The Long Night

A Tragedy of Errors

Once in ancient days, the then King of England told Sir Christopher Wren, whose name is yet remembered, that the new Cathedral of St. Paul which he had designed was “awful, pompous and artificial.” Kings have seldom been noted for perspicacity.

Later ages wove a myth about Roan Tom. He became their archetype of those star rovers who fared forth while the Long Night prevailed. As such, he was made to ‘ fit the preconceptions and prejudices of whoever happened to mention him. To many scholars, he was a monster, a murderer and thief, bandit and vandal, skulking like some carrion animal through the ruins of the Terran Empire. Others called him a hero, a gallant and romantic leader of fresh young peoples destined to sweep out of time the remnants of a failed civilization and build something better.

He would have been equally surprised, and amused, by either legend.

“Look,” one can imagine his ghost drawling, “we had to eat. For which purpose, it’s sort o’ helpful to keep your throat uncut, no? That was a spiny-tail period. Society’d fallen. Andhavin’ so far to fall, it hit bottom almighty hard. The economic basis for things like buildin’ spaceships wasn’t there any more. That meant little trade between planets. Which meant trouble on most of You let such go on for a century or two, snowballin’, and what’ve you got? A kettle o’ short-lived dwarf nations, that’s what—one-planet, one-continent, one-island nations; all of ’em one-lung for sure—where they haven’t collapsed even further. No more information-collatin’ services, so nobody can keep track o’ what’s happenin’ amongst those millions o’suns. What few spaceships are left in workin’ order are naturally the most valuable objects in sight. So they naturally get acquired by the toughest men around who, bein’ what they are, are apt to use the ships for conquerin’ or plunderin’… and complicate matters still worse.

“Well,” and he pauses to stuff a pipe with Earthgrown tobacco, which is available in his particular Valhalla, “like everybody else, I just made the best o’ things as I found ’em. Fought? Sure. Grew up fightin’. I was born on a spaceship. My dad was from Lochlann, but outlawed after a family feud went sour. He hadn’t much choice but to turn pirate. One day I was in a landin’ party which got bushwhacked. Next I heard, I’d been sold into slavery. Had to take it from there. Got some lucky breaks after a while and worked ’em hard. Didn’t do too badly, by and large.

‘Wind you, though, I never belonged to one o’ those freaky cultures that’d taken to glorifyin’ combat for its own sake. In fact, once I’d gotten some power on Kraken, I was a lot more int’rested in startin’ trade again than in anything else. But neither did I mind the idea o’ fightin’, if we stood to gain by it, nor o’ collectin’ any loose piece o’ property that wasn’t too well defended. Also, willy-nilly, we were bound to get into brawls with other factions. Usually those happened a long ways from home. I saw to that. Better there than where I lived, no?

“We didn’t always win, either. Sometimes we took a clobberin’. Like finally, what I’d reckon as about the worst time, I found myself skyhootin’ away from Sassania, in a damaged ship, alone except for a couple o’ wives. I shook pursuit in the Nebula. But when we came out on the other side, we were in a part o’ space that wasn’t known to us. Old Imperial territory still, o’ course, but that could mean anything. And we needed repairs. Once my ship’d been self-fixin’, as well as selfcrewin’, self-pilotin’, self-navigatin,’ aye-ya, even self-aware. But that computer was long gone, together with a lot of other gear. We had to find us a place with a smidgin of industrial capacity, or we were done for.”

The image in the viewscreens flickered so badly that Tom donned armor and went out for a direct look at the system he had entered.

He liked being free in space anyway. He had more esthetic sense than he publicly admitted. The men of Kraken were quick to praise the beauty of a weapon or a woman, but would have considered it strange to spill time admiring a view rather than examining the scene for pitfalls and possibilities. In the hush and dreamlike liberty of weightlessness, Tom found an inner peace; and from this he turned outward, becoming one with the grandeur around him.

After he had flitted a kilometer from it, Firedrake’s lean hull did not cut off much vista. But reflections, where energy beams had scored through black camouflage coating to the steel beneath, hurt his eye… He looked away from ship and sun alike. It was a bright sun, intrinsic luminosity of two Sols, though the color was ruddy, like a gold and copper alloy. At a distance of one and a half astronomical units, it showed a disc thirty-four minutes wide; and no magnification, only a darkened faceplate, was necessary to see the flares that jetted from it. Corona and zodiacal light made a bronze cloud. That was not a typical main sequence star, Tom thought, though nothing in his background had equipped him to identify what the strangeness consisted of.

Elsewhere glittered the remoter stars, multitudinous and many-colored in their high night. Tom’s gaze circled among them. Yes, yonder was Capella. Old Earth lay on the far side, a couple of hundred light-years from here. But he wanted home, to Kraken: much less of a trip, ten parsecs or so. He could have picked out its sun with the naked eye, as a minor member of that jewel-swarm, had the Nebula not stood between. The thundercloud mass reared gloomy and awesome athwart a quarter of heaven. Arid it might as well be a solid wall, if his vessel didn’t get fixed.

That brought Tom’s attention back to the planet he was orbiting. It seemed enormous at this close remove, a thick crescent growing as the ship swung dayward, as if it were toppling upon him. The tints were green, blue, brown, but with an underlying red in the land areas that wasn’t entirely due to the sunlight color. Clouds banded the brightness of many seas; there was no true ocean. The southern polar cap was extensive. Yet it couldn’t be very deep, because its northern counterpart had almost disappeared with summer, albeit the axial tilt was a mere ten degrees. Atmosphere rimmed the horizon with purple. A tiny disc was heaving into sight, the farther of the two small moons.

Impressive, yes. Habitable, probably according to the spectroscope, certainly according to the radio emissions on which he had homed. (They’d broken off several light-years away, but by then no doubt remained that this system was their origin, and this was the only possible world within the system.) Nonetheless—puzzling. In a way, daunting.

The planet was actually a midget. Its equatorial diameter was—6810 kilometers, its mass 0.15 Terra. Nothing that size ought to have air, and water enough for men.

But there were men there. Or had been. Feeble and distorted though the broadcasts became, away off in space, Tom had caught Anglic words spoken with human mouths.

He shrugged. One way to find out. Activating his pellers, he flitted back. His boots struck hull and clung. He free-walked to the forward manlock and so inboard.

The interior gee-field was operational. Weight thrust his armor down onto his neck and shoulders. Yasmin heard him clatter and came to help him unsuit. He waved her back. “Don’t you see the frost on me? I been in planet shadow. Your finger’d stick to the metal, kid.” Not wearing radio earplugs, she didn’t hear him, but she got the idea and stood aside. Gauntleted, he stripped down to coverall and mukluks and lockered the space equipment. At the same time, he admired her.

She was slight and dark, but prettier than he had realized at first. That was an effect of personality, reasserting itself after what happened in Anushirvan. The city had been not only the most beautiful and civilized, but the gayest on all Sassania; and her father was Nadjaf Kuli, the deputy governor. Now he was dead and his palace sacked, and she had fled for her life with one of her Shah’s defeated barbarian allies. Yet she was getting back the ability to laugh. Good stock, Tom thought; she’d bear him good sons.

“Did you see trace of humans?” she asked. He had believed her Anglic bore a charming accent—it was not native to her—until he discovered that she had been taught the classical language. Her gazelle eyes flickered from the telescope he carried in one fist on to his battered and weatherbeaten face.

“Trace, yes,” he answered bluntly. “Stumps of a few towns. They’d been hit with nukes.”

“Oh-h-h…”

“Ease off, youngster.” He rumpled the flowing hair. “I couldn’t make out much, with nothin’ better’n these lenses. We’d already agreed the planet was likely raided, that time the broadcasts quit. Don’t mean they haven’t rebuilt a fair amount. I’d guess they have. The level o’. shall I say in two words, radio activity—” Tom paused. “You were supposed to smile at that,” he said in a wounded tone.

“Well, may I smile at the second joke, instead?” she retorted impishly. They both chuckled. Her back grew straighter, in the drab one-piece garment that was all he had been able to give her, and somehow the strength of the curving nose dominated the tenderness of her mouth. “Please go on, my lord.”

“Uh, you shouldn’t call me that. They’re free women on Kraken.”

“So we were on Sassania. In fact, plural marriage—”

“I know, I know. Let’s get on with business.” Tom started down the corridor. Yasmin accompanied him, less gracefully than she had moved at home. The field was set for Kraken weight, which was 1.25 standard. But she’d develop the muscles for it before long.

He had gone through a wedding ceremony with her, once they were in space, at Dagny’s insistence. “Who else will the poor child have for a protector but you, the rest of her life? Surely you won’t turn her loose on any random planet. At the same time, she is aristocratic born. It’d humiliate her to become a plain concubine.”

“M-m-m… but the heirship problem—”

“I like her myself, what little I’ve seen of her; and the Kuli barons always had an honorable name. I don’t think she’ll raise boys who’ll try to steal house rule from my sons.”

As usual, Dagny was no doubt right.

Anxious to swap findings with her, Tom hurried. The passage reached empty and echoing; air from the ventilators blew loud and chilled him; the stylized murals of gods and sea beasts had changed from bold to patheticnow that only three people crewed this ship. But they were lucky to be alive—would not have been so, save for the primitive loyalty of his personal guardsmen, who died in their tracks while he ran through the burning city in search of Dagny—when the Pretender’s nonhuman mercenaries broke down the last defenses. He found his chief wife standing by the ship with a Mark IV thunderbolter, awaiting his return. She would not have left without him. Yasmin huddled at her feet. They managed to loose a few missiles as they lifted. But otherwise there was nothing to do but hope to fight another day. The damage that Firedrake sustained in running the enemy space fleet had made escape touch and go. The resulting absence of exterior force-fields and much interior homeostasis made the damage worse as they traveled. Either they found the wherewithal for repair here, or they stayed here.

Tom said to Yasmin while he strode: “We couldn’t’ve picked up their radio so far out’s we did, less’n they’d had quite a lot, both talk and radar. That means they had a pretty broad industrial base. You don’t destroy that by scrubbin’ cities. Too many crossroads machine shops and so forth; too much skill spread through the population. I’d be surprised if this planet’s not on the way back up.”

“But why haven’t they rebuilt any cities?”

“Maybe they haven’t gotten that far yet. Been less’n ten years, you know. Or, ’course, they might’ve got knocked clear down to savagery. I’ve seen places where it happened. We’ll find out.”

Walking beside the girl, Roan Tom did not look especially note-worthy, certainly not like the rover and trader chieftain whose name was already in the ballads of a dozen planets. He was of medium height, though so broad in shoulders and chest as to look stocky. From his father, he had the long head, wide face, high cheekbones, snub nose and beardlessness of the Lochlanna. But his mother, a freedwoman said to be of Hermetian stock,, had given him dark-red hair, which was now thinning, and star-blue eyes. Only the right of those remained; a patch covered where the left had been. (Some day, somewhere, he’d find someone with the knowledge and facilities to grow him a new one!) He walked with the rolling gait of a Krakener, whose planet is mostly ocean, and bore the intertwining tattoos of his adopted people on most of his hide. A blaster and knife hung at his waist.

Dagny was in the detector shack. Viewscreens might be malfunctioning, along with a lot else, but such instruments as the radionic, spectroscopic, magnetic and sonic were not integrated with ship circuitry. They had kept their accuracy, and she was expert—not educated, but rule-of-thumb expert—in their use.

“Well; there,” she said, looking around the console at which she sat. “What’d you see?”

Tom repeated in more detail what he had told Yasmin. Since Dagny spoke no Pelevah and only a little pidgin Anglic, while Yasmin had no Eylan, these two of his wives communicated with difficulty. Maybe that was why they got along so well. “And how ‘bout you?” he finished.

“I caught a flash of radiocast. Seemed like two stations communicating from either end of a continental-size area.”

“Still, somebody is able to chat a bit,” Torn said. “Hopeful.” He lounged against the doorframe. “Anyone spot us, d’ you think?”

Dagny grinned. “What do you think?”

His lips responded. A positive answer would have had them in action at once, he to the bridge, she to the main fire control turret. They couldn’t be sure they had not been noticed—by optical system, quickly brushing radar or maser, gadget responsive to the neutrino emission of their prciton converter, several other possible ways—but it was unlikely.

“Any further indications?” Tom asked. “Atomic powerplants?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know what the readings mean that I get, particle flux, magnetic variations and the rest. This is such a confoundedly queer sun and planet. I’ve never seen anything like them. Have you?”

“No.”

They regarded each other for a moment that grew very quiet. Dagny, Od’s-daughter in the House of Brenning, was a big woman, a few years his senior. Her shoulder-length yellow mane was fading a bit, and her hazel eyes were burdened with those contact lenses that were the best help anyone on Kraken knew how to give. But her frame was still strong and erect, her hands still clever and murderously quick. It had been natural for an impoverished noble family to make alliance with an energetic young immigrant who had a goodly following and a spaceship. But in time, voyages together, childbirths and child-rearings, the marriage of convenience had become one of affection.

“Well… s’pose we better go on down,” Tom said. “Sooner we get patched, sooner we can start back. And we’d better not be gone from home too long.”

Dagny nodded. Yasmin saw the grimness that touched them and said, “What is wrong, my… my husband?”

Tom hadn’t the heart to explain how turbulent matters were on Kraken also. She’d learn that soon enough, if they lived. He said merely, “There’s some kind o’ civilization goin’ yet around here. But it may exist only as traces o’ veneer. The signs are hard to figure. This is a rogue planet, you see.”

“Rogue?” Yasmin was bemused. “But that is a loose planet—sunless—isn’t it?”

“You mean a bandit planet. A rogue’s one that don’t fit in with its usual type, got a skrewball orbit or composition or whatever. Like this’n.”

“Oh. Yes, I know.”

“What?” He caught her shoulder, not noticing how she winced at so hard a grip. “You’ve heard o’ this system before?”

“No… please… no, my people never came to this side of the Nebula either, with what few ships we had. But I studied some astro-physics and planetography at Anusliirvan University.”

