Star Bridge

by

JACK WILLIAMSON

And

JAMES E. GUNN

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ALAN HORN

His own efforts to escape resulted in a battle for the freedom of all mankind.

WU

Without his parrot he would die; with her he was immortal.

WENDRE KOHLNAR

She was heiress to the universe—and to the secret of the Tubes.

PETER SAIR

No liberator ever brought freedom to a greater empire.

DUCHANE

He was the watchdog of Eron.

REDBLADE

No man but Horn had ever trusted this renegade pirate.

ACE BOOKS

A Division of A. A. Wyn, Inc. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

star bridge

Copyright, 1955, by Jack Williamson & James E. Gunn An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gnome Press, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Printed in U.S.A.

PROLOGUE

"A HISTORIAN is not just a chronicler of what has been," the Historian said. "The fruit of his labors is a series of terms from which the future can be extrapolated.

"His significant function is not bookkeeping but prediction."

Swiftly, then, in flowing characters, he began to write:

the history

Empire.... The greatest empire of them all, spanning the light-years, gathering in the stars like a patient fisherman with a golden net.

Eron. Poor, barren planet, mother of greatness. Name of empire.

World after world. Star after star. Build a model. Scale it: one million miles to the inch. An Earth-size planet would not contain it.

But if you had that model and looked closely—closer yet—you would see the stars joined together by a delicately shimmering golden tracery like an iridescent web.

For an empire is communications, and communications is an empire. The fact of the Eron Empire was the Tubes. Each gleaming strand in the vast web was a Tube, a bridge between the stars, over the wide, dark river of space.

Star bridge....

chapter 1

FORBIDDEN GROUND

The flaming wheel of the sun had passed the apogee of its journey across the sky. It had started down toward its resting place behind the looming mesa when the rider stopped to let the tired buckskin pony drink at a gypsum spring. Buckskin once but no longer; sweat and red dust had blended and dried into another coat.

Caked nostrils dipped into the water and jerked back, surprised. Thirst forced the head back down. The pony drank noisily.

The rider was motionless, but his hard, gray eyes were busy. They swept the hot, cloudless blue sky. No tell-tale shimmer disclosed the presence of an Eron cruiser. The only movement was the lazy wheeling of a black-winged buzzard.

The eyes dropped to the horizon, studied the mesa for a moment, and slowly worked their way back through the wavering desert. The rider turned in the saddle and looked back the way they had come. The pony lifted its head nervously; its legs quivered.

The rider patted the pony's sweating shoulder. "We've lost them, boy," he whispered dustily. "I think we've lost them."

He forced the reluctant pony away from the spring and urged it on through the eroded, red-dust desert toward the bare, dead mesa where once the great city of Sunport had raised itself proudly toward the stars.

The rider was tall and deceptively lean. He could move quickly and surely when he had to, and his broad, flat shoulders were powerful. From them hung the rags of what had once been a dark-gray uniform. Dust and sweat had stained red the legs of the tattered pants, but the leather boots were still sound.

A canteen hung from the saddlehorn, sloshing musically as the pony plodded toward the mesa, its head low. Around the rider's left shoulder was a cord that hugged a heavy unitron pistol close to his armpit. Its blue barrel was stamped: Made in Eron.

No one would have called the rider handsome. His face was thin, hard, and immobile; where a month's bluish growth of beard had not protected it, the face was burned almost black. His name was Alan Horn. He was a soldier of fortune.

In all the inhabited galaxy, there were no more than a hundred men who followed Horn's profession. Their business was trouble and how to profit from it and survive. They were strong men, clever men, skillful men. They had to be. All the others were dead.

The red dust rose under Horn and drifted behind, and his narrowed eyes were never still. They searched the sky and the desert in a long, restless arc that always ended behind him.

An hour before dusk he came to the sign.

The rain that had sluiced away the topsoil had spared the granite boulder. From the rusty metal post set into it, a durex oblong hung askew. The centuries had cracked and faded it, but the bastard Eronian which served as a space lingua was still readable.

WARNING! Forbidden Ground This area is hereby declared abandoned. It is prohibited for human occupation. All persons hereon will surrender themselves to the Company Resident at the nearest gate. Failure to comply promptly will forfeit all rights of property and person. Notice is hereby given that this area will be opened to licensed hunters. —Posted in this year of the Eron Company 1046, by order of the General Manager.

Horn spat through sun-blistered lips. For more than two centuries the nomads of this desert had been hunted like wild animals. The desert was wide—the fences of the nearest occupied area were almost 1,000 kilometers eastward toward the Mississippi Valley—but Eron was efficient. Horn had seen one savage on the desert; he had bought the pony from him.

Bought? Well, he had paid for it, although the pistol had been more persuasive than money.

The pony lifted its head and began to shiver. Horn raised himself in the stirrups and looked back. He stood there, silent, unmoving. Then he heard it, too. His back stiffened. He drew in a quick, sharp breath.

The baying of the hounds, distant and terrible. The hunters riding to the music of death.

Horn sank back into the saddle. "They've picked up the scent, boy," he whispered, "but they've been on our trail before. We got away. We'll do it again."

But then the pony had been comparatively fresh. Desert muscles, spurred by terror, had pulled them away. Now the weeks of relentless riding were apparent. The pony was gaunt, spiritless. The distant clamor only made him tremble. And behind him they had fresh mounts now, fresh, bell-throated, slavering mounts.

The thought narrowed Horn's eyes. Why were they after him? As a deserter? As a casual prey? Or as a man with a mission who had been hired three hundred light-years away? Horn would have given a great deal to know; it could be the knowledge that would save him. He glanced down at the pistol. That would be a surprise for them.

His hand lifted from the saddlehorn to his waist, to the fat belt that encircled it snugly under the trouser band. Hard money, not company scrip. Money as solid as Eron.

What brings a man three hundred light years across the galaxy? Money? Horn shrugged. To him money was only a means of power over those who valued it. Not everyone did. The nomad would rather have kept the pony. Some things you can't buy.

Horn had told the man that, the man who had whispered in the lightless room on Quarnon Four.

The one altruistic act of Horn's life had just ended in failure, as it was doomed to do. The Cluster had been beaten from the start. But it had fought, and foolishly Horn had volunteered to fight with it. He had shared the fight and the inevitable defeat. Penniless, weaponless, he had gone to meet the man whose message promised money.

The cautious darkness had been a surprise. He had stared into it and decided, suddenly, not to take the job.

"You can't buy a man with money."

"True—in a few cases. And the others won't stay bought. But what I want to buy is a man's death."

"Three hundred light years away?"

"The victim will be there for the dedication of the Victory Monument. All the killer has to do is meet him."

"You make is sound simple. How does the killer do it?"

"That is his problem."

"It might be done. Eron would have to help...."

As the plans tumbled over each other in his mind, Horn had reversed his decision. Why? Had it been the challenge?

It had been impossible from the start, but impossibility depends on acceptance. It is less than absolute when a man refuses to recognize it. The difficulties were great, the odds were greater, but Horn would conquer them. And, having conquered them, be left unsatisfied.

Life holds no kindness for such a man. And defeat short of death is only a spur; success is empty.

With cold self-analysis, Horn recognized this fact, accepted it, and went on unchanged.

Horn looked back again. The hunters were closer. The baying was clearer. The slanting rays of the sun reddened a cloud of dust.

It was a three-way race with death: Horn, the hunters, and the victim. Horn jabbed his boot-heels sharply into the pony's flanks. It gave a startled leap forward and settled into a tired gallop.

Horn's only chance was to reach the mesa first Fifteen minutes later, he knew that they would never make it.

He noticed the footprints.

They were fresh in the red dust, close together, uneven. The person had been staggering. With instant decision, Horn turned the pony to follow them.

A few hundred meters farther the dust held the imprint of a man's body. Horn urged the pony forward. The baying behind was loud, but Horn shut it out Time was growing short. The sun was half a disk sitting on the mesa. Darkness would soon hide the trail, but it wouldn't dull the nostrils that sniffed out the way he had come.

The pony's unshod hooves clattered suddenly on a stretch of rock. The ground had begun to rise. Coming down into the dust again, the pony stumbled. Horn pulled it back to its feet. He strained his eyes through the growing dusk.

There! Horn kicked the pony again. Once more, nobly, it responded. The shadow ahead drew closer, resolved into something forked and weaving. It turned to look behind, opened a mute, shadow mouth, and began to run, stumbling. Close to another stretch of rock, it fell and lay still.

Horn rode well up on the ledge before he let the pony stop. He sat in the saddle for a moment, studying the flat stone table. It was a full hundred meters across. On the mesa side, the table shelved down gently to red dust once more. To the left, it dropped off sharply.

Only then did he look at the man crumpled in the dust. Once he might have been big and strong and proud. Now he was a stick man with blackened skin stretched taut over protruding bones. Nondescript rags hung from his waist.

Horn waited patiently. The man levered himself up on an elbow and raised his head. Red-rimmed eyes, swollen almost shut, peered hopelessly at Horn, blinked, and widened a little. Surprise and relief were in them. A-roo! The hounds were close.

The man's mouth opened and shut silently. His tongue was black and swollen. His throat tightened and relaxed and tightened again as he tried to speak. At last he forced out a thin thread of sound.

"Water! For mercy's sake, water!"

Horn dropped off the pony and unhooked the canteen from the saddlehorn. He walked to the edge of the rock and held it out to the man in the dust. He shook it. The water tinkled.

The man whimpered. He dragged himself forward on his elbows. Horn shook the canteen again. The man moved faster, but the few meters to the rock diminished with painful slowness.

"Come on, man," Horn said impatiently. He looked over the man's head, back across the desert. The dust cloud was rising higher. "Here's water. Hurry!"

The man hurried. Grunting, grimacing, he crawled toward the canteen, his half-blind eyes fixed on it unmoving. He crawled up on the rock, one hand reaching.

Horn stooped instantly, lifted him, tilted the canteen to his lips. The man's throat worked convulsively. Water spilled over his chin and ran down his chest.

"That's enough," Horn said, taking the canteen away. "Not too much all at once. Better?"

The man nodded with dumb gratitude.

A-Roo!

Horn glanced up. "They're getting closer," he said. "You can't walk, and I can't leave you here for the hounds. We'll have to ride double. Think you can hang on?"

The man nodded eagerly. "Shouldn't—let you—do this," he panted. "Go on. Leave me. Thanks—for drink."

"Forget it!" Horn snapped. He helped the man stand, steadied him by the pony, and lifted the man's left foot into the stirrup. He shoved. Although the body was light, it was all dead weight Getting it balanced in the saddle was an act of skill.

A-ROO! Horn could distinguish the different voices blended into the call. He wrapped the man's hands around the saddlehorn. "Hang on!" he said. The hands clenched, whitened.

The man turned his terrified eyes down toward Horn. "Don't—let them—get me," he pleaded in a toneless whisper. "YI-I-I-I! Horn yelled shrilly.

SPLAT-T-T! His palm exploded against the pony's rump. The pony jumped forward. The man reeled drunkenly in the saddle. He turned his head and stared back with eyes that were suddenly, bitterly wise. Horn watched the swaying rider. His jaw muscles tightened.

The pony ran down the stone ramp into the dust; the man clung desperately. Horn turned then and reached the rock edge to the left in four giant strides. He dived, lit in the dust doubled up, rolled once, and was still.

A-ROO! A last time, and then no more. They were too close now, too intent upon the prey to break the silence of the kill.

Horn heard the swift, soft padding of dust-muffled paws. He huddled close to the rock, watching the red dust lift over the edge, higher, thicker, nearer. As the hounds reached the rock, the sound became sharper. Nails clicked. Horn closed his eyes and listened.

The rhythm was broken. One hound had slowed. Horn reached toward the pistol.

And then a sharp command. The slowing paws picked up the pace. Dust and distance muffled them again.

Horn risked a quick glimpse over the meter-high ledge.

They were gone, their attention all for the fleeing rider ahead.

Horn shivered. There they were, the terrible hunting dogs of Eron. Mutated to the size of horses, they could carry a man for loping hours; their giant jaws could drag down anything that moved. Four-footed terror.

And on their backs, shouting them in to the kill, the golden-skinned merchant princes of Eron, reddish-gold hair gleaming in the dusk. Mutants, also, it was said. More dreadful, certainly, than their mounts.

They closed in. The fleeing man turned in the saddle and clawed at his waist.

The pack was only a hundred meters behind when Horn saw something glint dully. Instinct drew his head down. A muffled sound of impact was followed by a screaming shriek of metal on stone. The bullet whistled far into the desert, propelled by the pistol's miniature unitronic field.

A pistol, Horn thought. Where did that stick man get a pistol?

Horn peered over the edge again. One dog was down, a leg crumpled under it, but its mouth was snarling with thwarted desire. Its rider lay stunned in the dust. The rest closed in, undeterred. Their prey, his last strength thrown into the one effort, clung hopelessly to the saddlehorn with both hands, his face turned back to look at death.

There was no sound now. There was only the silent pantomime of death being acted before Horn's eyes. The closest hound tilted its head, jaws gaping. The jaws closed. Within them was the pony's hind quarter.

The pony reared, feet pawing the sky in frantic terror and sudden pain, tossing the rider high into the air. As it reared, its feet were drawn out from under it. As it fell, it was torn apart.

The man never hit the ground. Savage jaws were waiting for him as he came down flailing the air with arms that no amount of fear-spurred desire could turn into wings.

Poor buckskin, Horn thought, and burrowed deeper into the red dust.

the history

Toll bridge.... Consider the man who invents a new method of transportation, whose toil shortens the way. Surely he deserves the gratitude and reward of his fellow men.

For centuries the speed of light was an absolute limit for space travel, and even at that speed the stars were years between. Then the Eron Tubeways Power, Transport, and Communications Company introduced the Tube. As soon as a conventional ship carried terminal equipment to a distant world, it could be linked to Eron. The stars drew close.

Three hours to Eron.

Inside the mysterious, golden tubes of energy, space was somehow foreshortened. It was a different kind of energy, and it created a different kind of space.

The Tubes, moreover, transmitted power and messages at the same speed. For the first time, interstellar civilization was possible. There is no doubt—the Company deserved a great reward.

But every bridge led to Eron, and the toll was high....

chapter 2

BLOOD MONEY

The night was thick; clouds veiled the stars. Even if there had been a break in the sheer cliff face, Horn might easily have missed it. So, when he first saw the dim, reflected glow against the mesa wall, he shrugged it away as the rebellion of strained eyes against an impossible task.

The darkness had been a comfortable blanket as he had crept from the ledge toward the mesa. Since then it had become a curtain through which he couldn't find his way, a barrier he couldn't climb, an opponent he couldn't fight. It was an enemy, like the three hundred light-years, like the arid desert, like the hunters, like the mesa wall.

The darkness would pass, as the others had passed, but the unscalable wall would still be there, tall, straight, bleak —impassable.

Now time was an enemy too, this an enemy escaping, slipping away hour by hour, fleeing minute by minute. The Earth turned, the night whispered by him, and the sun would find him—where? Still searching for a place to scale the unscalable? Or lying in wait for an unsuspecting victim at the scene of Eron's greatest moment? The bullet in his pistol was paid for; the money hung heavy at his waist.

Horn's jaw tightened for a moment—and relaxed. He had conquered the others; he would conquer these. Destiny had shadowed him from the first, stepping in his tracks as his foot left them. Soon he would hold the moment, fixed on a sharp point of time like a butterfly wriggling upon a pin-just as he held his victim within a telescopic sight, a solitary player upon a fatal stage, and his finger would squeeze, slowly, slowly....

The glow reddened, flickered, became certain. It came from a depression backed against the sheer wall. Fire painted scarlet figures and dancing shadows on gray granite.

Horn crawled around the depression, silently, just beyond the fire-tinged rim of dust. The voices stopped him. One was a man's voice, mumbling, indistinct. The other was high-pitched, shrill, and vaguely feminine. A woman? Here? Horn shook his head and listened.

"Come, now," she said. "A little food. A tiny morsel? A forgotten grain? Shake out that old tin box. Surely you'll find a bite for starving Lil."

The man mumbled something.

"Search, old man. Look hard! I'm not asking for diamonds, you know, even a little one no bigger than a seed. Please? For Lil? A bit of coal? A speck of dust? You're an ungrateful old man. Day and night, sleepless, Lil works to feed you, to keep you alive when you should have been dead long, long ago, and you won't give poor Lil the smallest crumb to keep her from starving...." The words faded into soft sobs.

Horn stared at the shadows leaping against the rock face. One, darker and more distinct than the others, slowly became solid and real, a projection of fantasy against the gray solidity of fact. It looked like a squat, black demon with two heads, one round and featureless, the other hook-nosed and fiercely dominant.

Horn looked away and crawled on. Every few meters he stopped to listen. The desert sent no warning. When he completed the half-circle, against the mesa wall once more, he knew that there was no one near except an old man and a weeping woman.

The sobs broke into a scream. "All right, you old sot. If you won't give me anything to eat, at least don't keep all the liquor to yourself. Give me a slug, you depraved old man, you befuddled rum-pot, you...." The description that followed was fantastically scurrilous and inventive.

Horn raised his head cautiously above the dusty rim. And froze, stunned.

Below, between the campfire and the mesa wall, an old man leaned against a rounded boulder. Below a tight scarlet skullcap was a wrinkled, yellow face. Slanted eyes were half-closed. A dirty yellow handkerchief knotted around a short neck was the color of the skin that peeked through a torn shirt of bright, green synsilk. A single suspender held up a baggy pair of space breeches.

Behind him, perched on the boulder, was a gaudy, red-and-green bird; it balanced itself precariously on one leg as the other tilted a half-liter bottle into a preposterously big bill. She was bedraggled and disreputable. One tail-feather was broken and several were obviously missing. She had only one eye; it blinked in the firelight.

A small pot hung over the fire. From it drifted an odor that brought a jet of saliva into Horn's mouth. The only other thing in the hollow was a battered metal suitcase close beside the old man.

Horn took a deep breath and launched himself into the camp, his pistol in his hand. One foot kicked dust over the fire as he passed. It died, smoking. Horn stopped with his back against the rock wall.

The bird strangled. She dropped the bottle and fluttered into the air on battered wings. The old man sprang to his feet, black eyes wild and staring, fat quivering on his round face and short, stout body.

"Pirates!" the bird croaked. "Stand by to repel boarders!"

The color of the man's wrinkled, ageless face had faded to a pale yellow. "No killee!" he said in an archaic dialect. His voice quavered nasally. "Please no killee poor China boy." He hiccoughed. Horn caught a faint whiff of synthetic alcohol. "Poor li'l China laundly boy no makee bother noblody!"

It sounded phony to Horn. Phonier, even, than the ridiculous pair being here below the ruins of Sunport.

Horn glanced at the suitcase beside the man's feet. There was lettering on the side; it was scratched, faded, and archaic, like the old man's speech. It said: Mr. Oliver, Wu, Proprietor, New Canton Sanitary Laundry. Horn took four quick strides to the right. On the other side, he read: Lily. The Mathematical Parrot. Can Do Sums.

"Poor China boy will get himself killed quick with a fire on the Forbidden Ground," Horn said deliberately. "A hunting party of the Golden Folk trailed me to within half a kilometer of this spot."

Wu's face got paler. His legs gave way under him. He sank down in front of the boulder. The parrot settled on his shoulder, staring at Horn with her one good eye.

"Poor li'l China boy," Wu said shakily. "No gottee nothing. One stupid bird." He cringed as the bird bit his ear. "One dirty clothes." His patched, outsize boot kicked the battered suitcase. "No makee tlouble noblody."

"The hunters will kill you just as quick," Horn said casually. "They're gone now, but they'll be back. If we're still here...." He let it hang in the air, unfinished.

"No one talks well," the parrot said, "with a gun in face."

Horn laughed, mirthlessly, and dropped the gun. The cord pulled it up tightly to his chest, ready to the slap of his hand. "Smart bird," he said. "Very smart. Smart enough to talk better than his master."

Slowly the color returned to Wu's face. "They aren't close then?" he panted. "The hunters?"

"You can speak the lingual Maybe you can speak it well enough to tell me what you're doing here."

Wu sighed and breathed easier. "Even miserable creatures like us must live—or think we must," he said sorrowfully. "When the rich feast, crumbs fall under the table. Hunger is a fearful goad. It drove us a weary distance across the dreadful desert to reach the Victory Dedication. Tormented by thirst, chased by the hunters." Wu shuddered. "We saw three men die for their sport."

Lil waggled her head, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. "The bloody, bloody hunters. And the dead men all had guns like yours, stranger."

"Odd," Wu mused, "that they should have unitron pistols. Eron guards them jealously." He glanced slantingly at Horn. Horn stared back, his arms folded across his chest, his lips a straight immobile line. "Many died," Wu went on, "but we go through the desert and the hunters, and tomorrow we will be at the ruins. And there we will find means to continue life a little longer, eh, Lil?"

Horn's eyelids flickered.

"The weak are killed," Lil said flatly. "The fit survive."

She cocked her head and stared at the ground. The bottle had long since spilled its contents into the dust. "Oh, the lovely, lovely liquor. All gone, all gone." A large tear gathered in her eye and dropped onto Wu's green shirt.

Suddenly Wu scrambled to his knees. Lil flapped into the air, complaining raucously. Wu knelt beside the ashes of the fire and peered into the pot. "Dust in the stew. Ah, me! But maybe something can be saved." He picked up a battered spoon, carefully skimmed off the surface layer of liquid, and cast it on the ground. The second dip he raised to his lips. He tasted it critically. "Marred but edible. Insignificant as our lives are, stranger, you have disrupted them considerably."

"Horn is the name." A flick of his hand sent a glistening crystal disk spinning through the air; Wu caught it deftly. "I'm in nobody's debt."

"A five-kellon piece," Wu said, raising the gold-banded disk to his eye. The clouds had begun to scatter; a few stars peered through. "Genuine, too. The beautiful new regent. Beauty and value. A rare combination. It will more than repay us for our inconvenience, eh, Lil?" The coin disappeared in Wu's voluminous clothing.

"What is beauty to an empty stomach?" the parrot grumbled.

"Poof Lil has the soul of an earthworm." Wu began ladling stew into two chipped plastic plates. He held one out to Horn. "Here. Since you have paid, you deserve a share."

Horn hesitated momentarily and then walked forward to accept the food. He retreated to the wall, squatted on his heels, and waited. Ignoring Horn's caution, Wu dived into the mixture with thick fingers. After a moment, Horn began to eat. In spite of an occasional bite that gritted between the teeth, the stew was surprisingly delicious. Small chunks of meat were identifiably rabbit; the other ingredients were obscure.

