Bulaboldo, pacing a winding course among the small hills, obviously knew where he was going, though Harry could see no markings to indicate a path or trail. It would have to be a matter of memorizing small landmarks. The big man walked at a brisk and steady pace, except that now and then he looked around abruptly, as if checking to see whether they were still being followed.

In several places Harry took note of abandoned excavations, deep and wide enough for mass graves.

Harry's guide gestured toward one of these holes. "All dug by hand, Harry. There hasn't been prospecting and mining like this on any other world for centuries."

Harry doubted that any prospectors using primitive digging implements would have made such neatly geometric holes, and said so.

Bulaboldo shook his head. "Whenever this land undergoes any artificial deformation, it starts to come back together by itself. It makes digging a mine shaft, or even a pit, a very interesting process. You have to think of this place in terms of geometry as well as geography."

A couple of the fresher ones still looked irregular. But it seemed that they were all changing with time, turning slowly into geometric designs. Some analogue of a healing process was under way.

Presently they stopped, in front of another digging, the start of a shaft or adit, driven into another low hillside. The hills here looked so much alike that Harry wondered if he would be able to find his way back to the vehicle without help.

Within fifty klicks or so of Minersville, almost the entire surface of the lifeless land, save for the strips reserved for roads, was divided into claims, of the same size as Bulaboldo's - one hectare, a square a hundred meters on a side.

Most of these had already been worked over and abandoned as nonproductive. Harry saw tracks, which Kul said were those of wild spheres, just roaming through.

Pegs with little pennants attached marked the corners of each claim and sketched the sides of each square of the standard size, all of this peculiar world that one individual was allowed to possess.

The standard claim, at a hundred meters square, afforded plenty of room to land a small ship, if anyone could fly a ship in here - maybe even enough room to conceal one, if the topography was sufficiently rugged, or you could somehow alter the shape of the land to make it so.

One hundred hectares - claims - in every square kilometer of this land. In every thousand square kilometers, 100,000 possible mining claims.

Obviously claims located in free zones, where power machinery could be used, would be much easier to work - but a miner would have to pass through extensive breakdown zones to reach such isolated pockets. After the lucky prospector had hauled his power supply and digging equipment in by pedicab, he would be able to determine much more quickly that the mineral rights to his land were really worth nothing at all. Or in the minority of cases where they were, you could get right down to productive work.

Harry could well believe that a great many people had gone that route. But any claim in a free zone, whether rich in minerals or not, might be very valuable and useful as a place to set up processing and packing machinery. If any refining of the ore was necessary - probably it wouldn't be, at least in the case of the drug stuff.

"Here," said Bulaboldo, succinctly. "My claim."

Harry nodded. Part of his mind automatically took note of the fact that other hillocks blocked their line of sight to their car, and every part of the vestigial road.

"What now?" he asked. Maybe great Malako or some other deity would see whatever happened here, back in among the little hills, but there'd be no other casual observers - no fear, here in a breakdown zone, that anyone with high-tech gadgetry was watching from afar. Spies would have to take a chance by coming close.

Bulaboldo squatted in front of the deepest part of the modest excavation. With a meaningful gesture he pulled a glove onto his right hand. Then, grunting as he bent over, he reached down with his gloved hand, pushed aside a layer of stuff that passed for top-soil, reached in, and pulled out a handful of what looked at first glance like unimpressive sand.

Without rising, he held it out for Harry's inspection.

Harry stooped for a closer look than any he had taken yet at the substance of Maracanda. He wasn't sure it would be right to call this material soil. It wasn't dirt, not of the kind you fought with soap, nor the type in which you planted flowers. It wasn't exactly sand or clay or gravel, nor like any kind of natural substance that Harry could remember encountering before. He knelt beside the hole and tried to scoop some up in his fingers, but the stuff resisted being handled. It felt bone dry, but it didn't want to behave like a powder. More like a cross between modeling clay and - and something else.

After looking around once more, Bulaboldo led the way behind a towering landform topped by a natural bulge in the shape of an onion dome. Here he used the digging tool to scrape away a few centimeters of the Maracandan version of topsoil.

