JhsLAicUc - SPICA. JhsL pdamt— MARTAS. JhsL phobkm.— UTOPIA.

They said: "The ideal society would have no stated rules because it would be so designed that everyone would do the right thing anyway."

But Interstellar Security asked:

Was it right for a society to veil everything in secrecy?

. . . To refuse entry to honest visitors?

. . . To incur the hatred of the rest oj the planet?

. . . To greet investigators with rocket attacks?

. . . To set a murder trap for an interplanetary envoy?

It was a problem for I.S. Agents Sixx and Lowry, and it might well be their last.

JOHNT. PfflLLJPENT, an engineer by profession, is a well-established writer of both science fiction and mystery novels. His works have been published in the United States and in Great Britain in both hard covers and in paperback. He has been a regular contributor to Analog andto other leading science fiction magazines. Many of his novels have appeared under the pen-name of John Rackham. He reserves his own name for what he considers his best work—among which, this novel obviously belongs. He lives in London with his family.

GENIUS

UNLIMITED

by

John T. Phillifent

DAW  BOOKS,INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

1301 Avenue of theAmericas New York, N. Y.       10019

COPYRIGHT © 1972 BY JOHN T.PHILLIFENT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED COVER ART BY JACK GAUGHAN

BCD o K s PRINTED IN U.S.A.

One

The Interstellar Security building, at least that eight hundred feet of it that bulked soldily above the lunar crater floor, had not been designed with aesthetic considerations in mind. It was intended to be functional, and it was, all the way down from the star-aimed antenna, past the line-of-sight wave guides, through communication offices and provision for the possible bulky cargo that I.S. agents could be called on to shepherd to and from distant spots, and on down into the complex of departments that made up the invisible two-thirds below, resting solidly on the mascon shield. It was unlovely, but to Rex Sixx, catching a brief glimpse of it as the moon tube carried him and his companion through the crater wall, it looked like home.

His feelings, as a consequence, were mixed. He would have been less than human, less than honest, if he had denied a certain thrill, a small tug at his nerves. But he would have been less than the trained agent he was if he had not at the same time been aware of a strong spark of suspicion. Jason Horn, the managing director and virtual owner of I.S., was not in the habit of calling his two most esteemed agents off a furlough just for trivilalities. Sixx eyed his colleague as the speeding tube car dived below the surface again and ran into the maze of tunnels that led to the building's underground section. Roger Lowry looked to be half-asleep, but that was normal for him. His herculean six foot six of well-distributed muscle bulked inside his stark-white uniform suit and was calculated to produce an immediate impression of awe and respect, but a second glance would take in his ingenuous stare and mild manner, marking him as big but dumb. And that was of considerable advantage to Lowry, and he

knew it and used it when and as necessary. He caught and

returned Sixx's wondering look now, and waited.

"What d'you suppose the old man wants us for this time?" Sixx mused, idly voicing the question in both their minds. Lowry shrugged fractionally.

"Been thinking about that. Refresher course, maybe?"

"Go back to sleep," Sixx advised sadly. "The only refresher treatment I ever need is precisely that which I have just been diverted from. If that's the best you can do . . ." Silence came again, but he grasped at the idea for a moment or two. It was a possibility he hadn't thought of. I.S. was nothing if not thorough, and whenever any individual or group openly declares it has something of great value that is absolutely safely taken care of, there are always other individuals suddenly inspired to find out just how good that claim is, so a great deal of the unseen work of I.S. lay in keeping one jump ahead of the latest in hijacking and other assorted forms of unlawfully possessing somebody else's property. Maybe the ungodly had come up with something very new. It was an interesting thought. It still lingered at the back of his mind as they were admitted to Jason Horn's office and told to sit.

"I seem to recall, some time ago," Horn began conversationally, sharing his mild stare equally between both men, "one of you making some supposedly witty comment about you two always getting stuck with the difficult assignments . . . ?" He let it hang there, quite at ease behind his vast desk, looking like a much-abused but determinedly patient grandfather. Sixx promptly forgot all about such trivia as training courses. He had made the comment in question, and he knew that Horn knew it And any time the old man needed to sound abused, misunderstood, and forgetful, all at the same time, you could bet something hairy was in the pipeline. Horn took a breath that was almost a sigh. "This time it's something so simple and easy I'm almost ashamed to discuss it. But it is important to a whole lot of people, and I do not have to tell you two that at least half of our reputation stems from what we appear to be doing, and this is one of those times when it has to look good. So you two are it."

This ingenuous appeal to simple logic and reason turned up Sixx's suspicions to full throttle. He favored Horn with a sad smile. "Now what kind of an approach is that, sir?" he asked gently. "When have we ever refused a job? So it's a tough one I Why not just spell it out? You're going to, anyway."

"That soft-sell routine makes me nervous," Lowry agreed, and Sixx had to be careful with his smile. Lowry nervous would be like a Mount Rushmore carving putting its tongue out.

"You're a couple of cynics." Horn told them. "You don't trust anybody at all!"

"Right!" Sixx agreed. "And we're still here, which has to prove something one way or the other."

Horn sighed, looked at the slip of paper on his desk. "The assignment. How much do either of you know about a place called Martas?"

"Not a thing." Sixx admitted.

"Quite a bit," Lowry stated at the same moment, and then moved in faint embarrassment as the other two turned to stare at him curiously.

"You do?" Horn said. "All right. I have a little data here, but I'd like to hear what you know just to check. Go ahead!"

Lowry moved his suit helmet from his knees to the floor by his feet, finger-combed his mane of pale blond hair, scowled in thought. "Man called Jan Bardak," he began. "Hungarian. Polymath genius. Was in one of the very early Colony Probe expeditions in charge of the scientific and technical section. It was around fifty years ago. That expedition had a bad time, lost their unit chief and a few of the other section leaders. Ended up, anyway, with Bardak in command. They located a star with planets somewhere in the Spica System, I think. Not too sure about that, but a star with planets. They named the star Bardak after him. One planet was 'E'-type primitive, with continental land masses, islands, acceptable climate. They classed it suitable for colonization and named it Martas. Bardak's idea. He must have had a sense of humor."

"Not to me," Sixx denied. "Not until you explain it a bit."

"In Hungarian 'Martas' means 'gravy.' He must have read a book."

Horn took another glance at his paper. "Any more?"

"A bit. Seems Bardak really was a smart man. He stayed with it, held a high place with the colonizing parties, organized things. They took over the major continent. Semitropical, rugged but fertile, and rich in minerals. He got it all going, turning over, made himself a pile."

"Smart,"Sixx agreed cautiously. "A good businessman, maybe. But a genius? That's a big word, Roger."

"There'smore." Lowry stayed mild, went on. "Bardak stayed with it, with the major continent . . . they called it 'Dolgozni,' it means "work' . . . until he'd had enough. Then he realized all his holdings, made enough to be able to buy outright and in perpetuity . . . everything ... the rights to a nearby island. Big place that nobody else fancied, so maybe it wasnt so difficult. But then, off his own bat, he issued an open invitation to any superbrain, genius, expert, whatever . . . who felt frustrated and hampered by civilized society ... to come and live on his island and help work out the plans for an ideal social frame, some kind of Utopia. For free, if they could pass his tests. He named the island 'Iskola' . . . means •school*. . ."

"Bells,"Sixx interrupted softly, "begin to ring. The new Utopia. I have heard snippets, not a lot. But as I recall, the whole thing died, folded for lack of support and interest. Seems the geniuses would rather be frustrated in familiar surroundings than have to make their theories work in virgin territory. Something like that. No?"

"No!"Lowry was quietly emphatic. "The news value faded fast, and there was no great rush. The qualifying tests are rugged, I hear. But there has been a slow and steady trickle of people into Iskola ever since. Nobody ever comes back, and there's very little genuine information released, but there are rumors that they are all doing very well. One thing I hear is that Iskola runs a problem-solving service on the side, only they pick and choose what problems they will work on, and the answers they come up with aren't always too popular. Effective, maybe, but not popular.

"OneI heard about ... a new kind of power source. Somebody asked . . . don't know who ... if the geniuses could come up with a power source that wouldn't create pollution problems. The answer came back that they already had one, were using it. That it didn't cost anything, either, after the original installation and maintenance. They offered to give it away free, but only on condition that the produced power would also be given away free. And it seems whoever asked the question did some hard thinking about it and decided they couldn't afford to accept it on those terms. That's the sort of thing I hear."

Sixxshook his head slowly. "I've heard some queer ones, too. No way of telling whether it's myth, leg pull, or just plain wishful thinking. For me, I will believe in a society of geniuses, a new Utopia, when I see it. Maybe."

"All the same," Horn took charge again, "your account tallies with what I have here, Lowry. Essentially. I have a few dates and details, not important. By all accounts Bar-dak is either dead by now or a very old man, but the island society continues, is just as close-mouthed as ever, self-contained and hard to get into. Until now. Something has happened. And that is where we come in."

Sixx discarded philosophy rapidly, became attentive. "There's discord in Eden, now?"

"Something like that." Horn was cautious. "You need some background to help get the perspective. For one thing, there is no love lost whatever between Dolgozni and Iskola. So far as I can read it, the Dolgoznians—or Mar-tans, as they prefer it—have the firm impression that Bardak played their economy into a phony high, a boom, then sold up and ducked out, and left them to cope with a whole flock of hard crises that they never saw coming. The way things are now, the colony is still thriving, but it is hard work all the way. What you get, you have to earn. They think Bardak saw it coming and ducked out. So they do not wish to know about Iskola. And it's mutual. Iskola doesn't want to know about them any more than is inescapably necessary.

"Next, the only available law and police body on Mar-tas is, of course, in Dolgozni. Although it is efficient enough, it is geared to industrial and personal offenses, casual violence, property rights, stuff like that. By all accounts Dolgozni proves something, that in a hard-grinding community there is no time for any smart set, no upper crust, no economic juggling . . . and no crimes of degeneration. Nobody has much free time, free capital, free anything. Everybody has to work hard just to get by. So the laws are simple and basic, and crime is rough, ready, and uncomplicated. And so," he shrugged, "when Iskola had to confess to itself that it is stuck with a crime wave among its geniuses, it did not turn to Dolgozni for aid."

"Hah!" Sixx found it wryly amusing. "Physician, heal thyself. If they have such a superclever society, surely they can catch their own bad ones?"

"That's backwards, Rex," Lowry declared. "If you set away to design an ideal society, the last thing you'd think of,or need, would be enforcement or rules that need enforcing, come to that. Law and order, rule and punishment —discipline from outside—that's only for those who need it as an assist!"

"That'sa good point" Horn agreed. "When have I ever had to use the whip on either of you two?"

Sixxturned an exasperated stare on his partner. "You're so smart, how come you never ran off and joined the School?" And then, following his own hint, he added. "Or maybe you did try once, and that's how come you know so much?"

Lowrystirred again in faint embarrassment "I made a few inquiries, sure. No harm in that"

Hornwas openly intrigued now. "I never knew that, Lowry. What came of it? Did you take a test and blow it?"

"Nevergot that far, sir.I wanted to find out what a man would be letting himself in for, supposing he passed and was accepted. But they don't give out that kind of information, so I let the idea slide. You say they have a crime wave? Where does that interest us?"

"Ahyes." Horn went back to his paperwork. "All I haveis an outline. Seemingly it took the Iskolans some time to realize they had acrime wave in the first place, as they do not have any setup for indicating such things. Then it took them quite a while to organize a group, or committee, to decide what to do about it"

"Thisis genius?" Sixx demanded. "What's so difficult about organizing a committee? We ordinary mortals do it all the time!"

"Exactly!"Horn retorted. "You think about that and listen. They got a committee, made a decision, and the decision was to invite an external agency to investigate and help. Not from Dolgozni, as I have already made clear. So they handed it out to Interstelpol, and it eventually ended up at I.S.P. headquarters And they kicked it around for a while. Not a bit keen. Nobody seems to be keen to help Iskola. Do I have to explain that?"

"Notto me." Sixx was emphatic. "I'm sticking with what I said just now. They're so smart, they shouldn't have any crooks, anyway, and they ought to be able to catch their own."

"Quiteso.That's the common attitude."

Sixxscowled a little at having his attitude described as "common" but forebore further comment. Horn sat up now, a subtle change showing in his manner.

"A compromise has been effected. l.S.P. will provide one special agent without authority, in advisory capacity only, to look over the problem and apply expert knowledge, give advice. That is where we come in. You two. It is, in other words, a straight security-bodyguard job."

Lowry stirred in interest this time. "It looks as if I might get an inside view of Iskola after all."

"I'd be interested in that myself," Sixx admitted, recovering his aplomb. "Just where is Martas?"

Horn slid a data sheet across the desk for them to study. The star Bardak is just off the Spica cluster in Virgo. You'll use your own clipper, but travel in caravan. Routine stuff that you know as well as I do. But there is one more item, strictly between us." The new manner was more apparent than ever now, the tone putting a damper on levity.

"I can guess part of it." Sixx aimed a finger at an entry on the sheet. "The l.S.P. agent is a woman . . . ?"

"Is a lady," Horn corrected gently, moving the switch that isolated the office from any kind of external interruption or surveillance whatever. He eyed his two best men. "Louise Latham is the only child of a very good friend of mine. Wally—Commander Walter Latham—in his own way did for l.S.P. what I've managed to do for this business." He made a gesture that included by inference the whole of Interstellar Security and its reputation of never having failed to deliver strictly as per agreement.

"My father started this as a shoestring outfit. I made it grow a name. Wally studied in the same schools I did, only he preferred to go into a professional organization. He helped make Interstelpol famous for its claim "without fear or favor,' you know? That's all water over the dam now. Wally had one child. We've both watched Louise grow up. She is bright. Brilliant, even. So, inevitably, a bit odd. Difficult, at times. And difficult for him to avoid suspicion of nepotism. So I have to assure you she got where she is on her own steam. And she is good. Very good. All this is to tell you that any time she seems a bit peculiar, a little off, that is none of your affair, get me? Your job, both of you, is to get her safely to Iskola, to guard her at all times, and bring her back safely. In all other respects you will do whatever she says, right?"

Sixx thought he detected anxiety, put it down to personal involvement, and offered a reassuring smile. "That's allright with us, sir. Do we collect from Earth, or can she make it this far alone?"

Itwas a legitimate question. Moon-Base was the accepted Transit Station between Earth and way out there, and riding the Earth-Moon shuttle was a little more hazardous man driving downtown to shop, but not much. All the same, if Louise Tjtham wasall that much of a somebody, perhaps the full panoply might be called for. IS. men didn't often make spectacles of themselves in their white immune suits on Earth, but it had been done. Calculated publicity never did any harm, and Sixx himself was in no way averse to a little notoriety . , . but Horn shook his head.

"Igave the wrong impression, sorry. Louise isn't famous at all, not even among her colleagues. I told you, she's odd. I wanted to warn you on that, and I have done so. You'll have no need to lay on the spectaculars until you're on Martas. Even then, diplomacy will be called for. This is one time we have to be strictly neutral, offending nobody. I.S.P. is sending the boss's daughter to make it look good. We go along with that We do not offend Martas— mat is a valuable economy—and we do not offend Iskola, either, by letting them get the notion that this is just going through the motions. Diplomacy is called for."

Sixxrose, collected more documents and his helmet Lowry, also rising, looked puzzled. "Sounds to me as if we are justgoing through the motions," he said. "As if nobody really gives a damn about the Iskolan crime wave!"

Horneyed him, turned to Sixx with a sigh. "You have the common viewpoint Sixx. Take him awayand explain it to him, will you? I have things to do." He moved switches, touched a button on his desk. "Harriet? Let me have the latest progress report on that Canopus psycho-perfume shipment would you7"

Two

"Soexplain," Lowry invited as they descended rapidly to subsurface transport level. "Why doesn't anybody have any time for a society of geniuses?"

"Thereare times," Sixx retorted, "when you bother me, Roger. How can you say it like that and not see the obvious answer?" They stepped out of the shaft car and made for the tunnel platform, buttoned for a four-man, and waited.

"Iknow it's obvious that people do not like geniuses, Rex. That's not what I asked. Iwant to know why they don't."

"That'sjust as obvious, hnt it?How do you feel when you run across somebody who's a mile ahead of you in everything?"

"Idon't. Never met anybody like that. I have met plenty who know a lot more about certain things than I do. From them I learn if I can." Lowry checked his next words as a car hissed alongside, vacuum-seal doors parting to let them in, murmuring shut again. Sixx punched in their destination. The car sped away under the urging of sole-noidal fields.

Lowrytried again. "This suit, for instance," he offered. "I had to learn how to get into and out of it, how to maintain it, monitor it, what it will and wont stand up to, all that and more from people who know a lot more about it than ever I will. They know the how and why of all the protective and support systems. I don't. That makes them smarter than me ... on that. But so what? Maybe I know things about unarmed combat that they don't Are they worried?"

"Notthe point. We each have our own areas of excellence there. But I said somebody who'd be ahead of you

in everything. Then what? If you had to go up against

him, you'd lose every time!"

"So?" Lowry was unmoved. "Who says I have to win them all? And, anyway, why should such a man want to go against me?"

Sixx felt growing irritation, then caught himself with a slow grin. "You are doing it again, aren't you? You and that wide-eyed innocent look. You know damned well . . ."

"I know it's typical of most people to be scared of something they don't understand, sure. But I have never understood why. If a man is all that much smarter than me, then he is, and maybe I can learn something from him. As for him being a threat to me—I suppose, yes— but I can't see why. The urge to dominate somebody else is a sign of a small mind not a big one. And, anyway, by me a genius is not just somebody plus, it's somebody different"

"Now you're changing the rules." Sixx braced himself as the car slid to a halt and opened up. "You may be eagerly looking forward to moving among a crowd of crackpots. Me, I intend to keep a very sharp eye on them. And I still say, if they are so smart, they should be able to worm out their own crooks."

The Transport Terminus hall was a vast controlled confusion of action, with knots of intent people being convoyed in various directions, low-flying flatcars magnetically levitating across the metal floor, piled high with miscellaneous luggage, the regular chanting of arrival and departure times, and on all sides the constant ripple and change of destination and time displays. This pair had negotiated the complexity many times and were unimpressed by it. Sixx consulted his documents, then a distant display, handed a flimsy to Lowry.

"Earth shuttle is just in. Our assignment ought to be on it. Ill get her at the in-gates. You go fix us a berth for Clipper IV in the next caravan heading Spica-way. Let's hope we get lucky and catch a through trip."

Lowry moved away through the throng, the various passenger groups giving him an awed and respectful clearance. The stark-white suit and glitter gold facings were highly effective in such moments. Sixx grinned and ambled across to the archway where luggage was already starting to emerge on floats. Now, by twos and threes, came the travelers. It was easy to assort them into those who had and had not been this way before. The distracting series ofswitches, from zero-gee in flight, to anything up to three-gee landing, to Luna's own low-gee in the tunnels and Terminus, were enough to unsettle any but the hardiest set of reflexes. Novices looked unhappy, even ill at times, whereas the experienced merely looked resigned to it alL Gee changes also did strange things to the delicate nuances of feminine architecture and adornment, and it was by no means uncommon for some shapely miss to discover that what had draped her within fashionable bounds back home on Earth now had a tendency to betray rather too much not-so-solid flesh. Sixx had an eye open for anything like that, but not to the degree that he was likely to miss his main purpose.

Ina while he saw one, alone, showing all the signs of expecting to be met—and inwardly distressed. She was of medium height, nonspectacular in a blue-black cape, the hood back to show a royal blue lining and raven-black hair to her shoulders. Her eyes were enigmatic under tinted lenses. He moved in.

"MissLatham? Miss Louise Latham?"

Sheput out a hand to touch his wrist, peered up, took off her lenses, and her eyes were big, yellow-brown like sunshine through honey. In the next moment she squeezed them tight shut and restored her protection. "You got me," she said thickly in her throat "Now . . . find someplace where I can sit, near a table with a glass on it, a big glass. I need it!"

"Noproblem." Sixx offered his arm, and she leaned on it, allowed herself to be led. "Bumpy trip? Your first?"

"Alltrips are bumpy to me." Her voice was odd, throaty as if she had a heavy cold, and the words were slurred, but she was obviously taking great care to enunciate properly. "Any gross movement, movement faster than a brisk walk, upsets my location sense. Do you have that?"

"Notsure what it means, Miss Latham." Sixx extended his other arm to trip a door eye, and they passed within, into a quiet, discreetly dim-lit saloon. He steered her to a table and buttoned for service. "If you mean sense of direction, I have it, a little. But it doesnt get upset that •I know of. Anyway, I dont get travel sick, and I suppose that's the same thing. What's your taste?"

Atrundling mechanical halted by their table. She peered at it, made a faint head shake of disapproval. "Dial a double whiskey and a double vodka, and just a sneeze of lemon, all in the same glass."

Sixx slowed his hand in midmovement. He remembered Horn's warning, but he couldn't resist asking. "You're sure?"

"With that model, that's the most you can get in one glass. I've tried. Even then it won't operate without that touch of lemon. Regulations? Why can't a person just go ahead and order whatever she wants? You know, if you don't dial that properly, it will automatically serve up two glasses—which is a waste of time, isn't it? And . . ."

"That's not what I meant," he interrupted hastily, and dialed her order. As the mechanical began to disgorge, he inserted a modest whiskey and lime for himself and glanced at Miss Latham to see her glass tilting steadily in one unbroken movement until it was quite empty.

She put it down, shivered, and said, "That is much better. Another would be better stilll"

He couldn't find any words. Looking away, he saw Lowry looming up and fingered the dial again. "Yours with soda, Roger?"

"Move your card out of the slot, mister," Miss Latham urged. "Now that there's three of us—that thing can count." Sixx removed his credit card as Lowry sat, took his glass, and stared candidly. She inserted her own card and dialed another lethal glassful for herself. "Same again for you two?" she asked, and the glasses appeared dutifully. Sixx took a deep breath and a small sip.

"Introductions," he said. "Miss Latham. I'm Rex Sixx. This is my partner Roger Lowry. We bodyguard you from here on. What's the word, Roger?"

"Fair. There's a caravan due out in a couple of hours bound for Arcturus. We can connect from there for a Spica run. I checked, and Miss Latham is already provisionally reserved aboard Canberra II for Arcturus with ransfer. Her baggage is already going aboard." He moved his gaze to look a query at the lady, but she was attending to the glass destined for her. It went the way of the first, all in one long, smooth swallow, and Sixx expected to see her drop dead, but she appeared to thrive on the dose.

"Better still," she sighed. "Your turn, Mr. Lowry."

Lowry eyed the pair of glasses appointed to him, then the one sipped, one as yet untouched beside Sixx, looked at her again warily, asked the formula, and stared at Sixx in unbelief as she pronounced it.

"Don't look at me." Sixx hunched his shoulders inside his suit "You heard what she said. You also remember whatMr. Horn told us. Whatever she says, and if we have to carry her aboard, that's no great problem."

MissLatham chuckled as Lowry operated the dial. She removed her tinted lenses again, laid them aside, and he saw that so far from being semiconscious she looked refreshed, at peace with herself, and genuinely amused. "You wouldn't be the first to make the mistake you're making, Mr. Sixx. You won't have to carry me anywhere. Thank you." She extended a slim hand for the third glass, and the mechanical automatically trundled away, obeying its built-in program. As she had said, it could count There had to be a ten-minute interval between orders on any one card, 'but there was nothing to stop three people ordering in a row, or six, or ten, even. If you wanted to hang one on fast, it wasn't difficult to beat the machine. Sixx pondered that as he watched the third slug follow the other two.

"Ihave a thing," he said candidly, "about making the same mistake more than once, but this time it looks as if I have to. Nobody can put away that much alcohol and stay conscious."

"You'recovering too much territory, Mr. Sixx. There are exceptions to all rules. What was that about my baggage?" She even sounded better, easier, more alert than before. And attractive, with a glow that wasn't in the least like anything from a bottle. Sixx had the curious, ridiculous impression that all that alcohol had acted like lubrication or some kind of solvent against armor.

"Yourbaggage is going aboard Canberra IL" Lowry repeated.

"Ah.And you'd rather I traveledin your ship?"

"Wewould," Sixx agreed. "Our ship is something special, as you maybe know. And while we don't look for anything to happen, certainly not until we get to Martas, we got our reputation by not taking any chances."

"Iknow your reputation in I.S. I've called Jason Horn Uncle Jason for a good few years now, and I don't want to be in any way difficult You boys fix it whichever way you want"

"Supposewe do it this way." Lowry consulted a flight-program leaflet "It's only six hours to Arcturus. Twenty four hours from there to Spica, but there will be a time lag between while we connect. So we can leave your stuff on Canberra until then and switch while we wait for the next caravan to form. Unless you need anything out of

your bags right away?"

"Not a thing. I don't expect to touch anything until we get where we are going. Just now I said I know a bit about I.S., and so I do, but I've never been inside a clipper. I'd like to. Do you have time to show me around before we lift off?"

"Why not?" Sixx rose, half offering his arm, still convinced that she had to be on the brink of total blackout But Miss Latham rose with apparent ease and stability, striding along between the two men as if breaking rules was an everyday event to her. Over her head Sixx exchanged baffled glances with his partner as they reached the tube-car station and were whisked away to where Clipper IV stood, waist-girdled in her vacuum seal.

"Acronyms fascinate me," she said as they ascended from the tube to approach the ship, "simply because I'm no good at thinking them up myself. This one—Comparator-Loop Integrated Personality-Profile Examiner and Recorder—hence 'Clipper,' right?"

"Not mat it matters a lot. We call him Joe."

"That's the computer that does all the tricks?" She looked up at the immobile hatchway. "Is he watching me now?"

"You could say that." Sixx was a little pained by her tone, which lacked something of the reverence he thought was due. "Joe is recording you for future reference. Hell allow you inboard so long as you're with us. He won't do you any harm, but he won't do a damn thing for you, either, until we assure him you are a friend. Then he will work with you and for you." And there was a lot more to it that Sixx could have told her but didn't. Not even Miss Louise Latham, only daughter of I.S.P.'s Commander Latham and adoptive niece of Jason Horn, and an alcoholic . . . ? Sixx found that hard to take. It itched the back of his mind all the while he and Lowry played host and through the routine of buttoning up and lifting off to rendezvous with the warp ship that would boost them all to Arcturus. In a quiet moment, while she was elsewhere talking to Lowry, he put the question to Joe direct.

"Just how and why does an otherwise nice girl—adult, European, about twenty-eight or thirty, five-eight, around one hundred thirty well-arranged pounds—put away somewhat more than eight fluid ounces of alcohol in as many minutes and stay fully conscious?"

Joe's answer was prosaic and predictable. Physical reaction to alcohol varies widely according to habitation, preparation, congenerics, stomach content, medical history, and learned 'behavior. In other words, insufficient data. As for the "why," same answer. Sixx hadn't really expected anything more. Horn, of course, had known, had warned them. Odd, he'd said. Peculiar, but good. But how does an immunity to alcohol make anybody a good detective? Joe couldn't answer that one, either. By the time the warp was established and the ships were all in cluster within the private, artificial universe of Pauli-space that could go skipping and slipping through and around the absolutes of Einsteinian space-time, Sixx was thoroughly ill at ease with himself. The only positive way to scratch his itch would have been to ask the lady direct, and he wasn't ready for that extreme yet. Instead, he offered a suggestion.

"Nothing much can go wrong in Pauli-space," he said, "so why don't we use a moment to jaunt across to Canberra II and pick up your stuff?"

"Why not?" she agreed amiably. "That's something else I've heard about but never tried. I'm told it's good fun."

The view from the hatchway platform was something to catch the eye and inspire wonder even for those who had seen it often before. "The warp ship," Sixx explained, more for something to say than anything else, "acts as the focal point of a microuniverse about a half a mile in diameter. That pearly-gray backdrop is the boundary. Everything inside is totally isolated. We have our own atmosphere. We even have a small gravitational effect, but for all practical purposes we are in free fall. This—" he put a nine-inch tube-with-toggles into her hand, "—is nothing more than a ducted fan. Point it which way you want to go. Push the button. That's all. You don't even have inertia problems here." All the same he took care to secure the belt of it about her waist to make sure she didn't drop it and get stranded.

The pearl-glow light showed them some eighteen ships of various sizes and types, each hanging from its own sensor-cable link with the central warp ship. Already the ambient space was dotted with gamboling figures exploring a novel sensation. It compared, Sixx thought, with scuba-diving, but without the slide and press of liquid, or bubbles, or alien life shapes. This was a man-made "sea" in which man could clown to his heart's content. A young couple went by, chasing each other in eel-like looping flight He turned a side glance on Miss Latham. She held her fly-cycle chest high, herself almost upright leaning forward into the breeze just a little, her dark hair and flowing cape lifting in fluttering dance. He was instantly reminded of himself as a boy, years ago, standing on a high wall and leaning into a stiff breeze, imagining himself flying like some superman. She looked as pleased now as he had felt then.

Attractive, too.A good, balanced, almost classic face. Good bones. Good shape, too. The dark one-piece pants suit, moulded to her body by the rush of wind, made that obvious. So why the booze? He ran his mind over the reasons known to him and found no comfort there. Ask ten people why they drink and you will get ten answers. Ask experts, so-called, and you'll get theories. He was still shaking his head at the enigma as they slid to a stop by Canberra's gangway and climbed inboard, where ship's power maintained a constant one-fourth gee. A steward, consulting his reference reader, pointed them to "B" deck, cabin 4. It was hardly palatial.

"You wont lose anything by the swap." Lowry thumped the cot with a critical hand. "Our spare cabins are bigger and better. This all of it?" He indicated two snap-locked bags on the floor by a pull-out table. Miss Latham nodded but looked suddenly ill at ease.

"A minute," she said, and her voice had gone fuzzy again. "Something feels all wrong somehow." She edged past Lowry, who had taken up the bags and now rested them on the table. "Heat," she muttered, and put her hand gingerly on one bag, shook her head, tried the other, and snatched her hand back fast as if stung. "That one. Hotl"

Lowry lifted the first bag away and moved to give Sixx room to enter, to slip off an armored glove, to feel for himself.

"Nothing that I can detect, Miss Latham."

"Something!" she insisted, her face upturned to his, strain lines pulling at her mouth, her amber-yellow eyes wide with distress. "It doesn't feel right I'd better open it just to be sure."

"Is it locked?" he asked, and as she shook her head, he replaced his glove, waved her back a little. "Better let me do it just in case." He applied his thumbs to the catches, clicked them free, and the lid started swinging up of itself. There came a fizz and flare, and he slapped the lid shut instantly.

