"Good night. Go to sleep." He masked his anxiety with enough brusqueness to deceive himself that he was not interested. He began the breathing exercises that would put him to sleep in thirty seconds; just before they worked, he felt her hand move down his ribs, pause a moment, and then withdraw. He fell into a troubled sleep.

Chapter Eight

Next morning, Pierce had been awake for a long time when the rear door was unlocked and gray light seeped in.

"Pierce," Mrs. Curtice said quietly. He felt a light tingle on his wrist, rose, and stepped over Dallow, who blinked up at bun. Mrs. Curtice hobbled to one of the picnic benches and slowly seated herself, ignoring the heavy dew. Pierce stood seven or eight meters away from her.

"Christ, it really hurts this morning. Anyway. We're goin' to town today, you an' me, and you're gonna go through Klein's knothole."

"Ma'am."

"Here's the drill." She gave her instructions in a soft, unresonant voice: how to deal with Klein, how to find the man she wanted killed, how to return. Pierce listened attentively, though he knew he would not be carrying out her orders. At some point he would have to overpower her, with or without Anita's help, make his way to Government House in Farallon City, and then do whatever his Briefing impelled.

"Ma'am, it'd sure be easier if you'd come with me into Klein's place."

"Oh, no. I'm an old operator—I don't get caught in a place where there's folks with no bracelets. Anyhow, you're a big boy. You don't need no help."

"Whatever you say, ma'am."

"Goddamn right. Now, be a good boy and get that lazy nigger Dallow off his black ass. Sun's damn near up—gotta get these people's breakfast." Pierce rapped on the door, and Dallow was up at once, bellowing at the others. Yawning and scratching, they stumbled out into the morning mist and shaped up in two lines. Dallow called roll, turned to Mrs. Curtice, and said: "All present, ma'am."

"Okay. Get the bus cleaned up and send a detail out for breakfast. After chow everybody gets the morning off. Bring that Jap-nigger girl over here."

Dallow gestured to Anita, who followed him. Pierce turned to go with them.

"She din't say nothin' about you. Git in that bus and help stow the bedding."

Reluctantly, Pierce obeyed, but he stayed close to the open door. It wasn't hard, with his sharpened hearing, to eavesdrop.

"You know what your friend is gonna do today?"

"Yes."

"Show respect!"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well, you better hope he does it, 'cause if he screws up—or goes AWOL—I'm gonna mess you up. Know what it feels like to have one of these bracelets round your neck? You don't ever want to find that out, honey. So you make sure he knows what you're in for. Understand me?"

"Yes, Mrs. Curtice… You're in pain."

"So what?"

Pierce stepped into the doorway; he could see Mrs. Curtice sitting on the bench, with Anita and Dallow facing her at the usual distance.

"I can take away the pain."

"Is that right."

Then Pierce saw blank astonishment in Mrs. Curtice's face. She gasped and stood erect.

"Oh my God! Oh—my—God! What you—what— what you done to me?"

"I've blocked the pain."

"Oh my God." She took a few tentative steps. "I can walk. And it don't hurt at all." Her face showed shock, delight, and then: alarm. "This is some kind of trap!"

Pierce realized, too late, what was happening, and saw Mrs. Curtice's fingers tighten on the wand. He leaped from the bus, but he was too far away to do anything. None the less, Anita might be able to take advantage of any distraction he could create. He got five or six steps toward them before the pain smashed up his arm. Everyone was screaming and falling—she had triggered all the bracelets at once.

Somehow Pierce kept his feet. His peripheral vision vanished. He was staring down a long tunnel at Mrs. Curtice, at Anita vomiting as she collapsed under the collective agony of thirty people, at Dallow springing at Mrs. Curtice, his face contorted. Dallow hit the old woman hard, knocking her fiat The wand splashed into a mud puddle. The pain went on, and on. Pierce staggered and fell, and crawled awkwardly on one hand and his knees. Mrs. Curtice, pinned under Dallow's convulsing body, screamed in renewed pain and groped frantically for the wand.

Pierce grasped it and turned it off. Everyone in the group had been shrieking, but suddenly it was very quiet. The children sobbed. Dallow picked himself up. Mrs. Curtice lay still, her clothes soaked in mud, her face unreadable. She looked at Pierce.

"I was right."

"About what?"

"Everything. You're a real pro, you are. Nobody but a pro could keep moving with a hot bracelet on."

"Dallow, help her up."

Dallow lifted her gently while she spat and hissed with pain, and carried her into the bus. Pierce bent over Anita, touched the pulse in her throat. Her skin was clammy with sweat He picked her up and followed Dallow to the bus. As he did so, he heard the morning shape-ups in the other campsites, and realized no one had bothered to investigate the horrible uproar they had made.

The two women lay almost side by side in the doorway of the bus. Mrs. Curtice never took her eyes off Pierce.

"Boy, you're in real trouble now."

"Is that right," said Pierce.

"Incitement to riot Inducing an indent to abrogate his contract." She glared at Dallow. "Theft of personnel-management equipment. I'll have the law on you, you bastard. And your weirdo girlfriend. Hope the bitch dies. And, Dallow, you're goddamn well finished. I'll have you so fucking blacklisted you'll have to go endo or starve."

"Put a bracelet on her, Dallow."

"Hey, man, you sure? She no indent."

Pierce looked balefully at him. Dallow fished a bracelet out of his jacket and sealed it around Mrs. Curtice's bony wrist. She made no resistance.

"Bring 'em up out'a the gutter, make somethin' of 'em, see they're fed and clothed and got work—look at the th-thanks you get. Oh, Billy Dallow, how c-c-could you?"

"Miz Curtice—that girl, that Anita, she healed you. She took away you pain. And what you do? You freak out, Miz Curtice, you hurt ev'body. You think we all out to get you."

She laughed bitterly. "And I was right, right. It was a trap, and I'da got out of it until you jumped me."

Dallow looked at Pierce. "You better not be playin' me for a fool, man. You said some smooth words las' night, you better not be lyin'."

"Don't worry, Dallow. You did the right thing." He looked down at Anita, wondering what it felt like to suffer that much pain. "I need sedatives. Something to keep Anita asleep for a few hours."

"Hunh? Miz Curtice, she don't stand for no drugs."

"You playing me for a fool? You've got drugs." Looking embarrassed, Dallow climbed past the two women and fumbled about in the bus's dark interior. He returned with a hypospray pistol and a single pink cartridge. Pierce recognized the drug—a nonprescription sedative that would keep her out for about four hours.

"Any more of these?"

"One."

"Okay." Pierce shot the drug into Anita's thigh; she trembled and relaxed. "Put her in the bunk above the cab. Mrs. Curtice, get up."

"I can't. It hurts too much."

"Get up."

Whimpering, she obeyed. He gestured to her to climb down. Somewhat absently, Pierce observed that the others were standing in a ragged semicircle behind him, watching silently.

"You're riding up front with me," he said to her. Turning to the workers, he said: "I'm the boss for a while. I've got the wand, and I'll use it if I have to. After we get to where I'm going, you can do whatever you damn well want."

"Watchoo gonna do with Miz Curtice?" Dallow asked.

"Nothing, if she behaves. If she doesn't, I'll kill her. Okay, let's get going. Everybody in the bus."

Before getting behind the wheel, Pierce retrieved his Smith and Wesson from the glove compartment and slipped it into his jacket Then he helped Mrs. Curtice into the cab. They drove out of the camp without incident Mrs. Curtice sat sullenly glaring out the window, averting her face from Pierce. After a few minutes, she said: "What's all this about, anyway?

What the hell you doing?"

"A job."

"A job, a job. Why pick on me? What I ever do to you? I'm just a hardworking old woman, tryin' to get along—"

"Quit blubbering. You just came down the road at the right time."

"—Gonna get me in the shit with the Copos, I always had a clean record, made my payoffs like clockwork—"

"Once we get to Farallon and I finish my job, you're on your own. You can have your wand back and everything. I don't think there's much future in black-birding, though. Once we get one or two matters cleaned up, we're going to shake out every Colonial government from top to bottom. People like you are going to be out of business."

"Why, you sneaky son of a bitch, you're a Trainable, ain'tcha? You work for AID."

"Mm-hm."

She laughed. "The Agency ain't gonna mess with me. I done 'em too many favors."

Pierce said nothing. He reflected that he had been too high up, too specialized to be aware of everything the Agency had been doing. He was vaguely embarrassed that the Agency should deal with blackbirders, though it was not really surprising. He remembered Wigner's remark about slavery on Beulah.

Highway 605 ran up out of the Alcatraz Valley to the lower slopes of the hills of Little Frisco-. Then it turned north to the Golden Gate Pass and followed the river west across the Farallon Dunes. The road was busy: logging trucks, bracero buses, and many, many Copo cars.

"Never saw so many," Mrs. Curtice said. "For Christ's sake, drive careful. They like to shake us down every time the brakes squeak." Pierce laughed. He had the pleasant, light-in-the-stomach feeling of being in danger of his own free will, like a hang-glider stepping off a thousand-meter cliff. In a few hours at most, Gersen would be dead, Sherlock would be stalled if not stopped, and Pierce would be on his way back to Earth with a message for Wigner, and with Anita to back it up. This time tomorrow, the Gurkhas would be in control of Mojave Verde; a month from now, the Agency and all Colonial government would be thoroughly purged. After that, he could retire—but that was a long time away.

All around them the dunes stretched green and gray and blue in the mid-morning sun. Sloughs gleamed, their surfaces rippling in the wind; the dune grass waved shimmeringly. Overhead, millions of birds stormed into the sky and sank again to their ponds and thickets: snow geese, wood ducks, grebes, passenger pigeons, mallards, pintails—so many that their cries and the thunder of their wings drowned out the wind in a strange, dispassionate jubilation.

"Why'd you dope your girlfriend?"

"None of your business."

"She's got some kinda power, don't she? Something you can't control." Mrs. Curtice studied him for a moment "And she wouldn't like whatever it is you plan on doin'. You need her, or you'da ditched her some-wheres, but first you gotta do somethin' nasty. Probably kill somebody."

"Don't you worry, ma'am. The less you know, the less they'll hurt you."

"Who?"

"The Copos, if I don't succeed."

"Lord, lord. Well, it's my own damn fault for pickin' up hitchhikers." She laughed at her own wit. Pierce laughed, too.

They entered Farallon City. The bus would attract attention in the city center, but Pierce had to risk it. From the bus to Gersen's office and back must be only a brief sortie. The downtown area stood between the western slopes of Mount Farallon and the harbor. Government House, thirty stories high, dominated the waterfront skyline. At the top was Gersen's office, no doubt heavily guarded. Pierce reviewed what he knew about the building as he drove into a parking lot two blocks away. The Copos' North American headquarters took up the first five floors; above that were various agencies and departments, with the Commissioner's staff situated on the top three floors. The building would be swarming with police; it had better be, if his plan was to work.

As soon as the bus was parked, Pierce used one of his last flechettes on Mrs. Curtice. She slumped back into her seat, eyes rolled up. Pierce opened the panel to the rear of the bus: "Dallow!"

"Yo." Dallow's lean face appeared in the opening.

"I'm locking the bus. Mrs. Curtice is out; so's Anita. You people just relax for a while. I should be back in half an hour, maybe less."

"Yeah. Hunh. What if you ain't?"

"Raise hell. Scream, shout, whatever. But not for half an hour."

"Right."

Pierce left the bus, locked it, and began walking purposefully toward Government House. A hard, clean wind, smelling of salt, gusted down the street, and he could hear surf pounding the seawall. It was nearly lunch hour, and the streets were already filling with hungry civil servants. A driveway led down into an underground garage: AUTHORIZED

PERSONNEL ONLY. Pierce strode down into the garage, past the rows of Copo cars, past the duty sergeant immersed in a newspaper, into the locker room. It was empty; the day shift had been on for almost four hours.

The lockers posed no problem; Pierce's tripled sensory-input synthesis made it easy to feel out the padlock combinations. The first locker held only civilian clothes; the second, a uniform a shade too large. Just as well; he put it on over his shirt and trousers. The hiking boots looked bad, but they would have to do. The Smith and Wesson fit snugly in the long holster.

He took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, got out, climbed a flight of stairs, took the elevator another five floors. Lunch hour was well under way, and the people in the elevator gave no more than a glance at him and the others in uniform.

At the twenty-sixth floor, Pierce went to the stairs again. He was just a little shaky with eagerness.

"Hold it."

Two plainclothesmen stood by the door to the twenty-seventh floor, their pistols aimed down the stairs at him.

"Who're you?" asked the older of the two.

"Turner. Just got in from Little St. Louis. I'm supposed to report to Mr. McGowan."

"Why you on the stairs?"

"I don't like waiting for elevators, so I ran up."

"All thirty floors?" The younger man laughed.

"Sure. Like to stay in shape." Both plainclothesmen had beer bellies.

"Now can I for God's sake come up and show you guys my orders?"

"Come up slow. Keep your hands where we can see them."

"Right."

They were office cops, very slow. Pierce dropped them without difficulty. He took their pistols, serviceable Mallorys that scarcely showed when he tucked them inside his shirt. He would have to hurry now. Going through the door to the twenty-seventh floor, he found himself In a typing pool, rows of desks facing a supervisor's glass-walled office. A few of the typists looked up as he walked calmly to the supervisor's door. He knocked and entered.

"Sit down, ma'am. Would you mind, uh, opaquing the wall for a minute? This is a confidential matter, I'm afraid. Thank you." He leaned across the desk. His fingers reached out, curled around her neck, and his thumb pressed against her windpipe. She was a Latin-American of thirty or so, and she looked at him with stupefied horror.

"Where's Commissioner Gersen?"

"H-he's not here. He's not in Farallon City." Her eyes were round and focused tightly on him. "I swear, I swear."

"Where is he, then?"

"I don't know, I don't know."

He pressed hard for a moment, then relaxed.

"Uh! Oh, please! Mojave Verde. He—went down yesterday, w-w-with Mr. McGowan. Please, I—"

She got a drugged flechette. Pierce went from the office into a corridor leading to the elevators. With no target, with no objective now but escape, he shivered uncontrollably. The plainclothesmen would be coming to any minute; he had little chance of slipping unnoticed out of the building, so he might as well do it in style. Besides, it would help Mm take out his frustrations.

A descending elevator opened its doors. Pierce drew his pistol and shot the woman and three men inside. Down the corridor, someone gasped. Pierce lunged into the elevator, pressed the button for the mezzanine floor, and turned to study his unconscious traveling companions. All were plainclothes Copos; had they noticed his boots, he might well have been killed. He discarded the Smith and Wesson—its clip was almost empty—and replaced it in his holster with one of the Mallorys. It was fully loaded.

As he had hoped, the mezzanine was quiet. He pressed the main-floor button and stepped out. He descended a flight of stairs and found the main floor boiling with people who hurried to the elevators; the arrival of the Copos had created a useful diversion. He walked briskly outside into the sea breeze.

Damn it! How the hell was he going to get to Mojave Verde? The bus was far too slow, never mind the problems of looking after Mrs. Curtice and the indents. Then there was Anita to consider: she was quickly becoming more of a liability than an asset Perhaps he could persuade her to go through that knotholer's I-Screen, warn Wigner personally—some such bullshit stratagem, though it seemed unlikely to work on a mind-reading genius. But he must get to Gersen; his Briefing would allow no one to stand in his way. If necessary, he decided, he would risk killing her; even a IKosi was expendable when the stakes were this high. As he entered the parking lot, he glanced at his watch: twenty-three minutes had passed. His white bracelet glinted in the sunshine. Somewhere he would have to get the damned thing removed; he detested even the potential restriction on his freedom of action. Getting into the cab, he saw Mrs. Curtice and Anita still sleeping peacefully. The panel was open; Pierce thought he'd left it closed. Dallow looked at him with a smile.

"Ev'thing smooth?"