Bulaboldo pulled out a piece of cloth, which he spread on his broad palm. Then he used the tool with great delicacy, to dig out a mere thimbleful of the underlying layer. Spreading this on the cloth, he held his flattened hand up for inspection.

Harry looked but didn't touch. He raised an eyebrow in silent query.

Bulaboldo said: "It's an honor and a privilege to show Harry Silver something he's never seen before."

Harry grunted, and looked closely. "This is, of course, not fairyground." For once the big man's voice was low. "The usual name for this is 'grit.' What this particular version is, old top, is unadulterated wealth. It'll be worth millions as soon as I can get it away from here and to the right distributors. Did I say millions? More millions than you'd be likely to believe."

Harry stared, fascinated despite his wariness. The stuff lying on Kul's palm was a mottled gray - but saying that didn't begin to describe the reality. Just looking at it brought on the beginnings of quirky sensation. For just a moment there was a hint, a flashing remembrance, of something he might have seen in the moment when the c-plus cannon fired.

Watching carefully, he didn't really see it crawl and creep, and keep infolding on itself, as if with a life of its own, but somehow it gave the impression of doing so. Harry didn't want to touch it, but even without doing so, he could understand how the stuff had got its name. He had an impression of small, hard particles, wrapped up in the flowing goo.

Bulaboldo was on the same wavelength. "If I were you, old man, I wouldn't let it touch my skin. Some individuals turn out to be very susceptible. But if you've got a pair of sensitive gloves with you, you can feel the grit."

Harry grunted. He had no gloves, and wouldn't have made the experiment if he had.

"No matter how finely you subdivide it, the parts behave in much the same way as the whole." With a faint sigh of reluctance, Bulaboldo let the sample sift back into the deposit in the ground. With careful movements he scraped the topsoil back in place.

Harry straightened, then stood back a half step, legs braced apart, arms folded. Now he had no doubt where this was heading.

Bulaboldo stood up, too, towering over him. He leaned closer, projecting emphasis. "It was just providential, old man, your dropping in on Maracanda when you did, and with your ship."

"Was it?"

Bulaboldo blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Never mind. Go ahead, wind up your sales pitch."

"Right. Now you've seen the product, and I can tell you that a considerable quantity has been mined, and put through the minimal refining process that is required. The problem is that all cargoes shipped out of Port City are examined carefully by badgers very difficult to bribe. But that difficulty can easily be got round by a fairly small and extremely agile spaceship, driven by an excellent pilot - "

"Ah. Aha."

" - and when I say excellent, I mean I don't know of any autopilot I'd trust to do the job. Not until the route is programmed into it. I mean one who can - when a pathway is charted for him - maneuver a deep-space-going ship in through all of these god-blasted veils and layers of crap making up this sky" - he gestured fiercely overhead - "and land it in the right spot. That spot is very near to where we're standing. The individual who pilots that ship is going to be stupefyingly wealthy. I guarantee it." And Bulaboldo leaned back, folding his arms, with the air of a geometry teacher concluding an important proof. "Wealthy enough to have a new ship designed and built. Or whatever other baubles your little heart desires."

"It seems to me I've heard this before. And not too long ago. About the great smuggling project, the urgent need for a small ship with a good pilot."

"Indeed?"

"Those two bastards were your partners, weren't they? You're the one who sent them out."

The big man drew himself up. For once he sounded cold. "Which two bastards have you in mind, dear boy? I know so many."

"You know the ones I mean. They called themselves Dietrich and Redpath."

Bulaboldo made a different kind of gesture, throwing something away with both hands, seemingly to say it was good riddance, whatever might have happened to them. Suddenly once more warm and friendly, he also looked pained.

"Dear fellow, not partners, no. Do show me a little respect. True, they were sent to Hong's World to acquire a ship, the means of doing so unfortunately left to their discretion. It seemed there ought to be plenty of vessels available there, with the evacuation going on, and a good bit of confusion to make things easier.

