Flandry of Terra

I

Seen on approach, against crystal darkness and stars crowded into foreign constellations, Altai was beautiful. More than half the northern hemisphere, somewhat less in the south, was polar cap. Snowfields were tinged rosy by the sun Krasna; naked ice shimmered blue and cold green. The tropical belt, steppe and tundra, which covered the remainder, shaded from bronze to tarnished gold, here and there the quicksilver flash of a big lake. Altai was ringed like Saturn, a tawny hoop with subtle rainbow iridescence flung spinning around the equator, three radii out in space. And beyond were two copper-coin moons.

Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, field agent, Naval Intelligence Corps of the Terrestrial Empire, pulled his gaze reluctantly back to the spaceship’s bridge. “I see where its name came from,” he remarked. Altai meant Golden in the language of the planet’s human colonists; or so the Betelgeusean trader who passed on his knowledge electronically to Flandry had insisted. “But Krasna is a misnomer for the sun. It isn’t really red to the human eye. Not nearly as much as your star, for instance. More of an orange-yellow, I’d say.”

The blue visage of Zalat, skipper of the battered merchant vessel, twisted into the grimace which was his race’s equivalent of a shrug. He was moderately humanoid, though only half as tall as a man, stout, hairless, clad in a metal mesh tunic. “I zuppoze it was de, you zay, contrazt.” He spoke Terrestrial Anglic with a thick accent, as if to show that the independence of the Betelgeusean System-buffer state between the hostile realms of Terra and Merseia-did not mean isolation from the mainstream of interstellar culture.

Flandry would rather have practiced his Altaian, especially since Zalat’s Anglic vocabulary was so small so to limit conversation to platitudes. But he deferred. As the sole passenger on this ship, of alien species at that, with correspondingly special requirements in diet, he depended on the captain’s good will. Also, the Betelgeuseans took him at face value. Officially, he was only being sent to re-establish contact between Altai and the rest of mankind. Officially, his mission was so minor that Terra didn’t even give him a ship of his own, but left him to negotiate passage as best he might… So, let Zalat chatter.

“After all,” continued the master, “Altai was firzt colonized more dan zeven hoondert Terra-years a-pazt: in de verry dawn, you say, of in-terztellar travel. Little was known about w’at to eggzpect. Krazna muzt have been deprezzingly cold and red, after Zol. Now-to-days, we have more aztronautical zophiztication.”

Flandry looked to the blaze of space, stars and stars and stars. He thought that an estimated four million of them, included in that vague sphere called the Terrestrial Empire, was an insignificant portion of this one spiral arm of this one commonplace galaxy. Even if you added the other empires, the sovereign suns like Betelgeuse, the reports of a few explorers who had gone extremely far in the old days, that part of the universe known to man was terrifyingly small. And it would always remain so.

“Just how often do you come here?” he asked, largely to drown out silence.

“About onze a Terra-year,” answered Zalat. “However, dere is ot’er merchantz on dis route. I have de fur trade, but Altai alzo produzes gemz, mineralz, hides, variouz organic productz, even dried meatz, w’ich are in zome demand at home. Zo dere is usually a Betelgeusean zhip or two at Ulan Baligh.”

“Will you be here long?”

“I hope not. It iz a tediouz plaze for a non-human. One pleasure houze for uz haz been eztab-lizhed, but-” Zalat made another face. “Wid de dizturbanzez going on, fur trapping and caravanz have been much hampered. Lazt time I had to wait a ztandard mont’ for a full cargo. Diz time may be worze.”

Oh-oh, thought Flandry. But he merely asked aloud: “Since the metals and machinery you bring in exchange are so valuable, I wonder why some Altaians don’t acquire spaceships of their own and start trading.”

“Dey have not dat kind of zivilization,” Zalat replied. “Remember, our people have been coming here for lezz dan a zentury. Before den Altai was izolated, onze de original zhipz had been worn out. Dere was never zo great an interest among dem in re-eztablizhing galactic contact az would overcome de handicap of poverty in metalz w’ich would have made zpazezship building eggzpenzive for dem. By now, might-be, zome of de younger Altaian malez have zome wizh for zuch an enterprize. But lately de Kha Khan has forbidden any of his zubjectz from leaving de planet, eggzept zome truzted and verry cloze-mout’ perzonal reprezentatives in de Betelgeu-zean Zyztem. Dis prohibition is might-be one reazon for de inzurrectionz.”

“Yeh.” Flandry gave the ice fields a hard look. “If it were my planet, I think I’d look around for an enemy to sell it to.”

And still I’m going there, he thought. Talk about your unsung heroes! Though I suppose, the more the Empire cracks and crumbles, the more frantically a few of us have to scurry around patching it. Or else the Long Night could come in our own sacrosanct lifetimes.

And in this particular instance, his mind ran on, I have reason to believe that an enemy is trying to buy the planet.

II

Where the Zeya and the Talyma, broad shallow rivers winding southward over the steppes from polar snows, met at Ozero Rurik, the city named Ulan Baligh was long ago founded. It had never been large, and now the only permanent human settlement on Altai had perhaps 20,000 residents. But there was always a ring of encampments around it, tribesmen come to trade or confer or hold rites in the Prophet’s Tower. Their tents and trunks walled the landward side of Ulan Baligh, spilled around the primitive spaceport, and raised campfire smoke for many kilometers along the indigo lakeshore.

As the spaceship descended, Captain Flandry was more interested in something less picturesque. Through a magnifying viewport in the after turret, to which he had bribed his way, he saw that monorail tracks encircled the city like spider strands; that unmistakable launchers for heavy missiles squatted on them; that some highly efficient modern military aircraft lazed on grav repulsors in the sky; that barracks and emplacements for an armored brigade were under construction to the west, numerous tanks and beetlecars already prowling on guard; that a squat building in the center of town must house a negagrav generator powerful enough to shield the entire urban area.

That all of this was new.

That none of it came from any factories controlled by Terra.

“But quite probably from our little green chums,” he murmured to himself. “A Merseian base here, in the buffer region, outflanking us at Catawrayannis… Well, it wouldn’t be decisive in itself, but it would strengthen their hand quite a bit. And eventually, when their hand looks strong enough, they’re going to fight.”

He suppressed a tinge of bitterness at his own people, too rich to spend treasure in an open attack on the menace-most of them, even, denying that any menace existed, for what would dare break the Pax Terrestria? After all, he thought wryly, he enjoyed his furloughs Home precisely because Terra was decadent.

But for now, there was work at hand. Intelligence had collected hints in the Betelgeuse region: traders spoke of curious goings-on at some place named Altai; the archives mentioned a colony far off the regular space lanes, not so much lost as overlooked; inquiry produced little more than this, for Betelgeusean civilians like Zalat had no interest in Altaian affairs beyond the current price of angora pelts.

A proper investigation would have required some hundreds of men and several months. Being spread horribly thin over far too many stars, Intelligence was able to ship just one man to Betelgeuse. At the Terran Embassy, Flandry received a slim dossier, a stingy expense account, and orders to find what the devil was behind all this. After which, overworked men and machines forgot about him. They would remember when he reported back, or if he died in some spectacular fashion; otherwise, Altai might well lie obscure for another decade.

Which could be a trifle too long, Flandry thought.

He strolled with elaborate casualness from the turret to his cabin. It must not be suspected on Altai what he had already seen: or, if that information leaked out, it must absolutely not be suspected that he suspected these new installations involved more than suppressing a local rebellion. The Khan had been careless about hiding the evidence, presumably not expecting a Terran investigator. He would certainly not be so careless as to let the investigator take significant information home again.

At his cabin, Flandry dressed with his usual care. According to report, the Altaians were people after his own heart: they liked color on their clothes, in great gobs. He chose a shimmerite blouse, green embroidered vest, purple trousers with gold stripe tucked into tooled-leather half boots, crimson sash and cloak, black beret slanted rakishly over his sleek seal-brown hair. He himself was a tall well-muscled man; his long face bore high cheekbones and straight nose, gray eyes, neat mustache. But then, he patronized Terra’s best cosmetic biosculptor.

The spaceship landed at one end of the concrete field. Another Betelgeusean vessel towered opposite, confirming Zalat’s claims about the trade. Not precisely brisk-maybe a score of ships per standard year-but continuous, and doubtless by now important to the planet’s economy.

As he stepped out the debarkation lock, Flandry felt the exhilaration of a gravity only three-fourths that of Home. But it was quickly lost when the air stung him. Ulan Baligh lay at eleven degrees north latitude. With an axial tilt about like Terra’s, a wan dwarf sun, no oceans to moderate the climate, Altai knew seasons almost to the equator. The northern hemisphere was approaching winter. A wind streaking off the pole sheathed Flandry in chill, hooted around his ears, and snatched the beret from his head.

He grabbed it back, swore, and confronted the portmaster with less dignity than he had planned. “Greeting,” he said as instructed; “may peace dwell in your yurt. This person is named Dominic Flandry, and ranges Terra, the Empire.”

The Altaian blinked narrow black eyes, but otherwise kept his face a mask. It was a wide, rather flat countenance, but not purely mongoloid: hook nose, thick close-cropped beard, light skin bespoke caucasoid admixture as much as the hybrid language. He was short, heavy-set, a wide-brimmed fur hat was tied in place, his leather jacket was lacquered in an intricate design, his pants were of thick felt and his boots fleece-lined. An old-style machine pistol was bolstered at his left side, a broad-bladed knife oh the right.

“We have not had such visitors-” He paused, collected himself, and bowed. “Be welcome, all guests who come with honest words,” he said ritually. “This person is named Pyotr Gutchluk, of the Kha Khan’s sworn men.” He turned to Zalat. “You and your crew may proceed directly to the yamen. We can handle the formalities later. I must personally conduct so distinguished a… a guest to the palace.”

He clapped his hands. A couple of servants appeared, men of his own race, similarly dressed and similarly armed. Their eyes glittered, seldom leaving the Terran; the woodenness of their faces must cover an excitement which seethed. Flandry’s luggage was loaded on a small electro-truck of antique design. Pyotr Gutchluk said, half inquiringly, “Of course so great an orluk as yourself would prefer a varyak to a tulyak.”

“Of course,” said Flandry, wishing his education had included those terms.

He discovered that a varyak was a native-made motorcycle. At least, that was the closest Terran word. It was a massive thing on two wheels, smoothly powered from a bank of energy capacitors, a baggage rack aft and a machine-gun mount forward. It was steered with the knees, which touched a crossbar. Other controls were on a manual panel behind the windscreen. An outrigger wheel could be lowered for support when the vehicle was stationary or moving slowly. Pyotr Gutchluk offered a goggled crash helmet from a saddlebag and took off at 200 kilometers an hour.

Flandry, accelerating his own varyak, felt the wind come around the screen, slash his face and nearly drag him from the saddle. He started to slow down. But-Come now, old chap. Imperial prestige, stiff upper lip, and so on drearily. Somehow he managed to stay on Gutchluk’s tail as they roared into the city.

Ulan Baligh formed a crescent, where the waters of Ozero Rurik cut a bay into the flat shore. Overhead was a deep-blue sky, and the rings. Pale by day, they made a frosty halo above the orange sun. in such a light, the steeply upcurving red tile roofs took on the color of fresh blood. Even the ancient gray stone walls beneath were tinged faint crimson. All the buildings were large, residences holding several families each, commercial ones jammed with tiny shops. The streets were wide, clean-swept, full of nomads and the wind. Gutchluk took an overhead road, suspended from pylons cast like dragons holding the cables in their teeth. It seemed an official passageway, nearly empty save for an occasional varyak patrol.

It also gave a clear view of the palace, standing in walled gardens: a giant version of the other houses but gaudily painted and colonnaded with wooden dragons. The royal residence was, however, overshadowed by the Prophet’s Tower. So was everything else.

Flandry understood from vague Betelgeusean descriptions that most of Altai professed a sort of Moslem-Buddhist synthesis, codified centuries ago by the Prophet Subotai. The religion had only this one temple, but that was enough. A sheer two kilometers it reared up into the thin hurried air, as if it would spear a moon. Basically a pagoda, blinding red, it had one blank wall facing north. No, not blank either, but a single flat tablet on which, in a contorted Sino-Cyrillic alphabet, the words of the Prophet stood holy forever. Even Flandry, with scant reverence in his heart, knew a moment’s awe. A stupendous will had raised that spire above these plains.

The elevated road swooped downward again. Gutchluk’s varyak slammed to a halt outside the palace. Flandry, taller than any man of Altai, was having trouble with his steering bar. He almost crashed into the wrought-bronze gate. He untangled his legs and veered in bare time, a swerve that nearly threw him. Up on the wall, a guard leaned on his portable rocket launcher and laughed. Flandry heard him and swore. He continued the curve, steered a ring around Gutchluk so tight that it could easily have killed them both, slapped down the third wheel and let the cycle slow itself to a halt while he leaped from the saddle and took a bow.

“By the Ice People!” exclaimed Gutchluk. Sweat shone on his face. He wiped it off with a shaky hand. ‘They breed reckless men on Terra!”

“Oh, no,” said Flandry, wishing he dared mop his own wet skin. “A bit demonstrative, perhaps, but never reckless.”

Once again he had occasion to thank loathed hours of calisthenics and judo practice for a responsive body. As the gates opened Gutchluk had used his panel radio to call ahead-Flandry jumped back on his varyak and putt-putted through under the guard’s awed gaze.

The garden was rocks, arched bridges, dwarf trees, and mutant lichen. Little that was Terran would grow on Altai. Flandry began to feel the dryness of his own nose and throat. This air snatched moisture from him as greedily as it did heat. He was more grateful for the warmth inside the palace than he wished to admit.

A white-bearded man in a fur-trimmed robe made a deep bow. “The Kha Khan himself bids you welcome, Orluk Flandry,” he said. “He will see you at once.”

