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Devil's Star

by Jack Williamson

My mother had chronic bad luck, and a secret shield against it. On no evidence at all, she clung to a stubborn belief that she was the great-grandniece of an illegitimate son of President Cleon Starhawke I, who had won fame for the interstellar conquests that added half a thousand planets to the Terran Republic, and notoriety for the beauty and fertility of his numerous mistresses.

"Never forget that we have presidential blood," she used to urge me. "Live up to it, Kiff, and it will make you great."

With no proof of the myth, I grew up proud of my Starhawke blood, loyal to the Republic and dreaming of a chance for some signal service to the President. My father abandoned us before I was five, migrating to a newly opened planet with a younger woman. My mother spent the next few years working as a domestic servant before she found another husband and skipped out with him, leaving me alone on Earth.

My own luck ran better. Both husbands left funds toward my education. She enrolled me in the Starhawke Space Academy. I came of age and earned my commission there, swearing eternal allegiance to the Terran Republic and Cleon III.

Graduating as a military historian, I begged for the chance to make my name with some active force out on the Rim frontier. Instead, I found myself still stuck on Earth, the freshman member of a little research team in the library at the Presidential War College near New Denver. Our project was to produce an updated history of Devil's Star. On my first day there, a discontented senior officer tried to shatter my illusions.

"You'll find no career here." He looked around and dropped his voice. "The library was founded to glorify the Starhawkes, but they won no wars on Devil's Star. The planet may justify the name, but it has no history."

I asked for facts about it

"None worth knowing." He shrugged. "Sea level air pressure nearly twice Terra's. Surface mostly too hot and too hostile to be terraformed. No resources worth attention. The explorers had labeled it Lucifer and passed it by."

"Wasn't it once a penal colony?"

"A death pit." He shrugged again. "Called the Black Hole. Infested with hostile life and strange disease. Prisoners sometimes sent down in old landing craft, with no fuel to take off again. Public outrage stopped that when the truth got out. No landings since." He made a bitter face. "We're in the same fix here, condemned to our own hopeless hole."

"The convicts did survive?"

"A disappointment to the executioners." He grinned. "A hardy few climbed out of the heat, to a high mountain ridge that runs down the middle of the main continent. A cooler corner of hell. Some are likely still alive."

Trapped there, with nothing to do and no future in sight, I was feeling as hopeless as another maroon until the day an officer in the uniform of the Presidential Guard caught me in my little cubicle with the news that Space Admiral Gilliyar wanted to see me at once. Astonished and a little alarmed, I asked why.

"He'll tell you why."

A luxury aircar carried us across the base to the Space Command Tower. We found the admiral in a huge corner office that looked across a great field of silver-bright skip-ships. A big man with a bulldog chin, his bright red hair cut short, he was in shirt sleeves, his uniform jacket flung over the back of a chair behind a huge bare desk.

He stood up when the orderly brought me in. My heart thumping, I saluted.

"So you are Starman Kiff McCall?" He returned the salute, studied me with keen gray eyes, nodded abruptly. "You look fit for the job. Let's sit."

Breathing a little easier, but anxious to know what job, I followed him to chairs at a wide window that looked out west across the starport to snowcapped mountain summits.

"Have you done duty off the Earth?"

"No sir."

I waited, sweating.

"No matter." He shrugged again. "What do you know about Devil's Star?"

"Very little, sir. I doubt that much is known by anybody. All contact was outlawed two centuries ago."

"You'll soon know more." My mouth must have gaped; he laughed at me. "If you're ready to go there?"

"I—" I had to catch my breath. "I'm ready."

"Think before you jump." He bent toward me, hard eyes narrowed to study me again. "This will be a highly confidential mission, with no official support or public reward. Your career and even your life may be in danger."

"I've sworn an oath." Feeling like a schoolboy, I put my hand on my heart. "My life is pledged to the Republic and the President."

He smiled at the quiver in my voice.

"I trust you." He spoke very gravely. "What I say is for your ears only. Here is the situation. The sanctions against contact with the planet Lucifer have been broken. As you may know, enemies of the Republic were once exiled there. Their descendants appear to have created an outlaw society. The mere rumor of a free society is a hazard to the state. The President has ordered the planet reclaimed as Terran territory. He is sending me there as the first governor."

Muscles tightened in his jaw.

"It's been a black hole. The convict transports didn't all return. We never knew why, but those who got back called it hell. Before any landing is attempted, we're sending an undercover agent to look the situation over and report what resistance we should expect. That's your errand."

I never returned to my library cubicle. Instead I spent a few hectic months in a class for interstellar intelligence officers, a disappointment to me. I'd hoped for training to face the hazards of the star frontiers, but Cleon I had annihilated the alien foes he found there. These future agents were destined for duty here closer to home.

"Worlds gone soft!" a black-mustached instructor shouted at us. "Rotten to the heart! Maybe loyal Terrans once, but turncoats now, corrupted by all that damned Free Space gibble-gabble. Your future duty is to hunt such traitors down and stop their venomous slander against the Starhawke Presidents."

Admiral Gilliyar's mission had not been revealed, yet my part in it gave me a thrill of secret pride. His staff invented a cover story for me. Based on my mother's claims to presidential kinship, it named me the leader of an exposed Free Space plot to overthrow the President. In flight to escape arrest, I was to become a hunted fugitive, my whereabouts unknown.

On my last day at school, I was hustled out of class and escorted to an empty hangar at the skyport. There, equipped with an oxygen mask and a radio, I was nailed into a rough wooden box stenciled electronic sundries. The radio kept me informed while it was tilted, jarred and jolted, finally loaded into the cargo hold of the Star of Avalon.

That was the ship of a suspected smuggler that had been captured, but released with a warning when the captain paid his excise taxes. And no doubt a bribe; I had learned that even the great Terran Republic is not without corruption.

Our first skip was a stomach-churning lurch. The radio went silent. Elated to be off the Earth and on my way, I got out of the box and hammered on a bulkhead. A startled spacehand let me out of the hold and took me to Bart Greenlaw, master and owner of the ship. A fit youthful man in a bright yellow skip suit, he interrupted my cover story.

"So you are Kiff McCall?" His keen eyes scanned me. "I trade with Free Spacers. The price on your head has them wondering about you and your conspiracy. They'd never heard of you."

"We try to keep our secrets," I told him. "I left friends behind, friends I can't betray."

"I understand." He studied me again, and finally smiled as if he believed me. "I know how my own Free Spacer friends feel about the Republic. Or the Terran Empire, they call it. Power corrupts, they say, until it finally rots itself. The Starhawkes hold too much power. They've held it too long."

His gaze sharpened to study my reaction.

"They say Cleon III is sitting on a bomb, armed and ready to blow."

I nodded, trying not to show too much emotion. Any connection between the Free Space activists and Devil's Star was something I must report, but my own mission could have ended then and there if he had guessed the truth.

"One question, if I may ask." His eyes narrowed. "If you're an actual freedom fighter, why are you heading for a prison you'll never escape?"

"We lost a battle." I groped for anything he might accept. "I had to run while I could, but the war isn't over. I want the whole picture. I'm fascinated with the little I know about Devil's Star. I want to do a history of it. Smuggled out to civilization, it might make a difference."

"Civilization?" His face set hard for an instant, but then he gave me a quizzical smile. "You ought to find us interesting."

Seeming satisfied, he found a berth for me, and treated me like another member of his little crew. They all were busy, calculating skip congruencies and maneuvering for relaunch positions and relative velocities, but he let me sit with them at meals, where I could listen for anything Admiral Gilliyar might want to know.

In my berth that night, I dreamed the admiral had won his little war. I was with him on his triumphant return to Earth. A military band was blaring when we came off his flagship, and a goose-stepping squad from the Presidential Guard escorted us to the White Palace. Cleon III received us in the Diamond Room to praise the admiral for his heroic victory and make him the sole proprietor of the conquered planet.

As the dream went on, the beaming admiral presented me to Cleon III. Without my daring undercover work, he said, his expedition would have ended in disaster. The President thanked me for my heroic service to the Republic, and pinned a glittering Starhawke Medal of Honor on my chest.

I felt let down when I woke to find that moment of glory gone, yet my elation lingered. After all, I was safely on my way to Lucifer. Greenlaw seemed to trust me. Something like the dream might still come true.

Our flight took a week. The skips themselves are instant; outside our space-time bubble there is no space to cross or time to pass, but any long voyage requires a series of jumps from one point of congruence to another. On the major space lanes these are marked and charted, but contact points are hard to find and markers can drift. Some points are periodic. Some can vanish altogether. Skip navigation takes high skills and a rare grasp of the total cosmos.

I came to admire Greenlaw for his easy-seeming expertise as an extraspatial pilot, and to enjoy his company. A native of Devil's Star, he loved his planet and liked to talk about its history and geography.

