"Maybe they know what?" Flame demanded suspi-ciously, her grip on the rocket rifle tightening.

"Maybe they know it's time for breakfast," Turner finished weakly, his hunger still on his mind.

Flame did not seem to be worried about food; she snorted derisively.

"Gravitational anomalies have ceased," the com-puter said.

Flame stopped dead. Turner, automatically recog-nizing the difference between her normal walk and the sound of her final footstep, halted and turned.

"What's going on?" she demanded.

"They're resting, I guess," Turner said.

"They didn't just disappear?" Her grip on the rifle tightened.

"How could they disappear?" Turner asked placat-ingly.

Flame was not willing to be placated. "How should I know?" she said. "You're supposed to be the expert on this planet."

"People don't disappear here any more than on any other planet," Turner said, disgusted. "They're just resting, I guess, not using their magic—I mean, not using the mutation—at the moment. Your ship can't very well see a few individuals through all these trees."

"How do I know they aren't going to ambush us?" Flame asked suspiciously. "What is this mutation, any-way?"

"Why would they ambush us?" Turner knew that was a stupid question even before he finished asking it; Flame did not bother to answer it.

"What is this mutation?" she demanded again.

Turner could think of no answer that would serve better than the truth. "Psionics," he said.

"What are psionics?" Flame asked. "I've heard the word, but I want to know what you mean by it."

"Well, it's mental powers, sort of," Turner said hesi-tantly. "Levitation, mostly. That's how they can fly."

He was careful to make no mention of telepathy or any of the other psychic senses; he was sure that Flame would violently object to the idea of such scrutiny.

"Levitation?" she said. "It is antigravity, then?"

"I don't know," Turner admitted truthfully. "Maybe."

Flame remained dubious. "It's not all just a lot of mystical tricks?" she asked skeptically.

"I don't think so." Turner thought that leaving a little doubt in Flame's mind might be useful later. He certainly did not want to admit that he himself was a wizard.

"We had one of these anomalies centered on us be-fore," Flame said, still skeptical. "We didn't levitate."

Trapped, Turner shrugged. "I can't explain that."

"Oh, I'm sure—just as sure as crayfish whistle," she said sarcastically. "You're lying, you bastard, and we both know it."

"Query: Evidence for assertion of untruthfulness," the computer interrupted.

"The whole general pattern," she replied silently. Turner heard her over the open communication chan-nel. "His entire behavior. Besides, didn't he say earlier that he knew all about the anomalies? Now he's saying he doesn't. That's a contradiction."

"Affirmative."

"I can explain!" Turner called quickly. Shifting to subvocalization, he continued. "Computer, I lied for security reasons. I don't trust Flame; she destroyed a friendly village. After that, how can I trust her with information that might be extremely destructive to our side—to Old Earth? The psionic abilities here are probably unique in all the colonized worlds, and if she is a traitor, she might sell them to the enemy."

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' is incapable of dis-loyalty, due to presence of termination systems."

"You mean the thermite in her skull. But that's just it! Psionic abilities allow the removal of security mech-anisms like that! How long do you think she'd stay loyal if she could—"

"That's enough of that!" Flame shouted, the rifle pointed directly at Turner's belly. Her voice trembled with rage; her hands, regulated by computerized mi-cromechanisms, did not. "I won't have a piece of filth like you impugning my loyalty!"

Turner held up his hands placatingly. "All right, calm down; if you shoot me now, you'll just prove what I say, and the computer will blow your head off. Right, computer?"

"Affirmative."

"There, you see?"

Flame's face contorted in wordless fury; after a long silent moment she spat out, "It would almost be worth it! After I went, the ship would nuke your precious planet back to the Stone Age, Slant!"

"But you wouldn't be around to see it, would you?" He forced himself to speak calmly and quietly, calling on the emotionlessness that some of his personalities had been taught so long ago back on Mars.

"Destruction of planetary installations in the event of termination of cyborg unit for insubordination is not definite," the computer put in. "Further analysis re-quired. Circumstances might result in destruction of ship before attack could be carried out."

"See? You might not even destroy the planet. Now, calm down. I'm sorry if you feel I insulted you, but I don't trust you—you're too violent." His tone was that of an adult soothing a child, though his gut twisted at the memory of the burning village.

Turner watched as Flame silently struggled with herself, her face working. He wondered whether more than one personality might be involved but easily re-sisted any temptation to look into her mind and see. He was attuned to her aura but did not make the effort to listen for fear the computer would notice and disap-prove.

"All right," she said at last. "Keep walking. I want to see these psionic marvels." The thought that fol-lowed was so intense that Turner, quite inadvertently, picked it up telepathically.

"And when we see them," she thought, "I'll blow them to hell!"

Chapter Fifteen

TURNER QUIETLY SLIPPED THE SNARK WITH THE greatest charge into his hand as they walked and dialed it from safety to high, keeping it carefully hidden from Flame. He did not intend to let her kill any wizards, and most particularly not his wife. He hoped fiercely that Parrah and her companions would be alert and ready to defend themselves when he and Flame arrived.

All he could do was hope. He did not dare try to warn them about the rocket rifle or anything else, while Flame was walking a few paces behind him with her finger ready on the rifle's trigger and while the computer was watching closely for any psionic activity.

As he rounded a tree he glimpsed a clearing ahead. Three robed figures stood in the clearing's center. He glanced back at Flame.

"I see them," she said. "Keep going."

He kept going down a short, needle-covered slope, his breath rising in clouds above him as he descended.

His shoulder felt curiously empty without the rocket rifle's weight on it, as if his coat were hovering about him unsupported. Cold gray daylight filtered through the trees and speckled the dark ground with dull colors.

Parrah was sending again, and at her present range he received part of her message without trying, not as words but as concepts and images.

She wanted something; she was here representing the Council, and they had sent her to tell him that they wanted something.

Exactly what they wanted was not clear; Parrah's imagery was of something bright and shining, hidden by something dark and unspeakably hideous.

He decided he really didn't care what the Council wanted, and he resented their use of his wife as a mes-senger. He had far more important concerns than what the Council, that shortsighted, elitist, arrogant bunch of psionic freaks, wanted. He looked down at his feet.

Parrah stopped sending.

The slope ended in a ditch, a dry streambed; he could see ice crystals on the bottom, in the cold shadows where daylight never shone directly. He climbed the other side, then stepped around a thicket into clear view of the waiting wizards.

They had all known he was coming, of course, and were looking directly at him, their gaze friendly and open.

"Hello, Sam," Parrah called aloud. She stood be-tween Arzadel and Dekert, whom Turner knew to be not only old friends but two of Praunce's most power-ful wizards as well. If any wizardry should be needed, she had chosen her companions well—she or the Council.

"I left the children with Haiger and Ahnao,"she added before her husband could answer. "I thought you might like a little company out here."

Turner needed an instant to switch his thoughts from polyglot to the Prauncer dialect and to compre-hend that Parrah was giving no outward sign of her actual reasons for coming. He had still not phrased his reply when he was distracted.

Flame, close behind him, had stopped abruptly. "What the hell is this?" she cried. "Slant, that's your wife!"

He turned, startled. How had Flame recognized Parrah? The two women had never met, he was sure of that.

Then, with sudden clarity, it dawned upon him that when he had spoken with Parrah in their kitchen—

when was that, just three days ago?—the computer had been watching, taking in the telemetry from his still-functioning systems, and it must have seen and re-corded everything he saw. At some point before Flame left her ship she must have played that recording back, including the visual. With the control cable plugged into the back of her neck she could have experienced the entire thing exactly as if she had been there, in Turner's place—assuming that all the telemetry was still functioning, which seemed unlikely.

Obviously, though, the feed from his optic center still worked.

"You're right," he admitted in polyglot. "That's Parrah."

"What's she doing here? She should be back in that city of yours!"

"Why?" Turner demanded, honestly annoyed by Flame's arrogance. "She has a right to go where she chooses, just as we do! Normal life doesn't stop for everybody just because you're here, you know."

"Sam, say something we can understand," Parrah called.

Simultaneously, the computer was saying, "Gravitational anomalies detected in immediate vicinity of cy-borg units."

Before he could respond to either Parrah or the computer, Flame said, "Oh, come on, Slant, this has got to be a trick of some kind! I didn't expect anything this obvious, but I'm still not going to wait around here for you to close your trap!" She swung the rocket rifle up and squeezed the trigger.

At some point in their walk, Turner realized, she had switched the rifle from single-fire to automatic. A stream of rockets screamed out, drawing lines of red fire across the clearing in a stroboscopic flicker.

The miniature missiles' explosions were out of all proportion to the size of the projectiles. The blasts came so quickly and so close together that the sound resembled a high-pitched roll of thunder; the glare was so sudden and intense that Turner blinked involuntar-ily, and even so he was partially blinded. Acting on a trained reflex he had had drummed into him through-out his apprenticeship, he flung up a defensive shield without thinking, a telekinetic barrier against anything solid that might come his way.

Nothing came his way save light and sound and a few tiny flecks of debris. Flame was concentrating her fire on the wizards—on the other wizards, not on him.

The roar subsided abruptly, replaced not by com-plete silence but by a soft patter as fragments of rocket casing and pine tree fell to the ground all around him.

When his ears had stopped ringing, when he had blinked away the red blotches of afterimage that had marred his vision, when the cloud of smoke had dissi-pated somewhat, he looked around.

His three fellow wizards stood unscathed in the center of the clearing, blinking and befuddled, looking about themselves in dumbfoundment; around them the ground was pockmarked with assorted small craters and strewn with a variety of litter. The trees around the clearing were a shambles of splintered branches and broken, blackened trunks. Several small fires flickered in the carpet of pine needles. Tiny shards of metal and plastic, all that remained of the rockets themselves, glittered on all sides like multicolored dew.

Flame was nowhere in sight, either by eye or by the quick psionic scan that was the best the rather shaken Turner could manage. She had apparently fled imme-diately after firing her burst.

"Oh, damn!" Turner muttered. He drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly before silently asking,

"Computer? Are you still there?"

Parrah started to say something; Turner held up a hand for silence.

"Affirmative," the computer said. "Ship is dropping from synchronous orbit in preparation for landing to recover cyborg unit designated 'Flame.'"

"Damn," Turner said again. "Listen, computer, he subvocalized, "it was all a mistake. I admit that it was a pretty strange coincidence, my wife being one of the wizards we went to talk to, but that's all it was, a coin-cidence. She probably got worried and followed me. I wasn't trying anything deceitful. You've been watching me ever since we first made contact, I'm sure; I ask you, have I had a chance to arrange any tricks?"

"On four occaisons since initial contact, communi-cations contact between ship and cyborg unit desig-nated 'Slant' has been terminated due to ship's location in nonsynchronous approach or departure orbits," the computer told him.

"It has?" Turner's surprise was genuine. "I didn't know that."

"Affirmative. Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' was not informed of termination of communications con-tact."

"But then I didn't know I could have planned some-thing. I couldn't have set up any tricks because even if I had known you'd be out of contact, I didn't know when. You see?"

"Affirmative. Evidence indicates no conspiracy ex-isted between cyborg unit designated 'Slant' and any local inhabitants."

"Tell Flame that!"

"Affirmative."

"Thank you." That eased Turner's mind somewhat, and he was able to turn his attention to his wife and her companions.

"Sam," Parrah called immediately in Prauncer dia-lect. "We came to see if we could do anything to help."

That was not what Turner really wanted to hear just then. " That's what was so urgent?"

"Well, no," Parrah began.

Arzadel interrupted. "Is that demon still around?" He pointed to his ear, and Turner knew that what he actually meant was, "Is the demon listening?"

"Probably."

"Then it can wait."

Turner shrugged. Whatever their reasons for com-ing, they were here, and he had to deal with that. The first objective had to be simply to keep them alive.

"Stay alert," he called. "Keep your defenses up; Flame might sneak around for another attack. I don't really think she will, but she might."

Arzadel nodded quickly, while Parrah began study-ing the surrounding pines intently, as if expecting Flame to leap out at her at any moment.

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in unidentified language," the com-puter said.

Turner had been expecting that request at any mo-ment, but that did not make it any more enjoyable to actually receive it. Annoyed, he forced himself to think in polyglot as he tried to devise an intelligent response to that. It was irritating that Flame and her computer could not understand the local version of Anglo-Spanish, when so far as he knew nobody on Dest, except himself, spoke anything other than that tongue or variations on it as a native language.

It was worse than irritating, he suddenly realized; it might be disastrous. It could mean that there was no-body on Dest who could tell either half of IRU 247 that Dest was loyal to Old Earth.

He might well be the only person on the planet who could speak to both sides.

This also meant that he could have conspired with Parrah or anyone else without worrying about being discovered by the computer. He fervently hoped that neither the computer nor Flame would think of that.

That was relatively unimportant, however. The im-portant thing was that no one on Dest could attest to the planet's loyalty.

Was that true, though? Simply because he had never heard anything but dialects of Anglo-Spanish spoken didn't mean that all knowledge of other languages had been lost. In fact, thinking back to his earliest days on Dest, he remembered seeing books in other languages in a library in Teyzha. Might any of the scholar-wizards of that city know either Russian or polyglot or some other language that either Flame or her computer could understand?

And if they did, would they agree that Dest's people were loyal to Old Earth? Teyzha was not part of Praunce's empire, at least not yet; it ruled its own little piece of turf, several hundred kilometers away in the eastern hills, and had its own unique culture. It was a wizard-dominated oligarchy like most of Dest's city-states, but it had a good many cultural and social dis-tinctions.

Teyzha had been founded well after the Bad Times by people who had wanted nothing to do with the past, while Praunce had been built on ruins by people deter-mined to restore as much of the past as they could. Prauncers had put up with the constant damage caused by lingering radiation for the sake of salvage and his-tory, and the loyalty to Old Earth professed by much of the educated elite was a part of the heritage that they sought to preserve. Teyzhans, less concerned with heritage, might not feel that way. They might well feel that Old Earth had abandoned them and deserved no loyalty.

Certainly, they had abandoned Old Earth's customs. They made no pretense of representative government in Teyzha, or of social equality, or any of the other democratic or egalitarian habits Old Earth had passed on to its colonies. The Council of Wizards ruled the city outright and guarded their prerogatives and the city's territory zealously.

He remembered that long ago, in the course of an audience before the Teyzhan Council, he had men-tioned his loyalty to Old Earth—at the time his com-puter had still been operational and had been diligently enforcing that loyalty. One of the council-lors, a middle-aged woman, had reacted to that and had started to demand an explanation, but the eldest of the councillors had brushed the matter aside as irrel-evant.

He silently cursed the old man; the question was certainly relevant now. If the old councillor was still alive, his life could depend on it.

Because the subject had been shoved aside, Turner had no idea whether Teyzha considered Old Earth friend or foe, whether the Teyzhans thought of their ancestral home as the long-lost motherland or a trivial anachronistic legend or even as the bitter enemy that had betrayed them and destroyed the planet's original civilization. Save for his own friends and family, no one in Praunce's empire knew that the fleet that had bombed the cities had come from Old Earth, but the people of Teyzha might be better informed.

And he did not really know whether anyone in Teyzha spoke Russian or polyglot. He could not recall, after more than a decade, whether either language had been present in that library. He had the feeling that he had been unable to read any of the books that were not in dialects of Anglo-Spanish, and if that were so, then Flame would probably be equally ignorant.

He could not be certain of his memories, but Teyzha did not seem promising.

What of the other eastern cities, such as Orna?

Turner shook his head. He knew less of them than he did of Teyzha. At least he had once been inside Teyzha; he had never visited Orna or any of the others.

There were still independent city-states on the west-ern plains as well as in the east, but from what he recalled of Awlmei, the only one he had seen directly, the western towns were very much a rough-and-ready sort of culture, one that had diverged from the old Terran model at least as much as Teyzha had, though in a different direction. It was unlikely that anyone there would speak a language Flame could understand.

Somewhere on the eastern coast, beyond even Teyzha, was the ancient museum city of Setharipoor, the only prewar city that had never been nuked. It was a small town by prewar standards, which probably ac-counted for its survival, but it had always been consid-ered a city by those who survived the Bad Times.

There could well be people there who spoke the old languages.

Setharipoor was well over a thousand kilometers away, though, and again, he was unsure of the city's loyalties. The people of Setharipoor should by loyal to Old Earth, he thought, but he simply wasn't sure.

Al-though the city had never been bombed, it had been abandoned for decades after the Bad Times had disrupted everything.

He was not eager to risk the entire planet's fate on a mere probability, but if necessary, he decided he might resort to taking Flame to Setharipoor and hoping that no one there said the wrong thing.

Of course, Flame might wonder why she was being taken to so distant and obscure a city and assume it to be a ruse of some sort, but it was probably about the best he could do as far as finding natives of Dest who could speak to IRU 247.

As he came to this conclusion, he realized that he had been standing silently and staring at the three wiz-ards for several seconds. They were staring back un-easily, apparently not sure it was safe to speak.

And something was tugging at his mind. Parrah had been trying to speak to him, telepathically, for several minutes but had been unable to get through the inter-ference his cyborg modifications created.

He hesitated, wondering if CCC-IRU 247 might possibly be able to intercept telepathic transmissions, then let himself hear her.

Sam, she thought at him when she realized he was listening. You mustn't destroy the ship if you can help it. The Council wants it intact.

What?

Stop the demon, of course, but if there is any way you can capture the ship, instead of wrecking it, capture it. Do it as little damage as you can.

Why? he demanded.

I don't know, Parrah answered, flustered. They just want it.

"Gravitational anomaly in immediate vicinity of cy-borg unit designated 'Slant,' the computer interrupted.

"Yes," Turner said in silent polyglot, breaking his telepathic link. "I know."

"Request explanation."

"My wife is using psionics to check for damage from Flame's unprovoked attack."

"Query: Civilian designated as wife of cyborg unit designated 'Slant' possesses mutation responsible for gravitational anomalies."

"That's right." He could hardly deny it under the circumstances.

"Query: Reason for survival of civilians."

"Psionics," Turner replied succinctly. "It can be used to defend against projectiles."

"Request detailed explanation of psionics."

"You're talking to the demon," Parrah said sharply.

"Yes, I am," Turner said. "Wait a moment."

Parrah watched him closely but said nothing fur-ther, and Turner switched back to subvocalization. "I won't explain psionics over this channel. I told you that."

The computer did not reply immediately, and Turner knew that he had been standing and staring for an unnaturally long time. He broke eye contact, then looked back casually and tried to restore a semblance of normality.

"Are you all right?" he called in the Prauncer dia-lect.

"I think so," Parrah replied aloud as Arzadel nod-ded beside her. "Are you?"

"I'm fine," he said before the computer interrupted again.

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in unidentified language," it re-peated.

"It's not unidentified; it's the local dialect of Anglo-Spanish," Turner retorted.

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in language not known to this unit," the computer said.

Ignoring the silent exchange, since she could not follow it or participate in it, Parrah asked, "What were those things that exploded everywhere? And how could that demon throw them so fast?" She waved a hand at the blasted clearing around her as she stepped gingerly toward her husband, picking her way carefully among the smoking bits of wreckage.

