CHAPTER SEVEN

The prison they took me to was a brilliantly-lit rabbit war-ren of partitions, blind alleys, cubicles, passages, tiny rooms where inscrutable oyster-faces stared at me while carrying on inaudible conversations that made my eardrums itch. I asked questions, but got no answers. For all I know it was the same oyster I talked to each time; it might even have been the same office. I got very hungry and thirsty and sleepy, but nobody got out any rubber hoses. I could have done worse in any small town in Mississippi. After about an hour of these silent examinations, I wound up in a room the size of a phone booth with a Rishian wearing a talk box. He told me his name was Humekoy and that he was Chief of Physical Interrogation and Punishment. I got the impression the two duties were hard to tell apart.

“You are in a most serious position,” he told me in his mechanically translated squeak. “The Rish Hierarchy has no mercy for strangers seeking to do evil. However, I am aware that you yourself have merely been used-possibly even without your knowledge-as an agency for transporting criminals. By cooperating with me fully, you may save yourself from the more unpleasant consequences of your actions. Accordingly, you will now give me full particulars of the activities of your associates.”

“I want to see the Ahacian consul,” I said.

“Don’t waste my time,” he shrilled. “What were the specific missions of the four agents who accompanied you here?”

“If my crew are under arrest, I want to see them.”

“You have an imperfect grasp of the situation, Captain Danger! It is I who make the demands!”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“Nonsense, I know you Men too well. Each of you would sell his own kind to save his person.”

“Then why are you afraid to let me see the consul?”

“Afraid?” He made a sound which was probably a laugh, but it lost something in translation. “Very well, then. I grant your plea.”

They took me to a bigger room with softer light and left me, and a minute later an egg-bald man in dandified clothes came in, looking worried and mad.

“I understand you demanded to see me,” he said and handed me a gadget and looped a similar one around his neck, with an attachment to the left ear and the Adam’s apple. I followed suit.

“Look here, Danger,” his voice peeped in my ear. “There’s nothing I can do for you! You knew that when you came here. Insistence on seeing me serves merely to implicate Ahax.”

“Who are you kidding?” I sub-vocalized. “They know all about the mission. Something leaked. That wasn’t part of the deal.”

“That’s neither here nor there. Your duty now is to avoid any appearance that yours is an official mission.”

“You think they’re dumb enough to believe I’m in the spy business for myself?”

“See here, Danger, don’t meddle in affairs that are beyond your grasp! You were selected for this mission because of your total illiteracy in matters of policy.”

“Let’s quit kidding,” I said. “Why do you think they let you see me?”

“Let me? They practically kidnaped me!”

“Sure; this is a test. They want to see what you’ll do. Species loyalty is a big thing with them-I learned that much studying tapes, back on Ahax. Every time they capture and execute a Man with no reaction from his home world, they get a little bolder.”

“This is nonsense, a desperate bid for rescue-”

“You made a mistake, seeing me, Mister Consul. You can’t pretend you don’t know me, now. Better get me out of this; if you don’t, I’ll spill the beans.”

“What’s that?” He looked shocked. “What can you tell them? You know nothing of the actual-” He cut himself off.

“I can tell them all about you, for a starter,” I told him.

“Tell them what about me?”

“That you’re the mastermind of the Ahacian espionage ring here on the Rish world,” I said. “And every-thing else I can think of. Some of it might even be true.”

He got his back stiffened up and gave me the old ice-blue glare. “You’d play the treacher to the Ahacian Assembly, which trusted you?”

“You bureaucrats have a curious confidence in the power of one-way loyalty. You’d sell me down the river just to maintain a polite diplomatic lie; and you expect me to go, singing glad hosannas.”

He struggled some more, but I had him hooked in the eye. In the end he said he’d see what he could do and went away, mopping his forehead. The oysters hustled me into an elevator and took me down into what must have been a sub-sub-basement and made me crawl through a four-foot tun-nel into a dim-lit room with a strange, unpleasant smell. I was still sniffing and trying to remember what it was about the odor that made my scalp crawl when something moved in the deep gloom of the far corner and an armored, four-foot midget rose up on a set of thick legs and two oversized eyes stared at me from the middle of its chest.

2

For the first five seconds I stood where I was, feeling the shock reaction slamming through my brain. Then, without any conscious decision on my part, I was diving for it. It tried to scuttle aside, but I landed on it, grabbed for what passed for its throat. Its body arced under me and the stubby legs beat against the floor, and it broke free and went for the exit tunnel, making a sound like water gurgling down a drain. I kicked it away from the opening and it curled up and rolled to a neutral corner and I stood over it, breathing hard and looking for a soft spot to attack.

“Peace!” the word sounded grotesque coming from what looked like an oversized armadillo. “I yield, Master! Have mercy on poor Srat!” Then it made sounds that were exactly like an Australian bush baby-or a crying child.

“That’s right,” I said, and my voice had a high, quavering note. I could feel the gooseflesh on my arms, just from being this close to the thing. “I’m not ready to kill you yet. First you’re going to tell me things!”

“Yes, Master! Poor Srat will tell Master everything he knows! All, all!”

“There was a ship-wasp-waisted, copper-colored, big. It answered our distress call. Bugs like you came out of it. They shot me up, but I guess they didn’t know much human anatomy. And they took the Lady Raire. Where did they take her? Where is she? What did they do to her?”

“Master, let poor Srat think!” it gurgled, and I real-ized I’d been kicking it with every question mark.

“Don’t think-just give me the answers.” I drew a deep breath and felt the rage draining away and my hands started to shake from the reaction.

“Master, poor Srat doesn’t understand about the lady-” It oof’ed in anticipation when I took a step toward it.

“The ship, yes,” it babbled. “Long ago poor Srat re-mem-bers such a ship, all in the beauty of its mighty form, like a great mother. But that was long, long ago!”

“Three years,” I said. “On a world out in the Arm.”

“No, Master! Forty years have passed away since last poor Srat glimpsed the great mother-shape! And that was deep in Fringe Space-” It stopped suddenly, as if it had said too much, and I kicked it again.

“Poor Srat is in exile,” it whined. “So far, so far from the heaving, oil-black bosom of the deeps of H’eeaq.”

“Is that where they took her? To H’eeaq?”

It groaned. “Weep for great H’eeaq, Master. Weep for poor Srat’s memories of that which was once, and can never be again. . . .”

I listened to the blubbering and groaning, and piece by piece, got the story from it: H’eeaq, a lone world, a hundred lights out toward Galactic Zenith, where Center spread over the sky like a blazing roof; the discovery that the sun was on the verge of a nova -explosion; the flight into space, the years-centuries-of gypsy wandering. And a landing on a Rish-controlled world, a small brush with the Rish law-and forty years of slavery. By the time it was finished, I was sitting on the bench by the wall, feeling cold, washed out of all emotion, for the first time in three years. Kicking this poor waif wouldn’t bring the Lady Raire back home. That left me with nothing at all.

“And Master?” poor Srat whimpered. “Has Master, too, aroused the cruel ire of these Others?”

“Yeah, I guess you could say that. They’re using me for a test case-” I cut myself off. I wasn’t ready to start gossiping with the thing.

“Master-poor Srat can tell Master many things about these Rishes. Things that will help him.”

“It’s a little late for that,” I said. “I’ve already had my say. Humekoy wasn’t impressed.”

The H’eeaq crept closer to me. “No, Master, listen to poor Srat: Of mercy, the Rish-things know nothing. But in matters of business ethic . . .”

3

I was asleep when they came for me. Four guards with symbols painted on their backs herded me along to a circular room where a lone Rish who might have been Humekoy sat behind a desk under a spotlight. Other Rish came in, took seats along the walls -behind me. My buddy, the Ahacian consul, was nowhere in sight.

“What will you offer for your freedom?” the presiding Rish asked bluntly. I stood there remembering what poor Srat had told me about the Rish and wondering whether to believe him.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You offer nothing for your life?”

“It’s already mine. If you kill me you’ll be stealing.”

“And if we imprison you?”

“Stealing is stealing. My life is mine, not yours.”

I felt the silent buzzing that meant they were talking it over. Then Humekoy picked up two rods, a white one and a red one, from the desk. He held the white one out to me.

“You will depart the Rish world at once,” he said. “Take this symbol of Rish magnanimity and go.”

I shook my head, and felt the sweat start up. “I’ll take my life and freedom because it’s mine, not as a gift. I don’t want any gifts from you; no gifts at all.”

“You refuse the mercy of the Hierarch?” Humekoy’s canned voice went up off the scale.

“All I want is what’s mine.”

More silent conversation. Humekoy put the rods back on the desk.

“Then go, Captain Danger. You have your freedom.”

“What about my crew?”

“They are guilty. They will pay their debt.”

“They’re no good to you. I suppose you’ve already pumped them dry. Why not let them go?”

“Ah, you crave a gift after all?”

“No. I’ll pay for them.”

“So? What payment do you offer?”

Poor Srat had briefed me on this, too. I knew what I had to do, but my mouth felt dry and my stomach was quivering. We bargained for ten minutes before we agreed on a price.

My right eye.

4

They were skillful surgeons. They took the eye out without anesthetic, other than a stiff drink of what tasted like refrigerant fluid. Humekoy stood by and watched with every indication of deep interest. As for me, I had already learned about pain: the body is capable of registering only a certain amount of it; about what you’d get from laying your palm on a hot plate. After that, it’s all the same. I yelled and screamed a little, and kicked around a bit, but it was over very quickly. They packed the empty socket with something cold and wet that numbed it in a few seconds. In half an hour I was back on my feet, feeling dizzy and with a sort of gauzy veil between my remaining eye and the world.

They took me to the port and my crew were there ahead of me, handcuffed and looking pale green around the ears. And the consul was there, too, with his hands clamped up as tight as the rest.

“It has been a fair exchange, Captain Danger,” Humekoy told me after the others were aboard. “These paid cheats have garnered their petty harvest of data on industrial and port facilities, volume of shipping and sophistication of equipment, on which to base estimates of Rish assault capability. And in return, the Hierarch has gained valuable information for proper assessment of you humans. Had we acted on the basis of impressions gained by study of the persons so-cleverly trained to delude us heretofore, we might have made a serious blunder.”

We parted on that note, not as pals, exactly, but with what might be described as a mutual wary respect. At the last minute a rampcar pulled up and a pair of Rish guards dumped poor Srat out.

“The creature aided, indirectly, in our rapprochement,” Humekoy said. “His payment is his freedom. Perhaps you, too, may have an account to settle.”

“Put him aboard,” I said. “He and I will have a lot of things to talk over before I get back to Ahax.”

5

By the time the fifty-seven-day voyage was over, I knew as much about H’eeaq as poor Srat could tell me.

“Why these mistaken kin of mine may have stolen a lady of Master’s kind, I can’t say,” he insisted. But as to where-he had a few ideas on that.

“There are worlds, Master, where long ago H’eeaq established markets for the complex molecules so abun-dantly available to her in those days. Our vessels call there still, and out of regard for past ties perhaps, the in-dwellers supply our needs for stores. And in return, we give them what we can.”

He gave me the details of a few of these old market-places-worlds far out in Fringe Space, where few ques-tions were asked, and a human was a rare freak.

“We’ll go take a look,” I said. “As soon as I collect my pay.”

At Ahax, Traffic Control allotted me a slot at the remotest corner of the port. We docked and my four cheery crewmen were gone in a rampcar before I finished securing the command deck. I told Srat to follow me, and started off to walk the two miles to the nearest power way. A rampcar went past in a hurry in the next lane over, headed out toward where my tub was parked. I thought about hailing it, but even with the chill wind blowing, walking felt good after the weeks in space.

Inside the long terminal building, a P.A. voice was droning something. Srat made a gobbling noise and said, “Master, they speak of you!” I looked where he pointed with one flipper and saw my face looking down from a public screen.

“ . . . distinguishing scar on the right side of the neck and jaw,” the voice was saying. “It is the duty of any person seeing this man to detain him and notify Central Authority at once!”

6

Nobody seemed to be looking my way. I was wearing a plain gray shipsuit and a light windbreaker with the collar turned up far enough to cover the scar; I didn’t look much different than a lot of other space-burned crew types. Poor Srat was crouching and quivering; they hadn’t put him on the air, but he would attract attention with his whimpering. We had to get to cover, fast. I turned and headed for the nearest ramp exit and as I reached the vestibule a woman’s voice called my name. I spun and saw a familiar face: Nacy, the little tech operator I’d left Eureka with.

“I was in Ops Three when your clearance request came, four hours ago,”

she said in a fast whisper. She saw the patch over my eye and her voice faltered and went on: “I thought . . . after all, no one expected you to come back . . . it would be nice to come down and meet you.

“Then . . . I heard the announcement. . . .”

“What’s it all about, Nacy?”

She shook her head. She was a pert little girl with a turned-up nose and very white, even teeth. “I don’t know, Billy. Someone said you’d gone against your orders, turned back early-”

“Yeah. There’s something in that. But you don’t want to be seen talking to me-”

“Billy-maybe if you went to them voluntarily . . .”

“I have a funny feeling near the back of my neck that says that would be a wrong play.”

Her face looked tight; she nodded. “I think I under-stand.” She took a bite of her lip. “Come with me.” She turned and started across the lobby. Srat plucked at my sleeve.

“You’ll do better on your own,” I said, and followed her. She led me through a door marked for private use, along a plain corridor with lots of doors, out through a small personnel entry onto a parking lot full of ramp vehicles.

“Good thinking, girl,” I said. “You’d better fade out fast now-”

“Just a minute.” She ducked back inside. I went to a small mail-carrier, found the controls unlocked. I started it up and backed it around by the door as it swung open and a sleek pepper and salt and tan animal stalked through, looking relaxed, as always.

“Eureka!” I called, and the old boy stopped and looked my way, then reached the car in one bound and was in beside me. I looked up and Nacy was watching from the door.

“Thanks for everything,” I said. “I don’t know why you took the chance, but thanks.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re what’s known as a romantic figure,” she said and whirled and was gone before I could ask her what that meant. I pulled the car out and into a lane across the ramp, keeping it at an easy speed. There was a small click from over my head and a voice said,

“Seven-eight-nine-o, where do you think you’re -going?”

“Fuel check,” I mumbled.

“Little late, aren’t you? You heard the clear ramp order.”

“Yeah, what’s it all about?”

“Pickup order out on some smuggler that gave Control the slip a few minutes ago. Now get off the ramp!” He clicked off. I angled right as if I were headed for the maintenance bay at the end of the line, but at the last second I veered left and headed out toward where I’d parked Jongo. I could see rampcars buzzing back and forth, off to my left; I passed two uniformed men, on foot. One of them stared at me and I kept my chin down in my collar and waved to him. A hundred yards from the tub, I saw the cordon of cars around it. So much for my chances of a slick takeoff under their noses. I pulled the car offside between a massive freighter that looked as if it hadn’t been moved for a couple of hundred years, and a racy yacht that reminded me of Lord Desroy’s, and tried to make my brain think. It didn’t seem to want to. My eyes kept wandering back to the fancy enamel-inlaid trim around the entry lock of the yacht. The port was open and I could see the gleam of hand-rubbed finishes inside. . . .

I was out of the car and across to the yacht before I realized I’d made a decision. Eureka went in ahead of me, as if he owned the boat. Just as I got a foot on the carpeted four-step ladder, one of the pedestrian cops came into sight around the side of the old freighter. He saw me and broke into a run, fumbling with a holster at his side in a way that said he had orders to shoot. I unfroze and started up, knowing I wouldn’t make it, and heard a scuffling sound and a heavy thud and a crash of fire that cracked and scorched the inlay by the door. I looked back and he was spread out on the pavement, out cold, and poor Srat was untangling himself from his legs. He scrambled in behind me and I tripped the port-secure lever and ran for the flight deck. I slammed the main drive lever to full emergency lift-off position and felt my back teeth shake as the yacht screamed off the ramp, splitting the atmosphere of Ahax like a meteorite outward-bound. 7

The ship handled like a yachtsman’s dream; for the first few hours I ducked and bobbed in an evasion pattern that took us out through the planetary patrols. I kept the comm channels open and listened to a lot of excited talk that told me I’d picked the personal transportation of an Ahacian official whose title translated roughly as Assistant Dictator. After a while Assembly-man Ognath came on, looking very red around the ears, and showed me a big smile as phony as a UN peace proposal.