"There's one big continent," he said. "Split in half by a high ridge that runs north and south down the middle of it. That's where we live, between two harsh frontiers, east and west of us. Monsoon rains keep the east half buried under jungle and forest. Dry downslope winds keep the west half hotter than any place on Earth. Both halves are deadly in a dozen ways, yet rich with resources we've learned to use."

I asked about the government.

"We have none." He grinned at my astonishment. "No laws. No money. No taxes. No cops or prisons. We never forgot the merciless government that dumped us here." He paused to smooth his bitter voice. "We were political convicts, condemned for wanting freedom. The Terran government dumped us into the desert or that deadly jungle, with freedom to die."

He glared as if I had challenged him.

"A few of us didn't. We made it up to the highlands, where survival was barely possible—after we learned to care for one another. That's our secret. All for each and each for all." He intoned the words like a mantra. "If you can understand?"

Not sure I did, I shook my head.

"It's your culture." He frowned and shook his head. "I saw it when I was a student there. A culture of selfish aggression. You need your laws and cops and prisons to protect yourselves from one another. We don't, if you get the difference."

"No money?" I asked. "How do you manage without it?"

"Well enough." He shrugged. "You would call it a barter economy. We have exchange centers. Through your working life, you make contributions when you can. In return you draw what you need, a loaf of bread, a farm tool, the service of a surgeon. You continue to serve and be served as long as you live. We have no idle millionaires, no homeless beggars."

"No public services?" I asked. "Don't you need roads, schools, fire departments, hospitals?"

"Of course we do."

"With no money and no taxes, who pays for them?"

"Why pay?" His tone was almost scolding. "We build them. Where you have laws, and lockups for those who break them, we have customs. Our own folkways. A culture of altruism. Every young person spends a year in some service of his or her own choice—and one of our years is nearly two of Earth's. I spent mine sweating down in the desert, at work on date farms and a new angel wood plantation.

"The rest of our lives, we serve one day a week. Teaching, nursing, farming, building roads or bridges, doing what we can for others, trusting them to do for us. When I'm unable to care for myself, others will care for me. Not for money, but because that's our way of life."

"Don't people shirk?"

"Not many. Not often. Not long." He laughed. "A few have tried to live alone. They find how much we need each other."

"With no government at all?"

"You will see." He paused and spoke again, more reflectively. "As a student on Earth, I saw enough of the rotten Terran government you say is hunting you now. I learned to cope with cops and laws and rules and regulations and stupid bureaucrats. Give me freedom!"

Listening, I felt uncomfortable. I had begun to like him. My mission meant trouble for him, trouble for the world he loved. I had to remind myself that I was a Terran soldier, bound to a path of duty I must follow, whatever the cost to me.

Our final skip brought us into planetary orbit. The first hemisphere we saw was all blue ocean. The single huge continent slid into view, the east half-hidden under white monsoon clouds, the western desert a naked waste of dull reds and bright yellows, wrinkled with bare brown hills.

"My home!" Smiling like a happy child, Greenlaw pointed to the highlands, a thin green slash between desert and cloud. "The Vale of Avalon."

The next skip took us lower. I made it out, a high valley between two mountain ridges. A little river ran north between green slopes from a white-capped volcanic cone to a long narrow lake.

"The Avalon River." He pointed. "Most of our settlements are scattered along it, some grown into towns."

He landed at Benspost, a cluster of red tile roofs at a bend in the river. His father, Ben Greenlaw, owned the trading post, a sprawling building with low walls of roughly shaped stone. A little crowd had gathered to welcome him home, calling eager greetings as we came down the ramp.

Men in fringed brown buckskin, women in brighter cottons, wide-eyed children, all anxious to see the wonders he had brought back from the stars. He waved to a smiling, dark-haired woman in slacks and a neat leather jacket.

"Laurel," he said. "My kid sister. She's just back from her service year, down in the jungles. You'll meet our father. He's crippled from hell fever he caught there when he was young. I hope she came back better."

She ran to hug him when we stepped off the ramp.

"All okay." Smiling into his face, she looked fit enough and trimly attractive. "It was a great adventure, really. We were cutting a road across the flood plain to the Styx."

That was the great river than drained half the rainy lowlands.

"Kiff McCall." He introduced me. "A runaway rebel, in flight from the wrath of Cleon III."

"From old Earth?" She appraised me with clear green eyes, smiled, and gave me a strong handshake. "I want to hear all about it."

"I want to hear about the jungle."

"They call it hell, but I had a great year there!" Flushed with the excitement of the moment, she was beautiful. "We got all the way to the river. Set up a sawmill. Cut lumber to build a little boat with a sawmill engine. The first steamer on the Styx."

I stood stupidly silent, longing for her to like me and thinking how she would hate me when she learned what I was.

"Kiff will be our guest," Bart told her. "If you can find him a room.

"I certainly can."

She wanted to carry my bag. It held things I didn't want to show, a gun, my long-range radio, electronic gear to record and encode my reports to the admiral. I clung to it, and followed her through the store. Flushed with pride in Bart and his daring voyages, she showed me tables stacked with goods he had brought in: books and holo sets, watches, radios, computers.

"Things we don't make yet," she said. "But we're learning fast."

Uneasy with her, thinking of the painful lessons the admiral would soon be teaching, I followed her through the tables loaded with local goods. Shoes and clothing, hardware, flour, dried meats, native fruits and nuts with names strange to me.

A clerk was filling an order, punching prices into a barter card. As eager as a child with a birthday, she showed me a hunting rifle she wanted to buy with her savings from the service year. It was the work of a native craftsman, beautifully finished, the stock inlaid with silver, but useless to stop the admiral's battlecraft.

The family lived at the back of the single-story building. We left my bag in a clean little room with white-plastered walls and a comfortable bed, and she took me to meet her father. We found him at a desk facing a big window that looked out across the wide green valley to that old volcano in the south.

A heavy man with a withered leg, he gripped the edges of the desk to haul himself upright and shake my hand. I saw patches of dead-white scar tissue on his face and hands, saw his grimace of pain. Yet his grasp was strong. He smiled warmly at me and then at Laurel, when she came to put her arm around him.

"Relics of the hell country." He raised his hands to show the scars. "I spent my service year there, back before we discovered angel wood. Laurel was luckier."

"Kiff's a freedom fighter," she told him. "In flight from Cleon III"

"Welcome, sir!" He shook my hand again. "They'll never touch you here."

Sitting again, he listened to my cover story with a shrewd intentness that left me afraid he might see through the lies.

"We'll keep you safe." Laurel's eyes were shining. "You'll like it here."

She took me out see the town, a cluster of low stone buildings along a single cobblestone street. There were no motor vehicles, but I saw people on huge ungainly native creatures she called camels, larger than the Terran sort and able to carry half a ton of weight.

"I rode them down into the rain country," she told me. "They have evil tempers, but they're addicted to the silvernuts that grow there. When one gets unruly, a handful of nuts will make him kneel and beg."

She pointed to wires strung from poles along the street.

"Something my grandfather brought us. He found a junkyard of wrecked landing craft down in the desert where they used to unload the convicts, and salvaged parts to rebuild one that got him off the planet. He got aboard an old prison transport that had been lost in orbit when mutineers killed the officers.

"He taught himself skip navigation from the texts and tools he found aboard. The first skip took him nowhere, but a few more got him out to the home planet of our ancestors. He found kinsmen, made Free Space friends—and spent a dozen years on Earth learning everything he could. He'd abandoned the old transport, but he finally got home in a modern ship, with a cargo that changed life here."

I hated to think how Gilliyar would change it again.

"Electricity!" Her voice had risen. "Lights. Telephones. Radio. We've found no oil or coal to burn for power, but now we have windmill generators up in mountain gaps where the trade winds are steady. I wish we could get nuclear power."

I thought of the fusion engines on the admiral's battlecraft.

That uneasy awareness of my mission kept me troubled and silent that evening at dinner. Laurel's mother, Martha, had grown most of the food in her own kitchen garden. A genial, generous woman, she kept piling my plate with servings too large and seemed troubled that I had no better appetite.

In spite of such a welcome, the passing days left me no happier. I was there for months, waiting for Gilliyar's armada to arrive in orbit and preparing to tell him that the outlaws had no defenses worth concern. Laurel arranged a barter card for me. In return, I agreed to teach classes or tutor students in what they wanted to know about the outside worlds.

She became my first student. My cover story made me a romantic figure in her mind, the lone survivor of a heroic rebellion crushed by ruthless Terran power. Her face used to light when she saw me, in a way that wrenched my heart. I knew the truth would come out, knew it would destroy me.

I longed to reveal myself and beg for her forgiveness. Yet I was still a Terran soldier, bound by my oath of allegiance and a lifetime of loyal emotion, hopelessly trapped by all the lies I had told. Keeping silent because I had to, I let her enjoy the days that brought a tortured joy to me. She became an eager guide to her world: the lofty ridge that sliced like a blade between the jungle and the desert. She had seen enough of the jungle, but she took me on a camel down a winding mountain trail to an oasis on the high desert. A long day of clinging to a clumsy wooden seat on the back of the lurching beast left me sun-blistered and aching.

