The Man-Kzin Wars 09

1

Close to noon, the Father Sun baked pungencies out of turf and turned the forest that walled the northern horizon into a wind-whispery surf of leaves and shadow. Closer by, a field of hsakh stood golden. Kdatlyno slaves were hand-cultivating it in the ancient way, growing fiber that would be handwoven into cloaks for the mighty to wear at Midwinter Bloodfeast and then burn. Scattered elsewhere were the dwellings of the Heroes attendant upon this household. Though stately enough, they were dwarfed by the manor looming ahead of Ghrul-Captain.

These lands were a minor holding of Grand Lord Narr-Souwa's and the building was fairly new, in a modern style. Mosaic of red-and-black thunderbolt pattern decorated walls that sheered up to steep roofs of copper kept blindingly polished, whose beam ends gaped in the forms of carnivores. Tradition had made the lower windows mere gun slits, but those on upper floors were arrogantly broad. Saw-toothed spires at the four cardinal points flew ancestral banners.

As was fitting, Ghrul-Captain had come afoot, unaccompanied, from a landing field now out of sight. But he loped like a warrior to battle and passed the gate with head high. A display of fearlessness also behooved him, showing him not unworthy to enter the presence of the one who waited here.

His hopes heightened when he received due courtesy in return. A pair of armed Heroes met him, gave greeting, and escorted him down a granite corridor to an elevator, and thence to a flamewood door that recognized them and slid aside. There they left him. Ghrul-Captain stepped through. The door silently slid shut at his back.

The chamber was austere, paneled with various metals, its floor turf-like and sound-absorbent. Two open windows let in daylight and summer air. He glimpsed a hookbeak at hover outside. Furnishings were scant, mostly a minimum of communications equipment. He was alone with Narr-Souwa.

That Grand Lord half-reclined on a couch, like a slashtooth at its ease between hunts. He bore no weapons other than his teeth and claws. His only ornament was a scarf loosely draped across a frame whose black-striped orange fur was getting grizzled, but the scarf was of genuine silk, somehow brought from Earth itself. His eyes smoldered yellow, undimmed by the years.

Ghrul-Captain did not simply come to attention and salute, as he would before an ordinary superior. First he lowered his head and knees, tail between thighs. That galled him. It was meant to, he knew. He should think of it as a test. The sword blade, bent, will spring back to keen-edged straightness and ring as it does, if the steel be true.

“Ghrul-Captain of the Navy begs leave to present himself.” The request sounded flat in his ears.

Narr-Souwa peered at him for a while that grew long. “You may relax,” he answered at last. “This interview is at your plea. Justify yourself.”

Ghrul-Captain had rehearsed in his mind. “As my lord knows, I advanced my proposal”—he laid a measured weight on that word—“through proper channels. I never looked for response at this exalted level, and still less the glory of a flesh-meeting.” Which might, he thought, be the prelude to a death sentence. If so, may I be turned loose in yonder forest for him and his hunters to chase down as they would any other brave, dangerous animal. Maybe I can take one or two to the Darkness with me.

“I want to get the actual scent of you and the sense of how your blood runs,” explained Narr-Souwa. “Yours is an unusual suggestion… especially from a member of your house.”

I have nothing to gain, much to lose, by self-abasement, Ghrul-Captain knew. “Noble One, my wish is to redeem the honor of that house.”

Narr-Souwa stroked his chin. “Honor has been satisfied. High Admiral Ress-Chiuu made a decision and issued orders that proved disastrous. It cost us a warship's whole complement. Worse, it let that ship fall into the hands of the humans. Their naval intelligence has surely been dissecting it ever since. When condemned, Ress-Chiuu went boldly into the Patriarchal Arena and acquitted himself well against the beasts. It was good sport.”

Ghrul-Captain drew breath. “So their spokesmales have graciously informed his kin. But, sire—my lord will understand that we want to make full redemption.”

Narr-Souwa's eyes narrowed a bit. “And thus regain his holdings, as well as the prestige,” he said shrewdly. “The database has told me that you would inherit his estate in the Hrungn Valley.”

For an instant the memory and the yearning stabbed Ghrul-Captain, lands broad beneath the Mooncatcher Mountains, castle raised in olden days when kzin fought kzin hand-to-hand, graves of his forebears, a wilderness to rove in freedom. He curbed himself. “My lord is wise. But I wish yet more to win back the trust, the favor, that raises to leadership.”

He had kept the title to his half-name, but been relieved of command over the Venomous Fang that had been his. Small she was, but swift, agile, deadly. Ah-hai, the beautiful guns and missiles, the standing among his peers and over his crew, the tautness of close maneuver, and space, space, the stars for a hunting ground! “More than life do I want to take a real part in the next war,” and gain repute, a whole name, the right to breed.

Narr-Souwa folded his ears a bit, unfolded them again and murmured, “So you expect a second war with the humans?”

“Doesn't everyone, sire?”

Contempt spat. “They hope otherwise. Most of them.”

Ghrul-Captain deemed it best to wait.

The Grand Lord sighed. “We need time to make ready, time. The more so after that major setback at the ancient red sun. This later affair at the black hole was less catastrophic, but—it has doubtless changed the minds of still more monkeys about us. Certainly they now have important data on our Raptor-class ships.”

“With deepest respect, sire,” Ghrul-Captain ventured, “I submit that we should not let them gather information we do not even possess.”

“Hr-r-r, yes. That expedition they are planning, to the young sun and its doomed planet. Well, but what intelligence we have on it inclines me to believe it will be what they claim, purely scientific.” Perforce Narr-Souwa spoke that phrase in the closest rough, snarling approximation to English the kzin voice could manage, for nothing quite like it existed in any language of his race.

Here was a moment to show initiative and thoughtfulness. “Monkey curiosity, sire. I took this into account. They are—no, not so much flighty as… playful. The most playful breed in known space. The oldest of them are like kittens.”

“Kittens that never grow up to realism or dignity. Vermin of the universe… But how does this little new game of theirs concern us?”

“Sire, I tried to make that clear in my petition. They suppose they may learn something they do not yet know. What that might be, they do not know either. It may well prove of no practical value. Nevertheless, my lord, those monkeys have a way of turning anything into a weapon if they feel the need. Anything.”

And thus they beat back our invasion, Ghrul-Captain recalled, and were the first to acquire the hyperdrive, and stuffed what they snivel is peace down our throats. He nearly gagged.

“Granted.” Narr-Souwa's eyes seemed to kindle. His whiskers lifted, his voice dropped to a purr. “Do you imply the Supreme Councillors have not studied the enemy's history?”

“Of course not, Grand Lord,” Ghrul-Captain protested. “Never!” Boldness was advisable, within bounds. “Still, sire, they have much to think upon, many spoor to trace. I merely offer them an idea.”

Narr-Souwa mildened and nodded. “That we should dispatch an expedition of our own there to observe what happens.”

Ghrul-Captain knew better than to reply, “Yes, sire,” as though expressing agreement with a near-equal.

“It is not a bad thought,” Narr-Souwa went on, quite softly. “No, not at all bad in itself. And—I have personally reviewed your record—you are in fact well qualified to lead such a faring. You have had experience with technical teams. In two situations that could have become troublesome you exercised sound judgment. Such restraint does not come easily. Well do I know.”

Rapture flowed into Ghrul-Captain, that a great one would speak personally and at such length to him, him. “May I always hunt well and bring home a pleasing quarry, sire!”

The tone went businesslike. “Perhaps you do not quite grasp the difficulties. Time is short until the event. Likewise are our resources for space operations.”

Encouraged, Ghrul-Captain said, “The lord will remember that my proposal goes somewhat into specifics.”

“To the extent of your knowledge when you composed it. Hr-r, the details can quickly be settled—and must be, if we are to act. There is also another matter, to which we must reluctantly accord importance.”

“Will my lord enlighten me?” If he does, blazed through Ghrul-Captain, I'm in!

“We shall not spare a warcraft for a mission as dubious of profit as this,” Narr-Souwa said methodically. “Besides, that would be a mistake in any event. As I indicated earlier, because of the incidents I mentioned, those humans who credit us with hostile intent have gained a certain advantage over those who wish it were not so and”—sardonically—“to borrow a monkey saying I have heard, let the wish become the father to the thought. We would be unwise to make any fresh overt move that could strengthen those who call themselves the advocates of preparedness. To send a combat vessel to a star they have announced they will be visiting and will have a presence at for a long time to come—that would probably be such a move.”

“Sire, I have admitted that the Council would likely order economy of means. Indeed, I respectfully advised it,” bearing in mind the needs of a navy, still rebuilding after its shattering defeat, which must meanwhile keep control over the remaining kzin empire.

“We can assign a transport, no more.” Yes, clearly Narr-Souwa had pulled in all available information and tracked out all its implications beforehand. “It will carry what auxiliary vessels may be needed, but nothing adequate for a serious engagement. This being the case, our psychologically best gambit is to let the humans know that we do intend to send such a scientific group. Do you seize my meaning?”

“Yes, sire. An earnest of peacefulness, of desire to cooperate—Aargh!” Ghrul-Captain could not hold the growl back.

Narr-Souwa took it understandingly. “Beware of otherwise natural emotions,” he warned. “Quite possibly, once they hear from us, the monkeys will provide their ship with an armed escort. That crystallizes the necessity of quiescence. Think of a male, spear-hunting slashtooth, who must withdraw and bide his time if a whole pride of them comes down the trail. Later he will find one alone.”

Ghrul-Captain gulped. “My lord speaks wisdom. I will not forget.”

“I trust not. Your record gives reason to expect you can hold yourself and your crew on a tight leash. It will be a test of your fitness for a new and higher command.”

Ghrul-Captain quivered. “Yes, lord, but—but we won't only make our observations from afar, like the monkeys. We'll try—discreetly, yes, of course, lord—try to learn what they do discover and what they infer. I think we can beat them at their own game too, and show them what Heroes are.”

“Do not take risks merely for the sake of that.”

“No, lord, certainly not.” It might be harder to curb his personnel than himself, but Ghrul-Captain felt confident. “However, as my proposal notes, we have a special craft available to us, the prototype of Sun Defier. My lord doubtless knows that that was the tug designed and built for Werlith-Commandant's mission to the ancient star, able to operate closer to it while keeping the crew alive than any other vessel in known space. It was lost in the debacle, but the engineering works has kept the preliminary model that tested the concept. This is much smaller, of course, less powerful, but unique. The humans have nothing like it. They prefer to orbit afar, send in robotic probes, and not hazard their own precious pelts. Lord, a live pilot might well observe and experience things that it would not occur to a stupid robot to try for. We may win a prize the monkeys never realize existed.”

“Yes-s, that will be good, if feasible. You must decide on the spot.” Narr-Souwa paused. “Return with whatever accomplishments are yours and give them to our judgment. Then we shall see what further you have proven yourself worthy of. We shall see.”

2

“This has changed everything,” said Peter Nordbo.

“Yah. Obviously,” answered Robert Saxtorph. “Damn. God damn.”

He had jumped from his chair on hearing the news. Now he sat back down, heavily in spite of the light gravity. For a moment his gaze went from the man behind the desk, outward, as if in search of help.

He found no more than beauty. The main office of Saxtorph & Nordbo lay near the top of a building which, although on the edge of town, rose tall. One window held sight of the roofs, towers, steeples, and traffic of München. The other gave on green countryside, scattered homes and groves, a distant range of hills blue against a blue sky. Alpha Centauri A spilled morning radiance across it. B was not yet visible and, currently close to maximum separation, would shine only as the brightest of the stars. A flight of rosewings passed across a snowy cloud. Kind of like wild geese, he thought vaguely, but sunrise-colored. Not that I've ever seen wild geese, except on a screen. Yes, Wunderland's still a lovely world, as alive as Earth used to be before people screwed her up.

“It would not have been a particularly profitable charter for us,” said Nordbo.

Saxtorph's burly frame swung around to confront the gray-bearded face. “No,” he admitted harshly, “but Dorcas and me, how we lusted to go! What a bodacious spectacle! And the publicity would've been worth more than the money,” to the single privately owned hyperdrive craft in known space, competing with the lines of half a dozen governments.

“That has become worse than worthless.”

“How?”

“I've had time to think this over, you know.” Saxtorph and his crew had been en route from Jinx with a load of organics cheaper to grow there and haul here than to synthesize. Centaurian industry hadn't fully recovered from the long kzin occupation. Maybe—his mind wandered again for a second—it never would, but concentrate instead on whole new kinds of enterprise. Which ought to leave room for Rover to ply her trade.

But he didn't want her always to be just a tramp freighter. She'd been more. He'd left with his head full of the wonderful discovery the astronomers had made, the fact that an expedition to go for a close look was being organized as fast as possible, and the near-promise that his ship would carry it. She'd proven she could survive pretty terrible surprises, she'd have no other commitments, and Nordbo was closing the deal. It helped that the headquarters of the Interworld Space Commission was handy, right in this same system; he'd gotten on friendly terms with key bureaucrats.

If only the engineers had miniaturized hyperwave transmitters enough that a ship could hold one, Saxtorph thought, not for the first time. Then: What'd have been the use? I'd've gotten the bad news sooner, that's all.

“In der Tat,” Nordbo went on, briefly reverting to Wunderland's chief language, “I saw at once that the ISC would forbid you to go, and forestalled them by offering to cancel the contract myself. It was the responsible thing to do, anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Saxtorph challenged almost involuntarily.

“Yes. You will be too, once you've swallowed your disappointment.” Nordbo sighed. “Robert, we agreed when I became your partner, Rover will steer clear of any volume of space where there's a significant chance of your encountering kzinti. You destroyed their base at the ancient star and uncovered the secret that they now have the hyperdrive. You killed a naval crew of theirs at the black hole—”

“Self-defense,” Saxtorph snapped. “Both times, it was them or us, and we didn't start the fracas. The second time, it was Tyra also.”

“You needn't tell me.”

