GALACTIC ODYSSEY

CHAPTER ONE

I remember hearing somewhere that freezing to death is an easy way to go; but the guy that said that never tried it. I’d found myself a little hollow where a falling-down stone wall met a dirt-bank, and hunkered down in it; but the wall wasn’t high enough to keep the wind off or stop the sleet from hitting my neck like buckshot and running down cold under my collar. There were some moldy leaves drifted there, and I used the last of my lighter fluid trying to get a lit-tle blaze going, but that turned out like everything else I’d tried lately: a fizzle. One thing about it: My feet were so numb from the cold I couldn’t feel the blisters from the eighteen miles I’d hiked since my last ride dumped me at a crossroads, just before dawn. I had my collar turned up, for what good that might do, which wasn’t much; the coat felt like wet newspaper. Both elbows were out of it, and two of the buttons were gone. Funny; three weeks ago it had been decent-looking enough to walk into a second-class restaurant in without attracting more than the usual quota of hostile stares. Three weeks: That’s all it took to slide from a shaky toehold in the economic cycle all the way to the bottom. I’d heard of hit-ting the skids, but I never knew before just what it meant. Once you go over that invisible edge, it’s downhill all the way. It had been almost a year since I’d quit school, when Uncle Jason died. What money I had went for the cheapest funeral the little man with the sweet, sad smile could bear to talk about. After that, I’d held a couple of jobs that had wafted away like the morning mist as soon as the three months “tryout” was over and the question of regular wages came up. There’d been a few months of scrounging, then; mowing lawns, running errands, one-day stands as a carpenter’s helper or assis-tant busboy while the regular man was off. I’d tried to keep up appearances, enough not to scare off any prospective employers, but the money barely stretched to cover food and what the sign said was a clean bed. Then one day I’d showed up looking just a little too thin, a little too hungry, the collar just a little too frayed.

And now I was here, with my stomach making whim-pering sounds to remind me of all the meals it hadn’t had lately, as far as ever from where I was headed-wherever that was. I didn’t really have a destination. I just wanted to be where I wasn’t.

And I couldn’t stay here. The wall was worse than no protection at all, and the wind was blowing colder and wet-ter all the time. I crawled out and made it back up the slope to the road. There were no headlights in sight; it wouldn’t have helped if there were. Nobody was going to stop in a sleetstorm in the middle of nowhere to give a lift to a hobo like me. I didn’t have any little sign to hold up, stating that I was a hardship case, that comfortable middle-class con-formity was my true vocation, that I was an honest young fellow with a year of college who’d had a little hard luck lately; all I had were the clothes I stood in, a bad cough, and a deep conviction that if I didn’t get out of the weather, fast, by morning I’d be one of those dead-of-exposure cases they’re always finding in alleys back of cut-rate liquor stores.

I put my back to the wind and started off, hobbling on a couple of legs that ended somewhere below the knee. I didn’t notice feeling tired anymore, or hungry; I was just a machine somebody had left running. All I could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other until I ran down. 2

I saw the light when I came up over a rise, just a weak little spark, glowing a long way off in the big dark beyond the trees. I turned and started off across the open field toward it.

Ten minutes later, I came up behind a big swaybacked barn with a new-looking silo beside it and a rambling two story house beyond. The light was shining from a ground-floor window. There was a pickup parked in the side yard near the barn, and a late-model Cadillac convertible, with the top down. Just looking at it made me ten degrees colder. I didn’t have any idea of knocking on the door, introducing myself: “Billy Danger, sir. May I step inside and curl up in front of the fire?”-and being invited to belly up to a chicken dinner. But there was the barn; and where there were barns, there was hay; and where there was hay, a man could snuggle down and sleep, if not warm, at least not out in the freezing rain. It was worth a try. The barn door looked easy enough: just warped boards hanging on big rusted-out hinges; but when I tried it, nothing budged. I looked closer, and saw that the hinges weren’t rotted after all; they were just made to look that way. I picked at a flake of paint on the door; there was bright metal underneath. That was kind of strange, but all it meant to me then was that I wouldn’t be crawling into that haystack after all. The sleet was coming down thicker than ever now. I put my nose up and sniffed, caught a whiff of frying bacon and coffee that made my jaws ache. All of a sudden, my stomach remembered its complaint and tried to tie itself into a hard knot. I went back through tall weeds past some rusty iron that used to be farm machinery, and across a rutted drive toward the silo. I didn’t know much about silos except that they were where you stored the corn, but at least it had walls and a roof. If I could get in there, I might find a dry spot to hide in. I reached a door set in the curved wall; it opened and I slid inside, into dim light and a flow of warm air. Across the room, there was an inner door standing open, and I could see steps going up: glass steps on chrome-plated rails. The soft light and the warm air were coming from there. I went up, moving on instinct, like the first fish crawling out on land, reached the top and was in a room full of pipes and tubes and machinery and a smell like the inside of a TX set. Weary as I was, this didn’t look like a place to curl up in. I made it up another turn of the spiral stair, came out in a space where big shapes like cotton bales were stacked, with dark spaces between them. There was a smell like a fresh-tarred road here. I groped toward the deepest shadow I could find, and my hand touched something soft. In the faint light from the stairwell it looked like mink or sable, except that it was an electric-blue color. I didn’t let that worry me. I crawled up on top of the stack and put my face down in the velvety fluff and let all the strings break at once.

3

In the dream, I was a burglar, holed up in somebody else’s house, hiding in the closet, and in a minute they’d find me and haul me out and ride me into town in a police car to sit under the lights and answer questions about every un-solved chicken-stealing in the county in the past five years. The feet were coming up the stairs, coming closer. Somebody said something and a woman’s voice answered in a foreign language. They went away and the dream faded. . . .

. . . And then the noise started.

It was a thin, high-pitched shrilling, like one of those whistles you call the dog with. It went right between my bones and pried at the joints. It got louder, and angrier, like bees boiling out of a hive, and I was awake now, and trying to get up; but a big hand came down and mashed me flat. I tried to get enough breath in to yell, but the air had turned to syrup. I just had time to remember the day back in Pineville when the Chevy rolled off the rack at Uncle Jason’s gas station and pinned a man under the back bumper. Then it all went red and I was someplace else, going over Niagara Falls in a big rubber balloon, wearing a cement life jacket, while thousands cheered. 4

When I woke up, I heard voices.

“ . . . talking rot now. It’s nothing to do with me.” This was a man’s voice, speaking with an English accent. He sounded as if he were a little amused by something.

“I mark well t’was thee I charged with the -integrity o’ the vessel!” This one sounded big, and mad. He had a strange way of talking, but I could understand most of the words all right. Then a girl spoke, but in -another language. She had a nice, clear, sweet voice. She sounded worried.

“No harm done, Desroy.” The first man gave a soft laugh. “And it might be a spot of good luck, at that. Perhaps he’ll make a replacement for Jongo.”

“I don’t omit thy ill-placed japery, Orfeo! Rid me this urchin, ere you vex me out of all humor!”

“A bit of a sticky wicket, that, old boy. He’s still alive, you know. If I nurse him along-”

“How say you? What stuff is this! Art thou the parish comfort, to wax chirurgeonly o’er this whelp?”

“If he can be trained-”

“You o’ertax my patience, Orfeo! I’d make a chough of as deep chat!”

“He’ll make a gun-boy, mark my words.”

“Bah! You more invest the misadventure than a mar-ketplace trinket chafferer! In any case, the imp’s beyond re-covery!”

Part of me wanted to just skip over this part of the dream and sink back down into the big, soft black that was waiting for me, but a little voice somewhere back behind my eyes was telling me to do something, fast, before bad things happened. I made a big effort and got one eyelid open. Everything looked red and hazy. The three of them were standing ten feet away, near the door. The one with the funny way of speaking was big, built solid as a line-backer, with slicked-back black hair and a little moustache. He wore a loose jacket covered with pockets; he looked like Clark Gable playing Frank Buck.

The other man was not much older than me; he had a rugged jawline, a short nose, curly reddish-brown hair, wide shoulders, slim hips in a form-fitting gray coverall. He was pretty enough to be a TV intern. The girl . . . I had to stop and get the other eyelid up. No girl could be that pretty. She had jet black hair and smoky gray eyes big enough to go wading in; an oval face, mellow ivory-colored skin, features like one of those old statues. She was wearing a white coverall, and the form it fit was enough to break your heart.

I made a move to sit up and pain broke over me like a wave. It seemed to be coming mostly from my left arm. I took hold of the wrist with my other hand and got up on one elbow with no more effort than it takes to swing a safe in your teeth.

Nobody seemed to notice; when the whirly lights settled down, they were still standing there, still argu-ing.

“ . . . a spot of bother, Desroy, but it’s worth a go.”

“Methinks sloth instructs thee, naught else!” The big fellow turned and stamped off. The young fellow grinned at the girl.

“Just twisting the old boy’s tail. Actually, he’s right. You nip off and soothe him down a bit. I’ll attend to this.”

I slid over the edge of my nest and kind of fell to the floor. At the noise, they both whirled on me. I got hold of the floor and swung it around under me.

“I just came in to get out of the weather,” I meant to say, but it came out as a sort of gargly sound. The man took a quick step toward me and over his shoulder said, “Pop off now, Milady.” He had a hand on a thing clipped to his belt. I didn’t need a set of technical specifications to tell me it was some kind of gun. The girl moved up quickly and put her hand on his arm.

“Orfeo-the poor creature suffers!” She spoke English with an accent that made it sound like music.

He moved her around behind him. “He might be dangerous. Now do be a good child and toddle off.”

“I’m . . . not dangerous,” I managed to get the words out. The smile was less successful. I felt sick. But I wasn’t going to come unfed in front of her. I got my back against the pile of furs and tried to stand up straight.

“So you can talk,” the man said. He was frowning at me. “Damn me if I know what to do with you.” He seemed to be talking to himself.

“Just . . . let me rest a few minutes . . . and I’ll be on my way . . .” I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears like bongo drums.

“Why did you come aboard?” The man snapped the question at me. “What did you think you’d find here?”

“I was cold,” I said. “It was warm here-”

He snorted. “Letting yourself in for a devilish change of scene, weren’t you?”

His first words were beginning to filter through. “What is this place?” I asked him.

“You’re aboard Lord Desroy’s yacht. He’s not keen on contraband holed up in the aft lazaret-”

“A boat?” I felt I’d missed something somewhere. The last I remembered was a farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere. “You must be fooling me.” I tried to show him a smile to let him know I got the joke. “I don’t feel any waves.”

“She’s a converted ketch, stressed-field primaries, ion-pulse auxiliaries, fitted with full antiac and variable G gear, four years out of Zeridajh on a private expedition. Every square inch of her is allocated to items in specific support of her mission in life, which brings us back to you. What’s your name?” He asked that last in a businesslike tone.

“Billy Danger. I don’t understand all that about a catch . . .”

“Just think of her as a small spaceship.” He sounded impatient. “Now, Billy Danger, it’s up to me to-”

“Spaceship? You mean like they shoot astronauts off in?”

Orfeo laughed. “Astronauts, eh? Couple of natives pad-dling about the shallows in a dugout canoe. No, Billy Danger, this is a deep-space yacht, capable of cruising for many centuries at multiple-light velocities. At the moment, she’s on course for a world very distant from your native Earth.”

“Walt a minute,” I said; I wanted everything to slow down for just a second while I got caught up with it. “I don’t want to go to any star. I just want out of here.” I tried a step and had to lean against the bale beside me.

“Just let me off, and I’ll disappear so quick you’ll think you dreamed me-”

“I’m afraid that’s not practical.” Orfeo cut me off short. “Now you’re here, the question is what to do with you. As you doubtless heard, Lord Desroy’s in favor of putting you out the lock. As for myself, I have hopes of making use of you. Know anything about weapons? Hunted much?”

“Just let me off,” I said. “Anywhere at all. I’ll walk home.”

“You must answer my questions promptly, Billy Danger! What becomes of you depends on how well you answer them.”

“I never hunted,” I said. My breath was short, as if I’d run a long way.

“That’s all right. Nothing to unlearn. How old are you?”

“Nineteen, next April.”

“Amazing. You look younger. Are you quick to learn, Billy Danger?”

“It’s kidnaping,” I said. “You can’t just kidnap a man. There’s laws-”

“Mind your tongue, Billy Danger! I’ll tolerate no insolence, you’d best understand that at the outset! As for law, Lord Desroy makes the law here. This is his vessel; with the exception of the Lady Raire and myself, he owns every atom aboard her, including stowaways.”

A sudden thought occurred to me, like an icepick through the heart. “You’re not . . . Earthmen, are you?”

“Happily, no.”

“But you look human; you speak English.”

“Of course we’re human; much older stock than your own unfortunate branch. We’ve spent a year on your drab little world, going after walrus, elephant, that sort of thing. Now, that’s enough chatter, Billy Danger. Do you think you can learn to be a proper gunbearer?”

“How long-before we go back?”

“To Earth? Never, I trust. Now, see here! Don’t fret about matters out of your control! Your job is to keep me happy with you. If you can do that, you’ll stay alive and well. If not . . .” He let the rest hang. “But then, I’m sure you’ll try your best, eh, Billy Danger?”

It was crazy, but the way he said it, I believed every word of it. The thing I had to do right now was stay alive. Then, later, I could worry about getting home.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll try.”

“Right. That’s settled, then.” Orfeo looked relieved, as if he’d just found an excuse to put off a mean chore. “You were lucky, you know. You took eight gravities, unprotect-ed. A wonder you didn’t break a few bones.”

I was still holding my left arm by the wrist; I eased it around front, and felt the sharp point poking out through my sleeve.

“Who said I didn’t?” I asked him, and felt myself folding like a windblown newspaper.

CHAPTER TWO

I woke up feeling different. At first, I couldn’t quite dope out what it was; then I got it: I was clean, fresh-shaved, sweet-smelling, tucked in between sheets as crisp as new dollar bills. And I felt good; I tingled all over, as if I’d just had a needle shower and a rubdown.

The room I was in was a little low-ceilinged cubbyhole with nothing much in it but the pallet I was lying on. I remembered the arm then, and pulled back a loose yellow sleeve somebody had put on me. Outside of a little swelling and a bright pink scar under a clear plastic patch, it was as good as new.

Something clicked and a little door in the wall slid back. The man named Orfeo stuck his head in.

“Good; you’re awake. About time. I’m about to field-strip the Z-guns. You’ll watch.”

I got up and discovered that my knees didn’t wobble anymore. I felt strong enough to run up a wall. And hungry. Just thinking about ham and eggs made my jaws ache. Orfeo tossed me a set of yellow coveralls from a closet back of a sliding panel.

“Try these; I cut them down from Jongo’s old cape.”

I pulled them on. The cloth was tough and light and smooth as glove silk.