“But the gifts I brought—”

“No matter now, my lord.” The chamberlain bowed again, turned and led the way down arched corridors hung with tapestries. It was very silent: servants scurried about whispering, guards with modern blasters stood rigid in dragon-faced leather tunics and goggled helmets, tripods fumed bitter incense. The entire sprawling house seemed to crouch, watchful.

I imagine I have upset them somewhat, thought Flandry. Here they have some cozy little conspiracy-with beings sworn to lay all Terra waste, I suspect-and suddenly a Terran officer drops in, for the first time in five or six hundred years. Yes-s-s.

So what do they do next? It’s their move.

III

Oleg Yesukai, Kha Khan of All the Tribes, was bigger than most Altaians, with a long sharp face and a stiff reddish beard. He wore gold rings, a robe thickly embroidered, silver trim on his fur cap, but all with an air of impatient concession to tedious custom. The hand which Flandry, kneeling, touched to his brow, was hard and muscular; the gun at the royal waist had seen use. This private audience chamber was curtained in red, its furniture inlaid and grotesquely carved; but it also held an ultramodern Betelgeusean graphone and a desk buried under official papers.

“Be seated,” said the Khan. He himself took a low-legged chair and opened a carved-bone cigar box. A smile of sorts bent his mouth. “Now that we’ve gotten rid of all my damned fool courtiers, we need no longer act as if you were a vassal.” He took a crooked purple stogie from the box. “I would offer you one of these, but it might make you ill. In thirty-odd generations, eating Altaian food, we have probably changed our metabolism a bit.”

“Your majesty is most gracious.” Flandry inhaled a cigarette of his own and relaxed as much as the straightbacked furniture permitted.

Oleg Khan spoke a stockbreeder’s pungent obscenity. “Gracious? My father was an outlaw on the tundra at fifteen.” (He meant local years, a third again as long as Terra’s. Altai was about one A.U. distant from Krasna, but the sun was less massive than Sol.) “At thirty he had seized Ulan Baligh with 50,000 warriors and deposited old Tuli Khan naked on the artic snows: so as not to shed royal blood, you understand. But he never would live here, and all his sons grew up in the ordu, the encampment, as he had. done, practiced war against the Tebtengri as he had known war, and mastered reading, writing, and science to boot. Let us not bother with graciousness, Orluk Flandry. I never had time to learn any.”

The Terran waited passive. It seemed to disconcert Oleg, who smoked for a minute in short ferocious drags, then leaned forward and said, “Well, why does your government finally deign to notice us?”

“I had the impression, your majesty,” said Flandry in a mild voice, “that the colonists of Altai came this far from Sol in order to escape notice.”

“True. True. Don’t believe that rat crud in the hero songs. Our ancestors came here because they were weak, not strong. Planets where men could settle at all were rare enough to make each one a prize, and there was little law in those days. By going far and picking a wretched icy desert, a few shiploads of Central Asians avoided having to fight for their home. Nor did they plan to become herdsmen. They tried to farm, but it proved impossible. Too cold and dry, among other things. They could not build an industrial, food-synthesizing society either: not enough heavy metals, fossil fuels, fissionables. This is a low density planet, you know. Step by step, over generations, with only dim traditions to guide them, they were forced to evolve a nomadic life. And that was suited to Altai; that worked, and their numbers increased. Of course, legends have grown up. Most of my people still believe Terra is some kind of lost Utopia and our ancestors were hardy warriors.” Oleg’s rust-colored eyes narrowed upon Flandry. He stroked his beard. “I’ve read enough, thought enough, to have a fair idea of what your Empire is and what it can do. So-why this visit, at this exact moment?”

“We are no longer interested in conquest for its own sake, your majesty,” said Flandry. True, as far as it went. “And our merchants have avoided this sector for several reasons. It lies far from heartland stars; the Betelgeuseans, close to their own home, can compete on unequal terms; the risk of meeting some prowling warship of our Merseian enemies is unattractive. There has, in short, been no occasion, military or civilian, to search out Altai.” He slipped smoothly into prevarication gear. “However, it is not the Emperor’s wish that any members of the human family be cut off. At the very least, I bring you his brotherly greetings.” (That was subversive. It should have been “fatherly.” But Oleg Khan would not take kindly to being patronized.) “At most, if Altai wished to rejoin us, for mutual protection and other benefits, there are many possibilities which could be discussed. An Imperial resident, say, to offer help and advice—”

He let the proposal trail off, since in point of fact a resident’s advice tended to be, “I suggest you do thus and so lest I call in the Marines.”

The Altaian king surprised him by not getting huffy about sovereign status. Instead, amiable as a tiger, Oleg Yesukai answered: “If you are distressed about our internal difficulties, pray do not be. Nomadism necessarily means tribalism, which usually means feud and war. I already spoke of my father’s clan seizing planetary leadership from the Nuro Bator. We in turn have rebellious gurkhans. As you will hear in court, that alliance called the Tebtengri Shamanate is giving us trouble. But such is nothing new in Altain history. Indeed, I have a firmer hold over more of the planet than any Kha Khan since the Prophet’s day. In a little while more I shall bring every last clan to heel.”

“With the help of imported armament?” Flandry elevated his brows a millimeter. Risky though it was to admit having seen the evidence, it might be still more suspicious not to. And indeed the other man seemed unruffled. Flandry continued, “The Imperium would gladly send a technical mission.”

“I do not doubt it.” Oleg’s response was dry.

“May I respectfully ask what planet supplies the assistance your majesty is now receiving?”

“Your question is impertinent, as well you know. I do not take offense, but I decline to answer.” Confidentially: “The old mercantile treaties with Betelgeuse guarantee monopolies in certain exports to then: traders. This other race is taking payment in the same articles, I am not bound by oaths sworn by the Nuro Bator dynasty, but at present it would be inexpedient that Betelgeuse discover the facts.”

It was a good spur-of-the-moment lie: so good that Flandry hoped Oleg would believe he had fallen for it. He assumed a fatuous Look-Mom-I’m-a-man-of-the-world smirk. “I understand, great Khan. You may rely on Terrestrial discretion.”

“I hope so,” said Oleg humorously. “Our traditional punishment for spies involves a method to keep them alive for days after they have been flayed.”

Flandry’s gulp was calculated, but not altogether faked. “It is best to remind your majesty,” he said, “just in case some of your less well-educated citizens should act impulsively, that the Imperial Navy is under standing orders to redress any wrong suffered by any Terran national anywhere in the universe.”

“Very rightly,” said Oleg. His tone made clear his knowledge that that famous rule had become a dead letter, except as an occasional excuse for bombarding some obstreperous world unable to fight back. Between the traders, his own study missions sent to Betelgeuse, and whoever was arming him-the Kha Khan had become as unmercifully well-informed about galactic politics as any Terran aristocrat.

Or Merseian. The realization was chilling. Flandry had perforce gone blind into his assignment. Only now, piece by piece, did he see how big and dangerous it was,

“A sound policy,” continued Oleg. “But let us be perfectly frank, Orluk. If you should suffer, let us say, accidental harm in my dominions-and if your masters should misinterpret the circumstances, though of course they would not-I should be forced to invoke assistance which is quite readily available.”

Merseia isn’t far, thought Flandry, and Intelligence knows they’ve massed naval units at their closest base. If I want to hoist Terran vintages again, I’d better start acting the fool as never before in a gloriously misspent life.

Aloud, a hint of bluster: “Betelgeuse has treaties with the Imperium, your majesty. They would not interfere in a purely inter human dispute!” And then, as if appalled at himself: “But surely there won’t be any. The, uh, conversation has, uh, taken an undesirable turn. Most unfortunate, your majesty! I was ah, am interested in, er, unusual human colonies, and it was suggested to me by an archivist that—”

And so on and so on.

Oleg Yesukai grinned.

IV

Altai rotated once in 35 hours. The settlers had adapted, and Flandry was used to postponing sleep. He spent the afternoon being guided around Ulan Baligh, asking silly questions which he felt sure his guides would relay to the Khan. The practice of four or five meals during the long day-his were offered in the town houses of chieftains belonging to Clan Yesukai-gave him a chance to build up the role of a young Terran fop who had wangled this assignment from an uninterested Imperium, simply for a lark. A visit to one of the joyhouses, operated for transient nomads, helped reinforce the impression. Also, it was fun.

Emerging after sunset, he saw the Prophet’s Tower turned luminous, so that it stood like a bloody lance over brawling, flicker-lit streets. The tablet wall was white, the words thereon in jet: two kilometers of precepts for a stern and bitter way of life. “I say,” he exclaimed, “we haven’t toured that yet. Let’s go.”

The chief guide, a burly gray warrior leathered by decades of wind and frost, looked uneasy. “We must hasten back to the palace, Orluk,” he said. “A banquet is being prepared.”

“Oh, fine. Fine! Though I don’t know how much of an orgy I’m in any shape for after this bout. Eh, what?” Flandry nudged the man’s ribs with an indecent thumb. “Still, a peek inside, really I must. It’s unbelievable, that skyscraper, don’t you know.”

“We must first cleanse ourselves.”

A young man added bluntly: “In no case could it be allowed. You are not an initiate, and there is no holier spot in all the stars.”

“Oh, well, in that case-Mind if I photograph it tomorrow?”

“Yes,” said the young man. “It is not forbidden, perhaps, but we could not be responsible for what the ordinary tribesman who saw you with your camera might do. None but the Tebtengri would look on the Tower with anything but reverent eyes.”

“Teb—”

“Rebels and heathen, up in the north.” The older man touched brow and lips, a sign against evil. “Magic-workers at Tengri Nor, traffickers with the Ice People. It is not well to speak of them, only to exterminate them. Now we must hasten, Orluk.”

“Oh, yes. Yes. To be sure. Yes, indeed.” Flandry scrambled into the tulyak, an open motor carriage with a dragon figurehead.

As he was driven to the palace; he weighed what he knew in an uncomforting balance. Something was going on, much bigger than a local war. Oleg Khan had no intention Terra should hear about it. A Terran agent who actually learned a bit of truth would not go home alive; only a well-born idiot could safely be allowed return passage. Whether or not Flandry could convince the Altaians he was that idiot, remained to be seen. It wouldn’t be easy, for certainly he must probe deeper.

Furthermore, my lad, if somehow you do manage to swirl your cloak, twiddle your mustache, and gallop off to call an Imperial task force, Oleg may summon his friends. They are obviously not a private gun-selling concern, as he wants me to think; all Altai couldn’t produce enough trade goods to pay for that stuff. So, if the friends get here first and decide to protect this military investment of theirs, there’s going to be a fight. And with them dug in on the surface, as well as cruising local space, they’ll have all the advantages. The Navy won’t thank you, lad, if you drag them into a losing campaign.

He kindled a fresh cigarette and wondered miserably why he hadn’t told HQ he was down with Twonk’s Disease.

The valet assigned to him, at his guest suite in the palace, was a little puzzled by Terran garments. Flandry spent half an hour choosing his own ensemble. At last, much soothed, he followed an honor guard, who carried bared daggers in their hands, to the banquet hall, where he was placed at the Khan’s right.

There was no table. A great stone trough stretched the length of the hall, a hundred men sitting cross-legged on either side. Broth, reminiscent of wonton soup but with a sharp taste, was poured into it from wheeled kettles. When next the Khan signaled, the soup was drained through traps, spigots flushed the trough clean, and even less identifiable solid dishes were shoveled in. Meanwhile cups of hot, powerfully alcoholic herb tea were kept filled, a small orchestra caterwauled on pipes and drums, and there were some fairly spectacular performances by varyak riders, knife dancers, acrobats, and marksmen. At the meal’s end, an old tribal bard stood up and chanted lays; a plump and merry little man was summoned from the bazaars downtown to tell his original stories; gifts from the Khan were given every man present; and the affair broke up. Not a word of conversation had been spoken.

Oh, well, I’m sure everyone else had a hilarious time, Flandry grumbled to himself.

Not quite sober, he followed his guards back to his apartment. The valet bade him goodnight and closed the thick fur drapes which served for internal doors.

There was a radiant globe illuminating the room, but it seemed feeble next to the light filling a glazed balcony window. Flandry opened this and looked out in wonder. , Beneath him lay the darkened city. Past twinkling red campfires, Ozero Rurik stretched in blackness and multiple moonshivers, out to an unseen horizon. On his left the Prophet’s Tower leaped up, a perpetual flame crowned with unwinking winter-brilliant stars. Both moons were near the full, ruddy discs six and eight times as broad to the eye as Luna, haloed by ice crystals. Their light drenched the plains, turned the Zeya and Talyma into ribbons of mercury. But the rings dominated all else, bridging the southern sky with pale rainbows. Second by second, thin fire-streaks crossed heaven up there, as meteoric particles from that huge double band hurtled into the atmosphere.

Flandry was not much for gaping at landscapes. But this time it took minutes for him to realize how frigid the air was.

He turned back to the comparative warmth of his suite. As he closed the window, a woman entered from the bedroom.

Flandry had expected some such hospitality. He saw that she was taller than most Altaians, with long blue-black hair and lustrous tilted eyes of a greenish hue rare on this planet. Otherwise a veil and a gold-stiffened cloak hid her. She advanced quickly, till she was very near him, and he waited for some token of submission.

Instead, she stood watching him for close to a minute. It grew so still in the room that he heard the wind on the lake. Shadows were thick in the corners, and the dragons and warriors on the tapestries appeared to stir.

Finally, in a low uneven voice, she said: “Orluk, are you indeed a spy from the Mother of Men?”

“Spy?” Flandry thought, horrified, about agents provocateurs. “Good cosmos, no! I mean, that is to say, nothing of the sort!”

