Junz always remembered Abel as he had been that day. Deepset eyes half closed under startling white eyebrows, beaky nose hovering intermittently over his goblet of wine, insunken cheeks accentuating the thinness of his face and body, and a gnarled finger slowly keeping time to some unheard music. Junz began his story, telling it with stolid economy. Abel listened carefully and without interruption.

            When Junz was finished, he dabbed delicately at his lips and said, “Look now, do you know this man who has disappeared?”

            “No.”

            “Nor met him?”

            “Our field analysts are hard men to meet.”

            “Has he had delusions before this?”

            “This is his first, according to the records at central I.S.B. offices, if it is a delusion.”

            “If?” The Ambassador did not follow that up. He said, “And why have you come to me?”

            “For help.”

            “Obviously. But in what way? What can I do?”

            “Let me explain. The Sarkite Bureau of Extra-Planetary Transportation has checked near space for the energy pattern of the motors of our man’s ship, and there is no sign of it. They wouldn’t be lying about that. I do not say that the Sarkites are above lying, but they are certainly above useless lying, and they must know that I can have the matter checked in the space of two or three hours.”

            “True. What then?”

            “There are two times when an energy-pattern trace will fail. One, when the ship is not in near space, because it~ has jumped through hyperspace and is in another region of the Galaxy, and two, when it is not in space at all because it has landed on a planet. I cannot believe our man has jumped. If his statements about peril to Florina and Galactic importance are megalomanic delusions, nothing would stop him from coming to Sark to report on them. He would not have changed his mind and left. I’ve had fifteen years experience with such things. If, by any chance, his statements were sane and real, then certainly the matter would be too serious to allow him to change his mind and leave near space.”

            The old Trantorian lifted a finger and waved it gently. “Your conclusion then is that he is on Sark.”

            “Exactly. Again, there are two alternatives. First, if he is in the grip of a psychosis, he may have landed anywhere on the planet other than at a recognized spaceport. He may be wandering about, sick and semi-amnesiac. These things are very unusual, even for field men, but they have happened. Usually, in such a case, the fits are temporary. As they pass, the victim finds the details of his job returning first, before any personal memories at all. After all, the Spatio-analyst’s job is his life. Very often the amnesiac is picked up because he wanders into a public library to look up references on Spatio-analysis.”

            “I see. Then you want to have me help you arrange with the Board of Librarians to have such a situation reported to you.”

            “No, because I don’t anticipate any trouble there. I will ask that certain standard works on Spatio-analysis be placed on reserve and that any man asking for them, other than those who can prove they are native Sarkites, be held for questioning. They will agree to that because they will know, or certain of their superiors will know, that such a plan will come to nothing.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because,” and Junz was speaking rapidly now, caught up in a trembling cloud of fury, “I am certain that our man landed at Sark City spaceport exactly as he planned and, sane or psychotic, was then possibly imprisoned but probably killed by the Sarkite authorities.”

            Abel put down his nearly empty glass. “Are you joking?”

            “Do I look as if I were? What did you tell me just half an hour ago about Sark? Their lives, prosperity and power depend upon their control of Florina. What has all my own reading in this past twenty-four hours shown me? That the kyrt fields of Florina are the wealth of Sark. And here comes a man, sane or psychotic, it doesn’t matter, who claims that something of Galactic importance has put the life of every man and woman on Florina in danger. Look at this transcript of our man’s last known conversation.”

            Abel picked up the sliver of film that had been dashed upon his lap by Junz and accepted the reader held out to him. He ran it through slowly, his faded eyes blinking and peering at the eyepiece.

            “It’s not very informative.”

            “Of course not. It says there is a danger. It says there is horrible urgency. That’s all. But it should never have been sent to the Sarkites. Even if the man were wrong, could the Sarkite government allow him to broadcast whatever madness, granting it be madness, he has in his mind and fill the Galaxy with it? Leaving out of consideration the panic it might give rise to on Florina, the interference with the production of kyrt thread, it remains a fact that the whole dirty mess of Sark-Florina political relationships would be exposed to the view of the Galaxy as a whole. Consider that they need do away with only one man to prevent all that, since I can’t take action on this transcript alone and they know it. Would Sark hesitate to stop at murder in such a case? The world of such genetic experimenters as you describe would not hesitate.”

            “And what would you have me do? I am still, I must say, not certain.” Abel seemed unmoved.

            “Find out if they have killed him,” said Junz grimly. “You must have an organization for espionage here. Oh, let’s not quibble. I have been knocking about the Galaxy long enough to have passed my political adolescence. Get to the bottom of this while I distract their attention with my library negotiations. And when you find them out for the murderers they are, I want Trantor to see to it that no government anywhere in the Galaxy ever again has the notion it can kill an I.S.B. man and get away with it.”

            And there his first interview with Abel had ended.

            Junz was right in one thing. The Sarkite officials were cooperative and even sympathetic as far as making library arrangements were concerned.

            But he seemed right in nothing else. Months passed, and Abel’s agents could find no trace of the missing field man anywhere on Sark, alive or dead.

            For over eleven months that held true. Almost, Junz began to feel ready to quit. Almost, he decided to wait for the twelfth month to be done and then no more. And then the break had come and it was not from Abel at all, but from the nearly forgotten straw man he had himself set up. A report came from Sark’s Public Library and Junz found himself sitting across the desk from a Florinian civil servant in the Bureau of Florinian Affairs.

           

            The Clerk completed his mental arrangement of the case. He had turned the last sheet.

            He looked up. “Now what can I do for you?”

            Junz spoke with precision. “Yesterday, at 4:22 P.M., I was informed that the Florinian branch of the Public Library of Sark was holding a man for me who had attempted to consult two standard texts on Spatio-analysis and who was not a native Sarkite. I have not heard from the library since.”

            He continued, raising his voice to override some comment begun by the Clerk. He said, “A tele-news bulletin received over a public instrument owned by the hotel at which I maintain residence, and timed 5:05 P.M. yesterday, claimed that a member of the Florinian Patrol had been knocked unconscious in the Florinian branch of the Public Library of Sark and that three native Florinians believed responsible for the outrage were being pursued. That bulletin was not repeated in later news-broadcast summaries.

            “Now I have no doubt that the two pieces of information are connected. I have no doubt that the man I want is in the custody of the Patrol. I have asked for permission to travel to Florina and been refused. I have sub-ethered Florina to send the man in question to Sark and have received no answer. I come to the Bureau of Florinian Affairs to demand action in this respect. Either I go there or he comes here.”

            The Clerk’s lifeless voice said, “The government of Sark cannot accept ultimata from officers of the I.S.B. I have been warned by my superiors that you would probably be questioning me in these matters and I have been instructed as to the facts I am to make known to you. The man who was reported to be consulting the reserved texts, along with two companions, a Townman and a Florinian female, did indeed commit the assault you referred to, and they were pursued by the Patrol. They were not, however, apprehended.”

            A bitter disappointment swept over Junz. He did not bother to &y to hide it. “They have escaped?”

            “Not exactly. They were traced to the bakery shop of one Matt Khorov.”

            Junz stared. “And allowed to remain there?”

            “Have you been in conference with His Excellency, Ludigan Abel, lately?”

            “What has that to do with--”

            “We are informed that you have been frequently seen at the Trantorian Embassy.”

            “I have not seen the Ambassador in a week.”

            “Then I suggest you see him. We allowed the criminals to remain unharmed at Khorov’s shop out of respect for our delicate interstellar relationships with Trantor. I have been instructed to tell you, if it seemed necessary, that Khorov, as you probably will not be surprised to hear,” and here the white face took on something uncommonly like a sneer, “is well known to our Department of Security as an agent of Trantor.”

           

           

SIX: The Ambassador

     

     

      IT WAS ten hours before Junz had his interview with the Clerk that Terens left Khorov’s bakery.

            Terens kept a hand on the rough surfaces of the workers’ hovels he passed, as he stepped gingerly along the alleys of the City. Except for the pale light that washed down in a periodic glimmer from the Upper City, he was in total darkness. What light might exist in Lower City would be the pearly flashes of the patrollers, marching in twos and threes.

            Lower City lay like a slumbering noxious monster, its greasy coils hidden by the glittering cover of Upper City. Parts of it probably maintained a shadowy life as produce was brought in and stored for the coming day, but that was not here, not in the slums.

            Terens shrank into a dusty alley (even the nightly showers of Florina could scarcely penetrate into the shadowy regions beneath the cementalloy) as the distant clank of footsteps reached him. Lights appeared, passed, and disappeared a hundred yards away.

            All night long the patrollers marched back and forth. They needed only to march. The fear they inspired was strong enough to maintain order with scarcely any display of force. With no City lights, the darkness might well be cover for innumerable crawling humans, but even without patrollers as a distant threat, that danger could have been discounted. The food stores and workshops were well guarded; the luxury of Upper City was unattainable; and to steal from one another, to parasitize on one another’s misery, was obviously futile.

            What would be considered crime on other worlds was virtually non-existent here in the dark. The poor were at hand but had been picked clean, and the rich were strictly out of reach.

            Terens flitted on, his face gleaming white when he passed under one of the openings in the cementalloy above, and he could not help but look up.

            Out of reach!

            Were they indeed out of reach? How many changes in attitude toward the Squires of Sark had he endured in his life? As a child, he had been but a child. Patrollers were monsters in black and silver, from whom one fled as a matter of course, whether one had done wrong or not. The Squires were misty and mystical supermen, enormously good, who lived in a paradise known as Sark and brooded watchfully and patiently over the welfare of the foolish men and women of Florina.

            He would repeat every day in school: May the Spirit of the Galaxy watch over the Squires as they watch over us.

            Yes, he thought now, exactly. Exactly! Let the Spirit be to them as they to us. No more and no less. His fists clenched and burned in the shadows.

            When he was ten, he had written an essay for school about what he imagined life to be like on Sark. It had been a work of purely creative imagination, designed to show off his penmanship. He remembered very little, only one passage in fact. In that, he described the Squires, gathering every morning in a great hall with colors like those of the kyrt blossoms and standing about gravely in twenty-foot-high splendor, debating on the sins of the Florinians and sorrowfully somber over the necessities of winning them back to virtue.

            The teacher had been very pleased, and at the end of the year, when the other boys and girls proceeded with their short sessions on reading, writing and morality, he had been promoted to a special class where he learned arithmetic, galactography, and Sarkite history. At the age of sixteen he had been taken to Sark.

            He could still remember the greatness of that day, and he shuddered away from the memory. The thought of it shamed him.

            Terens was approaching the outskirts of the City now. An occasional breeze brought him the heavy night odor of the kyrt blossoms. A few minutes now and he would be out in the relative safety of the open fields where there were no regular patroller beats and where, through the ragged night clouds, he would see the stars again. Even the hard, bright yellow star that was Sark’s sun.

            It had been his sun for half his life. When he first saw it through a spaceship’s porthole as more than a star, as an unbearably bright little marble, he wanted to get on his knees. The thought that he was approaching paradise removed even the paralyzing fright of his first space flight.

            He had landed on his paradise, and been delivered to an old Florinian who saw to it that be was bathed and clothed becomingly. He was brought to a large building, and on the way there his elderly guide had bowed low to a figure that passed.

            “Bow!” the old one muttered angrily to the young Terens.

            Terens did so and was confused. “Who was that?”

            “A Squire, you ignorant farm hand.”

            “He! A Squire?”

            He stopped dead in his tracks and had to be urged forward. It was his first sight of a Squire. Not twenty feet tall at all, but a man like men. Other Florinian youths might have recovered from the shock of such a disillusion, but not Terens. Something changed inside him, changed permanently.