"Those were miniature missiles," Turner explained. "Rockets, each with its own propellant and warhead.

That thing she was carrying can spit them out at sev-eral hundred a minute; I don't remember the exact rate of fire."

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in language not known to this unit," the computer repeated.

"Oh, shut up!" Turner replied in silent annoyance. "I'm a civilian, and I have a right to talk to my wife!"

He knew that part of his irritation was not actually with the computer but with Parrah. What was she doing, turning up here with this mysterious request— or was it an order?—from the Council, complicating matters when he was struggling to keep their entire world alive?

"That weapon she used—isn't that the one you had?" Parrah asked hesitantly. "Or did she have one, too?"

"Oh, she probably has one, too," Turner said, hid-ing his anger. "But that one was mine."

"How did she get it away from you?" Parrah asked, worried.

"We traded," Turner explained. "And you can be glad we did, because if she had been using a snark and had gotten close enough to get a shot at you, your protective shield wouldn't have done anything to help you.

I shot someone right through a shield once, in Teyzha." He smiled, an attempt at reassurance that became genuine pleasure. Seeing Parrah's familiar face, even when she wore her present worried look, even when she had no business being here, even when she was interfering dangerously, was wonderfully com-forting.

"Uncooperative attitude of cyborg unit designated 'Slant' has been noted. Therefore, request matter of planetary loyalty be settled immediately."

"Fine," Turner said, slightly startled. "But how?"

"Suggest interrogation of random sample of popula-tion."

"The population doesn't speak polyglot around here," Turner said. Reluctantly, thinking of Sethari-poor and hoping that the people there would profess loyalty to Old Earth, he added, "I think I know a place where they do, however."

"Negative. Due to uncertainty regarding loyalty of cyborg unit designated 'Slant,' sample must be chosen without reference to input from cyborg units."

Turner tried to think of some clever counter to that but could not. "But you won't find anyone you can understand!" he finally burst out in frustration.

"Sampling will continue until sufficient evidence for determination has been accumulated."

That, Turner thought, was exactly the sort of idiocy one could expect from a computer. "How much of a sample do you need?"

"A minimum of three isolated responses will be ad-equate, or if both cyborg units reach agreement."

Parrah watched her husband for a moment as he stood, silently arguing. With a stifled sigh she turned away. He was obviously going to be too busy to talk to her for a while, distracted by that incomprehensible machine that he called a computer and that she consid-ered a demon.

She had delivered the Council's message and had seen that her man was still alive and coping. There was nothing more she could do until Sam instructed her, and right now he barely saw her.

The demon obviously still controlled its ship and its city-destroying weapons, the prizes that the Council hoped to capture.

She wondered where the ship was. She saw no sign of it anywhere nearby.

She looked around, first at the forest, where she half expected to see that dreadful yellow-haired mon-ster leap out at her with some new and hideous weapon, and then at the clearing.

Arzadel and Dekert were systematically stamping out the last few smoldering fires left by Flame's bar-rage. Parrah joined them, taking out her helpless frus-tration at the demon's existence and her husband's distraction by grinding harmless charred pine needles into black powder beneath her booted heel.

Chapter Sixteen

the discussion in turner's head seemed to drag on endlessly. He could think of no clever new arguments but could only repeat that if the selec-tion were left entirely to random chance, it would take years to find anyone on Dest who spoke polyglot or Russian.

That prospect did not seem to trouble the computer in the slightest. It seemed perfectly willing to devote years to the task.

When the computer stated as much, even Flame broke into the conversation to protest, but with no more effect than Turner had had. Her interruption served only to prove that wherever she was, she was listening in, which Turner had already suspected.

The details of the computer's plan gradually became clear. After picking up Flame and allowing her to re-equip herself, it would choose population centers at random. It would transport Flame to each in turn and wait at each until Turner could make the journey over-land to join them. The two cyborgs, working together, would then question the inhabitants in either polyglot or Russian.

The computer required both cyborgs to be present in order to prevent any sort of deception. It had been programmed to be aware of its own ignorance of large areas of human psychology and knew that either cy-borg alone might be able to distort the responses to suit his or her own preferences. Turner did not think it actually understood the concept of slanting evidence, but its programmers had, and had guarded against it.

The computer assumed that if either cyborg at-tempted any trickery, the other cyborg would be able to detect or prevent or counter any deceit where it, the computer, might not be aware that anything was amiss. It wanted an honest survey.

That was heartening, Turner thought. Flame might be paranoid, committed to bending facts to fit what she chose to believe, but her computer still seemed genuinely impartial.

When three responses supported one side, with none for the other, the computer would consider the matter settled in favor of that side. If either cyborg unit, at any point, were to acquiesce and accept the other's point of view, the computer would likewise ac-cept that point of view. Uninformative responses, whether in unintelligible languages or simply not clearly supporting one view or the other, would be ig-nored.

If positive responses were obtained on both sides of the argument, the entire method would be thrown out and another would be found.

What that other method might be could not be de-cided as yet. A simple majority would not serve, though; the computer wanted a unanimous decision.

The whole thing was quite clear, simple, and direct. Turner and Flame both understood it immediately, and neither of them liked it at all. Since Turner was sure that only a handful of scholars spoke any language ei-ther Flame or CCC-IRU 247 could understand, and most of those scholars would probably be vague on matters of planetary loyalty, the survey would in all likelihood take the rest of the cyborgs' lives.

Spending the rest of his life tramping from one town to another interrogating strangers was not the future Turner had planned for himself; he said as much, to no avail.

He did not say that he was afraid that the results, if any were ever obtained, would be inconclusive or con-tradictory or that they would support Flame's position, but that was a very real concern.

He could not imagine what alternative method the computer might eventually devise if this one failed, but since this was, the computer said, the best, simplest, fastest, most immediate method, he did not want to find out.

Wandering hither and yon until he dropped dead of exhaustion was certainly preferable to dying in an im-mediate nuclear holocaust, of course. He had to con-cede that.

Once the computer had stated its irrevocable posi-tion and he and Flame had run out of objections, the discussion degenerated into a debate between Flame and himself over who should acquiesce and put an end to the project. She maintained that he should give up his treason, join her aboard the ship, and watch as Dest was blasted into lifelessness. He suggested that she could afford to err on the side of mercy and leave Dest and himself alone.

The argument was still going on. with Flame hold-ing forth on the vileness of all surviving humans, when the computer abruptly said, "Termination of communi-cations contact imminent. Will continue determination of course of action upon resumption of communica-tions contact in approximately fifty-five minutes."

"Nice of you to tell me this time," Turner said sar-castically.

The break in communications meant that the ship was about to drop below the horizon. It was in a steep descending orbit on its way to pick up Flame, but the approach was not so steep that it could avoid passing around the planet on its way down. It could not simply drop straight down; that would require a ridiculous amount of braking.

Turner started to wonder just what sort of an orbit it was following but dismissed the matter as irrelevant.

The computer certainly knew what it was doing when it came to piloting the ship, no matter how confused and stubborn it might be on other matters.

The break also meant that he would be able to talk to Parrah privately, even more privately than the com-puter's ignorance of Anglo-Spanish already assured. He could find out more of what the Council had in mind or enlist her aid in any schemes he might devise. He did not need to worry about Flame overhearing on the communications circuit; he could not speak di-rectly to Flame even if he wanted to. Everything had to be relayed by the ship.

Flame certainly had no way to tap into anything he did not want to transmit. Only the computer had ac-cess to his body's telemetry.

And he did not need to worry that Flame might sneak up undetected and eavesdrop with her own ears.

No one could sneak up on four alert wizards unde-tected.

He realized suddenly that he had been assuming that the computer genuinely did not understand the language and was not simply shamming ignorance in hopes that he would slip up and say something incrim-inating. The computer would never have thought of such a ruse—but Flame might have. He wished he had considered the possibility earlier.

For that matter, even dropping below the broadcast horizon might be a deception. The ship might still be somewhere overhead, listening to everything.

He gave the matter another few seconds' considera-tion, then decided to ignore it. He doubted that any of it was trickery. Flame did not strike him as being that subtle. If she had been clever, she would long ago have professed to accept Dest as friendly while secretly con-spiring with the computer, letting it know she was lying. She would then have found some trivial contra-diction, cited it to the computer as proof that Dest was enemy territory, and killed Turner, probably by shoot-ing him while his back was turned.

That would have been easy, and he could only be glad that Flame had not thought of it. Whether she was simply not very bright, or whether her apparent insanity had damaged her ability to scheme, or whether some other cause entirely had prevented her from devising and carrying out such a deception, he had no way of knowing.

Of course, now that he had thought of it, he would be alert for any such attempt, ready to head it off. Of the two cyborgs, he was definitely the tricky one. Flame was right about that.

He needed trickery when faced with the ship's over-whelming firepower, and he knew he was capable of it. He had had years of practice in fooling his own com-puter in myriad small ways, and he had abilities as a wizard that IRU 247 could not imagine. He would find a way to counter any scheme Flame might devise—

though with the computer's insistence on its interroga-tion plan, he was not sure she would be concocting any schemes.

He intended to concoct his own, however. He was determined to find a way out of spending the rest of his life questioning people. Already, an idea was stir-ring somewhere in the back of his mind.

"Termination of communications contact," the com-puter said.

Tearing his thoughts away from the communications circuit and back to the world around him, Turner found himself staring fixedly at a thick clump of long dark pine needles that dangled from the tip of a bro-ken branch, just at eye level. He took a deep breath of the frosty air, looked around, and saw his black-robed wife seated on a fallen log, chatting quietly with Arzathe del while Dekert studied a handful of missile frag-ments.

Was Dekert's action simple curiosity about some-thing novel, or was it an unhealthy interest in the old military technology? Why did the Council want the ship?

He shoved that aside. He couldn't spare the time to worry about it. The ship would be back in contact soon.

"Parrah," Turner called.

Parrah looked up, startled, then broke into a smile as she realized that she could detect no sign of the demon.

"Hello, Sam," she said. "Did you get rid of the demon yet?"

"No," Turner said, "Not yet. I have an idea, though. Come here, I've got to talk to you."

Chapter Seventeen

PARRAH WAS NOT SMILING ANYMORE. "Are you serious?" she demanded. "You want me to learn an entire language telepathically in the next forty minutes—from you, the hardest mind to read on the entire planet—and then teach it to three whole towns?" She stared at him in open disbelief.

"That's right," Turner agreed, nodding. "Can you do it?"

Studying his face, she realized he was completely serious. She sighed and thought for a moment.

"I don't know," she said finally. "I doubt it. I can read your mind when you cooperate, but I never learned another language before, telepathically or oth-erwise." She shivered slightly at the thought; the very idea of any language but her own was unpleasantly alien. Her entire world had always spoken a single tongue. She knew other languages existed, even on Dest, but she had never encountered them. Her ap-prehension at the prospect, and Sam's intensity, dis-tracted her from any consideration of other matters, such as whether Sam's scheme, whatever it was, would capture the ship intact.

Turner, for his part, was grateful that she had accepted his brief explanation and was not demanding unimportant details or arguing about the necessity of learning polyglot or otherwise wasting precious time.

"You don't need to learn all of it," he said. "Just enough to make yourself understood on a few sub-jects."

"I can try," Parrah said reluctantly. "You'll have to think through everything you want me to learn, and I'll need to be in a trance. Dekert and Arzadel may be able to help."

Turner glanced up from his wife's face and realized that both the other wizards had been listening intently; he had forgotten they were there at all. Arzadel nod-ded agreement with Parrah's suggestion.

He had gone to Parrah because she was his wife, the one he trusted above all others, but it occurred to him that Dekert and Arzadel might actually be better qual-ified for the task he proposed. They were both some-what more powerful—but Parrah's specialty was telepathy, while the others preferred other skills.

Turner looked up at the two of them. "Do you think one of you two might do better?" he asked uncertainly.

"No," Arzadel replied. "Parrah knows your mind far better than we do—or she should, at any rate, as your wife."

"She's as good a telepath as anyone," Dekert put in.

"We will help, though, as much as we can," Arzadel added.

"All right, then," Turner said. "Go to it." He closed his eyes, thought back to his earliest language lessons, and concentrated on translating Prauncer Anglo-Span-ish to polyglot.

Back on Mars his training had included techniques for learning languages quickly, with or without com-puter assistance. The Command appeared to have skipped that with Flame, further evidence that her series of IRU had been a rush job. Turner, along with the rest of his slightly earlier group, had been given careful instruction in the best, most efficient methods of either learning or teaching a rough working knowl-edge of new tongues. He was able to run through the essentials of the two grammars very quickly and then to review the basic vocabulary, starting with pronouns, then covering the most common verbs, and then the nouns he thought might be needed, such as "world," "war," "loyalty," and a few dozen more.

He could feel Parrah's mind touching his own, tak-ing in at least part of the information, but whether she would be able to put it together and use it he could not tell. She had never spoken any tongue but her own, had never even heard any language but her own save for a few odd sentences spoken almost in jest, and learning a language was not just a matter of knowing a few hundred words and some formal rules of sentence structure. He forced himself to think every thought in both Anglo-Spanish and polyglot, almost simultane-ously.

He knew that he would have been able to acquire the rudiments of a new language from what he was giving Parrah, but he had spoken three different tongues by the time he started college, not counting machine languages, and had learned bits and pieces of at least half a dozen more later on. Each new language learned was easier than the last; that had been a recog-nized fact for centuries. Parrah did not even know any dialect of Anglo-Spanish but her own.

He forced himself not to worry about that but in-stead ran over the polyglot vocabulary again. He let the grammar slide this second time around; it was simi-lar enough to Anglo-Spanish grammar that he thought Parrah could get by if Flame kept her sentences sim-ple. The vocabulary was another matter; although Anglo-Spanish and polyglot were both largely derived from Old American English, they had gone in very different directions in what they did with that ancestral tongue. The people of Dest had modified their speech still further, of course, so that even the few words with the same roots were hardly recognizable as cognates.

He was starting on a third run-through when the mental voice of Flame's computer broke into his thoughts. "Gravitational anomaly exists in immediate vicinity of cyborg unit designated 'Slant.'"

Turner immediately forgot about language lessons and waved Parrah away.

She was deep in trance and ignored her husband's gesture, but Dekert was more alert and forced a break in Parrah's concentration. The mental link between the wizards vanished instantly.

"Gravitational anomaly has ceased," the computer said immediately. "Query: Advisability of further in-vestigation."

"Not necessary," Turner said. "We were just passing time."

"Acknowledged. Site selection for determination of planetary loyalty completed. Initial interrogation site will be population center located approximately one hundred and forty-three kilometers south by southeast of present location of cyborg unit designated 'Slant.'"

"Where?"

"Initial interrogation site will be population center located approximately one hundred and forty-three kilometers south by southeast of present location of cyborg unit designated 'Slant.'"

He tried to estimate his position and figure out where that would be but gave up. "I'll need my horse," he said. He had left the animal somewhere back near the burned-out village.

The computer made no reply. Turner realized he had not asked a question.

"What about Flame?" he inquired. "Will we be traveling together?"

"Negative."

The computer had no need to explain further; even before Arzadel shouted in surprise and pointed, Turner saw the blazing streak burst out of the clouds and burn its way across the sky as the starship came in hot for a fast landing approach. As the computer had said before it looped around the far side of the planet, it was coming down to pick Flame up.

Flame and her ship certainly seemed to like showy landings. Turner shook his head slightly in disap-proval. His own computer would certainly have ob-jected to so blatant an approach, even in its later, suicidal days.

His own computer had liked to take its time and circle in slowly or simply to start in a much lower orbit. It would glide in silently at subsonic speeds that did not even warm the hull. Once it had refused to land at all and had delivered him by parachute.

Flame's computer had obviously been programmed differently.

The line of fire vanished behind the treetops, and a moment later the sound of the starship's passage struck like a thunderclap.

"Not very subtle," Turner said aloud in polyglot, thinking of his own arrivals.

"No," Parrah agreed. "It wasn't."

Turner looked at her, startled.

She smiled and nodded, but before she could say anything, he held up a hand for silence. She hesitated, then nodded again.

Turner relaxed slightly. The computer probably be-lieved Parrah did not speak polyglot, and letting it learn otherwise might well be a serious tactical error. This was obvious to Turner, while Parrah trusted her husband enough to accept his command without fully understanding its reasons.

She had something she wanted to discuss with him, however, so she switched back to her native Prauncer dialect. "Sam, we came partly because the council talked it over and decided that—"

"We don't have time," Turner began in Anglo-Spanish.

"No, this is important," Parrah insisted. "We want the ship—if you can get rid of the demon without wrecking it, do it. That's what we came to help you with—" She had intended to go on to explain that for her that was only an excuse, that she had come be-cause she loved him, but before she could say that, he interrupted her, gesturing angrily.

"You told me that! Don't worry about it. First we need to deal with the demon! Get moving!"

He did not enjoy saying that. He wanted very much to get a clear explanation of just what the Council wanted the ship for, and why they had sent Parrah, and why she had agreed to come, and any number of other things—but the computer was listening, and Flame might be as well, and they wanted an immediate resolution. He had no time to spare.

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in language not known to this unit," the computer said.

Turner ignored it.

There was no need to say more. Parrah knew what to do. Turner had explained it before beginning the language lesson. She was to go to the site the computer had chosen and teach as many as possible of the peo-ple there to say, in polyglot, that they were loyal to Old Earth. She would be able to reach the village quickly by flying, arriving long before the computer could expect Turner to arrive.

Turner suddenly saw two flaws in his scheme, flaws that had somehow eluded him before.

First, the ship might fly Flame directly to the site and let her wait for him there, in which case Parrah might not be able to get in to teach anyone anything. Even a wizard flying at top speed could not match the starship's velocity.

He could do nothing to prevent that, however, and could only hope it would not happen.

The second, more serious flaw was that if Parrah flew, the computer would be able to track her the en-tire way. Her flight would create a moving "gravita-tional anomaly."

That would ruin everything; that would make the entire scheme woefully obvious even to something as stupid as a computer. Flame, suspecting conspiracies everywhere, could not possibly fail to denounce this one if Parrah's flight path made it so blatant.

"Parrah," he said. "There's a problem." He still spoke in Anglo-Spanish so that the computer would not understand him.

"Request cyborg unit designated 'Slant' refrain from conversation in language not known to this unit," the computer said again.

"I'm just saying good-bye to my wife," he replied, then hesitated, waiting to counter further objections.

The computer said nothing.

"You mustn't fly or use any other magic," he told Parrah quickly in Anglo-Spanish, "or the demon will know where you are. But you've still got to get there ahead of me, so you'll have time to teach people poly-glot."

Parrah nodded. "I'll try," she said. "But Sam, I don't even know where I'm going!"

Turner cursed himself. Of course, Parrah had not heard the computer's directions, which had been given silently over his cyborg communication circuit. He re-peated the description of the chosen town's location to her, intentionally using peculiar phrasing so the com-puter would not recognize the cognate words. He was relieved that Dest had not lost the metric system in the Bad Times. He did not think he could have managed if he had had to convert kilometers to some other unit.

Parrah nodded understanding. "I have it," she said. "Seven score and three kilometers southeast by south."