The torrid sun was low before we could dismount at the edge of a tiny lake at the end of a dry stream that ran down from the highlands in the monsoon season. It was on a stony plateau, the low desert and the vast salt marshes on the coast still a full mile farther down, but even after sunset the heat was stifling. Laurel used her barter card to pay for our rooms and meals at a lodge where her brother had worked through his social service year.

She gave me a little handful of bright green beans.

"The seed of the angel tree," she said. "A shrub from down along the coast. It's a natural drug for hell fever. We're trying to grow it here.

I chewed one of the seeds. Its sharp astringency burned my mouth, bitter as my own predicament.

"It's better than it tastes." She laughed at the face I made. "It saved my father's life."

Radiant at breakfast next morning, she wanted to show me the rows of young angel trees her brother had planted, and took me through a little museum that held the relics of a tragic chapter in the planet's history. A shipload of Free Space convicts had been left at the oasis with no supplies. Nearly half of them died. Gunter Greenlaw led the team that opened the road and got the survivors to the Vale.

"We earned our liberty," she told me.

Later, we rode south to ski on the slopes of that dead volcano. The road ran beside the Avalon through gardens, fruit orchards, grain fields, green meadows where spotted cattle grazed the slopes above us. Laurel spoke proudly of the pioneers who had tamed a hostile wilderness, dammed mountain streams for water, cleared land for crops and cattle, built their new society.

The beast's lurching gait kept bumping us together on the high wooden seat. Tormented by her body warmth, breathing her haunting scent, listening to her easy laugh, I tried to contain tides of wild desire and bitter despair.

At the lodge I offered my card and asked for two rooms.

"One will do," she told the clerk, and turned to grin at me. "I love you, Kiff. You do like me, don't you?"

Trapped in a tangle of emotions, I stammered that I did.

"Do you think we must be married?" The clerk stared, and she laughed at me. "You've talked about your government and how it limits all you do. We have more freedom here."

The clerk punched my card for just one room, but I needed time to sort my tangled feelings out. I said I felt hungry. We had dinner and a bottle of wine, out on a terrace below the snows. She admired the view and asked if we had snow sports on Earth. I found little to say.

"Kiff, you are hard to understand." She pushed her glass aside and leaned to stare into my face. "Even when I know how different your old world was. Are you unhappy here? Is there someone you love back outside?"

Honestly, I told her there was no one. Still I couldn't tell her what I felt, but the wine had begun to dull my reservations. When it was gone, we went to bed together. She was passionate. I half forgot my mission. Honestly, I told her I loved her, but all I couldn't say choked me with bitter shame.

We spent three days there. There were no lifts, but a big windmill drove an endless cable that pulled us to the top. The sun was bright, the slope great fun. Laurel was more intoxicating than the wine. She seemed radiant, imagining our future together.

"My brother has Free Space friends," she told me. "They say the star worlds have to change. He hopes we can make some kind of peaceful contact with them. Do you think a time will come when I can go with you back to the stars?"

"That would be wonderful," I told her. "If it could happen."

I knew it was impossible.

My radio stayed dead until the night when I found a green light flashing. Admiral Gilliyar was overhead, on a geosynchronous orbit that kept his armada over the highland ridge. I spent the rest of the night transmitting my recorded notes and pictures.

The sonic boom of an emerging skip craft pealed out of the sky while we were at breakfast a few mornings later. Jets roared overhead. A clerk rushed in, shouting that a Terran lander was down on the pad. A sleek little craft, it carried the Terran flag painted on its armored flank. Black-muzzled guns jutted out of the top turret.

Nobody got off. It sat there nearly an hour, while uneasy citizens gathered around it. A door dropped at last to make a ramp. I heard a roll of martial music. A flagman led a squad of riflemen down the ramp. A cameraman followed, set up a tripod, and shot Admiral Gilliyar marching out of the air lock in dress blue and gold, medals flashing on his breast.

Moving with the music, he took the flag and stabbed the sharpened staff into the ground. He turned, found me standing with my hosts in the watching crowd, and called my name. I stood there a moment, caught in confusion and bleak regret, before I stumbled toward him. Laurel ran to overtake me and threw her arms around me.

"Kiff!" she whispered. "I've always been afraid they'd come after you. Can't we help?"

I stood there an endless time trembling in her arms, too sick to speak. Breathing at last, I muttered that I was sorry, terribly sorry. I kissed her. Sobbing, she clung to me.

"I never meant—never meant to hurt you." The words stuck in my throat. "But I'm a spy. In the service of Cleon III and the Terran Republic."

She gripped my arms and stared at me, her wide eyes strange with shock. Blind with my own sudden tears I pulled out of her grasp, blundered on toward the admiral, and stopped to give him a stiff salute. Smiling, he returned the salute and came on to shake my hand. The little crowd had fallen silent, waiting till he turned and spoke.

"I am Terran Space Admiral Acton Gilliyar."

He paused for a moment before he went on, his mellow eloquence echoing off the long stone wall. He came in peace, to bring President Cleon Stawhawke's most cordial greetings and a heartfelt welcome into the Republic. I hardly heard the booming words. I was watching Laurel.

Her face white and stiff at first, she flushed pink. Her small fists clenched. Glaring at me with a look that changed from shock to scornful contempt, she spat on the ground.

"The President regrets your long neglect," his polished voice rolled on. "I understand that you are trying to survive here in a stare of lawless anarchy. I have come to bring you the law and order of Terran civilization. President Starhawke has appointed me the first governor of the planet Lucifer."

Muttering, people stared at one another and back at him.

"Sir!" Laurel's voice rang loud, heated perhaps by her anger at me. "We want none of your Republic." She looked around at those beside her, saw them nodding with agreement. "We need none of you!"

"Madam." He raised his voice, his tone grown harder. "With all due respect, I must inform you that your planet has belonged to the Terran Republic since the discoverers landed here and raised our flag."

"Non—nonsense, sir!" She caught her breath and lifted her quivering voice. "You threw us out of your wicked empire, and left us here to die. We've earned our freedom and we'll die to keep it."

"You may die. You'll never keep it."

"We'll never give it up."

"I must warn you, madam, that your words are a reckless incitement to treason." His voice slow and grimly solemn, he looked around at the little crowd and fixed his eyes on her. "If you want to die, the choice is yours. In modern times, suspected traitors are no longer merely exiled. The penalty now is death."

I heard a stifled outcry from her mother, a furious oath from her father. Friends gathered around them in a muttering group. The admiral turned to lift his hand at nose of the lander. The martial music rose again. He ordered his rifle squad back to the ramp. Laurel darted past them to the flag, pulled the staff out of the ground, and hurled it against the side of the lander. She stood staring at him and then at me, breathing hard.

"We witnessed that outrageous act of open treason!" he shouted at her. "What is your name?"

"Laurel Greenlaw." She tossed her head. "What is yours?"

"Acton Gilliyar." He grinned at her bleakly. "We'll be meeting again."

He beckoned to me. I followed him and the riflemen aboard. A warning siren screeched. Looking down from the control turret, I saw people scattering. Laurel stood closer, shaking here fist, dwindling to a defiant doll as we lifted.

The admiral landed us at half a dozen towns up and down the Avalon, at the ski lodge below the volcano, the oasis down on the desert, at a lumber camp on the headwaters of the Styx. At each stop he went off with his rifle squad to read his proclamations. A few people hooted. Nobody cheered.

We climbed back to the geosynchronous point. He broadcast an ultimatum demanding unconditional submission. The colonists must accept the rule of the democratic Terran Republic, swear allegiance to President Cleon III, welcome Terran landing forces, pay Terran taxes, obey orders from him as their newly appointed governor. Unless he received a signal of surrender within three days, he would be forced, however unwillingly, to take whatever measures the situation might require.

"There will be no signal," I warned him. "There is no government, nobody with authority to surrender."

"I expected opposition from the like of that Greenlaw woman." He shook his head, his jaw set hard. "These people were condemned and sent here as outlaw enemies of the state. They are enemies and outlaws still. If they want a lesson in Terran power, I'll give them a lesson."

Waiting three days in orbit, he received no signal of surrender. His lesson was a volley of guided missiles.

"I'm remaining on the flagship," he told me. "It will be my official residence. Captain Crendock is going down as my executive secretary with orders to secure the planet and establish administrative control."

He was startled when I wanted to go back to Benspost.

"Why?" He gave me a hard look. "You won't find friends there."

Uncomfortably, I tried to explain my own torn feelings.

"I'm still loyal," I told him, "bound by my duty to the Republic. But I did make friends there. People were generous to me. I was fascinated with their history. I want to write it for the whole Republic."

"Forget your pet traitors," he advised me. "That Greenlaw woman is no friend now."

"Yet she is making history. History worth recording."

"Better get back to Terra while you can." He gave me a stiff half-smile. "You were warned to expect no public recognition, but we will surely find something for you."