            In all the training he received, through all the studies in which he did so well, he never forgot that Squires were men.

            For ten years he studied, and when he neither studied nor ate nor slept, he was taught to make himself useful in many small ways. He was taught to run messages and empty wastebaskets, to bow low when a Squire passed and to turn his face respectfully to the wall when a Squire’s Lady passed.

            For five more years he worked in the Civil Service, shifted as usual from post to post in order that his capacities might best be tested under a variety of conditions.

            A plump, soft Florinian visited him once, smiling his friendship, pinching his shoulder gently, and asked what he thought of the Squires.

            Terens repressed a desire to turn away and run. He wondered if his thoughts could have imprinted themselves in some obscure code upon the lines of his face. He shook his head, murmured a string of banalities on the goodness of the Squires.

            But the plump one stretched his lips and said, “You don’t mean that. Come to this place tonight.” He gave him a small card, that crumbled and charred in a few minutes.

            Terens went. He was afraid, but very curious. There he met friends of his, who looked at him with secrecy in their eyes and who met him at work later with bland glances of indifference. He listened to what they said and found that many seemed to believe what he had been hoarding in his own mind and honestly had thought to be his own creation and no one else’s.

            He learned that at least some Florinians thought the Squires to be vile brutes who milked Florina of its riches for their own useless good while they left the hard-working natives to wallow in ignorance and poverty. He learned that the time was coming when there would be a giant uprising against Sark and all the luxury and wealth of Florina would be appropriated by their rightful owners.

            How? Terens asked. He asked it over and over again. After all, the Squires and the patrollers had the weapons.

            And they told him of Trantor, of the gigantic empire that had swollen in the last few centuries until half the inhabited worlds of the Galaxy were part of it. Trantor, they said, would destroy Sark with the help of the Florinians.

            But, said Terens, first to himself, then to others, if Trantor was so large and Florina so small, would not Trantor simply replace Sark as a still larger and more tyrannical master? If that were the only escape, Sark was to be endured in preference. Better the master they knew than the master they knew not.

            He was derided and ejected, with threats against his life if he ever talked of what he had heard.

            But some time afterward, he noted that one by one those of the conspiracy disappeared, until only the original plump one was left.

            Occasionally he saw that one whisper to some newcomer here and there, but it would not have been safe to warn the young victim that he was being presented with a temptation and a test. He would have to find his own way, as had Terens.

            Terens even spent some time in the Department of Security, which only a few Florinians could ever expect to accomplish. It was a short stay, for the power attached to an official in Security was such that the time spent there by any individual was even shorter than elsewhere.

            But here Terens found, somewhat to his surprise, that there were real conspiracies to be countered. Somehow men and women met on Florina and plotted rebellion. Usually these were surreptitiously supported by Trantorian money. Sometimes the would-be rebels actually thought Florina would succeed unaided.

            Terens meditated on the matter. His words were few, his bearing correct, but his thoughts ranged unchecked. The Squires he hated, partly because they were not twenty feet tall, partly because he might not look at their women, and partly because he had served a few, with bowed head, and had found that for all their arrogance they were foolish creatures no better educated than himself and usually far less intelligent.

            Yet what alternative to this personal slavery was there? To exchange the stupid Sarkite Squire for the stupid Trantorian Imperial was useless. To expect the Florinian peasants to do something on their own was fantastically foolish. So there was no way out.

            It was the problem that had been in his mind for years, as student, as petty official, and as Townman.

            And then there had arisen the peculiar set of circumstances that put an undreamed-of answer in his hands in the person of this insignificant-looking man who had once been a Spatio-analyst and who now babbled of something that put the life of every man and woman on Florina in danger.

            Terens was out in the fields now, where the night rain was ending and the stars gleamed wetly among the clouds. He breathed deeply of the kyrt that was Florina’s treasure and her curse.

            He was under no illusions. He was no longer a Townman. He was not even a free Florinian peasant. He was a criminal on the run, a fugitive who must hide.

            Yet there was a burning in his mind. For the last twenty-four hours he had had in his hands the greatest weapon against Sark anyone could have dreamed of. There was no question about it. He knew that Rik remembered correctly, that he had been a Spatio-analyst once, that he had been psycho-probed into near brainlessness; and that what he remembered was something true and horrible and--powerful.

            He was sure of it.

            And now this Rik was in the thick hands of a man who pretended to be a Florinian patriot but was actually a Trantorian agent.

            Terens felt the bitterness of his anger in the back of his throat. Of course this Baker was a Trantorian agent. He had had no doubt about that from the first moment. Who else among dwellers in the Lower City would have the capital to build dummy radar ovens?

            He could not allow Rik to fall into the hands of Trantor. He would not allow Rik to fall into the hands of Trantor. There was no limit to the risks he was prepared to run. What matter the risks? He had incurred the death penalty already.

            There was a dim gleam in the corner of the sky. He would wait for dawn. The various patroller stations would have his description, of course, but it might take several minutes for his appearance to register.

            And during those several minutes he would be a Townman. It would give him time to do something that even now, even now, he did not dare let his mind dwell upon.

           

            It was ten hours after Junz had had his interview with the Clerk that he met Ludigan Abel again.

            The Ambassador greeted Junz with his usual surface cordiality, yet with a definite and disturbing sensation of guilt. At their first meeting (it had been a long time ago; nearly a Standard Year had passed) he had paid no attention to the man’s story per se. His only thought had been: Will this, or can this, help Trantor?

            Trantor! It was always first in his thought, yet he was not the kind of fool who would worship a cluster of stars or the yellow emblem of Spaceship-and-Sun that the Trantorian armed forces wore. In short, he was not a patriot in the ordinary meaning of the word and Trantor as Trantor meant nothing to him.

            But he did worship peace; all the more so because he was growing old and enjoyed his glass of wine, his atmosphere saturated with mild music and perfume, his afternoon nap, and his quiet wait for death. It was how he imagined all men must feel; yet all men suffered war and destruction. They died frozen in the vacuum of space, vaporized in the blast of exploding atoms, famished on a besieged and bombarded planet.

            How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?

            So then, to end the misuse of force, only one solution was left, force itself.

            Abel had a map of Trantor in his study, so designed as to show the application of that force. It was a clear crystalline ovoid in which the Galactic lens was three-dimensionally laid out. Its stars were specks of white diamond dust, its nebulae, patches of light or dark fog, and in its central depths there were the few red specks that had been the Trantorian Republic.

            Not “were” but “had been.” The Trantorian Republic had been a mere five worlds, five hundred years earlier.

            But it was a historical map, and showed the Republic at that stage only when the dial was set at zero. Advance the dial one notch and the pictured Galaxy would be as it was fifty years later and a sheaf of stars would redden about Trantor’s rim.

            In ten stages, half a millennium would pass and the crimson would spread like a widening bloodstain until more than half the Galaxy had fallen into the red puddle.

            That red was the red of blood in more than a fanciful way. As the Trantorian Republic became the Trantorian Confederation and then the Trantorian Empire, its advance had lain through a tangled forest of gutted men, gutted ships, and gutted worlds. Yet through it all Trantor had become strong and within the red there was peace.

            Now Trantor trembled at the brink of a new conversion: from Trantorian Empire to Galactic Empire and then the red would engulf all the stars and there would be universal peace--pax Trantorica. ;

            Abel wanted that. Five hundred years ago, four hundred years ago, even two hundred years ago, he would have opposed Trantor as an unpleasant nest of nasty, materialistic and aggressive people, careless of the rights of others, imperfectly democratic at home though quick to see the minor slaveries of others, and greedy without end. But the time had passed for all that.

            He was not for Trantor, but for the all-embracing end that Trantor represented. So the question: How will this help Galactic peace? naturally became: How will this help Trantor?

            The trouble was that in this particular instance he could not be certain. To Junz the solution was obviously a straightforward one. Trantor must uphold the I.S.B. and punish Sark.

            Possibly this would be a good thing, if something could definitely be proven against Sark. Possibly not, even then. Certainly not, if nothing could be proven. But in any case Trantor could not move rashly. All the Galaxy could see that Trantor stood at the edge of Galactic dominion and there was still a chance that what yet remained of the non-Trantorian planets might unite against that. Trantor could win even such a war, but perhaps not without paying a price that would make victory only a pleasanter name for defeat.

            So Trantor must never make an incautious move in this final stage of the game. Abel had therefore proceeded slowly, casting his gentle web across the labyrinth of the Civil Service and the glitter of the Sarkite Squiredom, probing with a smile and questioning without seeming to. Nor did he forget to keep the fingers of the Trantorian secret service upon Junz himself lest the angry Libairian do in a moment damage that Abel could not repair in a year.

            Abel was astonished at the Libairian’s persistent anger. He had asked him once, “Why does one agent concern you so?”

            He half expected a speech on the integrity of the I.S.B. and the duty of all to uphold the Bureau as an instrument not of this world or that, but of all humanity. He did not get it.

            Instead Junz frowned and said, “Because at the bottom of all this lies the relationship between Sark and Florina. I want to expose that relationship and destroy it.”

            Abel felt nothing less than nausea. Always, everywhere, there was this preoccupation with single worlds that prevented, over and over again, any intelligent concentration upon the problem of Galactic unity. Certainly social injustices existed here and there. Certainly they seemed sometimes impossible to stomach. But who could imagine that such injustice could be solved on any scale less than Galactic? First, there must be an end to war and national rivalry and only then could one turn to the internal miseries that, after all, had external conflict as their chief cause. And Junz was not even of Florina. He had not even that cause for emotionalized shortsightedness.

            Abel said, “What is Florina to you?”

            Junz hesitated. He said, “I feel a kinship.”

            “But you are a Libairian. Or at least that is my impression.”

            “I am, but there lies the kinship. We are both extremes in a Galaxy of the average.”

            “Extremes? I don’t understand.”

            Junz said, “In skin pigmentation. They are unusually pale. We are unusually dark. It means something. It binds us together. It gives us something in common. It seems to me our ancestors must have had long histories of being different, even of being excluded from the social majority. We are unfortunate whites and darks, brothers in being different.”

            By that time, under Abel’s astonished gaze, Junz stumbled to a halt. The subject had never been sounded again.

 

            And now, after a year, without warning, without any previous intimations, just at the point where, perhaps, a quiet trailing end might be expected of the whole wretched matter and where even Junz showed signs of flagging zeal, it all exploded.

            He faced a different Junz now, one whose anger was not reserved for Sark, but spilled and overflowed onto Abel as well.

            “It is not,” the Libairian said in part, “that I resent the fact that your agents have been set upon my heels. Presumably you are cautious and must rely on nothing and nobody. Good, as far as that goes. But why was I not informed as soon as our man was located?”

            Abel’s hand smoothed the warm fabric of the arm of his chair. “Matters are complicated. Always complicated. I had arranged that any report on an unauthorized seeker after Spatio-analytic data be reported to certain of my own agents as well as to you. I even thought you might need protection. But on Florina--”

            Junz said bitterly, “Yes. We were fools not to have considered that. We spent nearly a year proving we could find him nowhere on Sark. He had to be on Florina and we were blind to that. In any case, we have him now. Or you have, and presumably it will be arranged to have me see him?”

            Abel did not answer directly. He said, “You say they told you this man Khorov was a Trantorian agent?”

            “Isn’t he? Why should they lie? Or are they misinformed?”