"Yes," Turner said. On a sudden uncontrollable im-pulse, he pulled her to him, embraced her, kissed her, then let her go. "Go now," he said. "Hurry!"

"I will," she replied. "I love you. Be careful. And try not to wreck the ship!" Before she could say any more, he turned and trotted into the forest, back to-ward where he had left his mount.

He had covered less than half the distance from the clearing to the burned-out village when the overcast sky lit up ahead of him and IRU 247 lifted off, ascend-ing into the heavens atop a tower of flame.

He stared at it for a moment, but even before the starship had vanished into the clouds he was marching onward once more.

In the woods a kilometer or so to the southeast of the blasted clearing, in an area where evergreens began to give way to the leafless branches of maples and oaks, Parrah was baffled. She was fairly certain the town of Killalah, on the old Etorrian highway, was her intended destination. How could she get to Killa-lah before Sam did if she could not fly?

Killalah was where she was headed, following Sam's instructions, and she was fairly confident that she un-derstood where she was going, and why, and what she was to do when she got there, but she had no idea at all of how she could reach the place in time.

For the present she simply ran, trotting south through the forests at a steady pace, trying to keep her wizard's robe from tangling in the bushes and trying to think of something she could do to speed her passage. She had left Arzadel and Dekert back in the clearing and set out on her own, wasting not a moment in ex-planation, so she had no one to ask for advice.

She did not really understand why she was not to fly or use any other magic. Sam had not had time to ex-plain how her magic could tell the demon anything. Magic left no traces that she was aware of. The only way she could detect magic in use was through her own magic, and she knew that demons did not use wizardry, but something else.

If Sam said she was not to use magic, though, she would not use magic. She trusted him and was deter-mined not to fail him.

She wished she had had more time with him. At least, she thought, she was helping now, not just sitting at home with the children.

She knew her husband well enough to be sure that he would give her every chance. If he wanted her to reach Killalah first, he would do what he could to see that she did. He would undoubtedly dawdle along the way, keeping his horse to a walk, but still, she needed to have reached the town, taught people a strange an-cient tongue and what they were to say in it, and then departed without a trace before either Sam or the yellow-haired, baggy-garbed demon with Sam's weapon arrived.

If she could find a horse herself, that might be all she needed. She risked a quick magical scan of the surrounding area.

A brilliant golden light appeared to the west, and for a moment she thought she had found something. She quickly realized, though, that she was seeing the demon's ship take off, with her eyes more than with her magic. That was nothing that could possibly help.

The roar reached her a few moments later, like a distant explosion or the echo of thunder.

The thought of thunder gave her an idea. She thought for a moment, then decided that a little more wizardry, more powerful this time, was needed. Sam had told her not to use magic, but she needed her magic if she was to accomplish anything, and she chose to risk it. Concentrating, she made a long-range men-tal call to Arzadel, straining herself badly to do it.

Her feet slowed and stumbled, and she completed the message—semiconscious and in a light trance—

lying on her face on the cold, damp dead leaves that carpeted the ground.

When she was sure that Arzadel had heard and un-derstood, she sent him a final warning that he was not to fly until he was well away from the blasted clearing —if it was not safe for her, then it would not be safe for the others. When she received an acknowledg-ment, faint with distance, of both her message and her final warning, she broke contact with a rush of relief and lay still for a few seconds, the warmth of her cheek melting the frost from the cold leaves.

After a moment's recuperation, she forced herself back to her feet, brushed off her robe, and began walking, gradually picking up speed until she was again running, not flat out but at a pace she could maintain for kilometers.

She was no longer quite so worried. She had found a way to ensure that she would reach Killalah first.

If she could not go quickly, then Sam would need to go slowly. The demon would not want him to dawdle, but it could scarcely blame Sam if the weather turned bad enough to slow him down. That thundering sound the demon's ship had made as it took off into the sky had reminded her that the magical techniques that her comrades used to keep dangerous storms from damag-ing Praunce could make storms as well as break them. The clouds were thick, and the winter had been dry, so that plenty of raw material should be available to work with.

Arzadel and the other wizards of Praunce should have no trouble in creating a fair-sized blizzard, its lo-cation carefully controlled. She herself would go around it, along its eastern edge, unhindered. Sam, farther to the west, would catch its full force. Even her Sam, strong and fast as he was, would be slowed by a blizzard.

Building and controlling a blizzard called for a really heavy use of magic, of course, but not in Killa-lah or moving in that direction. If the demon saw it, it would have no reason to connect it with Sam's mission.

She hoped that Sam would not have too rough a time with the storm and that he would forgive her for not finding a less strenuous way.

She spared little thought for capturing the demon's ship intact.

Chapter Eighteen

TURNER WAS PUZZLED BY THE BLIZZARD'S SUDDEN arrival. The clouds had thickened and dark-ened with incredible speed, turning the sky from pale gray to black, and the snow had begun falling even before the last light had vanished into the gather-ing gloom.

He knew immediately that the storm was magical in origin. He could sense it, even had its suddenness not been a giveaway. The magic that piled up the clouds put a tingle in the air as if it were a thunderstorm to break a long summer drought rather than a midwinter snowfall. This storm, beyond question, was made by wizards.

But why would wizards be creating a snowstorm?

Turner had no idea. The wizards in the area were strangers, he was sure, and no doubt had their own reasons. Perhaps water supplies were running low somewhere. He could have signaled or tried to mind-speak to someone, but the computer would have no-ticed his use of psionics. Instead, he simply shrugged and rode on.

A few moments after the first flakes sprinkled his brown hair with white, the computer asked, "Query: Reason for high concentration of gravitational anoma-lies in and around center of winter storm system."

Turner sighed, his breath swirling away in the wind, lost in the snow. "I don't know," he lied. "I suppose the local wizards must be trying to break the storm up."

He saw no point in revealing that wizards could create storms, since that would establish beyond ques-tion the possibility of using psionics as a weapon. It might also bring up questions of whether the wizards might be trying to interfere with Turner's own actions. Flame and her computer were quite suspicious enough without adding any such unnecessary complications.

Although he would never have mentioned it to the computer, he wondered inwardly whether there might actually be some connection between the storm and his own activities, despite his failure to guess at what the connection might be.

The more he thought about it, the more he sus-pected a link of some kind. He had never before heard of anyone intentionally creating a blizzard. Certainly wizards often gathered clouds and supersaturated them to create rain for crops and drinking water, but nobody ever made snow.

The sudden appearance of such a unique event di-rectly in his path seemed an unlikely coincidence.

When presented with two extremely unusual occur-rences so close together as this snowstorm and his con-flict with Flame, only a fool could be certain that one was not cause and the other effect. The blizzard had hardly brought Flame to Dest, but he could not really rule out the possibility that Flame's arrival was some-how responsible for the snowstorm. The local wizards were strangers, but they were all, he supposed, loyal subjects of Praunce. His compatriots might well have a hand in the storm.

He had no idea why they would want to, though.

Could it have anything to do with the Council's re-quest that he try to capture Flame's ship intact?

He began to wonder whether the storm might be an act of war or the start of a rebellion against Praunce.

Neither one seemed likely. Turner tried to keep up with current events, and so far as he knew, the area had been completely peaceful for years. In fact, he was fairly certain that the region he was crossing had not been forcibly conquered but had joined Praunce's em-pire peacefully and willingly. Such an area did not seem likely to rebel without warning, and any external enemy would have surely attacked either Praunce itself or somewhere along the border, not a thinly settled expanse of forest nowhere near either the city or the frontier.

But if this blizzard were an attack of some sort in a new, no-holds-barred war, might Praunce want a star-ship to retaliate against hostile wizardry?

That made no sense. No war had been brewing when he had left the city; no one could have known that any extraordinary defenses might be called for. Besides, magic could easily suppress hostile magic, which was why wizards had proved to be of very little use in combat, leaving warfare to the swordsmen and archers; a single defending wizard could usually sup-press three or four attacking wizards. Magic was deli-cate stuff, easily disrupted. Wizardry was of military use only in intelligence or if the other side had no wiz-ards—or if the element of surprise was present.

If a storm could be conjured up without the enemy noticing, Turner supposed that it might have its uses.

But that was fantastically unlikely. Wars did not simply happen without warning. And nobody would be stupid enough to attack Praunce, not even with total surprise on his side. Even if Praunce had not had more wizards than any other nation, and more powerful wiz-ards, it would still have no need of the starship to counter hostile magic. A handful of competent wizards would be enough for that, and Praunce's regular army was the largest and best on the planet.

But if the Council didn't want the ship to defend against magical attacks, then why did they want it? For attacking the city-states that remained unconquered? For quick transportation? For its computer, or its arse-nal, or the technological knowledge it could provide?

Actually, he realized, they might not know exactly why they wanted it. They might simply see an opportu-nity, one they did not want to miss. They might not yet know just what they would do with the ship; after all, they knew very little about it.

If they had it, what would they do with it? Unite all of Dest under their dominion? That seemed the most probable use.

What right did they have to ask him for it? Why should he give it to them?

Was there any connection at all between the ship and the snowstorm?

He puzzled over the matter for a few minutes longer, then gave it up. He had no answers. He re-signed himself to that and forgot about the mysteries as he concentrated on directing his mount through the thickening snow.

The storm worsened quickly and steadily. The wind picked up from a moderate breeze to a screaming gale, and the snow began falling in heavy white masses rather than gentle scattered flakes. Visibility decreased quickly, and the footing deteriorated, so that Turner soon had to dismount and lead his horse.

The surrounding forest provided little shelter. The heavy, wet snow quickly exceeded what even the ever-greens' branches would hold and tumbled down to the ground beneath. Turner could not recall ever having seen so fierce a storm, and certainly not one that had achieved such ferocity so rapidly. The wizards respon-sible had certainly outdone themselves.

Within half an hour of the first flakes Turner found himself plowing through meter-high drifts, unable to see anything but blowing whiteness ahead except once, briefly, when he came within centimeters of walking into a tree's trunk. As he tugged at the reins, pulling his frightened horse along, he could feel the stallion's trembling through the wet leather. Even over the mounting howl of the wind he could hear branches above him creaking under the weight of the snow. A limb snapped loudly somewhere off to his right.

He began to worry that he would become lost and wander endlessly in circles in the manner described by innumerable old stories, stories told on both Dest and Old Earth. The possibility of freezing to death or walking off a precipice seemed less absurd with every step.

"Computer," he asked as he fought through a drift, "Am I still headed the right direction?"

"Affirmative," the machine answered immediately and clearly. Turner was relieved to learn that the storm did not interfere significantly with either transmission or reception.

"Let me know if I veer off, all right?" he said.

"Affirmative."

Somewhat reassured, he struggled onward.

Assuming that the faint magical aura that permeated the entire storm would cover his own minimal output, he risked using his own psychic senses to guide him. The computer said nothing. With that little bit of magical assistance and the computer's tracking as backup, he fought his way on into the storm.

Within fifteen minutes of first asking the computer's aid, however, he was forced to admit that he was lost and exhausted. His coat was layered with snow, his beard frosted with his own frozen breath. Moisture from the snow and his own sweat had frozen into the reins, making them stiff and awkward, and the horse put up more and more resistance with every step. Un-able to use any high-energy magic for fear the com-puter would find it suspicious and change the entire plan for determining Dest's loyalty, he had done with-out a heat-field, and as a result he could no longer feel anything in his toes. He still dared not warm them.

He could no longer perceive much physically, and nothing useful at all. The storm and his own weariness blurred his senses. He did not know the area.

The computer, however, would have routinely re-corded every visible detail of the entire planet ever since its ship entered orbit. He knew that. He had been relying on the computer to guide him to the tar-get village, but now it occurred to them that he might have a better, more immediate use for the computer's stored data.

"Computer," he asked. "Do you have any record of human habitation in my immediate vicinity—within a kilometer, say? It doesn't have to be a real town or even a village; a farmhouse or an inn would do just fine."

"Affirmative," the computer replied immediately. "Isolated building located approximately two hundred and forty meters west by southwest of present plotted position of cyborg unit designated 'Slant.' Evidence in-dicates an individual dwelling."

"That's great," Turner said sincerely. "Direct me to it, would you?"

The computer complied. Several long moments later, Turner's outstretched hand had struck the side of a building.

He groped along until he found a door, and tried the latch.

The door was barred, which was hardly surprising. An ordinary latch could easily have given way before the wild gusts of wind, and whoever was inside would not have wanted to risk snow blowing in.

The fact that the door was barred from the inside meant that someone was inside to have barred it.

Turner pounded on the snow-spattered oak as enthusi-astically as he could.

Not until the door opened suddenly and he fell for-ward into a cozy living room was Turner able to verify that the computer had been right, that it was indeed a house and not an inn or some other structure. The snow had hidden all exterior details so thoroughly that Turner believed he could have walked directly under an inn's low-hanging signboard without seeing it.

A short middle-aged man in brown homespun had opened the door. A woman stood behind him, a long knife ready in her hand. Turner had fallen to the floor when the door had given way beneath his weight, too tired to bother about such details as breaking his fall. As the man shoved the door past Turner's feet, closing and barring it, Turner smiled up at them both from where he had landed.

"Hello," he said. "I hope you don't mind, but I lost my way in the storm. Could I stay here until it breaks?"

He smiled again, cracking the ice on his beard, not so much in an attempt to reassure his new hosts as in genuine relief at getting out of the wind for even a moment.

Until he noticed how good it felt to lie there on the floor, Turner had not realized how tired and battered he was. It was not entirely the storm's doing. He had not really rested since he had stupidly tried to read Flame's mind that morning. He had fled through the forest, and taught his wife polyglot, and fought his way through the storm, all in a single day.

Getting off the floor would be difficult.

The man and the woman glanced at each other, and then both began speaking at once.

No one would turn a man out into such a storm, he was assured in a confused volley of words. The two before him were the owners of the house, Hellegai and Turei by name, and they had many questions. They wanted to know who he was, where he came from, whether he knew anything about the storm, and vir-tually everything else up to and perhaps including the meaning of life itself.

Turner told himself that he could not lie on the floor indefinitely, and reluctantly acknowledged to himself that this was true. He had responsibilities. He had to save the world, among other things—and Praunce's wizards thought it would be nice if he could give them a starship while he was at it.

Right now, though, he had smaller, more immediate commitments. With a sigh, he rolled over and strug-gled slowly to his feet, thanking Hellegai and Turei profusely while completely ignoring their questions.

Once upright, he took a deep breath of the warm air, asked directions, then pulled his coat tightly about him, hunched his shoulders, and fought his way back out to his horse.

He led the unhappy beast into the stable adjoining the house, tethered it to a post, then found a bucket and manger. The bucket was mostly full. He broke in the ice with the heel of one hand, then placed it where the stallion could reach it.

Fodder was a little more difficult, but eventually he simply stole a portion from the manger of the other horse in the stable, which presumably belonged to his hosts.

He was too tired to bother with any elaborate care, but he did at least manage to get the saddle off his mount.

He left the blanket on. The stable was cold. The walls kept out the snow and most of the wind but pro-vided little warmth.

When he was satisfied that the beast was not about to fall dead, he took a deep breath and opened the stable door.

The storm blasted at him. He would have groaned, save that he could not spare the breath. Instead he hunched himself forward and marched back out.

He reached the safety of the house's front door, where he was once again admitted. He staggered in, closed and barred the door, and then collapsed grate-fully onto the hearthrug to warm his face and hands before the fire.

Once he had thawed out a little, he could worry about other matters, such as what Flame might be doing, what Parrah might be doing, and why Praunce's wizards wanted the ship.

Chapter Nineteen

FLAME LAY BACK ON THE ACCELERATION COUCH and closed her eyes. The control cable was secure-ly in place in the socket in the back of her neck, and it felt almost comfortable there, linking her to her ship. She relaxed, enjoying the good feeling of a solid meal in her stomach and the familiar well-worn shape of the couch beneath her.

Her adventures planetside had been exciting, an ex-hilarating change of pace, but the ship was her home, and she was glad to be safely back aboard, away from the cold and the dirt and the wind and the damp, se-cure where Slant and his treacherous allies could not get at her.

She only wished she could convince the computer to launch the missiles. That would make her pleasure complete. She had argued with the obstinate machine throughout the launch and off and on throughout her subsequent leisurely shower and meal, but it had re-fused to yield. She had delayed resetting the timer on her little doomsday device, but when it became obvi-ous that the computer was not going to yield, she had relented. The computer insisted in carrying out its scheme to question people at randomly selected sites and would have let her destroy them both rather than doing the sensible thing and nuking the planet immedi-ately.

Now that she had been back aboard for a few hours and was rested, calm, and fed, she felt that she was ready to get down to business. She could yield grace-fully. If the silly machine was determined to interro-gate villagers, she might as well accept the fact and get on with the farce.

It would only mean a delay, after all. Sooner or later the truth would become apparent, and the com-puter would acknowledge that Slant was a traitor and that the planet was run by rebels. Then she could nuke the cities and move on to the next target.

There was no hurry. This planet would get its just deserts eventually, she was certain. She judged that about fourteen warheads of varying yields would do the job, and then she would head for the next system.

She would live long enough to see her entire arsenal fired, she was sure. She was still young—or at any rate not old—and even with the missiles salvaged from IRU 205, she could wipe out only a few more worlds, at best. One heavily populated planet would take everything she had, and then she would have nothing left to do but die. There was no need to hurry. Wasting a few days, or even months, on this planet could do no lasting harm.

"All right," she thought to the computer. "Where is this village you've picked out?"

The computer fed her its answer visually, through the control cable. Dest's one inhabited continent appeared in her mind, spreading out before her like a rug unroll-ing. A tiny spot glowed a vivid red amid the greens of forest and grassland. She saw nothing special about it.

"Has it got a name?" she asked.

"Information unavailable."

She stared at the map for a moment, then, on a sudden whim, she asked, "Show me all the gravita-tional whatever-they-ares."

Innumerable golden sparkles appeared, scattered here and there across the map, some blinking instantly into existence and then vanishing a moment later, others burning steadily for extended periods of time.

Some were stationary, while others moved about ran-domly. A few of the cities were almost invisible be-neath liberal coats of yellow-gold light. The big central city, however, seemed to be only lightly infested.

Generally, the dots were either gathered in the cities or strewn sparsely across the countryside. Outside the towns very few of the golden dots appeared in groups, with one exception. Several of them seemed to be gathering in an area to the north of the red dot that represented the computer's chosen interrogation site, not in a tight bunch but in a loose ring several kilome-ters across.

That looked suspicious.

"Where's Slant?" she asked.

A blue dot appeared to the northwest of both the red dot and all but the outermost of the gathered golden ones. It did not appear to be moving. She con-centrated on it for a moment, thinking it might be moving very, very slowly, but it still appeared motion-less, and she decided that Slant must be resting. The center of the cluster of gold lay directly between Slant and the village.

What could that mean?

She studied the situation for a moment. "Is there any antigravity activity right around Slant? I mean, within half a kilometer or so?"

"Negative."

Then it was not anything Slant was doing directly, she told herself.

Slant had friends, though.

"What about his wife? Is she doing any of that?" she asked.

"Information insufficient," the computer replied.

"Why?"