She laid a hand on his wrist. The fingers were cold, and clasped him with frantic strength. Her other hand slipped the veil aside. He looked upon a broad fair-skinned face, delicately arched nose, full mouth, and firm chin: handsome rather than pretty. She whispered, so fast and fiercely he had trouble following:

“Whatever you are, you must listen! If you are no warrior, then give the word when you go home to those who are. I am Bourtai Ivanskaya of the Tumurji folk, who belonged to the Tebtengri Shamanate. Surely you have heard speak of them, enemies of Oleg, driven into the north but still at war with him. My father was a noyon, a division commander, well known to Juchi Ilyak. He fell at the battle of Rivers Meet, last year, where the Yesukai men took our whole ordu. I was brought here alive, partly as a hostage-” A flare of haughtiness: “As if that could influence my people!-and partly for the Kha Khan’s harem. Since then I have gained a little of his confidence. More important, I have my own connection now, the harem is always a center of intrigue, nothing is secret from it for very long, but much which is secret begins there—”

“I know,” said Flandry. He was stunned, almost overwhelmed, but could not help adding: “Bedfellows make strange politics.”

She blinked incomprehension and plunged on: “I heard today that a Terran envoy was landed. I thought perhaps, perhaps he was come, knowing a little of what Oleg Yesukai readies against the Mother of Men. Or if he does not, he must be told! I found what woman would be lent him, and arranged the substitution of myself. Ask me not how! I have wormed secrets which give me power over more than one harem guard-it is not enough to load them with antisex hormone on such a tour of duty! I had the right. Oleg Khan is my enemy and the enemy of my dead father, all means of revenge are lawful to me. But more, worse, Holy Terra lies in danger. Listen, Terra man—”

Flandry awoke. For those few seconds, it had been so fantastic he couldn’t react. Like a bad stereodrama, the most ludicrous cliches, he was confronted with a girl (it would be a girl, too, and not simply a disgruntled man) who babbled her autobiography as prologue to some improbable revelation. Now suddenly he understood that this was real: that melodrama does happen once in a while. And if he got caught playing the hero, any role except comic relief, he was dead.

He drew himself up, fended Bourtai off, and said in haste: “My dear young lady, I have not the slightest competence in these matters. Furthermore, I’ve heard far more plausible stories from far too many colonial girls hoping for a free ride to Terra. Which, I assure you, is actually not a nice place at all for a little colonial girl without funds. I do not wish to offend local pride, but the idea that a single backward planet could offer any threat to the Imperium would be funny if it were not so yawnworthy. I beg you, spare me.”

Bourtai stepped back. The cloak fell open. She wore a translucent gown which revealed a figure somewhat stocky for Terran taste but nonetheless full and supple. He would have enjoyed watching that, except for the uncomprehending pain on her face.

“But, my lord Orluk,” she stammered, “I swear to you by the Mother of us both—”

You poor romantic, it cried in him, what do you think I am, a god? If you’re such a yokel you never heard of planting microphones in a guest room, Oleg Khan is not. Shut up before you kill us both!

Aloud, he got out a delighted guffaw. “Well, by Sirius, I do call this thoughtful. Furnishing me with a beautiful spy atop everything else! But honestly, darling, you can drop the pretense now. Let’s play some more adult games, eh, what?”

He reached out for her. She writhed free, ran across the room, dodged his pursuit and almost shouted through swift tears: “No, you fool, you blind brainless cackler, you will listen! You will listen if I must knock you to the floor and tie you up-and tell them, tell when you come home, ask them only to send a real spy and learn for themselves!”

Flandry cornered her. He grabbed both flailing wrists and tried to stop her mouth with a kiss. She brought her forehead hard against his nose. He staggered back, half blind with the pain, and heard her yelling: “It is the Merseians, great greenskinned monsters with long tails, the Merseians, I tell you, who come in secret from a secret landing field. I have seen them myself, walking these halls after dark, I have heard from a girl to whom a drunken orkhon babbled, I have crept like a rat in the walls and listened myself. They are called Merseians, the most terrible enemy your race and mine have yet known, and—”

Flandry sat down on a couch, wiped blood off his mustache, and said weakly: “Never mind that for now. How do we get out of here? Before the guards come to shoot us down, I mean.”

V

Bourtai fell silent, and he realized he had spoken in Anglic. He realized further that they wouldn’t be shot, except to prevent escape. They would be questioned, gruesomely.

He didn’t know if there were lenses as well as microphones in the walls. Nor did he know if the bugs passed information on to some watchful human, or only recorded data for study in the morning. He dared assume nothing but the former.

Springing to his feet, he reached Bourtai in one bound. She reacted with feline speed. A hand, edge on, cracked toward his larynx. He had already dropped his head, and took the blow on the hard top of his skull. His own hands gripped the borders of her cloak and crossed forearms at her throat. Before she could jab him in the solar plexus, he yanked her too close to him. She reached up thumbs, to scoop out his eyeballs. He rolled his head and was merely scratched on the nose. After the last buffet, that hurt. He yipped, but didn’t let go. A second later, she went limp in his strangle.

He whirled her around, got an arm lock, and let her sag against him. She stirred. So brief an oxygen starvation had brought no more than a moment’s unconsciousness. He buried his face in her dark flowing hair, as if he were a lover. It had a warm, somehow summery smell. He found an ear and breathed softly:

“You little gristlehead, did it ever occur to you that the Khan is suspicious of me? That there must be listeners? Now our forlorn chance is to get out of here. Steal a Betelgeusean spaceship, maybe. First, though, I must pretend I am arresting you, so they won’t come here with too much haste and alertness for us. Understand? Can you play the part?

She grew rigid. He felt her almost invisible nod. The hard young body leaning on him eased into a smoothness of controlled nerve and muscle. He had seldom known a woman this competent in a physical emergency. Unquestionably, Bourtai Ivanskaya had military training.

She was going to need it.

Aloud, Flandry huffed: “Well, I’ve certainly never heard anything more ridiculous! There aren’t any Merseians around here. I checked very carefully before setting out. Wouldn’t want to come across them, don’t you know, and spend maybe a year in some dreary Merseian jail while the pater negotiated my release. Eh, what? Really now, it’s perfect rot, every word.” He hemmed and hawed a bit. “I think I’d better turn you in, madam. Come along, now, no tricks!”

He marched her out the door, into a pillared corridor. One end opened on a window, twenty meters above a night-frozen fishpond. The other stretched into dusk, lit by infrequent bracketed lamps. Flandry hustled Bourtai down that side. Presently they came to a downward-sweeping staircase. A pair of sentries, in helmets, leather jackets, guns and knives, stood posted there. One of them aimed and barked: “Halt! What would you?”

“This girl, don’t you know,” panted Flandry. He nudged Bourtai, who gave some realistic squirmings. “Started to babble all sorts of wild nonsense. Who’s in charge here? She thought I’d help her against the Kha Khan. Imagine!”

“What?” A guardsman trod close.

“The Tebtengri will avenge me!” snarled Bourtai. “The Ice People will house in the ruin of this palace!”

Flandry thought she was overacting, but the guards both looked shocked. The nearer onesheathed his blaster. “I shall hold her, Orluk,” he said. “Boris, run for the commander.”

As he stepped close, Flandry let the girl go. With steel on his pate and stiff leather on his torso, the sentry wasn’t very vulnerable. Except-Flandry’s right hand rocketed upward. The heel of it struck the guard under the nose. He lurched backward, caromed off the balustrade, and flopped dead on the stairs. The other, half-turned to go, spun about on one booted heel. He snatched for his weapon. Bourtai put a leg behind his ankles and pushed. Down he went, Flandry pounced. They rolled over, clawing for a grip. The guard yelped. Flandry saw Bourtai over his opponent’s shoulder. She had taken the belt off the first warrior and circled about with the leather in her hands. Flandry let his enemy get on top. Bourtai put the belt around the man’s neck, a knee between his shoulder-blades, and heaved.

Flandry scrambled from below. “Get their blasters,” he gasped. “Here, give me one. Quick! We’ve made more racket than I hoped. Do you know the best way to escape? Lead on, then!”

Bourtai raced barefoot down the steps. Her goldcloth cloak and frail gown streamed behind her, insanely, unfitting for the occasion. Flandry came behind, one flight, two flights.

Boots clattered on marble. Rounding yet another spiral curve, Flandry met a squad of soldiers quick-stepping upward. The leader hailed him: “Do you have the evil woman, Orluk?”

So there had been a continuous listener. Of course, even surrendering Bourtai, Flandry could not save his own skin. Harmless fop or no, he had heard too much.

The squad’s eyes registered the girl’s blaster even as their chief spoke. Someone yelled. Bourtai fired into the thick of them. Ionic lightning crashed. Flandry dropped. A bolt sizzled where he had been. He fired, wide-beam, the energy too diluted to kill even at this range but scorching four men at once. As their screams lifted, he bounced back to his feet, overleaped the fallen front line, stiff-armed a warrior beyond, and hit the landing.

From here, a bannister curled grandly to the ground floor. Flandry whooped, seated himself, and slid. At the bottom was a sort of lobby, with glass doors opening on the garden. The moons and rings were so bright that no headlights shone from the half-dozen varyaks roaring toward this entrance. Mounted guardsmen, attracted by the noise of the fight-Flandry stared around. Arched windows flanked the doors, two meters up. He gestured to Bourtai, crouched beneath one and made a stirrup of his hands. She nodded, soared to the sill, broke glass with her gun butt, and fired into the troops. Flandry took shelter behind a column and blasted loose at the remnant of the infantry squad, stumbling down the stairs in pursuit. Their position hopelessly exposed to him, they retreated from sight.

A varyak leaped through the doors. The arms of the soldier aboard it shielded his face against flying glass. Flandry shot before the man had uncovered himself. The varyak, sensitively controlled, veered and went down across the doorway. The next one hurtled over it. The rider balanced himself with a trained body, blazing away at the Terran. Bourtai dropped him from above.

She sprang down unassisted. “I got two more outside,” she said. “Another pair are lurking, calling for help—”

“We’ll have to chance them. Where are the nearest gates?”

“They will be closed! We cannot burn through the lock before—”

“I’ll find a means. Quick, up on this saddle. Slowly, now, out the door behind me. Right the putt-putts of those two men you killed and stand by.” Flandry had already dragged a corpse from one varyak (not without an instant’s compassionate wondering what the man had been like alive) and set the machine back on its wheels. He sprang to the seat and went full speed out the shattered door.

So far, energy weapons had fulfilled their traditional military function, giving more value to purposeful speed of action than mere numbers. But there was a limit: two people couldn’t stave off hundreds for very long. He had to get clear.

Flame sought him. He lacked skill to evade such fire by tricky riding. Instead, he plunged straight down the path, crouched low and hoping he wouldn’t be pierced. A bolt burned one leg, slightly but with savage pain. He reached the gloomy, high-arched bridge he wanted. His cycle snorted up and over. Just beyond the hump, he dropped off, relaxing muscles and cushioning himself with an arm in judoka style. Even so, he bumped his nose. For a moment, tears blinded him, and he used bad words. Then the two enemy varyaks followed each other across the bridge. He sprang up on the railing, unseen, and shot both men as they went by.

Vaguely, he heard an uproar elsewhere. One by one, the palace windows lit, until scores of dragon eyes glared into night. Flandry slid down the bridge, disentangled the heaped varyaks, and hailed Bourtai. “Bring the other machines!” She came, riding one and leading two more by tethers to the guide bars. He had felt reasonably sure that would be standard equipment; if these things were commonly used by nomads, there’d be times when a string of pack vehicles was required.

“We take two,” he muttered. Here, beneath an overleaning rock, they were a pair of shadows. Moonlight beyond made the garden one fog of coppery light. The outer wall cut that off, brutally black, with merlons raised against Altai’s rings like teeth. “The rest, we use to ram down the gates. Can do?”

“Must do!” she said, and set the varyak control panels. “Here. Extra helmets and clothing are always kept in the saddlebags. Put on the helmet, at least. The clothes we can don later.”

“We won’t need them for a short dash—”

“Do you think the spaceport is not now a-crawl with Yesukai men?”

“Oh, hell,” said Flandry.

He buckled on the headgear, snapped down the goggles, and mounted anew. Bourtai ran along file varyak line, flipping main switches. The riderless machines took off. Gravel spurted from their wheels into Flandry’s abused face. He followed the girl.

A pair of warriors raced down a cross path briefly stark under the moons and then eaten again by murk. They had not seen their quarry. The household troops must be in one classic confusion, Flandry thought. He had to escape before hysteria faded and systematic hunting was organized.

The palace gates loomed before him, heavy bars screening off a plaza that was death-white in the moon radiance. Flandry saw his varyaks only as meteoric gleams. Sentries atop the wall had a better view. Blasters thundered, machine guns raved, but there were no riders to drop from those saddles.

The first varyak hit with a doomsday clangor. It rebounded in four pieces. Flandry sensed a chunk of red-hot metal buzz past his ear. The next one crashed, and the bars buckled. The third smote and collapsed across a narrow opening. The fourth flung the gates wide. “Now!”

At 200 KPH, Bourtai and Flandry made for the gateway. They had a few seconds without fire from the demoralized men above them. Bourtai hit the toppled machines. Her own climbed that pile, took off, and soared halfway across the plaza. Flandry saw her balance herself, precise as a bird, land on two wheels and vanish in an alley beyond the square. Then it was his turn. He wondered fleetingly what the chances of surviving a broken neck were, and hoped he would not. Not with the Khan’s interrogation chambers waiting. Whoops, bang, here we go! He knew he couldn’t match Bourtai’s performance. He slammed down the third wheel in midair. He hit ground with less violence than expected: first-class shock absorbers on this cycle. An instant he teetered, almost rolling over. He came down on his outrigger. Fire spattered off stone behind him. He retracted the extra wheel and gunned his motor.

A glance north, past the Tower toward the spaceport, showed him grav-beam air-boats aloft, a hornet swarm. He had no prayer of hijacking a Betelgeusean ship. Nor was it any use to flee to Zalat in the yamen. Where, then, beneath these unmerciful autumnal stars?