Pierce opened his mouth to reply, but no words came. Every muscle in his body seemed paralyzed. His hands fell limply across his thighs. Anita slid down out of the bunk onto the seat next to him. Her eyes were dark and unreadable. His jaw slack, Pierce watched her unbutton the Copo shirt, the shirt underneath, felt her push up the T-shirt and scratch her nails across his chest. Something peeled back; he felt a brief, sharp sting between his ribs.

Anita held a very small cylinder between thumb and forefinger.

"A self-destruct, Jerry. I felt the pseudoderm patch last night." He wheezed, croaked, found he had a voice again. "That bastard."

"Who?"

"Wigner. Wigner. He's the only one who could order an involuntary implant on a Senior Field Agent. Even so, he was taking a hell of a chance. Bastard."

"Why?"

"It's not to keep me from being questioned—if it were, I'd have died yesterday morning when Shih captured me. It's an Agent abort. Once I'd killed Gersen, I was supposed to blow myself up."

"That's senseless."

"Wigner never did a senseless thing in his life." Pierce turned away, and his eyes met Dallow's.

"More trouble?" Dallow asked,

"More trouble."

"Watchoo gon' do now?"

"I don't know—we've got to get out of here. I've got to get to Mojave Verde."

"Jerry." Anita put her hand on his.

"Wigner or no Wigner, whatever Sherlock is, it's got to be stopped. I've got to kill Gersen. Even if I annoy my boss by living to tell about it."

"The Briefing is still running you, Jerry."

"Not much we can do about that, ma'am."

"Don't 'ma'am' me—you make me feel like Mrs. Curtice. No, there's quite a lot I can do, Jerry. I can knock you out, and keep you out for a day or two if necessary. That would at least keep you out of trouble while I tried to warn Wigner. But I don't know enough yet You're the one with all the information."

"I'm blocked."

She took his hands in hers. "Jerry, I can Clear you. Without the drugs and machines. Without wrecking your mind."

He wanted to believe she was lying, but knew she was not. Unaccountably, he began to tremble.

"I can feel your mind, Jerry. I can feel the blocks. They're like cysts, running deep. I think I may open up some things you don't want to remember, things you're not supposed to remember, but we've got to know everything they put in your Briefing. And when it's over, you'll be your own man again. Free."

"There's no such th—" A flutter of remembrance: where, when, had he told someone that there was no such thing as freedom? What had happened next? It seemed oddly urgent, like a powerful dream not quite recalled.

"How long will it take?" he muttered.

"A few hours. Not long."

"All right. All right." He switched on the ignition. "We'd better find a quiet place to do it."

"There's a camp outta town," Dallow said. "Nobody mess witchoo there. We look after you."

Anita smiled. "Thank you, Dallow."

He smiled back. "You welcome."

The bus moved out into the traffic. Pierce drove very carefully, very slowly. He had never been so frightened in his life.

Chapter Nine

Dallow directed them to a migrant camp a few kilometers north of Farallon, between the dunes and the sea. Pierce parked El Emperador sin Ropa on a site facing east, across the gray-green crests of the dunes to the snow-gleaming Coast Range. In mid-afternoon, the camp was almost deserted.

Pierce climbed out of the cab and carried Mrs. Curtice around to the back. She still slept heavily, as if her body were grateful for a respite her mind would never willingly allow. She was very light, older and frailer than she had seemed when her fingers had held the inductance wand. After he left her, Pierce went for a restless walk around the campsite. The indents, glad to be outside at last, flopped contentedly on the sand, letting the sun soak into their bodies. Ignored by everyone, the children ran squealing around the bus and made forays down to the surf to chase sandpipers. Dallow detailed a crew to pick up a late lunch from the camp mess hall. There was an air of holiday, which Pierce did not share. Anita came out of the bus with a couple of blankets under her arm. She spoke briefly to Dallow, who nodded respectfully. Anita turned toward Pierce.

They walked silently out of the camp, into the dunes; the wind slapped at them and drove sand like mist around their ankles. In a few minutes they were oat of sight of the truck; in the lee of a dune, the air was calm. The surf thumped patiently a hundred meters away.

"This will do. Sit down, Jerry." She spread a blanket on the smooth sand.

He obeyed. She undressed and sat cross-legged, facing him. The black chromotilm was gone; her body gleamed like gold.

"I said I would Clear you, but that's not quite the word. Whatever is in your mind will stay there; it won't go into a reel of psychotape. But it'll all be accessible to you; you'll Clear yourself… You're very scared."

"Yes."

"With reason. Your mind is full of blocks, and I don't know which one will release your Briefing. I'm going to have to open up everything. I won't wreck your mind, but the experience will probably be very unpleasant. They don't put in those blocks without good reasons."

"And the whole thing'll take just a few hours?"

"Yes."

"Wouldn't Dr. Suad love to get his hands on you."

"Wouldn't he just." She smiled "Are you ready?"

"I'm ready."

"I will feel what you feel about whatever is released, but that is all. Your memories will be your own. And when we're through, no matter what, it'll be your life, your mind, and no one else's."

"I know. I know." That was one reason he was so frightened.

"Then…" She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth. A little IKosi song whispered on the wind.

Whatever it brings, I won't look away, Pierce said to himself. Then, as he stared rigidly at the naked woman an arm's length away, he froze. The wind no longer blew; the surf had become a dull, meaningless noise. The sun blazed on Anita's shoulders, on her arms, her breasts, her thighs, but she no longer moved. He felt like a prisoner condemned for life to a single eternal quarter-second.

Then, incredibly, in that endless immobility something moved. Anita's eyes opened, her face tilted like a flower to the sun, and she seemed not just alive but afire, burning, burning bright as she walked naked into the night forest that was his mind.

He was on Ulro again. His tank had crossed the dusty bed of the East River, heading back to the Transferpoint in Queens. The early morning sun blazed through the window, throwing the cabin into dazzling contrast despite the filters.

Pierce, sweating and itchy in his spacesuit, was eager to get back through the I-Screen. It had been a good scavenge: the case in the nose of the tank was full of artifacts carefully excavated from a buried basement on Morningside Heights. Columbia University, in some form, had still existed on its old campus when Doomsday came, and Pierce hoped his cargo of broken plastic and glass would be somehow connected with whatever the university's scientists had been doing.

A TV monitor showed that his partner's tank had fallen more than a hundred meters behind. They must be back at the Transferpoint in just seventeen minutes, when the I-Screen would open for exactly three seconds.

"Trouble, Wayne?"

"Overheating a bit. No fear."

It was rough going over the beige-and-gray wasteland, since no two tanks were ever allowed to take the same route; if there were Outsiders, and they should happen to glance down at New York, they must see no sign of recent activity on the surface. They might, of course, manage to notice a tank itself, not merely its tracks, but that was a gamble the Agency had to take.

The Transferpoint was in sight now, a small flat patch in the rubble. Pierce checked the time: four minutes to go. He pressed the timed self-destruct button. After he and Wayne had lugged their cases through the Screen, their tanks would back off a few hundred meters and blow themselves to bits. Such was the caution of the scavenging teams.

"Hustle," Pierce called.

"She's goddamn well packed up on me." Wayne was two hundred meters behind now, his tank camouflaged by clinging yellow-gray dust.

"Got time to pull me?"

Pierce didn't hesitate. "Sure."

He spun his tank around and roared back. By the time he reached the disabled tank, he had already computed the outcome of trying to haul Wayne's tank within jumping distance of the Screen. There would be just six seconds for them to blow their doors away, step out, grab their cases, and lurch to the spot where the Screen would appear.

"Hey, whoa," Wayne said, his voice tinny in Pierce's earphones. "Too fast."

Pierce said nothing. He slipped a hand into a remote glove, and one of the tank's tentacles snaked out and looped itself around the handle of Wayne's case. The case came out easily.

Another spin, and Pierce was racing back toward the Transferpoint.

"Jerry, you son of a bitch!"

The monitor showed Wayne leaping clumsily from his tank. The sun glared on his white suit. He ran, painfully slowly, over the treacherous surface. Pierce could compute the outcome of this decision also: he would reach the Transferpoint with both cases and a margin of thirteen seconds. Wayne would be at least forty meters away when the Screen shut down. Wayne could compute just as well, of course. And he knew perfectly well that the Screen could not be reopened until the reception cell had been thoroughly decontaminated, which would be several hours after Wayne's air was gone.

Pierce's door blew away into the blinding vacuum. He retrieved his cases and plodded slowly, carefully, over the rubble to the open patch. Wayne's breath was harsh in his earphones. He heard it as the Screen appeared, as he stepped through into the airless, lead-lined cell; when the Screen vanished, Wayne's panting cut off instantly. Another voice murmured in his phones: Wigner's. "Good thinking, Jerry." Air began to howl into the room, and then jets of decontamination fluid sluiced the radioactive dust of Ulro from his suit. Standing in the little room between his two cases, Pierce threw up inside his suit; the De-con squad got him out just before he would have suffocated. The sun rose into a cloudless blue sky over the Saharan grasslands of Vala. Pierce and two rookies, a man named Cherois and a girl named Carmody, hiked across the brown prairie, a few paces behind three undersized Black adolescents. The Team had doped a hunting band last night, Tested the youths, and found these three Trainables. For some reason, Base Camp had failed to send the rendezvous helicopter, so the Team and its captives had been walking since midnight. Pierce expected to reach camp by sundown, unless the copter met them en route. The endos, two girls and a boy, were terrified. They had wailed for a time, after the dope wore off, but Pierce's growls and gestures had kept them quiet since then. They made no attempt to escape, for which Pierce was grateful; if they did, he would have to shoot them full of dope again, and the Team would have to carry them.

He called a halt near a noisy brook. The endos all squatted to urinate, even the boy, and avoided looking at their captors. They were diuretic marvels, Pierce thought; they had stopped to piss every couple of kilometers. He leaned against a rock and scanned the sky, wishing the copter would arrive and spare them the rest of this tedious march. The rookies offered candy to the endos, who refused it with averted faces. Carmody turned to Pierce.

"Not very friendly, are they?"

"They usually aren't. Stupid not to include tranquilizers in our drug kits—but nobody expects a rendezvous to be missed."

"Well, they'll be little lambs after we get them back to camp." Pierce liked Carmody a lot. She was a tall, slender Irish girl with brains as well as Trainability; she had been sleeping with him since the mission began, and he was beginning to think she might be a long-term partner.

"Well, let's get going," he said.

"Oooh!" Carmody gasped. She crumpled, the shaft of a spear drooping from her belly. Pierce spun around and saw a tall, one-eyed Black man less than twenty meters away, crouched in the waist-high yellow grass, his arm already drawn back to launch another spear. The endo children cried out in relief and fright.

Automatically, Pierce thumbed his rifle to Impact 10 and fired. The spearman howled and fell back, his blood vivid against his skin in the pure morning light.

Pierce and Cherois found cover and awaited any other attackers, but there were none. The children became hysterical, and Cherois's cuffs and shouts only upset them more. One of the girls finally broke away and ran to the body of the spearman; the other two followed her. They embraced the blood-streaked corpse, shrieking and sobbing.

Carmody was dying. An antishock drug kept her conscious, but she was obviously finished.

"The sky is so blue, Jerry," Carmody whispered. "The sky is so blue. The sky." She turned her head toward Pierce, her eyes bright with the elation of some ultimate, all-revealing discovery. "Look at the sky." Then she was dead, though her eyes were as bright as ever.

Cherois stood ineffectually beside the screaming children.

"What now?" he called.

"We wait for the copter."

In a scorching noon it finally appeared, the pilot waving blithely to them through the bubble. The children huddled together, eyes blank with terror. Flies had been crawling for hours over the bodies of Carmody and the endo. Pierce had to carry each child into the copter. Cherois brought in Carmody's body.

"What about the endo?" he asked.

Pierce was strapping the children down. "We don't have time to bury him. A gift to the ecosystem of the Sahara."

The copter lifted in a whirlwind of dust. The children, looking out the open door, saw the spearman's body dwindle; they began to rock back and forth, faces in their hands.

The deck of HMS Trident was a welter of shattered wood, broken iron, and smoldering canvas. A dozen dead men had been dragged into a tidy row along the starboard gunwale, and Pierce trod on one as he boarded the vanquished warship. A squad of Agency marines followed him, rifles at port arms. Pierce made his way to the afterdeck, where the ship's surviving officers stood in a formal cluster.

"Good day, gentlemen," Pierce said, feeling foolish in his Napoleonic admiral's uniform. His eyes stung from the tear gas.

A young officer, his face pale, stepped forward.

"Lieutenant George Dunstable, sir. I am the senior officer; Captain Wheeler is dead."

"Gerald Pierce—your servant, sir. I am acting on behalf of the French government, although I am a citizen of the International Federation."

"We deduced as much, sir, from the nature of your craft." A hundred meters to starboard, the combat hovercraft Waltzing Matilda rode the swell. She looked absurdly small next to the vast, smelly bulk of the Trident. "Your weaponry has carried the day, Admiral Pierce. It is my duty to surrender this vessel—"

"Permit me, Lieutenant Dunstable, to interrupt. I have no desire to seize your ship, sir, nor to make captives of you or your crew. In fact, I wish to see you all safely back in England as soon as possible."

"Sir, I beg your forgiveness, but I fail to understand."

"Lieutenant, my superiors wish to see the blockade of the French coast lifted forthwith, and the resumption of French maritime commerce. My superiors are not interested in local politics. I am sending you back to Plymouth with a videotape of this morning's engagement. I sincerely hope, sir, that your superiors will thereby understand that we are quite capable of destroying the entire British Navy in short order. In a day, sir! And we will, unless this war against Napoleon ceases at once."

" Sir, before I can do as you suggest, I must advise Admiral Fletcher. I believe his ship is presently off Le Havre—it will be some days—"

"Admiral Fletcher has already been advised by radio." Dunstable nodded. Most civilized Beulan endos knew something of radio and television, though few had encountered them personally.

"Sir, I beg leave to make a request of you. Your surgeons are by repute the finest in the world. I would deem it an act of charity were you kind enough to minister to our men. Almost forty are wounded; not half will live to see England, unless you condescend to help." Pierce raised his eyebrows. "Have you enough men to sail for home?"

"Yes, sir—"

"Then, sir, that is all I am concerned about. We are not in the business of nursing our opponents back to health. If you lose twenty men, thank your pigheaded Sea Lords and their pigheaded masters for it. If they are not utterly lost to reason, they will see in those bodies some measure of our sincerity. Good day, Lieutenant—gentlemen—and bon voyage." The evening was warm and humid, full of the promise of the monsoon. In the garden of the Agency compound, Pierce and Dr. Chatterjee strolled back and forth. They had enjoyed a splendid dinner, and the servants had withdrawn.

"I understand your position, Mr. Pierce, but I am afraid I must refuse to cooperate. In fact, cooperation would destroy the Freedom Party's credibility with the masses, and you would be no better off than you are now."

"You underestimate your influence." Pierce smiled. "We are quite confident that a properly worded statement by you would reconcile ninety percent of the emigrants to their move downtime." Dr. Chatterjee laughed, an oddly pleasant laugh in a man so serious.

"The remaining ten percent are three hundred thousand people. How will you move anyone if three hundred thousand choose to resist you?" Pierce stopped walking, and looked into Dr. Chatterjee's deep-set eyes.

"We are prepared to incur an attrition rate of substantially more than ten percent in effecting this movement."

"An attrition rate?"

"As you know, I'm sure, our projections indicate a minimum of four hundred thousand deaths above normal in the Greater Calcutta region in the next two years—from disease, civil disorders, and famine. We are quite prepared to lose that many, and more, to accomplish the move. In fact, there is a rather bloody-minded group within the Agency who would prefer a good fight. They feel we would eliminate what they call socially volatile elements."

Dr. Chatterjee began walking again. "I expected to hear some such threat. But actually to hear it is terribly upsetting."

"Actually to say it is also upsetting. There is no need for anyone to die, if only people will cooperate."

"Mr. Pierce—put yourself in our place. We are not consulted; we have no say in when or how we shall be moved; we have no assurance that we shall be safe from native diseases—or, for that matter, from the natives. Our culture is being irreparably distorted. And why? Because we are…

unTrainable. Yet surely we have some rights, some freedoms."