“Captain Danger, there’s been a misunderstanding,” he warbled. “The police officers you may have seen at the port were merely a guard of honor-”

“Somebody forgot to tell the gun-handlers about that,” I said in a breezy tone that I thought would have the maximum irritant value. “I had an idea maybe you fellows decided forty years’ pay was too much to spend, after all. But that’s OK; I’ll accept this bucket as payment in full.”

“Look here, Danger,” Ognath let the paper smile drop. “Bring the vessel back, and I’ll employ my influ-ence to see that you’re dealt with leniently.”

“Thanks; I’ve had a sample of your influence. I don’t think I’d live through another.”

“You’re a fool! Every civilized world within ten parsecs will be alerted; you’ll be hunted down and blasted without mercy-unless you turn back now!”

“I guess the previous owner is after somebody’s scalp, eh, Ognath? Too bad.”

I gave him, and a couple of naval types who followed him, some more funny answers and in the process managed to get a fair idea of the interference I could expect to run into. I had to dodge three patrols in the first twenty hours; by the thirtieth hour I was running directly toward Galactic Zenith with nothing ahead but the Big Black.

“Give me the coordinates of the nearest of the worlds where you H’eeaq used to trade,” I ordered Srat.

“It is distant, Master. So far away, so lonely. The world called Drope.”

“We’ll try it anyway,” I said. “Maybe somewhere out there we’ll run into a little luck.”

The yacht was fueled and supplied in a way that suggest-ed that someone had been prepared for any sudden changes in the political climate back home. It carried food, wines, a library that was all the most self-indulgent dictator could want to while away those long, dull days in space. I showed Srat how to handle the controls so that he could relieve me whenever I felt like taking a long nap or sampling the library. I asked him why he had stuck with me, but he just looked at me with those goggle-eyes, and for the first time in many weeks it struck me what a strange-looking thing he was. You can get used to anything, even a H’eeaq. 8

Eureka was better company than the alien, in spite of not being able to talk. He settled in in a cabin full of frills that conjured up pictures of a dance-hall floozie with the brains of a Pekinese and a voice to match. Fortunately, the dictator’s taste in music and books was closer to mine than his choice of mistresses. There were tapes aboard on everything from ancient human history to the latest techniques in cell-surgery, thoroughly indexed. I sampled them all.

The Fringe worlds, I learned, were the Museum of the Galaxy. These lonely planets had once, long eons ago, been members of the tightly packed community of Center; their races had been the first in the young Galaxy to explore out through the Bar and Eastern Arm, where their remote descendants still thrived. Now the ancient Mother-worlds lingered on, living out the twilight of their long careers, circling dying suns, far out in the cool emptiness of the space between Galaxies. One of those old races, Srat assured me, was the ancestral form of Man-not that I’d recognize the relationship if I encountered a representative of the tribe. One day I ran through a gazeteer of the Western Arm, found a listing of an obscure sun I was pretty sure was Sol and coded its reference into the index. The documentary that came onto the view-screen showed me a dull-steel ball bearing with a brilliant highlight that the voice track said was the system’s tenth planet. Number nine looked about the same, only bigger. Eight and seven were big fuzz-balls flattened at the poles. I had just about decided I had the wrong star when Saturn swam into view. The sight of that old familiar ring made me feel homesick, as if I’d spent the long happy hours of childhood there. I recognized Big Jupe, too. The camera came in close on this one, and then there were surface scenes on the moons. They looked just like Luna.

Mars was a little different than the pictures I -remembered seeing; the ice caps were bigger, and in the close scan the camera moved in on what looked like the ruins of a camp; not a city, just a lash-up collection of metal huts and fallen antennas, such as a South Pole expe-dition might have left behind. And then I was looking at Earth, swimming there on the screen, cool and misty green and upside down, with Europe at the bottom and Africa at the top. I stared at it for half a minute before I noticed that the ice caps were wrong. The northern one covered most of Germany and the British Isles, and as the camera swung past, I could see that it spread down across North America as far as Kansas. And there wasn’t any south polar cap. Antarctica was a crescent-shaped island, all by itself in the ocean, ice-free; and Australia was connected to Indochina. I knew then the pictures had been made a long time ago.

The camera moved in close, and I saw oceans and jungles, deserts and ice-fields, but nowhere any sign of Man. The apparent altitude at the closest approach was at least ten thousand feet, but even from that height I could make out herds of game. But whether they were mammoths and megatheria or something even older, I couldn’t tell. Then the scene shifted to Venus, which looked like Neptune, only smaller and brighter, and I switched the viewer off and made myself a long, strong drink and settled down for the long run ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Drope was a lone world, circling a tired old star the color of sunset in Nevada. No hostile interceptors rose to meet me, but there was no welcoming committee either. We grounded at what Srat said was a port, but all I saw was a windblown wasteland with a few hillocks around it, under a purplish-black sky without a star in sight, Center being below the horizon. The air was cold, and the wind seemed to be whispering sad stories in the dusk. I went back aboard; I dined well and drank a bottle of old Ahacian wine and listened to music, but it seemed to be telling sad stories, too. Just before dawn Srat came back with a report that a H’eeaq ship had called-about a century ago, Earth time.

“That doesn’t help us much,” I pointed out.

“At least,” Poor Srat got down and wriggled in the dust, but I sensed a certain insolence in his voice-“at least Master knows now I speak truly of the voyages of the H’eeaq.”

“Either that or you’re a consistent liar,” I said, and stopped. My tone of voice when I talked to the midget reminded me of something, but I couldn’t say what it was.

Srat’s informant had mentioned the name of the H’eeaq vessel’s next port of call: a world known as E’el, ten lights farther out into intergalactic space, which meant a two weeks’ run. I set ship time up on a cycle as close to Earth time as I could estimate, and for a while I tried to sleep eight hours at a stretch, eat three meals a day, and maintain some pretense of night and day; but the habit of nearly six years in space was too strong. I soon reverted to three on, three off, with meals every other off-period. We picked up E’el on our screens at last, a small, dim star not even shown on the standard charts. I set the yacht down on a grassy plain near a town made of little mud-colored domes and went into the village with Srat. There was nothing there but dust and heat and a few shy natives who scuttled inside their huts as we passed. An hour of that was enough. After that we called at a world that Srat called Zlinn, where a swarm of little atmosphere fliers about as sturdy as Spads came up and buzzed us like irate hornets. They refused us permission to disembark. If any H’eeaq vessel had been there in the last few decades, it was their secret. We visited Lii, a swamp-world where vast batteries of floodlights burned all day under a dying sun, and Shoram-nath, where everyone had died since Srat’s last visit, and we walked around among the bones and the rusted machines and the fallen-in buildings, and wondered what had hit them; and we saw Far, and Z’reeth, and on Kish they let us land and then attacked us, just a few seconds prema-turely, so that we made it back to the lock and lifted off in the middle of a barrage of HE fire that burned some of the shine off the hull. Suicide fliers threw themselves at us as we streaked for space; they must have been tough organisms, because some of them survived the collisions and clung to the hull and I heard them yammering and rat-tat-tatting there for minutes after we had left the last of the atmosphere behind.

On Tith, there were fallen towers that had once been two miles high, lying in rows pointing north, like a forest felled by a meteor strike. We talked to the descendants of the tower builders, and they told me that a H’eeaq ship had called; a year ago, a century ago, a thousand years-it was all the same to them.

We pushed on, hearing rumors, legends, hints that a vessel like the one I described had been seen once, long ago, or had visited the next world out-system, or that creatures like Srat had been found, dead, on an abandoned moon. Then even the rumors ran out; and Srat was fresh out of worlds.

“The trail’s cold,” I told him. “There’s nothing out here but death and decay and legends. I’m turning back for Center.”

“Only a little farther, Master,” Poor Srat pleaded. “Master will find what he seeks, if only he presses on.” He didn’t have quite the whimpering tone now that he used to use. I wondered about poor Srat; what he had up his sleeve.

“One more try,” I said. “Then I turn back and try for Center, even if every post office this side of Earth has my picture in it.”

But the next sun that swam into range was one of a small cluster; eight small, long-lived suns, well past Sol on the evolutionary scale, but still in their prime. Srat almost tied himself into a knot.

“Well do I remember the Eight Suns, Master! These are rich worlds, and generous. After we filled our holds here with succulent lichens-”

“I don’t want any succulent lichens,” I cut off his rhapsody. “All I want is a hot line on a H’eeaq ship.”

I picked the nearest of the suns, swung in on a navigation beam from Drath, the ninth planet, with Srat doing the talking to Control, and sat the ship down on a ramp that looked as though it had survived some heavy bombard-ments in its day. A driverless flatcar riding on an airstream came out to pick us up. We rode in it toward a big pinkish-gray structure across the field. Beyond it, a walled city sprawled up across a range of rounded hills. The sky was a pre-storm black, but the sun’s heat baked down through the haze like a smelter.

There were rank, tropical trees and fleshy-looking flowers growing along the drive that ran the final hundred yards. Up close, I could see cracks in the building.

There were no immigration formalities to clear through, just a swarm of heavy-bodied, robed humanoids with skin like hard olive-green plastic and oversized faces-if you can call something that looks like a tangle of fish guts a face. Eureka stayed close to my side, rubbing against my leg as we pushed through the crowd inside the big arrival shed. Srat followed, making the oof!ing sounds that meant he didn’t like it here. I told him to find someone he could talk to, and try for some information; he picked a non-Drathian, a frail little knob-kneed creature creeping along by a wall with the fringe of its dark blue cloak dragging in the mud. It directed him along to a stall at the far side of the lobby, which turned out to be a sort of combination labor exchange and lost-and-found. A three-hundred-pound Drathian in a dirty saffron toga listened to Srat, then rumbled an answer

“No vessel of H’eeaq has called here, says he, Master,” Srat reported.

“Drath trades with no world; the produce of Drath is the most magnificent in the Universe; he demands why anyone would seek items made elsewhere. He says also that he can offer an attractive price on a thousand tons of glath.”

“What’s glath?”

“Mud, Master,” he translated.

“Tell him thanks, but I’ve sworn off.” We left him and pushed on through to take a look at the town.

The buildings were high, blank-fronted, stuccoed in drab shades of ochre and pink and mauve. There was an eerie feeling hanging over the place, as if everyone was away, at-tending a funeral. The click and clatter and pat-pat of our assorted styles of feet were jarringly loud. A hot rain started up, to add to the cheer. It struck me again how alike cities were, on worlds all across the Galaxy. Where creatures gather together to build dwellings, the system of arranging them in rows along open streets is almost universal. This one was like a Mexican village, with water; all poverty and mud. I saw nothing that would pass for a policeman, an information office, a city hall or government house. After an hour of walking I was wet to the skin, cold to the bone, and depressed to the soul. I was ready to give it up and head back to the ship when the street widened out into a plaza crowded with stalls and carts under tattered awnings of various shades of gray. Compared to the empty streets, the place looked almost gay.

The nearest stall displayed an assortment of dull-colored balls, ranging from lemon to grapefruit size. Srat tried to find out what they were, but the

-answer was untranslatable. Another bin was filled with what seemed to be dead beetles. I gathered they were edible, if you liked that sort of thing. The next displayed baubles and gimcracks made of polished metal and stone, like jewelry in every time and clime. Most of the metal was dull yellow, lead-heavy gold, and I felt a faint stir of an impulse to fill my pockets. Up ahead, an enterprising merchant had draped the front of his stall with scraps of cloth. From the colors, I judged he was color-blind, at least in what I thought of as the visible spectrum. One piece of rag caught my eye; it was a soft, silvery gray. I fingered it and felt a shock go through me as if I’d grabbed a hot wire. But it wasn’t electricity that made my muscles go rigid; it was the unmistakable feel of Zeridajhan cloth. It was a piece about two feet long and a foot wide, raggedly cut. It might have been the back panel from a shipsuit. I started to lift it and the stall-keeper grabbed for it, and cracked something in the local language, a sound like hot fat sizzling. I didn’t let go.

“Tell him I want to buy it,” I told Srat

The stall-keeper tugged and made more hot-fat sounds.

“Master, he doesn’t understand the trade tongue,” Srat said. The merchant was getting excited, now. He made an angry buzzing and yanked hard; I ripped the cloth out of his balled fists; then Srat was clutching at my arm and saying, “Beware, Master!”

2

I looked around. A large Drathian who could have been the same one who offered me the load of glath except for the white serape across his chitinous shoulder was pushing through the gathering crowd toward me. Something about him didn’t look friendly. As he came up, he crackled at the merchant. The merchant crackled back. The big Drathian planted himself in front of me and spit words at me.

“Master,” Srat gobbled, “the Rule-keeper demands to know why you seek to rob the merchant!”

“Tell him I’ll pay well for the cloth.” I took out a green trade chip that was worth six months’ pay back on the Bar Worlds, and handed it over, but the Rule-keeper still didn’t seem satisfied.

“Find out where he got the cloth, Srat,” I said. There was more talk then; I couldn’t tell whether the big Drathian was a policeman, a guild official, a racket boss, or an ambulance-chasing shyster, but he seemed to pull a lot of weight. The stall-keeper was scared to death of him.

“Master, the merchant swears he came by the rag honestly; yet if Master insists, he will make him a gift of it.”

“I’m not accusing him of anything. I just want to know where the cloth came from.”

This time the bully-boy did the talking, ended by pointing across the plaza.

“Master, a slave sold the cloth to the merchant.”

“What kind of slave?”

“Master . . . a Man-slave.”

“Like me?”

“He says-yes, Master.”

I let my elbow touch the butt of my filament pistol. If the crowd that had gathered around to watch and listen decided to turn nasty, it wouldn’t help much; but it was comforting anyway.

“Where did he see this Man-slave?”

“Here, Master; the slave is the property of the Least Triarch.”

“Find out where the Triarch lives.”

“There, Master.” Srat pointed to a dusty blue -facade rising behind the other buildings like a distant -cliff-face. “That is the palace of His Least Greatness.”

“Let’s go.” I started past the Rule-keeper and he jab-bered at Srat.

“Master, he says you have forgotten his bribe.”

“My mistake.” I handed over another chip. “Tell him I’d like his assistance in getting an interview with the Triarch.”

A price was agreed on and he led the way across the plaza and through the network of dark streets, along a compli-cated route that ended in a tiled courtyard with a yellow glass roof that made it look -almost like a sunny day. There were trees and flowering shrubs around a reflecting pool, a shady cloister along the far side. Srat was nervous; he perched on a chair and mewed to himself. Eureka stretched out and stared across at a tall blue-legged bird wading in the pool.

A small Drathian came over and took orders. He asked Eureka three times what he’d have; he couldn’t seem to get the idea that the old cat didn’t speak the language. The drinks he brought were a thick, blue syrup with a taste of sulfur and honey. Srat sniffed his cup and said, “Master must not drink this,” and proceeded to swallow his share in one gulp. I stared into the shadows under the arcade where my guide had disappeared, and pretended to nibble the drink. Rain drummed on the glass overhead. It was steamy hot, like a greenhouse. After half an hour, the Drathian came back, with a friend.

The newcomer was six feet tall, five feet wide, draped in dark blue velvet and hung with ribbons and tassels and fringes like a Victorian bonnet. He was introduced as Hruba. He was the Triarch’s majordomo, and he spoke very bad, but understandable lingua.

“You may crave one boon of His Greatness,” he stated. “In return, he will accept a gift.”

“I understand the Triarch owns a human slave,” I said. “I’d like to see him, if His Greatness has no objection.”

The majordomo agreed, and gave orders to a servant; in ten minutes the servant was back, prodding a man along ahead of him. He was a stocky, strong-looking fellow with close-cropped black hair, well-cut features, dressed in a plain dark blue kilt. There was an ugly, two-inch scar on his left side, just below the ribs. He saw me and stopped dead and his face worked.

“You’re a human being!” he gasped-in Zeridajhi.

3

His name was Huvile, and he had been a prisoner for ten years. He’d been captured, he said, when his personal boat had developed drive control troubles and had carried him off course into Fringe Space.

“In the name of humanity, Milord,” he begged, “buy my freedom.” He looked as if he wanted to kneel, but the big Drathian servant was holding his arm in a two-handed grip.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

“Save me, Milord-and you’ll never regret it! My family is wealthy-” That was as far as he got before Hruba waved an arm and the servant hustled him away.