Saxtorph's massive shoulders slumped a bit. “Sorry. I got carried away… Yah. Aside from the few of them amongst us, probably every kzin alive would cheerfully die to collect my scalp.” He straightened. “But, hey, do they have to know it's Rover? Change the ID code, disguise the body lines, give her a new paint job.”

Nordbo smiled wryly. “Forever the optimist, aren't you? No, much too risky. We'd certainly lose our insurance.”

“Uh-huh,” Saxtorph must agree. “Seeing as how they'd be in a tiny danger of having to pay up.”

“The danger would not be tiny, and it would be to you and yours, Robert.”

Dorcas, Saxtorph thought. Her, and everything we've shared all these years, and the kids we still hope to have someday. Not to mention Kam, Carita, and Buck. And any passengers.

“The kzinti say their expedition will be strictly scientific, like ours, employing simply a transport and a few auxiliaries,” Nordbo continued. “But everybody knows that will be a naval transport with at least some armament. If they learned Rover had come, as they might very well—No, it would be too much to expect of kzinti, not to attack.”

Saxtorph surrendered. “Okay. Okay. You've gotten through this thick skull of mine. You're right.” He rallied his spirit. “What'll we do instead?”

Nordbo smiled afresh, warmly. “The coin has a bright side. Because I saved the ISC embarrassment, I was able to drive a bargain. They naturally prefer our names never be associated with this. So… we keep silence. In return, we have a commission to bring several special cargoes to the puppeteers' tradepoint and distribute the exchange goods to four different human planets.”

Joy flared. “Holy Christ! Clear to there!”

“And well paid. With a clause that will allow us to develop the route further for ourselves if we choose and the puppeteers are willing.”

“Pete,” Saxtorph declared, “I take every hard thought about you back. I apologize, I heap sthondat dung on my head, I adore. You're flat-out a genius.”

A parallel gladness: How grandly this guy's gotten over his decades of exile, a kzin prisoner, and the death of his son. Even though I got the reasons for it made an official secret, he knew, he knows. He threw himself into our partnership to escape. Oh, he did a lot more than furnish some capital we badly needed, he hadn't lost his skill at handling people either, but it was an escape. In the three years since, however—He and his new wife seem like being about as happy as Dorcas and me. And now he's wangled this for us.

“Aw, shucks,” said Nordbo. “Isn't that your American expression?”

“Your triumph calls for a drink, followed by unbridled celebration.” And, Saxtorph thought, what happens at the cannibal star will be fun to watch when the databases arrive home. We'll've been having real-time adventures just as much fun, or maybe more.

He took forth his pipe and tobacco pouch. “First, though, fill me in, will you? Who's going to carry the mission?”

“I helped arrange that too,” Nordbo told him. “A little reshifting of schedules made the Freuchen available.”

“Oh, fine. She is mainly for exploration—done good work in the past… A tad crowded, maybe, for an expedition like this, with the tonne of gear I imagine they'll want to take.”

“They'll have ample extra room. A naval vessel will escort them.”

Saxtorph grinned. “Well, well. The ISC's being smart for a change. Nothing ‘provocative,' no, never; but the kitty-cats won't be tempted to touch off an ‘incident' and claim afterward it was our side's fault.”

Nordbo nodded. “That's the unspoken idea. Nobody wants a fight, myself least.”

“The Freuchen… Yah, the establishment, scientists and politicians both, owe us one, over and above the puppeteer contract. They owe you, rather.”

Nordbo gave his friend a steady look. “I cashed in that part of it. Which is why I'm especially relieved by their having an escort.”

“Hey?”

“Tyra's going along.”

“Huh?”

“She was after me about it from the first. A writer by trade, and what a story to tell! I managed to make her assignment part of the bargain, and didn't suppose you would object. Not but what they won't get their money's worth. She'll make the public love that science.”

“Well, yes, she always was a venturesome sort. Not strange, seeing she's your daughter.” And can wind you around her finger, Saxtorph said silently. As she damn near did me, till she decided not to finish the job. I've never said anything to you or anybody. Nor did I stay regretful. Dorcas and me do belong together.

He knew how suddenly seriousness could grab hold of the other man. Nordbo generally kept his deepest feelings to himself. But he and Saxtorph had grown close, and from time to time everybody needs somebody who will listen.

“Robert, she's been unhappy. She doesn't let on, she wouldn't, but I can tell. I don't know why. Yes, she's grieved for Ib, side by side with me, but—but that's past and done with. It isn't like her to brood. Is it?” He had missed out on the years when she grew up.

Did our not-quite-affair really hurt her so badly? wondered Saxtorph. I sure never thought that, seeing how she behaved. Afterward—well, friendly when we've met, of course, but in the nature of the case that hasn't been often.

What can I do except wish her everything good?

“No, her style is to get on with her life.”

Nordbo steadied. “She's been doing so. It's simply that I felt her heart wasn't altogether in it. Now, I do believe, this prospect, this amazement to see and take part in, I think it's healing her.”

3

Having climbed high enough up the complex and changeable Alpha Centaurian gravity well, the lancer Samurai slipped into hyperspace. Freuchen followed seventy-two hours later. The naval ship was to reach destination first and make sure of security before the civilians appeared.

Although no passenger liner, Freuchen often made long voyages, and long stays at the far ends of them, which might well involve hardship and danger. Facilities for privacy, recreation, and exercise were not a luxury but a necessity. A couple of watchcycles after leaving 3-space, Tyra Nordbo and Craig Raden were in the gymnasium playing recoil ball.

That game takes strength and wind as well as speed and agility. This being a Wunderland vessel crewed mostly by Wunderlanders, her gravity polarizers maintained the interior weight to which they were accustomed. Nevertheless the Earthman found himself hard challenged. The match ended with score tied and both breathing from the bottoms of their lungs, sweat agleam and animal-odorous on their skins.

“Whoof!” Raden laughed. “Congratulations and thanks. You gave me a good one.”

“The same to you,” Tyra answered. Her tone was warmer toward him than hitherto. It had been fun. And, she must admit to herself, the sight of him was fun too—medium-tall, slim and supple but well-muscled, features Roman-nosed and regular, with bright hazel eyes, beneath wavy brown hair. That doesn't mean I have to fall over you—or under you, said defensiveness.

“Frankly, I didn't expect it from a person of your origins.”

Then why did you invite me to play? she flared inwardly. An approach? Likely. They say you're quite a tomcat. “We're healthy,” she snapped.

“Oh, absolutely. Normal adaptation to a lower gravity. No offense intended, please believe.” Raden shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Foolish of me. I should have given more thought to what I saw, besides enjoying the view.”

He made no pretense of doing otherwise. Tyra's height equaled his, which was not surprising in a Wunderlander woman, but damp T-shirt and shorts clung to a figure as full and robust as that of any Earthling female in good condition. Flaxen hair in a pageboy cut framed a face strong-boned and blunt, where little save a few fine lines at the blue eyes hinted at an age of about forty terrestrial years, perhaps three more than his. “You'd be unusually athletic on any planet,” he added.

She shrugged. “I'm not obsessed with aerobics. I just enjoy some activities.”

“Which especially, if I may ask?”

“Swimming, wingsailing, hiking, mountaineering, that sort of thing.”

“Tastes we share, then. The results do come in useful occasionally, don't you agree? I understand you too have spent a fair amount of time on different worlds, and not merely in their tourist resorts.”

“My work. Gathering material, getting ideas.” He's pushing familiarity pretty fast, isn't he? “You're an astrophysicist.” Put him in his place. Imply that his travels were a gadding about.

Raden's smile faded, his voice went amicably earnest. “Look here, Fräulein Nordbo, may I suggest we become better acquainted? We've a rather long haul before us, and then a time about which we can predict nothing other than that it will be busy, till we've done whatever we can. Let's go as friends.”

“Have I seemed unfriendly?” she asked with caution.

“No, no. A bit aloof, perhaps.”

“We're barely into the voyage.”

“Why not start it on the right foot? Suppose after we've washed and changed clothes, we meet in the wardroom. I'd be honored to stand you a drink or two before dinner.”

“Honored? You?” She spoke coldly, to make clear that she didn't like being patronized.

He caught on at once. “I'm sorry. I truly am. What I wanted to say was ‘delighted,’ but I was afraid of seeming too forward. You're known as a formidable sort.”

That's hard to resist, Tyra confessed. Damn him, he can turn on the charm like a light. Anyhow, it's true, we need to become comrades, all of us on board. There's unknownness waiting yonder, and kzinti.

“Not intentionally.” She didn't have to force her smile. “Thank you, I'd be delighted myself. In half an hour?”

Command and competence were as vital as in any spacecraft, but an explorer did best without social distinctions between ranks off duty. The wardroom was open to anyone who wanted sociability. Nobody chanced to be present but steward Marcus Hauptmann and planetologist Kees Verwoort, pushing chessmen. Already at ease with Tyra, they nodded as she came in. Nattily attired, Raden jumped from a chair and strode to meet her. “Ah, jolly good,” he said. “What would you like?”

“Draft Solborg.” She sat down at the little table where he had been. Several more were spaced around the room with their chairs, plus a few loungers. Underneath each was the magnetic inductor that would secure it to the deck in case of untoward acceleration or free fall.

“Forthcoming. Hm, not too early in the daywatch for a glass of wine. They've shipped a reasonably decent dry Riesling.” Raden got them from the dispenser, which debited his personal ration, and brought them over. He took his place opposite her and lifted his goblet. “Skaal.”

So he's remembered, Tyra thought, or he's taken the trouble to find out, things about me like my hailing from Skogarna, and that this is our toast there instead of “Prosit.”

She didn't know how to feel about that. Well, pay him in kind. “Here's how,” she responded.

Glasyl clinked against stein. The beer was a welcome tartness in mouth and throat.

“Ah-ha. Then you know I'm American, Fräulein Nordbo?” Raden said genially. “Most people off Earth seem under the impression I'm a Brit.”

“Next time I'll say ‘Cheers' if you prefer.” Was she parrying something?

He laughed. “Touché! Yes, I admit to certain affectations. And I did study for a while at Cambridge.” He sipped and went on in a philosophical tone. “Such details are apt to look vanishingly small across a few light-years, aren't they? Consider how societies diverged when only subluminal transit was available. They've not had much time or opportunity thus far to catch up, have they? Rather amazing, how knowledgeable you are.”

Is he showing off his serious, intellectual side? wondered Tyra. Or do quantum jumps come naturally to him? “No surprise, Dr. Raden. Writers collect oddments like glitterfowl. You know that.”

“Well, yes, I am a writer too, of sorts. But secondarily. Not a rival of yours on this mission or, I hope, ever.”

“I've seen your popular science works, those of them that have reached us, and your ‘Multiverse' show.” Be honest, she told herself. “I've enjoyed them, in fact admired them.”

“Thank you. I look forward to seeing what you've done.”

“Nothing like yours. Mainly travel pieces, some assorted journalism, some fiction, a couple of things for children.”

“I'll doubtless write up this expedition and its findings myself, elsewhere than in the scientific databases. But I don't imagine I'll overlap what you do in the least.”

And my audience won't be ten percent of yours, even if my accounts get distribution on Earth, Tyra realized. The famous young scientist, popularizer, lecturer, sportsman, yes, licensed spaceboat pilot and bronze medalist in the Saturnian Ring Run—all very well publicized—showman—Unfair? Am I being nasty and jealous? Or just shy? I'm not sure. I'm not used to either of those feelings.

“I have in mind telling about the people with us and what happens to them personally,” she said. “But you will do that too, along with explaining the discoveries, same as always, won't you?”

“Mostly incidentally, trying to get across that science isn't a revelation handed down from on high, it's something that intelligent creatures do. You'll concentrate on the human story. We are not in competition. We may well prove to be in cooperation.”

“M-m, maybe. You're kind to say so, Dr. Raden.”

“Please,” he replied gently, “must we continue formal? I'm Craig to my friends.”

Impulse grabbed Tyra. “And I'm not properly ‘Fräulein.' I've resumed my family name, but I was married twice.”

His gaze searched her. “To what kind of man, that they'd give up one like you?”

She flushed, but stiffened less than she probably should have. “Things simply didn't work out. If I'm not mistaken, you've had similar experiences.”

“True. And I'm not self-righteous about them, either… Tyra.” Quickly: “Yes, I'm trying to cultivate your acquaintance, not entirely for its own sake. I hope we can talk about your adventures at the black hole.”

“That was Captain Saxtorph's department,” she demurred. “I was hardly more than a passenger.”

“Forgive me, but according to what I've gathered, you're overly modest. You had a great deal to do with what went on.” Again quickly: “Although you've wanted your part in it de-emphasized as much as possible. Aristocratic reserve?”

As little as possible about Ib—She put down the pain. “Wunderland doesn't have aristocrats any longer.”

“Still, the heritage, the pride… This very ship bears the name of your clan… Well, I certainly don't mean to intrude. If ever I ask anything, or say anything, you don't like, please let me know. I swear to respect your privacy.”

Disarmed, she blurted, “What'll be left to talk about, then, that you can't have retrieved from public databases?”

“Endlessly much. You and your companions met something unique in our knowledge—a mini black hole, and the artifact the tnuctipun built around it, billions of years ago… Gone, now, gone. Surely you see what this means to me and every astrophysicist, cosmologist, archeologist, anybody who's ever looked at the stars and wondered.”

“I only had glimpses and heard others rattle off numbers they'd taken from their instruments.”

“I think you observed more, perhaps more than you know. At any rate, I'll wager your story of it is vivid.”

Tyra could not but smile. It was as if his enthusiasm smoothed away every lingering hurt and reopened her eyes to wonder. “You flatter me.”

He turned playful. “I'm good at that. Especially when it's sincere.”

She laughed. “We'll have time enough under way.”

“Yes, indeed. I won't be champing at the bit as impatiently as I expected. Thank you, Tyra.”

He led the conversation on to undisturbing reminiscences, anecdotes, jokes, a cheerful hour.

