The berserkers had been chasing Harry for a long time, hounding him continuously, never giving him a break, for an epoch that seemed to stretch out into eternity. He was tired, so tired, of never being able to put them out of his mind. Right now they were at least out of sight, but that didn't help much, because he knew for a certainty that they were lurking nearby. He could feel their presence in his bones. They had chased him for an age, endlessly and relentlessly, and now they were about to pounce.

That, Harry realized, was the way things usually went in dreams. First came the fear, and afterward came the image, the presence, to give the fear a face and form. In some small corner of Harry's mind he already realized that he was dreaming, but the knowledge did not help much.

Suddenly he knew that the first of the death machines was about to attack, and simultaneously with the knowledge the metallic shape came bursting out of ambush, popping right up from the middle of a strange landscape that might have been somewhere on a world called Hyperborea.

In the next moment, with an abrupt shifting of the scene Harry realized that he was not on Hyperborea at all, but standing on the much colder world that had once been his home. He hadn't been back to the place for many years, yet his booted feet crunched in the snow, and the land lay brilliant in the light of the three moons.

There sounded a loud, snapping clang, and Harry knew the sound came from the impact of the berserker's jagged grippers against the heavy armor he had willed himself to wear. But even though in his dreamworld he had the armor on, it wasn't going to do him a bit of good. In another second or two the fusion-powered arms of the berserker were going to tear him right apart...

The terror brought him upright in bed, gasping. The loud sharp noise that had wrenched Harry Silver out of his dream had landed him in a waking reality that seemed even less probable than the dream, and more confusing.

He was not out on the rocky waste of Hyperborea, nor had he returned in some mysterious way to his home world. He was waking up on one of the narrow cots in a small room in the caravanserai on Maracanda, and people - live, solid people - were forcing their way in through the window.

Around him, the darkness that passed for night on this strange habitable body had been comfortably quiet - until now The harsh clanging, snapping noise was repeated, loud enough to awaken anybody, and this time Harry realized that it was made by one of the window bars being broken out of its socket.

The window, like all the others in the low, sprawling building, lacked any kind of glass or screen, and the metal bars were more ornamental than serious. They might discourage a casual trespasser, but were too flimsy to withstand a determined assault. A prying attack with a strong, simple lever had broken loose first one of them and then another. Someone just outside the window was holding a long, thick bar of wood.

At some distance outside the building, near the area where the caravan had parked, an oil lamp on a tall pole was burning, sending a faint wash of light into the room. Another dim glow came from Maracanda's cloudless, spaceless sky, which, like the sky of Earth, had never gone completely dark. Streaks of interior lamplight, fainter still, came sliding in under the closed door leading to the hallway.

By the time Harry's eyes were fully open, it seemed to him that a small army of enemies was streaming in through the violated window. The first pair of dark-clad figures, showing something woodenly peculiar about their faces, were standing beside Harry's bunk even before he was fully awake. In another moment they had laid hands on him. Each of them had one of Harry's arms, and they were attempting to drag him away. The narrow bed sat close against the small room's wall, and the man trying to grip Harry's right arm had to climb onto the cot to do so.

Harry's first reaction of fear and outrage was mixed with something like relief, on realizing that in reality he did not face berserkers. The hands grabbing at him were strong, but had no more than human strength. Only the invaders' strange faces gave him doubt, and it took him another moment to realize that they were artificial, subtle masks, no two alike, that offered, almost convincingly, the impression of natural humanity.

Training and instinct had already taken over, and the fight was well under way even before Harry was fully awake. Both of his arms were caught; neither of his immediate assailants was a weakling, and for the moment he had to do what he could by using his bootless feet alone. There were yells and gasps, and the third and fourth figures to approach him were sent staggering back.

The intruders had him outnumbered, about five to one, as near as he could tell, in the midst of what had swiftly become a crazy melee. But their trouble was that they were anything but a practiced, well-coordinated team. Too many of them had come crowding into the unfamiliar little room, so that in the semidarkness they kept blundering into each other's way. They were all dressed alike, in dark, tight-fitting garments, and Harry had the impression that all carried short, primitive weapons sheathed at their belts. But so far, in these first moments of voiceless struggle they had drawn none of their knives or clubs. The two men who had seized Harry kept trying to wrestle him, rather than stabbing him or hitting him over the head.

As soon as he could spare the breath, he got out one good karate yell.

As if the noise had broken some spell, suddenly all of the attackers were loudly vocalizing, too, jabbering warnings and barking confused orders at each other.

"Hold his head... this way." That sounded like a woman's voice, trying to give directions, coming from behind a mask that showed a molded imitation beard. She was cradling what looked like a piece of cloth in one outstretched hand, holding a soft pad loosely, as if in readiness to slap it over Harry's face the instant she got the chance.

She wasn't going to get it. Harry twisted his head and neck from side to side. He kicked out again and again, as methodical in his viciousness as he could be. No way he was going to get full power behind the kicks in this position, but there were so many bodies around him he could hardly miss, even if it was hard to see. One figure reeled back, groaning, another dropped to one knee.

