailant.

There was none.

The killers ignored them.

Nor did they pay attention to each other.

While not totally unexpected, the relief sent Flandry's mind whirling.

When he had recovered, he saw that the machines were converging on a

point. Nothing appeared above the horizon; their goal was too distant.

He knew what it was, though--the central complex of buildings.

Djana began to laugh, wilder and wilder. Flandry didn't think they could

afford hysteria. He hauled her to her feet. "Turn off that braying

before I shake it out of you!" When words didn't work, he took her by

her ankles, held her upside down, and made his threat good.

While she sobbed and gulped and wrestled her way back to control, he

held her in a more gentle embrace and studied the robots across her

shoulder. Most were in poor shape, holes torn in their skins, limbs

missing. No wonder he'd heard them rattle and clank in the fog.

Some looked unhurt aside from minor scratches and dents. Probably their

accumulators were about drained.

In the end, he could explain to her: "I always figured those which

survived the battles would get recharge and repair in this area. Um-m-m

… it can't well serve all Wayland … I daresay the critters never

wander extremely far from it … and we did spot construction work, the

setup's being steadily expanded, probably new centers are planned …

Anyhow, this place is trucial. Elsewhere, they're programmed to attack

anything that moves and isn't like their own particular breed. Here,

they're perfect lambs. Or so goes my current guess."

"W-we're safe, then?"

"I wouldn't swear to that. What's caused this whole insanity? But I do

think we can proceed."

"Where to?"

"The centrum, of course. Giving those fellows a respectful berth. They

seem to be headed offside. I imagine their R & R stations lie some ways

from the main computer's old location."

"Old?"

"We don't know if it exists any longer," Flandry reminded her.

Nonetheless he walked with ebullience. He was still alive. How marvelous

that his arms swung, his heels smote ground, his lungs inhaled, his

unwashed scalp itched! Regin had begun to wax, the thinnest of bows

drawing back from Mimir's incandescent arrowpoint. Elsewhere glittered

stars. Djana walked silent, exhausted by emotion. She'd recover, and

when he got her back inside the sealtent …

He was actually whistling as they crossed the next line. A moment later

he took her arm and pointed. "Look," he said.

A new kind of robot was approaching from within the square. It was about

the size of a man. The skin gleamed golden. Iridescence was lovely over

the great batlike wings that helped the springing to its two long hoofed

and spurred legs. The body was a horizontal barrel, a balancing tail

behind, a neck and head rearing in front. With its goggling optical and

erect audio sensors, its muzzle that perhaps held the computer, its mane

of erect antennae, that head looked eerily equine. From its forepart,

swivel-mounted, thrust a lance.

"We could almost call it a rockinghorsefly, couldn't we?" Flandry said.

"As for the bread-and-butterfly--" His classical reference was lost on

the girl.

She screamed afresh when the robot wheeled and came toward them in huge

leaps. The lance was aimed to kill.

IX

--

Djana was the target. She stood paralyzed. "Run!" Flandry bawled. He

sped to intercept. The gun flamed in his grasp. Sparks showered where

the beam struck.

Djana bolted. The robot swerved and bounded after her. It paid no

attention to Flandry. And his shooting had no effect he could see.

Must be armored against energy beams--unlike the things we've met

hitherto--He thumbed the power stud to full intensity. Fire cascaded

blinding off the metal shape. Heedless, it bore down on his unarmed

companion.

"Dodge toward me!" Flandry cried.

She heard and obeyed. The lance struck her from behind. It did not

penetrate the air tank, as it would have the thinner cuirass of the

spacesuit. The blow knocked her sprawling. She rolled over, scrambled up

and fled on. Wings beat. The machine was hopping around to get at her

from the front.

It passed by Flandry. He leaped. His arms locked around the neck of the

horsehead. He threw a leg over the body. The wings boomed behind him

where he rode.

And still the thing did not fight him, still it chased Djana. But

Flandry's mass slowed it, made it stumble. Twisting about, he fired into

the right wing. Sheet metal and a rib gave way. Crippled, the robot went

to the ground. It threshed and bucked. Somehow Flandry hung on.

Battered, half stunned, he kept his blaster snout within centimeters of

the head and the trigger held back. His faceplate darkened itself

against furious radiance. Heat struck at him like teeth.

Abruptly came quiet. He had pierced through to an essential part and

slain the killer.

He sprawled across it, gasping the oven-hot air into his mouth, aware of

undergarments, sodden with sweat and muscles, athrob with bruises, dimly

aware that he had better arise. Not until Djana returned to him did he

feel able to.

A draught of water and stimpill shoved through his chowlock restored a

measure of strength. He looked at the machine he had destroyed and

thought vaguely that it was quite handsome. Like a dreamworld knight …

Almost of themselves his arm lifted in salute and his voice murmured.

"Ahoy, ahoy, check."

"What?" Djana asked, equally faintly.

"Nothing." Flandry willed the aches out of his consciousness and the

shakes out of his body. "Let's get going."

"Y-y-yes." She was suffering worse from reaction than him. Her features

seemed completely drained. She started off with mechanical strides, back

toward the mountain.

"Wait a tick!" Flandry grabbed her shoulder. "Where're you bound?"

"Away," she said without tone. "Before something else comes after us."

"To sit in the sealtent--or at best, the boat--and wait for death? No,

thanks." Flandry turned her about. She was too numbed to resist. "Here,

swallow a booster of your own."

He had lost all but a rag of hope himself. The centrum was at the far

side of the pattern, some ten kilometers hence. If robots were programed

actually to attack humans, this close to where the great computer had

been--We'll explore a wee bit further, regardless. Why not?

A machine appeared. At first it was a glint on the horizon, metal

reflecting Mimirlight. Traveling fast across the plain, it gained shape

within minutes. Headed straight this way. And big! Flandry cursed. Half

dragging Djana, he made for a house-sized piece of meteoritic stone.

From its top, defense might be possible.

The robot went past.

Djana sobbed her thanks. After a second, Flandry recovered from the

shock of his latest deliverance. He stood where he was, holding the girl

against him, and watched. The machine wasn't meant for combat. It was

not much more than a self-operating flatbed truck with a pair of lifting

arms.

It loaded the fallen lancer aboard and returned whence it came.

"For repairs," Flandry breathed. "No wonder we don't find stray parts in

this neighborhood."

Djana shuddered in his arms.

His words went slowly on, shaping the thoughts they uttered: "Two

classes of killer robot, then. One is free-ranging, fights

indiscriminately, comes here to get fixed if it can make the trip, and

doubtless returns to the wilderness for more hunting. While it's here,

it keeps the peace.

"The other kind stays here, does fight here--though it doesn't interfere

with the first kind or the maintenance

flandry

69

machines--and is carefully salvaged when it comes to grief."

He shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't know if that's encouraging

or not." Gazing down at Djana: "How do you feel?"

The drug he had forced on her was taking hold. It was not magical; it

couldn't marshal resources which were no longer there. But for a time he

and she would be alert, cool-headed, strong, quick-reacting. And we'd

better complete our business before the metabolic bill is presented,

Flandry recalled.

Her lips, twitched in a woebegone smile. "I guess I'll do," she said.

"Are you certain we should continue?"

"No. However, we will."

The next two squares they crossed were empty. One to their left was

occupied. The humans kept a taut watch on that robot as they went past,

but it did not stir. It was a tread-mounted cylinder, taller and broader

than a man, its two arms ending in giant mauls, its head--the top of it,

anyway, where there were what must be sensors--crowned with merlons like

the battlements of some ancient tower. The sight jogged at Flandry's

memory. An idea stirred in him but vanished before he could seize it. It

could wait; readiness for another assault could not.

Djana startled him: "Nicky, does each of them stay inside its own

square?"

"And defend that particular bit of territory against intruders?"

Flandry's mind sprang. He smacked fist into palm. "By Jumbo, I think

you're right! It could be a scheme for guarding the centrum … against

really dangerous gizmos that don't behave themselves on this plain … a

weird scheme, but then, everything on Wayland is weird.--Yes. The types

of, uh, wild robot we've seen, and the ambulance and such, they're

recognized as harmless and left alone. We don't fit into that program,

so we're fair game."

"Not all the squares are occupied," she said dubiously.

He shrugged. "Maybe a lot of sentries are under repair at present. '

Excitement waxed in him. "The important point is, we can get across.

Either directly across the lines, or over to a boundary and then around

the whole layout. We simply avoid sections where any machine is. Making

sure none are lurking behind a rock or whatever, of course." He hugged

her. "Sweetheart, I do believe we're going to make it!"

The same eagerness kindled in her. They stepped briskly forth.

A figure that came into view, two kilometers ahead, as they passed the

hillock which had concealed it, drew a cry from her. "Nicky, a man!" He

jolted to a stop and raised his binoculars in unsteady hands. The object

was indeed creepily similar to a large spacesuited human. But there were

differences of detail, and it stood as death-still as the tower thing,

and it was armed with sword and shield. Rather, its arms terminated in

those pieces of war gear. Flandry lowered the glasses.

"No such luck," he said. "Not that it'd be luck. Anybody who's come here

and taken charge like this would probably scupper us. It's yet another

brand of guard robot." He tried to joke. "That means a further detour.

I'm getting more exercise than I really want, aren't you?"

"You could destroy it."

"Maybe. Maybe not. If our friend the knight was typical, as I suspect,

the lot of them are fairly well armored against energy beams. Besides, I

don't care to waste charge. Used too bloody much in that last encounter.

Another fracas, and we could be weaponless." Flandry started off on a

slant across the square. "We'll avoid him and go catercorner past the

domain of that comparatively mild-looking chap there."

Djana's gaze followed his finger. Remotely gleamed other immobile forms,

including a duplicate of the hippoid and three of the anthropoid.

Doubtless more were hidden by irregularities of terrain or its steep

fall to the horizon. The machine which Flandry had in mind was closer,

just left of his intended path. It was another cylinder, more tall and

slim than the robot with the 'hammers. The smooth bright surface was

unbroken by limbs. The conical head was partly split down the middle,

above an array of instruments.

"He may simply be a watcher," Flandry theorized.

They had passed by, the gaunt abstract statue was falling behind, when

Djana yelled.

Flandry spun about. The thing had left its square and was entering the

one they were now in.

Dust and sparkling ice crystals whirled in the meter of space between

its base and the ground. Air cushion drive, beat through Flandry. He

looked frantically around for shelter. Nothing. This square held only

basalt and frozen water.