"But I never sent them with the idea of hijacking your beloved Witch, old chap! Impossible! Please give me credit for more intelligence than that. Had no idea you were going to be on the scene. Anyway, I can just see that pair, walking up to Harry Silver: 'By the way, old sport, we're taking over your ship.' I would've expected a bit of old-fashioned Darwinian selection at that point. Excising some defective material from the great gene pool of the species."

Harry nodded. "It came pretty close to that. How do you know so much about what happened out there?" He paused. "So Lily told you."

Bulaboldo seemed genuinely surprised. "Lily? No, not a bit of it. I had it yesterday from the men themselves. It is with mixed feelings, as you might imagine, that I acknowledge their return. I won't say I welcome them back."

"Back! Back here on Maracanda?" Harry could feel his jaw drop open.

Bulaboldo looked pained. "I was planning to break it to you gently, old fellow. Of course, the news of your attempted kidnapping got back to Port City by telegraph. And when our beloved Commandant Rovaki heard that someone had tried to kidnap Harry Silver, he took it to be only a skirmish in some war between gangs of smugglers. Rovaki has no high opinion of yours truly, either, and so he was not surprised to hear that the two of us had been seen together.

"You had told him that on your last flight you visited the Thisworld system, indeed that you had fought and recorded a berserker there. Somewhat to Rovaki's disappointment, spectroscopic studies of the images of background stars in your recording confirmed that that was indeed where the clash had taken place.

"I have met Commandant Rovaki a time or two, and I can imagine how smugly proud of himself he must have been. In my imagination I can hear him saying: 'So I played a hunch, and sent a scoutship over to Thisworld to take a look. And guess what my crew found? Two men, very recently marooned on an abandoned research satellite.'

"Both of the lucky pair have criminal records, though neither is currently wanted anywhere, as far as anyone on Maracanda can determine."

"So what does Rovaki know about how they came to be marooned?"

"Nothing much, my sources tell me. Neither Dietrich nor Redpath was willing to give the Space Force an explanation - not one that anyone could believe. Told Rovaki they'd been given a ride by some mysterious character who picked them up at the busiest spaceport in the sector. Neither ever quite caught the fellow's name, and they have trouble remembering anything at all about his ship."

Harry was shaking his head. "Did this mysterious man look anything like Harry Silver?"

"Rovaki had no luck there, either. They could remember very clearly what the miscreant did not look like, and that was a perfect description of you, old friend."

"Sounds like you're better acquainted with that pair than I am. What do you think they'll do?"

"From now on, what I tell them, and nothing else. Unless they... What was that?"

Harry had heard it, too, a murmur of distant but familiar voices.

"Somehow they've found our trail." Kul moved a few paces back along the way they had come, putting some distance between himself and his secret cache. "One of them could have looked up the location of my claim. Matter of public record."

A moment later, Lily and Alan and Kloskurb came in sight, walking together around the squared-off corner of a tall landform.

"There you are, Silver." Kloskurb was apologetic, but said he had begun to worry about Harry's warning, and felt he had to talk to him again as soon as possible.

Alan was looking around avidly at the landscape, but not as if he knew what he was looking for. He totally ignored the scratchings in the dirt, beneath which part of Kul's illegal grit mine lay concealed. Bulaboldo studied him keenly, then seemed to dismiss him as a threat.

Lily ignored Kul. She said: "Hello, Harry."

"Hello yourself. Are we prospecting today?"

"Alan is. Rather, he's trying to learn how. I came along because he said he had to talk to me. So far, nothing he's told me has made much sense. Then he wanted to follow the people who he thinks know what they're doing - I guess that's you."

Alan had dragged Kloskurb away, wanting to consult him on some landforms in the middle distance, but Lily lingered with her two former traveling companions.

Harry said: "I've just heard that Dietrich and Redpath are back. Here on Maracanda."

Lily gave him a blank stare for a long moment. Then she shook her head. "That doesn't make any sense. They can't be here. Are you seeing ghosts?"

Harry said what should be done to ghosts. "Just saying what I heard. And if you turn around, you can see for yourself."