“How are you feeling?” Orfeo was looking me up and down.

“Fine,” I said. “How long did I sleep?”

“Ninety-six hours. I doped you up a bit.”

I ran a finger over my new scar. “I don’t understand about the arm. I remember it as being broken; broken bad-”

“A hunter has to know a little field medicine,” he said. “While I was about it, I gave you a good worming and balanced up your body chemistry.” He shook his head. “Bloody wonder you could walk, the rot that boiled out of you. Bloody microbe culture. How’s your vision?”

I blinked at the wall. If there’d been a fly there, I could have counted his whiskers. “Good,” I said. “Better than it’s ever been.”

“Well, you’re no good to me sick,” he said, as if he had to apologize.

“Thanks,” I said. “For the arm, and the bath and the pretty yellow pajamas, too.”

“Don’t thank me. The Lady Raire took care of that part.”

“You mean . . . the girl?”

“She’s the Lady Raire, Jongo! And I’m Sir Orfeo. As for the wash-up and the kit, someone had to do it. You stank to high heaven. Now come along. We’ve a great deal to cover if you’re to be of any use to me on the hunt.”

2

The armory was a small room lined with racks full of guns that weren’t like any guns I’d ever seen before. There were handguns, rifles, rocket-throwers, some with short barrels, some with just a bundle of glass rods, some with fancy telescopic sights, one that looked like a flare pistol with a red glass thermometer on the side; and there were a few big elephant guns of Earth manufacture. The whole room glit-tered like Tiffany’s front window. I ran a finger along a stock made of polished purple wood, with fittings that looked like solid gold. “It looks like Mister Desroy goes first class.”

“Keep your hands off the weapons until you know how to service them.” Sir Orfeo poked buttons and a table tilted up out of the floor and a section of ceiling over it glared up brighter than before. He flipped a switch and the lock-bar on a rack snapped up, and he lifted out a heavy-looking, black-stocked item with a drum magazine and three triggers and a flared shoulder plate, chrome-plated.

“This is a Z-gun,” he said. “It’s a handy all-round piece, packs 0.8

megaton/seconds of firepower, weight four pounds three ounces.” He snapped a switch on the side back and forth a couple of times and handed the gun across to me.

“What’s a megaton/second?” I asked him.

“Enough power to vaporize the yacht if it were released at one burst. At full gain the Z-gun will punch a three-millimeter hole through an inch of flint steel at a range of five miles with a five millisecond burst.” He went on to tell me a lot more about Z-guns, -crater-rifles, infinite repeaters, filament pistols.

At the end of it I didn’t know much more about the weapons Lord Desroy would be using on his hunt, but I was feeling sorry for whatever it was he was after.

3

Sir Orfeo took me back to the little room I’d waked up in, showed me how to work a gadget that delivered a little can of pink oatmeal, steaming hot. I sniffed it; it smelled like seaweed. I tasted it. It was flat and insipid, like papier--mâché.

“Sir Orfeo, I hate to complain about a free gift,” I said. “But are you sure this was meant for a man to eat?”

“Jongo wasn’t a man.”

I kind of goggled at him. “What was he?”

“A Lithian. Very good boy, Jongo. With me for a long time.” He glanced around the room. “Damned if it doesn’t give me a touch of something-or-other to see you in his ken-nel.”

“Kennel?”

“Nest, pitch, call it cabin if you like.” Sir Orfeo beetled a fine eyebrow at me. “Don’t be putting on airs, Billy Danger. I’ve no patience with it.”

He left me there to dine in solitude. Afterward, he gave me a tour of the ship. He was showing me a fancy leather-and-inlay lounge when Lord Desroy came in.

“Ah, there you are, Desroy,” Orfeo said in a breezy way. “Just occurred to me you might like to have Jongo-ah, Billy Danger, that is-do a bit of a dust-up here in the lounge-”

“How now? Hast lost thy wits, Orfeo? Hie the mooncalf hence i’ the instant!”

“Steady on, Desroy. Just thought I’d ask-”

“I’ve a whim to chide the varlet for his impertinence!” the big boss barked and took a step toward me. Orfeo pushed me behind him.

“Don’t blame the boy. My doing, you know,” he said in a nice cool tone.

“Thy role of advocate for this scurvy patch would want credit, an’ I stood not witness on’t!”

We went on down the stairs. Instead of looking mad, Sir Orfeo was smiling and humming between his teeth. He dropped the smile when he saw me looking at him.

“I advise you to stay out of Lord Desroy’s way, Jongo. For now, he’s willing to humor me along; I have a carefully nurtured reputation for temperament, you see. If I get upset, the game might turn out to be scarce. But if you ruffle his feathers by being underfoot, he might act hastily.”

“He has a strange way of talking,” I said. “What kind of accent is that?”

“Eh? Oh, it’s a somewhat archaic dialect of English. Been some three hundred years since his lordship last visit-ed Earth. Now, that’s enough gossip, Jongo-”

“It’s Billy Dan-”

“I’ll call you Jongo. Shorter. Now let’s get along to Hold F and you can earn your keep by polishing a spot of brightwork in Environmental.”

The polishing turned out to be a job of scraping slimy deposits off the valves and piping. Sir Orfeo left me to it while he went back up and joined in whatever they were doing on the other side of the forbidden door. 4

One day Sir Orfeo showed me a star chart and pointed out the relative locations of Earth, Gar 28, the world we were headed for at the moment, and Zeridajh, far in toward the big gob of stars at the center of the Galaxy.

“We’ll never get there,” I said. “I read somewhere it takes light a hundred thousand years to cross the Galaxy; Gar 28 must be about ten light-years away; and Zeridajh is thousands!”

He laughed. “The limiting velocity of light is a myth, Jongo,” he said. “Like the edge of the world your early sailors were afraid they’d fall over-or the sound barrier you used to worry about. This vessel could reach Zeridajh in eighteen months, if she stretched her legs.”

I wanted to ask him why Lord Desroy picked such a distant part of the sky to go hunting in, but I’d learned not to be nosy. Whatever the reasons were, they were somebody’s secret.

After my first few weeks away from all time indicators, I began to develop my own internal time-sense, independent of the three-hour cycles that were the Galactic shipboard standard. I could sense when an hour had passed, and looking back, I knew, without knowing how I knew, just about how long I’d been away from Earth. I might have been wrong-there was no way to check-but the sense was very definite, and always consistent. I had been aboard just under six weeks when Sir Orfeo took me to the personal equipment room one day and fitted me out with thermal boots, leggings, gloves, a fancy pair of binocular sunglasses, breathing apparatus, a backpack, and a temperature suit. He spent an hour fussing over me, get-ting everything fitted just right. Then he told me to go and tie down in my digs. I did, and for the next hour the yacht shook and shrilled and thumped. When the noise stopped, Sir Orfeo came along and yelled to me to get into my kit and come down to F Hold. When I got there, walking pretty heavy with all the gear I was carrying or had strapped to my back, he was there, checking items off a list.

“A little more juldee next time, Jongo,” he snapped at me. “Come along now; I’ll want your help in getting the ground-car out shipshape.”

It was a powerful-looking vehicle, wide, squatty, with tracks like a small tank, a plastic bubble dome over the top. There was a roomy compartment up front full of leather and inlaid wood and bright work, and a smaller space behind, with two hard seats. Lord Desroy showed up in his Frank Buck bush jacket and jodhpurs and a wide-brimmed hat; the Lady Raire wore her white coverall. Sir Orfeo was dressed in his usual tailored gray with a filament pistol strapped to his hip and a canteen and bush knife on the other side. We all wore temperature suits, which were like long-handled under-wear, under the coveralls. “Keep your helmet closed, Jongo,” Sir Orfeo told me.

“Toxic atmos-phere, you know.”

He pushed a button and a door opened up in the side of the hold, and I was looking out at a plain of bluish grass. A wave of heat rolled in and the thermostat in my suit clicked, and right away it turned cool against my skin. Sir Orfeo started up and the car lifted a couple of inches from the floor, swung around, and slid out under the open sky of a new world. For the next five hours I perched on my seat with my mouth open, taking in the sights: the high, blue-black sky, strange trees like overgrown parsley sprigs, the leathery grass that stretched to a horizon that was too far away-and the animals. The things we were after were big crab-armored monstrosities, pale purple and white, with mouths full of needle-pointed teeth and horns all over their faces. Lord Desroy shot two of them, stopping the car and going forward on foot. I guess it took courage, but I didn’t see the point in it. Each time, he and Sir Orfeo made a big thing of hacking off one of the horns and taking a lot of pictures and -congratulating each other. The Lady Raire just watched from the car. She didn’t seem to smile much.

We loaded up and went on to another world then, and Milord shot a thing as big as a diesel locomotive. Sir Orfeo never talked about himself or the other members of the party, or the world they came from, but he explained the details of the hunt to me, gave me pointers on tracking and approaching, told me which gun to use for different kinds of quarry. Not much of it stuck. After the fourth or fifth hunt, it all got a little stale.

“This next world is called Gar 28,” Sir Orfeo woke me up to tell me after a long stretch in space. “Doesn’t look like much; dry, you know; but there’ll be keen hunting. I found this one myself, running through tapes made by a survey team a few hundred years ago. The fellows we’ll be going after they called dire-beast. You’ll understand why when you see the beggars.”

He was right about Gar 28. We started out across a rugged desert of dry-baked pink and tan and yellow clay, fissured and cracked by the sun, with points of purplish rock pushing up here and there, a line of jagged peaks for a horizon. It didn’t look like game country to me, but then I wasn’t the hunter.

The sun was high in the sky, too bright to look at, a little smaller than the one I was used to. It was cool and comfortable inside the car; it hummed along a couple of feet above the ground, laying a dust trail behind it from the air blast it was riding on. The tracks were for hills that were too steep for the air cushion to climb.

About a mile from the yacht, I looked back; it was just a tiny glint, like a lost needle, among all that desolation.

Up front, on the other side of the glass panel, Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo and the Lady Raire chatted away in their odd language, and every now and then said something in that strange brand of English they spoke. I could hear them through a speaker hookup in the back of the car. If I’d had something to say, I don’t know whether they could have heard it or not. After two hours’ run, we pulled up at the top of a high escarpment. Sir Orfeo opened the hatch, and we all got out. I remembered Sir Orfeo had told me always to stay close with his gun when we were out of the car so I got out one of the crater-rifles and came up behind them in time to see Sir Orfeo point.

“There-by the double peak at the far end of the fault-line!” He snapped his goggles up and whirled to start back and almost slammed into me. A very thin slice of an instant later I was lying on my back with my head swimming, looking into the operating end of his filament pistol.

“Never come up behind me with a weapon in your hand!”

I got up, with my head still whanging from the blow he’d hit me, and followed them to the car, and we went tearing back down the slope the way we’d come.

It was a fast fifteen-minute run out across the flats toward where Sir Orfeo had seen whatever it was he saw. I had my binocular goggles on and was looking hard, but all I saw was the dusty plain and the sharp rock spires, growing taller as we rushed toward them. Then Sir Orfeo swung the car to the left in a wide curve and pulled to a stop behind a low ridge.

“Everybody out!” he snapped, and popped the hatch up and was over the side.

“Don’t sit there and brood, Jongo!” He was grinning, excited and happy now.

“My crater-rifle; Z-guns for his lordship and Lady Raire!”

I handed the weapons down to him, stock-first, the way he’d told me.

“You’ll carry the extra crater and a filament pistol,” he said, and moved back up front to go into conference with the others. I strapped on the Z-gun and grabbed the rifle and hopped down just as Sir Orfeo and Lord Desroy started off. The Lady Raire followed about ten feet back, and I took up my post offside to the right about five yards. My job was to keep that relative position to Sir Orfeo, no matter what, until he yelled “Close!” Then I was to move in quick. That was about all I knew about a hunt. That, and don’t come up behind Sir Orfeo with a gun.

The sun still seemed to be about where it had been when we started out. There was a little wind blowing from behind, keeping a light cloud of dust rolling along ahead. It seemed to me I’d heard somewhere that you were supposed to sneak up on game from downwind, but that wasn’t for me to worry about. All I had to do was maintain my interval. We came to a slight rise of ground. The wind was picking up, driving a thick curtain of dust ahead. For a few seconds I couldn’t see anything but that yellow fog swirling all around. I stopped and heard a sound, a deep thoom! thoom!

thoom!

“Close! Damn your eyes, Jongo, close!” Sir Orfeo shouted. I ran toward the sound of his voice, tripped over a rock, and went flat. I could hear Lord Desroy shouting something and the thoom-thoom, louder than before. I scrambled up and ran on forward, and as suddenly as it had blown up, the gale died and the dust rolled away from us. Sir Orfeo was twenty feet off to my left, with Lord Desroy beside him. I changed direction and started toward them, and saw Sir Orfeo make a motion, and Lord Desroy brought his rifle up and I looked where he was aiming and out of the dust cloud a thing came galloping that was right out of a nightmare. It was big-twenty, thirty feet high, -running on two legs that seemed to have too many knees. The feet were huge snowshoelike pads, and they rose and fell like something in a slow-motion movie, driving dust from under them in big spurts, and at each stride the ground shook. A second one came charging out of the dust cloud, and it was bigger than the first one. Their hides were a glistening greenish brown, except where they were coated with dust, and there was a sort of cape of ragged skin flapping from the narrow shoulders of one as he ran, and I thought he must be shedding. Thick necks rose from the shoulders, with wide flat heads that were all mouth, like the bucket of a drag-line. And then a third, smaller edition came scampering after the big fellows.

All this happened in maybe a second or two. I had skid-ded to a halt and was standing there, in a half crouch, literally paralyzed. I couldn’t have moved if an express train had been coming straight at me. And these were worse than express trains.

They were about a hundred and fifty yards away when Lord Desroy fired. I heard the Z-gun make a sharp whickering noise and an electric-blue light flashed up and lit the rocks like lightning, and the lead monster broke stride and veered off to the left, running irregularly now. He leaned, losing his balance, but still driving on, his neck whipped back and up and the head flailed offside as he went down, hit, bounced half upright, his legs still pumping, then went into a tumble of flailing legs and neck and the dust closed over him and only then I heard the shuddering boom he made hitting the ground.

And the second one was still coming, closer now than number one had been when he was hit, and the little fellow-a baby, only fifteen feet high-sprinted up along-side him, tilted his head sideways, and snapped at his big brother’s side. I saw a flash of white as the hide and mus-cle tore; then the little one was skidding to a halt on his haunches, his big jaws working hard over the bite he’d gotten, while the one that had supplied the snack came on, looming up as high as a two-story house, black blood streaming down his flank, coming straight at Lord Desroy. I saw the Lady Raire then, just beyond him, right in the path of the charge; and still I couldn’t move. Lord Desroy had his gun up again and it flickered and flashed and made its slapping noise and the biped’s head, that it had been car-rying high on its long neck, drooped and the neck went slack and the head came down and hit the ground and the big haunches, with the big feet still kicking, went up and over high in the air in a somersault and slammed the ground with a smash like two semi’s colliding, and flipped up and went over again with one leg swinging out at a crazy angle and the other still pumping, and then it was looping the loop on the ground, kicking up a dust cloud that hid everything beyond it.