Bourtai was a glimpse in moonlight, half a kilometer ahead of him down a narrow nighted street He let her take the lead, concentrated grimly on avoiding accidents. It seemed like an eyeblink, and it seemed like forever, before they were out of the city and onto the open steppe.

VI

Wind lulled in long grasses, the whispering ran for kilometers, on and on beyond the world’s edge, pale yellow-green in a thousand subtle hues rippled by the wind’s footsteps. Here and there the spiky red of some frost-nipped bush thrust up; the grasses swirled about it like a sea. High and high overhead, incredibly high, an infinite vault full of wind and deepblue chill, the sky reached. Krasna burned low in the west, dull orange, painting the steppe with ruddy light and fugitive shadows. The rings were an ice bridge to the south; northward the sky had a bleak greenish shimmer which Bourtai said was reflection off an early snowfall.

Flandry crouched in grasses as tall as himself. When he ventured a peek, he saw the airboat that hunted them. It spiraled lazy, but the mathematics guiding it and its cohorts wove a net around this planet. To his eyes, even through binoculars taken from a saddlebag, the boat was so far as to be a mere metallic flash; but he knew it probed for him with telescopes, ferrous detectors, infrared amplifiers.

He would not have believed he could escape the Khan’s hundreds of searching craft this long. Two Altaian days, was it? Memory had faded. He knew only a fever dream of bounding north on furious wheels, his skin dried and bleeding from the air; sleeping a few seconds at a tune, in the saddle, eating jerked meat from the varyak supplies as he rode, stopping to refill canteens at a waterhole Bourtai had found by signs invisible to him. He knew only how he ached, to the nucleus of his inmost cell, and how his brain was gritty from weariness.

But the plain was unbelievably huge, almost twice the land area of all Terra. The grass was often as high as this, veiling prey from sky-borne eyes. They had driven through several big herds, to break their trail; they had dodged and woven under Bourtai’s guidance, and she had a hunter’s knowledge of how to confuse pursuit.

Now, though, the chase seemed near its end.

Flandry glanced at the girl. She sat cross-legged, impassive, showing her own exhaustion just by the darkening under her eyes. In stolen leather clothes, hair braided under the crash helmet, she might have been a boy. But the grease smeared on her face for protection had not much affected its haughty good looks. The man hefted his gun. “Think he’ll spot us?” he asked. He didn’t speak low, but the blowing immensities around reduced all voices to nothing.

“Not yet,” she answered. “He is at the extreme detector range, and cannot swoop down at every dubious flicker of instrument readings.”

“So… ignore him and he’ll go away?”

“I fear not.” She grew troubled. “They are no fools, the Khan’s troopers. I know that search pattern. He and his fellows will circle about, patrolling much the same territory until nightfall. Then, as you know, if we try to ride further, we must turn on the heaters of our varyaks or freeze to death. And that will make us a flame to the infrared spotters.”

Flandry rubbed his smooth chin. Altaian garments were ridiculously short on him, so thank all elegant gods for antibeard enzyme! He wished he dared smoke. “What can we do?” he said.

She shrugged. “Stay here. There are well-insulated sleeping bags, which ought to keep us alive if we share a single one. But if the local temperature drops far enough below zero, our own breath and body radiation may betray us.”

“How close are we to your friends?”

Bourtai rubbed tired hazel eyes. “I cannot say. They move about, under the Khrebet and along the Kara Gobi fringe. At this time of year they will be drifting southward, so we are not so terribly far from one or another ordu, I suppose. Still, distances are never small on the steppe.” After a moment: “If we live the night, we can still not drive to find them. The varyaks’ energy cells are nigh exhausted. We shall have to walk.”

Flandry glanced at the vehicles, now battered and dusty beyond recognition. Wonderfully durable gadgets, he thought in a vague way. Largely handmade, of course, using small power tools and the care possible in a nonmercantile economy. The radios, though, were short range… No use getting wistful. The first call for Tebtengri help would bring that aircraft overhead down like a swooping falcon.

He eased himself to his back and let his muscles throb. The ground was cold under him. After a moment, Bourtai followed suit, snuggling close in somehow childlike trustfulness.

“If we do not escape, well, such is the space-time pattern,” she said, more clamly than he could have managed. “But if we do, what then is your plan, Orluk?”

“Get word to Terra, I suppose. Don’t ask me how.”

“Will not your friends come avenging when you fail to return?”

“No. The Khan need only tell the Betelgeuseans that I, regrettably, died in some accident or riot or whatever, and will be cremated with full honors. It would not be difficult to fake: a blaster-charred corpse about my size, perhaps, for one human looks much like another to the untrained non-human. Word will reach my organization, and naturally some will suspect, but they have so much else to do that the suspicion will not appear strong enough to act on. The most they will do is ‘send another agent like myself. And this time, expecting him, the Khan can fool him: camouflage the new installations, make sure our man talks only to the right people and sees only the right things. What can one man do against a planet?”

“You have done somewhat already.”

“But I told you, I caught Oleg by surprise.”

“You will do more,” she continued serenely.

“Can you not, for instance, smuggle a letter out through some Betelgeusean? We can get agents into Ulan Baligh.”

“I imagine the same thought has occurred to the Khan. He will make sure no one he is not certain of has any contact with any Betelgeusean, and will search all export material with care,”

“Write a letter in the Terran language.”

“He can read that himself, if no one else.”

“Oh, no.” Bourtai raised herself on one elbow. “There is not a human on all Altai except yourself who reads the-what do you call it?-the Anglic. Some Betelgeuseans do, of course, but no Altaian has ever learned; there seemed no pressing reason. Oleg himself reads only Altaian and the principal Betelgeusean language. I know; he mentioned it to me one night recently.” She spoke quite coolly of her past year. Flandry gathered that in this culture it was no disgrace to have been a harem slave: fortunes of war.

“Even worse,” he said. “I can just see Oleg’s agents permitting a document in an unknown alphabet to get out. In fact, from now until whenever they have me dead, I doubt if they will let anything they are not absolutely sure about come near a spaceship, or a spacefarer.”

Bourtai sat up straight. Sudden, startling tears blurred her gaze. “But you cannot be helpless!” she cried. “You are from Terra!”

He didn’t want to disillusion her. “We’ll see.” Hastily plucking a stalk of grass and chewing it: “This tastes almost like home. Remarkable similarity.”

“Oh, but it is of Terran origin.” Bourtai’s dismay changed mercurially to simple astonishment that he should not know what was so everyday to her. “The first colonists here found the steppe a virtual desert-only sparse plant forms, poisonous to man. All other native life had retreated into the Arctic and Antarctic. Our ancestors mutated what seeds and small animals they had along, created suitable strains, and released them. Terrestroid ecology soon took over the whole unfrozen belt.”

Flandry noticed once more that Bourtai’s nomadic life had not made her a simple barbarian. Hm, it would be most interesting to see what a true civilization on wheels was like… if he survived, which was dubious… He was too tired to concentrate. His thoughts drifted off along a pattern of fact and deduction, mostly things he knew already.

Krasna was obviously an old sun, middle Population Two, drifted from the galactic nucleus into this spiral arm. As such, it-and its planets-were poor in the heavier elements, which are formed within the stars, scattered by novae and super-novae, and accumulated in the next stellar generation. Being smaller than Sol, Krasna had matured slowly, a red dwarf through most of its long existence.

Initially, for the first billion years or so, internal heat had made Altai more or less Terrestroid in temperature. Protoplasmic life had evolved in shallow seas, and probably the first crude land forms. But when moltenness and most radioactivity were used up, only the dull sun furnished heat. Altai froze. It happened slowly enough for life to adapt during the long period of change.

And then, while who knew how many megacenturies passed, Altai was ice-bound from pole to pole. An old, old world, so old that one moon had finally spiraled close and shattered to make the rings: so old, indeed, that its sun had completed the first stage of hydrogen burning and moved into the next. From now on, for the next several million years, Krasna would get hotter and brighter. At last Altai’s seas, liquid again, would boil; beyond that, the planet itself would boil, as Krasna became nova; and beyond that the star would be a white dwarf, sinking toward ultimate darkness.

But as yet the process was only begun. Only the tropics had reached a temperature men could endure. Most of the water fled thence and snowed down on the still frigid polar quarters, leaving dry plains where a few plants struggled to re-adapt… and were destroyed by this invading green grass…

Flandry’s mind touched the remote future of his own planet, and recoiled. A gelid breeze slid around him. He grew aware how stiff and chilly he was. And the sun not even set!

He groaned back to a sitting position. Bourtai sat calm in her fatalism. Flandry envied her. But it was not in him, to accept the chance of freezing-to walk, if he survived this night, over hundreds of parched kilometers, through cold strengthening hour by autumn hour.

His mind scuttered about, a trapped weasel seeking any bolthole. Fire, fire, my chance of immortality for a fire-Hoy, there!

He sprang to his feet, remembered the aircraft, and hit dirt again so fast that he bumped his bruised nose. The girl listened wide-eyed to his streaming, sputtering Anglic. When he had finished, she sketched a reverent sign. “I too pray the Spirit of the Mother that She guide us,” said Bourtai.

Flandry skinned his teeth in a grin. “I, uh, wasn’t precisely praying, my dear. No, I think I’ve a plan. Wild, but-now, listen—”

VII

Arghun Tiliksky thrust his face out of that shadow which blurred the ring of cross-legged men, into the scant sunlight trickling through a small window of the kibitka. “It was evil,” he declared sharply. “Nothing is more dreaded than a grass fire. And you set one! No luck can come from such a deed.”

Flandry studied him. The noyon of the Mangu Tuman was quite young, even for these times when few men of Tebtengri reached great age; and a dashing, gallant warrior, as everyone said and as he had proved in the rescue. But to some extent, Arghtin was the local equivalent of a prude.

“The fire was soon put out, wasn’t it?” asked the Terran mildly. “I heard from your scout, the Kha Khan’s aircraft swarmed there and tossed foam bombs down till the flames were smothered. Not many hectares were burned over.”

“In such tasks,” said Toghrul Vavilov, Gur-Khan of the tribe, “all Altaians are one.” He stroked his beard and traded bland smiles with Flandry: a kindred hypocrite. “Our scout needed but to carry a few foam bombs himself, and no enemy vessel would molest him. He observed them and returned here in peace.”

One of the visiting chieftains exclaimed: “Your noyon verges on blasphemy himself, Toghrul. Sir Dominic is from Terra! If a lord of Terra wishes to set a blaze, who dares deny him?”

Flandry felt he ought to blush, but decided not to. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I couldn’t think of any better plan. Not all the tribal leaders who have come to this-what do you call the meeting?-this kurultai, have heard just what happened. The girl Bourtai and myself were trapped with little power left in our varyaks, and the probability of freezing or starving in a few more days if we were not detected by infra-red that same night. So, soon after dark, I scurried about on foot, setting fires I which quickly coalesced into one. The wind swept the flames from us-but the radiation of our varyak heaters was still undetectable against such a background! Since we could not be extremely far as negagrav flight goes from some ordu of the Shamanate, it seemed likely that at least one aerial scout would come near to investigate the fire. Therefore, after a while, we broke radio silence to call for help. Then we ducked and dodged, hunted by the gathering vessels of Oleg, so what was screened by the heat and smoke… until a flying war party from the Mangu Tuman arrived, beat off the foe, and escaped with us before more of the enemy should arrive.”

“And so this council has been called,” added Toghrul Vavilov. “The chiefs of all our allied tribes must understand what we now face,”

“But the fire-” mumbled Arghun.

Eyes went through gloom to an old man seated under the window. Furs covered frail Juchi so thickly that his bald parchment-skinned he looked disembodied. The Shaman stroked a wisp of white beard, blinked eyes that were still sharp, and murmured with a dry little smile: “This is not the time to dispute whether the rights of a man from Holy Terra override the Yassa by which Altai lives. The question seems rather, how shall we all survive in order to raise such legal quibbles at another date?”

Arghun tossed his reddish-black hair and snorted: “Oleg’s father, and the whole Nuru Bator dynasty before him, tried to beat down the Tebtengri. But still we hold the northlands. I do not think this will change overnight.”

“Oh, but it will,” said Flandry in his softest voice. “Unless something is done, it will.”

He treated himself to one of the few remaining cigarettes and leaned forward so the light would pick out his features, exotic on this planet. He said: “Throughout your history, you have waged war, as you have driven your machines, with chemical power and stored solar energy. A few Ismail, stationary nuclear generators at Ulan, Baligh and the mines are all that your way of life demanded. Your economy would not have supported atomic war, even if feuds and boundary disputes were worth it. So you Tebtengri have remained strong enough to hold these subarctic pastures, though all other tribes were to ally against you. Am I right?” They nodded. He continued: “But now Oleg is getting help from outside. Some of his toys I have seen with my own eyes. Craft that can fly flourishes around yours, or go beyond the atmosphere to swoop down again; battlecars whose armor your strongest chemical explosives cannot pierce; missiles to devastate so wide an area that no dispersal can save you. As yet, he has not much modern equipment. But more will arrive during the next several months, until he has enough to crush you. And, still worse, he will have allies that are not human.”

They stirred uneasily, some of them making signs against witchcraft. Only Juchi the Shaman remained quiet, watching Flandry with impassive eyes. A clay pipe in his hand sent bitter incense toward the roof. “Who are these creatures?” he asked calmly.

“Merseians,” said Flandry. “Another imperial race than man-and man stands in the path of their ambitions. For long now we have been locked with them, nominally at peace, actually probing for weaknesses, subverting, assassinating, skirmishing. They have decided Altai would make a useful naval base. Outright invasion would be expensive, especially if Terra noticed and interfered: and we probably would notice, since we watch them so closely. But if the Merseians supply Oleg with just enough help so that he can conquer the whole planet for them-do you see? Once he has done that, the Merseian engineers will arrive; Altaians will dig and die to build fortresses; this entire world will be one impregnable net of strongholds… and then Terra is welcome to learn what has been going on!”