"Run!" he cried. He retreated backward himself, blaster out. The heart

slugged in him, the breath rasped, still hot from his prior battle.

A pencil of white fire struck at him from the cleft head. It missed at

its range, but barely. He felt heat gust where the energy splashed and

steam exploded. A sharp small thunderclap followed.

This kind does pack a gun!

Reflexively, he returned a shot. Less powerful, his beam bounced off the

alloy hide. The robot moved on it. He could hear the roar of its motor.

A direct hit at closer quarters would pierce his suit and body. He fired

again and prepared to flee.

If I can divert that tin bastard--It did not occur to Flandry that his

action might get him accused of gallantry. He started off in a different

direction from the girl's. Longer-legged, he had a feebly better chance

than she of keeping ahead of death, reaching a natural barricade and

making a stand …

Tensed with the expectation of lightning, the hope that his air unit

would give protection and not be ruined, he had almost reached the next

line when he realized there had been no fire. He braked and turned to

stare behind.

The robot must have halted right after the exchange. Its top swung back

and forth, as if in search. Surely it must sense him.

It started off after Djana.

Flandry spat an oath and pounded back to help. She had a good head

start, but the machine was faster, and if it had crossed one line,

wouldn't it cross another? Flandry's boots slammed upon stone.

Oxygen-starved, his brain cast forth giddiness and patches of black. His

intercepting course brought him nearer. He shot. The bolt went wild. He

bounded yet more swiftly. Again he shot. This time he hit.

The robot slowed, veered as if to meet this antagonist who could be

dangerous, faced away once more and resumed its pursuit of Djana.

Flandry held down his trigger and hosed it with flame. The girl crossed

the boundary. The robot stopped dead.

But--but--gibbered in Flandry's skull.

The robot stirred, lifted, and swung toward him. It moved hesitantly,

wobbling a trifle, not as if damaged--it couldn't have been--but as if

… puzzled?

I shouldn't be toting a blaster, Flandry thought in the turmoil. With my

shape, I'm supposed to carry sword and shield.

The truth crashed into him.

He took no time to examine it. He knew simply that he must get into the

same square as Djana. An anthropoid with blade and scute in place of

hands could not crawl very well. Flandry went on all fours. He scuttled

backward. The lean tall figure rocked after him, but no faster. Its

limited computer--an artificial brain moronic and monomaniacal--could

reach no decision as to what he was and what to do about him.

He crossed the line. The robot settled to the ground.

Flandry rose and tottered toward Djana. She had collapsed several meters

away. He joined her. Murk spun down upon him.

It lifted in minutes, after his air unit purified the atmosphere in his

suit and his stimulated cells drank the oxygen. He sat up. The machine

that had chased them was retreating to the middle of the adjacent

square, another gleam against the dark plain, under the dark sky. He

looked at his blaster's charge indicator. It stood near zero. He could

reload it from the powerpack he carried, but his life-support units

needed the energy worse. Maybe.

Djana was rousing too. She half raised herself, fell across his lap, and

wept. "It's no use, Nicky. We can't make it. We'll be murdered. And if

we do get by, what'll we find? A thing that builds killing engines.

Let's go back. We can go back the way we came. Can't we? And have a

little, little while alive together--"

He consoled her until the chill and hardness of the rock on which he sat

got through to him. Then, stiffly, he rose and assisted her to her feet.

His voice sounded remote and strange in his ears. "Ordinarily I'd agree

with you, dear. But I think I see what the arrangement is. The way the

bishop behaved. Didn't you notice?"

"B-b-bishop?"

"Consider. Like the knight, I'm sure, the bishop attacks when the square

he's on is invaded. I daresay the result of a move on this board depends

on the outcome of the battle that follows it. Now a bishop can only

proceed offensively along a diagonal. And the pieces are only programed

to fight one other piece at a time; of certain kinds, at that." Flandry

stared toward his hidden destination. "I imagine the anthropoids are the

pawns. I wonder why. Maybe because they're the most numerous pieces, and

the computer was lonely for mankind?"

"Computer?" She huddled against him.

"Has to be. Nothing else could have made this. It used the engineering

facilities it had, possibly built some additional manufacturing plant.

It didn't bother coloring the squares or the pieces, knowing quite well

which was which. That's why I didn't see at once we're actually on a

giant chessboard." Flandry grimaced. "If I hadn't … we'd've quit,

returned, and died. Come on." He urged her forward.

"We can't go further," she pleaded. "We'll be set on."

"Not if we study the positions of the pieces," he said, "and travel on

the squares that nobody can currently enter."

After some trudging: "My guess is, the computer split its attention into

a number of parts. One or more to keep track of the wild robots. Two,

with no intercommunication, to be rival chessmasters. That could be why

it hasn't noticed something strange is going on today. I wonder if it

can notice anything new any longer, without being nudged."

He zigzagged off the board with Djana, onto the blessed safe unmarked

part of the land, and walked around the boundary. En route he saw a

robot that had to be a king. It loomed four meters tall in the form of a

man who wore the indoor dress of centuries ago, gold-plated and crowned

with clustered diamonds. It bore no weapons. He learned later that it

captured by divine right.

They reached the ancient buildings. The worker machines that scuttled

about had kept them in good repair. Flandry stopped before the main

structure. He tuned his radio to standard frequency. "At this range," he

said to that which was within, "you've got to have some receiver that'll

pick up my transmission."

Code clicked and gibbered in his earplugs; and then, slowly, rustily,

but gathering sureness as the words advanced, like the voice of one who

has been heavily asleep: "Is … it … you? A man … returned at last?

… No, two men, I detect--"

"More or less," Flandry said.

Across the plain, beasts and chessmen came to a halt.

"Enter. The airlock … Remove your spacesuits inside. It is

Earth-conditioned, with … furnished chambers. Inspection reveals a

supply of undeteriorated food and drink … I hope you will find things

in proper order. Some derangements are possible. The time was long and

empty."

X

-

Djana stumbled to bed and did not wake for thirty-odd hours. Flandry

needed less rest. After breakfast he busied himself, languidly at first

but with increasing energy. What he learned fascinated him so much that

he regretted not daring to spend time exploring in depth the history of

these past five centuries on Wayland.

He was in the main control room, holding technical discussions with the

prime computer, when the speaker in its quaint-looking instrument bank

said in its quaint-sounding Anglic: "As instructed, I have kept your

companion under observation. Her eyelids are moving."

Flandry got up. "Thanks," he said automatically. It was hard to remember

that no living mind flickered behind those meters and readout screens.

An awareness did, yes, but not like that of any natural sophont, no

matter how strange to man; this one was in some ways more and in some

ways less than organic. "I'd better go to her. Uh, have a servitor bring

hot soup and, uh, tea and buttered toast, soon's it can."

He strode down corridors silent except for the hum of machines, past

apartments that held a few moldering possessions of men long dead, until

he found hers.

"Nicky--" She blinked mistily and reached tremulous arms toward him. How

thin and pale she'd grown! He could just hear her. Bending for a kiss,

he felt her lips passive beneath his.

"Nicky … are we … all right?" The whisper-breath tickled his ear.

"Assuredly." He stroked her cheek. "Everything's on orbit."

"Outside?"

"Safe as houses. Safer than numerous houses I could name." Flandry

straightened. "Relax. We'll start putting meat back on those lovely

bones in a few minutes. By departure date, you ought to be completely

yourself again."

She frowned, shook her head in a puzzled way, tried to sit up. "Hoy, not

yet," he said, laying hands on the bare slight shoulders. "I prescribe

lots of bed rest. When you're strong enough to find that boring, I'll

arrange for entertainment tapes to be projected. The computer says

there're a few left. Ought to be interesting, a show that old."

Still she struggled feebly. The chemical-smelling air fluttered fast, in

and out of her lungs. Alarm struck him. "What's the trouble, Djana?"

"I … don't know. Dizzy--"

"Oh, well. After what you've been through."

Cold fingers clutched his arm. "Nicky. This moon. Is it … worth …

anything?"

"Huh?"

"Money!" she shrieked like an insect. "Is it worth money?"

Why should that make that much difference, right now? flashed through

him. Her past life's made her fanatical on the subject, I suppose,

and--"Sure."

"You're certain?" she gasped.

"My dear," he said, "Leon Ammon will have to work hard at it if he does

not want to become one of the richest men in the Empire."

Her eyes rolled back till he saw only whiteness. She sagged in his

embrace.

"Fainted," he muttered, and eased her down. Rising, scratching his

scalp: "Computer, what kind of medical knowledge do you keep in your

data banks?"

Reviving after a while, Djana sobbed. She wouldn't tell him why.

Presently she was as near hysteria as her condition permitted. The

computer found a sedative which Flandry administered.

Or her next awakening she was calm, at any rate on the surface, but

somehow remote from him. She answered his remarks so curtly as to make

it clear she didn't want to talk. She did take nourishment, though.

Afterward she lay frowning upward, fists clenched at her sides. He left

her alone.

She was more cheerful by the following watch, and gradually reverted to

her usual self.

But they saw scant of each other until they were again in space, bound

back to the assigned round that was to end on Irumclaw where it began.

She had spent most of the time previous in bed, waited on by robots

while she recovered. He, vigor regained sooner, was preoccupied with

setting matters on the moon to rights and supervising the repair of

Jake. The latter job was complicated by the requirement that no clue

remain to what had really taken place. He didn't want his superiors

disbelieving his entries in the log concerning a malfunction of the

hyperdrive oscillator which it had taken him three weeks to fix by

himself.

Stark Wayland fell aft, and mighty Regin, and lurid Mimir; and the boat

moved alone amidst a glory of stars. Flandry sat with Djana in the conn,

which was the single halfway comfortable area to sit. Rested, clean,

depilated, fed, liquored, in crisp coverall, breathing ample air,

feeling the tug of a steady Terran g and the faint throb of the power

that drove him toward his destination, he inhaled of a cigarette, patted

Djana's hand, and grinned at her freshborn comeliness. "Mission

accomplished," he said. "I shall expect you to show your gratitude in

the ways you know best."

"Well-l-l," she purred. After a moment: "How could you tell, Nicky?"

"Hm?"

"I don't yet understand what went wrong. You tried to explain before,

but I was too dazed, I guess."

"Most simple," he said, entirely willing to parade his cleverness anew.

"Once I saw we were caught in a chess game, everything else made sense.

For instance, I remembered those radio masts being erected in the wilds.

An impossible job unless the construction robots were free from attack.