“Watch for baby!” Sir Orfeo yelled, and I could barely hear his voice through the thudding and pounding. Then the little one stalked out of the dust, tossing his head to help him swallow down what he had in his mouth. Sir Orfeo brought his gun up and the cub was coming straight at me, and the gun tracked him and went off with a flat crackkk! that kicked a pit the size of a washtub in the rock beside him and the young one changed direction and trotted off and Sir Orfeo let him go.

The dust was blowing away now, except for what number two was still kicking up with one foot that was twitching, still trying to run. Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo went over to it, and the hunter used his pistol to put it out of its misery. It went slack and a gush of fluid sluiced out of its mouth and it was quiet.

“In sooth, the beast raised a din to make the ground quake,” Lord Desroy called in a light-hearted tone. He walked around the creature, and Sir Orfeo went over to the other one, and about then I got my joints unlocked and trot-ted after him. Sir Orfeo looked up as I came up and gave me a grin.

“I think perhaps you’ll make a gun-boy yet, Jongo,” he said. “You were a bit slow coming up, but you held steady as a rock during the charge.”

And for some reason I felt kind of ashamed of myself, knowing how it had really been.

5

Lord Desroy spent a quarter of an hour taking movies of the dead animals; then we made the hike back to the car.

“We were lucky, Desroy,” Sir Orfeo told him as we set-tled into our seats.

“Takes a bit of doing to knock over a fine brace on the first stalk! I suggest we go back to the yacht now and call it a day-”

“What foolery’s this?” Lord Desroy boomed out. “Wi’ a foison o’ quarry to hand, ye’d skulk back to thy comforts wi’out further sweat or endeavor?”

“No use pushing our luck-”

“Prithee, spare! Ye spoke but now of bull-devil, lurking in the crags yonder-”

“Plenty of time to go after them later.” Orfeo was still smiling, but there was an edge to his voice. He didn’t like to have anyone argue with him about a hunt.

“A pox on’t!” Lord Desroy slammed his fist down on the arm of his chair.

“Dost dream I’d loiter in my chambers with game abounding? Drive on, I say, or I’ll take the tiller self!”

Sir Orfeo slapped the drive lever in and the engines started up with a howl.

“I was thinking of the Lady Raire,” he said. “If you’re that dead-set on running us all ragged, very well! Though what the infernal rush is, I’m sure I don’t know!”

As usual, the Lady Raire sat by quietly, looking cool and calm and too beautiful to be real. Lord Desroy got out a silver flask and poured out yellow wine for her and himself, then lolled back in his chair and gazed out at the landscape rushing past.

An hour brought us to the foothills of the range that had been visible from the yacht. The going was rougher here; we switched over to tracks for the climb. Lord Orfeo had quit humming to himself and was beginning to frown, as if maybe he was thinking about how nice it would be to be back in his apartment aboard the yacht, having a bath and a nice dinner, instead of being in for another four hours, minimum, in the car. We came out on a high plateau, and Sir Orfeo pulled the car in under a steep escarpment and opened up and climbed down without a word to anybody. I had his crater-rifle ready for him; I took the other guns and got out and Lord Desroy looked around and said something I didn’t catch.

“They’re here, right enough,” Sir Orfeo answered him, sounding mad. He walked off and Lord Desroy and the girl trailed. I had to scramble up on rough ground to get to my proper position off to Sir Orfeo’s right. He was headed into a narrow cut that curved up and away in deep shadow. The sun still seemed to be in the same spot, directly overhead. My suit kept me comfortable enough, but the heat reflecting back from the stone scalded my face.

Sir Orfeo noticed me working my way along up above him and snarled something about where the devil did I think I was going; I didn’t try to answer that. I’d gotten myself onto a ledge that ran along twenty feet above the trail, with no way down. I stayed abreast of Sir Orfeo and looked for my chance to rejoin the party.

We kept going this way, nobody talking, the happy look long gone from Lord Desroy’s face now, the Lady Raire walking just to his left, Sir Orfeo out in front twenty paces. The trail did a sharp jog to the left, and I had to scramble to catch up; as I did, I saw something move on the rocks up ahead.

Being above the rest of them, I had a view past the next outcropping that hung out over the trail; the movement I saw was just a flicker of something in the shadows, spread but flat on the rock like a giant leech. I felt my heart take a jump and jam itself up in my throat and I tried to yell and choked and tried again:

“Sir Orfeo! Up ahead! On the right!”

He stopped dead, swung his gun around and up, at the same time motioned to the others to halt. Lord Desroy checked for just a moment; then he started on up toward Sir Orfeo. The animal-creature-thing-whatever it was-moved again. Now I could see what looked like an eye near the front, surrounded by a fringe of stiff reddish hairs. I got just the one quick look before I heard the whisper of a Z-gun from below, and the thing jerked back violently and disappeared into black shadow. Down below, Lord Desroy was lowering his gun.

“Well, that tears it!” Sir Orfeo said in a too loud voice. “Nice bit of shooting, Desroy! You failed to keep to your position, fired without my permission, and then succeeded in wounding the beggar! Anything else you’d care to try before we go into that cranny after him?”

“Methinks you skirt insolence, Orfeo,” Lord Desroy started.

“Not intentionally, as I’m damned!” Orfeo’s face was red; I could see the flush from where I was perched, twen-ty feet above him. “I’ll remind you I’m master of the hunt, I’m responsible for the safety of the party-”

“I’m out of patience wi’ cautious counsel!” Lord Desroy roared. “Shall I be merely cheated o’ my sport whilst I at-tend your swoons?”

Sir Orfeo stared to answer that, then caught himself and laughed.

“’Pon my word, you have a way about you, Milord! Now, I suggest we give over this tomfoolery and give a thought to how we’re going to get him out of there!” He turned and squinted up toward the place where the thing had disappeared.

“I warrant ye make mockery of me,” Lord Desroy growled. He jerked his head in my direction. “Despatch yon natural to draw forth the beast!” Sir Orfeo looked up, too, then back at his boss.

“The boy’s new, untrained,” he said. “That’s a risky bit of business-”

“D’ye aver thy gun-boy lacks spirit, then?”

Sir Orfeo gave me a sharp look. “By no means,” he said. “He’s steady enough. Jongo!” His voice changed tone. “Press on a few yards, see if you can rout the blighter out.”

I didn’t move. I just squatted where I was and stared down at him. The next instant, something smashed against the wall beside my head and knocked me sprawling. I came up spitting dust, with my head ringing, and Lord Desroy’s second shot crashed close enough to drive stone chips into my cheek.

“Sir Orfeo!” I got the yell out. “He’s shooting at me!”

I heard Sir Orfeo shout and I rolled over and looked for a hole to dive into and in that instant saw the wounded leech-thing flow down across the rock, disappear for a second behind a spur, come into view again just above the trail, about thirty feet above Lord Desroy, between him and the Lady Raire. It must have made some sound I couldn’t hear; before I could shout, Lord Desroy whirled and brought his gun up and it crackled and vivid shadows winked on the rocks and the animal leaped out and down, broad as a blanket, leathery dark, right into the gun. Lord Desroy stood his ground, firing steadily into the leech-thing until the instant it struck full on him, covering him completely. It gathered itself together and lurched toward the Lady Raire, standing all alone in the trail, sixty feet behind where I was. As it moved, it left a trail of what was left of Lord Desroy. Sir Orfeo had fired once, while the thing was in the air. He ran toward it, stopped and took aim and fired again. I saw a movement off to the right, up the trail, and a second leech-thing was there, coming up fast behind Sir Orfeo, big as a hippopotamus, wide and flat and with its one eye gleaming green.

I yelled. He didn’t look up, just stood where he was, his back to the leech, firing, and firing again. The wounded leech was close to the Lady Raire now, and I saw then that she had no gun, and I remembered that Lord Desroy had taken it and had been carrying it for her. She stood there, facing the thing, while Sir Orfeo poured the fire into it. At each shot, a chunk flew from its back, but it never slowed-and behind Sir Orfeo the other one was closing the gap. Sir Orfeo could have turned his fire on it and saved himself; but he never budged. I realized I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and then I remembered I had a gun, too, slung across my back to free my hands for climbing. I grabbed for it, wasted a second or more fumbling with it, got it around and to my shoulder and aimed and couldn’t find the firing stud and had to lower it and look and brought it up again and centered it on the thing only yards from Sir Orfeo’s exposed back and squeezedThe recoil almost knocked me off my feet, not that it was bad, but I wasn’t expecting it. I got back on target and fired again, and again; and it kept coming. Six feet from Sir Orfeo the thing reared up, tall as a grizzly, and I got a glimpse of a yellow underside covered with shredding hooks, and I fired into it and then it was dropping down on Sir Orfeo and at the last possible second he moved, but not far enough, and the thing struck him and knocked him rolling, and then he and it lay still. I traversed the gun across to the other beast and saw that it was down, ten feet from Milady Raire, bucking and writhing, coiling back on itself. It flopped up against the side wall and rolled back down, half on its back, and lay still and the echoes of its struggle went racketing away up the ravine. I heard Sir Orfeo make a moaning sound where he lay all bloody and the Lady Raire looked up and her eyes met mine and we looked at each other across the terrible silence.

CHAPTER THREE

Sir Orfeo was still alive, with all the flesh torn off the back of his thighs and the glistening white bone showing.

He caught at my arm when I bent over him.

“Jongo-your job now-the Lady Raire . . .”

I was shaking and tears were running down my face. I tried not to look at his horrible wounds.

“Buck up, man,” Sir Orfeo’s voice was a groan of agony. “I’m depending on you . . . keep her safe . . . your responsibility, now. . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll take care of her, Sir Orfeo.”

“Good . . . now . . . water. Fetch water . . . from the car . . . .”

I ran off to follow his orders. When I came back the Lady Raire met me, looking pale and with dust sticking to the perspiration on her forehead. She told me that he’d sent her to investigate a sound and then dragged himself to where his filament pistol had fallen and blown his head off. 2

I used a crater-rifle to blast shallow pockets under the overhanging rock beside the trail; she helped me drag the bodies to them. Then we went back down to the car. We car-ried our guns at the ready, but nothing moved in all that jumble of broken rock. Sir Orfeo had been lucky about finding game, all right.

The Lady Raire got into the driver’s seat and headed back down the way we’d come. When we reached level ground, she stopped and looked around as if she didn’t know which way to go. I tapped on the glass and her head jerked around. I think she had forgotten I was there. Poor Lady Raire, so all-alone.

“That direction, Milady,” I said, and pointed toward where the yacht was, out of sight over the horizon.

She followed my directions; three hours later we came up over a low ridge and there was the yacht, glittering far away across the desert. Another forty-five minutes and we pulled up in front of the big cargo door. She jumped down and went to it and twinkled her fingers on a polished metal disc set in the hull beside it. Nothing happened. She went around to the smaller personnel door and the same thing happened. Then she looked at me. Having her look at me was an event even then.

“We cannot enter,” she said in a whisper. “I mind well ’twas Sir Orfeo’s custom to reset the entry code ’ere each planetfall lest the yacht be rifled by -aborigines.”

“There’s got to be a way,” I said. I went up and ham-mered on the panel and on the control disc and walked all the way around the yacht and back to the door that I had sneaked in by, that first night, and tried again, but with no luck. A terrible, hollow feeling was growing inside me.

“I can shoot a hole in it, maybe,” I said. My voice sounded weak in the big silence. I unslung the crater-rifle and asked her to step back, and then took aim from ten feet and fired. The blast knocked me down, but the metal wasn’t even scorched.

I got to my feet and brushed dust off my shins, feeling the full impact of the situation sinking in like the sun that was beating down on my back. The Lady Raire looked at me, not seeing me.

“We must . . . take stock of what supplies may be in the car,” she said after a long pause. “Then can’st thou make for thyself a pallet here in the shadow of the boat.”

“You mean-we’re just going to sit here?”

“If any rescue comes, we must be close by the yacht, else they’ll not spy us in this endless waste.”

I took a deep breath and swallowed hard. “Milady, we can’t stay here.”

“Indeed? Why can we not?” She stood there, a slim, aristocratic little girl, giving me a level look from those cool gray eyes.

“I don’t know much about the odds against anybody finding us, but we’ve got a long wait, at best. The supplies in the car won’t last long. And the heat will wear us down. We have to try to find a better spot, now, while we’re still strong.” I tried to sound confident, as if I knew what I was doing. But my voice shook. I was scared; scared sick. But I knew I was right about moving on.

“’Tis a better thing to perish here than to live on in the wilderness, without hope.”

“We’re not dead yet, Milady. But we will be if we don’t do something about it, now.”

“I’ll tarry here,” she said. “Flee if thou wilt, Jongo.”

“Sir Orfeo told me to take care of you, Milady. I’m going to do my best to follow his order.”

She looked at me coolly. “Wouldst force me, then?”

“I’m afraid so, Milady.”

She walked to the car stiffly; I got into my usual seat in back and she started up and we headed out across the desert.

3

We drove until the sun set and a huge, pock-marked moon rose, looking a lot like the old one back home, except that it was almost close enough to touch. We slept then, and went on, still in the dark. Day came again, and I asked the Lady Raire to show me how to drive so I could relieve her at the wheel. After that, we drove shift on, shift off, holding course steady to the northwest. On what I estimated was the third day, Earth-style, we reached a belt of scrub-land. Half an hour later the engine made a gargly sound and died, and wouldn’t go again.

I went forward on foot to a rise and looked over the landscape. The scrub-dotted waste went on, as far as I could see. When I got back to the car, the Lady Raire was standing beside it with a filament pistol in her hand.

“Now indeed is our strait hopeless,” she held the gun out to me. “Do thy final duty to me, Jongo.” Her voice was a breathless whisper. I took the gun; then I whirled and threw it as far as I could. When I faced her, my hands were shaking.

“Don’t ever say anything like that again!” I said. “Not ever!”

“Would you then have me linger on, to wither in this heat, shrivel under the sun-”

I grabbed her arm. It was cool, as smooth as satin. “I’m going to take care of you, Milady,” I said. “I’ll get you home again safe, you’ll see!”

She shook her head. “I have no home, Jongo; my loyal friends are dead-”

“I’m still alive. And my name’s not Jongo. It’s Billy Danger. I’m human, too. I’ll be your friend.”

She looked straight at me. It was the first time she ever really looked at me. I looked back, straight into her eyes. Then she smiled.