Yet another struck at Harry, but ineffectually, with an empty, untrained hand. They seemed to be going to great lengths to keep from doing him any serious damage. All their efforts were concentrated on dragging him away.

The man holding Harry's right arm made an attempt to shift his hold, and in the moment when his grip was slackened, Harry got that arm free. His backfist strike, snapped from the elbow, caught his fumble-fingered assailant on his masked right cheek with an impact that must have loosened a tooth or two, and sent the fellow tumbling off the cot. With his right arm free, Harry saw about getting the left one loose.

Only a few seconds had passed since the second window bar gave way. The door to the adjoining room slid open. Lily's head appeared in the aperture, followed by her shoulders still clad in the top of her coveralls, and like any normal person she was coming to see what in the name of Malako could be going on. In the slow way that things seemed to move when a fight was on, Harry saw one of the intruders turning away from him to confront this newcomer. Lily's mouth was opening, and in another instant she would be yelling, too.

By this time a couple of the villains had regrouped enough to make another effort to hold a saturated cloth over Harry's nose and mouth. That plan had not succeeded even when Harry's arms were being held, and it had no chance of working now. The cloth was soon on the floor again, along with one of the people who had been holding it. Others were starting to regain their feet.

Now Lily, her mouth gone wide and screaming, was being pulled into the room. Harry was off the bed at last and standing on his feet. Ducking under ineffective blows, fighting off what seemed a score of clutching arms, he could hear someone rattling the other door, the one to the corridor, which he had locked before retiring. From out there in the hallway, Kul Bulaboldo's voice, much louder than Harry had ever heard it before, was calling out to know just what in all the hells was going on?

Lily meanwhile had started fighting with the temper of a small fiend, kicking, biting, scratching. But either she hadn't much skill at this kind of thing, or the room was just too crowded to let her show it. Judging by the way she yelled, she had not yet been seriously hurt.

One intruder was saying, or at least Harry seemed to hear: "If you don't struggle, Doctor Kloskurb, your wife won't get hurt."

At the same time, another of them was managing to get Lily's two arms pinned behind her back.

"Come with us, Doctor Kloskurb, or she gets..."

Harry, having got both arms free at last, was not impressed. Dr. Kloskurb, whoever he might be, was probably home safe in bed, and his wife likewise. The man who had been holding the knife at Lily's throat caught a smashing elbow under his chin, and went down groaning. The knife went flying somewhere, and Lily grabbed at her throat as if she had been nicked.

The rattling of the door had grown more violent, and now came to a stop, in a pause followed instantaneously by a crash. The whole panel, formed of some imported plastic, came bursting in, admitting the relatively bright light of the corridor. Where the door had been, a bulky outline, Bulaboldo's, clad in a long, strange-looking, netlike shirt or gown, stood outlined against the brighter illumination.

From that moment it was all downhill for the attackers.

Bulaboldo had come in carrying some kind of a short club - with a second look Harry could see that he was holding a pistol reversed so he could strike with the butt - the odds had definitely shifted.

In only another moment the surviving attackers had broken and were scrambling away in panicked flight, some struggling to get back out through the broken window, some taking good advantage of the open doorway.

At absolutely the wrong time, in the key moment, with full victory in the defenders' grasp, Kul, as if reeling back from some assailant's blow, or dodging the thrust of a knife, somehow blundered into Harry.

Harry fell, tripping over something - he couldn't tell what, maybe a fallen body, or maybe a broken chair or upended candle stand. Bulaboldo kept struggling to get up and sliding back. The great bulk of Harry's helpful rescuer kept squashing him down, pinning him in place long enough to keep him from grabbing any of the intruders who were still active, as they went out by door and window with amazing speed.

Spitting oaths, grabbing handfuls of Kul's netlike garment and manhandling his great bulk out of the way, Harry at last regained his feet. Kicking broken furniture from his path, he lurched and stumbled across the small room to the window, but, having got that far, all he could do was hang there, panting, on the sill.

One of the five attackers was still writhing on the floor, but the four others had got clean away. Harry was just in time to see the last escaping enemy vanish into the shadows surrounding a darkened pedicar, a moderate-sized vehicle already moving, picking up speed. The enemy had been beaten and routed, and Harry wasn't going to run out into the night in hopeless pursuit of a bunch of lunatics.

Besides, three places on his body, maybe four, were starting to send out signals that he had been strained and bruised. None of the sore spots seemed likely to need professional help.

He went to Lily, checking to see that she had not been seriously hurt. She was gasping and blubbering, but Harry could see that the knife nick on her neck was superficial.

Kul was the loudly groaning one, as he stamped about with his pistol still in hand.

How many sleeping rooms did this facility afford? Maybe one hundred? Harry had the impression that all, or most of them at least, were occupied tonight. He had observed on his way in that none of the visible entrances to the building seemed to be locked, and the main entrance stood open and unguarded. But rather than enter the building that way, the intruders, whatever their purpose, had chosen to break their way in through Harry's barred window.

Not all of them had got away; he had one captive still on hand for questioning. Harry turned and looked at the body on the floor. One leg and one arm were moving slightly, so the man was still alive.