He called me a fool when I shook my head.

I had to go back to find Laurel, to try to explain what I had done, to beg her to understand. I didn't tell him that, but in the end, he replaced my lost radio and holo camera and let me go back down to Benspost with Crendock. A missile had struck there, and little remained of old Ben Greenlaw's trading post.

Yet life went on. I saw camels loaded with lumber and tile to repair shattered buildings. Bart was back again from some Terran planet with another illicit cargo. We found his skipcraft undamaged, standing on the pad near the ashes and fallen walls.

"Leave him alone," Gilliyar had ordered. "I hope to legalize the trade and impose excise taxes.

Camels were tethered around his ship, the drivers loading them with goods he had brought. His crew was loading it again with exports: nuts and dried fruit from the desert lowlands, rare hardwoods and balls of raw rubber from the rain forest.

His parents had set up a new barter center in a tent on a vacant lot. His mother burst into tears when she saw me, and ran back into the tent. His father sat in his wheelchair behind a rough table, surrounded with whatever his clerks had been able to salvage. I thought he seemed sick, the splotches of his old jungle fever infection livid and swollen.

He looked up at me with an enigmatic expression.

"Well, sir?" He shook his head. "I never expected to see you again."

"I'm a historian," I said. "I came back to write the history of the colony. And I want to see your daughter."

"You've turned our history to tragedy." He spoke with a harsh finality. "You'll never see Laurel."

He turned to deal with a farmer who had come with a basket of eggs to trade. I saw Bart himself, stooping in the ashes of the store, filling a bag with scraps of fused and blackened metal. He met me with a quizzical grin and handed me what was left of my gun, the magazine shattered when the ammunition exploded.

"I think this was yours."

I asked about Laurel.

"Gone." The grin vanished. "I don't know where." His gaze grew sharper. "If your Terran friends are looking for her . . ."

He shrugged and stooped again into the ashes.

A few days later he came up to me while I was out with the camera to shoot a group of workers with spades and wheelbarrows, refilling a crater that one of Gilliyar's missiles had left in the road.

"Let's talk." He offered his hand. "I've heard about your history. I want our Terran friends to know our story. Will you let me take you back to tell it?"

I thanked him.

"But the history isn't finished. And I want to stay till I can see your sister."

His face grew bleak. "You'll be here forever."

Before he took off, I gave him a draft of my unfinished narrative, copies of my holos of the ruins, and a shot of Crendock strutting off a lander to repeat Gilliyar's ultimatum. I kept digging into the records I could find, asking people for their recollections, shooting the damage from the bombardment and the efforts at reconstruction.

And longing all the time for a glimpse of Laurel.

Crendock set up his headquarters on a hilltop above the ruins. His landers were busy for a time, bringing down temporary buildings and equipment. He tried to employ civilian labor, but nobody wanted his money or wanted him there. The few people left in the town were clearing the streets, rebuilding their homes, replanting gardens. Some of them let me join the labor teams, gave me food and shelter in return. I asked and asked again for news of Laurel, receiving blank or hostile stares.

Crendock's officers were just as determined to find her, but no more successful.

"It's frustrating," he told me one night when he had asked me to his quarters for a Terran dinner. "There's nobody with authority, no way to get control. Gilliyar says this Laurel Greenlaw has to be our first target. She openly defied him. He wants her caught and tried for treason."

He asked for anything I knew. That was nothing at all.

"My investigators have been looking everywhere. Broiling themselves down in the desert. Freezing on the slopes of that volcano. Not a clue. I hear that she was once employed down in the jungle. She may have returned. Nowhere we can follow, but we're posting a price on her head."

With no better lead, I found Marco Finn, the top driver of a camel train returning to the lumber mills, and begged him for a ride down to the jungle.

"Don't go." He turned to spit green fluid from the angel cud that bulged his bearded cheek. "You ain't fit for it."

He was a raw-boned, short-spoken man, scarred from hell fever, his wild beard stained bright green from the angel wood bark he chewed. He frowned and squinted at me. I tried to explain that I wanted to see the jungle, get the history of the lumbermen, the silvernut and rubber plantations, the barges on the Styx.

"Who will give a damn?" He shrugged and spat again. "Nothing but poison vines and devil bugs and rain that never stops. We call it hell country. No place for a Terran."

"But you're going back."

"We hell rats ain't quite human." He gave me a ferocious scowl. "We toughen up and take it like it is. Sometimes it kills us, but people need the timber and the rubber and the silvernuts. And we get double barter points. If I'm alive ten years from now I can use my last timber load to build a cabin up in sky country. Grow a garden. Keep chickens and a cow. What you ought to do."

Yet he let me climb to the hard seat beside him.

The east rim of the upland is higher and steeper than the west. None of the convicts dropped into the jungle ever reached the highlands until rescue teams from the top found and cleared the trail. The ride down took us three long days.

Finn and I sat together every day on the pitching seat. We shared meals when we squatted around the cook fires, shared space in his little tent when we camped. He knew who I was. He must have wondered about Terra and my life there, wondered how I became a spy, but he never inquired.

Listening for Laurel's name, I never spoke of her.

The first day we wound through sunless gorges that old glaciers had cut, and came out into blinding sun on ledges so narrow I hardly dared look down at the endless ocean of glaring monsoon clouds, a mile and more beneath us. The second day we were still in them, in a fog so dense I could hardly see the beast ahead. The third day we came out of the clouds, down into ceaseless rain and suffocating heat. Still far below, the jungle was a featureless dark-green sea. The fourth day we were in its dismal twilight, breathing the reeks of wet decay and the rank musks of strange life.

Still the road ran on. Sometimes it was made of logs, laid side by side. Sometimes it was flat rocks, laid to crown a thin clay dike. More often it was only a ditch of thick red mud, splashed and churned by the camel's wide-splayed feet. Undergrowth walled it and arched overhead, most of it a tangle of thick-leafed fungoid stuff the driver had no name for when I asked. The rain never stopped.

The days were endless nightmares. Stinging insects hummed around us. My face and arms itched and burned. My bones ached. My appetite was gone. My strength drained away till I had to tie myself into the bucking seat. I tried to chew the angel bark Finn shared when he saw I had the fever, but the bitter stuff burned my mouth and knotted my stomach and seemed to do no good.

Sweating and gasping for breath though the endless nights, I dreamed and dreamed again that I had found Laurel. Sometimes we had been swimming together in that little lake at the desert oasis, sometimes we were skiing on the old volcano, sometimes we had been back in bed together. She was always beautiful. Longing for her to love me, I tried to tell her how sorry I was. The words always stuck in my burning throat and she coldly turned away.

I lost the count of days. I don't know when we reached the lumber mills or how I got to Hell. That was the name of a settlement on the swampy shore of the Styx. Dimly, I remember the patter of the endless rain on the tent, the coughs and stinks of the men on the cots around me, the days when all I wanted was death. I remember dreams of Laurel, bathing my body in angel seed tea when my swollen throat wouldn't swallow.

A morning came when my head seemed clear. The tent was silent, except for the murmur of the rain. The other cots were empty. The epidemic was over. Feeling well again, I lay waiting until Laurel came in. She was real, alive and smiling, lovely in a white uniform somehow spotless in spite of the mud. She helped me sit up and gave me a mug of the angel seed tea. Magically, its burning bitterness was gone. It had almost the taste of a good dry wine.

She laughed when I tried to say how sorry I was.

"You've already told me, at least a thousand times." She asked if I felt hungry and brought a tray of food. Suddenly ravenous, I gorged on river fish and hellcakes and roasted silvernuts and camel cheese. I was able to limp with her out into the clearing. Huge crimson blooms blazed from the vines that twined the trees around it. The air was sweet with their scent, and the jungle's dark power seemed almost kind. We went down to the dock to watch the little steamer come in with a load of cured rubber from a plantation down the river. The name painted on the bow was Laurel.

Next day she was even happier.

"Bart was on the radio," she told me. "He's back from Terra with great good news. Your stories about Gilliyar's bombardment set off new Free Space riots on a hundred planets. Revolution came so close that Cleon III had to abdicate. His son is promising to negotiate the independence of a new Free Space Federation.

"The new government has recognized our own freedom and ordered Gilliyar's forces out. They wanted to rename the planet Avalon. Bart told them no. He says Lucifer fits us better. They wanted him to stay as our ambassador. He said no to that. Ambassadors are government.

"But he did get them to guarantee free trade and free travel. They want angel wood and silvernut for medical research. We're free to visit Terra if we like." Soberly, she shook her head and caught my hand. "Not soon, I think. Our lives are here."

She found a place for us on a camel train when I felt strong enough. We rode together back up the hell road, back out of the rain and the bugs and the stink of the swamps, back through the fog into bright sunlight, back through narrow passes into the Vale of Avalon. I was still half-drunk on the angel tea and my dreams of our future together. She was more realistic.

"Freedom won't come free," she told me. "It never does."