Dietrich and Redpath, dressed and equipped as prospectors, were standing at a little distance, in the mouth of another sharp-angled ravine. The pair were eyeing Bulaboldo warily, as if uncertain of their welcome. But now Redpath, his nervous tic no better than before, shifted his gaze to Harry.

"Hey, Silver. You don't have to worry about the Space Force. Rovaki kept pushing your name at us, but we never heard of you, never saw you or your friggin' ship, let alone rode in it. You're safe enough - for now. Business comes first."

Harry said nothing. He could see in their faces all the things that they would like to do to him, a heavy grudge. But there was lingering fear of him as well. And they did believe it, about the business coming first.

Seeing that Harry still had nothing to say, Kul assured his operatives they were obscenely lucky to be still alive. What had they been thinking of, trying to grab the Witch!

One reason for the attempt, they reluctantly admitted, was that they had gambled away half of the expense money Bulaboldo had given them to charter a ship. No, they hadn't known that Harry was anyone special, or a friend of their boss. They had chosen him because of his ship's size, and assumed they'd be able to intimidate him into driving just where they commanded.

Bulaboldo expressed his disapproval. "All right, dear vermin, let it go for now. When the time comes, in a couple of days, I'm going to need you to carry bags of grit, if for no other reason."

Dietrich was a little slow. "Carry them where, Boss?"

"Aboard the ship, simpleton. Aboard the ship." Kul dismissed the pair with a wave, and watched them turn and disappear back into the narrow ravine.

Alan had called to his wife, and she had gone to join him and Kloskurb at a little distance. Harry and Kul were alone again.

Harry said to Bulaboldo: "Now it's your turn to make pretty much the same offer that your dimwits did. Except maybe you won't tell me how much fun I'll have taking the drug myself."

"You're a hard sell, aren't you, Harry?" With an air of reluctance, that quickly vanished as his enthusiasm bloomed again, the pitchman said he had seen how well the stuff did in a small market and was sure it couldn't miss in a large one.

"How's it work as a drug?"

Matters of biology and medicine weren't really his department, Bulaboldo said. But when Harry insisted that he try, the big man explained. Introduced into the human body, through any orifice (the effects varied, depending which one was chosen), or simply by absorption through the skin, it produced a varied spectrum of sensations, frequently ecstatic but on rare occasions extremely unpleasant.

Harry made a slight pushing gesture, telling Bulaboldo he could put his sample away. "Let me guess. It could get bad enough to cost you some of your customers?"

Bulaboldo frowned slightly, and nodded, acknowledging the problem. "Not as many as you might think. It's still early in the game, of course. Hard to tell yet how many years the average user is likely to keep on buying."

Harry said: "I'm already fabulously wealthy. Hadn't you noticed?"

"Ah, when you say that, my friend, you imagine that you jest. But in sober fact you speak the truth. And my plan also provides something much closer to your heart (if I know you at all) than fabulous wealth - I mean the actual restoration of your ship. Come come, Harry, you must have noticed that. It gets you immediately back into a real, here-and-now spaceship, in fact, your very own dear Witch. Believe me, old man, I want to see that ship back in your hands as avidly as you do. Because not until it is, dear heart, will either you or your ship be of any use to me.

"Now. There is one more thing that I must show you, and then it will be time for you to start back to Port City. No slow caravan this time, but a private pedicar; the return journey will be substantially faster."

"What am I going back there for?"

"Why, dear lad, to pick up your ship."

"You mean the Space Force seals are off?"

"Probably not just yet, old fellow. But they will be, by the time you get there." Kul started to check his timepiece, realized the futility of such a gesture here in breakdown zone, and shook his head. "Very difficult to coordinate things properly on this world. But perhaps as early as this very hour, certainly by the time you are approaching the spaceport, the ship will be yours to drive, with the blessing of all authorities concerned."

"Including Rovaki?"

"Of course, old comrade."

"How in all the hells do you propose to manage that?"