Therefore the ferocity of the roving machines was limited to their own

kind. Another game, you see, with more potentialities and less

predictability than chess, even the chess-cum-combat that had been

developed when the regular sort got boring. New types of killer were

produced at intervals and sent forth to see how they'd do against the

older models. Our boat, and later we ourselves, were naturally taken for

such newcomers; the robots weren't supplied with information about

humans, and line-of-sight radio often had them out of touch with the big

computer."

"When we tried to call for help, though--"

"You mean from the peak of Mt. Maidens? Well, obviously none of the wild

robots would recognize our signal, on the band they used. And that part

of the computer's attention which 'listened in' on its children simply

filtered out my voice, the way you or I can fail to hear sounds when

we're busy with something else. With so much natural static around,

that's not surprising.

"Those masts were constructed strictly as relays for the robots--for the

high frequencies which carried the digital transmissions--so that's why

they didn't buck on my calls on any other band. The computer always did

keep a small part of itself on the qui vive for a voice call on standard

frequencies. But it assumed that, if and when humans came back, they

would descend straight from the zenith and land near the buildings as

they used to. Hence it didn't make arrangements to detect people radio

from any other direction."

Flandry puffed. Smoke curled across the viewscreen, as if to veil off

the abysses beyond. "Maybe it should have done so, in theory," he said.

"However, after all those centuries, the poor thing was more than a

little bonkers. Actually, what it did--first establish that chess game,

then modify it, then produce fighters that obeyed no rules, then extend

the range and variety of their battles further and further across the

moon--that was done to save most of its sanity."

"What?" Djana said, surprised.

"Why, sure. A thinking capability like that, with nothing but routine to

handle, no new input, decade after decade--" Flandry shivered. "Br-rr!

You must know what sensory deprivation does to organic sophonts. Our

computer rescued itself by creating something complicated and

unpredictable to watch." He paused before adding slyly: "I refrain from

suggesting analogies to the Creator you believe in."

And regretted it when she bridled and snapped, "I want a full report on

how you influenced the situation."

"Oh, for the best, for the best," he said. "Not that that was hard. The

moment I woke the White King up, the world he'd been dreaming of came to

an end." His metaphor went over her head, so he merely continued: "The

computer's pathetically impatient to convert back to the original style

of operations. Brother Ammon will find a fortune in metals waiting for

his first ship.

"I do think you are morally obliged to recommend me for a substantial

bonus, which he is normally obliged to pay."

"Morally!" The bitterness of a life which had never allowed her a chance

to consider such questions whipped forth. But it seemed to him she

exaggerated it, as if to provide herself an excuse for attacking. "Who

are you to blat about morals, Dominic Flandry, who took an oath to serve

the Empire and a bribe to serve Leon Ammon?"

Stung, he threw back: "What else could I do?"

"Refuse." Her mood softened. She shook her amber-locked head, smiled a

sad smile, and squeezed his hand. "No, never mind. That would be too

much to expect of anyone nowadays, wouldn't it? Let's be corrupt

together, Nicky darling, and kind to each other till we have to say

goodbye."

He looked long at her, and at the stars, where his gaze remained, before

he said quietly, "I suppose I can tell you what I've had in mind. I'll

take the pay because I can use it; also the risk, for the rest of my

life, of being found out and broken. It seems a reasonable price for

holding a frontier."

Her lips parted. Her eyes widened. "I don't follow you."

"Irumclaw was due to be abandoned," he said. "Everybody knows--knew--it

was. Which made the prophecy self-fulfilling: The garrison turned

incompetent. The able civilians withdrew, taking their capital with

them. Defensibility and economic value spiraled down toward the point

where it really wouldn't be worth our rational while to stay. In the

end, the Empire would let Irumclaw go. And without this anchor, it'd

have to pull the whole frontier parsecs back; and Merseia and the Long

Night would draw closer."

He sighed. "Leon Ammon is evil and contemptible," he went on. "Under

different circumstances, I'd propose we gut him with a butterknife. But

he does have energy, determination, actual courage and foresight of

sorts.

"I went to his office to learn his intentions. When he told me, I agreed

to go along because--well--

"If the Imperial bureaucrats were offered Wayland, they wouldn't know

what to do with it. Probably they'd stamp its existence Secret, to avoid

making any decisions or laying out any extra effort. If nothing else, a

prize like that would make 'conciliation and consolidation' a wee bit

difficult, eh?

"Ammon, though, he's got a personal profit to harvest. He'll go in to

stay. His enterprise will be a human one. He'll make it pay off so

well--he'll get so much economic and thereby political leverage from

it--that he can force the government to protect his interests. Which

means standing fast on Irumclaw. Which means holding this border, and

even extending control a ways outward.

"In short," Flandry concluded, "as the proverb phrases it, he may be a

son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

He stubbed out the cigarette with a violent gesture and turned back to

the girl, more in search of forgetful-ness than anything else.

Strangely, in view of the fellow-feeling she had just shown him, she did

not respond. Her hands fended him off. The blue glance was troubled upon

his. "Please, Nicky. I want to think … about what you've told me."

He respected her wish and relaxed in his seat, crossing shank over knee.

"I daresay I can contain myself for a bit." The sight of her mildened

the harshness that had risen in him. He chuckled. "Be warned, it won't

be a long bit. You're too delectable."

Her mouth twitched, but not in any smile. "I never realized such things

mattered to you," she said uncertainly.

Having been raised to consider idealism gauche, he shrugged. "They'd

better. I live in the Terran Empire."

"But if--" She leaned forward. "Do you seriously believe, Nicky, Wayland

can make that big a difference?"

"I like to believe it. Why do you ask? I can't well imagine you giving a

rusty horntoot about future generations."

"That's what I mean. Suppose … Nicky, suppose, oh, something happens

so Leon doesn't get to exploit Wayland. So nobody does. How'd that

affect us--you and me?"

"Depends on our lifespans, I'd guess, among other items. Maybe we'd see

no change. Or maybe, twenty-thirty years hence, we'd see the Empire

retreat the way I was talking about."

"But that wouldn't mean its end!"

"No, no. Not at once. We could doubtless finish our lives in the style

to which we want to become accustomed." Flandry considered. "Or could

we? Political repercussions at home … unrest leading to upheaval …

well, I don't know."

"We could always find ourselves a safe place. A nice offside colony

planet--not so offside it's primitive, but--"

"Yes, probably." Flandry scowled. "I don't understand what's gnawing

you. We'll report to Ammon and that will finish our part. Remember, he's

holding the rest of our pay."

She nodded. For a space they were both silent. The stars in the

viewscreen made an aureole behind her gold head.

Then craftiness came upon her, and she smiled and murmured: "It wouldn't

make any difference, would it, if somebody else on Irumclaw--somebody

besides Leon--got Wayland. Would it?"

"I guess not, if you mean one of his brother entrepreneurs." Flandry's

unease waxed. "What're you thinking of, wench? Trying to rake in more

for yourself, by passing the secret on to a competitor? I wouldn't

recommend that. Bloody dripping dangerous."

"You--"

"Emphatically not! I'll squirrel away my money, and for the rest of my

Irumclaw tour, you won't believe what a good boy I'll be. No more Old

Town junkets whatsoever; wholesome on-base recreation and study of naval

manuals. Fortunately, my Irumclaw tour is nearly done."

Flandry captured her hands in his. "I won't even risk seeing you," he

declared. "Nor should you take any avoidable chances. The universe would

be too poor without you."

Her lips pinched together. "If that's how you feel--"

"It is." Flandry leered. "Fortunately, we've days and days before we

arrive. Let's use them, hm-m-m?"

Her eyes dropped, and rose, and she was on his lap embracing him, warm,

soft, smiling, pupils wide between the long lashes, and "Hm-m-m indeed,"

she crooned.

Thunder ended a dream. Nothingness.

He woke, and wished he hadn't. Someone had scooped out his skull to make

room for the boat's nuclear generator.

No … He tried to roll over, and couldn't.

When he groaned, a hand lifted his head. Cool wetness touched his mouth.

"Drink this," Djana's voice told him from far away.

He got down a couple of tablets with the water, and could look around

him. She stood by the bunk, staring down. As the stimpills took hold and

the pain receded, her image grew less blurred, until he could identify

the hardness that sat on her face. Craning his neck, he made out that he

lay on his back with wrists and ankles wired--securely--to the

bunkframe.

"Feel better?" Her tone was flat.

"I assume you gave me a jolt from your stun gun after I feel asleep," he

succeeded in croaking.

"I'm sorry, Nicky." Did her shell crack the tiniest bit, for that

tiniest instant?

"What's the reason?"

She told him about Rax, ending: "We're already bound for the rendezvous.

If I figured right, remembering what you taught me, it's about forty or

fifty light-years; and I set the 'pilot for top cruising hyperspeed, the

way you said I ought to."

He was too groggy for the loss of his fortune to seem more than

academic. But dismay struck through him like a blunt nail. "Four or five

days! With me trussed up?"

"I'm sorry," she repeated. "I don't dare give you a chance to grab me

or--or anything--" She hesitated. "I'll take care of you as best I can.

Nothing personal in this. You know? It's that million credits."

"What makes you think your unknown friends will honor their end of the

deal?"

"If Wayland's what you say, a megacredit's going to be a microbe to

them. And I can keep on being useful till I leave them." All at once, it

was as if a sword spoke: "That payment will make me my own."

Flandry surrendered to his physical misery.

Which passed. But was followed by the miseries of confinement. He

couldn't do most isometric exercises. The wires would have cut him. A

few were possible; and he spent hours flexing what muscles he was able

to; and Djana was fairly good about massaging him. Nonetheless he ached

and tingled.

Djana also kept her promise to give him a nurse's attentions. Hers

weren't the best, for lack of training and equipment, but they served.

And she read to him by the hour, over the intercom, from the bookreels

he had along. She even offered to make love to him. On the third day he

accepted.

Otherwise little passed between them: the constraints were too many for

conversation. They spent most of their time separately, toughing it out.

Once he was over the initial shock and had disciplined himself, Flandry

didn't do badly at first. While no academician, he had many experiences,

ideas, and stray pieces of information to play with. Toward the end,

though, environmental impoverishment got to him and each hour became a

desert century.

When at last the detectors buzzed, he had to struggle out of

semi-delirium to recognize what the noise was. When the outercom boomed

with words, he blubbered for joy.

But when hypervelocities were matched and phasing in was completed and

airlocks were joined and the other crew came aboard, Djana screamed.