“Thou art valiant, Billy Danger,” she said. “How can I then shrink from duty?

Lead on, and I’ll follow while my strength lasts.”

4

The car was stocked with food concentrates, plus a freezer full of delicacies that would have to be eaten first, before they spoiled. The problem was water. The tanks held about thirty gallons, but with the distiller out of action, there’d be no refilling them. There were the weapons and plenty of ammunition, first-aid supplies, some spare com-municators, goggles, boots. It wasn’t much to set up housekeeping on.

For the next week, I quartered the landscape over a radius of about five miles, looking for a spring or water hole, with no luck. By that time, the fresh food was gone-eaten or spoiled, and the water was down to two ten-gallon jugs full.

“We’ll have to try a longer hike,” I told the Lady Raire. “There may be an oasis just one ridge farther than I’ve gone.”

“As you wish, Billy Danger,” she said, and gave me that smile, like sunrise after a long night.

We packed up the food and water and a few extras. I slung a Z-gun over my shoulder, and started off at twilight, after the worst of the day’s heat. It was monotonous country, just hilly enough to give us a long pull up to one low crest after another and an ankle-turning slog down the far side. I steered due west, not because the prospects looked any better in that direction, but just because it was easier to steer straight toward the setting sun.

We did about twenty miles before dark, another forty in two marches before the sun rose. I worried about the Lady Raire, but there was nothing I could do that I wasn’t already doing. We slogged on toward the next ridge, hoping for a miracle on the other side. And always the next side looked the same.

We rested in the heat of the long day, then marched on, into the glare of the sun. And about an hour before sunset, we saw the cat. 5

He was standing on a rock on the crest of a rise, whipping his tail from side to side in a slow, graceful motion. He made a graceful leap to a lower rock and was just a dark shadow moving against the slope ahead. I unlimbered my rifle and watched him close. At thirty feet, he paused and sat down on his haunches and wrinkled his face and began licking his chest. He finished and stuck out a long tongue and yawned, and then rose and went loping off into the dusk, the way he’d come.

All the while, we stood there and watched him, not saying a word. As soon as he was gone, I went to where he’d been sitting. His paw-prints were plain in the powdery dust. I started believing in him, then. I might see imaginary cats, but never imaginary cat tracks. We set off following them as fast as we could in the failing light.

6

The water hole was in a hollow in the rock, hidden behind a wall of black-green foliage growing on the brink of a ravine. The Lady Raire stopped to gaze at it, but I stumbled down the slope and fell full-length in the water and drank in big gulps and luckily choked and had a coughing fit before I could drink myself to death.

There was a steep jumble of rock rising behind the pool, with the dark mouths of caves showing. I picked my way around the pond in the near-dark with my gun ready in my hand. There was a smell of cat in the air. I was grateful to tabby for leading me to water, but I didn’t want him jumping on our backs now that it looked like we might live another few days.

The caves weren’t much, just holes about ten feet deep, not quite high enough to stand up in, with enough dirt drifted in them to make a more or less level floor.

The Lady Raire picked out one for herself, and I helped her clean out the dead leaves and cat droppings and fix up a stone that could be rolled into the opening to block it, in case anything bigger than a woodchuck wanted in. Then she picked out another one and told me it was mine and started in on it. It was dark when we finished. I saw her to her den, then sat down outside it with the pistol in my hand and went to sleep. . . .

-and woke hungry, clear-headed, and wondering how a cat happened to be here, in this super-Mojave. I thought about the dire-beasts and the meat--shredding leeches that had killed Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo. The cat was no relative of theirs. He had been a -regulation-type, black and gray and tan striped feline, complete with vertical-slitted pupils and retractable claws. He looked like anybody’s house-cat, except that he was the size of a collie dog. I’d heard about parallel evolution, and I hadn’t been too surprised when Sir Orfeo had told me about how many four-legged, one-headed creatures there were in the Universe-but a copy this perfect wasn’t possible.

That meant one of two things: Either I had dreamed the whole thing-which was kind of unlikely, inasmuch as when I looked down I saw two more cats, just like the other one, in the bright moonlight down by the water-or our yacht wasn’t the first human-owned ship to land on Gar 28. 7

In the morning light, the water looked clear and inviting. The Lady Raire studied it for a while, then called to me. “Billy Danger, watch thee well the while I lave me. Methinks t’will be safe enow . . .” She glanced my way, and I realized she was talking about going for a swim. I just stared at her.

“How now, art stricken dumb?” she called.

“The pond may be full of poison snakes, crocodiles, quicksand and undertows,” I said.

“I’d as lief be devoured as go longer unwashed.” She proceeded to unzip the front of the tunic she’d changed into from the temperature suit, and stepped out of it. And for the second time in one minute, I was struck dumb. She stood there in front of me, as naked as a goddess, and as beautiful, and said, “I charge thee, Billy Danger, take not thine eyes from me,” and turned and waded down into the water. It was the easiest order to follow I ever heard of.

She stayed in for half an hour, stroking up and down as unconcerned as if she were in the pool at some high-priced resort at Miami Beach. Once or twice she ducked under and stayed so long I found myself wading in to look for her. After the second time I complained and she laughed and promised to stay on top.

“Verily, hast thou found a garden in the wilderness, Billy Danger,” she said after she had her clothes back on. “’Tis so peaceful-and in its rude way, so fair.”

“Not much like home, though, I guess, Milady,” I said; but she changed the subject, as she always did when the conversation brought back too many memories.

In the next few days, I made two trips back to the car, brought in everything that looked as if it might be useful; then we settled down to what I might describe as a very quiet routine. She strolled around, climbed the rocks, brought home small green shrubs and flowers that she planted around the caves and along the path and watered constantly, using a pot made of clay from the poolside cooked by a Z-gun on wide-beam. I spent my time exploring to the west and north, and trying to make friends with the cats.

There were plenty of them; at certain times of the day, there’d be as many as ten in sight at one time, around the water hole. They didn’t pay much attention to us; just watched us when we came toward them and at about fifteen feet, rose casually and moved off into the thick growth along the ravine. They were well fed and lazy, just nice hearthside tabbies, a little larger than usual.

There was one with a few streaks of orange in among the black and tan that I concentrated on, mainly because I could identify him easily. Every time I saw him I’d go out and move up as close as I could without spooking him, sit down, and start to play with a ball of string from the car. He sat and watched. I’d roll it toward him, then pull it back. He moved in closer. I let him get a paw on it, then jerked it. He went after it and cuffed it, and I pulled it in and tossed it out again.

In a week, the game was a regular routine. In two, he had a name-Eureka-and was letting me scratch him between the ears. In three, he had taken to lying across the mouth of my cave, not even moving when I stepped over him going out.

The Lady Raire watched all this with a sort of indulgent smile. According to her, cats were pets on most of the human-inhabited world she knew of. She wasn’t sure where they had originated, but she smiled when I said they were a native of Earth.

“In sooth, Billy Danger, ’tis a truism that each un-schooled mind fancies itself the center of the Universe. But the stars were seeded by Man long ago, and by his chattels with him.”

At first, the Lady Raire didn’t pay much attention to my pet, but one day he showed up limping, and she spent half an hour carefully removing a splinter from his foot. The next day she gave him a bath, and brushed his fur to a high gloss. After that, he took to following her on her walks. And it wasn’t long before he took to sleeping at the mouth of her cubbyhole. He got more petting that way.

I watched the cats, trying to see what it was they fed on, on the theory that whatever they ate, we could eat, too. Our concentrates wouldn’t last forever. But I never saw them pounce on anything. They came to the water hole to drink and lie around in the shade; then they wandered off again into the undergrowth. One day I decided to follow Eureka.

“As thou wilt,” the Lady Raire said, smiling at me. “Tho’ I trow thy cat o’

mountain lives on naught but moonbeams.”

“Baked moonbeam for dinner coming up,” I said.

The cat led me up the rocks and through the screen of alien foliage at the north side of the hollow, then struck out along the edge of the ravine, which was filled from edge to edge by a mass of deep-green vines. The chasm was about three hundred yards long, fifty yards wide; I couldn’t see the bottom under the tangle of green, but I could make out the big stems, as thick as my leg, snaking down into the deep shadows for at least a hundred feet. And I could see the cats. They lay in crotches of the big vine, walked delicately along the thick stems, peered out of shadows with green eyes. There were a few up on the rim, sitting on their haunches, watching me watching them. Eureka yawned and switched his tail against my thigh, then made a sudden leap, and disappeared into the green gloom. By getting down on all fours and shading my eyes, I could see the broad branch he’d jumped to. I could have followed, but the idea of going down into that maze full of cats lacked appeal. I got up and started off along the rim. I noticed that it was scattered with what looked like chips of thick eggshell.

8

The ravine shallowed out to nothing at the far end. The vines were less dense here, and I could see rock strata slanting down into the depths. There were strange knobs and shafts of blackish rock embedded in the lighter stone. I found one protruding near the surface and saw that it was a fossilized bone. The rock was full of them. That would be a matter of deep interest to a paleontologlst specializing in the fauna of Gar 28, but it was no help to me. I needed live meat. If there was any around-excepting the cats, and I didn’t like the idea of eating them, for six or eight reasons I could think of offhand-it had to be down below, in the shade of the greenery. The descent looked pretty easy, here at the end of the cut. I hitched my gun around front for quick access, and started down. The rock slanted off under me at an angle of about thirty degrees. The big vines bending up over my head were tough, woody, scaled with dead-looking bark. Only a few green tendrils curled up here, reaching for sunlight. The air was fresh and cool in the shade of the big leaves; there was a sharp, pungent odor of green life, mixed with the rank smell of cat. Fifty feet down the broken slope the growth got too thick to be ignored; it was switch over to limb-climbing or go back. I went on. It was easy going at first. The stems weren’t too close together to push between, and there was still plenty of light to see by. I could hear the cats moving around, back deeper in the growth. I reached a major stem, as big as my torso, and started down it. There were plenty of handholds here. Big seedpods hung in clusters near me. A lot of them had been gnawed, either by the cats or by what the cats ate. So far I hadn’t seen any signs of the latter. I broke off one of the pods. It was about a foot long, knobby and pale green. It broke open easily and half a dozen beans as big as egg yolks rolled out. I took a nibble of one. It tasted like raw beans. After a couple of weeks on concentrates, even that was good-if it didn’t kill me. I went down. The light was deep green now; a luminous dusk filtered through a hundred feet of foli-age. The trunk I was following curved sharply, and I worked my way around to the up side, descended another ten feet, and my feet thunked solidly against something hard. I had to get down on all fours to see that I was on a smooth, curving surface of tarnished metal.

9

Something thumped beside me like a dropped blanket; it was Eureka, coming over to check on me. He sat and washed his face while I rooted around the base of the big vine, saw that it was growing out through a fracture in the metal. The wood had bulged and spread and shaped itself to conform to the opening. I had the impression that it was the vine that had burst the metal.

By crawling, I was able to explore an oval area about fifteen feet long by ten wide before the vines slanted in too close to let me move. All of it was the same iodine-colored metal, with no seams, no variations in contour, with the exception of the bulge around the break. If I wanted to see more, I’d have to do a little land-clearance. I got out the pistol and set it on needle-beam, cut enough wood away to get a look into a room the size of a walk-in freezer, almost filled with an impacted growth of wood. I backed out then, wormed my way over to the big trunk, and climbed back to the surface. There was a lot more to see, but what I wanted to do now was get back in a hurry and tell the Lady Raire that under the vines in the ravine, I’d found a full-sized spaceship.

CHAPTER FOUR

Fifteen minutes later, she stood on the rim of the ravine with me. I could dimly make out the whole three-hundred-foot length of the ship, now that I knew what to look for. It was lying at an angle of about fifteen degrees from the horizontal, the high end to the south.

“It must have been caught by an earthquake,” I said. “Or a Garquake.”

“I ween full likely she toppled thither,” the Lady Raire said. “During a tempest, mayhap. Look thee, where a great fragment has fallen from the rim of the abyss-and see yon broken stones, crushed as she fell.”

We found an access route near the south end, well worn by cats, and made an easier approach than my first climb. I led her to the hatch and we spent the next hour burning the wood away from it, climbed through onto a floor that slanted down under a tangle of vine stem to a drift of broken objects half buried in black dirt at the low end. The air was cool and damp, and there was a sour smell of rotted vegetation and stagnant water. We waded knee-deep in foul-smelling muck to a railed stair lying on its side, crawled along it to another open door. I stepped through into a narrow corridor, and a faint, greenish light sprang up. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

“I misdoubt me not ’tis but an automatic system,” Milady said calmly.

“Still working, after all this time?”

“Why not? ’Twas built to endure.” She pointed to a dark opening in a wall.

“Yon shaft should lead us to the upper decks.” She went past me, and I followed, feeling like a very small kid in a very large haunted castle. 2

The shaft led us to a grim-looking place full of broken piping and big dark shapes the size of moving vans that Milady said were primitive ion-pulse engines. There was plenty of breakage visible, but only a few dead tendrils of vine. We climbed on forward, found a storeroom, a plotting room full of still-shiny equipment, and a lounge where built-in furniture stuck out from what was now the wall. The living quarters were on the other side of the lounge and beyond there was a room with a ring of dark TV screens arching up overhead around a central podium that had snapped off at the base and was hanging by a snarl of conduits. Beyond that point, the nose of the ship was too badly crushed to get into. There were no signs of the original owners, with the possible exception of a few scraps that might have been human bone.

“What do you think, Milady?” I asked her. “Is there anything here we can use?”

“If so, ’twere wonderful, Billy Danger; yet would I see more ere I abandon hope.”

Back in the hold, she spent some time crawling over the big vines that came coiling up from somewhere down below.

“’Tis passing strange,” she said. “These stems rise not from soil, but rather burgeon from the bowels of the vessel. And meseemeth they want likeness to the other flora of this world.”

I pulled one of the big, leathery leaves over to me. It was heart-shaped, about eight inches wide, strongly ribbed.

“It looks like an ordinary pea to me,” I said. “Just overgrown-like the cats.”

“We’ll trace these to their beginnings, their mystery to resolve.” The Lady Raire pointed. “An’ mine eyes deceive me not, they rise through yonder hatch.”

There was just room to squeeze through between the thigh-thick trunks, into a narrow service shaft. I flashed my light along it, and saw bones.

“Just a cat,” I said, more to reassure me than Milady. We went on, ducking under festoons of thick vine. We passed another cat skeleton, well scattered. There was a strange smell, something like crushed almonds with an under-taint of decay. The vines led fifty feet along the passage, then in through a door that had been forced outward off its hinges. The room beyond was a dark mass of coiled white roots. On its far side, faint twilight shone in through a break in the hull. There was a soft clink, like water dripping into a still pond, a faint rustling. I flashed my light down. The floor of the big room slanted off sharply. Down among the snarled roots, a million tiny points of amber light glowed. The Lady Raire took a step back.