            “They neither lie nor are they misinformed. He has been an agent of ours for a decade, and it is disturbing to me that they were aware of it. It makes me wonder what more they know of us and how shaky our structure may be altogether. But doesn’t it make you wonder why they told you baldly that he was one of our men?”

            “Because it was the truth, I imagine, and to keep me, once and for all, from embarrassing them by further demands that could only cause trouble between themselves and Trantor.”

            “Truth is a discredited commodity among diplomats and what greater trouble can they cause for themselves than to let us know the extent of their knowledge about us: to give us the opportunity before it is too late, to draw in our damaged net, mend it and put it out whole again?”

            “Then answer your own question.”

            “I say they told you of their knowledge of Khorov’s true identity as a gesture of triumph. They knew that the fact of their knowledge could no longer either help or harm them since I have known for twelve hours that they knew Khorov was one of our men.”

            “But how?”

            “By the most unmistakable hint possible. Listen! Twelve hours ago Matt Khorov, agent for Trantor, was killed by a member of the Florinian Patrol. The two Florinians he held at the time, a woman and the man who, in all probability, is the field man you have been seeking, are gone, vanished. Presumably they are in the hands of the Squires.”

            Junz cried out and half rose from his seat.

            Abel lifted a glass of wine to his lips calmly and said, “There is nothing I can do officially. The dead man was a Florinian and those who have vanished, for all we can prove to the contrary, are likewise Florinians. So, you see, we have been badly outplayed, and are now being mocked in addition.”

           

           

SEVEN: The Patroller

     

     

      RIK saw the Baker killed. He saw him crumple without a sound, his chest driven in and charred into smoking ruins under the silent push of the blaster. It was a sight that drowned out for him most of what had preceded and almost all that had followed.

            There was the dim memory of the patroller’s first approach, of the quiet but terribly intent manner in which he had drawn his weapon. The Baker had looked up and shaped his lips for one last word that he had no time to utter. Then the deed was done, there was the rushing of blood in Rik’s ears and the wild screaming scramble of the mob swirling in all directions, like a river in flood.

            For a moment it negated the improvement Rik’s mind had made in those last few hours of sleep. The patroller had plunged toward him, throwing himself forward upon yelling men and women as though they were a viscous sea of mud he would have to slog through. Rik and Lona turned with the current and were carried away. There were eddies and subcurrents, turning and quivering as the flying patrollers’ cars began to hover overhead. Valona urged Rik forward, ever outward to the outskirts of the City. For a while he was the frightened child of yesterday, not the almost adult of that morning.

            He had awakened that morning in the grayness of a dawn he could not see in the windowless room he slept in. For long minutes he lay there, inspecting his mind. Something had healed during the night; something had knit together and become whole. It had been getting ready to happen ever since the moment, two days before, when he had begun to “remember.” The process had been proceeding all through yesterday. The trip to the Upper City and the library, the attack upon the patroller and the flight that followed, the encounter with Baker--it had all acted upon him like a ferment. The shriveled fibers of his mind, so long dormant, had been seized and stretched, forced into an aching activity, and now, after a sleep, there was a feeble pulsing about them.

            He thought of space and the stars, of long, long, lonely stretches, and great silences.

            Finally he turned his head to one side and said, “Lona.”

            She snapped awake, lifting herself to an elbow, peering in his direction.

            “Rik?”

            “Here I am, Lona.”

            “Are you all right?”

            “Sure.” He couldn’t hold down his excitement. “I feel fine, Lona. Listen! I remember more. I was in a ship and I know exactly--”

            But she wasn’t listening to him. She slipped into her dress and with her back to him smoothed the seam shut down the front and then fumbled nervously with her belt.

            She tiptoed toward him. “I didn’t mean to sleep, Rik. I tried to stay awake.”

            Rik felt the infection of her nervousness. He said, “Is something wrong?”

            “Sh, don’t speak so loudly. It’s all right.”

            “Where’s the Townman?”

            “He’s not here. He--he had to leave. Why don’t you go back to sleep, Rik?”

            He pushed her consoling arm aside. “I’m all right. I don’t want to sleep. I wanted to tell the Townman about my ship.”

            But the Townman wasn’t there and Valona would not listen. Rik subsided and for the first time felt actively annoyed with Valona. She treated him as though he were a child and he was beginning to feel like a man.

            A light entered the room and the broad figure of the Baker entered with it. Rik blinked at him and was, for a moment, daunted. He did not entirely object when Valona’s comforting arm stole about his shoulder.

            The Baker’s thick lips stretched in a smile. “You’re early awake.”

            Neither answered..

            The Baker said, “It’s just as well. You’ll be moving today.”

            Valona’s mouth, was dry. She said, “You’ll not be giving us to the patrollers?”

            She remembered the way he had looked at Rik after the Townman had left. He was still looking at Rik; only at Rik.

            “Not to the patrollers,” he said. “The proper people have been informed and you’ll be safe enough.”

            He left, and when he returned shortly thereafter he brought food, clothes and two basins of water. The clothes were new and looked completely strange.

            He watched them as they ate, saying, “I’m going to give you new names and new histories. You’re to listen, and I don’t want you to forget. You’re not Florinians, do you understand? You’re brother and sister from the planet Wotex. You’ve been visiting Florina--”

            He went on, supplying details, asking questions, listening to their answers.

            Rik was pleased to be able to demonstrate the workings of his memory, his easy ability to learn, but Valona’s eyes were dark with worry.

            The Baker was not blind to that. He said to the girl, “If you give me the least trouble I’ll send him on alone and leave you behind.”

            Valona’s strong hands clenched spasmodically. “I will give you no trouble.”

            It was well into the morning when the Baker rose to his feet and said, “Let’s go!”

            His last action was to place little black sheets of limp leatherette in their breast pockets.

            Once outside, Rik looked with astonishment at what he could see of himself. He did not know clothing could be so complicated. The Baker had helped him get it on, but who would help him take it off? Valona didn’t look like a farm girl at all. Even her legs were covered with thin material, and her shoes were raised at the heels so that she had to balance carefully when she walked.

            Passers-by gathered, staring and gawking, calling to one another. Mostly they were children, marketing women, and skulking, ragged idlers. The Baker seemed oblivious to them. He carried a thick stick which found itself occasionally, as though by accident, between the legs of any who pressed too closely.

            And then, when they were still only a hundred yards from the bakery and had made but one turning, the outer reaches of the surrounding crowd swirled excitedly and Rik made out the black and silver of a patroller.

            That was when it happened. The weapon, the blast, and again a wild flight. Was there ever a time when fear had not been with him, when the shadow of the patroller had not been behind him?

 

            They found themselves in the squalor of one of the outlying districts of the City. Valona was panting harshly; her new dress bore the wet stains of perspiration.

            Rik gasped, “I can’t run any more.”

            “We’ve got to.”

            “Not like this. Listen.” He pulled back firmly against the pressure of the girl’s grip. “Listen to me.”

            The fright and panic were leaving him.

            He said, “Why don’t we go on and do what the Baker wanted us to do?”

            She said, “How do you know what he wanted us to do?” She was anxious. She wanted to keep moving.

            He said, “We were to pretend we were from another world and he gave us these.” Rik was excited. He pulled the little rectangle out of his pocket, staring at both sides and trying to open it as though it were a booklet.

            He couldn’t. It was a single sheet. He felt about the edges and as his fingers closed at one corner he heard, or rather felt, something give, and the side toward him turned a startling milky white. The close wording on the new surface was difficult to understand though he began carefully making out the syllables.

            Finally he said, “It’s a passport.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Something to get us away.” He was sure of it. It had popped into his head. A single word, “passport,” like that. “Don’t you see? He was going to have us leave Florina. On a ship. Let’s go through with that.”

            She said, “No. They stopped him. They killed him. We couldn’t, Rik, we couldn’t.”

            He was urgent about it. He was nearly babbling. “But it would be the best thing to do. They wouldn’t be expecting us to do that. And we wouldn’t go on the ship he wanted us to go on. They’d be watching that. We’d go on another ship. Any other ship.”

            A ship. Any ship. The words rang in his ears. Whether his idea was a good one or not, he didn’t care. He wanted to be on a ship. He wanted to be in space.

            “Please, Lona!”

            She said, “All right. If you really think so. I know where the spaceport is. When I was a little girl we used to go there on idle-days sometimes and watch from far away to see the ships shoot upward.”

            They were on their way again, and only a slight uneasiness scratched vainly at the gateway of Rik’s consciousness. Some memory not of the far past but of the very near past; something he should remember and could not; could just barely not. Something.

            He drowned it in the thought of the ship that waited for them.

            The Florinian at the entry gate was having his fill of excitement that day, but it was excitement at long distance. There had been the wild stories of the previous evening, telling of patrollers attacked and of daring escapes. By this morning the stories had expanded and there were whispers of patrollers killed.

            He dared not leave his post, but he craned his neck and watched the air-cars pass, and the grim-faced patrollers leave, as the spaceport contingent was cut and cut till it was almost nothing.

            They were filling the City with patrollers, he thought, and was at once frightened and drunkenly uplifted. Why should it make him happy to think of patrollers being killed? They never bothered him. At least not much. He had a good job. It wasn’t as though he were a stupid peasant.

            But he was happy.

            He scarcely had time for the couple before him, uncomfortable and perspiring in the outlandish clothing that marked them at once as foreigners. The woman was holding a passport through the slot.

            A glance at her, a glance at the passport, a glance at the list of reservations. He pressed the appropriate button and two translucent ribbons of film sprang out at them.

            “Go on,” he said impatiently. “Get them on your wrists and move on.”

            “Which ship is ours?” asked the woman in a polite whisper.

            That pleased him. Foreigners were infrequent at the Florinian spaceport. In recent years they had grown more and more infrequent. But when they did come they were neither patrollers nor Squires. They didn’t seem to realize you were only a Florinian yourself and they spoke to you politely.

            It made him feel two inches taller. He said, “You’ll find it in Berth 17, madam. I wish you a pleasant trip to Wotex.” He said it in the grand manner.

            He then returned to his task of putting in surreptitious calls to friends in the City for more information and of trying, even more unobtrusively, to tap private power-beam conversations in Upper City.

            It was hours before he found out that he had made a horrible mistake.

 

            Rik said, “Lona!”

            He tugged at her elbow, pointed quickly and whispered, “That one!”

            Valona looked at the indicated ship doubtfully. It was much smaller than the ship in Berth 17, for which their tickets held good. It looked more burnished. Four air locks yawned open and the main port gaped, with a ramp leading from it like an outstretched tongue reaching to ground level.

            Rik said, “They’re airing it. They usually air passenger ships before flight to get rid of the accumulated odor of canned oxygen, used and reused.”

            Valona stared at him. “How do you know?”

            Rik felt a sprig of vanity grow within himself. “I just know. You see, there wouldn’t be anyone in it now. It isn’t comfortable, with the draft on.”

            He looked about uneasily. “I don’t know why there aren’t more people about, though. Was it like this when you used to watch it?”

            Valona thought not, but she could scarcely remember. Childhood memories were far away.

 

            There was not a patroller in sight as they walked up the ramp on quivering legs. What figures they could see were civilian employees, intent on their own jobs, and small in the distance.

            Moving air cut through them as they stepped into the hold and Valona’s dress bellied so that she had to bring her hands down to keep the hemline within bounds.

            “Is it always like this?” she asked. She had never been on a spaceship before; never dreamed of being on one. Her lips stuck together and her heart pounded.

            Rik said, “No. Just during aeration.”

            He walked joyfully over the hard metallite passageways, inspecting the empty rooms eagerly.

            “Here,” he said. It was the galley.