It vanished quickly. Horn tilted the plate to his mouth and let the last of the broth trickle down his throat. For the first time in many days, his stomach felt warm and full. He was sleepy and tired; taut muscles and strung nerves relaxed. The warmth swept out toward the fat old man and his bird like a wave of gratitude-Horn straightened, scoured his plate in the sand at the base of the rock wall, and dropped it at Wu's feet. "Thanks," he said flatly. He went back to the wall, wiping greasy fingers on the rags of his pants. He squatted again and keyed his senses to their habitual, restless awareness.

Wu had pushed his plate away with a contented sigh. He turned to the suitcase beside him, his body blocking Horn's view. When he swung back, the suitcase was closed and another half-liter of alcohol was in his hand. He took several generous swallows and held it out, inquiringly, to Horn. Horn shook his head. Lil, who had eaten nothing, grabbed the neck of the bottle with eager claws. She turned it up; the clear liquid gurgled down her throat.

Wu rummaged in a deep pocket and finally pulled out a battered plug of lethe weed. Fastidiously cleaning one corner of lint, he gnawed it off and began to chew, his eyes half-closed.

Horn studied him. The last man he had seen mix the weed and alcohol had died quickly. At one time, Horn had smuggled the weed, but fumes from the hold had knocked out everyone for days and almost wrecked the ship. Wu seemed unaffected.

The old man spat. The dust turned a reddish-brown. "Here we are," he mused. "Three outcasts met on the Forbidden Ground. Did you know this was once the most fertile farmland on the continent?"

"I don't believe it," Horn said.

Wu shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I mention it only to illustrate the folly of men who think they shape their destinies. What strange eddy in the river of history swept us here? Where will it take us next?"

"It takes me nowhere," Horn said. "I go where I wish."

"So we think, so we think. In the middle of things, we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear."

Horn was silent.

"Lil and I, we think we go to the ruins of Sunport because we choose, but it is our hunger that drives us. And hunger is a force that has no equal. Why do you go there?"

The question was casual and unexpected; it took Horn by surprise. He blinked once before his eyes narrowed. "Who said I do?"

"Why else should you be here on the desert? Do you go to steal, like Lil and I, or to kill?"

"There is no other choice?"

"For a deserter with a gun? What else would he be doing at the Dedication? To steal or to kill, it makes no difference.

The ruins will be better guarded than any spot in the Empire, and brute force must always bow to greater force. It is a pity for one to die so young."

Horn waited. He had schooled himself to wait until others had identified themselves and their purposes.

"We're three of a land," Wu said. "We need have no secrets, one from the others. Lil and I, we have lived too long to be moralists. Men must live, and they must do what they must do."

"I won't die," Horn said.

"So we think, so we all think. And yet we do. But you may be right. You won't die now because you won't reach the ruins in time."

"You're wrong," Horn said calmly. "As you said, we are three of a kind. We need have no secrets. You are going to the Dedication; you will show me the way."

The cold certainty that the old man would be his guide had come a long time ago. Maybe he had known it as he watched from above the depression.

"No, no," Wu stammered. "I couldn't do that. I mean—that would be—"

Horn's eyes were icy on Wu's face.

Wu squirmed, shrugged, and sank back. "As you will. Outcasts must stick together. But you don't realize the chain of causation you are beginning."

"Men," Lil said darkly, "fashion their own nooses."

Horn stared at them silently, ridges slowly forming between his eyebrows. Wu yawned, shivered, and lay down by the cold ashes of the fire. He curled into a fetal position.

"No watch?" Horn asked sardonically.

"For what?" Wu's voice was muffled. "Death will come, just as the dawn will come. If they come together, there is no help for it. I'm not going to stay awake to watch for either."

"How have you survived so long?"

A yawn reached Horn's ears. "By eating regularly, sleeping whenever possible, and not worrying about tomorrow. The wall is to our backs. Where would we run? Besides, Lil will watch."

Horn shrugged and climbed with habitual caution to the rim of the depression. After his senses had adjusted to the silence and the night, he let them roam out into the desert, but they brought him no warning. He settled down against the mesa wall to wait out the night.

The clouds had vanished. The stars were out, and, and the sky was brilliant. He could see a long way into the desert; it was lifeless. He pinched the heavy belt inside the waistband of his pants. A coin was ejected into his hand. The crystal disk had a silver rim. He held it up between his eye and the stars.

His hand trembled. He caught it quickly, stopped the tremor, held the coin steady. The strain had been great for a long time, but it would be fatal to let loose now.

Garth Kohlnar stared at him out of the coin. His massive, bronze face, his stiff, reddish hair, his yellow-gray eyes were startlingly lifelike. Powerful and dominant, the General Manager of the Eron Company fixed the holder of the coin with unwavering eyes, as if to say:

"Here is money. Here is the stuff of trade, the symbol of empire. Here is good money, hard money, crafted so carefully that counterfeit is impossible, backed by all the might and wealth of Eron. You have toiled for it, but your toil was not wasted. You hold your reward in your hands, a work of art, a token of value. Whatever you have done to get this coin was worthwhile. You own a share of Eron. Ask for it. It will be delivered without question."

The night wind was cold on Horn's half-naked body. He resisted the impulse to shiver. He laid the coin in the dust of the desert and drew out another and another until five of the crystal disks lay side by side, silver-rimmed, orange, green, blue, black. The General Manager and four of his five Directors: Matal for Power, Fenelon for Transport, Ronholm for Commerce, Duchane for Security.

Five faces: thin and round, long and short, bold and cunning. The differences were unimportant. They all had the golden skin of the pureblood, and an even deeper kinship spoke through the eyes. It was the kinship of power, an imperial hunger only half-satisfied and basically unappeasable.

The sixth coin was gold-banded like the one Horn had tossed to Wu. The symbol of the Directorship of Communications. Horn held the coin up to the stars.

The coin held a woman's face as a morning flower holds a drop of dew, mirroring in it the limitless possibilities of the world that begins again. Her skin was softly golden against red-gold hair confined by a fillet of immense white diamonds. Her red lips curved gently in the faint beginning of a smile; they promised an empire to the man who could win them. And her head, held proudly, told him that an empire would not be enough to lay at her feet. Her tawny eyes looked out at Horn, sank deep into his eyes, judging, weighing....

Is this the man?

"The lovely Wendre," a voice wheezed. "Wendre Kohlnar, the new Director, daughter of the General Manager."

Startled, Horn turned at the first words. His hand darted toward his gun, dropping the coin. Wu knelt beside him. He was unarmed. Horn's hand fell back to his side.

"Beautiful," Wu went on casually, "and heir to all that." He waved a careless hand at the star-studded sky. "If she can find a man strong enough to hold it for her."

"All except that," Horn said. He pointed toward the seven sisters of the Pleiades Cluster, just rising on the horizon.

"Eron has conquered the Quarnon League, but keeping it is another matter."

"The tides of empire rise," Wu said softly. "A few always flee in front of it, but the waves crash after them. Now they have crushed the Cluster. They have smashed it flat. It will never rise again. When the tide recedes at last, it will leave only sand-strewn ruins."

"The defeat isn't final. Not while the Liberator lives."

"You think Eron doesn't know that?" Wu asked. "Peter Sair was sent to Prison Terminal. Vantee. A few months ago, he died there. Or so it is said."

"Dead?" Horn said. He stared toward the horizon, toward the Pleiades, toward the cluster of stars that were close enough for civilization without the Tube, where freedom had died. He stared toward home and realized for the first time that he could never go back.

Three hundred light years separated him from the Cluster. Six hours by Tube; half-a-dozen lifetimes by the next quickest means. And the Tubes led through Eron; he had barred himself from Eron by what he had done and what he was going to do.

Why am I here? Horn wondered, and pushed the thought away.

"Goodnight, idealist," Wu whispered, and was gone. Horn shrugged and scooped up the coins in front of him Whatever you have done to earn these coins was worthwhile.

He reached for the pistol under his left arm and pulled it down easily. He held it between his knees, pointing toward the desert.

He hadn't earned them yet. He would earn them tomorrow.

the history

Civilization....

Like everything else, it has a price. The clown payment is freedom. For the privilege of living together, men surrender the right to do as they please; they make laws and restrict themselves within them.

When civilization is conferred from outside, the price is even steeper: someone else makes the laws.

Only the Tube made possible an interstellar civilization. And only Eron knew the secret of the Tube.

Some people will not pay the price. They buy freedom instead and pay for it with toil and hardship.

So men fled before Eron. They fled down the star-ways in dusty ships ahead of the expanding sphere of civilization and empire.

In the star cluster once called the Pleiades, freedom stopped running. The stars were close enough for loose federation and trade but too far apart for conquest. Slow ships could link them together into the Quarnon League. Instead of a ship, its symbol was a man.

And there in the Cluster, freedom died, crushed by Eron in two great wars. For freedom is contagious, and bridges are profitable.

The news traveled fast: Peter Sair was dead.

But Sair was a symbol. And symbols, like freedom, cannot die as long as one man still believes in them.

chapter 3

THE NARROW BRIDGE

Horn came awake instantly, his nerves tingling with alarm. The pistol was in his hand as he glanced out over the desert. The eastern horizon was beginning to gray. The stars had faded there. But the danger wasn't in the desert. It was lifeless.

He looked to the left, but the depression was still dark. Dark and still. But something had changed.

A man in constant danger learns to depend on his intuition, that subtle analyzer of unconscious perceptions. He has to. Danger will not wait for judgment.

Stiffened muscles protesting, Horn crept silently down the slope. The hollow was deserted. Only the black ashes in the dust were evidence that someone had been there.

Wu and the parrot were gone. They had picked up their few belongings and left soundlessly in the night while he slept.

That was the disturbing factor. For longer than he could remember he hadn't allowed himself the luxury of real sleep. His sleep was only a step below consciousness, a drowsing broken by the slightest change of environment. How could they have gone without waking him?

He hadn't planned to sleep at all. The closer he got to the goal, the greater the pitch of danger. Had it been the rebellion of a body driven beyond endurance? That was ridiculous. And yet he had slept. He felt more rested, more alert than he had since leaving the cruiser.

If he had been drugged, in spite of his caution, Wu had been clever. Horn added another stroke to the implausibility of their presence here and the greater implausibility of their appearance.

Horn finished the automatic process of covering the ashes and shrugged. He felt no after-effects.

It was unfortunate, nevertheless. The old man would have been useful; Horn was convinced that Wu had known a way to the mesa top. But anger was pointless. To Horn, Wu was a thing to be used. Wu had a right to avoid being used, if he could.

Horn considered the problem of climbing the mesa. By the growing daylight, he could see no break in the wall. It was likely that the search would take him all day. That was too long.

Horn ran up the slope beside the single set of boot tracks and studied the trail. It ran straight along the edge of the cliff until it grew indistinct in the distance.

Horn started after them at a steady trot. The tracks weren't too old, an hour or two at most, and the patches on the boots were plain. Horn read the trail skillfully. Here Wu had shifted the suitcase to his left hand; there he had stopped to catch his breath or take a drink. The undulations of a snake began and ended abruptly; farther on, a rabbit's tracks were beside the trail.

Horn passed a discarded half-liter bottle. The label said: Ethyl Alcohol, synthetic, 180 proof. Bottled by Eron Export Authority.

Thirst began to bother Horn. He took the last drink from the canteen, a tepid sip that was little better than nothing. He recapped the canteen and licked his lips.

Almost imperceptibly, the tracks grew fresher. Wu was only minutes ahead. Horn glanced up, as he had before, but there was only the sheer cliff face to his left and the red dust ahead.

Then he lost the tracks. They ended at a shelving of rock scoured clean by the wind and didn't return to the dust anywhere around the perimeter.

Horn stared up at the cliff. The bird could have flown over it but not Wu. Horn studied the bush that grew tight against the foot of the cliff. It was an unlikely green. Some of the leaves had been bruised recently.

Carefully, Horn pushed the bush aside. Behind it was blackness. A hole, a meter high, two-thirds of a meter wide. Horn didn't like holes or tunnels; there was too much uncertainty about them. But this one led toward Sunport.

The smooth rock was damp as he scrambled through the darkness on hands and knees. That trickle of moisture had been the reason for the bush. Water on the desert was a rarity. The clatter of the empty canteen against the side and floor of the tunnel reminded Horn how much of a rarity it was. It was torment to his dust-caked throat.

He grimaced and crawled faster. Slowly the darkness lessened, became a frame for brightness, and fell behind.

Horn stood up cautiously, the rocks at his back. After the drab desert, the colors were achingly brilliant, the all-pervading green broken here and there with red and blue and yellow. He breathed deeply, and his senses came alive to a myriad odors. It was like coming back from death.

A thought intruded: he must pass from this to death again.

He pushed through the close-packed greenness, trampling the color and odor underfoot, until he came to a clearing. Over the surrounding trees and bushes he could see the bare, gray granite marching unbroken around the valley. He was no better off than he had been. And yet Wu had come this way.

The music of water was close. Horn made his way to it, ignoring the branches and thorns that tore at his arms and chest. He waited at the edge of the little brook. Birds in the trees had fallen silent, but as he stood motionless they began to sing again.

Horn stretched himself out beside the brook and plunged his face into the water. He let it trickle into his mouth, raised his dripping head, and the water washed down his throat, sluicing away the desert dust.

It was good water, incredibly sweet after alkaline bitterness of the gypsum springs. He bent to drink again, deeply this time, when he saw the cottontail on the other side of the brook. Black eyes stared at him curiously.

Cautiously Horn reached for his pistol, set it at low velocity and took quick aim. He needed meat. But as the gun came down, the rabbit turned and disappeared into the brush in one giant leap.

A moment later, as Horn watched with narrowed eyes, a brown bird erupted from the brush and vanished toward the far wall. Horn followed its flight thoughtfully, drank again, and filled his canteen.

Horn trotted toward the distant wall, ducking under branches, circling clumps of bushes. As he drew near, he saw through the trees that here the cliff face had crumbled. Great sections of it had fallen, breaking into boulders and masses of rubble that piled against the wall in a steep ramp.

Coming out from under the last tree, Horn saw the small, dark figure toiling toward the top of the slide, loosening pebbles that rattled down the slope. Something smaller and darker circled in the air around the figure's head.

The pistol was in Horn's hand.

"Stop!" Horn shouted. The words echoed back and forth between the cliffs.

A white face turned back toward him. Horn raised the gun to his eye. Through the powerful telescopic sight, Wu seemed only a few meters away, caught upon the crosshairs. His eyes were wide and black as he stared down into the gun; his face was pale; indecision seemed to paralyze him.

Something brown and winged swept across the sight and disappeared into the blackness of the cliff.

"Stay where you are!" Horn yelled.

Wu moved then, swiftly for such a fat, old man, and swarmed up the rocks. The crosshairs swung to follow him. Annoyance flitted across Horn's face. The old man was a fool; he deserved to die. Horn's finger tightened on the trigger. At the last moment he twisted the crosshairs away.

The projectile whistled from the gun, fought its way through the air, and ricocheted from rocks a meter to Wu's left. And then the old man was gone, into the blackness in the cliff face, like the brown bird.

Disgustedly, Horn released the gun and dashed up the rocks, ignoring the way they slipped and turned under his feet and the dangers of starting a slide that would pull the natural ramp out from under him. Pebbles rattled down the slope. In a loose patch, he went to one knee, but in a few minutes he was staring into the black mouth of a cave.

Water trickled along a crooked channel carved into the smooth floor. It disappeared into the loose rock that fell away from the mouth. That and the long heating and cooling of the centuries had loosened the cliff face and pulled it down.

Horn stepped into the darkness. The mouth was unnaturally round; the walls were unnaturally smooth. This was a tunnel, not a cave.

It seemed straight. A light flickered far ahead in the darkness. Horn ran toward it, wondering if there might be wide, deep holes and pushing the thought away.

The light wavered, almost disappeared, and grew brighter, Finally Horn saw that it was a torch. Wu was holding it and walking wearily, his face turned back. The parrot was on his shoulder.

When Horn came into the flickering circle of light, breathing easily, Wu stopped, leaned against the tunnel wall, and sighed. Sweat trickled down his yellow face. His chest rose and fell raggedly.

"You are a determined man," he gasped. "In itself, that is an admirable trait."

"Character is judged by the ends it serves," Lil said harshly, her one eye gleaming in the torchlight.

Horn's face was calm. "I said last night that you would take me to Sunport. If this is the way, let's go on."

Wu put one hand to his chest as if to ease a pain. "I'm an old man. I've moved too fast. Besides, you shot at me. I might have been killed." There was horror in his voice.

Horn nodded. "You might have been. Lead the way."

The torch sagged in Wu's hand. Horn took it and motioned him away from the wall. Wu protested, but he moved ahead.

"How did you know of this place?" Horn asked.

Wu shrugged. "Men learn many odd things if they live long enough. Sometimes I think I've lived too long. When Sunport was young, this whole mountain was honeycombed with passages. The deeper ones are flooded. Most of the others are caved in. But this one should lead to the top."

Twice they had to crawl on hands and knees over piles of fallen rubble that almost choked the tunnel. When Wu began to complain again, Horn reached for the battered suitcase. Reluctantly, Wu gave it up. It was surprisingly heavy. Horn prodded Wu forward into the darkness that the torch forced into only a small retreat.

They walked silently into the darkness, slowly climbing, sloshing occasionally in the icy stream of water that ran along the floor or collected in pools where it had been dammed by refuse or rubble.

"A deserter," Wu panted. "A deserter from the Guard— with sympathies for the beaten Cluster—heading for the Victory Dedication at the ruins of old Sunport—with a gun. That paints an interesting picture."

"Glad you like it," Horn said.

"It presents some interesting possibilities, too. Where would a guard get money? Not from Eron. Not in those amounts. One might almost imagine that you came from the Cluster, that you were among those defeated soldiers who were permitted to enlist in the Eron Guard, that you came here with a purpose, determined to desert on Earth and make your way to the ruins of Sunport in time for the Dedication— But that is impossible. No one would have attempted it, and no one knew about the Dedication. It wasn't public knowledge until recently."

"You talk too much," Horn said curtly.

Wu stopped walking suddenly. Horn bumped into him. Lil flew into the air. Wu clutched at Horn and pressed himself back. Beyond Wu, Horn saw the pit.

Across the entire width of the tunnel, the floor had fallen away. They stood on the edge of a wide, black hole. Horn stepped forward past Wu and held the torch high. Across the pit stretched a rusty, metal girder to an uneasy resting place on the other side, more than five meters away. Someone long dead must have put it there. It was a narrow bridge across black infinity.

Horn knelt at the edge and held the torch out over the side. The light died away before it reached bottom. As he stood up, his foot dislodged a pebble. It rang and clattered against the sides for a long time before a distant splash told them it had hit water.

Wu stared at the pit and at the girder, half a meter wide, that spanned it. Sweat glistened in shiny beads on his round, yellow face.

Horn set one foot on the girder, testing its balance. It didn't move. He put his other foot on it. It didn't sag. Steadily then, without haste, he walked across the bridge, putting one foot down and swinging the other one around in front of it, until he stepped safely onto the other side.

He put down the suitcase and turned, holding the torch up so that it lighted the other side. "Come on," he said. "It's getting late."

Lil flapped across and settled down beside Horn. She looked back at Wu, who hesitated at the end of the girder.

"I'm an old man," he wailed. "I'm old and feeble. I can't do it. I've been running all day and creeping and crawling and climbing through a mountain's black heart. I can't do it I can't stand the thought of heights. I feel dizzy already."

Horn grunted impatiently and put his foot on the end of the girder. Lil stared at Wu with her one good eye.

"Come back," Wu moaned. "Come back, my friend. I've been a sentimental fool long enough. After this you can eat coal."

"Life is more precious than diamonds," Lil said obscurely. She winked with malice. "Maybe this strong young man would like to find diamonds for me."

"You wouldn't leave me to die?" Wu gasped. "Wait. I'm coming." But his voice trembled.

He started out unsteadily, his breath coming fast and shallow. His fat arms were spread out for balance, and his eyes stared fixedly at a point in the darkness beyond Horn's shoulder. He sidled across, one foot inching forward, the other scraping behind.

When he was halfway across, the girder wobbled under Horn's foot. Wu stiffened, swayed, and stopped.

"Ah, no!" he said breathlessly. "Don't let it move. My poor, mistreated heart—it can't stand much more of this."

"I think," Horn said slowly, "that it's time we had a little talk."

"Of course," Wu said. "Talk, talk. Anything. I'll talk. I'm the best talker you ever heard. Only wait until I'm over there." Sweat was streaming down his face.

"I'll get better answers if you're there," Horn said calmly. "Don't move."

Wu had started to inch forward; the girder wobbled again. Wu gasped and stopped.

"What shall we talk about?" Horn asked casually. "About Sunport and why old men go there? About tunnels and valleys? About rabbits that turn into birds? About snake tracks and rabbit tracks that start suddenly and end just as abruptly? About—"

"Anything—" Wu gasped.

"What are you?" Horn asked. "And what is Lil? When I saw her the first time, her one eye was on the left. Now it's on the right."

"I'll tell you," Wu moaned. "Only let me cross. I can't talk here. I'll fall—"

"Don't move!" Horn looked down at the parrot. "Don't you try anything either, whatever you are, or your master will—"

But as Horn looked down, the girder twisted under his foot. Wu screamed and tottered, his arms contorting themselves grotesquely.

Before Horn could move, the old man had toppled into the black pit.

the history

Port of the sun. Sunport....

It rose from its own ashes, phoenixlike, and launched its gleaming, wingless children toward the stars. Outward they spread in a vast sphere, seeking the new worlds, the virgin worlds, carrying with them a spark of the immortal flame. Where they landed, the spark leaped and grew.

Sunport waited, but they did not come back.

They found all kinds of worlds; some so sweet they could not leave, some so bitter there was no time for anything but struggle.... They relaxed, or they fought. They shaped and were shaped.

Weary, like Earth, Sunport waited. Exhausted, like the soil and the mines, Sunport waited. Still waiting, Sunport returned to ashes.

And at last they came. They came as conquerors. But they were still the children of Earth. Changed a little, they were still men.

Something stirred in the ashes....

CHAPTER 4

PHOENIX

While Wu was still toppling, something whirred beside Horn and disappeared swiftly into the darkness. Horn glanced quickly around. They were both gone, Wu and Lil. Horn listened. The seconds passed, and there was no distant splash from the pit.

Horn put one foot on the girder and held up the torch. The fat old man was dangling under the girder, his mouth opening and shutting in mute terror, his arms and legs pushing downward as if they could shove the blackness away.

A wire gleamed. It circled the rusty beam. A bright metal hook went through the waistband of Wu's baggy breeches. Where the wire joined the hook was blue brilliance, burning in the torchlight with a cold, splendid luminescence. It was faceted, like diamonds, thousands of them sparkling.

Kicking, gasping, Wu swung jerkily back and forth. Horn shook himself. He walked out on the beam, stooped, took hold of the unexplainable wire. It moved liquidly in his hand, and he almost dropped it and the living burden it supported. His hand tightened. Inside it was a comfortable handle.