I looked at the majordomo.

“How much?”

“He is yours.”

I expressed gratification, and offered money in return. Hruba indicated that Bar money was hard to spend on Drath. I ran through a list of items from Jongo II’s well-stocked larders and storage hold; we finally agreed on a mixed consignment of drugs, wines, clothing and sense-tapes.

“His Greatness will be gratified,” Hruba said expansive-ly, “at this opportunity to display his graciousness.” He aimed a sense-organ at me.

“Ah . . . you wouldn’t by chance wish to accept a second slave?”

“Another Man?”

“As it happens.”

“How many more humans have you got?”

“His Greatness owns many properties; but only the two humans.” His voice got almost confidential: “Useful, of course, but a trifle, ah, intractable. But you’ll have no trouble on that score, I’m sure.”

We dickered for ten minutes and settled on a deal that would leave Jongo II’s larder practically stripped. It was lucky the Triarch didn’t own three men; I couldn’t have afforded any more.

“I will send porters and a car to fetch these trifles from your vessel,” Hruba said, “which His Greatness accepts out of sentiment. You wish the slaves delivered there?”

“Never mind; I’ll take them myself.” I started to get up. Hruba made a shocked noise. “You would omit the ceremonies of Agreement, of Honorable Dealing, of Mutual Satisfaction?”

I calmed him down and he sent his staff scurrying for the necessary celebratory paraphernalia.

“Srat, you go to the ship, hand over the goods we agreed on, and see that the men get aboard all right. Take Eureka with you.”

“Master, Poor Srat is afraid to go alone-and he fears for Master-”

“Better get going or they’ll be there ahead of you.”

He made a sad sound and hurried away.

“Your other slave,” the majordomo pointed. Across the court, a Drathian servant came out from a side entry leading a slim figure in a gray kilt like Huvile had worn.

“You said another man,” I said stupidly.

“Eh? You doubt it is a Man?” he asked in a stiff voice. “It is not often that the probity of His Least Greatness is impugned in his own Place of Harmonious Accord!”

“My apologies,” I tried to recover. “It was just a matter of terminology. I didn’t expect to see a female.”

“Very well, a female Man-but still a Man and a sturdy worker,” the majordomo came back. “Not so large as the other, perhaps, but diligent, diligent. Still, His Greatness would not have you feel cheated. . . .” His voice faded off. He was watching me as I watched the servant leading the girl past, some twenty feet away. She had a scar on her side, exactly like Huvile’s. Beside the horny, gray-green thorax of the Drathian beside her, her human breast looked incredibly vulnerable. Then she turned her head my way and I saw that it was the Lady Raire.

4

For a long, echoing instant, time stood still. Then she was past. She hadn’t seen me, sitting in the deep shade of the canopy. I heard myself make some kind of sound and realized I had half risen from my chair.

“This slave is of some particular interest for you?” the majordomo inquired, and I could tell from the edge on his voice that his commercial instinct was telling him he had missed a bet somewhere.

I sat down. “No,” I managed to croak. “I was wondering . . . about the scars. . . .”

“Have no fear; the cicatrice merely marks the point where the control drive is embedded. However, perhaps I should withdraw His Greatness’s offer of this gift, since it is less than you expected, lest the generosity of the Triarch suffer reflection. . . .”

“My mistake,” I said. “I’m perfectly satisfied.” I could feel my heart slamming inside my chest. I felt as though the universe was balanced on a knife-edge. One wrong word from me and the whole fragile deal would collapse.

The liquor pots arrived then, and conversation was suspended while my host made a big thing of tasting half a dozen varieties of syrupy booze and organizing the ar-rangement of outsize drinking pots on the table. I sat tight and sweated bullets and wondered how it was going back at the ship. The Drathian offered the local equivalent of a toast. While my host sucked his cup dry, I pretended to take a sip, but he noticed and writhed his face at me.

“You do not sup! Is your zeal for Honorable Dealing less than complete?”

This time I had to drink. The stuff had a sweet overflavor, but left an aftertaste of iron filings. I forced it down. After that, there was another toast. He watched to be sure I drank it. I tried not to think about what the stuff was doing to my stomach. I fixed my thoughts on a face I had just seen, looking no older than the day I had seen it last, nearly four years before; and the smooth, suntanned skin, and the hideous scar that marred it.

There was a lot of chanting and exchanging of cups, and I chewed another drink. Srat would be showing Milady Raire to a cabin now, and she’d be feeling the softness of a human--style bed, a rug under her bare feet, the tingle of the ion-bath for the first time in four years. . . .

“Another toast!” Hruba called; His command of lingua was slipping; the booze was having a powerful effect on him. It was working on me, too. My head was buzzing and there was a frying-egg feeling in my stomach. My arms felt almost too heavy to lift. The taste of the liquor was cloying in my mouth. When the next cup was passed my way I pushed it aside.

“I’ve had all I can take,” I said, and felt my tongue slur the words. It was hard to push the chair back and stand. Hruba rose, too. He was swaying slightly-or maybe it was just my vision.

“I confess surprise, Man,” he said. “Your zeal in the pledging of honor exceeded even my own. My brain swims in a sea of consecrated wine!” He turned to a servant standing by and accepted a small box from him.

“The control device governing your new acquisition,” he said and handed the box over to me. I took it and my finger touched a hidden latch and the lid valved open. There was a small plastic ovoid inside, bedded in floss.

“Wha’s . . . what’s this?”

“Ah, you are unfamiliar with our Drathian devices!” He plucked the egg from its niche and waved it under my nose.

“This gnurled wheel; on the first setting, it administers sharp reminder; at the second position . . .” he pushed the control until it clicked, “ . . . an attack of angina which doubles the object in torment. And at the third . . . but I must not demonstrate the third setting, eh? Or you will find yourself with a dead slave on your hands, his heart burned to charcoal by a magnesium element buried in the organ itself!” He tossed the control back into the box and sat down heavily. “That pertaining to the female is in the possession of her tender; he will leave it in the hands of your servant. You’ll have no trouble with ’em. . . .” He made a sound that resembled a hiccup. “Best return to zero setting the one I handled; if its subject lacks stamina, he may be dead by now.”

I tilted the box and dumped the ovoid on the ground and stamped on it; it crunched like a blown egg. Hruba came out of his chair in a rush.

“Here-what are you doing!” He stared down at the smashed controller, then at me. “Have you lost your mind, Man?”

“I’m going now,” I said, and went past him toward the passage I had entered by, a long time ago, it seemed. Behind me, Hruba was shouting in the local dialect. A servant jittered in front of me, and I yanked my pistol out and waved it and he jumped aside.

Out in the street, night had fallen, and the wet pavement glimmered under the yellow-green glare of lanterns set on the building fronts. I felt deathly ill. The street seemed to be rising up under my feet. I staggered, stayed on my feet by holding onto the wall. A pain like a knife-thrust stabbed into my stomach. I headed off in the direction of the port, made half a block before I had to lean against the wall and retch. When I straightened there were half a dozen Drathians standing by, watching me with their obscene faces. I yelled something at them, and they scattered back, and I went on. I passed the plaza where I had found the Zeridajhi cloth, recognized the street along which Srat and Eureka and I had come. It seemed to be a steep hill, now. My legs felt like soft tallow. I fell and got up and fell again. I retched until my stomach was a dry knot of pain. It was harder getting to my feet this time. My lungs were on fire. The pain in my head was like a hammer swinging against my temples. My eyes were crossing, and I stumbled along between twinned walls, seeing the two-headed Drathians retreat before me.

Then I saw the port ahead, the translucent, glowing dome rising at the end of the narrow alleyway. Not much farther, now. Srat would be wondering what happened; maybe he would be waiting, just ahead. And at the ship, the Lady Raire. . . .

I was lying on my face, and the sky was spinning slowly over me, a pitch-black canopy with the great dim blur of Center sprawled across it, and the faint avenue that was the Bar reaching out to trail off into the dwindling spiral curve of the Eastern Arm. I found the pavement under me, and pushed against it, and got to my knees, then to my feet. I could see the ship across the ramp, tall and rakish, her high polish dimned by the years of hard use, her station lights glaring amber from high on her slim prow. I steadied myself and started across toward her, and as I did the rectangle of light that was the open port narrowed and winked out. The amber lights flicked out and the red and green pattern of her running lights sprang up. I stopped dead and felt a drum-ming start up, vibrating through the pavement under my feet.

I started to run then, and my legs were broken straws that collapsed and my head hit and the blow cleared it for a moment. I got my chin up off the pavement; and Jongo II lifted, standing up away from the surface on a tenuous pillar of blue flame that lengthened as she rose. Then she was climbing swiftly into the night, tilting away, dwindling above the licking tongue of pale fire that shrank, became a tiny point of twinkling yellow, and was gone.

5

They were all around me in a tight circle. I stared at their horny shins, their sandaled feet, as alien as an alligator’s, and felt the icy sweat clammy on my face. Deathly sickness rose inside me in a wave that knotted my stomach and left me quivering like a beached jellyfish. The legs around me stirred and gave way to a tall Drathian in the white serape of a Rule-keeper. Hard hands clamped on me, dragged me to my feet. A light glared in my face.

“Man, the Rule-keeper demands you produce the two slaves given as a gift to you by His least Greatness!”

“Gone,” I gargled the words. “Trusted Srat. Filthy midget . . .”

“Man, you are guilty of a crime of the first category! Illegal manumission of slaves! To redress these crimes, the Rule-keeper demands a fine of twice the value of the slaves, plus triple bribes for himself and his attendants!”

“You’re out of luck,” I said. “No money . . . no ship . . . all gone. . . .”

I felt myself blacking out then. I was dimly aware of being carried, of lights glaring on me, later of a pain that seemed to tear me open, like a rotten fruit; but it was all remote, far away, happening to someone else. . . . 6

I came to myself lying on a hard pallet on a stone floor, still sick, but clear-headed now. For a while, I looked at the lone glare-bulb in the ceiling and tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a confused fog. I sat up and a red-hot hook grabbed at my side. I pulled back the short, coarse-weave jacket I was wearing, and saw a livid, six-inch cut under my ribs, neatly stitched with tough thread. It was the kind of wound that would heal in a few weeks and leave a welted scar; a scar like I’d seen recently, in the sides of Huvile and the Lady Raire. A scar that meant I was a slave.

CHAPTER NINE

The controller made a small lump under the skin. It wasn’t painful-not unless you got too close to your overseer. At ten feet, it began to feel like a slight case of indigestion. At five, it was a stone knife being twisted in your chest. Once, in an experimental mood, I pushed in to four feet from him before he noticed and waved me back. It was like a fire in my chest. That was just the mild form of its action, of course. If he had pushed the little lever on the egg-shape strapped to his arm-or died, while the thing was tuned to his body -inductance-the fire in my chest would be real. Once, months later, I saw three slaves whose keeper had been accidentally killed; the holes burned in their chests from the inside were as big as dinner plates.

As a rule, though, the Lesser Triarch believed in treating his slaves well, as valuable property deserved. Hruba dropped by twice a day for the first few days to be sure that my alien flesh was healing properly. I spent my time lying on the bed or hobbling up and down the small, windowless room, talking to myself:

“You’re a smart boy, Billy Danger. You learned a lot, these last four years. Enough to get yourself a ship of your own, and bring it here, against all the odds there are, to find her. And then you handed her and the ship to the midget on a silver platter-for the second time. He must have had a good laugh. For a year he followed you like a sick pup, and wagged his tail every time you looked his way. But he was waiting. And you made it easy. While you sat there poisoning yourself, he strolled back to the ship, told Huvile you weren’t coming, and lifted off. The Lady Raire might have interfered, but she never knew; she didn’t see you. And now Srat has her right back where she started. . . .”

It wasn’t a line of thought that made me feel better, but it served the purpose of keeping me on my feet, pacing. With those ideas chewing at me, I wasn’t in a mood for long, restful naps.

When the wound had stitched up, a Drathian overseer took me out of my private cell and herded me along to a big room that looked like a nineteenth century sweatshop. There were other slaves there, forty or fifty of them, all shapes, all sizes, even a few Drathians who’d run foul of the Rule-keepers. I was assigned to a stool beside a big, broad-backed animal with a face like a Halloween mask snipped out of an old inner tube and fringed with feathery red gills. The overseer talked to him in the local buzz-buzz, and went away. He looked at me with big yellow eyes like a twin-yolked egg, and said, “Welcome to the club, friend,” in perfect, unaccented lingua, in a voice that seemed to come from under a tin washtub.

He told me that his name was Fsha-fsha, that he had been left behind seventeen years before when the freighter he was shipping on had been condemned here on Drath after her linings went out, and that he had been a slave since his money ran out, three months after that.

“It’s not a bad life,” he said. “Plenty of food, a place to sleep, and the work’s not arduous, after you’ve learned the routine.”

The routine, he went on to explain, was Sorting. “It’s a high-level job,”

Fsha-fsha assured me. “Only the top-category workers get this slot. And let me tell you, friend, it’s better than duty in the mines, or on the pelagic harvest-ing rafts!”

He explained the work; it consisted of watching an endless line of glowing spheres as they came toward us along a conveyor belt, and sorting them into one of eight categories. He told me what the types were, and demon-strated; all the while he talked, the bulbs kept coming, and his big hands flicked the keys in front of him, shunt-ing them their separate ways. But as far as I could tell, all the bulbs were exactly alike.

“You’ll learn,” he said blandly, and flipped a switch that stopped the line. He fetched a lightweight assembly of straps from a wall locker.

“Training harness,” he explained. “It helps you catch on in a hurry.” He fitted it to me with the straps and wires crisscrossing my back and chest, along my arms, cinched up tight on each finger. When he finished, he climbed back on his stool, and switched on the line.

“Watch,” he said. The glowing bulbs came toward him and his fingers played over the keys.

“Now you follow through on your console,” he said. I put my hands on the buttons and he reached across to attach a snap that held them there. A bulb came toward me and a sensation like a hot needle stabbed the middle finger on my right hand. I punched the key under it and the pain stopped, but there was another bulb coming, and the needle stabbed my little finger this time, and I jabbed with it, and there was another bulb coming. . . .

“It’s a surefire teaching system,” Fsha-fsha said in his cheery, sub-cellar voice. “Your hands learn to sort without even bringing the forebrain into it. You can’t beat pain--association for fast results.”

For the rest of the shift, I watched glorm-bulbs sail at me, trying to second-guess the pain circuits that were activated by Fsha-fsha’s selections. All I had to do was recognize a left-forefinger or right ring-finger bulb before he did, and punch the key first. By the end of the first hour my hands ached like unlanced boils. By the second hour, my arms were numb to the elbow. At the end of three hours I was throbbing all over.

“You did fine,” Fsha-fsha told me when the gong rang that meant the shift was ended. “Old Hruba knew what he was doing when he assigned you here. You’re a quick study. You were coding ten percent above random the last few minutes.”

He took me along a damp-looking tunnel to a gloomy barracks where he and twenty-six other slaves lived. He showed me an empty alcove, got me a hammock and helped me sling it, then took me along to the mess. The cook was a warty creature with a ferocious set of ivory tusks, but he turned out to be a good-natured fellow. He cooked me up a sort of omelette that he assured me the other Man-slaves had liked. It wasn’t a gourmet’s delight, but it was better than the gruel I’d had in the hospital cell. I slept then, until my new tutor shook me awake and led me back to the Sorting line.

The training sessions got worse for the next three shifts; then I started to catch on-or my eye and fingers did; I still couldn’t consciously tell one glorm-bulb from another. By the time I’d been at it for six weeks, I was as good as Fsha--fsha. I was promoted to a bulb-line of my own, and the harness went back in the locker.

The Sorting training, as it turned out, didn’t only apply to glorm-bulbs. One day the line appeared with what looked like tangles of colored spaghetti riding on it.

“Watch,” Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck.

“You have to key-in your response patterns,” he said. “Tie this one . . .” he flipped his sorting key, “ . . . to one of your learned circuits. And this one . .

.” he coded another gob of wires, “ . . . to another. . . .”

I didn’t really understand all that, but I tried making analogies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs-and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly.

“You’ve trained a new section of your brain,” Fsha-fsha said. “And it isn’t just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical analysis.”

