should be. Anticipation was mixed with the fright. Besides, the change was inevitable. He had seen it in dreams twelve nights in a row. The thing was communicating with him in dreams, in images and in feelings. They had no common language, but they did not need it.

His body was contracting, rounding, flattening. The flesh and the bones were softening, just as his daughter's bones had softened when he had seen her in the car in the high-school parking lot while fleeing from the police. But her skeleton had become semi-jelly so that she could assume, or be shaped into, human form. Not a human form, he thought, since she had been all-too-human. An acceptable human form with a straight spine and full breasts and full legs. But he was going to have a nonhuman form. One, in fact, which no human had ever had before.

Where would his bones and organs go?

He held up one hand under the springs. The fingernails were shimmering; the flesh was glowing. Would the watchers see the darkness under the sheets hanging over the sides dissolve before a bright light? Would they think that he had set himself on fire? And then, knowing that he had no matches or flammable fluid, would they know that he could not be on fire? They would want to send someone into his room, but they would not dare. They could only watch and wonder.

He had enough wonder for all of them. How could his one hundred and fifty pounds be altered and squeezed so without killing him? How could his brain be flattened and condensed without killing him?

His body sagged and spread out. He tried to lift his head but could not. His eyes were separating, one drifting to the left, one to the right. At the same time, his vision was becoming weaker. Only the bright light enabled him to see at all. They felt smaller, and they were starting to sink within his skull. But they could not go far because his skull was spread out and at the same time shrinking.

For a while, his eyes were at the bottoms of wells or seemed to be. He remembered reading that a man could stand at the bottom of a deep well in the daytime and see, faintly, the stars. And here came the stars. And comets. And novas. But they were within him; the nerves were flashing signals. And soon, the nerves would be gone. Or changed into a structure which the neurologists of Earth could not understand. And changed in function, too, a function beyond their understanding.

His body moved across the floor as if it were an amoeba. Though he could not see himself, he knew that he must look as if he were becoming an amoeba. His trunk was flattening and becoming circular. His legs, his arms, his head were changing into flat, circular forms and also shrinking. He was an amoeba withdrawing its pseudopods.

Where would his brain go? What would happen to his eyes? What about his veins and arteries and capillaries? What would his bones become? His fingers? His toes? His ears? His nose? His teeth? What would become of him, Paul Eyre?

He had always believed that he had a soul. When his body died, he would ascend to heaven. Unchangeable, incorruptible, eternal Paul Eyre.

But his soul would be squeezed and flattened along with his body. Souls follow the map of the body. What the body writes, the soul reads.

And he did not know the language in which the writing was set.

He could not scream when the terror of full realization struck. He had no throat, and his lips were melted into each other.

Something within did scream then. Its voice echoed back and forth as if it were a man lost and screaming in a labyrinth deep underground. Somewhere in the dimness a form rose up and moved toward him. It was blacker than the blackness and only half-human in shape. It was menacing, yet when it spoke its voice was soft and reassuring. Paul Eyre did not want to be reassured and he wanted to run.

He felt his body swelling. A feeling of triumph and of disappointment filled him, and suddenly, he had a throat and a mouth. Instead of screaming, he whimpered.

[2.]

At ten in the morning he awoke. He was in his pajamas and lying flat on his back on the bed. He felt tired and hungry and also ashamed. Why should he be ashamed? Was it because he was a coward?

He got out of bed and wobbled to the only door to his room. A third of the way down on this door was a smaller door. He swung this open, and a shelf holding a tray of food and milk swiveled inward. He took the tray off and shut the little door. He carried the tray to a small folding table, set it on the table and sat down in the chair before the table. While he ate ham and eggs, toast and butter, and a grapefruit, he wondered what he would have eaten if he had allowed his new form to take over. What could a being with no mouth and no digestive organs, as far as he knew, use for food? Or fuel?

There was only one way to find out, a way he did not want to take. Or did he?

What he should be wondering about, he reminded himself, was why he accepted the change as reality. Once, he would have said that it was impossible. Anyone who actually thought he could change shape had to be crazy. Now, the universe seemed as flexible to him as his body.

He put the tray back on the swinging door and went into the bathroom. When he left it, he went to the doorless closet and changed from his pajamas into his clothes. At one time, he had gone into the bathroom to dress because there he would not be watched. At least, he had hoped he wasn't. Now he did not care, even if women were watching him. And that meant that he was changing not only in body but in his attitudes. Before he had been brought here, he would not have undressed before any female. Even when going to bed with his wife, he had shed his clothes in the dark so she could not see him naked.

That reminded him of some of his dreams. Though fifty-four years old, no, fifty-five now, he had a strong sex drive. He had insisted that Mavice relieve him at least three times a week. It had not mattered to him whether or not she were sick or just disinclined. It was her duty to take care of him. Mavice had usually submitted but she had complained or else been silent and had let him know through her sullenness that she was angry.

If he were to be released, he would not go back to Mavice. She hated him, though he had to admit that she had cause. But he hated her, too. Perhaps part of his hate for her was hate reflected, hate for himself. Or contempt. But there was no use thinking about that. That was in a past that seemed even more bizarre than the present.

What a pair of wretches they had been!

"Falcons in a net," Tincrowder had once said of them. The writer was probably quoting some poem or book; his talk was half-quotation, as if he had no power to make up his own phrases. But that wasn't true. Tin-crowder had then said, "No, not falcons. You and Mavice are more like vultures in a net. Or hyenas. Or rats in a hole plugged up with cyanide."

He had hated Tincrowder, too. No wonder that the man was afraid to meet him face to face now. Not that he blamed him. Why should Tincrowder take a chance on dropping dead?

The sex drive had not been shut off when the door of his cell closed on him. He would have gone insane with desire if it had not been for those dreams. He would sleep, and he would see that glittering green city at the far end of many fields covered with red flowers. He would be walking across it on four feet, paws, rather. He was a creature half-human and half-feline. A leocentaur. And he was female. He had a beautiful human face, white shoulders and arms, and magnificent breasts. From the human torso down, his body was that of a lioness. A strange and powerful odor emanated from him, or, rather, her. His sexual organ twitched and stank with desire. He—she—was mad with desire, but, being sentient, could control somewhat his—her —lust.

And then a great male leocentaur would come leaping and bounding across the red fields, and he—she —and the male would couple.

What a difference eight hundred pounds of feline muscle, sweating, fur, a tail, and four paws with two hands and no inhibitions made!

Eyre quivered with memory of the ecstasy, far beyond anything he had experienced as a human. He also felt shame, but, as the day passed, the shame dwindled.

He could not understand why, if he was the female, he woke up with his pajamas sticky. But the orgasms of himself, the female, in the dream were paralleled by himself, the male, in his human body. Or form.

There were other dreams, dreams in which he was a small body with a hard shell, flying through the air, flying also through emptiness where stars were the only light. He saw the stars, or, rather, felt them in a way that he could not comprehend. This "seeing" was better than "seeing" with eyes.

Did the little yellow brick in his brain carry inside it ancestral memories? Memories that it could transmit to him via dreams?

He did not know. There were many things he could not explain. For instance, the thing in him could kill or cure human beings. If it saw a diseased or crippled human being, it cured that being. If it thought it was threatened, it killed. Paul Eyre was the agent through which the thing worked, but he had no control over it.

Yet, when he had been out hunting and had fired his shotgun at the saucerthing, why hadn't it killed him? When he had searched for it afterward in those woods, why hadn't it killed him then? It could not have been in doubt about his intentions.

He thought he had wounded it. How else explain the yellow haze that issued from some opening in its side? An opening his shotgun pellets must have made.

Or had it? Tincrowder had said that perhaps it was spawning or sporing. The cloud had been composed of microscopic quicksilver-like objects, and these were the saucerthing's young. Some had undoubtedly gone into Paul Eyre, through his nose and perhaps through his skin. They had become millions of yellow-brick-shaped things in his blood cells and in his skin tissues. He had excreted all but one, which had lodged in his brain. The others, sneezed out, digested out, sweated out, had not affected any other living being. They seemed to have died.

While in the woods, he had seen the saucer, and he had also seen the female leocentaur, a creature of unsurpassed beauty. Only now did he understand that she was the saucerthing in another shape.

He could accept that because he had to. But why hadn't the thing killed him with its thoughts or whatever power it used to kill?

If he allowed himself to become a saucerthing, then he might understand.

Tincrowder might have a theory. Tincrowder was a writer whose field was mainly science fiction. When Eyre had related his experiences in the woods, Tincrowder had given some fairly plausible theories to explain what had happened. Eyre felt that Tincrowder had, somehow, hit close to the truth.

He would ask Tincrowder.

Two days later, the closed-circuit TV screen lit up, and a broad red face appeared. For a minute, Eyre did not recognize him. Tincrowder had a shaggy red and white beard, and his eyes were sunken in black. He looked as if he had grown a beard to disguise himself from Death.

"Hello, Paul," he said. "They flew me in, but the cheapos made me go second-class. I had to buy my own champagne."

"Listen," Eyre said. "The others might think I'm crazy, but that doesn't matter. My situation won't be changed by their opinions."

He paused and then said, "Last night I almost turned into a flying saucer."

[3.]

Tincrowder listened without interrupting. He said, "Some years ago, I would have thought you crazy, too. Now, I'm not so sure. What the hell, I know you're not crazy! I'll tell you why I believe what very few can believe. A few years ago an anthropological student named Carlos Castaneda wrote three books about his experiences with Yaqui Indian magic. Put quotes around the word magic, because that's a word loaded with superstition and prejudice among Westerners. To the Yaqui brujos, sorcerers we'd call them, there are many worlds coexistent with ours. Parallel worlds, if you will, which intersect ours. By use of their quote magic unquote, the brujos can use entities, or forces, in these other worlds. Castaneda called these worlds nonordinary reality. That is, they are realities which we don't usually encounter.

"I won't go into how these brujos can perform their so-called magic. It's not magic, but a rigid and always dangerous science. Or a discipline. Never mind the terms. The thing is that the brujos Castaneda knew, Don Juan and Don Genaro and some others, could perform incredible feats. They had powers we Westerners have always thought were mumbo-jumbo, fantasies, superstitions. Castaneda was convinced that the powers existed, have existed since the Old Stone Age. For instance, and I cite only one because it is relevant to your case, the brujos can change themselves into birds and fly. I became convinced after reading his books that they can do this. Castaneda is a level-headed scientist and no hoaxer."

"You mean that I met a creature from this, this nonordinary reality, and that it has made these changes in me?" Eyre said.

Tincrowder shook his head. "Not entirely. You have met a nonordinary creature and are undergoing some nonordinary changes. But these are not of the nature which Castañeda described. Your saucerthing and your sphinx come from this world, this hard universe. They are nonordinary only because they have just arrived. Probably, many things here are nonordinary to them, or it, I should say, since the forms seem to be metamorphous, not discrete.

"Apparently, the yellow-thing in you is capable of causing these changes in shape. It many not derive its power solely from itself. We human beings may have this power but have never realized it. Rather, only a few have ever realized it. The devices exist in our bodies, and the yellow-thing knows how to use them.

"Here's what I think the situation could be. Postulate a species of sentient, or maybe nonsentient, beings which can live in space. They can also travel through space, perhaps using gravitons as a means of propulsion. Gravitons are wavicles. Wavicles are phenomena which act as if they're both frequency waves and particles. Gravitons are wavicles responsible for gravity, just as photons are wavicles responsible for light. Well, that doesn't matter. It's not how they can propel themselves through space and atmosphere but their biological setup that is important.

"I can't guess at how they have sexual intercourse and have children with genes from male and female. Maybe they have a sexual-reproductive process that isn't remotely like what we know on Earth. Anyway, these ufos, let's call them that and not flying saucers, these ufos, originated on some planet or maybe in space. Their planet was long ago crowded, or else they have a drive to seed other planets. In any event, many leave their native world. They go to other planets that are like Earth.

These have sentients. Some are humanoids. Some cen-tauroids. Some are only God knows what.

"The pregnant female lands and releases the egg-bearing cloud. The microscopic eggs, or spores, or what have you, enter the tissues of sentients. Only one of the millions of eggs in a sentient's body survives, just as only one sperm out of millions in an ejaculation survives to unite with an ovum in the womb. Whoever gets to the brain first is the winner.

"The egg and the sperm, that's you, Paul, a bipedal thinking sperm, unite. The process is half-fusion, half-symbiosis. You think it's parasitism because you're an unwilling and very conscious host. A reluctant sper-matozoan. Strange things happen. You have the power to cure or kill even when unconscious or sleeping. Only it's not being done by you but by the ufo-egg, which goes all the way in its healing or its self-defense.

"Why does the symbiote kill those who threaten you? Obviously because it's protecting itself and you, the host. Why does it heal nonthreatening humans? Obviously because it regards them as future hosts, or sperm.

"And so you're shut up in a prison hospital for observation by scientists who can't believe what they're seeing but have to believe.

"Meanwhile, the zygote becomes embryo becomes an adult. The adulus, or will be, the ufo-egg plus the host. My analogies are, biologically speaking, mixed up. A symbiote, or parasite, and its host are not two gametes. But this doesn't matter. You get the idea. You start to change shape. You resist, but you will eventually go all the way. You will become a saucerthing. What will happen to the brain in that saucer? I don't know. I suspect you'll become half-human, half-alien. You'll grow to like your powers. After all, it's only human to desire powers that other humans don't have. Nor will you be bound to one shape. At times, maybe whenever you wish, you can change back to your original shape.

"That the saucer you saw changes into the shape of its original leocentaur form demonstrates that.

"Then, one day, you get out of this prison. You either stay on Earth to look for a male or go out into space for a male. You get fertilized, how, don't ask me. You spread your seed. Other humans suffer the same strange space-change that you have suffered. And so on. Eventually, we have an Earth populated by ufo-humans. What happens then? I don't know. I suspect that some will take off into space to seek virgin planets."

Eyre said, "You don't believe that."

Tincrowder said, "Do you believe it?"

"I don't know," Eyre said. "I do know that I don't like it."

[4.]

That was not the end of the conversation. What about the ufos? Why had so many been sighted and why, if there were so many, hadn't any man been affected by them, as Eyre now was?

"I don't know that any have actually been sighted here," Tincrowder said. "The Air Force investigation explained away all but about two percent as misinterpreted natural phenomena, delusions, hoaxes, or the result of mass hysteria. That an unexplainable two percent remains might be due to the investigators' failure of rationalizing powers. Or perhaps the two percent were composed of actual ufos. These could have been males looking for females, which weren't at that time on Earth."

"But they weren't all of the same type," Eyre said.

"Some were balls that acted more like electrical phenomena than anything. Some were cigar-shaped. Some had blinking lights. Almost all were much larger than the saucer I saw."

Tincrowder shrugged and said, "If they existed in some place other than the observer's mind, they may have belonged to different species or genera than your saucer. Or perhaps the males have different shapes. Maybe the differing types were hostile toward each other and expended their energies chasing each other. They may have exterminated each other in a secret unseen war or perhaps declared Earth a dangerous area and so avoid it from now on. Maybe they have a treaty that has declared Earth off-limits, and your saucer was here illegally. Or maybe she was sick or out of food and had to land here.

"You want me to explain all about them, and I can't even tell you all about the how and why of human beings. Besides, everything I've said may be wrong."

Tincrowder seemed to* find this amusing. Eyre did not.

When the dialogue was ended, Eyre paced back and forth—he could not sit still long unless he was reading or watching TV—and wondered what the effect of the conversation would be on the authorities. Would they assume he was crazy? If they did, then they would do nothing. Things would proceed as they had been. They might want to give him therapy, but they would be afraid to try it. If they believed his story, then they might become so alarmed that they would try to kill him. They would justify murder as in the best interest of the majority. The majority: all humanity with the exception of Paul Eyre. Logically, he had to agree with them.

[5.]

The following morning, Tincrowder's face appeared again on the screen. He looked pale and frightened.

"Paul," he said, "you've been told that, if it looks as if you might escape, cyanide gas will be released in your room. It's a terrible thing, but they can't allow you even to get out into the hall. They're afraid they couldn't stop you, since you can kill with a glance. Well, last night. . . ."

He paused and swallowed, then said, "Last night one of them made up his own mind to take action. Apparently, he believed what we said yesterday. He sneaked into the room in which the valves and the off-on button controlling the cyanide gas are located. This is guarded by one man, and an alarm is set off if any unauthorized person enters. He bludgeoned the guard and made a dash for the controls. He had to turn two valves before he could press the release button. He never got the first valve turned. As he touched it, he dropped dead. Now tell me. Did you somehow know all this was going on?"

Eyre was silent for a moment, then he said, "Not at all."

Tincrowder swallowed again and said, "Well, you see the implications, don't you?"

Eyre could not keep the exultation out of his voice.

"Yes, I—this thing in me, rather—can kill even if I can't see the one who's threatening us."

A few seconds later, the shock hit him. He sat down trembling. People were actually trying to kill him. Yet he had done nothing except to defend himself. No, he had not done even that. It was the creature inside him. But even as he thought that, he knew that that was not true. There was no longer any clearly defined Paul Eyre or ufo-child. Their borders were dissolving; their identities were merging.

He had to get out and away, but to do that he had to experience something the thought of which terrified him.

"They," Tincrowder said, "are divided. Half think you are telling the truth; half think you're crazy. But the latter half isn't certain. They saw the bright light emanating from under the bed, and they know that it wasn't caused by fire. Your room is monitored for any change in temperature, and there was none then. That was a cold light."

"Why aren't Polar and Kowalski talking to me?" Eyre said. "Why have you suddenly become the spokesman?"

"I don't have a degree in science, but I do have a free-wheeling imagination. This is a situation which requires a mind that is at ease with the fantastic. Set a thief to catch a thief. Put a science-fiction author in a science-fiction situation. Besides, I don't think they trust me to keep my mouth shut. They can watch me while I'm working for them." *

"Are you actually going to help them to kill me?" Eyre said.

Tincrowder looked distressed. "I don't think you can be killed." "But you're willing to try," Eyre said. Tincrowder was silent.

Eyre said, "And you're the one who was always raising hell because the U.S. was needlessly killing so many in Vietnam. You're the one who was too tender-hearted to shoot deer."

Tincrowder was obviously frightened. For all he knew, he might drop dead at this moment. Actually, Eyre thought, Tincrowder wasn't as cowardly and soft-hearted as he had supposed him to be. He must have courage to be able to tell him all this and to chance making him angry.

Or perhaps Tincrowder wanted to be struck dead. He felt guilt because he had not made the public aware of what was being done to Eyre. This guilt was increased by his participation in the imprisonment of Eyre. Moreover, he could not keep from trying to figure out ways to kill the unkillable. It was a challenge to the intellect, which he had no doubt justified with all sorts of rationalization.

Suddenly Eyre realized that the face on the screen belonged to his most dangerous enemy.

That knowledge was followed by a slight shock. Why hadn't Tincrowder fallen dead?

Could it be because Tincrowder was also secretly rooting for him? Tincrowder had once said that it would be a good thing if something did wipe out all of mankind. Insanity, grief, sorrow, greed, murder, rape, brutality, hopelessness, despair, prejudice, hypocrisy, and persecution would vanish from Earth. Tincrowder had admitted that poetry, art, and music would also disappear, but the price paid for a few worthwhile poems, dramas, paintings, sculptures, and symphonies wasn't worth it. Besides, very few people appreciated art. According to him, money, power, and tearing other people apart, verbally and physically, were what most people cared about.

"On the other hand," Tincrowder had said, "if man goes, love and compassion also go. Perhaps we're just a stage in evolution toward a species all of whose members will be filled with love and compassion. But I ask our Creator why, if this is true, we stages have to suffer so? Don't we count for anything?"

Tincrowder had once written a short story, What You

See, in which visitors from the star Algol, as a parting gift, had spread an aerosol all over Earth. This covered all the mirrors in the world, and whenever anybody looked in one, he saw himself as he truly was. This did not have the desired effect of causing changes for the better in the viewers of self. Instead, all mirrors were smashed and a law passed making it a capital offense to manufacture mirrors. The law wasn't necessary. Nobody except a few masochists wanted mirrors.

Eyre had asked Tincrowder why, if he felt that way, he didn't commit suicide.

"I like to make myself and others miserable," the writer had said.

And now Tincrowder was torn in two. He wanted to survive and hence wanted Eyre to die. He also wanted Eyre to survive, because he might be the next stage in man's evolution.

That Eyre could perceive this meant that he had evolved in one respect. There was a time when he would have been too dull to see what" was troubling Tincrowder. Eyre was, had been, an engineer who could analyze malfunctions in machines down to the last nut and bolt. But troubleshooting people had been beyond him. They were impenetrable and irrational.

[6.]

That night, Eyre awoke from a sleep untroubled by dreams. He rose, drank some water, and went to the single window to look at the night scene. The stars were out, the river beyond the walls and the city on both sides of the river were speckled and striped with lights. Like a zebra with the measles, he thought.

Between his building and the high stone walls was a paved area. This was bright with floodlights on the building and the wall. A tower at a corner of the walls to his left thrust up like the hand of a traffic cop signaling for a stop. It held two guards armed with rifles, and a machine gun.

He was surprised, though not shocked, to see the female leocentaur standing on the pavement below. The light gleamed whitely on her bare upper trunk, blackly on her long hair and tawnily on the leonine underbody. She was smiling up at him and waving with one hand.

The last time he had seen her, she had been a saucer-shaped thing hanging in the air outside his window. From her whirling body had come a sound that had seemed to him a farewell. But he had been mistaken. She was still around, still watching over him. Like a mother over her child.

Shouts came from the watchtower. She bounded to one side as rifle bullets struck the pavement and then she loped away out of Eyre's sight to the right. A moment later, the machine gun opened up, but, after five bursts, it stopped. There were no more shots, but there was much excitement.

Three-quarters of an hour after the guards and the dogs had quit running around on the pavement, Tincrowder's face filled the TV.

"Up to now I've been a sort of John the Baptist for a weird messiah," he said. "Faith was noticeable only by its absence. But they believe now! They've not only got two eye witnesses, but they've got photographs! The watch-tower was equipped with a motion picture camera, you know. No, you wouldn't. Anyway here are some stills."

The first was of the leocentauress running away. The third showed her leaping high into the air. At least fifteen feet, Eyre estimated. The fifth showed an elongated blur. The next one was of a blurred but undeniably saucer-shaped object. The last showed the saucer as it shot by a floodlight.

"Apparently, she didn't think she was really in danger," Tincrowder said. "Otherwise, the guards would be dead. Of course, it may be that the adult isn't capable of killing through ESP means or however it's done. In which case, you, if you become an adult, may no longer be a danger. At least, not one kind of danger. You'll always be a menace.

"One reason I think that the adult form may not be able to kill is that you didn't kill the guards. You, that thing in you, anyway, must have wanted to protect its mother. So why didn't it do it?

"Or is there something we don't know?"

Eyre repressed any show of joy at the mother's escape. He said, "So what happens now?"

"I don't know. I think they're going to let the White House in on what's been going on. They've been very secretive so far. Very few officials know that a man is being held without any judicial processes at all and with no consideration of his civil rights. And fewer yet know the real reason why. But now that they have evidence that even the most unimaginative will have to accept, they will have to inform the highest authority. It may take some time to convince him, though."

What you're not saying, Eyre thought, is that everybody in the know is going to be scared to death. To my death.

And that morning, while it was still dark, he undressed and went under the bed. Sometime later he emerged, shaking, weak, and frightened. Halfway through, he had quit. For a long time, he lay in bed, tossing and turning, and cursing himself for a weakling. Yet he was glad that something in him, himself this time, had refused to become nonhuman. He finally fell asleep, waking at ten-thirty. He ate breakfast and read several pages of a book on a tribe in highland New Guinea. He had been reading much and widely of late, trying to make up for all the years when he had read only the daily local newspaper and sports magazines.

As he began pacing back and forth, the closed-circuit TV came on. Tincrowder said, "This'll be the last time I'll be seeing you, Paul. Here, anyway. I'm quitting. I don't want anything more to do with these people. Or with you. I can't take it any longer. I'm being ripped apart between my conscience and what I believe, logically, should be done with you. And this last incident is too much for me. It was my idea, I'll admit, but I didn't like it when it was put in practice."

"What last idea?" Paul said.

Somebody out of sight said something to Tincrowder. He snarled, "What the hell's the difference?" and turned back to Eyre. "I suggested a device to turn on the cyanide by a remote control machine. And they installed one. Two, rather. The light-sensing monitor on you was to send a radio signal to a machine in Washington, D.C., when it detected that glow from under the bed. This in turn would signal back to the automatic controller of the cyanide-release machine. The setup was arranged so that there would be no human agency involved in the actual operation of gas release. That way, no one would die, they hoped."

He swallowed, looked contrite, and said, "I did it, Paul, because I'm human! I want humanity to survive! As humans. Better the devil you know, I thought. And anyway, I didn't believe that you could be killed, and I wanted to find out if I was wrong. I hoped I was at the same time I hoped I wasn't. Can you understand?"

"I suppose that if I were in your shoes, I'd do the same," Eyre said. "But you can't expect me to be very friendly with a man who's been trying to kill me."

"Of course I don't. I'm not very friendly to myself just now. But here's what happened. As soon as the light glowed, a signal was sent to the machine in Washington. That machine never got to send a signal back. Both it and the control device here burned up! The circuits apparently became overloaded and burst into flames. They had fused but it made no difference. Up they went!"

"You can keep on trying, and you'll never succeed," Eyre said.

He was startled. He had had no intention of saying that. Was the thing in him talking? Or was the merger, the fusion as Tincrowder called it, almost complete?

"Listen, Paul!" Tincrowder shouted. "That window is
shatterproof, but you can get through it! Their
plan___ "

A hand clamped down on Tincrowder's mouth. Polar and Kowalski appeared behind him and dragged him, struggling, out of sight.

Eyre wished Polar and Kowalski dead, but a moment later Polar appeared. Eyre was glad that he had not killed him. Perhaps it was better that he had no control over his powers. The responsibility and the guilt were not his.

"I assure you, Eyre, that we're not planning anything more," Polar said in a high-pitched voice. "Not against you, not in a positive manner, I mean. We know we can't do anything to you. So we're just going to keep you here until, by the grace of God, we can reach a satisfactory solution."

Polar was lying, of course.

"Die! Die!" Eyre shouted, forgetting in another burst of anger his gladness of a moment ago.

Polar screamed and ran out of sight. A moment later, the screen went blank. Eyre quit laughing and stretched out on the floor. He closed his eyes but opened them almost at once. This time, the light was coming not from his skin but from deep within himself. And it was not steady but pulsing.

There was horror again, though it was as much less as the light was more. Or so it seemed to him. And the metamorphosis went so swiftly that his head would have swum—if he had had a head. Suddenly, he didn't. It had collapsed and withdrawn and changed.

He rose from the floor humming. He was rotating or at least aware that he was, but he had at the same time no sense of dizziness or disorientation. Without eyes, he could see. The room around him was a black sphere, not a cube. The furniture was violet bowls. The electrical wiring within the walls was helixes of pulsing blue. The window was hexagonal, and the light from the flood lights was mauve, and the stars were of many colors and many shapes. One was a huge russet doughnut.