He backed along the girder, his chest rigid with strain, shining with sweat, Wu swung heavily below, each swing threatening to send them both into the gulf. Finally one backward-reaching foot touched solid rock. Horn strained backward. Wu swung in, rising. His hands caught the edge of rock. He clawed his way desperately over the brink, crawled meters from the edge, and collapsed, panting and trembling.

The thing in Horn's hand flowed again. Horn looked down. The parrot was perched on his finger, his ragged wings drooping wearily.

"Disaster," she said breathlessly, "is the crucible of human hearts. We thank you, my master and I."

Wu sat up slowly. "Indeed, indeed. You are a noble young man, brave—'

"It won't go away if you shut your eyes," Horn said.

He stuck the torch into a crevice in the wall. It flared smokily over the scene as he sat down and pulled his gun forward between his knees so that it pointed toward the old man and the bird perched now on his shoulder.

"I toppled you off the girder," Horn said. "I'd just as soon toss you over the edge again."

"It was a stupid thing to do," Wu said. "You can't get answers from a dead man."

"Obviously. What is your life worth to you? It's immaterial to me whether you live or die."

Wu sighed and shook his head. "Ah, violence! You give us no choice. An old man and an old bird, what chance do we have against youth and callousness and a gun?"

"Answers," Horn said.

"How old do you think I am?" Wu asked.

Horn stared at Wu's ageless face. "Seventy? Eighty?" he said, and knew that he was wrong.

"More than fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred weary years. Searching for peace and never finding it. Longing for rest and afraid of dying. Lil and I going on and on."

Horn's eyes narrowed, but the rest of his face was immobile.

"Like Lil, I am the last of my race," Wu went on. "When I was born on Stockton Street in San Francisco, my people were the most numerous on Earth. And the oldest. But they clung to Earth while others went out to the stars. With Earth, they died.

"I was different. I emigrated to Mars. At Syrtis City, with youthful folly, I established the New Canton Sanitary Laundry. But water was scarce and cleaning fluids were dear. It was cheaper to weave new plastic clothes than to clean them.

"I became a ship's cook on a small, prospecting vessel. Its owners struck the richest treasure in history. On one of the asteroids, we found the Diamond Cavern."

Wu crawled warily to the suitcase close to the edge of the pit, dug into it, and crawled back with a bottle. He lifted it to his lips; his throat moved convulsively twice before he lowered it and handed it to Lil. Wu sighed; his small, black eyes blinked.

"Living diamonds, sir. Carbon deposits in a mountain torn from an exploding world. The cavern was underlaid by uranium. For a long time, that energy fed Lil's race; when it began to fail, they learned how to fission individual atoms. When the uranium was used up entirely, they learned to gather thermal energy even from very cold molecules, in defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Improbable? True. But all life exists in a kind of defiance of the Second Law.

"Living diamonds. But the creatures were more wonderful then their crystalline skins. As you have noticed, Lil is no parrot. She is a pseudomorph of the Diamond Cavern."

A tear sparkled gemlike in Lil's one eye and dropped to the dusty tunnel floor.

"Lil's race had many things to offer men. They had a culture almost as old as Earth itself. Energy was low there; time moved slowly. They were almost immortal. But the ship's crew saw only one thing: the diamonds. One radiation bomb destroyed the cavern and all the creatures in it, discoloring and ruining most of the diamonds in the process. Only Lil was saved. I hid her in the gallery. We have been together ever since."

Lil moaned thinly. "Poor old Lil," she sobbed. "She's all alone. Ah, all, ah. Her people, all gone. Her world murdered and forgotten. No friend in all the universe but poor old Wu. Oh, the lost wonder, the beauty...."

She wilted. Horn's gun lifted. Wu held up a warning finger. "Sh-h-h," he said softly. "You are going to see something that no one alive but me has ever seen."

Lil's gay, disheveled plumage flowed. The yellow legs collapsed into pliant pseudopods. A glittering surface of diamond was uncovered. Everything else ran shapelessly into an opening at the top, leaving a diamond the size of a man's two hands clasped together.

Torchlight struck it. The diamond threw it back, multiplied, in an incredible glory of prismatic colors. Horn caught his breath.

"Wait," Wu whispered. "Wait until she opens."

Seams appeared in the top of the burning, thousand-faceted spheroid. Six diamond petals bent slowly down. Above them rose six slender, living tendrils. Reaching pink fingers, they grew and divided into delicate and intricate membranes like a pure white web.

"With those and her amorphous body," Wu said, "she can assume any form she wishes. Those tracks you saw, the rabbit who looked at you across the stream, the bird that flew to me—all Lil."

The pistol slipped from Horn's relaxed hand; it slithered up under his shoulder. At the sound, the diamond thing leaped explosively into the air. Its splendor was concealed, in an instant, by the parrot's ragged feathers.

Lil swayed and moaned again. "Gone, all gone."

"Don't cry, Lil," Wu said softly. He rummaged deep in one pocket. "Here's a little trinket I've been saving for a bitter hour. It came out of the stickpin of a grafting Company inspector who tried to jail us for vagrancy."

Lil stopped moaning and flapped to Wu's shoulder. Her strong beak took the gleaming, pea-sized diamond delicately from his thick fingers. A muffled crunch and the stone was gone.

"One tomorrow," she said cheerfully, "is worth a million yesterdays." She rubbed her beak affectionately against Wu's wrinkled cheek. "A most beautiful diamond."

"She can assimilate almost any form of carbon," Wu said. "But she prefers diamond. When we're prosperous, that's what she eats. Recently we've been reduced to anthracite."

"The secret," Horn said coldly. "How have you lived so long?"

"Lil," Wu said. "Her people learned many things in their long, almost eternal existence: life, probability, atomic structure.... That was only one of the things mankind lost through greed. She keeps me alive, and I help her find food.

"We wander. If we stay still very long, Duchane's Index will find us. That vast collection of memory would quickly fit our descriptions into a thousand-year-old record of jewel thefts. We would like to stay on the frontiers, beyond the reach of Eron, but there are few diamonds there.

"Wanderers, eternal vagabonds, we have seen a hundred worlds and known them all and have only our memories that go back too far to show for it. We must keep moving.

Men would wonder why I don't die. My secret would rouse in them the same madness as Lil's diamond carapace. They would kill me for it.

"Yet there are consolations. There is always tomorrow—a new ship to catch, a virgin planet waiting. When memory grows too long, there's a way to blot it out. The weed for me, and diamonds for Lil, and rum for both of us."

Horn studied them for a moment. "That's all you've done with it?"

Wu shrugged. "What would you do?"

"It would give a man a different perspective," Horn said thoughtfully. "You could do something for all humanity: in science, politics, philosophy. You owe it—"

"For what?" Wu asked dryly. "Humanity had nothing to do with it. It tossed away its chance when its representatives wiped out Lil's race."

"Original sin?" A smile flickered across Horn's face. "If a man could think things out thoroughly, plan carefully, act slowly," he mused, "he could guide his people into better, wiser paths. If a tyrant arose, like Eron, he could—"

"One man against an empire?" Wu broke in. "Empires rise and fall, and that cycle is dictated by forces ignorant of things as insignificant as a man. They are as vast and mysterious in their workings as fate itself. Eron will fall—in its own time. But you will probably be long dead, and I myself may be dead. Even Lil can't push that finality away forever."

"Forces!" Horn shrugged. "They are only men in the mass. One man can lead them or push them. And one man, acting at the right time, at the right place, in the right way, can topple the greatest boulder.

"And get crushed himself when it falls," Wu said. "No, thank you. As long as I have lived, as weary as life sometimes grows, I cling to it—more desperately even than you.

What have you to lose but a few unhappy years? It is easy for you to be foolhardy and contemptuous of danger. I must be timid and cowardly. This miserable carcass, which has lasted me so long, may last me as long again, with care."

Horn was on his feet. He pulled the torch out of the wall and motioned with his head for Wu and Lil to go in front. Wu picked up his suitcase and turned his head back to look at Horn.

"Don't you believe me, sir?"

"You aren't in the pit, are you?" Horn answered. The question Wu asked was something Horn couldn't answer directly. For the moment he was willing to accept it as a working hypothesis; it fitted the observed data. In addition, it was too fantastic not to have an element of truth. "Keep moving. We may be late as it is."

"We mustn't make you late for your appointment with destiny," Wu said. The words floated back mockingly.

The tunnel began to widen. It spilled them into a great chain of vast black areas: warehouses, Horn guessed, for the first interplanetary commerce. Sloping ramps led them up and up again. With the first distant suggestion of sunlight, Horn ground out the torch against the wall and, a little farther on, leaned it against the side of the last broad tunnel.

Storms had washed mud and debris into the crumbling entrance. The narrow exit that remained was well concealed by a gnarled juniper tree. Horn peered between the leaves. Beyond were ruins: mounds of weathered rubble pierced by an occasional rusted spear, a tottering wall. It was deserted. Horn climbed through the hole and slipped down under the lowest branch. Wu followed with a muffled sigh of relief.

Horn crept to the shaky wall and glanced quickly over it. He stifled an exclamation. "The victory monument!"

It towered against the noon sky, eight hundred meters away, where once the Mars Docks of Old Sunport had been. But even Sunport, at her proudest, couldn't have built this.

Its base was an immense black cube capped with a black hemisphere. It was at least nine hundred meters high. Towering endlessly above that rounded pedestal was a great, cylindrical column. It was faced with luxion and glowed with rising waves of living color. Blood-red just above the black hemisphere, it shimmered through orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The top faded to a shining white.

Crowning the pillar, four kilometers overhead, was a huge, steel-gray sphere, smooth and featureless except at the poles. There, thousands of slender golden spikes bristled in every direction.

"Eron!" Wu said at Horn's elbow.

"I've never seen it," Horn said.

"It's a good reproduction," Wu said. "That's it. Eron. Your boulder. Let's see you topple it."

Horn turned his eyes away from the monument and studied the area surrounding it. Only around the vast perimeter of the mesa were the ruins visible, and the other side was so distant it dwindled away grayly. Everywhere else the ruins had been sealed under a marble-smooth surface inlaid with murals.

"Sunport," Wu said softly. "They built it high and tall, on the ruins of a city called Denver, so that it would be nearer the stars. Like Eron, it ruled the known world. Legend says that a great barbarian leader sacked Sunport in its greatness. He led his nomad bands upon it, the legend says, and tore it down and gave it back to the sun, its might and its oppression."

"Eron, too, can be destroyed," Horn said.

"A straw man." Wu chuckled. "Legend is not to be trusted. Sunport was dead long before then. Created by a historic need, it died when its job was done. That tribal hero cremated a corpse."

Horn shrugged. There were immediate problems; he was intent upon the crowded surface of the sealed ruins.

Across giant doors in the black cube's face was a broad platform. Obviously temporary, it had the solidity of permanence. Like the broad steps that led up to it, the platform was gleaming, golden plastic. Emerging from under it and stretching far across the field were deep, metal-lined tracks. Facing the platform were concentric semicircles of bleachers, their tiers capable of seating many thousands.

Pavilions were a riot of color everywhere. Milling among them were the Golden Folk. Surely there were more of them here, Horn thought, than had ever been gathered together before. Below him was the aristocracy of Eron, the heirs of the universe, proud, powerful, arrogant—and effeminate. Not one of them could have done what he had done to get here.

The voices rose to Horn, their laughter, their gaiety, high-pitched, nervous. It sounded like the music for a last palsied dance before dissolution.

They were leeches, bloodsuckers. It would be pleasant to have the power to crush them all. The white, anemic worlds would bless him and grow strong again. But only one of them was to die. There would be time for only one.

The Golden Folk were no threat. Danger lay only in the strength they bought. Guards, sprinkled thickly, outnumbered their masters. They lined the perimeter of the paved mesa, alert and watchful. Units were posted in strategic spots. They clustered around the base of the black cube. They seemed unusually tall there, even at this distance. They were the Elite Guard, Horn realized, the three-meter Denebolan Lancers.

It wasn't a question of being afraid of them. They were only a complication to be considered.

Monoliths ringed the edges of the mesa. They were the tall, black spires of battleships, their one-hundred meter diameters and half-kilometer lengths dwarfed only by the monument. Two broad, golden bands, fore and aft, adapted them to passage through the Tube. Nothing projected beyond them; it was understood that they kept the ship from touching the Tube's deadly walls.

There were nine of the monoliths, each one a sleek, efficient, ruthless fighting machine. Each one carried twelve thirty-inch rifles. The thrust of their unitron helices could throw twelve-ton projectiles at velocities sufficient to vaporize them on impact. One shot would have split apart a mountain.

Only the rifles, normally retracted into flat turrets in the N-iron hulls, were busy, roaming restlessly in search of targets in the pale sky or on the mountains beyond that seemed close but were actually kilometers away. They found nothing to stop their searching.

Other ships were in the sky and on the ground: cruisers, scoutships.... Eron guarded its rulers thoroughly.

One small pistol against the massive power that had crushed a star cluster. It was not too uneven. Horn wasn't fighting with battleships, and brute power isn't efficient at swatting gnats. It takes only one small bullet to kill a man.

They thought eight hundred meters was an impossible range for a portable weapon. Horn smiled grimly. Eron didn't know its own devices.

Something whined above him. Instinctively, Horn threw himself down in the brush-covered hollow and turned his head to glance upward. The fantastic black mass of a battleship was poised above them, its hull rippling with iridescent color. Betraying the infinitesimal power loss of the unitronic field that lifted and drove it.

Wu squalled and jumped to his feet. With one hand, Horn dumped him unceremoniously into the brush and held him there.

"Shut up and stay down!" he shouted about the whine.

Wu shivered helplessly, his face pressed into the dirt. "My ancestors, preserve me!"

Gently the giant stem lowered, passed them not a hundred meters away, and slowed to a stop on the field below. Colossal, tripod landing skids unfolded and bit into the mountain. The ground quivered under them. From behind them came the rumble of falling rock. Horn thought of the tunnel and hoped, briefly, that it hadn't been blocked.

He raised his head above the wall, shaken now so that it was only half as high. He could still see the monument and the platform in front of it. The ship served him instead of Eron; it gave him a shield from casual observation.

He glanced upward at the black tower, and Lil fluttered across his vision. For the first time he realized that she had been gone.

"Guards are as thick as lice on a beggar's bed," she reported. "But that monster is nothing to worry about. A man in armor pays no attention to ants underneath his foot."

Wu groaned, unappeased. "Can't a man pick up a wretched handful of diamonds? Must the Company send ships enough to blow the whole planet into atoms?"

Horn unclipped the pistol from the cord around his shoulder. There was little to go wrong with it, but even that little was a chance that need not be taken.

With the quick efficiency of the Guard, he stripped it down. Out of the butt he shook the small, flat dynode cell.

Its molecule-thin films stored the energy of a ton of chemical explosives. The little magazine of fifty bullets was well oiled; the projectiles slid easily. The helix-wound barrel was clean and untarnished.

It was in perfect working order. When he pulled the trigger, a bullet, armored against atmospheric friction, would leave the gun with the velocity of an ancient cannon shell.

Wu looked at the dismantled gun and shuddered. "It seems as if all these precautions are for you," he said slowly. "I urge you: don't use that pistol! One man's death means nothing—except to himself. And the death that gun holds is yours."

Horn stared silently across the mesa toward the monument and thought again: Why am I here? To kill a man, he told himself, to do a job no one else could do.

"The man of violence," Lil said suddenly, "is a dangerous companion."

"You are right, Lil, as usual," Wu said.

Before Horn could stop him, the fat, old man had grabbed his suitcase and vaulted the little wall with surprising agility. As Horn listened to him slithering down the other side, his hands were busy snapping the pistol back together.

He pointed the pistol over the wall—and lowered it slowly. Wu and the parrot were already mingling with the throng below. A shot would accomplish nothing now but betrayal.

And yet— Horn indulged in a rare moment of self-reproach. This was the price of softness. It was obvious that the yellow man was going to sell him to save his own ancient skin.

Horn shrugged. There was nothing to do but wait.

the history

Secrets don't keep....

The facts of nature are written duplicate in atoms, which reveal them with the same phenomena everywhere, for intelligence to see. Intelligence can't be monopolized.

Yet one secret kept for a thousand years.

Men died to learn Eron's secret: scientists, spies, raiders. The theory, the mathematics, the technical details were all available in thick manuals and thicker textbooks. Captured technicians could build terminals, but they couldn't link them together. One thing was missing: the imponderable, the unguessable. The secret.

Of the many ways to keep a secret, only one is perfect: tell nobody. But some secrets can't be allowed to die.

Someone had to know. Who? The Directors? The General Manager? At least one of them was always present when a new Tube was activated.

The secret. What was it? Who knew it? Eron guarded it well.

If all men could build bridges, who would pay toll?

chapter 5

ASSASSIN

The seconds passed slowly, but they passed without alarm. Horn's pulse began to slow. He risked another glance over the wall, his pistol clenched in a sweaty palm. No one was looking toward him. There were no guards in the crowd clustered around Wu and Lil.

Wu stood on his battered suitcase haranguing the curious Golden folk in a surprisingly loud voice of blustery confidence. Some of the phrases even drifted to Horn.

".... Space-kings! Master-engineers of mighty Eron.... come to visit the mother-world. Pause a moment and see her latest wonder...."

Lil stretched her ragged wings on Wu's shoulder, her eye fixed on something in the crowd. The conquerors were tall and blond and proud. Even the men were gorgeously dressed with padded bosoms and femininely symmetrical legs covered with heavy synsilk and furs. And jewels. A huge diamond flashed prismatically from the throat of a bulky matron.

".... the bird with a human brain," Wu bellowed nasally. ".... educated in the arts of calculation .... will give the correct answer to any mathematical problem you wish to ask...."

The purple-clad matron jabbed a jewel-studded cane at the parrot and said something Horn couldn't hear.

Lil flapped to Wu's outstretched finger and screamed, "Two and two are four. Four and four are eight. Eight and eight—"

Wu jerked his hand. Lil shut her beak.

A tall man pushed his way forward. On his tunic was the jeweled golden star of a retired space-officer. "Here's a problem for you," he shouted drunkenly. "State the elements of the curve of synergy for a unitron vessel entering a G-sub-four type binary system at forty-six degrees to the ecliptic plane and preparing to land on a mass-18 planet in an E-3 orbit. Deceleration constant at 80 G. Planet 8 degrees past relative conjunction."

Wu turned away hastily and said something to the crowd, but Lil launched herself from Wu's finger and flew to the officer's shoulder, croaking in hoarse imitation of his voice.

"You will find the synergic curve to be type y-18 times factor e/c plus G-field correction point oh oh nine four." The man looked startled.

"Upon complete solution of your problem, however," Lil went on mockingly, "you will discover that such a landing would be unwise. An E-3 orbit for a mass-18 planet about a G-sub-four binary is radically unstable. In fact, within four hours after crossing the E-3 orbit, the planet in question will collide with the inferior sun."

The officer gasped. He pulled an astrogator's manual and a small calculator out of his pocket and started computing feverishly.

Lil flew back to Wu. Horn noticed that the white diamond was missing from the center of the spaceman's golden star.

Trumpets snarled across the field. The vast, amoebic beast that was the crowd stopped flowing aimlessly and froze, their eyes turned toward Horn. Horn dropped behind the wall, his heart beating fast.

But there was no sound of assault, no firing of guns. There was only the snarling trumpets. Horn waited until waiting became unendurable. Irresistibly his head came up.

Guard companies had cleared five paths from battlesships at the perimeter to the monument in the center. A procession had started toward the monument from across the field. A company of marching, Denebolan lancers led it, their two-meter strides covering the distance effortlessly. The brilliant, enamel on their N-iron link armor was blue. Blue, too, were the plumes on their upright, ceremonial lances. Holstered at their sides were gray, unitron pistols.

The shimmering blue car that followed floated a meter above the ground. Its torpedo-shape came to rest at the foot of the steps leading to the platform. Horn raised the pistol to his eye and stared through its telescopic sight at the man who stepped out of the car. It was a young man. He climbed the stairs briskly, tall, his back lean at the waist and swelling to well-muscled shoulders. As he turned, applause beat against the hills.

It was a young man's face, golden with the pure blood of Eron, hard with confidence and pride. It was smiling now. Horn recognized the man: Ronholm, Director for Commerce.

Along a second lane, another procession was approaching. Its color was green. Green for Transport, Horn translated. Thin, aristocratic Fenelon mounted the steps without haste and turned his hatchet face to the crowd. His eyes were deep-set and powerful. They blazed imperiously at the crowd, demanding its homage. They dragged it out of the formless beast.

They came more swiftly. Orange was next. Matal, Director for Power, panting as he hoisted his short, fat body up the steps, smiling broadly, his yellow jowls shaking as he acknowledged the applause. But the gun sight brought that face close to Horn. Horn saw the eyes, almost concealed in puffy flesh, peering out calculatingly over the crowd and shifting to eye the men on either side of him. Greed, Horn thought, greed and gluttony.

Then black. Black for Security. Black for Duchane. There was no sleek, unitronic car for him. He came on the back of a black hound. The massive beast, almost two-meters tall at the shoulder, slavered on the steps as Duchane rode him up onto the platform.

Duchane swung down from the saddle and set the monster to sit, mouth gaping, like a red-eyed shadow at the back of the platform. The crowd was silent, but that seemed applause enough for Duchane. The square, powerful face on the heavy body looked out over the heads of the people standing beyond the bleachers with a pleased half-smile.

His face was sallow. With his darker eyes and hair, he seemed atypical. But he was, Horn knew, one of the most powerful men of Eron. Certainly, he enjoyed it the most.

Ruthless, cruel, lustful, Duchane was the most hated man in the Empire. His agents were everywhere; his power was close to absolute.

Duchane had been staring almost directly at Horn. Horn dropped back. One finger stoppering the barrel, he dusted the gun carefully. When he returned to the wall, there was no chance of betrayal from a sudden reflection of sunlight.

Duchane's eyes had shifted a little. Horn saw what he had been staring at. A fifth procession had been making its way from the battleship beside him. It was halfway to the monument before it came into view. Its dominant color was gold. Gold for Communications.

Horn stared through the sight at the lone passenger of the car. The softly golden shoulders and red-gold hair shining down across them could only belong to Wendre Kohlnar. Was she as beautiful as her image in the five-kellon coin? It was impossible, Horn knew; no woman could be so beautiful.

As she climbed the steps, straight, slim, and proud, Horn's breath stuck in his throat. He waited for her to turn. She turned. Horn gasped as her face filled the gunsight. Here was a woman worth a galaxy, worthy of the name of Eron.

Her bare arm lifted to a thunder of applause; her head, crowned by the same fillet of white diamonds, bowed in recognition. When she looked up, her eyes seemed to look again into Horn's. Tawny eyes, wide and wise and clear.

Horn looked away.