"Get her out of here, Rogerl" he snapped, scooping the bag tight with one gloved hand while he armed his helmet into place with the other, too intent on his own business to be watching Lowry scoop Miss Latham similarly and hurl her and himself out of the cabin. The bag was hot now, the plastic already bubbling and yielding to the inferno inside. Into his helmet radio he said, "No way to stop it, Roger, not now. Contain is the best I can do. Shut the door and keep it shut."

"Check!" Lowry's reply came instantly. "Smother it, maybe? Ill get you some cool!"

Three

Thebag was dissolving now. Sixx dumped it bodily in the middle of the cot and tore at the coverings, sheets, sleeping bag, and then the foam-filled mattress, piling barriers between himself and the blast, part of his mind seeking to analyze what he had seen in that brief glimpse. A canister of some kind. A nozzle. Alarm-red color. And the glare-white of the flare—a flare! That would be acetylene and magnesium, and extras. And it wouldn't smother at alL The soft bulk between him andthe fire started to melt and collapse. He looked around for more, but there wasn't anything. Lowry came on again, breathing a little heavily.

"Keepclear the cabin door, Rex, all right?"

Tmclear.Don't be a damned fool and open it now!**

Theinside of the cabin was thick with fumes, and hot, but Sixx was in no great distress as yet His suit, the product of I.S. skill and ingenuity, was intended to make him immune to just about any threat He was all right, but he couldn't be responsible if the door was opened. Lowry snorted disdain.

"Youkeep clear. I'm going to bust a C0_2 can through now!"

Withthe words and an almighty crash the red spike of a conical fire extinguisher erupted through one plastic panel of the door and wedged there, spouting instant snow with a throaty roar. Then another joined it A third. And a fourth to complete the set. Lowry was nothing if not thorough. Within a few seconds Sixx was blind and lost in a room-sized blizzard of COa snow. There was nothing he could do but wait now.

"Roger,"he said, "if that was a lifeboat flare—and it looked likeone—how long do the damned things take to burn out?"

"Five minutes, as I recall, but I'll check. Ship's officers out here, hold it." Lowry was back in seconds. "Five minutes is right, Rex. You all right in there?"

"No problems, but you'd better warn Lulu the Lush that there isn't going to be anything left here worth a damn. No evidence, nothingl"

In a moment he heard Miss Latham herself in that thick but studiedly coherent voice of their first meeting. "Can you hear me, Mr. Sixx? Are you really all right in there?"

"I've been worse. The hot spot is buried for the moment No sweat. That thing looked like a lifeboat flare, a marker. Not too difficult to get hold of, to plant inside a bag, triggered to go off when opened. You any idea who didn't want you to get to Martas?"

There was a background of agitated gossip and then her voice again in obvious effort "Hadn't we better leave that until later?"

"I suppose. You realize that whatever you had in the way of equipment in that bag is a total loss?"

"Equipment?" Her voice squeaked now. "All the equipment I ever use is in my head, Mr. Sixx. There was only toiletry and clothing in that bag."

"That's something, anyway." Sixx could see now, over an uneasy sea of simmering white as the "snow" sublimed into invisible vapor. Over by the cot was a persistent small volcano of activity and the occasional spit of flame. 'Tell me," he said curiously, "how did you know?"

"That's something else we should leave for later, please." Her reply was prompt, belying the sound of thickness in her speech.

"Hey, Rex, that flare should be about fizzled by now."

"Last gasp, Roger. Ill check. Hold on." Sixx waded through the snow, dabbed at the bubbling mess, and a few solitary sparks boiled up and went out. He touched something solid, grabbed and hauled it up and out. The foul, half-melted canister was harmless now. He shook it to make sure. "All gone, Roger. You can open the door. Better warn the rubbernecks to stand clear."

It must be quite a spectacle, he thought, to see him come tramping out of a snow-filled cabin wreathed in vapor, clutching the remains of the flare. A goggling crowd backed off either way along the passage. It was safe now to grin, so he did. There was Roger, and Miss Latham, cautiously clear. And distressed officers of the Canberra, one of whom, in a hastily acquired pair of asbestos gauntlets, took the canister from Sixx and glared at it.

"It's a flare, sure. A standard unit. No way of telling where it came from, but we are having all of ours checked out." Another officer came to eye the mess and mark that cabin as a total write-off.

"That's all right," Lowry soothed. "Miss Latham will be traveling with us in any case. No problem there."

She looked on the point of keeling over. "I could do with a drink 1" she mumbled, and Sixx, arming back his helmet, had to grin. To anyone listening it would sound the most natural thing in the world. Canberra had a bar and the rare luxury of a bartender.

To him Sixx said confidingly, "We have just had a very hairy moment, friend. Gimme three doubles—and make them good big ones, huh?" On his way to their table he made one out of three and handed it to her. "I don't know how you do it," he confessed, "but seeing is believing, and if you don't know what's good for you at your age, you never will, I reckon."

She took the stagger stuff eagerly, put it away without pause for breath, and the resulting glow was almost instant. "You know," she put the glass gently down on the table, "I owe you two. I would have been burned at least Maybe badly. Maybe even killed. I usually react but not that fasti"

"It might be faster if you laid off that stuff." Lowry made it blunt, and her smile for him was something to see. Sixx marveled. She was a lovely woman now, as normal as spring rain and as delightful as the flowers it brings— with enough alcohol in her system to nail a strong man to the floorl

"You have an explanation coming," she agreed, "and you've earned it. Can we go now, or does some official want to ask us questions?"

"We go!" Sixx declared. "We have the questions; let them come up with a few answers. You have our eyewitness evidence if you want to sue I"

Back in the relative security of the clipper, with her one bag stowed in a spare cabin and the autochef working on a meal for them, Miss Latham declined Lowry's offer of another tall drink and relaxed in a chair.

"I don't need it yet," she explained, "and I only take what I need. The thing that really scares me is that I might eventually get to like the stuff!"

"Now hold it!" Sixx protested. "Throw us just one curve at a time if you don't mind. I'm confused enough now. Just start at the beginning . . ."

"Go on until you come to the end and then stop. Lewis Carroll." She chuckled gently. "I can wrap it all up in one word for you, but it won't help much. I'm intuitive." She laughed again at the null-comprehension that greeted her words. Sixx knew his face was registering bknkness.

"Most women like to believe they have a highly developed sense of intmtion," he observed. "That's not new. Whether they do or not is another thing."

"I have it," she said quietly but with grim undertones. "I can't even start to explain it I'm no good at that side of it It's just that ever since I was quite small I have been able to sense—feel, be aware of—a kind of aura around people and things, places and events. It's like an extension in time, so that I know what has just been, what is, and what is going to be soon. It's not visual or pictorial in any way, just a feeling. And it becomes a distress if and when something is going to go wrong or is dangerous. Does that make sense to you?"

Sixx nodded slowly. Lowry said, "111 buy that. We have something of the kind, me and Rex. In this job you have to. A kind of smell hunch when things don't add up right But—" he shrugged it away, "—that's just training, habit a lot of small observations, and unconscious processes adding it all up. Isn't it?"

She shook her head, managing to smile. "I dont find it that simple. For just one thing, I've never even tried telling anyone any of this, not since I was twelve, because I knew no one would try to understand. But you two do, and I knew you would. And again, what training did I ever have? As a girl I breezed through school, any academic work, my biggest problem being the inability to see how and why everything wasn't as glaringly obvious to everyone else as it was to me. And things were, always. You have to remember that This wasn't something I could turn on and off. It was there all the time. And then I had to grow up a little more and become a woman." Her smile faded again, her luminous brown eyes clouding at the memory.

"Just chemistry, of course, but I've thought of it since as the same as if someone had turned up the gain on my nervous system. What had been a soft broad-band background now turned into a high-volume scream from all directions and on all channels. I went out of my mind for a little while. Until I fell on the answer."

"But alcohol is a stimulant!" Sixx protested, and she shook her head.

"Oh no. Believe me, this is something I've gone into in sheer self-defense. Check with Joe if you like." Lowry took her at her word, swiveled his chair to reach for the terminal console and screen, started inserting data. "Alcohol," she said, "is related to ether, has a similar chemistry. It seems to stimulate mental and physical functions by unwinding the tensions, but it in fact anesthetizes. First the small aches and pains we all have. Then it lowers the critical faculties and sense perceptions. You feel good— better—simply because you are less capable of judging, in general. It's that simple. For me it damps out the screaming overtones I can't otherwise avoid. When I am cold sober, in your terms—" she shuddered slightly, "—it's as if every nerve in my body is operating at maximum intensity. In hard fact I haven't been completely 'dry' in eighteen years. Just to think about it gives me the shivers." She turned to Lowry interestedly. "How does that check out with Joe?"

"All the way down. But Joe adds this, that alcohol is a powerful irritant and poison, that it tends to coagulate and harden soft tissues, impairs the physical reactions—and the life prognosis is not good!"

"I know," she sighed, "but what would you have me do?"

Sixx scowled at it. For no reason at all except that he had seen and heard, he believed her entirely. "But it's crazy!" he complained. "You have to be stoned out of your mind to slow down to normal! There has to be some way—training, maybe? I mean, if you could only learn, somehow, how to handle all the data you're getting, cold, you'd really be away out in front of everybody!"

She shook her head again but was smiling now. "It's not like that. I've checked that, too. That way lies megalomania. Normal people have built-in shutoffs, filters of some kind, simply because the brain can handle only so much data at a time. And me, I donrt have that, whatever it is. So I have to shut off by other means. In this case, with alcohol. There are other things, but they are harder to get and invite suspicion. Booze I can get anywhere. But I want to thank you two for catching up so fast Can you imagine the many times and ways that well-meaning people have tried to save me from my *weakness'?"

Sixx grinned, but at the back of his mind was the thought that surely modern medicine ought to be able to come up with something? Then, on thinking it further along, he saw the snags. How would you explain such a thing? He had a brief vision of some well-meaning clinician starting away by drying her out and shifted hurriedly away from that picture.

"Does your intuition tell you anything more about that flare, apart from the fact that it was there?"

"Like who put it there?" She shook her head slowly. "No. You asked if anyone would want to stop me going to Martas. There are a few, but not that way. There are plenty who don't approve of me, for obvious reasons, but none who'd be vicious enough to attack me physically like that"

"Not even people youVe helped put away?"

"I don't work that way, Mr. Lowry. In fact I dont really work at all" Her smile was wry now. "I just nose around among the data on a crime, just looking, observing, feeling, until I get a hunch, the feeling that something doesn't match up somewhere. Then I point to it By now my colleagues have learned to heed my guesses. On this one I get nothing at all. A flare like that—you can get one anywhere on a ship. Any ship."

"Rightl" Sixx confirmed. "Useless to try backtracking on it But the event serves one good purpose, a long-shot assumption that it is somehow tied in with whatever is happening on Martas—which means you need a bodyguard."

"Does that make a difference?"

"Does to us!" Lowry declared. "We were sold this assignment as an easy one. Just going through the motions. But we, too, have intuitions."

"We know Jason Horn," Sixx amplified sadly. "Him and his easy jobs!" The conversation veered away to less harrowing things. The meal came, went and they were well on the way to building close friendships beyond the call of duty when the word came from Canberra II that all its flare canisters had been counted and accounted for.

"So much for that." Lowry said. "We could*ve checked out their passenger list if we had any idea what or who to look for. Short of a flash of genius, it looks as if we are just going to have to stick with you like glue, Louise."

"I can't think of anyone I'd rather be stuck with," she admitted. "I can't remember a time I've ever felt so easy in anyone's company. As a rule I'm smothered in low-key disapproval or badly camouflaged sympathy, like a thin gray fog. But not with you two."

"You mean you register the way we feel, too?" Sixx demanded, staring at her. This was easy to do. She had discarded her dark suit for a pale green confection she called a harem rig that fitted her at wrists, ankles, and neck and was airily loose everywhere else. And she had talked freely and at great length about anything and everything as if some long-locked floodgate had suddenly come open. Now she could grin mischeviously at him.

"Call it picking up unconscious clues if you like, but I usually do know what people are thinking. Feelings and attitudes, anyway."

"Beats me," Lowry wondered, "why you stay with police work.With all that talent to spare?"

"I've worked on that one, too, Roger. Try this. Name me one other profession where it is taken for granted that you can snoop at will, mind other people's business, ask all the questions you like, and safely appear to know all sorts of things you've no real right to know. Go on!"

Lowry scowled a moment in thought. "Medical work? Psychology?"

"Certainly," she agreed. "So long as you produce documentary evidence that you believe in the recognized theories and standards and that you follow the approved methodology. Even if it doesn't work? You have to give that much credit to police work. It's results which count all the time. And I get those." Even, Sixx had to remind himself, with a staggering load of hooch aboard. He was still finding it hard to break away from the conviction that she was handicapped by alcohol. Neither he nor Lowry was at all puritan, they were as fond of a convivial snort as anyone, but both men knew the danger of mixing drink with business, their kind of business particularly, where fast reflexes could make all the difference between the quick and the dead. And it was an effort to accept the fact that she was better off stoned. When he pursued that thought further he kept having the image of a thoroughbred racehorse condemned to puU a farm cart

They were a few minutes out of warp, lazily orbiting the Arcturus Outer Beacon while Lowry radio-checked the prospects of a caravan to Spica. Joe was doing tricks, abetted by Suae. 'This is quite a region for spectaculars," he assured her, "apart from that—the Whirlpool Nebula. M.51.—there's that one there, one of the biggest globular clusters you're ever likely to see. M.3., that is. And a few pretty-color binaries. Joe, show us Epsilon Bootes."

"They don't look reall" she exclaimed "Orange and green doesn't seem proper for stars, somehow."

"Hey, Rexl" Lowry, at the radio desk, slid an earpiece aside. "You ought to hear this. News from Martas."

"Martas?" Sixx was alert instantly. Lowry spoke into his mike.

"Request replay from beginning, item reference Sol Senator Arthur Vancec. Over." He moved a switch, and the loudspeaker sizzled as a flatly nonemotional voice came on.

"Dateline ARATNI, capital city of Dolgozni, planet Martas, four-month, three-day, nine-thirty hours, standard time. Police chief Ramon Martinez announced, as reported to him from Iskola, the body of Solar Senator Arthur Vancec was found in a guest villa, part of the property area of Bernard Hoff, Iskolan, earlier today. Report indicates Vancec apparentiy shot at close range by some not-yet-found weapon of a solid-projectile explosive-charge type. As the Iskolans have no law-enforcement agency of their own, the tragedy was immediately referred to Chief Martinez who states for the record that he will not hesitate to use all the resources at his command in dealing with the unhappy affair. It is understood here that Sol Senator Vancec was on a fact-finding tour of Martas, and one of the rare few to be invited to visit Iskola. It is common knowledge that Iskola is rigidly isolationist. No official visits have been permitted in more than thirty years. Rumor has it that all is not well in this so-called super-cultural enclave. For a full discussion and résumé of the known facts on the Iskola phenomenon, hold this channel immediately following this news roundup. For an appreciation and biography of the late Solar Senator Vancec . . ."

Lowry canceled the noise with a finger. "We don't need that I doubt if they know any more about Iskola than we do. As for Vancec, somebody was bound to shoot him sooner or later. You're the boss, Louise. What now?"

"Time is everything now," she said. "For the murder of a solar senator, the higher-ups will want somebody bigger than me, almost for sure, but it's my duty to get there as fast as possible, grab all the data there is before somebody

spoils it. How soon can we leave?" She looked to Sixx,

who passed to Lowry.

"Next caravan due out isn't for another seventy-two hours yet. Nothing else going that way at all before then."

"Hmm!" Sixx rubbed his chin. "How important is time, Louise? I mean, we can get you there in around ten hours if we have to, but it will be rough going. Very roughl"

Four

"I don't quite understand. If a standard warp ship takes twenty-four hours to travel that distance . . . ?"

"And a cozy-comfy ride, sure. He has a big unit. The optima are different. We have our own warp capacity for emergencies. It's rough. It's a bit like trying to push a rowboat at forty knots over a stormy sea, but we can do it if we have to."

"If you can stand it, I canl" she declared. "Given enough poison."

"That's another thing," he told her. "Warp fields do funny things to people sometimes. That's why ships in caravan lay well out from the master, out on the fringe. We will be right in the middle of ours. Wouldn't want to see you lose your talents, for instance."

"You have got to be joking." She rose from her seat readily. "There's nothing I would like better. Shall we go?"

Traveling inside their own warp field was every bit as bumpy as Sixx had predicted. It wasn't a thing they did any oftener than they had to. The globular field put out by a warp master was big enough to absorb and smooth out the serial transitions from one artificial field of reference to the next, the rapidly repetitive leap from one "forbidden" state to another. The clipper's generator lacked that resilience, hence everything within its field buck-jumped to each split-second twist. The purely physical effect could be warded off to some degree by cushioning, by the special suits the two men wore, or in Miss Latham's case, by the genie from the bottle. But there was no way of shielding the mental effect. Sixx recalled one explanation he had heard, on an analogy with image persistence in vision.

"If the retinal image did not persist after the original stimulus, we would never be able to see coherent pictures

ofanything. The brain functions to assemble the persistent traces of a view-field scan into a picture. God knows what we would 'see' if the traces didn't persist—a stipple of spiral traces, maybe? Anyway, our perception of 'reality,' whatever that is, functions in the same way. And the fact is that within the operational center of a warp field 'reality' is changing faster than we can keep up with it The body, being material, just goes along with, but the consciousness, whatever that is, gets left behind in confusion somewhere, struggling to make sense out of it."

Helay on his bunk, safe inside his suit, which was safe inside the ship, and he knew—and tried not to feel bodiless, jellified, impossibly strewn through insubstantial space, while eddies of unlikely energy and nameless colors swirled around and through him. As in any nightmare the solid rational knowledge that this was all illusion did nothing at all to help.

Joe,being "nothing more" than a highly sophisticated complex of electronic pathways, suffered no such malaise. Hebrought Clipper IV expertly to within sensor range of Bardak's plasma envelope, kicked out the warp, and then dutifully set course for Marias as instructed.

Sixxreassembled himself unwillingly, levered up to his feet heard Lowry go heavily by, and reached his cabin door in time to see his partner come back bearing Miss Latham as a limp burden in his arms.

"Shellbe all right Rex. I know what she needs."

"Pourone for me, too, Roger. 11 be down in a minute." Sixx made a rapid check of the control room just in case Joe had gone wild, then followed on down to the lounge. Miss Latham was stirring, trying valiantly to grin, holding a glass in both hands. Sixx settled into a seat, reaching for the drink already set out for him, thumbing the terminal read-out with his other hand.

"Wehave maybe half an hour before we can strike orbit," he said. "It only takes a minute or two for this disaster feeling to wear off. How d*you feel?"

"Likedeath would be welcomel" She sipped and sighed.

"You'repast the worst already. You'll live!"

"Theawful part," she managed to smile properly now, "was that it was beginning to make a kind of sense after a while. Fugitive glimpses of another world showing through the cracks in this one."

Butit took only a little while, as Sixx had said, for the nightmare to dissolve and normal clarity to come back.

In due course Joe summoned them to the control room where an audio signal was repeating, ". . . identify. This is Aratni Beacon. Identify. This is . . ."

Sixx did the talking, discreetly from documents, while Joe nudged the ship expertly into orbit and the cameras gave them a panorama of the planet. It was in many ways similar to Earth. Two major land masses were crowded into one hemisphere, with scattered strings and necklaces of small islands to decorate the seas of the other. But here both continents lay across the equatorial line, with only stub tails of land stretching anywhere near the temperate zones.

"Hot!" Sixx mused. "Hot all over. Humid. Plenty of rainfall. Subtropical. Hardly a paradise. What you get you have to work for."

Aratni had taken a minute or two to digest their information, but once that was done the rest of the formalities passed quickly enough. "That's our mark, down there." Sixx indicated a wide-mouthed harbor where the line and pattern of civilization could be seen even at this distance. "We'll splash down there next time around. And that's Iskola. Looks as if they haven't done a thing to it since they moved in."

All three of them studied the jungle-green expanse of land that lay a little to the east of Dolgozni. "It certainly looks primitive," Miss Latham agreed. "But what are those plumes there? Smoke, vapor—what?"

Higher magnification, aimed at the long, low, rugged southern coastline, showed that the while vapor trails were regularly spaced, with just the hint of structural work between them. Another set of plumes inland showed similar features. "Mountain-top installations of some kind," Sixx guessed. "Could be anything." He switched to something else. "You'll notice," he said, "that the sea lane between Iskola and Dolgozni is around two hundred miles."

"And," Lowry carried the thought on, "that Iskola has no visible harbor facilities, landing pads, nor beacon signal."

"Plus the fact," Sixx rounded it off, "there is only one com-sat, and that is geostationary over Dolgozni. That we have spoken to Aratni and no one else, and that we are landing in that harbor. Iskola is introverted, all right."

"But not any more," Lowry pointed out. "Not with a murder to explain away. Especially when the body happens to be 'Nosey' Vancec. If somebody had it in mind to tear down Iskola's veil, he couldn't have picked a better way."

"Now hold on a minute, you two I" Miss Latham protested. "Why would anybody want to do that?"

"Plenty of reasons." Sixx watched the island image slide off the screen and turned to grin at her. "How's this one? The official front is that Iskola is a haven for discontented antisocial supermen. But it could just as easily be a prison, too. Two hundred miles is quite a swim! Roger'—" he turned to his partner, "—when you were digging data on Iskola, did you turn up figures on renegades? Those who were accepted and later dropped out?"

"Nil." Lowry sat back thoughtfully. "Not one in fifty years. I put all the hard data in Joe's store if you want to look at it"

Joe supplied them with a neat grid of figures, curves, and averages. Sixx studied it curiously. "Average yearly applicants, a fraction over thirty. Average reject rate, a shade less than two. That's low!"

"The preliminary tests are rugged," Lowry pointed out "I never got to see one. Seems they tailor them to each individual applicant But I did manage to talk to one or two who'd got that far and then backed off. They were tough, so a five-percent reject rate isn't all that surprising."

"Perhaps not but you could read it another way. Once you set foot on Iskola, you have a less than one in twenty chance of ever getting back!"

"Now just a minute!" Miss Latham protested again, chuckling now. "You two are committing the basic sin, theorizing ahead of your data. Let's wait until we know what we're talking about. Crime, yes. Murder, possibly. But not the internal ethics of a so-called Utopia. Remember, Iskola is private property, and it's no one else's business how they live."

"It is now," Sixx contradicted her. "Vancec's untimely demise has made sure of it. In a murder investigation there's no such thing as privacy, as you certainly know." She made a face at him, and then Joe interrupted with a gentle warning that landing was imminent

The harbor at Aratni was not so very different from any of a score of trader planets the two men had visited. If anything, it looked a little cleaner and was certainly hotter than most, but the backdrop skyline of grain towers and mineral warehouses was familiar enough. And the organization was efficient No sooner had the girdle clamps secured the clipper in her appointed berth than a hydrofoil came skimming alongside to collect them.

"Stone everywhere," Sixx commented as they were driven swiftly away from the dockside area into the city proper. "You'd think with the jungle on the doorstep, they'd use more wood, but they build in this gray-brown stone as if it came free! Gives one a heavy, solid feeling!"

Miss Latham was unhappy. Her dress was a compromise between colonial primness and the sweltering heat, so she was not comfortable, but her unease was more than just that. Sixx paid attention to her. "What?" he demanded.

"It's hard to name," she said. "General resentment. People at constant odds with the environment. The living is grudging. But there's more. They do not like us. It is a specific and distinct animus. Can't think why."

Police headquarters was massive, imposing, and mercifully cool within. Stony-faced staff saw them to an elevator that lifted them to the roof. Police Chief Martinez wasted no time in accounting for some of the resentment. He was small, dark, and with some of the Latin volatility his name would suggest, but steel-hard purpose showed through his set smile.

"I recognize your uniforms, Mr. Sixx, Mr. Lowry. I respect your credentials, Miss Latham I will cooperate with you to the best of my ability—in due course. But I do not accept, or trust, or welcome you—not yet. If 1 am abrupt, direct, it is because I have learned that it saves time to state a position clearly. The formal pretenses, the conventional untruths, have very little value here." It was all said through a smile that was little more than showing teeth Sixx, with his helmet under one arm, tried a grin of his own.

"No need for you to get too involved, Chief. All you need do is pass on to Miss Latham whatever data you have on the affair and then point us in the direction of Iskola. We'll take it from there."

"You have not understood." Martinez kept his toothy smile. "You go nowhere, do nothing, I tell you nothing until I am satisfied you are what you say you are. Here and now!"

"That's quite an order," Sixx murmured. "How do you intend doing it?"

"It is already in progress. Your every movement, action, sound, and appearance have been monitored from the moment you first entered our ionospace. Those data are being analyzed now. Also there will be a physical check." Martinez moved to his desk to touch a button and sound impatient.

"Physical check?" Sixx queried, but before Martinez could explain, doors slid open to admit a large cushion-tired trolley bristling with gadgetry. Leaning on it to keep it moving was a tall, lean, startle-haired man of about fifty in a white dust coat.

"Ahl Dobnyl" Martinez trotted forward to lend a hand in bringing the trolley to a standstill. "I introduce. This is Dr. Edgar Dobny, head of our forensic laboratories. Dobny, this is Miss Latham of Interstelpol who has come to deal with the affair Vancec. And her escort, two agents of Interstellar Security." He swiveled to his company. "You are honored. Dobny is a very busy man. Not often does he perform tests like these in person."

'Tests?" Sixx eyed the gadgetry warily. "That contraption will prove to you that I am what I say I am?"

"It willl" Martinez sounded positive as he strode back to his desk. Lowry shook his head fractionally.

"Looks like a polygraph with doodads," he murmured. "Yours, Dr. Dobny?"

The man in the dust coat, almost a caricature of the proverbial "mad scientist," turned away from an array of verniers and smiled apologetically, a smile quite different from Martinez's. "Not my design, no. I have done small things to it, modifications in assembly and layout, but the essential circuitry and design was supplied to me from Iskola. At my request. A device such as this is quite beyond my modest powers."

"You are too modest, Edgar. You are every bit as much a genius as any of those over there!"

"No, no, Ramon. I know my limits." Dobny was quietly firm. He turned his gentle smile on the others. "I once applied to join Iskola. And failed. What more proof is needed than that?"

"But you do have relationships with Iskola?" Sixx asked, hoping to steer the talk into less explosive areas.

"Oh yes. They are not ogres. In a way I suppose one should regard them as a many-headed oracle. They operate a problem-solving service, but one has to ask the proper questions. Not always an easy thing to do."

"Hahl" Martinez snorted. "Why wouldn't they tell us what to do about laterization? Why?"

"I've already told you, Ramon, perhaps they dont know. Perhaps there is nothing that can be done. But most probably the answer involves economic advantage, and they do not answer questions like that As we all know."

"Don't they charge fees?" Lowry demanded, and Dob-ny's smile grew. He trailed a heavy power cable away, pushed it into a wall outlet

"A logical question," he admitted. "No, they do not charge. There is an automatic radio terminal by the south seawall. All communications flow by that route. You'll have to use it you know, before you can get in. But, as I meant to point out, we can and do monitor all questions in and answers out. They answer about once in a thousand times. And there is no charge. In this case—" he gestured to the machine, "—I asked if it was possible to measure personal integrity by a machine. This was the result. So far as I can understand the circuits, it indicates consistency—or lack of it—between the speech centers and the premotor lobes. Oversimplifying, if you say one thing and think another, it will show up."

Out of the subsequent silence Lowry sighed and said, "That makes sense of a kind. You couldn't make a profit on it and that's your economic-advantage angle. But the social benefits are obvious."

"Exactly!" Dobny beamed. "And, of course, the entire raison d'être of Iskola is sociological. Well, it is all ready. Who will be first?"

"Take me," Lowry offered. "How much of me d'you want?"

"Only your head. Sit here. I place the cradle over your head so and adjust things. Then you will state your name, age, sex, occupation, and office."

Sixx shifted his attention to Miss Latham. Already he had learned to read signs on her, and she was in distress under her surface calm. This was not the time or place to ask what was twanging her sensitive nerve ends. In the hope of diversion he asked softly, "What's laterization?"

"IVe no idea," she muttered. "Rex, I'm scared. Something hurts!"

Sixx touched her hand, turned to look to where Martinez sat sternly at his desk. "Doesn't your office run to conventions in hospitality, either, Chief? Like a little something from a bottle, maybe?"

Martinez converted his set smile into a sneer by changing small fractions of his facial set and Sixx shrugged.

"So much for that. You'd better go next, Louise. Get it

over with. Looks like Roger's all through and clear."

Her face was pale and set as she moved to take the chair Lowry had vacated. Sixx caught just a taste of what she must be feeling and shivered. By the pricking of my thumbs, he thought, there's something cockeyed somewhere, but what? Is she scared of what the gadget will show?

Lowry had moved back, apparently in innocent watchfulness, but something about his casual movements caught Sixx's attention and held it. Roger was on to—or up to— something. What? Dobny busied himself resetting his controls, took the cradle delicately, smiled at Miss Latham.

"Sit quite still," he said. "I place this over your head like this and adjust it. When I ask, you will state your name, age, sex, occupation, and office. You understand?"

"Yes!" Her voice came faintly and heavily furred. Dobny turned to his controls. Sixx had a sudden irrational sense of panic, the itch to call out "Stop!" but before he could override his natural reluctance, Dobny threw his master switch. And nothing. For a long moment he stared at his read-out in wordless wonder. Then—"Damn! There must be something wrong!"

"Could it be this?" Lowry spoke, pointing down to the input cable, the plug end of which lay detached on the carpet. "Must have caught it with my foot!"

Dobny scowled, mumbled something inaudible, and went down on a knee to replace the plug. But Lowry had his foot firmly on it. "Rex!" he said. "Get Louise out from under that thing and clear. Just to be on the safe side, huh?"

Baffled but keeping a straight face, Sixx did as he was told, took her hand, led her three steps clear. "What is the meaning of this?" Martinez blared.

Lowry ignored him entirely. Grinning down at Dobny he said, "All right, go ahead and plug it in. Now!"

The forensic man hesitated, his gentle smile all gone, his brow agleam with sweat. Then he took the plug and rammed it home. In the same instant there came clicks and squeaks from the gadgetry, a sudden crackling corona in and around the head cradle, then the explosive pop of an overloaded breaker. And then a spreading, loaded silence.