He had no hands to feel his shell, but he could feel with a sense strange to him. The shell was far more resistant than steel but as flexible as rubber.

He thought, Forward, and the shatterproof glass flew out from in front of him, the shards flaming and falling like comets with green tails. As they struck the yellow pavement below, they became brown.

If he had had a voice, he would have shouted with exultation. Instead, a tiny electric spark seemed to pass through him. It glowed as it traveled from one edge of his shell to the other, sputtered, and was gone.

Where were his eyes, his ears, his arms, his legs, his mouth, his genitals? Who cared? He certainly did not, as he swept out and up, curving almost vertically into the air. His change of angle brought visions of a lightning streak, colored scarlet. He was riding on it. Below, machine-gun bullets made orange pyramids that became increasingly brown as gravity carried them back to Earth. When they landed, they became flat hexagons.

Babies play, and Eyre played for a long time. Up and down, in and out, skimming the fields, climbing above the atmosphere where the sun blazed azure and space blazed greenly, down again, the air moving around him like snow on a TV screen, the snow melting as he slowed down, down into a river, moving through the blood-colored water, fishes pentagons of dark violet, the weeds upside-down beige towers of Babel. And up and out again, through clouds that looked like cerulean toadstools.

He did not get tired or hungry. Exerting or resting, he was "feeding." He did not understand how he did it, any more than a savage would understand the processes by which food entering his mouth became energy and flesh. All he knew was that, munching mouthlessly, he devoured photonsyand gravitons and chronotrons and radio waves and magnetic lines of force. When in space, he would be eating all these and x-ray energy. His mouth was his shell.

As an engineer, he would have supposed that the surface area of his shell was too small to absorb enough energy to keep him alive. As what he now was, he knew that he could take in more than enough energy.

And then, as he soared up in a catenary curve that left behind a mile-long line of glimmering sapphire porcupine quills, quickly fading, he saw his mother. Going three times as fast, she was an ankh-shaped thing, striped with scarlet and blue and trailing yellow energy particles shaped like stars of David. She did not slow down, she went on up, out into space, headed toward some star. But as she passed, she whispered—or so it seemed to him—that he should follow her. She would love to have him accompany her. If he did not wish to, however, she bade him a fond farewell and hello.

"And what shall we do, brother?" he said in his non-voice.

His brother did not answer. The little yellow thing in him was he; his brother was he, and he was his brother.

He turned and raced around the planet, which was a shifting pattern of triangles and cubes below him. He sped in his orbit as if circularity was a means for arriving at a decision.

And it was.

[V.]

The doorbell rang.

Mavice Eyre got up from her chair before the TV set and walked through babble and smoke to the front door. She opened it onto the night and Paul Eyre. Two seconds passed, during which he could have covered fifty miles while out of the atmosphere and in the other form. Then Mavice fainted.

There was confusion and consternation. Paul Eyre acted calmly and did what had to be done. With order restored, the TV set off, and Mavice and his children, Roger and Glenda, in their chairs, he began to tell them a little of what had happened. Of his metamorphosis, he said nothing.

When he had finished, Mavice said, "Why didn't they tell us that they were letting you go? Why didn't you phone us? I almost died when I saw you!"

"They would like to keep this a secret," he said. "Your oaths of silence still hold. I'm well now, though I'm not what I was. Not by a long shot. And I didn't notify you I was coming because they asked me not to. Why, I don't know. Security reasons, I suppose."

He could not tell them the truth, of course.

There was a silence. His wife and his son were still afraid of him. Glenda did not fear him, but she did not trust him all the way. Of the three, she suspected that he was far more changed than he had admitted.

"Dad, where'd you get those clothes?" Roger said. "They look as if they came off a skid-row bum. And they sure smell like it!"

"I'll get rid of them," he said. And he thought, they did come from a wino. I took his clothes and in return I cured his diseased liver and his incipient tuberculosis and I may have altered the chemical imbalance that has made him an alcoholic. Maybe. I don't know what was sick about him. But if he had a cirrhosed liver and that cough was from TB and his lust for drink comes from chemistry and not from the pysche, then he's healed.

"Are you going back to work at Trackless Diesel, Dad?" Glenda said.

"Never. The idea makes me sick."

"But what will you do!" Mavice said shrilly. "You're fifty-five, and in only ten years you'll be able to retire! If you quit, you'll lose your retirement pension and the group medical insurance and. . . ."

"I have better things to do,"he said.

"Such as what?" Mavice said.

"Such as finding out what a human being is and why he is," Eyre said. "Before I go on." "Go on where?" Glenda said. "Wherever my destiny takes me." "And what is that?"

"Whatever seems to be best. Or whatever is good." "Look, Dad," Glenda said. She stood up. "Look at me.

I was a cripple and a hunchback, and you healed me just by looking at me! Think of what you can do for others!"

Glenda was radiant with joy, but Roger and Mavice had a better foundation for their emotion than Glenda did for hers. Not that they should be so afraid of him. They should dread what others would try to do to him and to them. Perhaps he should not have come back here. He had put them in jeopardy, whereas, if he had gone to some distant place, they would be safe.

But that wasn't true either. As long as he stayed on Earth, no human was safe. Change was dangerous, and he was here to see that all were changed. It didn't matter if he went to Timbuktu (and he might), change would spread out from him in an all-engulfing wave. It would lap over the Earth.

He stood up. "Let's go to bed. Tomorrow. . . ."

Mavice said, "Yes. . . ?"

"I begin looking."

Mavice assumed that he meant he would search for another job. It was his duty to support his family.

And so it was. But a far stronger duty was to find a mate. And then the seeding would begin.

bered the toil and poverty he had lived with, like everyone else, and smiled a bit. Yes, there is such a thing as progress, he thought.

Air flowed and murmured, cool on his face, crisp in his nostrils. The sky arched altogether clear, pale blue, full of southbound wings. Eastward, the early morning sun stood ruddy-orange at the end of street and town, above the snowpeaks of the distant Hercules range. Though Anchor's hinterland was an entire planet, it was itself not large: about ten thousand permanent residents, more than half of them children. To be sure, this was a fourth of the world's humanity.

Glancing the opposite way, Coffin saw a tattered drift of smoke above the mostly low roofs. A flaw of wind brought a rotten-egg stench. He scowled. Progress can get overdone. Though he had never seen it in person, writings, films, and the tales of witnesses had driven into his bones what too much population and industry had done to Earth.

And as for children—the cheerfulness of the weather departed. Here was the hospital. His heart knocked and he mounted the steps more slowly than was his wont.

"Good morning, Mr. Coffin." The nurse on desk duty was quite young. She addressed him with an awe which hitherto he had found wryly amusing. Him, plain Dan Coffin, lowland farmer?

Well, of course he'd made a name for himself as a young man, one of the few who could explore the immensities down yonder and gain the knowledge of Rustum that all men must have. And, yes, he'd had experiences that made sensational stories. But he'd always winced at those, recollecting the ancient saying that adventure happens only to the incompetent—then excusing himself with the fact that in so much unknownness, it was impossible to foresee every working of Murphy's Law.

And anyhow, that was long behind him. He'd been settled down at Lake Moondance for—was it thirty-five years? (Which'd be about twenty Terrestrial, said an echo from his childhood, when people were still trying to keep up traditions like Christmas.) Oh yes, he did have by far the biggest plantation in those parts, or anywhere in the lowlands. He could be reckoned as well-off. His neighbors for three or four hundred kilometers around considered him a sort of leader, and had informally commissioned him to speak for them in High America. Nevertheless!

"Good morning, Miss Herskowitz," he said, bowing as was expected in Anchor, where they went in more for mannerly gestures than folk did on the frontier. "Uh, I wonder, I know, it's early but I have an appointment soon and—"

The sudden compassion on her face struck him with terror. "Yes, by all means, Mr. Coffin. Your wife's awake. Go right on in."

That gaze followed him as he strode: a stocky, muscular man, roughly clad for his field trip later today, his features broad and weathered, his black hair streaked with gray. He felt it on his back, in his heart.

The door was open to Eva's room. He closed it behind him. For a moment he stood mute. Against propped-up pillows, sunlight through a window gave her mane back the redness it had had when first they knew each other. She was nursing their baby. On a table stood a vase of roses. He hadn't brought them, hadn't even known the town now boasted a conservatory. The hospital staff must have given them. That meant—

She raised her eyes to him. Their green was faded by weariness and (he could tell) recent crying. For the same reason, the freckles stood forth sharply on her snub-nosed countenance. And yet she was making a recovery from childbirth that would have been fast and good in a much younger woman.

"Dan—" He had long had a little trouble hearing, in the High American air that was scarcely thicker than Earth's. Now he must almost read her lips. "We can't keep him."

He clamped his fists. "Oh, no."

She spoke a bit louder, word by word. "It's final. They've made every clinical test and there is no doubt. If we bring Charlie to the lowlands, he'll die."

He slumped on a chair at the bedside and groped for her hand. She didn't give it to him. Holding the infant close in both arms, she stared at the wall before her and said, flat-voiced: "That was twelve or thirteen hours ago. They tried to get hold of you, but you weren't to be found."

"No, I—I had business, urgent business."

"You've had a lot of that, the whole while I was here."

"Oh, God, darling, don't I know it!" He barely, lightly grasped her shoulder. His hand shook. "Don't you know it, too?" he begged. "I've explained—"

"Yes. Of course." She turned to him with the resolution he knew. She even tried to smile, though that failed. "I've just . . . been lonely. I've missed you. . . ." Then she could hold out no longer, and she bent her head and wept.

He rose, stooped over her, gathered clumsily to his bosom her and the last child the doctors said she could ever have. "I know half a dozen fine homes that'd be happy to foster him," he said. "That's one thing that kept me busy, looking into this matter, in case. We can come see him whenever we want. It's not like him being dead, is it? And, sure, we'll adopt an exogene as soon as possible. Sweetheart, we both knew our luck couldn't hold out forever. Three children of our own that we could keep may actually have bucked the odds. We've a lot to be glad of. Really we do."

"Y-yes. It, it's only that . . . little Charlie, here at my breast, m-m-milking me this minute—Could we move here, Dan?"

He stiffened before answering slowly: "No. Wouldn't work. You've got to realize that. We'd lose everything we and—the the rest of our kids—ever hoped and worked for. We'd be too homesick—"

—for soaring mountains, rivers gleaming and belling down their cliffs; for boundless forests, turquoise, russet, and gold, spilling out to boundless prairies darkened by herds of beautiful beasts; for seas made wild by sun and outer moon, challenging men to sail around the curve of the world; for skies argent with cloud deck, or bright and changeable when that broke apart, or ablaze with lightning till the mighty rains came cataracting; for air so dense and rich with odors of soil and water and life, that the life in humans who could breathe it burned doubly bright, ran doubly strong; for the house that had grown under their hands from cabin to gracious-ness, the gardens and arbors and enormous fields that were theirs, the lake like a sea before them and wild-woods elsewhere around it; for friends with whom roots had intertwined over the years until they were more than friends and a daughter of theirs became the first love of a boy called Joshua Coffin—

"You're right," Eva said. "It wouldn't work. I, I, I'll be okay . . . later on. . . . But hold me for a while, Dan, darling. Stay near me."

He let her go and stood up. "I can't, Eva. Not yet."

She stared as if in horror.

"The whole community depends on, well, on me," he said wretchedly. "The negotiations. We've discussed them often enough, you and I."

"But—" She shifted the gurgling baby, in order to hold out one arm in beseeching. "Can't that wait for a while? It's waited plenty long already."

"That's part of the point. Everything I've been working for is coming to a head. I dare not hesitate. The time's as good as it'll ever be. I feel that. I can't let. .. my man . . . cool off; he'll back away from the commitment he's close to making. I've gotten to know him, believe me. In politics, you either grab the chance when it comes, or—"

"Politics!"

He consoled her for the short span he was able. At least, she accepted his farewell kiss and his promise to come back soon, bearing his triumph and their people's for a gift. He did not tell her that the triumph was not guaranteed. Doubtless she understood that. Her brain and will had been half of his throughout the years. In this hour she was worn down, she needed him, and he had never done anything harder than to leave her alone, crying, while he went to do his damned duty.

Or try to. Nothing is certain, on a world never meant for man.

Consider that world, its manifold strangenesses, and the fact that no help could possibly come from an Earth which a handful of freedom-lovers had left behind them. Consider, especially, a gravity one-fourth again as great as that under which our species, and its ancestors back to the first half-alive mote, evolved.

Hardy folk adapted to the weight. Children who grew up under it became still better fitted. But the bearing of those children had not been easy. It would never be easy for most women, until natural selection had created an entire new race.

Worse, that gravity held down immensely more atmosphere than did Earth's. Because this was more compressed, men could breathe comfortably near the tops of the loftiest mountains. As they descended, however, the gas concentration rose sharply, until it became too much for most of them. Carbon dioxide acidosis, nitrogen narcosis, the slower but equally deadly effects of excess oxygen: these made the average adult sick, and killed him if he was exposed overly long. Babies died sooner.

Now the human species is infinitely varied. One man's meat can quite literally be another man's poison. Such variability requires a gene pool big enough to contain it. The original colonists of Rustum were too few—had too few different chromosomes between them—to assure long-range survival in an alien environment. But they could take with them the sperms and ova of donors, preserved in the same fashion as were those of animals. These could be united and brought to full fetal development in exogenetic "tanks," on whatever schedule circumstances might allow. Thus man on Rustum had a million future parents.

And: as far as practicable, the donors back on Earth had been chosen with a view to air-pressure tolerance.

Some of the original settlers could stand the conditions at intermediate altitudes; some could actually thrive. But exogenes like Daniel Coffin and Eva Spain could live well throughout the entire range, from ocean to alp. To them and their descendants, and whoever else happened to be born equally lucky, the whole planet stood open.

The human species is infinitely varied. A type on the far end of a distribution curve will not always breed true. There will be throwbacks to the median —perfectly normal, healthy children, perfectly well suited to live on Earth. Certain among them will be so vulnerable to unearthliness that they die already in the womb.

Because of that possibility, every woman who could manage it spent the latter halves of her pregnancies on High America. In earlier years, Coffin had often been able to visit Eva there. During this final wait she had seen little of him, in spite of all the time he spent on the plateau.

Thomas de Smet was a fairly young man; the accidental death of his father had early put him in charge of the Smithy. He ran it well, producing most of the heavy machinery on Rustum, and planned to diversify. Thus far, businesses were small, family affairs. They were, that is, with respect to number of employees. Since machines had started to beget machines, the volume of production—given the resources of an entire unrav-aged world—was becoming impressive. Manpower was the worst bottleneck, and the settlers were doing their lusty best to deal with that.

Coffin had known de Smet since their youth, albeit slightly. On Rustum, everybody of the least importance knew everybody else of the same. When the first glimmerings of his scheme came to him, Coffin decided that this was the man to zero in on. He had spent as much of the past year as he could, cultivating his friendship.

The worst of it is, Coffin thought, / like the fellow. I like him a lot, and feel like a hound for what I hope to do.

"Hi, Tom," he said. "Sorry I'm late."

"Who cares?" de Smet replied. "This is my day off."

"Not quite."

"Dan, you don't mean to propagandize me again, do you? I thought we were going fishing."

"First I want to show you something. It'll interest you."

De Smet, a lanky towhead, studied Coffin for a second. Nothing in the lowlander's squint-eyed smile, relaxed stance, and easy drawl suggested a serious intent. However, that was Coffin's way at the poker table. "As you wish. Shall we flit?"

They entered the aircar. Since Coffin would be guide on the first stage of the outing, de Smet waved him to the pilot's seat. The vehicle quivered and murmured up from the lot behind the Smithy. Anchor became a collection of dollhouses, where the Swift and Smoky rivers ran together to form the Emperor and all three gleamed like drawn swords. The countryside spread brown in plowland and stubblefields, amber in late-ripening crops, fading green in Terrestrial grasses and clovers, blue-green in their native equivalents, mul-tihued in timberlots and woods, one vast subtle chessboard. Dirt roads meandered between widely spaced farmsteads. Far to the north, where the tableland dropped off, a white sea of cloud deck shone above the low country. Eastward reared the Hercules; southward, the yet mightier Centaur Mountains came into sight above the horizon; westward, cultivation presently gave way to wilderness.

Coffin aimed in that last direction, set the autopilot, leaned back, drew forth a pipe and tobacco pouch. He hadn't commanded a high speed of the machine. Equinox was barely past; daylight prevailed for better than thirty hours.

"How's Eva?" de Smet asked.

"Herself healthy." Coffin was silent for a heartbeat. "As we feared, we can't take the kid home."

De Smet winced. "That's hard." His fingers stole forth to touch his companion's arm. "I'm awfully damn sorry."

Coffin grew busy charging his pipe. "We've seen it happen to neighbors of ours. Eva feels bad, but she's tough. We'll get us another exogene baby who can live with us." They had long since added to their brood the one that law required every family to adopt. "I reminded her of how she, and I for that matter, how we're as fond of Betty as of those we made ourselves. Which is true."

"Naturally. Uh, have you made any arrangements for . . . yours?"

"Not yet. We couldn't, before we got the verdict." Coffin hesitated. "Don't be afraid to say no, I realize this is none of my business and we do have ample opportunities. But what might you and Jane think about taking our Charlie in?"

"Huh? Why, mmm—"

"You haven't taken your exogene yet. Well, we'll be adopting a second. The rules allow a family to do that on another's behalf, you know. Eva and I would be mighty glad to have you raise Charlie. Then you'd be free to order an exogene later on, or not, whichever you chose."

"This is rather sudden, Dan." De Smet sat awhile in thought. "I'll have to discuss it with Jane, of course. Frankly, though, to me it looks like a very attractive proposition. Instead of getting some doubtless nice kid, but one whose parentage is a total blank, we'd get one that we're certain comes of high-grade stock." After a moment: "And, hmm, it'd create a tie between two influential houses, in highlands and lowlands."

Coffin chuckled. "In effect," he said, "we'd swap babies. You'd have to adopt a tank-orphan—except that now Eva must take a second. So you gain freedom of choice, we gain a proper home for Charlie, both families gain, a you say, a kind of alliance . . . and, well, the babies gain, too. Mind you, this is my own notion. I'll have to talk it over with Eva also. I'm sure she'll agree if Jane does."

He kindled his pipe. De Smet, though a nonsmoker, didn't object. Among numerous achievements on his plantation, Coffin had, with the help of a consulting agronomist, developed tobacco that could grow in Rus-tumite soil without becoming utterly vile.

He puffed for a bit before he added, "It's what you've kept insisting, Tom, as we argued. A fair exchange is no robbery."

De Smet hadfirst quoted that proverb of economists to Coffin on the first occasion that the two men seriously discussed business. This was several lunations after they began to be well acquainted. They amused themselves by calculating precisely how many, since only a short while before, the lunation—the time it took for both moons to return to the same positions in the sky—had been defined officially, if not quite truthfully, as five Rustumite days.

Coffin had returned from one of his frequent expeditions into the highland wilds, returned to Anchor and Eva. The de Smets invited him to dinner. Later the men sat far into the night, talking.

That meant less on Rustum than it did on Earth. Here, folk were regularly active through part of each long darkness. Nevertheless, most of the town was abed when Coffin asked: "Why won't you? I tell you, and I'd expect you and your experts to check me out beforehand, I tell you, it'll pay. The Smithy will turn a profit."

school. I'm simply recapitulating. I want to spell out that I have better reasons than greed for saying no to you."

"Well, but look, Tom, I'm better off than most of my friends down there, and I often feel the pinch."

"What you mean is, you'd like to do certain things, and can't do them without High American help. You might wish for an up-to-date flour mill, for instance, instead of a waterwheel or windmill—or instead of selling your wheat here and buying back part of it, as bread, at a considerable markup. Yes, surely. The fact is, however, I regret it very much, but the fact is you will simply have to do without until there's enough machinery available to bring its rental or purchase price down. Meanwhile, you can be self-sufficient. And nobody is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to overproduce."

De Smet filled his lungs afresh before he continued: "You see, if we gave you a subsidy, the cost of that would have to be met either through taxation or inflation. No matter which way, it'd amount to taking earnings from the highlander for the benefit of the lowlander, who gives nothing in return. Price controls would have the same effect. In fact, any kind of official intervention would distort the economy. Instead of meeting our difficulties head-on and solving them once and for all, we'd hide them behind a screen of paper, where they'd grow worse and breed new troubles to boot.

"Machinery and labor are costly because there's a demand for them—they're wanted, in both senses of the word—and at the same time, for the nonce, they remain scarce. In a free market, the price of a commodity is nothing more nor less than an index of how much people are prepared to exchange for it."

"You High Americans, though"—Coffin chopped the air with his hand—"you've got more than your share of machines. Even per capita you do. Which means, yours is the way the money flows, no matter what we lowlanders do. It isn't right!"

De Smet took a sip of whisky before he shook his head and sighed, "Dan, Dan, you're a frontiersman. You know better than I, from experience, no two people ever have identical luck.

"It isn't as if your folk were in dire want. If they were, I'd be the first to bring them relief. The free market doesn't forbid helping your fellow man. It only makes such acts voluntary—and so in the long run, I believe, encourages altruism, though I admit that's just my opinion.

"Your folk aren't suffering, except in their own minds. The poorest of them eats well, dresses decently, has adequate shelter. You, yourself, to judge from the pictures you've shown me, you live in a bigger and better house than mine, live like a medieval squire. All you lowlanders enjoy many things we don't, such as unlimited room to move around. And . .. whoever can't stand it is welcome here. We have this chronic labor shortage; he can earn excellent wages."

"We want to be our own men," Coffin growled, albeit not hostilely.

"I admire you for that," de Smet said in a mild tone. "Still, recall your origins. Individuals who could live in the low country went there first to study it, paid by High America because the knowledge they could get was essential. They fell in love with the land and settled. And this was right. Mankind ought to take over the whole planet.

"That'll be slow, however. Meanwhile, most of us are confined to the uplands. We have the same right as you to improve our standards of living, don't we? Since you lowlanders can come join us but would rather not, why should we sacrifice to support you in your own free choice—a much freer choice than we have?

"That's where the social utility of the supply-demand law shows itself, Dan. High America is also still young, has plenty left to do. Plenty that must be done, because we'll be crowded long before the typical lowlander can see his neighbor's chimney smoke. The quicker return—the effectively higher profit—to be made here, simply reflects that urgency, as well as the fact that here, today, are far more persons needing to be served.

"Please don't take this wrong; but honestly, it looks to me as if your community is the one asking for more than is fair, not ours."

"I told you, we don't want a handout," Coffin answered with somewhat strained patience. "I can prove to you that the return on any investment you make among us will be good. Okay, granted, maybe not as good as equal investment made on High America. Still, you'll gain, and gain well."

"We already have considerable investments in the lowlands," de Smet pointed out.

Coffin nodded violently. "Yes! Mines, power stations, transport lines that you own, you High Americans. You employ lowlanders to work in them, but they're your property, and the profits go to you."

He leaned over. His pipestem jabbed, stopping barely short of the other man's chest. "Now let me explain some home truths," he said. "Believe it or not, I understand your economics. I know that I'm asking, on behalf of my community, I'm asking you to use part of the stuff and staff you command, part of it to come build us—oh, that flour mill, or a factory producing machine tools, or whatever—come build that for us, instead of building something like it for High America.

"Well, I tell you, my friend, economics is not all there is to life. Rightly or wrongly, the lowlanders are starting to feel slighted. After a while they'll come to feel neglected, and then go on to feeling exploited. I'm not saying that makes sense, but I am saying it's true."

"I know," de Smet replied as if half-apologetic. "I've been down there myself, inside an air helmet, remember. You're not the first lowlander I've talked to at length. Yes, you're already beginning to think of yourselves as a separate breed, rough, tough, bluff frontiersmen opposed to us dandified, calculating upland-ers. That notion hasn't developed far yet—"

"It will. Unless you come help us. If you do, maybe this will stay a unified planet. Or don't you care about your grandchildren?" Coffin waited before he added, gravely, "This is not a threat. But do bear in mind, Tom, several generations from tonight the highlanders will be an enclave. The population will nearly all be down yonder. And so will the power. Man, win their good will before it's too late."

"I've thought about that. I genuinely have. I'm aware that this isn't a problem with any neat either-or solution. If some arrangement could be made, an economically sensible arrangement, so it'd endure. . . . But why should the lowlands be industrialized? In time, and not such a terribly long time, the prices of food and timber will soar, as High America fills up. Wouldn't it be wiser to wait for that day? Meanwhile you'd keep your attractive surroundings."

"They're not that attractive, when we have to overwork our kids for lack of equipment we know could be built. Anyway, nobody wants to found an industrial slum. Of course not. We just want a few specific items. We've ample space to locate them properly, ample resources to treat the wastes so they don't poison the land."

"We haven't. At least, we don't have that kind of chance much longer, at the rate we're going." De Smet locked eyes with his guest and said in a voice tautened by intensity: "That's my main reason for wanting to get rich fast. I mean to buy up as much virgin highland as possible and make a preserve of it."

Coffin smiled in fellow feeling. De Smet's outdoors-manship was what had originally brought them together. It is hard not to like a man with whom you have been hiking, riding, boating, camping for days on end.

"Maybe we can work something out," de Smet finished. "However, it has got to involve a quid pro quo, or it's no good. As the saying goes, a fair exchange is no robbery."

Lake Royal, where they planned to fish, gleamed remotely on the right. Still the car whined ahead. A ways further came a break in the forest, an ugly scar where the ground had been ripped open across several kilometers. No life save a few weeds had returned to heal it.

Coffin gestured with his pipestem. "How old is that thing, anyway?"

De Smet peered out the canopy. "Oh, the strip mine?" He grimaced. "Seventy , eighty years, I guess. From the early days."

"Industrialization," Coffin grunted.

De Smet stared at him. "What're you talking about? Necessity. They had to have fuel. Their nuclear generator was broken down, couldn't be fixed soon, and winter was coming on. Here was a surface seam of coal which they could easily quarry and airlift out."

"Nevertheless, industry, huh? Earlier this morning, I caught a knock-you-over stink from the refinery."

"That'll have to be corrected. I'm leaning on the owners. So are others. Mainly, Dan, you know as well as I do, we've had to take temporary measures, but we're almost back to a clean hydrogen-fueled technology."

"Then why do you worry about industrialization? Why do you want to set aside parts of High America?"

De Smet seemed bewildered. "Isn't it obvious? Because ... I, highlanders who feel like me, we can never really belong in your unspoiled lowland nature. Shouldn't we too have a few places to be, well, alone with our souls?" He uttered a nervous laugh. "Sorry. Didn't mean to get sententious."

"No matter." Coffin blew a smoke ring. "As population grows, won't there be more and more pressure to turn this whole plateau into a big loose city? Do you really think your wilderness areas won't be bought out, or simply seized? Unless ample goods are coming from the lowlands. Then High Americans will be able to afford letting plenty of land lie fallow. . . . Well, that can't happen without trade, which can't happen unless the lowlanders have something—not only raw materials but finished products—to trade with.

"Don't you think, even today, even at the cost of some profit, it makes better sense to spread the industry more thin?"

De Smet leaned back and regarded Coffin for a while before he said, "You promised me, no further arguments on our holiday."