The trumpets screamed a newer, more violent note. And then fell silent.

The silver of the General Manager was approaching the stand. The guards were silver; the car was silver. Silver, too, was Kohlnar's hair as he sat at the foot of the long steps, not stiff and red as it had been in the coin. He waited. Two giant lancers came forward and lifted him out of the car and helped him up the steps.

What was wrong with Kohlnar?

At the platform, he turned and grasped the railing and raised one hand to the thousands in front of him. It was a sign of victory. The Golden Folk exploded with shouts and cheers.

They couldn't see what Horn saw. He stared through the sight, unbelieving. The face was like an old woman's. The seamed, yellow skin hung in loose folds. The cheeks were heavily rouged. The lips were painted scarlet. The hairless eyebrows were penciled black. Flesh had shrunken from the nose; it left a thin, yellow beak.

It was a patient, cunning, ruthless face. It had all the powers of the other Directors, and it held them chained to an iron will. But the General Manager of the Company and through the Company, of Eron, and through Eron, of the Empire, was a dying man. He had spent his strength in a long drive for power and in the use of that power to conquer the Cluster.

Now, at the moment of his triumph here upon the ruins of the world from which the human race swept out into the stars, when Eron was truly the master of all the human-held galaxy, Kohlnar was dying.

While the Directors retired to seats at the back of the platform, Kohlnar clutched the railing with quivering yellow claws. Under the rouge, the lax folds of his skin were a sickly gray. Sweat stood out on his forehead. But when he began to speak, and amplifiers picked up his words and flung them to the far corners of the immense field, his voice was harsh and strong.

"Men of Eron," he grated. "Sons of Earth. We are here to celebrate not the victory of Eron but the victory of man. Nations, worlds, empires have won many battles. They have lost others. And in the end it did not matter whether they won or lost. The only victory that must be won is man's. And so we have come back to celebrate one more victory in the long, glorious sequence of man's conquest. We have come back to our origins, to Earth, to the mother-world. But let us go back even farther. Let us go back to beginnings."

He stopped. His breathing came in labored gasps as his fumbling finger found a button. Against the blackness of the monument base behind him, a vast mosaic sprang out, colorful, almost three-dimensional in its reality.

In the background was the primordial universe, vast chaos churning with unborn life. Closer was the misty glory of a spiral nebula, its arms far-flung as it slowly turned. Against it flamed a curling row of suns illustrating the sequence of stellar evolution. Red giants shrank. Planets condensed. At one corner of the scene was gentle Earth. At the other was harsh Eron.

"Out of chaos, order," Kohlnar said. "Out of order, life."

He pressed another button. The scene flowed around the corner of the cube and was replaced by another.

This was Earth and the evolution of life. At the left of the broad panorama, something shapeless but alive crept out of a primal sea. Monsters fought in steamy jungles. A caveman kindled a fire against the sharp-toothed cold. Men hunted and planted and reaped and wheeled their produce to market in small villages that grew into empires with marching soldiers. The empires rose and fell but man went on, budding higher and better, destroying himself and rising again until he built the towers of Sunport, reaching out toward the stars. At the right Roy Kellon—legendary father of the Golden Folk—stood at the Nova's valve ready to set out upon the first interstellar flight.

"For this, man built and suffered and labored, to claim his heritage—the stars."

Kohlnar pressed a button. The scene on the black face of the cube gave way to another.

Eron. It gleamed cold and steel-gray like the great sphere overhead. Like it, the golden spikes radiated from it toward the far corners of the Empire. Only here they did not end in points. They connected everything to Eron, the near stars and the distant ones. All kinds of stars: giants and super-giants, dense white dwarfs and faint red ones, and the blue-white, white, and yellow of those between. Everywhere there was life and profit, the Tubes reached and siphoned them away to Eron. And one massive Tube stabbed far across the galaxy into the heart of giant Canopus.

Eron. A fat gray spider, Horn thought, sitting in the center of its golden web, waiting the tremor that announced the capture of another victim.

Horn shrugged. The Golden Folk screamed their appreciation. "Eron! Eron! Eron!" they shouted, until it rang against the hills.

"Eron, yes!" Kohlnar said, and his amplified voice overwhelmed the shouting. "But more than that—man! Man's greatest achievement—the civilization of the stars. Eron! Man at his peak, one great culture reaching out from Eron in every direction almost five hundred light-years, only possible because of Eron. And here—Eron's most recent victory!"

He stabbed a button.

The Cluster behind. In front the colossal ruins of the last demolished fortress on Quarnon Four. The surrender of Peter Sair. Small, stout, white-haired, old, the Liberator knelt in front of a tall, stem Kohlnar and signed the articles of capitulation. Behind Sair were the kneeling ranks of his defeated troops, receiving their yellow numbered disks. Behind them, symbolically, were numbered slaves toiling in the fields and mines and factories beneath hovering, black, gold-banded cruisers.

"Victory!" Kohlnar's voice was husky and low. "Not for Eron. For man. Those who challenge Eron challenge not the Empire but man's greatness. Let this be their answer. Eron will preserve man's goal, man's inheritance—the stars, strong and united. This is Eron's mission. She will not let it die, though we and others die to preserve it. Now, as a symbol of man's continuity of striving, we dedicate this Tube, uniting Eron with the place from which our ancestors launched the first ships toward the stars."

Behind him, the Directors stepped forward. Wendre stepped quickly to his side and placed her right arm around him. Duchane and Matal stood at his right, Fenelon and Ronholm at his left. Kohlnar rested his hand upon a golden switch on top of the railing; the others placed their hands on his. They pushed it closed.

The Tube. Suddenly it was there, golden and real, reaching out from the far side of the black cube toward the east, rising through the air, spearing out into space, crossing the thirty light years that separated Earth from Eron.

Horn's eyes followed it up and up until the distance narrowed it to a thread and then the thread was gone. He wondered if it was perspective alone that shrank the one-hundred-meter diameter into nothing. He remembered, vaguely, something about a real dwindling....

Earth and Eron, linked now a second time, joined by a new umbilical cord. Not to feed the mother, worn and barren from the long agonies of childbirth, but to drain away the last, slow streams of life.

The Empire, held together by these golden cords, nourishing in the womb a great, greedy child. It had grown too large to live independently. It must protect these cords or starve.

Strange, Horn thought, that strength makes weakness.

Through being strong, Eron had become the most dependent world in the Empire.

And yet, looking at the Tube, Horn couldn't deny it beauty.

His eyes slid back down the golden cord. A buzzard brushed incautiously against the Tube wall and burned brilliantly. Here and there along the Tube, it flared as insects leaped at it blindly.

That was the Tube: deadly beauty. Beauty to Eron, food for the greedy child. To all others, it was death.

The guards swirled near the reviewing stand. Horn looked down in time to see Denebolan giants drag a man from under it. Horn stared through the gunsight. It was Wu. The ragged old man was protesting vigorously and clinging desperately to his battered suitcase. There was no sign of Lil. Wu was hurried away. On the back of his neck was a large, red carbuncle Horn had never noticed before.

Horn's lips twisted. So it was the thief who was caught, not the assassin.

The gunsight drifted back up the steps to the group on the platform, separated a little now as it acknowledged the audience's enthusiasm.

Like the finger of fate, the sight moved across the faces of the rulers of Eron.

Young, proud Ronholm, flushed with triumph.

Thin, sardonic Fenelon, contemptuous of the herd.

Wendre Kohlnar, radiantly lovely, holding her father's arm with a slim, golden hand.

The dying man, Kohlnar, blinking in the sunlight, his face set with the effort of keeping himself erect.

Duchane, powerful and arrogant, his eyes searching the crowd for those who did not cheer or cheered without enthusiasm.

Short, fat Matal, eyes small and calculating as they estimated how much of the applause was for him.

Which one? The question was idle. Horn knew which one. That was why he was here. To kill a man. To shoot one man down from ambush. The sight wavered.

Why am I here? The answer this time was a little different. Because someone wants this man killed.

It had nothing to do with Horn. He was just an instrument. Suddenly he resented that, resented the necessity of doing something he had no interest in doing. The getting here was something different. This thing was easy and distasteful.

But the necessity was there. He had taken the money to do a job. The job was not yet done.

The crosshairs steadied. They centered themselves on the dying man.

Horn gave the thumbscrew another half-twist, estimated the air velocity, and peered through the sight once more. The gun, resting on the wall, didn't waver. The General Manager of Eron seemed only a few meters away. The symbol of Empire waited for the executioner.

Slowly Horn's finger squeezed the trigger. The pistol jumped, just a little. For a second Kohlnar looked surprised, and then his face sagged, blankly, and his body folded gently to the platform.

the history

Star-wandering....

That strange, wonderful period after the breakdown of the first interplanetary civilization. That irresistible bursting-forth which scattered man's seed hundreds of light years across the stars. That time of struggle and adventure, villainy and heroism.

There were heroes in those days, men larger than reality and magnified in the retelling. Men like Roy Kellon, they became the demi-gods of a new mythology.

Man didn't emerge from the star-wandering quite the same. The engines of the first interstellar ships were poorly shielded; that changed him. The worlds he settled changed him. Isolation changed him. And he traced his ancestry from heroes and demi-gods.

From such origins should come the superman. But the changes were insignificant. Men were still men, even the three-meter Denebolan giants who formed Eron's elite guard.

Even the Golden Folk of Eron, who lived, loved, and died like other men.

Still, it is unwise to underestimate the psychological importance of a slight variation in pigmentation.

How do you define the superman? The Golden Folk knew....

chapter 6

FLIGHT

The scene was frozen under an afternoon sun. All eternity seemed concentrated into a moment, unchanging, unchangeable. And then-Chaos....

The Directors scattered. Only Wendre remained, kneeling beside the crumpled thing that had been her father, then rising, straight and unafraid, to search the edge of the field.

Horn held her face in the gunsight. It was a caress. His finger was far from the trigger.

The charging guards reached the platform. Their ranks became a living shield, three meters high. The last thing Horn saw was the black hulk of Duchane's hunter. It was dead against the monument. The bullet had passed through Kohlnar and struck down another killer.

The amplifier shouted orders in a sure, powerful voice. Duchane, Horn thought.

The voice was quick and accurate. No one would move except the guards. They would assemble under their officers at this side of the monument.

Scoutships climbed into the sky, were launched by battleships, circled with misleading laziness around the field. Companies of guards moved outward from the monument. They carved a pie-shaped sector. Its point was Kohlnar's body; its base enclosed, unerringly, Horn's hiding place in the hollow behind the wall.

"The General Manager is dead," Duchane said softly. It was a voice used to announce sacrilege and desecration.

For the first time, Horn realized what he had done. To Eron, it was sacrilege, it was desecration. Horn had shattered the symbol of empire, and Eron could not rest until he was caught and punished. All the resources of Eron would be thrown into the search.

Psychological factors are almost as important to empires as the fleets they can muster or the firepower they can assemble. Revolt would be futile, true; Eron could crush any world in a few hours. But let rebellion spring up here and there, continually, let the flow of trade falter, let the mercenaries themselves grow restless—and Eron would tremble.

Eron's rule rested upon a pedestal of omnipotence. No distance was too great for her fleet to go; no slight was too small for her dignity to overlook. Conquerors live by conquest; the first failure is a signal for the conquered to rise against them.

Omnipotence. How else could the Empire control a conquered population exceeding that of the Golden Folk by a million times? But let the slave worlds suspect that the pedestal is cracked—!

If not in outrage, then in calculated policy, Eron had to capture the assassin. Had to! No effort could be too great.

And, once captured, his punishment must be salutary. Long, excruciating, and public.

Horn licked his lips. An empire against one man. It was like a death sentence. His chest heaved, sucked air deep into his lungs. The air smelled sweet to the dead man. The sun felt warm.

Horn shook himself. He was still alive. They must catch him first. He would give them a chase yet.

The guards had almost reached the base of the battleship towering close to Horn. The buzzards circling blackly overhead were wingless. It was time to leave.

Horn faded back through the branches of the juniper into the hidden mouth of the tunnel. As he turned his back to the light, he clipped the pistol to the cord around his shoulder and let the cord pull the gun tight to his chest. A few hundred paces into the darkness, a searching hand retrieved the torch. A moment later it was flaming.

The fugitive's walk was swift but unhurried. When legs are matched against ships, hurry is pointless. The pursuers would think of the desert long before the fugitive got there.

But how soon would they find the tunnel mouth? The hunted man broke into a trot. The trot became a headlong run. Panic ran with him.

Down the long ramps into vast blacknesses. Running through them wildly, the torch flame dancing and leaping into the darkness and swallowed up immediately. Running .... running .... lost....

The tunnel went down too fast. It ended in a black pool. The hunted man stared at it with wide, dazed eyes. His gasping lungs began to ease. His mind cleared a little. Somewhere he had turned the wrong way.

He retraced his steps. In the echoing chambers, he tried to reconstruct the location of the right tunnel. Where it should have been was rubble. The hunted man fought his way through it, tossing the stones behind him with growing haste. The torch brushed out against a wall, and he worked in night, complete, impenetrable.

At last he felt a breath of air against his sweaty face. There was space in front of him. He scrambled upright and began to run again. One hand clung desperately to a useless stick of tar-soaked wood.

A subtle warning told him to slow down: a distant tinkling? A change in the echoes of his frantic footsteps? He stopped. He began to breathe again. Once more he started to think. He lit the torch again.

He raised the torch in front of him. A meter away was the pit, gaping blackly, hungrily. He walked toward it, his legs trembling wearily. He put one foot on the girder and stopped. He remembered Wu tottering, falling....

He had crossed this bridge so easily a few hours ago. What stopped him now? The hunted man knew. This morning he hadn't known the shape of fear. He knew it now, and everything was tinged with it. His heart beat swiftly. His chest drew in greedy gasps of air. His hands trembled.

But behind him was certain death. Ahead was uncertainty. He edged out on the girder, carefully, thinking about the long way there was to fall, and the thinking made him weak and dizzy. He swayed, caught himself, and crossed the last meter in a clumsy run.

Panic caught him again, jumping the pit effortlessly, and shot adrenalin through his veins and spurred his feet, and he ran again and crawled where he couldn't run, and slithered where he couldn't crawl. And at last the light came, ghostly at first but growing, and it was like a promise of resurrection from the night of death. The hunted man threw down the torch and ran toward the light.

He stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, high above the little valley, and the sight calmed him. The panic was gone, suddenly, and he couldn't understand why it had ever driven him, and the long flight through the tunnel was like something that had happened to someone else. He was sane again.

More than half the valley was in shadows. Soon the cliffs would rise up in front of the sun, and the valley would be dark, and after that the sky would begin to deepen and the night would come. By that time he must be out on the desert. Night would be his chance. Once it had been an enemy; now it would be a friend.

Before dark he would have to be rested and sure of himself. His stomach complained. It must be fed. After getting away from the hunters, his body must take him far across the red-dust desert.

Horn picked his way carefully down the uncertain, rocky slope. He pressed through the bushes to the little stream. His hands worked quickly. They fashioned snares out of vines and branches and notched twigs. He glanced occasionally at the slowly darkening sky, but it was empty. So far, the hunters hadn't discovered this oasis.

With a bundle of leaves, he brushed away the human traces around the snares and backed away up the icy stream. He stopped when he reached a pool, dammed behind a fallen tree trunk, packed leaves, and pebbles. Horn knelt and drank deeply and refilled his half-empty canteen.

He stripped off his soaked boots and ragged clothes and plunged into the water. It bit into the cuts and bruises that scarred and mottled his chest and back, and it set his teeth to chattering in spite of a grim jaw. In a moment the shivers stopped, and his body began to glow as he splashed vigorously. Again and again he ducked his head under the water and came up shaking it from his hair in a flying spray.

When he finally pulled himself out and rubbed himself dry with his ragged shirt, he felt renewed. He passed his hand reflectively over his beard, got a long pocket knife out of a pants pocket, and honed it against a smooth pebble. He hacked at the beard, honed the knife again, and in a few minutes his face was reasonably smooth. His chin and cheeks were pale against the dark tan of his face, and the unveiled mouth was surprisingly sensitive.

Life surged powerfully through his body. With it came purpose and determination. He was clean again and young and strong and alive. He had done what he had set out to do, what he had been paid to do, what no one had thought possible. Maybe it hadn't been a proud thing, to shoot a man from ambush, but Kohlnar hadn't been innocent. There had been blood on his hands.

Let all Eron come against him; he would survive, because survival is more than an instinct—it is a desire, and in him the desire was strong.

These were the things he told himself as he strapped the heavy moneybelt around his waist, pulled on pants and boots, drew the still damp rags of the shirt around his shoulders, slipped on the cord of the pistol, lifted the canteen by its strap, and set out to inspect his snares.

They were empty, all of them. The sun was gone, twilight was fading, and he would have to go hungry into the desert.

He shrugged and followed the creek as it dwindled into a rivulet and almost disappeared close to the hole in the cliff wall. He crept through the small tunnel on hands and knees, annoyed by the way it seemed to whine, cautiously parted the bush at the far end, and peered into the lesser darkness. Here the whine was louder. It was not the tunnel; it was ships, many of them, in the sky above the desert.

The lesser darkness was broken by patches of light. They moved aimlessly across the desert. Horn crawled out onto the flat rock and stood up in the night, his back pressed against the warmth of the rock face behind.

The patches of light were almost square. They made a shifting, restless chessboard out of the desert: dark and light, light and dark, moving....

Horn threw himself down at the base of the cliff, huddling close to the bush, just before the searchlight passed over him. A second later the whine came down to him, and he watched the light sweep into the desert.

Horn watched the crisscrossing lights, and there was a pattern. There was a consistency to the way the dark and light squares moved. The ships were using the sector principle. Hundreds of them swept the desert with eager, deadly fingers. Complicating the pattern were unassigned ships operating on a random-choice principle, lights on, lights off, darting here and there. There was no way of being certain exactly when a particular patch of desert would be safely dark or fatally brilliant.

Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality.

And yet, insofar as there is virtue in patterns, this was a good one. The sky whined with leashed desire, waiting to collapse on the hunted man. Horn crouched close to the protection of the bush, listening, studying the chessboard. He followed it on either side, far down the cliffs until it faded into distance and uncertainty. He could imagine what would happen if a sunbright beam chanced to pick him out.

He might dodge it for a moment, running this way and that in sudden twists and turns, but the ships would converge, pool their brilliance, and lay out a huge daylit square upon the night desert. In that square would be death.

He timed the passage of the ship in front of him, counting slowly to himself. When a random-flying ship crossed the pattern, he started to sprint, counting, choosing the safe, dark squares of the chessboard. Light and dark, light and dark. The patterns shifting, sweeping behind him. Veer this way, jump that way. Light and dark. Dark, dark. Jump!

He had almost miscalculated the ship's speed. It had come up behind him, and he had sailed into darkness just as the ship had turned upon another leg of its pattern. Horn picked himself up out of the dust and began studying the next pattern.

Only after three lines of ships lay behind him did Horn grow discouraged. The chessboard still marched across the desert in front of him. There was no end to it. The sky still whined above his head. It would go on forever; the whine had become a part of him, fraying his nerves, nagging at his mind until thought was an effort.

Then he heard the baying. A mounted party of hunters passed through a sweeping finger of light. The hunters circled there, back and forth, waiting for the man who was clever enough to pass the lights.

A line of hunting dogs, hell-hounds, completely encircling the patterns of light. That was how Horn would have planned it. They would have their sectors, too. They would patrol them, relieved by fresh hunters and mounts when they grew tired, and if he managed to slip between them, they would quickly pick up his scent and be after him. How long could he evade them on foot?

And beyond them, what? Another line of guards with ready guns? And beyond them another?

The desert night was cool, but Horn was sweating. His situation was hopeless. One man can never hope to escape an empire, if the empire is determined to find him. Not here on the desert, where there was no place to hide. The daylight would be more merciless than the searchlights. With the daylight he was dead. With the daylight, they would scout the hills and send parties of men ferreting out the smallest hiding places. They would leave no crevice unexplored. An empire had to find the assassin.

Horn realized then what he would have to do. A haystack is no place to hide a needle. The best place is among other needles. The best place to hide a grain of sand is on a beach. A man can only hide among other men. Horn knew where he would have to go.

He started to turn—and the searching finger found him.

It swept past. In that moment of passing, Horn sprinted. He sprinted away from the cliffs into the desert, tripped, and rolled in a choking cloud of dust down an arroyo wall. He landed, still running, but now the light was past and he was running in the opposite direction. He was running back toward the cliffs, back toward the mesa; he was running as if death pursued him.

The whine grew louder, became a chorus. The lights swept in. Horn ran, pressed close to the arroyo wall. In the distance the hounds began to bay. Horn ran a little faster, his breath coming into his lungs in great, burning gasps.

The lights swept past him and coalesced into a square behind. It was a restless square, moving this way and that as it picked out nothing but desert and then the bell-throated hounds and their armed riders. The square broke apart impatiently and began a new pattern. It was smaller now, and the dark squares were smaller as the arroyo dwindled away to nothing and Horn was running on the fiat desert again.

He dodged and veered. Events were moving too swiftly now for thought and judgment. It was all instinct to pick out the square that would be dark next, instinct and luck as the squares shifted and merged and twisted. Instinct was right or luck held as the cliff face loomed up in front of Horn, and he threw himself in a heap at the base of it, and the lights roamed restlessly behind.

Left or right? Horn chose the right, only because he had to choose one of them, knowing that the wrong choice would be his last. He crawled along the base of the rocks, freezing when a light swept close, hoping that he looked like a fallen rock.

He crawled a long way, the baying of the hounds growing louder and urging him to speed he knew would be fatal, and the fear grew that he had turned in the wrong direction. But after an infinity he felt smooth stone under him, punishing his knees, and his left hand touched something that jabbed and rustled, and he slipped behind the bush and into the hole he had left—incredibly—only an hour ago.

He came back into the valley as if into peace, more blessed because it could not last. The hounds would find his trail. His doubling back might confuse them, but their masters would soon discover that they were making a giant loop into the desert and back to the cliff, and they would find the hole behind the bush because it was the only concealment anywhere on that loop.

He crawled beside the trickling stream for a moment, because there the bushes didn't grow as thick, and then, slowly, he collapsed and rolled over on his back with a weariness that was infinite. Chased, hunted, he had come close to the end. The long journey was almost over.

He had thought of that dark room on Quarnon Four as the beginning and the killing as the end, but the bullet that had shortened Kohlnar's life by only a few days had been an end only for the General Manager. Horn hadn't thought beyond it to the inevitable consequence—his own death. He wondered now if the dark room had been the real beginning. He knew that it hadn't.

All the little things that go to make up a life had shaped him for the decision that had started him on a three-hundred light-year journey toward death. The Cluster had given him birth and moulded him.