Five

Sixx held his breath and kept still, feeling Miss Latham's fingers twitch in his. Lowry reached down deliberately with a large hand, hauled Dobny to his feet by the collar of his dust coat, urged him toward his instrument.

"Don't claim to be specially bright," he murmured, "but I do use my eyes. See this little jigger here? For me you had that set at one point five volts. See where it is now? Fifteen hundred! You ought to be a bit more careful, mister, when you're playing with things like that!"

Dobny stared, goggled—and then his eyes rolled up, and he went sack limp in Lowry's grasp. Behind his desk Martinez was spluttering incoherencies until Lowry let Dobny's lifeless form slump to the carpet and marched across the office deliberately. Sixx stifled a huge grin. This was Roger in rare form, piling it on, using all his impressive bulk to tower over the police chief.

"Looks like your pet machine is busted," he announced. "And your pet expert has fainted from the shock. And you are dead lucky that's all it is, too. Anything had happened to Miss Latham here, you'd have had the whole of Interstelpol down on your neck! You—and him!"

"It was accident—accident!"

"Maybe. He put the machine together. He set it up. You gave the order for him to do it. Miss Latham could've been killed! Some accident! What's your favorite charge, mister? Malfeasance, criminal negligence, attempted homicide, accessory before, during, and after—or what?"

"There was no crime!" Martinez howled. "It was accident! Not intended! No one is hurt!"

"That's your story. This has to be reported, and it will be, just exactly the way it happened."

"But you saw! It was unintentional! You cannot say otherwise! Dobny, you fool, get up!" Martinez was bab-

bllng, jabbing at buttons on his desk. The stink of overheated insulation made itself unpleasantly apparent now, and Sixx could lift the clamps on his nerves and begin to shake with the aftermath. But Miss Latham was completely at ease now.

"It's gone" she announced. "All clear. For a while, anyway."

"Hmm!" Sixx glanced to Dobny's unconscious sprawL "Was it him? I mean, was it deliberate? Can you tell?"

"Not to be sure, no. I did get an odd sensation from him, almost like fear, but there was so much general animus—still is—that it's hard to be specific. Nothing at all from him now, of course. And Roger is scaring Chief Martinez sick. I had better rescue him, poor man."

She did it very well, too. With no apparent effort she hushed Lowry, moved him, took his place, and without raising her voice she laid it on the line for Martinez in no uncertain terms. He was already in the spotlight glare over the Vancec business. Unless he wanted the full severity of a hard-nosed Interstelpol investigation on his neck, into his office and the total workings thereof, he would be wise to start cooperating right away, totally.

"Begin," she advised, "by assuming that we are what we say we are and go on from there. Your machine is useless, forget it. I want the full dossier, everything you have, on Solar Senator Vancec. You will arrange communication with whoever is in charge on Iskola. And I believe Mr. Sixx suggested something to drink?" She had her own brand of magic. Sixx was impressed—and enlightened, too. It must help, he thought, to know what the other person is feeling. And that was how, he realized belatedly, she had slid so easily into familiar terms with himself and Roger. That was something he promised himself he would think more about later. Just now, things were happening fast. Many hands came to remove Dobny and his device. A slim folder was produced and put into her hand. A shapely bottle made its appearance—and glasses.

"Local produce," Martinez apologized. "You may find it crude. It is robust. To be delicate one should add it to water, thus."

Something like absinthe, Sixx thought, and with the same syrupy consistency but lacking the anise bouquet. He approached it with caution. Miss Latham, using the minimum dilution, threw hers down her throat with no more than a blink and returned her attention to the dossier in her hand, reading and turning the pages swiftly while Martinez goggled. Sixx had his own questions.

"Did you have any trouble with Senator Vancec while he was here in Dolgozni, sir?"

"Nothing to remark, no. Security-wise he was no problem. I have only the layman's knowledge of economics, you understand, but I understand he was satisfied that no individual or group is or was making a large profit. One gathers that to the senator it was a crime to become rich. On that principle we of Dolgozni are all law-abiding citizens. To make enough this year to live on next—that is an achievement here."

"Jan Bardak got rich," Sixx pointed out. "That ought to have made him Public Enemy Number Onel"

"He still is! If he still lives!"

"You're old enough to remember him, sir, and obviously not with any affection. Just what did he do, anyway?"

Martinez scowled, visibly restraining unpleasant thoughts. "He made fools of us, all of usl" he growled at last. "We came here in high hopes, Mr. Sixx. We had a lush, green, fertile continent to our hand, adequate machinery, and a vast market ready and waiting for our produce, our foodstuffs, our minerals. Bardak was our great man. He spun the plan for us. We would work hard, yes, for three, four, even five years. But then we would reap, each man his own, not to give anything away in punitive percentages to some absentee franchise-holder, none of that. We were scientifically cooperative, you see? And it was hard work. That jungle, it is ferocious and insatiable. We had to clear it to get at the soil and the rare minerals, to make roads, towns, places to work and live. But we did it. We began to win.

"We are divided into regions, you understand, each with its own general problems. Bardak had a small share in everything. He worked harder than any of us, here, there, everywhere, to help, show, explain, advise. Always patient, wise, helpful. A hero!" Martinez snorted at the memory. "Who was surprised when at last he said he wanted to drop out7 No one. It was too much for one man, he said, and we understood. The problems were dissolving, the way ahead was clear, and he was weary, he said. And we believed him. We were willing—eager, even glad—to buy out his share of everything. We made him rich, but we didn't mind because we were all going to be

rich, too. We forged ahead on our own—for a while."

The toothy smile 'became a grimace. "For a while. But then, somehow . . . everything went . . . stiff! The crop returns dwindled. The machinery-failure rate escalated. The jungle crept back. The soil grew poor. The minerals were harder to get, not so rich. He knew!" Martinez slammed his desk. "He knew it was coming! 'We are over the hill!' he said. How true. Now we are down in the hole! And he sits over there in Iskola—and laughs at us!"

"li he's still alive," Sixx cautioned.

"He lives for us in infamy. We remember him with every drop of our sweat, Mr. Sixx."

"Sorry to break in." Miss Latham was brisk. "This dossier is fine, is thorough, but it's data only. A computer could handle it. I need to be where it happened, and soon. By your time the body was found yesterday, early. That is quite enough delay, we shouldn't have much more."

"Of course!" Martinez was all anxious eagerness now. "Transport—" he touched buttons and spat orders, "—is waiting. Do you wish anything more of Dr. Dobny?"

"Ill leave you to deal with him. I wouldn't say no to another glass of your local product, though. What do you call it?"

"Villaml" Martinez told her, watching in awe as she threw down one more hefty slug. "In the Hungarian it means lightning."

"It certainly hits the spot!" she agreed cheerfully, and they departed before Martinez could think of an adequate comment. This time they were driven north and east, through the city, and Sixx turned a different eye now on the solid stone building. The shapes and designs made little or no concession to grace or ease. Life, he mused, is full of care, with little time to stand and stare. All in grim earnest.

To Miss Latham he said, "The common animus seems to be against Jan Bardak. Seems he outsmarted them so much they can't ever forgive him. That's their story. A motive?"

"For the crime wave or the murder?" Lowry demanded. "They differ in emphasis, Rex. The Iskolans asked for help about their crime wave. That was a private thing, internal. The murder is something different."

"I won't buy it as a coincidence, Roger." Miss Latham was quietiy positive. "I've seen too many that looked it and weren't. And you have to add in two attempted hits on me. Put that all together and the pattern begins to look familiar. To me, anyway."

"You've been attacked before?" Sixx queried, realizing the obvious answer even as he spoke. She nodded gently.

"More times than I care to count. The criminal mind is pragmatic to a degree. If a method or technique works, you use it again and again, why not? And if your plots and plans regularly fall apart in the presence of a certain individual, then somehow that individual is responsible. So, to ensure success next time, eliminate that person. It's really very simple. Fortunately for me I have my own built-in alarm system."

Of a kind, Sixx thought, but it's only an alarm, not a protection. He shelved that idea and looked ahead with interest. By now they were clear of the city and following a narrow causeway over a shingle beach, aiming for a bleak pier that thrust into the sea. The police car halted within ten yards of a low, featureless building that straddled the pier.

"From here," the driver said pointedly, "it is up to them."

"And a long walk back if they don't admit us." Sixx watched the car swoop around and depart. He felt no premonitory tingles. Louise looked interested but unwor-ried. They marched ahead and in, through automatic doors, into busy quiet, the subdued chatter of relays, the ghost dance of fugitive lights over panel arrays but a clearly obvious pathway to be followed.

"There's no one here." Miss Latham was positive. "Just machinery. A sense of neutral curiosity, if there is such a thing."

"Follow the arrows." Lowry pointed practically, and they came soon to a minor auditorium, a place where a semicircle array of benches faced a screen that covered one entire wall. The bench arms were inlaid with contact buttons. Sixx eyed these respectfully.

"I imagine we are supposed to sit," he said, "but I suggest we don't touch anything else just yet. Whoever laid out this lot didn't believe in labels." The act of sitting must have triggered something, for as soon as they were settled, the screen glowed and in a moment dissolved into the hole-in-the-wall effect of well-cared-for electro-optics. Sixx nodded in approval both of the technique and the scene. They saw into a cool green garden, with a subduedriot of flowers on either side and an expanse of carpetlike turf inviting the eye toward a far archway between two dark-trunked trees. They heard bird song and the indefinable drowsy hum of insect life. "Prettyl" Sixx murmured. "Good sales line. I like it. Anybody home?"

Aquietly impersonal voice told him, "Human Tillet has been called, is approaching now. Wait, please."

"Nicevoice, too," Lowry murmured. "They keep their electronics in good shape, Rex."

"I'm alittle surprised they use any at all. Maybe I have it all wrong, but I'd always imagined your superman as being above that kind of thing."

"Hush!"Miss Latham urged. "Someone coming. She might be able to hear what you're saying!"

Thatit was a "she" there could be no doubt from the moment she appeared in the tree arch and started walking across the turf to the camera. From bosom to hip she was loosely draped in something creamy yellow. The rest of her was a poem of golden browns, the tints of a blonde who has lived long in sun and air. Barefoot, bareheaded, she moved in perfect resonance with the trees, the flowers, the tamed wilderness, as if she belonged there. The movement sold Sixx long before she was near enough for him to see her attractively homely grin, her amused blue stare. He had seen pretty girls before, beyond count. This was a beautiful woman, a rare and different thing entirely. When she was head and shoulders in the picture, she halted, glanced aside, and the scene moved with her to a tree-shaded, tile-floored corner with a chair. She sat, did something that turned up brighter lights in the little auditorium.

"Hello,"she said. "I'm Alma Tillet." There was just the faintest hint of Scottish angularity in her speech. "I assume you're from Interstelpol. Will you identify yourselves, please. The slot for your I.D. cards is in the left arm, front"

"I'mInterstelpol," Miss Latham offered, inserting her card. "I'm Louise Latham. These men are—bodyguards, I suppose you'd call them."

TheIskolan looked aside and down as the two men used their cards in the required manner. After a moment of study she nodded to herself.

"InterstellarSecurity, yes.That explains it. Your benches are designed to provide me with metabolic data, among other things, but your suits, gentlemen, are interfering with that. I must ask you—there's a plate, green, rectangle, front right. Your bare hand, please."

"What are you looking for, Miss Tillet?" Lowry asked as both men complied with her request.

"Many things, Mr. Lowry. General state of health about covers it. I am getting wild variables from you, Miss Latham. Is there an explanation you'd care to give at this time?"

"I'd rather not just now. It's complicated and personal."

"As you wish. My concern is only to collect the data. Others will interpret it and use it My function is to explain."

"Just that?" Sixx queried, as she didn't go on.

"Just that, Mr. Sixx. I explain one person to another. Interpreter? Generalist? Analogist? There are many possible labels. I keep busy."

"I can imagine!" he agreed warmly, and she laughed.

"It's not so wonderful. You'll see if and when you ever have to explain yourself to me in the first place. I'm told I help people to think straight. Maybe I do. Ah well, there's a surface craft on the way. I will meet you here and be your guide."

"I feel we are putting you to a lot of trouble."

"Not at all, Miss Latham. It is my routine duty period for being available to new applicants, if and when, so I am spared that. It is no pleasure at all to reject people, which we do, nine times out of ten."

"You do?" Sixx asked, and she shook her head.

"Not personally, no. You are sitting in the middle of some very delicate and comprehensive test machinery, Mr. Sixx. All I have to do is read off."

"You seem to rely rather a lot on gadgetry." Miss Latham said it with a suggestion of disapproval. Alma Tillet chuckled.

"That's the coarse screen. We use devices extensively to do all those things a machine can do better than a person. Why not?"

"Why not?" Miss Latham agreed. "Thus leaving you free to concentrate on human problems, things a machine wouldn't understand?"

"Yes." The Iskolan looked wary now. "So why don't we catch our own criminals?"

"I'm sorry to be so obvious, but yes. After all, if the legends about Iskola are true at all, every last one of you is head and shoulders smarter than I will ever be."

"Not like that." Alma Tillet was prompt and positive. "We have our differences, certainly, but they are not vertical. Not easy to explain, either, not in a few words. Let me offer an analogy. Your personal health and welfare are your own concern always, but if and when you fall ill, or suffer injury or infection, you immediately put yourself into the hands of an outside expert, a doctor. Would you agree?"

"Yes, but—" Lowry objected quickly, "—the way I hear it, the entire point of the Iskolan venture is to work toward an ideal society, and a proper study of that surely has to include crime, just as a gardener has to know all about weeds."

"Well put." The Iskolan smiled. "I must remember that line. But it is not a parallel. The gardener and the garden are separate. We are Iskola. And we are not in any sense trying to build a society here. We are a society, the optimum pattern for us. What we are doing is an analysis of the various social designs thrown up by mankind over the centuries in the hope of being able to set a pattern that will work for ordinary people everywhere. It is complex. Try this, for instance, Mr. Lowry. The ideal society would have no stated rules as such because it would be so designed that everyone would do the right thing, anyway. Like a suit of clothing that would fit anyone and everyone perfectly?"

"I still don't see it," Sixx objected. "If you're studying social history, that has to include crime. I admit you sent for Louise before the murder came up, but that's only a matter of degree, surely?"

"Not quite. We use data. A social analyst must use data. As objectively as possible. But we are now involved in this, so it is no longer data but phenomena. We hope . . . Louise . . . will provide us with data. A doctor, if I may reinvoke my analogy, should never diagnose himself when ill because, being ill, 'his critical judgment is impaired. You see? And we are involved now." Alma Tillet chuckled again, glanced aside at some indicator or other. "Your transport should be almost there by now. Ill see you again soon."

Six

The picture illusion winked out, and Sixx consulted his watch. "Half an hour for two hundred miles! That's some boat, if it is a boat!"

"Some girl, too!" Lowry declared as they passed through the small auditorium and out into the hot sunshine again. "She's bright. I liked that bit about how a society should fit like a well-made suit."

"I didn't," Miss Latham said. "I'm no expert in sociology, but I have touched it a little. One has to in my job. And basically social 'behavior is a learned process, which is just another way of describing conformity to a given set of rules. Training. And all training has to be, at bottom, yes you can this and no you can't that."

"There!" Sixx pointed to where a V of white spray heralded the skim of something over the blue sea toward the pier end. The split bow wave subsided as the craft slowed and slid alongside. It was unmanned, a teardrop shape that looked anything but fast as it wallowed in the waves while they scrambled down and into the cushioned stem well. Athwart the bows was a flat panel with a speaker grille. Sixx spoke to it.

"That's the lot," he said. "Only three of us. All aboard. Home, James, or whatever your name is." To his delight a gendy impersonal voice answered.

"Thank you. Please distribute your weight evenly and remain seated." There came the muted mutter of power as the ungainly craft swung away from the pier and into speed, squattering over the water, bouncing more and more until all at once the bump and bounce ceased and the power hum deepened.

"Down foils!" Sixx assumed, turning to look aft. The glassite windbreak around the gunwale climbed higher to cut off the growing gale, and he saw, astern, that the

screw was now canted up out of the water and acting as an air screw inside a snug, tubular housing. "Very neatl" he commented. "We are now flying low. Smooth, tool"

"If you're impressed by that kind of thing!" Miss Latham sounded irritable now. "Machinery is all very well in its place, but my concern is with people. That approach to sociology we just heard is so obviously a fallacy that it is suspicious in itself."

"How a fallacy?" Lowry challenged mildly. "What's wrong with a social system that fits people instead of the other way around?"

"Because it is nonsense! Suit of clothes indeed! That immune suit of yours is tailored to fit you, of course. But what is an ordinary suit of clothing for? Clothing in general has a double function. It fits you, and it fits you into society. In the privacy of your own room you can take it off, you can wear what you like—or nothing. But in public you wear what society approves, only. We have had various degrees of exposure and cover-up, over the ages, as we all know. It's called fashion.' But we have never had total anarchy in dress, nor have we ever had total nudity, not for very long. Except in nudist camps, which exception makes my whole point. There has to be some outward sign that identifies the members of a society, one to another, if it's only a lick of paint In other words society requires you to give something in order to get something. It has to be restrictive in some way or it doesn't exist!"

"They didn't have any nudity taboo in Ancient Greece," Sixx offered.

"Quite so!" she retorted. "And how long did that last?"

Crushed, he sought a different tack. "Is it important?"

"To me, yes. IVe told you, I just get impressions. Hunches. I need other people to implement them. And that requires social machinery. And by the sound of it the Iskolans haven't got any!"

"No problem," Lowry murmured. "You have them over a barrel, Louise. The murder of a Sol Senator moves this thing out of the parochial level. They are going to have a full-scale investigation, one way or another, by you or somebody else whether they like it or not. So all you have to do is lay it on the line. Total and immediate cooperation or else! They'll play!"

"You make it sound simple, but I'm not that kind of person, Roger."

"Still no problem." Lowry gave her an easy grin. "That's what we are for, Rex and me. You just say, well fix it And you sound as if you need this to be getting along with. For motion sickness." He produced a flat flask from a recess in his suit, and she took it gratefully, dealt with it at once. Sixx had to stifle a sigh. Even though he knew her reasons, it was still ingrained in him to expect a lurch and stagger, and thus an unconscious offense when she visibly brightened and became more alert Then a dismaying thought struck him.

"Hey, suppose Iskola is so utterly civilized as to have risen above the indulgence in alcohol altogether?"

Miss Latham opened her amber eyes wide in distress. "Oh no!" she breathed. "Let's not anticipate any more bogies than we have to. There will be enough headaches in this affair without inventing any."

"I can think of a few," Lowry said. "Without intuition. Just arithmetic and geography. Like for instance, this is a mighty big island, and there are only a few Iskolans, comparatively. So how do they keep out the unwanted?"

"Simple question," Sixx admitted. "I'll bet there's a simple answer, too, but I can't think of it offhand. Any more?"

"This one. My information, from the official records, says the rate of recruitment into Iskola has been around twenty-eight out of thirty per year. But that Alma Tillet just told us they fail nine out of ten. It could've been just a figure of speech, but I doubt she's that sort. She said nine out of ten, that is what she meant. And that is a long way from two out of thirty. There has to be something cock«eyed somewhere."

"Well find out," Sixx soothed. "That's one nice thing, we can ask questions and demand answers. If there's anything good to be said for a murder, that's it." Then he lost his easy grin and turned curiously to the coldly impersonal panel control and its speaker grille, as the subdued hum of the hydrofoil's engine suddenly declined. "Why are we slowing down, James?" he asked.

"Collision course, collision course!" The machine's voice held no note of alarm, just precision. "Other craft are crossing our path. I am monitored to slow down and wait for them to pass."

Lowry was already on his feet and peering. "Over there, Rex. Looks like a power tug and a long line of barges, about seven or eight of them."

Sixx joined him, stood and stared where he pointed. The dark hull on the skyline was featureless, the smaller blobs following in equal anonymity. He shrugged. "So we will be a minute or two late at the other end. No harm done." But even as he said it, he didn't believe it. Icy fingers traced out a message along his spine, making him uneasy. He tried to laugh it off.

"I'm catching the apprehension bug from you, Louise!'* He turned to her half-apologetically, then forgot all his humor and tightened all over at her pinched expression. Aside he muttered, "Keep a sharp eye on yon craft, Roger. Looks as if Louise has smelled something foul again." He moved close to her, took her hand. "What is it this time? Can you give us any kind of hint or a pointer as to method, anything?"

"I'm sorry." She sounded choked and breathless. "I don't know a thing except that it is very bad. I'm aching all over. And I'm cold all at once."

"I don't see how?" Lowry's growl came from up there, his internal problem not diverting his hawk-eyed attention for one moment. "It doesn't make any sense. That string of scows can't possibly run us down, or anything like it This foil can make rings around them."

"Right." Sixx agreed. "Only, it is computer-controlled, steered in response to a set of stored patterns, and what will you bet there's nothing in there that deals with marine warfare?"

"Even then," Lowry argued, "it still doesn't add up. We know it is programmed to avoid, so that string of craft can't possibly get closer than so much. And it can't be any kind of armada. Nobody could whip up anything like that at the drop of a hat!"

"They wouldn't have to," Sixx responded promptly, appreciating the exercise. He knew full well that his partner was not for one minute denying the threat, merely trying to chop it up into logical fragments, to reason it out, and thus to analyze it down into basics. It was a routine they had found very useful in the past. Eliminate the impossibles and whatever was left had to be it "Look," he offered, "they probably do a lot of sea haulage up and down here. It would be a sight easier than flogging it on wheels through a jungle. So a tug and convoy like that is by no means novel."

"Right!" Lowry agreed. "And no trouble at all to persuade the skipper to make a little more room on board for a few laddies with some lethal toys."

"That's the way I would do it" Sixx backed away, squeezing Louise's hand reassuringly and joining his colleague to stare at the enemy again. The tugs and barges were closer now, a little more than a mile distant and to starboard but steady on a course that would bring them dead ahead soon. "Where would you plant 'em?" he asked.

"On a barge!" Lowry was prompt and confident "That way the tug master and crew can claim they didn't know a thing about it should it ever come to awkward questions afterwards."

"You have a wicked mind." Sixx chuckled, then went back to crouch by Louise, schemes spinning through his mind. She still looked cold.

"Can you swim?" he asked, and she nodded, managed a painful grin.

"That's what it feels like, the cold part In water."

"All right You be ready for that, just in case. I need to have words with our tin-brained friend here." He eyed the grille thoughtfully, trying to estimate the capacity of the circuitry within.

"James," he said. "Boat Craft Hydrofoil. Robot How do I address you properly, please?"

"I am programmed to respond to Navigator, as required."

"Thank you, Navigator. Now, tell me, how do I override your course program and take over manual control?"

"That is not possible. I have only one program, to collect passengers from the target point and return them safely to home base. I am equipped to use various strategies to achieve that objective, but there is no way in which you can take over manual control."

Sixx scowled thoughtfully at that "What about emergencies?"

"Define emergency.'*

"Surely. Suppose, for Instance, one of your passengers should fall over the side into the water?"

"In that event I am constrained to remain within reaching distance of such a passenger until such times as he returns inboard or, after a predetermined lapse of time with no visible activity or attempt to return, to use the hoisting equipment I have to bring him inboard and proceed with the course as already laid down."

"That's fine!" Sixx patted the grille approvingly. "Well keep you to that, friend." He moved away, rejoined Lowry

at lookout. "Anything new?"

"Difficult to tell, but it looks as if the convoy is slowing down, losing speed. What d'you expect them to do, Rex?"

"They haven't much choice, as I see it. Either they throw something at us and/or the foil to kill and/or sink or they come and get us. Or any combination of all of those. Whatever, it wants some adjusting to, this slow crawl. I've read about sea battles, but I never realized before just how slow they must have been." He hadn't realized before, either, just how isolated one could be in the midst of open waters, with the horizon shortened into no more than five miles or so, but he didn't think that was worth mentioning in the circumstances. Miss Latham came now to stand between them and struggle to hide her distress.

"It certainly looks," she said, "as if someone doesnt want me to get to Iskola. I seem to be letting you boys in for a lot of trouble. I'm sorry."

"Don't give it another thought," Sixx assured her. "This is all part of our job. We deliver. We are used to it. AU you have to do is pay attention and do exactly as we tell you." He eyed the wallowing barges, now uncomfortably close and visibly slowing down. "At this stage we can't do a lot of planning, so let's stick to basics until we see what they have in store for us. Basic to all is that you keep us between you and them at all times. It is perfectly natural for us to exhibit a little curiosity, which we are doing, but you let us do that bit. We are being rude and standing in front of you, right?" He drew her gently backward and joined shoulders with Lowry to offer a screen of armor, at the same time making the fast and practiced movements that sealed him into near-impregnability. He knew that Lowry had done the same.

"My guess would be laser rifles." Lowry's calm voice came in his ear. "I'd pick the middle barge, myself."

"Ill bet on the tail-end one." Sixx argued idly, his eyes raking the bulky silhouettes hawklike for the first sign of movement. "If we got half a chance, I think our best ploy is to fall artistically overboard and play dead. That way we might save an attack on the foil itself. If they sink that, we are in real trouble." He knew he was just talking to pass the time, not telling Lowry anything he didn't already know. When a man is near-impregnable he learns to think in backward terms, to let the enemy think he is helpless or hurt, to take seemingly foolhardy chances. "There he is! End barge!"

A dark head and shoulders showed suddenly against sun-dappled water, a man hunched in the unmistakable attitude of aiming a weapon. Both men tensed. There came a spit of orange-red flame, another, and a third, in snap-quick succession. There were thin threads of barely visible fumes, a curious triple-echo cracking sound, and Sixx had barely time to guess that the enemy was using something rocket-assisted when there came a leaping fountain of water only a yard short of the foil and the hammer blow of some kind of projectile over his left breast. There was no need at all for artistic pretense. Whatever the thing was, it struck him hard enough to stagger him backward, to set him grabbing at Lowry for balance, and all three of them went over and backward into the water with an almighty splash.

"You all right, Rex?" Lowry's voice came as he went down.

"No harm done." Sixx righted himself and let the suit's buoyancy heave him to the surface. "Didn't even dent me, but it packed a lot of punch, whatever it was."

"I heard the third one go by me," Lowry growled. "Rocket-assist supersonic solid, at a guess. They want to play rough, looks like."

It was his way of saying that the gloves were off. Sixx felt the same. Shaking water from his visor, he looked around, saw Louise chin-deep and paddling gently. She seemed calm enough. He switched to external speaker, stroked near.

"Grab hold the side and hang on until we find out what's next. It'll be nasty, whatever it is, so take no chances. Roger, where are you?"

"By the stem. I can see them. Two-three of them at least. They are lowering what looks like an inflatable. Coming to check up on the damage. Do we split?"

"Check. You have the best bangs in your kit. Go, man. Ill stay and welcome the curious ones."

"On my way. Don't take any chances with those rocket launchers close up. The impact won't be pleasant in the water."

"You don't have to tell me that." Sixx paddled closer to Louise. "You heard that?" She nodded. "How's the water, cold?"

"Not now. I can stand this for quite a while. What happens next?"

"All sorts of things. Roger is submerged to about seven-eight feet by now and on his way to do unpleasant things to yonder barge just to seal up one bolt hole. The enemy have lowered a boat and are on their way to do the same sort of thing to us, but 111 tend to them. You just stay where you are."

"Isn't there anything I can do?"

"In a while, yes. I'll tell you when. That boat is going to circle us, obviously. Soon as I see which end they are making for, I'll tell you, and you be ready to paddle around the other side to keep out of sight."

"But I want to see what goes on!"

"Don't be difficult, now. I'll tell you all about it afterwards. You ready to go?"

At her nod he paddled gently toward the bows and edged himself around to where he could see. This low in the water, it wasn't easy to pick out the small bulk of the bouncing inflatable, but he got it as it reared up on a wavecrest, saw that it was heading almost directly toward him. Turning, he splashed the water to attract her attention.

"Coming, this end," he called. "You make your way around the stern, all right?" As soon as he was sure she understood and was moving, he made ready for his next move. From a flat pocket in his suit he retrieved a knife, a highly useful implement of flexible vanadium steel with a razor edge one side and a fine-diamond-toothed saw the other. Against rocket-powered missiles it seemed inadequate, but he hoped it wouldn't come to that. There was another worry, one that he tried to keep well to the back of his mind. He had heard of the unpleasant consequences of being in water too close to an underwater explosion. Roger wasn't one to waste time. And Louise had no armor, only her slight clothing and her skin. However, no time to dwell on that now, here came the inflatable, bouncing ahead of the stutter of an outboard motor.

He rolled over flat on his back and gave just one small shove to set himself clear before going still and motionless, hopefully dead-seeming. The small motor throbbed in his ear. He tried to imagine the thoughts of those who were now staring at his stark-white suit hobbling lifelessly in the swell.

They've got to be curious enough to come close and look! he reasoned hopefully, and lay still, waiting and listening. The motor noise died, and he heard the slap of wavelets on rubberized plastic.

A low voice muttered, "He looks to be out cold to me."

"That's not good enough," another demurred. "We have to make sure. We wouldn't want him to wash up on some beach for stupid people to get curious about, would we?"

"Well all right, go ahead and sink him!"

"Not this close, you fool! The shock wave would sink us!"

"Ill back off a little. Tell me when. See anything of the others?"

Sixx had been squinting through slit eyes, saw the gray-green bulk of the boat close enough to reach. He decided it was time to come alive. He did not fancy the shock wave any more than they did. With a sudden power-assisted snatch he reached and laid hold of a rope bight, hauled, swung over his other hand, and slashed vigorously, hearing the slurp and whoosh of air and the frantic yells of the opposition. He hacked thoroughly, thrashing about until he was sure the surface was clear, then he let go and bobbed up, looking about. A seal-wet head rose up close by with dripping beard and a white snarl of teeth. And with him came the dark muzzle of a weapon, gushing water momentarily.

Irrelevantly Sixx could marvel at the insane ferocity of a man who would cling to a weapon at a time like this. He even had time, so curiously does the mind work, to observe that it was made of durable plastic and therefore not all that heavy. A rocket launcher has no need of a precision barrel and pressure to send a projectile on its way. Roger had guessed right, for what good that was in the circumstances. But all that fled through the periphery of his mind as his reflexes sent him into a desperate surge and grab to deflect the barrel enough to have the lethal projectile miss him by a fraction of an inch, and then his armored fists closed on the bearded one and stayed closed.

He tripped his suit to zero buoyancy and held on. In a while the man in his grasp stopped struggling and became inert. He let go and drove up through the water, back to the surface urgently, shook his face plate clear, and was in time to see the other man scrambling aboard the hydrofoil, clutching his weapon.