"Nor've I broken my promise, Tom. I just reminded you about what I'd said before, to help you appreciate the interesting thing I also promised to show you."

The autopilot beeped. Coffin switched it off, took the controls, checked landmarks, and slanted the car downward. Below was a rough and lovely upthrust of hills. A lake gleamed among them like a star, and overhead circled uncountably many waterfowl. Sunlight made rainbow iridescences on their wings.

"You recall, several close friends and I have been around here quite a bit," Coffin said. "We gave out that we were investigating botanical matters, to try to get a line on a problem we're having in our home ecology. It wasn't altogether false—we did even get the information we wanted—and nobody paid much attention anyhow."

De Smet waited, braced.

"In addition," Coffin said, "we prospected."

Air whistled around the hull. Ground leaped dizzy-ingly upward.

"You see," Coffin went on, "if we lowlanders don't have the wherewithal to develop our country as we'd like, and if nobody'll help us get it, why, we'd better go help ourselves. If we could stake out a claim in your country, then transportation to Anchor would be fast and cheap, giving us a competitive break. Or we might sell out to a highland combine, or maybe take a royalty. In any case, we'd have the money we need to bid for the equipment and personnel we need."

"Nobody's prospected these parts to speak of," de Smet said slowly.

"That's why we did. You think of this section as being far from home, but to us, it's no further than Anchor."

The car came to a halt, then descended straight into a meadow. Coffin opened the door on his side. A thousand songs and soughings flowed in, autumn crispness and the fragrance of that forest which stood everywhere around, ripe. Grasses rippled, trees tossed their myriad colors, not far off blinked the lake.

"Marvelous spot," Coffin said. "You're lucky to own it."

"Not lucky." De Smet smiled, however worried he perhaps was. "Smart. I decided this ought to be the heart of my preserve, and claimed the maximum which the Homestead Rule allows."

"You don't mind that my gang and I camped here for a bit?"

"Oh, no, certainly not. You'd leave the place clean."

"You see, in searching for clues to minerals on unclaimed land, we needed an idea of the whole region. So we checked here too. We made quite a discovery. Congratulations, Tom."

De Smet grew less eager than alarmed. "What'd you find?" he snapped.

"Gold. Lots and lots of gold."

"Hoy?"

"Mighty useful industrial metal, like for electrical conductors and chemically durable plating. Making it available ought to be a real social service." Coffin's thumb gestured aft. "You'll want to see for yourself, no doubt. I brought the equipment. I knew you know how to use it, otherwise I'd've invited along any technician you named. Go ahead. Inspect the quartz veins in the boulders. Put samples through the crusher and assayer. Pan that brook, sift the lakeshore sands. My friend, you'll find every indication that you're sitting on a mother lode."

De Smet shook his head like a man stunned. "Industry can't use a lot of gold. Not for decades to come. The currency—"

"Yeh. That should be exciting, what happens to this hard currency you're so proud of. Not to mention what happens to the wilderness, the majority of it that you don't own, when the rush starts. And it'll be tough to get labor for producing things we can merely eat and wear. You, though, Tom, you'll become the richest man on Rustum."

Coffin knocked the dottle from his pipe, stretched, and rose. "Go ahead, look around," he suggested. "I'll make camp. I've brought a collapsible canoe, and the fishing's even better here than at Lake Royal."

De Smet's look searched him. "Do you . . . plan ... to join the gold rush?"

Coffin shrugged. "Under the circumstances, we low-landers won't have much choice, will we?"

"I—See here, Dan—"

"Go on, Tom. Do your checking around, and your thinking. I'll have lunch ready when you come back. Afterward we can go out on the water, and maybe dicker while we fish."

He strode into the hospital room, grabbed Eva from her bed to him, and bestowed upon her a mighty kiss. "Dan!" she cried low. "I didn't expect—" "Nor I," he said, and laughed. "I never dared hope things'd go this fast or this well." The sun stood at noon. "But they did, and it's done, and from this minute forward, sweetheart, I am yours altogether and forever."

"What—what—Dan, let me go! I love you, too, but you're strangling me."

"Sorry." He released her, except to lower her most gently, bent over her, and kissed her again with unending tenderness. Afterward he sat down and took her hand.

"What's happened?" she demanded. "Speak up, Daniel Coffin, or before heaven, I'll personally wring the truth out of you." She was half weeping, half aglow.

He glanced at the door, to make doubly sure he had closed it, and dropped his voice. "We've got our contract, Eva. Tom de Smet called in his counselor as soon as we returned, a couple hours ago, and we wrote a contract for the Smithy to come do work at Moondance, and you know Tom never goes back on his word. That's one reason I was after him particularly."

"You finally persuaded him? Oh, wonderful!"

"I s'pose you could call it persuasion. I—Okay, I've told you before, strictly confidentially, how my gang and I weren't just doing research in the High American backwoods, we were trying for a mineral strike."

"Yes. I couldn't understand why the hurry." Her tone did not accuse. Nor did it forgive. It said that now she saw nothing which needed forgiving, and merely asked for reasons. "I kept telling you, the minerals would wait, and the ecological trouble wasn't that urgent."

"But getting the contract I was after was." He stared downward, and his free hand knotted into a fist. "I had to leave you mostly alone, and I knew it hurt you, and yet I didn't dare explain even to you."

She leaned over to kiss him afresh. When he could talk again, he said: "You see, machinery and engineers are scarce. The Smithy itself has none too big a supply. Any day, someone else might've instigated a project which'd tie everything up for years to come. And in fact, if word should leak out that we lowlanders might seriously bid, why, then chances were that somebody else would tie the Smithy up, and invent a project afterward. Not to suppress us or anything, but because it's true that profits are higher here than amongst us.

"It wouldn't've mattered if you, under anesthesia or whatever, if you let slip that I was quietly prospecting. I knew there'd be suspicion of that in Anchor; and what the hell, plenty of people go on such ventures, even if not quite that far afield. This other thing, though, this real aim of mine—"

"I see, I see. And you did succeed? You're a marvel."

"According to Tom de Smet, I'm a bastard." He grinned. "Then after we'd talked awhile, he said I was a damn fine bastard who he was proud to call a friend, and we shook on it and have a date later today to go out and get roaring drunk."

Puzzlement darkened her eyes. "What do you mean, Dan? First you talk about prospecting, but evidently you didn't find your mine. Then you talk about getting this contract that you were actually after all the while. Didn't you simply, finally, persuade Tom to give it to you?"

He shook his head. "No. I tried and tried, for lunations, and he wouldn't agree. I grew sure that he wanted to, down inside. But his silly social economic conscience insisted he stick by the dictates of economic theory. In the end, I told him I knew I'd gotten to be a bore on the subject, and I'd dog my hatch, and why not go fishing?"

"And—?" she said like a word of love.

"This is a secret you and I take to our graves with us. Promise? Fine, your nod is worth more than most people's oaths.

"I took him to a mother lode of gold I'd found on land of his. I explained that I hated, the same as him, how a gold rush would destroy the wilderness, let alone the currency, and draw effort away from things more useful. But I had a duty to my own community, I said, to my friends who'd asked me to speak for them. I offered my silence, and my fellow prospectors'—I'd picked them very carefully—I offered him that in return for his contract with us. We could write that in, as a provision not made public unless our blabbing gave him cause to cancel the deal. Take it or leave it, I said. A fair exchange is no robbery.

"He took it, and I really am convinced he was personally glad to have that excuse for helping us. Say, how about letting him and Jane foster Charlie? They're more than willing."

"Dan, Dan, Dan! Come here—"

He knelt by the bed and they held each other for a long while.

Eventually, calmed a little, he took his chair and she lowered herself back onto her pillows. Eyes remained with eyes.

One of hers closed in a wink. "You don't fool me, Dan Coffin," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"That act of yours. The simple, hearty rural squire. Nobody gets to lead as many people as you do without being bloody damn shrewd."

"Well. . . ." He looked a trifle smug.

"My love," she said, barely audible, "this may be the first time in history that anyone salted a mine which the victim already owned."

"I have my contract, which Tom de Smet will honor in word and spirit both. Further than that, deponent saith not."

Eva cocked her head. "Have you considered, Dan, that the possibility may have occurred to Tom, and he decided not to check the facts too closely?"

"Huh?" Seldom before had she seen or enjoyed seeing her husband rocked back hard.

But when at last he left her—for a while, only a while—he walked again like a young buccaneer. The wind outside had strengthened, a trumpet voice beneath heaven, and every autumn leaf was a banner flying in challenge.

The old Eskimos—extinct now in the manswarm that was Earth—would have recognized the Lupani, and understood them.

They had faced many of the same problems.

The Lupani could not just park themselves in one spot and live off the land. Farming was impossible. They had to shift with the seasons, utilizing the resources of each to the maximum.

Summers were hard and lonely, but productive. During the summer months, the askaggen moved in small groups onto the suddenly flowering treeless plains that formed the southern edge of the Lupani range. The askaggen were not herd animals. Large, hairy, and formidably tusked, they were more like a stunted mammoth than anything else. Scattered in little knots of four or five animals, they feasted on the grasses and shrubs of the summer plains. In order to hunt them —and even to find them—the Lupani had to split up into family groups and fan out over a huge territory. It took a lot of walking, and friends that parted when summer began would not see each other again for many long months.

In the fall, when the chill winds began to blow, the askaggen drifted southward out of the land of the Lupani. The scattered Lupani began their trek north toward their winter villages, carrying their collected tusk-ivory with them. They lived on berries and marsh birds and the small rodents that burrowed in the damp soil.

Winter was the best time, despite the bitter cold. The Lupani were together and snug in their rock villages with the interior walls lined with hides. There were sea mammals beneath the ice, sleek propoise-like karibu that maintained breathing holes in the crust ice. The harpoons of the Lupani hunters sought them out with ease; it took skill and patience but it was not really hard work. Winter was a time of enforced leisure, a time for sewing skins and repairing weapons and carving dreams and memories out of ivory. It was also a time of awesome frozen beauty, and the Lupani were by no means unaware of the magic of their winter world.

The onslaught of spring was no cause for rejoicing; the Lupani sang no songs to spring. It was a time for thaws and open rushing water, a time for drenching rains and snarling knife-edged winds. The karibu swam far to the south to bear their young in warmer water that splashed against distant islands. For the Lupani, it was a time for farewells and a time of gnawing hunger. The people of the villages delayed as long as they could, and then broke up into tiny groups that moved toward the barren wet plains, waiting for the askaggen to come again. Meanwhile, they scavenged what they could.

That was the annual cycle of the Lupani.

That was the way it had always worked. That was the way it was supposed to work.

The problem was simple. It wasn't working now.

The cycle was broken.

The Caravans lightship, operating now in normal space, flashed toward Arctica. The huge white sun that was Sirius bathed the ship in silver. The symbol of the laden camel on the bow seemed somehow right at home. Had there been anyone to see, it would not have been difficult to imagine another burning sun, a sea of shifting sand, the patient tinkling of the harness bells. . . .

And men. Men of a special breed. Men with an ancient lineage. Men who knew about far journeys and strange ports of call. Men who for most of their adult lives sought out products that were worth transporting across immense distances. Men who lived with the stars—

"It just can't be that way," Tucker Olton said. "There has to be some other explanation."

Alex Porvenir filled one of his habitually foul pipes and fired it up. "Great," he said. "I'm all ears. Clue me in on that other explanation."

"I wish I could. Just once, I'd like to reverse our roles. It would do my ego a lot of good—what's left of it."

Alex Porvenir smiled. "Your time will come. Besides, we worked this one out together, remember? It wasn't just my idea. I don't understand it either. But there's no other way the thing will work."

"It won't work this way either. You know it won't. I don't give a damn what the computer says. Yveseen the Lupani. I know what they can do and what they can't do. The theory may sound good, but it has the slight defect of being impossible."

Alex nodded and stretched out his long legs. His disconcertingly direct brown eyes narrowed slightly. He passed a lean hard hand through his graying hair. He liked Tucker Olton. The two men had been through a lot together, intellectually and otherwise. Alex was proud of the younger man. He had learned his lessons well but he had a mind of his own. He had the too-rare gift of being able to see what he looked at. He saw what was there, not what was supposed to be there.

"You will grant two facts," Alex said, puffing on his pipe. "One, the Lupani have virtually stopped producing their carved ivory artifacts. Two, they told the probe team that they were out of ivory. They said they no longer hunted the askaggen. No askaggen, no ivory. No ivory and thus no more of those wonderful carvings. And no product for Caravans; we can't market harpoons and skin hats. Correct?"

"Okay except for one small item. They have to hunt the askageen. They can't survive any other way. The karibu aren't available in the summer, and even if they were the Lupani couldn't eat them. The strongest tabu in their culture involves consuming out-of-season food. You remember Bob Edgerton's classic article?"

"The Ecological Base of Lupani Food Prohibitions} I think I vaguely recall it. In fact, I talked it over with Bob before he wrote it, and I showed it to you when it first came out."

Tucker Olton flushed. "Well, anyway. They can't eat askaggen meat except in the summer. They can't eat the flesh of the karibu except in the winter. Under no circumstances can they eat both at the same time. Even allowing for overlapping distributions, it works out very neatly. They don't harvest enough karibu to affect the breeding population and the same goes for the askaggen. They are assured a perpetual food supply—"

"I grasp the argument."

"Yeah, but consider the implications. They have to hunt the askaggen in the summer. Otherwise, they'd starve. If they go after the askaggen, they get the ivory from the tusks. The karibu have no tusks; they're not built like a walrus. Okay, no askaggen and no ivory. What in the hell are they doing?"

Alex knocked out his pipe. "Obviously, our friends are staying put in their winter villages. Instead of dispersing in the spring and heading for the askaggen range, they are staying together where they are."

"My point is that they can't do that. People have to eat. That's as solid a law as we can have in what we laughingly refer to as the behavioral sciences."

Alex shrugged. "When you can't get an answer or the answer is impossible the chances are that you're asking the wrong question. The Lupani are not hunting the askaggen. They are parked on their posteriors in their winter villages. Presumably, they aren't eating each other. Therefore, they have found a food resource that we don't understand. The question is simple. What is this food and where is it coming from?"

"Swell. Does that get us closer to an answer?"

"Maybe. If we know the question we're halfway to a solution. There's something to be said for the old Boasian approach. We don't need a speculative theory. We need some facts."

"I have a hunch that those facts are going to be pretty damned peculiar."

"Facts are generally more peculiar than imaginative guesses. I'm inclined to agree with you. I don't pretend to know the answer to this one. I am sure that there's only one place to find the answer."

Tucker Olton shivered. "It's not my idea of an ideal vacation spot. I don't have enough fat on my bones. I also regret to inform you that I'm not waterproof."

"It won't be fun," Alex Porvenir conceded. "Just the same, it's the only way. No sacrifice is too great for dear old Caravans. If the old man can take it, you'll survive. No matter how you slice it, we're stuck. The two of us have to go down there and find out what is going on."

Tucker Olton shivered again. He did not look happy.

The spherical landing shuttle drifted silently down through a cold gray sky. Like a fragile bubble it came to rest, hardly breaking the crust of the old, melting snow. The wind moaned eerily outside, a wind untamed and unbroken by obstructions of any sort. It was not a playful wind. It had teeth in it and it meant business.

"Mush," Tucker Olton muttered. "Nanook rides again."

"Nanook walks " Alex Porvenir corrected him. "But not very far, fortunately."

The two men left the shuttle, moving from an artificial world in which everything was controlled. The transition was a shock.

The howling wind almost knocked Alex down. The cold got to him at once despite the special clothing that he wore. His face burned and then became numb.

It was impossible to talk. The two men just had to bend their bodies against the wind and force themselves through the snow. Their boots sank in almost to their knees.

Alex could see; there was no danger of losing his way. He had put the shuttle down within sight of the stone walls of the village, walls that glinted icily in the diffused white light of the cloud-hidden sun. He could see the forbidding sea beyond the village, with turbulent, open black water frothing between great piles of shifting pack ice.

They kept going, stumbling through the snow. It took them a good thirty minutes to reach the Lupani village.

Alex led the way to the house of Korigh,. who was the nearest thing the Lupani had to a leader. There was no way to knock against the hides that sealed the tunnel entrance. Alex dropped down on his hands and knees, pulled aside the flap, and crawled inside. The passageway was cool, dark, and damp. But there was no wind and the silence was startling.

"Horani!" he shouted. His voice didn't perform up to his expectations. He swallowed and tried again. "Horani!"

There was a stirring against the inner seal. He thought he heard an answering call.

Alex shoved the second flap open and crawled in. He stood up, sensing Tucker behind him. The heat hit him like a hot fist. The chamber smelled heavily of burning fish-oil and half-cured hides and sweating bodies. It took him a long minute before his eyes adjusted to the dim light from the oil lamps hanging on thongs from the roof. He felt singularly vulnerable although he knew he had nothing to fear from Korigh under normal circumstances. Korigh had always welcomed the traders and the good things the traders had brought to the Lupani.

Alex recognized the fat old man despite the fact that it had been years since he had last seen him. Korigh was not a man you forget easily. Strong he was, with arms like a wrestler. His long black hair shone with fresh grease. His round face was lined and weathered, but his eyes were as sharp as those of any man that Alex had ever known.

Alex remembered one of Korigh's wives too. She was no beauty and never had been, but there had been a time when she had extended the hospitality of the house to Alex and he had been only too happy to accept.

Not a word was spoken.

That was not the way.

Alex shucked off his clothes, stripping down to the loin cloth that was proper indoors attire. He stepped forward and embraced Korigh.

The old man smelled as bad as ever.

Then the conversation exploded.

Alex could not keep up with all of it. As a younger man, he had dealt directly with many different peoples on a variety of worlds; even then, using the best linguistic boosters that were available, he could not possibly be fluent in all of the varied languages he had to speak and understand. Now, when he was essentially a policy planner and occasional troubleshooter, his linguistic skills were rusty. It was only the necessity of visiting the Lupani in the spring that had saved him. There had been time, utilized in between other jobs, to brush up on the language. He was far from perfect, but he was not totally out of it either.

Tucker, he noticed, was in better shape. Languages got tougher with age.

There were a few peoples in the galaxy with whom you could come straight to the point. The Lupani, emphatically, were not among them.

They drank a kind of sweet berry wine that did nothing to improve Alex's powers of communication. He was not a wine man; wine made him sleepy and gave him a colossal headache. They ate slabs of rubbery karibu flesh. The karibu were still acceptable in Lupani terms, since it was too early to hunt the askaggen and spring was only beginning, but the karibu were not wholly acceptable to Alex. The meat was nearly raw and full of fat.

The heat inside the hide-lined house was terrific. It was hard to believe that a cold wind whined over fields of snow just beyond the walls.

And the talk went on and on. Korigh was in no hurry.

They spoke of when the traders had first come to the Lupani. They joked of the ivory heirloom that Korigh had always refused to trade. The old man laughed and brought it out for Alex to examine. It was a fantastic thing, alive, half dream and half memory. It was less than two feet long, yellowed with age, carved with an extraordinary skill. When you held it in your hands, you saw the ancient gods of sea and snow, you lived the old hunts and the old loves, you felt the pride of a people who had met a tough world head-on and licked the worst it had to offer—

As art, it was a masterpiece.

As a product for Caravans, it was ideal. Small, portable, eminently marketable.

But it was not for sale. And the other carvings, living legends created from the ivory of the askaggen tusks, were not being produced. . . .

They talked of blizzards and blinding white sunlight and drenching rains that scoured the land. They talked of feasts and starvation. They talked of stalking the karibu on shoals of ice and harpooning them through their breathing holes. They talked of how the sinew line whistled into the deep black water when the harpoon foreshaft detached and the karibu dived, and how the warm red blood stained the snow.

They talked of everything except the askaggen hunts.

Try as he would, Alex could not make a dent in that one. He knew that Korigh was fencing with him, and Korigh was a master. He would speak of the askaggen and the carvings when he was ready.

That might be a long, long time.

Alex was not sure whether he finally passed out from the heat and the wine or just went to sleep.

He was sure that he had not made the slightest progress.

The next day, Alex walked through the village. It was raining hard and it was cold. The wind blew in gusts that almost knocked him off his feet. He didn't care. After the sweltering oily heat of a Lupani house, the chilly rain was downright refreshing.

Why the Lupani did not all die of pneumonia he did not know. Nor did he care at the moment. He simply needed to clear his head and wash the stink off his clothing.

The village looked the same. He could not detect any basic change in it at all.

The same bleak, square rock houses with their extended tunnel entry-corridors. The same elevated stone platforms supporting glistening, inverted skin-lined canoes. The same stacked toboggans, flat-bottomed and wet, with their arched pushing-handles. The same bundled-up children, oblivious to the cold and the rain, hurling their small harpoons at improvised targets.

Everything was the same and yet there was a subtle sense of strangeness. The timing was wrong.

There was a notable lack of industry in the village, and the Lupani were a hard-working people. It was the beginning of spring and that meant that the Lupani were facing the worst time of the year. It was normal for them to delay leaving their winter villages as long as they could, but they had to prepare for dispersal and the endurance of the lean season. There were traps to be repaired, packs to be sewn, compound bows to be rewound, arrows to be tested. They could not hunt the askaggen with harpoons; despite this, not a single child was practicing with the bow and arrow. . . .

It was as though the Lupani were expecting easy times, a season of plenty. Certainly, there was no sign of preparations to start the long trek toward the range of the askaggen.

Alex shook his head. He did not understand what was going on.

He returned to the house of Korigh, removing his dripping clothes and immersing himself in the oily heat.

"Well?" said Tucker Olton, wiping a film of sweat from his forehead. "Where are we now?"

"In a word," Alex replied, "nowhere."

Old Korigh rubbed his fat hands together and smiled an unreadable smile.

Alex gave it a week and reached an unavoidable conclusion. He was no closer to a solution than when he had arrived. The Lupani were friendly enough and they were as talkative as ever. But they would not discuss the askaggen even when prodded by direct questions. And they did nothing at all to get themselves ready to leave the village.

The rains poured down and there were cold rivers winding through the snow. The winds moaned against the rock walls and icy breakers from the sea pounded the slippery shores.

The Lupani sat cozily in their houses and did nothing.

They simply waited.

Alex did not know what they were waiting/or and he could not find out. He was more than a little frustrated and he was not enchanted with the stench of the hot Lupani houses. He was sick of berry wine and he had a perpetual headache. The blubbery karibu meat gave out, and that was a minor blessing. The spring season was far enough along now so that the karibu were moving south to bear their young, and in any event it was too late to eat karibu. The Lupani had not changed enough to violate their most ancient food prohibition. They were living on small dried fish and the supply was already getting low.

They could not exist on fish for long. There were not enough of them in the cold sea and they were making no attempt to replenish their stock.

They just waited.

That was fine for the Lupani. They knew what they were doing, and a less suicidally inclined people could hardly be imagined.

It was not fine for Alex.

Caravans was in business to make a profit. It was a difficult enterprise, hemmed in as they were by a multitude of legal restrictions. They could not simply provide the Lupani with a supply of ivory; that would be a clear case of cultural manipulation that could lead to drastic consequences both for the Lupani and for Caravans. The U.N. ET Council would have a collective hemorrhage.

In interstellar trade, time was a factor that had to be taken into account. As long as the lightship orbited Arctica without positive results, it was wasting time. There were other planets in the Sirius system, and other products. Caravans could not afford to go into suspended animation while Alex Porvenir tried to figure out what in hell the Lupani were up to.

And Alex was not inclined to let the lightship go without him. It was always wise to stay within hollering distance.

Therefore: leave.

Admit defeat for now.

Come back later. If the Lupani would not explain, a month's time would explain for them. They could not hide events.

Beyond that, Alex was human. He was a man; he had no ambition to be a disembodied intellect. He missed Helen. He wanted some gut-cleansing Scotch. He wanted to puff on a pipe that did not reek of oil.

"Come on, Tuck," he said. "I've had enough."

Tucker Olton grinned. "You mean the Old Man is going back empty-handed? No solution? No fancy scheme up his sleeve? I never thought I'd live to see the day."

"Do you have a solution?" "If I have, it's invisible."

"Then you've lived to see the day. We'll save our fancy schemes for another time."

"Mush!" yelled Tucker Olton. He was not enchanted with the Lupani.

The two men said their farewells.

They splashed through a driving rain to the shuttle.

The spheroid lifted into the stormy sky, having accomplished exactly nothing.

Exactly one month later, the lightship returned.

The landing shuttle touched down.

A grim-faced Alex Porvenir stepped out, followed by a dubious Tucker Olton.

It was almost summer now. The winds of Arctica had softened. There was still snow on the ground, but it was not piled high into drifts. There was cold black water everywhere.

Miraculously, the rains had stopped.

The white fire of Sirius was far from balmy, but there was a trace of warmth in the air.

The two men sloshed through the muddy snow toward the Lupani village. It was easier going than it had been before, although not Alex's idea of a pleasant stroll.

He was angry at his own previous failure. He blamed himself. He had no hostility toward the Lupani. After all, they owed him nothing. On their own merits, they were a remarkable people. They had a right to be secretive if that was their desire.

Within minutes, it was obvious that the Lupani were still in their winter village. It was impossible, but there they were.

Before he ever actually got into the village, Alex Porvenir knew where the answer to the riddle was. He did not know what the answer was, but he knew where it was.

He stopped short. A chill ran through him that owed nothing to the weather of Arctica. "Look at that," he whispered.

Tucker Olton had turned very pale. "I don't believe it. Alex, you know what this means. Here, among the Lupani, of all the people on all the worlds—"

Alex shrugged. He noticed that he was trembling. His mind fastened on little things: the brownish color of the snow, the wet cold against his boots, the pale blue of the cloudless sky. "Why not here?" he asked. He did not expect an answer. "Why not here?"

The two men knew what they were seeing. They knew it with an instant certainty. It was something they had half-anticipated for much of their adult lives, and yet the reality staggered them.

"Little man, what now?" Tucker Olton released a breath he had not been conscious of holding. "We'd better turn back. This is too big for us, Alex."

Alex Porvenir hesitated, then made up his mind. "It may be too big for us, but who else is there? I vote we go ahead."

Tucker Olton searched for a way out and found none. "I guess we're all there is," he admitted.

The two men moved forward, their boots squishing in the muck. Their eyes never left the thing that waited for them just outside the Lupani village.

In itself, the thing was not spectacular. The facts about it could be easily discerned. It was a structure of some sort. It was about sixty feet across. It was hemispherical in shape. It was gray in color and appeared to be metallic.

It most certainly had not been built by the Lupani, or by any other people on the world of Arctica.

It had also not been built by anyone from Earth.

The structure was plainly and clearly alien. It had no business being there, but there it emphatically was.

Alex Porvenir was perfectly capable of putting two and two together. It was one of his talents. He knew, at least roughly, what was inside that building.

So did Tucker Olton.

"Let's check it out first," Alex said. "We want to be sure of our facts."

They walked right up to the structure. Nobody tried to stop them. It was no great trick to find the entrance. The pathway was marked by the tracks of many boots. There was a door, almost square, with a handle. There was a simple latch. The door was not locked.

"Naturally," Alex muttered.

He opened the door and stepped inside. There was interior illumination, apparently coming from the dome itself. The chamber was just a big room, like a vault. It was unheated.