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Framed

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Devil's Star

by Jack Williamson

My mother had chronic bad luck, and a secret shield against it. On no evidence at all, she clung to a stubborn belief that she was the great-grandniece of an illegitimate son of President Cleon Starhawke I, who had won fame for the interstellar conquests that added half a thousand planets to the Terran Republic, and notoriety for the beauty and fertility of his numerous mistresses.

"Never forget that we have presidential blood," she used to urge me. "Live up to it, Kiff, and it will make you great."

With no proof of the myth, I grew up proud of my Starhawke blood, loyal to the Republic and dreaming of a chance for some signal service to the President. My father abandoned us before I was five, migrating to a newly opened planet with a younger woman. My mother spent the next few years working as a domestic servant before she found another husband and skipped out with him, leaving me alone on Earth.

My own luck ran better. Both husbands left funds toward my education. She enrolled me in the Starhawke Space Academy. I came of age and earned my commission there, swearing eternal allegiance to the Terran Republic and Cleon III.

Graduating as a military historian, I begged for the chance to make my name with some active force out on the Rim frontier. Instead, I found myself still stuck on Earth, the freshman member of a little research team in the library at the Presidential War College near New Denver. Our project was to produce an updated history of Devil's Star. On my first day there, a discontented senior officer tried to shatter my illusions.

"You'll find no career here." He looked around and dropped his voice. "The library was founded to glorify the Starhawkes, but they won no wars on Devil's Star. The planet may justify the name, but it has no history."

I asked for facts about it

"None worth knowing." He shrugged. "Sea level air pressure nearly twice Terra's. Surface mostly too hot and too hostile to be terraformed. No resources worth attention. The explorers had labeled it Lucifer and passed it by."

"Wasn't it once a penal colony?"

"A death pit." He shrugged again. "Called the Black Hole. Infested with hostile life and strange disease. Prisoners sometimes sent down in old landing craft, with no fuel to take off again. Public outrage stopped that when the truth got out. No landings since." He made a bitter face. "We're in the same fix here, condemned to our own hopeless hole."

"The convicts did survive?"

"A disappointment to the executioners." He grinned. "A hardy few climbed out of the heat, to a high mountain ridge that runs down the middle of the main continent. A cooler corner of hell. Some are likely still alive."

Trapped there, with nothing to do and no future in sight, I was feeling as hopeless as another maroon until the day an officer in the uniform of the Presidential Guard caught me in my little cubicle with the news that Space Admiral Gilliyar wanted to see me at once. Astonished and a little alarmed, I asked why.

"He'll tell you why."

A luxury aircar carried us across the base to the Space Command Tower. We found the admiral in a huge corner office that looked across a great field of silver-bright skip-ships. A big man with a bulldog chin, his bright red hair cut short, he was in shirt sleeves, his uniform jacket flung over the back of a chair behind a huge bare desk.

He stood up when the orderly brought me in. My heart thumping, I saluted.

"So you are Starman Kiff McCall?" He returned the salute, studied me with keen gray eyes, nodded abruptly. "You look fit for the job. Let's sit."

Breathing a little easier, but anxious to know what job, I followed him to chairs at a wide window that looked out west across the starport to snowcapped mountain summits.

"Have you done duty off the Earth?"

"No sir."

I waited, sweating.

"No matter." He shrugged again. "What do you know about Devil's Star?"

"Very little, sir. I doubt that much is known by anybody. All contact was outlawed two centuries ago."

"You'll soon know more." My mouth must have gaped; he laughed at me. "If you're ready to go there?"

"I—" I had to catch my breath. "I'm ready."

"Think before you jump." He bent toward me, hard eyes narrowed to study me again. "This will be a highly confidential mission, with no official support or public reward. Your career and even your life may be in danger."

"I've sworn an oath." Feeling like a schoolboy, I put my hand on my heart. "My life is pledged to the Republic and the President."

He smiled at the quiver in my voice.

"I trust you." He spoke very gravely. "What I say is for your ears only. Here is the situation. The sanctions against contact with the planet Lucifer have been broken. As you may know, enemies of the Republic were once exiled there. Their descendants appear to have created an outlaw society. The mere rumor of a free society is a hazard to the state. The President has ordered the planet reclaimed as Terran territory. He is sending me there as the first governor."

Muscles tightened in his jaw.

"It's been a black hole. The convict transports didn't all return. We never knew why, but those who got back called it hell. Before any landing is attempted, we're sending an undercover agent to look the situation over and report what resistance we should expect. That's your errand."

I never returned to my library cubicle. Instead I spent a few hectic months in a class for interstellar intelligence officers, a disappointment to me. I'd hoped for training to face the hazards of the star frontiers, but Cleon I had annihilated the alien foes he found there. These future agents were destined for duty here closer to home.

"Worlds gone soft!" a black-mustached instructor shouted at us. "Rotten to the heart! Maybe loyal Terrans once, but turncoats now, corrupted by all that damned Free Space gibble-gabble. Your future duty is to hunt such traitors down and stop their venomous slander against the Starhawke Presidents."

Admiral Gilliyar's mission had not been revealed, yet my part in it gave me a thrill of secret pride. His staff invented a cover story for me. Based on my mother's claims to presidential kinship, it named me the leader of an exposed Free Space plot to overthrow the President. In flight to escape arrest, I was to become a hunted fugitive, my whereabouts unknown.

On my last day at school, I was hustled out of class and escorted to an empty hangar at the skyport. There, equipped with an oxygen mask and a radio, I was nailed into a rough wooden box stenciled electronic sundries. The radio kept me informed while it was tilted, jarred and jolted, finally loaded into the cargo hold of the Star of Avalon.

That was the ship of a suspected smuggler that had been captured, but released with a warning when the captain paid his excise taxes. And no doubt a bribe; I had learned that even the great Terran Republic is not without corruption.

Our first skip was a stomach-churning lurch. The radio went silent. Elated to be off the Earth and on my way, I got out of the box and hammered on a bulkhead. A startled spacehand let me out of the hold and took me to Bart Greenlaw, master and owner of the ship. A fit youthful man in a bright yellow skip suit, he interrupted my cover story.

"So you are Kiff McCall?" His keen eyes scanned me. "I trade with Free Spacers. The price on your head has them wondering about you and your conspiracy. They'd never heard of you."

"We try to keep our secrets," I told him. "I left friends behind, friends I can't betray."

"I understand." He studied me again, and finally smiled as if he believed me. "I know how my own Free Spacer friends feel about the Republic. Or the Terran Empire, they call it. Power corrupts, they say, until it finally rots itself. The Starhawkes hold too much power. They've held it too long."

His gaze sharpened to study my reaction.

"They say Cleon III is sitting on a bomb, armed and ready to blow."

I nodded, trying not to show too much emotion. Any connection between the Free Space activists and Devil's Star was something I must report, but my own mission could have ended then and there if he had guessed the truth.

"One question, if I may ask." His eyes narrowed. "If you're an actual freedom fighter, why are you heading for a prison you'll never escape?"

"We lost a battle." I groped for anything he might accept. "I had to run while I could, but the war isn't over. I want the whole picture. I'm fascinated with the little I know about Devil's Star. I want to do a history of it. Smuggled out to civilization, it might make a difference."

"Civilization?" His face set hard for an instant, but then he gave me a quizzical smile. "You ought to find us interesting."

Seeming satisfied, he found a berth for me, and treated me like another member of his little crew. They all were busy, calculating skip congruencies and maneuvering for relaunch positions and relative velocities, but he let me sit with them at meals, where I could listen for anything Admiral Gilliyar might want to know.

In my berth that night, I dreamed the admiral had won his little war. I was with him on his triumphant return to Earth. A military band was blaring when we came off his flagship, and a goose-stepping squad from the Presidential Guard escorted us to the White Palace. Cleon III received us in the Diamond Room to praise the admiral for his heroic victory and make him the sole proprietor of the conquered planet.

As the dream went on, the beaming admiral presented me to Cleon III. Without my daring undercover work, he said, his expedition would have ended in disaster. The President thanked me for my heroic service to the Republic, and pinned a glittering Starhawke Medal of Honor on my chest.

I felt let down when I woke to find that moment of glory gone, yet my elation lingered. After all, I was safely on my way to Lucifer. Greenlaw seemed to trust me. Something like the dream might still come true.

Our flight took a week. The skips themselves are instant; outside our space-time bubble there is no space to cross or time to pass, but any long voyage requires a series of jumps from one point of congruence to another. On the major space lanes these are marked and charted, but contact points are hard to find and markers can drift. Some points are periodic. Some can vanish altogether. Skip navigation takes high skills and a rare grasp of the total cosmos.

I came to admire Greenlaw for his easy-seeming expertise as an extraspatial pilot, and to enjoy his company. A native of Devil's Star, he loved his planet and liked to talk about its history and geography.