“Huh?” He let her go and gaped. “Science? Real, Imperial-era science, not engineerin’ tricks?” She nodded breathlessly. “But I thought—you said—you’d studied classics.”

“Is not scientific knowledge one of the classic arts? We had a very complete collection of tapes in the Royal Library.” Forlornness came upon her. “Gone, now, into smoke.”

“Never mind. Can you explain how come this globe is as it is?”

“Well, I… well, no. I don’t believe I could. I would need more information. Mass, and chemical data, and—And even then, I would probably not be able. I am not one of the ancient experts.”

“Hardly anybody is,” Tom sighed. “All right. Let’s get us a snack, and then to our stations for planetfall.”

Descent was tricky. Sensor-computer-autopilot linkups could no longer be trusted. Tom had to bring Firedrake in on manual controls. His few instruments were of limited use, when he couldn’t get precise data by which to recalibrate them for local conditions. With no view-screens working properly, he had no magnification, infra-red and ultra-violet presentations, any of the conventional aids. He depended on an emergency periscope, on Dagny’s radar readings called via intercom and on the trained reflexes of a lifetime.

Yasmin sat beside him. There was nothing she could do elsewhere, and he wanted to be able to assist her in her inexperience if they must bail out. The spacesuit and gravity impellers surrounded her with an awkward bulk that made the visage in the helmet look like a child’s. Neither one of them had closed a faceplate. Her voice came small through the gathering throb of power: “Is it so difficult, to land? I mean, I used to watch ships do it, and even if we are partly crippled—we could travel between the stars. What can an aircar do that we can’t?”

“Hyperdrive’s not the same thing as kinetic velocity, and most particular not the same as aerodynamic speed,” Tom grunted. “To start with, I know the theory o’ sublight physics.”

“Yon do?” She was frankly astounded.

“Enough of it, anyhow. I can read and write, too.” His hands played over the board. Vibration grew in the deck, the bulkheads, his bones. A thin shrilling was heard, the first cloven atmosphere. “A spaceship’s a sort o’ big and clumsy object, once out o’ her native habitat;” he said absently. “Got quite a moment of inertia, f’r instance. Means a sudden, hard wind can turn her top over tip and she don’t right easy. When you got a lot o’ sensitive machinery to do the work, that’s no problem. But we don’t.” He buried his face in the periscope hood. Cloudiness swirled beneath. “Also,” he said, “we got no screens and nobody at the guns. So we’d better be choosy about where we sit down. And… we don’t have any way to scan an area in detail. Now do be quiet and let me steer.”

Already in the upper air, he encountered severe turbulence. That was unexpected, on a planet which received less than 0.9 Terran insolation, with a lower proportion of UV to bait. It wasn’t that the atmosphere was peculiar. The spectroscope readout had said the mixture was ordinary oxy-nitro-CO₂, on the thin and dry side—sea-level pressure around 600 mm.—but quite breathable. Nor was the phenomenon due to excessive rotation; the period was twenty-five and a half hours. Of course, the inner moon, while small, was close in and must have considerable tidal effect—Hoy!

The outercom buzzed. Someone was calling. “Take that, Yasmin,” Tom snapped. The ship wallowed. He felt it even through the cushioning internal gee-field, and the altitude meters were wavering crazily. Wind screamed louder. The clouds roiled near, coppery-headed blue-shadowed billows on the starboard horizon, deep purple below him. He had hoped that night and overcast would veil his arrival, but evidently a radar had fingered him. Or—“The knob marked A, you idiot! Turn it widdershins. I can’t let go now!”

Yasmin caught her lower lip between her teeth and obeyed. The screen flickered to life. “Up the volume,” Tom commanded. “Maybe Dagny can’t watch, but she’d better hear. You on, Dagny?” .

“Aye.” Her tone was crisp from the intercom speaker. “I doubt if I’ll understand many words, though. Hadn’t you better start aloft and I leave the radar and take over fire control?”

“No, stand where you are. See what you can detect. We’re not after a tussle, are we?” Tom glanced at the screen for the instant he dared. It was sidewise to him, putting him outside the pickup arc, but he could get a profile of the three-dimensional image.

The man who gazed out was so young that his beard was brownish fuzz. Braids hung from beneath a goggled fiber crash helmet. But his features were hard; his background appeared to be an aircraft cockpit; and his green tunic had the look of a uniform.

“Who are you?” he challenged. Seeing himself confronted by a girl, he let his jaw drop. “Who are you?”

“Might ask the same o’ you,” Tom answered for her. “We’re from offplanet.”

“Why did you not declare yourselves?” The Anglic was thickly accented but comprehensible, roughened with tension.

“We didn’t know anybody was near. I reckon you had to try several bands before hittin’ the one we were tuned to. Isn’t a standard signal frequency any more.” Tom spoke with careful casualness, while the ship bucked and groaned around him and lightning zigzagged in the clouds he approached. “Don’t worry about us. We mean no harm.”

“You trespass in the sky of Karol Weyer.”

“Son, we never heard o’ him. We don’t even know what you call this planet.”

The, pilot gulped. “N-Nike,” he said automatically.

“The planet Nike. Karol Weyer is our Engineer, here in Hanno. Who are you?”

Dagny’s voice said in Eylan, “I’ve spotted him on the scope, Tom. Coming in fast at eleven o’clock low.”

“Let me see your face,” the pilot demanded harshly. “Hide not by this woman.”

“Can’t stop to be polite,” Tom said. “S’pose you let us land, and we’ll talk to your Engineer. Or shall we take our business elsewhere?”

Yasmin’s gauntlet closed convulsively on Tom’s sleeve. “The look on him grows terrible,” she whispered. “Gods damn,” Tom said, “we’re friends!”

“What?” the pilot shouted.

“Friends, I tell you! We need help. Maybe you—”

“The screen went blank,” Yasmin cried.

Tom risked yawing Firedrake till he could see in the direction Dagny had bespoken. The craft was in view. It was a one—or two-man job, a delta wing whose contrail betrayed the energy source as chemical rather than atomic or electric. However, instruments reported it as applying that power to a gravity drive. At this distance he couldn’t make out if the boat had guns, but hardly doubted that. Fora moment it glinted silvery against the darkling clouds, banked and vanished.

“Prob’ly hollerin’ for orders,” Tom said. “And maybe reinforcements. Chil’ren, I think we’d better hustle back spaceward and try our luck in some place more sociable than Hanno.”

“Is there any?” Dagny wondered.

“Remains to be seen. Let’s hope its not our remains that’ll be seen.” Tom concentrated on the controls. Lame and weakened, the ship could not simply reverse. She had too much downward momentum and was too deep in Nike’s gravity well. He must shift vectors slowly and nurse her up again.

After minutes, Dagny called through the racket and shudderings: “Several of them—at least five—climbing faster than us, from all sides.”

“I was afraid o’ that,” Tom said. “Yasmin, see if you can eavesdrop on the chit-chat between ’em.”

“Should we not stay tuned for their call?” the Sassanian asked timidly.

“I doubt they aim to call. If ever anybody acted so scared and angry as to be past reason—No, hold ’er.”

The screen had suddenly reawakened. This time the man who stared forth was middle-aged, leonine, bearded to the waist. His coat was trimmed with fur and, beneath the storm in his voice, pride rang. “I am the Engineer,” he said. “You will land and be slaves.”

“Huh?” Tom said. “Look, we was goin’ away—”

“You declared yourselves friends!”

“Yes. We’d like to do business with you. But—”

“Land at once. Slave yourselves to me. Or my craft open fire. They have tommics.”

“Nukes, you mean?” Tom growled. Yasmin stifled a shriek. Karol Weyer observed and looked grimly pleased. Tom cursed, without words.

The Nikean shook his head. Tom got a glimpse of that, and wasn’t sure whether the gesture meant yes, no or maybe in this land. But the answer was plain: “Weapons that unleash the might which lurks in matter.”

And our force-screen generator is on sick leave, Tom thought. He may be lyin’. But I doubt it, because they do still use grays here. We can’t outrun a rocket, let alone an energy beam. Nor could Dagny, by herself, shoot down the lot in time to forestall ’em.

“You win,” he said. “Here we come.”

“Leave your transceiver on,”, Weyer instructed. “When you are below the clouds, the fish will tell you where to go.”

“Fish?” Tom choked. But the screen had emptied, save for the crackling and formlessnesses of static. “D-d-dialect?” Yasmin suggested.

“Uh, yeh. Must mean somethin’ like squadron leader. Good girl.” Tom spared her a grin. The tears were starting forth.

“Slaves?” she wailed. “Oh, no, no.”

“Course not, if I can help it,” he said, sotto voce lest the hostiles be listening. “Rather die.”

He did not speak exact truth. Having been a slave once, he didn’t prefer death—assuming his owner was not unreasonable, and that some hope existed of getting his freedom back. But becoming property was apt to be worse for a woman than a man: much worse, when she was a daughter of Sassania’s barons or Kraken’s sea kings. As their husband, he was honor bound to save theni if he could.

“We’ll make a break,” he said. “Lot o’ wild country underneath. One reason I picked this area. But first we have to get down.”

“What’s gone by me?” Dagny called.

Tom explained in Eylan while he fought the ship. “But that doesn’t make sense!” she said. “When they know nothing about us—”

“Well, they took a bad clobberin’, ten years back. Can’t expect ’em to act terribly sensible about strangers. And s’posin’ this is a misunderstandin’… we have to stay alive while we straighten it out. Stand by for a rough jaunt.”

The aircraft snarled into sight, but warily, keeping their distance in swoops and circles that drew fantastic trails of exhaust. For a moment Tom wondered if that didn’t prove the locals were familiar with space-war techniques. Those buzzeroos seemed careful to stay beyond reach of a tractor or pressor beam, that could have seized them… But no. They were exposed to his guns and missiles, which had far greater range, and didn’t know that these were unmanned.

Nevertheless, they were at least shrewd on this planet. From what Tom had let slip, and the battered condition of the vessel, Weyer had clearly guessed that the newcomers were weak. They could doubtless wipe out one or two aircraft before being hit, but could they handle half a dozen? That Weyer had taken the risk and scrambled this much of what must be a very small air fleet suggested implacable enmity. (Why? He couldn’t be so stupid as to assume that everyone from offplanet was a foe. Could he?) What was worse, his assessment of the military situation was quite correct. In her present state, Firedrake could not take on so many opponents and survive.

She entered the clouds.

For a while Tom was blind. Thunder and darkness encompassed him. Metal toned. The instrument dials glowed like goblin eyes. Their needles spun; the ship lurched; Tom stabbed and pulled and twisted controls, sweat drenched his coverall and reeked in his nostrils.

Then he was through, into windy but, uncluttered air. Fifteen kilometers beneath him lay that part of the north temperate zone he had so unfortunately chosen. The view was of a valley, cut into a checkerboard pattern that suggested large agricultural estates. A river wound through, shining silver in what first dawn-light reddened the eastern horizon. A few villages clustered along it, and traffic moved, barge trains and waterships. A swampy delta spread at the eastern end of a great bay.

That bay was as yet in the hour before sunrise, but glimmered with reflections. It had a narrow mouth, opening on a sea to the west. Lights twinkled on either side of the gate, and clustered quite thickly on the southern bayshore. Tom’s glance went to the north. There he saw little trace of habitation. Instead, hills humped steeply toward a mountain which smoked. Forests covered them, but radar showed how rugged they were.

The outercom flashed with the image of the pilot who had first hailed him. Now that conditions were easier, Tom could have swiveled it around himself to let the scanner cover his own features. Yasmin could have done so for him at any time. But he refrained. Anonymity wasn’t an ace in the hole—at most, a deuce or a trey—but he needed every card he had.

“You will bear east-northeast,” the “fish” instructed. “About a hundred kilos upriver lies a cave. Descend there.”

“Kilos?” Tom stalled. He had no intention of leaving the refuges below him for the open flatlands. “Distances. Thousand-meters.”

“But a cave? I mean, look, I want to be a good fellow and so forth, but how’m I goin’ to spot a cave from the air?”

“Spot?” It was the Nikean’s turn to be puzzled. However, he was no fool. “Oh, so, you mean espy. A cave is a stronghouse. You will know it by turrets, projectors, setdown fields.”

“Your Engineer’s castle?”

“Think you we’re so whetless we’d let you near the Great Cave? You might have a tommic boom aboard. No. Karol Weyer dwells by the bay gate. You go to the stronghouse guarding the Nereid River valley. Now change course, I said, or we fire.”

Torn had used the talk-time to shed a good bit of altitude. “We can’t,” he said. “Not that fast. Have to get low first, before we dare shift.”

“You go no lower, friend! Those are our folk down there.”

“Be reasonable,” Torn said. “A spaceship’s worth your havin’, I’m sure, even a damaged one like ours. Why blang us for somethin’ we can’t help?”

“Urn-m-m… hold where you are.”

“I can’t. This is not like an aircraft. I’ve got to either rise or sink. Ask your bosses.”

The pilot’s face disappeared. “But—” Yasmin began. “Shhh!” Tom winked his good eye at her.

He was gambling that they hadn’t had spacecraft on Nike for a long time. Otherwise they wouldn’t have taken such a licking a decade ago; and they’d have sent a ship after, him, rather than those few miserable, probably handmade gravplanes. So if they didn’t have anyone around who was qualified in the practical problems of handling that kind of vessel.

Not but what Firedrake wasn’t giving him practical problems of his own. Wind boomed and shoved.

The pilot returned. “Go lower if you must,” he said. “But follow my word, go above the northshore hills.”

“Surely.” Right what I was hopin’ for! Tom switched to Eylan. “Dagny, get to the forward manlock.”

“What do you say?” rapped the pilot.

“I’m issuin’ orders to my crew,” Tom said. “They don’t speak Anglic.”

“No! You’ll not triple-talk me!”

Tom let out a sigh that was a production. “Unless they know what to do, we’ll crash. Do you want live slaves and a whole spaceship, or no? Make up your mind, son.”