Stacked in orderly rows were little gleaming boxes, about a foot square. There were thousands of them, piled all the way up to the curved roof. They filled the structure.

Alex pulled one of the boxes down. It was not particularly heavy. The glittering covering was simply a wrapping foil. He peeled it off.

There were four brownish cubes inside the box. The stuff was granular and slightly greasy to the touch. It had a faintly aromatic smell.

Alex licked one of the cubes, gingerly. It had a meaty flavor.

"It's food concentrate of some sort," he said.

"That was a foregone conclusion. What the devil do we do now?"

Alex considered. "I think we want an analysis of this stuff," he said. His voice seemed very small in the packed vault. "Take a box and haul it back to the ship. Find out exactly what it is. You'll have to make a full report, of course. It's going to cause a bit of a stir."

"That's the understatement of the day."

"It doesn't matter how excited they get. Keep them out of here until I decide what to do. You'll have to go straight to Carlos and Captain Dryden. Just keep reminding them that I am the senior cultural officer and this is my responsibility until and unless the U.N. directs otherwise. The ship is in no danger as far as I can see; Dryden will have to make that judgment. You tell Carlos I will look after the interests of Caravans. That should keep him happy. By the time the U.N. ET Council receives a report and«acts and gets a message back we'll be long gone from here. Understand?"

"Oh, sure. Nothing to it. I just go back and calmly inform them that man has made his first contact with an alien civilization operating in space. I tell them that they're messing around with the Lupani. And I tell our boys just to sit tight."

"Exactly."

"And meanwhile, what do / do?"

"You get an exact analysis of that junk. You make damned sure the communications men are on the alert for my instructions and a landing crew is at the ready. Then bring the shuttle back. Park it where I can see it from the village. I'll tell you what to do then."

Tucker Olton looked at him with something like awe. "Just what are you going to do?"

Alex Porvenir smiled. "I haven't the foggiest notion," he said.

The younger man started to object, gave it up as a bad job, and scooped up a shiny box.

He waved and headed back for the shuttle.

Alex Porvenir put his hands on his hips and stared intently at the food concentrates piled in the dome.

He was quite confident on one point.

For man, for Caravans, for the future—

Nothing would ever be the same again.

The oily heat in the house of Korigh was as bad as ever. The smells were a little different, though. The bubbling food that was stone-boiling in the hide kettle had an aromatic, pungent odor. The smell was stronger than it had been in the alien warehouse.

Alex wiped the sweat from his brow. "We have always traded fairly with our friends, the Lupani," he said. He knew he was repeating himself. He and Korigh had been getting nowhere fast for two days.

"That is true," the fat old man with the sharp eyes conceded.

"Why did you not tell me about the food?" "They said not to speak of it." "We are your friends."

"You trade fairly. They give something for nothing. We no longer must leave our companions and hunt the askaggen. There is much food. Enough to last until the karibu come again. We are happy."

"Who gives something for nothing?"

"They do. The strangers."

"What do they look like?"

"They come from the sky."

"Do they look like us?"

"They are not Lupani."

"We are not Lupani, either."

"You are more like Lupani than they are." "Do they have a name?"

"They are the Others. They are very powerful. They bring much food."

"How long did it take them to build the food-house?"

"Not long. The Others came. Then it was there."

"In the winter, where does the food-house go?"

"It is not there."

"Why don't they just leave it?"

"They are not like us. They are Others."

"And you will not hunt the askaggen again?"

"This food is good. It is easy. We do nothing for it. Why hunt the askaggen?"

"You have always hunted the askaggen."

The old man grinned and flexed his naked massive arms. "But you have not. It is very hard. It is very lonely. We will find other things to trade."

"What?"

Korigh shrugged. The folds of fat on his belly quivered. It was plain that he could not care less. There was more food than he could eat. It was free for the taking. That was a bargain that was hard to beat.

"It will destroy the Lupani," Alex said. "Once, you were strong. Now you will be weak."

"We still harpoon the karibu. We cannot eat them now. Life has been hard for my people. Now it is easier. If you are my friend, you will understand that."

"What if the food stops coming?"

"Then we will hunt the askaggen as before."

Heads we win, tails you lose.

Alex was getting a headache again.

"Korigh, there are some things you do not understand."

"Do you understand everything?"

Alex shook his head and regretted it. The pain sharpened. He did not understand everything. He did not like what he had to do.

Still, there were some things he understood very well.

And there were some things he could do.

"I will show you why the Lupani must hunt the askag-gen," he said. "I will show you because it is right."

"My eyes will be open," the old man assured him. He meant: It had better be good.

Alex Porvenir put on his clothes and left.

Back in the shuttle, Alex explained his plan to Tucker.

"You've got to be kidding." Tucker Olton looked more harassed than Alex had ever seen him. "You don't think it will work?"

"Oh, it'll work as far as the Lupani are concerned. I can see the logic of it. But if you think I'm going back up to the ship and set this one up you're crazy. You don't know what it's like up there. Dryden and Carlos are both mad enough to chew nails."

"I had the authority, as long as the ship was not in danger."

"I know that. They know that. But be reasonable, Alex. This thing is big."

Alex sighed. "Okay, Tuck. Take her up. I'll give them my instructions personally."

Tucker Olton moved to the controls. "This I have to see.

"You will," Alex Porvenir promised.

It took them two weeks to get things ready.

The machine itself, which Alex insisted on calling the Converter, was not too troublesome. It was even kind of fun for the shop crew—a dream assignment, except for the pressure involved. After all, it did not have to do much of anything. It just had to look right and perform a few simple functions.

The scout ship that went after the porpoise-like karibu had a tougher job. The sea was large and the karibu were not easy to locate. They were not simple to catch either, particularly the females who were close to bearing their young. Once caught, it was difficult to keep them alive.

Still, a Caravans ship was nothing if not adaptable. It had handled stickier problems than this in its time.

Alex Porvenir did not argue and he explained no more than he had to. That could wait.

If he had self-doubts, he did not express them.

He knew what he had to do.

He did it.

The Converter was ready.

It was assembled not far from the alien warehouse. It stood there in the muck with a solid go-to-hell assurance. It was basically square and it glittered impressively in the pale white sunlight. It had lots of buzzers, dials, lights, and bells. It had a contracting chute at the top. Near the bottom there was a high-visibility slot. It too was square.

The Lupani had gathered to watch—men, women, and children. Old Korigh had been true to his word. The old man stood in front of his people, strong arms folded across his massive chest, his sharp eyes keen and alert.

"Are you prepared?" Alex Porvenir asked.

"We are prepared," Korigh replied.

"Watch, then. See the source of your new food."

Alex waved his hand for a signal.

Three traders went to work. They had been carefully rehearsed, but it was still sloppy work. They heaved a tranquilized karibu out of the portable tank. They held it up high so the Lupani could see it.

The Lupani reacted with murmurs and gestures. They knew a karibu when they saw one.

The three men hauled the gleaming sea-mammal up the ladder to the top of the Converter. They held the karibu up high again, giving the Lupani a good look.

They dropped the karibu down the chute.

The Converter went into action. It chugged and whined and hissed. Steam shot out through vents. Needles moved on dials. Buzzers sounded and bells rang. Colored lights flashed.

After ninety seconds of feverish mechanical activity, the Converter gave a conclusive terminal cough. Glittering boxes about a foot square shot out through the bottom slot. There were ten of the boxes, identical to the ones in the alien warehouse. They lay there, in the slush, impassively.

Alex picked one up and handed it to Korigh. The old man peeled back the foil. He sniffed one of the greasy brown cubes. The aromatic smell could not be mistaken.

Korigh stepped forward and selected one of the boxes for himSelf. He repeated his investigation. Alex waved his hand.

The three men grabbed another karibu and dropped it down the chute.

The Converter did its stuff again.

Alex waved his hand for the third time.

When the Converter finished its dramatic chugging and buzzing, there was a goodly stack of boxes of food concentrate confronting the Lupani.

"This new food the strangers brought to you," Alex said loudly, "is not new food at all. It is old food. It is made from the karibu, as we have shown you. You have been eating the karibu in the spring and summer. As your friends, we felt that you should know this thing." There was a long, slow silence.

Then the Lupani began to back away, expressions of horror on their faces.

They had eaten a lot of that stuff. Karibu! They had violated the most ancient law of their people.

Many of the Lupani became violently ill. Old Korigh led the way into the warehouse. The people went to work angrily. They hauled the gleaming boxes of food concentrate out of the vault. They ran with them to the dark sea and heaved them into the water.

Alex gave the signal to dismantle the Converter.

Tucker Olton stared at the village and shook his head. "Proud of yourself?" he asked.

Alex Porvenir managed a tight smile. "A little," he admitted. "On balance, just a little."

The Caravans lightship was flashing through the gray wastes of not-space. Even in dimensional terms, it was already far from the Sirius system.

Alex Porvenir poured himself a glass of Scotch, tasted it, and carefully added two cubes of ice. There were some things, he felt, that could not be improved upon. He stoked up his pipe and lit it. The smoke was a shade on the bitter side. He had expected that. Alex never had much luck with his pipes.

"Want to talk about it?" asked Tucker Olton.

"You've read the report."

"Yeah, but what do you really think?"

"I told the truth."

"Nobody ever tells the full truth in an official report. You taught me that, Alex."

"Maybe." Alex fiddled with his pipe and fired it up again. It was not significantly improved. "Suppose we take the Lupani for openers."

"You put them in one hell of a spot."

"No. I didn't put them anywhere. In effect, I returned them to their traditional way of life. I let them alone."

"Come on."

Alex fixed himself another drink. It made the pipe taste better. "Look at it this way. You know the cycle of the Lupani. Basically, they stay put in their villages during the winter, harpooning the karibu. Then they break up into small groups and head for the askaggen range for the summer hunting. Suppose that we had broken that cycle by dumping in enough food to hold them in their villages. We could have supplied askaggen tusks, too, for that matter. Then what?"

"It would have been a clear case of cultural manipulation. The U.N. ET Council would have blown their collective stacks. The Caravans lawyers would have been demolished; there would have been no case to defend. But that's not the point—"

"It is the point. If we had done that, we would have been in hot water legally. Beyond that, it would have been morally wrong—I'm an old graybeard who still worries about morality, you know. Ultimately, it would have destroyed the Lupani by destroying their culture. This was not a change thatthey had made. They would just be pawns. When we tired of the game, the food would stop. The Lupani have to work out their own future. It is their right."

"But—"

"Okay, we didn't break the cycle. This time, we were completely innocent. We found the cycle broken. It was a bad business, from our viewpoint and from that of the Lupani. We restored the cycle. The Lupani will hunt the askaggen again. They won't eat food they believe to be karibu during the summer. They have nothing else. They'll break up and go after the askaggen."

"And we'll have our ivory carvings again. Caravans saves another product."

"I grant you it's not the central issue. But I did protect the interests of Caravans. That's my job."

"What difference does that make now? You of all people must realize what we ran into down there. . . ."

"Yes." Alex tried another pipe. It was a shade better. "Don't you see how important this makes Caravans?"

"I'm afraid I don't. It seems to me that it reduces our little trading game to utter insignificance."

"Why? Because of the Others?"

"Of course. We're not alone in space any longer. We've contacted an alien civilization that's trying to do something. They have a plan, whoever or whatever they are. We can't just go on with business as usual."

"What plan do they have?"

"I don't know the details, of course. How could I? They are alien, for one thing. We can't read their minds. But some aspects of what they're up to are clear enough."

"Such as?"

"There's just one sensible reason for supplying the Lupani with enough food to carry them through the summer. That's to keep them from moving and splitting up. If they stay put in those winter villages, it will change their social structure. The most obvious consequence would be that the Lupani will develop a different pattern of leadership. Instead of an informal headman like old Korigh, who has no real authority, they will evolve a chief system or some mechanism that can control a stable and sedentary unit. In short, the Others would create a situation there where they could deal with responsible leadership—leadership that could back up its commitments with force. It must be part of a plan designated to produce a network of controlled cultures in scattered star systems. I can't even begin to guess what the ultimate purpose is. But I'm damned well sure they're not doing it for our benefit. And I'm certain they're not concerned about the basic rights of the people they are pushing around, either—they're using them as pawns. In my book, that's ominous. And it's dangerous."

"I'll buy that. But you've got to push the wagon a little further down the road."

"Meaning?"

Alex poured himself a final drink. The strain of the decisions that he had made were beginning to tell on him. He was tired and he was worried. He needed to justify himself, if he could.

"The Others have a plan of some sort," Alex said. "We don't. But it's a very long-range scheme, whatever it is. It would take decades to produce the kind of change they want in the Lupani, and let's face it—the Lupani are a very small cog in a very large plan. I confess that I don't understand why they picked the Lupani at all; there are other peoples right there on Arctica that would seem to be better suited to their purposes. But we don't have to understand the details of what they are doing. I suspect that it was just a coincidence that we both had an interest in the Lupani. Anyway, I think they'll leave the Lupani alone now. The Lupani won't be easy for them to deal with after this little misadventure, and there are so many other cultures on so many other worlds. . . ."

"Okay, we may have saved the Lupani. So?"

"So that's something—and it's also a key to the future. We have no master plan of our own, and we're not likely to have one in our lifetimes. But we can try to undo what they do whenever and wherever we meet—as long as it is in our best interests to do so, and as long as what they are doing is clearly counter to the best interests of the peoples involved. And that's all we can do." "But surely—"

"Look, friend. There ain't no convenient Space Patrol—unless we're it. There is no magnificent space navy that is going to take decisive and imaginative action. We come from a world that didn't care enough about the universe it lived in to finance interstellar exploration. We come from a planet of deadheads."

"That's putting it pretty strongly, Alex."

"What do you think will happen when our report reaches Earth—meaning the U.N. ET Council? There will be all kinds of flapping and screaming and the tri-di pundits will editorialize for maybe two whole weeks about What This Really Means. Then the local political priorities will assert themselves. Sirius is a long way from Earth and there is no dramatic threat—it isn't as though an alien space fleet were about to vaporize the planet. The end result will be a decision that we can't afford to spend vast sums of money needed at home to encounter a hypothetical something out there in space. Our friends at home will saddle us with fifty-five new regulations and that will be it. Earth will do nothing. We're all there is—Caravans and the other trading companies."

"We can't take that kind of responsibility. What if we made mistakes? Our goofs could affect the whole future of mankind—"

"We have to do what we can. We can probably make on-the-spot decisions that will be better than those produced by a pack of politicians who have never even seen another planet. We can't do much. We can't come up with big-deal Final Solutions. We can't be sure we're right—but who is? I am sure of one thing."

"Hit me with it quick. My head is spinning."

"Just this. It is imperative that we keep Caravans in operation. Without the trading companies, we have no eyes in space. And we need some eyes now. We need some vision."

"It isn't much, Alex."

"I know that. Sometimes you just have to do the best you can with what you've got. This peculiar human animal has muddled through before that way. Maybe he can again."

"I'm scared, Alex."

"So am I. But right now I'm more sleepy than frightened. This peculiar human animal is going to sack out."

The Caravans lightship thrust on through the gray-ness of not-space.

It carried a fragile cargo of men and women and tools and trinkets and strange art objects and stranger dreams.

The symbol of the laden camel seemed curiously mundane and inadequate. An anachronism, perhaps.

The universe was vast, an endless sea in which floated so many flaming suns, so many waiting worlds. . . .

But the camel was a patient animal.

It would make it to the next port of call, and the next.

It might get the job done.

Die Anelan de Galactea—Vol. II, ca. 3400

I am the Inquisitor Jarvis on the service of His Most Exalted Plurality, the Premier Anointed of this, our Holy State of Earth. It may seem that in preparing this tape, I take an undue burden of pride upon myself in speaking knowledgeably of this, our Time of Troubles, but my insight into the events leading to this great chaos that is upon us is both intimate and complete. Since I have served as Inquisitor throughout the advent of the thing called Martin, I have collected a number of interrogation and subsidiary tapes and will, as my purpose seems suited, interject these into this recorded document.

There is no God but the State and the Earth is its abiding Mother!

When did I first hear that? It seems centuries ago rather than a mere three decades. It was a part of the teachings of the creche to reinforce the subtle conditioning of the Mettler serum. The general DNA conditioning was implicit in the molecule of the serum, but the specific semantic content had to be inculcated in us. The finely structured logic of the State would have been apparent to any observer, but it was necessary that each learn a particular esthetic in viewing the grandeur of this final creation that had preserved the human race against its own savagery.

It is this Thing called Martin and the creatures he called down from the stars that have returned us to the brutalized existence of the days before the State. (Hard to imagine but there were days before the State realized its ideal.) Granted, we, and I in particular, limited the infection when we killed the other children in the first prelude to Armageddon in the Great Smokies. Still, Martin remains and is alive and the very embodiment of the Chaos Principle against which all the vassals and the anointed ministers of the State have preached. He is, believe me, the ultimate evil, the Anti-State.

For this reason I pursued him long after that terrible day in the Great Smokies when the alien ship came down from the skies to avenge the loss of the lesser ship, the one upon which Martin and his companions were prisoners. Well, not prisoners really, since they were captured in a remote part of Canada where their parents had taken them and were incorporated into the strange insect life of the ship. Imagine aliens whose knowledge of biochemistry was so superb, whose understanding of the manipulation of the most subtle forces of the universe was so complete that they could change human beings into something that could merge with their society. Martin described himself and his fellow children as "cows." It seems from all that I have learned that the insect-like aliens (I still do not know what they call themselves) changed the human biochemistry so that the children became "kreels," leading an aphid-like existence to provide sustenance for the aliens. They became a part of that ship's group mind, drawing from it the aliens' most prized talents and secrets. This was the chief mistake of the aliens for they did not realize that Martin and his fellows were different from the normal strain of humans, that this was indeed the reason that their parents had fled our Holy State and taken refuge in the most inhospitable part of the north country.

So Martin and his fellows took charge of the ship, a part of the great fleet that was about to depart from our solar system forever, fleeing some indefinable menace that had destroyed their world. They took the ship and threw the creatures into a sleep, crashing the ship near Cherokee in the Great Smokies. When we attacked the ship finally, we destroyed it and the aliens. How were we to know that this was the first strike in what has become Armageddon for our race? Martin said the aliens were peaceful, that They meant us no harm. Only why have They returned to soar over our cities, meet our air fleets in battle, and devastate our lands? I know now that it stems from a great fear, an overriding fear that transcends their fear of that distant thing that destroyed their world.

It is the fear of Martin.

Martin, who was a departure from humanity, who was changed by them to something inhuman, who returned to his people and found for a moment a friendship he had never had with John Talltrees in the hills beyond Cherokee. Martin, who has since gone on, growing in the human image, expanding in nonhuman ways, carrying a corrupting messianic mission to the shattered peoples of my world. Martin, who threatens the final dissolution of our Holy State, the greatest monolithic spiritual and political structure humans have ever built. The structure that was to usher in a thousand years of peace to our troubled species.

I am resolved, implacable. I will seek him, and kill him. Somehow I will kill him for this is necessary to our survival. Perhaps then the aliens will leave us alone.

After the savage attack against our forces at Cherokee and the destruction of my interrogation van beyond the town (They must somehow have detected that residual personality of Martin lodged in John Talltrees, whom I was interrogating), I managed to summon help and. was returned to Washington where my wounds were tended. Even with the vast resources of St. Bethesda, it was weeks before I could again walk freely and without pain. In the meantime Martin had disappeared, after his fellows had been destroyed in

Cherokee. *(Face it, admit it. It was I who had them killed. Why not? They were a terrible menace and we had Martin. Besides, they were younger and underdeveloped. I doubt if we could have killed him.)

How find an illusion; how trap a wraith? This was the problem I faced. Yet it had to be done. The first of the alien raids have been carried out against Rome and Chicago, tentatively as though They were testing our strength. They did not use their large ships, as though They feared their power. They were probing and even then our defenses, so long fallow, were almost equal to Them. The rocket pursuits (there were five in Chicago) drove the ship away, but not before it had left the Loop a smoldering ruin. The solution was obvious. Driven by the immediate threat of Martin as They were, I knew that They would sense his death and go away. I had to find him and destroy him. I requested the assignment from my consecrated director, and he, in his wisdom, gave me the blessings of the Holy State.

My taped journal of the period after my hospitalization extracts as:

. . . the land down to Lake Michigan like one slick of rippled glass with no sign of the grand avenues, the delicate soaring buildings that were our pride... nothing but the mottled glassy greens and browns of fused earth where the beams reached from the sky and made the very ground flow like molasses.

But why Chicago"?

And why Rome?

The very antipodes of our culture. Yet of all the cities of the earth, they chose to fall on these two great cities and reduce parts of each to mere spatterings of melted glass and metal. The destroyed area in Rome touched the Augustan Forum but saved most of the rest of the city. We ourselves had long ago reduced the Anti-State symbol of the Vatican, but we had preserved some of the stately buildings. Much of the art we had dismantled and stored in deep parts of the catacombs, recognizing that, while these were dangerous reminders of an earlier chaotic period, no State can truly exist in the minds of men without some evidence of historical continuity. The rationale of this eludes me since these are the relics of the foremost religious state against which we warred a particularly long and vicious battle, but the theosophists and theoreticians of the Holy State had decided that this was necessary. But why Rome?

Then it came to me. Believing as I now do in racial inspiration I can see the source. Then it was baffling but I knew that it was because he was there. Martin, the Anti-State. Yet how could he be in two places at once? I knew enough of Martin by then not to be dismayed by this question. Martin could. I began to. . . .

I was young then. The voice on the tape is crisp and vigorous with no vacillation. It holds a fervor that has only recently left my tired spirit. If only the Beast could be met and destroyed, these things from another galaxy would simply depart. They would recognize that we no longer posed a threat to Them and They would continue Their flight from the unknown menace that had destroyed Their planet.

That wasn't my motive, of course. My motive was one of sheer impersonal hate. I could not hate as an individual, not then. My service and devotion to our Holy State was too complete, so rigid that I would never allow myself the luxury of hate. I was the implacable force of this great creation of man, determined to destroy the final blasphemy . . . the Anti-State . . . the Anti-Man.

I read the newscripts that were issued during my months of recuperation and slowly, though the day-to-day news was carefully edited to avoid needless spiritual troubling of the citizens, I saw the pattern emerge. At first there were signs of selective affluence in several of the lower economic areas where rationing was particularly rigid. UObservatore, the east City tape news, mentioned that the San Togliatti area had met its final tax bill completely and had followed this by three days of unseemly feasting and rejoicing. The tape wondered at the masses of food and drink when there had been no discernible drain on the strained peripheral transportation system. (In those days, in spite of the Great Confrontation, Rome had rebuilt to the limits of its valley and had burst forth to sprawl all along the southern coastline to the very edge of the deadly areas. The problem of maintaining food supplies to the interior of the city was astronomical. The State Chambers of the Blessed Fields were even turning aside applicants, who perforce went to their homes and lay quietly expiring from lack of food.

Yet here was a celebration—no, a bacchanal in the very center of the city, with food and drink abounding in such disgusting plenty that the very inner spirit of a man rose in disgust at such gluttony. The people of the district must have consumed millions of kilos of food and drink in one night and yet there was no sign of unusual drains upon the transportation facilities. Indeed, the tape remarked, enough food had been diverted from the district because of this to supplement the rations of two badly deprived but politically and spiritually less desirable districts.

I considered a similar event in Chicago, but this district had been wiped out in the alien raid while the San Togliatti district was on the edge of the attack, as though the aliens had somehow failed to pinpoint Their target properly. Of course, the Mediterranean forces of Anointed Plurality were based near at hand along the edges of the Belgradian Lake (which peculiar natives still insist was once a thriving capital), and they responded within minutes of the appearance of the ship. They managed to drive it off, seriously damaged, and the San Togliatti district survived.

The decision was, of course, obvious. I prayed for the blessings of food and comfort from my superiors and set out for Rome. Had I been allowed military transport, I would have been there in three hours but the trip required an unhappy four days and when I arrived there was little evidence left of the visitation. Only the scattered baffled words of the people of the district until. . . .

It is true, Senor. I saw him. The others saw him but they will not tell.

Don't be a fool, Casaletto. They are part of the Holy State. They must tell. They cannot help but tell.

As He said, if all is obedience and all must tell, then why the existence of the Inquisitors?

He? Who is this man you call He?

He was the one who spoke of the great destiny of our human race and the thing it was to become. He spoke of power, power that was to be apart of all of us and was to be our ultimate proud stance among the stars. He spoke of our greatness to wage war against the ultimate evil.

An unconditioned one, an Anti-State?

No, a man of goodness and strength and terrible vengeance against those that would destroy him.

Let me tell you, Casaletto, what he looked like. He was tall and lean, scarcely more than eighteen with deep burning eyes with odd pupils that looked into your very inner mind. . . .

No, he was not that way at all. He was well above the middle years with fierce yellow-white hair and a look that seemed to hold you close to him and dare you to breathe in his presence. We feared him and thought he was mad.

No, that's not possible. The creature I want is still only a boy in appearance.

I know nothing of this. He had the appearance of our ancient Moses even to the horn upon his head. As to his features, they seemed to change from day to day as he assimilated followers.

Assimilated?

They became a part of his substance though they still lived. It was his way, but, even though they did not die, their children and their parents spoke to them through him, testing him, and he did not fail a single test.

He taught you to disobey the State, to deny us our terrible need for children?

No, he taught us to be fecund for there are personalities beyond life, crying to be born, and no man is ever lost. He proved that.

He spoke of the Holy State's failure to feed you?

He spoke of the Holy State as a desperate need of the human race and not lightly to be discarded.

Liar! He is the Anti-State.

No, he is the ultimate consummation of the Holy State.

He is our enemy.

He is our friend and our ally against the ultimate evil that will in too short a time come from the heavens to destroy us and all the spirits that might otherwise be forever immortal.

The aliens'? They are strong but we can defeat Them.

No, not Them. Something vastly greater, vastly more deadly, something that is anti-life.

Disgusting. This is an intolerable mons. . . .

There is more to the tape, of course, but only the ravings of a madman. I sent him to the Fields. In those days I could make quick and effective decisions. I don't know why it is so hard for me to do this now. Has his influence infiltrated my brain in this latter year of my life? No matter. I sent him to the Fields, and after him almost a thousand others who raved in a similar manner. The details were all different. All saw him in some dissimilar manner, although no one ever saw him as an eighteen-year-old boy. They spoke of his powers of persuasion, of the same message of unspeakable menace coming to the human race. They spoke of his powers to create light above them in the darkness, his ability to summon food and drink from nowhere, his ability to strike a peace deacon in his tracks with a gesture, his ability to move great masses by the merest flicker of an eyebrow, of the energies of hell itself that seemed to crawl around his person as he spoke. It was like rabid hysterical mouthings out of some medieval witchcraft trials. In their contact with this creature, they had all become insane and it became necessary that they leave this society of sane men. I had no qualms about it. After all, was this not the total of my conditioning from childhood and that of my father before me?

I left that blighted city and returned painfully to the Americas, crossing the inland ocean and arriving finally in Chicago where the other attack had followed rumors of a similar appearance. Although the descriptions in Rome and in Chicago were different, there was no doubt that it was the same creature. And that it was the creature named Martin who had escaped me in the Carolina mountains after I had brought the State's Peace to the other children of his group.