In the Cluster, individualism was sacred. There was too much to do to waste time on laws; they were obeyed or ignored as it suited the individual. Life was struggle; a man got out of it as much as he could take on his own. The frontiers were everywhere.

Horn had learned self-sufficiency early. The first Quarnon War had orphaned him; the casual government had ignored him. He bore no malice for either. That was life; the sooner a man learned it, the better off he was.

Everything he had ever had, Horn had struggled for. He grew strong and quick to learn. He became skillful in getting what he wanted and confident that he could get anything he wanted badly enough.

All causes were alike, good and bad. A man got what he could out of them. The only person a man must answer to is himself.

Above all, a man must not care. To care is to yield one's armor against the world; to care is to hand the world the power to hurt. Let the universe go its way; Horn went his and took, with his strength, what he wanted from the universe.

Horn looked up between the leaves at the stars. He had thought that people were like stars, separated by dark walls. But he saw them now connected by a network of nerves, bridged by sensitive filaments. No one exists in himself. No action is isolated. The black ships that had swooped down on the Cluster many years before had helped fire the shot that had entered Kohlnar's chest.

Is it like this everywhere? Horn wondered.

He rolled over and got back to his knees and crawled forward again. Perhaps he did not live just for himself. He hadn't been killed with his parents, and now a man was dead. If he lived now, would it have its effect somewhere else?

Something brushed against his face, something dangling and furry. He reached out. It was a rabbit, still warm, hanging in the noose of one of his snares.

Horn took a deep breath. It was a good omen. A rabbit died, and its death would give him strength. Perhaps that strength would give him life again.

Horn remembered what he had decided back on the chessboard desert. A hiding place. The only place he could hide. As he took the rabbit down and began to skin it, the plan unfolded in his mind.

the history

Cultures aren't creatures....

And yet they are much alike. A creature is a collection of cooperating cells; a culture is a collection of cooperating individuals. Like cells, the individuals specialize in their functions; they divide labor and sometimes inherit these divisions; they propagate themselves. Sometimes they grow wildly and, unless controlled, threaten the whole organism.

Like a creature, Eron needed blood, nerves, and food. Eron itself was the heart, the brain, and the stomach.

One thick, golden cylinder drove out from Eron into the greatest engine of all, into the flaming yellow heart of giant Canopus: It was the master Tube. It was power. Power sustained the deadly walls of the other Tubes, and the walls transmitted it to power centers at each Terminal. Power. The blood of empire.

The Tubes were nerves. Along its walls raced variations—messages—bridging light-years in hours.

And through the Tubes, just as swiftly, sped the giant ships: freighters, cruisers, liners. The cradles inched them into the locks; massive doors closed behind; air was sucked out. Doors parted in front of them, and they fell, fell into darkness, fell toward the narrowing center of the Tube until they passed it and began to slow. Only the golden bands that encircled them insured against a fatal contact with the invisible walls. The food of an empire.

The analogy can be extended, but the analogies don't bleed on the dissection table. Eron was more and less than a living thing....

chapter 7

THE DARK ROAD

The lights roamed restlessly from artificial peaks, fleeing across the smooth pavement, illuminating for a second a dark form that turned its head away from unbearable brightness, jumping into the rocks, climbing the hills, crossing another beam like a giant sword, gleaming from the black flanks and golden bands of battleships with their own, roving cyclopean eyes.

The changing, prismatic colors of the monument and the radiance of the golden Tube stretching starward from it made the center of the field bright with wonder and imagination. But the perimeter of the field was dark, and guards stood in the darkness like patient shadows, unmoving, waiting for dawn to give them rest.

Among the shadow guards, a shadow moved; it was a little shorter than the others. A cloak and hood gave it a humped shapelessness. It passed from guard to guard, stopping for a moment and moving on.

The great sealed ruins of Sunport were quiet. Elsewhere there was noise and life; here was only silence and shadows and the sweep of searchlight. The day's thousands were gone, inspected, passed, shipped elsewhere, through the Tube at the domed base of the monument or through the older Terminal on Callisto. Only half the battleships remained around the edges of the field and the guards that were their complements. The only other ship was a small scout, insignificant beside the towering bulk of a battleship.

The desert was stirred into a sea of climbing dust by ships and hunters; they soared over the mountains and toiled over the hills and probed the hollows. But here there was quiet. The assassin had escaped for the moment, but he would not get far. Certainly he would not return.

"Guard!"

The shadow stiffened, as the shapeless shadow stopped beside him. It was a woman's voice, low and soft. "Yes?"

"What have you seen?"

"Other guards."

She was passing, but she stopped and peered up at his shadow face. It was too dark to make out features. The guard saw nothing but a pale blur under the shadow of the hood. A faint fragrance drifted to him; his nose wrinkled. His pulse quickened. He had never been so close to one of the golden women. He could reach out now and touch her, if he dared.

He stood straight and still, staring ahead. "You don't think the assassin will come back?" the woman asked.

"Guards aren't paid to think."

"I'm asking you to think, now." Her voice became reflective. "They laughed when I said he would be back. They said they would catch him on the desert." She spoke to the guard again. "What do you think? Will he come back?"

"If I were he, I would come back."

She peered at his face again, curiously, futilely. "Your accent is odd. Where were you born?"

"In the Cluster."

"You enlisted after the War?"

"Yes."

"Then you don't know this area."

"A little."

"Then where did the assassin come from?"

"The desert."

"But the hunting parties were out. There's no food and almost no water."

"A strong man could do it. A clever man could get through."

"But how would he get here? And how did he get away?"

"Beyond the ship, there, is a tree. Behind the tree is a tunnel that cuts down through the mountain, down close to the desert. He never had to get closer than that."

"You knew this? Why didn't you say something?"

"To whom? I gave the reason before."

"Guards aren't paid to think?" The woman was silent for a moment. "Maybe you're right. But then you don't love Eron, do you?"

"Should I?"

"Why did you enlist in the guard if you didn't want to serve Eron?"

"There was another choice?"

"And yet Eron pays you, feeds you, shelters you. What do you give Eron in return?"

"What Eron asks of me and everyone: obedience."

"You think we are hard masters then, the Golden Folk?"

"Masters are good and bad. Eron remains the same. It didn't grow strong by kindness. Eron is fat; the rest of the Empire starves."

"Then why doesn't it revolt?"

"With what? Fists against battleships? No, Eron is safe as long as it has the Tube."

The woman was silent for a long time. The guard stood straight, but his breath came quickly.

"Why will the assassin come back?" she asked finally.

"Where else can he go? The desert is suicide. The hills will soon be as deadly. His only chance is to come back here and steal a ship. Once among other men, you will never find him."

"I think you sympathize with him."

"He is a man like other men. Deluded, perhaps, but he did no more than any guard is paid to do."

"At least you're honest," the woman said. "I won't ask your number. I'd have to report you for treason, and you've helped me tonight. I'm grateful."

She turned away. As she turned, they heard a faint groan. The woman started to swing back and found herself inside the arc of the guard's powerful arm, a sweaty palm clamped over her mouth. She took a quick, sharp breath and started to struggle.

Horn cursed softly to himself as he fought against the woman's unsuspected strength. Her body was surprisingly firm and youthful, and her muscles twisted wirily inside his arms.

A few minutes more and he could have dashed for the scoutship, but the woman had blundered along before he was more than dressed. It wouldn't have mattered if he hadn't been weak and talkative. Those had trapped him.

He should have killed the careless guard, the fool who turned his back to shadows, but at the last moment he had slowed his hand. Here was a man, like himself perhaps, trapped into serving Eron; why should he die? He was no enemy. And Horn had let him live, to groan. And then he had kept the woman here with foolish chatter when she wanted to leave.

Why? Horn decided to trust his intuition.

The woman struggled fiercely, silently; she twisted and kicked, and her breath came hot and quick against Horn's hand. Suddenly she stopped fighting. Her body stiffened.

"Yes," Horn whispered. "The assassin."

A wandering light swept close. Horn drew the woman back with him into the shadows. The diffused edge of the beam touched them. The woman's hood had fallen back from her shoulders, revealing a long, tumbling mass of red-gold hair and the gentle sweep of a golden cheek. For an instant Horn's arms relaxed; she almost got away from him then.

In his arms was Wendre Kohlnar, the lovely face in the coin, Director for Communications, daughter of the man he had killed.

Horn's arms tightened just in time. "I don't want to kill you," he whispered. "But I will if you make me. It's up to you. I'm going to let you go in a moment. Don't move until I tell you. Don't shout or scream. The moment you take a deep breath I'll shoot you through the back. The pistol is turned to low velocity; it won't make any noise. Understand?"

She nodded. Horn's arms dropped away. She drew in a quick breath. The pistol barrel jabbed into her back.

"Careful!" Horn whispered.

"I couldn't breathe," she said quickly. "You bloody killer!" she added bitterly.

"I killed one man," Horn said. "How many billions did your father kill? Not just men, either. Women and children, too."

"You know, then?" she said starting to turn. Keep your eyes ahead," Horn snapped. "Yes, I know who you are."

"That was different," Wendre said. "It always is,"

"But why?" Wendre asked. Her voice was puzzled. "He was dying."

Horn didn't answer. He didn't know the answer, and he had asked himself the same question. Why? Who had wanted Kohlnar killed? Who had paid Horn to kill him? And why was it important that Kohlnar didn't die a natural death?

It was important. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense and risked his own life to set the plan underway. It had to be important. But it wasn't as important right now as getting away and staying alive.

"We're going to walk across the field," Horn said slowly. "You'll walk in front; I'll follow. Head for the scout. Climb the steps. Order the crew out. If you try anything, you'll die."

"All right," she said. "Let's go," Horn said.

She walked in front of him across the field. It wasn't far to the little ship, maybe two hundred meters, but the reflected glory of the monument was brighter as they went toward it.

Wendre's walk was a little hesitant and stiff, but Horn decided it would pass unnoticed. Who would question one of Eron's Directors? Horn marched behind her at a respectful two-pace distance and a little to the left. It would take keen eyes to see, in the darkness, the pistol held low against his right thigh.

Half of the distance was behind them. Still no challenge. No suspicion. The field lay in night and silence, stirred only by the sweep of roving beams and the brisk click-click of their footsteps on the pavement.

The steep stairway leading up to the dark port of the scout was only a few steps away.

"Slowly," Horn whispered.

Obediently, Wendre slowed her pace.

Suddenly the odor of danger was stifling. Horn felt like screaming or running madly for the steps that led up toward freedom, up toward safety. He clamped his teeth firmly on his lower hp and stilled the eager trembling of his muscles. Of course there was danger. The farther he went, the more dangerous the situation became. It would build higher and higher until the scout blasted away from the mesa and got beyond the range of battleships, beyond pursuit.

In front of him, Wendre's shoulders straightened.

"I don't want to kill you," Horn whispered.

The shoulders slumped. She started up the steps.

Danger. Stirring close. Crouching in the darkness. Horn's eyes were busy in the masslike calm of his face. But he saw nothing.

Calm! Calm!

Horn climbed behind Wendre, watching her back, quickening his pace a little to close the gap between them. When they entered the ship, he must be only half a step behind.

Two more steps. One.

Danger! It exploded! Something moved in the shadow of the little ship. At the first flicker, Horn shoved Wendre forward, instinctively.

The bullet whined between them and screamed off the rounded hull of the ship.

"Guards!" Wendre was shouting. "The assassin. Guar---"

The clanging of the port cut off her words. That way was closed. Wendre had tricked him. But it hadn't been a trick. There had been a shot.

And Horn was spinning, waiting for the second shot, braced against it. Before it came, his own gun spat. A muffled thud came from the shadows beside the ship. A groan. A whisper of cloth.

A sound of men running. Shouts. The searchlights hesitated and began to converge.

Horn was leaping down the steps. Two long strides brought him to the ground. He didn't hesitate. He ran toward the center of the field, toward the glowing monument.

Feet drew close behind him, many of them.

"There!" Horn shouted. "There he is!"

He ran hard, holding his gun in front of him. Behind, the running feet came on. But there were no shots.

They were running into a fantasy of leaping, shifting, many-colored shadows, painting them with paint-dipped fingers....

"There he goes!" someone shouted.

Behind, distantly, came the creaking of an opening port. A woman's shouts were indistinguishable.

You're quick, Wendre, Horn thought. But not quite quick enough.

A hunter has to know what he is hunting. The guards didn't. No one knew what he looked like, not even Wendre. She knew that he was dressed like a guard, but she was the only one. As long as the chase continued, as long as the guards weren't mustered, inspected, questioned, searched, they couldn't find him. Before then, he would have to fade back into the hills. The far hills, this time.

Someone pulled abreast of him. The long desert trip, the thirst, the hunger, the lack of sleep had weakened him. But the guard beside him was looking ahead, looking for an assassin.

Assassin, assassin. The word hammered in Horn's brain. What is an assassin? What does he look like? How can you tell him from other men?

The Victory Monument drew close. Guards streamed by on both sides as Horn's stride faltered. His breath came raggedly.

He had no time to wonder about the bullet that had passed so close to him. Close but too far. A foot in front. Fantastic inaccuracy for a guard. It had passed through the space where Wendre had been a moment before, where she would have been if Horn hadn't pushed her through the lock. Wendre? Had the bullet been meant for her? Were there other assassins?

And then Horn was beside the towering cube, glowing with the giant picture of the Cluster's surrender. The platform was gone, and he wondered why he was here instead of running with the guards toward the distant hills, and then he understood. He could never make it. He could never survive another chase; he didn't have the strength to escape again. Again his instinct had been quicker than his judgment.

Here was escape. The only possible escape. Dangerous. Possibly fatal. But escape, if he lived through it. There was no other chance.

He tried to remember the terminal he had inspected on Quarnon Four, the terminal that stood outside the capital like a monument to futility. Somewhere in the cluster there had been another, just like it, identical with Eron's terminals to the minutest detail. They had never come to life. They had been dusty mausoleums for years.

Horn felt along the smooth black wall. Close to one corner was a crack. He traced it as high as he could reach; it went on up. Down, it turned a corner a few centimeters from the pavement, paralleled it for a meter and turned up again. A rectangle. The door.

Horn leaned against it. It swung in. Horn slipped into a dimly lit room and let the three-meter-tall door swing shut behind him. There was no one in the long room.

Horn turned back to the door. Beside it was a circular disk, slightly recessed into the wall Horn put his hand over it and tugged at the door handle. It was immovable.

Horn turned back into the room, feeling a moment of security. Where were the technicians? Gone to aid in the search? Or hadn't they moved in yet? Perhaps the Tube wasn't ready for operation. Horn felt a flash of panic.

It subsided as he inspected the room. He remembered. This was a dining hall. Plastic plates stacked at the far end of the room for disposal were soiled.

Horn passed through an archway into a room lined with bunks and lockers. Four doors opened off it. The first would be the control room, the second a communications room, the third-Horn palmed the disk beside the door. The door slid aside. Horn stepped into a huge, domed chamber, nine hundred meters high and almost as wide. Offset a little from the center was a massive, N-iron mounting for a giant, gun-shaped tube. It slanted upward. At a hole even larger than itself, the tube joined the dazzling brilliance of the real Tube. The floor trembled a little, as if the whole thing were in steady movement.

It was, Horn realized. It would have to follow the apparent movement of Eron.

At this end of the metal tube was a hinged cradle. The ships were brought into the cube on the many-wheeled dollies that rolled along the grooved tracks. The cradle lowered to receive them, raised them up, and shoved them forward into the main lock.

Horn ran toward the mounting and scrambled up the ladder welded to one of the beams. The first joint was two-hundred meters from the pavement. Railed steps led upward toward the main lock at a thirty-degree angle. At the top was a door. Beside it was a disk. Horn hesitated and palmed it.

Beyond was a small room. The walls were lined with space-suits, supported at the armpit by pegs. Personnel lock, Horn thought. He closed the door behind him.

He picked out a suit that seemed about the size of the one the Guard had issued him. He got into it with the ease of long practice.

He lowered the plastic helmet over his head and clamped it down. He shoved his hands into the gauntlets and felt them click against the metal cuffs. Gauges reflected their information against the front of the helmet. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two emergency rations. Closures: airtight.

He brushed his hand against the breastplate. The dials vanished. He walked heavily toward a door in the far wall. It slid aside to reveal a narrow cubicle lit by a single glowing plate in the ceiling.

Opposite Horn was another door. He palmed the disk beside it, but it didn't open. Instead, the door behind him closed. For a moment he stood there helplessly, feeling the sweat begin to trickle down his sides, and then the door slid open. Horn walked into a great tube, half-a-kilometer long, one hundred meters in diameter.

He began to run toward the far end of the tube, closed by giant doors. When he reached them he was winded again. At eye level, just to the right of the crack between the doors, was another disk. It was red. Above it was printed: DANGER-EMERGENCY.

Horn took a deep breath. Beyond the doors lay the Tube, and the Tube led to Eron, away from Earth and danger.

Was Eron better than Earth? For him, it was. Earth was death. Eron, at least, was uncertainty. Once there, if he could blend into that teeming hive of humanity, he could disappear. They would never find him.

He stood at the mouth of a second, darker tunnel and thought the thoughts he had thought before. Only this tunnel was deadlier. He remembered the buzzard that had flared so brilliantly against the Tube wall. The touch of the Tube was death.

Could he make it in a spacesuit?

Slowly he raised his hand toward the red disk. The metal gauntlet closed over-He fell, fell into endless night, fell toward Eron, thirty light years away....

the history

Eron....

Bitter child of a negligent mother. Spawned and forgotten.

Eron. Man's greatest challenge. Man's greatest triumph.

You had nothing but hate; that you gave freely. You froze man while he compressed your thin air to make it breathable. You scourged him while he searched futilely for useful minerals and fertile soil. You changed him; you made him as hard and bitter as yourself.

It's not surprising that he turned from you to the endless seas of space. Trade; raid. There was little difference between them.

Legend says that Roy Kellon found you, but legend is mistress to any man. Why should he have chosen you? Almost any world would have been fairer, sweeter, kinder. And you are nearly thirty light years from Earth, the journey of a weary lifetime.

Eron. Where are you now? Man changed you more than you changed him. He hid you beneath an expanding skin of metal and put you at the center of a star-flung empire. You sit there, tamed, obedient, holding it together with golden strings.

Eron. You are the Hub. All roads lead to you....

chapter 8

OUT OF CHAOS ....

Nothing. Nowhere. Lightless, soundless, weightless.... Nothing. Nothing to see or hear or feel. Formless, unreal.... Nothing.

The universe was dark, was dead, was gone. The world had ended.

No stars, no warmth, no life. The night had won, and the light was forever gone. Death had conquered. The great clock of creation had run down. The great energy gradient had been flattened. Hot, cold—there were no words for those. No motion. Nothing.

Infinity was a dark sameness. Here, there—the terms wore meaningless. Nowhere was everywhere; everywhere was nowhere.

One consciousness in the eternal night, stunned, reeling, afraid. One life living in the endless death. One thing aware when awareness was futile. One mind thinking when the time for thought was done.

Horn screamed. Soundlessly. Without movement. It was a shocking, mental thing without physical extensions, imprisoned within the narrow, impervious shell of the mind. It was lightning captured in a hollow ball.

No breath dilated his nostrils or stirred his lungs. No pump throbbed rhythmically in his chest. No muscles tensed or relaxed. He was a consciousness, hopelessly alone.

One mind, spinning in infinity.

Think! Think!

Infinity split. Creation!

Consciousness in the womb, weightless, eternally falling, endless distances below, above, around. That's wrong. Think! no up, no down. All directions were outward.

Consciousness. A mind to think Existence. Circular proof. Outside of this, nothing.

Birth!

Upon one fact a man can construct a universe. Always one fact, always the same. I think—I am. Reality begins with me. I am the universe! I am the creator.

Create, then. Everything is destroyed but you. There is nothing alive but you. There is no thought, no memory, but yours. Create!

The universe was falling through the void. Falling or weightless? Distinction meaningless: identity. Falling. Hold fast to that. A thing must fall from somewhere, fall to somewhere, fall through something.

Cling to it. Cling to sanity. Create.

Falling from somewhere. From a place of weight and solidity. Earth. Horn created Earth, complete, with green plains and gray mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, blue sky, white clouds, and sunlight. He peopled it with animals and men. Earth. His creation filled him with longing. But Earth was behind him. He was falling from there.

Falling to somewhere. To a place of weight and solidity. Eron. Horn created Eron, complete, steel-jacketed, cold, the hub of a giant wheel, spokes reaching across the stars. Beneath the icy metal skin, he tunneled it out and peopled it with mole-men, scampering blindly through the tunnels. Eron. It was in front of him. He was falling to there.

Falling through something. Falling through one of the golden spokes. The Tube. Horn created the Tube, complete, a golden shimmering of energy outside; within, a black nothingness, an empty, timeless void, foreshortening space or expanding time so that a distance of light years could be spanned in hours. He peopled it with a man, himself. He was falling through it.

Reality. Horn created it....

Memory returned. With it came sanity. Sensation was still missing, but he had these two, and he must hug them tightly or go mad. He had fallen up into the Tube, up into nothingness and insanity. He was still there, but now he had a mind that worked.

He willed his mind to feel. At the end of eternity, he gave up. Either his mind was isolated or there was nothing to feel.

Eternity. The Tube was timeless, too. Every instant was eternity.

This could be death. Horn considered the possibility calmly. He tossed it away. It was an unprofitable assumption. If true, his condition was unchangeable; if not, his acceptance of it might make it actual.

He was in the Tube. These sensations—or these lacks of sensation—were a result of that; probably they were the effect of it.

He had been in a Tube twice before: going from Quarnon Four to Eron and from Eron to Callisto. Both times he had been unconscious. Gas, he had thought the first time. The second time he had held his breath, lying strapped in the guard-quarters bunk, but it hadn't delayed the blackness. They could have other means.

He had suspected then that it was a precaution against revealing a clue to the nature of the Tube. Now he was not so sure. It was obviously—if not entirely—a precaution against insanity. He knew himself to be tough-minded, and he had come dangerously close to irreversible madness.

He returned to the problem. He was in the Tube, falling from Earth to Eron. The effects were these: no light, no sound.... Better: no movement. Still better: no energy. Or the effect was this: no sensation.

Was there a way to tell which was the actual state of affairs? The effect on his consciousness would be identical, whether there was no stimulus or no reaction. Or, perhaps, if there is no reaction, the stimulus does not exist. Is there a sound where there are no ears to hear it?

Horn cut the thought off. That was a metaphysical blind alley. He had to assume the reality of things outside himself; this existence was self-centered enough, and he had no desire to return to the universe-creator illusion.

There should be tests to determine which of the alternatives was true. But how can a mind test anything? The mind has three functions: memory, analysis, and synthesis. Memory....

A man, dressed in a gray uniform, looking at his watch: "I thought these trips took three hours; not even a minute has passed."

Analysis....