"Present location of civilian identified as wife of cy-borg unit designated 'Slant' is not known."

"Why not? Can't you find her?"

"Negative. Forest cover prevents visual tracking. Attempt at infrared tracking possible, but inconclusive results highly probable due to forest cover and pres-ence of other heat sources, and no attempt was made prior to loss of contact. Possibility exists of tracking gravitational anomaly congruent with her position while such anomaly exists, but no such anomaly has been present. Subject does not radiate significantly in any other quantity detectable and measurable from ship's present altitude. No reason was known to at-tempt tracking."

"You've lost her, then." Flame was, for once, not accusing but simply getting her facts straight.

"Affirmative."

"Is there a chance she could be connected with all that stuff I'm seeing, between Slant and the village?

That looks awfully suspicious."

"Information insufficient. However, no evidence exists to suggest connection. Anomalous activity oc-curring at distance from last known position of civilian subject not consistent with lack of vehicular transport observed on planet."

"You mean she couldn't have gotten there that fast?"

"Affirmative."

"What if she levitated?"

"No gravitational anomalies observed departing last known position of civilian subject."

"Could she have walked partway and then levi-tated?"

"Hypothesis is possible but not fully consistent with available data. Both gravitational anomalies originating within possible walking distance of last known position of civilian subject originated to east of last known position and proceeded southwest at high altitude. Behavior not consistent with human psychology."

"Both? There were two, not three?"

"Affirmative."

"High altitude?"

"Affirmative."

Flame thought that over. She was still suspicious, but if the two anomalies were two of the three psioni-cists she had shot at, where was the third? And why were they at high altitude?

"Plot me their courses."

Two pale blue lines appeared on the map. They did indeed originate near the spot where she had encoun-tered Slant's wife, but from there they diverged. One had headed straight toward the concentration of anom-alies, while the other had swerved off to the north and vanished in a small town. Neither went anywhere near the target site.

If they were part of some deception Turner was ar-ranging, she could not guess what it might be.

"Then you think that yellow stuff is all just a coinci-dence?" she asked.

The computer hesitated before replying. "Nonurban concentration of gravitational anomalies coincides with major winter storm activity. Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' theorizes an attempt by planet's inhabitants to disrupt storm system by use of psionics, to prevent possible damage and loss of life."

"A storm?" That sounded interesting. "Show me the weather, then," she demanded.

The calm green map was suddenly overlaid with swirling masses of white cloud. The area Flame had been watching vanished completely beneath a heavy gray blanket that spiraled and spun as she watched.

"Bozhe moi!" She started and opened her eyes for a moment, then quickly closed them again. Adding the beige background of the carpeted ceiling did nothing to improve the image she was seeing.

"Where did that come from?" she asked. "It was cloudy when we took off, but nothing like that!"

"Information insufficient."

Flame stared for a moment. "A corner of it is over that village you picked, too," she remarked.

"Affirmative."

The storm system was huge and obviously powerful. "Could you land in that?" she asked.

"Affirmative."

She stared for a few seconds more.

"I don't think I want to," she said at last. "I'd rather stay up here where it's warm. We can land when the weather clears."

"Affirmative."

That storm did seem like sufficient reason for the concentration of psionics, she had to admit. The two dots that had passed near the clearing had probably been on their way to the storm. Tracing their course back she could see a village where they might have started. The one who turned away had probably gone for more help.

They probably had nothing to do with Slant or with herself.

She willed the map-image away. "I think I'll take a nap," she said. "Call me when that storm is gone."

"Affirmative."

The computer observed the slowing of Flame's breath and heartbeat and charted the shift in brain waves as she fell quickly asleep.

Somewhere in the computer's processors, a fraction of a second after Flame passed the point the computer recognized as the line between sleeping and waking, the conclusion was reached that the storm could not be considered consistent with normal weather patterns.

That did not necessarily mean much. The com-puter's programming in regard to weather allowed for a great deal of latitude, since different planets had dif-ferent climates, and any number of odd variables might intrude, from volcanoes to chemical waste from manufacturing, or from the tidal effects of moons to the fallout from supernovas.

The computer could detect no sign of such phenom-ena here. This planet had a rotation, axial tilt, gravity, diameter, shape, temperature range, orbit, and atmos-pheric composition well within normal ranges. Its weather, as far as the computer could see, should be-have normally. The only abnormality was the concen-tration of what it had been told was "psionics," a concentration that had appeared before the storm really began.

The presence of psionic activity could be coinci-dence, or the result of good predictive methods, or causal.

It ran this information through its standard pro-gramming and arrived at the string of "if . . . then"

statements that related to informing its cyborg unit of the facts.

Flame had announced her intention of napping until the storm had passed. That kicked in a standing order she had given long before, that she was not to be dis-turbed unless something critical came up.

Therefore, the information on the storm's origin was run through tests of criticality.

Weather was not recognized as enemy activity, by definition, no matter how destructive. Certain sorts of weather, such as nuclear winter or volcanic eruptions where an impact had holed a planet's crust, could re-sult from enemy activity but were not in themselves enemy activity. This storm was not recognizably con-nected with enemy activity unless psionics were enemy activity. Slant had said that psionics were a mutation in friendly civilians, and no evidence to the contrary had been produced, so the computer did not consider psionics to necessarily be enemy activity.

Flame had said that the ship would not land until after the storm had subsided, so it was not critical to navigation.

The possibility that the psionicists had merely pre-dicted the storm was very strong, and new methods of weather prediction, while interesting, were not critical.

Test after test came up negative or brought in a sub-test that in turn either came up negative or brought in a sub-subtest. Quantification after quantification came within a point or two of testing positive, but none quite reached critical level.

Several tests yielded no decision. The termite dam-age to the computer's programming during that long-ago attack had been quite serious, far more serious than the computer itself realized.

One of the electronic termites in particular had been destroying computer memory for almost eight minutes when Flame finally got to it. It had wiped out vast quantities of essential data, most particularly data concerning the computer's own design and capabilities. The damage had not been judged critical only because the computer had been unaware that the destroyed programming had included most of its standards for judging criticality in any number of situations—in-cluding damage assessment and also including judging when to override its cyborg.

Flame had remained blithely unaware of the extent of the damage, and in any case her own judgment was no longer entirely sound. She had done nothing about the computer's impairment beyond rigging her sal-vaged termite as a doomsday device.

The computer had carried on, and was still carrying on, applying its remaining tests to the question of whether it should treat doubt about the storm's origin as an urgent enough matter to report to Flame during her nap.

It drew no conclusion regarding any effect that the storm might have on the loyalty of the civilians who were to be interrogated. It could establish no link be-tween the storm and the Slant cyborg.

The information was not reported. Had Flame taken another third of a second before falling asleep, the computer would have mentioned it.

By the time she awoke the computer had filed the information as inactive data, available should the sub-ject be brought up but not to be volunteered. Flame never learned that the storm might have been artifi-cial, never had a chance to guess why it had been cre-ated, to apply her conspiracy theories to the question.

On the planet below, as he ate Turei's thick vegeta-ble stew and listened to Hellegai's pointless anecdotes while he finished thawing out, Sam Turner had no way of knowing how close to falling apart his schemes had come. He was still far more concerned with what Par-rah had meant about keeping the ship intact.

What did the Prauncer wizards intend? Whose idea was it to capture the ship—Shopaur's? He was chairman of the Council at present, but Turner had not thought him sufficiently inventive to have come up with the idea. Arzadel was more likely. Dekert might well have thought of it but would probably not have suggested it aloud. Haiger? Parrah herself? Pleido?

Wirozhess? If that young idiot was responsible, Turner was sure that the idea was to use it to conquer the planet. Wirozhess thought that way.

He puzzled it over as he savored the stew.

And at that same time, several kilometers to the east, Parrah stared in awe at the piled clouds on the western horizon. She had asked Arzadel for a blizzard, true, but this storm was more than she had expected. She could sense its fury readily from where she rode. She was very glad indeed that only a few isolated flakes and random gusts of wind were reaching her as she hurried on toward Killalah. She rode a horse she had bought on her credit as a wizard of Praunce, pur-chased at the first inn she had been able to locate after leaving Arzadel, Dekert, and Sam.

Killalah itself, she knew, had not been as fortunate as she, and was catching considerably more than iso-lated flakes and random gusts. She dreaded having to fight her way in if she reached the area before the storm had died.

She also shivered at a thought she could not sup-press. A storm of that magnitude could easily kill someone. If anyone died in that howling maelstrom, she would be a murderess.

Furthermore, a storm of that size, for all she knew, would be enough to wreck the sky-ship she had been sent to preserve. Her entire mission might have been a mistake.

And worst of all, her husband was somewhere in the middle of the blizzard, and despite being a cyborg and wizard, he, too, could die as a result of her in-structions to Arzadel. That thought, had she allowed herself to entertain it for more than an instant, would have been enough to bring on nightmares.

She rode on toward Killalah, free of snow but in a thick fog of worry and desperation.

Somewhere in between husband and wife, in the fringes of the blizzard, Arzadel stared in horror at that same storm, towering above him as he hung in midair above the forest. He had started the cloudbuilding himself, before Dekert's local recruits began arriving, and had been concerned that the storm might not form quickly enough. Therefore, as the other wizards had arrived in twos or threes, he had urged them all on to the greatest possible speed, and had not really counted the newcomers or kept a close watch on the storm sys-tem's overall development.

They had obviously overdone it. The storm had burgeoned out of control, until it was now far and away the most powerful storm ever created by wiz-ardry on the face of Dest.

Even considering the wizards' haste and their numbers, Arzadel did not really understand how the blizzard had grown so big so fast.

Of course, the winter had been exceptionally dry. He guessed that he and his fellow wizards had unwit-tingly tapped into a pressure system that had been sit-ting there, waiting and building. Parrah's message had stressed urgency, so Arzadel had allowed no time to study the situation closely. He had simply started gath-ering clouds and ramming them together, piling them up and sweeping moisture up from lakes and rivers, until the sky could no longer hold the accumulated mass. The other wizards, as they arrived, had done the same.

And, apparently, they had triggered something as much as they had built anything. A storm that might have come days later, or not at all, or as a series of storms spread over a much larger area and much more time, had all come at once, concentrated into one small area.

The result was quite impressive.

Now, the problem was not building the storm or sustaining it but disposing of it. Arzadel was unsure whether the best approach would be to shred away pieces, or just to keep it contained until it blew itself out, or something else entirely.

A message formed in his mind, and the decision was taken away from him. Dekert and the others were al-ready shredding it, tearing away the outer cloud masses, deflecting winds, and trying to wear it down.

Arzadel looked at the roiling clouds and felt his heart sink. The thing was huge and looked stubborn.

Killing it might take days.

But, he asked himself rhetorically, what choice did he have?

He gulped, gathered his strength, and reached out with his mind to pull away the nearest clouds.

In all, it took four days to kill the storm they had built in an afternoon.

Chapter Twenty

THE SKIES WERE STILL GRAY BUT NO LONGER PARTICULARY dark or threatening when Parrah rode into Killalah. The snow had finally stopped falling there a few hours before, and already respectable paths had been dug out along most of the streets. Sev-eral people were now turning their attention to clear-ing the roofs, lest the weight of well over a meter of wet snow cave them in.

The storm had delayed Parrah somewhat, after all. She had been able to skirt its edge for more than a hundred kilometers, but for the last fourth of the jour-ney she had had to fight her way through the remnants of the once-mighty storm. She had made her way through two days of meter-deep snow and three-meter drifts, at times on horseback, at other times leading the way herself, practically dragging the beast along in her footsteps.

Now, though, she had reached her destination.

"Hello!" she called. "Who is in charge here?"

Several people stared at her, some of them openly hostile at the sight of a stranger in winter, when they had better things to do than cater to an uninvited guest.

Parrah wore the robe of a wizard, however, and wizards commanded respect. Many of the townspeople suspected that so sudden and heavy a storm could only have been the work of wizards and had said so to any-one who would listen, but that was just gossip. Wiz-ards commanded respect. People who failed to respect wizards had a tendency to suffer for it in one way or another.

Accordingly, when Parrah asked her question, half a dozen hands pointed to a nearby rooftop where a rotund figure was vigorously shoving snow out over the eaves with a manure scoop. Parrah gathered from various phrases shouted through scarves and mufflers that this person was the town's imperial agent.

"Thank you," she said, nodding politely. She urged her horse forward until she sat near the building—

though well clear of the overhanging eaves, as she had no desire for a faceful of snow.

"Hello!" she called again. "Are you in charge here?"

The person on the roof turned his head, saw her, and nodded, the manure scoop still in his hands.

"I need to talk to you!" Parrah shouted.

The plump figure, so heavily bundled in blue wool that Parrah could make out nothing but a vaguely manlike shape, rammed the scoop upright into the snow and turned to face the newcomer. A gloved hand reached up and pulled several layers of wool away from a thick black beard and a smiling mouth.

"Talk, then," a cheerful tenor voice replied.

"I would much prefer to speak on the ground," Par-rah called. "Or better still, indoors somewhere warm.

It's very important."

The figure peered speculatively around at the roof. Roughly a third of it had been cleared down to a depth of a few centimeters. The empire's representative ob-viously wanted to stay where he was and finish the job, but he, too, had seen the wizard's robe Parrah wore. Although Praunce's wizards theoretically served only an advisory role in government, everyone knew where the real power in the empire lay.

Since this woman wore no coat amid the snow and cold yet appeared warm and comfortable, it seemed a safe assumption, despite her request to speak indoors, that the robe was not fraudulent or stolen.

He sighed, his breath puffing out of the woolen bundle like the steam from a kettle. "I'll be right down," he called. "Meet me inside."

The building on which the empire's representative stood, Parrah saw when she dropped her gaze from the roof to the facade, was a public house. She tied her horse to a rail and found her way to the taproom, where the plump man joined her a moment later.

Unwrapped, the imperial agent in Killalah proved to be of medium height and large but not really exces-sive girth, with a round smiling face and big stub-fin-gered hands. He refused to speak until warm cider had been provided for both himself and his guest but then settled back comfortably and said, "My name is Tagyi, and I'm in charge around here as much as anyone is, so what can I do for you?"

Parrah hesitated; she had been so concerned with reaching Killalah that she had not really thought out what she would say.

"I'm here on an urgent errand," she said at last. "I need to teach as many people here as possible a new language, as quickly as possible. Magically."

The agent made no attempt to disguise his puzzle-ment as he looked at her, still smiling. "Why?" he asked at last.

Parrah sighed. "There is someone coming—a demon, in human form. She controls weapons from the Bad Times, many of them. My husband . . . she wants to kill us all. I mean, she intends to destroy en-tire cities at a time, with Praunce the first on her list. My husband is with her. No, I don't mean that; he's not with her, he's trying to stop her." Parrah, aware that her explanation was garbled, struggled to make clear what she herself did not fully understand. "She . . . she's under a geas, a commitment, and she can't kill those who swear loyalty to Old Earth, you see."

"Go on," Tagyi said noncommittally.

"Well, she's coming here. She conferred with her other demon, or whatever it is that restrains her, and they chose this town as their sample. They intend to come here and question people, and if anyone denies loyalty to Old Earth, then she'll start destroying cities. We don't want her to do that, of course, we just want her ship. So you must all say that you are loyal to Old Earth, do you see?"

The agent stared mildly at her for a moment before replying. "We're loyal to Praunce here, my lady; we know nothing of Old Earth."

"That doesn't matter." Parrah gestured as if to sweep away such unimportant details. " Praunce is loyal to Old Earth, and that's what we need to con-vince this demon of."

"My lady," Tagyi said politely. "I apologize if you think me impertinent, but who are you? You haven't mentioned that, and as a representative of the govern-ment of Praunce, I take an interest in such matters as loyalty oaths and cannot ask my people to give them based on nothing but the word of a stranger. I can see that you are a wizard—either a wizard or a truly gifted actress—but I know nothing more about you." He smiled gently, as if to make plain that he meant no offense.

Parrah was not offended by anything except the delay the agent's doubts would cause. "I am Parrah," she said, "and I am a member of the Council of the Wizards of Praunce. My husband is Sam Turner, also a member of the Council. I am here as a representative of the Council, on Council business."

"Ah." Tagyi nodded. "I believe that I have heard both your name and your husband's, though I have never before had the pleasure of meeting either of you. Killalah has never before been graced by your presence, and I have never had the good fortune to visit Praunce. I must therefore confess, reluctantly, that I am unable to attest that you are who you say you are, but accepting your identity for the moment, I will grant that you are well within your rights to ask a favor of our humble town. But what is this 'Old Earth' the Council wants us to swear allegiance to? Do you mean the country of the old myths? And what was that about teaching languages?"

Parrah hissed in exasperation.

"It doesn't matter what Old Earth is. I do mean the world of the old myths; it isn't mythical. That doesn't matter, though. What matters is this demon, and con-vincing it that all of Dest is still loyal to the govern-ment of Old Earth, so it won't destroy Praunce and so we can get its ship."

Tagyi remained courteous but visibly skeptical. "And what does this have to do with new languages?" he asked.

"The demon doesn't speak our tongue," Parrah ex-plained patiently. "So I have come here to teach as many of you as I can the demon's tongue."

"A demon that can't learn our speech, so that we must learn its?" Tagyi asked politely. "I had thought demons were more versatile than that."

Parrah's patience was exhausted. "Yes, damn you, it's a demon that can't learn our speech, so that we must learn its! Hligosh, I don't have time to argue about it! I need to start right away; the demon could be here any minute!"

"All right," the agent said calmly. "You're the wiz-ard; you pick who you want to teach, then, and I'll see what they say."

"I pick you, then, San take you to hell!" She reached out and forced her way into the agent's mind.

Aboard Flame's ship, several thousand kilometers above, the computer informed its cyborg,

"Gravita-tional anomaly occurring in site chosen for sample in-terrogation."

Flame was bored, after days of inaction while wait-ing for the storm to die, and sunk in lethargy and de-pression. "So what?" she asked.

"Insufficient information," the computer replied.

It said nothing more, but Flame could sense that it was awaiting further action. She sighed and stirred herself sufficiently to ask, "Is Slant there?"

"Negative."

She thought for a moment. "Did one of those psy-chics I met levitate himself to the place, or one of the ones that was in the storm?"

"Negative."

"Then forget about it," she said. "Those stupid anomalies turn up all over the place." She did not feel up to arguing about it either way.

"Affirmative." The computer considered silently for a moment and then said, "All winter storm activity near site chosen for sample interrogation has ceased. Query: Advisability of landing."

Flame shifted on the couch and frowned at the poster. "Is Slant there yet?"

"Negative."

"Oh, that's right; you already told me that." She thought for a moment. "Oh, hell, I don't feel like it right now. It must be cold down there, with all that snow they just got; I'd rather wait up here. You won't let me kill any of the bastards anyway, will you?"

"Information insufficient. Permissibility of termina-tion of local inhabitants dependent upon circum-stances."

She felt too tired and dismal to take umbrage at the computer's literal-mindedness. "I mean," she said,

"you won't just let me go in and shoot some, will you?"

"Negative."

"That's what I thought. In that case I'd just as soon wait up here, where it's warm."

"Acknowledged."