Kul took a modest bow. "Simply by sending a certain person in Port City a certain word, old lad. A code word, of course, quite innocently transmissible by telegraph. But I thought it vital that you first have a good look at the ground over here, before you head back to the spaceport. It's essential, of course, that we are certain of our landing site. Now, for the one more thing that you must see. It's rather important. Please follow me."

Harry followed. "I would still like to know just what you're doing."

"There is a time for great cleverness, old douche bag, and a time for direct action. Right now is a time for simple bribery, the method much to be preferred on most occasions."

"I see. And where do you expect me to bring my beloved Witch down again? Assuming I'm allowed to get her off the ground."

"You will be." Bulaboldo rounded a hillock and came to a stop, gesturing at an approximate hectare of flat land just ahead. "Just now I spoke to my precious dimwits of loading a ship. That will be done right here, dear boy, right here."

"Here? In the middle of..." Harry let it die away. With his last step forward, his wrist indicator had suddenly glowed to life, showing that he had just entered a free zone.

From his side came the voice of Kul, puffing a bit from the short, brisk walk. "Thought that would get your attention, Harry."

"A landing site on Maracanda, as you may have noticed, is a priceless prize. And by good fortune there just happens to be one available, on another claim to which I have access."

"If almost anyone else was telling me this, I'd say that they were crazy. How the hell did you arrange that?"

"Not arrange, dear lad. There are limits on even my powers of arranging. 'Discover' is perhaps the correct word."

"You just happened to discover a free-zone landing site? On land you also just happen to own?"

"Tut tut. I fear you would find the details of all my arrangements and discoveries boring; or perhaps you would react even more strongly. Let it suffice to know that the way lies open. Also, it might be well for you to gain whatever knowledge you can about your final approach, by gazing up earnestly into the Maracandan sky."

Harry walked a bit, looked around. He squinted into the sky as if he might be able to see zone boundaries there. He did some thinking.

Meanwhile Kul had plunged for a moment into a niche between two cubic rocks, from which he emerged holding a small, strange-looking device. He described how he had already been doing some tests, with a little radio-controlled drone flyer, taking off here and scouting out the irregular shape of this particular live flight zone. I

Harry was pressed to take the little drone in hand and look at it, wiggle its miniature ornithopter wings. The overall look was somewhere between that of a plastic mosquito and a metal hummingbird, but the size of a healthy chicken. A narrow, antennalike loop of something projected from the front, and Kul said this was the probe used to detect the boundary.

"It's clear sailing up to about one hundred meters." Bulaboldo gestured up at the seeming overcast, which gave no indication as to whether a ship could fly through it or not. "At that altitude, a dome of breakdown field roofs it over. But at one side of the dome is a narrow channel of free-zone space leading out. Yes, all the way out, but through a somewhat labyrinthine passage. Hence the need for a pilot of more than common skill."

"How narrow?"

"Almost - yes, almost prohibitively so. I tell you frankly that many people, many respected pilots, would not want to take the risk. But the charts I have compiled show that there is certainly a path that a small ship can travel, just room for a vessel of the Witch's size to squeeze through - though at the narrowest place with only this much clearance." And Kul held up two hands half a meter apart.

"How the hell do you know my ship's exact dimensions?"

"Not that hard to find out, old lad. Not compared to various other things I've dug up in my time. Been working on it since you came on world here. Shipyards and licensors and such like to keep records, you know, and records from many worlds tend to be accessible, even in backwaters like Maracanda."

Harry couldn't help being impressed by the scheme, though he wasn't tempted to sign on. It had the simplicity of all the best grand plans. The greatest physical risk would seem to be the pilot's, on his solo flight in here. But that was not why he was angry.

"What gives you the idea that I would use my ship to smuggle dope?"

"Well, to begin with, my lad, you'll be well compensated for a few hours' work - toil virtually risk free for a pilot as good as you are. No, 'well compensated' is too great an understatement. Your share of the total payoff will be vast indeed - far above and beyond the value of your ship, which we must agree is quite substantial in itself.

"Even including your c-plus cannon in the evaluation - oh, don't look at me like that, dear heart. I would not want to hint at blackmail, and certainly would not dare. I am merely pointing out the advantages of close cooperation."