During the off-shifts, we slaves were free to relax, talk, gamble with homemade cards and dice, commune with ourselves, or sleep. There was a small, walled court we could crowd into when the sun shone, to soak up a little vitamin D, and a cold, sulfury-smelling cave with a pool for swimming. Some of the slaves from watery worlds spent a lot of time there. I developed a habit of taking long walks-fifty laps up and down the barrack-room-with Fsha-fsha stumping along beside me, talking. He was a great storyteller. He’d spent a hundred and thirty years in space before he’d been -marooned here; he’d seen things that took the curl out of my hair to listen to.

The weeks passed and I sorted, watched, and listened. The place I was in was an underground factory, located, ac-cording to Fsha-fsha, in the heart of the city. There was only one exit, along a tunnel and up a flight of stairs barred by a steel gate that was guarded day and night.

“How do they bring in supplies?” I asked my sidekick. “How do they ship the finished products out? They can’t run everything up and down one little stairway.”

Fsha-fsha gave me what I had learned to interpret as a shrug. “I don’t know, Danger. I’ve seen the stairs, because I’ve been out that way quite a few times-”

I stopped him and asked for a little more detail on that point.

“Now and then it happens a slave is needed for labors above-ground,” he explained. “As for me, I prefer the peacefulness of my familiar routine; still, so long as the finger of the Triarch rests here-” he tapped a welted purple scar along his side-“I follow all orders with no argument.”

“Listen, Fsha-fsha,” I said. “Tell me everything you remember about your trips out: the route you took, the number of guards. How long were you out? How close did they watch you? What kind of weapons did they carry?

Any chains or handcuffs? Many people around? Was it day or night? Did you work inside or outside-”

“No, Danger!” Fsha-fsha waved a square purple-palmed hand at me. “I see the way your mind’s working; but forget the idea! Escape is impossible-and if you did break away from a work detail, you’d still be alone in the middle of Drath, an alien, not knowing the language, with every Rule-keeper in the city ready to pounce on you-”

“I know all that. But if you think I’m going to settle down here for the rest of my life, you’re dead wrong. Now start telling me: How many guards escorted you?”

“Just one. As long as he has my controller in his pocket, one is all that’s needed, even if I were the most intractable slave in the pens.”

“How can I get picked for an outside detail?”

“When you’re needed, you’ll be called.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll be getting ready. Now give.”

Fsha-fsha’s memory was good. I was surprised to hear that for as much as an hour at a time, he had worked unsupervised.

“It’s no use creeping off and hiding out under an overturned cart or in an unused root-cellar,” he said. “One touch of the controller, and you’re mewling aloud for your keeper.”

“That means we’ll have to get our hands on the control devices before we break.”

“They’ve thought of that; the thing is tuned to your neuronic carrier frequency. If you get within three feet of it, it’s triggered automatically. If the holder dies, it’s triggered. And if it’s taken off of the overseer’s body, the same thing.”

“We can stand it long enough to smash them.”

“If the controller’s destroyed, you die,” he said flatly. “It’s covered any way you play it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Fsha-fsha.” I told him about crushing the controller the night I had been arrested. “Huvile didn’t die. The Rule-keeper saw him board Jongo II, an hour afterward.”

“Strange-it’s common knowledge among the slaves that if your controller is damaged, it kills you.”

“It’s a useful story for the slave-owners to spread.”

“Maybe that’s why they grabbed you so fast. You might have given the game away. Hell’s ice, if the slaves knew. . . .”

“How about it, Fsha-fsha? Are you with me?”

He stared at me in the gloom of the comer where we’d drifted to talk in private. “You’re a strange, restless creature, Danger,” he said. “For a being as frail as you are, with that soft skin and brittle bones, you’ve got an al-mighty urge to look for trouble. Why not take a tip from me and make the best of it-”

“I’ll get out of here, Fsha-fsha-and get clear of the planet, too-or die trying. I’d as soon be dead as here, so I’m not risking much.”

Fsha-fsha made the noise that served him as a sigh. “You know, we Rinths see the Universe differently from your Propagators,” he said. “With us, it’s the Great Parent that produces the spores. We workers have the mobility, the intelligence-but no future, except the Parent. We have the instinct to protect the Tree, fertilize it and water it, prune it, insure its survival; but we’ve got no personal stake in the future, the way you have. Your instincts tell you to stay alive and propagate. Your body knows this is a dead end as far as offspring go, so it tells you to get out or die.” He sighed again.

“When I left Rinth, it was hard; for a long time, I had a homesickness that you wouldn’t be able to understand-any more than I can really understand the way you feel now. But I can remember how it was. And if it’s anything like that with you-yes; I can see you’ve got to try.”

“That’s right; I’ve got to try. But not you, Fsha-fsha. If you’re really content here, stay. I’ll make it on my own.”

“You wouldn’t have a chance, Danger. I know the language, the routes around the town. You need me. Not that it’ll do any good in the end. But knowing about the controllers will make a difference.”

“Forget it. You can teach me the language, and tell me all you can about the town. But there’s no point in your getting killed-”

“That’s another advantage a Rinth has,” Fsha-fsha cut me off. “No instinct for self-preservation. Now, let’s get started planning the details.”

2

The weeks went by. I sorted, slept, took my language lesson, and worked to memorize the map of the city I drew up from Fsha-fsha’s descriptions. About two months after our decision to crash out, Fsha-fsha got a call for an outside detail. He vetoed my suggestion that I volunteer to go along.

“This is a lucky break,” he said. “It will give me a chance to look over the ground again, in the light of our plans. Rest easy. We’ll get our chance.”

“We Propagators aren’t as patient as you Tree--farmers,” I told him. “It may be another six months before an outside detail comes up again.”

“Better to propagate in your old age than not at all, eh?” he reminded me, and I had to bite my teeth and watch him go. I got one quick look at the passage as he left. It was nar-row, dim-lit; the Drathians didn’t like a high level of illumination. I wondered if there was a useful tip for me in that. Fsha-fsha came back rippling his gill-flaps in a way that I knew meant he was excited. But it turned out not to be pleased anticipation.

“It’s hopeless, Danger,” he assured me. “The Worm-face in charge of the detail carries the controllers in a special rack, strapped to his chest for quick access. He keeps his distance; ten feet was as close as I could get before he warned me back.”

“What weapons did he carry?” I asked him.

“What weapon does he need? He holds your life in his hand as it is!”

“Too bad,” I said. “We’ll have to get our armaments somewhere else then.”

Fsha-fsha goggled at me. “You’re an amazing creature, Danger. If you were cornered by a Fangmaster, I think you’d complain that his teeth weren’t larger, so as to provide you with a better dagger!”

The routine settled in again then. Every day was like the one before; the glorm-bulbs rushed at me in a stream that never ended, never changed. I ate omelettes, played revo and tikal and a dozen other games, walked my two miles a day, up and down the dark room; and waited. And one day, I made a blunder that ended our plans with total finality. 3

The work-shift had ended half an hour before. Fsha-fsha and I had settled down in his alcove to play our favorite game of telling each other what we’d do, once we were clear of Drath. A big Drathian slave who’d been assigned to the Sorting crew a few hours earlier came lumbering over, breathing out fumes that reminded me of a package of rot-ten broccoli I’d opened once by mistake.

“I’ll take this alcove,” he said to Fsha-fsha. “Get out, animal.”

“Makes himself right at home, doesn’t he?” I pointed across the room to an empty alcove. “Try over there, sport,” I said to the broccoli-breather. “Lots of room-” I got that far when he reached out with a couple of arms like boa constrictors and ripped down the hammock. He yanked again, and tore the other end free. He tossed it aside and swung his own kit down onto the floor. I stood up.

“Wait,” Fsha-fsha said quickly. “The overseer will deal with this one. Don’t-”

The big Drathian took a quick step, threw a punch at me. I ducked, came up with a three-foot length of steel pipe the Rinth had tucked under the hammock for possible future use, and brought it down in a two-handed blow across the Drathian’s shoulder. He gave a bleat like a branded steer and went down bucking and kicking. In his convulsion, he beat his head against the floor, whipped his body against the wall hard enough to give off a dull boom! like a whale slapping the water with his tail. Thick, yellowish blood spat-tered. Every slave in the barracks came crowding around to see what was going on, but in thirty seconds it was all over. The big Drathian was dead. The Rule-keepers got there a minute or two later and took me away, up the stairs I’d looked forward to seeing for so long. My hearing didn’t amount to much. I explained to Hruba that the dead slave had attacked me, that I didn’t know Drathians kept their brains under their shoulder blades; but it was an open-and-shut case. I’d killed a fellow slave. My Sorting days were over.

“Transportation to the harvesting rafts,” the majordomo intoned in Drathian and repeated it in lingua. “Too bad, Man,” he added in his unofficial voice.

“You were a valuable Sorter-but like your kind, you have a savage streak in you most unbecoming in a chattel.”

They clamped my wrists in a steel ring and hustled me out into a courtyard where a big, tarry-smelling air-barge was waiting. I climbed aboard, and was kicked into a metal-walled broom-closet. They slammed the door on me, and I lay in the dark and felt the barge lift off. 4

The harvesting rafts were mile-square constructions of metal floats linked by woven-rope mats and carpeted with rotting vegetable husks and the refuse of the canning sheds, which worked night and day processing the marine life hoisted aboard by the seining derricks. A pair of husky Drathians threw me off the side of the barge into foul--odored ankle-deep muck, and another pair grabbed me, knocked me around a little just to keep in practice, and dragged me away to a long lean-to which served to keep the worst of the subtropical rains off any of the workers who were lucky enough to be on off-shift. They took off the wrist-irons and rigged a fine-gauge fiber loop around my neck, not tight enough to choke me, but plenty snug enough to wear the skin raw, until it toughened and formed a half-inch-wide scar that itched and burned day and night. There was a limp bladder attached to the rope, designed to inflate and keep my head above water if I happened to fall overboard; slaves weren’t allowed to evade their labors by anything as easy as drowning, intentionally or otherwise. I learned all this later; the first night the only orientation I got was what I could deduce from being dragged to a line of workers who were shelling out big crustaceans, and yelled at to get to work. The command was emphasized with a kick, but I had been watching for that; I slid aside from it and smashed my fist into the short ribs of the Drathian and chopped him again as he scrambled back. My reward for this effort was a solid beating, administered by three Drathians, two holding and one swinging a rod as heavy and limber as a golf club. They finished after a while, threw water over me, and someone shoved a sea-lobster at me.

“Better look busy,” the slave on my left tipped me off. He was a medium-sized Drathian with a badly scarred face; that made us pals on two counts. I followed his advice.

There wasn’t anything complicated about the work; you grabbed your chzik, held him by the blunt end, hooked a finger under his carapace, and stripped it off him. Then you captured his four flailing limbs, and with a neat twist of the wrist, removed them. The chziks were active creatures, and they showed their resentment of this treatment by writhing frantically during the operation. When you found yourself tackling a big fellow-weight ten pounds or more-it could sometimes be a little difficult to carry out the job as smoothly as the overseers desired. They usually let you know when this was the case by hitting you across the back with the golf club. At first, my fingers had a tendency to bleed, since the carapaces were razor-sharp and as tough as plexi-glass, and the barbs on the legs had a way of lodging in my palms. But the wounds healed cleanly; the microorganisms of Drath were too alien to my metabolism to give rise to infections. And after a while calluses formed.

I was lucky in timing my arrival near the end of a shift; I was able to look busy enough to keep the overseer away, and make it under my own power to the shed. There were no bunks, no assigned spaces. You just crowded in as far as possible from the weather side and dropped. There was no insomnia on the rafts. The scarred Drathian-the same one who had given me some good advice the first night-helped me out again the next shift, by showing me how to nip off a chunk of raw chzik and suck it for the water content. The meat itself was spongy and inedible as far as I was concerned; but the slop dipped up to us at the regular feeding time was specially designed to be assimilable by a wide variety of species. When an off-brand worker showed up who couldn’t live on the stuff, he soon starved, thus solving the problem.

Instead of the regular cycle of alternating work-and rest--shifts, we harvesters worked two shifts out of three, which effectively prevented any chance of boredom. For six hours at a stretch, we manned our places by the chute with the squirming heaps of chziks arriving just a little faster than we could shell them out. The slippery mat under foot rose and fell in its never-ending rhythm, and beyond its edge, the steel-gray sea stretched to the horizon. Sometimes the sun beat down in a dead calm, and the unbelievable stink rose around us like a foul tide. At night floodlights glared from high on the derricks, and the -insects swarmed in to fly into our mouths and eyes and be trampled underfoot to add to the carpet. Sometimes rain came, hot and torrential, but the line never slowed. And later, when gray sleet coated the rigging and decks with soft ice, and the wind cut at us like sabers, we worked on, those of us who could stand the cold; the others settled into the muck and were hauled away and put over the side. And some of us who were still alive envied them. I remembered reading, years before, back on old Earth, of concentration camp prisoners, and I wondered what it was that kept men going under conditions that made life a torture that never ended. Now I knew; it wasn’t a high-minded determination to endure, or a dauntless will to take a blood-curdling revenge. It was an instinct older than thought, older than hate, that said: “Survive!”

And I survived. My hands toughened, my muscles strengthened, my skin hardened against the cold and the rain. I learned to sleep in icy slush, without protection, with horny feet stumbling over me in the dark; to swallow the watery gruel and hold out the cup for more; to take the routine club-blows of the overseers without hitting back; in the end, without really noticing. There were no friendships on the rafts, no -recreations. There was no time or energy for anything not directly related to staying alive for one more day. The Drathian who had helped me on the first day died one wet night, and another took his place; I had never even learned his name. During my years in space, I had developed an instinc-tive time-sense that told me when a week, or a month, Earth-style, had passed. I had been almost five years away, now. Sometimes I wondered what had happened during those years, back on that small planet. But it was so far away that it seemed more like a dream than a reality.

For hours at a stretch, sometimes for a whole double shift, my mind would wander far away from the pelagic rafts of Drath. My memories seemed to become more vivid with time, until they were almost realer than the meaningless life around me.

And then one night, the routine broke. A morose-looking Drathian boss-overseer caught me as I went toward the chzik chute, shoved me toward the boat wharf.

“You’re assigned as a net-handler,” he told me. Except for the heavy leather coat he was wearing, he looked as cold and filthy and miserable as the slaves. I climbed down into the twenty-foot, double-prowed dory that was pitching in the choppy water at the foot of the loading ladder, and we shoved off. In five minutes the high-sided raft was out of sight in the ragged fog.

I sat in the stern and stared at the oily gray surface of the water. It was the first new sight I’d seen in many months. The wake was a swirl of foam that drifted aft, forming a pattern like an ugly face that leered up at me through the murky water. The face grew clearer, and then it broke water, a devil-mask of rippling black leaves edged with feathery red gills. An arm swept up, dripping water; I saw the flash of a knife blade as it swept down toward me-and felt the rope fall from my neck. A wide hand clamped on my arm, tumbled me over the stern, and before I could draw a breath, had dragged me down into the cold and the dark.

5

I woke up lying on my back in a warm, dry place. From the motion and the sound, I could tell I was on a boat. The air that moved over my face carried the sweet, clean smell of the sea. Fsha-fsha was standing beside the bunk; in the soft glow from the deck lamp, his face looked almost benign.

“It’s a good thing I recognized you,” I said, and was surprised at the weakness of my voice. “I might have spoiled things by putting a thumb in your eye.”

“Sorry about the rough treatment,” he said. “It was the best we could work out. The tender-master wasn’t in on it; just the boss-overseer.”

“It worked,” I said, and stopped to cough, and tasted the alien saltwater of Drath. “That’s all that counts.”

“We’re not clear yet, but the trickiest part went all right. Maybe the rest will work out, too.”

“Where are we headed?”

“There’s an abandoned harbor not far from here; about four hours’ run. A filer will meet us there.” I started to ask another question, but my eye was too heavy to hold open. I closed it and the warm blanket of darkness folded in on me.

6

Voices woke me. For a moment, I was back aboard Lord Desroy’s yacht, lying on a heap of uncured Nith-hides, and the illusion was so strong that I felt a ghostly pang from the arm, broken and mended so long ago. Then Fsha-fsha’s voice cut through the dream.

“ . . . up now, Danger, have to walk a little way. How do you feel?”