"There is no such thing as freedom," murmured Pierce. "Consider this, Dr. Chatterjee. I wish to pluck this flower. If I do, my actions are determined by what I must do to obtain the flower. I must reach, grasp, pluck—" The small white blossom disintegrated at his touch.

"They are very delicate," Dr. Chatterjee observed.

"Then my next attempt will be still less free. I must, after all, consider the consequences of my actions, and therefore I must limit my actions. In any case, how did I come to choose to pluck a flower at all, let alone that particular one? What made me choose to discuss this subject with you?

The impulses came unbidden into my mind, did they not?"

"Then you do not believe in freedom at all?"

"I do not perceive freedom at all. I perceive people obeying compulsion, internal or external. Freedom is something only God can enjoy—and then only if He does not care about the consequences of His actions. Which may very well be the case."

"Then, to use your own facile terms, I obey my own internal compulsion to remain here in Calcutta, on Earth; I reject your Agency's external compulsion. We shall resist this deportation with every means at our disposal." He extended his hand. "I bear you no personal ill will, Mr. Pierce. You are a likable man, for a slave. Thank you, and good night." Pierce shook his hand. "Good-bye, Dr. Chatterjee." As the tall, graying Indian turned to leave the garden, Pierce drew his Mallory .15 and fired. Dr. Chatterjee, knocked forward by the impact, fell heavily into a flower bed.

The Hutterite community was a cluster of barns, silos, and houses in a shallow valley. It was brutally cold, and a little snow sifted down out of the pale January sky.

Pierce had no real business being here in this minor deportation, but, having been in Calgary, he had decided to make -the short helicopter flight north to witness the move. This particular Hutterite Gemein, unlike most of them, had chosen to fight deportation in the courts, and had nearly won. The Agency, alarmed, had exerted considerable influence on the Canadian Supreme Court as well as initiating a media fog on the whole case. As a punitive step, the Gemein would be shipped to a bleak, uninhabited area in central Texas on Tharmas; the other Hutterite communities had been allowed to settle together in the relatively benign climate of Durango on Vala.

The buses were drawn up in a row outside the compound, their engines rumbling. A bell clanged somewhere, and the adults slowly emerged from their meeting hall. The women wore heavy coats over their long skirts, and their bonnets were incongruously colorful. The men wore sheepskin jackets, black cowboy hats, close-trimmed beards. Many wore glasses; centuries of inbreeding had made the Hutterites nearsighted. When the children emerged from the Klein-Schul, Pierce recalled that fertility was another inbred Hutterite quality, and one which would have made them candidates for deportation even if they had not resisted recruitment of their Trainable children. There were many children, nine or ten in the average family. They dressed like their parents, and their faces were clear and rosy in the cold air. An old woman supervised them; she had little to do, for they were quiet and well behaved. As the adults began loading their luggage into the buses, Pierce walked over to the children. A girl of ten or eleven regarded him tranquilly. Pierce smiled. "Guten Tag."

"Guten Tag, mein Herr." Her German was oddly accented, a fossil dialect preserved far from its sixteenth-century Bohemian homeland, but Pierce followed it well enough.

"What is your name?"

"Anna."

"That is a very pretty name. My name is Jerry." She said nothing. The old woman watched him uneasily.

"Would you like some chocolate?" He took a candy bar from the pocket of his overcoat.

"No, thank you."

"Are you sure? It's very good."

"No, thank you. Sir, why do you hate us so?" Pierce was taken aback. "I do not hate you, Anna. Not at all."

"Then that is even worse."

Pierce pressed the chocolate bar into her hand. She threw it away and ran to the old woman.

"Okay, folks, let's get a move on! Got a date with an I-Screen in Vancouver tomorrow morning." The move officer, a nervous fat man, began herding the people onto the buses. The children followed the old woman across the crusty snow, trampling the chocolate into brown fragments.

Pierce walked back across the snow to his waiting helicopter. "Let's get the hell out of this dump!" he barked at the pilot. The town was called Garibaldi; it reposed at the bottom of a lush green Sicilian valley on Urthona. Its ten thousand inhabitants were mostly Radical Catholics, and the southern European states of Earth were heartily glad to be rid of them. At dawn, standing on a ridge four kilometers from the town, Pierce admired what their industry had accomplished in just six years: orchards, vineyards, whitewashed houses, kitchen gardens, an austere cathedral beginning to rise above the red-tiled roofs. It looked like an ideal example of a successful cultie settlement.

Unfortunately, Garibaldi also supplied the local separatist movement with food, money, and recruits; over a thousand guerillas were operating in Sicily and North Africa, and doing much too well. Garibaldi was to become a lesson and a warning.

Pierce turned to the major of Agency artillery who had accompanied him to this vantage point. The major was a tall, tanned Afrikaner exile, one of many who had found good careers in the Agency's service.

"Major, you may proceed."

"Very good, sir." The major muttered nasally into his ringmike; three seconds later, a dozen columns of white smoke rose into the sky from all around the town. They curved gently, then steeply, converging on the houses and shops around the cathedral.

The operation was mercifully swift. Half the town was pulverized, the other half merely ruined. More rockets fell: the orchards exploded in flames, the houses erupted and collapsed into piles of broken bricks, the cathedral vanished. Smoke and dust enveloped the rums. The major handed Pierce a pair of electronic binoculars that brought the town almost close enough to touch. Pierce watched a young woman stumble out of the empty doorway of her home. Her clothes were on fire and her face was destroyed; blood pulsed brightly from her throat. Hands outstretched, she shuffled a few steps into the street and fell. Her clothes continued to burn.

"Excellent binoculars," Pierce remarked as he handed them back.

"Nikon. Cost me a bloody fortune. But they're worth it. Bloody Japs are bloody clever with optics."

"Yes."

It was a quiet Tuesday morning, and Pierce sat in the study of his apartment, flicking through hundreds of pages of follow-up memos on recent operations. It was dull but necessary work, and he could at least take frequent breaks.

The computer-terminal flickerscreen moved at a preset rate of sixteen pages per second, fast but comfortable for Pierce, and he felt jolted when it paused for a moment, flashed RESTRICTED MEMORANDUM, and resumed its normal speed with the next item. Pierce halted it at once and punched back to the restricted memo. He respected security, of course, but this was something about one of his own operations; he had a right to know.

His Training was thorough and up-to-date, so it did not take him long to outwit the computer's security barriers. Five seconds after doing so, he had read and absorbed the memorandum.

Filed by an epidemiological team on Luvah, it described the flare-up and control of a nasty artificial influenza called Strain Zeta. Pierce, visiting his mother in Puerto Cortines on Luvah, had witnessed an endo raid on the little resort settlement. On his return to Earth, he had recommended the introduction of Zeta to the endo tribes of the Yucatin. That had been just over a month ago.

Zeta, a usefully plastic virus, had been tailored for use against Luvah's endos; within a week of its deployment, it had virtually eradicated all the tribes within a hundred kilometers of Puerto Cortines. Then it had mutated—as sometimes happened with artificial viruses—and seventy two hours later everyone in Puerto Cortines was dead. AID had promptly sealed off the whole peninsula, and Strain Zeta died out, a victim of its own virulence.

Pierce sat quietly for a few minutes. When he lifted his ringmike to his lips, his hand was shaking.

"Dr. Suad?"

He was lying on the water bed, screaming, out of his mind, yet somehow aware that Suad was nearby, a dark presence in the shadows.

"It is very hard, Mr. Pierce," Suad said when Pierce's voice failed at last. "We sometimes must ask you to do some terrible things—terrible things. They are all in a good cause, but it is hard to take the long view when you are so close, eh? And you must do these things without reflection, without question, as if they were second nature. It is very hard.

"So we Brief you and condition you, and when you come back we Jock away the memories where they won't bother you. We even give you false memories. Where is your mother now, Mr. Pierce?"

"Dead. Dead."

"Of course not She is suffering from chronic bronchitis and emphysema, and you have sent her to the Institute Respiratorio in Nuevo Judrez. You have been writing to her every week for almost three months, ever since she moved from Puerto Cortines. She writes you less often, because she is so weak. But she is happy there, and the treatment she gets is excellent— excellent!"

"That's a lie, God damn you."

"Lies are only what we do not believe. You will believe me, Mr. Pierce. And when you do, you will feel very, very much better. You always do." He chuckled. "You come out of here a new man." The injections began.

Occasionally, Pierce was aware of a little hollow among sand dunes where the sun was warm whenever the wind died down. He was holding a small, hard hand; it was comforting, but not as vivid, not as real, as the memories that burst in his mind like flares over a ravaged battlefield. He could smell the tobacco on the Afrikaner's breath, feel the deck of the Trident swaying under his feet, see the burning girl fall into the street. Somewhere in the middle of the Clearing, Anita dissolved the block on his Briefing. Thickly, with a tongue that seemed swollen, he said: "That's it. Very, very interesting… Keep going."

Her hand tightened on his.

Then it was over. He rubbed his face while Anita dressed; her skin was covered with gooseflesh. About ninety minutes had passed. She huddled next to him, pulling a blanket around them.

"You look terrible," he muttered.

"So do you."

"Well. That was some Briefing. Wigner didn't put everything in, but I can guess at what he left out" He paused, ordering his thoughts.

"He's got plenty of spies at the WDS. They kept him posted on Sherlock, and one of them learned that Seamus Brown figured out that the Sherlock field doesn't need precise alignment. Not if you just position it between the Sun and the Earth like a burning glass."

"Ah, ah—how could I be so stupid?"

"So Brown went to Gersen. And Gersen understood… Isn't that incredible? A Trainable teaming up with unTrainables like that."

"Not surprising, really. Brown saw the implications." The implications. Pierce considered them. No solar flare would bring Doomsday to Earth. No alien invaders would pounce out of space. There was no need now for superweapons against Outsiders. On Ore and Ulro, an experiment had gone terribly wrong, and that was all. Doomsday was caused by a human act.

So the International Federation, welding all humanity into a single unit, was not needed. The Colonies were not needed; the Agency and all its expedients were not needed. Separatism was now legitimate—and practical, since Ore possessed a weapon Earth would be unable to counter for some time.

"Wigner had three motives in sending me here," Pierce said. "He knew about Sherlock in general—and what it meant—but not how far it had progressed. So he wanted that information. He also wanted me to abort it, preferably by killing Gersen. And he wanted me to die. He wanted to keep Sherlock a secret, preserve the whole Doomsday myth, even if there was only one chance in a thousand of succeeding. And if that meant blowing me up—" He shrugged. "And he knew all about my freezing, of course… Oh my God, my God."

"What—"

They block us all, for one reason or another. All Agents. And it's the blocking that makes us freeze. I remember Suad saying so, a few months ago. "Poor old Jerry. Twenty-six memory blocks. You'll be freezing solid in less than a year, old friend."

"If the blocks are gone—you may never freeze again."

"Never. I'll be a working Trainable all my life. All my life." He should have felt jubilant, but somehow he did not.

Anita nestled against him, warming him. "And now?" He shuddered. " 'What are you doing about Doomsday?' "

—The burning girl. She fell, and fell, and fell. She would fall forever, suspended on the screen of the Afrikaner's Nikon binoculars, on the screen of memory.

After a time, he finally said: "I know what to do."

Chapter Ten

They returned to the bus. The indents were enjoying their holiday, but cautiously: they gossiped, played cards, smoked, slept—all out of sight of Mrs. Curtice, who sat in the rear door of the bus with her hands tied behind her. Dallow sat nearby, his truncheon in his lap, smoking. He glanced up at Pierce and Anita, and his eyes widened in surprise.

"Man, you been doin' some extreme serious shit."

"Well put." Pierce stood in front of Mrs. Curtice. "How's your arthritis?"

"Fuck yourself, you goddamn—"

"Shut up.'"

There was so much danger in his voice, so much pent-up menace, that her voice cut off in a gurgle. Her pale eyes met his for a moment, then looked away. Absently, Pierce realized he must have a very crazy air about him, and exploited it.

He leaned forward. "I've just gone for a stroll down Nostalgia Alley. You wouldn't believe the number of corpses I saw there, Mrs. Curtice. Not even you. Be careful."

"Anight, arright—no harm intended—Tin just upset, that's all, just upset."

"Mm. How's your arthritis?"

"Much better, thanks. Lots better. Couldn't hardly stand bein' tied up if I was feelin' bad."

"Good. You're going to help us do a job."

"Is that right? Uh, mind tellin' me what it is?"

"We're all going through that knothole your old friend Klein operates." Her mouth fell open. She laughed; it was a most unpleasant noise. "He charges ten thousand a body, one way. You got that kinda money?"

"He'll do it for free."

"Uh. Uh-huh. Where we all goin'?"

"Everywhere. All twelve chronoplanes. A couple here, a couple there."

"This is crazy." She regretted the word at once. "I mean, it's hard to understand, y'know? What's all this about?"

"You'll know when you need to." Pierce looked at the Sun; it was mid-afternoon. He turned to Anita. "Give me the wand." A little reluctantly, she obeyed. Pierce whistled, and the indents began to drift over.

"Listen up. We're going back into Little Frisco. You folks are going to do a job for us, and then each of you gets his freedom. This time tomorrow, you won't have those bracelets on."

They did not exactly throw their caps in the air. A young Sicilian, arms folded across his massive chest, asked: "What kind of job?"

"A very safe, quiet job. All you have to do is mail some computer cartridges. Then you're on your own."

"I rather stay with Mrs. Curtice," the Sicilian said, and most of the others nodded.

Pierce had half expected this reaction. He raised the wand. "We all got a good taste of this today. Anyone want more?"

They were silent. Pierce hoped he was bluffing.

"If you people want to stay with this old bitch, that's fine. But first you're going to go through a knothole, hustle your ass to a mailbox, register what you're sending, and come back with the registration."

"What if we don' come back, man?" asked a tall American Black. "What you gon' do then?"

"Your kids will stay with me."

He scanned their unexpressive faces for a few seconds, watching his remark sink in, watching mothers look at fathers, fathers look at children.

"All right? We understand one another? Okay, everyone in the bus. Let's get going."

They stopped in Farallon City en route to Little Frisco, and Pierce went into a replication shop. A cheerful Chinese boy, snapping a mouthful of Coca-Chew, sold him a blank computer cartridge and gestured to an empty console booth. Pierce inserted the cartridge, thought carefully for a long minute, and began to program. The whole thing took him fifteen minutes. He got up, handed the cartridge to the boy, and ordered two hundred copies.

"Oh, wow. Yeah, but it'll take like an hour, mister."

"I can give you twenty minutes. Get going." The boy looked distressed, but nodded.

While the cartridge was being replicated, Pierce hurriedly typed address stickers. The copies would go to laboratories, government offices, newsfiche publishers—all places plugged into a major computer network. The boy stacked the copies in a cardboard box. "That must be some program."

"Not really—I just don't want to lose it." He paid and left, glad that Mrs. Curtice traveled with a sizable amount of cash. There was a mailbox outside. He dropped fifteen cartridges into it, addressed to destinations in Farallon, Glaciopolis, and Little St. Louis.

"What the hell is all that?" Mrs. Curtice asked when he returned to the cab. She was stowed in the bunk, still tied up.

"Don't you worry your pretty head about h, love." He winked at Anita, who replied with an uncertain smile.

The trip back across the dunes was uneventful; there seemed to be fewer Copos around. Pierce pulled into a McDonald's on the edge of Little Frisco, and sent Dai-low in with a huge order. There was considerable excitement in the back of the bus over this unexpected treat. But Pierce allowed no one else out of the bus. As the afternoon turned into a golden dusk, the passengers of El Emperador sin Ropa munched their hamburgers and fries in the parking lot.

Pierce sat behind the wheel, watching the almost-full Moon rising above the hills of Little Frisco. He was reviewing all the steps they still had to take when a spark suddenly began to burn very brightly on the Moon.

"Look," he said to Anita, with a mouth full of french fries. Mrs. Curtice squinted through the windshield from her bunk.

"Sherlock," Anita said.

"Works like a charm. That's why Gersen went down to Mojave Verde, to watch the launch."