4

An alert yowled. Ghrul-Captain sprang from his lair, down a passage and up a companionway to the main control chamber. He shoved aside the watchkeeper, a kzin currently known as Sub-officer. “Sire,” the underling told him, “the optics and nucleonics register a spacecraft approaching.”

“What else would it be?” Ghrul-Captain snarled. “Do you take me for a sthondat?”

“No, sire, of course not—”

“Silence till you have something worth saying, if ever.” Ghrul-Captain crouched into the central command seat.

The other drew back, submissive but poised. Bristling whiskers, broadened pupils, and half-folded ears showed anger. It was purely reflexive, not directed at his superior. This was what happened to one of his standing, like harsh weather on a planet. He may have counted himself lucky not to be punished.

Actually, while Ghrul-Captain had needed to vent some wrath, he could not afford to disable personnel for anything less than outright insubordination. The Strong Runner was undercrewed, underweaponed, alone. And his instruments were identifying the stranger as a human warship.

For a heartbeat he glared at the scene in the viewscreen. The target sun was a small disc, its luminance selectively dulled till an extravagant corona was eye-visible. Undimmed, a big world much farther out shone brighter than the true stars. They sprawled in strange constellations—seen at more than thirty light-years from the Father Sun and well off the galactic plane. The Ice River itself looked slightly different, against the background blackness of space.

His gaze focused on the meters and readouts before him, and then on the image a computer program was constructing. He had been taught to know that lean shape, those rakish lines of gun turrets and launch tubes. A lancer, a light naval vessel but easily able to annihilate this wretched carrier. It was about five million kilometers off, adjusting its vectors with an acceleration he could merely envy. A proper warcraft would have spotted it immediately when it emerged from hyperspace, wherever in this system that had been. Surely it had picked him up then, and set about reducing the gap between.

Ghrul-Captain forced steadiness on himself, as he might have donned a pressure suit too tight for him. He would have to communicate with the monkeys and offer them no threat. The necessity was foul in his mouth. He could have voice-ordered a beam in the standard band to lock on; instead, his claw stabbed the manual board.

They were obviously awaiting it yonder. In some thirty interminable seconds, the time for electromagnetic waves to go back and forth, his comboard lighted up. He sent a “Ready” signal—make them introduce themselves to him—and activated the translator program.

The screen came to life with a human face. Those always suggested to him the faces of flayed corpses. “United Nations Navy unit Samurai calling kzin vessel,” it gabbled, while the translator gave forth decent growls and hisses. “Request conference with your commanding officer.”

“I am he,” Ghrul-Captain answered. “I will speak to none but your own master.” They could kill him, but they could not make him lower himself.

In the time lag he felt a ventilator breeze stir his hair. It bore a sharp tinge of ozone. But no cleansing thunderstorm was going to break. Not now. Not yet.

The scan switched to another den and another face, dark brown. From its delicate lines and glabrous cheeks he decided it belonged to a female. Ruch! Still, human females were supposed to have as much consciousness as the males, and often held important positions. He must accept the perverted fact and cope with it.

“Captain Indira Lal Bihari, commanding UNSN Samurai,” she was saying. “Our intentions are peaceful. We trust they can remain so.”

“Ghrul-Captain, master of Strong Runner.” He would volunteer no more. If that piqued her, and if he could know it did, he would have won a tiny satisfaction.

Full lips drew back, upward. Ghrul-Captain had studied many views of human faces but never learned to tell whether a baring of teeth meant amusement, conciliation, or anger. “Apparently you prefer that I take the initiative. Very well. Your people announced they would send an expedition here like us. We were not quite certain of its nature or its timing. I am not much surprised that you arrived first. Kzinti are… quick to act; and our preparations have doubtless been more elaborate.

“We have ascertained that you have one large vessel carrying boats and probes. Our basic arrangements are similar. However, this ship has gone in advance of the civilian to make sure all is well, and will remain in her vicinity after rendezvous. I assume you agree it's wise to take precautions against possible contingencies.” That smile again. “Do you wish to respond now, or shall I proceed?”

“We will not tolerate interference with our undertakings. That includes too close an approach to any unit or work of ours.”

While the time lag hummed, Ghrul-Captain considered what else to say. He had better not antagonize her, for he did need information. Fortunately, humans were devoid of true pride.

“None is intended, Ghrul-Captain. Should any of you be in distress, we will gladly give assistance.” He lashed his bare pink tail but held his ears up under the insult, realizing it was unwitting. “Otherwise we will keep as separated as feasible. Let us establish a few rules between us to this end. We can begin by spelling out our plans to each other.”

“What are yours, then?”

She must have prepared the speech that followed the silence:

“While at hyperspacing distance, our civilian mother ship will unload a disassembled hyperwave transceiver, with radio relays to the inner system, and leave a gang to make it ready. The job should not take long, given their robots. They'll have a boat and rejoin the rest of us when they are done.

“Subject to change as circumstances warrant, the mother ship and escort will take ecliptic orbit around the sun at approximately three-fourths of an astronomical unit. The scientists will make observations from there, but naturally will also dispatch probes and boats on appropriate courses. These will include visits to the stable planets and their satellites, for survey, and landings if closer investigation seems warranted. We propose to notify you in advance of these, as well as any important maneuvers of the ships themselves.

“Early on, the scientists will put three small robotic observatories in polar orbit around the sun, at about the same radius, 120 degrees apart, to keep the inmost planet under constant study from that angle.

“We… request… noninterference, too. We will always be open to communication with you. Let neither party judge hastily. Correct, Ghrul-Captain?

“This is our basic plan. May I ask what yours is?”

Ghrul-Captain did not answer for a minute or two. First he must overcome his rage. He wanted to scream and leap. But he had nothing to kill, only this phantom of a monkey five million kilometers out of reach. Useless, anyway, for anything but one instant of release, which would bring down his mission and his dreams.

The humiliation, though! Her words had come like one whip flick after the next. Not that the she-monkey intended it. She was totally insensitive. It never occurred to her how she flaunted those capabilities—a hyperwave station brought along, a swarm of lesser craft, three solar watchposts—before his poor little expedition—wealth and power such as belonged to the race of Heroes, before her rabble overran and robbed them.

There would be a day of justice, a night of revenge.

Not for years.

Meanwhile, he remembered, and helped congeal his feelings thereby, meanwhile I may do a deed they cannot and dare not match, to shame them whether they know it or not—we will know, at home—and, possibly, bring back a prize they are also unaware of, which may possibly hold within it the making of some mighty weapon for their destruction. Yes, possibly I will.

First he must reach an accommodation with them, at least for immediate purposes. Grand Lord Narr-Souwa and he had developed some ideas about that back on Kzin.

“You may ask,” he said, as the stranglehold on his throat slackened. “For the present, I deem it best that my ship take the same orbit as yours, 90 degrees ahead. That should be a safe distance, while leaving you able to communicate with me on short notice when necessary.” And for us to keep an eye on you. “You understand that we will dispatch our own lesser craft as we see fit.”

He cooled further during the time lag.

Bihari didn't seem to notice how she had been disdained. He didn't want to believe that she had noticed and simply didn't care. “A question, if you please. We have detected activity of yours at a certain satellite of an outer planet. May I inquire what the purpose is?”

“Supply operations,” Ghrul-Captain snapped. He would give her no more. Let the monkeys discover the rest as it happened.

She didn't push the matter. Evidently she had been briefed on kzin ways. Or did she have direct experience? Had she fought in the war? Ghrul-Captain almost hoped so. One prefers an enemy for whom one can feel a trifle of respect. “I see. If you don't wish to speak further for the time being, shall we close?”

He replied by cutting off transmission.

5

Tyra had more and more enjoyed her voyage, until near the end. Everyone aboard was an interesting person. While not yet ready to do formal interviews, she took pleasure in cultivating their acquaintance, from Captain Worning on down. She had met some of the half-dozen crew before, but not all, and none of the scientists except Jens Lillebro, a physical chemist at the University of München; the rest were from Earth. Not that the distinction was absolute. Anybody serving on an explorer was necessarily a technician of wide-ranging skills and scientific turn of mind. Thus, the work gang who would assemble the hyperwave unit, engineer Reiner Koch and boat pilots-cum-rockjacks Birgit Eisenberg and Josef Brandt, would be much in demand after they rejoined the ship. Tyra heard many good stories and found ample cause for admiration.

She was oftenest in Craig Raden's company. She preferred to believe there was more on both sides than physical attraction. Of course, that played its part. Among other factors, she was the only woman out of the six with whom anything but the mildest flirtation was possible. Biologist Louise Dalmady made a team with her husband, Emil. Stellar astronomer Maria Kivi, middle-aged, kept quiet faith with her husband at home. Planetologist Toyo Takata was young and pretty but, in spite of being as shy as her colleague Verwoort was bluff, made plain that this was her great career opportunity and she wanted no distractions. Matronly mate Lili Deutsch had her own family back on Wunderland and seldom missed a chance to speak of the new grandchild. Pilots Eisenberg and Brandt had for years been a pair in every sense of the word. Once Tyra spied Raden and physicist Ernesto Padilla exchange a wry glance and a rueful grin. Had the first staked his claim on her? Whether or no, he was never offensive, merely fun and fascinating. They played games physical, intellectual, and childish; they listened to music and watched drama and quoted favorite poetry, they explored the ship's wine stock, they joked, they talked.

And talked and talked. He was a magnificent conversationalist, who always made it a two-way thing.

His account of the finding of their destination fascinated her. She knew about spaceborne interferometry—Wunderland had lately embarked on a project to build a set of such instruments and orbit it around Alpha Centauri C—but why had Earth's matchless facilities not identified this situation long ago? He explained in some detail how many other, more obviously exciting ventures were absorbing funds and attention, notably though not exclusively visits to the sites themselves, while the search for additional high-tech civilizations, beyond known space, grew ever more tantalizing. The star they were seeking had of course been catalogued in early times, but nothing further. It appeared completely ordinary, obscure in its remote location. Finally a slight spectral flutter, noticed in the course of a systematic survey of that region, betrayed it.

How had this given data enough to show not only what was happening, but when the climax would come? Raden had a gift for making analytical techniques clear to a non-mathematician. The precision awed her.

“Well, there's a significant probable error,” he admitted. “We'll be getting there none too soon, possibly a little too late for the actual event. Let's hope not! Sheer luck, making this discovery just when we did. True, it isn't unique, but to have one within our own lifetimes, at an accessible distance—” He laughed. “We live right, I suppose.”

The last weekly dance of the trip became an especially gleeful occasion. The gym was festooned with homemade decorations. Champagne sparkled on a sideboard. Every woman joined in, with no lack of partners, while music lilted from the speakers. Best for Tyra was when she and Craig were together. She was a good dancer; he was superb.

The hour was late when he saw her to the compartment known as her stateroom. They paused at the door, alone in the passageway. He took both her hands. “It's been wonderful,” he murmured. “Throughout.”

“Yes.” She felt the blood in her face and her pulse.

“It needn't end immediately, you know.”

“We have three daycycles left.”

“Once I'd have thought that was three too many. Now it's far too few.” He stepped close and laid arms around her waist. “Tyra, we do have them. Beginning this nightwatch.”

Not altogether surprised, she slipped free with a motion learned in a dojo and drew back a pace. Though her heart thudded, she was able to look into his eyes and say quite steadily, “I'm sorry, Craig. I like you very much, but I don't do casual.”

Robert Saxtorph thinks I do, wrenched within her. I had to make him think that, didn't I? After I saw I had no right to ruin his marriage. The kindest way—make it not too hard for him to let go—wasn't it? Wasn't it?

“We don't have to stay casual, Tyra,” Raden said. “I'm hoping we don't.”

He could be lying. She recalled his reputation. Or he could be sincere… temporarily. Or if he really meant it, or if there was a chance he might come to mean it, still, the gulf between them was interstellar. Not easily or surely bridged. Nevertheless—“Let me think, Craig. We'll have time, also at the star and on the voyage back. We'll stay friends at least. Won't we?”

He nodded. “At least,” he answered low, with a smile. “Goodnight, then, dear.” He leaned across, kissed her gently on the lips, and departed.

She stood for a moment staring after him. He knew better than to insist, tumbled through her. A gentleman, as well as everything else. Suppose he had kept trying—

Memory stabbed her again. Perhaps that was why she went to her bunk bewildered.

She slept poorly and awoke feeling on edge. At breakfast in the saloon she ate skimpily, said nothing, and when she was done returned to her room and screened book after book. None could hold her. When she went to the gym, it lay hollow and forlorn. Just the same, a workout followed by a shower was refreshing. She came to lunch with an appetite.

Raden was on hand, chatting easily with others. He gave her a smile as if nothing had happened, and brought her into the conversation. Afterward, however, as they were going out, he came alongside and asked, “Can we talk a bit?”

“What about?” Her voice sounded ragged in her ears.

He shrugged. “Anything you like. If I upset you, I'm terribly sorry and want to make amends.”

So he had read her mood in spite of her effort to seem her usual self. “No, I'm not upset, not offended.” She managed to give him back his smile. “A compliment, really, and if I couldn't accept, I did appreciate.” How honest was she? She didn't know.

He took her elbow. “Look, it's early in the watch for a drink, but on that account we should have the wardroom to ourselves. No harm in nursing a beer. Can we sit down and simply talk? I promise not to go importunate on you.”

It wasn't possible to refuse, was it? She liked the idea, didn't she?

Yet she must work to keep from showing her tension. To gaze across the table into his handsomeness reawakened the old pain and whetted it. She'd laid it aside, she'd actually been happy, now she must start over.

Self-pity wasn't in her nature. Resentment took its place. Oh, she had more sense than to blame him. He'd had no way of knowing what a nerve he touched. For that matter, she hadn't known it was still so raw. To rail at dice that fell wrong was idiotic. However, the anger had to strike at something.

“Yes, we'll be busier than a one-armed octopus,” he was saying. “Perhaps with the kzinti too.”