            He spoke rapidly. “It isn’t food so much. We can get along without food for quite a while. It’s water.”

            He rummaged through the neat and compact nestings of utensils and came up with a large, capped container. He looked about for the water tap, muttered a breathless hope that they had not neglected to fill the water tanks, then grinned his relief when the soft sound of pumps came, and the steady gush of liquid.

            “Now just take some of the cans. Not too many. We don’t want them to take notice.”

            Rik tried desperately to think of ways of countering discovery. Again he groped for something he could not quite remember. Occasionally he still ran into those gaps in his thought and, cowardlike, he avoided them, denied their existence.

            He found a small room devoted to fire-fighting equipment, emergency medical and surgical supplies, and welding equipment.

            He said with a certain lack of confidence, “They won’t be in here, except in emergencies. Are you afraid, Lona?”

            “I won’t be afraid with you, Rik,” she said humbly. Two days before, no, twelve hours before, it had been the other way around. But on board ship, by some transmutation of personality she did not question, it was Rik who was the adult, she who was the child.

            He said, “We won’t be able to use lights because they would notice the power drain, and to use the toilets, we’ll have to wait for rest periods and try to get out past any of the night crew.”

            The draft cut off suddenly. Its cold touch on their faces was no longer there and the soft, steady humming sound, that had distantly accompanied it, stopped and left a large silence to fill its place.

            Rik said, “They’ll be boarding soon, and then we’ll be out in space.”

            Valona had never seen such joy in Rik’s face. He was a lover going to meet his love.

 

            If Rik had felt a man on awaking that dawn, he was a giant now, his arms stretching the length of the Galaxy. The stars were his marbles, and the nebulae were cobwebs to brush away.

            He was on a ship! Memories rushed back continuously in a long flood and others left to make room. He was forgetting the kyrt fields and the mill and Valona crooning to him in the dark. They were only momentary breaks in a pattern that was now returning with its raveled ends slowly knitting.

            It was the ship!

            If they had put him on a ship long ago, he wouldn’t have had to wait so long for his burnt-out brain cells to heal themselves.

            He spoke softly to Valona in the darkness. “Now don’t worry. You’ll feel a vibration and hear a noise but that will be just the motors. There’ll be a heavy weight on you. That’s acceleration.”

            There was no common Florinian word for the concept and he used another word for it, one that came easily to mind. Valona did not understand.

            She said, “Will it hurt?”

            He said, “It will be very uncomfortable, because we don’t have anti-acceleration gear to take up the pressure, but it won’t last. Just stand against this wall, and when you feel yourself being pushed against it, relax. See, it’s beginning.”

            He had picked the right wall, and as the thrumming of the thrusting hyperatomics swelled, the apparent gravity shifted, and what had been a vertical wall seemed to grow more and more diagonal.

            Valona whimpered once, then lapsed into a hard-breathing silence. Their throats rasped as their chest walls, unprotected by straps and hydraulic absorbers, labored to free their lungs sufficiently for just a little air intake.

            Rik managed to pant out words, any words that might let Valona know he was there and ease the terrible fear of the unknown that he knew must be filling her. It was only a ship, only a wonderful ship; but she had never been on a ship before.

            He said, “There’s the jump, of course, when we go through hyperspace and cut across most of the distance between the stars all at once. That won’t bother you at all. You won’t even know it happened. It’s nothing compared to this. Just a little twitch in your insides and it’s over.” He got the words out syllable by grunted syllable. It took a long time.

            Slowly, the weight on their chests lifted and the invisible chain holding them to the wall stretched and dropped off. They fell, panting, to the floor.

            Finally Valona said, “Are you hurt, Rik?”

            “I, hurt?” He managed a laugh. He had not caught his breath yet, but he laughed at the thought that he could be hurt on a ship.

            He said, “I lived on a ship for years once. I didn’t land on a planet for months at a time.”

            “Why?” she asked. She had crawled closer and put a hand to his cheek, making sure he was there.

            He put his arm about her shoulder, and she rested within it quietly, accepting the reversal.

            “Why?” she asked.

            Rik could not remember why. He had done it; he had hated to land on a planet. For some reason it had been necessary to stay in space, but he could not remember why. Again he dodged the gap.

            He said, “I had a job.”

            “Yes,” she said. “You analyzed Nothing.”

            “That’s right.” He was pleased. “That’s exactly what I did. Do you know what that means?”

            "No."

            He didn’t expect her to understand, but he had to talk. He had to revel in memory, to delight drunkenly in the fact that he could call up past facts at the flick of a mental finger.

            He said, “You see, all the material in the universe is made up of a hundred different kinds of substances. We call those substances elements. Iron and copper are elements.”

            “I thought they were metals.”

            “So they are, and elements too. Also oxygen, and nitrogen, carbon and palladium. Most important of all, hydrogen and helium. They’re the simplest and most common.”

            “I never heard of those,” Valona said wistfully.

            “Ninety-five per cent of the universe is hydrogen and most of the rest is helium. Even space.”

            “I was once told,” said Valona, “that space was a vacuum. They said that meant there was nothing there. Was that wrong?”

            “Not quite. There’s almost nothing there. But you see, I was a Spatio-analyst, which meant that I went about through space collecting the extremely small amounts of elements there and analyzing them. That is, I decided how much was hydrogen, how much helium and how much other elements.”

            “Why?”

            “Well, that’s complicated. You see, the arrangement of elements isn’t the same everywhere in space. In some regions there is a little more helium than normal; in other places, more sodium than normal; and so on. These regions of special analytic makeup wind through space like currents. That’s what they call them. They’re the currents of space. It’s important to know how these currents are arranged because that might explain how the universe was created and how it developed.”

            “How would it explain that?”

            Rik hesitated. “Nobody knows exactly.”

            He hurried on, embarrassed that this immense store of knowledge in which his mind was thankfully wallowing could come so easily to an end marked “unknown” under the questioning of . . . of . . . It suddenly occurred to him that Valona, after all, was nothing but a Florinian peasant girl.

            He said, “Then, again, we find out the density, you know, the thickness, of this space gas in all regions of the Galaxy. It’s different in different places and we have to know exactly what it is in order to allow ships to calculate exactly how to jump through hyperspace. It’s like. . .” His voice died away.

            Valona stiffened and waited uneasily for him to continue, but only silence followed. Her voice sounded hoarsely in the complete darkness.

            “Rik? What’s wrong, Rik?”

            Still silence. Her hands groped to his shoulders, shaking him. “Rik! Rik!”

            And it was the voice of the old Rik, somehow, that answered. It was weak, frightened, its joy and confidence vanished.

            “Lona. We did something wrong.”

            “What’s the matter? We did what wrong?”

            The memory of the scene in which the patroller had shot down the Baker was in his mind, etched hard and clear, as though called back by his exact memory of so many other things.

            He said, “We shouldn’t have run away. We shouldn’t be here on this ship.”

            He was shivering uncontrollably, and Valona tried futilely to wipe the moisture from his forehead with her hand.

            “Why?” she demanded. “Why?”

            “Because we should have known that if the Baker were willing to take us out in daylight he expected no trouble from patrollers. Do you remember the patroller? The one who shot the Baker?”

            “Yes.”

            “Do you remember his face?”

            “I didn’t dare look.”

            “I did, and there was something queer, but I didn’t think. I didn’t think. Lona, that wasn’t a patroller. It was the Townman, Lona. It was the Townman dressed like a patroller.”

           

           

EIGHT: The Lady

     

     

      SAMIA of Fife was five feet tall, exactly, and all sixty inches of her were in a state of quivering exasperation. She weighed one and a half pounds per inch and, at the moment, each of her ninety pounds represented sixteen ounces of solid anger.

            She stepped quickly from end to end of the room, her dark hair piled in high masses, her spiked heels lending a spurious height and her narrow chin, with its pronounced cleft, trembling.

            She said, “Oh no. He wouldn’t do it to me. He couldn’t do it to me. Captain!”

            Her voice was sharp and carried the weight of authority. Captain Racety bowed with the storm. “My Lady?”

            To any Florinian, of course, Captain Racety would have been a “Squire.” Simply that. To any Florinian, all Sarkites were Squires. But to the Sarkites there were Squires and real Squires. The Captain was simply a Squire. Samia of Fife was a real Squire; or the feminine equivalent of one, which amounted to the same thing.

            “My Lady?” he asked.

            She said, “I am not to be ordered about. I am of age. I am my own mistress. I choose to remain here.”

            The Captain said carefully, “Please to understand, my Lady, that no orders of mine are involved. My advice was not asked. I have been told plainly and flatly what I am to do.”

            He fumbled for the copy of his orders halfheartedly. He had tried to present her with the evidence twice before and she had refused to consider it, as though by not looking she could continue, with a clear conscience, to deny where his duty lay.

            She said once again, exactly as before, “I am not interested in your orders.”

            She turned away with a ringing of her heels and moved rapidly away from him.

            He followed and said softly, “The orders include directions to the effect that, if you are not willing to come, I am, if you will excuse my saying so, to have you carried to the ship.”

            She whirled. “You wouldn’t dare do such a thing.”

            “When I consider,” said the Captain, “who it is who has ordered me to do it, I would dare anything.”

            She tried cajolery. “Surely, Captain, there is no real danger. This is quite ridiculous, entirely mad. The City is peaceful. All that has happened is that one patroller was knocked down yesterday afternoon in the library. Really!”

            “Another patroller was killed this dawn, again by Florinian attack.”

            That rocked her, but her olive skin grew dusky and her black eyes flashed. “What has that to do with me? I am not a patroller.”

            “My Lady, the ship is being prepared right now. It will leave shortly. You will have to be on it.”

            “And my work? My research? Do you realize--. No, you wouldn’t realize.”

            The Captain said nothing. She had turned from him. Her gleaming dress of copper kyrt, with its strands of milky silver, set off the extraordinary warm smoothness of her shoulders and upper arms. Captain Racety looked at her with something more than the bald courtesy and humble objectivity a mere Sarkite owed such a great Lady. He wondered why such an entirely desirable bite-size morsel should choose to spend her time in mimicking the scholarly pursuits of a university don.

 

            Samia knew well that her earnest scholarship made her an object of mild derision to people who were accustomed to thinking of the aristocratic Ladies of Sark as devoted entirely to the glitter of polite society and, eventually, acting as incubators for at least, but not more than, two future Squires of Sark. She didn’t care.

            They would come to her and say, “Are you really writing a book, Samia?” and ask to see it, and giggle.

            Those were the women. The men were even worse, with their gentle condescension and obvious conviction that it would only take a glance from themselves or a man’s arm about her waist to cure her of her nonsense and turn her mind to things of real importance.

            It had begun as far back, almost, as she could remember, because she had always been in love with kyrt, whereas most people took it for granted. Kyrt! The king, emperor, god of fabrics. There was no metaphor strong enough.

            Chemically, it was nothing more than a variety of cellulose. The chemists swore to that. Yet with all their instruments and theories they had never yet explained why on Florina, and only on Florina in all the Galaxy, cellulose became kyrt. It was a matter of the physical state; that’s what they said. But ask them exactly in what way the physical state varied from that of ordinary cellulose and they were mute.

            She had learned ignorance originally from her nurse.

            “Why does it shine, Nanny?”

            “Because it’s kyrt, Miakins.”

            “Why don’t other things shine so, Nanny?”

            “Other things aren’t kyrt, Miakins.”

            There you had it. A two-volume monograph on the subject had been written only three years before. She had read it carefully and it could all have been boiled down to her Nanny’s explanation. Kyrt was kyrt because it was kyrt. Things that weren’t kyrt, weren’t kyrt because they weren’t kyrt.