1. Eron lied; the trip is instantaneous.

2. The man was mistaken; his watch had stopped. Synthesis....

If 1) is true, then these thoughts I am thinking are instantaneous. Can this trip which seems infinitely long be infinitely short? Time is man's invention, true, and it may not exist in a way we can understand it inside the Tube, but I am conscious of duration, however long. Moreover, instantaneous transmission implies the existence of a thing in two places at the same time. Judgment: implausible.

If 2) is true, then motion ceases inside the Tube. This would include: light, sound, all manifestations of energy, breathing, heartbeats, all internal activity including neural.... Then how do I think? Is intelligence incorporeal? Judgment: more likely.

The hypothesis was self-consistent and fitted the observable phenomena. If it were correct, then both alternatives could be true: there was no stimulus and the senses could not receive impressions and transmit them to the brain. If he could test it-Horn recognized the familiar wall. At least he had a hypothesis, and that was better than nothing.

The walls—he remembered them suddenly, and he remembered that they were dangerous. He must not touch them. That was the function of the gold bands around the ships, to keep them from touching the walls. But he had no gold bands, and he had no way of keeping away from the walls and no way of knowing when he was close to them. Even now he might be edging close, imperceptibly—

He caught himself and drew back from the edge of panic. It was pointless to worry about the walls. If he touched them, it was all over, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He remembered how the Tube had seemed to taper. He had seen a sketch of a Tube once. He tried to visualize it. It had tapered. Like a tube of glass heated in the middle and pulled at both ends, the Tube had been drawn out to a slender filament. Was it wide enough to let him through?

The ships were much bigger. They got through. But the gold bands could be responsible for that. When he got to the narrowed section-It was necessary to do something. Fatalism and inactivity might be natural under the circumstances, but they could be disastrous psychologically.

He decided to concentrate on just one sense. He tried to see. And faded, after an eternity of mind-wracking effort. He was troubled, however, by a vague feeling of something impenetrable equidistant on all sides of him. Could that be the Tube? If the mind were something distinct from the brain, could it sense directly, especially in circumstances like these? He accepted the possibility, and saw no way to prove it or put it to use.

The endlessness of the trip oppressed him. Time might be man's invention and his tool, but it could also be an enemy to destroy him. With nothing to measure its passing, he could grow senile waiting for an instant to elapse. The objective duration of the trip might be three hours; subjectively it was eternity multiplied.

He had escaped one trapdoor to madness only to find himself standing on another. He must keep his mind busy; he must fill eternity with thoughts.

He planned what he would do when he reached Eron. The Tube would take him to one of the Terminal caps at the poles, a cap bristling with Tubes. The caps didn't rotate with Eron. If they did, the Tubes would soon be twisted together like spaghetti. The broad, spiked caps floated in a shallow pool of mercury. They turned in the opposite direction of Eron's rotation, or, rather, motors kept them motionless while Eron turned underneath.

The ships pushed through airlocks into the space around Eron. They located their assigned elevator. The massive elevator lowered each ship past level after level until it reached the appropriate one. The frieighters went deep, close to the ancient, sterile rock of Eron itself. The fighting ships stopped at the barracks-level. The liners, reserved almost exclusively for the Golden Folk, dropped only a little.

But ships were useless to him. Even if he could steal one and get it into space, he could have no place to go. Not into Eron. The elevators were operated from inside the skin of the world. The nearest planet was years away by conventional drive; he would be recaptured quickly.

There had to be some way to get from the caps to Eron itself, other than by ship. Could he walk out on the surface in his spacesuit and find a way in? No, that wasn't the way. Even if he could jump from the stationary cap to the spinning world without disaster, he would be dangerously exposed while he was searching for an entrance, if any.

There should be a direct connection. Not at the perimeter, although the relative motion would not be so great after all. If the caps were fifty kilometers in diameter and Eron rotated as rapidly as Earth, the relative motion would be less than seven kilometers an hour. But it would be awkward, waiting for doorways to align themselves; Eron would never plan it like that.

The nearer a man approached the pole, on the other hand, the less the linear velocity would be until it dropped away to zero directly over the pole. There, if anywhere, should be an entrance to Eron. Horn planned, in as much detail as his knowledge of Eron permitted, how he would get to Eron from the cap and what he would do when he got there.

But he could never quite forget the mouse of insanity nibbling at the edges of his mind. How swift is thought? How slow is time? How long is three hours?

The insensate mind that called itself Horn floated blind and helpless within a formless area, carried along by an unfelt force toward a shrinking goal. Only faith could sustain it, and the only faith it had was in itself.

It was irony, Horn thought, that when he was most alone, most independent of outside influences, he was unable to react with his environment; a completely isolated individual, he could not move a muscle, he could not alter his circumstances in any way. Perhaps there is a lesson in that, he thought.

Maybe it would have been better to have believed in something, he reflected, even though belief is a form of surrender to the universe. It might have sustained him now, if he could believe, as the Entropy Cult preached, that there was a great, beneficent force behind the apparent aimlessness of the wheel of creation.

He did believe in something: he believed in Eron, in its skill and its power. When Eron built something, it worked; the Tube worked, and it would take him to Eron. But believing in Eron was only a form of believing in himself; it was believing in his senses, his judgment, the validity of the external environment.

How swift is thought? How long to Eron?

It was not such a bad thing to believe in: himself. Would he have got so far if he hadn't, if he had believed in something else instead? He knew that he would not. It had saved him from self-pity, from easy satisfaction, and from soft acceptance, this belief that a man's fate is in his own two hands. Few things are impossible; fewer are inevitable.

It had taken him to wealth three times; twice he had tossed it away riotously. The third time he had wasted it fighting a futile war with Eron. It had taken him into countless adventures on a dozen worlds in the Cluster, found profit in them, and brought him out again. It had taken him three hundred light-years across the Empire to Earth and a rendezvous with assassination.

The only way to get to Earth had been through Eron. Horn had taken advantage of the general amnesty to enlist in the Guard. After brief training on Quarnon Four and a taste of the fierce discipline enforced by barbarian mercenaries, Horn had been shipped to Eron. There he was handed over to the molding hands of Eron's drillmasters.

None of the recruits died; the officers called them the lucky regiment. But Horn couldn't count on the lightning stroke that assignment to a ship with orders to Earth would be. He got himself attached to the headquarters staff; when the duplicated stacks of orders arrived, he leafed through them, found one for Earth, forged with practiced skill the name of his own company, and less than a day later was on Callisto, satellite of a giant world in the solar system that included Earth.

The trip to Earth was far slower. Once there, he spent days searching for a way to escape from the ship. One night he was stationed as a guard at Port Three, whose massive rifle had been dismounted for rewinding. He had gone through it as soon as his fellow guard was stunned and tied.

It had taken him a week to avoid recapture and reach the tall, electrified N-iron fence that separated the food-plantations from the great American desert. It was patrolled, and the fence went too deep to dig under in the time available. Eventually, he had to fight his way through a gate, leaving two out of the four dead because one man was too alert.

Through the desert, believing in himself, taking what he needed. The nomad's pony, the stick man's life. The pony had been forfeit, like the nomad's life, when he had crept up on his camp, on foot; if Horn could catch him, he would never have escaped the swarming hunters. The stick man had been dead anyway; why should two men die when one is sufficient?

Horn remembered the terrified Chinese, the incredibly ancient Wu, teetering on the twisting girder above the black abyss, gasping with fear, toppling, screaming.... Horn supposed he hadn't meant to twist the girder, but without the threat of it he would never have learned the truth about Wu and Lil. As it turned out, it hadn't mattered, but he couldn't know that.

Horn wondered if death had caught up with them at last. That or imprisonment and, of the two, death was more likely.

With a twinge of shame, Horn remembered the screaming panic of his flight after Kohlnar's death. He remembered the valley and the chessboard desert and the man who moved only on the black squares, and despair, the return to the valley, and the rabbit. The strength of that had brought him here, up through the dark tunnel for a third time to this darker tunnel.

He remembered holding Wendre Kohlnar in his arms, and it was a good memory because there was no feeling left in his body. He remembered the slim firmness of her body struggling against his arm and her breath hot against his hand. It could almost make his heart beat again, thinking of her beauty and her courage and the way she had talked....

How swift is thought? How far to Eron?

It was folly, thinking of Wendre, heir to the Empire, but it was better than madness. It was better than the eternal death that madness would be, because he had a hunch that he would need a mind that worked before he was out of the Tube.

Death. The bullet had whistled through the spot where Wendre had been. It had been meant for her; Horn knew that now. Who had wanted to kill her?

Who had hired him to kill Kohlnar?

That was behind him. Ahead was Eron. Surely he would be there soon!

He tried, once more, to see. Again he had a vague impression of impenetrability equidistant from him. Except in one direction. His mind strained. Was it light? Was it imagination? Was it delusion?

Distantly, an impression shaped itself inside the insensate mind. Brightness, coin-sized, growing. A long, barrel-shape beyond. Getting nearer, clearer. The image of the main lock grew more vivid in Horn's mind. Was this some kind of extrasensory perception, or was it illusion, the first step toward madness? There was no way to be certain, no tests to make. The brightness appeared to grow closer. Think!

If he were sensing this directly with his mind, why should there be a limit on it? Why couldn't he have seen this long ago? Answers: maybe he could, maybe there is a natural limit, maybe.... Too many answers, too many questions.

The brightness was growing larger more slowly. Too slowly. If he were seeing it, he would estimate the distance as twenty meters. Fifteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.

Too fast. Too fast!

Was it possible that he wasn't going to reach the lock? Was this real, what he was sensing, and was he going to fall short for some reason? Because he didn't enter the Tube with any velocity of his own, perhaps? Would he fall short by ten meters?

Ten. Ten. Ten. Eleven.

He had to act as if this were real, not a projection upon a hysterical mind of its own fears. But he couldn't act. There was nothing he could do—do— He couldn't move....

Twelve. Thirteen.

Think! What are the chances, say, of something falling thirty light years through a straight tube and never touching a wall? No chance. Meaningless. No—no! Something must have kept him equidistant, if this is real. The mind? Some force it exerts in this strange universe? Try it! What can you lose?

Only your sanity.

Horn pushed. There was no other word for it. Gravity caught him, yanked him crashing to the lock floor. Light blinded him, sensory impressions of every kind overwhelmed his mind.

Horn let out a gasping breath that started as a sigh and ended sounding much like a sob.

He had made it. He had reached Eron, and it seemed like an old friend.

But that was only a mask. It was suicide to think otherwise.

the history

Dreamer, builder....

Like the ant, man builds cities. Unlike the ant, he builds them consciously. Because they are convenient and economical, not because he needs the city life or likes it. He hates it. Always. And yet the city-building was something which, once started, could not be stopped.

All things tend toward ultimates, but it is the nature of ultimates that they can never be achieved. If Eron, then, was no an ultimate, it is because of the definition. Eron was the dream of Man, the City-Builder.

Trace the steps, the dreams. Ancient Paris and London; old New York and Denver; mighty Sunport. But they were rubble before Eron began.

Eron the City. A world encased in a metal skin, gleaming coldly in the light of its distant sun. One world, one city. As Eron grew powerful through the Tube, the Golden Folk built up and dug down: space, more space, still more. Warehouses and trading centers, schools, and barracks, tenements and residences and palaces, amusement centers and factories, restaurants and communal kitchens, control rooms and power rooms....

Eron was the center of a star-flung empire: politically, economically, socially. Every extraplanetary shipment, every message, and most of the Empire's power went through Eron. Eron grew, automatically. As long as the golden Tubes led only to Eron, that growth would never stop.

Eron. Megalopolis....

chapter 9

SPIDERWEB

Horn pulled himself together. It was an effort, as if part of himself were still on Earth and he had to wind it in through all the weary distance, the danger, the darkness, and the fear.

If that's independence, he thought wryly, I've had enough to last me for quite a while.

His senses had eased their angry battering at his mind, and his mind started working again in its usual way, collecting information, weighing it, acting on it. He pushed himself to his feet. The giant doors were closed behind him, sealing the mouth of the Tube. Horn looked at the red emergency disk and turned away, shuddering. He walked quickly down the long, gleaming barrel.

The door to the personnel lock was in the same position. It swung open readily, closed behind Horn, and in a moment the door opposite opened. The walls of the small room were lined with spacesuits, supported at the armpit by pegs. They were all identical, these Terminals, constructed to rigid specifications. This one was exactly like the one he had left on Earth. He had no way of knowing, really, that he hadn't returned there.

Faith sustained him. Faith in Eron and faith in the Tubes that were Eron's greatness. Eron built well, and the things that Eron built worked.

Still, Horn thought, it would be ironic if he had returned to Earth. He should have made some mark— He had. He had taken away a suit. There was no vacant space now. He must be on Eron.

He pushed one of the suits to the floor and stood in its place. Before he removed anything, he stopped and thoughtfully brushed the breastplate with his gauntleted hand. The gauges sprang to life against the helmet face. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two....

No change. He had used no air while in the Tube which seemed like proof that the bodily activities were suspended. Now, though, it would be a good idea to eat and drink. He might not have another chance for some time.

He worked the tube into his mouth and drew in half a liter of tepid water. He let the tube go and clamped his teeth on the food ejector. A pellet dropped into his mouth. He let it dissolve slowly, savoring the meaty flavor. When it was gone, he finished the water. He began stripping off the suit—

The room trembled.

Horn paused, half out of the suit, and listened to the reverberations. They could only be one thing: a ship entering the main lock a few meters away. A ship from Earth close upon his heels could only be pursuit.

He stepped free and made himself hesitate, studying the long line of suits against the wall like decapitated monsters, all gray, ungainly, limp. He stuck his hand inside the neck of one and squeezed the ejector. A pellet squirted into his hand.

When he reached the door, he had five of them. He dropped them into a tunic pocket.

Horn opened the door and stepped onto the railed steps slanting down. They shook as he ran down them, hundreds of meters from the pavement. He grabbed the rail and looked back. A ship was coming out of the lock into the cradle, stem first. It was a small ship, a scout.

Horn raced to the joint, where the ladder began. The whole mounting shuddered as the cradle swung down toward the pavement below. When it stopped, Horn started down the ladder, swinging down swiftly, scarcely touching the rungs with his feet. A glance at the ship told him that he couldn't beat it down. The shaped dolly had reached up to receive the ship and was lowering it to a horizontal position. A faint shimmering revealed the tiny power loss of a unitronic field.

Horn swung his body around the ladder quickly. A body of guards had marched into the room from the side doorway. Now the mounting was between him and them. There were a dozen of them, dressed in gray uniforms like the one he wore. They didn't look up. They headed purposefully across the floor toward the ship.

Horn moved down cautiously, silently. A dark opening grew oval and round in the scout's hull, became bright, and flickered as gold-uniformed guards emerged and came down the dolly's built-in steps to the pavement. There were six of them. They glanced at the waiting gray guards, shrugged, and looked back up the steps toward the ship. They waited. The gray guards waited. Horn, who had dropped within meters of the floor, waited.

Wendre Kohlnar came through the port and ran down the steps. As she reached the pavement the gray guards, with perfect timing, clubbed down Wendre's guards. While they were still falling, two more sprang at Wendre. She struggled in their arms, indignant, confused.

The noise covered Horn's final descent. Sheltered behind one of the giant beams, he stared speculatively at the scuffle. He fingered the butt of his pistol indecisively, fighting an unreasonable urge to help the girl.

He had no idea what was going on, what sides were represented here. There were too many of the gray guards. This wasn't his battle. Why should he trouble himself over a woman who would only turn him over to Eron justice? Let them fight their fights. His business was survival.

They had vanished into the ship again, taking Wendre with them, leaving the guards like molten gold on the pavement. The port closed.

Horn walked briskly across the broad floor toward the door in the side wall. He breathed deeply trying to shake a dark mood of depression and worthlessness. The hell with them. The hell with all of them! It didn't help much.

"Get her?"

Horn looked up quickly. A technician was standing in his way. His golden features were almost pure. "Who?"

"The assassin."

"Sure," Horn said and tried to brush past.

The technician held him back. "Something funny came through from Earth. Said the assassin was in the Tube. But the pronoun was 'he.' And it didn't mention a ship. It said 'suit.'"

"Garbled," Horn said. This time he succeeded in getting past. The giant room he had left was rumbling.

He swung around at the archway that led into the dining hall. "Didn't you know who we picked up?" he called back. "That was Wendre Kohlnar."

The technician looked blankly incredulous for a moment and then spun toward the control room. Horn walked quickly through the dining hall and out into a corridor over two hundred meters wide. Deep, metal-lined tracks were recessed into the floor. Horn turned to the right and walked briskly away.

The corridor was empty. The rumbling sound he had heard had been the ship being raised back into the cradle. The main lock would rotate it into position to launch itself into space. It would circle Eron until it came to rest on the elevator that would lower it—to whoever wanted Wendre. They should be out in space now if they were going to get out at all.

The capture had been carefully planned and skillfully executed. Horn decided they would get out before the technician could convince the control room to stop the ship. But the confusion should cover his escape.

Horn came to a broad cross-corridor. It seemed to curve inward. That meant he was moving away from the center of the cap. Good. If the cap were constructed logically—and Eron was predominantly logical—it would be a spiderweb with a set of straight, radial corridors intersected by circular, concentric ones. At the center would be the spider, a sensitive and dangerous area of some kind. It was where he had to go, true, but not at this level. He needed to approach it from another direction.

The corridor he was on was definitely radial. It ran straight in both directions until, although it was well lighted, it faded into indistinctness. The concentric corridor's curve was gentle, but Horn found it impossible to judge the degree of curvature by eye. It could be anywhere from several to twenty kilometers from the center of the cap.

Horn trotted on along the way he had been going when the intersecting corridor stopped him. Before he came to another, he found a relatively narrow ramp leading downward. He turned into it without hesitation. Within a descent of a few meters, the ramp crossed a level corridor, darker and narrower than the ones above.

The ships didn't get down here. Horn crossed the corridor and continued down the ramp. The second level was even narrower and almost dark. The floor was dusty; the only footprints Horn could see were his own. It smelled musty and unused. Horn turned to the left, toward the center of the web.

The corridor thrummed gently with a constant vibration. He was close to the shallow pool of mercury in which the cap floated. Somewhere there would be massive motors, compensating for Eron's rotation. The vibration would be due to one or the other, or both. Horn trotted toward the center of the cap.

The corridor seemed unending, unchanging. Horn coughed a little in the dust raised by his feet. He slipped a food pellet into his mouth and sucked on it and found himself wrapped in the unreality of a childish memory.

Someone had told him about Eron—could it have been his mother?—and the description had created as vivid a picture as a child's imagination can contain. It had been all false, of course, but it had all the truth of a fairy world. The golden Tubes, the metal world, the broad, rotating caps floating in seas of quicksilver....

The quicksilver sea—that had been the most wonderful part. The boy had dreamed about it, surging and splashing metallically, gleaming like molten silver. He had cherished the illusion for a long time, and when he had learned that the mercury was only a few centimeters thick, it had been like the breaking of something infinitely precious. It was his last dream.

And here the corridors were dark and dusty, without beauty or illusion. He was actually in the cap that floated on the quicksilver sea, and he couldn't dredge up the smallest relic of wonder or delight. He was on the threshold of Eron, searching for a doorway into long-lost dreams; he wouldn't find it. Eron wasn't a dream world to him, only a refuge, and he was only tired with the eternal necessity of awareness.

The radial corridor he was on stopped abruptly as it was intersected by a concentric corridor. Ahead of him the perceptibly curving wall was unbroken. Horn turned to the right, trotting. After a few hundred meters, he was able to turn left along another radial corridor continuing toward the center.

Horn nodded. Obviously, all the radial corridors couldn't meet at the center. For an extensive area, there would be no walls—only corridor.

And this corridor ended in a blind alley. Horn stood in the boxlike end, pressed against one wall to let the distant light filter past his shoulder. The walls, and floor, the ceiling met flush against a fifth plane set at right angles to all of them.

It should be a door, Horn told himself. It had to be a door. There would be no logic in a pocket like this.

There was nothing to brush or press along the walls. Horn pushed against the partition. It was solid and unyielding. He let his hand brush the edge. Something clicked. Horn threw his weight against the barrier. It gave a little, squealing, and stuck. A bright line of light appeared at the right.

Horn took a deep breath and tried once more. Complaining, groaning, the door swung open. Cautiously, Horn stepped into a large room shaped like a fat cylinder. In the center, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a smaller cylinder, about four meters in diameter. The room was empty.

Horn closed the door behind him and circled the room looking for an exit. Exit? Entry. Entry into Eron.

The surface of the small, central cylinder was smooth and unbroken. Opposite the door he had entered was another door in the curving wall of the room. When he had pulled it open, there was only another long, dark corridor behind it. He slammed it shut and leaned against it.

His shoulder slumped wearily. His legs trembled a little. It had been a long time since he had rested.

He leaned his head back against the cool metal and closed his eyes. He forced them open quickly. If he let them stay closed, he would fall asleep, and he couldn't afford to sleep. The silent desertion of the lower levels of the cap was deluding. There could be no peace for him, just as there could be no sleep. The hunt went on, somewhere, and if he stayed too long in one spot, the hunters would catch up with him.

He saw the wheel against the ceiling.

It was below the ceiling a few centimeters, connected to it by a thick, threaded bar. Beside it, against the wall, was a ladder. It started three meters from the floor.

Horn jumped, caught the bottom rung, and pulled himself up hand over hand. When his head was close to the ceiling, he wrapped one leg around a rung and leaned back to grab the wheel. Above the wheel was on opening in the ceiling about a meter in diameter; it was covered from above by a metal plate.

From his position, Horn couldn't exert much leverage, and the wheel was stubborn. Horn gripped it firmly and pushed with his legs and back. It began to turn. He sweated with it, his back muscles starting to cramp, until it was almost flat against the plate in the ceiling.

He rested for a moment and wiped his face on his sleeve, braced himself again, and shoved upward. The wheel lifted, taking the plate with it, and toppled to one side. Horn grabbed the edges of the circular hole and lifted himself into the room above, realizing that caution was useless after the noise he had made.

The room was almost identical with the one below. The differences: it was cleaner, better lighted, and the central cylinder was cut off a few feet from the ceiling. This room was empty, too.

Horn was interested in the central tube. It led down. From here. It ended here.

He circled it. The first thing he noticed was the disk just below eye level. Then he saw the hairline crack beside it. He palmed the disk and waited. Nothing happened for a moment.

He felt a slight jar under his hand. The crack widened. A door swung open toward him. Behind it was a little, circular room, just big enough for one person.

Horn waited until his heartbeat slowed and stepped into the room. It had to be a way into Eron, an elevator or a tube car. He sank gratefully into the single, room-filling pneumatic chair. He stared at the curved, softly golden wall. It was a pleasing color, but featureless.