“God, I hope not!” burst from her.

“I'm hoping for it, actually. I'll see what I can do toward bringing it about, in whatever degree.”

Startled, she asked, “What?”

“We might manage some scientific collaboration. You know how fruitful, how inspiring and stimulating, our exchanges with other races have been,” he said earnestly. “We're overdue for an interaction with the kzinti that isn't hostile.”

“How?” demanded scorn.

He raised his brows. “How not? They're intelligent, sentient beings. Their civilization surely has its own riches. What might we learn from them?”

“New ways of murder and torture, maybe,” she sneered.

“You can't be serious, Tyra. Yes, they've been aggressors, they've committed atrocities, but that's been true of humans in the past. Read your history. Nor have we lost the potential, I'm afraid.” He gulped from his stein. “Blood guilt is one of the most vile and dangerous concepts our race ever came up with. We've got to put it behind us, for decency's sake, for survival's sake.”

She unclenched her teeth. “I'm not talking about inherited guilt. I'm talking about inherited drives and instincts. The kzinti are what they are. You can no more deal with them in good faith than you can with a—a disease germ.”

“They live among us, Tyra!” he protested.

“A few. In their enclaves. Eccentrics, misfits, atypical—abnormal, for kzinti. But don't ever turn your back on one.”

His whisper sounded aghast. “I didn't imagine you were a racist.”

“I didn't imagine you were an utter fool.” The flare damped down. “Craig, I know them. I grew up under their occupation. I saw what they did to my people. I felt what they did to—my father, my family—” The tears stung. She blinked them away. “And then I myself—but that doesn't matter. They tried their best to kill my friends and me, that's all. What does matter is how often they've succeeded with others.”

“Culture— Ethnic character is mutable. It can grow in the right directions.”

“When enough of their most murderous are dead, out of their gene pool, maybe then,” she said. “You and I won't live to see the day, if it ever comes. And first the weeding has to be done.”

“This is appalling.” Raden sighed. “Well, evidently the attitude is a common one. We'd better drop the subject.”

“Yes,” she said coldly. She knocked back her beer and rose. “Thank you for the drink.” She left him.

The relationship continued amicably, but warmth had gone out of it.

6

While Freuchen accelerated sunward, the first observer probes shot forth from her and began transmitting their readings and images. When a synthesis of the sights was ready, everyone aboard crowded into the wardroom to see it on the big screen. Excitement swiftly became awe.

In itself the star was nothing unusual, a type G dwarf. It had formed from the primordial cloud only about a billion years ago, and as yet shone with only about 65% the luminosity of Sol or half that of Alpha Centauri A—fierce enough! Though not naked-eye visible, material was still raining into it in vast quantities. Optical programs, selectively and suitably taming fieriness, showed it wildly turbulent. Spots swirled in flocks, flares and prominences fountained, corona shimmered as far as a million kilometers outward.

Six planets went about it in eccentric orbits. The inmost would not survive much longer.

It had formed at a distance where the growth of a gas giant was possible, and it became one in truth, a mass of ten Jupiters. But already the unbalanced gravitational forces of an irregularly distributed proto-system had been spiraling it inward. Its pull on itself remained so strong that it lost little or nothing as it neared the sun and temperatures soared. The atmosphere distended, though, until now an ovoid 280,000 kilometers long glowed furnace hot, chaotic with storms that could have swallowed Earth or Wunderland whole. Friction with the thick interplanetary medium had almost circularized its path, and worked together with resonances to make this ever shorter. Stripped of moons, it raced through the coronal fringes a million kilometers from the stellar photosphere, around in eleven and a half hours, each time faster and faster. Rotation had been slowed by the huge tidal bulges until cloud whorls needed fifteen hours to face out to the dark again.

Such were the facts and figures. The reality was roiling, seething, terrible magnificence. It was as if the bloodbeat in the ears of humans struck dumb by the sight faintly echoed those surfs, eruptions, hurricanes, and violences.

After many minutes of silence, Raden said very quietly, “Yes, our luck has held, barely. I got the latest computation earlier this watch. The planet's practically at the Roche limit. It's due to start breaking up.”

“When?” asked Captain Worning.

“Not quite certain. Maybe as soon as two weeks, maybe as much as five or six. What will happen then and how—we don't have an adequate model to predict. We need more data, endless data.”

“What we also need is names for those… bodies,” said Lili Deutsch. “Catalogue numbers are too unhandy and hard to remember.”

“Yes,” agreed Toyo Takata. “And they are a mockery of this.” She shivered. “It is not well to mock the elemental powers.”

She's not superstitious, thought Tyra. She's right.

“Some of us have been talking about that,” put in Ernesto Padilla. “What of Hell for the star and Lucifer for the planet?”

“No,” replied Maria Kivi. “Lucifer brought his fate on himself.”

Words, words, a shield against the overwhelming mightiness yonder. Tyra raised a hand. Eyes turned toward her; she seemed to feel the touch of Raden's. “I have been thinking too,” she ventured. “I—I suggest Pele and Kumukahi.”

“Who the devil would they be?” barked Marcus Hauptmann.

“From Hawaii on Earth,” Tyra told them. “A myth they remember there. Pele was the volcano goddess. Kumukahi was a young chief who unwittingly insulted her. She destroyed him.”

Kamehameha Ryan had related it, back in Saxtorph's Rover. She had tried to keep him out of her mind. Through no fault of his own, memories of him hurt. Maybe that was why this came back to her in a sleepless nightwatch two daycycles ago.

“Splendid!” Raden exclaimed. “Perfect! You'll know names for the other planets too, won't you? Thanks a thousandfold.”

“I don't remember much more. Not enough to go around, certainly.”

Takata said, “But I can supply some. I have family in Hawaii, and works on folklore they sent me are in my personal database.”

“M-m, well, all right by me, but not official,” Worning rumbled.

“Leave that to the officials. I'll undertake to overbear them if they get stuffy.” Raden carried the rest along on the tide of his enthusiasm.

As if this really mattered, Tyra thought. Oh, it does, in a way, but that much? To him?

Because it came from me?

Congratulations surrounded her. Raden beamed and waved above the heads. “We'll have a drink on that, Tyra, as soon as may be,” he called.

I'm forgiven, she thought. Not that I suppose he was ever angry with me, just with my attitude… The anger was mainly mine, and unreasonable.

He's not going to let me stand aside from him if he can help it.

The knowledge was at once a gladness and an alarm signal.

Raden turned to the captain. “I'll take the boat out for a closer, personal look tomorrow.”

“What?” protested Worning. “We won't be in our orbit yet.”

“She has delta vee to burn. Not that I'll waste any.”

“She's our one auxiliary until the hyperwave gang rejoin us.”

“Samurai will be close, with several, in case of emergency. Which is ridiculously improbable. And you know I'm a qualified pilot.”

“Why, however, when our probes are not even all deployed?” the captain asked.

“Precisely for that reason. A live brain, a trained eye, alert for the unforeseeable. Which, at present, is virtually everything in and around Kumukahi. I'll wager you a month's pay we'll be rewriting the robots' programs immediately after my first excursion.”

Worning scowled. “I do not take the bet, because I will not allow this. It is reckless.”

Affability and persuasiveness flooded over him. “Captain, with due and considerable respect, I beg leave to prove to you that it isn't. Instead, it's the best investment we can make. Time is short. We can't afford to miss a single chance of learning something. It'll never come again.”

He'll win, Tyra knew, and go cometing off, laughing for sheer joy. He will return like a knight of old from a joust with giants.

She could well-nigh see plume and pennon flying in the wind of his gallop.

7

She had planned to conduct some interviews aboard Samurai, but it was an astonishment to be invited, virtually bidden, over there just four days after Freuchen took orbit. A naval auxiliary with a tight-lipped pilot flitted her quickly across the few hundred klicks between, and she was conducted directly to a communications-outfitted cabin. Captain Bihari sat alone at a desk, confronting a screen live but blank. The door slid shut behind her. “Be seated,” was the brusque greeting. However, when Tyra had taken a chair opposite, the officer said with a grim smile, “This should give you quite an interesting story.” The tone was serious. “For my part, I want a responsible outside observer, to report the truth afterward. Already we're having a crisis with the kzin. Please stay where you are and keep silence while I am transmitting. You will note that you can see what goes on but are not in the scanner field. I don't suppose these ones would recognize you and recall the part you played against their kind, but if any of them did, matters could get entirely out of hand. The situation is bad enough without taking the slightest added risk.”

“I could have stayed aboard the Freuchen, patched in,” Tyra said. Bihari frowned. “Too many others could eavesdrop. I don't call them untrustworthy, but—different people interpret things in different ways, and soon rumors run wild.” She sighed. “The political balance on Earth is such that we have to—we have orders to avoid any unnecessary word or action that might conceivably be taken as 'aggressive' or 'provocative.' ”

Tyra stiffened. “Really? Well, ma'am, you must decide what is necessary, mustn't you?”

“Yes, and justify it, here and at home. I wouldn't put it past certain parties to claim we falsified our databases. Easy to do, after all.”

No, Tyra thought, Craig would never be so paranoid. He simply, genuinely wants peace—what decent human being doesn't?—and believes we can have it if we try. “I see, ma'am. I'm your impartial witness.” Is that possible for me?… I'll have my opinions, but I won't write lies.

“You've come barely in time. I have commenced conversation”—again the wolf's grin—“as the diplomats say, with Ghrul-Captain aboard their mother ship. His response to my complaint, as the diplomats would also say, should arrive shortly.” Eight or nine minutes either way for radio to travel between the vessels circling Pele.

Dismay: “It's about Birgit and the Dalmadys, isn't it?”

“Who or what else would it be?”

The fact jabbed through Tyra. Eisenberg had piloted a boat carrying the biological team to the third planet, Kama-pua'a. The second was less favorably positioned at present; though the third orbited farther out, it wasn't much more than thirty hours off, at one gee with midpoint turnover. If something unexpected began happening to Kumukahi, which it might at any moment, the boat would be wanted back straightaway. Meanwhile, husband and wife could do science yonder.

“But—they weren't going to land where the kzinti are,” Tyra protested. More remembrance. Kama-pua'a was another giant, with a swarm of moons. The two biggest had thin atmospheres. They were close enough that tidal flexion, as well as whatever internal heat remained, kept them warm enough that life was perhaps, barely, germinating on either or both. Its origins were so various, probably many of the possibilities still unknown… The boat had sent images back, a great spheroid banded with clouds and storms, the craggy surface of Moku-ola ahead, the joyful expectations inboard…

The kzinti had established their bases on the small outer satellite the humans called Poliahu, obviously mostly ice.

“You know and the kzinti know what sensitive instruments can do, especially at short ranges like that,” Bihari said. “Frankly, I would have liked very much to send some of ours along, but my orders—Hold.”

The screen filled with a tigerish countenance. The voice rumbled with a menace and—glee?—that the flat English of the translator had no need to convey. “Your words are insolent. No Hero can tolerate such. You will make amends for the intrusion, amends which I will specify, or your spies will suffer the consequences that they have earned.”

Bihari kept her tone level, steeliness only in the dark face. “I deny again that they are spies and that your gang had any right whatsoever to seize them. They will be returned promptly, unharmed, or there will indeed be consequences. However, as a point of information, what demands have you in mind?” She ceased transmission pending the reply, turned to Tyra, and said, “This is preposterous, as I think even a kzin must realize. They can scarcely be carrying on military work there.”

“No,” Tyra answered. “Not exactly. I can guess what it is.”

“Tell me.”

“They used a special kind of tug at the old red sun where Captain Saxtorph surprised them. It could fly close, to nudge ferriferous objects into trajectories for collection. The crew survived those passages because the craft, besides having big reflecting surfaces, was heavily loaded with water. Vented to space, the water cooled it during the time of exposure. I think these kzinti have one like it along, though it must be smaller.”

Bihari nodded. “Yes, of course I remember the reports, but thank you for reminding me.” She stroked her chin. “Our own long-range observations do show large excavations, and structures that may well be prefabricated facilities for purification and transfer… Yes, I feel sure you are right. Thank you again. You have done us a service.”

Our instruments are all directed at Pele and Kumukahi, Tyra thought. “They can't claim that's military.”

“Not logically. If it were, it would be a violation of the peace treaty. But proprietary processes—I can't predict how an Earthside court would rule. I suspect dear Ghrul-Captain was rather well briefed before he left home. The kzin may be mad, but they are not stupid; and… there have been humans eager to inform them. There doubtless still are.”

“Civilian, military, no difference to them anyway,” said Tyra with a bitterness that the memory of her brother redoubled.

“You understand.”

“He's been on the lurk for an excuse, any excuse, to make trouble for us. What can we do?”

“That will be seen,” said Bihari.

They spoke little more but sat each with her thoughts until the kzin face came back.

“Your two ships will move to hyperspacing distance,” stated Ghrul-Captain. “When they have done so, we will allow the three creatures we hold to rendezvous with you. You will then depart.”

“And leave further discoveries to you,” Bihari retorted. “Sir, you know how underequipped you are. Priceless knowledge will be lost, which it is our mission to obtain.” She paused. “Very well, you have made your—initial offer, shall we say? Mine is that you release our people and their boat immediately, unconditionally, and unharmed. In return, we will consider this a misunderstanding which, fortunately, was resolved by mutual reasonableness. I expect your decision as quickly as transmission lag allows.”

The screen blanked.

“What next, ma'am?” Tyra whispered.

“We have about a quarter of an hour. Ample time.” Bihari activated an intercom and ordered battle stations. Tyra heard running feet and clashing metal. In minutes, a monitor screen showed assault boats leaping from their bays, spearlike athwart the stars.

It thrilled in her. Yet what would Craig think?

When Ghrul-Captain's image reappeared, he must have known what his radars and other detectors were revealing. Tyra wondered whether that smoothed his arrogance a little. It certainly did not quell him. “If you do not wish me to send the command for the execution of your agents, you will not try my patience further. I make this much concession in the interests of peace. You will turn your hyperwave transmitter over to us, with complete instructions for its use. I am prepared to consider that a barely sufficient atonement.”