That was not so good. With the slim advantage of surprise all used up, Sixx was very badly placed. On the surface and visible he was an easy target for that man up there who could shift and aim faster than Sixx could hope to evade. And while those rocket slugs couldn't penetrate his armor, they could cripple him with the energy of impact. Not good at all, he decided, swimming gently, trying other alternatives for flavor. He could submerge and come up. Where and how? Again, that man up there had the advantage of speed. Unless he tried wrecking the hydrofoil itself, and he didn't want to do that. Not unless there was absolutely no other way.

And where was Louise? Even as the question crossed his mind, he saw her. She was inboard, on the foil, creeping desperately along from the stern, holding something long and solid-looking, stalking the enemy. Choking back on his instant and instinctive urge to yell at her, Sixx hoisted himself in the water, splashing, making a target of himself, catching the enemy's eye, anything to distract his attention, aiming, and Louise stepped close, raised the thing she held in both hands, and flailed down with it like the hammer of doom. Sixx heard the impact distinctly over the water, saw the man lurch and pitch headfirst over the side into the water.

In the next instant he groaned as an enormous fist punched him from all sides at once, hard enough to stun him and rattle his teeth. It seemed a curiously long time before the sound of that explosion came rolling across the water. Shaking his head to rid it of bells, Sixx leaned into a crawl and came up to the foil to reach and grasp and haul himself carefully inboard. Into his suit radio he said,

"Roger, you all right?"

"Be with you in a couple of minutes, Rex."

There was his white helmet cleaving the water. In less than the stated time his glove came over the side, followed by his dripping bulk, a broad grin showing through his visor.

"You clown!" Sixx spoke severely. "You might have mangled Louise with that blast."

"Not a chance!" Lowry retorted easily. "I knew she was clear. I saw her clobber that laddie. Clown yourself for letting him get the drop on you like that. What did you hit him with, Louise?" He turned to where she stood, still propping the object against her thighs.

"I think," she said unsteadily, "they call it a thwart."

Lowry took it from her, hefted it appreciatively, dropped it back into the slots it had come from. "Say something, Rex," he suggested.

"All right, I was going to." Sixx hunched his shoulders at her. "I owe you. You shouldn't have done it. Never do anything like that again. You are the job, and it is our duty to safeguard you not for you to take risks and protect us. But I owe you just the same. That merchant would have given me a very bad time."

The navigator-robot spoke, its calmly impersonal voice surprising him, rescuing him from embarrassment.

"The obstruction is still present. Unless you can suggest a logical alternative, I will adopt an avoiding course, resume speed, and return to my original program."

Sixx was momentarily at a loss for comment, giving Lowry time to ask, "How much tolerance do you have to accept alternative suggestions?"

"It is possible for me to expend enorher eight minutes and still be able to arrive at the prearranged time."

"Can you steer us into hailing distance of the front end of the . . . obstruction and then wait there?"

"It is possible. Seven and nine-tenths minutes."

The idling motor coughed and boomed up to speed, the hydrofoil heeled over and picked up forward speed rapidly, making a stiff breeze.

"What's on your mind, Roger?"

"What Louise said. Somebody definitely doesn't want her to get to Iskola. Maybe the tug skipper knows who."

"Maybe. But maybe he and his merry men also have nasty weapons that spit slugs?"

"I'd bet against it, Rex. He hasn't helped any so far. And, like I said before, I can buy him giving a few fellers an emergency lift, but I can't see the opposition finding a whole hostile armada offhand."

"Yes. We've done that bit. All the same though, we will parley with him, ask him questions. You—" he turned a severe eye on Miss Latham, "—will hide behind us as before."

The precaution proved to be unnecessary. As the hydrofoil slowed once more and matched speed with the laboring tug, the face that stared at them out of the wheelhouse window was wide-eyed, fearful.

"I know nothing!" he shouted in response to their queries. "A man I have never seen before, he came, gave me much money, asked me if I would make a small change in course, thus and so, to meet a small boat and stop for a while. To talk, so he said. And then go on. That is all

I know."

"If he's lying, we'd have a sweet time proving it," Lowry muttered. "We can't twist his arm at all."

"We can shut his mouth, though. Like this." Sixx raised his voice to shout. "Do you recognize this boat?"

"From Iskolal" the tug skipper spat into the water. "Their business is none of mine. You tell me something. How am I to explain the loss of a barge and ten tons of precious ore?"

"You'll think of something. You had better make it a good story, too. If you try to drop us in for anything, you'll find yourself explaining to Police Chief Martinez. He is a very good friend of ours. Ail right, Navigator, on your way, it's all yours."

As the convoy dropped swiftly astern and the breeze of motion grew fresh, Sixx turned to Miss Latham.

"Now you're cold," he said, pointing the obvious. "You'd better strip out of those wet clothes and lay them out in the sun to dry or you'll catch pneumonia or something."

"Worried about the job again?" she asked, starting on zippers.

"That, of course. But if you have any sensitivity at all, youll know it's more personal than that. You're nice people, Louise. I'd hate to have anything happen to you. Me and Roger will sit up front and give you privacy if that's all right with you?"

"Don't be silly, Rex," she told him, already half out of her wet dress. "I shouldn't have twisted your arm like that." She stretched the wet garment over a seat where it fluttered in the breeze. "I know how you feel, both of you, and it's a great compliment to me, so don't spoil it by treating me old-fashioned. You saw how that Alma Tillet was dressed? It's pretty obvious that in their society clothing is whatever they happen to fancy at any time." She handed a wisp of something to Lowry, busied herself with what was left. "I've been itching to shed at least half of this lot, anyway." She gave the last item to Sixx to drape in the sun and settled on a seat "Besides, we have talking to do between us."

"Such as what?" Sixx demanded. "That attack back there? It's all over. I doubt if the tug skipper will talk any more than he has to, and the others certainly won't. They can't"

"Just so," she agreed. "But I like the way you two argue a thing out, and that attack is a good case, somewhere to start from. As I said, somebody wants to keep me out of Iskola. But who, and why? Or, put it a different way, is it somebody on the outside, back there, or one of them?" She aimed a slim arm ahead in the direction they were speeding.

"I like the look of Dobny as the mastermind." Lowry was prompt and confident. "He has the brain. He's in the right place. And he had an 'accident' no right-minded scientist should ever have. But that's all I've got on him, no reasons why at all."

"It can't be from the inside," Sixx argued. "That idea comes out bent. If the threat is from them, then they can't be the perfect society they are supposed to be. With one breath they call you in, with the other they try to rub you out. That makes no sense."

"Unless," she came back at him, "that's what they are trying to avoid, trying to stop me finding out just that."

"But that's stupid, too," he objected. "If they do anything to you, they will merely postpone the inevitable because that would bring down a full-scale Interstelpol investigation on their necks. It doesn't add up."

"You win." She grinned and drew up her knees to hug them in the sun. "So, I vote we say nothing at all about this unless we have to. If that robot is to be believed— and we are really hopping along now, if you hadn't noticed—we should arrive on time as if nothing had happened. Let's keep it that way unless and until we get evidence that somebody on Iskola is surprised and/or worried about our arrival, right?"

"You're the detective," Sixx assured her, and she laughed. Her black hair was almost dry and lifting in the breeze. Her honey-brown eyes had a glow in them that hadn't been there earlier. She was a very attractive woman, he thought, as she turned to speak to Roger.

"How in the world did you make that tremendous bang?" she asked him.

"Detonite, and a radio trigger. You know about detonite?"

"A little. It's the most powerful chemical explosive ever invented. Was that really necessary?"

"There were four more aboard that barge, and they had a lot of stuff that wouldn't have been any good to us at all."

"I suppose you're right," she agreed. "They were trying to kill us. I can never get used to that idea. People have tried to kill me often, but I can't ever think that way about them in return."

"What you should think about," Sixx declared, "is that you were stood up there to be shot at—and four of them back there capable of doing it. Ill say it once more. Don't ever do anything like that again."

"I knew they wouldn't I knew the danger was over. Just as I know it is all right for me to do this right now with you two. You don't suppose I would sit around naked with just anybody, do you?"

"I believe that's a compliment" Sixx retorted, "but I'd have to ask for time to think about it."

"Oh, come on, nowl" she teased him with a smile. "You're not really the sort that regards a woman as an enemy, someone to be conquered. That's just an attitude that you've made into a habit I'm not putting you down when I say I feel perfectly safe right now."

"You're not?" he still wasn't sure.

"I felt you look at me just now. It was a nice warm feeling. I liked it. Rex, a woman likes to be admired even when she feels inside she doesnt really deserve it."

"You need never be bothered with that feeling, anyway," Lowry told her flatly. "You deserve it all the time."

"Not all the time, Roger, but thanks, anyway. You know—" she looked over the sea, "—this is very pleasant just for this moment. What do you boys do with your time off?"

"We usually grab whatever happens to be going, any opportunity to relax; we don't usually get much chance to plan anything ahead."

"Maybe well change that. I'd like to spend a lot of time with you two just like this—but there, look, seems to be part of the answer to that other problem we were discussing, about how they keep people out"

On the blue horizon ahead a gray rock wall of coastline had grown, stretching to far left and right Evenly spaced rows of vapor plumes along the rim helped Sixx place the scene alongside the aerial view he had seen earlier.

"If that's the typical coastline, Rex, they don't need anything more."

"But this is only part. About five or six hundred miles of it. It's not like this all the way around. And those steam puffs are artificial. Too regularly spaced. Some kind of thermals, possibly?"

"On the top of a cliff? That doesn't sound right, somehow. What I'm looking for right now—" Lowry was practical, "—is how we get in there?"

In the event it was childishly simple. The foil, headed directly in, began to slow. They saw a cave mouth, too smoothly arched to be natural, and abruptly they were sliding along an underground channel barely big enough to pass them. Eventually the hydrofoil slowed to a crawl and nudged in alongside one wall of an open chamber. And there, perched on an oddly designed cart, was Alma Tillet, waiting for them.

"Climb aboard," she invited. "As a rule our way lies over there to the testing rooms, but that doesn't apply now. We go straight ahead."

The cart lifted as soon as they were settled and began to skim with no more than a gentle hiss of air noise.

"Cushion car?" Sixx queried, and she smiled.

"Modified. Instead of riding on one air bubble with side-walls, this has hundreds, each variable, computer-controlled. Less noise, more flexibility. Each bubble is like a foot in itself. Call it a centipede car."

"You must have bypassed the test rooms for the senator, too," Miss Latham suggested, and the Iskolan nodded.

'Two days ago. Poor man, he didn't get the chance to see much, after all. And we went to such a lot of trouble."

"You laid on a special show for him?"

"Of course, Mr. Lowry. We intended to show him what he wanted to see. As far as possible, anyway. Ah, sunshine!" The cart slid out into bright light and a garden wilderness very similar to that which they had seen on the screen. In a moment, rounding a leafy corner, they arrived at the tiled nook itself, and the car halted. Alma Tillet waved a slim arm. "Welcome to my temporary home."

The picture had failed to bring the rich scents of growing things, the warm immediacy of everything. Miss Latham caught a word. "Temporary?"

"Yes. We take turns to guard the gate. Year and year. I'm not the only explainer, by any means. Will you rest, eat, and drink?"

Sixx caught the tiny tickle of amusement in her voice and looked all around, seeing nothing but semi wild garden apart from the tiles and table nook where they stood

now."All right," he said, "111 buyit. Where?"

MissLatham looked at him in wonder. "Can't you feel it, Rex? Nor you, Roger? It's subsurface, of course!"

AlmaTillet lifted a brow just a fraction. "That's right," she said. "Come." And when they were all clustered around the small table, she said simply, "Down, please," and the entire nook sank swiftly and steadily.

"Thereare many reasons." Alma Tillet spoke as if answering their unvoiced question. "Aesthetic. Few, if any, animal species build homes on thesurface. Think of a cave or a burrow. Convenience. We have solidity, constant controllable temperature and lighting, simplicity, no need for massive supports or foundations. And we avoid interference with the environment as a whole. And that is important here. Does the word laterization mean anything to you?"

"We'veheard of it," Sixx admitted as they stepped off the platform and into a long, low room, soft carpeted but busy with clicking, ticking machines. Their host waved an apologetic hand.

"Dataroom.Every home place has this. Think of it as a combined library and reference reading room. An interface with the rest of the community. If we have one really hard rule here, it is that we do not hoard information. We put it into the common pool for everyone to use." She conducted them on and into a bigger room, this one with low tables, even lower reclining chairs, cushions scattered at random, thick carpets underfoot. "Be comfortable, please," she ordered. "There are no formalities whatever. For instance, if your clothing hampers you at all ..." A gesture completed her sentence. A cross-track serving machine trundled in to take their orders.

Sixxgrinned at it as he punched in an order for a mixed grilland coffee, caught Alma Tillet's eye, and explained, "Those things always touch my funny bone. There's a gadgetthat can move in any direction at will without turning 'round, and so simple. Take a square base and establish one track on each side, and it sounds like stalemate except that each track is made up of rollers that spin at right angles to the track. And there it is. Nothing to it. But the man who first thought of it really made a leap. Thatkind of thinking fascinates me, the simple and obvious solution to the seemingly impossible."

AlmaTillet eyed him thoughtfully. "It's a pity," she

Baid, "thatwe have no way, as yet, of developing that kind of appreciation for the simple and elegant solution. People resist change because they expect it to be complex and difficult, but they can be encouraged to struggle with it Thesimple elegant solutions can be found quite often, but getting people to accept those is much harder than getting them to struggle with something complicated." She was going to add something but held it as the scuttling serving machine came with a tall glass for Miss Latham, who took it and looked her apologies. The Iskolan shrugged. "Please ... if you feel you need it"

"Ido." Miss Latham sank the dose in a steady series of swallows, and Sixx saw surprise for the first time on Alma Tillet's face.

"Idouble-checked your analysis," she admitted, "just to be sure. The alcohol-in-blood level is incredibly high. By any normal standards you should be unconscious. Can you talk about it?"

"Mightas well get it over with."Miss Latham sighed, and the Iskolan scrambled up and away, came hurrying back with a mobile terminal.

"Data,"she explained. "Olga will be interested in this. Olga Glink, specialist in the biosciences. If you don't mind?"

They're a polite lot, Sixxmused as Miss Latham started, hesitantly at first and then more fluently once the first hurdles were passed. He ate, and listened, and thought Politeness made sense. Genius is difference, so a society of geniuses had to be polite or explode. But possibly it was more than that

"Absolutelytrue."He confirmed a point as it came up. "She's normal when she's full up and ragged when she runs dry. I don't believe it, either, but I've seen it and it's so."

"Veryinteresting.Olga will be keen to meet you, Louise."

"Meeting."Miss Latham caught at it. "You realize 111 haveto meet everyone involved, see the scene of the crime, all that?"

"Ohyes, we appreciate that. Let me explain." Alma Til-let cleared the mobile screen with a touch. "We seldom meet each other in person. With the instrumentation we have available it is seldom necessary, and we place much value on total privacy, but we are all aware of times when exceptions must be made. Now, this is Iskola." She put up a fine-line outline of the island. "Here is the gateway. We are here. And here are the home places." The outline became spotted with small dots, apparently at random. Sixx madea guess.

"Aboutfifty-five . . . sixty ...is that all?"

"Lessthan that," she said. "Our numbers are quite small.Now our small section in greater detail." The relevant part grew large, the included spots changing into small circles. "For the benefit of Senator Vancec, who had only a limited time to visit, we arranged a meeting, a gathering.That was somethinghighly irregular for us in itself,but the whole event was an irregularity, anyway, so wemade allowances for it. We chose Bernard Hoff's place as the most suitable. Bernard specializes in ekistics, and his establishment is extensive. It has to be for someone who sets up scale-model cities for experiment. Also, that kind of inquiry comes closest to what Senator Vancec would have been able to understand." She made it a Statement, withoutany suggestion of condescension.

"Howbig is a home place?" Lowry asked, and she shrugged.

"Thereis a five-mile diameter limit, not enforced, seldom reached. Most are about a mile across. Who needs more? Bernard agreed to play host to a small,representative group."

"Amoment!"Miss Latham interrupted. "Why did it all happen,anyway? I know as muchabout Iskola as anyone, only that it is rigidly exclusive, that you value privacy almost to the point of mania. Yet you suddenly throw your doors open to Vancec. Not, I may say, the happiest choice you could have made."

"Wedidn't choose him, he chose us. We were afflicted with our own internal problems, which seem small now but were a distress at that time. We had need of help and good will. Vancec was handy and sufficiently spectacular. So we made a gesture.It seemed logical at the time. Now—" she shrugged it away wryly. "—We arranged a group.Myself, of course. Bernard Hoff. Lea Lawrence . ., that's her home place there. She is in biosonics. Music and other noise, and its effects on the organism. Graham Packard, here, who covers the whole history of law and order. Ivan Rilke . . . here ... his field fringes on Lea's. He's a physicistspecializing in the interaction between organisms and electromagetic and gravitic fields. Fascinating stuff!"

"Ididn't know there was anysuch interaction to speak of," Sixx admitted, and Alma Tillet smiled with that hint of mischief again.

"Let'stry a long shot," she suggested, wiping the screen clear and setting up a program on the console. In a moment she turned to Miss Latham. "Can you point to Earth right now?" she demanded. The amber-eyed policewoman stared, blinked, then extended her arm as if groping, angled it almost straight down to the floor.

"There,I thinkl" she said. Alma Tillet touched a button.

"Comeand check it, Mr. Sixx," she invited. "You should be able to read astrogation plot. This is the big cast, Spica to Sol," she used a light pen to etch the line, then jumped the magnification in rapid stages, holding the line until he was satisfied.

"Allright, so she has a homing instinct, so what? So does an eel!"

"Andyou spoke of a leap! There are a score of explanations for homing instinct and territorial instinct. Familiarization. Experience. Polarization of sunlight Even the flavor of sea water. And others. All argued over and dubious. But when you have a sane person some tens of light years away from home and with no clues whatever who can still point right at it how else can you explain it except by some interaction with electromagnetic and gra-vitic field forces?"

"Idon't. You're doing it. But you're putting ten questions in the place of one. How do you set about studying something like that? And if she can do it and others, how come I can't. How come we can't all doit?"

"Howdo you know you cant?" the challenge came back; then Alma Tillet chuckled and waved a hand to dismiss the topic. "Later, perhaps. You must talk to Ivan. Where was I? Ah yes, one more. Olga Glink, biologist specializing in the whole art of how to live properly. And that was our little gathering—and still is."

"Youmean they are still assembled now?" Miss Latham demanded.

"Yes.Waiting for you. At great inconvenience to ourselves but in this case unavoidably. Everything has been held exactly as it was—except the body, of course. That had to be taken away."

Seven

"Whomoved the body?" Lowry was suspicious in a moment,but Miss Latham waved him down with a quiet smile, snowed him the dossier she still had.

"It'sall in here, Roger. Dr. Dobny and two policemen came to take the body away and examine it, noting times and places. Vancec was shot at close range by some explosive weapon, something primitive that threw a slug."

"Thatsounds like it wasn't found."

"Yes.Dobny reports looking for it but without success."

"That'sbad." Sixx frowned. "That weapon could maybe tell us a lot. Like who made it, and how, and where?"

AlmaTillet sharpened her tone just a shade as she said, "I know I've just steered us away from one set of irrelevant questions, however entertaining they could have been, but I'm afraid I have more now. Just what are you for, Mr. Sixx? You and Mr. Lowry?"

'That'sobvious, isn't it?" Lowry retorted. "We are delivery men. We brought Louise here. We protect her. We get her home again. And, between times, we help out any way we can. Why?"

"Aren'tyou somewhat redundant now? She needs no protection here!"

"Ibet you could have said that to Senator Vancec two days ago, too!" Sixx pointed out, and she lost her easy manner altogether for a breath. Then she firmed her lips and shook her head.

"Ideserved that. But I am sure that was not Iskola's doing. And it could not possibly happen again."

"Nowwait!" Miss Latham inserted her quiet voice. "Let's not strike any attitudes or get too far out on any limbs, not yet. I'm here to see what's to be seen, and the boys are here to help me do that. If you don't like it this

way,just say so and we'll go home again. But someone else will come, and you might like that a lot less!"

"I'msorry!" The Iskolan made a visible effort. "We are none of us at our best in person-to-person contacts. You'll have to make allowances."

"Allright.Can we move on now to Hoff's place?"

"Ofcourse!"Alma Tillet regained her smile with an effort. "There's a borer waiting for us. Just one thing— we do prefer to be informal here at all times. It helps. Please call everyone by first names as soon as introductions are made. Please? Louise, Rex, Roger, I'm Alma. Shall we go?"

The"borer" was something to see. The centipede car took them smoothly to what was obviously the perimeter of Alma's estate. The transition between park and jungle was knife-clean. There, seeming to crouch in readiness to leap at the wilderness, was a squat, solid machine on tracks with a many-toothed wheel mounted in front. But Sixx, in studying the borer, noted something else.

"Metabolicscreen?" he guessed, nodding to the precision-drawn perimeter and the slim, innocent-looking poles at twenty-foot intervals marking out the area where nothing grew. He and Lowry were fairly familiar with the neuron-field effect. Their ship could mount it if necessary, and it was in reasonably common use for this kind of protection, a fence that nothing living could pass. Within the field sustained by those posts any metabolic process whatever was amplified far beyond endurance. To go near was to ache and develop cramps, which grew more intense the closer you went. In theory nothing living could pass that area. He exchanged a cautious glance with Lowry as Alma instructed her household master robot to break the field just here to let them out. A moment later the centipede car was docked into the stern of the borer, and it growled into life.

Themonster wheel ahead began to spin, was two counterrotating wheels against fixed blades inside a razor-toothed tubular hood. In effect, to the whip crackle and screech of sliced greenery and the rich scent of new-mown jungle it bored a tunnel through the wilderness and towed the centipede car after it. In a moment Alma raised a transparent dome that reduced the noise, the scents, and the humidity considerably.

'Thattwist field," Sixx murmured. "Is that common to all your home places?"

"Yes.It's silent and clean, and it keeps out the few predators we have. Snakelike creatures and a species of pig. And scores of insects, of course."

"Andis that how you build a fence all the way around Iskola?"

"Allaround?"She looked startled, then laughed. "Hardly! Four thousand miles? Apart from the physical difficulties, we have hardly that much power to spare. We do have an efficient power plant, but it's not that good."

"Allright, but you must have some kind of fence?"

"Yesindeed. Jan Bardak devised it many years ago. Except where the cliff walls make it unnecessary, he organized the planting of a certain species of thorn. It is native to Dolgozni, and here, in places. It thrives on the sandy borderline soil of any beach and is extremely unpleasant to deal with."

"I'dhave to see it." Sixx shook his head. "You're in a knot, Alma. Naturally you want to claim that your crime, murder or otherwise, is not Iskolan, is from outside. And the outsider has to get in, somehow. Up a vertical cliff wall, or through an impassable thorn barrier?"

"Evenif he could do that," Lowry added, aiming a thumb at the passing jungle, "he would still have to fight this stuff. And it is practically solid. The odds against it being an outsider are way up!"

"Butit can't be one of us!" Alma protested. "What would be the motive? Look here, even if you totally discard all our in-depth personality inventories—and they are not so easily disregarded—even then, we are all here, all of us, because we like ithere. What we have here we just can not get anywhere else. Let me list some of it for you. On my home place I have absolute freedom to do whatever I like. There is absolutely no interference whatsoever. I have the gift of a clean and healthy environment, too. And immediate contact with like minds at any time. Endless interest and excitement, my kind. What more could anyone possibly want? And who would want to jeopardize that? It has tobe someone from outside, isn't that obvious?"

"Sure,but you've just finished explaining how it can't be," Sixx reminded her, and Louise put her hand on his arm.

"That'swhy we're here, Rex, after all. If it had been simple, they would never have needed us."

"Andwhere have I heard that one before?" he sighed.

"Allright, 111 leave the detecting to you. But you mentioned laterization, Alma, and I'm curious. Words I've never heard before bug me until I know what they mean."

"Whena problem has a solution, you find it. When it doesn't have a solution, it becomes a fact of life, and you learn to live with it. Somebody said once, I don't know who, laterization is one that hasn't any answer. It starts right there." She aimed a finger at the jungle going by. "Rich. Fertile. Lush, and so on, yes? But it isn't. This jungle, also on Dolgozni, is very similar to the kind of thing you could have found in Brazil, South America, Earth, not so long ago. It is fantasticallyfertile in its own peculiar way. The way one pictures a jungle, the leaves and branches, flowers and fruit, fall and decay into soil, into humus, rich and thick. But not here. This type of growth gets almost all its nourishment from fungal spores, mycorrhiza, which attack and break down organic litter almost as fast as it falls. The fungus, in synergy with other agencies and enzymes, works so efficiently that the cycle of decay and return to nourishment is virtually complete at soillevel. In other words the rich layer of topsoil is only inches thick, if that. There is reason to suspect, in fact, that this type of cycle develops because the soil is poor in itself."

"Youcould have fooled me," Lowry admitted. "I would have expected the humus layer to be several feet thick!"

"Onedoes. The first settlers on Dolgozni, those who went for agriculture, made just that assumption. They cut back and cleared off the jungle over large areas. They worked hard, they fought off pests, built homes, storage buildings, brought in machinery—and things grew wonderfully for a year or two. Then things began to happen. The fungus went first, destroyed by the new conditions. Then there was rain, regular and heavy. The jungle could take it. The bared soil couldn't. The sparse nutriments were leached out, all the very precious trace elements. What remained were mostly oxides of iron and aluminum, strongly acidic. In the brief but very hot, dry season that mixture makes a very good, very durable stone. That is laterization. The laterite cycle. Once it has happened, there is nothing to be done. That land is sterile."

'There'sno remedy at all?" Louise demanded.

"Oh,you can breakit up by physical means and then put down vast quantities of fertilizer and humus. But to do that you have to get it from somewhere else, which makes

thewhole exercise pointless, doesn't it?"

"Ican see now why Jan Bardak ducked out," Sixx observed, and Alma shook her head at him.

"Don'tbuy that propaganda,please. Bardak knew what to do, but he had no way of getting it across to agricultural experts. Obviously, the key is not to let the laterite cycle happen in the first place. By using special and expensive defoliants which rot instead of sterilizing. By composting rather than scorching and burning off. By planting those crops which in themselves enrich the soil. Other very obvious ways. But that kind of thinking requires that leap we were talking about. Have you ever tried telling a professional expert his own business, telling him how wrong (he is?"

"Knowwhat you mean." Sixx chuckled. "Can't be done!"

"Thatis why—" Alma took on a dedicated look, "—Bardak set away to study society as a phenomenon in itself. Society, he says, is fundamentally antigenius because its survival depends on uniformity of response. Which is true. Society as we know it can't work any other way. But he believes that it is, or should be, possible to devise a form of society that will have room for genius. Hence this place we call Iskola. We haven't found the whole formula yet, but we have learned quite a lot of very interesting things."

"Suchas a totally pollution-free power system?"Lowry queried, but she denied that with a quick shake of her head.

"Wehave it, yes, but we didn't invent or discover ft. That was done almost a century ago by someone else— only no one followed it up. You have already seen it, you know."

"Wehave?" Sixx wondered. "Oh! The vapor plumes. That? But, you'll excuse me, that looks like pollution of some kind, in itself."

"That'sthe one thing it is not. It is pure water vapor. And it is a by-product in any case. The whole idea seems dreadfully simple, even to me, and I just explain things, I do not necessarily understand them. Allow me just three things." She put up her hand. "Moist air is lighter than dry air. Warm air is lighter than cold air. And a chimney in normal circumstances will create its own updraft. Will you grant me those? Yes? Then the rest follows. You choose an area that is damp and hot—a lake in the jungle or the salt marsh by the sea at the bottom of a cliff. You build your chimney. Not straight up—not necessarily— you can run it up the side of a cliff or mountain, up to say four thousand feet or so. You have your updraft. You design your intake to draw warm, moist air from your lake or marsh. You can warm that up a bit by spraying with suitable chemicals that form thin layers to absorb radiant heat, thus helping evaporation. You design the top end of your updraft to turn tangential-wheel turbines. There's your power. You pass your hot moist air through breeze-cooled baffles, and you get fresh, distilled water. All free, after the original building. On the side you can have a mountain-top laboratory for power-physics studies. And gardens. Controlled irrigation. Controlled rainfall, if you like! The only astonishing thing is that such an idea had to lie on the shelf so long!"

"Niagarain reverse!"Lowry grinned. "Neat! Eh, Rex?"

"Notme, Roger. I'm beginning to itch. Everything is too simple, too obvious, too right. Either you are a very slick explainer indeed," he said, frowning at Alma, "or the rest of us are just plain dumb!"

"Ohno!" she said calmly. "That's just the point. You are not dumb,any of you. You can see the points, the leaps. Now Senator Vancec, he couldn't. To him simple and obvious were dirty words. I suppose that is occupational. It has been said that a thinker always tries to say exactly what he means, whereas a politician always tries to avoid saying exactly what he means. At any rate he was quite convinced, all the short while he was with us, that we were hiding all sorts of things from him. We weren't, of course."

"Youwere!" Louise surprised them all. "By being simple and obvious on your level, you were being totally incomprehensible to him. I know. I've had that problem all my life, only I never had anyone to explain me to other people, and I can't do it for myself, not very well. I've always counted that as failure on my part. In the same way, you fail if you can't get across to ordinary people— like the senator."

"Yes."Alma looked troubled now. "That certainly is a point to be considered." She consulted a dial before her, then peered ahead. "We're nearly there. We have made good time" because, of course, I've been this way a time or two just recentiy. Normally it would take twice as long to chop a paththrough raw jungle. Just one more reason why we almost never visit each other."

"Thenyou have to somehow get through Hoff's fence?" Sixx assumed. "By shield, or do you signal him to open up?"

"Signal,"Alma answered, putting out her hand and then withdrawing it again to turn and stare at him. "We use very little radio, only short-range stuff for matters such as these or robot control within a home place—you said —shield? Against a metabolic field?"

"Youdidn't know? In this suit I could stroll through that fence at any time. Does that surprise you?"

Shetouched buttons to halt the borer. "The fence is only a yardor two ahead," she said. "With all respect, I'd like to see you do it,"

"Whynot?"Sixx grinned. "You have to be convinced."