XI

--

The Merseians treated him correctly if coolly. He was unbound, conducted

aboard their destroyer, checked by a physician experienced in dealing

with foreign species, given a chance to clean and bestir himself. His

effects were returned, with the natural exception of weapons. A

cubbyhole was found and curtained off for him and the girl. Food was

brought them, and the toilet facilities down the passage were explained

for her benefit. A guard was posted, but committed no molestation.

Prisoners could scarcely have been vouchsafed more on this class of

warcraft; and the time in space would not be long.

Djana kept keening. "I thought they were human, I thought they were

human, only an-an-another damn gang--" She clung to him. "What'll they

do with us?"

"I can't say," he replied with no measurable sympathy, "except that I

don't imagine they care to have us take home our story."

A story of an intelligence ring on Irumclaw, headed by that Rax--whose

planet of origin is doubtless in the Roidhunate, not the Empire--and

probably staffed by members of the local syndicates. Not to mention the

fact that apparently there is a Merseian base in the wilderness, this

close to our borders. A crawling went along his spine. Then too, when

word gets back to their headquarters, somebody may well want a personal

interview with me.

The destroyer grappled the spaceboat alongside and started off. Flandry

tried to engage his guard in conversation, but the latter had orders to

refrain. The one who brought dinner did agree to convey a request for

him. Flandry was surprised when it was granted: that he might observe

approach and landing. Though why not? To repeat, they won't return me to

blab what I've seen.

Obviously the destination coordinates that Rax had given Djana meant the

boat would be on a course bringing her within detection range of a

picket ship; and any such wouldn't go far from the base. Flandry got his

summons in two or three hours. He left Djana knotted around her

wretchedness--serves her right, the stupid slut!--and preceded his armed

guide forward.

The layout resembled that of a human vessel. Details varied, to allow

for variations in size, shape, language, and culture. Yet it was the

same enclosing metal narrowness, the same drone and vibration, the same

warm oily-smelling gusts from ventilator grilles, the same duties to

perform.

But the crew were big, green-skinned, hairless, spined and tailed. Their

outfits were black, of foreign cut and drape, belts holding war knives.

They practiced rituals and deferences--a gesture, a word, a stepping

aside--with the smoothness of centuried tradition. The glimpses of

something personal, a picture or souvenir, showed a taste more austere

and abstract than was likely in a human spacehand. The body odors that

filled this crowded air were sharper and, somehow, drier than man's. The

dark eyes that followed him had no whites.

Broch--approximately, Second Mate--Tryntaf the Tall greeted him in the

chartroom. "You are entitled to the courtesies, Lieutenant. True, you

are under arrest for violation of ensovereigned space; but our realms

are not at war."

"I thank the broch," Flandry said in his best Eriau, complete with

salute of gratitude. He refrained from adding that, among other

provisions, the Covenant of Alfzar enjoined both powers from claiming

territory in the buffer zone. Surely here, as on Starkad and elsewhere,

a "mutual assistance pact" had been negotiated with an amenable, or

cowed, community of autochthons.

He was more interested in what he saw. Belike he looked on his

deathplace.

The viewport displayed the usual stars, so many as to be chaos to the

untrained perception. Flandry had learned the tricks--strain out the

less bright through your lashes; find your everywhere-visible markers,

like the Magellanic Clouds; estimate by its magnitude the distance of

the nearest giant, Betelgeuse. He soon found that he didn't need them

for a guess at where he was. Early in the game he'd gotten Djana to

recite those coordinates for him and stored them in his memory; and the

sun disc he saw was of a type uncommon enough, compared to the red dwarf

majority, that only one or two would exist in any given neighborhood.

The star was, in fact, akin to Mimir--somewhat less massive and radiant,

but of the same furious whiteness, with the same boiling spots and

leaping prominences. It must be a great deal older, though, for it had

no surrounding nebulosity. At its distance, it showed about a third

again the angular diameter of Sol seen from Terra.

"F5," Tryntaf said, "mass 1.34, luminosity 3.06, radius 1.25." The

standard to which he referred was, in reality, his home sun, Koiych; but

Flandiy recalculated the values in Solar terms with drilled-in ease. "We

call it Siekh. The planet we are bound for we call Talwin."

"Ah." The man nodded. "And what more heroes of your Civil Wars have you

honored?"

Tryntaf threw him a sharp glance. Damn, I forgot again, he thought.

Always make the opposition underestimate you." I am surprised at your

knowledge of our history before the Roidhunate, Lieutenant," the

Merseian said. "But then, considering that our pickets were ordered to

watch for a Terran scout, the pilot must be of special interest."

"Oh, well," Flandry said modestly.

"To answer your question, few bodies here are worth naming. Swarms of

asteroids, yes, but just four true planets, the smallest believed to be

a mere escaped satellite. Orbits are wildly skewed and eccentric. Our

astronomers theorize that early in the life of this system, another star

passed through, disrupting the normal configuration."

Flandry studied the world growing before him. The ship had switched from

hyperdrive to sublight under gravs--so few KPS as to support the idea of

many large meteoroids. (They posed no hazard to a vessel which could

detect them in plenty of time to dodge, or could simply let them bounce

off a forcefield; but they would jeopardize the career of a skipper who

thus inelegantly wasted power.) Talwin's crescent, blinding white,

blurred along the edges, indicated that, like Venus, it was entirely

clouded over. But it was not altogether featureless; spots and bands of

red could be seen.

"Looks none too promising," he remarked. "Aren't we almighty close to

the sun?"

"The planet is," Tryntaf said. "It is late summer--everywhere; there is

hardly any axial tilt--and temperatures remain fierce. Dress lightly

before you disembark, Lieutenant! At periastron, Talwin comes within

0.87 astronomical units of Siekh; but apastron is at a full 2.62 a.u."

Flandry whistled. "That's as eccentric as I can remember ever hearing of

in a planet, if not more. Uh … about one-half, right?" He saw a chance

to appear less than a genius. "How can you survive? I mean, a good big

axial tilt would protect one hemisphere, at least, from the worst

effects of orbital extremes. But this ball, well, any life it may have

has got to be unlike yours or mine."

"Wrong," was Tryntafs foreseeable reply. "Atmosphere and hydrosphere

moderate the climate to a degree; likewise location. Those markings you

see are of biological origin, spores carried into the uppermost air.

Photosynthesis maintains a breathable oxynitrogen mixture."

"Uh-h-h … diseases?" No, wait, now you're acting too stupid. True,

what's safe for a Merseian isn't necessarily so for a man. We may have

extraordinarily similar biochemistries, but still, we've fewer bugs in

common that are dangerous to us than we have with our respective

domestic animals. By the same token, though, a world as different as

Talwin isn't going to breed anything that'll affect us … at least,

nothing that'll produce any syndrome modern medicine can't easily slap

down. Tryntaf knows I know that much. The thought had flashed through

Flandry in part of a second. "I mean allergens and other poisons."

"Some. They cause no serious trouble. The bioform is basically akin to

ours, L-amino proteins in water solution. Deviations are frequent, of

course. But you or I could survive awhile on native foods, if we chose

them with care. Over an extended period we would need dietary

supplements. They have been compounded for emergency use."

Flandry decided that Tryntaf lacked any sense of humor. Most Merseians

had one, sometimes gusty, sometimes cruel, often incomprehensible to

men. He had in his turn baffled various of them when he visited their

planet; even after he put a joke into their equivalents, they did not

see why it should be funny that one diner said, "Bon appétit" and the

other said, "Ginsberg."

Sure. They differ, same as us. My life could depend on the personality

of the commandant down there. Will I be able to recognize any chance he

might give me?

He sought to probe his companion, but was soon left alone on grounds of

work to do, except for the close-mouthed rating who tail-sat by the

door.

Watching the view took his mind partly off his troubles. He could pick

up visual clues that a layman would be blind to, identify what they

represented, and conclude what the larger pattern must be.

Talwin had no moon--maybe once, but not after the invader star had

virtually wrecked this system. Flandry did see two relay satellites

glint, in positions indicating they belonged to a synchronous triad. If

the Merseians had installed no more than that, they had a barebones base

here. It was what you'd expect at the end of this long a communications

line: a watchpost, a depot, a first-stage receiving station for reports

from border-planet agents like Rax.

Aside from their boss, those latter wouldn't have been told Siekh's

coordinates, or of its very existence. They'd have courier torpedoes

stashed away in the hinterland, target preset and clues to the target

removed. Given elementary precautions, no Imperial loyalist was likely

to observe the departure of one. Replenishment would be more of a

problem, dependent on smuggling, but not overly difficult when the

Terran service was undermanned and lax. Conveyance of fresh orders to

the agents was no problem at all; who noticed what mail or what visitors

drifted into Rax's dope shop?

The value of Talwin was obvious. Besides surveillance, it allowed closer

contact with spies than would otherwise be possible. Flandry wondered if

his own corps ran an analogous operation out Roidhunate way. Probably

not. The Merseians were too vigilant, the human government too inert,

its wealthier citizens too opposed to pungling up the cost of positive

action.

Flandry shook himself, as if physically to cast off apprehension and

melancholy, and concentrated on what he saw.

Clearances given and path computed, the destroyer dropped in a spiral

that took her around the planet. Presumably her track was designed to

avoid storms. Cooler air, moving equatorward from the poles, must turn

summer into a "monsoon" season. Considering input energy, atmospheric

pressure (which Tryntaf had mentioned was twenty percent greater than

Terran), and rotation period (a shade over eighteen hours, he had said),

weather surely got more violent here than ever at Home; and a long,

thin, massive object like a destroyer was more vulnerable to wind than

you might think.

Water vapor rose high before condensing into clouds. Passing over

dayside below those upper layers, Flandry got a broad view.

A trifle smaller (equatorial diameter 0.97) and less dense than Terra,

Talwin in this era had but a single continent. Roughly wedge-shaped, it

reached from the north-pole area with its narrow end almost on the

equator. Otherwise the land consisted of islands. While multitudinous,

in the main they were thinly scattered.

Flandry guessed that the formation and melting of huge icecaps in the

course of the twice-Terran year disturbed isostatic balance. Likewise,

the flooding and great rainstorms of summer, the freezing of winter,

would speed erosion and hence the redistribution of mass. Tectony must

proceed at a furious rate; earthquake, vulcanism, the sinking of old

land and the rising of new, must be geologically common occurrences.