I was troubled by what I had read in the distorted ramblings of the lambs of the State in the San Togliatti district. Was his constantly changing appearance mere hysteria or perhaps some kind of mind control that he exerted on the people? Or was it more? The thought that he could indeed incorporate other personalities into him nagged me and I wondered if this was the source of this phenomenon. The method whereby the aliens did this . . . the method he must have learned from their minds disgusted me . . . but I would not discount it. After all, insects eat their dead. . . .

But humans?

But Martin is not human.

(And the thought persisted that this had not happened to John Talltrees but he still harbored a residual personality that seemed to be Martin's. I dismissed this finally as a particularly subtle form of hypnosis. Like the summoning of the two personalities in the brain of the first Interrogator who met him. Induced schizophrenia, nothing more. Whether or not the personality of his victims persisted, I knew what he and the children I had killed did in the village of Cherokee and the thought brought my dinner boiling up in my mouth.)

The Loop showed the same signs of attack as had the melted area south of the San Togliatti district. (I wonder at the old names. There is nothing in the geography of the area that resembles a "loop," yet the name for this district persists.) The new buildings in which the State had so gloried were gone, mere dimples of slag against the broader melted swath that the aliens' beams had cut through the city. Here, the defense had not been so quick and the ship had found a full ten minutes to do its damage. Surprisingly, it had not attacked any other part of the city. Only this section was damaged, and witnesses told me that the great sphere of the ship had hovered above this area, raking it with high-energy beams again and again until the ground boiled and for days thereafter the air was foul with the vapors from the area.

They know. Somehow They know. They can detect him and They are determined to destroy him. I have tried to convey this to my anointed superiors, but they are convinced that the aliens mean the complete destruction of our cities. It is obvious to me that THEY DO NOT. They want to destroy only one thing, the thing that I want most to destroy. .. this demon in human flesh that I have called Martin.

There were only a few witnesses to interrogate. Most of the people had been trapped in the area and their ashes were mingled with the melted rock and the brackish seawater that had poured in from the lake afterwards. These few I gathered together. Amazingly, they were terrified, but they were more terrified of him than they were of me. I set about to change that.

Citizen, doctrine teaches us that the most exquisite agonies are to be endured for the Holy State, not just endured but gloried in.

Please, Inquisitor, don't hurt me.

What is pain, dear woman? A transitory thing that exalts the spirit when it serves the greater goals. It is nothing that I joy in giving but I joy in your ability to give this to the Holy State even as much as I joy in your pleasure in giving her something more valuable, the information I need.

About him? I don't know anything about him. Perhaps if you commune with your inner senses. Oh, God, God.

There is no God. Only the ideal State that is the expression of centuries of human God-making.

Please, no more, no more.

You are exalted. I can see it in your expression. Extend your spirit and embrace the State's anointed servants. Tell us about him.

I will tell you. I'll tell you. Only . . .

Is he truly dead?

Him? Dead? Of course not. He cannot die any more than I can die.

Your spirit lives in the State but you can die. I assure you, I can demonstrate to you that you can die.

This part of me but I cannot die. I have shared blood with him.

And flesh? Oh, I have known about that filthy doctrine, that illusion he preaches.

No, blood. He learned that somewhere in the mountains, he said. It is the blood only that is needed. Now, we are one. I am he and he is I.

So that he is in this room, I suppose. He is watching and savoring your pain?

Silently. Yes. He is here. Oh-h-h-h.

This is a small part of the loving care I have reserved for him. There will be a day. I will find him and, free of all his tricks, I will talk with him as you and I talk now. I promise you.

Is there that much hate in you?

I serve the Holy State. There is no room for hate, only devotion to this highest of ideals. Tell me about him. Did he take you as a lover?

Me? I would have been honored. No, there was another. He is after all still a young man, scarcely eighteen or nineteen, I would say, but tall and lean with a mature man's figure and a face with eyes that look into you and beyond and seem to be filled with a million souls looking out of a single window.

Tell me about this other, the whore of the Anti-State.

You call her that?

Isn't that what she was?

No, she was one of the group who first came down to the lake to listen to him. Only it wasn't a matter of listening, but rather of experiencing, of seeing in a new way by new colors, of feeling with new nerves, of tasting tastes that had never crossed a human palate before. He was that way. He could expand your consciousness until it encompassed the world in dimensions that had been alien to you.

Drugs, surely drugs.

No, this was something completely different. He was trying to make us see, to bring us into greater unity against the day of Armageddon.

Armageddon? Did he use that term? Did he dare call upon that sacred term?

These are my words. I suppose we each used our own terms, found ways to vocalize what was after all a feeling and a sensing more than a message. It was not that he said anything but rather that we walked with him and experienced what he experienced. The small seconds we were with him seemed like an eternity and his taste-smell-sense-sight-thought became our taste-smell-sense-sight-thought. It was like being in a multiple of worlds, like entering into the real three-dimensional world after having been condemned to live a life confined to the life of a single line.

That's very poetic. You are obviously an educated woman. Has your education been so sadly neglected that you would abandon the sure teachings of the Holy State for this charlatan?

There is no difference, he told us. He is the extension of the principle of the State, the ideal of unity made flesh. He is not your enemy but your successor.

Enough, enough, I cannot tolerate . . .

I was stupid, of course. To let my emotions, no matter what my devotion to the State, override my control and my primary mission. Still, I have been absolved by my anointed superiors who themselves were horrified at the tape. They understood even though they disapproved. I wept as I had her body removed but I was more determined. I would hunt the Beast down and in the end he would go with my hand to the Fields.

There were others, of course. She was not the only one who had vital information and her loss was not a particularly great one. Had it been, I'm sure that my anointed superiors would have been less tolerant of my weakness. As it was, their reaction held a sort of grudging approbation and one of the Sacred College of the Diet even privately praised my devotion to our ideals. It was enough to fill my spirits, but I promised myself that I would not make such a mistake again.

There were others, as I said. Only a few but enough. . . .

He walked among us and he was good. He was the full realization of humanity. You saw him?

I touched him. I shared blood with him. Where did he go?

Away. He went away and took many of us with him. He took me with him.

You went with him ? What luck! Where did he go ? I don't know.

Another:

Yes, I remember her. She had lived in a small lean-to on the edge of the Loop since her mother died, a rickety lean-to of iron and discarded wood against the back wall of one of the great sacred buildings. She had little to eat, of course. No more than any of us who have not yet conceived or who are past the age of childbearing. She was very dark-haired with deep brown-black eyes, very large so that they seemed to fill a good part of her face. Her skin was pale and perfect except for one small black mole set high on her left cheek. I think it was the cheekbones, thin and marvel-ously molded with smooth hollows underneath that gave her that delicate fine look with its underlying strength.

Very pretty. You speak like a man rather than a citizen.

She was that way. She could make you feel very much a man. Not that she was conscious of it. It was simply that she responded to you and you to her and there was something like an undercurrent of empathy, of liking . . . no, loving . . . that flowed from her. I can understand why in his youth he would find her so desirable. I envy him.

Envy the Anti-State? Never mind. Where did they go?

South, I have heard.

Don't you know? You said you went with them, just as a dozen before you have said the same thing.

A part of me will always be with him, will always live.

The Holy State has forbidden mysticism. I am a product of the State and its serum. I could not be a mystic if I wished, but this is not mysticism...

And another:

South, that's all I know. He said it was imperative that he go south.

And another:

He could see a distance into the future, I know. Not as much as he would like but enough. I heard him tell her that he had to go south and that she would come with him. Something about a ship.

And still another:

Yes, he said that there would be a ship. On that last night as they lay together and made love.

You heard this? He allowed you to hear this.

I shared blood with him. He could not have changed it even had he wished. When he made love with her, we all made love with her . . . and with him. . . .

What about the ship?

One of the alien ships. He knew it would crash or be forced down. I don't know which, but he had to be there.

He hated Them. He plans to destroy Them?

There was a hate, of course, but there was a love too, strange warring emotions. No, he will not kill any of Them. He will become a part of Them and They of him, for that is his ultimate plan.

Part of those . . . things? Those insects that breed humans for food? They keep men like cows to be milked of their sustenance?

I cannot find this as disgusting as you, Inquisitor. It is all a part of an order that invests life. Even you, for all of your lack of humanity, are a part ofit...

That is enough. That is enough. ENOUGH!

South. South. South. That was all I heard. I had to know where south, but I could find nothing more than this vague direction. There were nearly thirty that I questioned, using all of the subtleties of the art I had learned as an apprentice but the artifices of the Inquisitor were not enough. One cannot elicit information where there is no information to be had. I sent them to the Fields, each and every one of them, save a single girl that I kept for my own devices for several days but eventually she too went the way of the others. I might have kept her, but she insisted on sharing blood, that disgusting ritual these beings have developed . . . and I led her personally into her blessedness ... or cursedness. After that I spent over an hour in the bath, ridding myself of her smell and the memory of her touch on my body.

I waited for a week, hoping to find another who could tell me but to no avail. In the latter part of the last week the news came to me. There had been another incursion of the aliens. A ship had come in rapidly (our radar net was now complete and the pursuits were increasingly effective so that the aliens were finding Their match in us, at least in a planetary atmosphere). It attacked a small village in the island between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers and the pursuits were upon it. It had little chance to escape. They shot it down and it crashed in the overgrowth along the Mississippi, spilling its fragments out over a limestone bluff. There was little doubt in the observer's mind that all were lost. I knew better.

You can't imagine the excitement I felt. They would not have attacked in this way if he were not there. That was obvious, and more obvious, from my interrogations, he expected one or more of Them to survive. That was why he was there. The Thing I called Martin was reestablishing his contact with these creatures, perhaps forming an alliance with Them. Between his powers and Theirs, they would grind humanity and the State into the most abject slavery.

But I knew, I knew, and I moved with as much speed as I could command. I claimed priorities that not even my anointed superiors had thought to give me and I commandeered one of the five rocket pursuits vital to the Chicago area. I knew that I would not be dangerously weakening the city because he was south and They would not attack here while he was there.

The flight took minutes and we landed near an old hamlet called Collinsville that had somehow survived the great disasters and was still much as it had been in the eighties. The pursuit hovered over the field, landed roughly, and before I climbed from the copilot compartment, a lorry was racing across the field to meet me. They had complete instructions and they had brought an interrogation van north from New Cairo literally minutes before I arrived.

Within the hour they brought me reports on the alien ship. The flamedozers cut through the rank vegetation to the south, the vegetation that had sprung up after the St. Louis miss and still carried a dangerous activity. It must have been a hellish mission and several of the men had to be hospitalized but they cut through in an hour and found the ship. It was completely destroyed, its crew dead, Their bodies badly charred. One of the dozer crews spotted the tracks on the sand before the bluff. Somehow one of Them had escaped or been thrown free and the three-clawed tracks led off into the underbrush and disappeared. Another member of the same crew found the human footsteps nearby. These were fresher steps with the moisture not yet evaporated from them and I knew.

He was there. He had come and he was tracking the thing, seeking to contact it. Somewhere out in that jungle growth he stalked the insect creature from the ship, not to kill it but to enlist its aid in the final destruction of humanity and the Holy State.

But I knew that she had come with him, that she must still be with him. She could not be on this stalk but she must be close at hand. I became fairly rabid at the thought, the chance to capture her and through her finally to confront him again, but to confront him this time with the power and the might of the Holy State arrayed against him. To bring him to his knees and watch him wither before my eyes. To kill him and dissolve his body and consign his liquids to the Fields.

I sent out interrogation teams. The reports came back. Yes, they had been in the area for nearly a week. They had walked through the villages and they had done as they did in the larger cities, spread corruption among the citizens. They had talked of a universal melding of all mankind, of the implacable menace that human and alien life of the galaxy must meet. They had done this sickening thing they called sharing blood.

She was always with him, silent and waiting. They knew of her, knew her role as his whore, watched them make love at night (or at least experienced it) and they were neither ashamed nor even silent in the memory. God, how they loved to talk about it. I reviewed tape after tape, feeling the disgust rise in me. Only the sure knowledge that the voices no longer existed, that their authors had joined so many others in the Fields comforted me.

Still, I had to have her and now I knew that there was a strong possibility that I might, since his physical protection was for the moment withdrawn. It was only a matter of finding her in what after all was a fairly small geographical area. I ordered spycells to be set out in all the villages, since we could not depend on the citizens to report her presence. We literally carpeted the river valley in sensors, over four thousand from the invoices. We flew them in from Chicago and New Cairo and the delta area, and in twenty-four hours a mayfly could not spread its wings in any village along the river without my ears hearing the rustle of its transparent wings.

Within twelve hours we had located her. They spoke knowingly of her in the homes of this small town called Grafton. That was the first time I knew her name to be Vera. She was there, of that I was sure. I sent two companions to Deacons of the Faithful West and they surrounded the town, entered it and went from house to house. By midafternoon I had the news. They had her. There was no doubt that it was she. She freely confessed it, showing no shame or fear. By nightfall they had brought her to the edge of Collinsville to my van where I waited.

I was surprised when they brought her in and bound her to the interrogation table. I had not expected her to be a Black. They spoke of her high cheekbones, which was true, and the delicacy of her beauty, which was true, and they had spoken of her pale skin. I had assumed they meant that pale waxy kind of complexion that many women develop from undernutrition or long absence from the sun. She was pale for a Black but it was a paleness that was still like burnt ginger with a fine textured skin that showed the" flush of blood underneath. She was for all of her youth remarkably beautiful.

I am told that you are Vera who is with the creature called Martin. Yes, I am.

The whore of the Anti-State.

If you wish. Words have little meaning.

It's not you I want. I promise you a quick peace if you will tell me where he is.

I don't know. It doesn't matter, however. He will come to you before too long. He told me of this.

Just, I'm sure, as he told you of your capture and what we would say and do here.

Yes, that too.

If that were so, you would have fled. You would have done anything to avoid confronting me. No, not if that is what he wanted.

And it went this way for several hours. It was not that she withheld information. I applied all of my techniques and I was sure that she withheld nothing. It was just that she had nothing to offer. He had freely abandoned her to pursue the thing from the ship, knowing that I would take her, knowing what I would do to her. She was carrying his child, I found, but this seemed not at all to matter.

She parroted all of the nonsense that I had heard from those in Rome and Chicago. She spoke frighten-ingly of some menace descending upon us and his intention of forging humanity and the insect race and others . . . for the first time I heard of others . . . into a galaxy-spanning organism that would meet this menace. She spoke of sharing blood but did not seem to understand its full import. She built a fantasy structure for me that rivaled the elaborate hells of the hopelessly insane. In the end she collapsed, exhausted, and I waited for her revival.

I must have dozed myself. When I awoke he was in the room. Suddenly and as simply as that, with no warning from the pickets, he was in the room. The tape was still running and. . . .

Wake up, Jarvis.

ƒ...ƒ... What are you doing here?

I came as you expected me to.

I did not expect you to. . . .

But you did. Although you will not admit it, you know me too well by now. We have met and a part of you has analyzed me completely to the point that you can almost predict my actions. You don't dare admit this consciously, for to do so would be to admit the validity of my motives, but you do.

Another example of your infectious madness. Will you now fragment my personality as you did to the poor interrogator when we first met?

No, you have a much fuller destiny. Even I can't change that. We are bound together by bonds of time that I cannot dissolve.

You seem to have remarkable powers. Yet you can't handle a thing as simple as this?

Yes, yes, I suppose I could, but at what cost? Remember my conversation long ago with John Talltrees, the time when we went badger hunting in the mountains and found the willow trap with the ragged leg of the poor beast? He had gnawed his leg free of the trap and crawled into the underbrush to die.

ƒ remember that. Disgusting.

You and I are like that. We are bound together and we may free ourselves from each other only at peril to our own lives and our own race. If it weren't for that, I would never spare an animal like you after what you've done tonight.

I needed the information.

She gave you everything she knew. I made sure of that.

How could I be sure?

No matter, she will heal and we have a great deal to do with each other yet. Only I am as human as you and I cannot let you go free after this, not without some satisfaction that you will suffer as she did.

Revenge? The self-styled savior of the^ race stoops to revenge?

We will leave you now but before we go . . .

We?

Here, my companion. Don't ask for his name for it's quite unpronounceable, fust call him... I'm sure you'll appreciate my jest eventually . . .just call him Peter.

The thing came out of the shadows in the rear of the van and I realized that I had been smelling its rank smell for minutes. It was tall and lean and gleamed like burnished gold in the lights above the couch. I had seen pictures of their corpses but to see one alive.... It made my stomach churn.

The thing came forward and passed Martin to the couch where it freed the girl, gathered her up in chitin-ous arms that were remarkably gentle.

"We'll go now," Martin said, "but there is one thing left. I will not share with you but I will take from you."

With that he leaned forward and I saw the gleam of the knife in his hand. I realized that it had been all talk. He would kill me now and I would die in the service of the State, which was as it should be. I tried to move but I could not. My muscles would not respond. I waited for the end.

Instead, he took my right hand and the knife made a sudden motion, opening the flesh on the wrist. Bright blood spurted forward and I knew that he would watch me bleed out my life. Instead he raised my wrist and I watched with sick disgust as he drank my blood. My stomach heaved at the sight but he continued for moments.

Then he lowered my arm to my side and stared at it for moments. I watched as the blood slackened, stopped, and the raw wound closed and in a second healed.

"It is not the end, you see," he said tiredly. "There will be other times and eventually you will understand our special trap. You and me, two savage badgers in a single trap."

And they left while I lay, waiting for the paralysis to leave. That was a year ago and! find that I weary easily as I write this. It's the kind of fatigue you would not expect a man of thirty-three to have, but it is common to me these days.

To have his throat in my hands, to squeeze the life from him for what he has done!

I can remember the horror, the agony as I rose from the couch, feeling the first stirrings of what was happening to me. Was it a venom from this creature that used to be human or something more sublte?

I stood before the mirror and watched my body sag, watched the skin coarsen and flow about my face, felt the heavy weight of softening muscles upon my bones. I looked in the mirror and saw in minutes my face take on the cast of a man of seventy, the very face I wear now. I stood and felt my youth dissolve about me and vanish.

But I am not too old to run him down, to have my final revenge. I will find him and kill him, slowly and painfully.

The monster. The State preaches there are no such things but I know.

The monster has stolen my soul.

fact that she was left strictly alone she thoroughly enjoyed her position.

She did learn a good deal about crystal singing and Ballybran: not all of it encouraging but certainly nothing that Carrik hadn't warned her about previously. Crystal singers did, indeed, have tremendous credit when they went off-world. They whooped it up, big spenders, fun people. Until the shakes started.

"I hear tell," one transport captain told her while deep in his puce-colored wine, "that crystal gets into your blood. Keeps you young, but you gotta sing it again. You sure you want that? There're lots of other professions that don't have inherent addiction."

Killashandra had smiled and led him to expand. He was young and virile and he'd've been willing if Carrik hadn't been witless down the corridor. There were disadvantages to her present occupation.

"I've done this journey-leg nineteen times now," the captain went on after a gulp of wine, "and I've had quite a few crystal singers on board, both in and out. Out they can't wait to get to civilization." He snorted. "Can't blame 'em. There's nothing but ploddy dull-witted clods on Ballybran. Their conversation is limited to the size of their crop and who could grow the largest what-ever-you-call the long green thin things they pickle in vats down there. The only item they can export is crystals. And singers."

"D'you see many coming back like Carrik?" she asked.

He shook his head, uncomfortably glancing down the corridor that led to the master cabin assigned to Killashandra and Carrik.

"He's the first like that. They're usually awfully shaky, though. What happened to him? He wait too long?"

"No, but when we were about to ship out, a shuttle came in with sour crystals ready to explode. He got caught in the sensory overload."

"Good of you to come back with him."

"I owed him that." Killashandra meant it. She was in Carrik's debt for introducing her to the notion of being a crystal singer. She might have a flawed voice, too grating for the career of a solo singer, but she had perfect pitch, which was the first requirement for singing crystal. Taking any risk involved in this profession was more preferable to Killashandra than being a second-rate chanter with neither prestige nor the chance to make Stellar rating.

"Are you certain"—and the captain was dubious and uneasy—"you want to be a crystal singer, too? I mean, I've seen enough of 'em to know the crazy rumors are space-drek, but. . . ," and he shook his head.

She shrugged. "We'll see. I'll analyze the situation when I reach Ballybran."

He turned the conversation to other matters then, such as what would Killashandra do after she'd safely delivered Carrik to his Guild's care. There was no doubt in her mind what he had on his mind, so she'd smiled enigmatically.

Whatever reception shed subconsciously hoped to receive was vastly different from the one she got from Lanzecki, the Resident Master of the Heptite Guild. He was at the space portal when the ship opened its airlock: a dour-faced man with a swarthy complexion and a squat figure, clothed in dull colors. The only things bright and active about him were his wide-set piercing brown eyes. They seemed to move incessantly, seeing more in one darting glance than they ought.

He gestured to the two men with him (they were dun-colored, too), who silently paced down the corridor to Carrik's cabin.

"Thank you, Killashandra Ree. You have an open ticket to whatever destination you desire and a credit of 1,000 galactic units." He proffered her two vouchers, each emblazoned with the Heptite Guild crest of a quartz crystal. He accorded her a deferential bow and then, as the men conducting the air-cushion stretcher with Carrik returned, he preceded them back through the portal and down the accordioned entrance maw.

For a long stunned moment, Killashandra stared after him, the two metallic slips limp in her fingers.

"Guildmaster? Lanzecki, sir? Wait. . . ."

The stately progress continued without pause.

"Of all the ungrateful. . . ."

"I'd not call them ungrateful," said the captain, stopping beside her and craning his neck to glance at the vouchers.

"I didn't expect a brass band," exclaimed Killashandra, "but a word or two. . . ."

"The important words are there," the captain said, pointing to the slips. "But they are an odd lot," he went on, staring at the retreating figures. "You hear all kinds of rumors about that Guild, like I said. But I see lots of strange things in my profession and I don't believe the half of it." Suddenly he slid an arm around her shoulders. "Now that the dead meat's gone, how about you and me. . . ."

"Later, later," Killashandra said, irritably pushing his hand away. "I want a word or two with that Guildmaster." And she strode rapidly after the trio guiding Carrik.

She never did see Carrik again, though his name appeared on the membership rolls as inactive for a good many years. Not that she remembered the name past the first four. Eventually the only face she could recognize and name was Lanzecki's. And that was for a variety of curious reasons, most of which were credit-oriented.

Right now she had tremendous difficulty getting an interview with Lanzecki. Though she arrived at the Guildhall a mere quarter of an hour after he did, he was "occupied." Well, she could understand that. She waited two hours in the prism-like reception chamber of the Guildhall. Hunger got the better of her then.

"They don't want you," said the captain after her third try. "Leave. That travel voucher'11 take you anywhere. There's sure nothing on this planet to hang around for." He looked around the public house where they were dining—the food was superb—at the dull faces.

"I've never met such sullen, rude, disinterested people in my life," Killashandra said, thoroughly piqued, "but I'm not leaving until I see Lanzecki and that's that!"

It nearly was, but at the sixth refusal she lost her temper.

"I've got perfect pitch," she said on a clear B-flat, the characteristic grating of her voice thrown back at her from the multisided reception hall. "I've been informed of all the hazards, including indifference, ingratitude, and rudeness. I'm going to join!"

The poor receptionist cringed away from the operatic announcement.

"I can't help you," the woman said piteously. "You have to see Guildmaster Lanzecki."

"Then let me see him! And don't"—Valkyries had chanted in whispers in comparison to Killashandra's projection—"come back without him." She dropped to a conversational pitch. "I've been informed that I've a voice that can shatter glass. Shall I try?" And she waved at the hall with its crystal mirrors and chandeliers.

The pace at which the woman scurried from the room soothed Killashandra's ego, and she stared around the hall, idly wondering if her voice could crack Ballybran crystal.

"You don't give up, do you?" said Lanzecki as he glided into the hall, the receptionist hovering about anxiously.

"No, I don't." One didn't antagonize the Master of the Guild one wished to join. At least not face to face.

"That's as well." He seemed pleased by her obduracy. "You've perfect pitch all right, according to the Fuertan report."

So Lanzecki'd been checking up on her.

He nodded. "And you've seen what supersonic overloads do to a crystal singer." He gestured toward the back of the building where the infirmary wing was situated. "Members of the Heptite Guild," and he gave a sour smile, "are prone to sensory overload. Sooner or later it will happen to you. But you insist on joining?" He waited until she nodded. "Despite repeated warnings and attempts to dissuade you?" She nodded more vigorously. "Will you swear that there have been no attempts to coerce you against your will to become an apprentice in the Heptite Guild?"

"Of course!" Killashandra's irritation returned, doubled.

To her surprise, Lanzecki strode past her, beckoning her to follow him out of the Guildhall and down the main street of the city into the communications building, where they were instantly ushered into the Spaceport Commissioner's office.

"This young woman insists on becoming an apprentice to the Heptite Guild," Lanzecki said. He then stepped out of the room.

"Now what. . . ," began Killashandra, whirling at his exit.

"Your name, rank and planet of origin, young woman," asked the Commissioner in a stern forbidding voice.

She gave it to him, startled by his unaccountable attitude. After all, his bloody planet was Mudball #1 if it weren't for the crystals. . . .

She was then subjected to an intensive physical examination, and a series of mental-health routines. She had to recite her life's history, up to and including her reasons for leaving the Arts Center on Fuerte.

Two intensive attempts were made to dissuade her, one including an hour-long documented film of the condition of storm-maddened victims. Finally Lanzecki was recalled and she was permitted—permitted!—to announce her official intention of becoming an apprentice to the Heptite Guild.

"I've never been through such a rigmarole in my life," she said, fuming, to her new Guildmaster on their way back to the Hall.

"You won't be again," Lanzecki said in a droll fashion but his manner was subtly altered. He seemed less austere, but not happy.

"Well, that's something."

"As you've been reminded, there are certain advantages to being a crystal singer, Killashandra. Very few, however. But then, there are some advantages to every situation ... if you care to look on the positive side of events. Take myself." He gave her an odd smile. "I'm totally deaf."

"I'd never've guessed."

He inclined his head, smiling again. "An advantage, I assure you. I need only turn my back and I can hear nothing." His smile was tinged with a certain malice. "You'll find, however, that the inhabitants of Ballybran, save only the singers, are either tone-deaf or have some serious impairment of that sensory faculty. In fact, these past few generations of babies are now born with impaired hearing." That seemed to please him. "You may wish you had been, too."

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," she said, and he nodded, humorlessly. "That accounts for everyone seeming so rude, then," she added.

"Probably."

"Here, you'd better have these back," she said, suddenly remembering the vouchers and thrusting them at him.

He glanced indifferently at the chits, and waved aside her offer.

"The Guild was grateful, a signal event I assure you in this profession. Make the most of it. Such opportunities will soon be beyond you."

They had reached the Guildhall and Lanzecki directed her to what was obviously a training room.

"Enough time has been wasted," he said. "Now, some of the necessary reeducation will be done by an aural teacher, for I am useless but I am your principal instructor. Initiation lasts until you have completed your first solo trip into the crystal-bearing ranges and return." He smiled sourly. "The ranges are not, by the way, mountains in the upward sense of the word, but deeps."