            Of course kyrt didn’t really shine of itself but, properly spun, it would gleam metallically in the sun in a variety of colors or in all colors at once. Another form of treatment could impart a diamond sparkle of the thread. It could be made, with little effort, completely impervious to heat up to 600 degrees Centigrade, and quite inert to almost all chemicals. Its fibers could be spun finer than the most delicate synthetics and those same fibers had a tensile strength no steel alloy known could duplicate.

            It had more uses, more versatility than any substance known to man. If it were not so expensive it could be used to replace glass, metal, or plastic in any of infinite industrial applications. As it was, it was the only material used for cross hairs on optical equipment, as molds in the casting of hydrochrons used in hyperatomic motors, and as lightweight, long-lived webbing where metal was too brittle or too heavy or both.

            But this was, as said, small-scale use, since use in quantity was prohibitive. Actually the kyrt harvest of Florina went into the manufacture of cloth that was used for the most fabulous garments in Galactic history. Florina clothed the aristocracy of a million worlds, and the kyrt harvest of the one world, Florina, had to be spread thin for that. Twenty women on a world might have outfits in kyrt; two thousand more might have a holiday jacket of the material, or perhaps a pair of gloves. Twenty million more watched from a distance and wished.

            The million worlds of the Galaxy shared a slang expression for the snob. It was the only idiom in the language that was easily and exactly understood everywhere. It went: “You’d think she blew her nose in kyrt!”

            When Samia was older she went to her father.

            “What is kyrt, Daddy?”

            “It’s your bread and butter, Mia.”

            “Mine?”

            “Not just yours, Mia. It’s S ark’s bread and butter.”

            Of course! She learned the reason for that easily enough. Not a world in the Galaxy but had tried to grow kyrt on its own soil. At first Sark had applied the death penalty to anyone, native or foreign, caught smuggling kyrt seed out of the planet. That had not prevented successful smuggling, and as the centuries passed, and the truth dawned on Sark, that law had been abolished. Men from anywhere were welcome to kyrt seed at the price, of course (weight for weight), of finished kyrt cloth.

            They might have it, because it turned out that kyrt grown anywhere in the Galaxy but on Florina was simply cellulose. White, flat, weak and useless. Not even honest cotton.

            Was it something in the soil? Something in the characteristics of the radiation of Florina’s sun? Something about the bacteria make-up of Florinian life? It had all been tried. Samples of Florinian soil had been taken. Artificial arc lights duplicating the known spectrum of Florina’s sun had been constructed. Foreign soil had been infected with Florinian bacteria. And always the kyrt grew white, flat, weak and useless.

            There was so much to be said about kyrt that had never been said. Material other than that contained in technical reports or in research papers or even in travel books. For five years Samia had been dreaming of writing a real book about the story of kyrt; of the land it grew on and of the people who grew it.

            It was a dream surrounded by mocking laughter, but she held to it. She had insisted on traveling to Florina. She was going to spend a season in the fields and a few months in the mills. She was going to--

            But what did it matter what she was going to do? She was being ordered back.

            With the sudden impulsiveness that marked her every act she made her decision. She would be able to fight this on Sark. Grimly she promised herself she would be back on Florina in a week.

            She turned to the Captain and said coolly, “When do we leave, sir?”

            Samia remained at the observation port for as long as Florina was a visible globe. It was a green, springlike world, much pleasanter than Sark in climate. She had looked forward to studying the natives. She didn’t like the Florinians on Sark, sapless men who dared not look at her but turned away when she passed, in accordance with the law. On their own world, however, the natives, by universal report, were happy and carefree. Irresponsible, of course, and like children, but they had charm.

            Captain Racety interrupted her thoughts. He said, “My Lady, would you retire to your room?”

            She looked up, a tiny vertical crease between her eyes. “What new orders have you received, Captain? Ann I a prisoner?”

            “Of course not. Merely a precaution. The space field was unusually empty before the take-off. It seems that another killing had taken place, again by a Florinian, and the field’s patroller contingent had joined the rest on a man hunt through the City.”

            “And the connection of that with myself?”

            “It is only that under the circumstances, which I ought to have reacted to by placing a guard of my own (I do not minimize my own offense), unauthorized persons may have boarded the ship.”

            “For what reason?”

            “I could not say, but scarcely to do our pleasure.”

            “You are romancing, Captain.”

            “I am afraid not, my Lady. Our energometrics were, of course, useless within planetary distance of Florina’s sun, but that is not the case now and I am afraid there is definite excess heat radiation from Emergency Stores.”

            “Are you serious?”

            The Captain’s lean, expressionless face regarded her aloofly for a moment. He said, “The radiation is equivalent to that which would be given off by two ordinary people.”

            “Or a heating unit someone forgot to turn off.”

            “There is no drain on our power supply, my Lady. We are ready to investigate, my Lady, and ask only that you first retire to your room.”

            She nodded silently and left the room. Two minutes later his calm voice spoke unhurriedly into the communi-tube. “Break into Emergency Stores.”

 

            Myrlyn Terens, had he released his taut nerves the slightest, might easily, and even thankfully, have gone into hysteria. He had been a trifle too late in returning to the bakery. They had already left it and it was only by good fortune that he Met them in the street. His next action had been dictated; it was in no way a matter of free choice; and the Baker lay quite horribly dead before him.

            Afterward, with the crowd swirling, Rik and Valona melting into the crowd, and the air-cars of the patrollers, the real patrollers, beginning to put in their vulture appearance, what could he do?

            His first impulse to race after Rik he quickly fought down. It would do no good. He would never find them, and there was too great a chance that the patrollers would not miss him. He scurried in another direction, toward the bakery.

            His only chance lay in the patroller organization itself. There had been generations of a quiet life. At least there had been no Florinian revolts to speak of in two centuries. The institution of the Townman (he grinned savagely at the thought) had worked wonders and the patrollers had only perfunctory police duties since. They lacked the fine-pointed teamwork that would have developed under more strenuous conditions.

            It had been possible for him to walk into a patroller station at dawn, where his description must have already been sent, though obviously it had not been much regarded. The lone patroller on duty was a mixture of indifference and sulkiness. Terens had been asked to state his business, but his business included a plastic two-by-four he had wrenched from the side of a crazy hovel at the outskirts of town.

            He had brought it down upon the patroller’s skull, changed clothing and weapons. The list of his crimes was already so formidable that it did not bother him in the least to discover that the patroller had been killed, not stunned.

            Yet he was still at large and the rusty machinery of patroller justice had so far creaked after him in vain.

            He was at the bakery. The Baker’s elderly helper, standing in the doorway in a vain attempt to peer knowledge of the disturbance into himself, squeaked thinly at the sight of the dread black and silver of patrollerhood and oozed back into his shop.

            The Townman lunged after him, crumpling the man’s loose, floury collar into his pudgy fist and twisting. “Where was the Baker going?”

            The old man’s lips yawned open, but no sound came.

            The Townman said, “I killed a man two minutes ago. I don’t care if I kill another.”

            “Please. Please. I do not know, sir.”

            “You will die for not knowing.”

            “But he did not tell me. He made some sort of reservations.”

            “You have overheard so much, have you? What else did you overhear?”

            “He mentioned Wotex once. I think the reservations were on a spaceship.”

            Terens thrust him away.

            He would have to wait. He would have to let the worst of the excitement outside die. He would have to risk the arrival of real patrollers at the bakery.

            But not for long. Not for long. He could guess what his erstwhile companions would do. Rik was unpredictable, of course, but Valona was an intelligent girl. From the way they ran, they must have taken him for a patroller indeed and Valona was sure to decide that their only safety lay in continuing the flight that the Baker had begun for them.

            The Baker had made reservations for them. A spaceship would be waiting. They would be there.

            And he would have to be there first.

            There was this about the desperation of the situation. Nothing more mattered. If he lost Rik, if he lost that potential weapon against the tyrants of Sark, his life was a small additional loss.

            So when he left, it was without a qualm, though it was broad daylight, though the patrollers must know by now it was a man in patroller uniform they sought, and though two air-cars were in easy sight.

           

            Terens knew the spaceport that would be involved. There was only one of its type on the planet. There were a dozen tiny ones in Upper City for the private use of space-yachts and there were hundreds all over the planet for the exclusive use of the ungainly freighters that carried gigantic bolts of kyrt cloth to Sark, and machinery and simple consumer goods back. But among all those there was only one spaceport for the use of ordinary travelers, for the poorer Sarkites, Florinian civil servants and the few foreigners who managed to obtain permission to visit Florina.

            The Florinian at the port’s entry gate observed Terens’ approach with every symptom of lively interest. The vacuum that surrounded him had grown insupportable.

            “Greetings, sir,” he said. There was a slyly eager tone in his voice. After all, patrollers were being killed. “Considerable excitement in the City, isn’t there?”

            Terens did not rise to the bait. He had drawn the arced visor of his hat low and buttoned the uppermost button of the tunic.

            Gruffly he snapped, “Did two persons, a man and a woman, enter the port recently en route to Wotex?”

            The gatekeeper looked startled. For a moment he gulped and then, in a considerably subdued tone, said, “Yes, Officer. About half an hour ago. Maybe less.” He reddened suddenly. “Is there any connection between them and--Officer, they had reservations which were entirely in order. I wouldn’t let foreigners through without proper authority.”

            Terens ignored that. Proper authority! The Baker had managed to establish that in the course of a night. Galaxy, he wondered, how deeply into the Sarkite administration did the Trantorian espionage organization go?

            “What names did they give?”

            “Gareth and Hansa Barne.”

            “Has their ship left? Quickly!”

            “No-no, sir.”

            “What berth?”

            “Seventeen.”

            Terens forced himself to refrain from running, but his walk was little short of that. Had there been a real patroller in sight that rapid, undignified half run of his would have been his last trip in freedom.

            A spaceman in officer’s uniform stood at the ship’s main air lock.

            Terens panted a little. He said, “Have Gareth and Hansa Barne boarded ship?”

            “No, they haven’t,” said the spaceman phlegmatically. He was a Sarkite and a patroller was only another man in uniform to him. “Do you have a message for them?”

            With cracking patience Terens said, “They haven’t boarded!”

            “That’s what I’ve said. And we’re not waiting for them. We leave on schedule, with or without them.”

            Terens turned away.

            He was at the gatekeeper’s booth again. “Have they left?”

            “Left? Who, sir?”

            “The Barnes. The ones for Wotex. They’re not on board ship. Did they leave?”

            “No, sir. Not to my knowledge.”

            “What about the other gates?”

            “They’re not exits, sir. This is the only exit.”

            “Check them, you miserable idiot.”

            The gatekeeper lifted the communi-tube in a state of panic. No patroller had ever spoken to him so in anger and he dreaded the results. In two minutes he put it down.

            He said, “No one has left, sir.”

            Terens stared at him. Under his black hat his sandy hair was damping against his skull and down each cheek there was the gleaming mark of perspiration.

            He said, “Has any ship left the port since they entered?”

            The gatekeeper consulted the schedule. “One,” he said, “the liner Endeavor.”

            Volubly he went on, eager to gain favor with the angry patroller by volunteering information. “The Endeavor is making a special trip to Sark to carry the Lady Samia of Fife back from Florina.”

            He did not bother to describe exactly by what refined manner of eavesdropping he had managed to acquaint himself with the “confidential report.”

            But to Terens now, nothing mattered.