No controls. No way of knowing where the car went or how to stop when it got there. It had to be automatic, then. With no choice, there was only one possible destination. That, logically, would be the other Terminal cap. If he went straight through Eron and out at the other pole, he would be no better off than if he stayed here.

Horn frowned. That meant there was no way directly from the caps to Eron. It didn't seem reasonable.

He reached out for the handle of the cylinder door and brought it gently toward him. Before he closed it completely, he hesitated and then, defiantly, slammed it shut. The lights went out. In the darkness, something nudged Horn's arm into the car and slid shut. Horn wondered why he felt no movement, no sense of falling.

Eight glowing disks floated in the darkness in front of him. Six of them were in the middle. To the left of these, separated a little, and a trifle more than half a diameter beneath the straight line that passed through the center of the others was a white disk. The six in the middle were colored: silver, gold, orange, green, blue, black. The last one was barely discernible against the deeper darkness. And, separated by a space to the right, there was a red disk.

Controls! They had to be. He could pick a destination inside Eron. All he had to do was figure out the meaning of the disks and pick one—the right one.

The white one at the left was easy. It should be for the south Terminal cap. If he had been at the south cap, that disk would be out and there would be one lit above it. At one of the other destinations, both of them would be lit, and a passenger could choose between them.

The colored disks—he could only think of one meaning. They could stand for the directorships. If he covered one of those, the car should take him to the residence of one of the Directors. It was a sobering discovery.

He had blundered into the Directors' private transportation system. It seemed to be the only route direct from Eron to the caps. It would take him into Eron, sure, but right into the hands of those most anxious to find him. Like the Tube that had brought him from Earth to Eron, this only postponed the imminence of capture in favor of greater inevitability.

But there wasn't any choice. A quarry has only one function: to run. When he stops, he is finished; the game is over. Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cluster. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now.

So it had led him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once started, he never had a chance to turn back. There was only one thing that could have prevented his appointed meeting with Kohlnar—death. And death is almost always the greater of evils.

"I go where I wish," Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff.

And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, "So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear."

In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed.

Choice. Where had there been choice? Having deserted, he would have been insane to stay in the occupied lands. In the desert, the hunting parties had forced him toward the mesa. Backed against the cliff, he had only one way to go: through them.

Wait. Twice there had been choice: at the beginning and at the end. He could have turned down the job. Could he? Given his condition, his experience, his background, his environment, had he chosen freely? Or had the choice been determined for him?

With the crosshairs on Kohlnar, he could have refused to pull the trigger. Couldn't he? Perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps that, too, had been determined by the built-in set of a lifetime.

And then, after the assassination, even the illusion of choice had vanished. Driven, guided, pushed. Down the dark tunnel to find the desert closed. Back to the mesa to find only one way open: the Tube. And through the Terminal cap to this spot.

Was it true that a man's only real choice was to live or die? Even then the dice are loaded. Roll them as often as he likes, the dice will come up: live! It is better to suffer than to feel nothing. The conscious mind may rebel; it may even, in a brief moment of sanity, win a surprising and final victory. But it is infrequent, and who can say whether that, too, is not determined.

"I won't die," Horn had said.

"So we think, so we all think," the fat, yellow man had answered. "And yet we do."

And now another choice, a choice of colors: silver, gold, orange, green, blue, black. You plays your money and you takes your choice. Not free. Not now or ever. Because the coin is life.

The other Directors might well be back by now. Only two would not be home: Kohlnar, who was dead, and his daughter, who was captured. Silver or gold? In any case, there would be guards, and they would be watchful and on edge. What choice? A choice of staying here, where he would certainly be caught, or postponing his capture for the duration of the trip through this private tubeway.

Horn's lips curled wryly. The quarry has no choice. He must run until he can run no more.

Silver was probably the better choice; the General Manager's household would be confused, disordered, headless. But Horn had a curious reluctance to go there.

His hand stretched out toward the disks, hesitated, and dropped over gold. He had chosen Wendre. Or had something pushed?

The thought was cut off as the chair dropped out from under him. The glowing disks vanished. Blackness was a blow, and he remembered nothing.

He opened his eyes to darkness and the unpleasant disorientation of free fall. For a moment he thought he was back in the Tube, but sensation was still with him. Behind him was smoothness. He gave himself a gentle push and floated through the darkness, his hands groping ahead. In a moment he had pulled himself into the chair and strapped around his legs the belt he hadn't noticed before.

He rubbed the back of his head gingerly. The colored disks were dark; it hadn't been all unconsciousness. Only the red disk on the far right was still glowing. As he watched, it blinked.

He knew then what it was. He slapped his hand over it, hoping he was not too late.

Then the panel was completely dark. The car began to slow.

the history

Hope....

It springs from the hopeless. It is all they have.

True religion comes from the slaves. It is a survival factor; for them, the major one.

The Entropy Cult, with its visionary hope, was born among the endless, numbered slaves of Eron. Its symbol was the bisected circle; its promise was a rebirth of matter and spirit when the eternal circle swung back to rest upon its other foot.

The day of regeneration. The poor, the hopeless, the oppressed waited for the promised reversal, when those that were low would rise high and those that were high, fall low.

Out of the darkness it was born. In the darkness of the deepest warrens and catacombs, it grew. Poor bastard-child of science and despair.

Officially, the Cult was banned. Unofficially, the Golden Folk considered it something which, if it had not existed, they would have invented. It kept the slaves docile.

But oppression and despair can breed other things. And a symbol can cover a multitude of meanings....

chapter 10

THE HOLLOW WORLD

Horn was pressed hard into the yielding chair for a moment, and then his body was straining against the belt around his legs. The car or an inner shell had flipped over. Suddenly the pull ceased; normal gravity took over. The car was at rest.

At rest where?

Horn looked at the disks which were floating once more in the darkness. All of them were on, even the two white ones, one above the other at the left, even the red one. He was nowhere. For Horn, it was better than somewhere.

Horn unfastened the belt and fumbled with the panel of the car before he found the button that pulled it back. Beyond it, a door swung aside. Light flooded into the car. It was blue.

The red disk had been an emergency stop. This was an unlisted exit into the hollow world. There might be dozens of them. There had to be more than one; otherwise the red disk would have gone out.

Horn stepped out of the car into the blue room. It was empty. He turned and studied the tube door. He suspected that when it was closed the thin line of its juncture with the wall would be completely concealed by the living mural on the luxion facing.

The blue world. Around the walls and across the ceiling the mural flowed, constantly changing. The sky was the blue of midnight; the foliage was blue-veined white fernery tossing gently in a breeze he couldn't feel. Horn had an uneasy feeling that blue-furred animals moved silently behind them, peering out with strange, cautious eyes.

The floor was carpeted with blue grass. In one corner the floor rose to a wide, mossy mound. Horn suspected that one would sink down deep into it. He shivered. Beyond the bed a brook sprang musically from the wall and streamed across the floor in a narrow channel.

The tube door was similar to the other walls except that there was a small, blue sun toward one edge. It was a little too blue to be realistic; it should have been blue-white and hot. Instead it chilled the room. Horn shivered again. He didn't like this room. The night sky was brilliant in the Cluster, rivaling the day. Nights on Earth had been bad enough. This gave him a shuddering, choking feeling.

He put his hand over the blue sun and felt something click. That was the lock and the signal for the tube car. He hesitated and then slowly shut the door. This was better than he could reasonably expect to find at another tube car destination. But the click-click had an ugly sound of finality. He thought about the car falling through the metal tube to wherever its depot was, for it wouldn't stay outside the blue room, blocking the tube.

Half an hour in the blue world was twenty-five minutes too long. Horn fought a desperate despondency as he searched for a way out of the room. But half an hour was the length of time it took him to find it. He had knelt on the blue grass, reluctantly, and sipped the blue water. It had been cold and sweet and vaguely effervescent. He had opened a closet filled with diaphanous blue and white clothing; there were also some stained things that could have been nothing but whips. At last Horn found the door.

He stepped into the yellow hall with a heavy sigh. The change in his attitude was remarkable. He felt invigorated, potent, powerful. He fought that, too, and moved cautiously down the hall. The doors he passed were marked with colored disks. When he passed too close to some of them, he heard high-pitched laughter and screams and low moans and animal-like grunts. If he had had any doubts about the nature of this place before, they were dispelled. After that he stayed in the middle of the hall. He wasn't squeamish; it was merely that some pastimes were not to his taste.

He met no one along the straight corridor that stopped, eventually, against an immovable door. Horn stared at it blankly. There was no disk to palm, nothing to press, nothing to turn; the only clue. Was a slot a few centimeters long and about a quarter of that wide.

Horn frowned. It was a simple door, at the end of the hall, obviously meant to be used. It would be irony to be turned back now. The slot was obviously meant for something.

Horn pinched coins from the money belt and fed one into the slot. It clucked contentedly, but it didn't open. Horn kept count. When the total reached five hundred kellons, the door swung out.

Horn grimaced. It had been an expensive exit; it had eaten a sizable hole in the price of Kohlnar's death. Escape and the exotic came high on Eron. He shrugged as the door closed behind him and another opened in front. He had never kept accounts.

He stepped warily into what seemed to be a roofed alley. It was dimly lit, a perfect spot for thugs and thieves. But perhaps the area was patrolled. The alley was deserted.

The alley opened into a broad, colorful roadway. Horn had seen slideways before but never so many and so swift. The ceiling overhead was a neutral color, reflecting without glare the light that streamed against it from hidden sources. The slideways were crowded; the golden-skinned people on them were dressed fantastically. The women wore very little, and Horn realized that the air was warm, a little too warm. Brief skirts or shorts revealed long, shapely legs often ornamented with brilliants. Blouses were even more revealing; they were transparent, low-cut, only a half, or slashed strategically to give tantalizing glimpses of golden flesh.

What clothing the women had removed, the men had put on. They were overdressed in synsilks, furs, and jewels. Their bosoms were padded into grotesque imitation of their mates, and their legs, elevated on stilt-heel shoes, had a feminine symmetry. These were the Golden Folk, at home, and Horn wondered how he could pass among them without being stopped.

He squared his shoulders and stepped purposefully onto the first strip, his eyes watchful. Brilliant light drew his eyes to the left. Above a glowing, multicolored door, were wriggling letters. They spelled out: THE PLEASURE WORLDS. As Horn stepped to a faster strip, they were gone behind him.

As if he were carrying out a grim mission, Horn moved from strip to strip, his face set and determined. Men and women glanced at him and looked away, and in this flicker Horn read distaste and uneasiness and a touch of fear.

What is H you sense? Horn thought. An assassin? Or is it only the vague knowledge that I could kill you so easily, I the barbarian, unsophisticated, savage, and powerful? Or is it your own society you fear and the security measures necessary to sustain it?

The slideways moved through the eternal tunnels of plastic and metal, past the near-hypnotic displays of shopping centers, the tantalizing odors of restaurants, the garish beckonings of amusement districts. Urging, luring, demanding. The slideway was a living snake weaving to the changing tunes of a skillful charmer. People got off and people got on, but it was always the same snake. Helplessly, Horn moved with it, watching the strips that split off into other corridors or turned downward, thinking dazedly how a man could stand in one spot and go entirely around this world, how he could keep traveling all his life and never pass the same spot twice, how this went on endlessly, this headless snake swallowing its tail.

Horn shook his head vigorously. Danger could be anywhere and was probably everywhere, but he had to decide where to go. He couldn't just stand and wait for the decision to come to him. But it was hard to think while the snake twisted mindlessly to the compulsive rhythms of music and the pleas and commands to buy this! buy that! do this! do that! use this! use that! .... Horn tried to close his mind to it, but words forced their way into his consciousness:

"All guards not now in their assigned barracks will report there immediately. All guards—repeat—all guards will report to their assigned barracks. No excuses. No exceptions. Guards on post will wait until relieved. All unreported guards will be shot on sight...."

The snake turned to look at Horn. He walked quickly to the right-hand strip and stepped onto the first strip heading down. As it carried him away from the brilliance, he heard the voice saying:

"A meeting of Directors has been called for some unspecified time within the next twenty-four hours. Presumably the most urgent business will be the election of a new General Manager to replace...."

Down. That was the right way. Down toward the barracks. Down in obedience to the general command, which could only mean that Duchane knew he was inside Eron dressed as a guard. The Guard would be inspected, a monumental task but one guaranteed to unmask an assassin hiding behind a gray uniform and a yellow identity disk his description did not match.

And if he didn't report, the manhunt would begin in Eron. Any solitary guard would be captured or shot.

Idly, Horn noticed the level number glowing on the wall as he stepped around a corner to take the next strip down: 111. He had been on the top level then; there were one hundred and twelve numbered levels to Eron. It was an odd fact that occurred to him suddenly, and he felt an odd satisfaction in the reflection that he had been where few barbarians had ever been.

The hunt was about to begin again. Horn felt a familiar flutter of something between panic and excitement. His hands got cold; he suppressed a shiver. He breathed deep for calmness, turned a corner, stepped onto another moving ramp. Down. Down, seeking his level, seeking the level of rats and vermin and other hunted things.

Down past flickering lights and darkness, intermixed: residence levels, schools, middle-class shopping centers, restaurants, amusement areas, music, babble, people.... They blurred together; they became a kaleidoscope, bright, colorful, flickering, fantastic, meaningless.

As he was carried lower, men in uniform began to join him, guards answering the order to report. They became a stream fed by countless tributaries as it dropped lower down the smooth, sloping channel; inevitably the stream became a river.

The lights brightened. The slideway leveled out into a wide, low-roofed area where guards waited with drawn pistols. Between them the river flowed, Horn carried with it Horn glanced at the faces bobbing in the river around him; they were blank and careless. But the men with the guns were watchful.

Ahead of them would be the long, narrow barracks with the stacked bunks against the walls and the eating benches between. Horn remembered them well. Once there his last chance would be gone. His eyes searched the walls ahead, searching for an opening; he kept his gun hidden beneath his arm. There were slideways leading down from here. Most calls for the guards came from below.

When the break in the walls appeared, Horn was ready. He saw the slideway when he was fifty meters away. He sneaked his pistol into his hand and edged toward the right side of the gray river. When the slideway was ten meters away, his gun was on his hip, slanting upward toward the low metal ceiling.

He pulled the trigger. The bullet screamed against the ceiling and ricocheted off a wall.

"There he is!" Horn shouted.

Guards turned to look. The river began flowing more swiftly. Men broke into a run. Horn lowered his shoulder and broke through the line of armed guards at the wall, dodged through the opening onto the slideway, and he ran down the moving strip in long strides, weaving from side to side.

The bullets that followed him were late. The feet that ran behind him were slow. In a few minutes, he lost them. He went down.

After innumerable turns and innumerable descents, the strips stopped moving. They looked as if they hadn't moved for a long time. The long inclines were darker, narrower, dirtier. Horn moved out into a roadway, his nostrils flaring to a general odor of decay.

Here the people were pasty-faced instead of golden; their clothes were drab and ragged; they had the blind look of moles. They trudged along the unmoving strips, their eyes down with their feet in the half-darkness, to no music except the shuffle of shoes on plastic.

The shops were dirty and poor. The plastic facings were cracked; large pieces had broken free. The goods on display matched the appearance of the stores they were sold in.

Horn walked with the ragged men and women, feeling a certain kinship with them. Like them, he was hungry; like them he had known that life was sorrow, and sorrow was eternal.

They walked among the factories where the sound of machinery shook the air, beat it with hammer blows, shattered it with explosions, and the air retaliated against the people who moved through it, swaying They passed the open doors and the long, dirty benches of communal kitchens, where the odor of rancid, rotten food drifted out to them, and many turned aside and entered.

Horn hesitated, feeling his hunger like a living thing inside, but it was folly. He fished a final pellet out of his pocket and let the crowd carry him along. As they entered another stretch of miserable shops, Horn noticed that the people shuffling near him had begun to inspect him warily out of the corners of their eyes. Even here, he had no place.

It was the uniform. If he wanted to hide, he had to get rid of it. He swung into a half-lit doorway. It was a clothing store. Cheap overalls and sleazy wrappers were stacked in the window. The door had a handle. He twisted it and pushed it open and went in.

A bell tinkled somewhere in the back; it had a cracked, hollow sound. As Horn's eyes adjusted to the darkness, something white moved, came close. It was a claylike face above a crooked body.

"Yeah?" It was a throaty whisper.

"Clothes," Horn said harshly, annoyed by a feeling of revulsion.

The face shook from side to side, laughing with a cracked, hollow sound like the bell. "Nah! The butcher'll nah get me. No clothes for gray guns. It is the law."

"Clothes," Horn repeated savagely. "I'll pay for them."

The doughy face shook. It had lines of dirt in the wrinkles. After a moment Horn realized that the gnome was laughing again. "Nah! Gray guns nah make so much."

"Ten kellon," Horn said.

The gnome stopped laughing and hesitated before he shook his head. "Nah, nah."

"Fifteen."

They settled on twenty-five. The gnome handed Horn a thin pair of coveralls, reputedly white, and motioned for him to change in the back room. Someone might see.

Horn shrugged, opened the grimy door, and walked into a room stale with old odors of food and sweat. It was even darker than the shop. Quickly he opened his tunic and started to pull it off.

Strong hands yanked the tunic down over his arms, pinning them back. Something whispered through the air. Horn threw himself forward, going down on his knees, rolling. Something grazed his head as he went, but the man who had been holding his tunic saded over his shoulder and hit against a wall with a thud and an explosion of air.

The tunic had ripped. Horn's arms were free. He was on his feet, turning to meet the expected charge. Something black flickered toward him. Horn threw up his arm and lunged with the other. The blow was numbing; his right arm was useless. But his left fist connected. As the second man staggered, Horn hit him again with a chopping blow that dropped him to the floor, moaning.

The first thug was rising dazedly. Horn turned, bringing up his knee sharply. The dark shape slammed against the wall again and slithered down it limply. The second one, on his hands and knees, was shaking his head like a sleepy bear. Horn chopped the edge of his hand against the back of the man' neck. He pitched forward.

Horn stood still, breathing deeply, listening. The room was silent now. He stooped and found the pistol that had been torn off in the struggle. He turned slowly, making a complete revolution. Nothing. Quickly, then, he stripped off the gray trousers and the remnants of the tunic and slipped into the loose coveralls. He pushed the pistol into one of the deep pockets and shook his right arm. The numbness had left it; there was a sore spot on the forearm, but it worked out as Horn clenched and unclenched his fist.

His eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness. He paused at the door to glance back at the men on the floor. They were big, heavy brutes, but their features were puffy, doughy. They looked soft and degenerate. Horn shook his head and went back into the shop. His hand was holding the pistol in the deep pocket, but the look of shock and helpless fear on the face of the crooked man brought his hand away.

He had been lurking near the door. Horn turned to him, his mouth twisting. "A cap," he said.

The second one he tried on fit well enough. He pulled the misshapen bill down low over his forehead. He stepped close to the shivering, silent shopkeeper, his hand held out. The man drew back fearfully.

"Here," Horn said. He dropped the coins into the man's grimy hand. "I'm paying for the clothes. You'd find a way to betray me if I didn't. I'd advise you not to try. The Guard or Duchane's agents would find the money. They'd take it away and you, too. They'll never believe you didn't help me. Forget you ever saw me."

The man nodded, his eyes rolling.

"Give me an identity disk for a warehouse laborer," Horn said.

Clutching the coins, the gnome bent beneath a table piled high with cheap cloth. In a moment he came up with a yellow disk hyphenated with numbers.

"Get rid of that uniform," Horn said, as he pinned the disk on his cap. "Fast. And you'd better take care of your boys. They're going to be unhappy with you."

Horn walked quickly to the front door. He stood there for a moment, studying the twilight street. Even the slaves were ready to rob him, kill him. He hadn't found his level yet. He would have to go lower still, down to the lowest levels, the warehouse levels.

Oh perhaps, he thought, an assassin has no natural allies.

He saw a guard burst through the shuffling mass of slaves and speed past and disappear again. Horn's eyes narrowed. The workers milled. A rising murmur reached Horn's ears, became shouts and curses. A squad of guards fought its way through the barriers of obstructing flesh, clubbing their pistols right and left to clear a path. Sullenly, the slaves parted.

When the tumult and shouting had passed on into the distance, Horn slipped through the door and joined the roiled stream. He let it carry him along for minutes, trying to see whether any faces followed him for long. There were so many of them, and they seemed so alike that he gave up. He turned aside at the first wide ramp leading down. The air, which had been fresh, although warm, at the top levels, was stale and hot here. It became worse as he passed through huge, dark caverns cluttered with stacked crates, boxes, barrels, bales. There were occasional working parties, but Horn kept well clear of them. Twice he saw thick, squat freighters in their wells, being loaded or unloaded. They were distant and well-lighted. Horn kept to the deepest shadows as he made his way deeper into Eron.

Downward, fleeing, where the rats scurried away from his footsteps and flying things brushed, flapping, past his face. The passages grew narrower, dustier, hotter. Sometimes there were holes in the ramps. The dark caverns, dotted frequently with thick, N-iron beams were deserted. They had been given up to rot and decay centuries ago. The air was stifling.

Horn tried not to think about the overpowering weight piled above him, supported by these long-forgotten beams. The mass of human flesh alone was a shuddering thought.

Horn stopped. He was in a dark, narrow corridor. The floor was rough underfoot, and the walls were chiseled rock, warm to the touch. Dust was thick in the air; cobwebs clung to his face. He swept them away with a coarse sleeve.

He was below the lowest level. He was down into the ancient catacombs in the heart of Eron's rocky crust. He tried to take a deep breath and walked forward wearily.

The corridor eventually turned right and widened. The light took Horn by surprise. Hours in the hewn passageway had covered him with cobwebs and dirt. Horn blinked. After a moment he saw that the light was only a dim reflection. He went on, turned left, and stopped at the edge of a vaulted chamber cut out of the rock.

Crude wooden benches were arranged neatly on the rough floor. The rows faced toward the far end of the room. That end was bright. Blackly, massively silhouetted against the light was a symbol carved out of the living rock; it was a circle bisected by a thick line extending above and below it and ending in horizontal arms and feet.

Horn recognized it. It was the scientific symbol for entropy, and this was an Entropy Cult chapel. There were a few people scattered singly on the benches, their heads covered and bent in thought or weariness. Their clothing was ragged. Horn sank gratefully onto a bench and bent his head into his arms.

He had run until he could run no more; this was the end. He had run from the naked desert of Earth deep into the rocky heart of Eron; he could run no farther. But what could a quarry do except run?

Eron wanted him, needed him as badly as it ever needed anything. It would never forget. It would never rest until he was in its hands, Horn the Assassin, smasher of images, threat to empire. There was no hope for him.

And he realized what he would have to do. Even the most timid animal will fight when it is cornered. While there is a chance for escape, it will run, but when it can run no farther, it will fight. And so Horn would fight. The only way to survive was to destroy Eron. Horn clenched his jaw: he would destroy Eron.