Yes, Tyra thought at him, and after that you can do anything you think you might get away with. You aren't armed like us, but Robert wiped out your red-sun base by crashing an asteroid on it. Your ice tug? I don't know. But I can hear that you don't gag on words like “peace.” Was this what you were after all along?

“Ghrul-Captain,” said Bihari glacially, “what I will consider barely sufficient atonement is the liberty of our people. My command is in attack mode, as I trust your instruments have verified for you. If we do not hear from those people in minimum transmission time that they are coming safely back to us, we will destroy you. Yes, they will die too, but a Hero understands what honor demands. I require your immediate response.”

Blankness.

“Whew!” gasped Tyra.

“Now the burden falls on you,” Bihari told her gravely.

“What? How?”

“To make them see at home that this has been the only way.”

“But, but you may lose your whole career—”

“Much worse, the movement for preparedness and a firm stance will suffer. And so a new war will become all the more likely. I think you can help make that clear to the human race. Will you?”

“I'll t-try my damnedest,” Tyra promised. Whatever it may cause between Craig and me.

Bihari smiled. “I haven't misjudged you. Nor do I think I have underestimated you.”

They waited in silence, together.

Ghrul-Captain snarled while the translator gave: “So be it, then. To treat with your hysteria would be unworthy of Heroes. Your wretched slinkers may return to you, and good riddance. But beware of coming near that planet again.” Bihari nodded. “We grant you that. The third planet will be off limits for us, within a ten-million-kilometer radius. Please note that nothing else in the system, except your vessels, will be. Let this agreement be made in full honor, and our original terms of relationship continue in force. As soon as I learn that our people are bound back unharmed, I will take my command off battle footing. Please acknowledge.”

The screen blanked anew.

Tyra felt and smelled that she had been sweating. A chill passed through her. Fire followed. “That was wonderful!” she cried.

Bihari smiled as if unperturbed. “Thank you. They'll be nearly out of their skins with rage, driven to do something or other showing they actually are superior to the monkeys. Let us hope it won't be too dangerous—to us, at any rate.” She leaned forward. “I also hope, and I believe you can, when you tell the story, you will soften it, make it seem as minor an incident as possible.”

“Yes,” Tyra murmured, “that would be best, wouldn't it?”

8

Every deployed robot and observatory, every probe, each of the boats when sent forth, transmitted continuously back to Freuchen. The computers printed everchanging displays and images. Aboard, Tyra could follow moment by moment. “Yes,” opined planetologist Verwoort. “The catastrophe will begin any day now.” Kumukahi writhed, distorted and in torment. The night side flickered with enormous lightnings, shimmered with their glare cast back from roiling clouds the size of Earth or greater, flashed with the red sparks of explosions, or whatever it was going on in the upper atmosphere, all above a dull glow of sheer heat. The day side seemed afire. Bursts of incandescent gas leaped from it like flames. Some broke free and whirled off, vanishing as they dissipated, toward the sun. Storms mightier than Jupiter's Red Spot, and perhaps of greater age, fought to keep their structure as they poured along the steepening slope of the inner tidal bulge. A segment of Pele's disc, dimmed by the imagers to seething purple, filled the right edge of the big screen.

“The spectrum grows more and more strange,” said his colleague Takata. “In the past few hours I have been finding an increase of iron, largely hydrides…” Her voice trailed off.

“Spewed up from below, I suppose,” suggested the physicist Padilla. “Should heavy elements not have sunk to form a core?”

“No,” answered Verwoort. “They exist, yes, and they would be more plentiful in lower layers, but with as vast a mass of hydrogen and helium as this, the percentage is so small that it must always have been diffused. The core is metallic hydrogen, maybe pressed into a still denser form than in Jupiter. This upwelling should tell us much about the gaseous atmosphere.”

“It is not the only peculiar chemistry,” Takata said. “Jens will have plenty to consider when he gets back.”

“What will we see when the whole thing breaks apart, before it falls into the sun?” asked the steward Hauptmann. While he was intelligent enough, science was not his forte, and with as many people to look after as there were on this voyage, he had been too busy to keep track.

Kivi shook her head. “It won't break like a melon,” she explained. “The planet's self-gravity will hold it together as it fills its Roche lobe. We can't predict events with any precision, and no doubt we will be surprised. However, we can say that turbulence within may well eject great gouts of material, forming a spiral that streams into the star. The magnetic effects—but that goes too far into speculation. Eventually the planet will take a teardrop shape, filling its Roche lobe, and pouring its substance down that spiral until it becomes an accretion disk. This will go on at an accelerating rate for some undetermined time. Decades at least, possibly centuries.” She sighed. “How I wish we had probes that could observe from sunside!”

A goodly number were aflight, but those that had gone between planet and star were suicides, sending only bare glimpses before heat and radiation killed their electronics. Tyra's mind strayed for a moment to an image she had seen two daywatches ago. Samurai's long-range observations had, earlier, picked up a craft that emerged from Strong Runner and went out to the ice moon of Three. Now it had returned, presumably loaded. Spheroidal, with broad fins, blinding-bright reflective, it was of a size to account for the mother ship apparently having only three other boats along in spite of being designed as a carrier. The view that Samurai's computer reconstructed and shared with Freuchen showed it maneuvering about, a test run. Spectroscopy revealed it venting some water vapor from widely over its surface.

Craig Raden had been with her then, gazing as intently. “A sundiver for certain,” she had said. “Not nearly as big as the one Captain Saxtorph encountered, and probably not as well outfitted. It can't have life support for more than one or two. A prototype, pressed into service.”

“You seem to have studied the subject rather thoroughly,” he drawled. She felt how she flushed.

“Naturally, after I'd been with Rover's people, I was interested in their past experiences and went back to the database entries.” Was he watching her? She didn't look toward him.

“For an opportunity like this, they'll take the risk. A bold venture, ingeniously thought out, and very possibly scientifically invaluable. We must find our way to cooperation with them.”

She made no reply. Worse than useless, reviving that quarrel. He had likewise been careful after the crisis to say merely that Bihari could have shown more restraint. After all, Emil, Louise, and Birgit were back among them, uninjured albeit shaken. Once again, though, the relationship between Tyra and Craig was not quite cordial. That hurt worse than she cared to admit.

Kumukahi's image was slipping close to Pele's in its headlong rush around the sun.

“The polar orbiters are doing fine work,” Takata was saying.

“At a distance,” Kivi answered. “If we had had time to design and build a sundiver of our own—”

“We didn't,” snorted Verwoort. “We can recommend the making and dispatching of several when we report home.”

“Robots,” said mate Deutsch a bit sadly. “Nothing but robots to keep watch after us.”

“Well,” replied Captain Worning, “decades or centuries would be a long and expensive time to maintain humans on station. They might grow bored.”

Padilla laughed. “Besides,” he put in, “when enough atmosphere is gone that the core drops below a critical threshold, it will explode. I would not want to be any closer than hyperspace escape distance.”

“Yes,” agreed engineer Koch, “better we live to see the images.” Kumukahi dropped below yonder restless horizon.

“Let us check with the boat,” proposed Worning, and entered a command. Tyra's heart stumbled.

Josef Brandt was piloting for physical chemist Jens Lillebro. Raden had invited himself along. “Not my cup of tea, strictly speaking,” he had said with his irresistible smile. “But one never knows what sort of clue lies where, does one? At least I can take a few observations of Pele from that angle. Those spots on her are acting downright eerily,” as the planet's gravitational force swept through the photosphere.

The screen in Freuchen awoke again, to a view of Henrietta Leavitt's cabin. Brandt sat intent at his controls, Lillebro at his spectroscopic readouts. Raden saw that they were in communication and responded. “All's well,” he proclaimed. “We're closing in on the asteroid, and will have velocities matched quite shortly, at about five klicks' distance. Behold.”

No time lag was noticeable. They were only some 15,000 kilometers away. Kivi had identified the body among the data pouring in from the continuous automatic skyscan and, retrieving earlier information, computed an orbit. Now they saw a rough gray lump, about three kilometers long and one at maximum thickness, slowly tumbling.

“Apparently chondritic,” commented Raden. “You'll notice the remarkable sparsity of craters. You're right, Maria, it must be from the outer belt, lately perturbed into an eccentric path.”

Pristine, Tyra knew, formed hardly more than a billion years ago, in a thinly bestrewn region where there had been scant occasion or time for collisions. Probes were to examine such rocks later. But who knew how much later? Composition and structure might well give unique insights into the early life of every planetary system. This chance was too good to pass up. Should Kumukahi make sudden call on Henrietta, she could boost back to Freuchen in well under an hour.

“Backing down on it, essentially,” continued Raden's voice. The asteroid swelled fast in sight. “As you recall, we'll run parallel and let Jens stare while we send minisamplers—”

The thing erupted. A white cloud burst raggedly forth. Gravel and boulders sleeted outward.

Tyra heard herself scream.

The view swung wildly. The barrage became glints across a whirl of stars. Somebody in the boat yelled, “Almächtige Gott!” Somebody else ripped an oath. The view returned to the cabin and steadied on Rader. Sweat studded his brow, but he grinned, well-nigh laughed. “Whoop, that was close! Thank Josef here. The autopilot isn't programmed for— He yanked us free. Barely, but he did it.” Brandt looked around, his own expression grim. “Barely is correct,” he grated. “Some of those stones could have holed us, or even been bouncers.” Tyra shuddered. She knew what he meant. The boat lacked a protective screenfield. The hull was self-sealing. But a small object that punched through could lose too much energy thereby to make an exit, not too much to ricochet back and forth and quite likely hit a man.

“Was für den Teufel—what happened?” roared Worning.

Lillebro spoke almost calmly. “I can guess. The chondrules surrounded a mixture of ices, which also mortared them together. The agglomerate was metastable, and the impulses from our polarizer drive as we neared touched off volatilization and—it will be fascinating to learn what reactions.”

“A bomb,” added Raden. “I daresay they're not uncommon in young systems, but all of them are disrupted—solar input, impact energy, perhaps cumulative cosmic ray effects—long before intelligence evolves locally to notice them. What a discovery!”

“It has just begun,” said Lillebro with rising excitement. “The gas spectrum, and we'll collect specimens—”

“No,” decreed Worning. “You will return here. At once.”

“What? But, sir, now that we're aware—”

“Of what are we still unaware? I will not risk one of our two boats and three of our lives for something that robots can examine at leisure. Return. That is an order.”

“Yes, sir.” Brandt did not sound unwilling. Lillebro sighed. Raden gave a wry grin and a rueful shrug.

When he cycled aboard, Tyra was waiting at the lock. She reached for his hands. “You might have been killed,” she stammered, and could not altogether hold back the tears. “You might have been killed.”

He drew her to him. “Do you care that much?” he whispered. “I dared not hope.”

9

A bunk could be folded out to double width, though it then filled most of the deck space in a so-called stateroom. Lights could be turned down to softness. Music could be commanded, Là cì daremm' la mano, Liebestod, afterward the lilt and gentleness of Fynsk Foraar, though likewise softened to a background. “That was amazing,” he said as low. “I didn't quite expect a supernova.”

“Thank you,” she answered, snuggling, refusing to wonder if he'd used those words before or how often. “Same order of magnitude to you, sir. But let's settle for ordinary novas. They can repeat.”

He chuckled. His lips brushed her cheek. “Shameless hussy.”

“I'd better be. You too. How many bets will be paid off tomorrow?”

He looked away. She heard the sudden seriousness. “You told me you… don't do casual.”

She confronted her own spirit. “I don't.”

“It's far too early to make promises. On either side.”

“I realize that. But I decided, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” And, if this didn't last—certainly the obstacles were many—she would at least have a profit of memories. As he would; she'd see to that. And she had the strength to pay the price. Which maybe wouldn't be required of her.

His eyes met hers. “I'm being as honest as I'm able,” he said, “because in fact I am in love with you.”

“All right, it's mutual.”

“I wish I could, well, give you more. Now, I mean, before we go… home. We have so little here.”

Through the eased-off happiness she felt her mind sharpen. She had given thought to this too. She did not believe the idea had snapped the leash she kept on herself. His escape did that. Nor was it a price she set, a bargain she struck. Nevertheless—

“You can,” she said.

His head lifted off the pillow. “What?”

She moved slightly aside from his warmth and male odor to lean on an elbow and keep hold of his gaze. “When Kumukahi begins breaking up, you'll be out there to watch, won't you?”

“Of course. We haven't that many free machines, and we don't know enough to write adequate programs for any. Who can tell what human observers might catch?”

“Take me along.”

“Eh?” he exclaimed, and sat straight. After a moment, he leaned back. “No, really, darling, it's not feasible. If the event begins in the next few days, and it probably will, Birgit won't yet be fit to pilot. That leaves Josef for one boat, crammed with scientists and their gear.”

Tyra nodded. “I know,” from what Rover's crew had told her. Neither they nor Eisenberg were weaklings, but kzinti captivity was at best unnerving. Given a stiff enough emergency, you could force yourself to carry on for a while. Thereafter medications merely helped time and nature. Eisenberg was absolutely right to disqualify herself for another week or two.

“And autopilot won't do for the other, not when we are bound to be surprised and must react fast if we are to collect the data,” Raden went on. “I shall have to steer.” Even now, she heard the relish.

“Exactly,” Tyra said. “In that case, you can pick who comes with you, can't you? If you make a point of it.”

“Well, I see where it could give you a spectacular story. But no, the hazard no.”

“What hazard?” she challenged. “You're skilled, you're not a fool, you won't take unnecessary risks.”

“Not knowingly. Still, who can foresee what happens?”

“Who can foresee what will happen anywhere?” She moved back to his side and laid an arm around his neck. “Yes, I may get quite an eyewitness account, but that doesn't matter, Craig, truly it doesn't. This,” she crooned, “is something you can give me, because it's something splendid we can share.”