            He backed slowly away. Eliminate the impossible and whatever remained, however improbable, was the truth. Rik and Valona had entered the spaceport. They had not been captured or the gatekeeper would certainly have known about it. They were not simply wandering about the port, or they would by now have been captured. They were not on the ship for which they had tickets. They had not left the field. The only object that had left the field was the Endeavor. Therefore, on it, possibly as captives, possibly as stowaways, were Rik and Valona.

            And the two were equivalent. If they were stowaways they would soon be captives. Only a Florinian peasant girl and a mindwrecked creature would fail to realize that one could not stow away on a modern spaceship.

            And of all spaceships to choose, they chose that which carried the daughter of the Squire of Fife.

            The Squire of Fife!

     

     

NINE: The Squire

     

     

      THE SQUIRE of Fife was the most important individual on Sark and for that reason did not like to be seen standing. Like his daughter, he was short, but unlike her, he was not perfectly proportioned, since most of the shortness lay in his legs. His torso was even beefy, and his head was undoubtedly majestic, but his body was fixed upon stubby legs that were forced into a ponderous waddle to carry their load.

            So he sat behind a desk and except for his daughter and personal servants and, when she had been alive, his wife, none saw him in any other position.

            There he looked the man he was. His large head, with its wide, nearly lipless mouth, broad, large-nostriled nose, and pointed, cleft chin, could look benign and inflexible in turn, with equal ease. His hair, brushed rigidly back and, in careless disregard for fashion, falling nearly to his shoulders, was blue-black, untouched by gray. A shadowy blue marked the regions of his cheeks, lips and chin where his Florinian barber twice daily battled the stubborn growth of facial hair.

            The Squire was posing and he knew it. He had schooled expression out of his face and allowed his hands, broad, strong and short-fingered, to remain loosely clasped on a desk whose smooth, polished surface was completely bare. There wasn’t a paper on it, no communi-tube, no ornament. By its very simplicity the Squire’s own presence was emphasized.

            He spoke to his pale, fish-white secretary with the special lifeless tone he reserved for mechanical appliances and Florinian civil servants. “I presume all have accepted?”

            He had no real doubt as to the answer.

            His secretary replied in a tone as lifeless, “The Squire of Bort stated that the press of previous business arrangements prevented his attending earlier than three.”

            “And you told him?”

            “I stated that the nature of the present business made any delay inadvisable.”

            “The result?”

            “He will be here, sir. The rest have agreed without reservation.”

            Fife smiled. Half an hour this way or that would have made no difference. There was a new principle involved, that was all. The Great Squires were too touchy with regard to their own independence, and such touchiness would have to go.

            He was waiting, now. The room was large, the places for the others were prepared. The large chronometer, whose tiny powering spark of radioactivity had not failed or faltered in a thousand years, said two twenty-one.

            What an explosion in the last two days! The old chronometer might yet witness events equal to any in the past.

            Yet that chronometer had seen many in its millennium. When it counted its first minutes Sark had been a new world of hand-hewn cities with doubtful contacts among the other, older worlds. The timepiece had been in the wall of an old brick building then, the very bricks of which had since become dust. It had counted its even tenor through three short-lived Sarkite “empires” when the undisciplined soldiers of Sark managed to govern, for a longer or shorter interval, some half a dozen surrounding worlds. Its radioactive atoms had exploded in strict statistical sequence through two periods when the fleets of neighboring worlds dictated policy on Sark.

            Five hundred years ago it had marked cool time as Sark discovered that the world nearest to it, Florina, had a treasure in its soil past counting. It had moved evenly through two victorious wars and recorded solemnly the establishment of a conqueror’s peace. Sark had abandoned its empires, absorbed Florina tightly, and become powerful in a way that Trantor itself could not duplicate.

            Trantor wanted Florina and other powers had wanted it. The centuries had marked Florina as a world for which hands stretched out through space, groping and reaching eagerly. But it was Sark whose hand clasped it and Sark, sooner than release that grasp, would allow Galactic war.

            Trantor knew that! Trantor knew that!

            It was as though the silent rhythm of the chronometer set up the little singsong in the Squire’s brain.

            It was two twenty-three.

 

            Nearly a year before, the five Great Squires of Sark had met. Then, as now, it had been here, in his own hall. Then, as now, the Squires, scattered over the face of the planet, each on his own continent, had met in trimensic personification.

            In a bald sense, it amounted to three-dimensional television in life size with sound and color. The duplicate could he found in any moderately well-to-do private home on Sark. Where it went beyond the ordinary was in the lack of any visible receiver. Except for Fife, the Squires present were present in every possible way but reality. The wall could not be seen behind them, they did not shimmer, yet a hand could have been passed through their bodies.

            The true body of the Squire of Rune was sitting in the antipodes, his continent the only one upon which, at the moment, night prevailed. The cubic area immediately surrounding his image in Fife’s office had the cold, white gleam of artificial light, dimmed by the brighter daylight about it.

            Gathered in the one room, in body or in image, was Sark itself. It was a queer and not altogether heroic personification of the planet. Rune was bald and pinkly fat, while Balle was gray and dryly wrinkled. Steen was powdered and rouged, wearing the desperate smile of a worn-out man pretending to a life force he no longer had, and Bort carried indifference to creature comforts to the unpleasant point of a two-day growth of beard and dirty fingernails.

            Yet they were the five Great Squires.

            They were the topmost of the three rungs of ruling powers on Sark. The lowest rung was, of course, the Florinian Civil Service, which remained steady through all the vicissitudes that marked the rise and fall of the individual noble houses of Sark. It was they who actually greased the axles and turned the wheels of government. Above them were the ministers and department heads appointed by the hereditary (and harmless) Chief of State. Their names and that of the Chief himself were needed on state papers to make them legally binding, but their only duties consisted of signing their names.

            The highest rung was occupied by these five, each tacitly allowed a continent by the remaining four. They were the heads of the families that controlled the major volume of the kyrt trade, and the revenues therefrom derived. It was money that gave power and eventually dictated policy on Sark, and these had it. And of the five, it was Fife who had the most.

            The Squire of Fife had faced them that day, nearly a year ago, and said to the other masters of the Galaxy’s second richest single planet (second richest after Trantor, which, after all, had half a million worlds to draw upon, rather than two):

            “I have received a curious message.”

            They said nothing. They waited.

            Fife handed a slip of metallite film to his secretary, who stepped from one seated figure to another, holding it well up for each to see, lingering just long enough for each to read.

            To each of the four who attended the conference in Fife’s office, he, himself, was real, and the others, including Fife, only shadows. The metallite film was a shadow as well. They could only sit and observe the light rays that focused across vast world-sectors from the Continent of Fife to those of Balle, Bort, Steen, and the island Continent of Rune. The words they read were shadows on shadow.

            Only Bort, direct and ungiven to subtleties, forgot that fact and reached for the message.

            His hand extended to the edge of the rectangular image-receptor and was cut off. His arm ended in a featureless stump. In his own chambers, Fife knew, Bores arm had succeeded merely in closing upon nothingness and passing through the filmed message. He smiled, and so did the others. Steen giggled.

            Bort reddened. He drew back his arm and his hand reappeared.

            Fife said, “Well, you have each seen it. If you don’t mind, I will now read it aloud so that you may consider its significance.”

            He reached upward, and his secretary, by hastening his steps, managed to hold the film in the proper position for Fife’s grasp to close upon it without an instant’s groping.

            Fife read mellowly, imparting drama to the words as though the message were his own and he enjoyed delivering it.

            He said, “This is the message: ‘You are a Great Squire of Sark and there is none to compete with you in power and wealth. Yet that power and wealth rest on a slender foundation. You may think that a planetary supply of kyrt, such as exists on Florina, is by no means a slender foundation, but ask yourself, how long will Florina exist? Forever?

            “'No! Florina may be destroyed tomorrow. It may exist for a thousand years. Of the two, it is more likely to be destroyed tomorrow. Not by myself, to be sure, but in a way you cannot predict or foresee. Consider that destruction. Consider, too, that your power and wealth are already gone, for I demand the greater part of them. You will have time to consider, but not too much time.

            “'Attempt to take too much time and I shall announce to all the Galaxy and particularly to Florina the truth about the waiting destruction. After that there will be no more kyrt, no more wealth, no more power. None for me, but then I am used to that. None for you, and that would be extremely serious, since you were born to great wealth.

            “'Turn over most of your estates to myself in the amount and in the manner which I shall dictate in the near future and you will remain in secure possession of what remains. Not a great deal will be left you by your present standards, to be sure, but it will be more than the nothing that will otherwise be left you. Do not sneer at the fragment you will retain, either. Florina may last your lifetime and you will live, if not lavishly, at least comfortably.”

            Fife had finished. He turned the film over and over in his hand, then folded it gently into a silvery translucent cylinder through which the stenciled letters merged into a reddish blur.

            He said in his natural voice, “It is an amusing letter. There is no signature and the tone of the letter, as you heard, is stilted and pompous. What do you think of it, Squires?”

            Rune’s ruddy face was set in displeasure. He said, “It’s obviously the work of a man not far removed from the psychotic. He writes like a historical novel. Frankly, Fife, I don’t see that such rubbish is a decent excuse to disrupt our traditions of continental autonomy by calling us together. And I don’t like all this going on in the presence of your secretary.”

            “My secretary? Because he is a Florinian? Are you afraid his mind will be unsettled by such things as this letter? Nonsense.” His tone shifted from one of mild amusement to the unmodulated syllables of command. “Turn to the Squire of Rune.”

            The secretary did so. His eyes were discreetly lowered and his white face was uncreased by lines and unmarred by expression. It almost seemed untouched by life.

            “This Florinian,” said Fife, careless of the man’s presence, “is my personal servant. He is never away from me, never with others of his kind. But it is not for that reason that he is absolutely trustworthy. Look at him. Look at his eyes. Isn’t it obvious to you that he has been under the psychic probe? He is incapable of any thought which is disloyal to myself in the slightest degree. With no offense intended, I can say that I would sooner trust him than any of you.”

            Bort chuckled. “I don’t blame you. None of us owes you the loyalty of a probed Florinian servant.”

            Steen giggled again and writhed in his seat as though it were growing gently warm.

            Not one of them made any comment on Fife’s use of a psychic probe for personal servants. Fife would have been tremendously astonished had they done so. The use of the psychic probe for any reason other than the correction of mental disorders or the removal of criminal impulses was forbidden. Strictly speaking, it was forbidden even to the Great Squires.

            Yet Fife probed whenever he felt it necessary, particularly when the subject was a Florinian. The probing of a Sarkite was a much more delicate matter. The Squire of Steen, whose writhings at the mention of the probing Fife did not miss, was well reputed to make use of probed Florinians of both sexes for purposes far removed from the secretarial.

            “Now.” Fife put his blunt fingers together. “I did not bring you all together for the reading of a crackpot letter. That, I hope, is understood. Actually I am afraid we have an important problem on our hands. First of all, I ask myself, why bother only with me? To be sure, I am the wealthiest of the Squires, but alone, I control only a third of the kyrt trade. Together the five of us control it all. It is easy to make five cello-copies of a letter, as easy as it is to make one.”

            “You use too many words,” muttered Bort. “What do you want?”

            Balle’s withered and colorless lips moved in a dull gray face. “He wants to know, my Lord of Bort, if we have received copies of this letter.”

            “Then let him say so.”

            “I thought I was saying so,” said Fife evenly. “Well?”

            They looked at one another, doubtfully or defiantly, as the personality of each dictated.