"There's one big continent," he said. "Split in half by a high ridge that runs north and south down the middle of it. That's where we live, between two harsh frontiers, east and west of us. Monsoon rains keep the east half buried under jungle and forest. Dry downslope winds keep the west half hotter than any place on Earth. Both halves are deadly in a dozen ways, yet rich with resources we've learned to use."

I asked about the government.

"We have none." He grinned at my astonishment. "No laws. No money. No taxes. No cops or prisons. We never forgot the merciless government that dumped us here." He paused to smooth his bitter voice. "We were political convicts, condemned for wanting freedom. The Terran government dumped us into the desert or that deadly jungle, with freedom to die."

He glared as if I had challenged him.

"A few of us didn't. We made it up to the highlands, where survival was barely possible—after we learned to care for one another. That's our secret. All for each and each for all." He intoned the words like a mantra. "If you can understand?"

Not sure I did, I shook my head.

"It's your culture." He frowned and shook his head. "I saw it when I was a student there. A culture of selfish aggression. You need your laws and cops and prisons to protect yourselves from one another. We don't, if you get the difference."

"No money?" I asked. "How do you manage without it?"

"Well enough." He shrugged. "You would call it a barter economy. We have exchange centers. Through your working life, you make contributions when you can. In return you draw what you need, a loaf of bread, a farm tool, the service of a surgeon. You continue to serve and be served as long as you live. We have no idle millionaires, no homeless beggars."

"No public services?" I asked. "Don't you need roads, schools, fire departments, hospitals?"

"Of course we do."

"With no money and no taxes, who pays for them?"

"Why pay?" His tone was almost scolding. "We build them. Where you have laws, and lockups for those who break them, we have customs. Our own folkways. A culture of altruism. Every young person spends a year in some service of his or her own choice—and one of our years is nearly two of Earth's. I spent mine sweating down in the desert, at work on date farms and a new angel wood plantation.

"The rest of our lives, we serve one day a week. Teaching, nursing, farming, building roads or bridges, doing what we can for others, trusting them to do for us. When I'm unable to care for myself, others will care for me. Not for money, but because that's our way of life."

"Don't people shirk?"

"Not many. Not often. Not long." He laughed. "A few have tried to live alone. They find how much we need each other."

"With no government at all?"

"You will see." He paused and spoke again, more reflectively. "As a student on Earth, I saw enough of the rotten Terran government you say is hunting you now. I learned to cope with cops and laws and rules and regulations and stupid bureaucrats. Give me freedom!"

Listening, I felt uncomfortable. I had begun to like him. My mission meant trouble for him, trouble for the world he loved. I had to remind myself that I was a Terran soldier, bound to a path of duty I must follow, whatever the cost to me.

Our final skip brought us into planetary orbit. The first hemisphere we saw was all blue ocean. The single huge continent slid into view, the east half-hidden under white monsoon clouds, the western desert a naked waste of dull reds and bright yellows, wrinkled with bare brown hills.

"My home!" Smiling like a happy child, Greenlaw pointed to the highlands, a thin green slash between desert and cloud. "The Vale of Avalon."

The next skip took us lower. I made it out, a high valley between two mountain ridges. A little river ran north between green slopes from a white-capped volcanic cone to a long narrow lake.

"The Avalon River." He pointed. "Most of our settlements are scattered along it, some grown into towns."

He landed at Benspost, a cluster of red tile roofs at a bend in the river. His father, Ben Greenlaw, owned the trading post, a sprawling building with low walls of roughly shaped stone. A little crowd had gathered to welcome him home, calling eager greetings as we came down the ramp.

Men in fringed brown buckskin, women in brighter cottons, wide-eyed children, all anxious to see the wonders he had brought back from the stars. He waved to a smiling, dark-haired woman in slacks and a neat leather jacket.

"Laurel," he said. "My kid sister. She's just back from her service year, down in the jungles. You'll meet our father. He's crippled from hell fever he caught there when he was young. I hope she came back better."

She ran to hug him when we stepped off the ramp.

"All okay." Smiling into his face, she looked fit enough and trimly attractive. "It was a great adventure, really. We were cutting a road across the flood plain to the Styx."

That was the great river than drained half the rainy lowlands.

"Kiff McCall." He introduced me. "A runaway rebel, in flight from the wrath of Cleon III."

"From old Earth?" She appraised me with clear green eyes, smiled, and gave me a strong handshake. "I want to hear all about it."

"I want to hear about the jungle."

"They call it hell, but I had a great year there!" Flushed with the excitement of the moment, she was beautiful. "We got all the way to the river. Set up a sawmill. Cut lumber to build a little boat with a sawmill engine. The first steamer on the Styx."

I stood stupidly silent, longing for her to like me and thinking how she would hate me when she learned what I was.

"Kiff will be our guest," Bart told her. "If you can find him a room.

"I certainly can."

She wanted to carry my bag. It held things I didn't want to show, a gun, my long-range radio, electronic gear to record and encode my reports to the admiral. I clung to it, and followed her through the store. Flushed with pride in Bart and his daring voyages, she showed me tables stacked with goods he had brought in: books and holo sets, watches, radios, computers.

"Things we don't make yet," she said. "But we're learning fast."

Uneasy with her, thinking of the painful lessons the admiral would soon be teaching, I followed her through the tables loaded with local goods. Shoes and clothing, hardware, flour, dried meats, native fruits and nuts with names strange to me.

A clerk was filling an order, punching prices into a barter card. As eager as a child with a birthday, she showed me a hunting rifle she wanted to buy with her savings from the service year. It was the work of a native craftsman, beautifully finished, the stock inlaid with silver, but useless to stop the admiral's battlecraft.

The family lived at the back of the single-story building. We left my bag in a clean little room with white-plastered walls and a comfortable bed, and she took me to meet her father. We found him at a desk facing a big window that looked out across the wide green valley to that old volcano in the south.

A heavy man with a withered leg, he gripped the edges of the desk to haul himself upright and shake my hand. I saw patches of dead-white scar tissue on his face and hands, saw his grimace of pain. Yet his grasp was strong. He smiled warmly at me and then at Laurel, when she came to put her arm around him.

"Relics of the hell country." He raised his hands to show the scars. "I spent my service year there, back before we discovered angel wood. Laurel was luckier."

"Kiff's a freedom fighter," she told him. "In flight from Cleon III"

"Welcome, sir!" He shook my hand again. "They'll never touch you here."

Sitting again, he listened to my cover story with a shrewd intentness that left me afraid he might see through the lies.

"We'll keep you safe." Laurel's eyes were shining. "You'll like it here."

She took me out see the town, a cluster of low stone buildings along a single cobblestone street. There were no motor vehicles, but I saw people on huge ungainly native creatures she called camels, larger than the Terran sort and able to carry half a ton of weight.

"I rode them down into the rain country," she told me. "They have evil tempers, but they're addicted to the silvernuts that grow there. When one gets unruly, a handful of nuts will make him kneel and beg."

She pointed to wires strung from poles along the street.

"Something my grandfather brought us. He found a junkyard of wrecked landing craft down in the desert where they used to unload the convicts, and salvaged parts to rebuild one that got him off the planet. He got aboard an old prison transport that had been lost in orbit when mutineers killed the officers.

"He taught himself skip navigation from the texts and tools he found aboard. The first skip took him nowhere, but a few more got him out to the home planet of our ancestors. He found kinsmen, made Free Space friends—and spent a dozen years on Earth learning everything he could. He'd abandoned the old transport, but he finally got home in a modern ship, with a cargo that changed life here."

I hated to think how Gilliyar would change it again.

"Electricity!" Her voice had risen. "Lights. Telephones. Radio. We've found no oil or coal to burn for power, but now we have windmill generators up in mountain gaps where the trade winds are steady. I wish we could get nuclear power."

I thought of the fusion engines on the admiral's battlecraft.

That uneasy awareness of my mission kept me troubled and silent that evening at dinner. Laurel's mother, Martha, had grown most of the food in her own kitchen garden. A genial, generous woman, she kept piling my plate with servings too large and seemed troubled that I had no better appetite.

In spite of such a welcome, the passing days left me no happier. I was there for months, waiting for Gilliyar's armada to arrive in orbit and preparing to tell him that the outlaws had no defenses worth concern. Laurel arranged a barter card for me. In return, I agreed to teach classes or tutor students in what they wanted to know about the outside worlds.

She became my first student. My cover story made me a romantic figure in her mind, the lone survivor of a heroic rebellion crushed by ruthless Terran power. Her face used to light when she saw me, in a way that wrenched my heart. I knew the truth would come out, knew it would destroy me.

I longed to reveal myself and beg for her forgiveness. Yet I was still a Terran soldier, bound by my oath of allegiance and a lifetime of loyal emotion, hopelessly trapped by all the lies I had told. Keeping silent because I had to, I let her enjoy the days that brought a tortured joy to me. She became an eager guide to her world: the lofty ridge that sliced like a blade between the jungle and the desert. She had seen enough of the jungle, but she took me on a camel down a winding mountain trail to an oasis on the high desert. A long day of clinging to a clumsy wooden seat on the back of the lurching beast left me sun-blistered and aching.