The spark's intensity grew as they watched. It was centered on the Sinus Medii, virtually the dead center of the Moon's face; Pierce suspected that that was no accident, but a deliberately aimed-at bull's-eye. The Sun set; the Moon climbed into a sky made pale by that pinpoint of fire.

"It's dimming," Anita said at last.

"No, but it's reddening around the edges. Beam's ejecting white-hot material that cools once it's out of the impact area. It'll make a gorgeous crater."

"More likely a rill. The beam is moving."

She was right. The spark had begun to shift toward the Sea of Fertility. It was winking like a star now, its light distorted by the turbulent lunar atmosphere it had created out of dust and vaporized rock; it left a track of ugly red, a new cicatrix on the Moon's scarred face.

In ten minutes the beam traversed perhaps a thousand kilometers. It winked out, leaving purple afterimages; then, almost at once, it reappeared at Sinus Medü and moved due north.

"They control the field pretty well," Anita observed. "Gersen could write his initials up there if he wanted to."

"I think I know what their strategy must be. First Gersen shuts down all the I-Screens, so no one can get off Ore to report funny lights on the Moon."

"But Earth can still send people in—"

"Doesn't matter, if Ore can control who goes out." Anyway, that's only a temporary precaution; they'll need just a day or two. Then they launch another spacecraft—and an I-Screen generator—into orbit around Ore. They turn the I-Screen on, move the spacecraft through to Earth's chronoplane, and that's it In another day or two, the Sherlock field would be in position, aimed right at Earth. Gersen reopens Ore and gives the IF his terms—independence for Ore or Doomsday for Earth. He might even burn another crater on the Moon, just to show them he's serious."

"No," said Anita, "on Earth. He'll want everyone scared. If he blows a hole in Australia, or the Himalayas, there'll be more pressure on the IF to give in."

Pierce nodded. "Well. We don't have much time, but I think we can screw Gersen— and Wigner. Finish your hamburger." They drove several blocks in silence before Mrs. Curtice cleared her throat.

"You people both Trainables?"

"Yes," said Pierce.

"Is that right. And you act just like ordinary folks. What the hell do Trainables need with a bunch of broke-down indents?"

"Not much. Just a few hours' work."

"Illegal, ain't it?"

"Extremely."

"Well, I don't mind that, but don't you get my people into nothin'

dangerous."

"Not a chance, Mrs. Curtice. No danger at all." In Greek, he asked Anita: "Are your powers weak?"

"Yes, but not gone."

"When we speak with the—" he groped for the Greek equivalent—"the gatekeeper, can you make him feel comfortable and trusting?"

"Yes, unless he is seriously disturbed or alarmed."

"Good." In English again: "Mrs. Curtice, you're coming in with us to see Klein."

"You gonna tell him we're all goin' through for free?"

"Yes."

"Wouldn't miss that scene for the world."

Their destination was a shabby two-story factory, not far from the Transferpoint: KLEIN & SON STORAGE CELLS. A good front for an operation that demanded heavy, regular use of electricity. Pierce parked in the factory's lot, next to a loading dock; no one was in sight, but there were lights on inside. He slid back the partition: "Dallow. We'll be back out in a few minutes. Anybody gives you trouble, hit 'em."

"Hm!" Dallow nodded and grinned.

Moving unhurriedly, Pierce and the two women got out of the bus and walked inside. A dusty corridor, its sides lined with cardboard boxes, led to a small office where a young man sat with his sandaled feet on a desktop. A radio murmured a news story about influenza spreading on other chronoplanes, and the impending closing of all I-Screen traffic. The young man, listening intently, held a finger to his lips until the item was over.

"Hi, Mrs. Curtice—good to see ya. Sir—ma'am. Sorry to make you folks wait Some story, huh? They say it could be the worst flu since '06. My ma died in that one."

"Remember it well, Tim. Thought your dad would never get over it. Rest her soul. Well, they close the Screens, you and your dad'll make a pile."

"About time, too. It's really been slow lately."

"Your dad in?"

"Sure is. Right through the door."

Pierce was relieved at the ease of entry. Mrs. Curtice had supplied him with passwords to use with Tim Klein and his father, Horst, but her presence alone was enough to get them in. They went through the door into a small anteroom whose echoes indicated armor plate in the walls. A loudspeaker buzzed:

"That you, Herman?" A password.

"It's not the milkman," Mrs. Curtice responded. The door to Klein's office slid open; they entered an office as neutral and impersonal as the first one. Klein, a short, stocky man of fifty, sat at a desk facing them. Pierce was fairly confident that there was a gun trained on them.

Klein studied them for a moment, then asked: "Mrs. Curtice. What can I do for you folks?"

"These two are phonies," Mrs. Curtice said conversationally. Instantly, Pierce sprang forward and slapped Klein across his face, then shoved him away from the desk.

"Don't move," he commanded softly. Without taking his eyes off Klein, he said to Mrs. Curtice: "You treacherous old savage. I ought to kill you."

"Well—worth a try, wasn't it? Can't blame me for tryin'." She sniffed.

"Fast son of a bitch, ain'tcha."

"Mr. Klein," Anita said urgently, "you're in no danger if you do as we ask, and we succeed. If we fail—if the Copos find us—they'll massacre all of us, just to make sure no one talks."

"That's your story," Mrs. Curtice growled. Klein's face was pale; his thick cheeks trembled with anger. "Wh-what is this all about?"

"It's all right, Mr. Klein." Anita stepped forward, put a comforting hand on his arm. "We're friends. We're not going to hurt you." The knotholer visibly began to relax. "This is a dangerous business, you know. We have to be so careful."

"That's over now. All the worries, all the fear, over. You and your son will be safe." Her words were just background music; the real message, Pierce knew, was going through Anita's fingers into Klein's arm.

"What do you want?"

"Eleven round trips, one to each chronoplane. Tonight."

"Oh, that's very dangerous. Too much power drain. The authorities will notice, and then I am out of business."

"By the time they can notice and react, it wont matter," Anita murmured.

Pierce watched Klein's transformation with interest. After years of living under stress, Klein was almost collapsing with gratitude for the tranquility Anita gave him.

"Whoever you are, you are not phonies. I will help."

"Thank you," Anita said.

Relaxed or not, Klein was now all business. "I must work out a schedule. How long are the trips to be?"

While Mrs. Curtice, disappointed, sat scowling in a chair, the others concentrated on logistical details. After a time, she interrupted:

"You people are gonna screw up everything, you know that? I don't know what you're doin', but it's gonna mean the end of everything. I can just feel it." Her distress was real.

Pierce looked at her. "Everything is ended anyway, Mrs. Curtice. The IF—the Agency—it's all over. That spark on the Moon was the end. All we're trying to do is to keep Gersen from using it on Earth." He smiled without amusement. "When this situation is resolved, I'm sure you'll be able to go back to blackbirding. If that's any consolation." The preparations were soon finished. Pierce returned to the bus and climbed in the back. The indents regarded him balefully; one of the children whimpered.

"We're ready," he told them. "I'm going to send you inside in pairs. You listen to the man and do exactly what he tells you. Each pair will take fifteen cartridges through the I-Screen. On the other side you'll mail them, registered. Then you come back and jump through the Screen when it goes on. You go AWOL, or you don't bring back the registration tabs, and the kids will pay for it."

"What if we get picked up by the police over there?" asked the young Sicilian.

"That'll be too damn bad for the kids. So don't get picked up. No matter what chronoplane you go to, you won't be more than a kilometer from a mailbox. Okay, let's go. You—and you."

He escorted them, two at a time, into the building, down the corridors to the I-Screen. It was an old machine, salvaged from some university after the IF declared I-Screens a government monopoly. But it would work as well as any official Screen.

Still, it was a slow business. After each pair went through the two-meter Screen, Klein and his son had to recalibrate for the next chronoplane. Pierce prowled restlessly between the bus and the building, fingering the wand. He stood in the dark parking lot, listening to the anxious chatter of the remaining indents, the whining and wailing of their children. The night air was cold, and the sky was clear. The L-shaped scar on the Moon still glowed a sullen red-orange.

The cartridges must already be in the mail on Luvah. Some would be reaching their destinations within an hour or two. Not all would be run at once, but some would, and all it would take was one per chronoplane. Earth was the only one that really mattered, but the mailings would ensure that no Colony remained ignorant of Sherlock, even for a few days. At 2:30 A.M., the last indent pair had left and Klein calibrated for Earth. The large, low-ceilinged room was quiet. Mrs. Curtice slept snoring on a battered old couch; Pierce had decided not to use her. Anita, her eyes red with exhaustion, sat next to Klein, keeping him calm and alert.

"The kids are all asleep in the bus," Pierce told her. "Dallow's baby-sitting until their folks start coming back."

"Good."

"Here's the wand."

She accepted it distastefully. "I won't use it," she whispered.

"Neither will I—least of all on kids. But to these people you're nothing without it."

"Speak for yourself." She found the energy for a wry, conspiratorial wink. "You're as bad as Wigner."

"Mm-hm."

"Ready," Klein called. Pierce automatically parted his pockets, making sure he had the cartridges.

The I-Screen formed in a free-standing ring in the middle of the room. On most chronoplanes, the knothole opened onto wilderness or farmland, with the nearest settlement huddled around the Transferpoint a couple of kilometers north. When it opened onto Earth, however, it revealed a large, oak-paneled room and another jumble of I-Screen equipment. Pierce strode through into an overheated atmosphere dense with cigarette smoke. The Screen winked out behind him with a gust of wind.

"Hold it right there."

Pierce obeyed.

"That you, Herman?"

Pierce sighed. "It sure isn't the milkman."

"Okay, turn around." Sitting behind a control console was a hard-faced man in a green turtleneck jumpsuit. He regarded Pierce with calm wariness.

"What's your story?"

"I'm doing a round trip; I'll be back in half an hour." The knotholer laughed. "Hell of an expensive trip."

"You have no idea. How do I get out of here?"

"Up those stairs behind you, and out the door. When you come back, knock three-one-two. Got that? Thr—"

"Got it, got it." He was already on his way. The door was a fire exit leading to an alley. It was early evening, with a damp February chill. The low hum of traffic resonated like a hive, and the sidewalks were thick with people. Pierce walked quickly, looking for a mailbox. He found one, fed the cartridges one by one into the registration slot, tore off the receipts, and walked away again. Signs everywhere asked: WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT DOOMSDAY?

He felt an unaccountable mix of emotions about the men and women who surrounded him: liking and regret, fondness and guilt. Each of them, happy or not, successful or not, pursued some private destiny that Pierce had just changed. Some, who might have lived long, would die young because of what he had done; others would be reprieved. (A stroboscopic memory: the Roman camp in the snow, the general and his catamite dying surprised. This was what Pierce knew best, the toppling of empires. His own would make a very loud crash.) Please don't be too angry, he asked the crowds. I think I'm doing what you'd want me to do—what you'd do yourselves.

He entered a corner drugstore, went to the phone booths, and plugged in his ringmike. He punched Wigner's home number in New York, and the unhuman voice of the computer whined in his ear: "Four dollars for the first three minutes, please." He slid his credit card into the slot, knowing it would enable the Agency to trace him pretty quickly. "Thank you." Wigner's phone rang twice before his answerer, in a voice almost identical to the computer's, said: "Please code."

"Pierce. Piggly Wiggly." Absurd password games. Everyone watched too many spy shows—especially the spies.

"Thank you." A click, then another ring.

"Hi, Jerry."

"Hi, Eric. The balloon's going up. They tested Sherlock a few hours ago on Ore. Burned a couple of big grooves on the Moon. They'll probably put a magnetic lens into Earth space within forty eight hours."

"Good work."

"Mine or theirs?"

Wigner laughed.

Pierce went on: "I hear Gersen's shut down the Transferpoints, but I assume you're sending people to Ore through our own Screens."

"Not yet. We've had some foul-ups."

"Mojave Verde. That's the important spot. And Farallon City. Get the Gurkhas in as fast as possible."

"Will do. Where are you, Jerry?"

"In San Francisco, as you must know perfectly well. Not for long, though."

"Come on home then, Jerry me lad." That was the code phrase, designed to trigger a Briefing Pierce no longer obeyed. He laughed.

"Not a chance, Eric. I'm off to spread the good news about Doomsday."

"Spread—" Wigner paused, for once at a loss. When he spoke again, his voice was cold with rage. "You must be mad. Think of the consequences."

"I have."

"Command, Jerry: I bid you good day."

Feeling a little giddy, Pierce put his lips closer to the ringmike and said:

" Bang! Arrgghh. Oh, they got me, Sheriff. I'm a goner. Ride on without me, fellas."

"Command, Jerry! I bid you good day!"

"I heard you the first time. That's supposed to make me self-destruct, isn't it, Eric? Too bad. I've been disarmed, so to speak. See you in a day or two. And get those goddamn Gurkhas into Mojave Verde." He hung up, feeling not giddy but desolated: Wigner tried to kill me. Directly, in person. Wigner.

He left the drugstore and walked back to the alley. The people on the sidewalks seemed foreign to him now; their faces were opaque, unreadable. Whatever he might do to save them, he did not understand them, did not belong to them or with them. How could they have allowed their lives to be directed by men like Wigner—or like himself? What criminal laziness or cowardice or apathy possessed them?

Well, he had the consolations of his craft, and his old boyish pleasure in making things go smash.

"That didn't take long," said the man in the green jumpsuit. "You still got twelve minutes."

"I'm efficient."

"Ha. Or she was. Like a cup of tea?"

"Sure."

"Earl Grey. Very nice stuff." He waved Pierce into a hanging-basket chair near the I-Screen ring. "You're the first round-tripper in—gee, almost a year. Mostly we get rich Backsliders. They make a pile downtime, but they're too dumb to stay there and enjoy it. So they pay us a fortune, and pay the forgers even more for phony papers, just to live in some uptime dump full of rats. Burns my ass to see 'em. Christ, I'd love to get downtime, start a vineyard on Los."

"Well, why don't you?"

"Oh, I will one of these days, soon as I make enough to get started properly. No point in going downtime to a joe-job. Trouble is, I got a wife who doesn't want to leave. She says this is where the action is." He shrugged. "Sure, action. So what? You got the right idea, bud. Come uptime for business, then back down again."

"Mmm." Pierce enjoyed his tea in slow, careful sips, then looked at his watch. "Want some really good advice?"

"Sure."

"Get the hell out of here. Right now."

The man's face tightened with suspicion. "What for?"

"In about fifteen minutes the whole city will be crawling with Agency gorillas. They're sure to find this place. You better be a long way away."

"Shit. What did you goddamn well do, anyways?"

"Got a computer terminal at home?"

"Sure. Built right into the cinevision. So what?"

"Watch the terminal. You should see what I did before noon tomorrow."

The man looked perplexed. "How is it going to show up on the terminal?"

"I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise." He stood in front of the I-Screen.

"No kidding—get out of here. By this time tomorrow, the heat should be off, but if they nail you before then, they'll take you to pieces and stuff you down the garburator."

The man looked a little sick. The I-Screen blinked on; Pierce waved and stepped through.

Klein smiled. "Last out, first back. Now we start pulling back the rest."

"Right."

"Mr. Pierce—we are making very heavy demands on power. If they investigate too soon, what do we do?"

"It won't happen. They'll have other things on their minds."

"Confidence becomes you," Anita said. "Now, will you please tell me how those cartridges are going to tie up the Copos?" Pierce laughed, an oddly mischievous guffaw. "Where's your computer terminal?" he asked Klein.

"My office."

"Good. That's where Anita and I will be for the next while. I'll order in some food."

Over the next two hours Pierce and Anita ate a late supper, talked with the returning indents, and watched the glowing blue screen of Klein's terminal. Not long before dawn, Pierce dozed off; a minute later, Anita shook him awake.

"Look."