He made out one mountain range, running east-west along the

400-kilometer width of the continent near its middle. Those peaks

dwarfed the Himalayas but were snowless, naked rock. Elsewhere,

elevations were generally low, rounded, worn. North of the wall, the

country seemed to be swamp. Whew! That means in winter the icecup grows

down to 45 degrees latitude! The glaciers grind everything flat. The far

southlands were a baked desolation, scoured by hurricanes. Quite

probably, at midsummer lakes and rivers there didn't simply dry up, they

boiled; and the equatorial ocean became a biological fence. It would be

intriguing to know how evolution had diverged in the two hemispheres.

Beyond the sterile tropics, life not long ago had been outrageously

abundant, jungle choking the central zone, the arctic abloom with

low-growing plants. Now annual drought was taking its toll in many

sections, leaves withering, stems crumbling, fires running wild, bald

black patches of desiccation and decay. But other districts, especially

near the coasts, got enough rain yet. Immense herds of grazers were

visible on open ground; wings filled the air; shoal waters were darkened

by weeds and swimmers. Most islands remained similarly fecund.

The dominant color of vegetation was blue, in a thousand shades--the

photosynthetic molecule was not chlorophyll, then, though likely to be a

close chemical relative--but there were the expected browns, reds,

yellows, the unexpected and stingingly Homelike splashes of green.

Descending, trailing a thunderclap, the ship crossed nightside. Flandry

used photomultiplier and infrared step-up controls to go on with his

watching. It confirmed the impressions he had gathered by day.

And the ship was back under the hidden sun, low, readying for setdown.

Her latitude was about 40 degrees. In the north, the lesser members of

the giant range gave way to foothills of their own. Flandry made out one

volcano in that region, staining heaven with smoke. A river flowed

thence, cataracting through canyons until it became broad and placid in

the wooden plains further south. The diffuse light made it shine dully,

like lead, on its track through yonder azure lands. Finally it ran out

in a kilometers-wide bay.

The greenish-gray sea creamed white with surf along much of the coast.

The tidal pull of Siekh in summer approximated that of Luna and Sol on

Terra, and ocean currents flowed strongly. For some distance inland,

dried, cracked, salt-streaked mud was relieved only by a few tough plant

species adapted to it.

Uh-huh, Flandry reflected. In spring the icecaps melt. Sea level rises

by many meters. Storms get really stiff; they, and increasing tides,

drive the waves in, over and over, to meet the floods running down from

the mountains … And Djana believes in a God Who gives a damn?

Or should I say, Who gives a blessing?

He rubbed his cheek, observing with what exquisite accuracy nerves

recorded pressure, texture, warmth, location, motion. Well, he thought.

I must admit, if Anyone's been in charge of my existence, He's furnished

it with noble pleasures. Despite everything, fear knocked in his heart

and dried his mouth. He's not about to take them away, is He? Not now!

Later, when I'm old, when I don't really care, all right; but not now!

He remembered comrades in arms who didn't make it as far through time as

he'd done. That was no consolation, but rallied him. They hadn't whined.

And maybe something would turn up.

The scene tilted. The engines growled on a deeper note. The ship was

landing.

The Merseian base stood on a bluff overlooking the river, thirty or so

kilometers north of its mouth, well into fertile territory. The

spaceport was minute, the facilities in proportion, as Flandry had

surmised; nothing fancier than a few destroyers and lesser craft could

work out of here. But he noticed several buildings within the compound

that didn't seem naval.

Hm. Do the Merseians have more than one interest in Talwin? … I

imagine they do at that. Otherwise they'd find a more hospitable planet

for their base--or else a better-camouflaged one, say a sunless rogue

… You know, their intelligence activities here begin to look almost

like an afterthought.

The ship touched down. Air pressure had gradually been raised during

descent to match sea-level value. When interior gravity was cut off, the

planet's reasserted itself and Flandry felt lighter. He gauged weight at

nine-tenths or a hair less.

Tryntaf reappeared, issued an order, and redisappeared. Flandry was

escorted to the lock. Djana waited by her own guard. She seemed

incredibly tiny and frail against the Merseian, a porcelain doll.

"Nicky," she stammered, reaching toward him, "Nicky, please forgive me,

please be good to me. I don't even know what they're saying."

"Maybe I will later," he snapped, "if they leave me in shape to do it."

She covered her eyes and shrank back. He regretted his reaction. She'd

been suckered--by her cupidity; nonetheless, suckered--and the feel of

her hand in his would have eased his isolation. But pride would not let

him soften.

The lock opened. The gangway extruded. The prisoners were gestured out.

Djana staggered. Flandry choked. Judas on a griddle, I was warned to

change clothes and I forgot!

The heat enveloped him, entered him, became him and everything else

which was. Temperature could not be less than 80 Celsius--might well be

higher--20 degrees below the Terran-pressure boiling point of water. A

furnace wind roared dully across the ferrocrete, which wavered in his

seared gaze. He was instantly covered, permeated, not with honest sweat

but with the sliminess that comes when humidity reaches an ultimate.

Breathing was like drowning.

Noises came loud to his ears through that dense air: wind, voices,

clatter of machines. Odors borne from the jungle were pungent and musky,

with traces of sulfurous reek. He saw a building blocky against the

clouds, and on its roof a gong to call for prayers to the God of a world

two and a half light-centuries hence. The shadow-less illumination made

distances hard to gauge; was that air-conditioned interior as remote as

he dreaded?

The crew were making for it. They weren't in formation, but discipline

lived in their close ranks and careful jog-trot. What Merseians had

tasks to do outside wore muffling white coveralls with equipment on the

back.

"Move along, Terran," said Flandry's guard. "Or do you enjoy our

weather?"

The man started off. "I've known slightly more comfortable espresso

cookers," he answered; but since the guard had never heard of espresso,

or coffee for that matter, his repartee fell flat again.

XII

---

In the Spartan tradition of Vach lords, the office of Ydwyr the Seeker

lacked any furniture save desk and cabinets. Though he and Morioch

Sun-in-eye were seated, it was on feet and tails, which looked to a

human as if they were crouched to spring. That, and their size, great

even for Wilwidh Merseians, and faint but sharp body odors, and rumbling

bass tones, and the explosive gutturals of Eriau, gave Djana a sense of

anger that might break loose in slaughter. She could see that Flandry

was worried and caught his hand in the cold dampness of hers. He made no

response; standing rigid, he listened.

"Perhaps the datholch has been misinformed about this affair," Morioch

said with strained courtesy. Flandry didn't know what the title

signified--and Merseian grades were subtle, variable things--but it was

plainly a high one, since the aristocratic-deferential form of address

was used.

"I shall hearken to whatever the qanryf wishes to say," Ydwyr replied,

in the same taut manner but with the merely polite verbal construction.

Flandry would have understood "qanryf (the first letter representing,

more or less, k followed by dh = voiced th) from the argent saltire on

Morioch's black uniform, had he not met the word often before. Morioch

was the commandant of this base, or anyhow on its naval aspect; but the

base was a minor one.

He--stockily built, hard of features, incongruous against the books and

reelboxes whose shelves filled every available square centimeter of wall

space--declared: "This is no capture of a scout who simply chanced by.

The female alone should … unquestionably does tell the datholch that.

But I didn't want to intrude on your work by speaking to you of mine.

Besides, since it's confidential, the fewer who are told, the better.

Correct?"

No guards had come in with their chief. They waited beyond the archway

curtains, which were not too soundproof to pass a cry for help.

Opposite, seen through a window, waited Talwin's lethal summer.

Blue-black and enormous, a thunderhead was piling up over the stockade,

where the banners of those Vachs and regions that had members here

whipped on their staffs.

Ydwyr's mouth drew into thinner lines. "I could have been trusted," he

said. Flandry didn't believe that mere wounded vanity spoke. Had a

prerogative been infringed? What was Ydwyr?

He wore a gray robe without emblems; at its sash hung only a purse. He

was taller than Morioch, but lean, wrinkled, aging. At first he had

spoken softly, when the humans were brought before him from their

quarters--on his demand after he learned of their arrival. As soon as

the commandant had given him a slight amount of back talk, he had

stiffened, and power fairly blazed from him.

Morioch confronted it stoutly. "That needs no utterance," he said. "I

hope the datholch accepts that I saw no reason to trouble you with

matters outside your own purposes here."

"Does the qanryf know every conceivable limit of my purposes?"

"No … however--" Raided but game, Morioch redonned formality. "May I

explain everything to the datholch?"

Ydwyr sighed permission. Morioch caught a breath and commenced:

"When the Brythioch stopped by, these months agone, her chief

intelligence officer gave me a word that did not then seem very

interesting. You recall she'd been at Irumclaw, the Terran frontier

post. There a mei--I have his name on record but don't remember it--had

come on a scoutship pilot he'd met previously. The pilot, the male

before you here, was running surveillance as part of his training for

their Intelligence Corps. Normally that'd have meant nothing--standard

procedure of theirs--but this particular male had been on Merseia in

company with a senior Terran agent. Those two got involved in something

which is secret from me but, I gather, caused major trouble to the

Roidhunate. Protector Brechdan Ironrede was said to have been furious."

Ydwyr started. Slowly he lifted one bony green hand and said, "You have

not told me the prisoner's name."

"Let the datholch know this is Junior Lieutenant Dominic Flandry."

Silence fell, except for the wind whose rising skirl began to pierce the

heavily insulated walls. Ydwyr s gaze probed and probed. Djana whispered

frantic, repeated prayers. Flandry felt the sweat slide down his ribs.

He needed all his will to hold steady.

"Yes," Ydwyr said at last, "I have heard somewhat about him."

"Then the datholch may appreciate this case more than I do," Morioch

said, looking relieved. "To be honest, I knew nothing of Flandry till

the Brythioch--"

"Continue your account," Ydwyr said unceremoniously.

Morioch's relief vanished, but he plowed on: "As the datholch wishes.

Whatever the importance of Flandry himself--he appears a cub to me--he

was associated with this other agent … khraich, yes, it comes back …

Max Abrams. And Abrams was, is, definitely a troublemaker of the worst

sort. Flandry appears to be a protégé of his. Perhaps, already, an

associate? Could his assignment to Irumclaw involve more than showed on

the skin?

"This much the mei reported to the chief intelligence officer of his

ship. The officer, in turn, directed our agents in the city"--Rax, of

course, and those in Rax's pay, Flandry thought through the loudening

wind--"to keep close watch on this young male. If he did anything

unusual, it should be investigated as thoroughly as might be.

"The officer asked me to stand by. As I've said, nothing happened for

months, until I'd almost forgotten. We get so many leads that never lead

anywhere in intelligence work.