“Does Oleg himself know this?” snapped Toghrul.

Flandry shrugged. “Insufficiently well, I imagine. Like many another puppet ruler, he will live to see the strings his masters have tied on him. But that will be too late. I’ve watched this sort of thing happen elsewhere.

“In fact,” he added, “I’ve helped bring it about now and then-on Terra’s behalf!”

Toghrul entwined nervous fingers. “I believe you,” he said.

“We have all had glimpses, heard rumors… What is to be done? Can we summon the Terrans?”

“Aye-aye-call the Terrans, warn the Mother of Men-” Flandry felt how passion flared up in the scarred warriors around him. He had gathered that the Tebtengri had no use for Subotai the Prophet but built their own religion around a hard-boiled sort of humanistic pantheism. It grew on him how strong a symbol the ancestral planet was to them.

He didn’t want to tell them what Terra was actually like these days. (Or perhaps had always been. He suspected men are only saints and heroes in retrospect.) Indeed, he dare not speak of clottish Emperors, venal nobles, faithless wives, servile commons, to this armed and burning reverence. But luckily, there’s a practical problem at hand.

Terra is farther from here than Merseia,” he said. “Even our nearest base is more distant than theirs. I don’t believe any Merseians are on Altai lat this moment, but surely Oleg has at least one swift spaceship at his disposal, to inform his masters if anything should go wrong. Let us get word Terra, and let Oleg learn this has happened, at do you think he’ll do?” Flandry nodded, “Right, on the first guess! Oleg will send to that nearest Merseian base, where I know a heavy naval force is currently stationed. I doubt very much if the Merseians will write off their investment tamely. No, they will dispatch their ships at once, occupy various points, blast the Tebtengri lands with nuclear bombs, and dig in. It will not be as smooth and thorough a job as they now plan, but it will be effective. By the time a Terran fleet of reasonable size can get here, the Merseians will be fairly well entrenched. The most difficult task in space warfare is to get a strong enemy off a planet firmly held. It may prove impossible. But even if, thanks to our precipitating matters, the Terrans do blast the Merseians loose, Altai will have been made into a radioactive desert.”

Silence clapped down. Men stared at each other, and back to Flandry, with a horror he had seen before and which was one of the few things it still hurt him to watch. He went on quickly:

“So the one decent objective for us is to get secret message out. If Oleg and the Merseiens don’t suspect Terra knows, they won’t hasten their program. It can be Terra, instead, which suddenly arrives in strength, seizes Ulan Balighj establishes ground emplacements and orbit forts. I know Merseian strategy well enough predict that, under those circumstances, they won’t fight. It isn’t worth it, since Altai cannot be used as an aggressive base against them.” should have said will not; but let these people make the heartbreaking discovery for themselves that Terra’s only real interest was to preserve a status quo.

Arghun sprang to his feet. As he crouched under the low ceiling, primness dropped from him. His young leonine face became a sun, he cried: “And Terra will have us! We will be restored to humankind!”

While the Tebtengri whooped and wept at that understanding, Flandry smoked his cigarette with care. After all, he thought, it needn’t corrupt them. Not too much. There would be a small naval base, an Imperial governor, an enforced peace between all tribes. Otherwise they could live as they chose. It wasn’t worth Terra’s while to proselytize. What freedom the Altaians lost here at home, their young men would regain simply by having access to the stars. Wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?

VIII

Juchi the Shaman, who bound together all these fiefs, spoke in a whisper that pierced: “Let us have silence. We must weigh how this may be alone.”

Flandry waited till the men had seated themselves. Then he gave them a rueful smile. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Next question, please.”

“The Betelgeuseans-” rumbled Toghrul.

“I doubt that,” said another gur-khan. “If I were Meg the Damned, I would put a guard around every individual Betelgeusean, as well as every spaceship, until all danger has passed. I would suspect every trade article, every fur or hide or gem, before it was loaded.”

“Or send to Merseia at once,” shivered someone else.

“No,” said Flandry. “Not that. We can be sure Merseia is not going to take such hazardous action without being fairly sure that Terra has heard of their project. They have too many commitments elsewhere.”

“Besides,” said Juchi, “Oleg Yesukai will not make himself a laughing stock before the screaming for help because one fugitive is loose in the Khrebet.”

“Anyhow,” put in Toghrul, “he knows how impossible it is to smuggle such an appeal out! Those tribes not of the Shamanate may dislike Yesukai tyranny, but they are still more suspicious of us, who traffic with the Ice Dwellers and scoff at that stupid Prophet. Even supposing one of them would agree to brand a hide for us, or slip a letter into a bale of pelts, and even supposing that did get past Oleg’s inspectors, the cargo might wait months to be loaded, months more in some Betelgeusean warehouse.”

“And we don’t have so many months, I suppose, before Oleg overruns you and the Merseians arrive as planned,” finished Flandry.

He sat for a while listening to their desperate chewing of impractical schemes. It was hot and stuffy in here, All at once he could take no mow He rose. “I need fresh air, and a chance to think, he said. Juchi nodded grave dismissal. Arghun jumped up again. “I come too,” he said.

“If the Terran desires your company,” said Toghrul.

“Indeed, indeed.” Flandry’s agreement was absent-minded.

He went out the door and down a short ladder. The kibitka where the chiefs met was a large, covered truck, its box fitted out as austere living quarters. On top of it, as on all the bigger, slower vehicles, the flat black plates of a solar-energy collector were tilted to face Krasna and charge an accumulator bank. Such roofs made this wandering town, dispersed across the hills, seem like a flock of futuristic turtles.

The Khrebet was not a high range. Gullied slopes ran up, gray-green with thornbush and yellow with sere grass, to a glacial cap in the north. Downward swept a cold wind, whining about Flandry; he shivered and drew the coat, hastily sewn to his measure, tighter about him. The sky was pale today, the rings low and wan in the south, where the hills emptied into steppe.

As far as Flandry could see, the herds of the Mangu Tuman spread out under care of varyak-mounted boys. They were not cattle. Terra’s higher mammals were hard to raise on other planets; rodents are tougher and more adaptable. The first colonists had brought rabbits along, which they mutated and cross-bred systematically. That ancestor could hardly be recognized in the cow-sized grazing beasts of today, more like giant dun guinea pigs than anything else. There were also separate flocks of bio-engineered ostriches.

Arghun gestured with pride.

“Yonder is the library,” he said, “and those children seated nearby are being instructed.”

Flandry looked at that kibitka. Of course, given microprint, you could carry thousands of volumes along on your travels; illiterates could never have operated these ground vehicles or the nega-grav aircraft watchful overhead. Certain other trucks-including some trains of them-must house arsenals, sickbay, machine tools, small factories for textiles and ceramics. Poorer families might live crowded in a single yurt, a round felt tent on a motor cart; but no one looked hungry or ragged. And it was not an impoverished nation which carried such gleaming missiles on flatbed cars, or operated such a flock of light tanks, or armed every adult. Considering Bourtai, Flandry decided that the entire tribe, male and female, must be a military as well as a social and economic unit. Everybody worked, and everybody fought, and in their system the proceeds were more evenly shared than on Terra.

“Where does your metal come from?” he inquired.

“The grazing lands of every tribe include some mines,” said Arghun. “We plan our yearly round so as to spend time there, digging and smelting-just as elsewhere we reap grain planted on the last visit, or tap crude oil from our wells and refine it. What we cannot produce ourselves, we trade with others to get.”

“It sounds like a virtuous life,” said Flandry.

His slight shudder did not escape Arghun, who hastened to say: “Oh, we have our pleasures, too, feasts, games and sports, the arts, the great fair at Kievka Hill each third year-” He broke off.

Bourtai came walking past a campfire. Flandry could sense her loneliness. Women in this culture were not much inferior to men; she was free to go where she would, and was a heroine for having brought the Terran here. But her family were slain and she was not even given work to do.

She saw the men and ran toward them. “Oh… what has been decided?”

“Nothing yet.” Flandry caught her hands. By all hot stars, she was a good-looking wench! His face crinkled its best smile. “I couldn’t see going in circles with a lot of men, hairy however well-intentioned, when I might be going in circles with you. So I came out here. And my hopes were granted.”

A flush crept up her high flat cheeks. She wasn’t used to glibness. Her gaze fluttered downward. “I do not know what to say,” she whispered.

“You need say nothing. Only be,” he leered.

“No-I am no one. The daughter of a dead man… my dowry long ago plundered… And you are a Terran! It is not right!”

“Do you think your dowry matters?” said Arghun. His voice cracked.

Flandry threw him a surprised glance. At once the warrior’s mask was restored. But for an instant, Flandry had seen why Arghun Tiliksky didn’t like him.

He sighed. “Come, we had better return to the kurultai,” he said.

He didn’t release Bourtai, but tucked her arm under his. She followed mutely along. He could feel her tremble a little, through the heavy garments. The wind off the glacier ruffled a stray lock of dark hair.

As they neared the kibitka of the council, its door opened. Juchi Ilyak stood there, bent beneath his years. The wizened lips opened, and somehow the breath carried across meters of blustering air: “Terran, perhaps there is a way for us. Dare you come with me to the Ice Folk?”

IX

Tengri Nor, the Ghost Lake, lay so far north that Altai’s rings were only a pale glimmer, half seen by night on the southern horizon. When Flandry and Juchi stepped from their airboat, it was still day. Krasna was an ember, tinging the snowfields red. But it toppled swiftly, purple shadows glided from drift to drift so fast a man could see them.

Flandry had not often met such quietness. Even in space, there was always the low noise of the machinery that kept you alive. Here, the air seemed to freeze all sound; the tiniest wind blew up fine ice crystals, whirling and glistening above diamond-like snowbanks, and it rippled the waters of Tengri Nor, but he could not hear it. He had no immediate sense of cold on his fur-muffled body, even on his thickly greased face-not in this dry atmosphere-but breathing was a sharpness in his nostrils. He thought he could smell the lake, a chemical pungency, but he wasn’t sure. None of his Terran senses were quite to be trusted in this winter place.

He said, and the unexpected loudness was like a gunshot, shocking, so that his question ended in a whisper: “Do they know we are here?”

“Oh, yes. They have their ways. They will meet us soon.” Juchi looked northward, past the lake shore to the mountainous ruins. Snow had drifted halfway up those marble walls, white on white, with the final sunlight bleeding across shattered colonnades. Frost from the Shaman’s breath began to stiffen his beard.

“I suppose they recognize the markings-know this is a friendly craft-but what if the Kha Khan sent a disguised vessel?”

“That was tried once or twice, years ago. The boats were destroyed by some means, far south of here. The Dwellers have their awareness.” Juchi raised his arms and started swaying on his feet. A high-pitched chant came from his lips, he threw back his head and closed his eyes.

Flandry had no idea whether the Shaman was indulging superstition, practicing formal ritual, or doing what was actually necessary to summon the glacier folk. He had been in too many strange places to dogmatize. He waited, his eyes ranging the scene.

Beyond the ruins, westward along the northern lake shore, a forest grew. White slender trees with intricate, oddly geometric branches flashed like icicles, like jewels. Then thin bluish leaves vibrated, it seemed they should tinkle, that all this forest was glass, but Flandry had never been near a wilderness so quiet. Low gray plants carpeted the snow between the gleaming boles. Where a rock thrust up here and there, it was almost buried under such lichenoid growth, in some place less cold and hushed, Flandry would have thought of tropical richness.

The lake itself reached out of sight, pale blue between snowbanks. As evening swept across the waters, Flandry could see against shadow that mists hovered above.

Juchi had told him, quite matter-of-factly, that the protoplasmic life native to Altai had adapted to low temperatures in past ages by synthesizing methanol. A fifty-fifty mixture of this and water remained fluid below minus forty degrees. When it finally must freeze, it did not expand into cell-disrupting ice crystals, but became gradually more slushy. Lower life forms remained functional till about seventy below, Celsius; after that they went dormant. The higher animals, being homeothermic, need not suspend animation till the air reached minus a hundred degrees.

Biological accumulation of alcohol kept the polar lakes and rivers fluid till midwinter. The chief problem of all species was to find minerals, in a world largely glaciated. Bacteria brought up some from below; animals traveled far to lick exposed rock, returned to their forests and contributed heavy atoms when they died. But in general, the Altaian ecology made do without. It had never evolved bones for instance, but had elaborated chitinous and cartilaginous materials beyond anything seen on Terra.

The account had sounded plausible and interesting, in a warm kibitka on a grassy slope, with microtexts at hand to give details. When he stood on million-year-old snow, and watching night creep up like smoke through crystal trees and cyclopean ruins, hearing Juchi chant under a huge green sunset sky, Flandry discovered that scientific explanations were but little of the truth.

One of the moons was up. Flandry saw something drift across its copper shield. The objects neared, a flock of white spheres, ranging in diameter from a few centimeters to a giant bigger than the airboat. Tentacles streamed downward from them. Juchi broke off. “Ah,” he said. “Aeromedusae. The Dwellers cannot be far.”

“What?” Flandry hugged himself. The cold was beginning to be felt now, as it gnawed through fur and leather toward flesh.

“Our name for them. They look primitive, but are actually well evolved, with sense organs and brains. They electrolyze hydrogen metabolically to inflate themselves, breathe backward for propulsion, feed on small game which they shock insensible. The Ice Folk have domesticated them.”

Flandry stole a glance at a jagged wall, rearing above gloom to catch a sunbeam and flush rose. “They did more than that, once,” he said with pity

Juchi nodded, oddly little impressed. “I daresay intelligence grew up on Altai in response to worsening conditions-the warming sun.” His tone was detached. “It built a high civilization, but the shortage of metals was a handicap, and the steady shrinking of the snow area may have led to a cultural collapse. Yet that is not what the Dwellers themselves claim. They have no sense of loss about their past.” He squinted slant eyes in a frown, seeking words. “As nearly as I can understand them, which is not much, they… abandoned something unsuitable… they found better methods.”