Lanzecki had gestured her to a seat at a small desk that bore writing materials and a taper. He pulled down a tri-d screen and took a pointer.

"Ballybran," and he indicated the fourth planet of the system on the tri-d visualization, "has a low volcanic action, being an old planet and well settled down. As you are aware from primary school galactology, quartz structures take eons to produce and occur where volcanic action is negligible, as it is on Ballybran. This planet has achieved an almost circular orbit so there are few changes of season such as you might have experienced on Fuerte or other planets you've visited."

He went on in detail about Ballybran's discovery on a routine survey and how its potential was overlooked until a vacationing engineer escaped from the crystal canyons only seconds before a mach storm. He'd been nearly driven mad by the sounds stroked by the freak high winds from the quartz hills and had returned later to investigate the phenomen. Since there was always a dearth of usable quartz crystal to focus the coherent light needed by lasers and communication devices, his discovery made him a wealthy man. One day he didn't outrun a mach storm. He and fifty other crystal prospectors.

Galactic Overgovernment had interdicted the planet until the hazard had been thoroughly assessed, and proper precautions could be specified. The Heptite Guild was formed to recruit ("Ha, dissuade," Kil-lashandra thought to herself), train and maintain quartz prospectors. The Guild very properly tithed active members throughout their working lives and then cared for those incapacitated. Since humans with perfect pitch were in a minority and since the Guild was required to explain the hazards of the profession in detail, the active membership remained small and the price of crystal high. No research disclosed a reliable substitute for Ballybran-mined crystal and blackmarket mining was notably unsuccessful for the improperly equipped pirates.

By constant handling, Killashandra learned the various marketable shapes. She had intensive drill on her pitch, which remained accurate to the machine-oriented vibrations: a simple matter with her background as a musical student. Easy, too, for her to sound a pitch and then key the polydiamond supersonic cutter to that exact note. She learned to tune soured crystal as an exercise preparatory to the actual cutting of quartz from the living hills. She studied thousands of diagrams and slides of crystal walls until she was able to discern at a glance where major fractures had been caused by alignment and realignment as the crystal was "born" from the tremendous pressures of volcanic action in the planet's surface. She began to appreciate micro-errors, those impure molecules that might, at a later date, cause a seemingly perfect crystal to fracture and explode, just as the shuttle's crystal had blown apart at Fuerte. Sometimes one could "hear" the micro-errors when one sounded a note and cut a "good" crystal above or below the error. But she wasn't to learn that trick until she got out into the ranges.

Though she fumed about the delay, she was forced to endure equally boring rehearsals of Guild rules, precepts and regulations until she'd wake herself up chanting Section and Paragraph. She was held in training for excessively long drills on the dangers, spotting and evasion of mach storms.

Because Ballybran was an old world, with few respectable mountain ranges, a storm literally raced around the planet, gathering terrific speed—often exceeding the sound barrier (hence the designation "mach storm"). The other three small planets in the system had asymmetrical orbits, occasionally exerting a malefic pull on the largest sibling of their sun. And the primary of Ballybran was given to spectacular gaseous eruptions. The resultant "sunspots" exerted undue gravitational effects on poor Ballybran: any and all combinations of the above contributed to the birth of the mach storms.

Warning devices were numerous and, Killashandra decided privately, it was a case of crying wolf in such chorus that the warnee mentally tuned out the claxons. She determined to keep only one monitor operative and thus more effective. She was also warned against considering this.

"You can't be warned too much about a mach storm," she was told repeatedly by Lanzecki, by the various technicians, by her only undeaf instructor. The woman had briefly been a crystal singer. She'd inadvertently cut off most of her right hand.

The day came when Killashandra could tolerate no further classroom antics. In theory she knew all there was to know about cutting crystal. She'd returned half the planet's crystals in practice and the mere thought of tracking another mach storm or reciting a Guild rule made her apoplectic.

"Lanzecki, if you remind me once more that I asked to join this benighted Guild, I'll rearrange your face," Killashandra told the Guildmaster when he declined, again, to let her solo.

"There isn't a singer available to shepherd you, Killashandra," he said, sighing heavily. He was as weary of her complaints as she was of making them.

"I thought I was to solo."

He shook his head. "Not your first time out in the ranges. And don't remind me how well versed you are in theory. What you have in your mind is not reliable in the crystal hills. Theoretical knowledge must be transmuted into reflex actions along with instinctive reactions in the successful crystal singer, not conscious considerations."

Killashandra made a rude noise and started to comment on her eidetic memory.

"Memory distortion," Lanzecki was saying. "Well now, Killashandra, most of our active members, and inactive ones too had that eidetic faculty at one time. It is as if that is a corollary of perfect pitch. . . . But memory distortion is one of the cruel facts of crystal singing, girl. Sensory overload is no joke and no crystal singer is immune to it. I would to the gods one of you was. But I can't permit you to venture forth the first time without a seasoned singer along. Oh, you'll be in your own flitter and you'll undoubtedly be sent off on your own in a few days but you will have had the benefit of watching the actual work in the ranges. And we have to wait until a reliable singer is available. Ah, speaking of which. . . ."

A panel behind them was flashing brilliant red/ orange/white. All warning devices on Ballybran activated color as well as sound. Lanzecki turned in his chair, gesturing Killashandra to attend. The panel blanked briefly and then a meteorological chart was superimposed on a blow-up of the Milekey Mountain Range, showing the incredibly fast spread of a high-intensity mach storm.

"They'll be coming in from this. Mach 4, at that." Lanzecki's dour face reflected both concern and satisfaction. "I hope someone remembered to cut subtonic cylinders. You may help me compute their cargoes. Nineteen singers are signed out to the Milekeys at the moment."

Killashandra had, in the course of her training, assisted Lanzecki before. In fact, she had met most of the current active members who were not off-planet. There were two hundred forty-three members capable of singing crystal, but of that number almost half were off-world on leave.

Those who had come in with partial loads immediately got as drunk as possible and stayed drunk until their flitters were serviced and refueled, at which point they went straight back into the crystal ranges. Those who had caught the market at a good price got as drunk as possible until they could catch a ship off-world for leave.

"Why didn't you ever tell me that I had to have a guide my first time out?" Killashandra asked, remembering that there were one or two men who could make passable partners.

"You hadn't been sufficiently saturated with theory which they wouldn't remember to tell you."

So she sat with Lanzecki as the flitters came in and precious crystal was duly weighed, assessed and the market price established. Twelve made small fortunes. Of the remainder, only two singers were considered possible guides for her: a rather striking brunette with wild hair and eyes to whom Killashandra took an instant dislike. (The woman reminded her of a Stellar contralto in the Trans-Romantic Repertoire company.) And an intensely sullen yellow-skinned Coombsite with whom Killashandra had previously had a long drunken argument.

"He's good in the upper registers, which would be an asset for you," Lanzecki told her, but he wasn't keen on Ardlor Bart at all. "Ibray is really less disoriented despite her appearance."

"I'd rather pair with the man."

"You could wait another. . . . No, I see you couldn't. I'll speak to Bart."

Bart had no great desire to double with her his next trip out, Lanzecki reported. The man was determined to make enough crystal to get off-world and he didn't want anyone around.

"He says the fee's only a drop in the bucket of what he needs," Lanzecki went on, when Killashandra pointed out that aspect, Section 14, Paragraph 9. "I'd forget him and go with Ibray. She cuts well in the Tortugal Hills and she's much more reliable." Killashandra was adamant.

"Then you'll have to convince Ardlor yourself," Lan-zecki told her, shrugging off further responsibility.

Killashandra found such convincing rather elementary although Ardlor had a marked tendency to call her by any name other than her own.

Three days later as she was in her flitter, checking it and her gear, the special ear-padded helmet that offered some protection against the worst of the sensory overload, the eye-lenses that filtered the blinding light refractions from open-face quartz mining, Lanzecki made a final attempt to persuade her to go with Ibray.

"Then don't trust Ardlor's memory about anything," Lanzecki warned her. "He's cut crystal too long and sung too long alone now."

"Then why must I go with him or anyone?"

"His hands will remember. Watch what he does, not what he says. If he's difficult, you can switch on the Playback. That'll be official recall. And don't—for the sake of your sanity—turn off any of the mach storm alarms. Remember that!"

Then to her surprise, Lanzecki gave her a warm and hearty handshake and said that she'd been one of his keenest students.

Ardlor had shown her on the range charts where he intended to take her.

"That storm will have bared some rose quartz. Lanzecki told me to remember about rose quartz. In octagon." Ardlor's face twisted with the effort of implanting that fact in his spongy mind. "It was octagons, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was."

"No sunspot activity," he told her, riffling through the pre-flight reports in his hand. "That last storm was planetary conjunction stuff. So long as there's no sun-spot activity there'll be clear days of cutting." He winced. "I gotta remember rose quartz." He tapped a scrawled note to that effect on the top of the p-f flimsies. "Not everyone can cut it. But you've a good upper register, haven't you? I remember that." He pulled nervously at his fringe of hair saying, "Now you follow me. Remember," and then darted off to his craft.

Killashandra experienced a certain rush of elation as she guided her flitter up over the Guild field, dipping eastward to follow Ardlor's brightly striped flyer.

There were five crystal-bearing areas on Ballybran, the largest of which was whimsically named Milekey Mountains. Various theories circulated as to why: the most popular was ascribed to the discoverer of the Ballybran crystal (whose name no one ever remembered). It was bruited about that he'd.ventured a mile into the range before he'd notice the crystal, the planet's unsuspected treasure.

Now, Ardlor and Killashandra penetrated a hundred and fifty kilometers into the Milekeys. Then Ardlor turned, speeding suddenly as if trying to lose her. One good look at the ripples of apparently identical deep troughs and canyons, and Killashandra wanted to be nearer him, who knew, presumably, where he was going.

"Stupid twit's forgotten I'm supposed to be with him," she muttered grimly and steeled herself for a chase.

Ardlor was a wild flitter-pilot and she was hard pressed to keep him in her viewplate as he swerved and tumbled deep into this canyon, zooming up, out and over into a still darker gorge so that she almost lost sight of him a couple of times in the shadows. Only the sun's telltale refraction on his bumble-bee striped flitter cued her as to his whereabouts.

At length he settled to a ledge, barely big enough for the two flitters.

"Why are you following me? Claim-jumpers are fined to the fullest extent, Section 2, Paragraph 3. You'll not get credit from my hard work!" He was jumping up and down in rage as she emerged exhausted from her flitter.

With a desperate and totally uncharacteristic display of diplomacy, she got Ardlor to switch on the Playback. She soothed him further with an exceptional feast from her own galley.

"Well, you've got to remember that you can't stay here all the time," Ardlor finally said, demurring, once the Playback proved to him he'd agreed to shepherd her. "Two days and then you'll have to go the next range over. And if you ever. . . ."

"Section 2, Paragraph 3. I won't claim-jump," she vowed earnestly. "Not that I'd ever be able to find my way back here anyhow. I was so busy keeping you in my sights, how could I remember directional changes?"

Ardlor grumbled but that admission pacified him as much as the well-cooked food.

Flitters were equipped with tracking devices and homing signals. Traditional compasses, excellent guides on most Earth-type planets, tended to be unreliable on Ballybran: something to do with the storms and the crystal and the absence of much heavy metal in the planet's crust. A directional finder could have been further developed to surmount such problems, but the crystal singers raised such a fuss about how that would facilitate claim-jumping that the research was abandoned. After all, the singer could get home on the directional finder and if he were "gone," the Guild Cruiser could locate him.

As Killashandra was to discover, instinct caused something to blossom in the inner ear that enabled a singer to find his or her way back to a lode they'd once cut . . . some familiar note in the special crystalline chorus.

For the hills did sing back at you, in harmony, counterpoint or descant. Sing out a note and the whole side of a canyon answered you, ringing up and down the valley; velvet in the unseen shadowy depths that the sun might never lighten; high, clear, sweet on the crest of the ridges.

Nighttime was an exquisite pain of beautiful sound as the crystal sang and cried in the cooling air, diminishing to pianissimo multiple-part harmonies, so gentle the whisper was a mere caress in the blood.

"Crystal song is addictive and exhausting," Killashandra announced (softly—so as not to start echoes) to herself on the fourth morning. She'd managed to sleep that night by wearing the padded helmet and closing the flitter's ports.

She'd stayed beside Ardlor the first two days, watching him closely and noticing his mistakes, too, though he didn't appear to note his errors in judgment. She did remind him about rose quartz in octagons and he thanked her gratefully the first nineteen times. After that he'd sullenly told her as he'd obstinately cut another tetrahedron that he'd been cutting crystal for longer than she'd been alive and she'd better mind her own business.

The third day she took his advice and hopped her flitter over not one but two ridges. Someone had worked this mountain before. She could see the old cuts, now wind-beveled and roughened by bombardment of shard and dirt.

Despite her self-confidence, Killashandra could not keep her hand from shaking as she held the supersonic cutter, preparatory to making her debut as a crystal singer. She took a good deep breath or two, pressed against her diaphragm and let an A-sharp above middle C emerge from her throat.

Instantly she was bombarded with echoes. It was one thing to listen to Ardlor making crystal sing, another to hear your own note bounce back at you from all sides. Slightly sour to the left, her ear told her, but true and pure directly in front of her where the rock face was scarred by old cuttings.

"Octagons," she told herself firmly and made the first cut.

Crystal cries! A dissonance like no other, a complaint of an agony so primitive that it shook Killashandra to the roots of her teeth. She was so startled by the unexpected "pain" that she froze, and the agony turned to pure sound, as clear as the note she then hurriedly tuned on the cutter.

As she'd been forewarned, itwas different cutting live crystal and different when your hand was guiding the cutter, and your bones echoed the sound. She excised the octagon from the quartz face, pared the outer sides and turned off the cutter. Almost reverently she held the finished prism in her hands. Reverberations from the cut-echoes vibrated against her flesh and she experienced a genuine awe for the dazzling object she had wrested from such a dull womb. Sunlight coruscated from all faces. The last thrum of sound was absorbed in her skin and yet Killashandra could not part with this, her first crystal song.

How long she stood musing over her handiwork she never knew, but a cloud passing over the sun roused her to sensations of cold and hunger. As much because she was yearning to repeat this magical rapport with her victims, Killashandra forced herself instead to eat and find a heavier jacket. She remembered the storm alarms. They were comfortably inactive.

She approached her second cut with more confidence, working about the first incision. This crystal sounded true, a third higher, and the finished octagon was smaller. But the experience of cutting, of holding the finished crystal like a warm pulsing rock-heart in her hand, was as exquisitely beautiful.

She'd cut only four crystals by the time the range began its night song. She puzzled over this phenomenon, having watched Ardlor cut thirty and more crystals as large or larger in a single day. She wondered if she was working too slowly, though she had no sense of slacking, knowing herself to be manually dextrous.

She was forced to the conclusion that she must be spending an inordinate amount of time communing with the finished prism. She took herself sternly to task the second morning and determinedly placed each crystal in the protective casing as soon as she made the final slice.

Obviously she'd lost hours of time in the sensual contemplation of her handiwork for that day she cut 19 rose quartz octagons in A-sharp or higher, triumphantly finishing the day with a five-tone dominant of matched rose crystal.

She woke in the night, suddenly, an odd apprehension driving sleep from her mind. Uneasily she checked the crystal, wondering if something might be causing them to sing, but the smooth sides were silent when she flicked back the protective sheathings.

Outside the night was clear and cold and the range somnolent. Only the faintest whisper of their lullabies was audible. She glanced at the storm alarms and thought she detected a flicker on the DEW, but it might have been her imagination for nothing else blurped in a space of five minutes.

She gained some uneasy sleep for the remainder of the night, but by the first crack of light she was wide awake and doubly apprehensive. Two widely spaced flickers marred the dull face of the DEW. If there were a storm in the making, she would have plenty of other warning. She buried herself in work, but despite the involvement with crystal song, she was continually aware of something being not quite right. She was storing the first full crate of the day in the hold when she heard more alarms singing out.

Mach storm! She knew the drill and computed its arrival in approximately three hours, building from the northwest and due to sweep her relative area in the southeast. She had two hours leeway to escape the consequences.

She cleared away her equipment, grav-locked the precious cargo and strapped herself in. Not that she'd need the storm fastenings. She took off, activating the homing device as she'd not worked out where she actually was, thanks to Ardlor's evasive tactics. Ardlor!

She veered left, over his working, and saw him busily chewing out a large tetrahedron. She wondered if he'd remembered octagons at all.

He was furious when he saw her, screaming vituperative curses and chanting Section 2, Paragraph 3. He'd report her to Lanzecki. Infringement! She'd not have any of his tetrahedrons. When she tried to leave her flitter, he attacked her with his cutter. She evaded him and moving swiftly got into his flitter and snapped up the Remind toggle.

"I'm supposed to be with you, you addle-pated baritone," she roared at him as the replay intoned the original orders. "Listen! It's Lanzecki's voice."

The crystal singer paused in his efforts to slice her up. And she took advantage of his momentary armistice to flick on the storm warnings. They blared forth, above Lanzecki's recital, at top, urgent volume.

"There's a mach storm coming. We've got to leave."

"Leave?" Panic replaced anger in Ardlor's wizened face. "I can't leave. I've struck a pure vein. . . . I've. . . ." He clamped his mouth shut with remembered caution and was about to renew his attack on her when the storm klaxons hit a new dissonance. "I'll just cut one more. Just one more," he pleaded with her piteously. "I've got to get off-world this time. I've got to get crystal out of my blood."

Killashandra snagged the cutter from his relaxed grip.

"You can't cut crystal with a mach storm coming, you fool."

"Crystal really sings when a storm's coming. Can't you hear it? Are you deaf?"

Now she fell for his ploy, stepping to the flitter entrance and hearing the distant thrumming as the ranges began to echo the stroking of approaching winds. Ard-lor wrenched his cutter from her hand and leapt from the flitter. Cursing, Killashandra followed him, caught his tunic and, applying pressure, swung him toward her, lashing out with a sure fist to the side of his jaw. He collapsed.

She caught the cutter from his lax hand, let him easily to the ground. She put the cutter carefully in its cradle before she struggled to get him aboard and into his couch. The storm warnings added their wild obbligato to her exertions, reaching a well-nigh unendurable wail.

"Oh, shut up. Shut up!" she cried, exasperated in her efforts to save Ardlor, his crystals and his ship.

It was then she caught sight of her own craft and realized her dilemma. Two ships and one conscious pilot. She tried to rouse Ardlor but he was impervious to stimulus.

Killashandra searched her memory for a Section and Paragraph covering rescue and salvage, but she simply couldn't think what it was. She did remember the two vouchers for escorting Carrik back and decided that there'd be something and she'd recall it later. After all, she owed Ardlor something for shepherding her when he didn't want to and he did want to get off-world this trip, so it was up to her to preserve his everlasting unwanted tetrahedrons. A quick glance told her that his cargo space wasn't full. She might be able to save something herself. She raced to her ship and scurried back with the dominant fifths. They'd be worth something. Would she have time for more?

The warning systems had climbed several deafening decibels toward the supersonic. She could now see the darkening of the horizon and the storm's approach. She risked one more trip, almost stumbling in her haste to get the crate aboard. She took care to secure them, vowing that she was going to exorcise her conscience as soon as possible for the nuisancy thing it was.

All flitters had similar control panels, though Ardlor's was somewhat the worse for wear and, despite a recent servicing, dirt engrained.

She lifted off, slamming on the homing device and veering upward as fast as she dared. His craft was sluggish. Didn't Ardlor believe in maintenance? And he all ready to cut again with the storm speeding down on them? He took ridiculous risks.

She cast one last look at her own trim flitter, wondering if she'd ever see it again, wondering how much damage the storm would wreak on it. She'd have to pay for the repairs, Sections 9, 10, 11 ... all paragraphs. Funny she couldn't think what the salvage rule was.

She was glad she'd secured Ardlor, because he came to before they'd quite cleared the Milekeys and he turned into a raving maniac. She could appreciate his agony because she felt the mach-tuned dissonances herself, jabbing her nerve ends, scoring her eardrums despite the buffering helmet.

He finally knocked himself out again, throwing his head against the duralloy wall so the last few hours into Ballybran City gave her the requisite quiet to restore her own nerves. Nonetheless she was feeling rather pleased with herself as she landed Ardlor's flitter and reported to field control that she had Ardlor with her.

She stood and watched the medics take the man's limp body off, even though she was told to report instantly to Lanzecki.

"He'll probably be all right," the medics told her diffidently.

She was miffed that they didn't seem to care about him or comment on her self-sacrifice. She'd not expected bouquets but a remark somehow seemed in order. If anything, the ground crew was uncomplimen-tarily annoyed with her for rescuing the older flitter.

Despite that prelude, she was hardly prepared for Lanzecki's castigations.

"Lost your flitter first time out? And a new one at that! How did you contrive to be so careless?" he demanded.

"I wasn't careless. I had to rescue Ardlor and I couldn't transfer everything to my flitter. Not with a storm ranging down on us."

"You rescued Ardlor?" Lanzecki was astounded. "I gave you more credit than that."

Killashandra gagged. "But... he wouldn't listen. He even tried to slice me as a claim-jumper. . . ." She couldn't believe Lanzecki's reaction. "I had to knock him out to save his neck. What'd you expect me to do?"

"Leave him there, of course."

She stared, aghast, at the Guildmaster.

"He'd've shown no compunction about leaving you in similar circumstances, I assure you. You did all that could be required of you by apprising him of the storm's approach. Then you should have taken off and saved your own nerves . .. and cuttings. As it is," and Lanzecki made a few passes at his computer, "you're now in debt to the Guild to the tune of 8,000 credits." He looked at her sternly. "You're responsible for the repairs ... if any can be effected when your flitter is recovered. . . ."

"But the crystals I'd already cut. . . ."

Lanzecki shrugged. "The containers are designed to keep the crystal safe through the normal hazards of air travel, not being bucked down mile-deep canyons. I doubt any will survive.

"I got two crates of rose quartz octagons out of my ship before I lifted off."

"You did?" Lanzecki's sour expression lightened and he seemed less forbidding. "What did you salvage?" His fingers poised over the computer keys.

"It's on the docket. . . ." She pointed.

"On Ardlor's?"

"Well, certainly. . . ." "Then it's to his credit."

"Oh, come now. How else could I get mine back? And no one told me I had to sort cargo, too." She was mad now.

Lanzecki continued obdurate. "The rules which govern the members of this Guild were clearly explained to you, Killashandra Ree. This is covered. . . ."

"I can't remember all of your forsaken rules for the gods' sakes!"

'"Ah!" Lanzecki's face brightened suddenly. "Fair enough. In the emergency you did not remember the need to personalize your crates."

"I had rose quartz, cut in octagons, one set is five octagons in a dominant A-major chord."

"Ah, very good. Very good indeed." Lanzecki nodded approvingly as he jabbed computer buttons. The computer chattered back at him and he beamed up at her. "Even better. Six crates of octagons . . . two rose quartz, four black. . . ."

"Ah. . . ."

"Ardlor is screaming that if you claim any tetrahedrons, you're stealing his cuttings." "But I. . . ."

"Therefore the octagons are undeniably yours." Lanzecki eyed her so sternly that her attempts to be honest caught in her throat. "Now," and he made another pass at the keyboard, glanced at the print-out, "you are only 5,750 credits in the Guild's debt. Rose quartz octagons bring a premium market price. Especially that chord!"

"There's the voucher from you for bringing Carrik back, too."

"Why so there is." He tallied that in as well and then beamed at her. "Well, you haven't done badly your first trip out. Now if the flitter can be salvaged. . . ."

"Speaking of salvage, do I get nothing for Ardlor and his cargo?"

Lanzecki looked her straight in the eye. "I think, my
dear Killashandra, you've realized more than your due
out of this affair. I wouldn't push my luck any further.
Or Ardlor may remember that you returned, unasked
to his claim. He might even file a charge against
you___ "

Lanzecki held his hand up against her protest. "I accept your version unconditionally because you're too new in the Guild to be disoriented. However, you've had a valuable lesson, which I hope you'll never forget. Don't worry about another man's ears in the crystal ranges. Keep your own clear. Gratitude is dependent on memory. That's one thing that you can't count on anymore."

"I'll remember that," Killashandra said grimly.

Donna? I am an alienist. Why is it you think your father and mother wish me to treat you? DW: I have people inside me. Dr. S: Do you mean you are pregnant? DW: I have people inside me, walking around, pulling the strings.

Dr. S: You are a marionette—is that what you're

saying? You feel you are mechanical?

DW: No. I feel like myself, but they're in there. The

woman is looking out through my left eye now.

Dr. S: How many of them are there?

DW: Three unless you count the other one.

Dr. S: Do you know their names?

DW: The man, the girl, and the woman.

Dr. S: The man is your father, the girl is yourself, and

the woman is your mother—isn't that right?

DW: No, I'm outside.

Dr. S: You are holding your arms oddly and twisting your legs. Why do you do that?

(Patient was sitting in an extremely contorted position which gave the impression that her knees and shoulders were dislocated, but seemed to suffer no discomfort.—HS)

DW: The other.

Dr. S: The one who is not the man, the girl, or the woman—is that correct?

DW: Doctor, this is going to be quite difficult for you

to understand, but this girl is not ill; we—my friends

and I—have found out that she is being used as an

energy base by Thag, and we're trying to protect her

from him until we can dislodge him.

Dr. S: You have a deep voice. I presume you are a

man.

DW: My name is Harry Nailer. Dr. S: Donna, what are you doing?

(Patient had left her chair and was walking about the room on all fours with a motion sometimes bestial, sometimes insectile.—HS)

Dr. S: Donna, if you don't get back into your chair I'm not going to talk to you anymore. . .. That's better. You may lie on my sofa if you like. Do you mind if I smoke? Does your father smoke? Do you know that my wife won't let me smoke in the dining room at home? She says the smoke gets into the drapes, but I like a good cigar.

DW: We could evict Thag by killing her, of course,
but besides the moral issue we don't think it would do
much good—he'd probably find somebody else, and
we'd have a hard time finding him. If we can cut him
off____

Dr. S: I don't like the light way in which you dismiss the moral issue, Donna. Your life is very valuable. DW: You see, from our point of view she's already dead.

Dr. S: No, no!

DW: What year is this?

Dr. S: It is nineteen thirty-five, Donna.

DW: We are from nineteen ninety-seven.

Dr. S: I would like to talk to Donna, please.

DW: All right, but she's not going to be able to tell you

much.

Dr. S: Donna, you are going to break your own bones—you frighten me. Have you been practicing to become a contortionist? DW: No.

Dr. S: That is better, now you sound like a pretty girl.

Can you tell me who these people are?

DW: My father's already told you about Thag, and

there's Laurel Baker. I'm June Nailer.

Dr. S: I have told you that I wish to speak to Donna

—the voice is fine, much better, but it must be Donna. I

will talk to no one else.

DW: I could pretend to be Donna and you wouldn't know the difference. But we need your help. In our time, you see, there were too many people, so some of them became nin—that's what we called them. It meant that you resigned from nature to exist in a purely subjective framework. Since we exist at a lower eneigy level, independent of physical reality, we'll last much longer, and fade away instead of dying. . . .