"It'snot that at all. Part of my function is to separate data from opinion. It gets to be second nature after a while. Put it this way. You believe you. I believe you. But a demonstratedfact requires no support at all. In the ordinary way I would signal to Bernard to open the fence for me. I will do that as soon as you have passed through."

"Right!"Sixx stirred, climbed out as she opened a panel of the canopy for him. In the brief moment it took him to flip his helmet into place, the thick and humid effluvium of crushed undergrowth filled his nostrils. He sank almost knee-deep in spongy, reedy decay, but he could see clearness ahead. He started away for it readily but by no means carelessly. It was quite in the cards that Iskolan genius had come up with some new and improved version of the metabolic field effect. In a momentor two he was clear of jungle, then on to bare soil where even grass wouldn't grow. A sensor clicked close to his ear, he felt a fainttickle on his skin, a thin,pale whine in his ear, but that was all. He moved forward, noted the two nearest poles, and strode confidently between them and on into the formally tailored garden beyond.

Thiswas a completelydifferent style from Alma's. The grass was cut to pool-table precision, there were no flowers at all, and the pathways were dark, glossy plastic, geometrically laid out between trees that were shorn into bare columns for the first ten feet or so of their height Order and design spoke everywhere, order and restraint, until he caught a flicker of movement by one of those trees and spunby reflex to face it. A tall man, lean and weathered like an aging Pan, came slowly to meet him.

"Whothe devil are you?" he demanded in mingled outrage and curiosity, "and how did you do that?" As soon as the words were said, he unhooked a gadget from his belt, drawing it with all the speed and skill of an old-time gun-fighter, to thrust it forward. There was a breathless moment of silence as he stared into the tiny muzzle of the needle gun Sixx had drawn with the same reflex speed. And then Sixx rearranged his mind, recognized the gadget as nothing more than a minirecorder, vanished his weapon as fast as he had produced it, and flicked back his helmet, grinning.

"Otherside of your fence," he said, aiming an arm, "is Alma Tillet, about to signal her way through. You ought to be Bernard Hoff. I'm Rex Sixx, escort to the expert from Interstelpol. Put that to music and you should have a hit number. Excuse my levity, won't you? You never ought to make a draw like that, not to mel"

"Draw?Oh, this! Pardon me. Purely reactive-defensive.This business of entertaining guests—very upsetting. Territorial intrusion. Quite strong and positive reactions. And you, of course, walking in like that. I can feel it still. Hostility, you know. Remarkable!" He looked down at his hand, then put the recorder away. "So silly. So seldom have face-to-face contact with others that I have this itch to get everything on record. Totally different from vision contact. Intrusion. Remarkable!"

Hewheeled around as there came the soft purr of the centipede car. "Alma!" he lifted a palm in greeting. "Welcome. And this is the detective? Miss Louise Latham? Charmed. My home place. Welcome. Mr. Lowry? Welcome."

"Wereyou waiting for us, Bernard?"

"Notreally." He led the way to a formal glass-walled enclosure. "I had to get away from the others. Remarkable! We all seem to have lost the art, the lesser gift, of idle conversation. Miss Latham—Louise—the sooner you can bring this unhappy business to a conclusion, the happier we all will be!"

Eight

Assoon as they were all clustered in the glass house, the floor sank away down to bring them to one comer of a huge, minimally furnished room, the walls of which were almost solidly book shelves. Their arrival brought a touch of animation to the people there assembled. Alma made the introductions, and Sixx took the opportunity to study each one candidly.

LeaLawrence was slender, inclined to drift rather than walk, and her choice of a long and shapeless white robe augmented her ethereal appearance, but her accent was down-to-earth hard Australian. Olga Glink, on the other hand, despite her angular name was as chubby and curvaceous as any Greek marble and almost as negligibly covered. The brief twist of cloth about her hips was startlingly white against her glow-tanned skin. She was the best possible advertisement for her own field, the art of living.

GrahamPackard, a long, angular, austere hawk of a man, came to offer a handshake, but Sixx had the impression that he was entrenched behind a facade, watching and noting everything. His neutral gray one-piece fitted him both in body and atmosphere. Rilke, by comparison, was squat, sturdy, and deliberately strong in handshaking, a knuckle-buster who got nowhere with the two men. He was inclined to scowl at nothing in particular, and his loose robe was violent orange, suiting him

Althoughhe was studying the party of oddballs, Sixx was keeping an eye on Louise, too. He had come to accept, almost without knowing it, that she was the key character here. Right from the start, of course, he had understood that she was the official, the detective, and he and Roger merely the guard, but that was on an intellectual level. It was in his bones and temperament to assume, to take for granted, that he would be able to stay up front

andlevel with her in any investigation. It came as a distinct and uncomfortable novelty to him, here and now, to realize that he was a long way behind her—and that she was probably away out of her depth, too, with only her instincts to lean on. She seemed composed enough, though, as the oddly assorted group dispersed once more to distant corners of the room. It was as if they could barely stand to be with one another.

"Youall right, Louise?" he asked softly, and she nodded.

"There'snothing here so far. Mild tensions only. They don't like each other—not as we understand it—more a discomfort. .."

"Youdon't have to be intuitive to see that," Lowry muttered. "They shy away from each other like a bunch of north poles."

"Nowonder," Sixx suggested. "They were all here when Vancec bought it, so they are all under direct suspicion, and that's enough to put a chill into any festive gathering."

"Ithink that's only part of it," Louise said. "Let's find out In a case like this, atmosphere can be important." She raised her voice, talking to Alma but including everyone within earshot. "I get the impression that everyone is avoiding everyone else. Is this true? If so, is it usual, and why?"

Almasmiled, turned her head. "Ivan? That's yours, I think."

Rilke,with a darker scowl than usual, cleared his throat. "All living things, organisms, generate, maintain, and are surrounded by affective fields of various kinds and intensities. The metabolic field effect in our perimeter fences is but one immediate example of this phenomenon. Social groupings form among organisms whose fields harmonize and reinforce each other. This is an extensive subject. It involves, for instance, the male-female relationship, the herd instinct, the sense of being welcome—or not—the ability to identify and recognize a fellow member of one's own group, colony, or species, to tell friend from foe, and so on. In every species there are always the few odd individuals who clash, who do not harmonize, who are natural solitaries. We are all of that type. For us it can be— it is—acutediscomfort to be in close relationship and involvement with anyone else. Does that answer you?"

Louisenodded as if that made everything clear to her, but Lowry had words of his own. "I'd like to ask one," he said. "I'll go along with the lone-wolf bit, the solitary one.

I'veknown people like that. It figures that the admission tests you all had were geared to select out that type of person, am I guessing right?" He spoke ostensibly to Alma, who nodded curiously.

"Allright, so my question is obvious. How can you possibly do anything practical in the social sciences if you're all antisocial types?" He swept them all with a glance. "It's cock-eyed, isn't it?"

Theentire room moved with instant, muttered response, and Sixx grinned. Trust Roger to set the whole group on its ear with a simple question. Then Graham Packard made a grunt that got silence.

"PerhapsI can answer that, young man, from my own field," he said. "Until about the middle of the last century history was not regarded as a science at all. It consisted of voluminous reports and records, mostly compiled by those who were immediately involved with the events and then heavily edited, biased, even rewritten, by later savants. All were intent on plugging their own point of view. One has only to compare, for instance, three parallel accounts of the events leading up to World War One—from French, German, and British sources—to see how impossible ft was for those writers to be objective—because they were involved. In precisely the same way is it impossible to study sociology, to be a social scientist with any degree of objectivity at all if one is a naturally social person. Incidentally, it is not fortuitous that not one of us is an accredited social scientist. Nor yet a psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst. It may occupy you a while to work out for yourself why this is necessarily so."

Packardleft ft there abruptly. Sixx felt irritation and guessed that Roger would be feeling something similar. This flat, stone-wall way of answering questions killed any kind of conversation stone dead. Louise seemed unmoved, somewhat distrait.

"Canwe get on, please?" she asked. "I'd like to see the place where it happened, and I shall probably want to ask you all questions afterwards. But there's no need to stay all in one room if you'd rather not. Just so long as you're all available."

"Thisway."Hoff came away from his wall and extended a guiding hand to lead them into a long gallery. "Accommodation is no great problem for me," he explained as they went, "because for my own purposes I have a large number of chambers, each capable of being furrushed in all sorts of different ways, and with full-surround wall screens and visuals I can simulate the living feel of any city you can imagine—and quite a few you can't. A city, you know, should be a machine to live in."

"Didthat kind of thing impress Vancec?" Sixx asked.

"Oddlyenough, no.I believe he had a touch of claustrophobia. Didn't like the idea of being underground. Surprising. The man must have spent more than half his life in a box, surely?"

"Maybenot.His angle was always the underpaid common man, with a lot of emphasis on common sense, grass roots, no-nonsense, back-ito-the-land stuff. He would fight anything big whether it was brains, money, success, repute, anything. Maybe he really had a fear of being boxed in."

"Possibly.He admired what he saw of Dolgozni and the hard-working community there. He was kind enough to tell me that he considered Aratni as near the ideal city as he had ever seen. Good solid stone and no fancy nonsense about it!" Hoff snorted gently, reaching a door and palming it open. "It was pointless to tell him that stone is just about the cheapest commodity they can get, there in Dolgozni." The door slid aside, and he waved them in.

Itwas a bright room. One wall carried the conventional cook nook and toilet stall, shelves and cabinets for stowage, while the other three were picture window views that gave the sense of being on a sunny windswept hillside so faithfully that one had an instant sensation of slope. The furnishings were neat and standard turn-of-the-century in-flatables, carefully contoured. The only solidly substantial item was the large, glass-topped desk that held the center of the room. "Nothing," Hoff said, "has been moved apart from the body itself. It's all untouched."

Sixxtook in the general feel with one comprehensive glance, then moved to one side, watching Louise. She looked tense now and wary. "It's here," she said. "There's something here, something bad."

"Aftereffect, maybe?"

"No,I can differentiate that much. It's still here, now."

Hoffwas watching curiously. "This sensitivity to environment—so acute—Ivan would be very interested, Ivan.. ."

"Canwait!"Sixx cut him short. "Can you home in on it at all, Louise?"

"I'lltry." She moved farther into the room, slowly casting about, and Lowry strode clear, went to stand by Hoff.

"Wherewas he found?" he asked in an undertone.

"Atthe desk" Hoff pointed. "I can show you if you like. All these chambers are equipped with scanners. I got several visual records while I was waiting for the police to come."

"Soundsuseful.Hold ft a minute, Louise. Let's look at some pix first. Go ahead, mister."

Hoffmoved to one of the picture-window walls, fiddled with a box for a moment or two, and the blowy sunlit scene winked out. In its place came a mirror image of the room they stood in, with the immediate difference being that they were not in the picture, but the body was. Sixx studied it carefully. It looked as if Vancec had been shot while sitting at the desk. Or he had been put there afterward to make it look like that.

"Canyou zoom in?" he asked. The image ballooned, and he set his jaw. It was not pleasant. The back of his head was a mess. A pool of dark blood lay on the glass around his fallen head. Hoff obliged with other views from other angles, filling in a few details while juggling with his controls.

"Thiswas at eight-thirty, day before yesterday," he said. "One of my mechanicals called him, as he had asked, to take his breakfast order. When it reported no response, I came here myself, thinking perhaps he was a heavy sleeper or was having some difficulty with the fittings or something. And there he was. I didn't go anywhere near him. There was no need. The blood was already starting to dry around the edges."

"ThenDr. Dobny and his assistants came from the mainland at eleven-fifteen." Louise followed him. "That's in their report," Hoff agreed. "And by their examination he must have been killed somewhere between midnight and two in the morning. Is that all right?"

"Heretired just before midnight," Hoff said thoughtfully. "That's the last any of us saw of him alive."

"Andnothing has been taken or moved except the body," Sixx murmured, looking at his partner. Lowry nodded fractionally.

"Musthave gone right through, Rex."

"Right.And that means it's still here. But where? That's a swivel chair he was sitting on."

Louisestared at them. "The bullet!" she cried, and half raised the dossier, let it fall again. "You're quite right. It isnl mentioned here at all, just that he was shot in the throat and the bullet exited at an upward angle, just clearing the occipital bone."

"Thatdon't help much, either," Lowry pointed out, "if he was sitting down. He could've been leaning back, looking up—anything!"

"Ifind this very interesting." Hoff rubbed his hands together. "Why do we not attempt a reconstruction?" He moved toward the chair, and Sixx halted him hurriedly, not liking the look on Louise's face.

"Easy!"he cautioned. "Let's not rush at anything. I assume everything has been checked for fingerprints and such?"

"Ohyes. The police did that There were no prints, only those of the senator. My mechanicals take care of such things."

"Andthey cleaned up afterward?"

"Ofcourse.Fortunately everything, all the surfaces, are stain-proof. So there was no need to remove anything or replace anything."

"Itsure looks as if he just sat there and let somebody walk right up to him and shoot him!" Lowry grumbled, shaking his head. "Can you see it any other way, Rex?"

"No,but Louise can. Is it very bad?"

Shewas pale now, making her way by unwilling steps toward the desk. "It's herel" she said unhappily. "It's still here!"

"There'sa way to find out." Lowry flipped his helmet into place and settled in the chair, making it creak under his weight. Sixx turned to Hoff, touching a lapel mike at the same time so that his partner could listen in.

"WhenVancec retired that night how was he? Mood, I mean. Relaxed, excited, angry, even? Had there been any argument? Any sort of suggestion he might want to see somebody privately afterward? Hints, anything like that?"

"Notthat I can recalL I can play you recordings of almost everything that was said by all of us. Rather stilted gossip, most of it. And speeches. Senator Vancec had that manner of making speeches rather than conversing."

Louisecaught her breath, and Sixx spun around to see his partner extending a gloved hand toward something on the desk.

"Easy,Roger," he cautioned. "What goes?"

"Lookslike some kind of bag, case, toilet gear, maybe?"

"Ah!"Hoff came in. "That—it belonged to the senator. He carried it with him everywhere. I had assumed it was some kind of briefcase."

"Mightgive us some kind of a lead."Lowry's voice was calm. He put his thumb to a catch, released it, and there was a distinct click. The flat lid reared up and back, and a cardioid microphone raised itself from a well and aimed itself at Lowry. Then there was another click of a quite different kind.

"Ithink we found it, Rex." Lowry sounded amused. "A booby. Come and take a look!"

Momentslater Sixx was peering over Lowry's shoulder and down the dark barrel of the microphone. Barrel it was. The cover grille was pierced and the interior quite dark. He investigated more closely, then shook his head in admiration. So beautifully simple, yet so utterly deadly. The recorder was designed as a whole unit The catch release lifted the lid, and that caused the microphone to rear up from between the reels and aim itself toward the sound source. Voice activated, all automatic. He stressed the fake microphone with one hand to test the spring legs. They were quite adequate to take the recoil. And a man would quite naturally aim himself at the mike. He would start talking. Boom! Just like that. And then in the ensuing silence it would patiently switch itself off and fold itself away, and just rest there.

"Slick!"he said. "Not too hard to do, either. It wouldn't take much more than half an hour to remove the real mike, patch in this tube, ready and loaded, with a spark-fire switch. We ought to be able to find the slug now."

Theyfound it by switching off the picture wall right behind where the senator had been sitting, and then it was obvious, in a patch of ruined electronics. Lowry shook his head at it.

"Hunkof lead.Doesn't tell us a thing."

"Ah,but—" Hoff scowled at the slug, "—this does at least establish convincing grounds for our innocence. Doesn't it?"

"Don'task me," Sixx muttered. "She's the detective."

Louiseseemed relieved of her fears now but a trifle downcast just the same. "I'm satisfied with it," she sighed. "I believe I am right in saying that from the moment the senator arrived, he was continuously with one or the other of you until he retired? And that he carried this personal recorder at all times?"

"I'msure the others will bear me out on that, yes."

"Thatwon't be necessary. Not unless you're all involved in some pointless conspiracy. And that doesn't make any kind of sense intellectually, and ft offends all my instincts into the bargain. No, it's obvious to me that someone on the mainland fixed this deadly trap, someone who knew of his habits, knew he was in the habit of recording his thoughts before going to bed. That is how I read it."

"Sonow what?"Sixx demanded. "You don't look too good. You need a drink, maybe?"

"Ina moment.There's something I have to do first. Can I get a radio link direct subetheric to Earth from here, Bernard?"

"Ofcourse.Each home place is linked in with the central computer complex and data bank, and with each other, and with outside. Into Aratni and the sUbether station there. Thisway, 111 show you." He led them away to a data room, a duplicate of the one they had seen at Alma's place. He did certain things delicately, then turned the terminal over to her. "It's quite straightforward from now," he assured her. "Just carry on as for any normal radio link."

"Noneed to back off." She smiled wearily. "It isn't private. I'm going to request a full background on Vancec and further instructions after I tell them what I've got so far. Iskola is in the clear, by me. It will take about forty-eight hours before the word comes back, but whatever it may be—we are certainly all through here. You can tell your friends. It will be a weight off their mindsl"

Nine

Hoffmoved thoughtfully away, out of listening range. He seemed in no great hurry to spread the good news. Sixx drifted close to him, Lowry close behind. "Where did I get the idea," he murmured, "that you don't use radio a lot, only short-range stuff?"

"Quitetrue, just for household robots, things like that Radio is too open, too easily overheard. No, in all our communications we use land lines. Armored multiplex sodium cables, in fact. Much more reliable than radio."

"It'sa point of view," Sixx admitted, "but it must be some job to lay all those cables!"

"Notreally." Hoff waved a finger at it. "It has only to be done once in each case, you see? You have seen a map? Then you will have a fair idea of our power centers, yes?"

"Thepretty vapor plumes." Sixx nodded.

"Quiteso.Now, assume you were a new entrant. You'd need a home place. You would be quite free to pick your own spot. Anywhere. As soon as your coordinates are entered into the master computer the rest follows, all preprogrammed. In the nearest power center to you a borer is activated and starts out towing a train of fabrication mechanicals, supplies, and a cable layer. Once that is done, you see, the new site has full power, total data, and all the necessary machinery to do whatever you require. I believe sodium cables are very much more efficient than more ordinary carriers, but Ivan is the man to ask about that aspect of it. Ah, Louise, all satisfactory?"

"Asfar as can be expected," she said ruefully. '1 can't doanything more now, not of any great use, until I have more data on Vancec's history. It looks as if I shall have the whole of Dolgozni to check over for motive, means, opportunity, the usual routine drill."

"That'snot the way they do it in the drama tapes," Sixx 82

complained."In all the crime plays IVe seen, the great detective puts his finger on the crucial fact, thinks hard, and then says, 'Aha! So that's who done it!'"

"Clown!"Louise managed to grin. "It is very seldom like that It is usually just plain, dull, hard work. I could use that drink now."

Backin the big room, in that strained atmosphere that Sixx himself could feel now, she caught their attention with a gesture. "I'm satisfied," she told them, "that Senator Vancec was killed by a mechanism that he brought with him from the mainland. Which means that there is now no reason at all for any of you to remain here any longer than you wish. There is just the remote possibility that I may want to see you again, to ask questions, but that is extremely unlikely."

"Forthis relief, much thanks." Lea Lawrence came drifting, her voice almost a chant "I'm sure I speak for all of us. For myself, I invite you to visit my home place while you are here. You will be welcome!"

AlmaTillet, who had been in close-head mumble with Olga Olink, now stood apart to offer an opinion."We had already arranged a tour of inspection for the late senator to visit one or two more home places, a power plant our computer center, and Jan Bardak—" a momentary hush of reverence at the sound of the great name, "—so why do we not go through with that plan? Louise, would you accept that as a formal invitation?" Alma swept the group with an inquiring eye, saw agreement, returned to Louise. "You don't have to rush away at once?"

"Notat all.I have to wait on radio instructions and information from Earth. That will take at least two days."

"Andyou can accept that anywhere there happens to be a terminal. So you wfll agree and accept? Good!"

Hoffraised a hand, obviously determined to be hospitable. "It will be my pleasure to offer you all a meal before you depart. A unique occasion!"

They're no different from anyone else, Sixxmused. The load of suspicion has come off, and they are overcompen-sating as a result.

OlgaGlink, radiating vivid health from every square inch of her person, came up to Louise. "My dear, Alma has been telling me about you, your metabolism analysis. Please permit me to prescribe a drink for you. It will be just a little different from what you would usually select I am quite sure most of your trouble is in diet" She of-

"Verywell!"She beamed at Lowry, and Sixx could feel the heat of it himself on the side. Different kind of signals altogether, he thought. But she was about to make a point "If now," she declared, "someone was beating a drum close by, we would have to shout at each other to hear and be heard, and that would be noise. Unpleasant. But if we were shouting and screaming at each other, and there was no drum at all, that would be distortion and just as unpleasant. Your trouble, my dear, is not noise— is not too much information but distortion. The quality is wrong."

Louisewas halfway down her drink, sipping it politely. She looked dubious. "I'd always thought of it as getting too much information too loudly. Too much for me to handle all at once."

'Toomuch for the brain to handle?"Olga shook her head. "Never! My dear, think! Have you ever listened to a vast orchestra with a choir and been able to identify every note, every instrument, every voice? And that is just auditory. Oh no, the brain can handle anything supplied to it if the quality is there. Not consciously, perhaps, but then what is consciousness but a selective focusing? We choose what we will attend to; we tune out everything else, but it is still being handled. You will see. I will prescribe for you, and soon you will no longer need anesthetic to stop the scream, you will be able to absorb it all properly, comfortably."

Sixxthought it was time to ease himself away. He found Olga a shade overpowering after a while. Hoff was conjuring up chairs and tables, screens to blot out the book shelves. Rilke and Lea Lawrence, between them, were planning a music program. Sixx circled and came up with Packard.

"I'mno great history student," he opened, "and you could put me down any time, but I've always understood there's a kind of savage truth in the old saying that we don't learn from history. Is that in fact true?"

"Itwas," Packard growled. "In the days when that aphorism was coined, all we had in the way of history was the record of the follies of our forebears. And that of course, made it possible always for 'man now' to convince himself that he was going to be a whole lot smarter than 'man then,' so he didn't, in fact, learn the lesson. As a.science, history is seen as a record of the interplay of inborn, innate tendencies in the human animal and the environment with its changes. A science does not allow you to say that you will be smarter than hard facts. It can say on study, 'You can't do it that way, periodl' We have learned to regard history as a valuable record of a vast series of experimental human situations. Very valuable reference. As Bardak has said, 'What you know is very useful. It helps to point to what you don't know, which is much more interesting.' The human animal is a highly complex creature, Mr. Sixx, but he is not infinitely variable. He is prisoned between certain limits whether he likes that or not"

"Likesurvival patterns?"

"That'sanother myth." Packard was flatly positive. "It is a common error to believe that our one basic instinct or drive is to survive."

"Anerror?You mean it's not true?"

"Ofcourse it isnt The individual does not survive.Isnt that obvious. Furthermore, he cannot survive.Individual immortality, like the value 'infinity,' is an abstraction. What can survive is the society-as-entity. And that is one ofthe built-in values of an organism."

"Holdon a minute!" Sixx objected. "I can't go along with that one. I can see a man risking his life for his family, sure. Animals will do that too, in some cases. But a man laying down his life for a society . . . ?"

Packardsmiled gloomily. "Astonishing, the way we would rather believe myths than evidence. Poems, plays, masterworks of the arts, have been created around the eternal triangle, about men who have fought each other, risking life for love. All very dramatic and inspiring. But how many actual cases have you known or seen on record? On the other side, think of the uncounted millions who have taken up arms, donned uniforms, and marched away to fight and die in wars, an endless succession of wars— in defense of what? A nation, a homeland, an abstraction, a society-as-entity. History, Mr. Sixx!"

Hoffbroke in to announce the meal. Sixx, battered but ready for more, elected to sit alongside Packard. "Maybe I'm being stupid again, but do you foresee a formula for the ideal society at all?"

"Forthe ideal, no.That would be conceit. But there are certain ground rules for the optimum. You'll have to hear Bardak on that. He will make you think. On equality, for instance. A society is dying when it demands equality for all regardless of achievement because that is to deny intellectability, and excellence. And what we were saying just now about instinctual drives—any fool can obey an instinct blindly. That is why so many fools get into such a lot of trouble. And you must make a point of hearing him on evolutionary theory."

Sixxgave necessary attention for a moment to the processes of eating and drinking, decided to change the drift of the conversation into channels he had more hope of following. "All at once," he said, "you people seem keen to open up. This blanket invitation to Louise to follow the program originally laid down for Vancec. The invitation to Vancec in the first place . . . ?"

"Yes.That is recent" Packard scowled at it. "We are isolationist by design and nature. I explained that, didn't I? But it wasn't until our machines began to yield up indisputable evidence of criminal practices amongst us that we realized the full extent of animus against us from outside. We do keep in touch with the outside world, of course, but we have niters. People like Alma, and others, who eliminate the unnecessary. We prefer to intake data not opinions. But then, when we made our request to Interstelpol for help, then we were made to realize that there was, shall I say, a distinct reluctance to spring to our aid. I suppose we were naive there."

Packardcoughed, struggled with his gloomy smile. "I suppose it is inevitable that an unknown will take on the aspect of a threat. At any rate we realized we had to do something to soften that image, and of course the senator's request came very opportunely. Unfortunately it has turned out to be exactly the reverse of what we intended. So now we are willing to extend the open band to Miss Latham and yourselves to repair some of the damage."

"Inother words you have nothing to hide?"

"That'snot strictly true. We do have information—call it that—which we would rather not release. But that doesn't make us unique. It is true of any society, surely?"

"Right."Sixx agreed, grinning. "In fact there's nothing particularly unique about any of this. A bit of a letdown for geniuses."

"Wedo not particularly care for that word." Packard frowned. "We—but Bardak has already said it, quoting someone else. Genius is just the art of seeing what everyone else sees and then thinking what no one else has thought. Seeing the obvious but thinking about it in a different way. And to do that one has to be detached.

Passionatelydisinterested.As far as possible. It is not possible, of course, to be completely objective. We use machines to keep us up to that mark."

Packardshut down abruptly as the background music suddenly grew into dominance. Sixx heard a dancing melodic line weaving its way through a mesh of interlaced counterpoint, the whole thing skipping merrily over an almost inaudible argument away down in the bass register. It lasted no longer than a minute, but somehow it conclusively ended the meal. Lea Lawrence stood.

"Thatwas a Bach bourree on the surface," she announced, "but with added subsonics to aid the digestion. So much nicer than that awful full' feeling, don't you all agree?"

Sixxdidn't Forall the fine food and the elevating conversation, he was glad it was time to leave. He wanted to see fresh sunshine and air, to get away from the sense of being manipulated and watched like something on a microscope slide. He settled close to Lowry as the departing guests arranged themselves on the centipede car and was pleased to see the rear seats left for himself and partner, with Alma and Louise right ahead of them.

"Youget the feeling they are parrying, Roger? You ask a question, you get a lecture. Arm's length. Nothing personal."

"Dependson the questions. I getthe feeling Vancec could've suicided. The way Olga talks,he was looking for somebody or something, like a man with a bomb all ready to drop. Ready to pouncel"

"Wonderwhy he would come here to do it?"

"Wemight get a line on that when we get his data back. You find out anything about their criminal activities, what they called Louise for?"

"No,damn itl" Sixx snorted at himself. "Packard could've told me and I let it go on by. Alma would know, though." He leaned forward to ask and saw that she had a small read-out screen between herself and Louise, making a map.

"We'rehere," she said, "and we head almost due north to Lea's place. Graham will get off there, too. His place is west of there. We will continue northward to Ivan's place and then strike northeast from there to Olga's. By then it will be nearly sunset, and you will have had a long day, so we will rest there overnight. If you've no objection?"

"Won't Olga mind?Does she know?"

Theanswer had to wait until they had waved good-by to Hoff and were hooked into the borer again. Then Alma said, "She won't mind. It was her suggestion. She's very interested in you as a problem. How do you feel?"

Louisetook her time. "Comfortable," she admitted. "And alert, too. I think Rex has a question."

"Mindreading now?"Sixx grinned. "I do, at that. Something we should have asked long ago. The criminal activities that drove you to ask for help in the first instance. What were they exactly?"

"Ahyes." Alma rotated her seat and Louise copied, making a cozy head-together foursome. "It's housekeeping, I suppose you'd call it You must have realized that as a society we are wide open to abuse. That it hasn't happened so far is a testimonial to our selection processes. Until recently. We are provided with everything we need, so it is obviously possible to overdo, to be ridiculously extravagant to waste. You agree?"

"Withinreason.Hard to define that sometimes."

"Nothere, Rex. Not with us. Until, quite by chance, someone needed some typical consumer values out of store and chose our own as a standard of comparison. And ours were ridiculously wrong, much too inflated. That was a start. Others made similar checks, found similar discrepancies. And then a more serious aspect emerged. Someone was deleting data from storage!"

"That'svague. Can you be more specific?"

"Ican indeed. I was the first to find it Programs missing. I use analogies extensively. Useful ones I code into store in case I forget them and to help anyone else along the same line of thought. Often one can forget the precise wording. And there was one I needed, a proverb-type story dating from the nineteen fifties about the unsolicited gift and the human brain. I knew it was there, but I needed refreshing on the wording. But it had been deleted. It was difficult to believe at first, but there it was. Or rather, there it wasnt. And that prompted me to start searching for other things. It is difficult to search for what may be missing if you think about it. But we found enough evidence to establish the fact that someone is cheating!"

Ten

"It'snice!" Sixx approved as he thought it over. "Somebody, one or more, is taking advantage of your built-in patterns."

"Exactly.It is an intolerable situation. Even though we must be by any standards a highly unorthodox society, we still have to follow the William James rule. That a society exists and functions only when each member of it can go about his business in the secure knowledge that all the other members are doing likewise."

"Andyou are stuck," Lowry murmured, "because you have this noninterference value. No face-to-face contact Solitaries. You all mind your own business."

"Butsurely," Louise suggested, "you have a computer complex, and it would be a relatively simple matter to set up a program to search ..."

"Forwhat isn't there?" Alma retorted, and Louise hunched her shoulders.

"Yes,I suppose that would be contradictory."

"And,you'll remember, we do not feed personal data into store, not theories or opinions or anything like that."