She was entirely wholehearted and honest. Well, almost.

Her free hand roved. She knew she could persuade him.

10

The three ranking kzinti met for their last time in the command lair of Strong Runner.

“Once more, master, I ask that you reconsider, and take me with you,” said Rach-Scientist.

Ghrul-Captain growled negation. “And once more I tell you that you are wanted to oversee what other data collection this expedition can do, and bring the booty safely home, whatever may become of me. You have been less than enthusiastic about my plan. Do you challenge my decision?”

Rach-Scientist slipped his tail briefly between his hocks. “No, master, assuredly not.”

Ghrul-Captain relented. “Bear in mind, this is a trial run, the first severe one. Yes, the instruments will peer and snuff, but foremost is to prove that the vessel can run such a course. That ride is for me alone.” And for me alone the glory, and the triumph that it will be over the monkeys, he thought; it was as if he tasted fresh blood. “On later flights, yes, perhaps I will let you come too.”

“Master, I have not questioned your wisdom, nor do I now,” said Shayin-Mate. “However, I venture to ask that you record a summary of your intent. Should anything go awry, against my wishes—”

Then you will be acting captain, who takes the ship back, makes trophy of the prestige that that confers, and contrives to lay the full blame for the debacle with the monkeys on me, thought Ghrul-Captain sardonically. Not altogether against your wishes.

He did not resent it. In the mate's position, he would have done the same. His rage at the humans flared. Because of their contumely, the exploit ahead of him would merely win back the standing Ress-Chiuu had lost for him. No net advancement. Unless, of course, he could do the foe a real injury…

“The lords at Kzin will want a quick overview of events,” Shayin-Mate went on. “The technical reports can be digested for them later.”

Ghrul-Captain's fury smoldered back down. He expanded the ears he had folded and gibed, “Since you feel yourself incapable, I will pace the track for you.”

“Master, it is simply that your own words will have the most force. I hope with all my entrails you will be on hand to deliver them personally.”

“So be it.” Ghrul-Captain set the intercom scanner to record. Having curtly stated the purpose, he declared:

“I am about to take the sundiver Firehunter on a swing around the sunward side of the giant planet we have come to spy out. The planet has just commenced its death struggle, so this is urgent. How things will go is unpredictable; they may become too violent for another such flight, although I am ready to dare whatever looks possible. For the same reason, unforeseeability, I make the flight piloted rather than robotic.” As well as there being no honor in risking a few machines. “I will accelerate inward, cut the drive at a suitable point, and have the planet itself take me around. I will then be moving at high velocity on a hyperbolic orbit which, if allowed to continue, would carry me nearer the human ships than is… desirable. However, well before then, I will reduce the vector and start acceleration on a quartering path to rendezvous with Strong Runner. Available delta vee is ample.

“Perhaps observation of these extreme conditions at that close range will yield data of military value. It is sure that nothing like my mission has ever been attempted before.

“Glory to the race!”

He switched off and looked straight at Shayin-Mate. “Will that do?” he asked: a sarcasm, for it had better.

The other dropped his gaze. “Thanks and honor to our captain.”

Rach-Scientist said nothing. En route he had expressed doubts about the utility of the scheme. The passage between star and planet would take less than four hours. What few instruments could endure the environment must be rugged, heavily shielded, basically simple, and therefore of very limited capabilities. His class was necessarily allowed a certain latitude, and Ghrul-Captain had been content to override his objections. But to pursue them, especially now, would be insolence meriting punishment.

And, yes, in the end he wanted to fare along. He too was a kzin. “I go, then,” said Ghrul-Captain. To linger when the game was afoot did not become a Hero.

He strode down passageways and sprang down companionways to the portside boat lock. Firehunter waited alongside. A guard made obeisance as he reached the gang tube between. He passed on.

The control den, the only section of the vessel with life support, was a hemispherical space less than five meters across, crammed with equipment and storage lockers, just enough room free for a kzin to curl up on a pad and get a little sleep—hardly a fit prison cell. The air hung chill and stale-smelling. Yet in the viewscreen above the main control panel blazed his goal. He exulted while he settled into the command seat, activated the systems, heard the purr of power and felt the slight tug on him when his craft cast free.

Heavily burdened with her surrounding shell of water, she could not accelerate as fiercely as he would have wished. But her speed did mount, second by second, sunward bound. Ghrul-Captain hissed his satisfaction.

11

Tyra and Craig would be alone aboard Caroline Herschel. They could take several days, perhaps as much as a week, depending on what they found. “Not long enough,” he grumbled, “not by half. Well, I'll come back, make better arrangements, and set forth again.”

“I don't think this arrangement is a bad one,” Tyra purred.

He laughed. “Nor do I. But the idea is to do science.”

“Don't worry, dear, I won't get in the way. Not of the science, at least. Remember, I'm supposed to report it. We won't be tied down twenty-four hours per daycycle, though, will we?”

“M-m, no. The instruments will generally operate themselves. I'm basically to oversee, and make decisions when the inevitable surprises jump at us. Otherwise… we'll often sit goggle-eyed, I'm sure. But no, not the whole time.”

“Don't worry,” she said demurely. “Some happenings won't be reported.” She could not have been accommodated in Henrietta Leavitt, in any case. That boat would be crowded with scientists and their equipment. The Dalmadys did best to stay aboard Freuchen, working up what results they had obtained so far. Likewise, Padilla was fully occupied with the data flooding in from probes and observatories. Verwoort remained also, having lost a coin toss with Takata; it was unwise to send both planetologists together, and he'd have more than enough to keep him busy.

Henrietta departed in the prograde direction, boosting to a path that would take her as far sunward as was deemed safe. A boat from Samurai went along, just in case, and to keep a better eye on the kzin mother ship, orbiting ninety degrees ahead of her. Mainly, Bihari wanted her to follow the progress of the sundiver lately detected on a course for Pele itself. Furthermore, the navy craft had capabilities that would be substantially helpful to the scientists. None accompanied Caroline. She was going retrograde, to study from a different angle what happened in the star rather than to the planet. The only kzin vessel she would see, and that from a considerable distance, was the sundiver when it swung half around Kumukahi and came out of the glare on a hurtling hyperbolic trajectory. Carrying two people, the boat could readily hold everything Raden needed for his work.

She even offered some extra space. He came upon Tyra when she was stowing a portable cooker-washer, kitchenware, tableware, and assorted things to eat. “What the deuce?” he asked.

She grinned. “I'll have more leisure to spare than you,” she explained. “I want to show you I can cook too. I wheedled Marcus out of this—yes, the chill cabinet has room for it—and we'll have beer and wine as well. No need for us to pig it on dry rations and recycled water.” She sighed. “Alas, no candles available.”

“Well, we can turn the lighting way low—”

“Or block off the sun. Simply the stars… No, maybe that's best for later.”

He cocked his head at her. “D'you know, you're the damnedest combination of the romantic and the practical.”

“We women have to be.”

“And we men get to enjoy it. How I pity the kzinti!”

Thus they took off merrily. The last thing they heard before the airlock closed behind them was Verwoort's bawdy farewell.

The next few days were sheer wonder. Personal joys became not separate, but integral with the whole. Tyra had an educated person's knowledge of science. Fascinated by what Raden told, especially about what was being newly revealed to him, she found that talking with her stimulated his thinking; she actually made a few suggestions that he called excellent. It was happiness merely to see and feel his glee; she could watch him in his preoccupation for hours, as she used to watch the sea at her childhood home or could lose herself in the splendor of open space. However, she seldom indulged idleness. Besides her cuisine and a few other minor things, there was her writing. How to find words for what she beheld, how to tell it? Personal impressions, text for a documentary, background for a novel, a cycle of poems—nothing could ever really capture truth, but the thrill of the quest was upon her.

A hundredth of Pele's mass skimmed around it and had begun to rain down into it. Incandescent tides raged, brewing maelstroms that crashed together and spouted monstrous plasmas; blaze scudded like spindrift; invisibly, magnetic lines twisted around each other till they snapped and energies exploded that dwarfed whatever mortals knew to touch off; the deeper layers roiled, and maybe certain atomic nuclei were fusing in strange ways: mystery, mystery, unfolding in fury. The sun was not shaken to the core, Raden said. These were transient effects. In the course of the next century or two, they would die down, leaving little other than a slightly changed chemical composition and thereby, perhaps, a mainsequence evolution slightly hastened. Nor was this present chaos quite akin to a storm such as humans knew. However mighty it appeared from afar, it was gases in a soft vacuum. The deadliness lay in the radiation, charged particles, searing infrared, blinding light, lethal X-rays. Heavily protected, a spacecraft might still pass quickly through unscathed.

Might. Nobody knew. Nobody before them had been this close to this kind of catastrophe.

Tyra's mind dwelt more on Kumukahi. A planet, no matter how huge and alien, was closer kin to home than any star. Whenever it swung into view and she had the use of the screens, she strained at the magnified image, gripped, half terrified.

Pele had drawn the spheroid into a teardrop, but a living and throbbing one. The extended tip seethed and surged like a monstrous, fluid volcano. Hydrogen-helium smoke poured as from a nozzle, redly and restlessly aglow with fluorescence. It rushed ahead, girdling the planet's slayer with a ring that wound into a spiral whirling ever inward. Sparks and gouts flew free, knots of momentary concentration, like lava bombs. The titanic outpouring shuddered, shifted, ever changeable, spurted lesser eruptions of moon size, wrapped itself in clouds that then boiled away to give sight anew of the cataract streaming upward. Everywhere else churned chaos. All was red, a thousand shades never the same for two instants, from murky roan through carmine to blood damasked with blue-white. Kumukahi's dying in style! thought Tyra once; and then: That's how Robert would put it.

She dismissed the pain, which had become small, and went back to what she had gained.

12

The rage toward which Ghrul-Captain rushed filled heaven. The air in which he crouched recalled to him an equatorial desert on Kzin. An overloaded cooling system gusted and whined. It was time to go into sundiver mode.

Firehunter could have done so automatically. This, though, was his flight. Whether or not any other Hero ever knew, each thing he did raised his honor, was a blow he himself struck at the enemy. He stabbed the manual override. “Hro-oo!” His roar echoed through his cave.

Steam vented from a thousand pores in the metal shell that enclosed the hull. The optics did not show it to his eyes, but the instruments did. The craft must take care of this for him, sensors gauging moment by moment how much to release. Calculation had shown that, given close control, there should be enough, just enough, to see him through the danger zone—if the calculations and the data upon which they drew were nearly enough correct. He had to trust them as he trusted his weapons. A Hero did.

And he was still the master of the wild hunt ahead. Again the control displays showed him what they would do of themselves and when. He heeded them as he would have heeded the scent of a quarry. But again it was he who cut off the drive. Now let the planet sling him halfway around itself and cast him forth at more than cometary speed. For those three and a half hours, while the instruments drank down what knowledge they could, he must watch and wait—only that, if all went well. If not, he must choose what to do and do it. Nobody could have programmed for every unforeseeable violence. The fact brought no sense of helplessness. He had the heat to fight, with copious drinks and his own endurance. Meanwhile, he lurked watchful, as if in ambush.

Nevertheless awe came upon him. Under these conditions, optics were altogether inadequate, yet he saw, however partially and blurrily, he felt, he defied. Firehunter flew between two walls that towered and reached beyond sight, one red-hot, geysering in mountainous lightning-shot clouds, shuddering beneath them until he imagined he could feel the thunders in his bones, the other a white-hot furnace out of which licked crimson tongues of flame. A thin opal haze shimmered everywhere around the spacecraft, fantastically writhing, where long livid arcs leaped and knots exploded into bursts of gigantic sparks. Ghrul-Captain sailed amidst a wreck of the gods.

Over and over again he roared at it, his challenge, his triumph. A crash smote his hearing. Firehunter reeled. The noise became a hailstorm that dashed against metal and rang in his cave.

That smote through!

Ghrul-Captain saw the brief cloud gush out. Immensity swallowed it. An alarm keened. Readouts raced crazily over the pilot panel. Ghrul-Captain knew himself for a warrior suddenly stabbed.

Something had riddled the outer hull. It had not pierced the inner, but the water cells were ruptured and the fluid of life boiling away.

The bombardment ceased. He had passed whatever it was, or it had ended. No matter. It had slain him.

“No!” he bellowed, and snatched for the override. Start the drive. At full boost, he might break free before he baked.

Weightlessness took him, like a falling off an infinite cliff. Lights still shone, ventilation whispered. But nothing responded to his claws. He glared at the panel. The gravity polarizers were dead. He had no thrust.

How? flashed through him. An integrated system, well armored— But the damage to the massive water circulators and everything that regulated them, the escape of those tonnes, vibrations, resonances, yes, the plunge in temperature—he was breathing air gone wintry—yes, that could have disrupted critical circuitry. Then safety locks cut in and the fusion generator shut down. Nothing was left but the energy reserve in the accumulators.

That's as well, he thought starkly. Radiation from reactions running free would have killed me in minutes.

Which would have been better. Easier.

“No!” he snarled. A Hero did not surrender.

He was on trajectory, outward bound. The chilling gave him a short respite before temperature mounted. It might level off, as he receded, before he was cooked dead.

If he survived, it would be an exploit unmatched in history. None could then deny him his birthright, and more, much more.

If not, this remained his deed, wholly and entirely his, which nothing could ever take from him.

13

“Oh-oh,” said Raden very softly. “I don't like this at all.”

Tyra's pulse jumped. “What is it?” Her voice sounded shrill in her ears. It must involve the kzin sundiver. Freuchen and Samurai were peering with high-tuned instruments, as the thing came out of Pele's blinding glare and deafening plasma. But they were almost two light-minutes farther away than Caroline had ventured. They had sent their request that the boat likewise keep watch. Orbiting ahead of them, the kzin mother ship currently had the sun between it and its explorer. Whoever was in command there had not deigned to respond to the human offer to relay information as soon as it was received.