A momentary flash of guilt for her own disinterest struck her, and she forced herself to add, "Let me know when Slant gets close, though—say, about a dozen kilometers away." After all, she thought to her-self, all she had left was her mission; she did not want to screw it up.

"Affirmative," the computer said.

On the ground, still a good many kilometers north of Killalah, Turner overheard this entire conversation as he clambered over the drifted snow. Flame's earlier orders regarding what Slant was to be told had appar-ently expired or been inadvertently countermanded somehow. The computer had informed both cyborgs of the psionic activity simultaneously and, in the absence of instructions to the contrary, had simply kept both communication circuits open.

Turner did not say anything, preferring to simply listen and save his energy for moving. The snow was too soft and deep to make riding a horse practical, so when he had decided the day before that the storm had let up enough for him to travel, he had left his mount with Hellegai and Turei, the householders who had sheltered him through the worst of the blizzard.

At first they had insisted that they would keep the animal safe for him until he returned, but he had told them to keep it for themselves as payment for their hospitality. He did not want to bother returning. So far as he knew, the horse was not anyone's particular pet. He would buy another mount if he needed one.

They had finally accepted, but having seen his bare head and face they had forced a sturdy hat and a long, thick black scarf on him in exchange. After only a token resistance he had accepted those gratefully.

Now, listening to IRU 247, despite the cold and the snow and his general weariness, he smiled, genuinely cheerful at what he heard. Parrah had reached the tar-get community and was starting her education pro-gram, he was sure. Furthermore, if Flame stayed in orbit until he was within a dozen kilometers of the town, she would not be arriving for days yet. Parrah would have all the time she needed.

That assumed, of course, that Flame didn't change her mind. Turner was slightly puzzled by her apparent indifference. It was not so much that indifference in an IRU cyborg was surprising; on the contrary, it was to be expected. A certain dull passivity seemed to be es-sential in anyone who was going to travel interstellar distances alone. The IRU default personalities, from what he knew of them, were designed for just that. His own default personality—Slant's default personality, at any rate—had certainly tended toward passivity. In general, he had acted only when forced by his com-puter to do so.

What was surprising in this case was not the passiv-ity itself but the contrast with Flame's earlier manic behavior.

He thought that over as he fought his way through forests and fields buried in snow. Having something to think about helped him resist the temptation to fly de-spite the inevitable arguments he knew flight would inspire.

After some consideration, he theorized that her present dull indifference was probably more or less Flame's normal condition. Surely, no personality, no matter how deranged, could sustain the level of anger and hatred that Flame had previously displayed—not over the long, empty years of uneventful travel be-tween stars. That anger and hatred must have been her response to the disruption of her shipboard routine. Her ferocity had been waiting somewhere below the surface until it had something to act on, and he and Dest had been a perfect target. When she had arrived at Dest, she had been primed and ready to unleash all her pent-up fury on the planet's cities—and she had been balked.

And, balked, she had been unable to maintain her state of rage.

In short, she was sulking. She hadn't been allowed her way, so now she would sit in her safe little place until she was allowed to do as she pleased and obliter-ate Dest's population.

Turner liked that theory. It seemed to fit everything he knew of her. The hatred and anger surely still lurked just below the surface, ready to break out in a new tantrum at any time.

He wondered what sort of a person she had been before her mind had been splintered. His current anal-ysis of her default personality made her sound childish. Had the whole person been childish?

It was entirely possible that she had been, of course. The default personality was generally supposed to be pretty close to the complete original as far as behavior went. It had to be, in order to remain dominant most of the time; the mind would keep trying to heal itself otherwise. That was why it took a special sort of per-son to become an IRU cyborg in the first place.

On the other hand, the Russian-speaking technician personality had seemed mature enough during the brief period he had seen it.

That meant nothing, he reminded himself. Of course, a cover personality had to seem like a complete and trustworthy person in order to be of any use in undercover work. That personality might have turned out to be utterly shallow and vapid. Probably would have, in fact.

He remembered, though, the puzzlement the cover self had displayed at her own emergence, and the wist-fulness when she had asked not to be sent away again, and doubted his own conclusions.

He sighed. He really had to find out Flame's real name, he told himself. Once he knew her name, he could deliver her release code, and her eighteen per-sonalities would automatically reintegrate.

Reinte-grated, she might be a perfectly reasonable and useful human being.

Of course, she might not be a perfectly reasonable and useful human being even then, but the release code would also demilitarize her ship, which would be well worth his while in any case.

What to do with the ship in that case might be an interesting problem. His fellow wizards wanted it, but having thought it over at length during the storm, he was not at all sure he liked the idea of giving it to them.

The wizards were quite powerful enough in Prauncer society already. Too powerful, perhaps.

That was getting ahead of himself, though. He could learn Flame's name only by telepathically prying deep into her unconscious mind, and he could not do that while the computer had doubts about his loyalty and believed that any and all psionic magic directed toward it had to be considered an attack.

As the situation stood, any study of Flame's mind was impossible.

He sighed again, his breath warm on the inside of the thick black scarf he had wrapped around the lower half of his face. He hoped his little scheme to establish Dest's loyalty to Old Earth would work.

He floundered on through the snow.

Dekert hovered in midair, wearily shredding a few last lingering clouds while he waited for the other wiz-ards to gather in the agreed-upon spot. His psychic sensitivity was high, as he wanted to detect his com-panions early so as to be able to greet them properly. He did not care to be caught off guard if one dropped unexpectedly out of a cloud bank.

Alert as he was, he was not surprised when he sensed someone nearby, but he was surprised that the new arrival, who definitely felt like a fellow wizard, was on foot and not flying. He paused in his cloud shredding, glanced down, and spotted a man who, judging by his hair color and clothing, looked like Sam Turner.

Startled, he verified Turner's identity with a quick psychic scan, so quick and light that it went unnoticed by its subject.

Dekert tried to evaluate the situation. He knew Turner was going to meet the demon. He did not know exactly what was to happen at that meeting or what might be happening now, but he could guess some of it.

A demon or two might well be watching Sam sur-reptitiously.

Dekert decided that dropping down and greeting Sam or calling to him telepathically would be a serious mistake.

Besides, even at the best of times, mind-talking to Sam Turner was extraordinarily difficult and uncom-fortable. His mind was shaped wrong, permanently damaged by his own long-dead demon.

Dekert watched contemplatively. The entire party of wizards responsible for building and then breaking the blizzard would be gathering shortly, in that very spot, to decide what, if anything, they should do next.

Dekert and Arzadel, as the two with the most infor-mation on what was happening as well as two of the highest-ranking and most powerful, would have con-siderable say in the final decision. Dekert therefore watched Turner with interest.

Sam, he knew, could take care of himself. Looking down, studying his compatriot, he could see no sign of uncertainty or worry in Turner's appearance either physically or psychically—though Sam's aura was always odd. Whatever Turner was doing, he did not seem to be encountering any unforeseen difficulties.

He deserved a chance to clear up the entire problem himself, before anyone else got involved, Dekert de-cided. After all, judging by their performance with the storm, the wizards of Praunce and its empire were not exactly flawlessly competent and inerrant, and Turner did seem to know what he was doing.

Taking the demon's ship intact was not really very important compared to preventing it from destroying Praunce. He saw no need to burden Sam with any fur-ther problems by reminding him that a sky-ship would be of use to the empire or by interfering in any way.

Dekert resolved that, when the wizards were gath-ered, he would personally see to it that none of them entered Killalah until Sam Turner had emerged, had called for help, or was proved dead.

Parrah was in the town, he knew, on some errand Sam had sent her. She might emerge at any time.

Im-pulsive as she was, she might then go back on some whim of her own. Dekert decided that he would send a party to watch for her, to find her at the first opportu-nity, and make sure that she behaved herself.

This affair's resolution was up to Sam Turner and no one else. Dekert watched silently, without interfering, as Turner struggled on toward Killalah.

Chapter Twenty-One

PARRAH LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW, SUDDENLY in-explicably nervous. The weather-beaten houses across the street looked no different than they had when she had entered.

Her gaze rose from the houses to the western sky just in time to see the starship blaze a band of golden fire across the indigo heavens.

Parrah froze for a moment. "Hligosh! She's finally coming! I have to get away from here, quickly. If she sees me, she'll suspect something."

The old woman she had been telepathically in-structing looked up at her in mild puzzlement.

Parrah turned back to the Killalaher. "Remember," she said sharply, "if you talk to her, don't tell her I was here, and don't let her know we were expecting her! Act as if her arrival is a complete surprise. Do you understand?"

The old woman nodded and smiled toothlessly.

"Ftha," Parrah swore as the boom of the starship's passage shook the walls. "Ftha and Hiigosh." As the echoes faded, she turned to the old woman and de-manded in polyglot, "Do you understand me?"

The villager nodded.

"Who are you loyal to?"

The crone licked her lips, then managed, "Old Earth?" Her pronunciation was abominable, even by Parrah's standards, but the words were intelligible.

"Good enough," Parrah said. "Don't forget it." She glanced at the sky again, then turned and dashed out of the house.

Aboard the starship Flame was arguing with the computer. "Land close in!" she demanded aloud. "Don't give them time to prepare!"

"Standard procedure—"the computer began.

"Standard procedure doesn't cover a case like this!" Flame interrupted. "Since when is there a standard procedure for loyalty checks?"

The computer, as usual, took her question literally. "Standard procedure for loyalty checks was developed over a sixty-day period betwee—"

"Never mind that," she said, interrupting again. The computer obligingly stopped in midword.

Flame gathered herself together, spat a few choice expletives in two different languages, and then said si-lently, "Listen, computer, I want to get there before Slant does, to be absolutely sure he doesn't interfere with anything before we get there. He speaks their lan-guage, remember. I want to land right next to the town—or better still, inside it—so I won't need to waste time walking from the ship to the town."

"Travel time has been allowed for."

"But you can't be sure there won't be unforeseen delays."

"Acknowledged. Not relevant."

Flame swore again, this time entirely in Russian. "Why don't you want to land right there in the town?"

she demanded.

"Presense of ship may affect response to interroga-tion."

"What do you mean? Affect the response how?"

"Local inhabitants may recognize solar origins of ship and present appearance of loyalty to avoid con-flict."

Flame sneered. "How would they recognize where we're from, idiot? They haven't seen any ships in three hundred years!"

The computer considered that for a perceptible fraction of a second before replying. "Acknowledged."

"Does that mean we can land close and save me a long walk? I don't have to remind you about a certain timed device?"

"Affirmative."

Flame smiled. Sometimes winning an argument with the computer could be very satisfying; it yielded so completely when it yielded at all. "Good!" she said. "Then let's get my pilot personality up here and I'll put us down right in the middle of town!" She lay back on the couch and let her mind go blank, to make room for the emotionless pilot identity.

"Affirmative," the computer said, but no one was listening.

Below, in Killalah, Parrah had left her horse at the public house that had been her home for the past three days. The pub stood on the town's central highway, toward the eastern end. The old woman's house had been chosen as Parrah's latest teaching site because it stood in the northwestern corner of town, where she judged Sam would first arrive. The distance between the two places was the better part of a kilometer, but Parrah wanted her horse and the other belongings she had left in her room.

She was still hurrying through the winding streets, calling last-minute instructions in polyglot to those she recognized as her recent students, when the fiery glare appeared overhead.

This new light was not the single vivid line the star-ship had drawn from one horizon to the other. This was a dull crimson radiance that approached almost slowly yet seemed to fill half the sky. A warm wind accompanied it.

She looked up to see the starship descending toward the village, a huge red-glowing barb that was gliding down as if to crush several houses beneath it.

The red light shimmered, and the trailing edges of the triangular wings seemed to warp out of line. The ship slipped sideways, as if sliding from an invisible surface that had been tilted beneath it, and a roaring, something like a waterfall but not really like any sound Parrah had ever heard before, reached her.

Then the terrifying craft vanished behind the roofs of the houses that lined the street she stood on. The sound became a violent hissing, as if a cat the size of a tower were spitting, and then faded to silence. She saw steam billowing up over the rooftops, but where Par-rah stood the warm breeze had passed and a renewed chill could be felt.

She had gotten her best look yet at the thing, and she had to admit that Arzadel had a point in wanting it intact. Flame's ship radiated sheer power. Possession of such a machine was very tempting.

Seeing it in the hands of an enemy was terrifying.

She realized, when she reviewed its movement, that the ship had landed not out in the surrounding forest as she had expected but somewhere very close to, if not in, Killalah. She guessed that it had settled into the market square itself. That would be the only open space in town large enough for it, and since almost all the people were busily digging out their homes, or else inside keeping warm, the market would have been empty.

Her horse stood in plain sight of anyone taking the east highway out of the square. She dared not go near the animal. Instead, she turned and headed north again.

Before she had gone a dozen paces, she stopped.

Going north was not safe, either. She did not dare risk meeting her husband. The demon was linked to Sam somehow and sometimes could see whatever Sam saw. Panicky, she looked about as if hoping to find instructions painted on one of the snow-covered houses.

She saw nothing that helped at all.

Gathering her wits, she turned again and ran for the nearest intersection, where she headed more or less east, hoping to find her way out of town without using the highway, without being spotted by the demons or their devices, or by her husband with his own diabolic ties. She did not concern herself with the horse, or her belongings, or with anything but her flight.

She had survived one encounter with the demon, and she did not care for another. Seeing a forest clear-ing blasted around her had been bad enough; if the demon were to unleash the same sort of firepower in Killalah, property damage would be inevitable, and someone might well be killed.

And if the demon had one of the other weapons Sam had told her about, the ones a shield could not stop, that someone might be herself.

She had done her part, had delivered the ancient language and the instructions to go with it. She had spent three days teaching Killalahers what to say and the language they were to say it in, and she had managed to educate a fair portion of the town's population. She had told Sam, however briefly, that the Council wanted the ship intact, even though she had had no time to explain why. That was more than she had thought she could do, but she had done it. All that remained was to get away unseen.

She fought down the temptation to take to the air, as she did not know if the demon would notice. Sam had not said anything about flying upon leaving the town, only that she must not fly to it, but she dared not take chances. She ran on, leaving the people of Killa-lah to fend for themselves with the knowledge she had given them.

That knowledge, she hoped, would be enough to save her world, her children, and herself.

When the starship landed, when Parrah turned and ran, Turner was still somewhere in the forest to the north, but he knew he was finally nearing the town. He saw the ship's approach. He saw it come in fast and hot, as Flame seemed to prefer, burning the air around it with the friction of its passage. He saw it veer sud-denly from its normal descent path, swoop back up slightly, turn, and then vanish behind the trees heading the opposite direction, still red-hot.

He stared for a moment, then demanded, "What the hell was that about?"

"Cyborg unit discretion in choosing landing site," the computer replied immediately.

"So where is she landing?" Turner asked. "Isn't one piece of forest as good as another?"

"Cyborg unit has chosen to land in open area at center of inhabited area."

Turner absorbed that for a few seconds, then re-marked, "Oh, hell." He wondered how much damage Flame was doing, bringing her ship down inside the town.

He could think of two ways to make such a landing. One was to simply land in the usual fashion, ignoring the obstacles posed by houses and shops, and the other was to stall the ship out over the intended landing site and allow it to fall the last few meters with only the belly maneuvering jets to brake.

The first method would reduce a significant portion of the town to burning rubble. He hoped the computer would not have allowed that. The second method did much less damage to the surroundings, but it was tricky and could damage the ship. It also used up ma-neuvering fuel, and the ship's replenishment facilities worked slowly, so the Command had discouraged its use.

"She stalled it and dropped it in?" he asked hope-fully.

"Affirmative."

That was at least a minor relief. Flame apparently was not overawed by the Command's discouragements or recommendations.

He was, he judged, still a good two hours' walk away from the town—three hours or more with the snow.

Flame would presumably emerge as soon as the ship had cooled enough. She had made a fast, hot landing, but the cooling would not take anything over an hour, at the very most.

He hoped that Parrah had done her work well. Flame would obviously be out of her ship and asking questions before he got there.

He struggled to pick up his pace, wondering if, with the ship in the town ahead of him, it might be safe to fly.

Chapter Twenty-Two

STILL LYING ON THE ACCELERATION COUCH FOR A moment after the landing, Flame listened du-biously to the computer's assurances that Slant was still a few kilometers away. "I'm not taking any chances," she said, swinging her feet to the floor. "I want to talk to these peasants before he can interfere. I want to get this over with. I want to get everything over with."

"Query: Planned course of action."

"I'll show you," she said as she ducked her head into the computer's access hatch and reset the timer. She checked the readout and, satisfied, straightened up and headed for the air lock.

"Hull temperature is unsafe for unshielded cyborg unit," the computer informed her.

"I know that, stupid," she said. "So I won't be un-shielded."

She found the door she wanted and opened it, then pulled the spacesuit from its locker and stepped into it.

She had chosen her weapons in advance, during the days she had spent waiting for the storm to break.

They lay ready and waiting in a griprack on the corri-dor wall beside the inner door of the air lock.

A moment later, fully suited, she emerged and stood on her ship's wing, looking out over the square.

Her landing had been a good one but not absolutely perfect. The tip of the wing she stood on had come down through the thatched roof of a shop, caving in a small portion of one of the supporting walls. The heat of the metal had ignited the roof's damp straw, and only a torrent of melting snow had kept it from blazing up and spreading. The wet thatch still smoldered. She could see a blackened area several meters across.

The wing, of course, was undamaged.

The ship's heat had melted or evaporated every trace of snow in the market. All that remained was a thin fog and a heavy dampness to the air. The ground beneath the ship had been baked hard and dry, but a few meters away, where the heat had not reached as intensely, the dirt had been transformed to mud by the melting snow.

Save for her ship, the square was completely empty. She looked about for signs of life.

The helmet got in her way, and the readout just above normal eye level showed a tolerable exterior temperature. She unlocked the neck-seal, lifted the helmet off, and tossed it back into the open air lock.

That reminded her that the lock was open. She sub-vocalized a command, and the door slid shut.

That taken care of, she took a deep breath of the damp air and studied the square again.

She glimpsed faces peering from windows, but whenever she looked directly at one, it would vanish behind curtains or corners. A few brave souls were just visible, watching her from a safe distance up one of the side streets. They looked like her best prospects for the planned interrogations.

She stepped forward and jumped down from the wing. The spacesuit made her clumsy, and she stum-bled awkwardly as she landed. Cursing her clumsiness, she straightened up and glared at the villagers on the side street.

They had not fled. She counted five of them, all watching her intently, albeit somewhat doubtfully.

"You there!" she called in polyglot, though she knew they probably either could not understand it or would pretend not to understand it. "Wait right where you are!"

The five of them glanced at each other but said nothing.

Flame stared at them for a moment, a rocket rifle in her hand—not Slant's but one from her own arsenal— waiting for one of the villagers to make a suspicious move.

They did nothing suspicious. They simply stood, un-easily motionless.

"Where is Slant?" she demanded silently.

"Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' is currently on plan-etary surface approximately eight point four kil-ometers north by northwest of present location of cyborg unit designated 'Flame,' and approaching along an irregular course at a variable speed averaging ap-proximately point nine meters per second."

"He has never been in this place?"