The torrid sun was low before we could dismount at the edge of a tiny lake at the end of a dry stream that ran down from the highlands in the monsoon season. It was on a stony plateau, the low desert and the vast salt marshes on the coast still a full mile farther down, but even after sunset the heat was stifling. Laurel used her barter card to pay for our rooms and meals at a lodge where her brother had worked through his social service year.

She gave me a little handful of bright green beans.

"The seed of the angel tree," she said. "A shrub from down along the coast. It's a natural drug for hell fever. We're trying to grow it here.

I chewed one of the seeds. Its sharp astringency burned my mouth, bitter as my own predicament.

"It's better than it tastes." She laughed at the face I made. "It saved my father's life."

Radiant at breakfast next morning, she wanted to show me the rows of young angel trees her brother had planted, and took me through a little museum that held the relics of a tragic chapter in the planet's history. A shipload of Free Space convicts had been left at the oasis with no supplies. Nearly half of them died. Gunter Greenlaw led the team that opened the road and got the survivors to the Vale.

"We earned our liberty," she told me.

Later, we rode south to ski on the slopes of that dead volcano. The road ran beside the Avalon through gardens, fruit orchards, grain fields, green meadows where spotted cattle grazed the slopes above us. Laurel spoke proudly of the pioneers who had tamed a hostile wilderness, dammed mountain streams for water, cleared land for crops and cattle, built their new society.

The beast's lurching gait kept bumping us together on the high wooden seat. Tormented by her body warmth, breathing her haunting scent, listening to her easy laugh, I tried to contain tides of wild desire and bitter despair.

At the lodge I offered my card and asked for two rooms.

"One will do," she told the clerk, and turned to grin at me. "I love you, Kiff. You do like me, don't you?"

Trapped in a tangle of emotions, I stammered that I did.

"Do you think we must be married?" The clerk stared, and she laughed at me. "You've talked about your government and how it limits all you do. We have more freedom here."

The clerk punched my card for just one room, but I needed time to sort my tangled feelings out. I said I felt hungry. We had dinner and a bottle of wine, out on a terrace below the snows. She admired the view and asked if we had snow sports on Earth. I found little to say.

"Kiff, you are hard to understand." She pushed her glass aside and leaned to stare into my face. "Even when I know how different your old world was. Are you unhappy here? Is there someone you love back outside?"

Honestly, I told her there was no one. Still I couldn't tell her what I felt, but the wine had begun to dull my reservations. When it was gone, we went to bed together. She was passionate. I half forgot my mission. Honestly, I told her I loved her, but all I couldn't say choked me with bitter shame.

We spent three days there. There were no lifts, but a big windmill drove an endless cable that pulled us to the top. The sun was bright, the slope great fun. Laurel was more intoxicating than the wine. She seemed radiant, imagining our future together.

"My brother has Free Space friends," she told me. "They say the star worlds have to change. He hopes we can make some kind of peaceful contact with them. Do you think a time will come when I can go with you back to the stars?"

"That would be wonderful," I told her. "If it could happen."

I knew it was impossible.

My radio stayed dead until the night when I found a green light flashing. Admiral Gilliyar was overhead, on a geosynchronous orbit that kept his armada over the highland ridge. I spent the rest of the night transmitting my recorded notes and pictures.

The sonic boom of an emerging skip craft pealed out of the sky while we were at breakfast a few mornings later. Jets roared overhead. A clerk rushed in, shouting that a Terran lander was down on the pad. A sleek little craft, it carried the Terran flag painted on its armored flank. Black-muzzled guns jutted out of the top turret.

Nobody got off. It sat there nearly an hour, while uneasy citizens gathered around it. A door dropped at last to make a ramp. I heard a roll of martial music. A flagman led a squad of riflemen down the ramp. A cameraman followed, set up a tripod, and shot Admiral Gilliyar marching out of the air lock in dress blue and gold, medals flashing on his breast.

Moving with the music, he took the flag and stabbed the sharpened staff into the ground. He turned, found me standing with my hosts in the watching crowd, and called my name. I stood there a moment, caught in confusion and bleak regret, before I stumbled toward him. Laurel ran to overtake me and threw her arms around me.

"Kiff!" she whispered. "I've always been afraid they'd come after you. Can't we help?"

I stood there an endless time trembling in her arms, too sick to speak. Breathing at last, I muttered that I was sorry, terribly sorry. I kissed her. Sobbing, she clung to me.

"I never meant—never meant to hurt you." The words stuck in my throat. "But I'm a spy. In the service of Cleon III and the Terran Republic."

She gripped my arms and stared at me, her wide eyes strange with shock. Blind with my own sudden tears I pulled out of her grasp, blundered on toward the admiral, and stopped to give him a stiff salute. Smiling, he returned the salute and came on to shake my hand. The little crowd had fallen silent, waiting till he turned and spoke.

"I am Terran Space Admiral Acton Gilliyar."

He paused for a moment before he went on, his mellow eloquence echoing off the long stone wall. He came in peace, to bring President Cleon Stawhawke's most cordial greetings and a heartfelt welcome into the Republic. I hardly heard the booming words. I was watching Laurel.

Her face white and stiff at first, she flushed pink. Her small fists clenched. Glaring at me with a look that changed from shock to scornful contempt, she spat on the ground.

"The President regrets your long neglect," his polished voice rolled on. "I understand that you are trying to survive here in a stare of lawless anarchy. I have come to bring you the law and order of Terran civilization. President Starhawke has appointed me the first governor of the planet Lucifer."

Muttering, people stared at one another and back at him.

"Sir!" Laurel's voice rang loud, heated perhaps by her anger at me. "We want none of your Republic." She looked around at those beside her, saw them nodding with agreement. "We need none of you!"

"Madam." He raised his voice, his tone grown harder. "With all due respect, I must inform you that your planet has belonged to the Terran Republic since the discoverers landed here and raised our flag."

"Non—nonsense, sir!" She caught her breath and lifted her quivering voice. "You threw us out of your wicked empire, and left us here to die. We've earned our freedom and we'll die to keep it."

"You may die. You'll never keep it."

"We'll never give it up."

"I must warn you, madam, that your words are a reckless incitement to treason." His voice slow and grimly solemn, he looked around at the little crowd and fixed his eyes on her. "If you want to die, the choice is yours. In modern times, suspected traitors are no longer merely exiled. The penalty now is death."

I heard a stifled outcry from her mother, a furious oath from her father. Friends gathered around them in a muttering group. The admiral turned to lift his hand at nose of the lander. The martial music rose again. He ordered his rifle squad back to the ramp. Laurel darted past them to the flag, pulled the staff out of the ground, and hurled it against the side of the lander. She stood staring at him and then at me, breathing hard.

"We witnessed that outrageous act of open treason!" he shouted at her. "What is your name?"

"Laurel Greenlaw." She tossed her head. "What is yours?"

"Acton Gilliyar." He grinned at her bleakly. "We'll be meeting again."

He beckoned to me. I followed him and the riflemen aboard. A warning siren screeched. Looking down from the control turret, I saw people scattering. Laurel stood closer, shaking here fist, dwindling to a defiant doll as we lifted.

The admiral landed us at half a dozen towns up and down the Avalon, at the ski lodge below the volcano, the oasis down on the desert, at a lumber camp on the headwaters of the Styx. At each stop he went off with his rifle squad to read his proclamations. A few people hooted. Nobody cheered.

We climbed back to the geosynchronous point. He broadcast an ultimatum demanding unconditional submission. The colonists must accept the rule of the democratic Terran Republic, swear allegiance to President Cleon III, welcome Terran landing forces, pay Terran taxes, obey orders from him as their newly appointed governor. Unless he received a signal of surrender within three days, he would be forced, however unwillingly, to take whatever measures the situation might require.

"There will be no signal," I warned him. "There is no government, nobody with authority to surrender."

"I expected opposition from the like of that Greenlaw woman." He shook his head, his jaw set hard. "These people were condemned and sent here as outlaw enemies of the state. They are enemies and outlaws still. If they want a lesson in Terran power, I'll give them a lesson."

Waiting three days in orbit, he received no signal of surrender. His lesson was a volley of guided missiles.

"I'm remaining on the flagship," he told me. "It will be my official residence. Captain Crendock is going down as my executive secretary with orders to secure the planet and establish administrative control."

He was startled when I wanted to go back to Benspost.

"Why?" He gave me a hard look. "You won't find friends there."

Uncomfortably, I tried to explain my own torn feelings.

"I'm still loyal," I told him, "bound by my duty to the Republic. But I did make friends there. People were generous to me. I was fascinated with their history. I want to write it for the whole Republic."

"Forget your pet traitors," he advised me. "That Greenlaw woman is no friend now."

"Yet she is making history. History worth recording."

"Better get back to Terra while you can." He gave me a stiff half-smile. "You were warned to expect no public recognition, but we will surely find something for you."