Raden gestured. “Look.”

Tyra peered over his shoulder at the viewscreen before which he sat. Magnified, chosen wavelengths dimmed or amplified, the image was hardly more than a schematic. To her eyes, a small segment of Pele was a purple rectangle filling a slice along the left side of the screen. Prominences were tendrils, the corona a ghost-shimmer. A starlike speck gleamed nearby. That must be the best that the boat's sensors could do at this remove, lacking interferometry, she thought almost mechanically. Raden's finger pointed at the displays and readouts beneath the video.

“The spectroscope gives no hint of water molecules or OH,” he said starkly. “She ought to be venting yet, to maintain an endurable temperature till she gets clear of the peristellar zone. Instead, the infrared emission is like an oven's, or worse. And doppler shows she isn't boosting to escape. Hyperbolic trajectory, slung off by the planet at terrific speed but not fast enough. Something's gone terribly wrong.”

It would be obscene to rejoice. However, Tyra could not find pity in her heart. “What may have happened?” she inquired.

“God knows, at this stage. Close examination ought to give an idea or two.” Raden turned his head to stare at her. “Meanwhile, though, the crew are being baked alive!”

“If they haven't already. Or he. Whichever. What do you want to do?”

“Try saving them. Nobody else possibly can.”

“How can we?” The figures he had mentioned to her spun through her head. If the sundiver's periapsis grazed through the significant fringe of Kumukahi's distended atmosphere—and what other course would a kzin plot?—the planet had hurled it forth at more than a hundred KPS, far over stellar escape velocity, bound for the stars… But the plan must have been to decelerate till the craft could swing around to rendezvous with its mother.

Raden swiveled about in his seat. His fingers danced across a keyboard. Meanwhile he voice-activated transmission. “Caroline to Freuchen and Samurai. By now you'll have seen that sundiver's in trouble. The other kzinti can't match velocities and lay to till long after the ones aboard are dead. I propose to make rendezvous and rescue them if they aren't, yet. If this craft has the capability. That's being checked. Assuming a positive answer, we'll need to skite off immediately. I'll await your response.”

Three or four minutes—“Have you gone crazy?” Tyra protested.

He gave her a lopsided grin. “No, in my opinion I'm being more sane than most. If the computations tell me what I hope they will… Ah!” He swung his chair again to stare at the readouts. She stood above him, behind him, helpless, listening to his monotone. “Yes. Just barely feasible. Killing our present vector, boosting to match while approaching, yes, it calls for accelerations up to ten gee. Within stress limits for our craft, though an engineer would probably shake his head a bit. The thermostatic system will be overloaded too, but not overwhelmed if we're quick. And we'll squander energy. We should have enough delta vee left afterward to make it home. If not, the difference by then will be slight, and Samurai has a tug plenty well able to meet us and haul us back. We can do it.”

Abruptly his tone rang. “Therefore we must.”

The comscreen lightened, view split to show two faces. “This is lunacy,” growled Worning. “No!” and Bihari, quietly, with her ironic smile: “The kzinti aren't noted for gratitude. My recommendation is a decided negative.”

“Ma'am and sir,” Raden replied, “let me respectfully remind you that while this vessel is in free space, I'm in command, with discretionary authority. If I'm mistaken, a board of inquiry will pass judgment later. Now I've no time to lose. We're on our way.”

He rapped his piloting instructions. In a moment or two the boat left free trajectory. The interior gravity polarizer field kept weight steady under Tyra's feet, but she saw the stars whirl into a new configuration and felt a brief surge of power fully aroused, a shiver in the deck and through her bones.

“Well, you are within your legal rights,” Bihari said. “I am not so sure about the moral ones. You understand, do you not, that we can do nothing to help you until much later in this game.”

“And the devil knows how the kzinti will react,” added Worning.

“Contact them, of course,” Raden answered. “Explain the situation. That I—we have no intention of more than a rescue attempt, and we'll lay no salvage claims or anything like that. In fact, I promise to leave whatever kind of black box they have, the data this flight gathered, alone, for them to retrieve. Let me suggest you offer them any other help you can give. That's traditional, after all.”

He laughed. “Don't worry about us. We're within our safety factors. Quite an adventure!”

He cut off transmission, pending further reception, rose, looked into Tyra's eyes, and reached for her hands. She withheld them.

His smile was gone. “There will be hazards,” he said low. “Aren't there always? I rejoiced to have you along, darling, but now I'd sell my chance of having an immortal soul—no, that's too cheap a price—I'd give everything I own for you to be safely back aboard Freuchen.”

Every material thing, maybe, she thought. The bank accounts, the royalties, the vacation home, the sailboat, whatever. But how could you divest yourself of your reputation, your fame? This deed can only add to them.

Her bitterness shocked her. It wasn't reasonable. Was it? “Well, I'm not there,” she said, “nor sorry.”

As if to reinforce her, the comscreen brought Worning and Bihari back. “Playing the noble knight may be very well, Raden,” Worning snapped. “But you're spending the resources of our expedition, and putting critical assets at risk, for no other gain.”

“Oh, God, can't you see?” Raden exclaimed. “That's a living, sentient being yonder, maybe two, with a ghastly death ahead of them. Could you stay idle in my circumstances and still call yourself a man? I don't believe that, Captain Worning. I don't believe you would.”

This time he left transmission going while he appealed to Tyra. “Nor would you.” With a quick, wry grin: “And call yourself a woman. Which you are, incredibly much.”

“I think you're confused about the issue,” she told him out of the ice within her. “A human being, or a—a dog, yes. Kzinti, no. They're something else.”

He seemed appalled. “You can't be serious!”

“Yes, they're as intelligent as we are, in their fashion. Maybe they can feel pain as much, in their fashion. But it doesn't mean the same to them. They have nothing like sympathy, compassion, anything we humans have had such a struggle to keep alive in ourselves. Craig, I've seen what they do. I've lived with it.” Dada-man, snatched away from everyone he loved and who loved him. Mother, dying of grief, unjustly disgraced. Ib, betrayed into dishonor. The endless years of the occupation, friends killed, crushed, hunted down like game animals, eaten. The murderous assault at the black hole… And those were merely things she had witnessed or heard of at firsthand. She knew of too many more. She heard the shock:

“But this is racism. The old horror. Jews made booty of, Amerindians massacred, Africans enslaved… I grant you, it's a horrible culture, but they can learn better. The Mongols were once the terror of half a world. They became one of the most peaceful people on Earth—”

“If you please,” interrupted Bihari, answering Raden's reply to Worning, “I daresay you suppose you're making a goodwill gesture, which will go toward improving relationships. I have my doubts, but since you are on your way and not open to argument, we will communicate with the kzinti, fully and frankly, and stand by to render any assistance we can that they will accept. We will keep you informed. Meanwhile, we shall be on alert status.”

“Ja,” rumbled Worning. “Good luck. You'll need it.”

The images blanked. Neither captain meant to nag, nor would they allow anyone else to stammer best wishes.

“We've got a couple of hours to make ready,” Raden said. “First aid, for openers. A very near thing at best. Prepare for unpleasantness, Tyra. A cooked corpse or… worse.”

“I've known worse.”

His expression, stance, voice pleaded. “Do you really feel we're altogether wrong to do this?”

It was not simply that she happened to be with him and got no choice, it was that she was with him, for as long as might be. Maybe for life. “No,” she made herself say, and confessed inwardly that he did have a certain logic, that without some forthcomingness—which could only begin on the human side—the hatred and slaughter might well go on until one race or the other went extinct. “I'm with you,” and now she took his hands and presently returned his kiss before they got busy.

She refrained from wishing aloud that they had a firearm along.

14

“We have still received no response from the kzinti,” Bihari reported. “Among other things, that means we don't have the code for opening any of their airlocks. Since you are closing in, I have ordered a naval 'key' program sent to you. I suppose you know it directs phased currents through your contact module and analyzes the reaction to each set of pulses. A search pattern conducted at electronic speed. It ought to determine the unlocking sequence within a few minutes. The program is classified information, but merely at 'confidential' level, and may be shared in emergency. Instructions will accompany it. Prepare to download.”

Raden nodded. “I rather expected this,” he told Tyra. “I didn't think the captain would leave us to cut our way in with laser torches. Dangerous, as well as slow. No doubt she'll order the program wiped from our database after we return, but actually, one relies more on interstellar distances and infrequent contacts to keep such things from spreading. All colony worlds have similar tools, civilian as well as military, and many spacecraft carry them. You might need to get into a friendly ship, too—a Crashlander, say—when for some reason the crew couldn't just let you in. Or any of all the other unpredictable situations.”

He spoke rapidly, dryly, as if he were lecturing to a class. Tyra listened, though she already knew most of it. This must be a way for him to release some tension. Mainly he directed himself toward the keyboard.

Sweat gleamed on his brow. Tyra felt it on her own face and soaking her armpits.

She wondered how much of it was due to excitement—fear?—and how much was the body trying to maintain temperature. The compartment, the whole interior had gotten unpleasantly warm, and still the temperature crept upward.

The thermostatics weren't failing; they struggled as best they could against an input for which they weren't intended. Caroline had unfolded her extra radiation surfaces, like huge wings, their thinness tilted normal to the swollen sun-disc. Unless you have vapor to release, as the kzin venturer had had, radiation is the single way to shed excess heat in space, and it does not work very fast.

The wings of an angel, speeding on an errand of mercy—Memories arose of themselves in Tyra, childhood, church, the steel steeple of St. Joachim's shining above München… during the kzinti occupation, it stood in more human minds than hers as a symbol of freedom, eventual liberation, but you seldom said such things aloud, never where kzinti might hear, because then they would likely tear it down…

Caroline was closing in, sensors at maximum, autopilot adjusting vectors like a high-wire walker… Yes, Wunderlanders had revived quite a few such acts during the war, more often performed for live audiences than cameras, another silent declaration that humans were not cattle…

Optics gave a clear view of the sundiver, massive, ungainly against the stars, but—she must admit—its own sign of indomitability. She could magnify until a single section filled the screen for close study. She saw the holes strewn over the outer hull, small, not really very many, but sufficient to let the water seethe unchecked away. And forward she identified a damaged outercom dish. That explained why there had been no contact on any band. The damage didn't look great to her. Crew could readily have fixed it and regained communication, except that none could venture outside and live to do the work. Could a robot? Kzinti technology seemed to lag others when it came to robotics. Nevertheless but maybe there was no robot, or maybe no person left who was able to dispatch one.

Minute by minute, the image expanded. Caroline was closing swiftly in on the reality.

Raden finished at the keyboard, rose, and stretched, seeking to limber muscles too long tautened. “Is the medical care station ready?” he asked. Laying everything out for that had been her job.

“Yes,” she snapped.

“I'm sorry. Stupid of me to ask. You're always competent.” He sighed. “Not long now. I damn near wish it were. Then we could perhaps—But we'd better prepare ourselves.”

She gave him a smile.

He did pause to frown at the spacecraft's image. “Quite a bombardment,” he muttered. “I doubt it holed the inner hull. I'd expect somewhat different spectroscopic readings in that case, and sheer off right away. As is, all we know is that it's an oven inside there.”

They started aft. “Have you any idea what did it?” she asked. “Does Pele have a ring of meteoroids?”

“No, Maria would have identified one, even a thin strewing of gravel, and told us. Implausible anyway, on general principles. I have been speculating, though, whenever I got a chance. A notion has occurred to me. It may be utterly wrong.”

An eagerness flickered amidst the forebodings. “What is it? I promise not to laugh.”

“Thanks. I badly needed a grin.” Raden spoke on as they made their way to the space gear lockers and busied themselves there. “Do you remember the anomalous iron content Maria found in the high Kumukahi atmosphere?” She nodded. “We don't yet know what spews it out. I'd say the best guess is convulsions in the planetary body; then rising air currents—what storms those must be!—bring it aloft. Pele isn't an ultraviolet emitter on the scale of Sol or Alpha A, but that close, Kumukahi surely gets plenty to split molecules or radicals into atoms—ionized atoms—once they're up where the air is thin. Then—here's my guess, tremendous magnetic fields are interacting, the star's and the planet's, changeably, chaotically. It may result in vortices that pull ferromagnetic atoms together over an enormous range. They join into macroscopic clumps, pellets, perhaps still carrying some charge. Then a surge in the fields accelerates them to escape velocity, or nearly. They're thrown out of the atmosphere, probably in bursts, like shotgun fire. The sundiver ran into a cluster. The planet had given her such a velocity of her own that the encounter riddled her.

“Whether I'm right or wrong, the notion suggests precautions for the future, doesn't it? We need data, data, data, observations, missions, year after year before we can hope to make a halfway decent computer model.” His tone and eyes came ablaze. “Unique in our experience. What a wild fluke of luck! What a chance to learn!”

For a moment the enthusiasm caught her too. She had always been fascinated by science, but none of her men before now had been scientists. To see, to be a part of truly doing it—If nothing else, life with Craig would never be dull. The mood chilled and hardened in them both. They had work on hand. Elementary prudence dictated wearing space gear. It needn't be cumbersome full armor, simply protection against possible hot spots, noxious gases, or the like. They stripped off their clothes—gazes flying up and down, and a pulse in the throat—and took skintights from the suit locker. Those were easy to pull on. The molecules flowed to make a dermis from neck to ankles, shinily reflective, leather-tough, silk-flexible, veined with electronics and tiny capillaries for exuding sweat vapor or other unwanted fluids but sealing the body off from the outside. Boots snuggled similarly to feet and ankles. A backrack went on nearly as readily, for powerpack, airtank, regulators, water supply. The collars of the clear, hard helmets made themselves fast to shoulders and coupled to the rack. The wearers could talk by radio or, with sound amplification, directly; they likewise had good hearing, while sensors woven into the integument provided tactility.

His smile quirked at her through the barriers between. “All set for the dance, Tyra?”

“Well, I'll take a promissory note for my corsage,” she forced herself to reply in kind.