I sat up and put my legs over the side of the cot and stood. “Like a drowned sailor,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Up on the deck of the little surface cutter, I could see lights across the water. Fsha-fsha had put a heavy mackinaw across my shoulders. For the first time in a year, I felt cold. The engines idled back and we swung in beside a jetty. A small, furtive-looking Drathian was waiting beside a battered cargo-car. We climbed up into the box and settled down under some stiff tarpaulins, and a moment later the truck started up and pulled out in a whine of worn turbos.

I slept again. The habit of almost a year on the rafts, to sleep whenever I wasn’t on the line, was too strong to break in an hour; and breathing the salt seas of Drath isn’t the best treatment for -human lungs. When I woke up this time, the car had stopped. Fsha-fsha put a hand on my arm and I lay quiet. Then he tapped me and we crawled out and slid down the tailgate, and I saw we were parked at the edge of the spaceport at Drath City. The big dome loomed up under the black sky across the ramp, as faded and patched as ever; and between us and it, the clumsy bulk of an ancient cargo-carrier squatted on battered parking jacks. Something moved in the shadows and a curiously shaped creature swathed in a long cloak came up to us. He flipped back the hood and I saw the leathery face of a Rishian.

“You’re late,” he said unhurriedly. “A couple of local gendarmes nosing about. Best we waste no time.” He turned and moved off toward the freighter. Fsha-fsha and I followed. We had covered half the distance when an actinic-green floodlight speared out to etch us in light, and a rusty-hinge voice shouted the Drathian equivalent of “Halt or I’ll shoot!”

7

I ran for it. The Rishian, ten feet in the lead, spun, planted himself, brought up his arm and a vivid orange light winked. The spotlight flared and died, and I was past him, sprinting for the open cargo-port, still a hundred yards away across open pavement. A gun stuttered from off to the right, where the searchlight had been, and in the crisp yellow flashes I saw Drathian Rule-keepers bounding out to intercept us. I altered course and charged the nearest Rule-keeper, hit him fair and square. As he fell, my fingers, which had learned to strip the carapace from a twelve-pound chzik with one stroke, found his throat and cartilage crumpled and popped and he went limp and I was back on my feet in time to see the other Drathian lunge for Fsha-fsha. I took him from behind, broke his neck with my forearm, lifted him and threw him ten feet from me. And we were running again.

The open port was just ahead, a brilliant rectangle against the dark swell of the hulk. Something gleamed red there, and Fsha-fsha threw himself sideways and a ravening spout of green fire lanced out and I went flat and rolled and saw a giant Drathian, his white serape thrown back across his shoulder, swinging a flare-muzzled gun around to cover me. I came to my feet and dove straight at him, but I knew I wouldn’t make itSomething small and dark plunged from the open port, leaped to the Drathian’s back. He twisted, struck down with the butt of the gun, and I heard it thud on flesh. He struck again, and bone crunched, and the small, dark thing fell away, twisting on the pavement; and then I was on the Rule-keeper. I caught the gun muzzle, ripped it out of his hands, threw it away into the dark. His face was coming around to me, and I swung with all the power that the months of mule-labor had given my arm, and felt the horny mask collapse, saw the ochre blood spatter; he went down and I stepped over him and the small, dark creature that had attacked him moved and the light from the entry fell across it and showed me the mangled body of a H’eeaq.

8

Up above, a shrill Rishian voice was shouting. Behind me, I heard the thud of Drathian feet, their sharp, buzzing commands.

“Srat,” I said, and could say no more. Thick, blackish blood welled from ghastly wounds. Broken rib-ends projected from the warty hide of his chest. One great goggle-eye was knocked from its socket. The other held on me.

“Master,” the ugly voice croaked. “Greatly . . . my people wronged you. Yet-if my wounds . . . may atone for yours . . . forego your vengeance . . . for they are lonely . . . and afraid. . . .”

“Srat . . . I thought . . .”

“I fought the Man, Master,” he gasped out. “But he was stronger . . . than I. . . .”

“Huvile!” I said. “He took the ship!”

Srat made a convulsive movement. He tried to speak, but only a moan came from his crocodile mouth.

I leaned closer.

“I die, Master,” he said, “obedient . . . to your . . . desires. . . .”

CHAPTER TEN

Fsha-fsha and a Rishian crewman hauled me aboard the ship; Srat’s corpse was left on the ramp. Other species aren’t as sentimental about such things as Man is. There were a few angry objections from Drath Traffic Control as we lifted, but the Drathians had long since given up Deep Space travel, and the loss of a couple of runaway slaves wasn’t sufficient reason to alienate the Rishians. They were one of the few worlds that still sent tramps into Fringe Space.

Once away, Fsha-fsha told me all that had happened since I was sent to the rafts:

“Once you’d planted the idea of escape, I had to go ahead with it,” he said.

“The next chance was three months later, two of us this time, just one overseer. I had a fancy plan worked out for decoying him into a side alley, but I had a freak piece of luck. It was a loading job, and a net broke and scattered cargo all over the wharf. The other slave got the whole load on his head-and a nice-sized iron casting clipped the guard and laid him out cold. He had the controllers strapped to his arm, in plain sight, but getting to them was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I used a metal bar from the spilled cargo on them and fainted at the same time.

“I came out of it just in time. The Load-master and a couple of Rule-keepers were just arriving. I got up and ran for it. They wasted a little time discovering my controller was out of action, and by then I had a good start. I headed for a hideaway I’d staked out earlier, and laid up there until dark.

“That night I came out and took a chance on a drinking--house that was run by a non-Drathian. I thought maybe he’d have a little sympathy for a fellow alien. I was wrong, but I strapped him to the bed and filled both my stomachs with high-lipid food, enough to keep me going for two weeks, and took what cash he had in the place and got clear.

“With money to spend, things were a little easier. I found a dive where I could lie low, no questions asked, and sent out feelers for information on where you’d been sent. The next day the little guy showed up: Srat.

“He’d been hanging around, waiting for a chance to talk to someone from the Triarch’s stable. I don’t know what he’d been eating, but it wasn’t much; and he slept in the street.

“I told him what I knew; between us, we got you located. Then the Rish ship showed up.”

The Rishian captain was sitting with us, listening. He wrinkled his face at me.

“The H’eeaq, Srat, spoke to me in my own tongue, greatly to my astonishment. Long ago, at Rish, I’d heard the tale of the One-Eyed Man who’d bartered half of the light of his world for the lives of his fellows. The symmetry of the matter demanded that I give such a one the help he asked.”

“The little guy didn’t look like much,” Fsha-fsha said. “But he had all the guts there were.”

“You may take pleasure in the memory of that rarest of creatures,” the Rishian said. “A loyal slave.”

“He was something rarer than that,” I said. “A friend.”

2

Fsha-fsha and I stayed with the freighter for three months; we left her on a world called Gloy. We could have ridden her all the way to Rish, but my destination was in the opposite direction: Zeridajh. Fsha-fsha stayed with me. One world was like another to him, he said. As for the ancestral Tree, having cut the ties, like a man recovered from an infatuation, he wasn’t eager to retie them. The Rish captain paid us off for our services aboard his vessel-we had rebuilt his standby power section, as well as pulling regular shifts with the crew. That gave us enough cash to re--outfit ourselves with respectable clothes and take rooms at a decent inn near the port, while we looked for a Center--bound berth.

We had a long wait, but it could have been worse. There were shops and taverns and apartments built among the towering ruins of a vast city ten thousand years dead; but the ruins were overgrown and softened by time, so that the town seemed to be built among forested hills, unless you saw it from the air and real-ized that the mountains were vine-grown structures. There was work for us on Gloy; by living frugally and saving what we earned, we accumulated enough for passenger berths inward to Tanix, a crossroads world where the volume of in-Galaxy shipping was more encouraging. After a few days’ wait, we signed on a mile-long super-liner. It was a four months’ cruise; at the end of it we stepped off on the soil of a busy trading planet, and looked up at the blaze of sky that meant Center was close.

“It’s still three thousand lights run to Zeridajh,” the Second Officer for Power told me as he paid me off. “Why not sign on for another cruise? Good powermen are hard to find; I can offer you a nice bonus.”

“It’s useless, Second,” Fsha-fsha answered for me. “Danger is searching for a magic flower that only grows in one special garden, at the hub of the Galaxy.”

After a couple of weeks of job-hunting, we signed on as scrapers on a Center-bound tub crewed by small, damp dandies from the edge of Center. That was the only berth a highbrow Center skipper would consider handing a bar-barian from what they called the Out-worlds. It was a long cruise, and as far as I could tell, the jobs that fell to a scraper on a Center ship were just as dirty as on any Outworld tub.

On our next cruise, we found ourselves stranded on a backwater world by a broken-down guidance system on the rotting hulk we had shipped in on. We waited for a berth outbound for a month, then took service under a local constabulary boss as mercenaries. We did a lot of jumping around the planet, marching in ragged jungle and eating inedible rations, and in the end barely got clear with our hides intact when the constabulary turned out to be a dacoit force. I made one interesting discovery; my sorting skill came in handy in using the bill-hook machetes issued to the troops. After one or two small run-ins, I had keyed-in a whole set of reflex responses that made me as good as the bat-talion champion.

Usually, though, we didn’t see much of the planets we visited. It was normal practice, all across the Galaxy, for a world to channel all its space-faring commerce and traffic through a single port, for economy of facilities and ease of control. The ports I saw were like ports in all times and climes: cities without personality, reduced to the lowest common denominator of the thousand breeds of being they served. After that, we found another slot, and another after that, on a small, fast lugger from Thlinthor; and on that jump we had a change in luck. 3

I was sound asleep in the off-watch cubbyhole I rated as a scraper when the alarm sirens went off. It took me thirty seconds to roll out and get across the deck to the screens where Fsha-fsha and half a dozen other on-watch crewmen were gaping at a sight that you only see once in a lifetime in Deep Space: a derelict hulk, adrift among the stars. This one was vast-and you could tell at one glance that she was old. . . . We were five hundred miles apart, closing on courses that were only slightly skew; that made two miracles. We hove-to ten miles from her and took a good look, while the power officer conferred with Command Deck. Then the word came through to resume course.

“Huh?” Both Fsha-fsha and I swiveled on him. From the instant I’d seen the hulk, visions of prize-money had been dancing in my head like sugarplums.

“He’s not going to salvage her?” Fsha-fsha came as close to yelling as his mild nature would let him.

The power officer gave him a fishy look from fishy eyes in a fishy face. Like the rest of the crew, he was an amphibian who slept in a tank of salty water for three hours at a stretch-and like all his tribe, he was an agoraphobe to the last feathery scale on his rudimentary rudder fin. “It ith not practical,” he said coldly.

“That tub’s fifty thousand years old if she’s a day,” Fsha--fsha protested.

“And I’m a mud-puppy if she’s not a Riv Surveyor! She’ll be loaded with Pre-collapse star maps! There’ll be data aboard her that’s been lost since before Thlinthor lofted her first satellite!”

“How would you propoth that we acthelerate thuch a math as that to interthtellar velothity?” he put the question to us. “The hulk outweigth uth a million to one. Our engines were not dethigned for thuch threthes.”

“She looks intact,” I said. “Maybe her engines are still in working order.”

“Tho?”

“We can put a prize crew aboard her and bring her in under her own power.”

The Thlinthorian tucked his head down between his shoulder plates, his version of a shudder.

“We Thlinthorians have no tathte for thuch exth-ploiths,” he said. “Our mithion is the thafe delivery of conthigned cargo-”

“You don’t have to go out on the hull,” Fsha-fsha said. “Danger and I will volunteer.”

The power officer goggled his eyes at us and conferred with Command Deck. After a few minutes of talk word came through that his Excellency the Captain was agreeable.

“One stipulation,” I said. “We’ll do the dirty work; but we take a quarter-share between us.”

The captain made a counter-offer of a twentieth share each. We compromised on a tenth.

“I don’t like it,” Fsha-fsha told me. “He gave in too easily.”

We suited up and took a small boat across to the old ship. She was a glossy brown ovoid about half a mile in diameter. Matching up with her was like landing on a planetoid. We found a hatch and a set of outside controls that let us into a dusty, cavernous hold. From there we went on through passenger quarters, recreation areas, technical labs and program rooms. In what looked like an armory, Fsha-fsha and I looked over a treasure-house of sophisticated personal offense and defense devices. Everything was in perfect order; and nowhere, then or later, did we ever find a bone of her crew, or any hint of what had happened to her.

A call from the captain on the portable communicator reminded us sharply that we had a job to do.

We followed a passage big enough to drive a moving van through, found the engine room, about the size of Grand Central Station. The generators ranged down the center of it were as massive as four-story apartment buildings. I whistled when I saw them, but Fsha-fsha took it in stride.

“I’ve seen bigger,” he said. “Let’s check out the system.”

It took us four hours to work out the meaning of the oversized controls ranged in a circular console around a swiveled chair the size of a bank vault. But the old power plant started up with as sweet a rumble as if it had been in use every day.

After a little experimental jockeying, I got the big hull aligned on course coordinates and fed the power to the generators. As soon as we were up to cruise velocity, His Excellency the Captain ordered us back aboard. “Who are you sending over to relieve us?” I asked him.

“You may leave that detail to my discrethion,” he told me in a no-argument tone.

“I can’t leave this power section unmanned,” I said. He bugged his eyes at me on the four-inch screen of the pocket communicator and repeated his order, louder, with quotations from the Universal Code.

“I don’t like it,” Fsha-fsha said. “But I’m afraid we haven’t got much choice.”

Back aboard the mother-ship, our reception was defi-nitely cool. Word had gotten around that we’d pigged an extra share of the goodies. That suited me all right. The Thlinthorians weren’t the kind who inspired much in the way of affection.

When we were well inside the Thlinthorian system the power officer called Fsha-fsha and me in and showed us what was probably a smile.

“I confeth I entertained a thertain thuthpithion of you both,” he confided.

“But now that we have arrived in the Home Thystem with our thuperb prize thafely in the thlave orbit, I thee that my cauthion was exthethive. Gentlemen, join me in a drink!”

We accepted the invitation, and he poured out nice-sized tumblers of wine. I was just reaching for mine when Fsha--fsha jostled the table and sloshed wine from the glasses. The power officer waved aside his apologies and turned to ring for a mess-boy to mop up the puddle. In the instant his back was turned, Fsha-fsha dropped a small pellet in our host’s drink, where it dissolved instantly. We all sat smiling benignly at each other while the small Thlinthorian servant mopped up, then lifted our glasses and swallowed. Fsha--fsha gulped his down whole. I took a nice swallow of mine, nodded my appreciation and took another. Our host chugalugged and poured another round. We sipped this one; he watched us and we watched him. I saw his eyes wander to the time-scale on the wall. Fsha-fsha looked at it, too.

“How long does it take your stuff to work?” he inquired pleasantly of the Thlinthorian. The latter goggled his eyes, made small choking noises, then, in a strangled voice said: “A quarter of an hour.”

Fsha-fsha nodded. “I can feel it, a little,” he said. “We both belted a couple of null-pills before we came up, just in case you had any funny stuff you wanted to try. How do you feel?”

“Not well,” the fish-mouth swallowed air. “I cannot control my . . . thpeech!”

“Right. Now, tell us all about everything. Take your time. It’ll be an hour or two before we hit Planetary Control. . . .”

4

Fsha-fsha and I reached the port less than ten minutes behind the boat we had trailed in from where our ship and the Riv vessel were parked, a hundred thousand miles out. We found the captain already at the mutual-congratulation stage with the portmaster. His already prominent eyes nearly rolled down his scaled cheeks when he saw us.

“Perhaps the captain forgot to mention that he owes Captain Danger and myself a tenth-share in the prize,” Fsha-fsha said, after the introductions were over.

“That’s a prepothterouth falthhood!” the officer started, but Fsha-fsha cut him off by producing a pocket recorder of a type allowable in every law court in the Bar. The scene that followed lacked that sense of close comradeship so desirable in captain-crew relationships, but there was nothing our former commander could do but go along. Afterward, in the four-room suite we treated ourselves to to rest up in, Fsha-fsha said, “Ah, by the way, Danger, I happened to pick up a little souvenir aboard that Riv tub-” He did something complicated with the groont-hide va-lise he carried his personal gear in and took out a small packet which opened out into a -crisscross of flat, black straps with a round pillbox in the center.