“Urn-m… well. At first ill-doing, we shoot.”

Tom ignored him. “Listen, Dagny. You’re not needed here any more. I can land on my altimeter and stuff. But I’ve got to set us down easy, and not get us hit by some overheated gunner. They must have what we need to make our repairs, but not to build a whole new ship, even s’posin’ we knew how. So we can’t risk defendin’ ourselves, leastwise till we get away from the ship.”

“She will be theirs,” Dagney said, troubled. “And we will be hunted. Shouldn’t we surrender peacefully and bargain with them?”

“What bargainin’ power has a slave got? Whereas free, if nothin’ else, I bet we’re the only two on Nike that can run a spacecraft. Besides, we don’t know what these fellows are like. They could be mighty cruel. No, you go stand by that manlock along, with Yasmin. The minute we touch dirt, you two get out—fast and far.”

“But Tom, you’ll be, on the bridge. What about you?”

“Somebody’s got to make that landin’. I dunno how they’ll react. But you girls won’t have much time to escape yourselves. I’ll come after you. If I haven’t joined you soon, figure I won’t, and do whatever comes natural. And look after Yasmin, huh?”

Silence dwelt for a moment amidst every inanimate noise. Until: “I understand. Tom, if we don’t see each other again, it was good with you.” Dagny uttered a shaken laugh. “Tell her to kiss you for both of us.”

“Aye-ya.” He couldn’t, of course, with that suspicious countenance glowering out of the screen. But in what little Pelevah he had, he gave Yasmin her orders. She didn’t protest, too stunned by events to grasp the implications.

Down and down. The tilted wilderness swooped at him.

“The steerin’s quit on me!” Tom yelled in Anglic. “Yasmin, go fantangle the dreelsprail! Hurry!” She flung off her safety webbing and left the bridge, as fast as possible in her clumsy armor. “I’ve got to make an emergency landin’,” Tom said to the Nikean officer.

Probably that caused them to hold their fire as he had hoped. He didn’t know, nor wonder. He was too busy. The sonoprobe said firm solid below. The altimeter said a hundred meters, fifty, twenty-five, ten—Leaves surged around. Boughs and boles splintered. The farther trees closed in like a cage. Impact shook, drummed, went to silence. Tom cut the engines and gee-field. Native gravity, one-half standard, hit him with giddiness. He unharnessed himself. The deck was canted. He slipped, skidded, got up and pounded down the companionway.

The manlock valves opened at Dagny’s control while Firedrake was still moving. The drop in air pressure hurt her eardrums. She glimpsed foliage against a sky red with dawn, gray with scattering stormclouds. The earthquake landing cast her to hands and knees. She rose, leaning against a bulkhead. Yasmin stumbled into sight. The faceplate stood open before the terrified young visage. “Chaos! Dog that thing!” Dagny cried. “We’ll be at top speed.” She was not understood. She grabbed the girl and snapped the plate shut herself.

“You… know… fly?” she asked in her fragment of Anglic.

“Yes. I think so.” Yasmin wet her lips. Her radio voice was unsteady in the other’s earplugs. “I mean… Lord Tom explained how.”

“No practice, though?” Dagny muttered in Eylan. “You’re about to get some.” In Anglic: “Follow I.”

She leaned out of the lock. High overhead she descried the gleam of a wheeling delta wing. The forest roared with wind. A little clearing surrounded the ship where trees had been flattened. Beyond the shadowy tangle of their trunks and limbs, their neighbors made a wall of night.

“Go!” Dagny touched her impeller stud and launched herself. She soared up. Flight was tricky in these gusts. Curving about, she saw Yasmin’s suit helplessly cartwheel. She returned, caught the Sassanian girl, laid one arm around her waist and used the other to operate her drive units for her in the style of an instructor. They moved off, slowly and awkwardly.

A scream split the air. Dagny glanced as far behind as she could. Two of the aircraft were stooping… One took a hoverstance above Firedrake, the other came after her and Yasmin. She saw the muzzle of an energy gun and slammed the two impeller sets into full forward speed. Alone, she might have dived under the trees. But Yasmin hadn’t the skill, and two couldn’t slip through those dense branches side by side. Tom had told her to look after Yasmin, and Dagny was his sworn woman.

She tried to summon before her the children they had had together, tall sons and daughters, the baby grandchildren, and Skerrygarth, their home that was the dowry she had brought him, towers steadfast above a surf that played white among the reefs.

Explosion smashed at her. Had she been looking directly aft, she would have been dazzled into momentary blindness. As it was the spots before her eyes and the tolling in her ears lasted for minutes. A wave of heat pushed through her armor.

She yelled, clung somehow to Yasmin, and kept the two of them going. Fury spoke again and again. It dwindled with, distance as they fled.

Finally it was gone. By that time the women had covered some twenty kilometers, more or less eastward. The sea-level horizon of Nike was only about six kilometers off; and this was not flat country. They were well into morning light and far beyond view of the spaceship. Dagny thought she could yet identify an aircraft or two, but maybe those sparks were something else.

Beneath her continued hills and ravines, thickly wooded, and rushing streams. The volcano bulked in the north; smoke plumed from a frost-rimmed crater. Southward the land rolled down to the quicksilver sheet of the bay. Its shore was marshy—an effect of the very considerable tides that the nearer moon raised—but, a village of neat wooden houses stood there on piles. Sailboats that doubtless belonged to fishermen were putting out. They must exist in such numbers because of a power shortage rather than extreme backwardness; for Dagny saw a good-sized motorship as well, crossing the bay from the gate to the lower, more populous south side. Its hull was of planks and its wake suggested the engine was minimal. At the same time, its lines and the nearly smokeless stack indicated competent design.

Here the wind had gentled, and the clouds were dissipating fast. (Odd to have such small cells of weather, she thought in a detached logical part of herself. Another indication of an atmosphere disturbed by violent solar conditions?) They shone ruddy-tinted in a deep purple vault of sky. The sun stood bright orange above, mists that lay on the Nereid River delta.

“Down we go, lass,” Dagny said, “before we’re noticed.”

“What happened? Lord Tom. where is he?”

The sob scratched at Dagny’s nerves. She snapped, biting back tears: “Use your brain, you little beast, if it’s anything except blubber! He went first to the main firecontrol turret. When he saw us attacked, he cut loose with the ship’s weapons. I don’t see how he could have gotten all those bastards, though. If they didn’t missile him, they’ve anyhow bottled him up. On our account!”

She realized she’d spoken entirely in Eylan. Suppressing a growl, she took over the controls of both suits. With no need for haste, she could ease them past the branches that tried to catch them, down to the forest floor.

“Now,” she said in Anglic. “Out.” Yasmin gaped. Dagny set the example by starting to remove her own armor.

“Wh-why?”

“Find us. In . in… in-stru-ments. Stnell metal, no? Could be. Not take chance. We got—got to—” Dagny’s vocabulary failed her. She had wanted to explain that if they stayed with the suits, they ran the risk of detection from afar. And even if the Nikeans didn’t have that much technology left, whatever speed and protection the equipment lent wasn’t worth its conspicuousness.

She was almost grateful for every difficulty. It kept her mind—somewhat—off the overwhelming fact that Tom, her Roan Tom, was gone.

Or maybe not. Just maybe not. He might be a prisoner, and she might in time contrive to bargain for his release. No, she would not remember what she had seen done to prisoners, here and there in her wanderings, by vengeful captors!

Were that the case, though… Her hand went first to the blaster at one coveralled hip, next to the broad-bladed knife; and there it lingered. If she devoted the rest of her days to the project, and, if the gods were kind, she might eventually get his murderers into her clutch.

Yasmin shed the last armor. She hugged herself and shivered in a chill breeze. “But we haven’t any radios except in our helmets,” she said. “How can he contact us?”

Dagny framed ,a reply: “If he’d been able to follow us, he’d already be here, or at least have called. I left my squealer circuit on, for him to track us by. That was safe; its frequency varies continuously, according to synchronized governors in both our suits. But he hasn’t arrived, and we daren’t stay near this much metal and resonant electronic stuff.” Somehow, by words and gestures, she conveyed the gist. Meanwhile she filled their pockets with rations and medications, arranged the weapons beneath their garments, checked footgear. Last she hid the armor under leaf mould and canebrake, and took precise note of landmarks.

Yasmin’s head drooped until the snarled dark locks covered her face. “I am so tired,” she whispered.

Think I’m not? My lips are numb with it. “Go!” Dagny snapped.

She had to show the city-bred girl how.to conceal their trail through the woods.

After a couple of hours, unhounded, the air warming and brightening around them, both felt a little better. It was up-and-down walking, but without much underbrush to combat, for the ground was densely carpeted with a soft mossy growth. Here and there stood clumps of fronded gymnosperm plants. This native vegetation was presumably chlorophyl-bearing, though its greenness was pale and had a curious bluish overcast. Otherwise the, country had been taken over by the more efficient, highly developed species that man commonly brought with him. Oaks cast sun-speckled shadows; birches danced and glistened; primroses bloomed in meadows, where grass had overwhelmed a pseudo-moss that apparently had a competitive advantage only in shade. A sweet summery smell was about, and Yasmin spoke of her homeland. Even Dagny, bred in salt winds and unrestful watery leagues, felt a stirring of ancient instinct.

She was used to denser atmosphere. Sounds—sough in leaves, whistle of birds, rifling of brooks they crossed, thud of her own feet—came as if muffled to her ears; and on a steep upgrade, her heart was apt to flutter. But oxygen shortage was more or less compensated for by a marvelous, almost floating low-gravity lightness.

A good many animals were to be seen. Again, terrestroid forms had crowded out most of the primitive native species. With a whole ecology open to them, they were now in the process of explosive evolution. A few big insect-like flyers, an occasional awkward amphibian, gave glimpses of the original biosphere. But thrushes, bulbuls, long-winged hawks rode the wind, Closer down swarmed butterflies and bees. A wild boar, tusked and rangy, caused Dagny to draw her blaster; but he went by, having perhaps learned to fear man. Splendid was the more distant sight of mustangs, carabao, an entire herd of antlered six-legged tanithars.

A measure of peace came upon Dagny, until at last she could say, “All right, we stop, eat, rest.”

They sat under a broad-spreading hilltop cedar, that hid them from above while openness, halfway down the heights to the forest, afforded ample ground vision. They had made for the bay and were thus at a lower altitude. The waters sheened to south, ridges and mountains stood sharply outlined to north. In this clear air, the blueness of their distance was too slight to hide the basic ocherous tint of rocks and soil.

Dagny broke out a packet of dehydrate. She hesitated for a moment before adding water to the tray from a canteen she had filled en route. Yasmin, slumped exhausted against the tree trunk, asked, “What is the matter?” And, her eyes and mind wandering a little, she tried to smile. “See, yonder, apples. They are green but they can be dessert.”

“No,” Dagny said.

“What? Why not?”

“Heavy metal.” Dagny scowled. How to explain? “Young planet. Dense. Lots heavy metals. Not good.”

“Young? But—”

“Look around you,” Dagny wanted to say. “That sun, putting out radiation like an early Type F—in amount—but the color and spectral distribution are late G or early K. I’ve never seen anything like it. The way it flares, I don’t believe it’s quite stabilized at its proper position on the main sequence yet. Because of anomalous chemical composition, I suppose. You get that with very young suns, my dear. They’ve condensed out of an interstellar medium made rich in metals by the thermonuclear furnaces of earlier star generations. Or so I’ve been told.

“I know for fact that planets with super-abundant heavy elements can be lethal to men. So much… oh, arsenic, selenium, radioactives. Slow poison in some areas, fast and horrible death in others. This water, that fruit, may have stuff to kill us.”

But she lacked words or inclination. She said, “Iron. Makes red in rocks. No? Lots iron. Could be lots bad metal. Young planet. Lots air, no?”

She had, in truth, never heard of a dwarf world like this, getting such an amount of sunlight, that had hung onto a proper atmosphere. Evidently, she thought, there had not been time for the gas to leak into space. The primitive life forms were another proof of a low age.

Beyond this, she didn’t reason. She did not have the knowledge on which to base logic, nor did she have the scientific way of thinking. What little cosmology and cosmogony she had learned, for instance, was in the form of vague, probably distorted tradition—latter-day myth. And she was intelligent enough to recognize this.

Once, she imagined, any Imperial space officer had been educated in the details of astrophysics and planetology. And he would have seen, or read about, a far greater variety of suns than today’s petty travels encompassed. So he would have known immediately what sort of system this was; or, if not, he would have known how to find out.

But that was centuries ago. The information might not actually be lost. It might even be moldering in the damp, uncatalogued library of her own Skerrygarth. Surely parts of it were taught in the universities of more civilized planets, though as a set of theoretical ideas, to be learned by rote without any need for genuine comprehension.

Practical spacefarers, like her and Tom, didn’t learn it. They didn’t get the chance. A rudiment of knowledge was handed down to them,.largely by word of mouth, the minimum they needed for survival.

And speaking of survival—

She reached her decision. “Eat,” she said. “Drink.” She took the first sample. The water had a woodsy taste, nothing unfamiliar.

After all, humans did flourish here. Perhaps they were adapted to metal-rich soil. But the adaptation could scarcely be enormous. Had that been the case, terrestroid species would not be so abundant and dominant, after a mere thousand years or whatever on this planet.

Thus Nike was biochemically safe—at least, in this general region—at least, for a reasonable time. Perhaps, if outworlders stayed as long as one or two decades, they might suffer from cumulative poisoning. But she needn’t worry that far ahead, when a hunt was on immediately and when Tom—

Grimly, she fueled her body. Afterward she stood watch while Yasmin caught a nap. What she thought about was her own affair.