"Information unavailable."

"Have you ever tracked him here?"

"Negative."

"And you've been tracking him since we got to this planet?"

"Affirmative, when possible. Tracking was not pos-sible when communication was occulted by planet."

"Good." She lowered the rifle. "I'm going to go question those people."

The computer paused perhaps half a second before replying. "Action marginally acceptable."

Flame hesitated. "Why only marginally?" she asked.

"Evidence exists to indicate that cyborg unit desig-nated 'Flame' possesses emotional commitment to demonstrating hostility of local inhabitants regardless of fact or consequences. This commitment is counter to programming. Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' act-ing without presence of cyborg unit designated 'Slant'

may be able to influence response of local inhabitants to increase probability of demonstrating hostility with-out allowing CCC-IRU 247 to detect this influence. Such action would be counter to programming.

How-ever, this interrogation site is not necessarily decisive in determination of planetary loyalty; therefore, inter-rogation remains marginally acceptable."

"Not necessarily decisive?"

"Affirmative. Results of interrogation may prove inconclusive. Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' may be able to refute demonstrations of hostility."

"You think so?"

"Information insufficient."

Flame snorted. "If we get a clear statement that these people are rebels, will that satisfy you?"

"Information insufficient. Exact situation may mod-ify final determination. Also, three sites required for decision in the event cyborg units continue to dis-agree."

"But we might be able to settle at least one of the three before Slant even gets here?"

"Affirmative."

Kilometers away, Turner overheard this entire ex-change. Once again, he guessed, Flame had forgotten that the computer required a specific order to keep telecommunications private. Either that or she simply did not care whether she was overheard.

Or, just possibly, the computer, in its damaged and confused state, was intentionally misleading her.

He could not guess why the computer might want to mislead Flame, but he did not want to rule out the possibility. He remembered how Flame had seemed to threaten the computer once or twice; the two halves of IRU 247 did not seem to get along well.

Turner debated for long minutes whether or not to say anything but resolved to keep silent. If Parrah had been successful, Flame should, he thought, be forced to admit that Dest was friendly. He did not want to risk interfering in that. That would save them all the trouble of finding two more sites.

If more sites were needed, he was unsure how he could contact Parrah to send her on ahead. That might be a problem.

However, if Parrah had done what she was told, the people of this town should state unequivocally that they were loyal to Old Earth, and if that happened, he could not see how Flame could fail to yield.

Of course, in the nine years of their marriage Par-rah had hardly ever done what she was told. Ordinarily he admired her independence, but he hoped that this time she had obeyed him.

If the interrogation went badly, he could still inter-vene over the communications circuit.

The five villagers were still standing, apprehensively awaiting Flame's next move. She forced a smile, osten-tatiously slung the rifle on her shoulder, and marched toward them.

She expected them to turn and flee, whereupon she would be able to argue to the computer that that was hardly the act of friendly civilians, but to her surprise all five stood their ground. She stopped two or three meters away and studied them.

She faced three men and two women. Two of the men were young, and the other man and both women were well into middle age. All five were obviously frightened. The older man was visibly trembling, and one of the women looked faint. One of the young men was trying to look nonchalant and failing miserably.

Still, they had stood their ground, which impressed her. She knew from everything she had seen on Dest that the culture was fairly primitive. Thatched roofs and wooden tools could mean little else. For five near-savages, the sight of her ship landing, glowing red-hot and boiling away the snow, must have been awesome and utterly alien. Her own appearance in the metallic-gray spacesuit could hardly be familiar. She guessed that she would seem more an apparition than a woman.

Yet there the five stood, right in front of her, grow-ing visibly more nervous as the silence continued.

They deserved, she decided, at least a chance to prove their disloyalty. She would talk to them, as the com-puter wanted, before she shot them.

She hesitated, unsure which language to try first, and then said, " Zdrastvuytye!"

The heavy consonants and strong Y-glide of the Russian greeting sounded nothing like the rattling, nasal language the villagers had been taught, the lan-guage they had expected the demon to use. One of the women moaned and leaned heavily on her younger male companion. "San and Hligosh!" the other young man muttered in his native language. "I couldn't un-derstand that at all!"

Flame, of course, could not understand what he said, either. Her hand slid up toward the strap of the rocket rifle.

The older man, his plump face now creased with worry, said hesitantly in bad polyglot, "I do not under-stand."

Thunderstruck, Flame stared at him, and her hand halted a centimeter from the rifle strap.

"What did you say?" she said at last in polyglot.

The older man looked to either side but found no help. His four companions were determinedly silent. "Ah

. . . I said that I do not . . . I mean, did not under-stand what you said," he managed. "The first thing, I mean." He stared at her pleadingly.

"You speak polyglot!" Flame said accusingly.

"Ah . . . a little, yes?"

She glared at him. "Where did you learn it?" she demanded.

Puzzled, the townsman said, "Here?"

"Here? In this village?"

Uncertainty was plain on his face; the word "vil-lage" was not in his limited vocabulary. "What?" he asked.

"You learned polyglot here?" She waved at the sur-rounding buildings.

"Yes," he said, nodding vigorously. "This is my place. This is Killalah. I am called Tagyi, and—"

Flame was not interested in introductions. She cut him short, demanding, "Who taught you? Was it Slant?"

"Who?" Tagyi's confusion was obviously genuine.

Flame was not yet ready to give up her conviction that only trickery by the traitorous cyborg could be responsible for the unexpected discovery of people who spoke polyglot. "Computer," she demanded. "What name does Slant use here?"

"Information unavailable," the computer replied immediately.

Flame snarled, then turned her attention back to the townsman. "A man?" she asked. "A tall man with brown hair, he taught you?"

"Oh, no," Tagyi replied. "No man. A woman."

"What woman?"

"A government . . . government person," he an-swered, unable to come up with a word meaning "agent"

or "representative" or "wizard."

"What government sent this woman? What govern-ment did she say sent her?"

"Praunce," Tagyi replied immediately and confi-dently.

"Do you recognize the name?" she silently asked the computer.

"Affirmative."

"Is it a rebel planet?" she asked hopefully.

"Negative. 'Praunce' is the name used by inhabi-tants of city where cyborg unit designated 'Slant' was located upon ship's arrival within communication range to describe both that city and the political entity of which the city is a part."

"So Slant does have something to do with it, then!"

"Information insufficient."

"This person from Praunce—why did she teach you polyglot?" she demanded, focusing again on the townsman.

"So . . . so we could talk to . . . I mean, so we could talk in the language of Old Earth. Praunce is a loyal .

. . uh . . . Praunce is loyal to Old Earth. I do not know the word for ' teibuitarro,'" he said apologetically, using a Prauncer word describing a conquered or colonized area that paid taxes to a central government in exchange for protection but otherwise more or less gov-erned itself.

Flame had no idea what the word meant, and there-fore she ignored it. Fuming, she stepped forward and grabbed the man by the front of his fur-lined blue woo! coat. The other four villagers stepped back in surprise and fear; Tagyi's mouth dropped open in terror. The woman-headed demon with the peculiar yellow hair and the strange gleaming garment had moved much faster than any human could move, and the grip on his clothing was as strong as granite.

" What did you say? " Flame demanded. " Did you say Praunce is loyal to Old Earth ?"

"Ah . . . ah . . . yes," he said, nodding, certain that he was about to be eaten alive by the demon but de-termined to do as he had been told rather than risk making things worse.

"Damn it!" Flame said as she flung the man to the street. "Damn it to hell! How did that bastard do it?"

"Rephrase question," the computer said.

Tagyi landed hard on a patch of ice, and his head snapped back against the base of a wall, dazing him.

His head would ache for a day or two, and he would wear bruises for a week, but none of his bones were broken. Flame ignored him and the computer both and grabbed the woman who had slumped, as if about to faint, earlier. "You!" she demanded. "Tell me about Old Earth!"

The woman moaned again and passed out. Flame flung her aside brutally. She was not as lucky as Tagyi.

Her right arm was broken just above the elbow when she slammed into a stone wall. Her other injuries were minor. Her head, fortunately, did not hit hard.

Again, the cyborg paid no attention. She grabbed one of the young men and shouted into his face, "Tell me about Old Earth!"

"Our fathers and mothers came from there, long ago!" the man babbled, terror-stricken. Parrah had not taught him a word for "distant ancestors," forcing him to improvise. "We are still loyal!"

"When did you hear from Old Earth?"

"Never! But we are still loyal, I swear!"

Flame was enraged beyond words and now, for the moment, even beyond violence. She released the man disgustedly and turned back toward her ship.

"Evidence now indicates—" the computer began.

"Shut up!" Flame ordered. The computer obeyed instantly.

She stood for a moment, staring back down the street to where her ship loomed above the empty mar-ket stalls. The heat-glow had completely died away, and its metal skin gleamed a dull silver above, its belly black with shadow.

She was furious, frustrated beyond the ability of words to express. She knew that all of humanity was her enemy, and there before her stood her weapon against that enemy. Aboard that ship were thirty-four nuclear warheads.

But she could not use any of them. The computer would not let her. She could kill the computer easily enough with the termite, but it might well blow her head off before it died completely, and even if she sur-vived, she did not know how to launch the missiles without the computer's help.

Slant had beaten her. If he had somehow made this one town lie, he could make them all lie. He had beaten her.

Or had he? A thought struck her. She turned again and stared at the five she had spoken to. Two of them still lay crumpled on the ground, and the other three were standing there, staring at her, not daring to flee.

This group had been obvious. They had stood here in the street and waited for her. They were most prob-ably plants, shills, people Slant or one of his unknown accomplices had selected and trained.

Whatever trick Slant had used, he might not have prepared anyone else. He might have sent these five to meet her because they were all he had ready. He prob-ably thought that after speaking with them, Flame would give up in despair or at least move on to another village.

He was wrong, she swore to herself. She would not give up that easily!

"Computer," she said, "I want you to make sure that Slant can't overhear anything. I'm going to find somebody around here who will tell me the truth!"

Chapter Twenty-Three

TURNER SLID CAUTIOUSLY DOWN THE FINAL SNOWBANK onto the shoveled-out street and looked around warily, studying the town.

The street was empty and silent. Long shadows stretched across it and up the buildings on the opposite side. Dest's primary was well down in the western sky, almost at the horizon, and the darkness of night seemed to already be gathering in the pools of shadow. No lights showed in any of the windows. No one was in sight in the street or in any of the windows. He could hear nothing but a distant bird whistling a complaint about the cold.

"Computer," he asked. "Where is everybody?"

"Information insufficient."

"Where is Flame?"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' is in a private resi-dence approximately eighty meters southeast of present location of cyborg unit designated "Slant."'

Before Turner could ask anything more a wordless scream reached his ears. He judged that it originated roughly eighty meters to the southeast of where he stood, around a corner on a cross street. Something about the voice sounded familiar, but he could not place it. It was not Parrah's, he was sure, and that was a small relief. After an instant's hesitation, he ran to-ward it.

Flame glowered down at her latest victim, who cowered in the corner, cringing in terror before this blood-spattered superhuman apparition. As with most of the others she had questioned, Flame had been un-able to get this scrawny teenaged girl to admit to any understanding of either Russian or polyglot or to speak in anything but that maddening babble the locals used. The cyborg's final wordless shriek, which had sent the girl into her moaning crouch, had been the result of pure frustration.

She had questioned dozens of townspeople. She could not recall the exact count. Somewhere between half and two-thirds had been, like this girl, unable to communicate at all.

All the others had insisted, no matter what Flame might do, that they and all of Praunce remained loyal to Old Earth. A few had died under her questioning, and more, perhaps a majority, had been injured in varying degrees. None of the blood that liberally adorned her face and spacesuit was her own.

She had tried everything she could think of to get a confession of what she knew to be the truth, that the whole town was lying, that they were rebels, that Slant had told them what to say.

She had tried surprise, bursting in through doors without warning and snatching up whomever she found inside. She had tried brutality, beating men and women to the verge of unconsciousness and sometimes beyond the verge. She had tried threats, smashing ob-viously prized possessions, abusing loved ones, dis-playing what her weaponry could do, once even demolishing an entire house with her bare hands to demonstrate her abilities. She had tried bribery, offer-ing people gold, weapons, power.

None of it had worked. Everyone in the village who spoke so much as a word of polyglot attested to Dest's undying loyalty to Old Earth.

She was amazed that she had so far resisted the temptation to flatten the entire town. She was proud of her self-restraint.

This terrified girl would tell her nothing more, she decided. She turned and marched back out into the street.

"Flame!" someone called.

She spun, rocket rifle ready in her hands, and saw a man in a heavy sheepskin coat rounding the corner, running toward her. Her finger automatically closed on the trigger.

Turner saw the rifle swinging toward him and reacted without thinking. He dropped flat to the ground, raised a telekinetic shield, and screamed si-lently, "Computer! Stop her!"

Half a dozen missiles whistled over him. An instant later the wall of a tack shop behind him erupted into an inferno with an ear-shattering six-part roar. Dust and debris scattered across his legs.

Realizing whom she faced, Flame had released the trigger as quickly as she could, and immediately shouted aloud, "It was a mistake, computer! I didn't recognize him at first, I just saw someone attacking!"

The explosions and collapse of the damaged tack shop into its own basement drowned out her voice, but the computer did not rely on sound. It calmly replied. "Acknowledged."

She relaxed and lowered the rifle.

A moment later, when the debris had settled and silence had descended once more, Turner got slowly and carefully to his feet, ignoring the particles of glass and plaster that spilled from his back. He saw the smeared blood that darkened Flame's spacesuit and did not allow himself to relax.

"I heard a scream," he said. "What happened? What's been going on here?"

Flame stared at him distrustfully. "How long have you been in the village?" she demanded.

"I just got here. Who screamed?"

"I did." Subvocally, she added, "Computer, is he telling the truth?"

"Affirmative."

"Why did you scream?" Turner asked, sincerely puzzled. He had assumed a townsperson had screamed in response to some act of violence Flame had com-mitted. To discover that she herself had screamed dis-concerted him. "Is something wrong?"

"No, nothing is wrong," she said. "At least, not as far as you are concerned. I was just angry. You did a good job on the people here, Slant; I couldn't get a single one to admit to disloyalty."

Turner resumed his puzzled expression, hoping that this fradulent one looked as genuine as its im-mediate predecessor. "What job are you talking about? I just got here. I haven't done anything to the people here."

"You know what I'm talking about, you lying bas-tard," Flame said, struggling to keep from screaming again. "I don't know how you did it, but you did it somehow. Every one of them that could speak polyglot swore he was loyal."

"Oh, is that all?" Turner feigned relief. "I told you, they are loyal!"

"Oh, save it for the priests! You know as well as I do that not a single planet outside the solar system fought on Old Earth's side!"

"I never said they did," Turner said mildly. "I said they were loyal, not that their ancestors fought for Old Earth. They never knew there was a war."

Flame stared for a moment, then demanded, "Computer, did you hear that? He admits they didn't fight for Old Earth!"

"Affirmative."

"They didn't know there was a war!" Turner in-sisted. "Besides, that was their ancestors, three hundred years ago; what we're concerned with now is the people now. And they're loyal; if I understand you correctly, they told you so themselves, several of them."

"Oh, they told me, all right. They told me lies and more lies! This planet was never loyal. Their ancestors didn't fight. They were all traitors!"

Turner sighed. "But that was their ancestors."

"That doesn't matter. If their ancestors were trai-tors, then they are, too."

"Their ancestors' ancestors were all from Old Earth, though; if the generations don't change any-thing, then these people are all from Old Earth, so they can't be enemies."

Flame stared at him. "That's nonsense!" she re-torted.

"No more so than yours," Turner replied.

Flame appealed to the final authority. "Computer, they're lying. They can't be loyal."

"No evidence exists to support that statement. All evidence acquired to date supports the contention that this planet's population has remained loyal to Old Earth and is therefore friendly. However, the plan agreed upon specified three separate interrogation sites. Query: Continue interrogations."

Turner watched Flame expectantly.

A string of expressions flitted across her features, first hope, then anger, then consideration, and finally despair. She slumped. "No," she said at last, reluc-tantly. "However he did it, Slant would just do the same thing at the other two sites."

"I didn't do anything," Turner insisted.

"Oh, you did," Flame said. "I know you did. But I give up. I can't argue about it anymore. You've beaten me, at least for now."

"You mean you're acknowledging that Dest is friendly?"

"I mean I can't prove it's not. You've got the whole planet on your side, and all I have is a computer that's damaged too badly to believe me without more evi-dence than I can give it, and that won't obey me even when I can destroy it."

Turner smiled and subvocalized. "You hear, com-puter? She admits that she can't provide any evidence that this planet is hostile, while I, and all these other people, have been telling you it's friendly. What do you say to that?"

"Analysis: Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' has ac-quiesced on major points. All further objections are irrational. Planetary population is friendly."

"Then you can't nuke us, right? You won't let Flame kill or harm anyone else, except in self-de-fense?"

"Affirmative."

Nearly overcome with relief, Turner allowed him-self to relax. As he did, he was suddenly struck by an overwhelming curiosity. "What happens now?" he asked.

Flame, whose gaze had sunk to the icy mud beneath her feet, suddenly looked up at him. "We leave," she said.

"Affirmative," the computer agreed. "Unit has no function in friendly territory. Unit is programmed to seek out and destroy hostile forces and populations. Mission must continue until receipt and acceptance of recall or release code. Therefore, unit must leave friendly territory immediately."

"What about me?"

"Unit has no authority over friendly civilians except in the event of military action."

"So you'll leave me here, and go away, and never come back? You'll leave Dest alone?"

"Affirmative."

Turner knew that he should have been happy. That was everything he had thought he wanted from IRU

247. His world was safe. He could return home to his children, his wife, his secure position. He had not cap-tured the ship for the wizards of Praunce, but he saw no reason why he should.

Something was still troubling him, though.

"Flame," he said, "is that what you want?"

She stared at him. "What the hell do you care?"

"Never mind my reasons; is that what you want, to get back in your ship and go on alone until you die?"

"No, that's not what I want, damn you." Her face twisted into a bitter smile. "What I want is to nuke this filthy planet into radioactive dust. I can't have this one, though; you've seen to that. But I'll find others. We were on our way to one when we picked up your message. I think we can get there from here in about two years of subjective time, and I can nuke them. And if we have any missiles left after that, we'll find another planet, and another, and when we run out of missiles we'll use beam weapons, and when those burn out I'll land and use up the entire ship's arsenal, and then I'll kill people hand to hand, until I die of old age. And when that happens the computer will carry on as long as it can, until my termite eats its brain out. Maybe the termite will keep going after that, I don't know. You haven't stopped me, Slant; you've saved this planet, but I'll find others, and they'll all pay for what was done to me." She took a step, then another, not toward Turner but heading around him, to return to her ship.

"Computer?" Slant said. "Is she right?" The men-tion of the termite slipped past him unnoticed.

"Affirmative."

Reluctantly, Turner said, "I can't let you do that."

"Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' has no authority to interfere with military actions."

"What are you going to do?" Flame demanded. "Kill me?"