            Rune spoke first. His pink forehead was moist with discrete drops of perspiration and he lifted a soft square of kyrt to mop the dampness out of the creases between the folds of fat that ran semicircles from ear to ear.

            He said, “I wouldn’t know, Fife. I can ask my secretaries, who are all Sarkites, by the way. After all, even if such a letter had reached my office, it would have been considered a--what is it we say?--a crank letter. It would never have come to me. That’s certain. It’s only your own peculiar secretarial system that kept you from being spared this trash yourself.”

            He looked about and smiled, his gums gleaming wetly between his lips above and below artificial teeth of chrome-steel. Each individual tooth was buried deeply, knit to the jawbone, and stronger than any tooth of mere enamel could ever be. His smile was more frightening than his frown could possibly be.

            Balle shrugged. “I imagine that what Rune has just said can hold for all of us.”

            Steen tittered. “I never read mail. Really, I never do. It’s such a bore, and such loads come in that I just wouldn’t have any time.” He looked about him earnestly, as though it were really necessary to convince the company of this important fact.

            Bort said, “Nuts. What’s wrong with you all? Afraid of Fife? Look here, Fife, I don’t keep any secretary because I don’t need anyone between myself and my business. I got a copy of that letter and I’m sure these three did too. Want to know what I did with mine? I threw it into the disposal chute. I’d advise you to do the same with yours. Let’s stop this. I’m tired.”

            His hand reached upward for the toggle switch that would cut contact and release his image from its presence in Fife.

            “Wait, Bort.” Fife’s voice rang out harshly. “Don’t do that. I’m not done. You wouldn’t want us to take measures and come to decisions in your absence. Surely you wouldn’t.”

            “Let us linger, Squire Bort,” urged Rune in his softer tones, though his little fat-buried eyes were not particularly amiable. “I wonder why Squire Fife seems to worry so about a trifle.”

            “Well,” said Balle, his dry voice scratching at their ears, “perhaps Fife thinks our letter-writing friend has information about a Trantorian attack on Florina.”

            “Pooh,” said Fife with scorn. “How would he know, whoever he is? Our secret service is adequate, I assure you. And how would he stop the attack if he received our properties as bribe? No, no. He speaks of the destruction of Flora as though he meant physical destruction and not political destruction.”

            “It’s just too insane,” said Steen.

            “Yes?” said Fife. “Then you don’t see the significance of the events of the last two weeks?”

            “Which particular events?” asked Bort.

            “It seems a Spatio-analyst has disappeared. Surely you’ve heard of that.”

            Bort looked annoyed and in no way soothed. “I’ve heard from Abel of Trantor about it. What of it? I know nothing of Spatio-analysts.”

            “At least you’ve read a copy of the last message to his base on Sank before he turned up missing.”

            “Abel showed it to me. I paid no attention to it.”

            “What about the rest of you?” Fife’s eyes challenged them one by one. “Your memory goes back a week?”

            “I read it,” said Rune. “I remember it too. Of course! It spoke of destruction also. Is that what you’re getting at?”

            “Look here,” Steen said shrilly, “it was full of nasty hints that made no sense. Really, I do hope we’re not going to discuss it now. I could scarcely get rid of Abel, and it was just before dinner, too. Most distressing. Really.”

            “There’s no help for it, Steen,” said Fife with more than a trace of impatience. (What could one do with a thing like Steen?) “We must speak of it again. The Spatio-analyst spoke of the destruction of Florina. Coincident with his disappearance, we receive messages also threatening the destruction of Florina. Is that coincidence?”

            “You are saying that the Spatio-analyst sent the blackmailing message?” whispered old Balle.

            “Not likely. Why say it first in his own name, then anonymously?”

            “When he spoke of it at first,” said Balle, “he was communicating with his district office, not with us.”

            “Even so. A blackmailer deals with no one but his victim if he can help it.”

            “Well then?”

            “He has disappeared. Call the Spatio-analyst honest. But he broadcast dangerous information. He is now in the hands of others who are not honest and they are blackmailers.”

            “What others?”

            Fife sat grimly back in his chair, his lips scarcely moving. “You ask me seriously? Trantor.”

            Steen shivered. “Trantor!” His high-pitched voice broke.

            “Why not? What better way to gain control of Florina? It’s one of the prime aims of their foreign policy. And if they can do it without war, so much the better for them. Look here, if we accede to this impossible ultimatum, Florina is theirs. They offer us a little”--he brought two fingers close together before his face-- “but how long shall we keep even that?

            “On the other hand, suppose we ignore this, and, really, we have no choice. What would Trantor do then? Why, they will spread rumors of an imminent end of the world to the Florinian peasants. As their rumors spread the peasants will panic, and what can follow but disaster? What force can make a man work if he thinks the end of the world will come tomorrow? The harvest will rot. The warehouses will empty.”

            Steen lifted a finger to smooth the coloring on one cheek, as he glanced at a mirror in his own apartments, out of range of the receptor-cube.

            He said, “I don’t think that would harm us much. If the supply goes down, wouldn’t the price go up? Then after a while it would turn out that Florina was still there and the peasants would go back to work. Besides, we could always threaten to clamp down on exports. Really, I don’t see how any cultured world could be expected to live without kyrt. Oh, it’s King Kyrt all right. I think this is a fuss about nothing.”

            He threw himself into an attitude of boredom, one finger placed delicately upon his cheek.

            Balle’s old eyes had been closed through all of this last. He said, “There can be no price increases now. We’ve got them at absolute ceiling height.”

            “Exactly,” said Fife. “It won’t come to serious disruption anyway. Trantor waits for any sign of disorder on Florina. If they could present the Galaxy with the prospect of a Sark that was unable to guarantee kyrt shipments, it would be the most natural thing in the universe for them to move in to maintain what they call order and to keep the kyrt coming. And the danger would be that the free worlds of the Galaxy would probably play along with them for the sake of the kyrt. Especially if Traritor agreed to break the monopoly, increase production and lower prices. Afterward it would be another story, but meanwhile, they would get their support.

            “It’s the only logical way that Trantor could possibly grip Florina. If it were simple force, the free Galaxy outside the Trantorian sphere of influence would join us in sheer self-protection.”

            Rune said, “How does the Spatio-analyst fit in this? Is he necessary? If your theory is adequate it should explain that.”

            “I think it does. These Spatio-analysts are unbalanced for the most part, and this one has developed some”--Fife’s fingers moved, as though building a vague structure--”some crazy theory. It doesn’t matter what. Trantor can’t let it come out, or the Spatio-analytic Bureau would quash it. To seize the man and learn the details would, however, give them something that would probably possess a surface validity to non-specialists. They could use it, make it sound real. The Bureau is a Trantorian puppet, and their denials, once the story is spread by way of scientific rumormongering, would never be forceful enough to overtake the lie.”

            “It sounds too complicated,” said Bort. “Nuts. They can’t let it come out, but then again they will let it come out.”

            “They can’t let it come out as a serious scientific announcement, or even reach the Bureau as such,” said Fife patiently. “They can let it leak out as a rumor. Don’t you see that?”            “What’s old Abel doing wasting his time looking for the Spatio-analyst then?”

            “You expect him to advertise the fact that he’s got him? What Abel does and what Abel seems to be doing are two different things.”

            “Well,” said Rune, “if you’re right, what are we to do?”

            Fife said, “We have learned the danger, and that is the important thing. We’ll find the Spatio-analyst if we can. We must keep all known agents of Trantor under strict scrutiny without really interfering with them. From their actions we may learn the course of coming events. We must suppress thoroughly any propaganda on Florina to the effect of the planet’s destruction. The first faint whisper must meet with instant counteraction of the most violent sort.

            “Most of all, we must remain united. That is the whole purpose of this meeting, in my eyes; the forming of a common front. We all know about continental autonomy and I’m sure there is no one more insistent upon it than I am. That is, under ordinary circumstances. These are not ordinary circumstances. You see that?”

            More or less reluctantly, for continental autonomy was not a thing to be abandoned lightly, they saw that.

            “Then,” said Fife, “we will wait for the second move.”

 

            That had been a year ago. They had left and there had followed the strangest and most complete fiasco ever to have fallen to the lot of the Squire of Fife in a moderately long and a more than moderately audacious career.

            No second move followed. There were no further letters to any of them. The Spatio-analyst remained unfound, while Trantor maintained a desultory search. There was no trace of apocalyptic rumors on Florina, and the harvesting and processing of kyrt continued its smooth pace.

            The Squire of Rune took to calling Fife at weekly intervals.

            “Fife,” he would call. “Anything new?” His fatness would quiver with delight and thick chuckles would force their way out of his gullet.

            Fife took it bleakly and stolidly. What could he do? Over and over again he sifted the facts. It was no use. Something was missing. Some vital factor was missing.

            And then it all began exploding at once, and he had the answer. He knew he had the answer, and it was what he had not expected.

            He had called a meeting once again. The chronometer now said two twenty-nine.

            They were beginning to appear now. Bort first, lips compressed and a rough hangnailed finger rasping against the grain of his grizzly-stubbled cheek. Then Steen, his face freshly washed clear of its paint and presenting a pallid, unhealthy appearance. Balle, indifferent and tired, his cheeks sunken, his armchair well cushioned, a glass of warm milk at his side. Lastly Rune, two minutes late, wet-lipped and sulky, sitting in the night once again. This time his lights were dimmed to the point where he was a hazy bulk sitting in a cube of shadow which Fife’s lights could not have illuminated though they had had the power of Sark’s sun.

            Fife began. “Squires! Last year I speculated on a distant and complicated danger. In so doing I fell into a trap. The danger exists, but it is not distant. It is near us, very near. One of you already knows what I mean. The others will find out shortly.”

            “What do you mean?” asked Bort shortly.

            “High treason!” shot back Fife.

           

           

TEN: The Fugitive

     

     

      MERLYN TERENS was not a man of action. He told himself that as an excuse, since now, leaving the spaceport, he found his mind paralyzed.

            He had to pick his pace carefully. Not too slowly, or he would seem to be dawdling. Not too quickly, or he would seem to be running. Just briskly, as a patroller would walk, a patroller who was about his business and ready to enter his ground-car.

            If only he could enter a ground-car! Driving one, unfortunately, did not come within the education of a Florinian, not even a Florinian Townman, so he tried to think as he walked and could not. He needed silence and leisure.

            And he felt almost too weak to walk. He might not be a man of action but he had acted quickly now for a day and a night and part of another day. It had used up his lifetime’s supply of nerve.

            Yet he dared not stop.

            If it were night he might have had a few hours to think. But it was early afternoon.

            If he could drive a ground-car he could put the miles between himself and the City. Just long enough to think a bit before deciding on the next step. But he had only his legs.

            If he could think. That was it. If he could think. If he could suspend all motion, all action. If he could catch the universe between instants of time, order it to halt, while he thought things through. There must be some way.

            He plunged into the welcome shade of Lower City. He walked stiffly, as he had seen the patrollers walk. He swung his shock stick in a firm grip. The streets were bare. The natives were huddling in their shacks. So much the better.

            The Townman chose his house carefully. It would be best to choose one of the better ones, one with patches of colored plastic briquets and polarized glass in the windows. The lower orders were sullen. They had less to lose. An “upper man” would be falling over himself to help.

            He walked up a short path to such a house. It was set back from the street, another sign of affluence. He knew he would have no need of pounding the door or breaking it in. There had been a noticeable movement at one window as he walked up the ramp. (How generations of necessity enabled a Florinian to smell the approach of a patroller.) The door would open.

            It did open.