The screen was pulsing red; white letters crawled across it. CODE JJ 16 VIOLET PRIME /PRIORITY XII

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE EMERGENCY OVERRIDE

EMERGENCY OVERRIDE

ALL STATIONS SUSPEND NORMAL OPERATIONS 2 HRS

PROM RECEIPT

REPEAT FOLLOWING MESSAGE FOR 2 HRS NO FURTHER

OVERRIDES PERMITTED FOR 2 HRS

The letters faded, replaced by a succinct description of Sherlock and its implications. The whole message took some four minutes to creep across the screen, then repeated.

"You've preempted the whole computer network," Anita said. Pierce nodded. "It was harder than it looks—the cartridge had to go through several test commands before it would override. And even that couldn't happen until some trusting soul put the cartridge into his terminal. But it means that every terminal hooked into this network is carrying the message. It can't be overlooked or suppressed." Anita began laughing. "What a wicked man! Think of all those innocent housepersons who won't be able to make breakfast because the computer won't talk about anything but Sherlock."

"Tragic. But this won't do much good unless Wigner gets his troops to Mojave Verde. If the Sherlock missile manages to get into Earth space, this little message will just help to soften people up. The awful Colonials with the death ray."

"What's the problem?"

"I spoke with Wigner. He mentioned foul-ups. Once I'd have taken that as stalling. Now I suspect he's really less organized than he looks." Dallow came in. "Ev'body's back. And hungry."

"Phone up the nearest cafe" and order some breakfast. After they eat, they can take off if they want to."

"Aw, thass too bad. This the best job we had in a long tune." Pierce and Anita were alone again in the little office, watching the letters crawl yet again across the screen.

"He tried to kill me. Wigner. Right over the phone." Anita's eyes widened.

"Oh, don't look so outraged. Eric's all right; from his point of view, he feels he's doing the right thing. And what I'm doing is a threat to everything he stands for."

"You're very forgiving of a man who's treated you like a—a utensil."

"He's the closest thing I've got to a friend, Anita. You don't let go of a friend just because he does something stupid or cruel."

"What a strange man you are."

"Mm."

Pierce found a portable cinevision plate in Klein's desk and turned it on. UnTrainable broadcasting always bored him, but it was worth putting up with this morning. A slightly haggard young woman was reading the news:

"—still tying up all computer networks. Trading has been suspended on the Glaciopolis Stock Exchange, and government offices have been paralyzed. Hospitals report several fatalities caused by the computer override as patients failed to receive automated therapy and medication.

"It's still not clear whether Commissioner Gersen will respond personally to the charges made against him in the mysterious message still displaying on all terminals. A Government House spokesperson in Farallon City says Gersen is in Mojave Verde and isn't expected to return until tomorrow night. The spokesperson denied that the Commissioner's tour of the Missile Facility is in any way related to the so-called Sherlock Project, which was reportedly suspended several weeks ago.

"The same government source says Sherlock was certainly not the cause of the unusual lunar light observed yesterday. No explanation has yet been offered for that, but some scientists speculate that an anti-matter meteor may have collided with the Moon.

"In other news, the I-Screens are still closed as the new flu strain continues to spread from one chrono-plane to the next. Government health officials say the quarantine will remain in effect until a vaccine is developed; that may not be for another week. But there's no cause for alarm. No cases of the so-called Thannas B flu have been reported anywhere on Ore."

She chanted her way through the rest of the news, ignored.

"If he's not due back till tomorrow night," Anita said, "It's because the Sherlock missile is due to be launched before then." Pierce reviewed what he knew of Mojave Verde's launch capabilities.

"Maybe as early as tonight; more likely tomorrow morning. They won't want to foul up the countdown. If Wigner doesn't get there in time—"

"You want to go south?"

"I don't want to, but we can't take a chance, not if Wigner is having trouble getting mobilized."

"How will you get there in time?"

"Oh—something dramatic, like renting a car from Hertz-Avis. Want to come with me?"

"I'd get in your way."

"We make a good team."

"Not in this case. I'm exhausted—couldn't do a thing. And you'll probably have to hurt people. Go alone."

He shrugged and stood up. "I'm going to see if Dallow found breakfast. And I want to get those damn bracelets off everyone."

"Good—that's something I'll be glad to help you with." The indents sat in little clusters around the empty ring of the I-Screen; they smoked, slept, compared trips. Tim Klein, the knotholer's son, blearily drank coffee in an armchair while his father slept on the floor by the couch, where Mrs. Curtice also slept. Dallow was nowhere in sight.

"Got some good wirecutters?" Pierce asked; after some rummaging, Tim retrieved a thermocutter from a tool chest. Pierce nodded his thanks and began with the young Sicilian, who tried to protest:

"I lose my job, I go to jail."

"A man must take his chances in this world," Pierce replied in Italian.

"And my family, sir, what of them?"

The thermocutter burned through the tough plastic. "They have endured pain and slavery on your account; could freedom be worse?" He handed the Sicilian the thermocutter. "Release your family and pass these around." He yawned, stretched, rubbed his face. His whiskers were growing back; it would be good to have his beard again. By the time Dallow and a couple of other indents had returned with boxes of doughnuts and a styrofoam coffee urn, most of the people were free. Dallow cut himself free with an enigmatic smile.

"It spooky oat there," he said. "Ev'body walk aroun' lookin' stoned. Nobody talk to nobody. Ex- treme"

"They'll get over it," Pierce said. He could imagine the streets of towns on a dozen chronoplanes, filled with people whose lives had been brusquely overturned by the crawling letters on the terminals. Some had been jolted right out of life altogether: they had gone to join the burning girl and Dr. Chatterjee and all others benevolently murdered. At least, Pierce thought, they would not suffer the final indignity of oblivion: he would remember his victims now, he would allow himself to be haunted. It seemed a small enough penance.

Now everyone had been cut free. Klein and Mrs. Curtice were awake, sleepily drinking coffee. The indents laughed nervously, comparing the paleness of wrists, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Pierce stood up. Gradually the others fell silent.

"You did well. Because of what you did, there won't be a Doomsday. And there won't be colonies any more, unless people want to have them. Soon you'll be able to go back home to Earth, or anywhere else you like. You can be independent, or you can find a patron again." He glanced at Mrs. Curtice, who gave him an evil wink.

"I'm sorry I threatened your children. I would never have harmed them. I hope they will never be threatened again."

Their blank expressions unsettled him a bit. Just as well; at least they weren't sucking up to him as then: new patron.

"Anita and I are leaving now. What's left of Mrs. Curtice's money is in the bus. Take it—you all earned it. Then disappear for a few days. And if Mrs. Curtice complains, she'll go to jail, not you."

"That'll be the day," the old woman muttered. There was an awkward, pleasant moment when everyone insisted on shaking their hands and wishing them luck. At last they left the room through the corridor to the parking lot.

"What now?" Anita asked.

"You go to ground in some motel. I rent a car—or a plane. With a plane I could be in Mojave Verde in four or five hours." They emerged into a cold, misty morning. Although the lot was screened from the street by other buildings, the traffic noise was loud. They were walking past the bus when there was a sudden change in the light, and Pierce saw the reflection of an oily rainbow shimmering on the bus's windshield. A gust of warm air swirled against their backs—

" Drop!" Pierce shouted.

He was already rolling under the bus, groping for the Mallory, as flechettes cracked and spattered on the asphalt. He caught a glimpse of their attacker striding through an I-Screen that vanished in an instant: a man with a Mallory .15 like Pierce's, a man in denim with a bolo tie glinting prettily at his throat.

Philon Richardson. The Dorian Climber, full of smiling hostility in the elevator to Wigner's floor. Sent through a portable I-Screen to zap a bad guy in the finest Agency style.

Pierce crawled swiftly under El Emperador sin Ropa; his heightened hearing tracked Philon's footsteps. The Dorian was moving around the edge of the lot, on Pierce's left, seeking a vantage point from which to drive Pierce into the open—or to kill him where he lay. Twenty meters across the lot from the bus's rear, two dumpsters stood open, awaiting more garbage. They were the only effective cover nearby, but Pierce had little chance of reaching them. If Philon did—and he would—he would be able to spray flechettes under the bus. The underside of the bus was filthy, caked with an oily mixture of mud, grease, and rust When he reached the gas tank, Pierce scraped off some of the crust: the metal was rotten-orange with corrosion. He fired one shot into the tank at maximum impact; it punched through almost soundlessly. Gasoline squirted out, pooling aromatically between the rear wheels. Phi-Ion was almost to the dumpsters now.

Pierce crawled backward, groping for a wire. He found it, pulled, felt the insulation crumble, saw the bare wire spark.

The gasoline vapor ignited softly but emphatically into a little fiery puddle that spread and brightened. Pierce pushed himself backward, eyes stinging, out from under the front bumper.

The bus blew up, sheltering Pierce with its own bulk. Flames lashed out like tentacles through a cloud of greasy smoke; the bus settled as its rear tires exploded. Pierce sprang onto the hood, onto the cab; the rear of the bus was a curtain of fire. Crouching a little, Pierce climbed onto the roof of the bus and sprinted into the flames.

Philon was sprawled behind the left-hand dumpster, watching to see from which side of the bus Pierce would emerge. He glanced up, startled, to see a blazing figure standing in the black smoke that boiled around the roof of the bus. Pierce put three flechettes into Phi-Ion's face. Then he leaped from the bus and rolled across the asphalt until his burning clothes only smoldered. He smelled the stink of his singed hair, felt the skin tighten on his burned hands.

"I chose, you lucky bastard," Pierce panted. "I chose! Low impact, and I could've blown you to bits. I chose!"

Coughing, he lifted Philon in a fireman's carry, turned, and headed for the entrance to the factory. He saw Dallow and Tun Klein carrying Anita inside. They left an erratic trail of bright blood that glittered in the light of the flames.

"Oh—oh, Anita—"

The weight of the poor, stupid boy on his shoulders was almost unendurable. He staggered down the corridor, his feet slipping in Anita's blood.

They took her into the I-Screen room, and lowered her gently onto the couch where Mrs. Curtice had slept. The indents pressed curiously around her.

" Get away!" He dumped Philon to the floor and slashed through the clustered bodies, while one quiet part of his mind asked: What's the hurry? She's dead, she's dead.

She was dead, her body ripped open by the fusillade meant for him. Her golden skin was already dull, her blood already dark; her open eyes gazed thoughtfully on nothingness. She was dead for no reason but chance timing, because she stood next to Pierce at the moment when Philon, reflexes hyped at least as high as Pierce's, came through the Screen knowing only that Pierce was nearby, and then saw his quarry directly in front of him.

His mother sprawled on the sidewalk, Carmody dying on the sand, the burning girl—he could not protect them, he could not save them, they were swept away from him out of space, out of time, leaving only memories that blurred and faded and cruelly sharpened. He could not save them, he was the agent of their destruction, and he was mad enough to try to save the world.

With difficulty, he made himself stop gasping for breath. Sirens were sounding outside.

"Everybody out!" Klein bellowed. "This way!" The indents followed him without confusion; an Algerian woman helped Mrs. Curtice, who limped past Pierce without a glance. Nor did Pierce waste time on her; he turned, stopped, and rifled Philon's pockets. Good: credit cards, passport, other documents, all in the name of J. Nathan Swift—one of Wigner's little jokes, no doubt. The photos of Philon did not at all resemble Pierce, but no one looked closely at IDs. He also found a little locket on a fine gold chain. Pierce recognized it: the locket he had given Judy a few days ago, the locket he had brought back from the Philadelphia goldsmith on Beulah.

Unhurriedly, despite the stink of smoke and the approaching sirens, Pierce pulled off his blackened clothes and dressed himself in Philon's embroidered denims. They were not to his taste, but they would do. He rubbed a hand over his head: his hair had not been too badly singed.

Philon was coming to as his hyped metabolism burned away the drug. Pierce turned the Dorian onto his belly, planted a knee between Philon's shoulder blades, and twisted his fingers into the cord of the bolo tie. Philon gasped. His limbs were still to numb to move.

"What did you do to Judy?"

"She—she was a stooge for the separatists. Fed 'em information. Wigner realized it after the cat's-paw nearly got you."

"Gersen wanted me to come to Ore—why would he try to kill me?"

"Wasn't Gersen. A cell of Trainables on Earth, friends of Judy's. They didn't know anything—thought they were doing Gersen a favor if they could get rid of you."

"So you executed her."

"I was ordered to."

"And what brings you after me, old friend?" Philon said nothing. Pierce twisted the bolo cord hard, then loosened it.

"You went rogue. That's all I was Briefed on. Go to Ore, nail you, go south to Mojave Verde."

"Ahh. How?"

"Agency safe house on Chavez Street—160. A car to Farallon airport and a jet from there."

"Gee, I could listen to you for hours."

"I'm talking for my life, Mr. Pierce."

"You're lucky to have the chance. Wigner built a bomb into me." He pulled Philon's head up so the Dorian could see the body on the couch.

"Know who that is, Philon? Know who you zapped?"

" I can't see her face."

"Anita IKosi, Philon. Anita IKosi."

"Oh no, oh—Mr. Pierce, what the hell was she doing here?" Pierce curled his fingers around Philon's throat, feeling the hard, fragile lump of his larynx, the vulnerable vertebrae. Philon's face grew pale except for the three little red wounds where the flechettes had hit. Reluctantly, Pierce loosened his grip. Once he would have performed an execution like this quickly, efficiently, with a mild pleasure and no reflection. Now he had to choose; he was a free man. But he had not expected freedom to mean suppressing his desire for Phi-Ion's death. No wonder the indents feared freedom, if it meant a constant battle between mind and reflex.

He gripped the Dorian by his hair and slammed his head against the linoleum floor. Philon's eyes rolled up. Pierce rucked the Mallory, its clip still half full, into his shirt. He walked slowly out the door that the others had fled through.

He did not look back at Anita's body on the couch. He could not bear to.

Chapter Eleven

The corridor from the I-Screen room led eventually to an empty, unpaved alley on the far side of the building from the burning bus. The indents and the knotholers had vanished. He was alone. For a moment Pierce felt a kind of serene detachment. No one owned him; no one had any claims upon him; he was obliged to no one but himself. If he chose, he could walk into the nearest bar and drink himself stupid, or rent a cubicle in a pornotheque, or go for a long walk out into the Alcatraz Valley—anything. The Sherlock missile might go up, or it might not; the Gurkhas might arrive in time, or they might not. He could try to interfere, but he did not need to.

—An illusion, of course; the illusion of stillness at the peak of a trajectory. He walked out of the alley, into a street full of mid-morning traffic. Many people seemed to be hurrying toward the fire behind him; others stood in quiet, intimate groups, talking softly. Pierce remembered some crisis of his childhood (Panama? Caracas? Zimbabwe?) when people had behaved like this, fearing the bombs as they hadn't feared them in twenty years. He had removed a phantom threat, only to replace it with a real one.

Chavez Street was a wooded cul-de-sac in a prosperous neighborhood; the Agency safe house was near the end, a large, low home with curtained windows. A safe house, for God's sake, in a Colony town. He rapped on the front door. A taped voice crooned: "Welcome to 160 Chavez. Please insert your ID in the slot and stand in front of the camera lens. Thank you." Pierce complied. Philon's ID card vanished, then popped out again. The door opened: a broad-shouldered blonde in a blue leotard smiled impersonally at him.

"So you're Philon—" Her face hardened as she compared his face with the indistinct image on the video monitor. Pierce stepped forward and clipped her on the chin, caught her as she fell, and carried her into the living room.

The house was silent, even to his ears. He slapped her smartly, rousing her, and pressed the Mallory against her belly.

"It's set on ten. No bullshit. I want Philon's car and the keys to the jet."

"I don't—"

"Don't waste my time, or you'll be the Agency's very last martyr." She surrendered, led him to a safe in the hallway, opened it, and gave him a set of keys and a passcard.

"The jet's in Hangar J at Farallon. Fuelled and ready." He looked at the passcard. "Modified Lear 200?"

"Yes."