“I checked it out,” he said, sounding like a kid with a new bike. “This baby is something. A personal body shield. Wear it under your tunic. Sets up a field nothing gets through!”

“Nifty,” I agreed, and worked the slides on the bottom of my kit bag. “I took a fancy to this little jewel.” I held up my memento. It was a very handsome jeweled wristlet, which just fit around my neck.

“Uh-huh, pretty,” Fsha-fsha said. “This harness of mine is so light you don’t know you’re wearing it-”

“It’s not only pretty, it’s a sense-booster,” I interrupted his paean. “It lowers the stimulus-response threshold for sight, hearing and touch.”

“I guess we out-traded old Slinth-face after all,” Fsha--fsha said, after we’d each checked out the other’s keepsake. “This squares the little finesse he tried with the sleepy-pills.”

The salvage authorities made us wait around for almost a month, but since they were keeping forty Thlinthorian crew members waiting, too, in the end they had to publish the valuation and pay off all hands. Between us, Fsha-fsha and I netted more cash than the lifetime earnings of a spacer. We shipped out the same day, a short hop to Hrix, a human-occupied world in a big twenty-seven-planet system only half a light from Thlinthor. It seemed like a good idea not to linger around town after the payoff. On Hrix, we shopped for a vessel of our own; something small, and superfast. We still had over two thousand lights to cover.

Hrix was a good place to ship-hunt. It had been a major shipbuilding world for a hundred thousand years, since before the era known as the Collapse when the original Central Empire folded-and incidentally gave the upstart tribe called Man its chance to spread out over the Galaxy. For two weeks we looked at brand-new ships, good-as-new second-and third-and tenth-hand jobs, crawled over hulls, poked into power sections, kicked figurative tires in every shipyard in town, and were no further along than the day we started. The last evening, Fsha-fsha and I were at a table under the lanterns swinging from the low branches of the Heo trees in the drinking garden attached to our inn, taking over the day’s frustrations.

“These new hulls we’ve been looking at,” Fsha-fsha said; “mass-produced junk; not like the good old days-”

“The old stuff isn’t much, either,” I countered. “They were built to last, and at those crawl-speeds, they had to.”

“Anything we can afford, we don’t want,” Fsha-fsha summed it up. “And anything we want, costs too much.”

The landlord who was refilling our wine jug spoke up. “If you gentlebeings are looking for something a little out of the usual line, I have an old grand-uncle-fine old chap, full of lore about the old times-he’s over three hundred you know-who still dabbles in buying and selling. There’s a hull in his yard that might be just what the sirs are look-ing for, with a little fixing up-”

We managed to break into the pitch long enough to find out where the ship was, and after emptying our jug, took a walk down there. It looked like every junkyard I’ve ever seen. The place was grown with weeds taller than I was, and the sales office was a salvaged escape blister, with flowers growing in little clay pots in the old jet orifices. There was a light on, though, and we pounded until an old crookbacked fellow with a few wisps of pink hair and a jaw like a snapping turtle poked his head out. We explained what we wanted, and who had sent us. He cackled and rubbed his hands and allowed as how we’d come to the right place. By this time we were both thinking we’d made a mistake. There was nothing here but junk so old that even the permalloy was beginning to corrode. But we followed him back between towering stacks of obsolete parts and assemblies, over heaps of warped hull-plates, through a maze of stacked atmosphere fittings to what looked like a thicket dense enough for Bre’r Rabbit to hide in.

“If you sirs’ll just pull aside a few tendrils of that danged wire vine,” the old boy suggested. Fsha-fsha had his mouth open to decline, but out of curiosity, I started stripping away a finger-thick creeper, and back in the green-black gloom I saw a curve of dull-polished metal. Fsha-fsha joined in, and in five minutes we had uncovered the stern of what had once been elegance personified.

“She was built by Sanjio,” the oldster told us. “See there?” he pointed at an ornate emblem, still jewel-bright against the tarnished metal. Fsha-fsha ran his hand over curve of the boat’s flank, peered along the slim-lined hull. Our eyes met.

“How much?” he asked.

“You’ll put her in shape, restore her,” the old man said. “You wouldn’t cut her up for the heavy metal in her jump fields, or convert her for rock-prospecting.” It was a question. We both yelled no loud enough to satisfy him.

The old man nodded. “I like you boys’ looks,” he said. “I wouldn’t sell her to just anybody. She’s yours.”

5

It took us a day to cut the boat free of the growth that had been crawling over her for eighty years. The old man, whose name was Knoute, managed, with curses and pleas and some help from a half-witted lad named Dune, to start up a long-defunct yard-tug and move the boat into a cleared space big enough to give us access to her. Fsha-fsha and I went through her from stem to stern. She was complete, original right down to the old logbook still lying in the chart table. It gave us some data to do further research on. I spent an afternoon in the shipping archives in the city, and that evening at dinner read the boat’s history to Fsha-fsha:

“Gleerim, fifty-five feet, one hundred and nine tons. Built by Sanjio, master builder to Prince Ahax, as color-bearer to the Great House, in the year Qon.

. . .”

“That would be just over four thousand years ago,” Knoute put in.

“In her maiden year, the Prince Ahax raced her at Poylon, and at Gael, and led a field of thirty-two to win at Fonteraine. In her fortieth year, with a long record of brilliant victories affixed to her crestplate, the boat was sold at auction by the hard-pressed and aged prince. Purchased by a Vidian dealer, she was passed on to the Solarch of Trie, whose chief of staff, recognizing the patrician lines of the vessel, refitted her as his personal scout. Captured nineteen years later in a surprise raid by the Alzethi, the boat was mounted on a wooden-wheeled platform and hauled by chained dire-beasts in a triumphal procession through the streets of Alz. Thereafter, for more than a century, the boat lay abandoned on her rotting cart at the edge of the noisome town.

“Greu of Balgreu found the forgotten boat, and set a crew to cutting her out of her bed of tangled wildwood. Fancying the vessel’s classic lines, the invading chieftain removed her to a field depot, where his shipfitters ham-mered in vain at her locked port. Greu himself hacked in at her crestplate, desiring it as an ornament, but succeeded only in shattering his favorite dress short-sword. In his rage, he ordered flammable rubble to be heaped on the boat, soaked with volatiles, and fired. After he razed the city and departed with his troops, the boat again lay in neglect for two centuries. Found by the Imperial Survey Team of His Effulgent Majesty, Lleon the fortieth, she was returned to Ahax, where she was refitted and returned to service as color-bearer to the Imperial House.”

“That was just her first days,” Knoute said. “She’s been many places since then, seen many sights. And the vessel doesn’t exist to this day that can outrun her.”

It took us three months to repair, refit, clean, polish, tune and equip the boat to suit ourselves and old Knoute. But in the end even he had to admit that the Prince Ahax himself couldn’t have done her more proud. And when the time came to pay him, he waved the money aside.

“I won’t live to spend it,” he said. “And you boys have bled yourselves white, doing her up. You’ll need what you’ve got left to cruise her as she should be cruised, wanting nothing. Take her, and see that the lines you add to her log don’t shame her history.”

6

Two thousand light-years is a goodly distance, even when you’re riding the ravening stream of raw power that Jongo III ripped out of the fabric of the continuum and convert-ed to acceleration that flung us inward at ten, a hundred, a thousand times the velocity of propagation of radiation. We covered the distance in jumps of a month or more, while the blaze of stars thickened across the skies ahead like clotting cream. We saw worlds where intelligent life had existed for thousands of centuries, planets that were the graveyards of cultures older than the dinosaurs of Earth. When our funds ran low, we made the discovery that even here at the heart of the Galaxy, there were people who would pay us a premium for fast delivery of passengers and freight.

Along the way we encountered life-forms that ranged from intelligent gnat-swarms to the titanic slumbering swamp-minds of Buroom. We found men on a hundred worlds, some rugged pioneers barely holding their own against hostile environments of ice or desert or competing flora and fauna, others the polished and refined products of millenia-old empires that had evolved cultural machinery as formal and complex as a lifelong ballet. There were worlds where we were welcomed to cities made of jade and crystal, and worlds where sharpers with faces like Neapolitan street-urchins plotted to rob and kill us; but our Riv souvenirs served us well, and a certain instinct for survival got us through.

And the day came when Zeridajh swam into our forward screens, a misty green world with two big moons.

7

The Port of Radaj was a multilevel composition of gardens, pools, trees, glass-smooth paving, sculpture-clean facades, with the transient shipping parked on dispersed pads like big toys set out for play. Fsha-fsha and I dressed up in our best shore-going clothes and rode a toy train in to a country-club style terminal.

The landing formalities were minimal; a gray-haired smoothie who reminded me of an older Sir Orfeo welcomed us to the planet, handed us illuminated handmaps that showed us our position as a moving point of green light, and asked how he could be of service.

“I’d like to get news of someone,” I told him. “A Lady-the Lady Raire.”

“Of what house?”

“I don’t know; but she was traveling in the company of Lord Desroy.”

He directed us to an information center that turned out to be manned by a computer. After a few minutes of close questioning and a display of triograms, the machine voice advised me that the lady I sought was of the House of Ancinet-Chanore, and that an interview with the head of the house would be my best bet for further information.

“But is she here?” I pressed the point. “Did she get back home safely?”

The computer repeated its advice and added that transportation was available outside gate twelve.

We crossed the wide floor of the terminal and came out on a platform where a gorgeous scarlet and silver inlaid porcelain car waited. We climbed in, and a discreet voice whispered an inquiry as to our destination.

“The Ancinet-Chanore estate,” I told it, and it clicked and whooshed away along a curving, soaring avenue that lofted us high above wooded hills and rolling acres of lawn with glass-smooth towers in pastel colors pushing up among the crowns of multi-thousand-year-old Heo trees. After a fast half-hour run, the car swooped down an exit ramp and pulled up in front of an imposing gate. A gray-liveried man on duty there asked us a few questions, played with a console inside his glass-walled cubicle, and advised us that the Lord Pastaine was at leisure and would be happy to grant us an interview.

“Sounds like a real VIP,” Fsha-fsha commented as the car tooled up the drive and deposited us at the edge of a ter-race fronting a sculptured facade.

“Maybe it’s just a civilized world,” I suggested. Another servitor in gray greeted us and ushered us inside, through a wide hall where sunlight slanting down through a faceted ceiling shed a rosy glow on luminous wood and brocaded hangings, winked from polished sculptures perched in shadowy recesses. And I thought of the Lady Raire, coming from this, living in a cave grubbed out of a dirt-bank, singing to herself as she planted wild flowers along the paths. . . . We came out into a patio, crossed that and went along a colonnaded arcade, emerged at the edge of a stretch of blue-violet grass as smooth as a billiard table, running down across a wide slope to a line of trees with the sheen of water beyond them. We followed a tiled path beside flowering shrubs, rounded a shallow pool where a fountain jetted liquid sunshine into the air, arrived at a small covered ter-race, where a vast, elderly man with a face like a clean-shaven Moses rested in an elaborately padded chair.

“The Lord Pastaine,” the servant said casually and stepped to adjust the angle of the old gentleman’s chair to a more conversational position. Its occupant looked us over impassively, said, “Thank you, Dos,” and -indicated a pair of benches next to him. I introduced myself and Fsha-fsha and we sat. Dos murmured an offer of refreshment and we asked for a light wine. He went away and Lord Pastaine gave me a keen glance.

“A Man from a very distant world,” he said. “A Man who is no stranger to violence.” His look turned to Fsha--fsha. “And a being equally far from his home-world, tested also in the crucible of -adversity.” He pushed his lips out and looked thoughtful. “And what brings such adventurers here, to ancient Zeridajh, a world in the twilight of its greatness, to call upon an aged idler, dozing away the long afternoon of his life?”

“I met a lady, once, Milord,” I said. “She was a long way from home-as far as I am, now, from mine. I tried to help her get home, but . . . things went wrong.” I took a deep breath. “I’d like to know, sir, if the Lady Raire is here, safe, on Zeridajh.”

His face changed, turned to wood. “The Lady Raire?” His voice had a thin, strained quality. “What do you know of her?”

“I was hired by Sir Orfeo,” I said. “To help on the hunt. There was an accident. . . .” I gave him a brief account of the rest of the story. “I tried to find a lead to the H’eeaq,” I finished. “But with no luck.” It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him the rest, about Huvile and the glimpse I’d gotten of her, three years before, on Drath; but for some reason I didn’t say it. The old man watched me all the while I talked. Then he shook his head.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said, “that I have no good tidings for you.”

“She never came back, then?”

His mouth worked. He started to speak, twice, then said, “No! The devoted child whom I knew was spirited away by stealth, by those whom I trusted, and never returned!”

I let that sink in. The golden light across the wide lawn seemed to fade suddenly to a tawdry glare. The vision of the empty years rose up in front of me.

“ . . . send out a search expedition,” Fsha-fsha was saying. “It might be possible-”

“The Lady Raire is dead!” the old man raised his voice. “Dead! Let us speak of other matters!”

The servant brought the wine, and I tried to sip mine and make small talk, but it wasn’t a success. Across the lawn a servant in neat gray livery was walking a leashed animal along a path that sparkled blood-red in the afternoon sun. The animal didn’t seem to like the idea of a stroll. He planted all four feet and pulled backward. The man stopped and mopped at his forehead while the reluctant pet sat on his haunches and yawned. When he did that, I was sure. I hadn’t seen a cat for almost three years, but I knew this one. His name was Eureka.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ten minutes later, as Fsha-fsha and I crossed the lawn toward the house, a broad-shouldered man with curled gray hair and an elegantly simple tunic emerged from a side path ahead.

“You spoke to His Lordship of Milady Raire?” he said in a low voice as we came up.

“That’s right.”

He jerked his head toward the house. “Come along to where we can talk quietly. Perhaps we can exchange information to our mutual advantage.” He led us by back passages into the deep, cool gloom of a room fitted up like an office for a planetary president. He told us his name was Sir Tanis, and got out a flagon and glasses and poured a round.

“The girl reappeared three months ago,” he said. “Unfortunately,” he added solemnly, “she is quite insane. Her first act was to disavow all her most hallowed obliga-tions to the House of Ancinet-Chanore. Now, I gather from the few scraps of advice that reached my ears-”

“Dos talks as well as listens, I take it,” I said.

“A useful man,” Sir Tanis agreed crisply. “As I was saying, I deduce that you know something of Milady’s activities while away from home. Perhaps you can tell me something which might explain the sad disaffection that afflicts her.”

“Why did Lord Pastaine lie to us?” I countered.

“The old man is in his dotage,” he snapped. “Perhaps, in his mind, she is dead.” His lips quirked in a mirthless smile. “He’s unused to rebellion among the very young.” The brief smile dropped. “But she didn’t stop with asserting her contempt for His Lordship’s doddering counsels; she spurned as well the advice of her most devoted friends!”

“Advice on what?”

“Family matters,” Tanis said shortly. “But you were about to tell me what’s behind her incomprehensible behavior.”

“Was I?”

“I assumed as much-I confided in you!” Tanis looked thwarted. “See here, if it’s a matter of, ah, compensation for services rendered . . .”

“Maybe you’d better give me a little more background.”

He looked at me sternly. “As you’re doubtless aware, the House of Ancinet-Chanore is one of the most distinguished on the planet,” he said.

“We trace our lineage back through eleven thousand years, to Lord Ancinet of Traval. Natu-rally, such a house enjoys a deserved preeminence among its peers. And the head of that house must be an individual of the very highest attainments. Why . . .” he looked indignant, “if the seat passed to anyone but myself, in a generation-less! we should deteriorate to the status of a mere fossil, lacking in all finesse in the arts that mark a truly superior seat!”

“What’s the Lady Raire got to do with all that?”

“Surely you’re aware. Why else are you here?”

“Pretend we’re not.”

“The girl is an orphan,” Sir Tanis said shortly. “Of the primary line. In addition . . .” he sounded -exasperated, “ . . . all the collateral heirs-all!

are either dead, exiled, or otherwise disqualified in the voting!”

“So?”

“She-a mere girl, utterly lacking in experience-other than whatever bizarre influences she may have come under during her absence-holds in her hands five ballots! Five, out of nine! She-ineligible herself, of course, on a number of counts-controls the selection of the next head of this house! Why else do you imagine she was kidnapped?”

“Kidnapped?”