“Come, Billy Danger! I like this not-” That was as far as she got before the mass of vine roots in front of me trembled and bulged and all the devils in Hell came swarming out.

3

Something dirty white, the size of a football, jittering on six spindly legs rushed at me, clicking a pair of jaws that opened sideways in a face like an imp in one of those medieval paintings. I jumped back and swung a kick and its biters clamped onto my boot toe like a steel trap. Another one bounced high enough to rip at my knee; the tough coverall held, but the hide under it tore. Something zapp’ed from behind my right ear and a flash of blue fire winked and two of the things skittered away and a stink of burnt horn hit me in the face. All this in the first half-second. I had my pistol up then, squeezing the firing lever, playing it over them like a hose. They curled and jumped and died and more came swarming over the dead ones.

“We’re losing,” I yelled. “We’ve got to bottle them up!” The big vine stem was on fire, and sap was bubbling out and spitting in the flames. I ducked down and grabbed up a dead one and threw him into the opening, and beamed another one that poked his snout through and took a step and tripped and went flat on my face. I threw my hands up to protect my head and heard a yowl and something dark bounded across me and there was a snap and a thud and I sat up and saw Eureka, whirling and pouncing, batting with both paws. Behind him the Lady Raire, splashed to the knee with brown, a smear of blood on her cheek, was aiming and firing as steadily as if she were shooting at clay pipes at the county fair. And then Eureka was sitting on his haunches, making a face at me, and the Lady Raire was turning toward me, and there was a last awkward scuffling sound and then silence.

“Well, that answers one question,” I said. “Now we know what the cats eat.”

4

It was a hard climb back down along the lift shaft, out through the hold, and up to the last of the sunlight. She got out her belt medikit and started dabbing liquid fire into the cuts on my legs, back, arms and thighs. While she doctored, I talked.

“That was the hydroponics room. When the ship crashed, or fell in the ravine, or got caught in an earthquake, the hull was opened there-or near enough that the plants could sense sunlight. They went for it. Either the equipment that watered them and provided the chemicals they needed was still working, or they found water and soil at the bottom of the ravine; or maybe both. They liked it here; plenty of sunshine, anyway. They adapted and grew and with no competition from other plant life, they developed into what we found.”

“There may be truth in thy imaginings, Billy Danger,” Milady said. “The vessel’s of a very ancient type; ’tis like to those in use on Zeridajh some seven thousand years since.”

“That might be long enough for a plant to evolve giant size,” I said.

“Especially if the local sun puts out a lot of hard radiation. Same for the cats. I guess there were a couple of them aboard-or maybe just one pregnant female. She survived the crash and found water and food-”

“Nay, Billy Danger. Thy Eureka may sup on such dainties as those he slew in thy defense-but they’d make two snaps of any house-born puss.”

“I didn’t mean that; a cat can live on beans, if it has to. Anyway, the critters weren’t as big, then.”

“How now? Knowest thou the history of Gar’s creatures as well as of more familiar kinds?”

“They aren’t natives, any more than the cats and the peas. They came along on the ship; to be specific, on the cat.”

“Dost rave? Art feverish?”

“I’m ashamed to admit it,” I said. “But I know a flea when I see one.”

5

We waited until daylight to go into the ship again. The location of the cat bones gave us a pretty good idea of where the boundaries of flea territory were. Apparently they kept to their dark hold and lived long, happy lives sucking juice from the vines, or an occasional lone cat who meandered over the line. Population pressure drove enough of them upstairs to keep the cats supplied; and the cat droppings and their bodies when they died wound up at the bottom of the ravine, to keep the cycle going. The Lady Raire had the idea of trying to locate the ship’s communication section; she finally did-in the smashed nose section. I crawled in beside her to look at the ruins of what had once been a message center that could bounce words and music across interstellar distances at a speed that was a complicated multiple of the speed of light. Now it looked like a junkman’s nightmare.

“Alack, I deemed I might find here a signaler, intact. ’Twere folly-and yet . .

.”

She sounded so downhearted that I had to say something to cheer her up.

“There’s an awful lot of gear lying around in there,” I said. “Maybe we could salvage something. . . .”

“Dost know aught of these matters, Billy Danger?” she asked in a lofty tone.

“Not much,” I said. “I know my way around the inside of an ordinary radio. I’m not talking about sending three-D pictures in glorious color; but maybe a simple signal. . . .”

She wanted to know more. I explained all I’d learned from ICS one summer when I had the idea of Getting Into Radio Now. I felt like an unspoiled native of Borneo explaining flint-chipping techniques to a -designer of H-bombs.

It took us a week to assemble a transmitter -capable of putting out a simple signal that Milady Raire assured me would show up as a burst of static on any screen within a couple of light-years. We led a big cable from the energy cells that powered the standby lighting system, rigged it so that what juice was in them would drain in one final burst. The ship itself would act as an antenna, once we’d wired our rig to the hull. We climbed out of her, dragging a length of coaxial cable, got back a couple of hundred yards in case of miscalculation with the power core, and touched her off. For a couple of seconds, nothing happened; then I felt a tremor run through the ground and a moment later a dull ka-whoom! rumbled up from the chasm, followed by a rapid exodus of cats. For the next hour, there was a lot of activity: cats chasing fleas, fleas bouncing around looking for cover, and the Lady Raire and me trying to stay out of the way of both parties. Then the smoke faded away, the fleas scuttled for cover, the cats went back down to lie under the leaves or wandered off in the direction of the -water hole, and Milady and I settled down to wait.

6

I made the discovery that by cutting into a vine just below a leaf, I could get a trickle of cool water. The Lady Raire had the idea of hauling a stem out and getting it growing in the direction of the caves; we did, and it grew enthusias-tically. By the time we’d been in residence for another month, we had shade and running water on tap right outside the door. I asked the Lady Raire to teach me her language, and along with the new words I learned a lot about her home world, Zeridajh. It was old-fifty thousand years of written history-but the men there were still men. It was no classless Utopia where people strolled in misty gardens spouting philosophy; there was plenty of strife and unhap-piness, and although the Lady Raire never talked about herself, I got the impression she had her share of the latter. I wondered how it happened that she was off wander-ing the far end of the Galaxy in the company of two unlike-ly types like Lord Desroy and Sir Orfeo, but I didn’t ask her; if she wanted to tell me, she could. But one day I said something that made her laugh.

“I thought-Sir Orfeo said Lord Desroy had been on Earth three hundred years ago. And you speak the same old-fashioned English-”

She laughed. “Billy Danger, didst deem me so ancient?”

“No-but-”

“I learned my English speech from Lord Desroy, somewhat altered, mayhap, by Sir Orfeo. But ’twas late; indeed, I have but eighteen years, Earth reckoning.”

“And you’ve been away from home for four years? Isn’t your family worried .

. .” Then I shut up, at the look that crossed her face. The weather had been gradually changing; the days grew shorter and cooler. The flowers Milady had brought in from the caves dropped their blossoms and turned brown. The cats got restless, and we’d hear them yowling and scrapping, down in their leafy den. And one day, there were kittens everywhere.

Our diet consisted of beans, fried, baked, sliced and eaten raw, chopped and roasted, mixed with food concentrates to make stews and soups. We used the scissors from the first-aid kit to trim our hair back. Fortunately, I had no beard to trim. The days got longer again, and for a while the ravine was a fairyland of blossoms that filled the air with a perfume so sweet it was almost dizzying. At sunset, the Lady Raire would walk out across the desert and look at the purple towers in the west. I trailed her, with a gun ready, in case any of Sir Orfeo’s dire-beasts wandered this way. And one night the ship came.

7

I was sound asleep; the Lady Raire woke me and I rolled out grabbing for my gun and she pointed to a star that glared blue and got bigger as we watched it. It came down in absolute silence and ground in the desert a quarter of a mile from us in a pool of blue light that cast hard shadows across Milady’s face. I was so excited I could hardly breathe, but she wasn’t smiling.

“The lines of yon vessel are strange to me, Billy Danger,” she said. “’Tis of most archaic appearance. Seest thou the double hull, like unto the body of an insect?”

“All I can see is the glare from the business end.” The blue glow was fading. Big floodlights came on and lit up the desert all around the ship like high noon.

“Mayhap . . .” she started, and a whistling, whooping noise boomed out across the flats. It stopped and the echoes bounced and faded and it was silent again.

“If ’twere speech, I know it not,” Milady said.

“I guess we’d better go meet them,” I said, but I had a powerful urge to run and hide among the pea vines.

“Billy Danger, I like this not.” Her hand gripped my arm. “Let’s flee to the shelter of the ravine-”

Her idea was a little too close to mine; I had to show her how silly her feminine intuition was.

“And miss the only chance we’ll ever have to get off this dust-ball? Come on, Milady. You’re going home-”

“Nay, Billy-” But I grabbed her arm and advanced. As we came closer, the ship looked as big as a wasp-waisted skyscraper. Three cars came around from the far side of it. Two of them fanned out to right and left; the third headed toward us, laying a dust trail behind it. It was squat, rounded, dark coppery-colored without windows. It stopped fifty feet away with its blunt snout aimed at us. A round panel about a foot in diameter swung open and a glittery assembly poked out and rotated half a turn and was still.

“It looks like it’s smelling of us,” I said, but the jolly note in my voice was a failure. Then a lid on top popped up like a jack-in-the-box and the most incredible creature I had ever seen climbed out.

He was about four feet high, and almost as wide, and my first impression was that he was a dwarf in Roman armor; then I saw that the armor was part of him. He scrambled down the side of the car on four short, thick legs, then reared his torso up and I got a good look at the face set between a pair of seal flippers in the middle of his chest. It reminded me of a blown-up photo of a bat I’d seen once. There were two eyes, some orifices, lots of wrinkled gray-brown skin, a mouth like a fanged frog. An odd metallic odor came from him. He stared at us and we stared back. Then a patch of rough, pinkish skin centered in a tangle of worms below his face bulged out and a gluey voice came from it. I didn’t understand the words, but somehow he sounded cautious.

The Lady Raire answered, speaking too fast for me to follow. I listened while they batted it back and forth. Once she glanced at me and I caught my name and the word “property.” I wasn’t sure just how she meant it. While they talked, the other two cars came rumbling in from offside, ringing us in.

More of the midgets trotted up, holding what looked like stacks of silver teacups, glued together, the open ends toward us. The spokesman took a step back and made a quick motion of his flippers.

“Throw down guns,” he said in Zeridajhi. He didn’t sound cautious anymore. The Lady Raire’s hand went toward her pistol. I grabbed her arm.

“I know these hagseed now,” she said. “They mean naught but dire mischief to any of my race-”

“Those are gunports under the headlights on the cars,” I said. “I think we’d better do what it says.”

“If we draw and fire as one-”

“No use, Milady. They’ve got the drop on us.”

She hesitated a moment longer, then unsnapped her gunbelt and let it fall. I did the same. Our new friend made a noise and batted his flippers against the sides, and his gun-boys moved in. He pointed at the Lady Raire.

“Fetter this one,” he said. “And kill the other.”

Two or three things happened at once then. One of the teacup-guns swung my way and the Lady Raire made a sound and threw herself at the gunner. He knocked her down and I charged at him and something exploded in my face and for a long time I floated in a river, shooting the rapids, and each time I slammed against a submerged rock, I heard myself groan, and then I opened my eyes and I was lying on my face with my cheek in a puddle of congealing blood, and the ship and the monsters and the Lady Raire were gone.

8

For the first few hours my consciousness kept blinking on and off like a defective table lamp. I’d come to and try to move and the next thing I knew I was coming to again. Then suddenly it was daylight, and Eureka was sitting beside me, yowling softly. This time I managed to roll over and raise my head far enough to see myself. I was a mess.

There was blood all over me. I hurt all over, too, so that was no clue. I explored with my hands and found a rip in my coverall along my side, and through that I could feel a furrow wide enough to lay two fingers in. Up higher, there was a hole in my right shoulder that seemed to come out in back; and the side of my neck felt like hamburger, medium rare. The pain wasn’t really as bad as you’d expect. I must have been in shock. I flopped back and listened to all the voices around me. I heard Sir Orfeo: She’s your responsibility now, Jongo. Take care of her.

“I tried,” I said. “I really tried-”

It’s all right, the Lady Raire was standing by me, looking scared, but smiling at me. I trust you, Billy Danger. The light from the open furnace door glowed in her black hair, and she turned and stepped into the flames and I yelled and reached after her, but the fires leaped up and I was awake again, sobbing.

“They’ve got her,” I said aloud. “She was frightened of them, but I had to show off. I led her out to them like a lamb to the slaughter. . . .” I pictured her, dragged aboard the dwarfs’ ship, locked away in a dark place, alone and ter-rified, and with no one to help her. And she’d trusted me. . . .

“My fault,” I groaned. “My fault! But don’t be afraid, Milady. I’ll find you. They think I’m dead, but I’ll trick them; I won’t die. I’ll stay alive, and find them and take you home. . . .”

9

The next time I was aware of what was going on, the cat was gone and the sun was directly overhead and I was dying of thirst. By turning my head, I could see the vines along the edge of the ravine. There was shade there, and water. I got myself turned over on my stomach and started crawling. It was a long trip-nearly a hundred yards-and I passed out so many times I lost count. But I reached the vines and got myself a drink and then it was dark. That meant it had been about seventy-two hours since the slug-people had done such a sloppy job of killing me. I must have slept for a long time, then. When I woke up, Eureka was back, with a nice fresh flea for me.

“Thanks, boy,” I said when he dropped the gift on my chest and nudged me with his nose. “It’s nice to know somebody cares.”

“You’re not dead yet,” he said, and his voice sounded like Orfeo’s. I called to him, but he was gone, down into the darkness. I followed him, along a trail of twisted vines, but the light always glimmered just ahead, and I was cold and wet and then the fleas came swarming out on the empty eyes of a giant skull and swarmed over me and I felt them eating me alive and I woke up, and I was still there, under the vines, and my wounds were hurting now and Eureka was gone and the flea with him. I got myself up on all fours to have another drink from the water vine, and noticed a young bean pod sprouting nearby. I was hungry and I tore it open and ate the beans. And the next time I woke up, I was stronger. For five long Garish days I stayed under the vines; then I made the trek to the caves. After that, on a diet of concentrates, I gained strength faster. I spent my time exercising my wounds so they wouldn’t stiffen up too much as they healed, and talking to the cat. He didn’t answer me anymore, so I judged I was getting better. No infections set in; the delousing Sir Orfeo had given me probably had something to do with that, plus the absence of microbes on Gar 28.

Finally a day came when it was time to get out and start seeing the world again. I slung my crater-rifle, not without difficulty, since my right arm didn’t want to cooperate, and made a hike around the far side of the ravine, with half a dozen rest stops. I was halfway back to the hut and the drink of water I’d promised myself as a reward, when the second ship came.