Two beings came from the forest.

At first glance they were like dwarfish white-furred men. Then you saw details of squat build and rubbery limbs. The feet were long and webbed, expandable to broad snowshoes or foldable to short skis. The hands had three fingers opposing a thumb set in the middle of the wrist. The ears were feathery tufts; fine tendrils waved above each round black eye; sad gray monkey faces peered from a ruff of hair. Their breath did not steam like the humans’: their body temperature was well below the Celsius zero. One of them bore a stone lamp in which an alcohol flame wavered. The other had an intricately carved white staff; in an indefinable way, the circling medusa flock seemed to be guided by it.

They came near, halted, and waited. Nothing moved but the low wind, ruffling their fur and streaming the flame. Juchi stood as quiet. Flandry made himself conform, though his teeth wanted to clap in his jaws. He had seen many kinds of life, on worlds more foreign than this. But there was a strangeness here which got under his skin and crawled.

The sun went down. Thin dustless air gave no twilight. Stars blazed forth, pyrotechnic in a sudden blackness. The edge of the rings painted a remote arc. The moon threw cuprous radiance over the snow, shadows into the forest.

A meteor split the sky with noiseless lightning. Juchi seemed to take that as a signal. He began talking. His voice was like ice, toning as it contracted in midnight cold: not altogether a human voice. Flandry began to understand what a Shaman was, and why he presided over the northland tribes. Few men were able to master the Dwellers’ language and deal with them. Yet trade and alliance-metal given for organic fuel and curious plastic substances; mutual defense against the Kha Khan’s sky raiders-was a large part of the Tebtengri strength.

One of the beings made answer. Juchi turned to Flandry. “I have said who you are and whence you come. They are not surprised. Before I spoke your need, he said their, I do not know just what the word means, but it has something to do with communication-he said they could reach Terra itself, as far as mere distance was concerned, but only through… dreams?”

Flandry stiffened. It could be. It could be. How long had men been hunting for some faster-than-light equivalent of radio? A handful of centuries. What was that, compared to the age of the universe? Or even the age of Altai? He realized, not simply intellectually but with his whole organism, how old this planet was. In all that time-

“Telepathy?” he blurted. “I’ve never heard of telepathy with so great a range!”

“No. Not that, or they would have warned us of this Merseian situation before now. It is nothing that I quite understand.” Juchi spoke with care: “He said to me, all the powers they possess look useless in this situation.”

Flandry sighed. “I might have known it. That would have been too easy. No chance for heroics.”

“They have found means to live, less cumbersome than all those buildings and engines were,” said Juchi. “They have been free to think for I know not how many ages. But they have therefore grown weak in sheerly material ways. They help us withstand the aggressions from Ulan Baligh; they can do nothing against the might of Merseia.”

Half seen in red moonlight, one of the autochthones spoke.

Juchi: “They do not fear racial death. They know all things must end, and yet nothing ever really ends. However, it would be desirable that their lesser brethren in the ice forests have a few more million years to live, so that they may also evolve toward truth.”

Which is a fine, resounding ploy, thought Flandry, provided it be not the simple fact.

Juchi: “They, like us, are willing to become clients of the Terrestrial Empire. To them, it means nothing; they will never have enough in common with men to be troubled by any human governors. They know Terra will not gratuitously harm them-whereas Merseia would, if only by provoking that planet-wide battle of space fleets you describe. Therefore, the Cold People will assist us in any way they can, though they know of none at present.”

“Do these two speak for their whole race?” asked Flandry dubiously.

“And for the forests and the lakes,” said Juchi.

Flandry thought of a life which was all one great organism, and nodded. “If you say so, I’ll accept it. But if they can’t help—”

Juchi gave an old man’s sigh, like wind over the acrid waters. “I had hoped they could. But now-Have you no plan of your own?”

Flandry stood a long time, feeling the chill creep inward. At last he said: “If the only spaceships are at Ulan Baligh, then it seems we must get into the city somehow, to deliver our message. Have these folk any means of secretly contacting a Betelgeusean?”

Juchi inquired. “No,” he translated the answer. “Not if the traders are closely guarded, and their awareness tells them that is so.”

One of the natives stooped forward a little, above the dull blue fire, so that his face was illuminated. Could as human an emotion as sorrow really be read into those eyes? Words droned. Juchi listened.

“They can get us into the city, undetected, if it be a cold enough night,” he said. “The medusae can carry us through the air, actually seeing radar beams and eluding them. And, of course, a medusa is invisible to metal detectors as well as infra-red scopes.” The Shaman paused. “But what use is that, Terra man? We ourselves can walk disguised into Ulan Baligh.

“But could we fly—?” Flandry’s voice trailed off.

“Not without being stopped by traffic control officers and investigated.”

“S-s-so.” Flandry raised his face to the glittering sky. He took the moonlight full in his eyes and was briefly dazzled. Tension tingled along his nerves.

“We’ve debated trying to radio a Betelgeusean ship as it takes off, before it goes into secondary drive.” He spoke aloud, slowly, to get the hammering within himself under control. “But you said the Tebtengri have no set powerful enough to broadcast that far, thousands of kilometers. And, of course, we couldn’t beamcast, since we couldn’t pinpoint the ship at any instant.”

“True. In any event, the Khan’s aerial patrols would detect our transmission and pounce.”

“Suppose a ship, a friendly spaceship, came near this planet without actually landing… could the Ice Dwellers communicate with it?”

Juchi asked; Flandry did not need the translated answer: “No. They have no radio sets at all. Even if they did, their ‘casting would be as liable to detection as ours. And did you not say yourself, Orluk, all our messages must be kept secret, right to the moment that the Terran fleet arrives in strength? That Oleg Khan must not even suspect a message has been sent?”

“Well, no harm in asking.” Flandry’s gaze continued to search upward, till he found Betelgeuse like a torch among the constellations. “Could we know there was such a ship in the neighborhood?”

“I daresay it would radio as it approached… notify Ulan Baligh spaceport-” Juchi conferred with the nonhumans. “Yes. We could have men, borne by medusae, stationed unnoticeably far above the city. They could carry receivers. There would be enough beam leakage for them to listen to any conversation between the spaceship and the portmaster. Would that serve?”

Flandry breathed out in a great freezing gust. “It might.”

Suddenly, and joyously, he laughed. Perhaps no such sound had ever rung across Tengri Nor. The Dwellers started back, like frightened small animals. Juchi stood in shadow. For that instant, only Captain Dominic Flandry of Imperial Terra had light upon him. He stood with his head raised into the copper moonlight, and laughed like a boy.

“By Heaven,” he shouted, “we’re going to do it!”

X

An autumn gale came down off the pole. It gathered snow on its way across the steppe, and struck Ulan Baligh near midnight. In minutes, the steep red roofs were lost to sight. Close by a lighted window, a man saw horizontal white streaks, whirling out of darkness and back into darkness. If he went a few meters away, pushing through drifts already knee-high, the light was gone. He stood blind, buffeted by the storm, and heard it rave.

Flandry descended from the upper atmosphere. Its cold had smitten so deep he thought he might never be warm again. In spite of an oxygen tank, his lungs were starving. He saw the blizzard from above as a moon-dappled black blot, the early ice floes on Ozero Rurik dashed to and fro along its southern fringe. A cabling of tentacles meshed him, he sat under a giant balloon rushing downward through the sky. Behind him trailed a flock of other medusae, twisting along air currents he could not feel to avoid radar beams he could not see. Ahead of him was only one, bearing a Dweller huddled against a cake of ice; for what lay below was hell’s own sulfurous wind to the native.

Even Flandry felt how much warmer it was, when the snowstorm enclosed him. He crouched forward, squinting into a nothingness that yelled. Once his numbed feet, dangling down, struck a rooftree. The blow came as if from far away. Palely at first, strengthening as he neared, the Prophet’s Tower thrust its luminous shaft up and out of sight.

Flandry groped for the nozzle at his shoulder. His destination gave just enough light for him to see through the driven flakes. Another medusa crowded close, bearing a pressure tank of paint. Somehow, Flandry reached across the air between and made the hose fast.

Now, Arctic intelligence, do you understand what I want to do? Can you guide this horse of mine for me?

The wind yammered in his ears. He heard other noises like blasting, the powerful breaths by which his medusa moved itself. Almost, he was battered against the tablet wall. His carrier wobbled in midair, fighting to maintain position. An inlaid letter, big as a house, loomed before him, black against shining white. He aimed his hose and squirted.

Damn! The green jet was flung aside in a flaw of wind. He corrected his aim and saw the paint strike. It remained liquid even at this temperature… no matter, it was sticky enough… The first tank was quickly used up. Flandry coupled to another. Blue this time. All the Tebtengri had contributed all the squirtable paint they had, every hue in God’s rainbow. Flandry could but hope there would be enough.

There was, though he came near fainting from chill and exhaustion before the end of the job. He could not remember ever having so brutal a task. Even so, when the last huge stroke was done, he could not resist adding an exclamation point at the very bottom-three centimeters high.

“Let’s go,” he whispered. Somehow, the mute Dweller understood and pointed his staff. The medusa flock sprang through the clouds.

Flandry had a moment’s glimpse of a military airboat. It had detached itself from the flock hovering above the spaceport, perhaps going off duty. As the medusae broke from the storm into clear moonlight and ringlight, the craft veered. Flandry saw its guns stab energy bolts into the flock, and reached for his own futile blaster. His fingers were wooden, they didn’t close…

The medusae, all but his and the Dweller’s whipped about. They surrounded the patrol boat, laid tentacles fast and clung. It was nearly buried under them. Electric fires crawled, sparks dripped, these creatures could break hydrogen from water. Flandry recalled in a dull part of his mind that a metallic fuselage was a Faraday cage, immune to lightning. But when concentrated electric discharges burned holes, spotwelded control circuits-the boat staggered in midair. The medusae detached themselves. The boat plummeted.

Flandry relaxed and let his creature bear him northward.

XI

The town seethed. There had been rioting in the Street of Gunsmiths, and blood still dappled the new-fallen snow. Armed men tramped around palace and spaceport; mobs hooted beyond them. From the lake shore encampments came war music, pipes squealed, gongs crashed, the young men rode their varyaks in breakneck circles and cursed.

Oleg Khan looked out the palace window. “It shall be made good to you,” he muttered. “Oh, yes, my people, you shall have satisfaction.”

Turning to the Betelgeusean, who had just been fetched, he glared into the blue face. “You have seen?”

“Yes, your majesty.” Zalat’s Altaian, usually fluent and little accented, grew thick. He was a badly shaken being. Only the quick arrival of the royal guards had saved his ship from destruction by a thousand shrieking fanatics. “I swear, I, my crew, we had nothing to do with… we are innocent as—”

“Of course! Of course!” Oleg Yesukai brought one palm down in an angry slicing motion. “I am not one of those ignorant rodent herders. Every Betelgeusean has been under supervision, every moment since-” He checked himself.

“I have still not understood why,” faltered ] Zalat.

“Was my reason not made clear to you? You know the Terran visitor was killed by Tebtengri, operatives, the very day he arrived. It bears out what I have long suspected, those tribes have become religiously xenophobic. Since they doubtless have other agents in the city, who will try to murder your people in turn, it is best all of you be closely guarded, have contact only with men we know are loyal, until I have full control of the situation.”

His own words calmed Oleg somewhat. He sat down, stroked his beard and watched Zalat from narrowed eyes. “Your difficulties this morning are regrettable,” he continued smoothly. “Because you are outworlders, and the defiling symbols are not in the Altaian alphabet, many people leaped to the conclusion that it was some dirty word in your language. I, of course, know better. I also know from the exact manner in which a patrol craft was lost last night, how this outrage was done: unquestionably by Tebtengri, with the help of the Arctic devil-folk. Such a vile deed would not trouble them in the least; they are not followers of the Prophet. But what puzzles me-I admit this frankly, though confidentially-why? A daring, gruelling task… merely for a wanton insult?”

He glanced back toward the window. From this ” angle, the crimson Tower looked itself. You had to be on the north to see what had been done: the tablet wall disfigured by more than a kilometer of splashed paint. But from that side, the fantastic desecration was visible across entire horizons.

The Kha Khan doubled a fist. “It shall be repaid them,” he said. “This has rallied the orthodox tribes behind me as no other thing imaginable. When their children are boiled before their eyes, the Tebtengri will realize what they have done.”

Zalat hesitated. “Your majesty—”

“Yes?” Oleg snarled, as he must at something.

“Those symbols are letters of the Terran alphabet.”

“What?”

“I know the Anglic language somewhat,” said Zalat. “Many Betelgeuseans do. But how could those Tebtengri ever have learned—”

Oleg, who knew the answer to that, interrupted by seizing the captain’s tunic and shaking him. “What does it say?” he cried.

“That’s the strangest part, your majesty,” stammered Zalat. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not that makes sense.”

“Well, what sound does it spell, then? Speak before I have your teeth pulled!”

“Mayday,” choked Zalat. “Just Mayday, your majesty.”

Oleg let him go. For a while there was silence. At last the Khan said: “Is that a Terran word?”

“Well… it could be. I mean, well, May is the name of a month in the Terran calendar, and Day means ‘diurnal period.’ ” Zalat rubbed his yellow eyes, searching for logic. “I suppose Mayday could mean the first day of May.”

Oleg nodded slowly. “That sounds reasonable. The Altaian calendar, which is modified from the ancient Terran, has a similar name for a month of what is locally springtime. Mayday-spring festival day? Perhaps.”

He returned to the window and brooded across the city. “It’s long until May,” he said. “If that was an incitement to… anything… it’s foredoomed. We are going to break the Tebtengri this very winter. By next spring-” He cleared his throat and finished curtly: “Certain other projects will be well under way.”

“How could it be an incitement, anyhow, your majesty?” argued Zalat, emboldened. “Who in Ulan Baligh could read it?”