Theconference broke off for a moment as the borer halted to let off Lea Lawrence and Graham Packard. The hot miasma of the jungle flooded in for the brief while the canopy was down, and Sixx was struck by the contrast. Seething wilderness everywhere, pockmarked by little enclaves of superorderliness that were human home places. And all were separated. Linked by mechanisms, yes, but separated from each other physically. Barriered off by the wilderness. He had the feeling, without any explanation for it, that this venture, the whole of Iskola, was founded in fallacy, was a group that wasn't a group, a community of individuals, all busily working away at their own little angles. Then the canopy closed again, and the borer

growled,veered away to skirt Lea Lawrence's home place. Olga Glink came back along the centipede car, balancing easily to the pitch and sway to stand in the middle of the four.

"Ihave discussed with Ivan, and he agrees." she said. "We would rather remain aboard with you and go direct to visit Jan Bardak. This happy conclusion to our distress —we should make a special effort to tell him in person. Does everyone agree?"

Almafrowned slightly, touched the buttons on her readout, and studied the new map that came up. "That will take us on a new and unused route," she mused. "The going will be very much slower. Still, we ought to arrive, anyway, before sundown." She looked up again at her three guests. "I am thinking of you chiefly. It has been a long day for you, and you aren't as healthy as we are."

"Thoughtyou didn't deal too much in opinions?" Lowry countered mildly. "I don't see how you can apply a ruler to a thing like health."

"Thereare several criteria." Olga took the bait promptly, squatting lithely between the seats, distributing her bright smile equally among the three. "Equilibrium is one. General appearance. Skin tone. Muscle tone. Reaction time. History of ailments. All can be quantized. Do you dispute that I am healthier than you, Roger?"

Ifshe meant it as a challenge, Sixx thought, carefully restraining a grin, she got her wish. "Depends on what you're measuring." Lowry told her. "I don't know a lot about skin tone, muscle tone, stuff like that. But I reckon I do know about reaction times. You ever slapped a man's face, Olga?"

Hersmile blinked away into surprise for a moment, then came back as amusement "You think I am not fast enough to slap your face?"

"Right.Once, maybe. But you won't do it twice!"

Lowryhad hardly done saying it when her left band moved in a blur that ended with the explosive briskness of a smack. Then another blur as her right hand came up and across, but no slap came this time. Somehow her wrist had got itself caught in Lowry's gloved hand. Even Sixx, expecting it, didn't see it happening, only the accomplished fact. Nor did he see the whole of the repeat effort with her left hand, only the fact that Roger was now holding both her wrists gently but firmly.

"You'repretty fast, Olga," he told her, "but you need to mix with people a bit more. All this studying all by yourself can fool you into that kind of mistake." She struggled now not savagely but strongly. She might just as well have tried to uproot a tree. Her smile went

Therewas an edge to her voice as she protested, "You have some special talent, some assistance!"

"Notthe way you're thinking."

"Butthis is impossible ... 1" She struggled more, both physically and to contain her anger and humiliation.

"Keepstill and 111 explain. Look, there is a top ceiling on how fast anybody can react no matter how good. It is limited by the speed of transmission of the nervous system. You can't beat that any more than you can beat any other absolute. So even you can move only so fast. And me, too, naturally. So we are even, that far. But I have an edge on you because I'm in the habit of dealing with people direct In my job I have to read a sign fast and react to the other guy, or maybe wind up dead. So I learn to anticipate. You got me the first time, sure. But that was enough to tell me your pattern and what to look for. Eye movements, body sway, shoulder set—stuff like that. And the way you're wearing next to nothing makes it that much easier. I couldsee you coming before you started."

Hereleased her wrists, and she crouched there, slowly sliding one hand across the other in puzzled wonder. Sixx watched her. Roger, so very easily, had put his finger right on the key weakness of this whole place. A society, any society, is people reacting to and with other people. Take out that datum and all the rest is so much academic waste of time. He was framing words to that end when the borer's whine suddenly modulated and died away to a purr. Up front, Rilke seemed as surprised as anyone else.

"Thecontrols indicate we are infringing a home place perimeter," he called back, "but there is nothing on the map to justify it. There should not be one here. That, or we are somehow far off course!"

Sixxmoved quickly to where he could read the course over Rilke's shoulder. Ahead he could see the distinct break in the green wilderness. On the screen the perimeter line showed plainly.

"Itmust be a course error." The physicist prodded the panel a time or two. "I will reset to avoid and resume our original direction." The borer backed, swung away, and the perimeter line slid off the screen. Sixx felt a tingle at his nerves and turned to glance back. Lowry had come halfway to join him, looked a query.

"Somethingsmells, Roger. Look, Louise is getting it, too. Better be with her, see if she can put a name or a direction on it"

Lowrywent back to the tail end. Sixx stayed up front, staring ahead over Rilke's shoulder, peering through the whirling blades of the borer. The noise was subtly different, their speed slower than it had been, and he knew, on the side, that this was because they were now hacking a virgin trail into the jungle. Had they followed the originally planned route, they would have been recutting a trail already traveled before. But that was academic. It was the unexpected home place that bothered him now, dropping away and behind to their left. Again he had that sense of stark contrast, of small spots of high-sophisticated civilization buried in primitive jungle, each completely introverted, cut off from all the rest. But now the borer, for all its heaving and rolling, was developing an overall upward cast

"Mountainside?"he suggested, and Rilke agreed, pointed ahead.

"Bardak'shome place is just below the first power plant that way. All that side of the mountain is cleared, is a kind of park scene. Very beautiful. Flowers in profusion, waterfalls, rainbows—a kind of living monument in the wild to our great man. We are approximately one hour's journey away from the first clearing. What . . . ?"

Hechoked off in astonishment as the borer's whirling blades screamed suddenly into high speed before the automatics could take over and slow them. Sixx reached out and slapped the control, halting the forward motion. All around them was a strange, unhealthy, straw-brown color, a death blight several feet wide and extending away to left and right. Rilke goggled at it.

"It'sall dead!" he cried. "Scorched! This is defoliation, the wrong kind, the kind we do not use!"

"Somebodydoes, mister. Somebody has been this way with a spray and not all that long ago, either. Hold still a minute" Sixx stared at it trying to comprehend it. Alma came hurriedly, looking as baffled as Rilke, to gaze at the blighted strip.

"I'venever seen anything like this before," she declared. Sixx snapped at her grimly. "You know your buttons. Set up a track on this, will you? Line it up, see if it points

towardthat home place we just passed, the one that

shouldn'tbe there. Go on!"

Shestared at him blankly for a moment, then spread her fingers and used them. In a moment the picture was plain, even to Sixx. It was exactly as he bad guessed. This open trail of forbidden defoliant that cut across their course led straight to that home place that shouldn't be there.

"Andnow what?"He passed the problem back to her. "Do we check this out now? Or do we just keep on our way and pretend nothing happened?"

"Someone,"she said slowly, "is using the type of defoliant we forbid. We use the growth hormone, overgrow type, which promotes compost. This is a sterilant, a scorch. We should report this data into store at once!"

"Andthat there is an interloper?That there is somebody here who has no business to be here?"

Shecouldn't take that in. "It's not possible!" she declared.

"Onehome place, not on your register, right there!" Hepointed left along the lane of death. "Possible or not, there it is!"

"Anddanger!" Louise said raggedly. "From that direction, over there, coming closer." She pointed in the opposite direction from the mystery, and Sixx was trapped for a moment in frustration. The job, the duty, said stay with Louise, pay attention to her, guard her. Natural inclination pulled the other way, proclaimed a mystery, urged him to investigate. But then the decision took itself right out of his hands. A distant growl grew very quickly into a clamor. An approaching chaff mist of scorched leaves, branches, and roots carried the roar within it, gave them a frightening picture to stare at. It was another borer, whirling away the dead stuff, coming up fast

"Hitit!" Sixx snapped. "Go ahead, full speed. That laddie is all set to run us down!"

Rilkestruck the controls fast, and the borer howled into life again, surged forward into movement gnashed its way into the greenery.

"Thisis ridiculous!" the physicist objected after a moment or two. "An unjustified series of assumptions!"

'Thinkso?" Sixx craned to stare back. "Then why has he turned to follow after us?"

"Goingto catch us, too."Lowry estimated calmly. "He has it made so long as we are cutting a trail for him to follow."

TheIskolans, all three, were totally baffled now, completely useless. Sixx could understand why. One impossibility was bad enough, but to have a string of them erupt in rapid sequence was too much for them to take. All the same, that purusing borer was catching up, had to, in the circumstances. And the centipede car was badly placed, trailing, caught in the middle, right in the voracious path of those whirling blades. Strategies scampered through his mind. Open country, in which they might have had a chance, was an hour away. Forget that But what else was there? By the nature of things the pursuer had all the best of it Unless—and he tapped Lowry gently on the shoulder.

"Youloaded, Roger?"

"Always.I had to make room for that flask for Louise, but I reckon I still have enough to discourage those fellers a bit. Detonite, maybe?"

"Itseems to be the only way left. You go down the tail end. As soon as you're ready, we'll drop the canopy. Right?"

Lowrywent away, slapping his helmet into place with one hand, reaching into a suit pocket with the other for detonite capsules.Those innocent-looking little silvery eggs came loosely stuck together like beads on a string. You pinched one off, crushed it firmly, then threw it. On a slow count of five the resulting explosion was astonishingly violent. Lowry reached the tail, knelt to make the most of what cover there was, raised an arm. Sixx turned to Alma.

"Getready to do exactly what I tell you when I say ft. Ill want the canopy down and everybody to duck at the same time." To Rilke he said, "Slow right d«wn, nowl" To Alma. "Right!" and he armed his helmet into place. The canopy fell away, letting in a rush of humid scents. Lowry threw . . . one . . . two . . . three . in quick succession. Sixx scanned to make sure everyone was properly ducked down. The pursuit borer filled the air with clamor, there was a sudden change in the sound of it and then the tropical humidity blew apart in three king-sized bangs, filling the back track with flying debris and momentary confusion.

Sixxpeered through it, scowling as he realized that whoever had been steering that pursuing machine had slapped on his brakes fast enough to avoid total destruction. The whirling blades were bent and ruined beyond hope, but the tracks still worked, the borer surged forward, and then there was something else, something that altered the balance irreparably. There came a wink of intense light, sudden shadow by grace of his helmet sensors, and the protruding edge of the glassite canopy spat and bubbled into ruin.

"Holdit, Roger." he growled. "We are in worse trouble than we thought. The opposition is using laser rifles on us. Better yield. We have innocent bystanders to consider." He switched to external speaker for the benefit of the others. "Stop everything. Cut engines. Give up. Elevate your hands. Surrender, dammit! They've got burners aimed at us!"

Lowry'svoice came in his ear, grim but calm. "We need heavy help, Rex. Better split, huh?"

"Right!"he said just as grimly. "One of us has to duck out. Not nice. Better be me. They can see you,right? Keep in touch."

Heducked, backed up to the front of the centipede car, and saw Louise and the Iskolans turning to watch him. The enemy borer, coming close, ground to a halt.On outside speaker again he rapped at them, "Don't do that! Look the other way! Face the enemy! Don't mind me, I'm going to run away and get help. I'll be back. Go on, turn around, dammit!"

Stillsemistunned, not really comprehending, they revolved with their hands raised. He scrambled hurriedly over the centipede car's bows along the squat body of the borer, wormed his way through a gapbetween the vicious blades, and plunged into the raw green beyond. It offended all his basic instincts to tackle the matted wilderness like this, to run away, but hard logic insisted that there was nothing else to be done. The opposition was hostile and armed, and although he and Roger might have stood a chance in armor, it was out of the question to risk Louise to weapon fire. To say nothing of Olga, Alma, and Ivan Rilke. So he plunged on angrily, striking a compromise between dodging the more massive obstructions and preserving his original course.

Hissuit mechanisms helped greatly, but he was under no illusions as to the magnitude of the task ahead. Rilke had said the cleared mountainside began about an hour's journey away. That would make it somewhere between

twenty-fiveto thirty miles, a shocking distance for a man on foot in this jungle. In his ear came Lowry's quiet comments at intervals.

"Sevenor eight of 'em.All in green coveralls. Each one has a beamer rifle and handgun. Surrounding us now. Looks like they don't know what to do next One has something looks like a radio." After a long pause. "They are going to take over our borer. That figures. Theirs is a mess. I could clobber three or four of them from here, easy."

"Betternot Roger.No sense in stirring them up. It will help us if we can find out a bit more about their background, who they are."

"Thatfigures. They seem to be waiting orders."

"AHright I'm signing off a while, Roger. I'm going to need all the signal power I can get for a while. Out!"

Stillslogging on through the wilderness, Sixx cut out the transmission circuits usually employed for person-to-person. Then with care he canceled other circuits section by section until he had reduced his assist systems to zero and could barely move. Then, concentrating all his suit power into one seldom-used pattern, he encoded a precise and highly secret series of impulses, let them go, and waited. Much to his relief the crisp acknowledge signal came within brief seconds.

"Hello,Joe," he said softly. "Sony to disturb, but I need you. I'm in bad trouble." The apparently commonplace words were enough, he knew, to alert the clipper's computer into total attention on him. He felt better, a lot better, at that thought

Eleven

"Giveme the ship-to-shore band," he ordered. There came a click and then a bored voice.

"AratniTower, reading.Go ahead."

"ClipperIV to tower, request clearance for takeoff, soonest"

"Acknowledge,Clipper IV, wait!" Sixx waited, not liking the increasing foulness of his air or the climbing temperature but enduring it. The bored voice came again. "Clipper IV, clear to proceed!"

Sixxacknowledged, ordered the link broken, spoke to the computer. "Routine takeoff, Joe. Ceiling, ten miles. Fix on my signal, take up position directiy above and call me back. Out!"

Withthat done and much heartened to know that help of a kind was on its way, Sixx restored his systems and started forward once more. At a very conservative estimate he didn't expect to hear from Joe again in anything less than an hour. It would help if he could get as far as possible along the way to Bardak and open ground by that time. The green wilderness seemed deliberately designed to be perverse, full of loops and tangles, ruts and roots, all branches and barriers. As he labored on, around and through he debated with himself whether it was worth it trying to bomb a way through with a few detonite capsules but decided against it. That would be a big loss in striking power against a very small gain in speed. He tramped on, shoving and struggling, then to freeze to a sudden halt at a nearby rustle and crackle. A moment later he snatched for his needle gun as undergrowth parted to show him a snouted and fanged beast not too unlike a boar. But bigger than he imagined they came.

Itlooked annoyed. It snorted and charged him without further ado or provocation, showing that it had more in

commonwith the pig family than just looks. He slid three knockout needles into its hide fast, then went reeling as it slammed into him bysheer inertia. He scrambled up warily, but it was solidly unconscious.

"Nexttime," he promised, "111 getmine in first. You take a bit of stopping, friend."

Heplunged on. His helmet speaker clicked, brought him Roger again.

"We'rein that scorch track again, heading back to that mystery home place. Two men guarding me, the rest of them taking it easy. That Alma—all of them—they are still fogged. They just can't get it that there can be a non-registered home place, not by their system."

"I'vebeen thinking about that, Roger. This must be where their housekeeping accounts have gone wrong, obviously. They have been invaded. But for that kind of thing to show up, there'd have to be more than one, surely?"

"Check.There could be hundreds here, Rex. The place is big enough."

"Right.And that has to mean they have somebody planted in a key spot by a power-supply plant."

"Check.But there's a lot of those. If they've picked the nearest, according to the routine, that should be close to Bardak's place—hold it, we've arrived." After a moment or two Lowry came on again. "Looks just like all the rest. Twist fence, up-and-down elevator, everything."

"Gotany idea who they are, Roger?"

"Notso far. One thing is sure, they don't have this antisocial bug. These characters work together real good." The voice in Sixx's ear dwindled in volume suddenly, and he spoke urgently.

"Boostyour volume a bit, Roger, I'm losing you. Must be the earthworks shielding the signal." He turned up his own power, heard Lowry's answer, clear but suddenly grim.

"Welost out again, Rex. Listen, this has to be fast. The bossman is Dobny, and he's no fool. He has a squeeze on Louise for leverage. She gets hers if I dont peel out of this suit fast. I've no choice. You're it. Out!"

Sixxknew a sudden savage rage. So far the exercise had been humdrum, academic, tedious at times. Even the recent display of force, the rough and tumble, was merely an annoyance. But now it got through to him that he had lost Louise—the job—which was very bad. And Roger,

too,which was disaster!

Hehoped and assumed that Roger would immobilize his suit as he shed it, a reasonably safe assumption, as there were systems and surprises in that set of armor that outsiders were not supposed to know anything about And he knew well that Roger, even reduced to his one-piece body suit and bare hands, was by no means an infant innocent. All the same, things couldn't be much worse.

Heslogged on grimly, impatiently awaiting the signal from his ship, meanwhile casting over various schemes and possibilities in his mind. The crop was slender. Bar-dak was something to aim at. The bossman, the presiding genius. And the power plants and the central computer complex. Key spots. But time was precious, too, and it was slipping remorselessly away. He felt savage frustration as he shoved and struggled and cursed at the stubborn green nightmare. He could get very little sense of real progress. One bit looked very like another. He knew for sure that he was holding to a direction, but he couldn't be sure even that it was the right one.

Hecould have used some of Louise's special talents right now. He thought of her and the Iskolans, and swore again. Isolationists, hence wide-open to infiltration. That assumed habit they had of wearing very little more than just skin, it could be justified, of course. It freed them from uniform, ridiculous taboos and labels. It maybe made them more sensitive to interaction with their environment. But it also left them vulnerable in the face of violence. That was their whole weakness, that they were vulnerable to almost anything unplanned for. It remained to be seen whether they had any reserves of strength. Sixx was inclined to doubt it. The long-awaited signal from his ship beeped in his ear, and he halted abruptly beside a forest monster shrouded in nightmare creepers.

"Surfacescan," he ordered. "Pinpoint on me, scan east to nearest vapor plume. Estimate distance."

"Miles,one four eight," the reply came promptly. Sixx visualized that as best he could, issued another instruction.

"Scanto nearest open ground along that same line, estimate distance."

"Miles.Fifteen"

"Hell!"he muttered. "That's going to take me hours— no, wait!" Inspiration came suddenly to him, and he issued the next instruction with great care, keeping perfectly still to give Joe the best possible chance to read. In a matter of scant seconds he heard the overhead stutter of jet fire growing rapidly from a growl into enormous thunder, hammering violently enough to shake him inside his suit He tuned down his outer sensors and headed for the noise as fast as he could smash his way through the hampering undergrowth.

Verysoon he was plunging into swirling smoke and steam, then crackling embers, sparks, clouds of smouldering carbon, spurting flames, the ruin left by the ship's jets. Virtually blind, shaken almost silly by the noise that was by now a tangible thing, Sixx ran doggedly on, wallowing and plunging thigh-deep at every step into glowing coals and ashes. But he was able to run, to make good time, and the ship, delicately tuned to his precise location, slid ahead of him, keeping a constant separation, blasting out a trail until its sensors read off the start of open space.

Sixxbecame aware of it only as a rapid falling off in the deafening clamor, down to a silence that rang with echoes. He shambled on, leg-weary and breathless, flailing his arms to shake off the worst of the soot and ashes, dabbing at his face plate until it was passably clear. The scene was freshening just by itself, a tonic to his spirits. Ahead and beyond, for miles the green turf, ornate with flower beds and decorative bushes, stretched to the first gray-blue slopes of the low mountain range ahead of him. White vapor drifted lazily away against a blue sky darkening into late afternoon. More importantly, just a short stretch beyond where the ship had settled inside a dark circle of scorched turf was a glass window and slant shingle-roof cabin.

Ora house.Sixx couldn't be sure. It looked like something from an archaic picture postcard. Unless all his calculations were miles out, that ought to be Bardak's place—and it looked as if Joe unwittingly had set his tail down smack on the perimeter fence. Sixx trotted steadily, regaining breath and confidence, his eye on the cabin. If you're in there, hethought, this should ring every alarm bell you've got! So come on out and check!

Hedrew level with the ship and the fence, and halted, undecided what next to do. Then there came movement by the cabin. Somebody lean and sun-browned in a white loincloth striding slowly but purposefully. Sixx took a chance, moved forward to meet the new arrival. This was an old man, wispy gray hair carelessly over a fine skull and heavily lined face. But he was in no way senile or feeble. Craggy brows were clamped down over an angry glare as he halted, raised a flat palm to halt Sixx.

"Youintrude!" he said in a good strong voice only faintly accented. "Who are you? How did you pass my fence? And how dare you bring that machine on to my ground?"

Sixxmarched straight on, flipping back his helmet, halting when he thought he was near enough to speak normally.

"Youmust be Jan Bardak. By reputation, a genius. Let's see you prove it by listening carefully. There's no time to throw away in repetitions and silly explanations. You, meaning Iskola, sent for experienced advice and help to catch what you thought was a criminal element in your midst. The help came. I helped bring it, me and my partner. You were right, there is a criminal element. That enemy now has your help, a lady prisoner. It has numbers and organization and weapons, offering violence, possibly death, to the lady, to my partner, and to some of your people. Alma Tillet, Olga Glink, Ivan Rilke. Are you up with me so far?"

Theold man scowled but nodded. Sixx went on briskly.

"Iavoided capture. I needed help, with muscles. So I calledmy ship. I'm sorry it landed on your home place. That was not intended. I still need help. From you!"

Theold man hunched his shoulders. "What can I do?"

"Plenty.Point the way to the nearest central computer complex and the nearest power plant and stores base."

"Why?"

"Doit! Ill explain as I go if you like. Go on, point!"

Bardakshrugged again, spun on his heel, and aimed an arm up the slope to where a glass-glitter hemisphere nestled in the green. It looked to be a half-mile or so away. Sixx started his trot again. In a moment Bardak was at his side, keeping level.

"Youcan't go in there. No one ever goes in there except by some very special arrangement. Maintenance. Very rarely."

"Isthat just a rule, or are there reasons for it?"

"Thereare reasons." Bardak spoke in spurts now, conserving his breath. "Maintenance . . . necessary, of course . . . but by skilled men ... in pairs. Any other intrusion

.. . could create damage . . . even to break the seals . . . can do harm. Besides . . . there is no read-out No information. It is a brain only. For information . . . you need a terminal!"

"Oh!"Sixx broke to a halt"That's no good. All right the nearest power plant, where?"

Bardakpointed still ahead, slightly to one side. "The steel-clad structure there."

"Witha terminal read-out?"

"Yes,certainly."

"Allright, come on!" Sixx started jogging again, and again Bardak came up level with him, but the old man was beginning to look angry now. Sixx grinned aside at him.

"Saveyour breath. Listen. And believe. You have been invaded. Not suddenly, not like that. Over an extended period would be my guess. And by somebody who knows your internal setup inside out and backwards. Like how to set up home places—at least one, and I will gamble more—that you know nothing about. Like making highways in the jungle with scorch defoliants. Like an efficient gang of men all armed with laser weapons. That, just for a start,is where your abnormal expenditures are going. You want more?"

Bardakjogged heavily, looked puzzled. "Invaded? But how and by whom?"

"Notclear on that, not yet. I have a name, just one. Dobny. Edgar Dobny. Seems he was a candidate for entry a longtime ago. Never made it. Stayed on as chief forensic scientist of Aratni. Mean anything to you?"

Bardakjogged on in silent furious thought. In a while he said, "I think I remember. Vaguely. A paranoid case. Like so many . . . with freak intellects . . . odd people . . . tend to be unbalanced. But how ... did they get in?"

"Yourfence technique, any fence, be it electronic or natural, is not going to stop any man with a mind to pass and a little imagination. You may be pretty smart about some things, Mr. Bardak, but you don't know a damned thing about people!"

Theold man scowled, his eyebrows jutting farther. "Who are you?" he demanded again. "That silly uniform!"

"InterstellarSecurity.Bodyguard to the Interstelpol detective you sent for. The name is Sixx. I'm no sociologist mister, but even I know that putting up a 'keep-out' fence is an open invitation to the curious to climb it and find out just what you are trying to hide."

Theywere level with the geodesic dome of the central computer complex now, the slanting sunlight striking fire from its facets. Sixx was aware of an odd parallel. This thing was the brain, or one of them, of the whole of the Iskolan "body," and just like the human brain it simply stored and processed data. It was entirely without eyes, ears, or sensations of its own. It was a disturbing thought

Bardakwas keeping up well for an old man, but he was getting more and more angry all the time, his thinking processes beginning to catch up.

"Why—"he puffed, "—are we . .. running there?" and he aimed at the metal-clad power center ahead. Just beyond it was the base of a squat tower from which drifted vapor plumes, lesser brothers of the majestic ones higher up on the ridge.

"Becausethat's the most likely place where we have a chance of finding out just what has been going on." Sixx himself caught up on a point or two of elementary precautions. "Does anybody live there? Any opposition likely?"

"Nota . . . home place!" Bardak grunted. "No one lives there. Certain ones visit . . . special experiments... maintenance. There is ... a fence!"

"Isee it." Sixx had noticed the frieze of slender poles, now only a matter of minutes away, was already wrestling with the problem of getting the old man through the obstruction. He was so engrossed on that teaser that he almost missed the tiny flicker of movement at the corner of the nearest structure. Unthinking reflexes saved him and Bardak, made him thrust the old man aside powerfully with one hand, shouting, "Go down! Flat!" even as he went flat down himself. Bardak bounced away into a grunting sprawl. Sixx fell flat and skidded a foot or two, arming 'his helmet into place and then elevating his head to look.

There,just by a massive double door, part open, stood a man in green coveralls, carrying something in that certain way and stance that labeled it "weapon," beyond all doubt Long-range, Sixx estimated. A little too far for accuracy with his needle gun. He rolled over, peered across the grass to where Bardak lay in a heap but visibly breathing.

"Youall right?"

"No!"the old man grunted. "I am hurt My arm, see?" and Sixx saw the angry red scorch mark of a fringe hit by a laser beam, even as he rapped.

"Putit down! I see it. Yon character over there can see it, too, if you wave it about like that. Keep still and listen. You are satisfied now that there is an opposition? All right, let us now find out how many we have just here. You stay put and watch. Don't move at all until I wave you to come on. Right?" He rolled over again, got his needle gun from one pouch, a slim extension barrel from another, screwed the two carefully together. It was still long-range for a skinny, lightweight knockout needle, especially in the freshening evening breeze, but he could do something about that. He rose steadily and purposefully and started striding toward the fence and the waiting enemy beyond.

"Comeon, brother," he invited softly, carrying his loaded right hand well back and partly obscured. "Come on. This white suit makes a good target, no? You'll never get another chance like this."

Thedistant man in green moved now only a step or two, then went down on one knee, leveling his weapon, apparently doing something to it first

"Setfor fine beam, full power," Sixx guessed, and went steadily on, gambling on the technical brains of I.S., who had designed this suit to be immune to just about anything. His helmet visor, for instance, had filter sensors far faster than any reflex of human nerves. Three snapped blackouts in fast succession were all that he knew of three accurate blasts. Then he saw the baffled marksman get to his feet and start back.

"No,don't do that," he urged. "If you duck back inside there, I'll have the devil's own job winkling you out. You hang on a bit!" He had reached a fence post now. He leaned against it, ignoring its output, steadied himself, did fast estimates on range and windage as he raised his extended needle gun and aimed. The opposition stopped to stare. Sixx put his thumb down and traversed his tolerance area, expending ten needles. The man in green moved again, just one step and then an ungraceful nosedive. He lay still

Sixxwaited, ever cautious, then grinned fiercely as another green coverall came out of that half-open door in a fast run and stoop, trying to grab the fallen weapon. That run ended in another nosedive. Sixx waited for a count of

fifty.Nothing. He turned and waved a come-on arm to

Bardakwho scrambled up, awkwardly favoring his arm.

Whenhe was near enough to feel the first twinges, he

stopped.

"Ican go no further. I cannot pass the fencer

Twelve

"Allright,'' Sixx called to him. "Back off a bit,lie down, cover up your ears. This next bit will be crude." He watched Bardak obey and nodded appreciatively. No fool, anyway. Then he groped for a couple of detonite pills, pinched one, and tossed it accurately to bounce close to the next fence post on his right Revolving, he repeated that to his left hunched his shoulders to ward off the two blasts and the sudden clattering rain of turf, soil, and stones. Then he swung around and waved to Bardak to come on again.

"Sorryabout that," he said. "You'll be able to get it fixed later. You do know, I take it, that it's the interference between the pole fields that ties the knots in you? And now, let's take a closerlook at the enemy."

Bardakignored the chaff, going up another notch in Sixx's estimation because of that. Instead he dove straight for the immediate puzzle. "Why here?" he demanded. "Why would they be here of all places?"

"Wellnow, just suppose I had smuggled you inside Jskola, and I wanted to fix you up with a home place, how would I get access to the preprogrammed constructor machinery without alerting the entire network? You can figure it from there, surely, that I have to have somebody on the inside just here?"

Theyreached the shadow of the building. Sixx was intent on the weapon, which be examined and then ruined with expert effort. Bardak was much more interested in the fallen men, crouching to examine one of them then looking up in bewilderment

"Thisman," he said, "I remember. Paul Massenet He is a brilliant physicist, also with a burning interest in social problems. He thought we would leap at the chance

tohave him with us. But he was obsessed by the idea of the rule of the elite. Plato's theory. You know it?"

"I'veheard of it Self-appointed superman guardians...?"

"Somethinglike that, yes. Of course it failed him for us. That is not our thesis at alL But that was more than a yearago, almost two!"

Sixxchecked his helmet, his systems, then eased in through the half-open door into the diffused light and murmuring quiet of a huge chamber where placid machines purred softly to themselves and the tiled floor underfoot shimmered gently to the beat of power. "You know the layout," he said. "You point the way to where the central controls are located. And tell me, just how many new applicants do you get in any average year, and how many do you take?"

"Forthe precise figures I can refer you to a terminal as soon as we reach one. Roughly, if that will do, we have about thirty a year, of which we accept two, sometimes three. About one in ten, in fact Why?"

"Justchecking.Alma Tillet said the same as you. But the outside figures, the best we could get, say a different story. They say thirty a year like you, but only two or three of those fail toget in!"

"Thatis ridiculous!" Bardak, who bad aimed him at a smaller door, caught up with him now. "On that basis there would be five hundred of us now over a twenty-year period."

"Thatdoesn't sound such a lot"

"Butit is. Originally there were ten of us, myself and nine more, all with the same inspiration. I evolved the plan, the other nine helped me hammer it into shape. And now we are—positively and precisely—fifty one! I know each one personally. Young man, no one, no one at all, enters Iskola unless I myself personally approve."

"Wellsee about that," Sixx promised him as they eased in and among standing panels where dancing, winking lights told stories to each other. And Bardak hung back, came to a halt, his craggy face setting into stubborn lines.