Turner began to reach for a snark but then stopped when he saw Flame's grip on the rocket rifle shift slightly. "Computer," he asked, "if Flame were murdered by a friendly civilian, in a personal quar-rel, what action would you take?" He had no desire to sacrifice himself, but he knew that he could never forgive himself if he allowed IRU 247 to go on de-stroying whole populations because their ancestors had left Old Earth. Even planets that actually had rebelled had done so centuries ago. Retaliating after so long a delay would be a meaningless, pointless injustice.

"Programming specifies that such action be immedi-ately reported to the nearest civilian and military au-thorities. However, special circumstances may allow direct action. If cyborg unit designated 'Slant'

destroyed cyborg unit designated 'Flame,' all data on this planet would be reevaluated."

Flame was watching him closely.

"If I killed her, and you killed me in return, but then decided that Dest really was friendly, what would you do?"

"Mission would continue. Unit would leave friendly territory immediately. Unit is programmed to seek out and destroy hostile forces and populations. Mission must continue until receipt and acceptance of recall or release code, or destruction of unit. Therefore, unit must leave friendly territory and seek out hostile forces or populations. With cyborg unit destroyed, mission programming requires ship to continue mission as long as possible, determining loy-alty of potential targets by response to Command identification codes or voice transmissions. Present situation would require that action be taken to pre-vent destruction of unit before programming could be carried out."

His own computer's programming had been differ-ent. His mission had been different. CCC-IRU 205

would not have gone on seeking out new target planets once he was dead, but CCC-IRU 247 had no such limi-tation.

That statement about the "present situation" made no sense, but he attributed it to the computer's dam-aged state and ignored it. He had not put together Flame's references to time limits and termites. His own ship had never encountered breeder lampreys or cy-bernetic termites.

As far as he could see, sacrificing himself would do no good. The ship would carry on anyway.

"Just asking," he said, retreating quickly from his position. "Our of curiosity, that's all. I wasn't planning to harm her."

He knew that he could not allow IRU 247 to go on, but he could think of no way to stop it. He was alone in the area. So far as he was aware, no other wizards were near enough to help, and he knew that by himself he could not drain the starship's power or otherwise cripple it before the computer realized what was hap-pening and retaliated.

By the time any other wizards could reach it, the ship would be gone. He had to stop it himself, single-handed, and he could not. IRU 247 would go on to launch its thirty-four, nuclear warheads against some other helpless planet.

With a twisted half smile at her recognition that Turner's victory was not complete, Flame strode by him.

She knew that if she died, the ship would never reach another target before the termite destroyed it, but she was hardly about to tell Turner that.

His hand on the snark in his pocket, Turner watched her go, cursing his helplessness. He was a cy-borg and a wizard, the only person ever to be both. That made him arguably the most powerful creature on the planet, yet he could think of no way to stop the ship.

He had stopped his own computer; why could he not stop this one? He was a wizard now, more power-ful than he had been then.

He stopped and ran over that line of thought again.

He had defeated his ship's computer. He had fed it their release code, and it had shut itself down.

He did not know the release code for IRU 247, and no distress message was about to tell him what it was, but he was a wizard. He could find it out. He hastily improvised a plan.

"Computer," he asked hurriedly as Flame walked out of sight around the corner. "Could I speak to you privately, without Flame listening in?"

Flame, out of sight but still in earshot, stopped walking.

"Query: Reason for request."

"It's personal; I'll tell you once you cut her out of the circuit."

The computer needed a full second to decide the matter. "Affirmative," it said at last.

Flame called, "Go ahead, Slant, try your tricks on it. I don't care anymore. If it gets out of hand, it'll die, and it knows that." She walked on.

Turner ignored Flame's retort, though he mentally filed this latest reference to her hold over the com-puter. He subvocalized. "I didn't want her to hear be-cause I didn't want to worry her. You see, Dest has some unusual indigenous diseases."

"Query: Nature of indigenous diseases."

"I'll get to that. First, though, since it's been estab-lished that Dest is friendly, then I assume you'll now acknowledge that psionics are not enemy weapons ac-tivity?"

"Affirmative."

"Then may I do a psionic inspection of Flame? I want to make certain that she hasn't picked up any of the local diseases. I guarantee the inspection won't harm her."

"Query: Cyborg unit designated 'Slant' possesses psionic capabilities."

"Yes, I do—artificially induced mutation. May I make the inspection?"

"Query: Nature of indigenous diseases."

"There's a family of degenerative nerve diseases, bacterial in origin," he lied smoothly. "The natives here have bred in an immunity over time, but off-worlders, like Flame, are mostly susceptible. Massive doses of antibiotics can halt the disease if it's caught early. May I make the inspection?"

Again, the computer needed a measurable time to decide the matter before replying. "Affirmative."

Turner did not allow himself any expression of his vast relief. He knew he had been taking a huge risk in revealing that he was a wizard, but over the past few days he had gradually become convinced that the com-puter was damaged to the point that it would agree to almost anything if asked correctly and if no one else objected. Only his presence and objections, he was sure, had kept IRU 247 from nuking Prance immedi-ately upon arrival; the computer would surely have given in to Flame, with or without evidence.

Perhaps Flame's warped values had somehow warped its own perceptions of who and what to trust.

Whatever the reason, the computer had agreed. He wasted no time in gloating but simply took off, lifting himself upward and flying directly toward the ship.

He spotted Flame walking quickly but unhurriedly along one of the town's main streets, and he reached out psychically, feeling her aura, trying to merge his own with it.

It was tricky, doing it while flying, but he managed.

He felt her surface emotions first, a tangle of pride that she was leaving Dest unscathed and shame that she had been partially defeated. He forced his way down through that.

Bitterness, surging, endless bitterness, that she had thrown her life away by volunteering for the IRU

pro-gram, that she could not surrender, that she could not destroy Dest, that she had been trapped into her current empty existence, that she had not died long ago. She would have preferred death.

Pride, proud determination that she would not give in, that she would not go mad from the loneliness, that she would not despair, that she would not die yet, that she would carry on, that she would not die so long as she had her mission.

She had been tricked and trapped into becoming an IRU cyborg, but having become one, she was proud of that, proud and determined to carry out her mission without fail. Mars had failed, Old Earth had failed, Slant's computer had failed, everything that had ever fought against the rebel worlds had failed, but she would not. She knew that her mission was meaning-less, but it was all she had.

Hatred and anger and a peculiar acceptance, a quick memory of the termite booby trap that came as a revelation to him, and then Turner was through the default personality.

The combat personality blinked past, a small, intri-cate complex made up of simple "if . . . then" concepts with no real thought or emotion at all.

The pilot personality could not be described ver-bally, not even to himself. It was all images and ab-stract concepts for which no words existed.

The cover personalities flicked past, thin and super-ficial, all asleep. A saboteur identity was somewhat like the combat personality, somewhat like the pilot. The seductress personality, which he had known he would find as an equivalent of his own long-merged seducer personality, was an eerie mix of cold calcula-tion and unbridled eroticism. It seemed out of place in Flame's unattractive body and hostile mind.

Of all the currently suppressed selves, only the one cover personality, the Russian-speaking technician, possessed any memories at all. He realized with a shock that except for brief use of the pilot, Flame's default personality had always been dominant, ever since the eighteen were first separated back on Mars, until her arrival on Dest. He had seen the combat identity and the Russian technician allowed to sur-face briefly, but that had been the very first time for each.

No wonder she was insane—and after reading her mind, he knew that she was indeed insane. Her reality was entirely internal, and in interacting with anything external she interpreted it entirely in terms of that inner reality. Anything that did not fit with her estab-lished view of how the universe operated was denied or ignored; she shaped facts to fit her beliefs, not her beliefs to fit facts.

Those beliefs included the certainty that the entire universe, everything outside herself, was hostile.

It had been a very long time, either subjectively or otherwise, since Turner had studied psychology, but he thought that he was looking at a case of paranoid schizophrenia.

Her other personalities did not appear to be mad, though he could not be sure of anything in their present inactive state.

The barriers between them were sharp and clear, but as he continued to pore over what he could sense

—and as Flame neared her ship—he came across thin, faint wisps of thought, of memory, of identity, seeping in between the eighteen.

He latched onto these and followed them down into the depths of Flame's past, into the memories that she herself could no longer reach, the memories the Com-mand had suppressed.

He saw through her eyes as, at the age of eight, she was teased by an older brother who held her new kit-ten out of reach above her head. When he finally re-lented and gave her her pet, the terrified animal scratched her face and fled in panic.

The scratch had become infected, and her parents had taken her to the hospital, blaming her for abusing the kitten, ignoring her accusations of her brother. Her father had declared the little cat to be ruined, turned against humanity, and had strangled it, wrung its neck in front of her so that it could not scratch her again.

He was only protecting her, he had explained, and he had stared in angry astonishment when she had burst into tears.

The white-coated doctors had talked quietly and calmly to her parents, and one of them had then turned to her and said loudly, "So, Valentina, you've been a bad girl!"

She had cowered in confused shame and hurt.

Valentina, Turner repeated to himself. He had her first name. Valentina what?

He could not find any more of the incident with the kitten. Anything else that might have happened at that time was gone beyond his reach.

Flame was crossing the market square to the ship's access ladder, unaware that anything was happening to her mind. She was too full of emotion to sense the electric tingling, and the computer, struggling with its confused and contradictory damaged programming, had not bothered to mention Turner's little psionic checkup. Turner, straining himself to the fullest extent of his magical abilities, watched her surface thoughts with what effort he could spare, ready to react should she realize that magic was in use.

He was hovering above the ship, but she had not noticed his presence. She thought he was still some-where behind her, in the streets of Killalah.

When she was seventeen a boy had taken her to a picnic beside a lake. She had been lying back, relaxing on the grass, when he reached out and touched her.

She had been feeling content, pleased with the world, and she did not want the mood broken. She was still a virgin at the time, and his attention made her nervous. She had pushed his hand away, saying, "Not right now."

"When, then?"

"Oh, later; right now I'm resting."

He had turned mockingly stern, imitating her fa-ther. "Resting, Valentina Mikhailovna?" he had de-manded. "And what has tired you out so?"

Her answer was lost. The imitation of her father had been enough to break her mood completely, and she had turned angry, but the exact words she had spo-ken were gone.

For a moment Turner thought he had found her full name, but then he realized that Mikhailovna was her patronymic, not her surname. As an ethnic Russian she would have regularly used all three names, in var-ious combinations depending on the degree of famil-iarity. He still needed her surname.

He flashed on through other memories, back to in-fancy, then forward again, through her idolatrous crushes on video stars, through the drudgery of her education in a backward town in the Urals, through her first kiss and her last, saw her brothers, mother, father, friends and friends and more friends, none of them close, none who stayed friends for more than a year or two. He saw her teachers, her relatives, her military superiors.

She stood before the sergeant. She was eighteen years old, reporting for duty, frightened but refusing to show any sign of it.

"Yessenina, V.M.," she said, clearly and precisely. Her voice had been flat and calm and had not shaken at all, and she had been proud of her composure.

Yessenina. That was her name. That was all he needed. He broke the telepathic link and looked around, focusing on the real world once again.

Flame—Valentina Mikhailovna Yessenina—was swinging herself up onto the wing of the ship. He began descending, careful not to plummet down and startle her into thinking she was under attack.

The air lock opened, and she vanished inside more quickly than he had expected; he landed on the ship's wing just as the portal closed.

"Warning," the computer said. "Evacuate launch area."

It struck him for the first time that although Flame had been able to drop her ship neatly into the market without destroying the surrounding buildings, she would not be able to take off without incinerat-ing a few of the structures, both ahead and behind. He felt himself turning angry at the thought but fought the anger down, lest it interfere with what he had to do.

"Let me in," he called. "I have something important to tell you." He knew from his own ship that the re-lease code could be delivered only over the Command frequency, which he had no way of using, or through the onboard audio system. Exterior pickups for the audio system existed but would not be active during the final preparations for launch.

"Negative," the computer said. "No civilian person-nel are authorized for access to ship."

"It's urgent!"

"No civilian personnel are authorized for access to ship under any circumstances. Please clear the launch area."

"You can't take off yet!"

"Affirmative. Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' must be secure on acceleration couch before launch."

"That's not what I meant; listen, let me talk to Flame!"

After a second of silence, "What the hell do you want, traitor?" came over his communication circuit.

"Flame, I need to talk to you, orally. Turn on the exterior audio."

"Why? No, never mind. It's just another trick of some kind." He could feel her cut off the circuit.

A faint tremble ran through the ship. Turner's psy-chic senses detected a sudden surge of power, and he knew it was warming up for takeoff. Desperate, he reached in his pocket and found the snark with the seventy percent charge.

He pulled it out, thumbed it to full power and its widest beam, and fired it point-blank at the air lock's outer door.

Metal dust glittered faintly in the last lingering day-light, and a moment later light poured out of a new hole and turned the particles into flecks of shadow in the beams from the brightly lit air lock.

The power dial had dropped to zero by the time he released the trigger button. He tossed the useless de-vice aside and stooped, putting his mouth to the open-ing he had just made.

He called, "Valentina Mikhailovna Yessenina, Val—" He coughed as some of the metallic dust got in his mouth, and he wished that Flame's real name was shorter. He swallowed, then tried again. "Valentina Mikhailovna Yessenina, Valentina Mikhailovna Yessenina, Valentina Mikhailovna Yessenina!" He choked again on the final syllable.

"Affirmative," a pleasant contralto voice replied from within the air lock. "Release code accepted.

Awaiting orders."

Flame's scream came clearly over the air lock speaker.

Chapter Twenty-Four

OPEN THE AIR LOCK," TURNER YELLED. "AND abort the launch!"

"Affirmative," the computer's contralto monotone replied. The air lock door slid open, the dust from the snarkhole scraping audibly against the retraction sheath.

Flame was still screaming as Turner stepped inside.

He had forgotten what it was like. After eleven years, or ten if one figured it that way, he had com-pletely forgotten how it felt to have the broken pieces of one's mind forcibly rammed back together into a single personality. He was fairly sure that he had not screamed—at least, not until later, when the pain-sup-pression mechanism had shut down and he had been able to feel the injuries he had sustained—but he had never been quite as dissociated as Flame.

He desperately wanted to know what she was think-ing, but he dared not read her mind again. He did not want to open his own mind up to the pain and confu-sion and mangled sense of identity that he knew she was suffering.

He had never forgotten any detail of his ship's in-terior, and the air lock of Flame's ship was horribly familiar, despite subtle differences in the visible wear. Less subtly, a long streak of something black was smeared across one bulkhead, and several service panels had been removed and never replaced.

"Open the inner door," he ordered. He could have opened it himself, but the computer would be faster.

Working the manual latch on his own ship had always taken him several seconds. While he waited for the hatch to open, he pulled his hand laser from an inner pocket.

When the gap between the hatch and its frame was wide enough, he squeezed through quickly. He did not know what was happening, but he was sure he had no time to spare.

It occurred to him to wonder, as he ran down the narrow corridor to the control cabin, why the com-puter was obeying him without question. He knew that, once aboard, anyone could give certain emer-gency orders, but why had it let him aboard in the first place, when it had refused him once before? Was it simply because he had known the release code?

It must have been that, he decided, or perhaps something to do with its damaged status. In any case it didn't really matter why. The computer was obeying him, and that was enough.

If it would obey anyone who happened to speak to it, though, that could be dangerous. "Computer," he said as he neared the door to the control cabin. "Until further notice, you are only to obey orders given over cyborg communication circuits; you will ignore com-mands or instructions given by voice alone. Except for emergencies, that is. I know you're programmed to take emergency orders from anyone, and I'm not try-ing to override that. Do you understand?"

"Affirmative."

The screaming stopped.

Turner burst into the cabin, laser ready.

Flame was lying on the acceleration couch, eyes wide, staring fixedly at one of the extruded lightbars on the ceiling. Her spacesuit, smeared with mud and blood, was in hideous contrast to the sleek cleanliness of the ovoid chamber, and Turner involuntarily saw her for a moment as a sick beast, too far gone to clean itself, in a veterinarian's surgery.

Her weapons were gone. She would naturally have deposited them in an equipment locker or back in the armory before returning to the control cabin.

She turned her head as he entered and stared just as fixedly at him as she had at the lightbar.

He thought, however, that she did not really see him. He began to reach out telepathically but then drew back again. The reintegration of her personality was surely complete by now, but if she had gone com-pletely around the bend into full-blown psychosis, he did not want to risk his own sanity by reading her mind.

"Ms. Yessenina?" he called gently. "Are you all right?"

She said nothing but simply stared.

He thought she might be catatonic or close to it. There were wizards who knew how to cope with that, using telepathy and psionic neurosurgery. He was still reluctant to try reading her mind himself. Repairing a damaged mind was a job for experts.

If he could get her out of the ship, he could find an expert. As long as she stayed where she was, she was still dangerous, and he did not really want to bring any wizards aboard the starship. Not yet.

He pocketed the laser, then crossed to the couch slowly and cautiously, hands empty and held out for her to see. "Ms. Yessenina? Could you come with me, please? I'll find someone who can help you."

"No one can help me!" she screamed suddenly.

Turner jumped back, startled.

He did not try to argue directly with what she had said. He had no real assurance that anyone could help her, even with wizardry. "What's the matter?" he asked. "I know the reintegration was a shock, but it's over—"

"I know it's over!" she screamed. "My mission is gone. You've taken my mission away from me." Her eyes were wild now, but she continued to stare at him.

"I know your mission is over," he said, reaching out toward her. "You're free now; you can stay—-"

"No!" she said, pushing his hand away. "My mission was all I had, can't you see that?"

"Please, come with me."

"No! I won't leave my ship, I tell you. I can't." Tears welled up in her eyes. "It's all I have left." Her voice broke. "You took my mission away from me."

"I'm sorry," he said desperately. "Please, Ms. Yes-senina, listen to me."

"I'm staying, I tell you!"

Pleading was not going to work, he could see. "But what can you do here?" he asked, trying to sound calmly reasonable.

She stared at him intently but silently for a moment before bursting out, "I can die, damn you! That's all you've left me; I can't kill anymore, but I can still die, and take my ship with me. You can't take that away.

I can still die. You can't have my ship! Computer, I hereby disavow Old Earth! I surrender to the rebels!

Kill me, damn you!"

The computer's calm voice replied, "This unit no longer possesses authority to terminate cyborg unit."

Yessenina/Flame screamed again, this time some-thing in Russian that Turner could not follow. She flung herself off the couch onto him, knocking him back against the carpeted curve of the wall.

He tried to grab her. They were both cyborgs, but he was bigger and presumably somewhat stronger. He threw up quick telekinetic protection for his face and other especially vulnerable points to guard against her attack.

He remembered that he had, only a short time be-fore, thought of himself as the most powerful creature on the planet, yet here he was fighting for his life.

She was not attacking, though. Instead of striking him or finding holds, her hands were sliding across his coat. She was searching for the pockets, and even as he realized that, she found one and reached quickly into it.

She smiled, the expression hideous. She had found what she was after. She pulled away from him, a snark in her hand.

Suddenly terrified, well aware that a snark was not affected at all by magical shields, Turner devoted all his energies to pushing her away and dodging while calling silently for the computer's aid.