"But lately a courier torpedo arrived. The message was that Flandry was

collaborating closely but, apparently, secretly, with the leader of an

underworld gang. The secrecy is understandable--ultra-illegal

behavior--and our agents' first guess was that normal corruption was all

that was involved." Scorn freighted Morioch's voice. "However, following

orders, they infiltrated the operation. They learned what it was."

He described Wayland, to the extent of Ammon's knowledge, and Ydwyr

nodded. "Yes," the old Merseian said, "I understand. The planet is too

far from home to be worth our while--at present--but it is not desirable

that Terrans reoccupy it."

"Our Irumclaw people are good," Morioch said. "They had to make a

decision and act on their own. Their plan succeeded. Does the datholch

agree they should get extra reward?"

"They had better," Ydwyr said dryly, "or they might decide Terrans are

more generous masters. You have yet to tell them to eliminate those who

know about the lost planet, correct?--Well, but what did they do?"

"The datholch sees this female. After Flandry had investigated the

planet, she captured him and brought his boat to a section where our

pickets were bound to detect it."

"Hun-n-nh … is she one of ours?"

"No, she thought she was working for a rival human gang. But the

datholch may agree she shows a talent for that kind of undertaking."

Flandry couldn't help it, too much compassion welled through his

despair, he bent his head down toward Djana's and muttered: "Don't be

afraid. They're pleased with what you did for them. I expect they'll pay

you something and let you go."

To spy on us--driven by blackmail as well as money--but you can probably

vanish into the inner Empire. Or … maybe you'd like the work. Your

species never treated you very kindly.

"And that is the whole tale, qanryf?" Ydwyr asked.

"Yes," Morioch said. "Now the datholch sees the importance. Bad enough

that we had to capture a boat. That'll provoke a widespread search,

which might stumble on places like Talwin. The odds are against it,

true, and we really had no choice. But we cannot release Flandry."

"I did not speak of that," Ydwyr said, cold again. "I did, and do, want

both these beings in my custody."

"But--"

"Do you fear they may escape?"

"No. Certainly not. But the datholch must know … the value of this

prisoner as a subject for interrogation--"

"The methods your folk would use would leave him of no value for

anything else," Ydwyr rapped. "And he can't have information we don't

already possess; I assume the Intelligence Corps is not interested in

his private life. He is here only through a coincidence."

"Can the datholch accept that strong a coincidence? Flandry met the met

by chance, yes. But that he, of every possible pilot, went off to the

lost planet as a happenstance: to that I must say no."

"I say yes. He is precisely the type to whom such things occur. If one

exposes oneself to life, qanryf, life will come to one. I have my own

uses for him and will not see him ruined. I also want to learn more

about this female. They go into my keeping."

Morioch flushed and well-nigh roared: "The datholch forgets that Flandry

worked tail-entwined with Abrams to thwart the Protector!"

Ydwyr lifted a hand, palm down, and chopped it across his breast.

Flandry sucked in a breath. That gesture was seldom used, and never by

those who did not have the hereditary right. Morioch swallowed, bent

head above folded hands, and muttered, "I beg the datholch's

forgiveness." Merseians didn't often beg, either.

"Granted," Ydwyr said. "Dismissed."

"Kh-h … the datholch understands I must report this to headquarters

with what recommendations my duty demands I make?"

"Certainly. I shall be sending messages of my own. No censure will be in

them." Ydwyr's hauteur vanished. Though his smile was not a man's, but

only pulled the upper lip back off the teeth, Flandry recognized

friendliness. "Hunt well, Morioch Sun-in-eye."

"I thank … and wish a good hunt … to you." Morioch rose, saluted,

and left.

Outside, the sky had gone altogether black. Lightning flamed, thunder

bawled, wind yammered behind galloping sheets of rain, whose drops

smoked back off the ground. Djana fell into Flandry's arms; they upheld

each other.

Releasing her, he turned to Ydwyr and made the best Merseian salute of

honor which a human could. "The datholch is thanked with my whole

spirit," he said in Eriau.

Ydwyr smiled anew. The overhead fluoropanel, automatically brightening

as the storm deepened, made the room into a warm little cave. (Or a cool

one; that rain was not far below its boiling point.) The folds in his

robe showed him relaxing. "Be seated if you desire," he invited.

The humans were quick to accept, lowering themselves to the rubbery

floor and leaning back against a cabinet. Their knees were grateful. To

be sure, there was a psychological drawback; now Ydwyr loomed over them

like a heathen god.

But I'm not going to be drugged, brainscrubbed, or shot. Not today.

Maybe … maybe, eventually, an exchange deal …

Ydwyr had returned to dignified impassivity. I mustn't keep him waiting.

Strength seeped back into Flandry's cells. He said, "May I ask the

datholch to tell me his standing, in order that I can try to show him

his due honor?'

"We set most ritual aside--of necessity--in my group here," the Merseian

answered. "But I am surprised that one who speaks Eriau fluently and has

been on our home planet has not encountered the term before."

"The uh, the datholch--may I inform the datholch, his language was

crammed into me in tearing haste; my stay on his delightful world was

brief; and what I was taught at the Academy dealt mainly with--uh--"

"I told you the simple forms of respect will do on most occasions."

Ydwyr's smile turned downward this time, betokening a degree of

grimness. "And I know how you decided not to end your sentence. Your

education dealt with us primarily as military opponents." He sighed.

"Khraich, I don't fear the tactless truth. We Merseians have plenty of

equivalents of you, the God knows. It's regrettable but inevitable, till

your government changes its policies. I bear no personal animosity,

Lieutenant Dominic Flandry. I far prefer friendship, and hope a measure

of it may take root between us while we are together.

"As for your question, datholch is a civilian rather than a military

rank." He did not speak in exact equivalents, for Merseia separated

"civilian" and "military" differently from Terra, and less clearly; but

Flandry got the idea. "It designates an aristocrat who heads an

enterprise concerned with expanding the Race's frontier." (Frontier of

knowledge, trade, influence, territory, or what? He didn't say, and

quite likely it didn't occur to him that there was any distinction.) "As

for my standing, I belong to the Vach Urdiolch and"--he stood up and

touched his brow while he finished--"it is my high honor that a brother

of my late noble father is, in the glory of the God, Almighty Roidhun of

Merseia, the Race, and all holdings, dominions, and subordinates of the

Race."

Flandry scrambled to his feet and yanked Djana to hers. "Salute!" he

hissed in her ear, in Anglic. "Like me! This chap's a nephew of their

grand panjandrum!"

Who might or might not be a figurehead, depending on the circumstances

of his reign--and surely, that he was always elected from among the

Urdiolchs, by the Hands of the Vachs and the heads of Merseian states

organized otherwise than the anciently dominant culture--from among the

Urdiolchs, the only landless Vach--surely this was in part a check on

his powers--but surely, too, the harshest, most dictatorial Protector

regarded his Roidhun with something of the same awe and pride that

inspired the lowliest "foot" or "tail"--for the Roidhun stood for the

God, the unity, and the hope of the warrior people--Flandry's mind

swirled close to chaos before he brought it under control.

"Be at ease." Ydwyr reseated himself and gestured the humans to do

likewise. "I myself am nothing but a scientist." He leaned forward. "Of

course, I served my time in the Navy, and continue to hold a reserve

commission; but my interests are xenological. This is essentially a

research station. Talwin was discovered by accident

about--uh-h-h-h--fifteen Terran years ago. Astronomers had noted an

unusual type of pulsar in this vicinity: extremely old, close to

extinction. A team of physicists went for a look. On the way back,

taking routine observations as they traveled, they detected the unique

orbital scramble around Siekh and investigated it too."

Flandry thought sadly that humans might well have visited that pulsar in

early days--it was undoubtedly noted in the pilot's data for these

parts, rare objects being navigationally useful--but that none of his

folk in the present era would venture almost to the ramparts of a

hostile realm just to satisfy their curiosity.

Ydwyr was proceeding: "When I learned about Tal-win's extraordinary

natives, I decided they must be studied, however awkwardly near your

borders this star lies."

Flandry could imagine the disputes and wire-pullings that had gone on,

and the compromise which finally was reached, that Talwin should also be

an advanced base for keeping an eye on the Terrans. No large cost was

involved, nor any large risk … nor any large chance of glory and

promotion, which last fact helped explain Morioch's eagerness to wring

his prisoners dry.

The lieutenant wet his lips. "You, uh, you are most kind, sir," he said;

the honorific appeared implicitly in the pronoun. "What do you wish of

us?"

"I would like to get to know you well," Ydwyr said frankly. "I have

studied your race in some detail; I have met individual members of it; I

have assisted in diplomatic business; but you remain almost an

abstraction, almost a complicated forcefield rather than a set of beings

with minds and desires and souls. It is curious, and annoying, that I

should be better acquainted with Domrath and Ruadrath than with Terrans,

our one-time saviors and teachers, now our mighty rivals. I want to

converse with you.

"Furthermore, since any intelligence agent must know considerable

xenology, you may be able to help us in our research on the autochthons

here. Of a different species and culture, you may gain insights that

have escaped us.

"This is the more true, and you are the more intriguing in your own

right, because of who you are. By virtue of my family connections, I

obtained the story--or part of the story--behind the Starkad affair. You

are either very capable, Dominic Flandry, or else very lucky, and I

wonder if there may not be a destiny in you."

The term he used was obscure, probably archaic, and the man had to guess

its meaning from context and cognation. Fate? Mana? Odd phrasing for a

scientist.

"In return," Ydwyr finished, "I will do what I can to protect you." With

the bleak honesty of his class: "I do not promise to succeed."

"Do you think, sir … I might ever be released?" Flandry asked.

"No. Not with the information you hold. Or not without so deep a memory

wiping that no real personality would remain. But you should find life

tolerable in my service."

If you find my service worthwhile, Flandry realized, and if higher-ups

don't overrule you when they learn about me. "I have no doubt I shall,

sir. Uh, maybe I can begin with a suggestion, for you to pass on to the

qanryf if you see fit."

Ydwyr waited.

"I heard the lords speaking about, uh, ordering that the man who hired

me--Leon Ammon--" might as well give him the name, it'll be in Rax's

dispatch "--that he be eliminated, to eliminate knowledge of Wayland

from the last Terrans. I'd suggest going slow and cautious there. You

know how alarmed and alerted they must be, sir, even on sleepy old

Irumclaw Base, when I haven't reported in. It'd be risky passing on an

order to your agents, let alone having them act. Best wait awhile.

Besides, I don't know myself how many others Ammon told. I should think

your operatives ought to make certain they've identified everyone who

may be in on the secret, before striking.