"No!"he growled. "There is too much here that I do not like. I am not satisfied. There are impossibilities. You say listen and believe. I am not prepared to believe so easily as that!"

"Illbet your arm doesn't hurt, either!" Sixx snapped at htm, wanting to be patient but feeling every passing minute as a personal pain. "Ill bet you didnt expect to be shot at on your home ground, did you? And those two bodies out there, you didn't believe those, either, did you? Come on, now, I can only lead you so far. The rest you have to do for yourself."

Bardaksnorted, breathing hard, then raised his good arm. "There is a terminal. That is what you were looking for."

"Allright, come on. Let's see if we can rub your nose in it a bit harder. Let me get this right. Everything starts from here, machinery, power line, materials, supplies, right?"

"Thatis so. The power input—I will show you . . ." Bardak approached the terminal, struck the keyboard rapidly, produced a schematic of colored lines. "Input to transformers and fhyristors, to ring-main all around the plant. Heavy machinery below. Prepackaged units. The newcomer selects his location anywhere, and the links are made automatically from there on."

"Thatbit I already know. Show me*all the home places!"

"Verywell!"Bardak struck the keys again, and Sixx saw the same diagram Alma Tillet had shown him. Bardak shrugged at it. "Count them if you wish."

"Noneed. I've seen that before. You had a preset program for that, didn't you?"

"Ofcourse!"

"Right.Now try this. Program for a full read-out of all presently active power and information links. Go onl" "But you already have it there!"

"NoI haven't. You do it the way I said. Power and information links. Not home places. Be specific. Go on!"

"Verywell."Bardak shrugged, winced at his arm, took a bit longer at the keys this time. "You realize this is not a standard program." He struck the read-out key and caught his breath. The bright spots blazed in profusion, far too many for the eye to count or even guess at

"Atotal!"Sixx snapped, and the old man fumbled, goggling at the screen, got his fingers to obey him. Sixx saw the number and sagged. "Six hundred eighteen!" he breathed.

"Itis not possible!" Bardak croaked.

"It'sa disaster, that's for sure!" Sixx glared at the awful evidence, his mind spinning. All those home places . . . and not necessarily one person to each . . . and none of the people indicated would be simple by any means . . .

theimpact was storming for a moment Then he grabbed

Bardak'sarm urgently.

"Workoff your astonishment later, old man. Right now, listen to me, answer me some questions. All home places are near enough identical, yes?"

"Abasic design, yes.The owner can modify, of course."

"Butthey are all subsurface?"

"Ohyes. That is a standard rule!"

"Let'shope not too many have broken it. Now listen, and get this right, all the way down. This is what I want you to do. First of all you'll prepare a general alert of some kind, something that will summon everybody to his terminal and keep him there. Paying attention. Right? You don't use it yet, but have it ready. The idea is to have everybody clustered around their screens, got it?"

"Yes,of course. But why?"

"That'sthe next thing. You will set up a blanket command, order, hard and positive, to cut . . . break ... remove and lock off ... all connection, all power, supplies, information . . . the lot . . . with all nonregistered home places. You understand that? Can you do it?"

"Cutoff the life lines?" Bardak made it sound like mass murder, and it probably was to him. "I can't do that!"

"Whatdo you mean, can't? Won't? Bardak, look!" Sixx flung a band at the message on the screen. "You have been invaded. You are about to be taken over by an army of power-mad paranoids because you have something they want."

"Weare not power-oriented."

"No,maybe.But they are. They are going to use you— you and the things you have discovered. All your secrets. Isn't it obvious?"

Bardakshook his head, showing his age all at once. "We have power, it is true. But not to be abused, not like that!"

"Iknow!" Sixx struggled to be patient. "I know you dontintend to abuse it. But they do. And they have it almost in their hands. Man, you are outnumbered twelve to one by desperate men with weapons who know what it is all about. You haven't a prayer unless you act now, right away!"

"Andyou said—" The old man mumbled, shaking his head, trying to grasp something solid, "—this plan . . . ?" "Listen. I said you had to make an alert, something that

wouldgrab them, bring them to their communicator screens. Right? Then, snap . . . you cut their life lines . .. and you've got 'em. Because . . . look ... a subsurface home place complex is a wonderful idea when it works. But it is a prison when the power fails. Isn't it? So we get them all into their traps . . . and then we spring the catches . . . and we've got 'em! Come on, now,think!"

Bardakdid well. It hurt him to slash through all his ready-made values, but there were visible signs that logic was making headway. "Very well," he said at last "But it cannot be done here, not at this stage. The various subassemblies will have to be set manually to drop out on a signal."

"Goahead and do it, whateveryou have to," Sixx urged, and the old man trotted away to yet another door. Prickling intuition made Sixx check and spin around just in time to snap off a needle at yet one more of the opposition who, in the outer doorway, bad a beamer coming down on Bardak. The green coverall went one way, the beamer another. Sixx revolved again.

"Youall right?"

Bardakshrank away from a glowing spot on the metal door, then nodded speechlessly.

"Yougo on. Ill keep watch. There may be more."

Hewaited and was rewarded. In came another green-suit, crouched and cagey, aiming around with his weapon but too distracted by the inert shape on the floor to do a good job. Sixx picked him off deliberately, watched him go down quietly beside his colleague. How many more, he wondered?

Heeased his way back, found a spot, stepped up on to the top of a panel, lay there where he could command both doors. The one where Bardak had gone was safely shut was metal, was part-proof against laser fire. The enemy seemed to hunt in pairs, which was smart of them. Footsteps, now that he was listening for them. One more greensuit showed very cautiously. Sixx held his fire, watching, saw him come all the way in and kick at one of the bodies, not too gently.

"Hans?What the—" Crouch, now, make a quick investigation. Turn and peer back and call. "Not a thing, Bergen. Just like the other two. This is crazy. They are both down and well out but not a mark on them!"

"There'sgot to be something." Bergen appeared, walking warily, eyes all around. "Anyway, there's no other way out, so it's in here, whatever. Hey, look at that bum mark on the door! That's the heavy-duty switch gear and relay system chamber. Come on!" Sixx let them get as far as the door, then put them to sleep like the rest. And he waited a while, but nothing else happened, so he came down from his perch and prowled as far as the outer door. Nothing. Nobody. He went back in time to see Bardak reappear, almost stumbling over the new bodies as he passed the door.

"Itis all arranged." he said, swiping at a smear of oil on his cheek. "Do I call them now, yes?"

"Yes,sure.Make it good!"

"Neverfear, I will!" The old man seemed on fire now. "My Iskola, indeed! We shall see!" He approached the terminal again, this time with a resolute air, started keying in a set of commands. A spotlight flared, and a pickup eye swung, lined itself on where he stood. He struck the master key.

"Geetingsto all my fellow Iskolans.This is Jan Bardak. I havea matter of the extreme importance to tell you, all of you. I will delay three minutes to give you time to attend, to warn others if necessary. This is of the utmost importance. Three minutes!" He let it hang there, standing sturdily and patiently. Sixx felt an itch even though he approved the performance. He tried not to wonder just what Roger would be doing. And Louise. He tried to visualize a total blackout in a subsurface dwelling and wondered how long the air would last out. Speed was important. Three minutes crawled by.

"Greetingsagain, my friends.Listen carefully. We are in danger, very grave danger. Please remain alert, ready to respond at once if I should ask for your help. That is all for the moment." And then he struck the key to activate the programs he had set up. In that instant the chamber lights brightened, and the droning machinery stirred angrily, grumbled, shook the floor. But it was only for a moment, and then everything was as calm as before. Bardak smiled.

"Webuilt well, young man. Such a massive load-shedding was never a part of our plan, but it is done, and we are still functioning. But what now? You seem to know much more than I do about what is going on. We have all the rats in the traps, but what do we do with them?"

"Theycan wait, most of them. My concern is with one in particular. My partner is trapped in there together with the detective lady you requested and for whom I am responsible. We—I have to get them safely out somehow."

Sixxturned away, scowling to himself at the problem. Bardak caught at his arm. "You started to say 'we,' and I agree with you. This is also my affair. How can I help?"

"Idunno, not yet, but I'm not in a position to refuse anything. Come on, let's get outside."

Theyheaded for the outdoors at a trot, but Sixx hadnt lost his sense of caution altogether. The enemy might all be caught underground, and then again they might not He spent a moment in the big doorway surveying the sunset scene before deciding it was all clear. Then he grinned at the old man.

"Illbet you don't fancy running as far as my ship. No more do I, and mere's an easier way." He flipped his helmet shut, triggered the intercom, and said gentiy, "Sorry to disturb you again, Joe," and then added the code commands that gave him control of liftoff and steer. The obedient ship roared and climbed up off the ground, hung, started to drift. Bardak galloped back from the comer of the building urgently.

"OjminglMore of them!"

Sixxstrode forward to where he could see a centipede car skimming, descending the slope. It was heading for the fence and making very good time. He made a fast decision, adjusted his signals to set the ship on a collision course right by the fence, and waited. The ship bellowed along, thundering no more than thirty feet above the surface, spreading a fearsome swath of scorched devastation several yards wide.

"Theybetter back up," he murmured. "Joe can cover a hell of a lot more ground than they can, and faster, too." He grinned as the scurrying car slowed its mad rush. He ordered a little more elevation, a slight veer, and the car sheered off rapidly, swung away.

"Allright, now!" he shouted to Bardak. "This will be lively. You get behind these doors for cover. I'm going to put Joe down right outside. I can stand the heat and noise. You can't. So use the doors. Just as soon as ever the ship is down, you jump on my back and hang on. It will be hot but not for very long. Right? Here we go!"

Hestood in the gap between the doors, shaking to the slam and smash of shock waves as the ship slid down over its jet blast and bounced on sprung feet. The jets snapped

off,Sixx waved, felt the thrust and weight of Bardak on his back. He ran heavily forward.

"Openup, Joe, it's me," he said, "and I'm in a hurry!" The gangway struck ground only seconds before he reached it. He galloped heavily up, into the lock, three more steps and gave a great sigh of relief at the rumble and clatter of armor closing after him.

"Stillall right?" he demanded as Bardak climbed down.

"Iam well, thank you. Young man, I have spent a lifetime preaching against violence in my own small way, but you have shaken me. But for you I would be dead several times over!"

"Forgetit." Sixx led the way up to the control room. "I haven't been straining myself on your account, not in the first instance. I have a job to do, that's all. I don't like violence, either. Given the choice, I'd rather use brain than brawn any time, but sometimes you don't have any choice at all. Let's have a picture or two." He activated screens to give him an all-round look at the terrain. There was the centipede car and four men aboard, all with laser rifles.

"There'sviolence," he said. "Those laddies seem very well off for weapons. Not that they can hurt us, not now. And if they don't back up once again, they are liable to get fried. Up we go!"

Thirteen

Thesunset scene fell briskly away, shimmering in the heat waves from jet fire. Sixx stared at it, thinking of something else.

"Itoccurs to me," he said, "that those bandits down there might just be smart enough to undo all our good work."

"Ithink not." Bardak stared at the several screens in fascination as if this was a new perspective for him. It probably was, Sixx realized. "No, I think not. I changed the coding patterns. I was a power man originally, did you know that? All my life I have been intrigued by the concept of power in all its aspects. The power to influence, modify, control other people and life forms, even events. Possessed by all forms of life to some degree but deliberately used and abused only by man. Look . . . down there . . . those raw yellow streaks! What are they? Not a natural phenomenon, surely, not in such straight lines?"

"There'sa point," Sixx mused. "If you'd had regular aerial surveys of your domain, none of this would ever have happened. Those are ground links in between the illegal home places of your invaders. Permanent highways, you could call them. Scorch defoliant."

"Thefools!Again and again I warned them not to burn out the vegetation like that A rot spray is better if it has to be done."

"Yeah,"Sixx agreed absently, winding up the focus on a different kind of scorch mark, the blackened, smouldering track left by the ship when it had rescued him. Using that as a marker, he was able to pinpoint the scorch-yellow track where the opposition had first shown itself and from there to the home place where Roger had to be.

AndLouise.As a double check, he set the ship's sensors

sniffingafter the beacon in Roger's suit.

"Ifthe big lunkhead had the sense to activate it, that is," he muttered. But the implied rebuke was unjust There it was, a small but positive "pip" at precise five-second intervals. So much for that. But now Sixx had really hard problems. He debated them with himself, but aloud, not caring one way or the other whether Bardak heard or understood.

"Forjust one thing,*' he said, "there's fuel. Hanging like this gulps it up pretty fast so whatever I do, I don't have a lot of time for it. In the second place, Roger is in there and parted from his armor. So, too, is the job, Louise. And a few innocent bystanders. So I can't afford to get too rough. I can bust a way in, all right, but somebody is liable to get hurt while I do it."

"CanI help in any way?" Bardak offered.

"Maybe.When you were designing your subsurface units, just what provision did you make against power failure?"

"Noneat all!"Bardak protested, but looked foolish. "Why would the power fail?"

"You'reno help." Sixx chewed his Hp irritably. "Why do I keep on thinking of air? Unless—" He spun to Bardak suddenly. "Is there provision—no, damn it, there has to be air intakes somewhere. Got tobe!"He touched his controls to sharpen the picture of the home place below. "Where?"

"Theyare peripheral." Bardak stared at the screen, studying it his experienced eyes seeing through the shrubbery camouflage. "Those clumps there. Four. North and south, east and west Regular. See?"

"Gotyou.That's my way in. One of those. But which? Damn! If I could only talk to Roger." He pushed the button that would get that five-second beacon again, just to make sure. And there came nothing at all. He scowled at it angrily. What now? And then the speaker in his helmet gave tongue very faintly.

"Rex?Do you read? Let me hear from you if you read?"

"Roger!"Sixx's fingers danced on the console to catch and hold that waveband and amplify it on open channel. "I read but not too loud. What goes?"

"Plenty.Who pulled the blackout switch, you?"

"Bycourtesy of Jan Bardak, yes.Good?"

"Depends.You have the opposition eating their nails trying to figure out a way of making a light. They had split Louise and me off from the rest, put us in a chamber two levels down, pretty cold, loaded with some goo or other, smells like sour yeast, mash, something like that'' "That's the culture vat," Bardak muttered. "Basic-protein-producer unit."

"Andyou got out, of course?"

"Didn'ttake much.All I had to do was find the draft, the air vents. I maybe should have come all the way out there and then, but I wanted my suit first. Then came the blackout, anyway, so I brought Louise along with me. And glad to have her, too. I can find my way around pretty good, but she leaves me a long way back."

"Soyou found your suit, you're armored again— where?" Sixx demanded, throwing the "stand by to go down" switch on the autopilot.

"Secondlevel.Some kind of storeroom, I imagine. Full of disposable gear, drapes, sheets, tissues, stuff like that Nothing solid."

"Right.I can line up on your signal, and that covers Louise, too, as she is with you—but what about the others? Alma, Olga—wait, Louise! Can you hear me?"

"Hello,Rex. I hear you. Where are you?"

"Rightover your head and about to drop.More important, have you any idea where the Iskolans are? Near you at all?"

"Yes.They are very near. Above. Very close."

"I'llhave to gamble on that. Right, hold on to your hats, I am coming down, but hard! Out!" Sixx hit the flight button and the finder in the same movement. The scene below started growing huge swiftly. "Better relax in your chair," he warned Bardak. "This is not going to be any textbook landing. And there he is!" he added as the direction finder drew intersecting lines to one side of the expanding circle below.

Grabbingmanual override, he nudged the ship away from dead center, away from Lowry's signal, and set his teeth as the parklike surface rushed up to meet him. Several seconds too late he threw in the braking thrust and groaned down in his seat as weight fell on him hugely. Sudden impact hammered him down more, close to blackout, as the tripod feet of the ship struck and telescoped inward against overworked shock absorbers. He had no fear whatever of damaging the ship. Like his suit, it was designedto absorb enormous punishment, sometimes more than frail human flesh could match, even with help. Breathless, aching in all his muscles and joints, he held on to the controls for a count of ten, just in case the ship was going to topple, it did lurch a little, and he fired a ready blast, but then it settled firm.

"That'sgiven them something more to worry about," he muttered, levering up in his seat and craning around to look at Bardak. The old m»n wasout, quite still, but breathing. Sixx got all the way up to his feet "More violence," he said regretfully. "Who's to blame, huh?" Then he flipped his helmet into security and ran stiffly, noting the way the deck was canted off level as he reached the inner air lock. "Roger?" he called. "How was that?"

"Likethe end of the world! Where did you hit?"

"Oppositeside from you."He reached the outer air lock; and there was no need for the gangway. From where he was standing, he saw turf and then a six-foot layer of streaky soil, and then the gray and glitter of ruptured foamcrete and reinforcing metal strands. The turf was just across and down a little. An effortful leap got him to the momentary insecurity of the edge, and then a scramble and he was on level footing. Smoke and steam swirled in lazy coils out of the hole the ship had dug for itself.

"It'sa mess!" he reported. "But I'm going to augment it somewhat before I start looking for a way down. Maybe you could try finding the Iskolans by an air trunk or something?"

"Onmy way.They must be scared out of their britches by now!"

Only they don't wear anything so practical! Sixxcommented silently, drawing crosses in his head. The ship had smashed down squarely over one air duct so that one over there had to be where Roger was. And that put the other two to left and right They needed treatment just in case any of the opposition had been smart enough to figure them as a way out

Hetrotted heavily away to the right, ploughed through a pretty stand of vivid scarlet blooms to find a stone mushroom head with a metal grille. Delicately he seeded it with three detonite pills in quick succession, then turned and ran as hard as he could for the opposite one. It was almost the last thing he ever did. He had just one wrenching sensation of agonized impact in his right leg, then the deafening blast of an explosion that smashed him aside anddown, hard.

Onlyhalf-conscious, he moved painfully, got elbow and knee to the turf, fought bis way up, swaying as his right leg wanted to fold under him, and as tie haze cleared from his senses, he was looking at a scarecrow in ruined green, smoke-blackened and bleeding from a scalp wound but glitter-eyed purposeful. And he was aiming a strange but impressive-looking hand weapon square at Sixx's middle not more than a yard away. He was growling something.

".. . rocket-thrust missiles.Explode on impact Heard all about your trick suit, mister, but I say this will put a dent in it. And you. So you hold still now, or we will both find out who's right"

Sixxalmost fell as the turf under him jumped to three quick explosions underground. He was too immediately involved to give that phenomenon any heed now. "You have the handle," he admitted, hearing his own voice as if it was in a tin box. "What d*you want?"

"That!"The scarecrow thumbed over his shoulder at the ship. "You and me and that. We will take it back where you've just been, and we will put the power on again."

"Andthen what?"

"Thenyou'll get yours!"

"Nodeal," Sixx mumbled. "You offer no inducement You're going to kill me, anyway. Where's the point?" Unreality wavered between him and the smoke-stained sight before him, likea dream on the point of breaking up. The scarecrow brushed at a trickle of blood down his cheek.

"Thepoint," he said, showing his teeth wolfishly, "is a simple one. This weapon holds ten. I know what it can do. I made it I tried to tell Dobny—the fool—but never mind that now. You have experienced a glancing blow from one missile. The next one—I Wowyour arm off. Then the other arm. Then a leg, depending on how tough you really are. The other way you get a quick death. That's the point!"

Theunreality shook itself and went away. The impossible was real, shockingly so. Sixx shook his head slowly. "I don't like you. I don't trust you, either. Why all this bother with me? There's the ship. Go ahead and grab it I cant stop you!" Sensation screamed back into his leg now, for all the good that might be, and sweat crawled on hisface as the enemy snarled and took careful aim,

demonicagainst the swirling smoke.

"Ican't fly your ship,mister. I know it, and you know it, don't try any more games with me. Come on, move, or here goes your left arm!"

"Dropit!" The barked command came from the ship's air lock where Bardak 'bad appeared, stood holding something long and glittering in his hands. The scarecrow whipped around, and Sixx hurled himself forward in the same instant, crashing into his opponent, striking at the weapon. In the next moment they were in a crazy struggling tangle in which Sixx kept all his desperate attention on that weapon and had no time at all to think about his aches and knots. The scarecrow was just as desperate and as savage as he looked, but his fury was pointless against Sixx's armor. It could be ignored. At last Sixx managed to clamp a hand on that lethal wrist, to squeeze it, shake it, get the weapon free, to kick it clumsily aside.

Thebalance shifted abruptly. The enemy launched a mad dive for his weapon, and Sixx kicked him hard, tramped forward to kick him again, then bent and reached and lifted that head with one hand, clouted it hard with the other. Then at last he could inhale a much-needed breath and relax just a little. He was shaking all over as he shambled across and picked up the missile thrower and studied it.

"Neatand nasty," he muttered. "This place is awash with geniuses. How is your end, Roger?" For reply he got only heavy breathing. "Roger?"

"Busy,Rex. Bottom end ... air shaft . . . two-three others ... got similar notions. Be coming out . . . soon's I've taken care ... be a while!"

"Havefun!" Sixx hefted the rocket gun, gripped it, wrenched until he heard things snap and part in it, then threw it away, hard. He tramped over and looked across and up at Bardak, still standing in the air lock.

"Youcan throw me that crowbar," he said. "It will come in handy. And if you look back along the bulkhead a bit, you'll see a coil of steel-core cable. I can use that, too, please." Bardak ducked out of sight, came back in a moment to toss out the cable and the crowbar. Sixx collected them, flexing his leg experimentally, reassured that his suit was relatively whole.

"Thanksfor the help," he called, "but I hope you wont have to try anything like that again. I mean . . . this thing doesn't even look likea weapon. And you're too valuable, anyway, to take chances like that Stay put"

Hestarted the long, limping trek across the garden to the flower bed that camouflaged Roger's air vent. He had no apprehensions whatever about his partner. If anything he felt a trifle sorry for the opposition. The air grille was exactly as he remembered the other one, an expanded mesh of heavy gauge alloy. He leaned close and called out, "Below! Mind your eyes. I'm going to bust this cage open. There might be some dust!" He heard a distant shout applied the crowbar lustily, leaned on it and there was dust and protest, but the metal yielded, folded back to where he could get his hands on it and rip it the rest of the way.

"Allclear now!" he called, but not so rashly as to stick his head in for it. Failed geniuses, he was learning, were just as dangerous as any other kind, possibly more so. He heard a reply, thought he recognized the voice.

"Olga—thatyou?"She assured him it was. "Stand clear," he told her. "Here comes a rope." He dropped the cable, making one end fast to the mushroom head itself. In a moment the dangling end grew taut and here came Olga Glink walking up hand over hand to leap clear and stare around in surprise.

"Sunset?Only? My time sense is thoroughly muddled!" There were dirt stains on her loincloth, arms, and knees, but otherwise she was unhurt.

"Thatwas easy for you," Sixx commented, "but what about the others?"

"Itis all arranged, Rex, you will see. Alma comes next, and then Roger the Terrible!" She made it sound like a title. "Ah, here—" and she went to extend an arm to Alma who hadn't quite the catlike skill of Olga but was managing very well. She, too, was dusty and had managed to rip her yellow drapery into ruin, but that didn't seem to bother her at all as she dropped to the turf.

'Totaldarkness," she said. "It's an experience. One feels . . . less . . . somehow. And never did I need body-field awareness more. But Louise is par excellence, dont you agree, Olga?"

"Yes,indeed, a rare gift! I amso glad my dietary additions have done something to help that"

Sixxshook his head blankly, kept a hand on the cable. Murder and mayhem, a revolt, a hairbreadth rescue from entombment—and what were they so excited about? Some talent or other! Now came Lowry, glare-white in his suit, monstrous in the gloom as he leaped down to the turf.

"What'sthis?" Sixx chided. "Leaving Louise down there?"

"AndRilke . . . and six of the opposition, sure.You fancy the job of hauling them up on your own?" He leaned back in to shout, "When you're ready!" and laid hold of the cable. Even with two of them, and the ladies helping, it was an arm-aching labor before the six battered and unconscious invaders were laid out on the sward. Dobny was among the fallen.

"Thehead man," Lowry said between breaths. "Bent as a corkscrew, but he had the whole thing sewn up. All set to be some kind of galactic dictator, I reckon until we blew in and ruined it. Big, too. The net stretches all the way back to Earth at least, probably several other places, too."

"Howmany down the hole, do you know?"

"Ifigured eight, to start One got squashed... six there ... maybe I miscounted...?"

"No,"Sixx corrected mildly. "There's the last one over there, look." And now here came Louise being hoisted but helping by walking. Sixx reached her down as Lowry dropped the cable one last time for Rilke.

"I'mglad to see you all in one piece," Sixx said inadequately.

"I'mglad to be out of there," she admitted, smiling through dust and grime. "But it was fun in a way."

"Fun?"he echoed, and she laughed. Even in the purple gloom she seemed to glow with well-being.

"That'sright, fun. I've never felt so well. You know, I think it was because I was being pushed. Under pressure. Total darkness, for one thing. I couldn't see, and I was scared sick. But then it came to me that I knew— and I did know—where everything and everyone was. I knew! Andso I had to accept it. And once I had done that much, it all seemed all right!"

Sixxshook his head slowly, trying to understand. "You make it sound like some kind of desperate commitment . . . ?"

"That'sright. That is exactly it. I couldnt run away from it any more. I had to face it And it's not frightening anymore."

Fourteen

Lastof all out of the air shaft came Rilke.Despite a rapidly purpling bruise over one cheekbone he was grinning, a startling change from his habitual scowl. "Physical violence," he said, "has a remarkably cathartic effect I must make a note—" He joined the others, and Sixx limped over to his partner, feeling curiously lightheaded.

'Totaldarkness, Roger?" he murmured. "What happened to your helmet light?"

"Nothing.Didn't need it. Would've made me a fine target for the opposition, anyway. And our Louise—she has some kind of dark sight—she could give it to me, somehow. Something like that. I don't understand it but it came in handy. Made things simple. What now?"

"Well...Bardak is over there... in the ship. That's quite a gap. I jumped it coming, but I now have knots in my leg. Over to you. The gangway will have to be hand-steered. Get everybody aboard—" Much to his disgust he felt his vision going, his balance failing. Reeling, putting out his hands to take the shock of falling—and there came a blurred hiatus, the sense of being carried, of being helpless. Light and clarity came back after a while, and he was in the ship's lounge, stretched out in a comfortable chair while Roger carefully unfastened his suit looking grim. Remotely there were voices.

"Weare past the moment for academic discussion." That was Bardak, and there was a crispness in his voice. "We have learned much about our weaknesses, and OUT strengths,our ideals, our theories. I ask you now to think more narrowly. We are faced with the immediate problem of more than five hundred intruders, under restraint for the moment but not for much longer. And actively hostile. What to do about them? What do we doabout them? For if we cannot solve the problems of our own society, we stand condemned as futile. Once, already, we

havemade that error. Let us learn from it. Let us begin with one thing—in this instance we must discard our policy of independent isolation and work together on this. Obvious, I think?"

"Itfits the equation." That was Alma's voice. Sixx spoke up over the fire that burned in his leg as Lowry eased the suit away.

"Whatequation?"

Almamoved to enter his line of vision, smiled at him. "It is really very simple, Rex. All living organisms have three essential needs. Assurance of identity in some form. Adequate stimulus to respond to, which is what life is all about, isn't ft? And security of living survival, which is obvious. But those three are always in constant conflict and uneasy balance. That is the dynamic of living. Threaten any one and it grows stronger while the others diminish in proportion. For example, lack of stimulus can bring boredom and the drive to risk life and security by some excitement or merge your identity into some cause or other. To gain status and fame—which is identity—you will risk security, and so on. At this moment our security is under attack, so we will be ready to hazard individual identity and those kinds of intellectual stimuli that we would otherwise prefer. That's how it is, Rex. We don't make those rules, they are built into us. Our advantage is that we understand them rather well."

Sixxhad the uneasy sensation that he was still a little lightheaded. Or dreaming all this perhaps. Roger had removed the lower part of his suit completely now, and that damaged leg felt twice its normal size. Bardak came.

"Thankyou, Alma, for the academics, but we must not waste any more time. Young man—Mr. Lowry?— can you take us back to my home place now? I have a multichannel terminal there. We must rally all our resources in this emergency, all of them!"

"Thatleg needs attention!" Lowry spoke sternly. Olga came with a competent wave and smile.

"Leaveit to me, Roger, I have the qualifications. You two are not made of iron, you know. You only act as if you were. Go along now!"

"It'llbe all right, Roger." Sixx grinned at him. "You take it. Joe knows the way. And nothing much can happen inside the ship. Geniuses! Even with a take-over war on their hands they have to spout theories!" He felt a firm touch on his knee, a moment of exquisite agony, and then the pleasant easement of some of the original pain. He looked down at Olga's dark head, lowered and intent on what she was doing. "I wonder how many of the opposition are climbing out of air shafts right now?"

"Wontdo them much good, not without power. Ill take your suit, Rex, and check it out just in case." Lowry hovered just one more minute. "Don't sell the brains short. They can pull it out when it's wanted. Ill bet they come up with plenty once they start!" He went swiftly away and up to the controls, leaving Sixx to look down again at Olga. She was investigating his leg with her fingertips as if listening through them. She smiled up at him, rose, went away to the autochef. He felt the stir and shudder of liftoff. She came back with a glass.

"Drinkit," she ordered. "I shall have to rearrange your leg bones a' little, which will hurt. You will find this a help. Better still if you just lean back and let everything go." The drink certainly helped. The next thing he remembered clearly was blinking at 'bright lights and realizing he was in Bardak's home place data room. He was just in time to hear the old man laying it on the line for his associates in bleakly practical terms.

"Weneed now," he said, after giving them the stark facts and figures of the situation, "urgent ways and means of disarming these intruders, ways to render them helpless and harmless, so that we may dispose of them. As painlessly as possible. Consult, all of you, with your fellows in knowledge. Here again is the enemy!" and he put up for them that schematic that showed all the illegal home places and link lines.

Then,in a matter of moments only, Sixx was irresistibly reminded of a vast orchestra tuning up, snatches of separate melody somehow meshing together and making sense to the players but a mighty confusion to the onlooker. All four Iskolans were in there, each at a terminal screen, and the separation between them and the three onlooking Earthlings was more than just physical They were on a different plane altogether.

Sixx,in awe, caught snatches! Rilke in interchange with others, tossing to and fro suggestions and designs for paralyzing fields, modified short-range tractor and pressor beams, various permutations on the metabolic-field screen; Alma catching data and deftly converting it for Olga to grasp—the basic structure of nerve gases that could be produced merely by subtle and skillful operations of the autochef range; Bardak himself linking up with Lea Lawrence and others, fostering the development of hypnotic and tranquilizing frequencies, to be fed in through the link lines—which could be partly restored for just that purpose—the generation of paralyzing flicker frequencies in the lighting systems.