(The man's voice here, Doctor. I assume this is still the patient? ?—jj)

The nin approach a zero energy level asymptotically. Theoretically we will remain in existence forever—or at least, indefinitely. That was my father. I was going to say that when you're a nin you don't consume the planetary resources. But you bounce back and forth for a long time—father and I are still bouncing, and Laurel, too, now that she's close to us.

Dr. S: JoanlWill you come in here a moment, please? Nurse Johnson: Yes, Dr. Stein.

Dr. S: From this girl's parents I want the blanket release, or I'm not accepting this patient. You know the one I mean? Everything. All. If they say yes, get them to sign and show them out. If they will not sign tell me and we will give her back to them. Nurse Johnson: I understand, Doctor. DW: The bouncing—as June calls it—isn't important.

Personalities newly arrived carry a heavy life-charge

that draws them back from time to time, and draws

others with them. Thag and those like him are

important—we don't know how many there are.

Dr. S: So now you are an older woman, a lady. You

wish me to believe you have multiple personalities—is

that not so? That is very rare, Donna. Most often we

find that those who seem to have them have really other

illnesses, and this is a disguise for them.

DW: This would go better, wouldn't you say, Doctor,

if we could control her arms and legs?

Dr. S: Also if you would control your voice. It is a good

voice for an opera singer, all that vibrato, but not for a

young girl.

DW: But we cannot. It's all that the three of us can do to hold the speech centers and the involuntary nervous system. You see, we have discovered that many of the nin are not simply human beings who have crossed over, but creatures who by the strength of their energy can assume that semblance to the others; and by some inversion we don't understand, they attenuate into the past rather than the future. Once there they are able to seize someone—like this poor baby—devour her energies, and use them to return.

Dr. S: You have tripped yourself up, Donna. If only

the Thags, as you call them, can go back to the present,

how did your other three voices get here?

DW: We seized Thag and forced him to draw us back

with him, Doctor. And I was not a singer in nature; I was

a medium, and one of the first to cross.

Dr. S: Of course. So you have been listening to the

spiritualists, Donna? Or perhaps only reading their

books?

Nurse Johnson: Here is the release, Dr. Stein.

Dr. S: Thank you. We will try the Cerletti treatment in a few minutes, I think. Donna, you seem to want me to do something to help you. What is it? DW: This is Harry Nailer again, Dr. Stein. As Miss Baker explained, we among the nin see Thag and others like him simply as powerful—perhaps eccentric—human personalities. The strength of their energies allows him to project this. As time passes and their energy level is reduced, we sometimes sense what I might call wrong notes. Miss Baker, who was a clairvoyant in nature, is very sensitive to this; and with my help and my daughter June's she began keeping a particular watch on Thag. At first we thought that he might be an unusually strong and bad personality fragment—all personalities shatter to some extent when they make the crossing, unless they have achieved complete union, what Miss Baker calls interior peace, while in nature.

Dr. S: So your Thag is not a human being or even a part of one, but what is he? I wish you would allow him to talk to me.

DW: Laurel Baker again, Doctor. I doubt that we could. Never having existed as a human in nature, Thag is an unskillful operator of the human body as you have seen. He may be a creature of a different sphere, or a spiritual survivor of a prehuman race.

(The masculine voice again—jj)

Something that might work would be to lower this girl's energy—that might force Thag to make some move that would let us get at him. As things are now, we're deadlocked. If she were confined, for example, and placed on a very restricted diet; or if she were forced to donate blood.

Dr. S: Well, we may come to confinement in time,

Donna, but first we are going to try something else, something new. You would not be familiar with the work of Cerletti and Bini in Italy; but they have developed a technique that shows great promise, and I have been using it experimentally. We place metal rods—they are called electrodes—to the temples; there is a conductive cream applied also which contains metal particles so that there are no burns. Then an electric current is passed, very briefly, through the brain. DW: Wait, Harry, let me talk to him. We are familiar with that treatment, Dr. Stein, but it will do no good here.

Dr. S: I expected you to say that, Madame opera singer. Is it because you are above all that? So superhuman that you cannot be removed from a poor girl's brain by mere electricity? Or is it that so much energy will raise your level and catapult you into your future again? Or will you bounce, as you call it when you speak in your natural voice, and appear to me in my surgery wearing ray pistols and rocket belts? You see I have begun to talk like Dr. Huer in the funnies, but I'm going to try the Cerletti treatment just the same. DW: Electrical energies are far too coarse to do the things you suggest, Doctor, but what their effect will be upon our ability to protect this girl, or on ourselves, I cannot say. From what I know of Thag, the thing that is sucking her life-energies—

Dr. S: Ah, I have it now. The way you move around the room, Donna—it had seemed to me that it was like the walking of a spider, yet there was something of the way a rat runs too, but now I know. You are a bat! In Germany, when I was a boy, we would sometimes throw things to knock them from the eaves of the coal shed, and when they are on the ground they walk just as you do. So your Thag is a blutsauger and next you will want me to pound a stick into you, which Dr. Freud and I

understand. No, Donna, but you need help with all

those people inside you, and we will try the Cerletti

treatment.

DW: Dr. Stein—

(End of cylinder.—jj)

The electrical treatment was administered to the patient as described on pp. 16-17. She convulsed satisfactorily and lapsed into normal sleep as soon as the current was discontinued. About one hour later I visited her bedside; she appeared rational but exhausted and not inclined to converse. Nurse reports she had said earlier, "I feel something gnawing at my heart." I left and a few minutes later nurse, who had gone to get patient soup, found her dead. I am preparing an account of this case for forwarding to Drs. Cerletti and Bini.

death of Abraham, witchcraft has been declared a delusion of barbaric and unmurcan minds. (I could still be burned for that "supposed," maybe, although the bonfires are rapidly losing favor as public entertainments, but this code I write in is not likely to be broken by those muttonheads upstairs, and my explosive notebooks ought to be safe behind the massive Complete Works of J. Fenimore Cooper.) Fifth Assistant is a soft, hideaway job. Here in the Ecclesiastical State of Nuber we are within my native land of Katskil but not of it, as the antique papal state once sheltered within the body of Italy. I am a mean, cynical, respectable old man, almost invisible, less vulnerable than most citizens to arrest and torture in the cause of modern alignment. Down here in the cellars I read, scribble at my History, and am sometimes almost happy. I am the jolly worm in your apple, O Ecclesia—look to the bloom on your cheek! For I shall one day be transfigured by a printing press into a book, and chew my way out clear through you, and spread my wings, while you fall to the mud, and rot.

I am thinking back to the St. George's Hatchet Day of the year 266, thirty-five years ago. I will write this moral tale for your someday instruction, whoever you are —my fellow man, poor sod!—because I have found out where the powers of darkness reside.

We thirteen silly adolescents met that June day according to our by-laws in the clearing below Simon's Mound, and Rudi Zavier was talking to us, resting his hand on the Stone of Sacrifice. "You have been faithful, my twelve," he said. "You shall learn more about the Master of the Horns." If you listened to Rudi, already loving him, your common sense wouldn't be yours to use again until he said so. He was close to twenty, by several years the oldest of us, full of inner fires.

That day he wore a brass pin on his shirt, a cherry and-hatchet symbol of St. George, the way any conventional citizen might do. We knew Rudi scoffed at the Murcan Saints—it was part of our fun—but wearing such trash was what he called policy. He saw me look at the pin and took it off, grinning, making a half-motion as if wiping his arse with it, but his eyes were chilly, bits of blue sharp sky, probing us, searching and measuring. He was taller than any of us except me, but not weedy as I was—Rudi could bend the seven-foot bow. He stood by the Stone, easy and beautiful, and behind him rose the colossus, Mafairson's Oak.

I wonder if it still stands—but I'm not going back to Nupal. It was said to be the tree where they hanged Fiddler Mafairson for robbing the Kingstone mail coach in former days, and the brave fella broke his fiddle over a stone before they strung him up. Some claim it's only a story from an Old-Time song; and I don't know. That day a moody wind was intruding on our sheltered space. I thought of Mafairson's ghost, craving human sounds, interrupting them with a sigh.

The sun came out a moment on Rudi's bright hair. Almost white it was, silver spun to gossamer, an imitation of age above a face of youthful splendor, demonic, secret. Rudi (at the time I knew him, when his childhood was spent) was not one for explaining himself. Maybe he tried to when his mother was living. She was a big pale woman with suffering eyes, who died a year after his family moved to Nupal from Albania up in Moha!

That day maybe our youngest—fat Nell Kunak or Jo Makepeace or poor Jena Doren who never stopped loving Rudi—believed the sun came out because he summoned it. Not Piet Horver. I think that big unhappy boy, the only one of us who never laughed, was already feeling the Church drag him back from our naughtiness. He had been the first member of the coven when Rudi started it, and worshipped Rudi fantastically for a while, but the bond was straining to the snapping point. Understand, my good readers of the future who may never exist, when I was a boy it was a common belief that witches could command the sun and moon, vagaries of storm and calm. And though today I see a few signs of reaction against such credulous nonsense, I promise you the multitudes will cherish it for a long time yet, for faith is easily generated, but the use of reason demands courage.

At seventeen I may not have believed that Rudi could dominate the sun and moon and rain. But there was a time when I think I would have jumped into the tarpits of Hell for him.

He had won me four years earlier, soon after he and his family came to Nupal. I was thirteen, all hands and feet and long bones—awkwardest damned boy in Nupal, my father said. Rudi won me by listening to my stumbling talk of becoming an explorer, when my sailor father couldn't hear it without a noisy snigger. And look you, for a few years I did that! In my early forties, as a Clerical in the company of only two scouts, I penetrated the southern jungle, marking out a new trail to the empire of Misipa. I know how its harbors gaze south over the sea, over the round turning world toward tropic-hearted Velen, cruel land of spices, coffee, mahogany, slaves for the brutal Misipan markets. But it's too late for me to go again, and I'll never sail to Velen. (Besides, those are other tales.) Four years after Rudi thus won me, I was still in subjection to his brilliance and power, my own will spellbound.

"You have been faithful," Rudi said to us. "When we formed this coven last year we swore loyalty. We haven't accomplished much yet—it had to be a time of testing.

You've done nobly." We looked, we hoped, nobly modest. "I'm proud of you. No one has left our company nor betrayed our secrets—pity for him if he had!" According to our by-laws, the penalty for betrayal was death. I suppose none of us except Rudi (and maybe Piet Horver) had more than a dim idea of what we had agreed to there.

Our "secrets" included our naked romps and orgies in this clearing. At our feasts each of us was required to bring liberated goodies—liberated not just from family but from outside victims who might holler for the Nupal constables. And there were the sacrifices on the Stone under Mafairson's Oak. Stolen chickens mostly; but a month ago at the May meeting Elder Meehan's smelly old half-blind dog Prince had waddled along to the gathering at Jon Bright's heels and Jon had not been able to send him home. Poor fool, he shambled up to the slanted Sacrificial Stone, lifted his leg at it, and climbed on it gazing down at us, tongue dribbling. I remember mifky spots where cataracts were forming on both his eyes; they were fuzzy at the iris and stupid with age. Before there was time for Jo Makepeace or any other softhearted one among us to protest, Rudi Zavier—no one else was allowed to touch the Sacrificial Knife —drove that knife into Prince's heart. Some of us trembled while his blood drenched the Stone.

(Elder Meehan, ancient and simple, searched all over town, speculating and grieving. We knew every pitiable move he made, and most of us were guilt-sick, but even little Jo Makepeace couldn't speak.)

I felt sometimes that Jo was with us as a sort of elfin observer. I don't mean a spy; I mean he inhabited the world itself like a stranger marveling at the darkness and occasional brightness of human ways. A fancy, of course—Jo was just a sweet kid with imagination, which is miracle enough, and maybe he let himself be drawn into Rudi's foolish coven because the poet in him wanted to discover what shadows are.

"Have I done wrong?" said Rudi, wiping the knife and smiling at us like bright death. "If so, let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

"How shall I become without sin?" That was Piet Horver, but what he said only began as a shout; it ended in a mumble, as Rudi walked to him and took hold of his fist, gently straightening the fingers.

"See, Piet," he said. "There's no stone."

If any townsman had found the Sacrificial Stone and the blood, other witches might have been blamed, though I doubt whether there were any in Nupal in our time; a hundred years earlier perhaps. Certainly in the remoter Katskil towns, deeper in the wilderness, witchcraft may well have been practiced. I wouldn't care to say it doesn't go on even nowadays, back in the hills. There's no mystery thicker than the things good people prefer not to mention.

Now at that June meeting in evening sunlight, Rudi said: "Because of your faithfulness I'll tell you one thing: what the Church says about the existence of only one god is the biggest of all the Church's lies. And soon I'll prove it to you."

We gaped—not at the notion of more than one god, which is probably natural to children, nor at the idea that the Church would tell fibs, but just at hearing Rudi put such things in words. We knew what would happen if any Church person heard him and passed on information to the College of Examiners at Nuber, that grim gang of inquisitors which was rapidly becoming the dread official conscience of all Katskil. Rudi's youth wouldn't save him from the bonfire. Public opinion might be saying no about witchcraft; not about heresy. We had also the thrilling second thought: He is trusting us, saying to us what he would say to no others.

And there was the mingy little chance that Jehovah might hear him, although thus far heaven had rudely ignored our toughest blasphemies. Believing in Lucifer does imply at least some belief in Jehovah. If you don't believe in a god, how can you defy him? The ones who truly don't believe, I've noticed, are the only ones who don't get uptye about religion. (I'm giving this an entire chapter in my History of Heresy.) They leave the roaring and the acid forgiving to the true believers, and get on with their own affairs.

"There are many gods," Rudi said. "Little gods, great ones. Think of the thousands of happenings, all day long. How could one god deal with them?" To many of us ignoramuses this was a clincher. Jena Doren nodded her bright head; she had to believe that Rudi, who constantly hurt and humiliated her, couldn't be wrong. "But the one greatest of all gods is Lucifer, Master of the Horns—Lucifer, Son of the Morning. They say he fell from heaven, do they? Why, he rejected the god of heaven, found heaven to be a poor sorry place." Rudi spread his arms, holding us with his yearning, mocking eyes. A number of his tricks were borrowed from Father Rupet's pulpit mannerisms; more were his own. Rudi was original; the devil dwelling behind his eyes stayed consistent with itself, even to the end. (Remember, too, we were stuffed full of our juicy 3rd Century romances, those hell-love-and-disaster yarns that promise to bloom better than ever in the 4th, with the growth of printing houses and what passes for literacy.) "No, he didn't fall from heaven, my twelve. He flew down to us of his own free will, to be Lord of Hell and Lord of the Earth also—the Earth to which he brought the floods, the pestilence, the cleansing fire of Old Time—the Earth that he holds in the cup of his left hand."

I have heard more practiced soul-rousers since then, but none with Rudi's voice-music, his power to shove that voice under your skin till you felt on the edge of orgasm from sheer scare and goosepimples. "Serve him, serve the Master of the Horns! He is the lightning-fire of the dark!" He had us swaying and moaning, as the most devout Abramites do in church. The girls closed their eyes in ecstasy. I saw Anna Hiel's nipples stiffen under her thin smock, and she slid me a glance. "He is the spark in the tiger's eye." (Who cared about making sense out of Rudi's rhapsody?—the purpose was the music, not the meaning: it was our Hear us, O Abraham and our Kyrie eleison.) "He is the black wolf s cry, the blade of sacrifice, the blood that follows it. And you shall see him in the flesh."

He stopped, his silence shocking us out of our fuzzy trance. He was waiting and smiling. Rudi knew how to outwait an audience. Then he leered and said in a luscious imitation of Father Rupet's cadence: "Ay-y-men." We laughed and pressed close with our questions.

Relaxed now and amiable, he said, oh, he just meant that at the next meeting we'd see him put on the attributes of Lucifer, that was all—yes, my good loves, including the horns—and when he did, the Master's spirit would enter him. He couldn't predict what he might then be obliged to do—we wouldn't mind kissing his arse, would we? He laughed, too, watching us. In a true sense, he would be Lucifer while the spirit made use of him.

The rest of that June meeting became an orgy as it grew dark. I chased Anna Hiels three times around the

Oak and got her down squealing with her legs open. Jon Bright took her twice after I had spent. But we were uneasy, though we had sentinels posted. Maybe we felt ourselves under the regard of Lucifer and it chilled us, gave us the sense of something enormous, wanton, consuming, outside our trivial posturing and capering.

Adam Ganz, who loved boys, got into a fight with Piet Horver, who shouted that his games with little Jo Makepeace were depraved—that from a witch! Sometimes we were more than comic. Rudi had to separate them when Piet earned himself a bloody nose and started to rave and cry. And Jena Doren fell to weeping, too, and couldn't stop, when we went through our Black Mass, the Maharba (Abraham said backwards), making her naked body the table for our mock communion.

Before the Fourth of July Night meeting, hell was loose in Nupal. Three young girls—Dora Mallon and Ethel Lyme, and Dasi Stiles, who was seventeen but queer in the head, or "tarded" to use a Katskil expression—were having fits and screaming of bewitchment. Dora and Ethel were cousins, and inseparable. Dora was a hunchback and for that reason suspected by some of being a mue, but the Church had let her live. Ethel's bland round face was purpled by a great birthmark on the left side. They had named no names, so far. When some fool asked whether one Mam Shiller might be responsible for their pitiable state, the wenches were supposed to have screamed louder.

At Sudler's Dairy, where Rudi and I were working that summer, Rudi told me our coven might be involved, if not up to the neck at least up to the balls. Dora Mallon, he told me, had suspected the existence of our group and approached him with hints, wanting to join. He had put her off with evasions. "She may have seen some of us slipping away to Simon's Mound," he said. "She's a bitch we don't need. Sharp, though. I don't think any of us would have betrayed the coven. Do you, Sam?" He was looking into me with ice-blue coldness. "Sam?"

"No, Rudi. No." His look changed then to one of dreaminess, and some kind of exhilaration. Rudi's job at Sudler's was a joke, possibly due to some democratic notion of his father's that it would be "good for the boy." The Zaviers lived in a great gloomy house with ten acres of fenced-in privacy and a mess of servants. But Rudi rather liked the work, and it kept him in touch with me.

Here in my cozy cellars I have dug up and read some accounts of the Salem witchcraft episode of 1692, the addled trial, the hangings, the pressing to death of brave Giles Corey. In Nupal I suppose history was repeating itself with a big squeak, as it may easily do for any people who have discarded knowledge and kept no understanding of the past. In old Massachusetts, however, the madness was followed by a significant revulsion against that kind of emotional garbage: the outrages did clear the air. In Nupal we had no Robert Calef or Thomas Brattle to risk their necks by pillorying the holy ghouls with indignation and laughter.

Mam Shiller was a fierce old twice-widowed reprobate living in a shanty outside of town, off the old Kingstone Road (which hadn't gone through to the national capital since the earthquake of 260 and still doesn't). She kept chickens, a few goats, a garden cherished behind thick hedges. In her late forties, she was currently giving bed and board to a traveling tinker who had holed up with her, scandalizing the town. I never could see that she was depriving Nupal's good ladies of anything, except the tinker, who was perfectly useless.

Mam Shiller wouldn't have strangers near her garden; she believed their sole object was to trample her flower beds. She'd take out after them with a broom or anything else handy. She also believed the town was dead set against her, and in that of course she was right—they are always against the queer and the lonely.

Dasi Stiles may have started the outbreak. Dasi nourished an ungovernable passion for flowers. She didn't admire them—she ate them. They must have done her good, too, for she had the creamiest complexion of any chick in Nupal, along with the weakest mind. Mam Shiller had recently chased her a quarter-mile with a pair of shears, Dasi chewing and strewing rose petals all the way. Slow to anger like any halfwit, Dasi did resent being chased, and I suppose Mam Shiller's roaring threats were impressive, though the old woman wouldn't have hurt a mouse. Dasi must have gabbled to the other girls.

All three were children of poor families in the shanty section, but when Dora toppled screaming and frothing on the church steps on Friday morning while the congregation was filing out, she got enough attention for minor nobility. Ask Baron Reilla—he was there, and gave a few orders.

They carried her across the street into the house of the Elder Meehan. His wife, Mam Clotilda, was as pious-vague and sweet and cloth-headed as he was, while his sister-in-law Miz Beulah saw to it that they remembered to eat and get up and go to bed. Left to himself, Elder Meehan would have sat reading the Book of Abraham until he dried up and blew away. The Meehans should have had children, everyone said. They made a huge tremulous fuss over afflicted Dora, and over Ethel who followed along shouting: "O my poor Dora, my darling, will they never cease a-persecuting you?"—at which words the people in their good church clothes did marvel. Baron Reilla remarked she could hardly have got them out of a romance-book, since he didn't suppose she could read. And we all chewed on the fact that Ethel Lyme had said they. Ethel then flopped on the bed along with Dora, frothing and wailing like a skinned wildcat. Presently both were speaking with tongues—that's what the faithful call it when the gobbling sounds almost like words.

Dasi Stiles had squeezed in along with the rest of us. When the girls were well launched on that sad ecstasy, I'll Be damned if Dasi wasn't down there prancing on all fours wagging her handsome big rump and barking like a dog.

Father Rupet tore over from the church, limping with his bad knee. At his arrival those three maidens really sucked up their lungs and tried for a record. I heard Ethel roaring: "Don't you dare touch me with that thing, you beast, you monster! I already said I wouldn't tell—ooh, ooh, that hurts!" I was crowded into a corner; being tall I didn't miss anything. Rudi was there, but didn't try to elbow forward; the girls may not have seen him. And then—I don't know quite how it started, or who asked the first question—presently the name Mam Shiller was zizzing around the room like a captive hornet.

By evening Mam Shiller was secured in the town lock-up. We heard she was to be tried when the Ecclesiastical Circuit Court arrived at Nupal in September. They said it required two men to get the chain fastened to her leg.

At the dairy, from the corner of his mouth as we were cleaning the milking stalls, Rudi said: "Those bitches are just warming up. They didn't name Mam Shiller, they just picked it up. I don't know why Dora hasn't named us."

Men were nearby, pitching hay into the loft. I said in the same kind of voice: "Could she be trying to scare us, hoping to get admitted?"

"Jasus-Abraham!" He thought about it. "Just maybe. But I'm sorry for Mam Shiller. I'm sorry for her." I couldn't recall ever hearing him say that about anyone else; but the devil was shining out of him still, and that exhilaration.

"Could she be a witch, Rudi?"

"Mam Shiller?" Again I'd said something that made him think. "I don't think so, Sam. No, she's a victim. We ought to do something for her." He thought some more, and laughed under his breath. "Ayah, something to turn the bloody town upside down." He was standing on the milking platform; for a fact, that was the only thing that made him taller than me when he put his arm around my shoulder, but I felt him taller. I was remembering who and what would be occupying his body on Fourth of July Night and believing every bit of it. "My good love, are you with me ? Sam?"

"What do you take me for? Of course I'm with you."

Not smiling anymore, he asked: "To the death?"

"Of course, Rudi. ... To the death."

"Sam, what happens if we're betrayed to the Gentiles?"

"Gentiles?"

He was impatient, shaking me; he'd taught us that word and I'd forgotten. "Gentiles means common folk, Sam. People like—oh, Elder Meehan, or even Baron Reilla, or my own crawling son of a bitch of a father." Rudi's father was a lawyer, bland and clammy, a busy deacon of the Church. I may have been the only person who knew how savagely Rudi hated him, for both masked their feelings in public very well—for that matter the deacon himself probably didn't know the whole of it, being so thickly concerned with his own righteousness that he may have seen those around him as not much more than animated dolls. Nobody could have liked rich and sanctimonious Deacon Zavier, nobody with any sense or warm blood, but Rudi's loathing went beyond anything I could imagine happening in my own insides. Rudi never spoke of his mother, that big sad-faced woman who was thought by some to possess the second sight. The deacon had remarried, a blowsy matron whom Rudi spoke of to me (and maybe not only to me) as The Sow. "So what happens if we're betrayed? Come on, Sam, think! We burn, don't we?"

Without thinking I made the sign of the Wheel, Church-fashion. Rudi grabbed my wrist and forced me to make the circle out from the body and in, the witch way, instead of tracing it flat across the chest. You're supposed to make the witch motion with a closed fist too, middle finger stuck out to look like a cock. His eyes were probing at me unbearably, inches away. "But Rudi, there haven't been any burnings for—oh, for years. Since before we was born."

"Means nothing." He still had his arm around me. "Hide your big dumb head if you got to." I could feel him using the contempt as a tool to push me around, and I couldn't be angry. "I was going to ask you to help me spring Mam Shiller, for that's what I'm going to do. But maybe you'd wish to be excused."

"I'm with you," I said, feeling all torn inside. "But Jasus-Abraham, Rudi, they got that lock-up guarded day and night."

His eyes were spitting blue fire. "Buck Winters, night guard—if a flea goosed him he'd run a mile. My good

Sam, I know one or two things about prison guards. You take my father for instance—he's sort of a prison guard, you might say, though too stupid to know it. I know one thing about prison guards, that's for sure."

"All right—what?"

'"They are mortal."

"Rudi! Rudi, you never would."

"Poor little Sam!" said that dear miserable devil, and he lifted up on his toes to kiss my cheek.

We got her free that same night, Rudi and I, with no word about it to the coven. Some of them, he remarked, were still mighty young, not to be counted on as much as he'd led them to believe when he was speechmaking. Me?—I was just about old enough to know I was being flattered by that confidence.

We stole down to the lock-up wearing black cloth masks and tight caps to hide our hair, after midnight when the town was in bed. Rudi had been watching the lock-up for two nights, and knew the guard Buck Winters' habits to the last yawn. The building was a small thing in a scrubby yard back of the town hall, approached by an alley; they'd had no one in it for years but an occasional tramp or drunk, and now no one but Mam Shiller. All we had to do was wait in the bushes near the back wall until Buck waddled out to take a leak. When he was squared away at the wall Rudi slid out shadow-soft and snapped him with a stone in a sock. You can kill a man easily with one of those, but we were lucky, or else somehow Rudi knew just how hard to hit without finishing him. Buck was tall as well as fat, but with not much muscle. I had the gag crammed in his mouth and tied back of his thick neck before he finished collapsing. He was already coming around by the time we had him blindfolded, legs and arms trussed. Rudi told him to stop moaning or he'd get gut-sliced; he stopped it. Then Rudi hissed in his ear: "We are of the Old Religion." A tremor shook his whole carcass; he couldn't answer but he went on breathing. Rudi snatched the key ring off his belt and we were inside.

There was a cubbyhole office for the guard, a storeroom, and an -shaped corridor with two cells, both empty. I carried the small lamp from the office for Rudi. She was crouched on a foul heap of straw, chained to the wall, and poor soul, she was naked. While Rudi was getting the cell door open she probably saw our masks. She said; "I can't tell you anything. Don't hurt me anymore."

"Nay, we're friends." And to me Rudi said: "Go find her clothes. Take the lamp."

"O my lordagod!" she said. "O my good loves!"

"Nay, Mother, don't talk now. We'll get you out."

"O Jesus and Abraham! They've hurt me some, my good loves. Will I have to walk far?"