“True. I can only conjecture, some wild act of defiance-or superstition, magical ritual-” The Khan turned on his heel. “You are leaving shortly, are you not?”

“Yes, your majesty.”

“You shall convey a message. No other traders are to come here for a standard year. We will have troubles enough, suppressing the Tebtengri and their aboriginal allies.” Oleg shrugged. “In any event, it would be useless for merchants to visit us. War will disrupt the caravans. Afterward-perhaps.”

Privately, he doubted it. By summer, the Merseians would have returned and started work on their base. A year from now, Altai would be firmly in their empire, and, under them, the Kha Khan would lead his warriors to battles in the stars, more glorious than any of the hero songs had ever told.

XII

Winter came early to the northlands. Flandry, following the Mangu Tuman in their migratory cycle, saw snow endless across the plains, under a sky like blued steel. The tribe, wagons and herds and people. Were a hatful of dust strewn on immensity: here a moving black dot, there a thin smoke-streaked vertical in windless air. Krasna hung low in the southeast, a frosty red-gold wheel.

Three folk glided from the main ordu. They were on skis, rifles slung behind their parkas, hands holding tethers which led to a small negagrav tow unit. It flew quickly, so skis sang on the thin scrip snow.

Arghun Tiliksky said hard-voiced: “I can appreciate that you and Juchi keep secret the reason for that Tower escapade of yours, five weeks ago. What none of us know, none can reveal if captured. Yet you seem quite blithe about the consequences. Our scouts tell us that infuriated warriors flock to Oleg Khan, that he has pledged to annihilate us this very year. In consequence, all the Tebtengri must remain close together, not spread along the whole Arctic Circle as before-and hereabouts, there is not enough forage under the snow for that many herds. I say to you, the Khan need only wait, and by the end of the season famine will have done half his work for him!”

“Let’s hope he plans on that,” said Flandry. “Less strenuous than fighting, isn’t it?”

Arghun’s angry young face turned toward him. The noyon clipped: “I do not share this awe of all things Terran. You are as human as I. In this environment, where you are untrained, you are much more fallible. I warn you plainly, unless you give me good reason to do otherwise, I shall request a kurultai. And at it I will argue that we strike now at Ulan Baligh, try for a decision while we can still count on full bellies.”

Bourtai cried aloud, “No! That would be asking for ruin. They outnumber us down there, three or four to one. And I have seen some of the new engines the Merseians brought. It would be butchery!”

“It would be quick.” Arghun glared at Flandry. “Well?”

The Terran sighed. He might have expected it. Bourtai was always near him, and Arghun was always near Bourtai, and the officer had spoken surly words before now. He might have known that this invitation to hunt a flock of sataru-mutant ostriches escaped from the herds and gone wild-masked something else. At least it was decent of Arghun to warn him.

“If you don’t trust me,” he said, “though Lord knows I’ve fought and bled and frostbitten my nose in your cause-can’t you trust Juchi Ilyak?

He and the Dwellers know my little scheme; they’ll assure you it depends on our hanging back and avoiding battle.”

“Juchi grows old,” said Arghun. “His mind is feeble as-Hoy, there!”

He yanked a guide line. The nega-grav unit purred to a stop and hung in air, halfway up a long slope. His politics dropped from Arghun, he pointed at the snow with a hunting dog’s eagerness. “Spoor,” he hissed. “We go by muscle power now, to sneak close. The birds can outrun this motor if they hear it. Do you go straight up this hill, Orluk Flandry; Bourtai and I will come around on opposite sides of it—”

The Altaians had slipped their reins and skied noiselessly from him before Flandry quite understood what had happened. Looking down, the Terran saw big splay tracks: a pair of sataru. He started after them. How the deuce did you manage these foot-sticks, anyway? Waddling across the slope, he tripped himself and went down. His nose clipped a boulder. He sat up, swearing in eighteen languages and Old Martian phono-glyphs.

“This they call fun?” He tottered erect. Snow had gotten under his parka hood. It began to melt, trickling over his ribs in search of a really good place to refreeze. “Great greasy comets,” said Flandry, “I might have been sitting in the Everest House with a bucket of champagne, lying to some beautiful wench about my exploits… but no, I had to come out here and do ‘em!”Slowly, he dragged himself up the hill, crouched on its brow, and peered through an unnecessarily cold and thorny bush. No two-legged birds, only a steep slant back down to the plain… wait!

He saw blood and the dismembered avian shapes an instant before the beasts attacked him.

They seemed to rise from weeds and snowdrifts, as if the earth had spewed them. Noiselessly they rushed in, a dozen white scuttering forms big as police dogs. Flandry glimpsed long sharp noses, alert black eyes that hated him, high backs and hairless tails. He yanked his rifle loose and fired. The slug bowled the nearest animal over. It rolled halfway downhill, lay a while, and crawled back to fight some more.

Flandry didn’t see it. The next was upon him. He shot it point blank. One of its fellows crouched to tear the flesh. But the rest ran on. Flandry took aim at a third. A heavy body landed between his shoulders. He went down, and felt jaws rip his leather coat.

He rolled over, somehow, shielding his face with one arm. His rifle had been torn from him: a beast fumbled it in forepaws almost like hands. He groped for the dagger at his belt. Two of the animals were on him, slashing with chisel teeth. He managed to kick one in the nose. It squealed, bounced away, sprang back with a couple of new arrivals to help.

Someone yelled. It sounded very far off, drowned by Flandry’s own heartbeat. The Terran drove his knife into a hairy shoulder. The beast writhed free, leaving him weaponless. Now they were piling on him where he lay. He fought with boots and knees, fists and elbows, in a cloud of kicked-up snow. An animal jumped in the air, came down on his midriff. The wind whooffed out of him. His face-defending arm dropped, and the creature went for his throat.

Arghun came up behind. The Altaian seized the animal by the neck. His free hand flashed steel, he disemboweled it and flung it toward the pack in one expert movement. Several of them fell on the still snarling shape and fed. Arghun booted another exactly behind the ear. It dropped as if poleaxed. One jumped from the rear, to get on his back. He stooped, his right hand made a judo heave, and as the beast soared over his head he ripped its stomach with his knife.

“Up, man!” He hoisted Flandry. The Terran stumbled beside him, while the pack chattered around. Now its outliers began to fall dead: Bourtai had regained the hillcrest and was sniping. The largest of the animals whistled. At that signal, the survivors bounded off. They were lost to view in seconds.

When they had reached Bourtai, Arghun sank down gasping. The girl flew to Flandry. “Are you hurt?” she sobbed.

“Only in my pride-I guess-” He looked past her to the noyon. “Thanks,” he said inadequately.

“You are a guest,” grunted Arghun. After a moment: “They grow bolder each year. I had never expected to be attacked this near an ordu. Something must be done about them, if we live through the winter.”

“What are they?” Flandry shuddered toward relaxation.

“Gurchaku. They range in packs over all the steppes, up into the Khrebet They will eat anything but prefer meat. Chiefly sataru and other feral animals, but they raid our herds, have killed people-” Arghun looked grim. “They were not as large in my grandfather’s day, nor as cunning.”

Flandry nodded. “Rats. Which is not an exclamation.”

“I know what rats are,” said Bourtai. “But the gurchaku—”

“A new genus. Similar things have happened on other colonized planets.” Flandry wished for a cigarette. He wished so hard that Bourtai had to remind him before he continued: “Oh, yes. Some of the stowaway rats on your ancestors’ ships must have gone into the wilds, as these began to be Terrestrialized. Size was advantageous: helped them keep warm, enabled them to prey on the big animals you were developing. Selection pressure, short generations, genetic drift within a small original population… Nature is quite capable of forced-draft evolution on her own hook.”

He managed a tired grin at Bourtai. “After all,” he said, “if a frontier planet has beautiful girls, tradition requires that it have monsters as well.”

Her blush was like fire.

They returned to camp in silence. Flandry entered the yurt given him, washed and changed clothes, lay down on his bunk and stared at the ceiling. He reflected bitterly on all the Terran romancing he had ever heard, the High Frontier in general and the dashing adventures of the Intelligence Corps in particular. So what did it amount to? A few nasty moments with men or giant rats that wanted to kill you; stinking leather clothes, wet feet, chilblains and frostbite, unseasoned food, creaking wheels exchanged for squealing runners; temperance, chastity, early rising, weighty speech with tribal elders, not a book he could enjoy or a joke he could understand for light-years. He yawned, rolled over on his stomach, tried to sleep, gave up after a while, and began to wish Arghun’s reckless counsel would be accepted. Anything to break this dreariness!

It tapped on the door. He started to his feet, bumped his head on a curved ridgepole, swore, and said: “Come in.” The caution of years laid his hand on a blaster.

The short day was near an end, only a red streak above one edge of the world. His lamp picked out Bourtai. She entered, closed the door, and stood unspeaking.

“Why… hullo.” Flandry paused. “What brings you here?”

“I came to see if you were indeed well.” Her eyes did not meet his.

“Oh? Oh, yes. Yes, of course,” he said stupidly. “Kind of you. I mean, uh, shall I make some tea?”

“If you were bitten, it should be tended,” said the girl. “Gurchaku bites can be infectious.”

“No, thanks, I escaped any actual wounds.” Automatically, Flandry added with a smile: “I could wish otherwise, though. So fair a nurse—”

Again he saw the blood rise in her face. Suddenly he understood. He would have realized earlier, had these people not been more reticent than his own. A heavy pulse beat in his throat. “Sit down,” he invited.

She lowered herself to the floor. He joined her, sliding a practiced arm over her shoulder. She did not flinch. He let his hand glide lower, till the arm was around her waist. She leaned against him.

“Do you think we will see another springtime?” she asked. Her tone grew steady once more; it was a quite practical question.

“I have one right here with me,” he said. His lips brushed her dark hair.

“No one speaks thus in the ordu,” she breathed. Quickly: “We are both cut off from our kindred, you by distance and I by death. Let us not remain lonely.”

He forced himself to give fair warning: “I shall return to Terra the first chance I get.”

“I know,” she cried, “but until then—”

His lips found hers.

There was a thump on the door.

“Go away!” Flandry and Bourtai said it together, looked surprised into each other’s eyes, and laughed with pleasure. “My lord,” called a man’s voice, “Toghrul Gur-Khan sends me. A message has been picked up-a Terran spaceship!”

Flandry knocked Bourtai over in his haste to get outside. But even as he ran, he thought with frustration that this job had been hoodooed from the outset.

XIII

Among the thin winds over Ulan Baligh, hidden by sheer height, a warrior sat in the patient arms of a medusa. He breathed oxygen from a tank and rested numbed fingers on a small radio transceiver. After four hours he was relieved; perhaps no other breed of human could have endured so long a watch.

Finally he was rewarded. His earphones crackled with a faint, distorted voice, speaking no language he had ever heard. A return beam gabbled from the spaceport. The man up above gave place to another, who spoke a halting, accented Altaian, doubtless learned from the Betelgeuseans.

The scout of the Tebtengri dared not try any communication of his own. If detected (and the chances were that it would be) such a call would bring a nuclear missile streaking upward from Ulan Baligh. However, his transceiver could amplify and relay what came to it. Medusae elsewhere carried similar sets: a long chain, ending in the ordu of Toghrul Vavilov. Were that re-transmission intercepted by the enemy, no one would be alarmed. They would take it for some freak of reflection off the ionosphere.

The scout’s binoculars actually showed him the Terran spaceship as it descended. He whistled in awe at its sleek, armed swiftness. Still, he thought, it was only one vessel, paying a visit to Oleg the Damned, who had carefully disguised all his modern installations. Oleg would be like butter to his guests, they would see what he wished them to see and no more. Presently they would go home again, to report that Altai was a harmless half-barbaric outpost, safely forgettable.

The scout sighed, beat gloved hands together, and wished his relief would soon arrive.

And up near the Arctic Circle, Dominic Flandry turned from Toghrul’s receiver. A frosted window framed his head with the early northern night. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll maintain our radio monitors, but I don’t expect to pick up anything else interesting, except the moment when the ship takes off again.”

“When will that be?” asked the Gur-Khan.

“In a couple of days, I imagine,” said Flandry. “We’ve got to be ready! All the tribesmen must be alerted, must move out on the plains according to the scheme Juchi and I drew up for you.”

Toghrul nodded. Arghun Tiliksky, who had also crowded into the kibitka, demanded: “What scheme is this? Why have I not been told?”

“You didn’t need to know,” Flandry answered. Blandly: “The warriors of Tebtengri can be moving at top speed, ready for battle, on five minutes’ notice, under any conditions whatsoever. Or so you were assuring me in a ten-minute speech one evening last week. Very well, move them, noyon.”

Arghun bristled. “And then—”

“You will lead the Mangu Tuman varyak division straight south for 500 kilometers,” said Toghrul. “There you will await radio orders. The other tribal forces will be stationed elsewhere; you will doubtless see a few, but strict radio silence is to be maintained between you. The less mobile vehicles will have to stay in this general region, with the women and children maneuvering them.”

“And the herds,” reminded Flandry. “Don’t forget, we can cover quite a large area with all the Tebtengri herds.”

“But this is lunacy!” yelped Arghun. “If Oleg knows we’re spread out in such a manner, and drives a wedge through—”

“He won’t know,” said Flandry. “Or if he does, he won’t know why: which is what counts. Now, git!”

For a moment Arghun’s eyes clashed with his. Then the noyon slapped gauntlets against one thigh, whirled, and departed. It was indeed only a few moments before the night grew loud with varyak motors and lowing battle horns.

When that had faded, Toghrul tugged his beard, looked across the radio, and said to Flandry: “Now can you tell me just what fetched that Terran spaceship here?”

“Why, to inquire more closely about the reported death of me, a Terran citizen, on Altai,” grinned Flandry. “At least, if he is not a moron, that is what the captain will tell Oleg. And he will let Oleg convince him it was all a deplorable accident, and he’ll take off again.”