"Dobnyhad something!" he muttered, looking up at Lowry and Louise. "If he could have laid his hands on this lot, somehow—what they have tucked away—he would have been something to stop!"

"Theyhave power, all right," Lowry agreed. "Dangerous power. But that's where Bardak's rules came in. This sort of thing is only dangerous if you want to use it against other people to gain control. That kind of power. And the natural solitary doesn't have that bug, doesn't need status that way."

"Iwill buy that," Sixx agreed. "But what turns them on now? If they are solitaries, Why are they suddenly all hand in glove?"

'Territory,I reckon. You know the way they fence off their home places? Well, the whole of Iskola is home place to all of them, isn't it? And they've been invaded. That's my guess. Anyway, it looks as if they are going to be able to handle it. Lets us out."

"Isthat right, Louise?" Sixx glanced up at her. "Is the job over?"

"Almost,"she said. "There are only a few loose ends to tie off. Dobny was the key that unlocked everything else."

"Howabout him, anyway?"

"Oh!"she shrugged. "He told us. A man like that has to stand big, to parade, to brag in front of somebody. To gloat! You see, he and Vancec were half-brothers. Both were power-mad types but along different lines and always competing with each other. Edgar—that's Dobny —he was a whiz kid, a brain, whereas Arthur was more the politico type; and that, incidentally, was why he was always distrustful of anything that even looked like excellence or superior intelligence. He grew up with it, you see? So he went strong for the common-sense vox populi angle. They fought, those two. Of course Edgar jumped at the original announcement of Iskola He made a big brag about it, how it was inevitable that true genius would transform and rule the human universe. He still believes that. So off he went to enlist with Bardak and was never beard from again. So Arthur had to assume that he was safely tucked away in Iskola in his kindof power and prestige, nothing would stop him from a visit to

Martasand, if possible, a confrontation and showdown with his smart brother. But he was outsmarted."

"Becausebrother Edgar was now chief forensic scientist and a big wheel in the law-and-order department of Arat-ni, in exactly the right place to be able to pull some very important strings."

"Apparentlyhe was able to commute in and out of Iskola by his own route virtually at will. Of course he was monitoring all the radio traffic in and out, too. And diligendyrecruiting all he could get out of Bardak's rejects, all the paranoids, scooping them in.In a way he was really a brilliant man. He was literally poised to take over Iskola, and it was sheer bad luck that his brother showed up at just the wrong moment for him."

"Sothat's it." Lowry spoke with unusual gravity for him. "It's all wrapped up, done, finished. The Iskolans can handle it from here."

Sheturned to look up at him, and Sixx saw a curiously reserved expression on her face, belied by the sudden rapid rise and fall of her bosom.

"Goon!" she invited, and Lowry shrugged minutely.

"Soyou write up your report, and me and Rex will take it..."

Sixxwanted to protest but only with half his mind. The other half had seen this coming, could share Lowry's reasoning. Louise, aglow and clear-eyed with health, wonderfully and brearhtakingly lovely now, belonged here with these idealists. Half of him ached vainly, the other half saw the reason and logic of it, and he turned almost angrily as Bardak approached him,

"Whatnow?"

"Iregret," the old man said, "that I am driven to appeal to you yet again for help. I would rather not, but I have little choice, and the matter is urgent, very urgent"

"What?"Sixx demanded, and despite his chagrin the old man smiled.

"Wecould learn directness from you. Here, I will show you." He wheeled a free read-out screen to where Sixx could overlook it with him, tapped buttons to put up an aerial view showing coastline, enlarged it, and pointed.

"Aboutforty miles from here.One of our power plants. Here is the complex of intake chimneys down by the water surface at the cliff bottom, and here again is the power plant itself, on the cliff top. Like all the others, it is unoccupied, but we use external scanners to monitor weather conditions, storms, winds, and so on..."

"Ithink I'm ahead of you," Sixx interrupted. "The enemy is there?"

"Yes.A number of them, we do not know how many. It seems they have surface craft at their disposal."

"Wecould have told you that How else did you imagine they were getting in and out of Iskola?"

"Yes.It is obvious now. Apparently they use radio more than we do, also. Those rogues must have been alerted somehow while they were abroad. We know for certain that we have everyone else safely enmeshed by narcotic gases, hypnotic sonics, and augmented field fences. We know that for sure. But this group is free, attacking the plant, and we cannot use any of those measures there, not to a power plant or a chimney. And although we are quite willing to assist you with physical violence, hand-to-hand combat if necessary, we lack the strategy and skill at such things." Bardak squeezed out the final phrase as if it hurt him. Lowry was attending now, grinning.

"Noneed to feel bad, sir. Experts are there to be called in. And it's a bad spot. They could wreck that power plant easily, which would be bad enough, but these laddies are smart. Given the time, they will probably be able to dream up something a whole lot worse than that."

"Holdon a bit Roger." Sixx was still a little irritated. "We are stepping out of our ground now, just for one thing. Louise has done what she came for, and that's as far as our assignment properly goes. For another, I can just about walk. That's not too bad if my suit is O.K.... ?"

"Fixed!"Lowry told Mm, "Adent or two, but all systems are go."

"That'ssomething, sure. But I wouldbe no use whatever in a brawl. This needs to be figured out. No point in rushing away half-cocked. And you cant do it alone, Roger."

"Sureenough," Lowry admitted, "I cant cover both ends of a four-thousand-foot chimney by myself. Incidentally, Mr. Bardak, can they climb up inside those things with no special trouble?"

"Quiteeasily.There are internal ladders and staging fitted for inspection. But I promise you this, no one will hurry upthere. As you say, Mr. Lowry, four thousand feet... and straight up!"

"Givesus a moment or two.What we need is a volunteer or two who knows the internal layout, the ideal solution being to cover both ends of the chimney and trap them before they can do any damage."

"Myself!"Bardak was prompt, and Sixx was just as prompt waving him down.

"No,sir.You're an old man. You're much too important, anyway. The penalties of fame, I'm afraid."

"Weneed more than just knowledge of layout," Lowry offered. "Whoever gets to climb that chimney with me is going to need stamina as well."

"Youwould accept me, perhaps?" Ivan Rilke was close enough to hear, to turn and approach with a fierce grin. "I am not doing anything very important I know that plant well. And I think you already know that I can be violent when it B calledfor?"

"Gladto have you." Lowry grinned. "You have quite a wallop. But how about you, Rex? You'll need somebody who can move real fast up at the plant end of the show."

Rilkeshowed his teeth in that wolfish grin again. "I think I can help you. Olga! Come a moment!"

Sixx'sirritation returned as she came trotting over, all bubbling eagerness. The careless twist of cloth about her waist seemed destined to fall off at any moment and her golden hair was a wildness about her face, but she was utterly unconscious of all that, sublimely self-confident It took only a moment to give her the gist of the emergency. Sixx expected to hear her raise a doubt or two, but she seemed to gather even more eagerness as she turned to him for approval.

"Butof course I will partner you if you will have me," she declared. "I have nothing to do here now, and I am all stirred up with the excitement, anyway. Action is exactly what I need to relieve tension. Also I can shoot very well. Does that surprise you? It is only coordination, after all. Am I acceptable?"

"It'syour skin." Sixx levered himself up from his couch and tried his leg gingerly. "Where's that suit, Roger?"

Louisecame to stand as he slid himself into his armor again and checked it swiftly but thoroughly. Her face was grave, her honey-gold eyes solemn.

"Iwish I could come and help," she said. "But this is one time I'm no use. I feel part of the team, somehow, and I shall worry all the time you're gone. You'll take care and come back, won't you?"

"Dontworry." He gave her a grin. "I'm very fond of me. Ill be back."

"Illbe waiting. We have something to talk over, something important to all of us, so be sure not to take any silly chances. The job is not over yet by any means." She squeezedhis hand before it disappeared into an armored glove and left him wondering just what that meant.Even with power-system assist he found it none too happy walking and was thankful when he reached the clipper and could relax in the control chair that had been built to fit him.

Takingthe ship straight up was routine that he could do and still ask, "Got anything figured out, Roger?"

"Oddbits.I'm none too happy about fuel. We're pretty low."

"Myfault."Sixx thought guiltily back to his devastating pathway through the jungle. "Still, we have enough for a straight splashdown by the bottom of the chimney. Ill go in as close as I can. There's the plant now, down there." He had it on the screens, a neat and tidy doll-block array of four long halls side by side, with squat block towers, two and two, flanking them. Fleecy white vapor rolled from the towers ceaselessly. Olga leaned over his shoulder to point.

"Theentrances to the four turbine halls are on this side," she indicated. "Across the grass from the gardens. You had better put down just there in the gardens. You will destroy a few flowers, but they will grow again, a powerplant wont."

"Ivan!"Lowry turned to the Iskolan engineer-physicist "Well go straight down alongside the chimney foot and splash down. Better let me hop out first just in case they've left a rear guard. Ill wave you on when it's clear. Rex, give him time to get out from under, then you come back* here and we'll meet up one way or the other."

"Check!"Sixx put the ship into a vertical drop, watching the gray cliff wall unreel upward. "Better go easy on the radio, too, just in case they have somebody listening out. Emergency only, right?"

Thehuge box frame of the chimney slid past, in places half obscured with creepers and bushes, and he had time to reflect how much easier it must have been to build this structure than an equivalent free-standing stack. Now the restless blue ocean came rushing to meet him, and he braked delicately and expertly.

Lowrygot up and went, taking Rilke with him, and Olga settled her curves into the seat beside him, stretching a shapely leg in complete ease. Her all-but-naked presence was at once a warmth and a disturbance to him, even through his armor, and he had the curious sense that she knew it, knew she was making impact on him, andhe felt his irritation return. Damn this place where everybody had some special talent or other, some unfair advantage, making him feel as out of place as an extra thumb.

"Youtwo have extremely good reflexes," she remarked. "Both of you. Do you have special training for it?"

"Iwouldn't call it training," he said grudgingly. "Practice. We have plenty of that." He juggled the controls delicately. "A lot of this job is just sitting around in beween times, waiting for something to happen, and a man can get stale doing that, so we practice all sorts of skills." The ship fell the last few feet into a brief bump and sway, and he struck a switch that lit a red winker, reporting the hatchway opening, canceling all thrust in the same instant with his other hand. "There's more to it than that, though. When you're working with a complex machine, you try to 'be as fast as the machine if you can—and that is quite a mark to keep up to."

"Thatis a very good point," she agreed. "One needs the pressure of challenge. This invasion... is a terrible thing... and yet good, in a way... we were all getting lazy-minded, I think."

"Theregoes Roger." He had switched to the over-door sensor and they were now looking from just above water level, over restless waves, toward the nearest edge of the vast chimney complex, green-weeded and darkly gloomy underneath. Lowry's white bulk slid rapidly through the water, the foam of his splashes whipping away in evidence of the powerful updraft "Making for that skimmer. That must be What the enemy came in."

"Theredoesn't appear to be anyone in it" She leaped forward to peer. "It should be safe for Ivan, don't you think?"

"Idon't. Ill bet Roger doesnt think that, either. If Ivan has any sense at all, hell stay put until Roger gives him the word." Sixx had his eyes on that skimmer, apparently idly bobbing. All at once a longhaired head rose up into view and poised to aim.

"Oh!"Olga gasped, clutching Sixx's arm, but her concern was needless. The stranger stood, swayed, aimed, and then seemed to lose all interest. His arms fell. He slumped and pitched headfirst out of the skimmer into the sea. Seconds later Lowry's white bulk heaved up by the craft for just a moment and then he turned and waved one arm in a plain invitation to come on.

"Nowit's safe," Sixx murmured, and saw the brief splash as Rilke went into the water and surfaced, swimming strongly. He was aware of her hand still on his arm, even through the armor. He turned, and her face was very close, all big blue eyes and intense curiosity.

"Whydid that man fall?" she asked. "I don't understand."

Sixxsmiled at her. It was easy to do. In this childlike mood she was very appealing. "You'd know, I guess, about fast-acting drugs that can knock an organism right out? The kind of go-to-sleep stuff they use when they want to knock down a wild animal without lulling it? With darts?"

"Yes,of course," she said. "But I sawno dart How was it done?"

"Withone of these."He moved his right hand smoothly and with the speed of long practice, and let her see the needle gun in his palm, watched her eyes look down and open wide. She put out her hand.

"MayI?" She took it into her grasp, hefted ft, seeming to "taste" ft with her touch; then she stared at him again, her blue eyes very wide. "But it is beautiful," she enthused. He had always thought so himself, although it hadn't been designed with that intention.

"Yousurprise me a little," he admitted. "I wouldn't haveexpected you to use that kind of word."

"Butwhy not?"She curled her fingers around it twisting her wrist and arm tentatively, then opened her hand again. "It fits into my hand; it has a natural balance; it js as natural to aim as pointing with a finger; and it has no ugly edges at all. How does it work?"

"Simpleenough."He produced its twin and showed her. "There's a power pack in here, circuitry that delivers a brief but powerful pulse to magnet coils here, a stack of cobalt-samarium alloy needles in here—drilled and loaded with the drug—and the flash gauss field yanks a needle out and sends it on its way with enough zip to make it effective up to half a mile. I don't have to tell you how to hold and aim, you're doing that now. There's no trigger—that's the major flaw with most projectile weapons, you have to use the finger you should be pointing with. That one has a thumb stud in the most natural place. The full pack is fifty."

"MayI keep this one in case I need it?"

"You?"He met her gaze directly, revised his earlier opinion, and made a smile. "You hang on to it Believe me, I wouldn't say that to just anybody, but you... you'll be all right with it." There came one of those moments that hovered on the edge of something else, but training took over, brought his eyes back to the screen, canceled wayward thoughts.

'Timeto go," he said. "Ivan is clear. Hold on to your girdle, we're going up fast!" He struck buttons and the cliff wall streamed rapidly downward past his cameras. Problems flooded into his mind, so important that he almost missed her indignant retort

"Itis not a girdle. I do not need anything like that This silly piece of silk is a gesture, a sop to convention for those who might take some kind of offense."

"Forgetit!" He cut her off. "I have other things to worry about. I want to come down close to that plant, in the gardens, as you said, but I am not going to be able to see a damned thing through that constant vapor bath I"

"Isthat all?" She chuckled cheerfully. "Just go down. It will be no problem. Those vapor-tower blocks are more than one hundred fifty feet high, and the vapor comes from the top. You saw them from above, remember?"

"Youmake me feel stupid," he muttered, juggling with studs as the plant swam into view below. "I didn't think of that"

"Notstupid, just underinformed, Rex. That is what I am here for, isn't it, because I know things you don't? Abo, you are not completely well and under pressure."

"I'mnot yet at the stage when I need somebody to hold my hand!" He sent the ship straight down now, braking it to a gentle bouncing halt amid a ruin of exotic blooms and riotous bushes. "I'm remembering, for instance, to switch off all systems because this ship will only work for me and Roger, nobody else. That's just in case any of the enemy happen to get by me."

"Youmustn't be too hard on yourself. Come, I will explain the layout as we go." She strode with him along and down to the air lock, down the gangway and into a heavily scented breeze, a component of which was the acrid tang of scorched greenery. "There—" she pointed a shapely arm, "—are the four turbine rooms, halls of power. The chimney divides into four sections about five hundred feet down, beyond the edge, one flue to each turbine."

Itwasnt obvious until he thought about it that she was deliberately matching her walking speed to his painful limp.It seemed the most natural thing in the world that she would take his arm and stroll with him as if they were on a Sunday afternoon walk. With his helmet back he could savor the scented breeze. As they left the flower groves and moved on to a carpet of green turf, the sunshine struck rainbows from the drifting vapor. And she had discarded that "silly piece of silk" and was a natural Eve alongside him. It needed a real effort for him to keep his mind focused on business, to study the approaches to the four turbine halls as areas to be covered against a ruthless enemy. Regretfully he armed his helmet into clicking security, chinned his external speaker, and took a gentle hold of her arm.

"Waitup a moment, Olga," he ordered. "This is very pleasant, but I have to remind you that it's not what it looks. We have problems here. Four big doors, each one pierced with a smaller door. A spread of about eight or nine hundred feet. And we don't know how many people are coming up that chimney or where they are likely to come out. And no cover. We are right out in the open I"

"Youare too gloomy, Rex." She faced him, staring upward into his anxious eyes. "That little boat could not possibly have held more than six people. One is accounted for, thus five are in the chimney; and it takes time to climb four thousand feet."

"Andyou are not the expert now," he interrupted angrily. "I ami I know about attacks, and I'm armored. You have only your pretty pink skin! You have to be protected." There was no more time for debate. A flicker of movement caught his eye, and he reacted before his conscious mind bad time to analyze it, planting a palm firmly on her breast and shoving her vigorously away in the same movement that swung him around, brought his pistol up in his other band to loose a burst of needles at a green-covered figure that had come halfway out of the main door of the second hall from his left. His visor went black for just a twitch, and then the green figure slumped and plunged face downward on the tiles in front of that door.

"Keepabsolutely still where you are!" he ordered, and edged his way toward her without once relaxing his vigilance on the spread of doors. 'Takes time, does it?" You don't seem to realize we are dealing with fanatics here! With crazy people all bets are off." He flicked a glance down to see that he was close and in front of her prone form. He crouched with his back to her to create a better shield. "Are you all right, Olga?"

Tohis enormous relief her voice came, muffled but calm. "I felt heat by my head. I think I am a little scorched, but I am all right otherwise. Tell me what happened."

"Countingfrom the left, one, two, three, and four, right? A man came out of number two. He is taken care of now, but that leaves at least four more, going on your estimate. He seems to have been on his own." Sixx kept his eyes restlessly moving. "Which suggests that they have staggered their climb, which makes a kind of sense for them and maybe gives me a time edge. Count out number two. I'm guessing that number three is the next best bet. Maybe the flues curve outward to the two end ones, do they?"

"Yes,there is a considerable curve."

"That'sit, then. They'd choose the straight-up path as the shortest. So I'm going in. Number three. Tell me what I'm going to find in there."

"Iwill show youl" He heard the rustle of her movement and spun around in time to see her spring lithely to her feet. Despite the protest from his leg he was standing as fast as she, to grab and hug her savagely close to his chest so that she gasped a little under the pressure.

"Nowlisten!" he said. "Dont you have any sense at all in that pretty head of yours? You've been burned once already—you won't need a haircut for some time, that's for sure." The golden wilderness of her hair showed singes and flaking ends without in any way detracting from her beauty. "You might not be so lucky next time. I'm going in there. They cant hurt me. You will take cover back there among the bushes."

"Iwill not. If I am to run and hide, why did I come at all? It is my skin, and this is my home. It is my fight You can't shut me out."

Sixxshook his head resignedly. He knew pigheaded determination when he saw it and this was it. "All right have it your way, but let's do it in a sensible manner. I'm going to let go and turn around in a moment. You will stick right behind me, real close, understand? Let's do that—now!"

Withthe maneuver complete he scanned the tiled frontage again. There was no movement. "So far," he sighed, "we are in business again. Now I'm going to walk to number-three door. You will stick tight behind. You will tell me what I am looking for in there. When we get there, you will stay outside, alongside the wall, just in case anybody gets by me. You will shoot anyone that

comesout instantly and regardless. Is that clear?"

"Yes,sir!" she said, and he had to grin as he started walking, feeling her hands on his shoulders. "The small door opens on to a long avenue," she said, "which runs alongside the turbine, left side. You will turn sharp right, past the exciter cage at the end, and thus reach the avenue on the other side. The avenue is of instrument panels, which need not concern you. At the far end is a metal wall. In that wall is an armored door, opened and closed with a hand wheel. That is the access to the flue. So far as I know, it cannot be locked in any way. Is yourconcern for my safety purely professional, or is there some other reason?"

Not that again! hethought. Aloud he said, "The trouble with your lot is that you're working your society theories in a vacuum. You have a nice argument, that you mustn't get involved because that would bias your observer status. That's fine up to a point, but societies are peopleinvolved with each other not integers in a computer simulation. And that makes all the diffeernce in the world. Does that answer your question?"

"Yes,I thank you. It also gives me an idea.** "Forget the ideas for now. Pay attention." The massive screen door of the turbine hall loomed up now, giving him a true perspective of the vastness of the space inside. He halted within two steps of the smaller man-door. "You get up to the wall, go on! And stay there. Keep your eyes busy. Shoot anything that moves, all right?"

Hewaited until she was in position then grabbed the catch, turned, and stepped in over a low coaming. The subdued hum that he had scarcely been aware of outside came like the sustained note of a cello in here. Matte surfaces of chased alloy met his stare. He saw the chatter and blink of recorders, the squat and monstrous bulk of the generator itself, the cage end of the exciter wreathed in a dancing halo of brush sparks. Turn sharp right, she had said, and he did that, and looked along a lane of instruments to the metal wall to see the dark blot of an open door!

Where are you, Buster? heasked himself, backing up to the wall and scanning the interior intently, unhappily aware of a hundred and one spots where a man could take cover. "You have to come out this way," and a movement up there, over the curved hump of the turbine itself, drew his hand and eye around. Before he could fire, his visor blacked out, and a whine from his servos told him he was under laser fire, and close. He could do nothing but wait, curse the delay, and be ready. The safety screens clicked off, and he was just in time to see a green figure scrambling frantically for the exit door. He sprayed needles and ran heavily and painfully to follow up. Reaching the door, he saw a body in green lying inert on the tiles and craned his head out to advise Olga, poised with her pistol in the act of firing.

"He'staken care of, you can relax."

Thewords had barely left his mouth when a solid body impacted on him from behind, staggering him forward into a trip and sprawl over the coaming. Wrenched by agony from Ins leg, falling heavily on his knees, he felt heavy feet stamp savagely on his back to plunge him down flat for a moment. Then, as he rolled over and started back up to his feet, a voice with edges in it came to him.

"Dontdo anything rash, mister, or she gets this right in the belly!"

Sixxstayed on one knee and stared. This green coverall was different. It clung snugly to a figure that had curves in all the best places. Above the shape was a vivid face that might have served as a model for Lady Macbeth, all bone structure, dark hair, and snapping eyes, teeth gleaming in a savage smile. But what was more to the point was the laser rifle she held at arm's length, just inches away from Olga's naked stomach, her finger on the stud. Sixx's brain raced in futile effort. His pistol, even given the chance to use it, was useless here. The drug was fast, but hardly fast enough for this impasse. And this woman, he knew from just one glance at her face, was as fanatic as all the rest. She started to move now, inching slowly, never taking her eyes off Sixx, working herself into a position where she could cover the two of them with negligible shift of aim.

"You,white knight," she sneered, "will back up. Go on! Back up and pass inside that door, or I burn your lady friend a little at a time. A leg, maybe, or an arm. Back up!"

Shewasnt so crazy, Sixx reflected, as he started to move, like it or not. Her strategy was good. Once she had driven him inside that door and closed it, he would have no way at all of knowing what was going on. He kept backing, dragging it out, until he felt the treacherous coaming against his heels, and still no strategy offered itself. So long as Olga was the target he was helpless. He studied her face, oddly different now that her golden locks were scorched short, but there was no expression there at all, just a set calm. As he lifted a foot to explore behind, she moved, catching him completely by surprise. The woman with the laser was just as astonished.

Olgaspun, a pink blur that grabbed and heaved and wrenched that weapon clear and away all in one violent act. Her pistol went the other way. With just her grasping hands she darted forward and grabbed hold. For a moment the action was so fast that the eye couldn't follow, but then it resolved itself into a famfliar design. Sixx saw Olga launching herself backward, both hands engaged, one foot up as a pivot, and the helpless green-clad woman screeching, flying through the air in a dive. He winced at the expected impact, but the dark one managed, just in time, to duck her head and roll heavily. It earned her only a delay.

Asshe came up to her feet, Olga was already there, nimble as a dancer, to seize a handful of dark hair and use it to steer that high-cheek boned face precisely into the up-smashing pathway of her knee. The hard click of jaw and teeth was distinctly audible. Lady Macbeth sprawled back, lay a moment, started to get up again, and Olga trod lightly, stooped, seized her hair once more, and used it to bounce that head solidly on the tiles. And that was it

"Youmake me feel useless!" Sixx mumbled as she came to face him and smile radiantly, but she didn't seem to hear.

Insteadshe threw her arms around him and said, "How can I kiss you while you have that silly helmet on!?"

"Whatfor?" he asked stupidly, triggering the helmet free.

"Becauseyou have taught me much, and I am grateful—and for my own personal reasons."

Thenext down-to-earth thing Sixx heard was the micro-voice of his colleague speaking from his pushed-back helmet. "By the way you're celebrating victory, Rex, I gather the war is over!"

Hepushed Olga away, firmly but not roughly, and looked away, across the frontage of the buildings, to see the massive whiteness of Lowry approaching from number one hall area. With him was Ivan Rilke, whose gleaming grin was visible even at that distance. He brought his eyes back to Olga.

"Allgood things have to come to an end sometime,

lady,"he sighed. "We had a job to do, and it looks as if

we'vefinally wrapped it up. It's all over." "You are in a hurry to be gone?"

"Youknow that's not true, Olga, but we have no choice. We have our orders." He held her hand gently, wondered what went on under her enigmatic smile, wondered whether she could even appreciate what it was like to get involved with someone else. "You're pretty good in combat," he said. "I maybe could teach you one or two things, but not much. And you look great with that boy-cut hair style. You're a wonderful person, Olga"

Hersmile became a radiance. "And you really think I amgoing to let you go away, just like that, after such a speech? You wait!"

Hehad no time to argue. Lowry arrived, all grins and reports of how the remainder of the invading party had been taken care of, and then over the grass came a centipede car, at speed, carrying Bardak himself and Louise, full of questions and apprehensions. The next hour or so was something of a blur as the effects of exertion and the constant pain from his leg conspired to depress him into a half-coma. He was only vaguely aware that they were once again transported back to Bardak's home place but this time seated at ease in a nook on the surface, warm in the sunshine. His suit was off and lying on the grass by his feet. Roger, also in only his gray cotton undersuit, sat by his side on his left, Louise on his right All three, he realized with a start, were supposed to be attending to a discussion between Olga,Rüke, andBardak himself.

"Wehave completely missed one essential point of the scientific method." Olga was laying it down firmly for them. "We have theories. We work out solutions. We sometimes give them away. But when do we perform the controlled experiments?"

"Yourpoint is not valid, my dear," Bardak protested. "Truly it is desirable to carry out controlled experiments to test theories, but in this particular discipline it cannot be done. One cannot experiment with people!"

"Andwhy not?" she retorted. "Isn't it true that any new community, any new gathering, is in itself an experiment with people?"

Rilkestared at her. "Are you suggesting that we set up such a group? Here?"

"Certainly.Why not? We have plenty of room. We can construct a village, a small, flexible development for, say, ten or a dozen people, for a limited period, and see what happens. Look—" she became intent and Sixx almost lost the thread of her argument in his admiration of her graceful movements, "—it has been done before. Once, may years ago, there was such an establishment for testing out remedies for the common cold. Just ordinary people were invited to spend a vacation there, all expenses paid, if they would agree to have themselves infected with cold virus and then to try various remedies. And it worked. Similar ideas have worked in other fields. Why not here? Why not create a vacation village, invite perfectly ordinary people to come and stay—for a month, perhaps, if they will agree to being observed and advised—free of all expense, why not?"

Bardaklooked sour, dubious. "I would want to see a pilot scheme first," he declared, and Olga pounced on that. Heads went together in close mumbling. Sixx turned to Louise in mild wonder.

"What'sthis to us?" he asked softly. "You should be writing out your report for me and Roger to take back."

"Yousaid that before." She had a curious smile on her face. "You seem determined to go off and leave me here."

"Youbelong here with these people," Lowry put in. "You have their kind of talents. Much as we love you ..." "Ah!" she said, and Lowry reddened, made protest "I didn't mean it like that."

"Don'tspoil it, not for me, Roger. I know differently. I do have that talent.But, boys, I'm not these people at all. I'm a social person, not a solitary. Olga has gone a long way to curing me of my other trouble with that diet of hers, but that only makes it clearer. And you've helped me to be sure of it where I was doubtful before. No, I don't belong here. I get involved with people."

Shebroke off as Olga crossed the grass to come and crouch lithely among them. "Did you hear that?" she asked. "About the vacation village?"

"Soundslike a good idea," Sixx offered.

"Itshould be. I got it from you, Rex. But Bardak is quite right, we need a pilot scheme first. And for that we need experimental subjects. And we have YOU three here."

"Us?"Sixx spoke in astonished unison with the other two. "We can't stay here, not now the job is over!" Olga grinned at him in pure mischief. "You think not?

Listen—Ihave not yet finished with your diet, my dear. It will take at least another month of tests and observations. Donl argue. I am expert."

"I'mnot arguing," Louise said faintly.

"Andyou." Olga turned to beam on Sixx. "You are ilL Your leg, it will take a long tune to mend. At least a month."

"You'llnever get away with that, dear. Jason Horn will never believe it for one minute 1"

"Iam expert!" she repeated. "Just leave it to me."

"Whatabout me?" Lowry demanded. "What's my excuse?"

"Sovery simple.Your ship is almost out of fuel, isnt it? And we have nothing like that on Iskola. It will take a long while, at least a month, to have some shipped in from somewhere. Yes?"

"Weyield." Sixx spoke for all of them. "I've said it all along, you're all geniuses here. Who are we to argue with that? We stay."

"Good!"Olga chuckled. "I said you wouldn't get away from me as easily as that, didnt I? Now you can teach me those tricks you spoke of about fighting and other things, yes?" She turned her smile on Louise. "And you, you are going to learn a lot of new things, too, I think."

"I'msure," Louise laughed. "I've learned quite a few already. I am looking forward to the rest of the treatment."

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If you had a high IQ, a yen to do the science-thing

in your own way, then Iskola was your place. Iskola was an island on the colony planet AAartas, and it was owned and controlled by the man who had led the colonists.

*

To qualify for Iskola, besides talent, you needed something else—you had to mind your own business about the other experimenters and the rest of the world.

Which sounded wonderful for certain kinds of mental wizards and do-it-yourself idealists.

And was also quite perfect for another sharp-eyed type...the kind that perfected villainy to a complex scieVice. That is where Interstellar Agents Rex Sixx and Roger Lowry came into the picture. Because something very, very evil was coming to a boil in Utopia.

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