CHAPTER FIVE

This one was smaller, something like Lord Orfeo’s yacht, but with less of a polish. I hid behind the vines with my gun aimed until I saw what were undoubtedly Men emerge. Then I went up to meet them. They were small, yellow-skinned, with round, bald heads. The captain was named Ancu-Uriru and he spoke a little Zeridajhi. He frowned at my scars, which were pretty spectacular, and wanted to know where the rest of the ship’s complement were. I told him there was just me. That made him frown worse than ever. It seemed he had picked up our signal and answered it in the hope of collecting a nice reward from somebody, along with a little salvage. I told him about the ship in the ravine, and he sent a couple of men down who came back shaking their heads. They showed every sign of being ready to leave then.

“What about me?” I asked Ancu-Uriru.

“We leave you in peace,” he said in an offhand way.

“There’s such a thing as too much peace,” I told him. “I want to go with you. I’ll work my way.”

“I have no need of you; space is limited aboard my small vessel. And I fear your wounds render you somewhat less than capable to perform useful labor. Here you are more comfortable. Stay, with my blessing.”

“Suppose I told you where there was another ship, a luxury model, in perfect shape-if you can get the doors open?”

That idea seemed to strike a spark. We dickered for a while, and there were hints that a little torture might squeeze the answers out of me with no need for favors in return. But in the end we struck a deal: My passage to a civilized port in return for Lord Desroy’s yacht. It took them most of a Garish day to tickle her locks open. Ancu-Uriru looked her over, then ordered his per-sonal effects moved into the owner’s suite. I was assigned to ride on his old tub along with a skeleton crew. Just before boarding time, Eureka came bounding across the flats toward me. One of the men had a gun in his hand, and I jumped in front of him just in time.

“This is my cat,” I told him. “He saved my life. We used to have long talks, while I was sick.”

The men all seemed to be cat-lovers; they gathered around and admired him.

“Bring the beast along,” Ancu-Uriru said. We went aboard then, and an hour later the ship lifted off Gar 28, as nearly as I could calculate, one year after I had landed.

2

It wasn’t a luxury cruise. The man Ancu-Uriru had assigned to captain the tub-In-Ruhic, by name-believed in every man’s working his way, in spite of the generous fare I’d paid. Even aboard as sophisticated a machine as a spaceship, there was plenty of coolie labor, as I well remembered from my apprenticeship under Sir Orfeo. The standards he’d taught me carried over here; after my assigned chores were done, I spent long hours chipping and scraping and cleaning and polishing, trying single-handed to clear away grime that had been accumulating since the days of the Vikings-or longer. According to In-Ruhic, the old ship had been built on a world called Urhaz, an -unknown number of millenia ago.

At first, my wounds caused me a lot of pain, until In--Ruhic stopped me one day and told me my groans were interfering with his inward peace. He had me stretch out on a table while he rubbed some vile-smelling grease into the scars.

“How you survived, untended, is a matter of wonder,” he said. “I think you lost a pound of flesh and bone here, where the pellet tore through your shoulder. And you’ve broken ribs, healed crookedly. And your throat! Man, under the web of scar tissue, I can see the pulse in the great vein each time you lift your chin!” But his hands were as gentle as any girl’s could have been; he gave me a treatment every day for a few weeks. The glop he used must have had some healing effect because the skin toughened up over the scars and the pain gradually faded.

I told In-Ruhic and the others about the wasp-waisted ship and the armored midgets that had taken the Lady Raire; but they’d never seen or heard of their kind. They wagged their heads and grunted in vicarious admiration when I described her to them.

“But these are matters best forgotten, Biridanju-” that was as close as In-Ruhic seemed to be able to get to my name. “I’ve heard of the world called Zeridajh; distant it is, and inhabited by men as rich as emperors. Doubtless these evil-doers you tell of have long since sold her there for ransom.”

By the time the world where Ancu-Uriru planned to drop me was visible in the view-screen on the bridge where I was pulling watches as a sort of assistant instrument reader, I was almost a full-fledged member of the crew. Just before we started our landing maneuvers, which were more complicated for an old tub like In-Ruhic’s command than they had been for Lord Desroy’s ultramodern yacht, -In--Ruhic took me aside and asked me what my plans were.

“If there’s a Zeridajhi Embassy, I’ll go there and tell them about the Lady Raire. Or maybe I can send some kind of message through. If not . . . well, I’ll figure out something.”

He shook his head and looked sad and wise. “You nurture a hopeless passion for this high-born lady,” he started.

“Nothing like that,” I cut him off short. “She was in my care. I’m responsible.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Biridanju, you’ve shown yourself a willing worker, and quick to learn. Stay on with me. I offer you a regular berth aboard this vessel.”

“Thanks, In-Ruhic. But I have another job to do.”

“Think well, Biridanju. For a foreigner, work is not easy to find; and to shore folk, who know not the cruel ways of space, your little decorations may prove unsightly, an added incubus.”

I put a hand up and felt the lumps and ridges along the side of my throat and jaw. “I know; it looks like hell. But I’m not asking for any beauty prizes. I’ll pay my way.”

“I suppose you must make your try. But after, Biridan-ju-remember: We’re based nearby, and call here at Inciro ever and anon. I’ll welcome you as shipmate whenever you’re ready.”

We landed a few hours later on a windswept ramp between a gray sea and a town growing on a hillside. Captain Ancu-Uriru was there ahead of us. He talked earnestly with In-Ruhic for a while, then invited me to his quarters aboard the yacht. There he sat me down and offered me a drink and a double-barreled cigar, rolled from two different weeds which, when combined, produced a smoke worse than any three nickle stogies.

“Biridanju, I tell you freely, you’ve made me a rich man,” he said. “I thought at first you were a shill who’d bring pirates down on me. Almost, I had you shot before you boarded.” He made a face that might have been a smile. “Your cat saved you. It passed reason that a man with your wounds, and an animal-lover, could be but a decoy for corsairs. I ordered In-Ruhic to watch you closely, and for long I slept but little, watching these beautiful screens for signs of mischief. Now I know I did you an injury.”

“You saved my life,” I said. “No apologies needed.”

He lifted a flat box from a drawer of the gorgeous inlaid desk. “I am a just man, Biridanju; or so I hope. I sold the special stores aboard this cutter for a sum greater than any year’s profits I’ve known since I first captained a trader. The proceeds are yours, your fair share.”

I lifted the lid and looked at an array of little colored sticks an eighth of an inch square and an inch long.

“There is enough there to keep you in comfort for many years,” he said. “If you squander it not on follies, such as star-messages or passenger fares-not that there’s enough to take you far.” He gave me a sharp look that meant In--Ruhic had told him my plans.

I thanked him and assured him I’d make it go as far as I could. It took me ten minutes to collect my personal belongings from the ship and buckle Eureka into the harness I’d made for him. Then Ancu-Uriru took me through the port for-malities, which weren’t much for anyone with a bankroll, and found me an inn in the town. In-Ruhic joined us for a final drink in my room, and then they left, and I sat on the side of the plain little bunk in the plain little room in the yellow twilight and scratched Eureka behind the ears and felt the loneliness close in. 3

The town was named Inciro, like the planet. It was one of half a dozen ports that had been built ages past to handle the long-vanished trade in minerals and hides and timber from the interior of the one big continent. The population of about ten thousand people, many of whom had six fingers on each hand for some reason, were tall, dark-eyed, pale-skinned, gloomy--looking, with a sort of Black Irish family resemblance, like Eskimos or Hottentots. I spent a few days wandering around the town, sampling the food in different chophouses and seafood dives-they were all good-and drinking a tasty red beer called “izm.” The mixed dialect I’d learned from In-Ruhic and his men was good enough to car-ry on a basic conversation. I soon learned there was no Zeridajhi Embassy anywhere on the planet; the nearest thing to it was a consular agent representing the commercial interest of the half dozen worlds within five light-years of Inciro. I called on him. He was a fattish, hairy man in a stale-smelling office over a warehouse. He steepled his pudgy fingers and listened to what I had to say, then solemnly suggested I forget the whole thing. It seemed it was a big Galaxy, and the things that had maimed me and stolen Milady Raire could be anywhere in it-probably at the far side of it by now. No belligerent nonhuman had been seen in these parts for more centuries than I had years. He would have liked to have told me I’d imagined it all, but his eyes kept straying back to my scars.

Eureka went with me on my walks, attracting quite a bit of attention at first. The Incirinos had seen a few cats before, but none his size. He did more than keep me company; one evening a trio of roughnecks with too many bowls of izm inside them came over to get a closer look at my scars, and he came to his feet from where he’d been curled up under the table and made a sound like tearing canvas and showed a mouthful of teeth, and they backed away fast.

I found a little old man who hung around one of the bars who knew half a dozen useful dialects. For the price of enough drinks each evening to keep him in a talking mood, he gave me language lessons, plus the beginnings of an education on the state of this end of the Galaxy. He told me how the human race had developed a long time ago on a world near Galactic Center, had spread outward in all directions for what must have been a couple of hundred thousand years, settled every habitable planet they found and built a giant empire that collapsed peacefully after a while of its own weight. That had been over twenty thousand years earlier; and since then the many separate tribes of Man had gone their own ways.

“Now, take you,” he poked a skinny finger at me. “From a planet you call

‘Eart.’ Thought you were the only people in the Universe. But all you were was a passed-over colony, or maybe what was left of a party marooned by an accident; or a downed battleship. Or maybe you were a penal colony. Or perhaps a few people wandered out there, just wanting to be alone. A few thousand years pass, and-there you are!” He looked triumphant, as if he’d just delivered a rigorous proof of the trisection of the angle.

“But we’ve dug up bones,” I told him. “Ape-men, and missing links. They show practically the whole chain of evolution, from animals to men. And we’ve got gorillas and chimps and monkeys that look too much like us to just be coincidence.”

“Who said anything about coincidence?” he came back. “Life adapts to conditions. Similar conditions, similar life. You ever look at the legs and feet on a plink-lizard? Swear they were human, except they’re only so long. Look at flying creatures; birds, mammals, reptiles, goranos, or mikls; they all have wings, all flap ’em, all have hollow bones, use two legs for walking-”

“Even Eureka here is related to humanity,” I pressed on. “We have more similarities than we have differences. As embryos of a few weeks, you can’t tell us apart.”

He nodded and grinned. “Uh-huh. And where’d you say you got him? Not on Eart.”

It was like arguing religion. Talking about it just confirmed everyone in his original opinion. But the talking was good experience. By the time I’d been on Inciro for three months, Earth time, I was fluent in the lingua franca that the spacers used, and had a pretty good working vocabulary in a couple of other dialects. And I kept my Zeridajhi sharpened up with long imaginary conversations with the Lady Raire, in which I explained over and over again how we should have greeted the midgets.

I looked up a local surgeon who examined my wounds and clucked and after a lot of lab studies and allergy tests, put me under an anesthetic and rebuilt my shoulder with metal and plastic to replace what was missing. When the synthetic skin had stitched itself in with the surrounding hide, he operated again, to straighten out my ribs. He wanted to reupholster the side of my neck and jaw next, but the synthetic hide was the same pale color as the locals; it wouldn’t have improved my looks much. And by then, I was tired of the pain and boredom of plastic surgery. My arm worked all right now, and I could stand straight again instead of cradling my smashed side. And it was time to move on.

In-Ruhic’s ship called about then, and I asked his advice.

“I don’t want to sign on for just a local run,” I told him. “I want to work my way toward Zeridajh, and ask questions along the way. Sooner or later I’ll find a lead to the midgets.”

“This is a long quest you set yourself, Biridanju,” he said. “And a vain one.”

But he took me along to a local shipowner and got me a place as an apprentice power-section tender on a freighter bound inward toward a world called Topaz.

4

Eureka and I saw Topaz, and after that Greu and Poylon and Trie and Pandache’s World and the Three Moons. Along the way, I learned the ins and outs of an ion-pulse drive and a stressed-field generator; and I served my time in vac suits, working outside under the big black sky that wrapped all the way around and seemed to pull at me like a magnet that would suck me away into its deepest blackest depths, every hour I spent out on a hull. And I had my head pounded by a few forecastle strong-arm types, until an oak-tough old tube-man who’d almost been fleet champion once in his home-world’s navy showed me a few simple tricks to keep from winding up on the short end of every bout. His method was effective: he pounded me harder than the bully-boys until I got fast enough to bloody his nose one night, and graduated.

I learned to pull duty three on, three off, to drink the concoctions that space-faring men seemed to always be able to produce no matter how far they were from the last port, and to play seventy-one different games with hundred-and-four card decks whose history was lost in antiquity. And at every world I asked, and got the same answer: No such animals as the midgets had been seen in five thousand years and probably not then. On a world called Unriss, in a library that was a museum relic itself, I found a picture of a midget-or a reasonable facsimile. I couldn’t read the text, but the librarian could make out a little of the old language. It said the thing was called a H’eeaq, that it was a denizen of a world of the same name, and that it was extinct. Where H’eeaq was located, it neglected to say. My small bankroll, which would have kept me in modest circumstances on Inciro, didn’t last long. I spent it carefully, item by item outfitted my ship chest, includ-ing a few luxuries like a dreamer and a supply of tapes, a good power gun, and shore clothes. I studied astrogation and power section maintenance whenever I was able to get hold of a tape I hadn’t seen before. By the time two years had passed, I had been promoted to power chief, second class, meaning I was qualified to act as standby chief on vessels big enough to have a standby complement. That was a big step forward-like jumping from Chinese junks to tramp steamers. It meant I could ship on bigger, faster vessels, with longer range. I reached a world called Lhiza after a six months’ cruise on a converted battle cruiser, and spent three months on the beach there, spending my back pay on new training tapes and looking for a berth that would take me into the edge of the sector of the Galaxy known as the Bar. It wasn’t easy; few of the older, slower hulls that worked the Eastern Arm had business there. But the Bar was where Zeridajh was, still thousands of light-years away, but getting closer.

The vessel I finally shipped on was a passenger liner, operating under a contract with the government of a world called Ahax, hauling immigrant labor. I didn’t much like the idea; it was my first time nursemaiding a shipload of Flatlanders. But I was offered a slot as first powerman, and the tub was going a long way, and in the right direction. So I signed on. She was an old ship, like most of the hulls operating in the Arm, but she had been a luxury job in her day. I had a suite to myself, with room for Eureka, so for the first time aboard ship the old cat got to sleep across my feet, the way he did ashore. The power section was a massive, old-fashioned stressed-field installation; but after the first few weeks of shakedown and impressing my ideas on my crew I had the engines running smoothly. Everything settled down then to the quiet, slightly dull, sometimes pleasant, always monotonous routine that all long cruises are. My first shift chief, Ommu, was a big-muscled, square-faced fellow with the faint greenish cast to his skin that said he was from a high C1 world. He listened to my story of the midgets, and told me that once, many years before, he’d seen a similar ship, copper-colored. It had drifted into a cometary orbit around a world in the Guree system, in the Bar. She was a navigational hazard and he’d been one of the crew assigned to rendezvous with her and set vaporizing charges. Against standing orders, he and another sapper had crawled in through a hole in her side to take a look around. The ship had been long dead, and there wasn’t much left of the crew; but he had picked up a souvenir. He got it from his ship chest and laid it on the mess table in front of me. It looked like a stack of demitasse cups, dull silver, with a loop at the base and a short rod projecting from the open end.