"Jesus Christ." The modifications included four air-to-air missiles and two .75-millimeter cannons. "Car in the garage? Good." He took her into the nearest bedroom and knocked her out with two flechettes, then locked the door. If Philon got away from the authorities and tried to follow him, he would find little help here. There was no trouble at the airport. His passcard showed him to be Robert R. Schneider, the registered owner of the Lear 200, which had been waiting in Hangar J for a week. After a quick checkout, he filed a flight plan to Hawaiki and took off. Twenty minutes on a south-southwest course put him out of range of Farallon's radar; he descended almost to the waves and turned southeast. Automatically, he checked out the Lear's armaments: all functioning. The plane was intended for surveillance and interdiction, usually against endos, so its firepower was not great. But it would serve Pierce's purposes, as it had been intended to serve Wigner's. The ocean was empty, a chaos of blue and white that mirrored the sky. Here and there, the rotting corpse of an iceberg wallowed in the current, bound for extinction somewhere far to the south. Once Pierce saw a pod of blue whales, also bound south, to breed in the warm lagoons of Baja. Their great flanks gleamed in the sun; they were proud and remote, their concerns far removed from humanity's. Pierce felt a stab of envy as he passed over them, envy for their clean and simple life. Then they were gone, and he turned his attention to the coast looming ahead. He crossed the coast not far north of Los Alamitos, and tilted the Lear into a steep climb. They would pick him up on radar, of course, but not in time to do much about it. In ten minutes he was forty kilometers above the WDS and beginning the long plunge to Mojave Verde. The Missile Facility was a small gray-brown patch of geometry against the green of the hills; from the hills to the north, smoke from fires set by Klasayat's endo hunters drifted toward the gantries.

Two fighters were climbing fast to intercept, their paths like pincers closing to crush bun. Pierce got a radar lock on the northern fighter and launched one of his four missiles. Three seconds later the fighter vanished, exploded into a ball of smoke that elongated toward him like a cheated ghost.

The other pilot was more adept at evasion; he escaped two missiles and launched one of his own. Pierce forced the Lear down and away, but he was still too close when the missile detonated. The concussion flipped the Lear over; metal fragments ripped through it, and Pierce felt the controls go dead. He was falling, not diving, and the fighter pursued him like a stooping falcon.

—A ferocious jolt as Pierce ejected, and a lesser one as his parachute deployed. The fighter snarled past, began a long braking curve that would bring it back to finish Pierce off as he dropped, defenseless, to the smoke-shrouded ground.

Watching that distant, glinting dart as it arced across the sky, Pierce felt again the serenity he had known in the alley behind Klein's. He was troubled by nothing but the increasing pressure on his eardrums and the sharp stink of burning chaparral. He had tried and failed. Briefed, he had failed; Cleared, he had failed disastrously.

But there was still one chance.

The smoke thickened with a shift in the wind, and he dropped the last twenty meters through acrid grayness. The fighter pilot, losing his visual fix and overestimating Pierce's height above the ground, fired wildly and missed. The jet thundered past as Pierce hit the ground and rolled down a steep slope into the floor of a gully. Shaken, he lay unmoving for a few minutes, face pressed to the earth. The fighter's roar receded and vanished.

Slowly Pierce stood up and disentangled himself from the chute. Gathering it into a bundle, he buried it under the rocks and mud where he had fallen. But he kept the survival pack attached to the chute, and with its compass got his bearings. He had come down northwest of the Missile Facility, probably no more than twenty kilometers from Mojave Verde, and much closer than that to the endos. The wind was blowing toward the Facility; he should be able to cover much of the distance camouflaged by the smoke. Coughing, he scrambled out of the gully and began to walk. For an hour or so the going was fairly easy, though visibility was bad; he was moving downslope through open country dotted with clumps of oak and occasional patches of pine woods.

He found the hunters where he expected to. They had heard him coming, however, and stood in a semicircle across his path. He stopped. They were very short, thick-bodied men in shirts and trousers of deerm'de. Most carried bows and arrows, a few had pistols, and one was even armed with an archaic AK-47. The rifleman stepped forward as the smoke thinned a bit. He was over a head shorter than Pierce, broad-faced and large-eyed, with geometric black tattoos across his cheeks. His thick, dark hair was tied in many thin braids.

"Greetings, Klasayat," Pierce said in the Grasslanders' purring language. "I come in brotherliness."

The rifleman recognized him, and looked surprised. "Then hawks have learned to swim, Jerry-mis-sanan'kaa." Deathwalker—his old title.

"Greater wonders have happened, Klasayat Horsehunter." Incongruously, Klasayat pulled a pack of cigarettes—Salems—from a pouch on his belt, and lit one with a Zippo. Pierce smiled and laughed.

"You burn the hills and still have not enough smoke. Always you were a man of marvels, O Klasayat."

"Once I was, Jerry-missanan'kaa. All the families of the Grasslanders had fed from my kills, and many a husband hoped for one of my sons. Then you came, and destroyed us. There are no women in our camp, no children."

"You made war on us."

"And what else should men do when their land is taken?"

"I bear no anger for it You did what men should do."

"As we shall do with you."

"O Klasayat, this smoke has clouded your wits. I am not some whimpering blue-eyes to be robbed and eaten. I am the Deathwalker." Klasayat came closer, his eyes fixed on him, the rifle pointed at Pierce's chest. "Are you? Walking alone and dirty across the hills? I have looked in the eyes of the Deathwalker before, but I do not see him now." Pierce laughed until the smoke made him cough. "Old friend, old war-mate, I walk closer to you than you know. Do the horses not think themselves growing safe as they flee your fires and race for the cliffs?

When the sloth drinks at the tar pits, does she not see her own reflection and walk gladly to her death? And here you stand, speaking with me, yet seeing nothing."

The hunters shifted uncomfortably. Klasayat puffed on his cigarette, his dark eyes moving quickly from Pierce to his companions. Pierce knew it was his attitude more than his words that had kept Klasayat from killing him outright. The little glowing ember of hope began to brighten in his mind: what he could not do with all the Agency's weaponry, he might do with a handful of wretched, homeless hunters. This was the last chance.

"Yours was the skybird that fell, slain by the other."

"It was."

"Why does the Deathwalker, defeated, come to us if not to die at my hands?"

"To give you back your land. All of it."

"After destroying us to take it away?"

"I am the Deathwalker; I do not explain."

"And how will you do this thing?" asked one of the other hunters, ignoring Klasayat's glare.

"The men who build the firetrees, the rockets, have displeased me. I go to overthrow them. When they are driven from the land, it shall be yours again."

Klasayat spat. "What joy would we have of it? We are men alone, half-men."

Again Pierce laughed, half contemptuously. "Does Klasayat tell me he can steal a rifle, tobacco, a fire-maker, but not women? Will the mountain people not beg you to accept their loveliest daughters when they see you rulers of the grasslands again?"

The hunters looked at one another, and Pierce knew he had won them, knew that Klasayat had read the same message in their dark, yearning eyes. The muzzle of the AK-47 lifted; Klasayat slung it over his shoulder.

"It is well. What shall we do, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

"We must go into the town where the rockets nest. Quickly."

"This is not easily done. We are great thieves, and we have often stolen from the blue-eyes' houses, but always at night."

"How close can you get in daylight?"

"Within easy bowshot of the guards, on the north side of the town." On that side of Mojave Verde, Pierce remembered, there was dense undergrowth, some wooded patches, and outcrops of bare rock, all higher than the settlement. The town itself was a compact cluster of apartment buildings, stores, and offices—a typical akademgorodok. The Facility buildings were southeast of the residential area; Mission Control was at the top of a low ridge overlooking the town on one side and the launching pads on the other. The airfield was ten kilometers west of the town. From the hunters' vantage point, he should at least be able to see the Sherlock missile if it was still on the ground; if it wasn't, there would be no point in going farther. And if the Gurkhas did arrive in time after all, he would have to disappear very quietly.

—And do what? he asked himself.

—Go endo for a while. With the Grasslanders, perhaps, if I can talk them into accepting me, or with the mountain tribes in the Panamints. Do some hunting, some thinking. A lot of thinking.

"Let us go, then."

They turned and moved silently through the smoke. For about a kilometer they walked single-file over increasingly stony terrain. Abruptly, they stood on the edge of a steep-sided ravine. At the bottom, a stream pounded over rocks; halfway down the slope, four horses lay dead or crippled.

Klasayat smiled. "You bring us luck." Some of the hunters scrambled down to butcher the horses. They took the livers and tongues, and left the rest to rot.

"A waste of meat," Pierce remarked as they resumed their path.

"There are plenty of horses," Klasayat said. "Why should we not eat well when we can?"

"You speak well," Pierce replied. Why expect economy from the hunters who were driving dozens of species to extinction? And who was he, after all, to criticize?

Both they and the wind changed direction, and they could breathe pure air again. It was a beautiful day: the sun hung in the clear April sky, and the hills were fresh with new green. They were in open forest now, moving at an easy, steady pace under good cover. The endos noted the plentiful spoor of horse, camel, and deer, and with irony praised the blue-eyes for driving tigers and wolves out of the region.

Pierce liked them. They had been the scourge of the whole Mojave once, incorrigible thieves and woman-stealers, and quick to master the weapons they stole. But they had refused to let the blue-eyes sweep them away, had taken the invaders seriously but not fatalistically, and had made a spirited fight of it. To have lost as terribly as they had (Pierce had made a point of leaving the women's and children's corpses in their camps) and still stay alive and together was not a small achievement.

At last they crossed a wooded ridge and found themselves looking down at Mojave Verde. As Klasayat had said, the guards were very close. Fifty meters downslope, a high barbed-wire fence ran east and west. Beyond it was a strip of bare earth perhaps three hundred meters wide and then the nearest buildings. A sentry patrolled inside the fence in a jeep with an armorglass dome.

Pierce looked beyond, to the gantries rising .above the next ridge. And there it was, glowing in the late-afternoon sun: a tall, blunt-nosed missile, still plugged into its umbilicals but obviously almost ready for liftoff.

"What now, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

"I must go to the big round house on the ridge. Once I am through the fence and across the empty strip, I will have no trouble. But I will need a guide through the wire, and a distraction to lure the guards away."

"And what will you do in the round house, Jerry-missanan'kaa?" Pierce looked into Klasayat's eyes. "I will set fire to the firetree, burn it to ashes while its roots are still in earth. When that is done, those who have displeased me will be overthrown, for that is no firetree like the others that grow there. Other men are coming at my bidding; they will seize my enemies, and all will leave. Then you will possess this land again."

"When you came to us before, you promised to destroy us, and you kept your promise. Now keep this one, Jerry-missanan'kaa." Pierce laughed softly.

The sun went down. The Grasslanders ate raw horse liver and tongue, and exchanged hunting boasts. The lights of Mojave Verde gleamed like a carpet of stars, while the missile stood like a cathedral spire in floodlit splendor. The bare strip beyond the wire was not illuminated, though darkened floodlights were spaced along the fence. At unpredictable intervals, the sentry jeep passed back and forth.

"There is a path," Klasayat murmured. "To step away from it is to die. The great lights blaze forth, and the men inside come firing their guns. Each must step in the proper place, or all will be lost." A sensor array, clearly, had been dug into the bare strip. Total interdiction would cause false alarms and inhibit the guards; this way, they could move quickly through clear lanes.

"How is it that you know where to step, Klasayat?"

"A strange question. We have eyes, we have noses. The path is clear to us."

"Even as you see where water-root lies buried in the dry season?"

"Just so. Can you not see such things?"

"Sometimes. But tonight I will follow where your feet go."

"Good. When shall we go? All are eager."

"Not until the firetree is ready to grow. It will not be long." If the Gurkhas got in first, though, he would be in trouble. The hours passed. The Moon rose, and the men talked softly, uneasily, about its terrible new scar. In the town there was still some traffic, though most houses were dark.

At 2:00 A.M., the umbilicals were detached.

At 2:30, lights began to go on in many of the houses.

"It's time," Pierce said. "Let us go." They drifted down the slope as silently as mist, paused, and watched the sentry. Once the jeep had passed, Klasayat rose and slipped through the wire; he moved with the grace and control of a ballet dancer. Pierce followed, enjoying the test of muscle and nerve.

The Moon had already passed the zenith, casting plenty of light; if the sentry returned in time, they would stand out like totem poles. Klasayat scanned the featureless gravel, took a step, then another, paused, and turned right; they were advancing into an invisible labyrinth. Pierce stepped gently into the endo's tracks, reflecting on the. moronic cleverness of the defenses. They would work only if the intruder made a mistake—a dangerously complacent assumption, especially about endos whose life had equipped them all with senses like Klasayat's.

In a very short time, the entire group was across the strip and comfortably huddled in the shadows between two storage sheds, watching the jeep go past.

"Now," Pierce murmured, "attend me well, or never see the sun rise over the grasslands again. You are to take no captives, nor slay anyone, unless they attack you. Go into the wide street of many lights; break the great windows of the stores. Take loot if you wish, but no more than a man can carry when he is running for his life. Make yourselves heard and seen, then get back across the wire. Can this be done?"

" Hoi," the men whispered, like wind in leaves.

"Good. Klasayat will stay with me and pretend he is my captive. Now go."

They went away, so smoothly that Pierce had to look hard to follow them toward the main street four blocks away. The hunters moved from shadow to shadow, never quite visible as more than a shift in light. He felt a professional admiration: their stealth had been just as good when he was hunting them years ago. That had been a short operation only because he had quickly switched from search-and-destroy tactics to biological warfare. Typhus in a waterhole will find the stealthiest enemy.

"Give me your rifle," Pierce ordered. Klasayat looked alarmed, and gripped it more firmly. "Do not argue, Klasayat. They will not believe you a captive, and me a captor, if you still carry the rifle."

"I obey you, Jerry-missanan'kaa."

Pierce took the rifle, astonished at its weight. Where on earth could he have found such an antique—some trapper's shack? "Put your hands behind your head. Good. Now, let us go."

They walked rapidly through the empty streets, Pierce a few steps behind the endo. Glass broke musically in the distance, and the trilled war cry of the Grasslanders cut through the darkness. With almost comic suddenness, lights went on in many windows, then went out again. Pierce glimpsed anxious faces peering through curtains, heard dogs barking.

"Keep going, you endo son of a bitch!" Pierce roared in English. They were jogging down a residential street, paralleling the main street and moving away from the disturbance, toward the ridge where the Mission Control blockhouse stood,

A jeep screeched around a corner, catching them in its headlights. The driver braked hard; his voice roared from the jeep's loudspeaker.

"Halt! Identify yourselves."

"Helmut Thiess, Physicist 6, 1701 D Street, ID number 67-671-1904."

"Who's the other individual?"

Pierce snarled in exasperation. "How the hell should I know? He's an endo, for God's sake. I found him sneaking through our yard, got his gun away from him—now I'm taking him to Security."

"I'll take him. Get him over here."

"Christ, man, never mind—they're running wild just a few blocks from here! Dozens of 'em! The people down there need every guard in town."

"Bring your prisoner over here, Dr. Thiess."

"Shit," Pierce muttered. He tapped Klasayat's shoulder with the barrel of the AK-47. "Get in the back of the jeep," he whispered.

"I will die, Jerry-missanan'kaa, and my soul will wander homeless forever if I am not given to the vultures."

"Do as I say, and do not be afraid."

The Security man, an impassive young Slav, opened the rear door as they approached. Pierce shoved Klasayat into the screen rear seat; the door clicked shut. Pierce rapped on the driver's window. The guard rolled it down, and Pierce struck out with the butt of the rifle, grateful now for the rifle's weight, and hit the guard squarely across his forehead. He slumped against his seatbelt without even looking surprised.

"Ah, you are quick." Klasayat chuckled as Pierce reached through the window and unlocked the rear door. They set off again.

"Could you not use the car yourself?" asked Klasayat.

"I choose not to." A masquerade would be too dangerous: he would have to struggle into another uniform, somehow dispose of the guard, and contrive to get past other guards, who would know every one of their colleagues. Better to appear as a courageous, public-spirited citizen with a valuable prisoner.

The blockhouse was a massive cylinder, two-thirds buried in the ridge and flanked by several outbuildings. A guard, somewhat agitated, paced outside his booth at the main entrance.

"What's goin' on downtown?" he asked.