When the Sassanian awoke, they held a lengthy conference. The order Dagny had to issue was not complicated:

“We’re in enemy territory. But I don’t believe it covers the whole planet, or even the whole area between this sea and the next one east. ‘The Engineer of Hanno’ is atypical feudal title. I’ve not heard before that ‘engineer’ changed meaning to the equivalent of ‘duke’ or ‘king,’ but it’s easy to see how that could’ve happened, and I’ve met odder cases of wordshift. Well, our darling Engineer made it plain he regarded us as either the worst menace or the juiciest prey that’d come by in years. Maybe both. So he’d naturally call his full air power, or most of it, against us. Which amounted to half a dozen little craft, with gravmotors so weak they need wings! And look at those sailboats, and the absence of real cities, and the fact there’s scarcely any radio in use… yes, they’ve fallen far on Nike. I’m sure that raid from space was only the latest blow. They must have a small half-educated class left, and some technicians of a sort; but the bulk of the people must’ve been poor and ignorant for many generations.

“And divided. I swear they must be divided. I’ve seen so many societies like this, I can practically identify them by smell. A crazy-quilt pattern of feudalisrns and sovereignties, any higher authority a ghost. If as rich a planet as this one potentially is were united, it’d have made a far greater recovery by now, after the space attack, than it has done. Or it would have beaten the raiders off at least.

“So, if we have enemies here in Hanno, we probably have automatic friends somewhere else. And not dreadfully far away. Ai any rate, we’re not likely to be pursued beyond the nearest border, nor extradited back here. In fact, the Engineer’s rivals are apt to be quite alarmed when they learn he’s clapped hands on a real space warship. They’re apt to join forces to get it away from him. Which’ll make you and me, my dear, much-sought-after advisors. We may or may not be able to get Tom back unhurt. I vow the gods a hundred Blue Giant seabeasts if we do! But we’ll be free, even powerful.

“Or so I hope. We’ve nothing to go on but hope. And courage and wits and endurance. Have you those, Yasmin? Your life was too easy until now. But he asked me to care for you.

“You’ll have to help. Our first and foremost job is to get out of Hanno. And I don’t speak their damned language for diddly squat. You’ll talk for both of us. Can you? We’ll plan a story. Then, if and when you see there must be a false note in it, you’ll have to cover—at once—with no ideas from me. Can you do that, Yasmin? You must!”

—But conference was perforce by single words, signs, sketches in the red dirt. It went slowly. And it was repeated, over and over, in every possible way, to make certain—they understood each other.

In the end, however, Yasmin nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I will try, as God gives me strength… and as you do.” The voice was almost inaudible, and the eyes she turned on the bigger, older woman were dark with awe.

In midafternoon they reached a farm. Its irregular fields were enclosed by forest, through which a cart track ran to join a dirt road that, in turn, twisted over several kilometers until it entered the fisher village.

Dagny spent minutes peering from a thicket. Beside her, Yasmin tried to guess what evaluations the Krakener was making. I should begin to learn these ways of staying alive, the Sassanian thought. More is involved than my own welfare. I don’t want to remain a burden on my companions, an actual danger to them.

And to think, not one year ago I took for granted the star rovers were ignorant, dirty, cruel, quarrelsome barbarians!

Yasmin had been taught about philosophic objectivity, but she was too young to practice it consistently. Her universe having been wrecked, herself cast adrift, she naturally seized upon the first thing that felt like a solid rock and began to make it her emotional foundation. And that thing happened to be Roan Tom and Dagny Od’s-daughter.

Not that she had intellectual illusions. She knew very well that the Krakeners had come to help the Shah of Sassania because the Pretender was allied with enemies of theirs. And she knew that, if successful, they would exact good pay. She had heard her father grumble about it.

Nevertheless, the facts were: First, compatriots of hers, supposedly civilized, supposedly above the greed and short-sightedness that elsewhere had destroyed civilization… had proven themselves every bit as animalistic. Second, the star-rover garrison in Anushirvan turned out to be jolly, well-scrubbed, fairly well-behaved. Indeed, they were rather glamorous to a girl who had never been past her planet’s moon. Third, they had stood by their oaths, died in their ships and at their guns, for her alien people. Fourth, two of them had saved her life, and offered her the best and most honorable way they could think of to last out her days. Fifth (or foremost?), Tom was now her husband.

She was not exactly infatuated with him. A middle-aged, battle-beaten, one-eyed buccaneer had never entered her adolescent dreams. But he was kind in his fashion, and a’skillful lover, and… and perhaps she did care for him in a way beyond friendship… if he was alive—oh, let him be alive!

In any event, here was Dagny. She certainly felt grief like a sword in her. But she hid it, planned, guided, guarded. She had stood in the light of a hundred different suns, had warred, wandered, been wife and mother and living sidearm. She knew everything worth knowing (what did ancient texts count for?) except one language. And she was so brave that she trusted her life to what ability an awkward weakling of a refugee might possess.

Please don’t let me fail her.

Thus Yasmin looked forth too and tried to make inferences from what she saw.

The house and outbuildings were frame, not large, well-built but well-weathered. Therefore they must have stood here for a good length of time. Therefore Imperial construction methods—alloy, prestressed concrete, synthetics, energy webs—had long been out of general use in these parts, probably everywhere on Nike. That primitiveness was emphasized by the agromech system.

A couple of horses drew a haycutter. It also was wooden; even the revolving blades were simply edged with metal. From its creaking and bouncing, the machine had neither wheel bearings nor springs. A man drove it. Two half-grown boys, belike his sons, walked after. They used wooden-tined rakes to order the windrows. The people, like the animals, were of long slim deep-chested build, brown-haired and fair-complexioned. Their garments were coarsely woven smock and trousers.

No weapons showed, which suggested that the bay region was free of bandits and vendattas. Nevertheless Dagny did not approach. Instead, she led a cautious way back into the woods and thence toward the house, so that the buildings screened off view of the hayfield.

The Ki-akener woman scowled. “Why?” she muttered.

“Why what… my lady?”

“Why make—” Dagny’s hands imitated whirling blades. “Here. Planet… canted?… little. No cold?”

“Oh. Do you mean, why do they bother making hay? Well, there must be times when their livestock can’t pasture.”

Dagny understood. Her nod was brusque. “Why that ?”

“Um-m-m… oh, dear, let me think. Lord Tom explained to me what he—what you two had learned about this planet. Yes. Not much axial tilt. I suppose not an unusually eccentric orbit. So the seasons oughtn’t to be very marked. And we are in a rather low latitude anyway, on a seacoast at that. It should never get too cold for grass. Too dry? No, this is midsummer time. And, well, they’d hardly export hay to other areas, would they?”

Dagny shrugged.

It is such a strange world, Yasmin thought. All wrong. Too dense. That is, if it had a great many heavy metals, humans would never have settled here permanently. So what makes it dense should be a core of iron, nickel and things, squeezed into compact quantum states. The kind that terrestroid planets normally have. Yes, and the formation of a true core causes tectonic processes, vulcanism, the outgassing of a primitive atmosphere and water. Later we get chemical evolution, life, photosynthesis, free oxygen.

But Nike is too small for that! It’s Mars type. We have a Mars type planet in our own system—oh, lost and loved star that shines upon Sassania—and it’s got a bare wisp of unbreathable air. Professor Nasruddin explained to us. If a world is small, it has weak gravity. So the differential migration of elements down toward the center, that builds a distinct core, is too slow. So few gas molecules get unlocked from mineral combination by heat… Nike isn’t possible!

(How suddenly, shockingly real came back to her the lecture hall, and the droning voice, young heads bent above notebooks, sunlight that streamed in through arched windows, and the buzz of bees, odor of roses, a glimpse of students strolling across a greensward that stretched between beautiful buildings.)

Dagny’s fingers clamped about Yasmin’s arm. “Heed! Fool!”

Yasmin started from her reverie. They were almost at the house. “Heavens! I’m sorry.”

“Talk well.” Dagny’s voice was bleak with doubt of her.

Yasmin swallowed and stepped forth into the yard. She felt dizzy. The knocking of her heart came remote as death. Penned cows, pigs, fowl were like things in a dream. There was something infinitely horrible about the windmill that groaned behind the barn.

Neither shot nor shout met her. The door opened a crack, and the woman who peered out did so fearfully. Why, she’s nervous of us!

Relief passed through Yasmin in a wave of darkness. But an odd, alert calm followed. She perceived with utter clarity. Her thoughts went in three or four directions at once, all coherent. One chain directed her to smile, extend unclenched hands, and say: “Greeting to you, good lady.” Another observed that the boards of the house were not nailed but pegged together. A third paid special heed to the windmill. It too was almost entirely of wood, with fabric sails. She saw that it pumped water into an elevated cistern, whence wooden pipes ran to the house and a couple of sheds. Attachments outside one of the latter indicated that there the water, when turned on, drove various machines, like the stone quern she could see.

No atomic or electric energy, then. Nor even solar or combustion power. And yet the knowledge of these things existed: if not complete, then sufficient to make aircraft possible, radio, occasional motorships, doubtless some groundcars. Why was it no longer applied by the common people? The appearance of this farm and of the fisher village as seen from a distance suggested moderate prosperity. The Engineer’s rule could not be unduly harsh.

Well, the answer must be, Nike’s economy had collapsed so far that hardly anyone could afford real power equipment.

But why not? Sunlight, wood, probably coal and petroleum were abundant. A simple generator, some batteries… Such things took metal. A broken-down society might not have the resources to extract much… Nonsense! Elements like iron, copper, lead, and uranium were surely simple to obtain, even after a thousand years of industrialization. Hadn’t Dagny, who knew, said this was a young planet? Weren’t young planets metal-rich?

Meanwhile the woman mumbled, “Day. You’re from outcountry?”

“Yes,” Yasmin said. No use trying to conceal that. Quite apart from accent and garments (the Hannoan woman wore a broad-sleeved embroidered blouse and a skirt halfway to her ankles), they—were not of the local racial type. But it was presumably not uniform over the whole planet. One could play on a peasantry’s likely ignorance of anything beyond its own neighborhood.

“I am from Kraken,” Yasmin said. “My friend is from Sassania.” If no one on those comparatively cosmopolitan planets had heard of Nike, vice versa was certain. “We were flying on a mission when our aircraft crashed in the hills.”

“That… was the flare… noises… this early-day?” the woman asked. Yasmin confirmed it. The woman drew breath and made a shaky sign in the air. “High ‘Uns I thank! We feared, we, ’twas them come back.”

Obvious who “they” were, and therefore impossible to inquire about them. A little hysterical with relief, the wife flung wide her door. “Enter you! Enter you! I call the men.”

“No need, we thank you,” Yasmin said quickly. The fewer who saw them and got a chance later to wonder and talk about them, the better. “Nor time. We must hurry. Do you know of our countries?”

“Well, er, far off.” The woman was embarrassed. Yasmin noted that the room behind her was neat, had a look of primitive well-being—but how primitive! Two younger children stared half frightened from an inner doorway. “Yes, far, and I, poor farm-wife, well, hasn’t so much as been to the Silva border—”

“That’s the next country?” Yasmin pounced.

“Why… next cavedorn, yes, ‘tother side of the High Sawtooths east’ard… Well, we’re both under the Emp’ror, but they do say as the Prester of Silva’s not happy with our good Engineer… You! A-travel like men!”

“They have different customs in our part of the world,” Yasmin said. “More like the Empire. Not your Empire. The real one, the Terran Empire, when women could do whatever a man might.” That was a safe claim. Throughout its remnants, no one questioned anything wonderful asserted about the lost Imperium—except, perhaps, a few unpleasant scholars, who asked why it had fallen if it had been so great. “Yes, we’re from far parts. My friend speaks little Anglic. They don’t, in her country.” That was why Dagny, clever Dagny, had said they should switch national origins. Krakener place names sounded more Anglic than Sassanian ones did, and Yasmin needed a ready-made supply.

“We have to get on with our mission as fast as possible,” she said. “But we know nothing about these lands.”

“Storm blow you off track?” the woman queried. As she relaxed, she became more intelligent. “Bad storm-time coming, we think. Lots rain already. Hope the hay’s not ruined before it dries.”

“Yes, that’s what happened.” Thank you, madam, for inventing my explanation. Yasmin could not resist probing further the riddle of Nike. “Do you really expect many storms?”

One child hustled after his father while they went in and took leather-covered chairs. The woman made a large to-do about coffee and cakes. Her name was Elanor, she said, and her husband was Petar Landa, a freeholder. One must not think them backwoods people. They were just a few hours from the town of Sea Gate, which lay nigh the Great Cave itself and was visited by ships from this entire coast. Yes, the Landa family went there often; they hadn’t missed a Founders’ Festival in ten years, except for the year after the friends came, when there had been none.

“You only needed a year to recover from something like that ?” Yasmin exclaimed.

Dagny showed alarm, laying a hand on the Sassanian’s and squeezing hard. Elanor Landa was surprised. “Well, Sea Gate wasn’t hit. Not that important. Nearest place was… I forgot, all the old big cities went, they say, bombed after being looted, but seems to me I heard Terrania was nearest to Hanno. Far off, though, and no man I know was ever there, because ’twas under the Mayor of Bollen and he wasn’t any camarado to us western cavedoms, they say—”

Yasmin saw her mistake. Unthinkingly, she had taken “year” to mean a standard, Terran year. It came the more natural to her because Sassania’s wasn’t very different. Well, thought the clarified brain within her, we came here to get information that might help us escape. And surely, if we’re to pretend to be Nikeans, we must know how the planet revolves.

“I’ve forgotten,” she said. “Exactly when was the attack?”

Elanor was not startled. Such imprecision was common in a largely illiterate people. Indeed, it was somewhat astonishing that she should say, “A little over five years back. Five and a quarter, abs’lut, come Petar’s father’s, birthday. I remember, for we planned a feast, and then we heard the news. We had radio news then. Everyone was so scared. Later I saw one black ship roar over us, and waited for my death, but it just went on,”

“I think we must use a different calendar from you in Kraken,” Yasmin said. “And—being wealthier, you understand—not that Hanno isn’t—but we did suffer worse. We lost records and—Well, let’s see if Kraken and Sassania were attacked on the same day you heard about it. That was… let me think… dear me, now, how many days in a year?”