“Yeah,” I said, and felt my scalp prickle, just looking at it. It wasn’t identical with the guns that had shot me up, back on Gar 28, but it was a close enough relative.

I had him tell me all about the ship, everything he could remember. There wasn’t much. We went up to the ship’s psychologist and after a lot of persuasion and a bottle of crude stuff from the power-section still, he agreed to run a recall on Ommu under hypnosis. I checked with the purser and located a xenologist among the passengers, and got him to sit in on the session.

In a light trance, Ornmu relived the approach to the ship, described it in detail as he came up on it from sun-side. We followed him inside, through the maze of compartments; we were with him as he stirred the remains of what must have been a H’eeaq and turned up the gun. The therapist ran him back through it three times, and he and the xenologist took turns firing questions at him. At the end of two hours, Ommu was soaking wet and I had the spooky feeling I’d been aboard that derelict with him.

The xenologist wanted to go back to his quarters and pore over his findings, but I talked him into giving us a spot analysis of what he’d gotten.

“The vessel itself appears a typical artifact of what we call the H’eeaq Group,” he said. “They are an echinoder-moid form, originating far out in Fringe Space, or, as some have theorized, representing an incursion from a neighbor-ing stellar assemblage, presumably the Lesser Cloud. Their few fully documented contacts with Man, and with other advanced races of the Galaxy, reveal a cultural pattern of marked -schizoid-accretional character-”

“Maybe you could make that a little plainer,” Ommu suggested.

“These are traits reflecting a basic disintegration of the societal mechanism,” he told us, and elaborated on that for a while. The simplified explanation was as bad as the reg-ular one, as far as my vocabulary was concerned. I told him so.

“Look here,” he snapped. He was a peppery little man. “You’re asking me to extrapolate from very scanty data, to place my professional reputation in jeopardy-”

“Nothing like that, sir,” I soothed him. “I’d just like to have a little edge the next time I meet those types.”

“Ummm. There’s their basic insecurity, of course. I’d judge their home-world has been cataclysmically destroyed, probably the bulk of their race along with it. What this might do to a species with a strong -racial-survival drive is anyone’s guess. If I were you, I’d look for a complex phobia system: Fear of heights or enclosed spaces, assorted fetish symbologies. And of course, the bully syndrome. Convince them you’re stronger, and they’re your slaves. Weaker, and they destroy you.”

That was all I got from him. Ommu gave me the teacup gun. I disassembled it and examined its workings, but it didn’t tell me much. The routine closed in again then. I fine--tuned the generators, and put the crew on polishing until the section gleamed from one end to the other. I won some money playing tikal, lost it again at revo. And then one offshift I was shocked up out of a deep sleep to find myself lying on the floor, with Eureka yowling over me and every alarm bell on the ship screaming disaster.

5

By the time I reached the power section, the buffeting was so bad that I had to grab a rail to stay on my feet.

“I’ve tried to get through to Command for orders,” Om-mu yelled over the racket, “but no contact!”

I tried the interdeck screen, raised a young plotman with blood on his face who told me the whole forward end of the ship had been carried away by a collision, with what, he didn’t know. That was all he told me before the screen blanked in the middle of a word.

A new shock knocked both of us down. The deck heaved up under us and kept going, right on up and over.

“She’s tumbling,” I yelled to Ommu. “She’ll break up, fast, under this! Order the men to lifeboat stations!” A tubeman named Rusi showed up then, pale as chalk, hugging internal injuries. I gave him a hand and we crawled on floors, walls and ceilings, made it to our boat station. The bay door was blown wide and the boat was hanging in its davits with the stern torn out, and there were pieces of a dead man scattered around. I ordered the men up to the next station and started to help my walking wounded, but he was dead.

The upper bay was chaos. I grabbed a gun from a lanky grandpa who was waving it and yelling, and fired over the crowd. Nobody noticed. Ommu joined me, and with a few crewmen, we formed up a flying wedge. Ommu got the hatch open while the rest of us beat back the mob. All this time, Eureka had stayed close to me, with his ears flattened and his tail twitching.

“Take ’em in order,” I told Ornmu. “Anybody tries to walk over somebody else, I’ll shoot him!” Two seconds later I had to make that good when a beefy two-hundred-pounder charged me. I blew a hole through him and the rest of them scattered back. The boat had been designed for fifty passengers; we had eighty-seven aboard when a wall of fire came rolling down the corridor and Ommu grabbed me just in time and hauled me in across the laps of a fat woman and a middle-aged man who was crying, and Eureka bounded in past me. I got forward and threw in the big red lever and a big boot kicked us and then there was the sick, null-G feel that meant we’d cleared the launch tube and were on our own. 6

In the two-by-four Command compartment, I watched the small screen where five miles away the ship was rotating slowly, end-over-end, with debris trailing off from her in a lazy spiral. Flashes of light sparkled at points along the hull where smashed piping was spewing explosive mixtures. Her back broke and the aft third of the ship separated and a cloud of tiny objects, some of them human, scattered out into the void, exploding as they hit vacuum. The center section blew then, and when the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but a major fragment of the stern, glowing red-hot, and an -expanding dust-cloud.

“Any other boats get away?” I asked.

“I didn’t see any, Billy.”

“There were five thousand people aboard that scow! We can’t be the only survivors!” I yelled at him, as if convincing him would make it true. A powerman named Lath stuck his head in. “We’ve got some casualties back here,” he said. “Where in the Nine Hells are we, anyway?”

I checked the chart screen. The nearest world was a planet named Cyoc, blue-coded, which meant uninhabited and uninhabitable.

“Nothing there but a beacon,” Ommu said. “An ice world.”

We checked; found nothing within a year’s range that was any better-or as good.

“Cyoc it is,” I said. “Now let’s take a look at what we’ve got to work with.”

I led the way down the no-G central tube past the passenger cells that were arranged radially around it, like the kernels on a corncob. They were badly overcrowded. There seemed to be a lot of women and children. Maybe the mob had demonstrated some of the chivalric instincts, after all; or maybe Ommu had done some selecting I didn’t notice. I wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing.

A big man, wearing what had been expensive clothes before the mob got them, pushed out in the aisle up ahead of me, waited for me to come to him.

“I’m Till Ognath, member of the Ahacian Assembly,” he stated. “As highest ranking individual aboard, I’m assum-ing command. I see you’re crew; I want you men to run a scan of the nearby volume of space and give me a choice of five possible destinations within our cruise capability. Then-”

“This is Chief Danger, Power Section,” Ommu butted into his spiel. “He’s ranking crew.”

Assemblyman Ognath looked me over. “Better give me the gun.” He held out a broad, well-tended hand.

“I’ll keep it,” I said. “I’ll be glad to have your help, Assemblyman.”

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” Ognath showed me a well-bred frown.

“As a member of the World Assembly of Ahax, I-”

“Ranking crew member assumes command, Assemblyman,” Ommu cut him off. “Better crawl back in your hole, Mister, before you qualify yourself for proceedings under space law.”

“You’d quote law to me, you-” Ognath’s vocabulary failed him.

“I’ll let you know how you can best be of service, Assemblyman,” I told him, and we moved on and left him still looking for a suitable word. 7

The boat was in good shape, fully equipped and supplied-for fifty people, all of whom were presumed to have had plenty of time to pack and file aboard like ladies and gentlemen. Assemblyman Ognath made a formal complaint about the presence of an animal aboard, but he was howled down. Everybody seemed to think a mascot was lucky. Anyway, Eureka ate very little and took up no useful space. Two of the injured died the first day, three more in the next week. We put them out the lock and closed ranks.

There wasn’t much room for modesty aboard, for those with strong feelings about such matters. One man objected to another man’s watching his wife taking a sponge bath-(ten other people were watching, too; they had no choice in the matter, unless they screwed their eyes shut) and knocked his front teeth out with a belt-buckle. Two days later, the jealous one turned up drifting in the no-G tube with his windpipe crushed. Nobody seemed to miss him much, not even the wife.

Two hundred and sixty-nine hours after we’d kicked free of the foundering ship, we were maneuvering for an approach to Cyoc. From five hundred miles up, it looked like one huge snowball.

It was my first try at landing an atmosphere boat. I’d run through plenty of drills, but the real thing was a little different. Even with fully automated controls that only needed a decision made for them here and there along the way, there were still plenty of things to do wrong. I did them all. After four hours of the roughest ride this side of a flatwheeled freight car, we slammed down hard in a mountain-rimmed icefield something over four hundred miles from the beacon station.

CHAPTER SIX

The rough landing had bloodied a few noses, one of them mine, broken an arm or two, and opened a ten-foot seam in the hull that let in a blast of refrigerated air; but that was incidental. The real damage was to the equipment com-partment forward. The power plant had been knocked right through the side of the boat. That meant no heat, no light, and no communications. Assemblyman Ognath told me what he thought of my piloting ability. I felt pretty bad until Ommu got him to admit he knew even less about atmosphere flying than I did.

The outside temperature was ten below freezing; that made it a warm day, for Cyoc. The sun was small and a long way off, glaring in a dark, metallic sky. It shed a sort of gray, before-the-storm light over a hummocky spread of glacier that ended at blue peaks, miles away. Assemblyman Ognath told me that now we were on terra firma he was taking charge, and that we would waste no time taking steps for rescue. He didn’t say what steps. I told him I’d retain com-mand as long as the emergency lasted. He fumed and used some strong language, but I was still wearing the gun. There were a lot of complaints from the passengers about the cold, the short rations, the recycled water, bruises, and other things. They’d been all right, in space, glad to be alive. Now that they were ashore they seemed to expect instant relief. I called some of the men aside for a conference.

“I’m taking a party to make the march to the beacon,” I told them.

“Party?” Ognath bellied up to me. “We’ll all go! Only by pulling together can we hope to survive!”

“I’m taking ten men,” I said. “The rest stay here.”

“You expect us to huddle here in this wreck, and slowly freeze to death?”

Ognath wanted to know.

“Not you, Assemblyman,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”

He didn’t like that, either. He said his place was with the people.

“I want the strongest, best-fed men,” I said. “We’ll be traveling with heavy packs at first. I can’t have stragglers.”

“Why not just yourself, and this fellow?” Ognath jerked a thumb at Ommu.

“We’re taking half the food with us. Somebody has to carry it.”

“Half the food-for ten men? And you’d leave -seventy-odd women and children to share what’s left?”

“That’s right. We’ll leave now. There’s still a few hours of daylight.”

Half an hour later we were ready to go, the cat included. The cold didn’t seem to bother him. The packs were too big by half, but they’d get lighter.

“Where’s your pack, Danger?” Ognath wanted to know.

“I’m not carrying one,” I told him. I left the boat in charge of a crewman with a sprained wrist; when I looked back at the end of the first hour all I could see was ice.

2

We made fifteen miles before sunset. When we camped, several of the men complained about the small rations, and a couple mentioned the food I gave Eureka. Ognath made another try to gather support for himself as trail boss, but without much luck. We turned in and slept for five hours. It wasn’t daylight yet when I rolled them out. One man complained that his suit-pack was down; he was shivering, and blue around the lips. I sent him back and distributed his pack among the others.

We went on, into rougher country, sprinkled with rock slabs that pushed up through the ice. The ground was rising, and footing was treacherous. When I called the noon halt, we had made another ten miles.

“At this rate, we’ll cover the distance in ten days,” Ognath informed me.

“The rations could be doubled, easily! We’re carrying enough for forty days!”

He had some support on that point. I said no. After a silent meal and a ten-minute rest, we went on. I watched the men. Ognath was a complainer but he held his position up front. Two men had a tendency to straggle. One of them seemed to be having trouble with his pack. I checked on him, found he had a bad bruise on his shoulder from a fall during the landing. I chewed him out and sent him back to the boat.

“If anybody else is endangering this party by being noble, speak up now,” I told them. Nobody did. We went on, down to eight men already, and only twenty-four hours out.

The climbing was stiff for the rest of the day. Night caught us halfway to a high pass. Everybody was dog-tired. Ommu came over and told me the packs were too heavy.

“They’ll get lighter,” I told him.

“Maybe if you carried one you’d see it my way,” he came back.

“Maybe that’s why I’m not carrying one.”

We spent a bad night in the lee of an ice-ridge. I ordered all suits set for minimum heat to conserve power. At dawn we had to dig ourselves out of drifted snow.

We made the pass by mid-afternoon, and were into a second line of hills by dark. Up until then, everyone had been getting by on his initial charge; now the strain was starting to show. When morning came, two men had trouble getting started. After the first hour, one of them passed out cold. I left him and the other fellow with a pack between them, to make it back to the boat. By dark, we’d put seventy-five miles behind us. I began to lose track of days then. One man slipped on a tricky climb around a crevasse and we lost him, pack and all. That left five of us: myself, Ommu, Ognath, a passenger named Choom, and Lath, one of my power-section crew. Their faces were hollow and when they pulled their masks off their eyes looked like wild animals’; but we’d weeded out the weak ones now.

At a noonday break, Ognath watched me passing out the ration cans.

“I thought so,” his fruity baritone was just a croak now. “Do you men see what he’s doing?” He turned to the others, who had sprawled on their backs as usual as soon as I called the halt. “No wonder Danger’s got more energy than the rest of us! He’s giving himself double rations-for himself and the animal!”

They all sat up and stared my way.

“How about it?” Ommu asked. “Is he right?”

“Never mind me,” I told them. “Just eat and get what rest you can. We’ve still got nearly three hundred miles to do.”

Ommu got to his feet. “Time you doubled up on rations for all of us,” he said. The other two men were sitting up, watching.

“I’ll decide when it’s time,” I told him.

“Ognath, open a pack and hand out an extra ration all around,” Ommu said.

“Touch a pack and I’ll kill you,” I said. “Lie down and get your rest, Ommu.”

They stood there and looked at me.