"Endo raid," Pierce replied, closing the distance between them. "I caught this one, but there must be dozens more, all over the place."

"Holy shit! Sure picked their time, didn't they, with McGowan and the Commissioner here." He surveyed Klasayat with distaste. "Well, better get this schmuck over to Headquarters."

"Where's that?"

The guard took a step or two closer, pointed down the street. Pierce swung the butt of the rifle and knocked the guard flat on his face. Shots rang out from a machine gun somewhere down in the town. Klasayat began shaking, and Pierce felt pity and admiration for him, for his courage.

"Quickly."

They sprinted across from the booth to the main entrance of the blockhouse; the entry was empty. Through a doorway and up several flights of narrow steps. At the top, another door, which opened slowly, heavily.

They walked into Mission Control.

It was a large, low-ceilinged, semicircular room filled with tall green cabinets, the Facility's computer system. Three Trainable technicians, all teenage girls, monitored the pre-launch information pouring through their flickerscreens; the only other people in the room were Bengt Gersen, Harry McGowan, and Seamus Brown, seated comfortably before a holovision image of the missile. No one had noticed the intruders. Pierce detached the clip from Klasayat's rifle. Six rounds—enough. He snapped the clip back in and handed the AK-47 to Klasayat.

"Stay here by the door. If I tell you to shoot, shoot only the one I point to."

"These are the great ones, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

"The greatest in this world. Do not dream of trophies." Obviously dreaming just such a thing, Klasayat clicked his tongue. Pierce went softly across the carpeted floor, not toward the observers but toward the technicians. Looking over their shoulders, he saw a small screen flashing out the launch countdown: 11:17; 11:16; 11:15. Close—he had cut it very fine.

"Excuse me, please," Pierce said quietly to the senior technician. She looked up in annoyance; then, seeing a stranger, her eyes widened. Pierce patted her shoulder, then reached out across the control board. He flipped the MANUAL OVERRIDE switch, then the LAUNCH button, then LAUNCH ABORT.

Dozens of video and holo screens showed the missile; when it exploded, it was like a perfectly timed fireworks display. The missile's eight million components vanished in a fireball of orange, yellow, and black, into which the nose of the missile sank with eerie slowness. Thunder echoed from loudspeakers, drowning out the shouts of the technicians and observers, but not the shrill, warbling cry of Klasayat triumphant. The observers turned and saw Pierce walking toward them. He sat down in one of the armchairs arranged neatly in front of the holovision, which now resembled a sort of outsize fireplace. A bottle of Fundador Cognac stood open on a little table; Pierce poured himself a drink and sipped it gratefully. Gersen, McGowan, and Brown regarded him in a trance of consternation.

McGowan, his complexion an unpleasant dark pink, was the first to recover. "W-where the hell did you c-c-come from?"

"The north side of town. With a friend." He nodded toward the door, and they turned to see Klasayat beaming at them over his sights. On the screen, the missile was now only a pile of glowing rubble on the launch pad, surrounded by ineffectual firefighting crews. Gersen shook his head.

"Impossible. Impossible. Another fifteen minutes and it would have been in Earth space. Our agents there would have taken over guidance; nothing could have stopped us."

"Nothing can stop you, Commissioner."

"What do you mean?" barked Seamus Brown, who seemed fully recovered from the shock of losing his greatest creation. He was a thin, sallow man of thirty with hard eyes and, incongruously, a red-lipped mouth like a woman's.

"It means that at the worst, you gentlemen will spend a few months in some well-furnished jail, writing your memoirs. You'll be freed as soon as Earth starts recognizing the Colonies as independent sovereign states. The new governments will demand your release, and off you'll go, heroes of national liberation."

Brown leaned forward, listening intently. Gersen and McGowan began to lose their glazed expressions.

"You were too clever. You saw what a weapon the Sherlock lens could be, but you didn't realize that the mere existence of Sherlock meant the death of the IF, of the Agency—everything you wanted to overthrow."

"You're going too fast for me, Mr. Pierce," Gersen said; he had recovered his irony as well as his composure.

"No doubt I am, Commissioner." Pierce smiled. "Look—with no Doomsday, there's no need for forced political unity, for coercion, for deportations. Separatism is inevitable. Ore will be independent within months—maybe weeks. The Agency is so rotten with incompetence and corruption, it couldn't stop you even if the IF ordered it to. And it won't, since—as I believe you know—I spread the word to every chrono-plane."

"Have some more cognac, Mr. Pierce." Brown poured him a fresh drink, then glared bitterly across the table at him. "You stupid son of a bitch! Of course we understood what would happen! D'you think we went to all this trouble just to—to Balkanize the chronoplanes? Pierce, Pierce—we were out to unify them. Under our rule, an alliance of Trainables and unTrainables. Not a tyranny of elitists, not a government based on a monstrous false threat."

Pierce's eyebrows rose a little; he laughed inwardly at himself for having, this late in his life, underestimated the perfidy of his opponents.

"Ah… naive of me. You'd have replaced the false threat with a real one."

"Of course!" Brown snapped. " It would've been irresponsible not to use the power we discovered. We'd have kept humanity unified, moving together, not sinking backward into so many German principalities and petty kingdoms."

"Irresponsible." Pierce felt achingly tired, and not at all in the mood for a political argument. He was about to get up when McGowan pointed to the screen.

"Christ, look at that!"

In the holovision, a little yellow spark had appeared in the distance.

"Unidentified aircraft on the radar!" one of the technicians called out. The yellow spark grew larger, nearer; pulsed orange; vanished. A few seconds later the screens went white, blacked out, then came on again to show pad and gantry utterly demolished. There was no trace of the firefighters. Parachute flares threw a flat bluish light over the blasted launch site.

Pierce cleared his throat. " I believe the Agency has arrived at last." Gersen cocked his head, listening to the computer murmuring in his ear. His large, bland face revealed little. He spoke into his ringmike: "Tell Deputy Minister Wigner he can meet with us here in Mission Control." So Eric himself had come along. Pierce wondered what they would have to say to each other.

Someone switched the video screens to monitor the area in front of the blockhouse. The guard Pierce had knocked out was still lying there, a small pool of blood around his head. Approaching from the street were two or three squads of Gurkhas, Uzis slung under their arms; they looked remarkably like Klasayat's hunters. As they took up positions near the blockhouse entrance, an armored personnel carrier pulled up. Wigner, looking a bit uncomfortable in a khaki uniform without insignia, got out; three young colonels followed him. Pierce recognized them all, tough Russians with plenty of combat experience.

"There'd better be more booze than this," Pierce observed. "Wigner's friends are all serious drinkers."

"Harry," Gersen said to McGowan, "would you get out the champagne, please? And glasses." He smiled faintly at Pierce. "We were saving it to celebrate."

"Jerry-missanan'kaa, what now?" Klasayat called.

"Come and sit with us."

Klasayat joined them smiling as he settled himself gingerly into a chair. Brown and McGowan looked disgusted; Pierce realized the endo smelled pretty powerfully of smoke and raw liver and unwashed deerhide. Oblivious, Klasayat flourished his cigarette and lighter, and savored the splash of cognac Pierce gave him.

"Sit in stillness," Pierce muttered, "but be ready. I do not know what the men who come will do."

"Hai."

The heavy door swung open; the three colonels strode in with Wigner in their wake. He looked more like an aging NCO than the superior of field-grade officers.

The room was very quiet except for the clump of the newcomers' boots. Pierce saw one of the colonels recognize him and turn to Wigner. Wigner saw him now, and smiled through his mustache.

"Hi. Jerry."

"Hi, Eric."

There was some fuss as more chairs were found and champagne was poured. On the holovision, the pad and gantry still burned.

"Nothing pleasanter than a drink by the fireside with good company," Wigner remarked. The colonels laughed heavily. No one else did. "I gather you beat us to the punch, Jerry."

"Mm."

"Damned resourceful. We very nearly didn't get downtime at all, thanks to your little computer stunt. The Federation Executive Council tried to dismiss me, just on principle."

" It would be the first time they ever did anything on principle. I'm sure you charmed them."

"Charm had nothing to do with it. I had to kick some sense into them. Took time." He sighed as he sipped his champagne. "Well, well. And what in hell has happened to you?"

"I've been Cleared, Eric. All the blocks are gone. I remember everything."

Wigner nodded. "Carmody?"

"Yes."

"Lovely girl. Too bad. She was the best thing that ever happened to you, Jerry."

"No." He felt a dull, deadly pressure growing behind his eyes. It took terrible control to keep from pouncing on Wigner, killing him. "The best thing was Anita IKosi. Philon killed her yesterday." Just for a moment, alarm shone in Wigner's eyes. He grimaced. "I'm very sorry. I didn't know she was—"

"You don't even know what you lost when your cat's-paw shot her, Eric. But I know what I lost."

Wigner hurled his glass at the holovision in sudden fury. " Damn you for a self-pitying moron! Don't you know what humanity has lost? D'you have any idea? Earth is already turning into a goddamn zoo. Riots, protests, fucking insurrections! They've burned down Paris Transferpoint. Fifteen countries screaming for immediate changes in the IF, or else. Hundreds of deaths. And the Colonies sure to start breaking away, sure to start fighting Earth and each other. Jerry, you idiot, you've thrown us back into the middle of the twentieth century."

Pierce finished his champagne. Slowly, carefully, he put his glass down.

"Eric. Eric. You chew me out, congratulate yourself, and miss the point, all in one tantrum. You think you've been doing humanity a favor, even if you've had to kill a few million people in the process. And you still think you could've gone on doing it, even after you knew Doomsday would never come—"

"If you hadn't acted independently, there was a slim but definite chance of maintaining the status quo. Any chance at all was better than facing anarchy. We decided to take that chance."

"We? Who decided?"

"The Minister and the Advisory Committee."

"Who all trust you implicitly—they have to, you give them all their data. You decided, Eric. You acted independently to turn Doomsday from a mistake into a hoax, and you're so goddamned insulated from reality, you actually thought it would work." The pressure behind his eyes was building. "The Agency is a shambles, the Colonies are concentration camps with indoor plumbing. When Earth was going to pieces twenty years ago, when you and I were smart-ass kids, we looked pretty good because we kept everything propped up for a while—for a while. Ishizawa saved our asses, and we thought we had the right to go on running things."

"What if we hadn't?"

"Why, then, Eric, we'd've enjoyed the benefits of our collective wisdom, or gone under through our collective stupidity. The way we will now." Wigner shook his head contemptuously. "You're too old for that sort of idealistic crap."

"Yeah. I'm still an eighteen-year-old, thanks to Dr. Suad. I still get a kick out of zapping bad guys."

"Well, that's one pleasure you'll be giving up." Wigner scratched himself absent-mindedly, and a short-barreled pistol appeared in his hand. "Old son, you're under arrest. So are the rest of—"

Klasayat had understood nothing, but he knew a firearm. Two rounds from the AK-47 threw Wigner back into his chair; he rebounded across the table, scattering bottles and glasses, his back spurting blood. The colonels died in the next second.

The shots seemed to ring in Pierce's ears for a long time. The technicians, somewhere far away, were crying.

"Peace, Klasayat-missanan'kaa. Peace. Your people are avenged."

"I would take trophies, Jerry-missanan'kaa." Pierce got up slowly, aware of the gold locket in his coat. He yanked a shoulderboard from each of the dead officers. Wigner's uniform had no insignia; his un-fired pistol would do.

"They are not flesh trophies," Klasayat protested.

"They are enough. Never has a man struck so high, Klasayat."

"Holy Mary," McGowan whispered. He and the others sat as if paralyzed. "How in hell's name do we get out of this? The bloody Gurkhas will think we put him up to it. Christ, they'll cut our balls off, they do that, you know, bloody endo's got us all in the shit—" Pierce ignored him. He looked down at Wigner, who seemed small and slightly pathetic in death.

—I liked you a lot, Eric, he thought. You were all the friend and family I had. But what a crazy fool you were, and what a lot of harm we did together.

He lifted Wigner's hand, checked the frequency of his ringmike, and gently put the hand down again. Tuning his own mike, he spoke into it:

"Sergeant."

" Sah!" The Gurkha's voice crackled in his ear.

"This is Dr. Wigner. The prisoners will be coming out with Senior Field Agent Pierce as their guard. They're to be flown out to Farallon City at once."

"Yes, sah! Shall I detail an escort squad, sah?"

"Only to the airfield, thank you. They can use our personnel carrier. The officers and I will be inspecting this facility for the next hour or so, and I'd be grateful if we weren't disturbed, Sergeant. There's a lot of information to be studied here."

"Of course, sah. No one will disturb you. Will that be all, sah?"

"Oh—an endochronic will be coming out also. He's to be escorted to the wire and allowed to leave the area. We have no need for him."

"Very good, sah!"

Pierce turned to the others. "Keep a straight face and we'll be out of here without much trouble. Once we're in the clear, it'll just be a matter of waiting for the Agency to collapse." He explained the plan to Klasayat.

"Great is your guile, Jerry-missananTcaa."

"Judge my guile when your feet are far away. Soon this will be your land again—I swear it, Klasayat."

"I will judge your promise when my feet are here again. It has been a great raid, Jerry-missanan'kaa, and our names will live in all the camps of the Grasslanders."

"That is something worth having, Klasayat my friend." To the others:

"Ready?"

Gersen, McGowan, and Brown filed out, followed by the three technicians and Klasayat.

Their escape was anticlimactically eventless. Klasayat rode with them as far as the main gate; he bade them farewell and, smiling, patted the pouch that held his trophies. At the airfield, two of the technicians asked to stay behind with their families; the rest of the party went aboard a small, sleek Boeing 905 that had come through an I-Screen with the Agency forces.

The sky was turning from black to purple and the almost-full Moon was setting as the plane lifted from the long runway. The scar from the Sherlock beam had cooled to a dark gray; one had to search for it now. Pierce went forward to the pilot's cabin. "There's been a change of plans," he told her. "We're to take the prisoners to Mexicopolis, not Farallon."

The pilot was a plump, motherly French-Canadian. "Okay, Mr. Pierce. We'll be there in two hours."

The Boeing turned through the paling sky. Below, just beginning to emerge from the night, the forests and grasslands of Ore stretched empty and endless.

Pierce went back into the cabin, where his companions sat in a state of mild shock. Well, it had been a rough time for everyone. Had it been only five days ago that he stepped from the Earth/Beulah shuttle and froze?

Had Anita still been alive twenty four hours ago?

He sat down opposite Gersen and Brown. Brown began shaking his head and giggling unpleasantly. "What a bluff, what a bluff. Pierce, you're a genius. You fall into shit and come up smelling like a goddamn rose. You're a bastard and a nuisance, but we owe you a lot."

"Shut up."

Pierce closed his eyes, repelled by their smooth, taut faces, and listened to the soft thunder of the jets. Somewhere down there, where the thunder had already faded away, Klasayat was back among his men, making the greatest boast ever heard on the grasslands. Soon he would begin planning the restoration of his people, the marriage negotiations with the men of the mountains. Pierce did not know how to contrive to have Mojave Verde restored to the Grasslanders, but he would manage somehow. Destroyed, Klasayat had lived to triumph; his destroyer, in the same hour, felt only sorrow and exhaustion. Trainables were great ironists, but nevertheless Pierce wished he were down there with Klasayat.

Far away at the edge of the world, the sun rose over red Ore's dark wilderness and turned the plane and its passengers to gold.

Chapter Twelve

Thirty-two thousand years downtime from Earth, Vala was nearing the end of an interstadial. The ice sheets still armored much of Europe and North America; soon they would advance again, reconquering their lost provinces.

For this reason, Vala had relatively few colonists-sixty million, perhaps. Most of them were crowded into the great cities of the tropics: Toureville, Sao Sebastiao, Mashongi, New Carthage, Ciudad Guevara, But some settlers chose to live close to the ice, to tolerate long winters and rainy summers. Fifty thousand of them lived in Chrysopylae, on the hills where San Francisco stood on Earth.