“What? Why, why, five hundred and ninety-one.”

Yasmin allayed Elanor’s surprise by laughing: “Of course. I was simply trying to recollect if an intercalary date came during the period since.”

“A what?”

“You know. The year isn’t an exact number of days long. So they have to put in an extra day or month or something, every once in a while.” That was a reasonable bet.

It paid off, too. Elanor spoke of an extra day every eleventh Nikean year. Yasmin related how in Kraken they added a month—“What do you call the moons hereabouts?… I mean by a month, the time it takes for them both to get back to the same place in the sky… We add an extra one every twentieth year.” Her arithmetic was undoubtedly wrong, but who was going to check? The important point was that Nike circled its sun in 591 days of 25.5 hours each, as near as made no difference.

And hadn’t much, in the way of seasons, but did suffer from irregular, scarcely predictable episodes when the sun grew noticeably hotter or cooler.

And was poor in heavy metals. Given all the prior evidence, what Yasmin wormed from the chattersome Elanor was conclusive. Quite likely iron oxides accounted for the basic color. But they were too diffuse to be workable. Metals had never been mined on this globe; they were obtained electrochemically from the sea and from clays. (Aluminum, beryllium, magnesium and the like; possibly a bit of heavy elements too, but only a bit. For the most part, iron, copper, silver, uranium, etc., had been imported from outsystem, in exchange for old-fashioned Terrestrial agroproducts that must have cornmanded good prices on less favored worlds. This would explain why, to the very present, Nike had such a pastoral character.)

The Empire fell. The starships came less and less often. Demoralization ruined the colonies in their turn; planets broke up politically; in the aftermath, most industry was destroyed, and the social resources were no longer there to build it afresh. Today, on Nike, heavy metals were gotten entirely through reclaiming scrap. Consquently they were too expensive for anything but military and the most vital civilian uses. Even the lighter elements came dear; some extractor-plants remained, but not enough.

Elanor did not relate this directly. But she didn’t need to. Trying to impress her distinguished guests, she made a parade of setting an aluminum coffeepot on the ceramic stove and mentioning the cost. (A foreigner could plausibly ask what that amounted to in real wages. It was considerable.) And, yes, Petar’s grandmother had had a lot of ironware in her kitchen. When he inherited, Petar was offered enormous sums for his share. But he had it made into cutting-edge implements. He cared less about money than about good tools, Petar did. Also for his wife. See, ladies, see right here, I use a real steel knife.

“Gold,” Dagny said, low and harsh in Yasmin’s ear. “Animals, buy, ride.”

The younger girl jerked to alertness. Tired, half lulled by Elanor’s millwheel voice, she had drifted off into contemplation. Dagny said this was a young world. Nevertheless it was metal-poor. The paradox had an answer. This system could have formed in the galactic halo, where stars were few and the interstellar dust and gas were thin, little enriched. Yes, that must be the case. It had drifted into this spiral arm… But wouldn’t it, then, have an abnormal proper motion? Tom hadn’t mentioned observing any such thing. Nor had he said there was anything peculiar about Nike’s own orbit. Yet he had remarked on less striking facts…

“Tell! Buy!”

Yasmin nodded frantically. “I understand. I understand.” They carried a number of Sassanian gold coins. In an age when interstellar currency and credit had vanished, the metal had resumed its ancient economic function. The value varied from place to place, but was never low, and should be fabulous on Nike.

“Good lady,” Yasmin said, “we are grateful for your kindness. But we have imposed too much. We should not take any of your men away from the hayfields when storms may be coming. If you will spare us two horses, we can make our own way to Vale and thence, of course, to your Engineer.”

Like fun we will! We’ll turn east. Maybe we’ll ride horseback maybe we’ll take passage on a river boat—whatevei—looks safest—but we’re bound for his enemy, the Prater of Silva!

“We’ll pay for them,” Yasmin said. “Our overlords provided us well with money. See.” She extended a coin. “Will this buy two horses and their gear?”

Elanor gasped. She made a sign again, sat down and fanned herself. Her youngest child sensed his mother’s agitation and whimpered.

“Is that gold?” she breathed. “Wait. Till Petar comes. He comes soon. We ask him.”

That was logical. But suppose the man got suspicious. Yasmin glanced back at Dagny. The Krakener made an imperceptible gesture. Beneath their coveralls were holstered energy weapons.

No! We can’t slaughter a whole, helpless family! I hope we won’t need to.

I won’t! Not for anything!

Tom reached the fire-control turret as two aircraft peeled off their squadron and dove.

The skyview was full of departing stormclouds, tinged bloody with dawn. Against them, his space-armored women looked tiny. Not so their hunters. Those devilfish shapes swelled at an appalling, speed. Tom threw himself into a manual-operation seat and punched for Number Two blastcannon. A cross-hair screen lit for him with what that elevated weapon “saw.” He twisted verniers. The auxiliary motors whirred. The vision spun giddily. There… the couple was separating… one to keep guard on him, its mate in a swoop after Dagny and Yasmin. Tom got the latter centered and pressed the discharge button.

The screen stepped down the searing brightness of the energy bolt. Through the open manlock crashed the thunderclap that followed. The Hannoan craft exploded into red-hot shards that rained down upon the trees.

“Gotcha!” Torn exulted. He fired two or three more times, raking toward the other boat where it hung on its negafield some fifty meters aloft. His hope was to scare it off and bluff its mates into holding their bombs—or whatever they had to drop on him; He didn’t want to kill again. The first shot had looked necessary if the girls were to live. But why add to the grudge against him?

Not that he expected to last another five minutes.

No! Wait! Tom swiveled around to another set of controls. Why hadn’t he thought of this at once?

The nearby pilot had needed a couple of seconds to recover from the shock of what happened to his companion. Now he was bound hastily back upward. He was too late. Tom focused a tractor beam on him. Its generator hummed with power. Ozone stung the nostrils; rewiring job needed, a distant aspect of Tom took note. Most of him was being a fisherman. He’d gotten his prey, and on a heavy line—the force locked onto the air-boat was meant to grab kilotons moving at cosmic Veloities—but his catch was a man-eater. ‘And he wanted to land it just so.

The vessel battled futilely to escape. Tom pushed it down near Firedrake’s hull, into the jumble of broken trees and canebrake that his own landing had made. Their branches probably damaged wings and fuselage, but their leaves, closing in above, hid any details of what was going on from the pilots overhead. Having jammed his capture against a fence of logs and brush, he held it there with a beam sufficiently narrow that the cockpit canopy wouldn’t be pulled shut. Quickly, with a second tractor-pressor projection, he rearranged the tangle in the clearing, shifting trunks, snapping limbs and tossing them about, until he had a fairly good view through a narrow slot that wouldn’t benefit observers in heaven. He trusted they were too poorly instrumented—or too agitated, or both—to see how useful the arrangement was for him, and would take the brief stirring they noticed as a natural result of a crash, heaped wood collapsing into a new configuration.

Thereafter he, left the turret and made his way to the forward manlock. It was rather high off the ground; the access ladder had automatically extruded, plunging down into the foliage that fluttered shadowy’arotind the base of the hull. Torn placed Shimself in the chamber, visible from the sky, hardly noticeable from beneath, and studied his fish more closely.

Fish: yes, indeed. In two senses.

The pilot was that youthful squadron leader with “whom he had spoken before. Tom tuned his helmet radio in on the frantic talk that went between the downed man, his companions and Karol Weyer in Sea Gate. He gathered they had no prehensile force-beams on Nike, and only vaguely inferred the existence of such things from their experience with “friends.”

Friends?-The raiders from space? Toni scowled.

But he couldn’t stoplo think beyond this moment, His notion had been, to take a man and an aircraft—the latter probably the, more highly valuea—as hostages. They’d not nuke him now. But as for what followed, he must play his cards as he drew them. At worst, he’d gotten the girls free. Perhaps he could strike some kind of bargain, though it was hard to tell why any Nikean should feel bound to keep a promise made to an outworlder. At best…

Hoy!

The canopy slid back. Tom got a look at the plane’s interior. There was room for two in the cockpit, if one scrooched and aft of the seat was a rack of—something or other, he couldn’t see what, but it didn’t seem welded in place. His pulse leaped.

The pilot emerged, in a dive flattening himself at once behinds a fallen tree. Weyer had said ther,several fruitless attempts lo get a reply from Tom: “You in the ship! You killed one of ours. Another, and your whole ship goes…Do you seize me?” (That must mean “understand?”) Next, to the flyboy: “Fish Aran, use own discretion.”

So the young man, deciding he couldn’t sit where he was.forever, was trying to reach the woods. That took nerve. Tom laid his telescope to his good—eye—his faceplate was open—and searched out details. Fiber helmet, as already noted; green tunic with cloth insignia, no metal; green trousers tucked into leather boots; a sidearm, but no indication of a portable communicator or, for that matter, a watch. Tom made sure his transmitter was off, trod a little further out in the lock chamber, and bawled from lungs that had often shouted against a gale at sea:

“Halt where you are! Or I’ll chop the legs from under you!”

The pilot had been about to scuttle from his place. He froze. Slowly, he raised his gaze. Tom’s armored shape was apparent to him, standing in the open lock, but not discernible by his mates. Likewise the blaster Tom aimed. The pilot’s hand hovered at the butt of his own weapon.

“Slack off, son,” the captain advised. “You wouldn’t come near me with that pipgun—I said ‘pip,’ not even ‘pop’—before I sizzled you. And I don’t want to. C’mon and let’s talk. That’s right; on your fept; stroll over here and use this nice ladder.”

The pilot obeyed, though his scramble across the log jam was hardly a stroll. As he started up, Tom said: “They’ll see in a minute what you’re doin’, I s’pose, when you come above the foliage… Belay, there, I can see you quite well already… I want you to draw your gun, as if you’d decided to come aboard and reconnoiter ‘stead o’ heaciin’ for the nearest beer hall. Better not try shootin’ at me, though. My friends’d cut you down.”

The Hannoan paused a moment, rigid with outrage, before he yielded. His face, approaching, showed pale and wet in the first light. He swung himself into the lock chamber. For an instant, he and Tom stood with guns almost in each other’s bellies. The spaceman’s gauntleted left hand struck like a viper, edge on, and the Nikean weapon clattered to the deck.

“You—you broke my wrist!” The pilot lurched back, clutching his arm and wheezing.

“I think not. I gauge these things pretty good if I do say so myself. And I do. March on ahead o’ me, please.” Tom conducted his prisoner into the passageway, gathering the fallen pistol en route. It was a slug-thrower, ingeniously ‘constructed with a minimum of steel. Tom found the magazine release and pressed it one-handed. The clip held ten high-caliber bullets. But what the hoo-hah! The cartridge cases were wood, the slugs appeared to be some heavy ceramic, with a mere skirt of soft metal for the rifling in the barrel to get a grip on!

“No wonder you came along meek-like,” Tom said. “You never could’ve dented me.”

The prisoner looked behind him. Footfalls echoed emptily around his words. “I think you are alone,” he said.

“Aye-ya. I told you my chums could wiff you… if they were present. In here.” Tom indicated the fire control turret “Sit yourself. Now I’m goin’ t’other side o’ this room and shuck my armor, which is too hot and heavy for informal wear. Don’t get ideas about plungin’ across the deck at me. I can snatch my blaster and take aim quicker’n that.”

The young man crouched in a chair and shuddered. His eyes moved like a trapped animal’s, around and around the crowding machines. “What do you mean to do?” he rattled. “You can’t get free. You’re alone. Soon the Engineer’s soldiers come, with ‘tillery, and ring you.”

“I know. We should be gone by then, however. Look here, uh, what’s your name?”

An aristocrat’s pride firmed the voice. “Yanos Aran, third son of Rober Aran, who’s chief computerman to Engineer Weyer’s self. I am a fish in the air force of Hanno—and you are a dirty friend!”

“Maybe so. Maybe not.” Tom stripped fast, letting the pieces lie where they fell. He hated to abandon his suit, but it was too bulky and perhaps too detectable for his latest scheme.

“Why not? Didn’t you business Evin Sato?”

“You mean that plane I gunned?”

“Yes. Evin Sato was my camarado.”

“Well, I’m sorry about that, but wasn’t he fixin’ to shoot two o’ my people? We came down frien—intendin’ no harm, and you set on us like hungry eels. I don’t want to hurt you, Yanos, lad. In fact, I hope betwixt us we can maybe settle this whole affair. But—” Tom’s features assumed their grimmest look which had terrified stronger men than Aran—“you try any fumblydiddles and you’ll find out things about friendship that your mother never told you.”

The boy seemed to crumple. “I… yes, I slave me to you,” he whispered.

He wouldn’t stay crumpled long, Tom knew. He must be the scion of a typical knightly class. Let him recover from the dismay of the past half hour and the unbalancing effect of being surrounded by unknown power and he’d prove a dangerous pet. It was necessary to use him while he remained useable.

Wherefore Tom, having peeled down to coveralls, gave him his orders in a few words. A slight demurral fetched a brutal cuff on the cheek. “And if I shoot you with this blaster, short range low intensity,” Tom added, “you won’t have a neat hole drilled through your heart. You’ll be cooked alive, medium rare, so you’ll be some days about dying. Seize me?”

He didn’t know if he’d really carry out his threat, come worst to worst. Probably not.

Having switched off the tractor beam, he brought Aran far down into the ship, to an emergency lock near the base. It was well hidden by leaves. The vague dawn-light aided concealment. They crept forth, and thence to the captured aircraft.

It had taken a beating, Tom saw. The wingtips were crumpled, the fuselage punctured. (The covering was mostly some fluorosynthetic. What a metal shortage they must have here!) But it ought to fly anyhow, after a fashion. Given a gravity drive, however weak, airfoils were mainly for auxiliary lift and control.

“In we go,” Tom said. He squeezed his bulky form behind Aran’s seat so that it concealed him. The blaster remained in his fist, ready to fire through the back.