He nodded vigorously. “And since her return, she’s not only rebuffed my most cordial offers of -association-but has alienated every other conceivable candidate as well. In fact . . .” he lowered his voice, “it’s my personal belief the girl intends to lend her support to an Outsider!”

“Sir Tanis, I guess all this family politics business is pret-ty interesting to you, but it’s over my head like a wild pitch. I came here to see Milady Raire, to find out if she was safe and well. First I’m told she’s dead, then that she’s lost her mind. I’d like to see for myself. If you could arrange-”

“No,” he said flatly. “That is quite impossible.”

“May I ask why?”

“Sir Revenat would never allow it. He closets her as closely as a prize breeding soumi.”

“And who’s Sir Revenat?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Her husband,” he said. “Who else?”

2

“Tough,” Fsha-fsha consoled me as we walked along the echoing corridor, following the servant Sir Tanis had assigned to lead us back into the outside world. “Not much joy there; but at least she’s home, and alive.”

We crossed an inner court where a fountain made soft music, and a door opened along the passage ahead. An elderly woman, thin, tight-corseted, dressed in a chiton of shimmering white, spoke to the servant, who faded away like smoke. She turned and looked at me with sharp eyes, studied Fsha-fsha’s alien face.

“You’ve come to help her,” she said to him in a dry, husky voice. “You know, and you’ve come to her aid.”

“Ah . . . whose aid, Milady?” he asked her.

The old lady grimaced and said: “The Lady Raire. She’s in mortal danger; that’s why her father ordered her sent away, on his deathbed! But none of them will believe me.”

“What kind of danger is she in?”

“I don’t know-but it’s there, thick in the air around her! Poor child, so all alone.”

“Milady,” I stepped forward. “I’ve come a long way. I want to see her before I go. Can you arrange it?”

“Of course, you fool, else why would I have lain here in wait like a mud-roach over a wine-arbor?” She returned her attention to Fsha-fsha.

“Tonight-at the Gathering of the House. Milady will be present; even Sir Revenat wouldn’t dare defy custom so far as to deny her; and you shall be there, too! Listen! This is what you must do. . . .”

3

Half an hour later, we were walking along a tiled street of craftsmen’s shops that was worn to a pastel smoothness that blended with the soft-toned facades that lined it. There were flowers in beds and rows and urns and boxes and in hanging trays that filtered the early light over open doorways where merchants fussed over displays of goods. I could smell fresh-baked bread and roasting coffee, and leather and wood-smoke. It was an atmosphere that made the events inside the ancient House of Ancinet-Chanore seem like an afternoon with the Red Queen.

“If you ask me, the whole bunch of them is round the bend,” Fsha-fsha said. “I think the old lady had an idea I was in touch with the spirit world.”

On a bench in front of a carpenter’s stall, a man sat tapping with a mallet and chisel at a slab of -tangerine-colored wood. He looked up and grinned at me.

“As pretty a bit of emberwood as ever a man laid steel to, eh?” he said.

“Strange,” Fsha-fsha said. “You only see hand labor on backward worlds and rich ones. On all the others, a machine would be squeezing a gob of plastic into whatever shape was wanted.”

In another stall, an aged woman was looming a rug of rich-colored fibers. Across the way, a boy sat in an open doorway, polishing what looked like a second-hand silver chalice. Up ahead, I saw the tailor shop the old woman-Milady Bezaille her name was-had told us about. An old fellow with a face like an elf was rolling out a bolt of green cloth with a texture like hand-rubbed metal. He looked up and ducked his head as we came in. “Ah, the sirs desire a change of costume?”

Fsha-fsha was already feeling the green stuff. “How about an outfit made of this?”

“Ah, the being has an eye,” the old fellow cackled. “Radiant, is it not?

Loomed by Y’sallo, of course.”

I picked out a black like a slice of midnight in the Fringe. The tailor flipped up the end of the material and whirled it around my shoulders, stepped back and studied the effect thoughtfully.

“I see the composition as an expression of experience,” he nodded. “Yes, it’s possible. Stark, unadorned-but for the handsome necklace-Riv work is it not? Yes, a state-ment of self-affirmation, an incitement to discipline.”

He went to work measuring and clucking. When he started cutting, we crossed a small bridge to a park where there were tables on the lawn beside a small lemon-yellow dome. We sat and ate pastries and then went along to a shoemaker, who sliced into glossy hides and in an hour had fitted new boots to both of us. When we got back to the tailor shop, the new clothes were waiting. We asked directions to a refresher station, and, after an ion-bath and a little attention to my hair and Fsha-fsha’s gill fringes, tried out our new costumes.

“You’re an impressive figure,” Fsha-fsha said admir-ingly. “In spite of your decorations, your size and mus-cular development give you a certain animal beauty; and I must say the little tailor set you off to best advantage.”

“The high collar helps,” I conceded. “But I’m afraid the eye-patch spoils the effect.”

“Wrong; it enhances the impression of an elegant corsair.”

“Well, if the old Tree could see you now, it would have to admit you’re the fanciest nut that ever dropped off it,” I said.

It was twilight in the parklike city. We still had an hour to kill, and decided to use it in a stroll around the Old Town-the ancient marketplace that was the original center of the city. It was a picturesque place, and we were just in time to see the merchants folding up their stalls, and streaming away to the drinking terraces under the strung lights among the trees. The sun set in a glory of painted clouds; the brilliant spread of stars that covered the sky like luminous clotted cream was obscured by the overcast. The empty streets dimmed into deep shadow, as we turned our steps toward the gates of the estate Ancinet-Chanore.

4

My sense-booster was set at 1.3 normal; any higher set-ting made ordinary sound and light levels painful. For the last hundred feet I had been listening to the gluey wheeze that was the sound of human lungs, coming from some-where up ahead. I touched Fsha-fsha’s arm. “In the alley,” I said softly. “Just one man.”

He stepped ahead of me, and in the same instant a small, lean figure sprang into view twenty feet ahead, stopped in a half-crouch facing us, with his feet planted wide and his gun hand up and aimed. I saw a

-lightning-wink and heard the soft whap! of a filament pistol. Fsha-fsha oof!ed as he took the bolt square in the chest; a corona outlined his figure in vivid blue as the harness bled the energy off to the ground. Then he was on the assassin; his arm rose and fell with the sound of a hammer hitting a grapefruit, and the would-be killer tumbled backward and slid down the wall to sprawl on the pavement. I went flat against the wall, flipped the booster up to max, heard nothing but the normal night sounds of a city.

“Clear,” I said. Fsha-fsha leaned over the little man.

“I hit him too hard,” he said. “He’s dead.”

“Maybe the old lady was right,” I said.

“Or maybe Sir Tanis wasn’t as foolish as he sounded,” Fsha-fsha grunted.

“Or Milord Pastaine as senile as they claimed.”

“A lot of maybes,” I said. “Let’s dump him out of sight and get out of here, in case a cleanup squad is following him up.”

We lifted him and tossed him in the narrow passage he had picked as a hiding place.

“Which way?” Fsha-fsha asked.

“Straight ahead, to the main gates,” I said.

“You’re still going there-after this?”

“More than ever. Somebody made a mistake, sending a hit man out. They made a second not making it stick. We’ll give them a chance to go for three.”

5

The Lady Bezaille had given instructions to the gate-keeper; he bowed us through like visiting royalty into an atmosphere of lights and sounds and movement. The grand celebration known as the Gathering of the House seemed to be going on all over the grounds and throughout the house. We made our way through the throngs of beautiful people, looking for a familiar face. Sir Tanis popped up and gave a lifted-eyebrow look, but there wasn’t enough surprise there to make him the man behind the assassination attempt.

“Captain Danger; Sir Fsha-fsha; I confess I didn’t expect to see you here . .

.” He was aching to ask by whose order we were included in the select gathering, but apparently his instinct for the oblique approach kept him from asking.

“It seemed the least I could do,” I said in what I hoped was a cryptic tone.

“By the way, has Milady Raire arrived yet?”

“Ha! She and Lord Revenat will make a dramatic entrance after the rest of us have been allowed to consume ourselves in restless patience for a time, you can be sure.”

He led us to the nearest refreshment server, which dispensed foamy concoctions in big tulip glasses; we stood on the lawn and fenced with him verbally for a few minutes, parted with an implied understanding that whatever hap-pened, our weight would go to the side of justice-what-ever that meant.

Milady Bezaille appeared, looked us over and gave a sniff that seemed to mean approval of our new finery. I had a feeling she’d regretted her earlier rash impulse of inviting two space tramps to the grand soiree of the year.

“Look sharp, now,” she cautioned me. “When Milord Revenat deigns to appear he’ll be swamped at once with the attentions of certain unwholesome elements of the House; that will be your chance to catch a glimpse of Milady Raire. See if you read in her face other than pain and terror!”

A slender, dandified lad sauntered over after the beldame had whisked away.

“I see the noble lady is attempting to influence you,” he said. “Beware of her, sirs. She is not of sound mind.”

“She was just tipping us off that the punch in number three bowl is spiked with hand-blaster pellets,” I assured him. He gave me a quick, sideways look.

“What, ah, did she say to you about Sir Fane?”

“Ah-hah!” I nodded.

“Don’t believe it!” he snapped. “Lies! Damnable lies!”

I edged closer to him. “What about Sir Tanis?” I mut-tered. He shifted his eyes. “Watch him. All his talk about unilateral revisionism and ancillary line vigor-pure super-stition.”

“And Lord Revenat?”

He looked startled. “You don’t mean-” he turned and scuttled away without finishing the sentence.

“Danger-are you sure this is the right place we’re in?” Fsha-fsha whispered.

“If the Lady Raire is anything like the rest of this menagerie. . . .”

“She isn’t,” I said. “She-”

I stopped talking as a stir ran through the little conversational groups around us. Across the lawn a servant in crimson livery was towing a floating floodlight along above the heads of a couple just descending a wide, shallow flight of steps from a landing terrace above. I hadn’t seen the heli arrive. The man was tall, wide-shouldered, trim, like all Zeridajhans, dressed in a form-fitting wine-colored outfit with an elaborate pectoral ornament suspended around his neck on a chain. The woman beside him was slim, elegantly gowned in silvery gauze, with her black hair piled high, intricately entwined in a jeweled coronet. I’d never seen her in jewels before but that perfect face, set in an expression that was the absence of all expression, was that of Milady Raire.

6

The crowd had moved in their direction as if by a com-mon impulse to rush up and greet the -newcomers; but the movement halted and the restless murmur of chatter resumed, but with a new, nervous note that was evident in the shrill cackle of laughter and the over-hearty waving of arms. I made my way across through the crowd, watching the circle of impressively clad males collecting around the newcomers. They moved off in a body, with a great deal of exuberant joking that sounded about as sincere as a losing politician’s congratulatory telegram to the winner. I trailed along at a distance of ten yards, while the group swirled around a drink dispenser and broke up into a central group and half a dozen squeezed-out satellites. The lucky winners steered their prize on an evasion course, dropping a few members along the way when clumsy footwork involved them in exchanges of amenities with other, less favored groups. In five minutes, the tall man in the burgundy tights was fenced into a corner by half a dozen hardy victors, while the lady in silver stood for the moment alone at a few yards distance.

I looked at her pale, aloof face, still as youthful and unlined as it had been seven years ago, when we last talked together under the white sun of Gar 28. I took a deep breath and started across the lawn toward her. She didn’t notice me until I was ten feet from her; then she turned slowly and her eyes went across me as coolly as the first breath of winter. They came back again, and this time flickered-and held on me. Suddenly I was conscious of the scar, two-thirds concealed by the high collar of my jacket, that marked the corner of my jaw-and of the black patch over my right eye. Her eyes moved over me, back to my face. They widened; her lips parted, then I was standing before her.

“Milady Raire,” I said, and heard the hoarse note in my voice.

“Can . . . can it be . . . you?” Her voice was the faintest of whispers. A hard hand took my arm, spun me around.

“I do not believe, sir,” a furious voice snarled, “that you have the privilege of approach to Her -Ladyship-” He got that far before his eyes took in what they were looking at; his voice trailed off. His mouth hung open. He dropped my arm and took a step back. It was the man named Huvile. 7

“Sir Revenat,” someone started, and let it drop. I could almost hear his mind racing, looking for the right line to take. But nobody, even someone who had only talked to me for five minutes three years before, could pretend to have forgotten my face: black-skinned, scarred, one-eyed.

“It . . . it . . . I . . .”

“Sir Revenat,” I said as smoothly as I could under the circumstances, and gave him a stiff little half-bow. That passed the ball to him. He could play it any way he liked from there.

“Why, why . . .” He took my arm, in a gentler grip this time. “My dear fellow! What an extraordinary pleasure. . . .” His eyes went to Milady Raire. She returned a look as impersonal as the carved face of a statue. She didn’t look at me.

“If you will excuse us, Milady,” Huvile/Revenat ducked his head and hustled me past her, and the silent crowd parted to let us through. 8

Inside a white damask room with a wall of glass through which the lights of the garden cast a soft polychrome glow, Huvile faced me. He looked a little different than he had the last time I had seen him, wearing the coarse kilt of a slave in the household of the Triarch of Drath. He had lost the gaunt look and was trimmed, manicured and polished like a prize--winning boar.

“You’ve . . . changed,” he said. “For a moment, I almost failed to recognize you.” His voice was hearty enough, but his eyes were as alert as a coiled rattler’s.

I nodded. “A year on the Triarch’s rafts have that effect.”

“The rafts?” He looked shocked. “But . . . but . . .”

“The penalty for freeing slaves,” I said. “And not being able to pay the fines.”

“But . . . I assumed . . .”

“Everything I owned was on my boat,” I said.

His face was turning darker, as if pressure was building up behind it. “Your boat . . . I . . . ah . . .” he made an effort to get hold of himself. “See here, didn’t you direct, ah, the young woman to lift ship at once?” His look told me he was waiting to see if I’d pick up the impersonal reference to the Lady Raire. I shook my head and waited.

“But-she arrived a moment or two after I reached the port. You did send her?”

“Yes-”

“Of course,” he hurried on. “She seemed most dis-traught, poor creature. I explained to her that a kindly stranger-yourself-had purchased my freedom-and presumably hers as well-and while we spoke, a -creature appeared; a ghastly-looking little beggar. The unfortunate girl was terrified by the sight of him; I drove the thing off, and then . . . and then she insisted that we lift at once!” Huvile shook his head, looking grieved. “I understand now; in her frenzy to make good her escape, she abandoned you, her unknown savior. . . .” A thought hit him, sharpened his eyes. “You hadn’t, ah, personally known the poor child?”

“I saw her for a moment at the Triarch’s palace-from a distance.”

He sighed. His look got more comfortable. “A tragedy that your kindness was rewarded by such ingratitude. Believe me, sir, I am eternally in your debt! I acknowledge it freely. . . .” He lowered his voice. “But let us keep the details in confidence, between us. It would not be desirable, at this moment, to introduce a new factor, however extraneous, into the somewhat complex equations of House affairs.” He was getting expansive now. “We shouldn’t like my ability to reward you as you deserve suffer through any fallacious construction that might be put on matters, eh?”

“I take it you took the female slave under your wing,” I said. He gave me a sharp look. He would have liked her left out of the conversation.

“She would have needed help to get home,” I amplified.

“Ah, yes, I think I see now,” he smiled a sad, sweet smile. “You were taken with her beauty. But alas . . .” his eyes held on mine, “she died.”

“That’s very sad,” I said. “How did it happen?”

“My friend, wouldn’t it be better to forget her? Who knows what terrible pressures might not have influenced her to the despicable course she chose? Poor waif; she suffered greatly. Her death gave her surcease.” His expression became brisk. “And now, in what way can I serve you, sir? Tell me how I can make amends for the injustice done you.”

He talked some more, offered me the hospitality of the estate, a meal, even, delicately, money. His relief when I turned them down was obvious. Now that he saw I wasn’t going to be nasty about the little misunderstanding, his confidence was coming back. I let him ramble on. When he ran down, I said:

“How about an introduction to the lady in silver? The Lady Raire, I understand her name is?’

His face went hard. “That is impossible. The lady is not well. Strange faces upset her.”

“Too bad,” I said. “In that case, I guess there’s not much for me to stay around for.”