"How is it you just happen to own the claim with the open passage over it, as well as the one with the most valuable mineral deposits?"

"Industry is claimed to be a virtue, and heaven rewards the virtuous, dear lad, but I doubt that you really want to know how the intentions of providence were made manifest in this instance."

There were several other things that Harry also doubted, but he wasn't going to discuss them now.

Instead, he said to Bulaboldo: "Then you have no proof that any solution to this maze exists? You don't actually know there's an aerial free-zone route all the way from the field at Port City to your claim?"

"Let us say, old chap, that I am morally certain of the fact. My small scout has not made the whole trip, no. But I assure you that a lot of computer work has gone into my determination."

This scouting by proxy showed one of the charted passages to be clear for several kilometers, and to open at the end of that distance into a larger free-zone cavity, that in turn debouched into open space. From that locus there ought to be nothing but a free and easy flight of a few hundred klicks directly to the Port City landing field, and the unbounded universe beyond.

"No one else has ever looked for a clear passage to this end of the surface?"

"No one else seems to have got around to it just yet, dear lad No doubt someone will, before long. Wouldn't do at all, old chap to be messing about here, in these narrow, low-altitude passages close above the surface, with a ship much bigger than yours. Almost certain to fail to get through, and any flight is likely to draw unwelcome attention. No, in and out is the game, one landing with a small ship and then away again. The product will be delivered and cash collected a good many parsecs from here."

Ahead of the little ridge where the two men were standing, the exotic desert, humped by a thousand little hills, stretched out for thousands of kilometers, toward what was literally the opposite edge of the world. He wondered how far the free zone sprawled out here at ground level.

Harry said: "Tell me one thing."

"Any number of them, old top."

"Just one, for now. Why should you trust me to keep my part of the bargain? What's keeping me from just driving my ship away, once I get back into her? Going on about my business, leaving you sitting here with your tons of grit?"

"I think I know you too well, Harry me lad, to believe you'd do a thing like..." Kul let his words die away.

Lily had rejoined them, and was displaying urgency. "Harry, there are some people over that way, acting rather strangely."

Looking in the other direction, Harry observed a small group, half a dozen men and women, about two hundred meters away. They seemed to be dragging something heavy along the ground, but he couldn't make out just what the object was.

"Why do you think they're acting especially strange?" Harry stopped. What the people were dragging was some kind of a machine. And he had seen one of those people somewhere before - yes, in Portal Square, arguing how nice it was going to be to die.

Kul was squinting in that direction, but he couldn't quite make out what the people were doing either. "What is it, Harry?"

He muttered: "Maybe Pike wasn't so crazy after all."

"Beg pardon?"

"Kul, turn around. Just walk with us. Lily, let's get out of here."

' The three started moving. Looking over his shoulder, Harry saw the little group of goodlife hoisting an actual berserker android to its feet. There was no mistaking that silvery, steely, manlike shape; humans built no robots that looked anything like that. He grabbed Lily by an arm and started running in the other direction, towing her with him, heading for where he judged the nearest boundary of breakdown zone to be. Bulaboldo labored along beside them.

Looking back, Harry saw the machine just starting to move under its own power, making a few jerky stumbles, circuits coming back to life now that they were in a free zone.

Bullets from goodlife small arms began to fly around them. Dietrich and Redpath had reappeared from somewhere, holding pistols, and were shooting back. Harry was close enough to see the little hole suddenly pop into existence, right in the middle of Dietrich's forehead. Before the man's body had hit the ground, Harry was running past him.

Bulaboldo was in his element, fighting back at supposed claim jumpers or government spies. He took the opportunity, just before plunging into breakdown space, of firing his handgun at the enemy.

Moments later, the berserker responded, having completed its revival. There was a small, stuttering flash at the machine's right shoulder. Force packets shot at a target inside a breakdown zone evidently disintegrated on crossing the border, and the impact was tremendously diminished. Several meters deep in breakdown, not enough power was left to inflict more than a bruise upon a human body. Force became farce, and when Harry was shot in the side of the head the sensation was no worse than getting slapped in the face with a wet rag.