But there was no trouble. Aran followed instructions. He called his squadron: “—Yes, you’re right, I did ‘cide I’d try looking, at the ship. And no one! None aboard. ‘Least, none I saw. Maybe robos fought us, or maybe the rest of the crew got away, on foot, not seen. I found a switch, looked like a main powerline breaker, and opened it. Maybe now I can rise.”

And he started the engine. The airboat climbed, wobbling on its damaged surfaces. A cheer sounded from the receiver. Tom wished he could see the face in the screen, but he dared not risk being scanned himself.

“You land, if Engineer Weyer approves,” Aran directed. “Go aboard. Be careful. Me, best I take my craft back to base immediately.”

Tom had figured that would be a natural move for a pilot on Nike, even a squadron leader. A plane was obviously precious. It couldn’t get to the repair shop too fast.

He must now hope that Aran’s expression and tone didn’t give him away. The “fish” was no actor. But everyone was strung wire-taut. Nobody noticed how much more perturbed this fellow was. After a few further words had passed, Man signed off and started west.

“Keep low,” Tom said. “Like you can’t get much altitude. Soon’s you’re out o’ their sight here, swing north. Find us a good secret place to land. I think we got a bucketful to say to each other, no?”

One craft was bound eagerly down. The rest stayed at hover. They’d, soon learn that the spaceship was, indeed, deserted. Hence, they wouldn’t suspect what had happened to Aran until he failed, to report. However, that wasn’t a long, time. He, Roan Tom, had better get into a bolt-hole quick! .

The volcano’s northern side was altogether wild. On the lower flanks, erosion had created, a rich lava soil and vegetation was dense. For some reason it was principally native Nikean, dominated by primitive but tree-sized “ferns.” An antigrav flyer could push its way under their soft branches and come to rest beneath the overhang of a cliff, camouflaged against aerial search.

Tom climbed out of the cockpit and stretched to uncramp himself. The abri was rough stone at his back, the forest brooded shadowy before him. Flecks of copper sunlight on bluish-green fronds and the integuments of bumbling giant pseudo-insects made the scene look as if cast in metal. But water rilled nearby, and the smells of damp growth were organic enough.

“C’mon, son. Relax with me,” Tom invited. “I won’t eat you. ‘Specially not if you’ve packed along a few sandwiches.”

“Food? No.” Yanos Aran spoke as stiffly as he moved.

“Well, then we’ll have to make do with what iron rations I got in my pockets.” Tom sighed. He flopped down on a chair-sized boulder, took out pipe and tobacco pouch, and consoled himself with smoke.

He needed consolation. He was a fugitive on an un—known planet. His ship had been taken, his wives were out of touch; an attempt to raise Dagny on the plane’s transmitter, using a Krakener military band, had brought silence. She must already have discarded her telespace armor.

“And all ‘count of a stupid lingo mistake!” he groaned. Aran sat down on another rock and regarded him with eyes in which alertness was replacing fear. “You say you are not truly our friend?”

“Not in your sense. Look, where I come from, the Aran word ‘friend’ means… well, fellow you like, and who likes you. When I told your Engineer we were friends, I wanted him to understand we didn’t aim him any harm, in fact we could do good business with him.”

“Business!” Aran exploded.

“Whoops-la. Sorry. Said the wrong thing again, didn’t I?”

“I think,” Aran replied slowly “what you have in mind is what we would call “change.’ You wanted to ‘change goods and services with our people. And to you, a ‘friend’ is what we call a ‘camarado.’ ”

“Reckon so. What’re your definitions?”

“A friend is a space raider such as did business with our planet some five years agone. They destroyed the last great cities we had left from the Terran Empire days, and none knows how many million Nikeans they killed.”

“Ah, now we’re gettin’ somewhere. Let’s straighten out for me what did happen.”

Aran’s hostility had not departed, but it had diminished. He was intelligent and willing to cooperate within the limits of loyalty to his own folk. Information rushed out of him.

Nike did not appear to be unique, except in its planetology. Tom asked about that. Aran was surprised. Was his world so unusual per se?

He knew only vague traditions and a few fragmentary written accounts of other planetary systems. Nike was discovered and colonized five hundred-odd years ago—about a thousand standard years. It was always a backwater. Fundamentally agricultural because of its shortage of heavy metals, it had no dense population, no major libraries or schools. Thus, when the Empire fell apart, knowledge vanished more quickly and thoroughly here than most places. Nikean society disintegrated; what had been an Imperial sub-province became hundreds of evanescent kingdoms, fiefs and tribes.

The people were on their way back, Aran added defiantly. Order and a measure of, prosperity had been restored in the advanced countries. As yet, they paid mere lip service to an “Emperor,” but the concept of global government did now, exist, Technology was improving. Ancient apparatus was being repaired and put back into service, or being reproduced on the basis of what diagrams and manuals could be found. Schemes had been broached for making interplanetary ships. Some dreamers had hoped that in time the Nikeans might end their centuries-long isolation themselves, by re-inventing the lost theory and practice of hyperdrive.

For that, of course, as for much else, the tinkering of technicians was insufficient. Basic scientific research must be done. But this was also slowly being started. Had not Aran remarked that his father was head cornputerman in the Engineer’s court? He used a highly sophisticated machine which had survived to the present day and which two generations of modern workers had finally learned how to operate.

Its work at present was mainly in astronomy. While some elementary nucleonics had been preserved through the dark ages—being essential to the maintenance of what few atomic power plants rcmaincd—practically all information about the stars had vanished. Today’s astronomers had learned that their sun (as distinguished from their planet) was not typical of its neighborhood. It was unpredictably variable, and not even its ground state could be fitted onto the main sequence diagram. No one had yet developed a satisfactory theory as to what made this sun abnormal, but the consensus was that it must be quite a young star.

One geologist had proposed checking this idea by establishing the age of the planet. Radioactive minerals should provide a clock. The attempt had failed, partly because of the near-nonexistence of isotopes with suitable half-lives and partly, Tom suspected, because of lousy laboratory technique. But passing references in old books did seem to confirm the idea held by latter-day theorists, that stars and planets condensed out of interstellar gas and dust. If so, Nike’s sun could be very new, as, cosmic time went, and not yet fully stabilized.

“Aye, Ed guess that myself,” Tom nodded.

“Good! Important to be sure. You seize, can we make a mathematical model of our sun, then we can predict its variations. Right? And we will never predict our weather until then. Unforeseen storms are our greatest natural woe. Hanno’s self, a southerly land, can get killing frosts any season.”

“Well, don’t take my authority, son. I’m no scientist. The Imperialists must’ve known for sure what kind o’star they had here. And a scholar of astronomy, from a planet where they still keep universities and such, should could tell you. But not me.” Tom struck new fire to his pipe. “Uh, we’d better stay with less fun topics. Like those ‘friends.’ ”

Aran’s enthusiasm gave way to starkness. He could relate little. The raiders had not come in any large fleet, a dozen ships at most. But there was no effective opposition to them. They smashed defenses from space, landed, plundered, raped, tortured, burned, during a nightmare of weeks. After sacking a major city, they missiled it. They were human, their language another dialect of Anglic. Whether in sarcasm or hypocrisy or because of linguistic change, they described themselves to the Nikeans as “your friends, come to do business with you.” Since “friend” and “business” had long dropped out of local speech, Tom saw the origin of their present meaning here.

“Do you know who they might have been?” Aran asked. His tone was thick with unshed tears.

“No. Not sure. Space’s full o’ their kind.” Tom refrained from adding that he too wasn’t above a bit of piracy on occasion. After all, he observed certain humane rules with respect to those whom he relieved of their portable goods. The really bestial types made his flesh crawl, and he’d exterminated several gangs of them with pleasure.

“Will they return, think you?”

“Well probly not. I’d reckon they destroyed your big population centers to make sure no one else’d be tempted to come here and start a base that might be used against ’em. They bein’ too few to conquer a whole world, you see. ‘Course, I wouldn’t go startin’ major industries and such again without husky space defenses.”

“No chance. We hide instead,” Aran said bitterly. “Most leaders dare allow naught that might draw other friends. Radio a bare minimum; no rebuilding of cities; yes, we crawl back to our dark age and cower.”

“I take it you don’t pers’nally agree with that policy.”

Aran shrugged. “What matter my thoughts? I am but a third son. The chiefs of the planet have ‘cided. They fought a war or two, forcing the rest to go with them in this. I myself bombed soldieers of Silva, when its Prester was made stop building a big atomic power plant. Our neighbor cavedom! And we had to fight them, not the friends!”

Tom wasn’t shocked. He’d seen human politics get more hashed than that. What pricked his ears up was the information that, right across the border, lived a baron who couldn’t feel overly kindly toward Engineer Weyer.

“You can seize, now, why we feared you,” Aran said.

“Aye-ya. A sad misunderstandin’. If you hadn’t been so bloody impulsive, though—if you’d been willin’ to talk—we’d’ve quick seen what the lingo problem was.”

“No! You were the ones who refused talk. When the Engineer called on you to be slaves—”

“What the muck did he expect us to do after that?” Tom rumbled. “Wear his chains?”

“Chains? Why… wait—oh-oh!”

“Oh-oh, for sure,” Tom said. “Another little shift o’ meanin’, huh? All right, what does ‘slave’ signify to you?”

It turned out that, on Nike, to be “enslaved” was nothing more than to be taken into custody: perhaps as a prisoner, perhaps merely for interrogation or protection. In Hanno, as in every advanced Nikean realm, slavery in Tom’s sense of the word had been abolished a lifetime ago.

The two men stared at each other. “Events got away from both sides,” Tom said. “Atter what’d happened when last spacemen came, you were too spooked to give us a chanCe. You reckoned you had to get us under guard right away. And we reacted to that. We’ve seen a lot o’ cruelty and treachery. We couldn’t trust ourselves to complete strangers, ‘specially when they acted hostile. So… neither side gave the other time to think out the busi—the matter o’ word shift. If there’d been a few minutes’ pause in the action, I think I, at least, would’ve guessed the truth. I’ve seen lots o’ similar cases. But I never had any such pause, till now.”

He grinned and extended a broad hard hand. “All’s well that ends well, I’m told,” he said. “Let’s be camarados.”

Aran ignored the gesture. The face he turned to the outworlder was only physically youthful. “We cannot,” he said. “You wrecked a plane and stole another. Worse, you killed a man of ours.”

“But—well, self-defense!”

“I might pardon you,” Aran said. “I do not think the Engineer would or could. It is more than the damage you worked. More than the anger of the powerful Sato family, who like it not if a son of theirs dies unavenged because of a comic mix in s’mantics. It is the policy that he, Weyer’s self, strove to bring.”

“You ‘mean . nothin’ good can come from outer space… wall Nike off… treat anyone that comes as hostile… right?” Tom rubbed his chin and scowled sullenly.

Weyer was probably not too dogmatic, nor too tightly bound by the isolationist treaty, to change his mind in time. But Tom had scant time to spare. Every hour that passed, he and his womenfolk risked getting shot down by some hysteric. Also, a bunch of untrained Nikeans, pawing over his spaceship, could damage her beyond the capacity of this planet’s industry to repair.

Also, he was needed back on Kraken soon, or his power there would crumble. And that would be a mortally dangerous situation for his other wives, children, grandchildren, old and good comrades…

In short, there was scant value in coming to terms with Weyer eventually. He needed to reach agreement fast. And, after what had happened this day, he didn’t see how he could.

Well, the first thing he must do was reunite his party. Together, they might accomplish something. If nothing else, they could seek refuge in the adjacent country, Silva. Though that was doubtless no very secure place for them, particularly if Weyer threatened another war.

“You should slave yourself,” Aran urged. “Afterward you can talk.”

“As a prisoner—a slave—I’d have precious little bargainin’ leverage,” Tom said. “Considerin’ what that last batch o’ spacers did, I can well imagine we bein’ tortured till I cough up for free everything I’ve got to tell. S’posin’ Weyer himself didn’t want to treat me so inhospitable, he could break down anyhow under pressure from his court or his fellow bosses.”

“It may be,” Aran conceded, reluctantly, but too idealistic at his age to violate the code of his class and lie.

“Whereas if I can stay loose, I can try a little pressure o’ my own. I can maybe find somethin’ to offer that’s worth makin’ a deal with me. That’d even appease the Sato clan, hm?” Tom fumed on his pipe. “I’ve got to contact my women. Right away. Can’t risk their fallin’ into Weyer’s hands. If they do, he’s got me! Know any way to raise a couple o’ girls who don’t have a radio and ‘re doin’ their level best to disappear?”

Sunset rays turned the hilltop fiery. Farther down, the land was already blue with a dusk through which river, bay, and distant sea glimmered argent. Cloud banks towered in the east, blood-colored, dwarfing the Saw-tooth Mountains that marked Hanno’s frontier.

At the lowest altitude when this was visible—the highest to which a damaged, overloaded flyer could limp—the air was savagely cold. It wasn’t too thin for breathing; the atmosphere’s density gradient is less for small than for large planets. But it swept through the cracked canopy to sear Tom’s nostrils and numb his fingers on the board. Above the drone of the combustion powerplant, he heard Yano Aran’s teeth clatter. Stuffed behind the pilot chair, the boy might have tried to mug his captor. But he wasn’t dressed for this temperature and was chilled half insensible. Tom’s clothes were somewhat warmer. Besides, he felt he could take on any two Nikeans hand-to-hand.

The controls of the plane were simple to a man who’d used as wide a variety of machines as he. Trickiness came from the broken and twisted airfoil surfaces. And, of course, he must keep a watch for Weyer’s boys. He didn’t think they’d be aloft, nor that they would scramble and get here in the few minutes he needed. But you never knew. If one did show up maybe Tom could pot him with a lucky blast from the guns.

He swung through another carousel curve. That should be that. Now to skate away. He throttled the engine back. The megafield dropped correspondingly, and he went into a glide. But he was no longer emitting enough exhaust for a visible trail.