"And there's no hurry, sir. Ammon hasn't any ship of his own, nor dare

he hire one of the few civilian craft around. Look how easy it was to

subvert the interplanetary ferrier we used, without ever telling him

what a treasure was at stake. Oh, you haven't heard that detail yet,

have you, sir? It's part of how I was trapped.

"Ammon will have to try discovering what went wrong; then killing those

who betrayed him, or those he can find or thinks he's found; and making

sure they don't kill him first; and locating another likely-looking

scoutship pilot, and sounding him out over months, and waiting for

assignment rotation to put him on the route passing nearest Wayland,

and--Well, don't you see, sir, nothing's going to happen that you need

bother about for more than a year? If you want to be ultra-cautious, I

suppose you can post a warcraft in the Mimirian System; I can tell you

the coordinates, though frankly, I think you'd be wasting your effort.

But mainly, sir, your side has everything to lose and nothing to gain by

moving fast against Ammon."

"Khraich." Ydwyr rubbed palm across chin, a sandpapery sound--under the

storm-noise--despite his lack of beard. "Your points are well taken.

Yes, I believe I will recommend that course to Morioch. And, while my

authority in naval affairs is theoretically beneath his, in practice--"

His glance turned keen. "I take for granted, Dominic Flandry, you speak

less in the hope of ingratiating yourself with me than in the hope of

keeping events on Irumclaw in abeyance until you can escape."

"Uh--uh, well, sir--"

Ydwyr chuckled. "Don't answer. I too was a young male, once. I do trust

you won't be so foolish as to try a break. If you accomplished it, the

planet would soon kill you. If you failed, I would have no choice but to

turn you over to Morioch's inquisitors."

XIII

----

The airbus was sturdier and more powerful than most, to withstand

violent weather. But the sky simmered quiet beneath its high gray cloud

deck when Flandry went to the Domrath.

That was several of Talwin's eighteen-hour days after he had arrived.

Ydwyr had assigned the humans a room in the building that housed his

scientific team. They shared the mess there. The Merseian civilians were

cordial and interested in them. The two species ate each other's food

and drank each other's ale with, usually, enjoyment as well as

nutrition. Flandry spent the bulk of his time getting back into physical

shape and oriented about this planet. Reasonably reconciled with

Djana--who'd been caught in the fortunes of war, he thought, and who now

did everything she could to mollify her solitary fellow human--she made

his nights remarkably pleasant. In general, aside from being a captive

whose fate was uncertain and from having run out of tobacco, he found

his stay diverting.

Nor was she badly off. She had little to fear, perhaps much to gain. If

she never returned to the Empire, well, that was no particular loss when

other humans lived under the Roidhunate. Like a cat that has landed on

its feet, she set about studying her new environment. This involved long

conversations with the thirty-plus members of Ydwyr's group. She had no

Merseian language except for the standard loan words, and none of her

hosts had more than the sketchiest Anglic. But they kept a translating

computer for use with the natives. The memory bank of such a device

regularly included the major tongues of known space.

She'll make out, Flandry decided. Her kind always does, right up to the

hour of the asp.

Then Ydwyr offered him a chance to accompany a party bound for Seething

Springs. He jumped at it, both from curiosity and from pragmatism. If he

was to be a quasi-slave, he might have a worse master; he must therefore

see about pleasing the better one. Moreover, he had not inwardly

surrendered hope of gaining his freedom, to which end anything he

learned might prove useful.

Half a dozen Merseians were in the expedition. "It's fairly ordinary

procedure, but should be stimulating," said Cnif hu Vanden,

xenophysiologist, who had gotten friendliest with him. "The Domrath are

staging their fall move to hibernating grounds--in the case of this

particular group, from Seething Springs to Mt. Thunderbelow. We've never

observed it among them, and they do have summertime customs that don't

occur elsewhere, so maybe their migration has special features too." He

gusted a sigh. "This pouchful of us … to fathom an entire world!"

"I know," Flandry answered. "I've heard my own scholarly acquaintances

groan about getting funds." He spread his hands. "Well, what do you

expect? As you say: an entire world. It took our races till practically

yesterday to begin to understand their home planets. And now, when we

have I don't know how many to walk on if we know the way--"

Cnif was typical of the problem, crossed his mind. The stout, yellowish,

slightly flat-faced male belonged to no Vach; his ancestors before

unification had lived in the southern hemisphere of Merseia, in the

Republic of Lafdigu, and to this day their descendants maintained

peculiarities of dress and custom, their old language and many of their

old laws. But Cnif was born in a colony; he had not seen the mother

world until he came there for advanced education, and many of its ways

were strange to him.

The bus glided forward. The first valve of the hangar heatlock closed

behind it, the second opened, and it climbed with a purr of motor and

whistle of wind. At 5000 meters it leveled off and bore north-northeast.

That course by and large followed the river. Mainly the passengers sat

mute, preparing their kits or thinking their thoughts. Merseians never

chattered like humans. But Cnif pointed out landmarks through the

windows.

"See, behind us, at the estuary, what we call Barrier Bay. In early

winter it becomes choked with icebergs and floes, left by the receding

waters. When they melt in spring, the turbulance and flooding is

unbelievable."

The steam wound like a somnolent snake through the myriad blues of

jungle. "We call it the Golden River in spite of its being silt-brown.

Auriferous sands, you see, washed down from the mountains. Most of the

place names are unavoidably ours. Some are crude translations from

Domrath terms. The Ruadrath don't have place names in our sense, which

is why we seldom borrow from them."

Cnif's words for the aborigine& were artificial. They had to be. "Dom"

did represent an attempt at pronouncing what one of the first

communities encountered called themselves; but "-rath" was an Eriau root

meaning, approximately, "folk," and "Ruadrath" had originally referred

to a class of nocturnal supernatural beings in a Merseian

mythology--"elves."

The forested plain gave way to ever steeper foothills. The shadowless

gray light made contours hard to judge, but Flandry could see how the

Golden ran here through a series of deep canyons. "Those are full to the

brim when the glaciers melt," Cnif said. "But we've since had so much

evaporation that the level is well down; and we'll soon stop getting

rain, it'll become first fog, later snow and hail. We are at the end of

the summer."

Flandry reviewed what he had read and heard at the base. Talwin went

about Siekh in an eccentric ellipse which, of course, had the sun at one

focus. You could define summer arbitrarily as follows: Draw a line

through that focus, normal to the major axis, intersecting the curve at

two points. Then summer was the six-month period during which Talwin

passed from one of those points, through periastron, to the other end of

the line segment. Fall was the six weeks or so which it took to get from

the latter point to the nearest intersection of the minor axis with the

ellipse. Winter occupied the fifteen months wherein Talwin swung out to

its remotest distance and back again to the opposite minor-axis

intersection. Thereafter spring took another six weeks, until the point

was reached again which defined the beginning of summer.

In practice, things were nowhere near that simple. There were three

degrees of axial tilt; there were climatic zones; there were

topographical vibrations; above all, there was the thermal inertia of

soil, rock, air, and water. Seasons lagged planetary positions by an

amount depending on where you were and on any number of other factors,

not every one of which the Merseians had unraveled. Nonetheless, once

weather started to change, it changed with astonishing speed. Cnif had

spoken in practical rather than theoretical terms.

Vague through haze, the awesome peaks of the Hell-kettle Mountains came

to view beyond their foothills. Several plumes of smoke drifted into

gloomy heaven. An isolated titan stood closer, lifting scarred black

flanks in cliffs and talus slopes and grotesquely congealed lava beds,

up to a cone that was quiet now but only for now. "Mt. Thunderbelow."

The bus banked left and descended on a long slant, above a tributary of

the Golden. Vapors roiled white on those waters. "The Neverfreeze River.

Almost all streams, even the biggest, go stiff in winter; but this is

fed by hot springs, that draw their energy from the volcanic depths.

That's why the Ruadrath--of Wirrda's, I mean--have prospered so well in

these parts. Aquatic life remains active and furnishes a large part of

their food."

Fuming rapids dashed off a plateau. In the distance, forest gave way to

sulfur beds, geysers, and steaming pools. The bus halted near the

plateau edge. Flandry spied a clearing and what appeared to be a

village, though seeing was poor through the tall trees. While the bus

hovered, the expedition chief spoke through its outercom. "We've

distributed miniature transceivers," Cnif explained to Flandry. "It's

best to ask leave before landing. Not that we have anything to fear from

them, but we don't want to make them shy. We lean backwards. Why … do

you know, a few years past, a newcomer to our group blundered into a

hibernation den before the males were awake. He thought they would be,

but they weren't; that was an especially cold spring. Two of them were

aroused. They tore him to shreds. And we refrained from punishment. They

weren't really conscious; instinct was ruling them."

His tone--insofar as a human could interpret--was not unkindly but did

imply: Poor animals, they aren't capable of behaving better. You

gatortails get a lot of dynamism out of taking for granted you're the

natural future lords of the galaxy, the man thought, but your attitude

has its disadvantages. Not that you deliberately antagonize any other

races, provided they give you no trouble. But you don't use their

talents as fully as you might. Ydwyr seems to understand this. He

mentioned that I could be valuable as a non-Merseian--which suggests

he'd like to have team members from among the Eoidhunate's client

species--but I imagine he had woes enough pushing his project through a

reluctant government, without bucking attitudes so ingrained that the

typical Merseian isn't even conscious of them.

Given a radio link to the base, the expedition leader didn't bother with

a vocalizer. He spoke Eriau directly to the computer back there. It

rendered his phrases into the dialect spoken here at Ktha-g-klek, to the

limited extent that the latter was "known" to its memory bank. Grunting,

clicking noises emerged from the minisets of whatever beings listened in

the village. The reverse process operated, via relay by the bus. An

artificial Merseian voice said: "Be welcome. We are in a torrent of

toil, but can happen a sharing of self is possible."

"The more if we can help you with your transportation," the leader

offered.

The Dom hesitated. A primitive's conservatism, Flandry recognized. He

can't be sure airlifts aren't unlucky, or whatever. Finally: "Come to

us."

That was not quickly done. First everybody aboard must get into his heat

suit. One had been modified for Flandry. It amounted to a white coverall

bedecked with pockets and sheaths; boots; gauntlets--everything

insulated around a web of thermoconductor strands. A fish-bowl helmet

was equipped with chowlock, mechanical wipers, two-way sonic

amplification, and short-range radio. A heat pump, hooked to the

thermoconductors and run off accumulators, was carried on a backpack

frame. Though heavy, the rig was less awkward than might have been

expected. Its weight was well distributed; the gloves were thick and

stiff, but apparatus was designed with that in mind, and plectrum-like

extensions could be slipped over the fingers for the finer work. Anyway,

Flandry thought, consider the alternative.