            A young girl opened it, her eyes white-rimmed circles. She was gawky in a dress whose frills showed a determined effort on the part of her parents to uphold their status as something more that the ordinary run of “Florinian trash.” She stood aside to let him pass, her breath coming quickly between parted lips.

            The Townman motioned to her to shut the door. “Is your father here, girl?”

            She screamed, “Pa!” then gasped, “Yes, sir!”

            “Pa” was moving in apologetically from another room. He came slowly. It was no news to him that a patroller was at the door. It was simply safer to let a young girl admit him. She was less apt to be knocked down out of hand than he himself was, if the patroller happened to be angry.

            “Your name?” asked the Townman.

            “Jacof, if it please you, sir.”

            The Townman’s uniform had a thin-sheeted notebook in one of its pockets. The Townman opened it, studied it briefly, made a crisp check mark and said, “Jacof! Yes! I want to see every member of the household. Quickly!”

            If he could have found room for any emotion but one of hopeless oppression, Terens would almost have enjoyed himself. He was not immune to the seductive pleasures of authority.

            They filed in. A thin woman, worried, a child of about two years wriggling in her arms. Then the girl who had admitted him and a younger brother.

            “That’s all?”

            “Everyone, sir,” said Jacof humbly.

            “Can I tend the baby?” asked the woman anxiously. “It’s her nap time. I was putting her to bed.” She held the young child out as though the sight of young innocence might melt a patroller’s heart.

            The Townman did not look at her. A patroller, he imagined, would not have, and he was a patroller. He said, “Put it down and give it a sugar sucker to keep it quiet. Now, you! Jacof!”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “You’re a responsible boy, aren’t you?” A native of whatever age was, of course, a “boy.”

            “Yes, sir.” Jacof’s eyes brightened and his shoulders lifted a trifle. “I’m a clerk in the food-processing center. I’ve had mathematics, long division. I can do logarithms.”

            Yes, the Townman thought, they’ve shown you how to use a table of logarithms and taught you how to pronounce the word.

            He knew the type. The man would be prouder of his logarithms than a Squireling of his yacht. The polaroid in his windows was the consequence of his logarithms and the tinted briquets advertised his long division. His contempt for the uneducated native would be equal to that of the average Squire for all natives and his hatred would be more intense since he had to live among them and was taken for one of them by his betters.

            “You believe in the law, don’t you, boy, and in the good Squires?” The Townman maintained the impressive fiction of consulting his notebook.

            “My husband is a good man,” burst in the woman volubly. “He hasn’t ever been in trouble. He doesn’t associate with trash. And I don’t. No more do the children. We always--”

            Terens waved her down. “Yes. Yes. Now look, boy, I want you to sit right here and do what I say. I want a list of everyone you know about on this block. Names, addresses, what they do, and what kind of boys they are. Especially the last. If there’s one of these troublemakers, I want to know. We’re going to clean up. Understand?”

            “Yes, sir. Yes, sir. There’s Husting first of all. He’s down the block a way. He--”

            “Not like that, boy. Get him a piece of paper, you. Now you sit there and write it all down. Every bit. Write it slowly because I can’t read native chicken tracks,”

            “I have a trained writing hand, sir.”

            “Let’s see it, then.”

            Jacof bent to his task, hand moving slowly. His wife looked over his shoulder.

            Terens spoke to the girl who had let him in. “Go to the window and let me know if any other patrollers come this way. I’ll want to speak to them, Don’t you call them. Just tell me.”

            And then, finally, he could relax. He had made a momentarily secure niche for himself in the midst of danger.

            Except for the noisy sucking of the baby in the corner, there was reasonable silence. He would be warned of the enemy’s approach in time for a fighting chance at escape.

            Now he could think.

            In the first place, his role as patroller was about over. There were undoubtedly road blocks at all possible exits from the town, and they knew he could use no means of transportation more complicated than a diamagnetic scooter. It would not be long before it would dawn on the search-rusty patrollers that only by a systematic quartering of the town, block by block and house by house, could they be sure of their man.

            When they finally decided that, they would undoubtedly start at the outskirts and work inward. If so, this house would be among the first to be entered, so his time was particularly limited.

            Until now, despite its black and silver conspicuousness, the patroller uniform had been useful. The natives themselves had not questioned it. They had not stopped to see his pale Florinian face; they had not studied his appearance. The uniform had been enough.

            Before long the pursuing hounds would find that fact dawning upon them. It would occur to them to broadcast instructions to all natives to hold any patroller unable to show proper identification, particularly one with a white skin and sandy hair. Temporary identifications would be passed out to all legitimate patrollers. Rewards would be offered. Perhaps only one native in a hundred would be courageous enough to tackle the uniform no matter how patently false the occupant was. One in a hundred would be enough.

            So he would have to stop being a patroller.

            That was one thing. Now another. He would be safe nowhere on Florina from now on. Killing a patroller was the ultimate crime and in fifty years, if he could elude capture so long, the chase would remain hot. So he would have to leave Florina.

            How?

            Well, he gave himself one more day of life. This was a generous estimate. It assumed the patrollers to be at maximum stupidity and himself in a state of maximum luck.

            In one way this was an advantage. A mere twenty-four hours of life was not much to risk. It meant he could take chances no sane man could possibly take.

            He stood up.

            Jacof looked up from his paper. “I’m not quite done, sir. I’m writing very carefully.”

            “Let me see what you have written.”

            He looked at the paper handed him and said, “It is enough. If other patrollers should come, don’t waste their time saying that you have already made a list. They are in a hurry and may have other tasks for you. Just do as they say. Are there any coming now?”

            The girl at the window said, “No, sir. Shall I go out in the street and look?”

            “It’s not necessary. Let’s see now. Where is the nearest elevator?”

            “It’s about a quarter of a mile to the left, sir, as you leave the house. You can--”

            “Yes, yes. Let me out.”

            A squad of patrollers turned into the street just as the door of the elevator ground into place behind the Townman. He could feel his heart pound. The systematic search was probably starting, and they were at his heels.

            A minute later, heartbeat still drumming, he stepped out of the elevator into Upper City. There would be no cover here. No pillars. No cementalloy hiding him from above.

            He felt like a moving black dot among the glare of the garish buildings. He felt visible for two miles on every side and for five miles up in the sky. There seemed to be large arrows pointing to him.

            There were no patrollers in view. The Squires who passed looked through him. If a patroller was an object of fear to a Florinian, he was an object of nothing-at-all to a Squire. If anything would save him, that would.

            He had a vague notion of the geography of Upper City. Somewhere in this section was City Park. The most logical step would have been to ask directions, the next most logical to enter any moderately tall building and look out from several of the upperstory terraces. The first alternative was impossible. No patroller could possibly need directions. The second was too risky. Inside a building, a patroller would be more conspicuous. Too conspicuous.

            He simply struck out in the direction indicated by his memory of the maps of Upper City he had seen on occasion. It served well enough. It was unmistakably City Park that he came across in five minutes’ time.

            City Park was an artificial patch of greenery about one hundred acres in area. On Sark itself, City Park had an exaggerated reputation for many things from bucolic peace to nightly orgies. On Florina, those who had vaguely heard of it imagiped it ten to a hundred times its actual size and a hundred to a thousand times its actual luxuriance.

            The reality was pleasant enough. In Florina’s mild climate it was green all year round. It had its patches of lawn, wooded areas and stony grottoes. It had a little pool with decorative fish in it and a larger pool for children to paddle in. At night it was aflame with colored illumination till the light rain started. It was between twilight and the rain that it was most alive. There was dancing, trimensional shows, and couples losing themselves along the winding walks.

            Terens had never actually been inside it. He found its artificiality repellent when he entered the Park. He knew that the soil and rocks he stepped on, the water and trees around him, all rested on a dead-flat cementalloy bottom and it annoyed him. He thought of the kyrt fields, long and level, and the mountain ranges of the south. He despised the aliens who had to build toys for themselves in the midst of magnificence.

            For half an hour Terens tramped the walks aimlessly. What he had to do would have to be done in City Park. Even here it might be impossible. Elsewhere it was impossible.

            No one saw him. No one was conscious of him. He was sure of that. Let them ask the Squires and Squirettes who passed him, “Did you see a patroller in the Park yesterday?”

            They could only stare. They might as well be asked whether they had seen a tree midge skitter across the path.

            The Park was too tame. He felt panic begin to grow. He made his way up a staircase between boulders and began descending into the cuplike hollow circled by small caves designed to shelter couples caught in the nightly rainfall. (More were caught than could be accounted for by chance alone.)

            And then he saw what he was looking for.

            A man! A Squire, rather. Stepping back and forth quickly. Smoking the stub of a cigarette with sharp drags, cramming it into an ash recess, where it lay quietly for a moment, then vanished with a quick flash. Consulting a pendant watch.

            There was no one else in the hollow. It was a place made for the evening and night.

            The Squire was waiting for someone. So much was obvious. Terens looked about him. No one was following him up the stairs.

            There might be other stairs. There were sure to be. No matter. He could not let the chance go.

            He stepped down toward the Squire. The Squire did not see him, of course, until Terens said, “If you’ll pardon me?”

            It was respectful enough, but a Squire is not accustomed to having a patroller touch the crook of his elbow in however respectful a fashion.

            “What the hell?” he said.

            Terens abandoned neither the respect nor the urgency in his tone. (Keep him talking. Keep his eyes on yours for just half a minute!) He said, “This way, sir. It is in connection with the City-wide search for the native murderer.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “It will take just a moment.”

            Unobtrusively Terens had drawn his neuronic whip. The Squire never saw it. It buzzed a little and the Squire strained into rigor and toppled.

            The Townman had never raised a hand against a Squire before. He was surprised at how sick and guilty he felt.

            There was still no one in sight. He dragged the wooden body, with its glazed and staring eyes, into the nearest cave. He dragged it to the cave’s shallow end.

            He stripped the Squire, yanking clothing off the stiffened arms and legs with difficulty. He stepped out of his own dusty, sweat-stained patroller uniform and climbed into the Squire’s underclothing. For the first time he felt kyrt fabric with some part of himself beside his fingers.

            Then the rest of the clothing, and the Squire’s skullcap. The last was necessary. Skullcaps were not entirely fashionable among the younger set but some wore them, this Squire luckily among them. To Terens it was a necessity as otherwise his light hair would make the masquerade impossible. He pulled the cap down tightly, covering his ears.

            Then he did what had to be done. The killing of a patroller was, he suddenly realized, not the ultimate crime after all.

            He adjusted his blaster to maximum dispersion and turned it on the unconscious Squire. In ten seconds only a charred mass was left. It would delay identification, confuse the pursuers.

            He reduced the patroller’s uniform to a powdery white ash with the blaster and clawed out of the heap blackened silver buttons and buckles. That, too, would make the chase harder. Perhaps he was buying only an additional hour, but that, too, was worth it.

            And now he would have to leave without delay. He paused a moment just outside the mouth of the cave to sniff. The blaster worked cleanly. There was only the slightest odor of burned flesh and the light breeze would clear it in a few moments.

            He was walking down the steps when a young girl passed him on the way up. For a moment he dropped his eyes out of habit. She was a Lady. He lifted them in time to see that she was young and quite good-looking, and in a hurry.

            His jaws set. She wouldn’t find him, of course. But she was late, or he wouldn’t have been staring at his watch so. She might think he had grown tired of waiting and had left. He walked a trifle faster. He didn’t want her returning, pursuing him breathlessly, asking if he had seen a young man.

            He left the Park, walking aimlessly. Another half hour passed.

            What now? He was no longer a patroller, he was a Squire.

            But what now?