The tracks he had left were scribbled over half the sky. The sun painted them gold-orange against that deepening purple.

Abruptly, turbulence across the buckled delta wing gained mastery. The glide became a tailspin. Aran yelled.

“Hang on,” Tom said. “I can ride ’er.”

Crazily whirling, the dark land rushed at him. He stopped Aran’s attempt to grab the stick with a karate chop and concentrated on his altimeter. At the last possible moment, allowing for the fact that he must coddle this wreck lest he tear her apart altogether, he pulled out of his tumble. A prop, jet or rocket would never have made it, but you could do special things with grays if you had the knack in your fingers. Or whatever part of the anatomy it was.

Finally the plane whispered a few meters above the bay. Its riding lights were doused, and the-air here was too warm for engine vapor to condense. Tom believed his passage had a fair chance of going unnoticed.

Hills shouldered black around the water. Here and there among them twinkled house lamps. One cluster bespoke a village on the shore. Tom’s convoluted contrail was breaking up, but slowly. It glowed huge and mysterious, doubtless frightening peasants and worrying the military.

Aran stared at it likewise, as panic and misery left him. “I thought you wrote a message to your camarados,” tie said. “That’s no writing.”

“Couldn’t use your alphabet, son, seein’ I had to give ’em directions to a place with a local name. Could I, now? Even Karken’s letters look too much like yours. But those’re Momotaroan phonograms. Dagny can read ’em. I hope none o’ Weyer’s folk’ll even guess it is a note. Maybe they’ll think I went out o’ control tryin’ to escape and, after staggerin’ around a while, crashed… Now, which way is this rendezvous?”

“Rendez—oh. The togethering I advised. Follow the north shore eastward a few more kilos. At the end of a headland stands Orgino’s Cave.”

“You absolutely sure nobody’ll be there?”

“As sure as may be; and you have me for hostage. Orgino was a war chief of three hundred years agone. They said he was so wicked he must be in pact with the Wanderer, and to this day the commons think he walks the ruins of his cave. But it’s a landmark. Let your camarados ask shrewdly, and they can find how to get there with none suspecting that for their wish.”

The plane sneaked onward. Twilight was short in this thin air. Stars twinkled splendidly forth, around the coalsack of the Nebula. The outer moon rose, gradually from the eastern cloudbanks, almost full but its disk tiny and corroded-bronze dark. An auroral glow flickered. This far south? Well, Nike had a, fairly strong magnetic field—which, with the mean density, showed that it possessed the ferrous core it wasn’t supposed to—but not so much that charged solar particles couldn’t strike along its sharp curvature clear to the equator.

If they were highly energetic particles, anyhow. And they must be. Tom had identified enormous spots as well as flares on that ruddy sun disk. Which oughtn’t to be there! Not even when output was rising. A young star, its outer layers cool and reddish because they were still contracting shouldn’t have such intensity. Should it?

Regardless, Nike’s sun did.

Well, Tom didn’t pretend to know every kind of star. His travels had really not been so extensive, covering a single corner of the old Imperium, which itself had been insignificant compared to the whole galaxy. And his attention had naturally always been focused on more or less Sol-type stars. He didn’t know what a very young or very old or very large or very small sun was like in detail.

Most certainly he didn’t know what the effects of abnormal chemical composition might be. And the distribution of elements in this system was unlike that of any other Tom had ever heard about. Conditions on Nike bore out what spectroanalysis had indicated in space: impoverishment with respect to heavy elements. Since it had formed recently, the sun and its planets must therefore have wandered here from some different region. Its velocity didn’t suggest that. However, Tom hadn’t determined the galactic orbit with any precision. Besides, it might have been radically changed by a close encounter with another orb. Improbable as the deuce, yes, but then the whole crazy situation was very weird.

The headland loomed before him, and battlements against the Milky Way. Tom made a vertical landing in a courtyard. “All right.” His voice sounded jarringly loud.

“Now we got nothin’ much to do but wait.”

“What if they come not?” Aran asked.

“I’ll give ’em a day or two,” Tom said. “After that, we’ll see.” He didn’t care to dwell on the possibility. His unsentimental soul was rather astonished to discover how big a part of it Dagny had become. And Yasmin was a good kid, he wished her well.

He left the crumbling flagstones for a walk around the walls. Pseudo-moss grew damp and slippery on the parapet. Once mail-clad spearmen had tramped their rounds here, and the same starlight sheened on their helmets as tonight, or as in the still more ancient, vanished glory of the Empire, or the League before it, or—And what of the nights yet to come? Tom shied from the thought and loaded his pipe.

Several hours later, the nearer moon rose from the hidden sea; its apparent path was retrograde and slow. Although at half phase, with an angular diameter of a full degree it bridged the bay with mercury.

Rising at the half—local midnight, more or less—would the girls never show? He ought to get some sleep. His eyelids were sandy. Aran had long since gone to rest in the tumbledown keep. He must be secured, of course, before Tom dozed off . No. I couldn’t manage a snooze even if I tried. Where are you, Dagny?

The cold wind lulled, the cold waves lapped, a winged creature fluttered and whistled. Tom sat down where a portcullis had been and stared into the woods beyond.

There came a noise. And another. Branches rustled. Hoofbeats clopped. Tom drew his blaster and slid into the shadow of a tower. Two riders on horseback emerged from the trees. For a moment they were unrecognizable, unreal. Then the moon’s light struck Dagny’s tawny mane. Tom shouted.

Dagny snatched her own gun forth. But when she saw who lumbered toward her, it fell into the rime-frosted grass.

Afterward, in what had been a feasting hall, with a flashlight from the aircraft to pick faces out of night, they conferred. “No, we had no trouble,” Dagny said. “The _ farmers sold us those animals without any fuss.”

“If you gave him a thirty-gram gold piece, on this planet, I reckon so,” Tom said. “You could probly’ve gotten hiss house thrown into the deal. He’s bound to gossip about you, though.”

“That can’t be helped,” Dagny said. “Our idea was to keep traveling east and hide in the woods when anyone happened by. But we’d no strong hope, especially with that wide cultivated valley to get across. Tom, dear, when I saw your sky writing, it was the second best moment of my life.”

“What was the first?”

“You were involved there too,” she said. “Rather often, in fact.”

Yasmin stirred. She sat huddled on the floor, chilled, exhausted, wretched, though nonetheless drawing Aran’s appreciative gaze. “Why do you grin at each other?” she wailed. “We’re hunted!”

“Tell me more,” Tom said.

“What can we do?”

“You can shut up, for the gods’ sake, and keep out o’ my way!” he snapped impatiently. She shrank from him and knuckled her eyes.

“Be gentle,” Dagny said. “She’s only a child.”

“She’ll be a dead child if we don’t get out o’ here,” Tom retorted. “We got time before dawn to slip across the Silvan border in yon airboat. After that, we’ll have to play ’er as she lies. But I been pumpin’ my—shall I say, my friend, about politics and geography and such. I think with luck we got a chance o’ staying free.”

“What chance of getting our ship back, and repaired?” Dagny asked.

“Well_that don’t look so good, but maybe somethin’ll come down the slot for us. Meanwhile let’s move.”

They went back to the courtyard. The inner moon was so bright that no supplement was needed for the job on hand. This was to unload the extra fuel tanks, which were racked aft of the cockpit. The plane would lose cruising range, would indeed be unable to go past the eastern slope of the Sawtooths. But it would gain room for two passengers.

“You stay behind, natural,” Tom told Aran. “You been a nice lad, and here’s where I prove I never aimed at any hurt for you. Have a horse on me, get a boat from the village to Weyer’s place, tell him what happened—and to tell him we want to be his camarados and ‘change with him.”

“I can say it.” Aran shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I think no large use comes from my word.”

“The prejudice against spacemen—”

“And the damage you worked. How shall you repay that? Since ’tis been ‘cided there’s no good in space-faring, I expect your ship’11 be stripped for its metal.”

“Try, though,” Tom urged.

“Should you leave now?” Aran wondered. “Weather looks twisty.”

“Aye, we’d better, But thanks for frettin”bout it.”

A storm, Tom thought, was the least of his problems. True, conditions did look fanged about the mountains. But he could sit down and wait them out, once over the border, which ought to remain in the bare fringes of the tempest. Who ever heard of weather moving very far west, on the western seacoast of a planet with rotation like this? What was urgent was to get beyond Weyer’s pursuit.

Yasmin and Dagny fitted themselves into the rear fuselage as best they could, which wasn’t very. Tom took the pilot’s seat again. He waved good-by to Yanos Aran and gunned the engine. Overburdened as well as battered, the plane lifted sluggishly and made no particular speed. But it flew, and could be out of Hanno before dawn. That sufficed.

Joy at reunion, vigilance against possible enemies, concentration on the difficult task of operating his cranky vessel, drove weariness out of him. He paid scant attention to the beauties of the landscape sliding below, though they were considerable—mist-magical delta, broad sweep of valley, river’s sinuous glow, all white under the moons. He must be one with the wind that blew across this sleeping land.

And blew.

Harder.

The plane bucked. The noise around it shrilled more and more clamorous. Though the cloud wall above the mountains must be a hundred kilometers distant, it was suddenly boiling zenithward with unbelievable speed.

It rolled over the peaks and hid them. Its murk swallowed the outer moon and reached tendrils forth for the inner one. Lightning blazed in its caverns. Then the first raindrops were hurled against the plane. Hail followed, and the snarl of a hurricane.

East wind! Couldn’t be! Tom had no further chance to think. He was too busy staying alive.

As if across parsecs, he heard Yasrnin’s scream, Dagny’s profane orders that she curb herself. Rain and hail made the cockpit a drum, himself a cockroach trapped, between the skins. The wind was the tuba of marching legions. Sheathing ripped loose from wings and tail. Now and then he could see through the night, when lightning burned. The thunder was like bombs, one after the, next, a line of them seeking him out. What followed was doomsday blackness.

His instrument panel went dark. His altitude control stick waggled loose in his hand. The airflaps must be gone, the vessel whirled leaf-fashion on the wind. Tom groped until his fingers closed on the gray-drive knobs. By modulating fields and thrust beams, he could keep a measure of command. Just a measure; the powerplant had everything it could do to lift this weight, without guiding it. But let him get sucked down to earth, that was the end!

He must land somehow, and survive the probably hard impact. How?

The river flashed lurid beneath him. He tried to follow its course. Something real, in this raving night—There was no more inner moon, there were no more stars.

The plane groaned, staggered, and tilted on its side. The starboard wing was torn off. Had the port one gone too, Tom might have operated the fuselage as a kind of gravity sled. But against forces as unbalanced as now fought him, he couldn’t last more than a few seconds. Minutes, if he was lucky.

Must be back above the rivermouths, thought the tiny part of him that stood aside and watched the struggle of the rest. Got to set down easy-like. And find some kind o’ shelter. Yasmin wouldn’t last out this night in the open.

Harshly: Will she last anyway? Is she anything but a dangerous drag on us? I can’t abandon her. I swore her an oath, but I almost wish.

The sky exploded anew with lightnings and showed him a wide vista of channels among forested, swampy islands. Trees tossed and roared in the wind, but the streams were too narrow for great waves to build up and—Hoy!

Suddenly, disastrously smitten, a barge train headed from Sea Gate to the upriver towns had broken apart. In the single blazing moment of vision that he had, Tom saw the tug itself reel toward safety on the northern side of the main channel. Its tow was scattered, some members sinking, some flung around, and one—yes, driven into a tributary creek, woods and waterplants closing behind it, screening it.

Tom made his decision.

He hoped for nothing more than a bellyflop in the drink, a scramble to escape from the plane and a swim to the barge. But lightning flamed again and again, enormous sheets of it that turned every raindrop and hailstone into brass. And once he was down near the surface of that natural canal, a wall of trees on either side, he got some relief. He was actually able to land on deck. The barge had ended on a sandbar and lay solid and stable. Tom led his women from the plane. He and Dagny found some rope and lashed their remnant of a vehicle into place. The cargo appeared to be casks of petroleum. A hatch led below, to a cabin where a watchman might rest. Tom’s flashlight picked out bunk, chair, a stump of candle.

“We’re playin’ a good hand,” he said.

“For how long?” Dagny mumbled.

“Till the weather slacks off.” Tom shrugged. “What comes after that, I’m too tired to care. I don’t s’pose… gods, yes!” he whooped. “Here, on the shelf! A bottle—lenune sniff—aye-ya, booze! Got to be booze!” And he danced upon the deckboards till he cracked his pate on the low overhead.

Yasmin regarded him with a dull kind of wonder. “What are you so happy about?” she asked in Anglic. When he had explained, she slumped. “You can laugh… at that… tonight? Lord Tom, I did not know how alien you are to me.”

Through hours the storm continued.

They sat crowded together, the three of them, in the uneasy candlelight, which threw huge misshapen shadows across the roughness of bulkheads. Rather Dagny sat on the chair, Tom on the foot of the bunk, while Yasmin lay, The wind-noise was muffled down here, but the slap of water on hull came loud. From time to time, thunder cannonaded, or the barge rocked and grated on the sandbar.

Wet, dirty, haggard, the party looked at each other. “We should try to sleep,” Dagny said.

“Not while I got this bottle,” Tom said. “You do what you like. Me, though, I think wed better guzzle while we can. Prob’ly won’t be long, you see.”

“Probably not,” Dagny agreed, and took another pull herself.

“What will we do?” Yasmin whispered.

Tom suppressed exasperation—she had done a good job in Petar Landa’s house, if nowhere else—and said, “Come mornin’, we head into the swamps. I s’pose Weyer’ll send his merry men lookin’ for us, and whoever owns this hulk’ll search after it, so we can’t claim squatter’s rights. Maybe we can live off the country, though, and eventually, one way or another, reach the border.”

“Would it not be sanest… they do seem to be decent folk… should we not surrender to them and hope for mercy?”

“Go ahead, if you want,” Tom said. “You may or may not get the mercy. But you’ll for sure have no freedom. I’ll stay my own man.”