It's not that man or Merseian can't survive awhile in this sauna. I

expect we could, if the while be fairly short. It's that we wouldn't

particularly want to survive.

Checked out, the party set down its vehicle and stepped forth. At this

altitude, relay to base continued automatically.

Flandry's first awareness was of weight, enclosure, chuttering pump,

cooled dried air blown at his nostrils. Being otherwise unprocessed, the

atmosphere bore odors--growth, decay, flower and animal exudations,

volcanic fumes--that stirred obscure memories at the back of his brain.

He dismissed them and concentrated on his surroundings.

The river boomed past a broad meadow, casting spray and steam over its

banks. Above and on every side loomed the jungle. Trees grew high, brush

grew wide, leaf crowding serrated blue leaf until the eye soon lost

itself in dripping murk. But the stems looked frail, pulpy, and the

leaves were drying out; they rattled against each other, the fallen ones

scrittled before a breeze, the short life of summer's forest drew near

to an end.

Sturdier on open ground was that vegetable family the Merseians called

wair: as widespread, variegated, and ecologically fundamental as grass

on Terra. In spring it grew from a tough-hulled seed, rapidly building a

cluster of foliage and a root that resembled a tuber without being one.

The leaves of the dominant local species were ankle height and lacy.

They too were withering, the wair was going dormant; but soon, in fall,

it would consume its root and sprout seeds, and when frost cracked their

pods, the seeds would fall to earth.

Darkling over treetops could be glimpsed Mt. Thunderbelow. A slight

shudder went through Flandry's shins, he heard a rumble, the volcano had

cleared its throat. Smoke puffed forth.

But the Domrath were coming. He focused on them.

Life on Talwin had followed the same general course as on most

terrestroid planets. Differences existed. It would have been surprising

were there none. Thus, while tissues were principally built of L-amino

proteins in water solution like Flandry's or Cnif's, here they normally

metabolized levo sugars. A man could live on native food, if he avoided

the poisonous varieties; but he must take the dietary capsules the

Merseians had prepared.

Still, the standard division into photosynthetic vegetable and

oxygen-breathing animal had occurred, and the larger animals were

structurally familiar with their interior skeletons, four limbs, paired

eyes and ears. Set beside many sophonts, the Domrath would have looked

homelike.

They were bipeds with four-fingered hands, their outline roughly

anthropoid except for the proportionately longer legs and huge, clawed,

thickly soled feet necessary to negotiate springtime swamps and summer

hardpan. The skin was glabrous, bluish, with brown and black mottlings

that were beginning to turn gaudy colors as mating season approached.

The heads were faintly suggestive of elephants', round, with beady eyes,

large erect ears that doubled as cooling surfaces, a short trunk that

was a chemosensor and a floodtime snorkel, small down-curving tusks on

the males. The people wore only loincloths, loosely woven straw cloaks

to help keep off "insects," necklaces and other ornaments of bone,

shell, horn, teeth, tinted clay. Some of their tools and weapons were

bronze, some--incongruously--paleolithic.

That much was easily grasped. And while their size was considerable,

adult males standing over two meters and massing a hundred or more

kilos, females even larger, it was not overwhelming. They were bisexual

and viviparous. Granted, they were not mammals. A mother fed her infants

by régurgitation. Bodies were poikilothermic, though now functioning at

a higher rate than any Terran reptile. That was not unheard of either.

Nonetheless, Flandry thought, it marked the foundation of their

uniqueness. For when your energy, your very intelligence was a function

of temperature; when you not only slept at night, but spent two-thirds

of your life among the ghostly half-dreams of hibernation--

About a score had come to meet the xenologists, with numerous young

tagging after. The grownups walked in ponderous stateliness. But several

had burdens strapped on their backs; and behind them Flandry saw others

continue work, packing, loading bundles onto carrier poles, sweeping and

garnishing soon-to-be-deserted houses.

The greeting committee stopped a few meters off. Its leader elevated his

trunk while dipping his ax. Sounds that a human palate could not

reproduce came from his mouth. Flandry heard the computer's voice in his

radio unit. "Here is Seething Springs. I am"--no translation available,

but the name sounded like "G'ung"--"who speaks this year for our tribe."

An intonation noted, in effect, that "tribe" (Eriau "maddeuth," itself

not too close an equivalent of the Anglic word by which Flandry rendered

it) was a debatable interpretation of the sound G'ung made, but must

serve until further studies had deepened comprehension of his society.

"Why have you come?"

The question was not hostile, nor was the omission of a spoken welcome.

The Domrath were gregarious, unwarlike although valiant fighters at

need, accustomed to organizing themselves in nomadic bands. And, while

omnivorous, they didn't make hunting a major occupation. Their near

ancestors had doubtless lived entirely off the superabundant plant life

of summer. Accordingly, they had no special territorial instincts.

Except for their winter dens, it did not occur to them that anyone might

not have a perfect right to be anywhere.

The Seething Springs folk were unusual in returning annually to

permanent buildings, instead of constructing temporary shelters wherever

they chanced to be. And this custom had grown up among them only because

their hibernation site was not too far from this village. No one had

challenged their occupation of it.

Quite simply and amiably, G'ung wondered what had brought the Merseians.

"We explained our reasons when last we visited you … with gifts,"

their leader reminded. His colleagues bore trade goods, metal tools and

the like, which had hitherto delighted all recipients. "We wish to learn

about your tribe."

"Is understood." Neither G'ung nor his group acted wildly enthusiastic.

No Domrath had shown fear of the Merseians. Being formidable animals,

they had never developed either timidity or undue aggressiveness; being

at an early prescientific stage, they lived among too many marvels and

mysteries to see anything terrifyingly strange about spaceships bearing

extraplanetarians; and Yowyr had enforced strict correctness in every

dealing with them. So why did these hesitate?

The answer was manifest as G'ung continued: "But you came before in high

summer. Fastbreaking Festival was past, the tribes had dispersed, food

was ample and wit was keen. Now we labor to bring the season's

gatherings to our hibernation place. When we are there, we shall feast

and mate until we drowse off. We have no time or desire for sharing self

with outsiders."

"Is understood, G'ung," the Merseian said. "We do not wish to hamper or

interfere. We do wish to observe. Other tribes have we watched as fall

drew nigh, but not yours, and we know your ways differ from the

Towlanders' in more than one regard. For this privilege we bid gifts

and, can happen, the help of our flying house to transport your stores."

The Domrath snorted among themselves. They must be tempted but unsure.

Against assistance in the hard job of moving stuff up toward Mt.

Thunderbelow must be balanced a change in immemorial practice, a

possible angering of gods … yes, it was known the Domrath were a

religious race …

"Your words shall be shared and chewed on," G'ung decided. "We shall

assemble tonight. Meanwhile is much to do while light remains." The

darkness of Talwin's clouded summer was pitchy; and in this dry period,

fires were restricted and torches tabooed: He issued no spoken

invitation, that not being the custom of his folk, but headed back. The

Merseians followed with Flandry.

The village was carefully laid out in a spiderweb pattern of

streets--for defense? Buildings varied in size and function, from hut to

storage shed, but were all of stone, beautifully dressed, dry-laid, and

chinked. Massive wooden beams supported steeply pitched sod roots. Both

workmanship and dimensions--low ceilings, narrow doorways, slit windows

with heavy shutters--showed that, while the Domrath used this place,

they had not erected it.

They boiled about, a hundred or so of every age; doubtless more were on

the trail to the dens. Voices and footfalls surged around. In spite of

obvious curiosity, no one halted work above a minute to stare at the

visitors. Autumn was too close.

At a central plaza, where the old cooked a communal meal over a firepit,

G'ung showed the Merseians some benches. "I will speak among the

people," he said. "Come day's end, you shall receive us here and we

shall share self on the matter you broach. Tell me first: would the

Ruadrath hold with your plan?"

"I assure you the Ruadrath have nothing against it," Cnif said.

From what I've studied, Flandry thought, I'm not quite sure that's true,

once they find out.

"I have glimpsed a Ruad--I think--when I was small and spring came

early," said an aged female. "That you see them each year--" She

wandered off, shaking her head.

With Cnif's assent, Flandry peeked into a house fronting on the square.

He saw a clay floor, a hearth and smokehole, daises along two sides with

shelves above. Bright unhuman patterns glowed on walls and intricately

carved timbers. In one comer stood a loaded rack, ready to go. But from

the rafters, with ingenious guards against animals, hung dried fruits

and cured meat--though the Domrath were rarely eaters of flesh. A male

sat carefully cleaning and greasing bronze utensils, knifes, bowls, an

ax, a saw. His female directed her young in tidying the single room

while she spread the daises with new straw mats.

Flandry greeted the family. "Is this to be left?" he asked. It seemed

like quite a bit for these impoverished savages.

"In lightness, what else?" the male replied. He didn't stop his work,

nor appear to notice that Flandry was not a Merseian. In his eyes, the

differences were probably negligible. "The metal is of the Ruadrath, as

is the house. For use we give payment, that they may be well pleased

with us when they come out of the sea." He did pause then, to make a

sign that might be avertive or might be reverent--or both or neither,

but surely reflected the universal sense of a mortal creature

confronting the unknown. "Such is the law, by which our forebears lived

while others died. Thch ra'a."

Ruadrath: elves, gods, winter ghosts.

XIV

---

More and more, as the weeks of Flandry's absence passed, her existence

took on for Djana an unreality. Or was it that she began slowly to enter

a higher truth, which muted the winds outside and made the walls around

her shadowy?

Not that she thought about it in that way, save perhaps when the

magician wove her into a spell. Otherwise she lived in everydayness. She

woke in the chamber that the man had shared with her. She exercised and

groomed herself out of habit, because her living had hitherto depended

on her body. At mess she stood respectfully aside while the Merseians

went through brief rituals religious, familial, and patriotic--oddly

impressive and stirring, those big forms and deep voices, drawn steel

and talking drums--and afterward joined in coarse bread, raw vegetables,

gwydh-msk cheese, and the Terran-descended tea which they raised

throughout the Roidhunate. There followed study, talk, sometimes a

special interview, sometimes recreation for a while; a simple lunch; a

nap in deference to her human circadian rhythm; more study, until

evening's meat and ale. (Since Merseia rotated at about half the rate of

Talwin, a night had already gone over the land.) Later she might have