He called me a fool when I shook my head.

I had to go back to find Laurel, to try to explain what I had done, to beg her to understand. I didn't tell him that, but in the end, he replaced my lost radio and holo camera and let me go back down to Benspost with Crendock. A missile had struck there, and little remained of old Ben Greenlaw's trading post.

Yet life went on. I saw camels loaded with lumber and tile to repair shattered buildings. Bart was back again from some Terran planet with another illicit cargo. We found his skipcraft undamaged, standing on the pad near the ashes and fallen walls.

"Leave him alone," Gilliyar had ordered. "I hope to legalize the trade and impose excise taxes.

Camels were tethered around his ship, the drivers loading them with goods he had brought. His crew was loading it again with exports: nuts and dried fruit from the desert lowlands, rare hardwoods and balls of raw rubber from the rain forest.

His parents had set up a new barter center in a tent on a vacant lot. His mother burst into tears when she saw me, and ran back into the tent. His father sat in his wheelchair behind a rough table, surrounded with whatever his clerks had been able to salvage. I thought he seemed sick, the splotches of his old jungle fever infection livid and swollen.

He looked up at me with an enigmatic expression.

"Well, sir?" He shook his head. "I never expected to see you again."

"I'm a historian," I said. "I came back to write the history of the colony. And I want to see your daughter."

"You've turned our history to tragedy." He spoke with a harsh finality. "You'll never see Laurel."

He turned to deal with a farmer who had come with a basket of eggs to trade. I saw Bart himself, stooping in the ashes of the store, filling a bag with scraps of fused and blackened metal. He met me with a quizzical grin and handed me what was left of my gun, the magazine shattered when the ammunition exploded.

"I think this was yours."

I asked about Laurel.

"Gone." The grin vanished. "I don't know where." His gaze grew sharper. "If your Terran friends are looking for her . . ."

He shrugged and stooped again into the ashes.

A few days later he came up to me while I was out with the camera to shoot a group of workers with spades and wheelbarrows, refilling a crater that one of Gilliyar's missiles had left in the road.

"Let's talk." He offered his hand. "I've heard about your history. I want our Terran friends to know our story. Will you let me take you back to tell it?"

I thanked him.

"But the history isn't finished. And I want to stay till I can see your sister."

His face grew bleak. "You'll be here forever."

Before he took off, I gave him a draft of my unfinished narrative, copies of my holos of the ruins, and a shot of Crendock strutting off a lander to repeat Gilliyar's ultimatum. I kept digging into the records I could find, asking people for their recollections, shooting the damage from the bombardment and the efforts at reconstruction.

And longing all the time for a glimpse of Laurel.

Crendock set up his headquarters on a hilltop above the ruins. His landers were busy for a time, bringing down temporary buildings and equipment. He tried to employ civilian labor, but nobody wanted his money or wanted him there. The few people left in the town were clearing the streets, rebuilding their homes, replanting gardens. Some of them let me join the labor teams, gave me food and shelter in return. I asked and asked again for news of Laurel, receiving blank or hostile stares.

Crendock's officers were just as determined to find her, but no more successful.

"It's frustrating," he told me one night when he had asked me to his quarters for a Terran dinner. "There's nobody with authority, no way to get control. Gilliyar says this Laurel Greenlaw has to be our first target. She openly defied him. He wants her caught and tried for treason."

He asked for anything I knew. That was nothing at all.

"My investigators have been looking everywhere. Broiling themselves down in the desert. Freezing on the slopes of that volcano. Not a clue. I hear that she was once employed down in the jungle. She may have returned. Nowhere we can follow, but we're posting a price on her head."

With no better lead, I found Marco Finn, the top driver of a camel train returning to the lumber mills, and begged him for a ride down to the jungle.

"Don't go." He turned to spit green fluid from the angel cud that bulged his bearded cheek. "You ain't fit for it."

He was a raw-boned, short-spoken man, scarred from hell fever, his wild beard stained bright green from the angel wood bark he chewed. He frowned and squinted at me. I tried to explain that I wanted to see the jungle, get the history of the lumbermen, the silvernut and rubber plantations, the barges on the Styx.

"Who will give a damn?" He shrugged and spat again. "Nothing but poison vines and devil bugs and rain that never stops. We call it hell country. No place for a Terran."

"But you're going back."

"We hell rats ain't quite human." He gave me a ferocious scowl. "We toughen up and take it like it is. Sometimes it kills us, but people need the timber and the rubber and the silvernuts. And we get double barter points. If I'm alive ten years from now I can use my last timber load to build a cabin up in sky country. Grow a garden. Keep chickens and a cow. What you ought to do."

Yet he let me climb to the hard seat beside him.

The east rim of the upland is higher and steeper than the west. None of the convicts dropped into the jungle ever reached the highlands until rescue teams from the top found and cleared the trail. The ride down took us three long days.

Finn and I sat together every day on the pitching seat. We shared meals when we squatted around the cook fires, shared space in his little tent when we camped. He knew who I was. He must have wondered about Terra and my life there, wondered how I became a spy, but he never inquired.

Listening for Laurel's name, I never spoke of her.

The first day we wound through sunless gorges that old glaciers had cut, and came out into blinding sun on ledges so narrow I hardly dared look down at the endless ocean of glaring monsoon clouds, a mile and more beneath us. The second day we were still in them, in a fog so dense I could hardly see the beast ahead. The third day we came out of the clouds, down into ceaseless rain and suffocating heat. Still far below, the jungle was a featureless dark-green sea. The fourth day we were in its dismal twilight, breathing the reeks of wet decay and the rank musks of strange life.

Still the road ran on. Sometimes it was made of logs, laid side by side. Sometimes it was flat rocks, laid to crown a thin clay dike. More often it was only a ditch of thick red mud, splashed and churned by the camel's wide-splayed feet. Undergrowth walled it and arched overhead, most of it a tangle of thick-leafed fungoid stuff the driver had no name for when I asked. The rain never stopped.

The days were endless nightmares. Stinging insects hummed around us. My face and arms itched and burned. My bones ached. My appetite was gone. My strength drained away till I had to tie myself into the bucking seat. I tried to chew the angel bark Finn shared when he saw I had the fever, but the bitter stuff burned my mouth and knotted my stomach and seemed to do no good.

Sweating and gasping for breath though the endless nights, I dreamed and dreamed again that I had found Laurel. Sometimes we had been swimming together in that little lake at the desert oasis, sometimes we were skiing on the old volcano, sometimes we had been back in bed together. She was always beautiful. Longing for her to love me, I tried to tell her how sorry I was. The words always stuck in my burning throat and she coldly turned away.

I lost the count of days. I don't know when we reached the lumber mills or how I got to Hell. That was the name of a settlement on the swampy shore of the Styx. Dimly, I remember the patter of the endless rain on the tent, the coughs and stinks of the men on the cots around me, the days when all I wanted was death. I remember dreams of Laurel, bathing my body in angel seed tea when my swollen throat wouldn't swallow.

A morning came when my head seemed clear. The tent was silent, except for the murmur of the rain. The other cots were empty. The epidemic was over. Feeling well again, I lay waiting until Laurel came in. She was real, alive and smiling, lovely in a white uniform somehow spotless in spite of the mud. She helped me sit up and gave me a mug of the angel seed tea. Magically, its burning bitterness was gone. It had almost the taste of a good dry wine.

She laughed when I tried to say how sorry I was.

"You've already told me, at least a thousand times." She asked if I felt hungry and brought a tray of food. Suddenly ravenous, I gorged on river fish and hellcakes and roasted silvernuts and camel cheese. I was able to limp with her out into the clearing. Huge crimson blooms blazed from the vines that twined the trees around it. The air was sweet with their scent, and the jungle's dark power seemed almost kind. We went down to the dock to watch the little steamer come in with a load of cured rubber from a plantation down the river. The name painted on the bow was Laurel.

Next day she was even happier.

"Bart was on the radio," she told me. "He's back from Terra with great good news. Your stories about Gilliyar's bombardment set off new Free Space riots on a hundred planets. Revolution came so close that Cleon III had to abdicate. His son is promising to negotiate the independence of a new Free Space Federation.

"The new government has recognized our own freedom and ordered Gilliyar's forces out. They wanted to rename the planet Avalon. Bart told them no. He says Lucifer fits us better. They wanted him to stay as our ambassador. He said no to that. Ambassadors are government.

"But he did get them to guarantee free trade and free travel. They want angel wood and silvernut for medical research. We're free to visit Terra if we like." Soberly, she shook her head and caught my hand. "Not soon, I think. Our lives are here."

She found a place for us on a camel train when I felt strong enough. We rode together back up the hell road, back out of the rain and the bugs and the stink of the swamps, back through the fog into bright sunlight, back through narrow passes into the Vale of Avalon. I was still half-drunk on the angel tea and my dreams of our future together. She was more realistic.

"Freedom won't come free," she told me. "It never does."

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