As I went to look for the clothes I heard him say: "Not far, Mother—nay, I don't know, it might be far." I had never heard him call any other old woman Mother, though it's a common thing in Katskil. "You're not safe in Nupal," he said—"ever, I guess."

Her clothes weren't to be found, not in the office nor in a ghastly storeroom, where I blundered into a heap of rusty tools dating from the old days that the Church says need never come again—all we have to do is trust in the faith and pay the taxes and the tithes. When I returned to the cell Rudi had unlocked her leg-iron. He still wore his cap and mask, so I kept mine. "No clothes. Nowhere."

Rudi was furious, but it was like him not to lash out at me or go looking where I'd looked. Mam Shiller was crying. "It's all right, boys—I won't try to find out who you are. I guess you're the good angels—you got fresh young voices like boys—never mind, I won't ask, I'll do anything you say. Is my man waiting for me? My Wat?"

That was the tinker. I never knew a last name for him. Nobody had glimpsed him since her arrest. "Gone," Rudi said. "He's no good."

"O my lordagod, don't say that!—no, never mind, I expect it's so, I never counted on him for nothing. A'n't anybody seeing to my goats, my little hens? They won't tell me."

"The town took them, Mam," I told her, talking soft like Rudi through the bottom of my mask. She looked at me keenly as if she might have recognized my voice, but I felt she'd never tell.

"The town," she said—"oh, the town, their balls can rot off and drop in the jakes, I won't cry. But boys, I can't travel without no clothes. I'm not decent."

"Wait," he said, "sit calm." He jerked his head at me. We slipped outside and skinned the clothes off Buck Winters and dressed him up again in the ropes. He was wide awake now, eyes rolling, but he played it safe and chewed quiet on his gag.

"All right," she said, and chuckled. "They got a p'ison smell of polis about 'em, but we can't be choosers. It's my back hurts where they broke a stick onto me." She supported herself on Rudi's shoulder while she struggled into the trousers. They were tight for her in the leg but not in the rump, for old Buck had a spread bottom like a lump of warm butter.

"Have you friends outside of Nupal, Mam Shiller?" Rudi was treating her like a lady and she knew it. There was a big streak of gentleman in Rudi; I don't think he got it from his father.

"Ah, by the last hear-tell I heard, my old father's still alive in Maplestock. Used to say himself he was too mean to die. He'll be gone seventy, or past."

"Go home to him," says Rudi, gentle and mild. "He'll take you, won't he, Mam?"

Strength was rising in her just from the taste of freedom, though she'd been miserably beaten and likely half starved. "He'll take me," she said, "or I'll sit howling on his doorstep. Look you, there's milk-and-egg money under a stone in my garden if the town ha'n't smelled it out. Wat never knew about it. If it's there it's yours. Under the second flat stone behind the rodidenders."

"No, you'll need that, we won't take it. We'll see you safe up there, and then you better be off for Maplestock across country, and fast. But don't risk the roads after sun-up, and wade upstream a piece through Myler's Brook, in case they go for dogs."

She was crying and blessing us. We got her moving, and out past the naked guard. She would have gone by him in the night dark, but Rudi stopped there. I could feel an ugliness rising, and when I put my hand on his arm he was tight as a drawn seven-foot bow, and breathing hard as if something hurt too much. "This bag of crap here," he said—"remind you of anybody?"

I remembered how he had talked wild about his father being like a prison guard, and I snatched hold of that frozen arm, my own strength surprising me. "No!" I said. "It's nothing but old Buck Winters, and you know it. Come on—we got to help Mam Shiller get clear." I think it was anyone's guess for a minute whether old Buck would live or die, but the moment crawled past and Rudi was coming along with us.

We saw Mam Shiller safe through the spooky sleeping town, as far as her shanty. It had already taken on that horrible haunted look that comes to any dwelling just because people have stopped caring; we stumbled over trash in the yard that looters had left there, and the shanty door was swinging wide and groaning under a little breeze. She found her money safe, though, and then we saw her a short way on the road to Maplestock, Rudi making her promise again to take to the woods before sunrise, and wade through Myler's Brook.

Maybe that moment with the bound guard was the first time I had thought of Rudi in words like "mad." And yet I loved him.

They made a wonder of it that grew every time Buck Winters told the story—that is, eight or ten times a day. Rudi had not only turned the town upside down, he'd shaken it, with just those few words whispered to Buck about the Old Religion. According to Buck, he counted five witches, and they made him climb the roof of the town hall, driving him with whips and pins. Given a week, good old Buck would have worked in a trip around the moon. But another wonder crowded us, at about the time people were getting tired of listening to Buck.

Two mornings after we sprang Mam Shiller, Dora Mallon was found strangled in an alley near the shanty where she had lived with her parents; Ethel Lyme had disappeared. They had been last seen together, the evening before, walking toward Main Street on the way to the church, where Father Rupet was to hold a prayer meeting for the guidance concerning their bewitchment and the prodigy of Mam Shiller's escape. They would have had to pass the opening of that alley.

Rumor and speculation fed the town's thunderstorm of terror. My own storm was worse. I lay awake all night after the discovery, maybe for fear that a nightmare would show me the truth, but I thought I knew it anyway. Rudi never came to work at the dairy that day, nor the next. Fourth of July Night was coming on, and to me that meant other nightmares.

The people did search for Ethel Lyme, but Nupal is a small town in a pocket of heavily wooded hills, several thousand acres of them. Search all the trails, gullies, thickets, bear dens? How?

The majority were convinced that Mam Shiller had murdered Dora, likely with supernatural help. Buck Winters, of course, was a wholehearted spokesman for that party. By then I'm sure he devoutly believed in his witches himself, all five of them. But some began remembering out loud that bland-looking Ethel Lyme possessed large hands and strong fingers, good at kneading bread dough. Those people also had it on firm authority that the Devil, given entrance to the body of a victim who (knowingly or not) invites him, can make that subject do just anything, even to murdering a close friend. Or it might be, they said (anxious to preserve good feeling), that Devil-occupied Ethel and Mam Shiller were out there working together. The upshot of all this earnest thinking was that nobody cared about scouring the woods even in a party of twenty with dogs.

After the third day of the so-called search for her, Dasi Stiles reported seeing Ethel Lyme chased by a big man with horns all the way to the beach of the Hudson Sea, where she grew fins on her arms and escaped him under water. Questioned eagerly by Father Rupet and other experts, Dasi smiled in her sweetest empty manner and said, why yes, sure, she dreamed it—thus making the public all the more certain of the vision's truth. There is no means, Confucius said, of persuading the human race not to believe whatever it chooses to.

Deacon Zavier announced to his respectable friends and clients: "You know, after all, there's got to be Something Out There." Or maybe he said "Something Up There." The views of a man with that kind of income are invariably sound.

And speaking of Deacon Zavier, I learned on that third day after the murder that the deacon had told Sudler's Dairy Rudi wouldn't be coming to work anymore. He was going to stay home and read law with his loving father, and go to the University at Nuber in the autumn. This made no sense to me whatever, for Rudi hated the law as he did his father. Indeed I have never quite understood why Rudi, almost twenty, detesting his father and stepmother, hadn't struck out for himself long before. No opportunity to speak of in Nupal, but all Katskil was available. He could have found work anywhere and taken care of himself. What bound him? Not Jena Doren—I think girls to him were little more than creatures to be used. Love along with the hate? He had it too soft there at the Zavier house, three carriages, a butler, and all that bit? Oh, I do myself no good with these questions now, when Rudi has been dead for gding-on thirty-five years.

After quitting work that third day I saw them walking together on Main Street, the deacon marching as usual like a well-fed secretary of the Lord, Rudi slouching half a pace behind. Rudi gave me a quick headshake, so I only waved to him from across the street; the deacon didn't even nod—he had to keep his recognition uncon-taminated, for important people. I couldn't read Rudi, in that glimpse. Captive? Change of heart? Lying low? I couldn't read him at all.

In Rudi's place Sudler hired Jon Bright. Jon was rather big on muscle and short on brain, a nice kid. Like me he was a First Member of the coven and full of wonder at all Rudi's doings. Jon confirmed what I had already heard—none of our lot was getting through to

Rudi. Jena Doren and Jo Makepeace went to the big house trying to see Rudi and were turned away by the acid old butler: Mister Rudi was busy with his law books and could not be disturbed, bang!

Jon and I met with a few of the others on the 3rd of July, a fret session. Without Rudi our courage softened; we might be dangerous witches, but nobody was about to take on the Zavier establishment, certainly not when the town was in a lather about Mam Shiller's escape, Dora's murder, Ethel Lyme's disappearance. We agreed to keep the meeting date the following night, and couldn't think beyond that. What we would do if Rudi didn't show we hadn't a notion.

I think we were all feeling—Jon and Adam Gantz and Jo and Anna Hiels and I—that we had been following a dream, maybe a childish one, into a country of experience where dreams of that kind can't live. Or we had worn out our old fantasies and needed new.

Dora Mallon's body had been publicly viewed at the parlor of the Nupal Mourners' Guild. Father Rupet fancied himself a scholar of Old-Time lore—he called it Lost Knowledge and I think he sometimes tiptoed a little bit close to heresy—and somewhere he had happened on the legend that if a murderer approached the corpse of his victim the dead flesh would betray him —wounds would open and bleed, and so on. Nothing like that happened. But we all did file past the bier, practically everyone in Nupal who could walk, including Rudi in his father's company. We all saw the green-purple bruises on Dora's young throat, and the terrible mouth. And we of the coven wanted out.

The Fourth of July Night arrived in weeping darkness, with black overcast and flurries of rain. The time of our appointment was midnight, and we all came there, all twelve of us, sneaking out of our houses and groping through the wet woods. Adam Ganz told me nobody had seen Rudi all day. Adam had brought a pail of coals, so we started a fire under the tree-cover in spite of the occasional drizzle. It reddened the clearing and showed us grimacing faces and lewd designs in the ancient bark of Mafairson's Oak, but we got little warmth from it because of a coldness inside us. We talked some, hush-voiced. Adam Ganz tended the fire, and Jo kept close to him for comfort. My mother, who was a cure-woman from Tappan, had taught me a little about telling time from the moon—any fool can read it from the sun—and I had passed on the tricks of it to Rudi. I knew it was drawing on close to midnight; if Rudi was anywhere about he would know it too. The actual moment would be told to us by the beautiful voice of Nupal's town bell two miles away across the pastures and the woods.

"He won't come," said Anna Hiels. "His Da's got him hog-tied. It's all crap anyway." She wouldn't have said that, or thought it, two days earlier.

"Maharba!" said Jena Doren, who never forgot any of the words that Rudi had taught her. "You think Deacon Zavier's got any power to stop Lucifer if the god is a-mind to—"

"Hush!" said Jon Bright. He had the sharpest hearing of any of us, but soon we all heard it, a dreadful small whimpering sound from deeper in the woods, like a hurt cat, or a child trying not to snuffle. It came closer by slow intervals. We couldn't speak or think; we were just suffering ears, and once or twice we heard a rustling and shifting of underbrush. We had turned our eyes away from our fire. We tried to pierce the wet forest blackness, and we searched for I don't know what—gold-green eyes, red eyes maybe, set high above ground and approaching like certain damnation. But we found nothing except the dark and the timorous-fluttering shadows of our own small fire. The whimpering ceased, and the noises of motion too, for the longest silence I have ever endured.

Then the bell. Twelve clear strokes, human and brave, reaching us through the rainy night—but they were also the signal for Lucifer to come to us; and he was coming.

He parted the bushes and stepped forth monstrous toward our fire, his masked head lifting high the horns, black and inward-pointing, and he led a victim slowly to the Stone by a cowhide rope. His shoulders bulked huge and shaggy, and his hairy loins sprouted a prodigious phallus that glinted in the firelight now dead white, now scarlet.

Painted wood, of course. I knew that. I knew it was Rudi, just Rudi. I knew the horror on his head was nothing but a pair of woods-buffalo horns, likely, some wall-trophy of his father's strapped clumsily in place, and the shag at his shoulders and hips was simply hacked off from a buffalo rug, and the priapus probably carved and painted by himself—poor Rudi was never very good with his hands. I knew all that, and so did most of the others. Why, we knew it and we didn't know it. Proving that an image is a fraud will not necessarily convince the credulous that the original of the likeness does not exist, and in this they follow a fair logic.

Lucifer's victim was Ethel Lyme, what was left of her after three days of captivity and isolation without food or drink. We learned afterward that she had spent that time tied and gagged in Mam Shiller's shanty where no one dared go after Mam Shiller's supernatural liberation. There Ethel had stayed in misery, probably remembering the sight of her friend's murder, until

Lucifer came horned and masked and shaggy to lead her to the Stone of Sacrifice. As for Lucifer, why, he had been detained at home or he might not have left her so, detained to read law books until he managed his escape on the Fourth of July Night. Did Luficer's father suspect who he was?—it's possible. I never held any conversation with Deacon Zavier, never desired any.

Ethel's wits were totally confused, gone with shock. She was so dirty and tear-stained, the remnant of her dress so ruined, that without the birthmark we might not even have recognized her—pinched too, somehow fallen in on herself. She was reduced to the mindless whimpering we had heard, and she lurched ahead obediently as Lucifer tugged the rope that was tied around her hands.

Jo Makepeace said: "No!" He ran to Ethel and struggled at the cowhide binding her hands. The god Lucifer roared at him in amazed fury and swung his black sharp horns, and I think little Jo, fighting the cowhide rope with no help from witless Ethel, was not even aware of it. He knew well enough who and what Lucifer was, by then.

I can't guess how much further we might have let it go, but for Jo Makepeace. As it was, his single-handed act of honest outrage got through to us, shamed us out of witchcraft for good. Whatever meanness or foolish wickedness we might stumble into in later times, it wouldn't be that. And then—no blame to Jo, who took no part in it—we went too far the other way in reaction: savages we were, and one brave kid couldn't change that.

The story's really over. I'll write the end as quickly as I can.

Adam Ganz snatched the other end of the rope out of Lucifer's grasp and shouted to us: "Hell, it's nothing but

Rudi dressed up! Who's afraid of him?" I heard Jo say, clear and urgent: "Ethel, Ethel! Wake up! We're going to take you home." Then he and Adam were hurrying away with her—as they passed beyond the firelight I saw Adam scoop her up in his arms—and paying no heed to us, and certainly none to the mighty god Lucifer, who just stood there.

Anna Hiels cried: "He killed Dora Mallon! Look you, who else?"

And someone else yelled: "Stone him! Stone him!"

Someone else?—why it was Jena Doren who screamed that, over and over. And still I think that in her own way she never did stop loving him: it was only the other side of the mirror. Maybe I still loved him too, even knowing what he had done to Dora Mallon, what he had done and would have done to Ethel Lyme. And I know (in my age, here in the cellars) that it is a great human folly to love the image, the aura of glamor that may hang about someone, instead of searching for the human self that may be someone altogether different from the dream.

Jena Doren yelled that; Piet Horver was the first to obey her, sweeping up a rock in his big fist and howling: "This in Christ's name! This for a murderer! This in Abraham's name!"

He hurled it true. It struck and knocked away the horns of Lucifer, who was Lucifer no more but only terrified Rudi, who couldn't understand what had happened, who called urgent things to us that our shouting drowned, and who then made the fearful mistake of running.

There were stones in all our hands. I saw Jena's arm swing. Hate and love were in us. Most of all there was fear, finding its voice in Jena's screaming. Rudi was lost, he was down.

I try to think there was love in me, or at least pity along with my panic terror, my resentment, my mindless need to make an end, when the stone left my own hand. For he saw me throw it, and after that blow he moved no longer.

Piet Horver became a priest, a good one I suppose, a missionary to the Salloren savages of the north country. Ethel won back her wits in a year or so, such as they were, and married a farmer. Jena married too—I think; it would have been after I left Nupal. Dear Jo Makepeace—ah, he grew up awhile, and went to the University, and became a poet, and died young.

Jenna was a source of shame to her mother. When she had reached thirteen summers, she had been married to Woka, the best hunter among her people. But after five summers of marriage, Jenna remained childless. So she had left him, and Woka took a new wife.

After that there had been no reason to stay in the village through the year. Jenna's presence only reminded people of her shame and made it difficult for her sisters to find husbands. Her past friends, now busy raising their own children, were uneasy in her presence, as if fearful that her sterility would somehow pass to them. There were so few humans. Every life was precious, and her people were wary of even the most distant dangers.

So Jenna had left, preferring her solitary life in the woods and the company of her own thoughts, which sometimes seemed unfamiliar and strange even to her. She returned only in winter to trade her knowledge for food and temporary shelter. Once she had felt shame before her people, but now she was happy with her life. She was free to roam and discover new things.

She still sensed the presence of the other in the forest. It was no longer behind her, but somewhere to her right and moving ahead of her. Her heart began to beat quickly. She took a deep breath and started to move back down the hill. Then she began to run. The sense of danger hammered at her mind and pushed her past the trees.

But even as she ran, she was curious about the being who was trailing her. She always thought of them as beings like herself, and this thought still surprised her. Her father once told her that the metal beings were the guardians of men, and that they would strike down those who repeated the errors of the Old Ones. Those who loved machines and tried to escape the ways of men would be punished. Most of the village believed this. But Jenna had been told many things that were not true, and she knew other tribes thought differently.

She ran down the hillside and splashed across the thawing stream! The water was cold and fresh. Chunks of ice floated downstream. She stumbled up the other side and ran for the trees. By now, she thought, her stalker should be confused. By doubling back and crossing the stream, she could follow her previous direction, but parallel to and behind her pursuer.

She went forward slowly, listening to all the sounds of the forest awakening from winter. Feeling a little more secure now, she wondered about the metal ones again. She knew that men had been killed by them. Yet once she had seen one shoot an animal, which soon after had awakened and walked around as if nothing had happened. She had heard stories of brave men who mocked the old stories and attacked the metal people in order to obtain their many parts for use in fashioning hunting tools and other implements. These would very often be exchanged for food and clothing with other tribes. Her husband Woka once possessed such a part, which he had used as a knife. He had been very proud of it until he lost it in the snow. She had not been permitted to mention it until the day she left him, or as he put it, the day he put her aside.

Yet the metal people only fought in self-defense, and otherwise did not seem to pay attention to the few tribes living in the forests. She had never heard of a metal one hunting one of her people. Not ever.

But if that was all true, then why was a metal one tracking her now? She stopped and listened. She could not sense him, but her heart started to beat faster again. A shiver went up her spine.

She spun around suddenly and saw him staring at her with his wide inhuman eyes. He had tricked her! He had done the same thing that she had. The weapon in his hand was raised, but he seemed to hesitate.

She darted to her right. She heard the weapon fire at the same time, and something entered her side through her deerskin shirt. She fell to the ground. As she lost consciousness, she saw the metal one coming closer. . . .

She had a dim memory of being carried. A vague image of the inhuman face seemed to swim in her mind. A series of short clicking sounds brought her to consciousness. Gradually she opened her eyes.

He was standing over her. His sturdy metal torso was perched on two slender silvery legs. His eyes were glassy surfaces, covering almost the entire top half of his head. And he was directing them at her. She started to scream, but he took a few steps backward and gestured at her. Then his long arms fell to his sides and he stood perfectly still.

She raised herself on one elbow and saw that she was lying on the floor of a room. On one wall there were five strange-looking nooks with open hatches. Otherwise the room was gray-walled and featureless. There was a shelf that ran the length of one wall, but there was nothing on it except the weapon which only a short time ago had been fired at her.

The room had one large window and a few smaller ones on each wall. Outside, the world was still the same, a countryside emerging from winter. The sun was climbing higher in the sky. Soon it would be midday, and the heat would help the snow melt to fill the rivers and streams running south to the sea. In the hillside shadows some of the snow would remain almost till summer, holding out to the last.

Jenna sat up, and still the metallic figure did not move. Slowly she stood up and felt her side. There was no pain where the thing had entered her body. It had only made her sleep.

She faced the metal creature. Suddenly he started clicking again and gesturing at her with his arms. There was something pathetic about the gestures. Jenna thought of the creature as a "he," but now the metal being seemed like a mother trying to explain something to a wayward child. She shook her head and opened her hands, wondering if the thing would understand.

The clicking grew more rapid. The metallic figure moved toward her. She stepped back, looking around frantically for a door.

Suddenly she ran past him toward the other wall. A portion of it slid back and she felt the air from outside rush in. She was outside in a moment, running across soft melting snow, the sun in her face.

She turned her head briefly and saw the gleam of the metal one as he raised his weapon and fired. Again something entered her body and she was drawn down into darkness. . . .

Ropes bound her when she regained consciousness. Her captor was kneeling over her, clicking insistently.

"What do you want?" she cried at the creature in frustration.

The clicking stopped. The creature stood up and regarded her with empty glassy eyes.

"I'm not an animal. I can speak," she said. "All you seem able to do is click like a fool. Our children make better sounds." She spat on the floor near his feet. "Let me go!"

There was no clicking this time. Somehow she felt that he was embarrassed by her words, just as she was puzzled by him. Obviously he had

tied her up only to keep her from getting away. If he had wanted, he could have killed her by now or taken her as a captive to his people. He was alone, just as she was. Perhaps he was like her, tolerated by his people but forever unaccepted.

He had been trying to speak to her, but his words and way of speech were different. It was strange to think of him in the way she would about another human being. But there was something manlike and intelligent inside that metal body. For a moment she wondered if it might not be a man wearing a strange outer garment for protection, but she rejected the thought. A man would have spoken as she did.

He left her bound all afternoon. He stood and watched her, listened to her speak and never once replied with anything more than a series of clicks. He clicked slowly, he clicked rapidly, but nothing made any sense to Jenna.

Outside, the progress of spring was halted by the coming night. The pine trees cast solid shadows across the refrozen snow. Stars began to appear in the darkening day; cold incandescent points burning in a realm beyond all understanding; lanterns hung by giant beings in some place beyond the world. She imagined dark human shapes coming up to the windows and breaking in to rescue her.

The man-without-flesh suddenly walked up to one of the nooks in the wall, slid inside and shut the hatch after himself.

She was alone, helpless in the ropes that bound her. She tried to imagine what the nooks could be for. Were they for sleep, or some kind of rest? A wolf howled outside, and she feared that it would come close to the door which opened by itself, and it would let the animal in.

But in a moment the hatch in the nook opened and the metal one slid out, slowly, almost as if he had been changed somehow. He came up to her and started to loosen the ropes. He was silent as he worked.

"Once ... did .. . you ... rule... the world?" he asked. She recognized the words, but they were spoken in a way that reminded her of the clicking. They seemed to whir and clatter as the metal one uttered them. "I . . . learned . . . from . . . your sounds . . . and my memory vault.. . and from certain remains ... of information in the mother computer of Central Agency." He was getting better even as he spoke, she noted. "But . . . you must tell me words when I need. . . ."

When the ropes were off, she stood up. "My name is Jenna," she said, pointing to herself.

". . . Suranov," he replied, ". . . robot. . . ."

The twinges of liking she had felt for the robot grew stronger in her mind. "There are stories," she went on, "that metal men were made by men of flesh, and men of flesh were made by the god of nature, against whom we sinned. And we were humbled."

"Then ... we are brothers . . . sisters," Suranov said, "and we should help you. The old superstitions are false. Men and robot . . . are minds ... in different shapes."

"What did you do in the hole?"

"Studying . . . how to make your sounds. It has taken
much research and study. My years have been troubled
by thought... of man." He paused. "It is the challenge
of within . . . knowledge of the past which mother-
computers evade, and Central Agency is fragments
on___ "

She did not understand what he was saying, but it seemed to make some kind of sense. He was referring to his kind, to his home and such matters. It was like what her tribe sometimes said when metal creatures were spoken about around the night fires.

She sat down on the floor and Suranov came near. His legs folded under his broad torso and he squatted next to her. The metal face seemed almost to hold a look of curiosity.

"I suffer for this," Suranov said without pausing. "Others of the robots no longer see me. I have lost . . . promotion. I am alone with my people."

"Alone?"

"I... travel alone. I am outside other robots. I seek ... truths of human beings. I found only pieces. The others are . . . erased."

Jenna stared at him. Then he was one like her, apart from his tribe. He was closer to her than the others of her kind, who banded together in fear.

"We must talk . . . discover," said the robot. "You . . . spring up elsewhere when killed ... in new bodies?"

"No," Jenna said, puzzled. It was a curious question.

"I thought not. It is not a rational idea. If men were such as our superstitions say, then the universe would not be rational... in any way. And you die . . . not only from wooden weapons, but in many ways?"

She nodded. Her eyes strayed from him for a moment to the largest window, which was behind the squatting Suranov.

There was a face there. A human face, toothless, grinning at her.

She screamed.

The door slid open and a band of warriors rushed into the lodge. Before Suranov could stand up they were upon him. As she watched, one man raised an axe. It struck Suranov's back, toppling him across the floor.

There were six warriors. She did not recognize any of them. They were not from her tribe, but of the roving bands who went out in the spring in search of women and spoils. Her village had killed a few from a band such as this many summers ago.

She watched them spreadeagle the metal one on the floor. One of the men came up to her. It was the one who had leered at her through the window.

"You were with the metal demon—what is he to you?"

And then she realized that Suranov had been distracted by her, that otherwise he might have noticed the danger and could have closed the door for the night.

"Suranov!" she cried, "Suranov, I'm sorry."

The man hit her across the face, knocking her to the ground. She grabbed at his legs, bringing him to the floor next to her. She smashed his nose with her hand, driving bone splinters into his brain. The brute was dead.

She got up and moved toward Suranov. But before she could get near, two men grabbed her and started to tie her up with the ropes on the floor.

Jenna watched as they clubbed the helpless robot into immobility. After the two men tied her securely, they rejoined their companions.

First they took off Suranov's legs, then his arms. And yet he still seemed to turn his head. She could hear a few clicking sounds. Then they broke his eyes, tore open his torso, and opened his head, breaking the ringlike cables near what had been his upper torso. By the time they finished, only the torn torso was left.

She started to cry. There had been light inside those eyes, someone had lived in that ruined container on the floor, a person, a being of a kind she had never known before. If the legends were true, and men had created these creatures, then they were the guardians of the world, the custodians of all that man had lost. It would have been good for her to know them better. They might have gone back together, to her people and to his. Perhaps something new might have come into the world as a result.

Now Suranov would become . . . scrap to be used for tools.

She mourned him now, the metal man who, like her, had roamed alone.

Suddenly the warriors were laughing at her, making fun of her tears. They spoke of what a fine catch she was and what they would do to her later. And for the first time in her life she began to despise her own kind, for the beasts they were. Later, she was sure, she would escape. She would have to. The men would grow careless in guarding her.

But she knew that she would never be able to regard the world in the same way again, not after speaking with Suranov ... gentle, curious, childlike Suranov. His kind did not kill. Suranov had wanted to know, and he had died at the moment of his success.

She knew what she would have to do. She would search, until another meeting like this one became possible. Suranov's work must not be lost. Then perhaps one day men would rise to something better in the world, helped by their brothers the robots.

But as she looked at the killers arguing over the pieces of the dead robot on the floor, all the horror and sadness of what she had seen this spring overwhelmed her. She closed her tear-filled eyes, hoping, even though she knew better, that she might die, if only for a short time.