“Better be careful how you sleep from now on, Danger,” Ommu said. Nobody said anything while we finished eating and shouldered packs and started on. I marched at the rear now, watching them. I couldn’t afford to let them fail. The Lady Raire was counting on me. 3

At the halfway point, I was still feeling fairly strong. Ognath and Choom had teamed up to help each other over the rough spots, and Ommu and Lath stuck together. None of them said anything to me unless they had to. Eureka had taken to ranging far offside, looking for game, maybe. Each day’s march was like the one before. We got on our feet at daylight, wolfed down the ration, and hit the trail. Our best speed was about two miles per hour now. The scenery never changed. When I estimated we’d done two hundred and fifty miles-about the fifteenth day-I increased the ration. We made better time that day, and the next. Then the pace began to drag again. The next day, there were a lot of falls. It wasn’t just rougher ground; the men were reaching the end of their strength. We halted in mid-afternoon and I told them to turn their suit heaters up to medium range. I saw Ognath and Choom swap looks. I went over to the assemblyman and checked his suit; it was on full high. So was Choom’s.

“Don’t blame them, Danger,” Ommu said. “On short rations they were freezing to death.”

The next day Choom’s heat-pack went out. He kept up for an hour; then he fell and couldn’t get up. I checked his feet; they were frozen waxy-white, ice-hard, hallway to the knee.

We set up a tent for him, left fourteen days’ rations, and went on. Assemblyman Ognath told me this would be one of the items I’d answer for at my trial.

“Not unless we reach the beacon,” I reminded him. Two days later, Ognath jumped me when he thought I was asleep. He didn’t know I had scattered ice chips off my boots around me as a precaution. I woke up just in time to roll out of his way. He rounded and came for me again and Eureka knocked him down and stood over him, snarling in a way to chill your blood. Lath and Ommu heard him yell and I had to hold the gun on them to get them calmed down.

“Rations,” Ognath said. “Divide them up now; four even shares!”

I turned him down. Ommu told me what he’d do to me as soon as he caught me without the gun. Lath asked me if I was willing to kill the cat, now that it had gone mad and was attacking people. I let them talk. When they had it out of their systems, we went on. That afternoon Ommu fell and couldn’t get up. I took his pack and told Lath to help him. An hour later Lath was down. I called a halt, issued a triple ration all around and made up what was left of the supplies into two packs. Ognath complained, but he took one and I took the other.

The next day was a hard one. We were into broken ground again, and Ognath was having trouble with his load, even though it was a lot lighter than the one he’d started with. Ommu and Lath took turns helping each other up. Sometimes it was hard to tell which one was helping which. We made eight miles and pitched camp. The next day we did six miles; the next five; the day after that, Ognath fell and sprained an ankle an hour after we’d started. By then we had covered three hundred and sixty miles.

“We’ll make camp here,” I said. “Ommu and Lath, lend a hand.”

I used the filament gun on narrow-beam to cut half a dozen foot-cube blocks of snow. When I told Ommu to start stacking them in a circle, he just looked at me.

“He’s gone crazy,” he said. “Listen, Lath; you too, Ognath. We’ve got to rush him. He can’t kill all three of us-”

“We’re going to build a shelter,” I told him. “You’ll stay warm there until I get back.”

“What are you talking about?” Lath was hobbling around offside, trying to get behind me. I waved him back.

“This is the end of the line for you. Ognath can’t go anywhere; you two might make another few miles, but the three of you together will have a better chance.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Ognath got himself up on one elbow to call out. “Are you abandoning us now?”

“He planned it this way all along,” Lath whispered. His voice had gone a couple of days before. “Made us pack his food for him, used us as draft animals; and now that we’re used up, he’ll leave us here to die.”

Ommu was the only one who didn’t spend the next ten minutes swearing at me. He flopped down on the snow and watched me range the snow blocks in a ten-foot circle. I cut and carried up more and built the second course. When I had the third row in place, he got up and silently started chinking the gaps with snow.

It took two hours to finish the igloo, including a six-foot entrance tunnel and a sanitary trench a few feet away.

“We’ll freeze inside that,” Ognath was almost blubbering now. “When our suit-packs go, we’ll freeze!”

I opened the packs and stacked part of the food, made up one light pack.

“Look,” Ognath was staring at the small heap of ration cans. “He’s leaving us with nothing! We’ll starve, while he stuffs his stomach!”

“If you starve you won’t freeze,” I said. “Better get him inside,” I told Ommu and Lath.

“He won’t be stuffing his stomach much,” Ommu said. “He’s leaving us twice what he’s taking for himself.”

“But-where’s all the food he’s been hoarding?”

“We’ve been eating it for the past week,” Ommu said. “Shut up, Ognath. You talk too much.”

We put Ognath in the igloo. It was already warmer inside, from the yellowish light filtering through the snow walls. I left them then, and with Eureka pacing beside me, started off in what I hoped was the direction of the beacon.

My pack weighed about ten pounds; I had food enough for three days’

half-rations. I was still in reasonable shape, reasonably well-fed. With luck, I expected to make the beacon in two days’ march. I didn’t have luck. I made ten miles before dark, slept cold and hungry, put in a full second day. By sundown I had covered the forty miles, but all I could see was flat plain and glare ice, all the way to the horizon. According to the chart, the beacon was built on a hundred-foot knoll that would be visible for at least twenty miles. That meant one more day, minimum. I did the day, and another day. I rechecked my log, and edited all the figures downward; and I still should have been in sight of home base by now. That night Eureka disappeared.

The next day my legs started to go. I finished the last of my food and threw away the pack; I had a suspicion my suit heaters were about finished; I shivered all the time.

Late that day I saw Eureka, far away, crossing a slight ripple in the flat ice. Maybe he was on the trail of something to eat. I wished him luck. I had a bad fall near sunset, and had a hard time crawling into the lee of a rock to sleep.

The next day things got tough. I knew I was within a few miles of the beacon, but my suit instruments weren’t good enough to pinpoint it. Any direction was as good as another. I walked east, toward the dull glare of the sun behind low clouds. When I couldn’t walk anymore, I crawled. After a while I couldn’t crawl anymore. I heard a buzzing from my suit pack that meant the charge was almost exhausted. It didn’t seem important. I didn’t hurt anymore, wasn’t hungry or tired. It felt good, just floating where I was, in a warm, golden sea. Golden, the color of the Lady Raire’s skin when she lay under the hot sun of Gar 28, slim and tawny. . . . Lady Raire, a prisoner, waiting for me to come for her.

I was on my feet, weaving, but upright. I picked out a rock ahead, and concentrated on reaching it. I made it and fell down and saw my own footprints there. That seemed funny. When I finished laughing, it was dark. I was cold now. I heard voices. . . .

The voices were louder, and then there was light and a man was standing over me and Eureka was sitting on his haunches beside me, washing his face.

4

Ommu and Ognath were all right; Lath had left the igloo and never came back; Choom was dead of gangrene. Of the four men I had sent back to the boat during the first few days, three reached it. All of the party at the boat survived. We later learned that our boat was the only one that got away from the ship. We never learned what it was we had collided with. I was back on my feet in a day or two. The men at the beacon station were glad to have an interruption in their routine; they gave us the best of everything the station had to offer. A couple of days later a ship arrived to take us off.

At Ahax, I went before a board of inquiry and answered a lot of questions, most of which seemed to be designed to get me to confess that it had all been my fault. But in the end they gave me a clean bill and a trip bonus for my trouble.

Assemblyman Ognath was waiting when I left the hearing room.

“I understand the board dismissed you with a modest bonus and a hint that the less you said of the disaster the better,” he said.

“That’s about it.”

“Danger, I’ve always considered myself to be a man of character,” he told me. “At Cyoc, I was in error. I owe you something. What are your plans?”

He gave me a sharp look when I told him. “I assume there’s a story behind that-but I won’t pry. . . . “

“No secret, Mister Assemblyman.” I told him the story over dinner at an eating place that almost made up for thirty days on the ice. When I finished he shook his head.

“Danger, do you have any idea how long it will take you to work your passage to as distant a world as Zeridajh?”

“A long time.”

“Longer than you’re likely to live, at the wages you’re earning.”

“Maybe.”

“Danger, as a politician I’m a practical man. I have no patience with romantic quests. However, you saved my life; I have a debt to discharge. I’m in a position to offer you the captaincy of your own vessel, to undertake a mission of considerable difficulty-but one which, if you’re successful, will pay you more than you could earn in twenty years below decks!”

5

The details were explained to me that night at a meeting in a plush suite on the top floor of a building that must have been two hundred stories high. From the terrace where I was invited to take a chair with four well-tailored and manicured gentlemen, the city lights spread out for fifty miles. Assemblyman Ognath wasn’t there. One of the men did most of the talking while the other three listened.

“The task we wish you to undertake,” he said in a husky whisper, “requires a man of sound judgment and intrepid character; a man without family ties or previous conflicting loyalties. I am assured you possess those qualities. The assignment also demands great deter-mination, quick wits and high integrity. If you succeed, the rewards will be great. If you fail, you can expect a painful death, and we can do nothing to help you.”

A silent-footed girl appeared with a tray of glasses. I took one and listened:

“Ahacian commercial interests have suffered badly during recent decades from the peculiarly insidious competition of a nonhuman race known as the Rish. The pattern of their activities has been such as to give rise to the conviction that more than mere mercantile ambitions are at work. We have, however, been singularly unsuccessful in our efforts to place observers among them.”

“In other words, your spies haven’t had any luck.”

“None.”

“What makes this time different?”

“You will enter Rish-controlled space openly, attended by adequate public notice. Your movements as a lone Ahacian vessel in alien-controlled space will be followed with interest by the popular screen. The Rish can hardly maintain their pretence of cordiality if they offer you open interference. Your visit to the capital, Hi-iliat, will appear no more than a casual commercial visit.”

“I don’t know anything about espionage,” I said. “What would I do when I got there-if I got there?”

“Nothing. Your crew of four will consist of trained specialists.”

“Why do you need me?”

“Precisely because you are not a specialist. Your training has been other than academic. You have faced disas-ter in space, and survived. Perhaps you will survive among the Rish.”

It sounded simple enough: I’d be gone a year; when I got back, a small fortune would be waiting for me. The amount they mentioned made my head swim. Ognath had been wrong; it wasn’t twenty years’ earnings; it was forty.

“I’ll take it,” I said. “But I think you’re wasting your money.”

“We pay you nothing unless you return,” the spokesman said. “In which case the outlay will not have been wasted.”

6

The vessel they showed me in a maintenance dock at the port was a space-scarred five-thousand tonner, built twelve hundred years ago and used hard ever since. If the Rish had any agents snooping around her for hidden armor, multi-light communications gear, or superdrive auxiliaries, they didn’t find them; there weren’t any. Just the ancient stressed-field generators, standard navigation gear, a hold full of pre-coded computer tapes for light manufacturing operations. My crew of four were an unlikely-looking set of secret agents. Two were chinless lads with expressions of goggle-eyed innocence; one was a middle-aged man who gave the impression of having run away from a fat wife; and the last was a tall, big-handed, silent fellow with moist blue eyes. I spent two weeks absorbing cephalotapes designed to fill in the gaps in my education. We lifted off before dawn one morning, with no more fanfare than any other tramp streamer leaving harbor. I left Eureka behind with one of the tech girls from the training center. Maybe that was a clue to the confidence I had in the mission.

For the first few weeks, I enjoyed captaining my own ship, even as ancient a scow as Jongo. My crew stared solemnly when I suited up and painted the letters on her prow myself; to them, the idea of anthropomorphizing an artifact with a pet name was pretty weird.

We made our first planetfall without incident. I contact-ed the importers ashore, quoted prices, bought replacement cargo in accordance with instructions, while my four happy--go-lucky men saw the town. I didn’t ask them what they’d found out; as far as I was concerned, the less I knew about their activities the better.

We went on, calling at small, unpopulous worlds, working our way deeper into the Bar, then angling toward Galactic South, swinging out into less densely populated space, where Center was a blazing arch in the screens. We touched down on Lon, Banoon, Ostrok and twenty other worlds, as alike as small towns in the midwestern United States. And then one day we arrived at a planet which looked no different than the rest of space, but was the target we’d been feeling our way toward for five months: The Rish capital, and the place where, if I made one tiny mistake, I’d leave my bones.

7

The port of Hi-iliat was a booming, bustling center where great shining hulls from all the great worlds of the Bar, and even a few from Center itself, stood ranged on the miles-wide ramp system, as proud and aloof as carved Assyrian kings. We rode a rampcar in from the remote boondocks where we’d been parked by Traffic Control to a mile-wide rotunda constructed of high arched ribs of white concrete with translucent filigree-work between them. I was so busy staring up at it that I didn’t see the Rish official until one of my men prodded me. I turned and was looking at a leathery five-foot oyster all ready for a walk on the beach, spindly legs and all. He was making thin buzzes and clicks that seemed to come from a locket hanging on the front side of him. It dawned on me then that it was speaking a dialect I could understand:

“All right, chaps, just in from out-system, eh? Mind stepping this way? A few formalities, won’t take a skwrth.”

I didn’t know how long a skwrth was, but I followed him, and my four beauties followed me. He led us into a room that was like a high, narrow corridor, too brightly lit for comfort, already crowded with Men and Rish and three or four other varieties of life, none of which I had ever seen before. We sat on small stools as directed and put our hands into slots and had lights flashed in our eyes and sharp tones beeped at our ears. Whatever the test was, we must have passed, because our guide led us out into a ceilingless circular passage like a cattle run and addressed us:

“Now, chaps, as guests of the Rish Hierarchy, you’re welcome to our great city and to our fair world. You’ll find hostelries catering to your metabolic requirements, and if at any time you are in need of assistance, you need merely repair to the nearest sanctuary station, marked by the white pole, and you will be helped. And I must also solemnly caution you: Any act unfriendly to the Rish Hierarchy will be dealt with instantly and with the full rigor of the law. I trust you’ll have a pleasant stay. Mind the step, now.” He pushed a -hidden control and a panel slid back and he waved us through into the concourse.

An hour later, after an ion-bath and a drink at the hotel bar, I set out to take a look at Hi-iliat. It was a beautiful town, full of blinding white pavement, sheer towers, tiled plazas with hundred-foot fountains, and schools and shoals of Rish, zooming along on tiny one-wheeled motorbikes. There were a few Men in sight, and an equal number of other aliens. The locals paid no attention to them, except to ping their bike-bells at them when they stepped out in front of them.

I found a park where orange grass as soft as velvet grew under trees with polished silver trunks and golden yellow leaves. There were odd little butterfly-like birds there, and small leathery animals the size of squirrels. Beyond it was a lake, with pretty little buildings standing up on stilts above the water; I could hear twittery music coming from somewhere. I sat on a bench and watched the big, pale sun setting across the lake. It seemed that maybe the life of a spy wasn’t so bad after all. It was twilight when I started back to the hotel. I was halfway there when four Rish on green-painted scooters surrounded me. One of them was wearing a voice box.

“Captain Billy Danger,” he said in a squeak like a bat. “You are under arrest for crimes against the peace and order of the Hierarch of Rish.”