They were momentarily safe from the berserker, but half a dozen goodlife were coming on, yelling and brandishing a variety of weapons.

Harry ran, with Bulaboldo panting at his side, doing a surprisingly good job of keeping up. Not far ahead, Lily, Alan, and Dr. Kloskurb were scrambling together to get back to the nearest pedicar.

When Bulaboldo was about to turn off on a side trail, Harry collared him and yanked him to a stop. Looking back, he saw that the goodlife had given up their immediate pursuit. There was no longer any sign of the berserker. Its friends were probably getting ready to haul it through breakdown to some free zone where victims were available.

Harry demanded: "Have you got a telegraph of your own, hidden somewhere near here?"

"Telegraph? Not a bit of it. Why - ?"

"We've got to call in an alert!" Harry was ferocious.

"But, old chap, a full alert's already been called. A fake, of course."

"What?"

"Already been sounded, I tell you." There was no mistaking Kul's fear, and his astonishment. His face had gone ashen, though his breath was gradually coming back. "I had to - make sure you'd somehow - be allowed to - lift off - didn't I? The code word already - sent out and acknowledged. Yes, of course, a fake. And now - turns out the bad machines are really here. Bit of irony in that. Perhaps I've saved the world. Without really trying."

"That thing that shot at us was real as they come. Except for this blessed breakdown business, we'd be toast. How'd you manage anything like that? A fake?"

Bulaboldo was smiling, in a ghastly way. "I swear, by all the profits I will ever make... It's just that one has - among one's acquaintances - those with extensive knowledge of the early warning system. And how it can be jiggled. All ships on the field will be not only allowed but compelled to get off the ground. Of course, your beloved Witch will still be there, waiting for your cunning hand at the controls."

"A fake." Harry was still having a problem believing that.

"Well, of course, old sponge." Kul showed injured dignity. "Even if one knew how to summon up actual berserkers, one certainly would not dabble in such matters. Accepting risk is one thing, committing suicide quite another."

"So, if an alert is already called - "

"Depend on it."

" - they'll know about it in Tomb Town and Minersville? They'll have got the word already, by telegraph."

"Private and public systems both, one would assume. But you're not thinking of going that way?"

Harry had thought of that. But he couldn't do it, wasn't going to delay his own effort to get himself back to Port City as rapidly as possible. "We're heading straight to the spaceport. I want my ship."

"That's the spirit. What about the caravanserai?"

"Don't intend to stop there unless we have to, and if we do, it won't be for long. I need my ship. Hell, this whole world needs it. There's not much else around in the way of fighting machinery. Very little Space Force, almost no Templar hardware."

"Good. Good, that's the ticket, old lad. Just don't be too eager to plunge into a space battle - one can always find those. But here, wait. Wouldn't do to forget this bit." And the smuggler handed over, in the form of another little message cube, the chart he had so painstakingly arranged for a pilot's guidance. "I'll be at the landing place, when you are. I'll look for you in about two days. I have a refuge nearby, where our product's stored. Solidly in breakdown zone, we ought to be able to hold out there for long enough. You will be quick as you can, won't you, old man?"

Harry ran on, catching up with Lily, Alan, and Kloskurb, who had been waiting for him uncertainly. "Explanations later. Run! All four get in one car - that way we can go faster."

"Can't believe - berserkers on Maracanda." That was Kloskurb, panting as he ran.

Harry said: "Better believe it. Whatever they're doing here, now that they know they've been spotted, they'll come out killing with everything they have."

Even as he ran, he cursed himself for a bumbling idiot, for not taking seriously a Templar general's warning. Even if Pike did tend to see berserkers and goodlife everywhere, the real ones that he discovered would be no less real.

Harry wished that he had some quick, direct means of communication with Robledo Pike. There were both public and private telegraph terminals in Tomb Town and Minersville, but there was no guarantee who would be in control of those cities.

So there was nothing to do but hurry on. The only help that he could truly depend on lay in the power and the optelectronic intelligence of his ship.