Toghrul stared, then broke into buffalo laughter. Flandry chimed in. For a while the GurKhan of the Mangu Tuman and the field agent of the Imperial Terrestrial Naval Intelligence Corps danced around the kibitka singing about the flowers that bloom in the spring.

Presently Flandry left. There wasn’t going to be much sleep for anyone in the next few days. Tonight, though. He rapped eagerly on his own Iurt. Silence answered him, the wind and a distant sad mewing of the herds. He scowled and opened the door.

A note lay on his bunk. My beloved, the alarm signals have blown. Toghrul gave me weapons and a new varyak. My father taught me to ride and shoot as well as any man. It is only fitting that the last of Clan Tumuri go with the warriors.

Flandry stared at the scrawl for a long while. Finally, “Oh, hell and tiddlywinks,” he said, and dressed and went to bed.

XIV

When he woke in the morning, his cart was under way. He emerged to find the whole encampment grinding across the steppe. Toghrul stood to one side, taking a navigational sight on the rings. He greeted Flandry with a gruff: “We should be in our own assigned position tomorrow.” A messenger dashed up, something needed the chiefs attention, one of the endless emergencies of so big a group on the move. Flandry found himself alone.

By now he had learned not to offer his own unskilled assistance. He spent the day composing scurrilous limericks about the superiors who had assigned him to this mission. The trek continued noisily through the dark. Next morning there was drifted snow to clear before camp could be made. Flandry discovered that he was at least able to wield a snow shovel. Soon he wished he weren’t.

By noon the ordu was settled; not in the compact standardized laagers which offered maximum safety, but straggling over kilometers in a line which brought mutinous grumbling. Toghrul roared down all protest and went back to his kibitka to crouch over the radio. After some hours he summoned Flandry.

“Ship departing,” he said. “We’ve just picked up a routine broadcast warning aircraft from the spaceport area.” He frowned. “Can we carry out all our maneuvers while we’re still in daylight?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Flandry. “Our initial pattern is already set up. Once he spots that from space-and he’s pretty sure to, because it’s routine to look as long and hard as possible at any doubtful planet-the skipper will hang around out there.”

His gray eyes went to a map on the desk before him. The positions of all Tebtengri units had now been radio confirmed. As marked by Toghrul, the ordus lay in a heavy east-and-west line, 500 kilometers long across the winter-white steppe. The more mobile varyak divisions sprawled their bunches to form lines slanting past either end of the stationary one, meeting in the north. He stroked his mustache and waited.

“Spaceship cleared for take off. Stand by. Rise, spaceship!”

As the relayed voice trickled weakly from the receiver, Flandry snatched up a pencil and drew another figure under Toghrul’s gaze. “This is the next formation,” he said. “Might as well start it now, I think; the ship will have seen the present one in a few minutes.”

The Gur-Khan bent over the microphone and rapped: “Varyak divisions of Clans Munlik, Fyodor, Kubilai, Tuli, attention! Drive straight west for 100 kilometers. Belgutai, Bagdarin, Chagatai, Kassar, due east for 100 kilometers. Gleb, Jahangir—”

Flandry rolled his pencil in tightened fingers. As the reports came in, over an endless hour, he marked where each unit had halted. The whole device began to look pathetically crude.

“I have been thinking,” said Toghrul after a period of prolonged silence.

“Nasty habit,” said Flandry. “Hard to break. Try cold baths and long walks.”

“What if Oleg finds out about this?”

“He’s pretty sure to discover something is going on. His air scouts will pick up bits of our messages. But only bits, since these are short-range transmissions. I’m depending on our own air cover to keep the enemy from getting too good a look at what we’re up to. All Oleg will know is, we’re maneuvering around on a large scale.” Flandry shrugged. “It would seem most logical to me, if I were him, that the Tebtengri were practicing formations against the day he attacks.”

“Which is not far off.” Toghrul drummed the desk top.

Flandry drew a figure on his paper. “This one next,” he said.

“Yes.” Toghrul gave the orders. Afterward: “We can continue through dark, you know. Light bonfires. Send airboats loaded with fuel to the varyak men, so they can do the same.”

“That would be well.”

“Of course,” frowned the chief, “it will consume an unholy amount of fuel. More than we can spare.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Flandry. “Before the shortage gets acute, your people will be safe, their needs supplied from outside-or they’ll be dead, which is still more economical.”

The night wore on. Now and then Flandry dozed. He paid scant heed to the sunrise; he had only half completed his job. Sometime later a warrior was shown in. “From Juchi Shaman,” he reported, with a clumsy salute.” Airscouts watching the Ozero Rurik area report massing of troops, outrider columns moving northward.”

Toghrul smote the desk with one big fist. “Already?” he said.

“It’ll take them a few days to get their big push this far,” said Flandry, though his guts felt cold at the news. “Longer, if we harry them from the air. All I need is one more day, I think.”

“But when can we expect help?” said Toghrul.

“Not for another three or four weeks at the very least,” said Flandry. “Word has to reach Catawrayannis Base, its commandant has to patch together a task force which has to get here. Allow a month, plus or minus. Can we retreat that long, holding the enemy off without undue losses to ourselves?”

“We had better,” said Toghrul, “or we are done.”

XV

Captain Flandry laid the rifle stock to his shoulder. Its plastic felt smooth and uncold, as nearly as his numbed cheek could feel anything. The chill of the metal parts, which would skewer any fingers that touched them, bit through his gloves. Hard to gauge distances in this red half-light, I across this whining scud of snow. Hard to guess windage; even trajectories were baffling, on this miserable three-quarter-gee planet… He decided the opposition wasn’t close enough yet, and flowered his gun.

Beside him, crouched in the same lee of a snowbank, the Dweller turned dark eyes upon the man. “I go now?” he asked. His Altaian was even worse than Flandry’s, though Juchi himself had been surprised to learn that any of the Ice Folk knew the human tongue.

“I told you no.” Flandry’s own accent was thickened by the frostbitten puffiness of his lips. “You must cross a hundred meters of open ground to reach those trees. Running, you would be seen and shot before going half way. Unless we can arrange a distraction—”

He peered again through the murk. Krasna had almost vanished from these polar lands for the winter, but was still not far below the horizon. There were still hours when a surly gleam in the south gave men enough light to see a little distance.

The attacking platoon was so close now that Flandry could make out blurred individuals, outlined against the great vague lake. He could see that they rode a sort of modified varyak, with runners and low-powered negagrav thrust to drive them across the permasnow. It was sheer ill luck that he and his squad had blundered into them. But the past month, or however long, had been that sort of time. Juchi had withdrawn all his people into the depths of the Ice Lands, to live off a few kine slaughtered and frozen while their herds wandered the steppes under slight guard… while a front line of Tebtengri and Dwellers fought a guerrilla war to slow Oleg Khan’s advance… Skulk, shoot, run, hide, bolt your food, snatch a nap in a sleeping bag as dank as yourself, and go forth to skulk again…

Now the rest of Flandry’s party lay dead by Tengri Nor. And he himself, with this one companion, was trapped by a pursuit moving faster on machine than he could afoot.

He gauged his range afresh. Perhaps. He got his sights on a man in the lead and jerked his head at the Dweller, who slipped from him. Then he fired.

The southerner jerked in the saddle, caught at his belly, and slid slowly to the ground. Even in this glum light, his blood was a red shout on the snow. Through the wind, Flandry heard the others yell. They swept into motion, dispersing. He followed them with his sights, aimed at another, squeezed trigger again. A miss. This wasn’t enough. He had to furnish a few seconds’ diversion, so the Dweller could reach those crystalline trees at his back.

Flandry thumbed his rifle to automatic fire. He popped up, shooting, and called: “My grandmother can lick your grandmother!”

Diving, he sensed more than heard the lead storm that went where he had been. Energy bolts crashed through the air overhead, came down again and sizzled in the snow. He breathed hot steam. Surely that damned Dweller had gotten to the woods now! He fired blind at the inward-rushing enemy. Come on, someone, pull me out of this mess!-What use is it, anyhow? The little guy babbled about calling through the roots, letting all the forest know-Through gun-thunder, Flandry heard the first high ringing noise. He raised his eyes in tune to see the medusae attack.

They swarmed from above, hundreds upon hundreds, their tentacles full of minor lightning. Some were hit, burst into hydrogen flame, and sought men to burn even as they died. Others snatched warriors from the saddle, lifted them, and dropped them in the mortally cold waters of Tengri Nor. Most went efficiently about a task of electrocution. Flandry had not quite understood what happened before he saw the retreat begin. By the time he had climbed erect, it was a rout.

“Holy hopping hexaflexagons,” he mumbled in awe. “Now why can’t I do that stunt?”

The Dweller returned, small, furry, rubbery, an unimpressive goblin who said with shyness: “Not enough medusa for do this often. Your friends come. We wait.”

“Huh? Oh… you mean a rescue party. Yeh, I suppose some of our units would have seen that flock arrive here and will come to investigate.” Flandry stamped his feet, trying to force circulation back. “Nice haul,” he said, looking over strewn weapons and vehicles. “I think we got revenge for our squad.”

“Dead man just as dead on any side of fight,” reproached the Dweller.

Flandry grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

He heard the whirr of tow motors. The ski patrol which came around the woods was bigger than he had expected. He recognized Arghun and Bourtai at its head. It came to him, with a shock, that he hadn’t spoken to either one, except to say hello-goodbye, since the campaign began. Too busy. That was the trouble with war. Leave out the toil, discipline, discomfort, scant sleep, lousy food, monotony, and combat, and war would be a fine institution.

He strolled to meet the newcomers, as debonairly as possible for a man without cigarettes. “Hi,” he said.

“Dominic… it was you-” Bourtai seized his hands. “You might have been killed!” she gasped.

“Occupational hazard,” said Flandry. “I thought you were in charge of our western division, Arghun.”

“No more fighting there,” said the noyon. “I am going about gathering our troops.”

“What?”

“Have you not heard?” The frank eyes widened. Arghun stood for a moment in the snow, gaping. Then a grin cracked his frozen mustache; he slapped Flandry’s back and shouted: “The Terrans have arrived!”

“Huh?” Flandry felt stunned. The blow he had taken-Arghun owned a hefty set of muscles-wait, what had he said?

“Yesterday,” chattered the Altaian. “I suppose your portable radio didn’t pick up the news, nor anyone in that company you were fighting. Reception is poor in this area. Or maybe they were fanatics. There are some, whom we’ll have to dispose of. But that should not be difficult.”

He brought himself under control and went on more calmly: “A task force appeared and demanded the surrender of all Yesukai forces as being Merseian clients. The commander at Ulan Baligh yielded without a fight-what could he have done? Oleg Khan tried to rally his men at the front… oh, you should have been listening, the ether was lively last night!… but a couple of Terran spaceships flew up and dropped a demonstration bomb squarely on his headquarters. That was the end of that. The tribesmen of the Khanate are already disengaging and streaming south. Juchi Shaman has a call from the Terran admiral at Ulan Baligh, to come advise him what to do next-oh yes, and bring you along—”

Flandry closed his eyes. He swayed on his feet, so that Bourtai caught him in her arms and cried, “What is it, my dear one?”

“Brandy,” he whispered. “Tobacco. India tea. Shrimp mayonnaise, with a bottle of gray Riesling on the side. Air conditioning… ” He shook himself. “Sorry. My mind wandered.”

He scarcely saw how her lip trembled. Arghun did, gave the Terran a defiant look, and caught the girl’s hand in his own. She clung to that like a lost child.

This time Flandry did notice. His mouth twitched upward. “Bless you, my children,” he murmured.

“What?” Arghun snapped it in an anger half bewilderment.

“When you get as old and battered as I,” said Flandry, “you will realize that no one dies of a broken heart. In fact, it heals with disgusting speed. If you want to name your first-born Dominic, I will be happy to mail a silver spoon, suitably engraved.”

“But-” stammered Bourtai. “But-” She gave up and held Arghun’s hand more tightly.

The noyon’s face burned with blood. He said hastily, seeking impersonal things: “Now will you explain your actions, Terra man?”

“Hm?” Flandry blinked. “Oh. Oh, yes. To be sure.”

He started walking. The other two kept pace, along the thin blue Lake of Ghosts, under a lacework of icy leaves. The red halfday smoldered toward night. Flandry spoke, with laughter reborn in his voice:

“Our problem was to send a secret message. The most secret possible would, of course, be one which nobody recognized as a message. For instance, Mayday painted on the Prophet’s Tower. It looked like gibberish, pure spiteful mischief… but all the city could see it. They’d talk. How they’d talk! Even if no Betelgeuseans happened to be at Ulan Baligh just then, there would soon be some who would certainly hear news so sensational, no matter how closely they were guarded. And the Betelgeuseans in turn would carry the yarn home with them-where the Terrans connected with the Embassy would hear it. And the Terrans would understand!

“You see, Mayday is a very ancient code call on my planet. It means, simply, Help me.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Bourtai.

“Oh-ho,” said Arghun. He slapped his thigh and his own laughter barked forth, “Yes, I see it now! Thanks, friend, for a joke to tell my grandchildren!”

“A classic,” agreed Flandry with his normal modesty. “My corps was bound to send a ship to investigate. Knowing little or nothing, its men would be alert and wary. Oleg’s tale of my accidental death, or whatever he told them, would be obvious seafood in view of that first message; but I figured I could trust them to keep their mouths shut, pretend to be taken in by him, until they could learn more. The problem now was, how to inform them exactly what the situation was-without Oleg knowing.

“Of course, you can guess how that was done: by maneuvering the whole Tebtengri Shamanate across the plain, to form Terran letters visible through a telescope. It could only be a short, simple note; but it served.”

He filled his lungs with the keen air. Through all his weariness, the magnificence of being alive flowed up into him. He grinned and added, half to himself: “Those were probably the first secret messages ever sent in an alphabet ranging from one to five hundred kilometers tall.”