He cursed himself for allowing her to get the weapon. He should never have entered the cabin, he told himself. He had defeated Flame. He had no rea-son to try to help her. Dying now, letting her kill him after she had lost, would be stupid, unforgivably stu-pid.

He knew he might well die. He did not know which snark she had gotten. One held a 5 percent charge, which might not be enough to kill him, but the other still had a 30 percent charge, which would be enough to kill anything.

Once she had the snark, however, Yessenina ig-nored Turner completely. She put up no resistance when, terror-stricken, he flung her away. Even as she tumbled back across the floor, propelled by both his augmented muscles and his psionic wizardry, she flicked the control, turned the weapon toward her own face, and pushed the button.

Blood splashed across the carpet and the accelera-tion couch, and her body arched backward, then col-lapsed and lay still. She had had the 30 percent charge. Turner took one look at what remained of her head and vomited, emptying his stomach onto the beige car-pet in a single choking heave.

"Excuse me, sir," the computer said in its smooth contralto. "Query: Confirm death of cyborg unit desig-nated 'Flame.'"

Startled, Turner swallowed, got to his feet again, and returned to be absolutely certain that she was dead.

There could be no doubt at all of that.

The worst part, he thought later when remembering the incident, was the sputtering wires and circuit boards that projected from the wetly gleaming bone and tissue.

"She's dead," he said, and closed his eyes.

"Query: Right thumb of cyborg unit designated 'Flame' substantially intact."

Turner did not want to take another look; instead he demanded, "Why?"

"An enemy sabotage device is in the computer core. Access panel has been coded for thumbprint access by cyborg unit designated 'Flame' only."

Turner wiped his mouth, opened his eyes, and looked up at the glossy poster of the ancient video star.

"What?"

"Cyborg unit designated 'Flame' placed an enemy sabotage device in the computer core. Unless it is re-moved or reset, it will activate in eighty-two hours, ten minutes, and forty-four seconds."

Puzzled, still shocked by Flame's death, Turner asked, "Then why haven't you removed it?"

"Access panel has been coded for thumbprint access by cyborg unit designated 'Flame' only."

Turner did not want to think about sabotage devices or access panels, but he forced himself to stop and con-sider the situation.

"Was that . . . was that causing programming con-flicts?"

"Affirmative."

That explained a lot. By placing such a device Flame had been insubordinate, almost treasonous— but taking the appropriate action and blowing her head off would have resulted in the destruction of the ship and computer as well.

No wonder the computer had been confused! It was forced to accept Flame as its cyborg unit, and to obey her orders to some extent, when it knew she had booby-trapped her own ship, thereby aiding the enemy. It would have been in a constant state of inter-nal conflict.

The computer, he knew from his own experiences, relied on the advice of humans to resolve program-ming conflicts. That was why CCC-IRU 247 had been so willing to do as it was told, so long as doing so did not create new conflicts; the perpetual tension the de-vice created had made the machine highly suggestible as it searched for an external resolution to its dilemma. Removing the device might make the computer less tractable, but if left alone, the thing, whatever it was, would destroy the ship. To let it be destroyed now seemed terribly wasteful. Besides, the Council wanted the ship intact, and he had not yet decided definitely that they shouldn't get it.

He looked at the access panel just to the right of the old poster of the video star he didn't recognize.

He was a wizard; he needed no thumbprint. He could open the panel and remove the device.

Or he could leave it right where it was.

The wizards of Praunce wanted this ship; he could give it to them, or he could destroy it.

Or perhaps he could keep it for himself. He turned that idea over slowly in his mind as he stared at the access panel.

Chapter Twenty-Five

DAYLIGHT POURED IN THROUGH THE WESTERN windows, and where it passed through the fac-eted stained-glass "jewels" that had been set into every pane, it spangled the fur carpets with colored sparks.

Seated on his cushion, Turner marveled at the sim-ple beauty of the scene. It seemed somehow far more interesting and important than the earnest discussion going on around him. He had made his decisions be-fore coming here, all of them, and he would not change them. He leaned over and slid an arm around his wife's waist.

The action did not go unobserved. "Sam," Ahnao said, visibly annoyed. "Can't you pay attention?"

"Yes," Shopaur agreed. "This is all your doing, after all."

"I know," Turner said, smiling calmly. "But it's done, isn't it?" He refused to give up his comfortable mood.

After weeks of discomfort and danger he was safe at home again, his wife beside him. He had seen his children, and they, too, were safe. Zhrellia had cut another molar.

And he was, more than ever, indisputably the most powerful creature on Dest. He allowed himself a cer-tain satisfaction at that thought as he studied the col-ored light.

"It's not exactly all done," Arzadel said. "There is still a working starship, with a demon still alive and active, sitting in the market square in Killalah."

"No," Turner said. "There isn't. It's in the air; I launched it this morning. I had the area evacuated, and I'll pay for the damages."

There was a moment of shocked silence.

"You acted without proper authority," Shopaur said in rebuke.

Turner shrugged. He did not feel that he had needed any authority but his own.

"And what about the dead and injured?" Shopaur demanded, annoyed, like Ahnao, by Turner's casual attitude. "Will you pay for them?"

Turner sighed in resignation and lifted his gaze from the carpets. "We've been over that," he said. "I can't pay for them. No one can. I didn't kill anyone, I didn't injure anyone, and it's not my fault. I know that Flame came here looking for me, but I didn't send the mes-sage she answered, an automatic machine did, one I didn't know existed. And I certainly did my best to stop her from killing or harming anyone. I tried, and no one else could have done as well."

"Please," Arzadel said, "we have been through that. Let us not go over the same things all over again.

We will all do what we can about the damages, whether they were caused by the ship or by this Flame person or by the storm that we, all the rest of us and not Sam, let get out of hand. That's not important.

Recriminations do no good. What has happened has happened, and we can't change it, we can only deal with the results. The important thing is the ship. Our world has a working starship; don't you people see what that means?"

"No, I don't," Parrah replied bluntly. "What does it mean? Why does it mean anything?" Her arm had found its way around her husband's waist.

"It means we can rejoin the mainstream of civiliza-tion," Arzadel explained enthusiastically. "We can visit the stars! We could send a party to Old Earth itself, to see what's left there—there may have been survivors, and by now they may have built an entire new society, much as we have."

There was a moment of silence as everyone present considered this. Turner reluctantly decided to bring in a touch of harsh reality—just a touch. His final state-ment could wait. "I think you're being optimistic," he said.

"Oh?" Arzadel's tone remained friendly, but his gaze was not. "You think so?"

"Yes," Turner said. "I think so." He looked around at the Council, annoyed that they could not see what was so obvious to him. "What makes you think that there is any mainstream to civilization anymore?" he demanded. "If an active interstellar civilization is out there somewhere, wouldn't they have contacted us by now? Dest's location is no secret. Furthermore, I doubt that there's anything left on Old Earth that's worth the trip. I doubt there's anything anywhere that's worth the trip. Interstellar travel simply isn't worth the trouble. You seem to have forgotten the dis-tances involved. It took me three hundred years, one way, to get here from Mars. True, I made stops along the way, but I doubt that a round trip from Dest to Old Earth and back could possibly be made in less than two hundred years. It wouldn't be two hundred years for the people aboard ship, but it would be for us, here on Dest. Do you really think that our great-great-grandchildren will care what's on Old Earth?"

"They might," Dekert said quietly.

"All right, then," Turner said. "Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we all agree that it's worth sending the ship out there somewhere, to Old Earth or one of the colony planets. Who is going to make the trip?

The computer can fly the ship, but who is going to go? That's a one-man military scout, not a colony ship or an explor-atory vessel. Only two or three people can go, at most— the algae tanks won't produce enough air and food for more than that, even if you squeezed them aboard—and the flight will take years."

"You're the only experienced pilot we have," De-kert said.

Several people nodded agreement or looked at him expectantly.

"Me?" Turner looked around at his fellow council-lors. They were all watching him expectantly.

He had expected this. "No," he said, calmly and definitely. "Absolutely not. I'm forty-four years old. I have a wife and a family, and I like it here on Dest. I spent fourteen years in one of those ships. That's more than enough for anyone. Do any of you have any idea how boring spaceflight is? And it takes years to reach another star. Boring! Boring beyond comprehension! I'd probably go completely mad, now that my person-ality is reintegrated. Flame did go mad. She went com-pletely mad from the sheer boredom of space travel. That was why she killed herself."

"But—" Wirozhess began.

Turner cut him off. "Forget it. I'm sorry, but I'm not going."

"What if we insist?" Wirozhess asked, a bit more loudly than necessary.

Turner stared at him for a moment, then pulled his arm from around Parrah's waist and stood up.

The entire Council watched him intently.

"I don't think you understand," he said softly. "I don't think you understand at all. You can't insist on anything. You have no power over me. You all seem to have forgotten that I, and I alone, control the ship.

None of you except Parrah can even speak its lan-guage, and none of you know anything about its capa-bilities. I am the only person on Dest whose authority it recognizes, because I am the only one who can give orders over a cyborg internal communication circuit, and it won't accept orders any other way right now. I am the one who knew its release code. I can destroy it any time I want. That ship is mine. It is not the prop-erty of this Council, or of the empire of Praunce, what-ever you people may have thought. It is mine. Furthermore, that ship— my ship—still carries enough firepower to obliterate your entire civilization."

He paused and looked around at uncomprehending faces.

"I," he said, "am the most powerful creature on this planet. I didn't ask for it, but I am. I need never again do anything I do not choose to do. Nobody can insist that I do anything. I am stronger and faster than any of you. I am a competent wizard, though not the most powerful here. And I can order the destruction of this entire city and be obeyed instantly. If I die by violence, that ship will retaliate by obliterating the city I die in, and quite possibly the rest of the planet as well. I will do as I damn well please." He looked around at his comrades, their expressions ranging from open horror to amused acceptance.

"Now," he went on, "I am willing to be reasonable about this. I am, in effect, the ruler of this planet now, but I'm willing to be reasonable about it. Let me ex-plain just what your choices are." He paused to take a breath.

"Now just a minute—" Shopaur began, rising from his seat.

"Sit down!" Turner ordered.

Startled, Shopaur sat down. Others, however, rose in his stead. "Who do you think you are?" Wirozhess demanded.

Turner, listening with his ears and psychic senses and communications circuit, smiled. "I'll show you who I am. I have a little demonstration planned, if you would all look out this window."

Puzzled, the councillors turned to the window.

Light flared, and a yellow flash across the skies headed directly toward them.

The tower suddenly shook under the impact of an ear-splitting sonic boom; the roar of the starship's pas-sage deafened them all for a moment, and the red glare of its blazing heatshields lit the room brightly for an instant, washing them all in its lurid glow.

Even when the ship had passed, fading turbulence whistled around the corner of the building and a lin-gering warmth seeped through the walls and windows into the room. Somewhere below them a pane of glass broke with a distant rattle.

"I," Turner said, "am the master of that ship. You had the presumption to think that you could take it from me; you can't. You don't know anything about the technology involved. That pass was just the ship itself, in flight; you have no idea of what the weapons it carries can do. I can't demonstrate them; they're too powerful. None of you know anything about it."

Parrah smiled, obviously proud of her man.

"We could learn," Arzadel said calmly. "Don't you think you're being somewhat arrogant about this? Why do you want the ship? You said yourself that you aren't interested in visiting other stars; what else is it good for? Setting yourself up as a dictator? Do you really want to do that?"

"No," Turner admitted. "I don't, not really. How-ever, right now, whether I like it or not, and whether you like it or not, I have the power to be a dictator here. Which brings me back to that choice I was about to offer you."

He paused, looking around.

"Go on," Arzadel said. "We won't interrupt this time."

Turner nodded. "All right, then. Your first choice is to accept me as the ruler of Dest. If you do that, I intend to be a benevolent despot, not merely a tyrant. That doesn't mean, though, that I'll let things go on unguided. Firstly, I'll see that Dest is united, by force if necessary. The ship's nukes, the Bad Times city-destroying bombs, shouldn't be needed; I have other weapons, kept hidden these past eleven years, and an-other arsenal aboard the ship as well—enough in all to equip an impressive little army. I don't think we'll have any trouble uniting the planet. Hligosh, just flying the ship over most towns should be enough to coax a sur-render!"

A murmur of agreement greeted this.

"Furthermore," Turner continued, "under my rule social justice will be established as far as possible; this elitist system of wizards and commoners will be cut back. It's time the people of Dest returned to the dem-ocratic principles of their ancestors. Anyone who is in-terested will be actively invited to apprentice to a wizard. Government officials other than myself will be elected—though I suppose at first we'll have to be se-lective about who can vote, to allow for the social ad-justments. People aren't used to elections yet."

This time the murmuring was much less positive. Turner had expected that. "The commoners can't—"

Shopaur began.

"Shut up!" Turner snapped.

Shopaur subsided uneasily.

Turner continued. "Education will be encouraged. Schools will be established. I'll do everything I can to stamp out ignorance. Anyone who wants to learn will be allowed to learn. And if anyone wants to learn science, or technology, right up to and including the technology to build starships, that's fine; I'll do my best to see that that education is available. If the peo-ple of Dest want the technology that built my ship, they can have it—but they'll have to build it up for themselves. The computer and I will provide whatever information is necessary, but the people will need to build their own industrial base."

That drew no murmur, only puzzlement.

"There's an old saying from Old Earth," Turner ex-plained. '"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach him to fish, and he eats every day.' If I give you that ship, if you just use the one starship, that's all you'll ever have, just one starship, and no way to maintain it. You can't repair anything if it goes wrong

—and the computer is already damaged. If you choose to accept me as dictator, and if you build up the neces-sary industries to build starships, then you can have, and maintain, all the ships you want. It will take years, maybe decades, maybe even centuries, but the tech-nology will be yours, it won't be stolen from a dead world. I don't think Dest is ready for starships, but if you learn how to build your own, you will be."

His audience grew restless. He saw Wirozhess and Shopaur exchanging ominous glances.

"I expect opposition," Turner said. "I'm ready for it. If I set up as ruler and die by violence, the ship will nuke whatever city I died in. If I die from what appear to be natural causes, the ship will destroy itself." He had the timed termite for that.

The other wizards were watching him closely, but he could not read their expressions anymore.

"I would point out," he said, "that I have as much right to rule as anyone. The people of Praunce have never had any say in their government; they won't care whether they serve one master or the few dozen they have now."

Shopaur grimaced.

"You do, of course, have a second choice," Turner said. "You can reject me, tell me that you won't have me as dictator. I don't want to bother fighting you. I'll accept your decision; I won't argue about it. If you refuse to accept my terms, I'll accept that—and I'll destroy the ship right now. You can go on as you always have, but without me and without the ship. Which would you prefer?"

Wirozhess snorted.

"Actually," Turner said, "I shouldn't even be asking you people. I should be polling the commoners. I don't have the means to do that, though, and besides, they've all been trained since childhood to leave mat-ters of state to the councils and advisers. We wizards are the rulers of Praunce, of all Dest, really. We have no right to be, but we are. So I'm asking you to make the decision on behalf of the people of this planet, and I'll abide by that decision."

There was a moment of silence, then a babble of voices. Turner held up his hands.

"You talk it over," he said. "You decide, and then send someone to fetch me." He marched from the room.

Parrah leapt up and followed him.

"They won't do it," she said as she stepped out the window behind him.

"I know," he answered. "But it will take them some time to decide that. Let's go home."

Two hours later, as he sprawled comfortably on cushions in his apartments while Parrah fetched an-other bottle of wine, he felt the touch of a telepathic message.

"Stand ready," he told the computer. The ship was waiting in orbit overhead; it had used the two hours to resume its preferred synchronous position.

"Acknowledged," the computer replied.

" Yes?" he asked.

The mental voice he heard was Shopaur's, and he knew immediately what the answer would be.

We can never accept an arbitrary dictator, Shopaur began, but we are eager to discuss possibilities for com-promise . . .

Turner wondered briefly why an arbitrary dictator was so much worse than an arbitrary council or an ar-bitrary nobility.

It didn't really matter. The decisions were all made. He cut Shopaur off. No, he replied.

"Sam!" Parrah said from the doorway, the bottle in her hand. She had heard.

"Parrah, I'm sure," he said before she could say anything more. "I almost did this even before they an-swered." He switched languages and transmitted, "As Old Earth's representative on this planet, I hereby order the immediate destruction of all war-surplus spacecraft."

"Acknowledged," the computer replied.

That was the last transmission.

Even from orbit, the silent flash of the explosion was far brighter than Dest's primary. It blazed up in-stantly, whiting out the heavens overhead with its glare, turning the windows of the towers to sheets of white fire, washing all color out of the world and leav-ing only stark white light and black shadow.

The light beat upon them for an interminable half second and then died slowly away, white to yellow to gold to orange to red, down from a bright crimson to a dull rust, and then to nothingness, leaving only blue sky above. The blinding whiteness faded into the dark-ness of mere daylight, letting all the colors of the world seep back into shocked, blinking eyes.

Flame's ship was gone.

The brilliance of the flash had caught Turner by surprise; he hoped that no one had been blinded. He had not thought of the possibility before. He had not been sure just how big the explosion would be, whether the computer would use the fusion drive or a warhead or something less devastating.

He still did not know, and never would, just what the computer had done. He could only hope that no one had been looking up at the time and that the ex-plosion had been clean.

At least it had been powerful enough that there would be no debris big enough to reach ground and had occurred well above the atmosphere, so that there would be no sound, no shockwave.

There was just the flash, and then nothing. No united planet, no improved education, no forced de-mocracy, no guided industry. Dest would go on as if he had never come.

Or, just possibly, he mused, the knowledge of the missed opportunity might drive people on a little bit faster.

"They aren't going to like this at all," Parrah said as she settled onto the cushions by his side. "They wanted that ship."

"I know," Turner replied. "We'll have to leave Praunce. We won't be welcome here anymore. I'm sorry about that."

"It's all right," she said. "It's better than trying to run the world. You're only human, Sam." She leaned over and kissed him.

He kissed her back. "I know," he whispered. "But it's too bad Dest lost its chance at all that knowledge."

Parrah waved that away. "We don't need it," she said. "When we do, we'll find it for ourselves, we won't have to pick Old Earth's corpse." She kissed him again, then rose. "I'll go tell the children we're leav-ing."

About the Author

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born and raised in Massa-chusetts, the fourth of six children in a big old house that was full of books. Both his parents read con-stantly, and both enjoyed science fiction; he grew up reading anything handy, including a wide variety of speculative fiction. His first attempts at writing his own were made at the age of seven.

After completing twelve years of public school, he followed in the footsteps of father and grandfather and attended Princeton University. Less successful than his ancestors, he left without a degree after two attempts, the first in architecture and the second in religion.

Being qualified for no other enjoyable work—he had discovered working in ladder factories, supermar-kets, or fast-food restaurants to be something less than enjoyable—he began trying to sell his writing between halves of his college career, without much immediate success. After his final departure from Princeton, how-ever, he produced The Lure of the Basilisk, which sold readily, beginning his career as a full-time writer.

He married in 1977, and he and his wife now have two children, one of each of the two standard varieties. The family lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

The Wizard and the War Machine is his tenth novel.