Yasmin tried to meet his hard gaze, and failed. “What has happened to us?” she pleaded.

He suspected that she meant, “What has become of the affection between you and me?” No doubt he should comfort her. But he didn’t have the strength left to play father image. Trying to distract her a little, he said, with calculated misunderstanding of her question:

“Why, we hit a storm that blew us the exact wrong way. It wasn’t s’posed to. But this’s such a funny planet. I reckon, given a violent kind o’ sun, you can get weather that whoops out o’ the east, straight seaward. And, o’ course, winds can move almighty fast when the air’s thin. Maybe young Aran was tryin’ to warn me. He spoke o’ twisty weather. Maybe he meant exactly this, and I got fooled once more by his Nikean lingo. Or maybe he just meant what ‘I believed he did, unreliable weather. He told me himself, their meteorology isn’t worth sour owl spit, ‘count o’ they can’t predict the solar output. Young star, you know. Have drink.”

Yasmin shook her head. But abruptly she sat straight. “Have you something to write with?”

“Huh?” Tom gaped at her.

“I have an idea. It is worthless,” she said humbly, “but since I cannot sleep, and do not wish to annoy my lord, I would like to pass the time.”

“Oh. Sure.” Tom found a paper and penstyl in a breast pocket of his coverall and gave them to her. She crossed her legs and began writing numbers in a neat foreign-looking script.

“What’s going on?” Dagny said in Eylan.

Tom explained. The older woman frowned. “I don’t like this, dear,” she said. “Yasmin’s been breaking down, closer and closer to hysteria, ever since we left those peasants. She’s not prepared for a guerrilla existence. She’s used up her last resources.”

“You reckon she’s quantum-jumpin’ already?”

“I don’t know. But I do think we should force her to take a drink, to put her to sleep.”

“Hm.” Tom glanced at the dark head, bent over some arithmetical calculations. “Could be. But no. Let her do what she chooses. She hasn’t bubbled her lips yet, has she? And—we are the free people.”

He went on with Dagny in a rather hopeless discussion of possibilities open to them. Once they were interrupted, when Yasmin asked if he had a trigonometric slide rule. No, he didn’t. “I suppose I can approximate the function with a series,” she said, and returned to her labors.

Has she really gone gollywobble? Tom wondered. Or is she just soothin’ herself with a hobby?

Half an hour later, Yasmin spoke again. “I have the solution.”

“To what?” Tom asked, a little muzzily after numerous gulps from the bottle. They distilled potent stuff in Hanno. “Our problem?”

“Oh, no, my lord. I couldn’t—I mean, I am nobody. But I did study science, you remember, and… and I assumed that if you and Lady Dagny said this was a young system, you must be right, you have traveled’ so widely. But it isn’t.”

“No? What’re you aimed at?”

“It doesn’t matter, really. I’m being an awful picky little nuisance. But this can’t be a young system. It has to be old.”

Tom put the bottle down with a thud that overrode the storm-yammer outside. Dagny opened her mouth to ask what .was happening. He shushed her. Out of the shadows across his scarred face, the single eye blazed blue. “Go on,” he said, most quietly.

Yasmin faltered. She hadn’t expected any such reaction. But, encouraged by him, she said with a, waxing confidence:

“From the known average distance of the sun, and the length of the planet’s year, anyone can calculate the sun’s mass. It turns out to be almost precisely one Sol. That is, it has the mass of a G2 star. But it has twice the luminosity, and more than half again the radius, and the reddish color of a late G or early K type. You thought those paradoxes were due to a strange composition. I don’t really see how that could be. I mean, any star is something like 98 per cent hydrogen and helium. Variations in other elements can affect its development some, but surely not this much. Well, we know from Nikean biology that this system must be at least a few billion years old. So the star’s instability cannot be due to extreme youth. Any solar mass must settle down on the main sequence far quicker than that. Otherwise we would have many, many more variables in the universe than we do.

“And besides, we can explain all the paradoxes so simply if we assume this system is old. Incredibly old, maybe almost as old as the galaxy itself.”

“Belay!” Tom exclaimed, though not loudly. “How could this planet have this much atmosphere after so long a time? If any? Don’t sunlight kick gases into space? And Nike hasn’t got the gravity to nail molecules down for good. Half a standard Gee; and the potential is even poorer, the field strength dropping off as fast as it does.”

“But my lord,” Yasmin said, “an atmosphere comes from within a planet. At least, it does for the smaller planets, that can’t keep their original hydrogen like the Jupiter types. On the smaller worlds, gas gets forced out of mineral compounds. Vulcanism and tectonism provide the heat for that, as well as radioactivity. But the major planetological forces originate in the core. And the core originates because the heavier elements, like iron, tend to migrate toward the center. We know Nike has some endowment of those. Perhaps more, even, than the average planet of its age.

“Earth-sized planets have strong gravity. The migration is quick. The core forms in their youth. But Mars-sized worlds… the process has to be slow, don’t you think? So much iron combines first in surface rocks that they are red. Nike. shows traces of this still today. The midget planets can’t outgas more than a wisp until their old age, when a core finally has taken shape.”

Tom shook his head in a stunned fashion. “I didn’t know. I took for granted—I mean, well, every Mars-type globe I ever saw or heard of had very little air—I reckoned they’d lost most o’ their gas long ago.”

“There are no extremely ancient systems in the range that your travels have covered,” Yasmin deduced. “Perhaps not in the whole Imperial territory. They aren’t common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, after all. So people never had much occasion to think about what they must be like.”

“Uh, what you been sayin’, this theory… you learned it in school?”

“No. I didn’t major in astronomy, just took some required basic courses. It simply appeared to me that some such idea is the only way to explain this system we’re in.” Yasmin spread her hands. “Maybe the pro-lessors at my university haven’t heard of the idea either. The truth must have been known in Imperial times, but it could have been lost since, not having immediate practical value.” Her smile was sad. “Who cares about pure science any more? What can you buy with it?

“Even the original colonists on Nike—Well, to them the fact must have been interesting, but not terribly important. They knew the planet was so old that it had lately gained an atmosphere and oxygen-liberating life.

So old that its sun is on the verge of becoming a red giant. Already the hydrogen is exhausted at the core, the nuclear reactions are moving outward in a shell, the photosphere is expanding and cooling while the total energy output rises. But the sun won’t be so huge that Nike is scorched for—oh, several million years. I suppose the colonists appreciated the irony here. But on the human time-scale, what difference did it make? No wonder their descendants have forgotten and think, like you, this has to be a young system.”

Tom caught her hands between his own. “And… that’s the reason… the real reason the sun’s so rambunctious?” he asked hoarsely.

“Why, yes. Red giants are usually variable. This star is in a transition stage, I guess, and hasn’t ‘found’ its period yet.” Yasmin’s smile turned warm. “If I have taken your mind off your troubles, I am glad. But why do you care about the aspect of this planet ten mega-years from now? I think best I do try to sleep, that I may help you a little tomorrow.”

Tom gulped. “Kid,” he said, “you don’t know your own:strength.”

“What’s she been talking about?” Dagny demanded. Tom told her. They spent the rest of the night laying plans.

Now and then a mid-morning sunbeam struck copper through the fog. But otherwise a wet, dripping, smoking mystery enclosed the barge. Despite its chill, Tom was glad. He didn’t care to be interrupted by a strafing attack.

To be sure, the air force might triangulate on the radio emission of his ruined plane and drop a bomb. However—

He sat in the cockpit, looked squarely into the screen, and said, “This is a parley. Agreed?”

“For the moment.” Karol Weyer gave him a smoldering return stare. “I talked with Fish Aran.”

“And he made it clear to you, didn’t her about the lingo scramble? How often your Anglic and mine use the same word different? Well, let’s not keep on with the farce. If anybody thinks t’other’s said somethin’ bad, let’s call a halt and thresh out what was intended. Aye?”

Weyer tugged his beard. His countenance lost none of its sternness. “You have yet to prove your good faith,” he said. “After what harm you worked—”

“I’m ready to make that up to you. To your whole planet.”

Weyer cocked a brow and waited.

“S’pose you give us what we need to fix our ship,” Tom said. “Some of it might be kind of expensive—copper and silver and such, and handicrafted because you haven’t got the dies and jigs—but we can make some gold payment. Then let us go. I, or a trusty captain o’ mine, will be back in a few months… uh, a few thirty-day periods.”

“With a host of friends to do business?”

“No. With camarados to ‘change. Nike lived on trade under the Terran Empire. It can once more.”

“How do I know you speak truth?”

‘Well, you’ll have to take somethin’ on my word. But listen. Kind of a bad storm last night, no? Did a lot o’ damage, I’ll bet. How much less would’ve been done if you’d been able to predict it? I can make that possible.” Tom paused before adding cynically, “You can share the information with all Nike, or keep it your national secret. Could be useful, if you feel like maybe the planet should—have a really strong Emperor, name of Weyer, for instance.”

The Engineer leaned forward till his image seemed about to jump from the screen. “How is this?”

Tom related what Yasmin had told him. “No wonder your solar meteorologists never get anywhere,” he finished. “They’re usin’ exactly the wrong mathematical model.”

Weyer’s eyes dwelt long upon Tom. “Are you giving this information away in hopes of my good will?” he said.

“No. As a free sample, to shake you loose from your notion that every chap who drops in from space is necessarily a hound o’ hell. And likewise this. Camarado Weyer, your astronomers’ll tell you my wife’s idea makes sense. They’ll be right glad to hear they’ve got an old star. But they’ll need many years to work out the details by themselves. You know enough science to realize that, I’m sure. Now I can put you in touch with people that already know the details—that can come here, study the situation for a few weeks, and predict your weather like dice odds.

“That’s my hole card. And you can only benefit by helpin’ us leave. Don’t think you can catch us and beat what we know out of us. First, we haven’t got the information. Second; we’ll die before we become slaves, in any meanin’ o’ the word. If it don’t look like we can get killed fightin’ the men you send to catch us, why, we’ll turn on our weapons on ourselves. Then all you’ve got is a spaceship that to you is nothin’ but scrap metal.”

Weyer drew a sharp breath. But he remained cautious. “This may be,” he said. “Nonetheless, if I let you go, why should you bring learned people back to me?”

“Because it’ll pay. I’m a trader and a warlord. The richer my markets, the stronger my allies, the better off I am.” Tom punched a forefinger at the screen. “Get rid o’ that conditioned reflex o’ yours and think a bit instead. You haven’t got much left that’s worth anybody’s lootin’. Why should I bother returnin’ for that purpose? But your potential, that’s somethin’ else entirely. Given as simple a thing as reliable weather forecasts—you’ll save, in a generation, more wealth than the ‘friends’ ever destroyed. And this’s only one for instance o’ what the outside universe can do for you. Man, you can’t afford not to trust me!”

They argued, back and forth, for a long time. Weyer was intrigued buy wary. Granted, Yasmin’s revelation did provide evidence that Tom’s folk were not utter savages like the last visitors from space. But the evidence wasn’t conclusive. And even if it was, what guarantee existed that the strangers would bring the promised experts?

The wrangle ended as well as Tom had hoped, in an uneasy compromise. He and his wives would be brought to Sea Gate. They’d keep their sidearms. Though guarded, they were to be treated more or less as guests. Discussions would continue. If Weyer judged, upon better acquaintance, that they were indeed trustworthy, he would arrange for the ship’s repair and release.

“But don’t be long about makin’ up your mind,” Torn warned, “or it won’t do us a lot o’ good to come home.”

“Perhaps,” Weyer said, “you can depart early if you leave a hostage.”

“You’ll be all right?” Tom asked for the hundredth time.

“Indeed, my lord,” Yasmin said. She was more cheerful than he, ‘bidding him good-by in the Engineer’s castle. “I’m iised to their ways by now, comfortable in this environment—honestly! And you know how much in demand an outworlder is.”

“That could get dull. I won’t be back too bloody soon, remember. What’ll you do for fun?”

“Oh,” she said demurely, “I plan to make arrangements with quite a number of men.”

“Stop teasin’ me.” He hugged her close. “I’m goin’ to miss you.”

And so Roan Tom and Dagny Od’s-daughter left Nike.

He fretted somewhat about Yasrnin, while Firedrake made the long flight back to Kraken, and while he mended his fences there, and while he voyaged back with his scholars and merchants. Had she really been joking, at the very last? She’d for sure gotten almighty friendly with Yanos Aran, and quite a few other young bucks. Tom was not obsessively jealous, but he could not afford to become a laughing stock.

He needn’t have worried. When he made his triumphant, landing at Sea Gate, he found that Yasmin had been charming, plausible, devious and, in short, had convinced several feudal lords of Nike that it was to their advantage that the rightful Shah be restored to the throne of Sassania. They commanded enough men to do the job. If the Krakeners could furnish weapons, training, and transportation—

Half delighted, half stunned, Tom said, “So this time we had a lingo scramble without somethin’ horrible happenin’? I don’t believe it!”

“Happy endings do occur,” she murmured, and came to him. “As now.”

And everyone was satisfied except, maybe, some few who went to lay a wreath upon a certain grave.

In the case of the King and Sir Christopher, however, a compliment was intended. A later era would have used the words “awe-inspiring, stately, and ingeniously conceived.”

The histories of Sassania and Nike illustrate how precious knowledge was being lost and reclaimed on a hundred thousand worlds. Sundered by the dark between the stars, Technic civilization’s wretched heirs no longer spoke the same language even when they shared a common tongue. Since reopening communications at whatever cost was the first step to lasting recovery, accounts of such problems dominate the annals of the post-Imperial era.

Freebooter that he was, Roan Tom’s contributions to the process were haphazard and self-serving, yet his legendary exploits did light the way for more systematic explorers to follow Natives of his birth world Lochlann and his adopted homeworld Kraken played crucial roles in rediscovery expeditions during the next four centuries.

Time and again, these contact teams would find that simple ignorance was the least of the barriers to mutual understanding.