“Must you go? But of course if you have business matters requiring your attention, I mustn’t keep you.” He went across to an archway leading toward the front of the house; he was so eager to get rid of me the easy way that he almost fell down getting there. He didn’t realize I’d turned the opposite way and stepped back out onto the terrace, until I was already across it and heading across the lawn to where Milady Raire still stood alone, like a pale statue in the winking light of an illuminated fountain. 9

She watched me come across the lawn to her. I could hear the hurrying footsteps of Sir Revenat behind me, not quite running, heard someone intercept him, the babble of self-important voices. I walked up to her and my eyes held on her face; it was as rigid as a death mask.

“Milady, what happened after you left Drath?” I asked her without preamble.

“I-” she started and her eyes showed shock. “Then-on Drath-it was you-”

“You’re scared, Milady. They’re all scared of Huvile, but you most of all. Tell me why.”

“Billy Danger,” she said, and for an instant the iron discipline of her face broke, but she caught herself. “Fly, Billy Danger,” she whispered in English.

“Fly hence in the instant, ere thou, too, art lost, for nothing can rescue me!”

I heard feet coming up fast behind me and turned to see Sir Revenat, his face white with fury, masked by a ghastly grin.

“You are elusive, my friend,” he grated. His fingers were playing with the heavy ornament dangling on his chest, an ovoid with a half-familiar look. . .

. “I fear you’ve lost your way. The gate lies at the opposite end of the gardens.” His hand reached for me as if to guide me back to the path, but I leaned aside from it, turned to Milady Raire. I put out my hand as if to offer it to her, instead reached farther, ran my fingers down her silken side-and felt the slight, telltale lump there. She gasped and drew back. Huvile let out a roar and caught at my arm savagely. A concerted gasp had gone up from every mouth within gasping range.

“Barbarian wretch!” Huvile howled. “You’d lay hands on the person of a lady of the House of Ancinet Chanore . . .” the rest was just an inarticulate bellow backed up by a chorus of the same from the assembled spectators.

“Enough!” Huvile yelled. “This adventurer comes among us to mock the dignity and honor of this house, openly offers insult to a noble lady of the ancient line!” He whirled to face the crowd. “Then I’ll oblige him with a taste of the just fury of that line! Milords! Bring me my sword box!” He turned back to me, and there was red fury enough in his eyes for ten houses. He stepped close, put his face close to mine. His fingers played with the slave controller at his neck. I judged the distance for a jump, but he was ready with his finger on the control. And we both knew that a touch by anyone but himself would activate it.

“You saw,” he hissed. “You know her life is in my hands. If you expose me, she dies!”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The lords and ladies of the House of Ancinet-Chanore may have been out of touch with reality in some ways, but when it came to setting up the stage for a blood-duel on their fancy lawn under the gay lights, they were the soul of efficiency. While a ring of armed servants stood obtrusively around me, others hurried away and came back with a fancy inlaid box of darkly polished wood. Huvile lifted the lid with a flourish and took out a straight-bladed saber heavy enough to behead a peasant with. There was a lot of gold thread and jewel-work around the hilt, but it was a butcher’s weapon. Another one, just like it but without the jelly beans was trotted out for me.

Sir Tanis made the formal speech; he cited all the hallowed customs that surrounded the curious custom that allowed an irate Lord of the House to take a cleaver to anyone who annoyed him sufficiently, and then in a less pompous tone explained the rules to me. They weren’t much: we’d hack at each other until Sir Revenat was satisfied or dead.

“Man to man,” Sir Tanis finished his spiel. “The House of Ancinet-Chanore defends its honor with the ancient right of its strong arm! Let her detractors beware!”

Then the crowd backed off and the servants formed up a loose ring, fifty feet across. Huvile brandished his sword and his eyes ate me alive. Fsha-fsha took my jacket and leaned close to give me a last word of advice.

“Remember your Sorting training, Billy Danger! Key-in your response patterns to his attack modes! Play him until you read him like a glorm-bulb line! Then strike!”

“If I don’t make it,” I said, “find a way to tell them.”

“You’ll make it,” he said. “But-yeah-I’ll do my best.”

He withdrew at a curt command from Tanis, and Huvile moved out to meet me. He held the sword lightly, as if his wrist was used to handling it. I had an idea the upstart sir had spent a lot of hours practicing the elevating art of throwing his weight around. He moved in with the blade held low, pointed straight at me. I imitated his stance. He made a small feint and I slapped his blade with mine and moved back as he dropped his point and lunged and missed my thigh by an inch. I tried to blank my mind, key in his approach-feint-attack gambit to a side-jump-and-counter cut syndrome. It was hard to bring the pattern I wanted into clear focus without running through it, physically. I backed, made Huvile blink by doing the jump and cut in pantomime, two sword-lengths from contact distance. A nervous titter ran through the audience, but that was all right. I was pretty sure I’d set the response pattern I wanted to at least one of his approaches. But he had others.

He came after me, cautious now, checking me out. He tried a high thrust, a low cut, a one-two lunge past my guard. I backed shamelessly, for each attack tried to key-in an appropriate responseI felt myself whip to one side, slash in an automatic reaction to a repetition of his opening gambit. My point caught his sleeve and ripped through the wine-red cloth. So far so good. Huvile back-pedaled, then tried a furious frontal attack; I gave ground, my arm countering him with no conscious thought on my part. He realized the tactic was getting him nowhere and dropped his point, whipped it up suddenly as he dived forward. I caught it barely in time, deflected the blade over my right shoulder, and was chest to chest with him, our hilts locked together.

“It’s necessary for me to kill you,” he whispered. “You understand that it’s impossible for me to let you live.” His eyes looked mad; his free hand still gripped the controller. “If I die-she dies. And if I suspect you may be gaining-I plunge the lever home. Your only choice is to sacrifice yourself.”

He pushed me away and jabbed a vicious cut at me and then we were circling again. My brain seemed to be set in concrete. Huvile was nuts-no doubt about that. He had brazened his way into the midst of the House of Ancinet-Chanore on the strength of the invisible knife he held at Milady’s heart; and if he saw the game was up-the fragile game he’d nursed along for months now-he’d kill her with utter finality and in the most incredible agony, as the magnesium flare set in her heart burned its way through her ribs.

There was just one possibility. The Drathians had gone to a lot of trouble to link the life of the slave to the well-being of the master; but there was one inevitable weak spot. Even the most sophisticated circuitry couldn’t do its job after it was destroyed. I’d proven that; I had crushed Huvile’s controller under my foot-and he was still alive.

But on the other hand, maybe that had been a freak, a defective controller. Huvile had been two miles away at the time. And it was no special trick to rig an electronic device so that the cut-off of a carrier signal actuated a response in a receiver. . . .

There was sweat on my face, not all of it from the exercise. My only chance was to smash the controller and kill Huvile with the same stroke-and hope for the best. Because, win or lose, the Lady Raire was better dead than slave to this madman.

While these merry thoughts were racing through my mind, I was backing, feinting and parrying automatically. And suddenly Huvile’s blade dropped, flickered in at me and out again and I felt my right leg sag and go out from under me. I caught myself in time to counter an over-eager swing and strike back from one knee, but it was only a moment’s delay of the inevitable. I saw his arm swing back for the finishing strokeThere was swirl of silver, and the Lady Raire was at his side, clutching his sword arm-and then she crumpled, white-faced, as the controller’s automatic angina circuit clamped iron fingers on her heart. But it was enough. While Huvile staggered, off-balance, his free hand groping, I came up in a one-legged lunge. He saw me, brought his sword up and back, at the same time snatched for the controller. He was a fraction of a second late. My point struck it, burst it into chips, slammed on through bone and muscle and lodged in his spine. He fell slowly, with an amazed look on his face. I saw him hit; then I went over sideways and grabbed for the gaping wound in my thigh and felt darkness close in.

2

The House of Ancinet-Chanore was very manly about acknowledging its mistake. I sat across from old Lord Pastaine under the canopy on his favorite sun terrace, telling him for the sixth or seventh time how it had happened that I had bought freedom for two slaves and then sent them off together in my boat while I went to the rafts. He wagged his Mosaic head and looked grave.

“A serious misjudgment of character on your part,” he said. “Yet were we not all guilty of misjudgment? When the Lady Raire returned, so unexpectedly, I wished to open my heart to her-supposed-savior. I granted the interloper-Huvile, you say his name was?” He shook his head. “An upstart, of no family-I granted him, I say, every freedom, every honor in the gift of Ancinet-Chanore. As for Milady-if she chose to closet herself in solitary withdrawal from the comfort of her family-could I say nay? And then I saw the beginnings of the wretched maneuverings that would make this stranger Head after my death. I called for Milady Raire to attend me-and she refused! Me! It was unheard of! Can you blame me for striking her from my memory, as one dead? And as for the others-venal, grasping, foolish-to what depths has the House not fallen since the days of my youth, a thousand years agone. . . .”

I listened to him ramble on. I had been hearing the same story from a variety of directions during the past three days, while my leg healed under the miracle-medicines of old Zeridajh. If any one of the Lady Raire’s doting relations had cared enough about her to take just one, good, searching look into her eyes, they’d have seen that something was seriously amiss. But all they saw was a pawn on the board of House politics, and her silent appeals had gone unanswered. As for why she hadn’t defied Huvile, faced death before submitting to enslavement to his ambitions-I could guess that half an hour of sub-fatal angina might be a persuasion that would convince a victim who could laugh at the threat of mere death.

“If you’d arrange for me to see the Lady Raire for a few minutes,” I butted in Milord’s rumbling assessment of the former Sir Revenat’s character, “I’d be most appreciative.”

He looked grave. “I believe we all agree that it would be best not to reawaken the unhappy emotions of these past months by any references thereto,” he said. “We are grateful to you, Captain Danger-the House will be forever in your debt. I’m sure Milady will understand if you slip quietly away, leaving her to the ministrations of her family, those who know where her interests lie.”

I got the idea. It had been explained to me in slightly varying terms by no less than twelve solemn pillars of the House of Ancinet-Chanore. The Lady Raire, having had one close brush with an interloper, would not be exposed to the questionable influences of another. They were glad I’d happened along in time to break the spell-but now the lady would return to her own kind, her own life.

And they were right, of course. I didn’t know just what it was that Jongo would have to say to Milady Raire of the ancient House of Ancinet-Chanore; I’d had my share of wild fancies, but none of them were wild enough to include offering her boudoir space aboard my boat as an alternative to the estates of Ancinet-Chanore.

On the way out, Sir Tanis offered me a crack at a lot of fancy trade opportunities, letters of recommendation to any house I might name, and assorted other vague rewards, and ended with a hint, none too closely veiled, that any further attempt to see the lady would end unhappily for me. I told him I got the idea and walked out into the twilight through the high gates of the house with no more than a slight limp to remind me of my visit.

3

Fsha-fsha was waiting for me at the boat. I told him about my parting interviews with the House of Ancinet--Chanore. He listened.

“You never learn, do you, Billy?” he wagged his head sadly.

“I’ve learned that there’s no place for me in fancy company,” I said. “Give me the honest solitude of space, and a trail of new worlds waiting ahead. That’s my style.”

“You saved the lady’s life on Gar 28, you know,” Fsha--fsha said, talking to himself. “If you hadn’t done what you did-when you did-she’d never have lived out the first week. It was too bad you didn’t look and listen a bit before you handed her over to the H’eeaq-but then, who would have known, eh?”

“Let’s forget all that,” I suggested. “The ship’s trimmed to lift-”

“Then at Drath, you picked her out from under the Triarch’s nose in as smooth a counter-swindle as I’ve ever heard of. He had no idea of letting them go, you know. They’d have been arrested at the port-except that the Rule-keepers were caught short when the tub lifted without you. Your only mistake was in trusting Huvile-”

“Trusting Huvile!”

“You trusted him. You sent him along to an unguarded ship. If you’d worked just one angle a little more -subtly-gone out yourself to see the lady aboard and then lifted, leaving Huvile behind-but this is neither here nor there. For the second time, you saved her-and handed her over to her enemy.”

“I know that,” I snapped. “I’ve kicked myself for it-”

“And now-here you are, repeating the pattern,” he bored on. “Three times and out.”

“What?”

“You saved the lady again, Billy. Plucked her out of the wicked hands of her tormentor-”

“And . . .?”

“And handed her over to her enemies.”

“Her family has her-”

“That’s what I said.”

“Then. . . .” wheels were beginning to whirl in front of my eyes.

“Maybe,” I said, “you’d better tell me exactly what you’re talking about. . .

.”

4

. . . She opened her eyes, startled, when I leaned over her sleeping couch.

“Billy Danger,” she breathed. “Is it thee? Why came you not to me ere now?”

“An acute attack of stupidity, Milady,” I whispered. She smiled a dazzling smile. “My name is Raire, Billy. I am no one’s lady.”

“You’re mine,” I said.

“Always, my Billy.” She reached and drew my face down to hers. Her lips were softer even than I had dreamed.

“Come,” I said.

She rose silently and Eureka rubbed himself across her knees. They followed me across the wide room, along a still corridor. In the great hall below, I asked her to show me the shortest route to the grounds. She led the way along a cloistered arcade, through a walled garden, onto a wide terrace above the dark sweep of sky-lit lawn.

“Billy-when I pass this door, the house alarms will be set off. . . .”

“I know. That’s why I dropped in on the roof in a one-man heli. Too bad we couldn’t leave the same way. There’s no help for it. Let’s go. . . .”

We started out at a run toward the trees. We had gone fifty feet when lights sprang up across the back of the house. I turned and took aim with my filament gun and knocked out the two biggest polyarcs, and we sprinted for cover, Eureka loping in the lead. A new light sprang up, just too late, swept the stretch of grass we had just crossed. We reached the trees, went flat. Men were coming through the rear doors of the house. There was a lot of yelling. I looked up. Against the swirls and clots of stars, nothing was visible. I checked my watch again; Fsha-fsha was two minutes late. The line of men was moving down across the lawn. In half a minute, they’d reach the trees.

There was a wink of light from above, followed by a dull baroom! as of distant thunder. A high, whistling screech became audible, descended to a full-throated roar; something flashed overhead-a long shape ablaze with lights. A second gunboat slammed across in the wake of the first.

“That cuts it,” I said. “Fsha-fsha’s been picked off-”

A terrific detonation boomed, drawling itself out into a bellow of power. I saw a dark shape flash past against the clotted stars. The men on the lawn saw it, too. They halted their advance, looking up at the dark boat that had shot past on an opposite course to the security cutters.

“Look!” The Lady Raire pointed. Something big and dark was drifting toward our position across the lake. It was Jongo III, barely a yard above the surface of the water, concealed from the house by the trees. We jumped up and ran for it. Her bow lights came on, dazzling as suns, traversed over us, lanced out to blind the men beyond the trees. I could see the soft glow from her open entry-port. We splashed out into knee-deep water; I tossed Eureka in, then jumped, caught the rail, pulled myself in, reached back for the Lady Raire as men burst through the screen of trees. Then we were inside, pressed flat against the floor by the surge of acceleration as the old racer lifted and screamed away at treetop level at a velocity that would have boiled the surface off any lesser hull.

5

From a distance of half a million miles, Zeridajh was a misty emerald crescent, dwindling on our screens.

“It was a pretty world, Milady,” I said. “You’re going to miss it.”

“Dost know what place I truly dreamed of, my Billy, when the gray years of Drath lengthened before me?”

“The gardens,” I suggested. “They’re very beautiful, with the sun on them.”

“I dreamt of the caves, and the green shade of the giant peas, and the simple loyalty of our good Eureka. . . .” She stroked the grizzled head resting on her knee.

“Never,” Fsha-fsha said from the depths of the big com-mand chair, “will I understand the motivations of you Propagators. Still, life in your company promises to be diverting, I’ll say that for it.” He showed us that ghastly expression he used for a smile. “But tell me, Milady-if the question isn’t impertinent: what were you doing out there, at the far end of the Eastern Arm, where Billy first saw you?”

“Haven’t you guessed?” she smiled at him. “Until Lord Desroy caught me, I was running away.”

“I knew it!” Fsha-fsha boomed. “And now that the great quest is finished-where to?”

“Anywhere,” I said. I put my arm around Raire’s flower-slim waist and drew her to me. “Anywhere at all.”

The sweet hum of the mighty and ancient engines drummed softly through the deck. Together, we watched the blaze of Center move to fill the screens.