A small, compact city, Chrysopylae lived by logging, ranching, and mining. It was separated from the tropical markets by distance and bad weather; most of its products went by I-Screen to San Francisco and other uptime centers. In this anxious year of 2020, many Chrysopylans were worried about the likelihood of a war uptime, for if San Francisco should be attacked, the local economy would collapse.

The news from Earth was ominous enough. Russia, China, and the United States were quarreling about their respective spheres of influence on several chrono-planes, including Earth itself. The New Incas, a nationalist movement led by Peruvian and Bolivian Indians, had taken Mendoza and were advancing rapidly on Buenos Aires. Indonesia had just crushed a neocommunist revolt; half a million rebels had been slaughtered, and another three million driven empty-handed through the I-Screens to Tharmas. And the International Federation, with its membership down to twenty three countries, was meeting in Geneva to dissolve itself.

Though many Chrysopylans were natives of the nations in conflict uptime, they got along well. Most were Americans and Canadians, with some Swedes and Finns and a lively community of Siberians. And there were many culties: New Luddites, Fifth Monarchists, Sokagakkai, Ishizawa's Witnesses. The mayor, now in her second term, was a Sapphist In most respects, therefore, it was a typical backwater town. Chrysopylae's university, however, was the largest on Vala, and one of the best on any chronoplane. Over a thousand students attended in person on its campus above the Golden Gate Pass; over a quarter million more studied by cinevision, flickerscreen, and video cassette. Less than ten years old, it already had the kind of prestige once enjoyed by Oxford and the Sorbonne.

Pierce had been on the faculty for three years now. For a year after the Sherlock affair, he had been kept under house arrest in Mexicopolis while several jurisdictions wrangled over who could try him, and for what. The IF, increasingly preoccupied by its own internal problems, failed to have him extradited; the infant Republic of Ore was in no hurry to charge the man who had rescued its first President, Bengt Gersen. At last he had been released, untried and unpunished, and had gone to court himself to sue the Republic for restoration of Mojave Verde to the Grasslanders. He had won, but Klasayat was dead by then, killed in a raid on the town Pierce had promised him. He had been too impatient.

Like most Trainable professors, Pierce had no specialty; he taught what interested him and his students. His colleagues found him reserved and impossible to involve in faculty politics. His students liked him: he had over seven hundred taking one or more of the twenty-eight courses he was teaching this semester.

They recalled that he had been involved in the big Agency scandal a few years ago, but few seemed impressed by his celebrity. There had been many scandals, many crises, since then.

It was early May, a gray noon, and snowing hard. The campus, with its steeply pitched roofs and snow-mantled quadrangles, seemed pleasantly medieval. Despite the weather, there were more people around than usual; most of them were converging on the theater building. There was to be a poetry reading today.

The theater could hold two thousand, and was almost full. Holo and cinevision cameras had been set up to record the reading; the poet's image, in two or three dimensions, would glow in the walls of thousands of homes all over the world, and like thunder, his voice would be heard somewhere on Vala at every moment for a long time to come. The Rector of the University came out onto the bare stage, smiling broadly, and said: "Good afternoon. I have the pleasure of introducing Mr. William Blake."

Blake appeared onstage to a crash pf applause. He was a stocky, prosperous-looking man of fifty-two, of medium height, in a dull-brown Beulan suit. He shook the Rector's hand, turned to the audience, and bowed. At last the applause died down.

"Thank you. Thank you. As many of you may know, I am here with an ulterior motive." He spoke with an accent that sounded remarkably like modern Bostonian. "My country, the United Republic of Great Britain, is a founding member of the Intertemporal League. The League is a free association of nations, both Futurite and endochronic; we hope your own North Valan Commonwealth, and the other sovereign states of Vala, will soon join us. Like Lord Byron, and Keats, and others, I am presently a sort of roving propagandist for the League. I do not intend, however, to belabor you with arguments on this occasion; if you wish to be belabored, you will have to watch me on the Six O'clock News tonight." There was a ripple of laughter. "I gather I am to be interviewed by one of your local controversialists. For now, however, I would like to recite some of the poems of William Blake."

His arms spread wide; he seemed to grow larger. His blunt features glowed.

"Hear the voice of the Bard!

Who Present, Past, & Future, sees;

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walk'd among the ancient trees…"

That voice was a great shout, a growl, elemental as rain and fire. The words crashed out; no matter how familiar the lines, how often-heard the poet's voice, the words pounded like surf over the listeners. The poems followed one another with scarcely a break; there was no applause. But a murmur like the wind before storm rose from the darkened seats, and Blake's voice rode on it like a soaring eagle: first a few, then more and more, hundreds were whispering the words that Blake roared out. He spoke, chanted, sang, crooned, howled: of chimneysweeps and whores, of the echoing green, of the worm in the night, of mind-forged manacles, of Urizen and Ore turning endlessly into each other, of the infinity in a grain of sand, of the eternity in an hour. With each poem more voices joined in, until Blake's was almost lost. He stopped.

"Turn on the lights."

The lights blazed down on them, burning like haloes on the listeners'

heads. People blinked, smiled tentatively at one another. An uncertain patter of applause broke out, then stopped as Blake began to sing Jerusalem. His strong, untrained baritone filled the hall, unaccompanied for the first three verses; for the last, all joined in.

"I will not cease from Mental Fight

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green & pleasant Land."

After the reading, Pierce was among the two dozen faculty members who lunched with the university's guest in an unpretentious refectory. The poet who had been so effectively dramatic on stage was quite another man now: he was full of jokes, a first-class mimic, a good listener. For all his Beulan traits, he was very aware of events on other chronoplanes; when the talk turned to politics, he was more optimistic than his hosts.

"I have great hopes for our new League," he said. "Already most of the nations of Beulah and Eden have joined; Ahanian Rome is about to, and many of the former Colonies far downtime."

"I am afraid there's little chance of our Commonwealth joining." The Rector sighed. "The government in Habana Grande is too jealous of its new power."

"That, dear friend, is of course why I accepted your kind invitation. And there are more of us than a handful of English poets. Look at Goethe: he has single-handedly drawn in four German states, and the Germanics of Earth are about to follow. Look at Jefferson, calling the Americans back to themselves. And who is there to oppose such men but a pack of knaves and fools?"

"I don't agree," said a professor who had a little too much wine. "We've just won our independence; we don't intend to throw it away. With all respect, Mr. Blake, we don't want any more interference. We have a right to live our own lives."

Blake laughed dangerously, a tiger of wrath encountering one of the horses of instruction.

"Our own lives. I wonder, sir, if you know how that sounds to one whose original life was lived by someone else. Recall that Beulah has been in touch with the Futurites for over twenty years, and no Beulan has lived his own life since then. Least of all myself." He paused, smiling.

"I well recall the day, long ago, when a young Fururite—disagreeable fellow he was, too—appeared unannounced in my back garden, where my wife and I were sunning ourselves. Quite naked, the two of us. Wouldn't have mattered nowadays, but then—well. The fellow was one of the first Futurites in Britain. He claimed to be a student at a university in California, of all places—named after Bishop Berkeley, of all people.

"Well, this young man claimed to be an expert in my poetry. And he presented me with a volume of my own collected verse. I was then just thirty, and had written very little, yet here was a great thick book with my name on it—and my death mask as the frontispiece." His listeners attended him in silence.

"Most edifying, to see one's own death mask. I was delighted to see I looked quite presentable. But the poems—ah, the poems. Reading them was—mm, rather like scanning a psychotape of a dream one has had and then forgotten. I had the strange sensation of having composed the poems without having quite written them down. Though I confess some of them I could scarcely understand until I had read the critics' explications. Yet—there they were, my life's literary output, compiled, annotated, printed in millions of copies.

"I finally decided to be delighted with this event; it meant that I could turn to other projects for which I now had the time. And, after Mr. Wordsworth's lawsuit, endochronic artists were entitled to royalties from uptime publication of their works, so I found myself rather well off. My unexpected celebrity also gave me a certain influence.

"I confess I am pleased that my propaganda for the League is usually welcomed, but I am a bit—disappointed—that my poetry is too. I half-expect to be clapped in irons and transported to a penal settlement for reading such seditious matter in public. Instead I am praised, applauded, holotaped. An ironic reward for a prophet."

"Would you rather have lived and died in obscurity?" the drunken professor asked pugnaciously.

"What I would rather have done is beside the point, dear friend; I have had no choice. I did not ask for this position in life; it was thrust upon me by the Futurites—by powerful and frightened men, children of Urizen who feared the future so much that they destroyed the past. We have none of us lived our own lives these past twenty-two years. We have robbed ourselves and each other of the lives we might have had. Some, like me, know what those lives would have been; most can only speculate. But consider this: my precursor, the man whose poems I read and whose royalties I enjoy, died in 1827, at seventy, singing hymns at the top of his lungs. If the Intertemporal League fails, if there is war among the chronoplanes, I shall doubtless die much younger than that, and my last words will be: ‘Which way, please, to the fallout shelter?' What consolation, then, to have seen my own death mask?" The academics were silent for a moment; then the conversation turned to other topics. Near the end of the meal, Blake leaned across the table to Pierce.

"Are you free this afternoon, sir?"

"I am."

"Perhaps we might spend a little time in private."

"I would be honored."

When they left the refectory, the snow had stopped and the sky was beginning to clear. Blake and Pierce walked across the north edge of the campus, looking down the steep slopes to the Golden Gate Pass. Here, as on many chronoplanes, a road led through the Pass and out across the Dunes to the coast. But there was no great city under Mount Farallon here, only a fishing village.

"You made quite a bit of history around here," Blake remarked.

"That is one of the few drawbacks to living in Chrysopylae. The land here won't change much in the next twenty thousand years. The river will change its course a little, the hills won't be as bare. But it looks very much here as it does on Ore."

"Does that disturb you, sir?"

"It is hard to escape one's memories."

"We seek escape only from prisons." Blake smiled at him. "You have all time to roam in, and still the past holds you. Specters hold you."

"Yes. I'm a true child of Urizen."

They entered one of the university residences, a long two-story building. Pierce's apartment, on the first floor, was small, spare, and impersonal. He turned on the walls: the Mendocino cliffs on Ahania. The same surf broke against black rock that had broken in Judy's apartment, long ago.

"I could be donnish and offer you sherry, or would you prefer a very good vinho verde?"

"Vinho verde, by all means." Blake made himself comfortable in a rocking chair. "Thank you. Your health."

"And yours… I believe you have more than one ulterior motive for your visit to Chrysopylae." . "I have. You said nothing at lunch about the new League."

"I'm for it."

"Would you like to go to work for it?"

Pierce's face grew smooth and impassive. He stroked his graying beard.

"What sort of work?"

"A special envoy, from the League to potential members. We very much need someone like you, Mr. Pierce. You're a Futurite who knows every chrono-plane, and almost every culture. You know scores of languages. Most citizens of the League are uncouth en-dos like myself, or unTrainable Backsliders from Earth. We have little influence on the Futurite nations, and they are the ones who must join if the League is to survive."

"If you need diplomats, you've got Metternich."

"Bosh! The fellow's an ass."

Pierce smiled. "That is no disqualification."

"It is for us. We are serious, Mr. Pierce. You Futurites have robbed us of our proper lives. We don't propose to let you rob us of our present ones as well."

"Understood. But there are thousands of people at least as qualified as I am. Why choose me?"

"There are no schools named after those thousands. There are no statues of them in the town squares."

Pierce looked embarrassed. "If you think you can trade on my fame, I'm afraid you'll find your wallet nearly empty. My celebrity has evaporated, thank God."

"You are mistaken there, I assure you. If you ever ventured from this academic cloister, you would find yourself acclaimed everywhere you went."

"And shot at as well."

"Nonsense! You can't seriously mean that."

Pierce shrugged.

"Well, sir, what would you, then? Do you propose to remain here, peacefully teaching, until some invading army marches through the I-Screens, or a Sherlock lens turns this lovely world into another Ulro?" Pierce stood up and took Mendocino off the walls. He plugged in another projection tape, but paused before turning it on. "You know, of course, about the new chronoplanes they've discovered far downtime, in the Permian? Four of them so far."

"Indeed I have, sir. Truly astonishing." Blake seemed perplexed by this change of subject.

"I managed to have a friend of mine hired on with one of the survey expeditions on Gondor, the nearest of the Permian chronoplanes. He was an indent when I met him, but bright; went back to school and did pretty well. He sent me this tape a few days ago."

It was a simple, homemade one-wall holoprojection with no olfaction or tactility tracks. It showed a short, lean Black man in khaki trousers and an orange parka standing on the edge of an encampment of tents and sheds. The sun was shining with a wintry brightness that made the Black man squint. When he spoke, wind blowing across the microphone fuzzed his voice.

"Hi, Jerry. Welcome to Gondwanaland Junction." The camera panned through 360 degrees, revealing that the camp sat on the edge of a plateau above a snow-streaked valley; beyond the valley, black mountains draped in glaciers rose abruptly into a deep blue sky. An orange helicopter fluttered over the valley toward some unknown destination.

"Pretty, huh? Pretty damn cold, too. We're only four thousand kilometers from the South Pole. It's a lot nicer up north. But this valley is a rift—those mountains over there are going to be Africa, and right here is Patagonia. We have geologists screaming to get in here—they go right on screaming after they arrive. This place is extreme." The tape shifted rapidly, showing brief glimpses of the terrain and its sparse, shrubby vegetation. Dallow's voice continued, describing the scenes with the eager pedantry of the novice biologist. Then one scene appeared and held: a rocky stream bed somewhere down in the rift valley. There were still patches of snow in the shadows.

Four gigantic beasts came down the stream bed toward the camera, but too far away to be seen clearly. The camera zoomed in on them. Blake gasped and leaned forward.

"A pride of anteosaurs," Dallow's voice continued. "Aren't they beautiful?"

The beasts settled down on a sunny shelf of rock above the water. The largest was perhaps the size of a lion; it must have weighed over five hundred kilos. Its massive head was covered with blue-green scales; behind its small eyes were heavy bone ridges. Its thick neck and heavy shoulders were adorned with a mane of bright blue hair; the rest of its body was covered with shorter hair, a darker blue. It idly waved its long tail.

"That's Big Daddy," Dallow said. "The others are his harem. They must have a pretty big hunting territory, because we just ran into them a few days ago. This seems to be their nesting area—they haven't left it for three days. I'm hoping we'll be able to watch them lay their eggs soon." The females, smaller and sleeker than the male, bickered for a preferred spot alongside Big Daddy. He yawned, showing great teeth, and uttered a deep bark that echoed from the rocks. Then all four went to sleep. The scene shifted back to Dallow at the camp. "Those are my babies, Jerry. I'm going to find out everything there is to know about 'em. And they're just one tiny bit of this world—man, there's so much to learn here, we'll be busy for a thousand years. Why don't you get yourself a leave of absence and come on down and see it for yourself?" He grinned and waved, and the wall went blank.

Blake sat back and rubbed his hands on his trousers. "Many mansions," he said quietly.

"That's where I'm going," Pierce said. "But not on a leave of absence. For good."

"I think perhaps I understand why."

"I'm going to stand on the rocks of Gondwanaland, and sail the Tethys Sea," Pierce said as if he had not heard. He put on the tape again, advancing it to the scene of the anteosaurs and stopping it there.

"So you want to bury yourself in the past."

"It's all the present now."

"But humanity needs you, Mr. Pierce. Very much."

"Humanity needs itself. It can't rely on heroes any more. It never could."

Blake sighed, crossed his legs, and raised his glass in a reluctant salute. Smiling, Pierce lifted his own glass and drank. His eyes never left the great blue beast sprawled arrogantly on the rock, his proud head lifted to the sun.

About the Author

Crawford Kilian was born in New York in 1941. Raised in Los Angeles and Mexico City, he is a naturalized Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, Alice, and daughters, Anna and Margaret Formerly a technical writer-editor at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, he has taught English at Capilano College in North Vancouver since 1968. His writing background includes two children's books (

Wonders Inc. and The Last Vikings); critical articles on Charles Dickens and the Canadian writer James De Mille; several radio plays broadcast by the CBC; and Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.