Sternly: “To repeat the doctrine one last time. I go first. You stay behind at the entrance till I call for you. If I call, 'Get away!' instead, or you realize that something's gone seriously wrong, close our airlock and release the gang tube. Worning will instruct you how to bring Caroline back. This isn't heroics, it's plain common sense, and you know how and why to follow orders.” Softly: “Not that I expect danger. Horror, perhaps. You may well be tougher than me, dealing with that. You're a remarkable lady, Tyra, and I'm an incredibly lucky man.”

“I love you,” she whispered, and knew she meant it. Whatever happened in the future, she had been set free of regrets from the past.

They waited for a span that felt endless, although clocks showed little change. Then she felt a thud go through metal and knew that the vessels had made contact.

She stood trying to visualize events. Caroline nudged the sundiver. Both recoiled the least bit. The autopilot had gauged nicely; airlocks were nearly aligned. Caroline's gang tube need only extrude two or three meters to enclose the lock opposite and grip with molecular forces. The search program got busy as directed, stimulating crystals into vibrations that it detected and analyzed. It found the combination that would activate the mechanisms. Quantum levels fluctuated, utterances of command. Engines in the outer and inner portals of the kzin hull swung the valves aside. Gas billowed into the tube. Instruments verified that, while not in any normal state, it was not potentially destructive. Caroline's lock opened.

Heat rushed over Tyra in a flood. Protected, she felt it only slightly. The suit could maintain her in the oven for several minutes at least. She was flashingly, selfishly glad she could not smell whatever stenches the inflow bore. Raden sprang forward. She followed as far as the airlock chamber and halted. Raden spun upward. His heels kicked ridiculously as he went out of her sight. The gravity polarizers inside the sundiver had failed too, she understood. Well, he knew how to handle himself in microgravity.

After a few hundred heartbeats his voice reached her. “Come on through, Tyra. There's just one of them. He's in bad shape, but alive. Come help me bring him over to us.”

15

Heroes scream when they leap to do battle. They bear pain in silence. That was a battle of its own. Ghrul-Captain had never dreamed how long and lonely it could be. Often he wanted to make an end. If necessary, he could claw his throat across.

But his folk might yet regain the spacecraft. Finding his body, they would see how he died. If he had endured to the end, always watchful for the chance to somehow strike back, they would bring home his praise. His kin would gain pride, and renewed standing. He would live on in memory, song, fame. If what he had done turned out to be to the good of the Race, he might be given a shrine and yearly blood sacrifices.

If nothing else, they would remember how he had dared. Something no kzin had ever done before. Something no monkey ever would.

Yes, let him keep this before him, that he was not a monkey who whimpered and fled, but a Hero.

He bobbed about randomly. Now and then he bumped into a side of the cabin. Though the lining was a soft insulator, every touch seared, and he jerked free with the breath hissing between his fangs. His fur was singed, his whiskers scorched, his tail one blister from end to end. Each shallow breath filled his breast with pain. His ears were clenched tight. He seldom opened his eyes to the parching, baking air. Dreams had begun to weave distortedly through the darkness behind the lids. He tried to fight them off.

If only death would come, the cool, kindly night—No, he must not think so, the wish was unworthy of a Hero. Let him rather hold that fact to his bosom, and the victory over the monkeys he had achieved.

It was what meant most, he thought whenever the tide of delirium ebbed back for a while. If only within his own spirit, he had struck a blow at them. Someday they would find out how deeply the blade had gone in. One stab, true, one out of the millions it would take to bring them down and avenge the Race, but his. Something stirred, something made noise. He hauled himself to full awareness. A shape, not a vision, a real thing that touched him—anguish lanced; he almost cried out—and gabbled. Behind its helmet was a face like the face of a flayed corpse.

Monkey.

Another soared in. He snatched for recollections. Strong Runner swung afar. The monkeys, the rich, battening monkeys had sent boats out. One had laid alongside his.

What did they want? To take him captive, maybe try to sell him back to his folk to seize the knowledge his vessel had won from the wreck of a world—or hand him over freely and gloat?

It hardly mattered. They were monkeys, victorious.

They were pulling and shoving him with them.

No, never. A kind of joy gleamed through the pain that had become Ghrul-Captain's universe.

Monkeys crawled around in their tree. They jeered at the hunter below and pelted him with dung. But all the while, their bough was bending under their weight, until they were in reach of him.

To kill these would be his vengeance for the Race and himself. What happened afterward mattered little. He might or might not be able to pilot their craft back to Strong Runner in time for the medic to save him. Certainly their fellow monkeys would shriek and jabber; but they'd do nothing decently warlike. Certainly, too, his achievement would go far toward inspiring the Race, would help hasten the day of reckoning.

His warrior skills returned to him. He should bide his time, let them carry him off to where he'd have weight under his feet, where he'd draw some lungfuls of air like the air of home. Then he'd be ready. Enough strength would flow back for long enough. Later he could rest in the blessed cool, rest and rest, sleep and sleep.

To loosen his muscles was the start of his preparing. He shut his eyes again and tried not to wince or gasp when the monkeys touched a burnt spot. They didn't mean to. There drifted through him a recollection of a teacher at his academy, discussing the monkeys, saying, “What they call conscience makes cowards of them all.”

16

“Easy, now, easy,” Raden said. “The poor devil. You or I wouldn't have survived this long, or wanted to. We can't let him crash on the deck when we enter our gravity field.”

“No,” Tyra agreed, “but we can't drag him to the first aid station either. He weighs,” that huge body.

“Yes. I think probably we'd do best to turn off the polarizer while we convey him. First, though, for God's sake, we have got to get him out of this damned kiln.”

They maneuvered the kzin through the gang tube. Straining, they eased his sudden ponderousness to the deck beyond. He lay sprawled, seemingly barely conscious. The eyelids weren't quite shut, a yellow slit gleamed between. Raden straightened and tapped instructions for airlock closure. Ventilators whirred, sucking away the hot air. Tyra imagined that, through her suit, she felt the freshness gusting in. She stepped a pace aside to catch her breath. Her glance flitted across scorch marks, blisters, raw fire wounds. I suppose this was our duty, she thought. Do we have any analgesics that work on kzinti? Maybe they can tell me on our ship or maybe we can only make haste there.

The giant stirred. He struggled up. For half a minute he stood unsteadily, breath harsh in his throat. Bloodshot eyes glared.

“What the hell?” Raden exclaimed. “Don't be afraid. You're with friends now.” Silly, flashed through Tyra. The kzin probably doesn't know English. And if he did, would he listen?

He didn't quite scream and leap. He uttered a hoarse, broken cry and lurched toward the man. Claws slid forth. He swiped a mighty arm. The spacesuit fabric ripped.

“No! Don't! Are you crazy?” Raden stumbled backward. The kzin followed. Again he slashed. Raden barely dodged, into a corner.

And we have no weapon, Tyra silently shrieked.

Maybe I do! She wheeled about and fled. Growls, snarls, and human yells pursued. Up the companionway. Down the passageway. A remote part of her knew how fast she bounded and ran, but it felt nightmarishly slow. Swivel through a doorway into the tiny galley. The largest knife she had brought gleamed in a rack. Her father had taught her always to keep cutting tools sharp. She snatched it and sped back.

She half expected to find Craig disemboweled. But he knew his martial arts, sidestepped, ducked, weaved, dropped to the deck and bounced up again. The kzin was slow and clumsy. Though red flowed from half a dozen shallow gashes, the dance of death went on.

The kzin didn't see her, or reckon her for anything if he did. She got behind him and sprang. Her legs clamped around his great barrel of a body, her free hand dug into an ear and hauled. The knife struck.

The kzin coughed a roar and reached back. She clung while she worked the blade across his throat. Blood spouted. She felt claws rake through her own suit. She clung and cut.

The kzin buckled. She let go and jumped clear. The kzin went to his knees, to all fours, onto his belly. He struggled for a while as the life pumped out of him.

Tyra had left the knife in his neck. She and Raden fell into each other's arms. “Are you all right?” she choked.

“N-nothing serious, I think. You?”

“Same.”

They stood thus, shuddering, until the body slumped and lay quiet. Blood reddened the chamber; excrement befouled the deck. So much for a heroic death, thought Tyra vaguely.

“What shall we do?” Raden mumbled.

She rallied a little. “Take care of our injuries. Disengage the spacecraft. Call our own. And… and send this corpse out the airlock.” Unwillingly, she thought: Let him go on to the stars. “Set the pilot for rendezvous with Freuchen, and go to sleep. Sleep and sleep. Later, we can clean up this place. And think.”

They trembled for an hour or more. A kzin wouldn't have. But they were merely human.

17

The captains met with them in Bihari's cabin aboard Samurai. She wanted complete privacy.

“You were wise not to report more than the bare minimum on your way back,” she said. After they arrived and gave her the whole story, the medical program ordered them to sickbay for two daycycles under sedation. Released, calmed, they would need a while more to feel entirely fit. However, a flit across to the lancer was, if anything, refreshing—a sight of stars, Milky Way, majesty and immensity.

Worning nodded. “Ja, we can't be quite sure the ratcats don't keep a few little receivers orbiting about; and you didn't have the equipment to encrypt.” Raden winced. “I, at least, didn't trust my judgment in this case either,” he confessed. “How might the kzinti react to a… a terrible incident?”

“I could have told you that,” Tyra said. “I'm damned glad we have a better warship than they do.”

“They don't have the news to react to in any case,” Bihari stated. “When they discovered that you'd made a short contact with the sundiver, they finally replied to my messages, demanding to know the details. I put them off until you came. Then I informed them that you found the pilot dead. Ghrul-Captain, he was. The master himself.”

“Daft,” snorted Worning. “You don't send a skipper off like that. They're maniacs, the whole lot of them.”

“They're different from us,” protested Raden.

“Which makes them deadly dangerous,” Tyra retorted.

He sighed. “I've admitted to you, darling, I've been shocked out of, of what seemed like realism. Yes, we do need to keep on guard all through negotiations. Well, I was afraid the blunt truth might antagonize them. So I left it to you professionals, Captain Bihari, to explain things tactfully.”

Tyra shook her head and clicked her tongue. He was honest, he'd change an opinion when the facts convinced him it was wrong, but down underneath he'd always be an idealist. Which probably was part of his being lovable. “What did you say to them?” she asked.

“That you'd made a gesture,” Bihari answered. “Because his vessel wouldn't cool down before he was roasted like a food animal, you gave him space burial. A mark of respect and honor. Shayin-Mate, the present master, seemed pleased, perhaps a bit relieved. I added that you did nothing else aboard, never touched the databases, which they could verify as soon as a mission of theirs overhauled the derelict.”

Raden's haggardness lighted up. “Excellent, ma'am! Tyra and I won't let the secret out either, will we, darling?”

“I'd like to,” Tyra replied. “You were so brave and—”

“Scarcely like you.” His hand reached for hers.

She shrugged. “Needs must. The story wouldn't give them a pretext for starting the next war. They aren't ready yet.”

He frowned slightly but kept silence.

“Maybe it could complicate diplomacy a little, though,” Tyra went on. “And surely it'd complicate relationships here at Pele. All right, ma'am and sir, it won't go beyond the four of us.” I'll keep the glory to myself, and wish he'd share it with me, but he never will, she thought.

He relaxed and laughed. “I couldn't have robbed that database anyhow,” he said. “Couldn't have endured the heat and wasn't acquainted with their systems.”

“I wish you had been,” growled Worning. “I'll hate seeing that knowledge fall into their claws.”

“It cannot be critically important,” Raden reassured him. “Once we've established a permanent scientific presence—robotic, no doubt, but permanent—we'll soon have all of it and much more. Meanwhile, we've gotten the truly invaluable piece of information. Not just that there's a hazard we must protect future probes against, but that there's an extraordinary phenomenon. Whether or not my hypothesis about the iron proves out, we hold a clue to understandings we never even knew we lacked.” His voice dropped. “Tragic, that a sentient being died for it. If only we could commemorate him somehow—”

Jesus Kristi, thought Tyra, after he did his best to kill us? Then, ruefully: That's my Craig.

“But we have learned,” Raden said, with a lilt in his voice that she also knew. “This alone justifies our expedition. Let the kzinti take what he earned for them.”

“As a matter of fact,” answered Bihari, “they aren't going to.” Startled gazes sought her. “Shayin-Mate told me he would launch a missile—he told me exactly when, giving us plenty of time to track and stand alert—that will overhaul and destroy the sundiver. It started off about half an hour ago. He also said, um-m, 'The Heroes have accomplished everything they intended, and will return home very shortly.' The latest indications are that preparations for departure are already in train.”

“Kzinti—simply giving up?” asked Tyra.

“Well, perhaps they have no boat capable of rendezvous with one on such a trajectory. Caroline barely was, and the parameters were more favorable than they are by now. Under no circumstances would the kzinti make us a free gift of anything the mission gained. On the other hand—I can't prove this, it's an intuition, but rising from experience. I strongly suspect Ghrul-Captain was the driving force behind their entire venture. The acting master may well be seizing an opportunity to minimize his role, or actually make him out to have been a fool. Thereafter Shayin-Mate becomes the paragon who frustrated the humans, salvaged everything that could be salvaged, and brought his ship home to fight another day. He can hope to be made Shayin-Captain. Kzinti have their own internal politics.”

Tyra grinned. “Not altogether unlike ours, hm? You're right about that much, Craig.”

Her look upon him remained soft. He returned it. The humans wouldn't be here much longer either. She'd insist he take several weeks' leave of absence, or vacation or whatever they called it in Earthside academe, to spend with her. She wanted him to meet her father. She wanted to show him the merry old inns of München, the ancestral house and sea cliffs at Korsness, the scenery and geysers of Gelbstein Park, the tremendous overlook from the peak of the Lucknerberg, the dancers in Anholt, all the wonders of Wunderland. Maybe later he could take her likewise around Earth. Maybe then they could think about making a home.