Only long afterwards did the decision seem funny: one man declaring war against man's greatest empire. At that moment Horn only knew that it was logical and just. Eron could be destroyed; he would destroy it.

It went no farther than that. In his weariness, he didn't think of odds or means or plans. There was only the decision, implacable, unshakable, and—

His arms were seized, twisted behind him while he came up off the bench. Helplessly, Horn braced his shoulders against the pain.

the history

Atoms and men....

They are moved by certain general forces in accordance with certain general laws, and their movements can be predicted in certain broad generalizations.

Physical forces, historical forces—if a man knew the laws of one as well as he knew the laws of the other, he could predict the reactions of a culture as accurately as the reactions of a rocket ship.

One historical force was obvious—Eron. It couldn't be overlooked. Its influence was universal.

Challenge and response. That was a force. Eron challenged; man responded with the Tube. Out of the Tube sprang the Empire.

But now the greatest challenge was the Empire itself; it shaped its own responses. By its own grim pressures, it created the forces that threatened it. It created its enemies and cut them down and found new enemies rising behind, beneath, within.

It created the Cluster and destroyed it, as it had destroyed other growing cultures and would go on, creating and destroying, until it grew too weak to respond with renewed vigor and was itself destroyed.

And there were other forces working, unseen, inexorable, sweeping before them men and worlds and empires.

What of a man? Is he at the mercy of these forces? Is he helpless to determine his own destiny?

The laws of classical physics are statistical; the unpredictable, individual atom enjoys free will....

chapter 11

THE TURNING TIDE

Horn woke to darkness.

He woke with the dream still vivid, remembering the sensation of being tossed and driven in the fury of the flood that rammed irresistibly through the tube, remembering the choking, gasping helplessness and the long, wild tumbling into nothing. He remembered, too, the sudden surge of decision and energy with which he had caught a handhold in the tube, blocked it with his body, withstood the furious battering of the raging water, and slowly, surely, forced it back upon itself....

Under Horn was rock, warm, worn smooth. The air was dusty and stale, but it was breathable. Horn sat up, recalling the narrow dimensions of the cell, and felt rested, restored, and alert. He sat in the darkness, hugging his knees to his chest, and remembered how he had been brought to this place.

On either side of him, there in the Entropy Cult chapel, had been a dark-cloaked man, his face shadowed and anonymous under a hood. Horn's arms had been twisted up tightly behind him; the hands holding him had been strong and sure, and he could get no leverage. They had moved him easily, silently, across the rough floor. None of the bent people on the benches had even looked up.

As they went through a break in the rock wall into a dark corridor, Horn glanced back over his shoulder. Uniformed guards poured into the room through an entrance near the carved entropy symbol, like a gray wave. Horn and his escort moved quietly through a maze of black tunnels before they stopped.

They tied his hands behind his back, took his gun away, and fitted two nooses around his neck. One cord led to the man in front who led the way; the other traded to the hooded figure behind. If he tried to escape, he would be strangled.

Horn trotted anxiously between them, trying to keep the cords slack. It was a nerve-wracking, exhausting effort that kept him at a constant half-run with no time for thought of anything except the tightening cords around his neck. They seemed to walk forever, through eternally branching, eternally dark corridors cut out of the rock. Horn started to stumble; it threatened to leave the silent figures with a corpse to carry.

Before Horn collapsed, they entered a room partially lighted by a hand torch blazing up from a metal bracket fastened to the wall. The ceiling was dark, bare rock not far overhead, but the light didn't reach the other walls of the room. From the echoes, Horn formed the impression that it was deep and wide.

Someone had been waiting for them. It was a man, shorter than his guards but dressed like them in a concealing, hooded robe. His face was hidden in shadows. On the breast of the robe was embroidered the bisected entropy circle.

Horn stood between them, struggling to stand straight. One of his captors spoke. It was the first sound Horn had heard him make.

"He fits the description. Found in chapel fifty-three."

The voice sounded hollow. It bounced back and forth between the rock walls. Horn looked straight ahead, his face immobile.

"Pull back his cap." The voice was firm and decisive.

As the cap was pulled back from his face, Horn caught a glimpse of the face under the hood. The light slanted across it as the man studied him. It was a hard, dedicated face. Horn had never seen it before. The voice, the face, both strange; Horn wondered why his intuition was making such an issue of it.

"It's the man."

They put him in the cell, cut his hands free, and gave him food and water. The food was coarse, but it was filling. Horn needed it after the bulkless nourishment of the food pellets. The barred, metal door had slammed behind them. It had been a solid, final sound.

Alone in the darkness and the complete silence, Horn had eaten and then investigated the cell. It was completely bare but clean. There was no exit except through the door, which admitted what air came into the room. Horn fingered the lock. It was newer than the door and escape-proof. Its small square of minute holes needed the insertion of tiny, magnetized filaments.

Before he had time to worry about it, he had fallen asleep.

Now, awake, he wondered what had awakened him. He heard again the odd, clinking sound that seemed loud in the total silence.

"Hurry!" someone whispered.

Horn felt his skin creep. He tensed his muscles. A final clinking sound and the door creaked. Before Horn could spring, a light was in his eyes. He blinked blindly.

"Ah, boy, boy," someone breathed softly. The light went out. "I've been a long, weary time finding you."

"Wu!" Horn said incredulously.

The old man himself." Something metallic clanked against the stone floor of the cell.

Something rustled. "And Lil. Don't forget poor Lil."

Horn moved quickly to the door. It was shut, locked tightly. He whirled in the darkness, his back pressed to the bars. "Why did you lock it again? We've got to get out."

"Easy, my boy. We got in. We can get out as quickly. But first we must talk."

"Talk then. How did you get here? The last time I saw you, the Lancers were leading you away from the Victory Monument."

"So they did. It is another mystery for Duchane's Index. Cells aren't made for Lil and me; locks cannot keep us in or out. The jail hasn't yet been built that will hold us."

"Not even Vantee?"

"Prison Terminal?" Wu said softly. "Perhaps. Vantee perhaps. But they would have to take us there, and how would they hold us on the way?"

There was no answer except a scurrying and rustling near the floor. In the brief flare of Wu's light, Horn saw that the old Chinese was dressed as he had been before. His battered metal suitcase was beside his feet. And on the floor was a glowing-eyed cat with matted fur and a scarred face. It trotted toward them triumphantly, a limp rat dangling from its mouth.

"What of you?" Wu asked. "I know, of course, that you were bold enough and foolish enough to carry out the assassination of Garth Kohlnar."

Briefly Horn described what had happened to him since Wu and Lil had leaped over the ruined wall. After Horn finished, Wu was silent for a few minutes.

"I could help you escape from here," Wu said finally, "but where would you go? Where in Eron is there a hiding place for the assassin of the General Manager?"

"There isn't any," Horn said quietly. "Eron must be destroyed before I'll be safe."

"Then you've given up?"

"That isn't what I said."

"Oh." Wu chuckled. "One man against Eron. A delightfully daring thought—but hopeless. Empires fall when they are ready and not before."

"When a tree is rotten," Lil interjected suddenly, "the lightest breeze will topple it."

"You, too?" Wu sighed. He was thoughtful. "Undaunted youth," he said. "I would like to feel those emotions again, those convictions that there are no mountains unscalable, no seas unswimable, no odds too great. How do you plan to start?"

"I don't know," Horn said slowly. "Maybe with the man who hired me to kill Kohlnar."

"Who was that?"

Horn shrugged and then realized the gesture was meaningless in the darkness. "It was in a room as dark as this."

"You would recognize his voice?"

"I don't know."

"Then how do you expect to find him."

"By something you said once. When we were in the tunnel. I was hired in the Cluster, you see, right after the surrender of Quarnon Four. You said nobody knew about the Dedication then."

"That's right," Wu agreed.

"Somebody knew about it. Kohlnar must have known. Whom did he confide in? Who did he trust? Who betrayed him?"

"I see," Wu said softly. "That eliminates his enemies, in the Cluster and elsewhere, and leaves his friends. His close friends. To which of them did he tell his dreams?"

"Exactly," Horn said. "It seems to me that it would be one of the Directors. Which one stood to gain most from Kohlnar's sudden death?"

"The hunter," Lil said hollowly, "the bloody, bloody hunter."

"Duchane?" Wu said. "Perhaps. He or one of the others might hope to retrieve from chaos what he couldn't get by an orderly transfer of authority. So far Duchane has seemed to gain the most. He has moved swiftly and surely; at the moment he is the most powerful man alive. His position is pretty; it would be even prettier if he had caught the assassin. Or if the lower levels were not on the edge of rebellion. He could have counted on the first; perhaps he could not have expected the second. Duchane. Or perhaps one of the others."

Horn heard light metallic sounds. He identified it with the opening of Wu's suitcase. A bar of something was pressed into his hand. He heard a gurgling sound bringing the pungent odor of synthetic alcohol. He bit into the bar gingerly. It was sweet and rich with oils. He ate it hungrily.

"Don't forget poor Lil!" the parrot said quickly.

The light clicked on briefly. Horn glimpsed a pouch in Wu's band and the glitter of huge diamonds sliding from it.

"How did you find me?" Horn asked suddenly.

"Lil and I are used to finding hidden things," Wu said. "We found the lovely Wendre's diamond tiara, eh, Lil?"

For answer there was only a muffled crunch and a sigh of satisfaction. "Lovely, lovely," Lil said. Horn couldn't decide whether she was referring to Wendre, the tiara, or the diamond.

"It must have been through the Cult," Horn said.

"You're a clever man," Wu said softly. "Yes, the Cult owes me a favor or two, and I called on it to locate you."

"It must be an interesting organization; even more efficient than Duchane's. That's surprising in a religious cult."

"Isn't it," Wu agreed. "And it is—efficient, I mean—in its way and at its level. It followed you for some time, sent out some red herrings to draw the pursuit away, and brought you here."

"That was the guard who ran past the shop," Horn exclaimed.

"No doubt," Wu said.

"Why did you want to find me?" Horn asked.

"You have a right to be curious. And I have a right to refuse to satisfy it. You may credit it to your own charm or an old man's whim, if you like. You are interesting, you know. Hired killers always are. Not admirable, but interesting."

"I've never asked for admiration," Horn said mildly. "This isn't the epoch for admirable characters. They die young. My only interest is survival. But then I don't suppose anyone would apply the adjective to you, either."

"True," said the old voice in the darkness. "But our survival characteristics are slightly different. Yours are skill, strength, courage, and amorality. Mine are craft, weakness, cowardice, and immorality. I recognize the great social forces and work through them; my infirmities keep me alive."

"It is a strong man," Lil said in a deep voice, "who recognizes his own weakness."

"You, on the other hand," Wu continued, "ignore the social forces and outrage them, and your strength has pitted you against an empire. And yet I like you, Mr. Horn. You are right; this is no time for admirable characters; and I am glad you recognize the historical necessities that mold and move us, willy-nilly."

"I've been used and moved," Horn said firmly. "No more. From this time on, I'm a free agent, moving but unmoved." He chuckled; it was an odd sound in the darkness. "Let Eron and history beware."

"It is a weak man," Lil said in the same tone at before, "who knows only his own strength."

"How do you know," Wu said, "that in these decisions and these acts you are not an instrument still?"

"We're wasting time," Horn said quickly. "What we need is not questions but answers. Someone must have the answers. The person who hired me, for one."

"And if you find him," Wu said, "and if you find out 'why?' —how much better off will you be?"

"I'll know which way to move," Horn said. "One thing that could be done, for instance: cut off the Tubes!"

Wu gasped and then chuckled appreciatively. "A master stroke! It would take a man like you to think of it."

Horn thought he caught a note of mockery in Wu's voice. "Eron is dependent on the Tubes, totally dependent. She can't live more than a few days without fresh supplies from the Empire. And if fighting should start, the only chance for a successful rebellion would be if Eron were isolated. Without fresh troops—"

"You needn't list the advantages," Wu broke in. "I appreciate them even more than you do. The Empire would be crippled, a wheel without a hub. But how do you propose to cut the Tubes? It isn't even known how they are activated."

"The Directors should know," Horn said.

"It comes back to them, doesn't it?" Wu mused. "I'm tempted to help you. Suppose we join forces temporarily. I say 'temporarily' because I can't guarantee how long this quixotic spirit will last. I am an old, old man and easily tired. But we have no love for Eron, eh, Lil? We wouldn't be sorry to do the Empire an ill turn."

"Good," Horn said softly. He didn't underestimate the help that Wu and Lil offered; they hadn't lived so long without unusual talents and great cleverness. "We've wasted enough time," he said. "Let's go."

"Where? Like this? Blindly? Ah, youth, youth!"

"Well, where do you want to go?"

"Why, to the center of things, of course. But suitably attired and adequately prepared. Put these things on."

Horn felt heavy cloth pressed into his hands. He sorted it into pants, a tunic, and a uniform cap. He hesitated a moment and then stripped off his coveralls.

"A little light," Lil said impatiently.

In the brief flash Horn saw Lil clinging to the lock of the door. One claw ended in minute feelers which disappeared into the lock's tiny holes. Tumblers fell, clinking metallically. No wonder locks were no barrier!

Horn slipped into the clothing. It was a uniform, by the feel of it, and it fit surprisingly well. While he listened to Wu's sighs and rustlings, he had time to wonder where the clothing had come from. It could only have been that fabulous, inexhaustible container, Wu's battered suitcase, which was obviously much bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.

Wu sighed deeply and clicked the suitcase shut. "Here," he said. He laid a heavy object in Horn's hand. Horn had no difficulty identifying it. It was a unitron pistol, complete with cord. "You need this for at least two reasons."

"Disguise and defense," Horn supplied. He slipped the cord around his left shoulder and followed Wu's footsteps through the open doorway. They walked along dark corridors for minutes. Wu stopped once to slip his suitcase, regret fully, into a hidden niche. The second time he flicked a light onto a smooth rock wall. His hand moved into the light. Horn noticed that it looked different, somehow, but he had no time to think about that.

The rock wall opened outward. Beyond was the dimly lighted interior of a tube-car. Wu was outlined against it He was dressed magnificently in rich orange synsilk and furs. A padded bosom stuck out above his round belly. Lil seemed to be gone. Horn looked down at his own uniform. It was orange, too.

Orange, Horn thought. Orange for the Directorship of Power.

Wu turned his face back toward Horn. Horn drew back, startled. It wasn't Wu's face; it was the fat, golden, jowly face of an Eron noble. Tawny eyes peered out at him over puffy folds of flesh. The hair was stiff, reddish.

The pistol was in Horn's hand. He knew that face. He had seen it, close, not long ago. It was the face of Matal, Director for Power.

"Ah," Wu's voice said. "Then the disguise is effective?"

Horn was startled again. His hand relaxed. The gun flew back against his chest. "But—" he began.

"Another of Lil's many talents," Wu said.

"The clothes, the disguise," Horn said. "It's obvious that you had this planned."

"Planned?" Wu echoed judiciously. "I am always prepared, let us say, for opportunity."

"It seems to me that I am being used," Horn said gloomily. "What are you after?"

"We all are used. If I am using you, you in turn, are using me. The question is: are we going where you want to go?"

"Where are we going?"

To a meeting of Eron's Directors," Wu said softly. They must elect a new General Manager. It is the most crucial meeting since the foundation of the Company. We will be there. We will take part in the decision, I as the Director for Power and you as my personal guard."

"Yes," Horn said. It was the right place to go; he could feel it intuitively. "But the real Matal will be there."

"Matal is dead."

"Dead?" Horn echoed.

"He was always a careless man. Greed and death caught up with him. Duchane's assassin found him alone. He was hurrying to a meeting with his head engineers. Power was shining in front of him, the power over men that is real power, and it blinded his eyes. He died at the south Terminal cap, clutching his belly. It was a poor substitute for an empire."

"Does Duchane know it?"

"Even Duchane wouldn't dare receive such a message. No, the assassin must make his way to the Director for Security as best he can, evading capture. He must come a long way, but if we delay much longer he may be there before us."

"How did you know about this car?" Horn asked.

There are few things about Eron I don't know," Wu said placidly. "It is difficult to keep secrets from a man who has outlived civilizations. I was here when the Directors' private tubeway was built. Another thing I know, for instance, is that the car is meant for one person but two can squeeze in. I will let you have the chair."

Horn hesitated and stepped into the car. He sat down and strapped the belt across his legs. Wu painfully maneuvered his bulky, padded figure past Horn's knees. He squeezed and panted and complained, but finally he was wedged into the space at Horn's feet, his back against the wall under the control panel, his feet planted solidly under the chair.

"Close the door," Wu sighed. "This is extremely uncomfortable for an old man of my size and shape. Already I can feel my enthusiasm waning."

Horn looked down. There was something naggingly familiar about the way his face was shadowed. It eluded him; Horn shook his head and slowly closed the door. The click was followed by darkness and the nudge of the sliding inner door. Once more the many-colored disks floated in front of Horn.

"Which one?" he asked. "Black."

Horn felt a shiver start up his spine. He frowned. "Duchane?"

"That's where the meeting is," Wu said. The colored disks cast an eery, motley pattern over his reddish hair, but his face was dark. "To the center of things. Quickly."

Horn reached out and palmed the black disk. He felt again that uneasy sensation of free fall; there is no direction but outward. Perhaps it was half due to that, the suspicion that swept over him.

It was obvious, however, that Wu knew too much and he knew too little. All he knew about Wu was what the old man had told him; that could easily be lies and evasions. Wu could be anyone; he could be working for Duchane himself. He could be leading Horn into a trap. He had to have some organization behind him; he couldn't have all the information he displayed without it, not even with the help of Lil.

"You know a great many things," Horn said in the darkness. "Things that Duchane doesn't know: me and my location, Matal and his fate. And things that no one but Directors know: the secret tubeway and the meeting and its location. It is a wonder how you have learned so much."

"I am—"

"I know," Horn said impatiently. "You are an old man, and you have learned many things."

He started. Shadows over Wu's face. Put a hood over it. The resemblance clicked into place.

"You!" Horn said hoarsely. "You were the priest with the embroidered symbol on your robe."

"The Prophet," Wu corrected gently.

the history

The pecking order....

Among men, as among chickens, it is a necessity. Hen A can peck hen B; hen B can peck hen C; hen C can peck hen D. Until the pecking order is established, there can be no peace in the henyard.

What chickens know instinctively, men must learn for themselves: power is indivisible.

Garth Kohlnar learned that rule well as he fought his way up the dangerous ladder of power politics from an impoverished nobility. Power is indivisible, and there are no means alien to it: intrigue, corruption, exposure of corruption, deals, betrayals....

The management of the Company had been set up as a check-ana-balance. The five Directors were chosen by competitive examination from all qualified engineers among the Golden Folk. Their duties: to establish policy, elect the General Manager, and preserve the secret of the Tube.

The General Manager was merely an executive. It had never worked that way. Kohlnar had ruled the Company with an iron hand.

His death shattered the peace of the henyard. The pecking order had to be rediscovered....

chapter 12

STALEMATE

"Do you think," Wu asked, "that a man could live as long as I have with just the aid of his own senses?"

"Then the Cult exists only for your protection," Horn said sardonically.

"For my protection," Wu agreed, "and the consolation of the miserable. And possibly for other reasons which we can't go into at the moment. For we are there."

The car came to a stop. The door swung open. Outside it was a large, bare room with glistening, black marble walls. Wu motioned him out of the car. Horn unsnapped the belt and cautiously stepped out, his pistol in his hand. The room was empty.

Wu led the way to one black wall. A section of it slid aside as they approached. Behind it was a small, square room; its walls were black minors. It was lighted by hidden sources near the ceiling. Dark, disquieting faces peered out of the walls at them. As they turned around, the door slid shut and the floor pressed heavily against their feet.

"I have more eyes and ears than you think," Wu said, "but it is better to say no more. So does Duchane, and this car is probably tapped."

"It is." The heavy, powerful voice came from a side wall. Duchane was staring blackly out of it at them. "Welcome, Matal." His voice was impassive and unsurprised. "We've been waiting for you."

The car stopped. The door opened. Wu preceded Horn down a long hall. Like the other room below, it was walled in black marble. Even the heavy carpet underneath their feet was black.

"Your tastes run to the macabre," Wu said. His voice had changed; there was a bubbling breathlessness to it.

"Thank you," Duchane said. His voice came from near the ceiling. It was an unnerving experience, as if the building itself were alive, a part of Duchane. "It is, after all, my job."

They approached a door. Two impassive, black-uniformed guards stood on either side of it. It slid open in front of them. Beyond it was another short hall, two more guards, a second sliding door. And then a large, hexagon room. It was black, as usual, but it was better lighted than any of the others. Horn watched the door close behind them. There was no visible seam. He tried to mark the spot.

The table was a polished, black hexagon to match the room. Three sides were occupied. Duchane had the door to his right; Fenelon was facing it; Ronholm had his back to it. A single guard stood behind Ronholm and Fenelon; each was dressed in the blue or green of the Directorship.

Duchane didn't have a human guard. Crouching beside his chair was a gigantic black hound. It was twin to the one Horn had seen dead upon the platform in front of the Victory Monument. Duchane's hand rested affectionately on the monster's head.

"You're late," Duchane said casually. "But now we can begin."

"I was—detained," Wu said breathlessly. "Where is the Director for Communications, the lovely Wendre?"

"She, too, is—detained. I expect her later—"

"I object to this entire air of intimidation," Ronholm broke in with quick, youthful anger. "I move that we hold our meeting, as usual, in the Directors' Room at the residence of the General Manager."

Duchane looked at Ronholm mildly. "There are obvious reasons why that is impractical. First, the General Manager is dead; we must respect this period of official mourning. Second, and more important, these are troubled times. Kohlnar has been assassinated. One of us may be next. The lower levels are muttering, and the word they use is 'revolt.' This is the only place whose absolute safety I can guarantee."

"I can guarantee the safety of my residence," Ronholm snapped, his handsome face flushed.

Duchane smiled broadly. "Can you?" He chuckled. "Can you really? The Director has made a motion. All in favor?" Only Ronholm's voice was heard. Duchane shrugged. "You seem to be in a minority."

Wu sank gratefully into a deep chair directly opposite Duchane. Horn stood behind the pseudo-Matal and watched Duchane.

Fenelon asked a pointed question in his high-pitched, aristocratic voice. "What can Security report about the assassin? Has he been found?"

Duchane's face, sprinkled with a golden powder, darkened. "Not yet. It is only a matter of hours. We know that he is on Eron. We are closing in."

"Are you?" Wu asked. "Are you really?"

Duchane shot him a swift, dark glance. "I'll get him. And when I'm finished with him, I'll give the remains to Panic." He caressed the huge, black head. "It will be justice for the death of Terror."

"You've mourned more over that hell-hound than you have about Kohlnar," Ronholm said bitterly.